Madonna of the Trail defies statue-toppling culture Madonna of the Trail defies statue-toppling culture Salena Zito BEALLSVILLE, Pennsylvania — If you are driving too fast, you'll miss her. It often happens at the pitch of the rolling Appalachian Mountain, where she sits — the statue of a sturdy frontier woman who has stood here for nearly 100 years holding a rifle in one arm and an infant in another as another child clings to her long skirt.
She is Madonna of the Trail. Constructed in 1927, the warm color of the algonite stone provides a telling portrayal of temperateness a person would imagine a woman protecting her treasure, and about to face uncertainty, would possess.
Her beauty does not lie in her features as she is rather plain. Instead, it lies in the strength she emotes as a symbol of the American frontier woman, one of hundreds of thousands who often left behind a more quiet life with their husbands in exchange for what they hoped was economic opportunity.
Her expression shows that she knows such an exchange will come at a price.
She is one of 12 identical statues placed across the country in 1928 along two migration routes, the National Road and the Santa Fe Trail. People can view her towering, 10-foot likeness not only here in Pennsylvania but also in Maryland, West Virginia, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, California, and Arizona.
As she is here, she is often overlooked or neglected. Attempting to pull over to walk around her statue was risky. The cars fly by in what is a blind spot on a curve and the arc of a hill. But looking at the strength portrayed in every inch of her construction and image, it's unclear whether or not she'd care if you stopped.
If you do stop, you'd best not whine about it.
A frontier woman probably would have thought it frivolous to honor her as she is just trying to make a way for herself and her family.
The project to build all 12 monuments to highlight the courage of these women was spearheaded by the Daughters of the American Revolution to remind us that the Wild West was not just a place of stories but also families looking for a fresh start. Along the way, they might find gold on a quest that included breathtaking vistas, hardship, lawlessness, and finding a sense of place in the wide-open spaces of the American frontier.
We've come to a remarkable moment when our culture supports the destruction of monuments designed to capture a sliver in the telling of our history. Often, both the mob and the liberal media that chronicle these destructive actions are illiterate in their understanding of history.
When they first came for the statues of confederate generals, it was considered justified. When they came for Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and the Emancipation Memorial that was erected in 1876 to honor Abraham Lincoln and was paid for by freed slaves, it was something else they wanted to express: hatred of America.
Activists dismiss any support for keeping the Emancipation Memorial. They claim that because Lincoln is standing over a kneeling slave with broken shackles around his wrists, it is racist.
"People tend to think of that figure as being servile, but on second look, you will see something different, perhaps. That man is not kneeling on two knees with his head bowed. He is in the act of getting up. And his head is up, not bowed because he's looking forward to a future of freedom," Marcia Cole, a member of the Female RE-Enactors of Distinction, told local Washington station WJLA. She also said the shackle on the portrayed freed man's wrist is attached to a broken chain.
The Madonna of the Trail monuments were built to evoke American exceptionalism, something many people still respect even though the drivers of our toxic political culture has found an abundance of manufactured reasons to decry it.
Were the men and women who set out to travel west in history, perfect? Of course not. They were flawed — most of them poor or middle-class immigrants looking for a better life. Those who possessed wealth and power did much to undo the lives and traditions of the natives of the western territories, but that does not mean we do not remember or cast off the history of what happened here, and everywhere the Madonnas stand.
Maya Angelou, the late American poet, and civil rights activist, once said, "History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage need not be lived again."
The drive along this stretch of U.S. 40, the National Pike, is graced with hundreds of American flags blowing gently from porches and flagpoles in front of homes and businesses. There is not a lot of wealth here. The houses are humble, mobile, and some have seen better days.
Alabaster, white mile markers, dot the highway with Cumberland-Wheeling etched across the top as the miles peel away between each stretch.
The drivers of our culture seemingly strive to disavow our historical attempts in achieving true exceptionalism because we have failed along the way. The truth is, we will always be less than perfect, but we cannot let that or rage ever get in the path of attaining our constitutional ideals.
Cops out! Cops out! Karol Markowicz What kind of person would become a police officer right now? That’s a question cops across the country are asking. Some say they wouldn’t do it themselves if they were making the choice now. Others say they’d discourage their children from following in their footsteps. But this is about more than how police are treated; it’s time to wonder what this sinking morale will mean for all of the communities that rely on the police for their safety and security.
The number of new applicants at police departments across the country had been plummeting for some time but may reach crisis levels as national anti-police sentiment grows, stoked by a wave of protests in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd.
A 2019 survey by the Police Executive Research Forum found that fewer people were becoming police officers and more officers were taking early retirement. Sixty-six percent of police departments nationwide reported a drop in recruitment numbers. The study called it a “crisis.” A year later, it threatens to become a full-blown catastrophe.
Rory, 22, lives on Long Island and has always wanted to be a police officer. He’s exactly the kind of smart, calm-under-pressure, composed young man we all would want on the job. He has one year left of college before he planned to apply. But the last month has rattled him, and he’s no longer sure of his path. “Police are becoming targets, making the job more unsafe than it already is,” he told me. Police had been shot at in nearby Rockaway, Queens, the day before our mid-June conversation.
Floyd’s killing, during an unprecedented health crisis that already had the country on edge, focused public anger on the men in blue. The venom wasn’t limited to just the police officers accused of his death, nor the department for which they worked. It spread quickly to police departments throughout the country.
It didn’t matter, for example, that each New York Police Department cadet class has been more diverse than the last and reflected the diversity of the city. Mayor Bill de Blasio enjoyed bragging about that during better times but did not mention it in their defense during the protests. Black officers at the NYPD don’t just walk the beat. They’re represented at every level of the force. Ten percent of NYPD captains are black, and 11.7% of positions above captain are also staffed by black officers.
The number of black patrol officers, however, has started to drop. In 2008, 18% of patrol officers were black. In 2020, that number is 15.5%.
It’s not hard to figure out why. Black officers in the streets bore the brunt of attacks from the protesters. A New York Times piece interviewed black NYPD officers about the protests. One lieutenant told the paper: “As I’m standing there with my riot helmet and being called a ‘coon,’ people have no idea that I identify with them. I understand them. I’m here for them. I’ve been trying to be here as a change agent.”
It didn’t matter. Cops were the bad guys, and the black lives that matter apparently don’t include them. The Times piece notes: “At the same time, the black and Hispanic officers say they feel unnerved by violence aimed at the police. Protesters have hit officers with rocks and bricks and have surrounded occupied police cars, throwing heavy objects at them. Some have even hurled Molotov cocktails.”
Detective Felicia Richards, president of the NYPD Guardians Association, a fraternal group of black officers, told The City website recently that the police department “carries a stigma.”
After the officers involved in the shooting of Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta were fired, many officers called out sick. Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms told CNN that morale in her city’s police department is “down 10-fold.” The story seems consistent in precincts around the country.
Traditionally, many became officers because their fathers or grandfathers were on the job. That’s far rarer today. A sergeant at a suburban police department, a 15-year veteran of the force, told me there is no way he would become a police officer in today’s climate, nor would he encourage his children to become police officers.
“Before this, I thought I'd stay on the job for years,” he told me. “But now, I'm out as soon as possible. I know people in back offices, with no interaction with the public, who are talking about getting out as soon as they can.”
In Seattle, the black police chief, Carmen Best, butted heads with the white mayor over the future of the so-called “autonomous zone” set up in the city, which has now seen several deaths. Protesters at the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone had taken over a police precinct and declared themselves separate from the United States. The mayor, when asked about how long she would allow this to go on, said, “Maybe we’ll have a Summer of Love.”
Best has had to bend, however, releasing plans for a new Seattle Police Department in an open letter last week. One point of the plan calls for aligning “the mission of the SPD to reflect humanization not criminalization,” whatever that means.
No similar plan exists for a reciprocal visualization of police officers as, yes, human.
There’s also the continuing issue that opponents of police departments don’t have a handle on what makes for good policing.
After three shootings in as many nights in the CHAZ, Seattle City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant released a statement angrily declaring, “Our movement should demand and insist that the Seattle Police fully investigate this attack and be held accountable to bring the killer(s) to justice.”
That the "A" in CHAZ stands for “autonomous” and signs at the CHAZ perimeter read, “You are now leaving the United States,” didn’t make the play-pretend territory any less Seattle PD's problem. Councilwoman Sawant is a supporter of defunding police. In her version of the future, a scaled-down or nonexistent police department would still be able to investigate street murders. That’s unlikely. It’s difficult to “demand and insist” intervention from something after you’ve defunded it. If it’s still intact at all, it’ll probably have its hands more than full.
Opponents say we don’t need more police officers; we just need smarter policing. But that also comes at a price. The idea that we can have that smarter policing while not recruiting the best and brightest as officers is unlikely. The sergeant told me, “I cannot imagine a sane human being becoming a police officer right now. What’s the upside? You want someone who wants to help people. Right now, the only person who would become a police officer probably has no other options.”
And, anyway, larger police forces do lead to lower crime. A 2018 study out of Yale found that crime goes down as more officers are added to the department. What’s interesting is the same study found that arrests don’t necessarily go up. The presence of additional officers serves as an effective deterrent.
The president of the Police Benevolent Association of the City of New York, Patrick J. Lynch, told me, “The nationwide policing crisis will absolutely have an impact on recruitment and retention — and that’s absolutely what the anti-cop crowd wants. They are not asking how we’re going to incentivize our best recruits to take and keep this job, despite the abuse and legal hazards that come with it. Instead, they are canceling academy classes and cutting budgets. If we have no cops because nobody wants to be a cop, they will have achieved their ultimate goal.”
Or so they think. Residents of a liberal Minneapolis neighborhood vowed not to call the police in the wake of Floyd’s killing. Soon, a tent city sprung up in a residential park. “Their presence has drawn heavy car traffic into the neighborhood, some from drug dealers,” the New York Times reports. “At least two residents have overdosed in the encampment and had to be taken away in ambulances.” One resident, a longtime progressive community leader, suddenly isn’t “feeling grounded in my city at all. Anything could happen.” Her nights are growing sleepless. “I am afraid,” she told the Times, but feels obligated to leave the police out of it.
The comfortable leftists who push defunding the police also like to claim policing isn’t that dangerous a job. There might be more lethal jobs, but police work still ranks in the top 20 most dangerous jobs in the country. The other jobs don’t have to worry about intense hatred directed at them or non-death indignities such as cursing, spitting, or, as happened often in New York last summer, buckets of water poured on them.
No one puts their bodies on the line for black lives more than police officers. The idea that it won’t be black people suffering in the absence of police is foolhardy.
New York City has been experiencing a serious crime spike in recent weeks, including a doubling of the murder rate. De Blasio has been all-in on what the progressive mayor of Newark, Ras Baraka, called a “bourgeois liberal” solution, to cut the very police force that had made his city a livable, prosperous place. “We’re committed to seeing a shift of funding to youth services, to social services, that will happen literally in the course of the next three weeks, but I’m not going to go into detail because it is subject to negotiation, and we want to figure out what makes sense,” de Blasio said.
Social services and youth services can’t be called in to solve murders. Officials like de Blasio are searching for a solution while in the process of defunding that solution.
Karol Markowicz is a New York Post columnist and a Washington Examiner contributing writer.
The Talented Mr. Musk The Talented Mr. Musk Nicholas Clairmont "Everyone should have one talent. What’s yours?” asks Dickie Greenleaf, played by Jude Law in the 1999 film adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley. “Telling lies, forging signatures, and impersonating almost anybody,” Matt Damon’s Tom Ripley replies. “That's three,” Greenleaf counters. “Nobody should have more than one talent.”
Elon Musk, like the fictional Ripley, has many talents. The drama of his life, merely exaggerated during a very eventful quarantine, works like that of the antihero in Patricia Highsmith’s brilliant reverse-murder Ripley mystery series. In a normal murder mystery, you know that, somehow, the crime is going to get solved, and the tension is in trying to determine how so before the plot reveals the solution. In Highsmith, the walls are always closing in, but Tom Ripley always gets away with it somehow.
Since the novel coronavirus was first reported, Tesla stock has more than doubled. In that time, Musk has inhabited all of his many identities. At the beginning of May, he announced he would be getting rid of all his worldly possessions, tweeting he “will own no house.” On June 19, it was reported he had sold his mansion in Bel Air to a Chinese tech billionaire for $29 million. Also in the intervening time, his SpaceX aerospace firm saw a disastrous rocket explosion on a launchpad in Texas and then, a week later, successfully sent American astronauts into orbit for a mission to the International Space Station for the first time since the shuttle program ended in 2011. He won a showdown with California regulators over what he described as the “fascist” lockdown orders stopping Tesla car production. He and his pop star partner had a baby whose name became a big story in the celebrity press, which also turned into a legal fight, and he got into fights with just about everybody on the internet (including his partner’s mother).
We’ve all had an eventful few months. We’ve lived through a period that we’ll be talking about for the rest of our lives, and anyone who didn’t live through it will have trouble fully understanding. Elon Musk’s few months also got crazier — but from a much higher baseline of crazy. Toward the beginning of the lockdown, he named his newborn X Æ A-12 Musk, a reference to a Greek letter and a spy plane and an algebra variable. So that child, at least, will probably carry a permanent sense of how weird things were at the moment his father signed his birth certificate. The birth document has been the subject of multiple objections from the state of California, since only the standard 26 letters of the Latin alphabet are allowed in legal names. The legal wrangling is now on its third challenge.
The baby name fiasco is typical Musk, yet still a footnote in the ballad of Elon’s pandemic. What it says about Musk’s image, though, is consistent with what we knew about his character — or should I say characters? It’s easy to forget, now that he’s a pop culture icon we just sort of accept as a fixture of public life, how strange a figure Musk cuts and how many identities he inhabits.
And, much like Mr. Ripley, Musk often appears to get into impossible binds from which he theatrically extracts himself.
First, the many roles he must play. As the CEO of Tesla Inc., he is a factory-owning industrialist as well as environmentalist hero pushing the edge of zero-emissions car technology with the help of green subsidies. Part Henry Ford and part Greta Thunberg. As the CEO of SpaceX, he is both heroically pushing the frontiers of science and space exploration in his absurd “Occupy Mars” T-shirts as well as doing business as a major government military contractor. (One should not forget that the U.S. Air Force is a bigger space program than NASA.) As a pop culture figure, he is just as much a Janus. His more right-wing face can be seen as a regular guest on Joe Rogan’s podcast and in his role as executive producer, along with Peter Thiel, of the film adaptation of Thank You for Smoking, the libertarian comedy novel about the perils of regulatory busybodies by Christopher Buckley. This offends those who prefer his more left-wing face as a climate-crusading, red-carpet Hollywood regular who appears alongside Canadian dream-pop indie sensation Grimes, the mother of X Æ A-12.
All of this, you would think, would require delicacy from Elon. He is walking some fine lines. But he does not practice delicacy. And thus our protagonist finds himself in avoidable, no-win situations in which he somehow wins. “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420,” he said in 2018 of his electric car company’s stock. “Funding secured,” he added, bafflingly. This one tweet got him docked $20 million by the FEC, about which he commented, “Worth it.” Of course, 420 is the countercultural number that signifies an affinity for smoking marijuana. Speaking of which: On Rogan’s podcast, which also features a video feed, he was shown smoking a joint. Because this is a federal crime, it almost caused him to lose the security clearance he needs for SpaceX to do its military contracting work and also ended up costing millions on his end and NASA’s.
I repeat: Almost cost him his security clearance.
Also in 2018, Musk baselessly accused a diver trying to save children trapped in a collapsed Thai cave of being a “child rapist” because Musk wanted to use a minisub of his own to resolve the situation. The ensuing defamation suit lasted over a year.
None of this seems to have taught Musk a lesson about steering clear of pointless feuds on the internet while the enterprises he leads are conducting important business. Even where his stunts don’t land him in legal hot water, they ignore the treacherous terrain of corporate virtue-signaling in the age of woke capitalism. At least these accomplishments and managerial responsibilities, you might think, would have captured Musk’s focus. You would be wrong. He also found the time and attention, meanwhile, to beef with the maternal grandmother of his newborn child on Twitter. Grimes’s mother, Sandy Garossino, attacked him for his “MRA bulls---.” (MRA, or “men’s rights activist,” is an online term for people who support reactionary anti-feminist ideas.) This is because he tweeted the advice to “take the red pill,” a reference to a scene in The Matrix that became popular on the alt-right as a metaphor for waking up to the moral and social reality liberals present as being illusory. The president’s daughter and adviser, Ivanka Trump, replied, “Taken!” to Musk, and Lilly Wachowski, one of the writers of The Matrix, who is a transgender woman and Trump critic, replied, “F--- both of you.”
This politico-culture war on the internet is what Musk was up to during the period when he was waging his high stakes legal battle with Alameda County over the future of his Fremont, California, car factory. Musk’s Tesla won an important standoff with county and state authorities over whether it could reopen production operations early, against work stoppage orders. Musk told the county it had to let him resume building cars, or he’d pull the job-heavy manufacturing hub out of the state and move to Nevada. It was unclear exactly which authority, county or state or both, he would be defying by reopening. Both ended up caving. First, President Trump tweeted support, saying that “California should let Tesla & @elonmusk open the plant, NOW. It can be done Fast & Safely!” Alameda County allowed for minimum business operations, but that didn’t satisfy Musk. With workers asked to return to the floor, he tweeted, “I will be on the line with everyone else. If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me.” The authorities relented, and 18 days after he was asking that only he be arrested, he got a nearly $800 million payout from Tesla according to his performance-based deal with the company, which rewards him for the Tesla share price hitting certain milestones.
Donning his space pioneer/rocketeering military contractor hat, things in Muskworld were also dramatic. First, there was the aforementioned launchpad explosion of a prototype rocket dubbed the Starship. Then, a week later, at the final second before liftoff, weather conditions forced SpaceX to abort a manned mission to launch two NASA veterans into orbit from U.S. soil for the first time since the end of the shuttle program, which had forced Washington to buy expensive rides to space from the Russians. Two days after that, SpaceX successfully completed the mission. Astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are aboard the International Space Station now.
Musk leads multiple lives at the same time, and he is always challenging reality to stop him and force him back inside the box. So even for those of us with no affinity for Elon or his crummy electric cars, there is a certain majestic drama to the dizzying, high-wire confidence with which the man operates. There might also be a lesson here about the inhospitableness of our current moment to innovation. It shouldn’t take Elon Musk’s resources and chutzpah to get space exploration moving or boost manufacturing or cut suffocating red tape or challenge successfully a lockdown power grab by our elected representatives. After all, despite appearances to the contrary, there’s only one of him.
Nicholas Clairmont is an associate editor at Arc Digital and a regular contributor to the Washington Examiner.
Is Gone With the Wind the Great American Novel? Is Gone With the Wind the Great American Novel? Charlotte Allen In early June, HBO Max pulled the 1939 Civil War classic Gone With the Wind from its streaming service, responding to criticism that the film whitewashed antebellum slavery. After much fan uproar, HBO promised that the immensely popular Clark Gable-Vivien Leigh vehicle, based on Georgia author Margaret Mitchell’s perennially best-selling 1936 novel, will someday be back on the HBO roster — although with a didactic introduction that will include a “denouncement” of the film’s “racist depictions.”
If a movie based on a novel is on a social justice blacklist, the novel itself cannot be far behind. And so, on June 11, Washington Monthly contributor Elizabeth Austin published “Why I threw away my copy of Gone With the Wind.” “Racist,” “pernicious,” and “evil” were some of the words she used: “Anybody who champions either book or movie is standing up for the cause of white supremacy and should be judged accordingly.”

The irony of all this is that Margaret Mitchell had actually succeeded in producing that obsession of American writers: the Great American Novel. That phrase, “Great American Novel,” was coined in 1868 in an essay for the Nation by John William DeForest, himself a prolific author. DeForest longed for a kind of fiction that would be essentially grounded in realism and would capture the spirit of “this eager and laborious people, which takes so many newspapers, builds so many railroads, does the most business on a given capital, wages the biggest war in proportion to its population, believes in the physically impossible and does some of it.” In Europe, a slew of novelists had set their protagonists’ struggles against a complex backdrop of larger historical events and social tableaux: Stendhal, Honore de Balzac, William Thackeray, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy. By contrast, McForest argued, American novelists gave their fiction a narrower scope.
DeForest’s essay prefigured Tom Wolfe’s 1989 manifesto for Harper’s, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast.” There, Wolfe bemoaned the absence (besides his own recently published Bonfire of the Vanities) of the “big novel” in America, the novel set in multiple social milieus analogous to those of Balzac’s Paris or Dickens’s London. Instead, Wolfe lamented, the American intelligentsia decried realistic fiction as “bourgeois” or “middlebrow,” unsuited to the contradictions of capitalism and the ambiguities of the human psyche.
Gone With the Wind is exactly the sort of big novel that DeForest and Wolfe had in mind. This may not be evident to people who know only the movie, which pares the plot down to the romantic intrigues of its four main characters: the bewitching and morally ruthless Scarlett O’Hara (Leigh); the darkly handsome speculator Rhett Butler (Gable), who sees right through her; the cultivated planter Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard), who is Scarlett’s love obsession; and sweet, saintly Melanie (Olivia de Havilland), whom Ashley marries instead of Scarlett. In the background stands the black slave Mammy (Hattie McDaniel), Scarlett’s beloved childhood nanny who continues to work for her mistress even after emancipation and who is the subject of much criticism today as an unrealistic stereotype.
But the novel Gone With the Wind has a much larger scope. Mitchell used War and Peace, Tolstoy’s epic about the Napoleonic wars, as her literary model, and her novel is meticulous in its depiction of the Civil War and Reconstruction. It follows the South’s military fortunes and misfortunes through Gettysburg and beyond, carefully tracing Gen. William Sherman’s scorched-earth march through Georgia in 1864 and the Confederacy’s ignominious, bloody defeats along the home front. She created dozens of characters representing every social stratum, each vividly sketched as an individual: the rowdy Tarleton twins, flighty Aunt Pittypat, fancy house madame Belle Watling, Scarlett’s mismatched parents and her two sisters, her three husbands (Rhett is the third), her children, and the elaborate social hierarchy of her neighbors in north Georgia. Mitchell also included slave characters with distinctive personalities and a hierarchy of their own. Like War and Peace, Gone With the Wind is a novel about families: which ones survive and which don’t.
Contrary to critics’ charges, Mitchell didn't sentimentalize the Old South. It was the movie, not the book, that limned the plantation system with romantic gauze: “the land of Cavaliers and Cotton fields … where Gallantry took its last bow,” as the opening titles recite. Mitchell was under no such illusions. In the novel, Clayton County, Georgia, where the O’Haras and the Wilkses raise their cotton, is rough upcountry, pine forest until just yesterday. Scarlett’s Irish-born father, Gerald O’Hara, is a raw newcomer who arrived to set up his plantation only in the 1830s or so. The “old” families who form the local aristocracy got there just a generation before he did. One elderly woman remembers when Clayton County was Indian territory.
Furthermore, Mitchell makes it clear that the Confederacy was a doomed enterprise from the start. The bravado of the Tarleton twins (“you don’t suppose any of us would stay in college with a war going on”) ends with both their names on the killed list at Gettysburg. The South had almost no industrial infrastructure to manufacture supplies and armaments and no navy to protect its ports so it could continue to export cotton, nearly its only source of cash. Most Southerners didn’t seem to realize that slavery, as an economic system, was moribund by the 1860s. Mitchell titled her book Gone With the Wind because the society she wrote about was already gone with the wind in April 1861, when the novel opens, right after the firing on Fort Sumter. And while Mitchell, like most white Southerners, was no fan of Reconstruction, she had little sympathy for the Lost Cause nostalgia that infects Ashley, Melanie, and others who seem unable to move beyond the defeat that destroyed their way of life.
Nonetheless, Gone With the Wind’s treatment of slaves, and black people in general, cannot help but disconcert 21st-century readers. Gone With the Wind was not so much pro-slavery as it was indifferent to it. The O’Haras and their neighbors happen to be kindly masters, which conveniently enables their creator to bypass the uglier and crueler aspects of Southern chattel slavery. Still, the notion that masters and slaves might, and sometimes did, form personal attachments that transcended their status is far from implausible. When Scarlett, in a fit of pique after the war, orders Mammy to return from Atlanta to the O’Haras’ plantation, Mammy responds that she is free and can’t be sent anywhere she doesn’t want to go. She is the only person in the novel who can strike fear into Scarlett’s heart.
In 1936, the same year that Gone With the Wind was published, William Faulkner published his own Civil War novel, Absalom, Absalom! There were striking similarities between the two books, mainly their profound skepticism toward the mythic qualities with which sentimental Southerners imbued their antebellum past. Both excelled in beautiful, evocative writing. But Faulkner crafted a highbrow piece of “literary” fiction, as Wolfe would describe it, replete with such Joycean conventions as multiple narrators, hallucinatory sequences, and levels of interiority that cry out for deciphering in an English class term paper. Mitchell opted for an epic realist novel. Absalom, Absalom! sold 6,000 copies in its first year. Gone With the Wind sold 1.7 million.
Charlotte Allen is a Washington writer. Her articles have appeared in Quillette, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times.
Make it new Make it new Brad Polumbo From the lightbulb to the iPhone, technological innovation is largely responsible for the revolutionary increases in mankind's standard of living over the last several centuries. But innovation itself is still largely misunderstood, often imagined in the public consciousness as the doing of a sole scientist in a laboratory somewhere having a “eureka” moment and stumbling onto a discovery. In his new book, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes In Freedom, British journalist Matt Ridley attempts to reshape the way we think about innovation, describing how societies can encourage it — and how they often do the opposite.
Ridley lays out a unique vision of innovation based on what he calls the “Infinite Improbability Drive,” the notion that there are infinite combinations of atoms, widgets, and ideas. In his telling, innovation is simply the “process of constantly discovering ways of rearranging the world into forms that are unlikely to arise by chance — and that happen to be useful.” Invention, then, is not the same thing as innovation. For an idea to be truly innovative, it must be scalable and capable of catching on.

Ridley attempts to debunk the idea that innovation is ever a truly individual effort. He cites the example of Thomas Edison, historically considered the inventor of the lightbulb. But while it is in some sense true that Edison invented the lightbulb, Ridley notes that 21 different people had either independently designed or meaningfully improved the lightbulb by 1880.
“The story of the light bulb,” Ridley writes, “far from illustrating the importance of the heroic inventor, turns out to tell the opposite story: of innovation as a gradual, incremental, collective yet inescapably inevitable process.” In this, he does not mean innovation is inevitable in all circumstances but that in societies hospitable to innovation, advances and discoveries do not depend on the actions of a single individual.
He also points to the example of automobile pioneer Henry Ford. Ford, Ridley writes, “developed little that was technically new.” Instead, he took the work of others — cars had been around for 30 years before the debut of the Model T Ford in 1908 — and “made it ubiquitous and cheap.”
Rather than being the work of lone geniuses, innovation happens through a long process of trial and error. Edison, for example, tried 6,000 different plants before discovering that bamboo could work as a component of the lightbulb. Ridley also stresses the role of serendipity and luck in innovation. From the development of inoculation to the discovery of penicillin, he recites example after example showing that innovation often happens when people can capitalize on a fortuitous coincidence.
Ridley uses this new vision of innovation as collaborative, gradual, and lucky to explain why some societies foster innovation while others quash it. “Innovation happens … when ideas have sex,” he writes. “It occurs where people meet and exchange goods, services and thoughts.” And because trial and error is so integral to this process, Ridley argues that overly cautious, highly regulated societies will not see meaningful levels of innovation.
“The astonishing safety record of the modern airline industry has been achieved, quite literally, by trial and error,” Ridley offers as an example. “This improvement in safety has happened in an era of deregulation and falling prices.”
He contrasts this with the complete lack of innovation in nuclear power in recent decades, a field in which regulators have made it all but impossible to try new ideas.
Ridley uses the example of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster to illustrate the unintended consequences of regulations that stifle innovation. The Fukushima reactor, constructed in the 1970s, “had huge safety flaws … simple design mistake[s] unlikely to be repeated in a more modern design. It was an old reactor and would have been phased out long since if Japan had still been building new nuclear reactors.” What happened, sadly, was that costly regulations and red tape, ostensibly rooted in safety concerns, had made constructing new nuclear plants so expensive and difficult that people kept using the old ones — with tragic results.
Ridley puts the perils of restricted trial and error quite simply: “If Thomas Edison had needed to get special regulatory approval for every one of the 6,000 plant samples he tested as a filament in a light bulb, he would never have found bamboo.”
Ridley similarly decries crony capitalism and regulatory capture for stopping innovation in its tracks. “There is likely to be a backlash against any new technology, usually driven partly by vested interests but clothing itself in the precautionary principle,” he explains. He uses the historical example of coffee to make his point.
Although coffee is now widely consumed, governments across Europe and the Middle East tried, with little success, to ban it during the 16th and 17th centuries. Entrenched interests such as winemakers wanted to squash a new competitor, while autocratic rulers were concerned that coffee shops would turn into refuges for political dissent.
Yet regulatory hostility to innovation is hardly a vestige of history. As Ridley explains, it is shockingly prevalent throughout the European Union, and he cites it as one of the main reasons for Europe’s slow economic growth relative to that of the United States. Ridley notes, too, that the U.S.’s federalist system long allowed for innovation thanks to varying levels of taxation and regulation between the states. But as the federal government has grown stronger, innovation has nosedived. He cites declining rates of economic growth and various other statistics to substantiate the claim that innovation is drying up. For instance, Ridley notes that new business formation rates dropped from 12% in the late 1980s to 8% in 2010 and that, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, startup rates are falling across the developed world.
The main drawback of How Innovation Works is that it is hardly accessible to the average reader. While journalists or think tank employees might be willing to plow through Ridley’s elaborate prose, it’s hard to imagine that most people will be willing to follow his narrative through an endless bombardment of anecdotes, historical tangents, names, and details.
Yet this doesn’t make Ridley’s message any less important. As he points out, “Without innovation we face a bleak prospect of stagnant living standards leading to political division and cultural disenchantment. With it, we face a bright future of longevity and health, more people leading more-fulfilled lives, astonishing technology achievements and a lighter impact on the planet’s ecology.”
Brad Polumbo is a freelance journalist and former fellow at the Washington Examiner.
Liberalism is dangerous to your wallet and your health Liberalism is dangerous to your wallet and your health Stephen Moore The most recent jobs report found that nine of the 10 states with unemployment rates above 14% are in liberal blue states. Ranked from highest to lowest, they are Nevada (25.3%), Hawaii (22.6%), Michigan (21.2%), California (16.3%), Rhode Island (16.3%), Massachusetts (16.3%), Delaware (15.8%), Illinois (15.2%), New Jersey (15.2%), and Washington state (15.1%). I call this the “blue state jobs depression.” The states with the lowest unemployment rates are all conservative red states: Nebraska (5.2%), Utah (8.5 %), Wyoming 8.8%, Arizona (8.9%), and Idaho (8.9%).
It is hardly shocking news. Liberals are anti-business, and their policies are especially hostile to small businesses. As my old boss, Dick Armey of Texas, used to say that liberals love jobs but hate employers. Democratic governors had the strictest economic lockdowns, and they let their businesses burn and get looted during the riots. They raise taxes and protect the unions over the general welfare of the citizens.
The meltdown of blue-state America isn’t new. It has been going on for at least three decades. Over the last five, 10, 20, or 30 years, red states with low taxes have created double the percentage of jobs than blue states with high taxes.
So, liberalism is bad for your wallets and the overall economy. Voters get this. Polling shows that even people who don’t like President Trump agree that he would be better for jobs and the economy than Joe Biden.
But the standard reply from the media and the liberal academics is that blue-state policies keep us safer and healthier. Those greedy free marketeers put greed and corporate profits over saving lives.
It is a false narrative: Nearly everyone agrees that saving lives during a pandemic must be a top policy priority. The question is, how do you keep people safe? Well, we now know that lockdowns didn’t keep us safer. The states that never locked down, such as Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, had the lowest death rates as a share of the population. The states with the strictest lockdown policies, including New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Michigan, had death rates three to eight times the national average. All of those states, except for Massachusetts, have Democratic governors.
To put it simply: People who live in blue states were more than twice as likely to die from the coronavirus as those who reside in red states. Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York recently declared that he wants to keep New Yorkers safe by preventing Floridians from entering the Empire State. Is he joking? New York’s death rate from COVID-19 is 10 times higher than Florida. It would be like Mexico telling Americans at the border: We aren’t going to let you in.
New cases are rising in red states that have opened up for business faster than in blue states that have remained mostly closed. And we will have to see how this pans out. But the deaths, especially in nursing homes, remain much higher in the blue states. Moreover, studies are now finding that the adverse health effects from the lockdown (suicide, delayed treatments for cancer and heart problems, depression, spousal and child abuse, alcohol, and drug overdoses, to name a few) could easily match the saved lives from lockdowns. These “lockdown deaths” are far more prevalent in blue states that shut down.
Also, if it is safety and a crime-free environment you want for your family, consider a Heritage Foundation analysis, which reported that 18 of the 20 most dangerous cities are run by mayors who are Democrats.
So, congratulations to Govs. Cuomo of New York, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, and J.B. Pritzker of Illinois. You rank last on jobs and health. And to think that the media herald them as the superstar leaders in America.
Southwest strengthens its hand in the wake of COVID-19 Southwest strengthens its hand in the wake of COVID-19 Jeremy Lott The number of seats available for booking on the United States's "big three" domestic airlines has taken a steep nosedive.
The COVID-19-related worldwide decline in air travel has pushed America's traditional No. 4 domestic airline, Southwest, well ahead of American, Delta, and United, according to air travel data company OAG. It's not clear that Southwest's commanding lead can be overtaken any time soon.
Worldwide, Southwest led the pack as of June 15, with 2.4 million seats available per week. American came in fourth place, behind two Chinese airlines, with over 1.6 million seats open for the week. Delta came in sixth with almost 1.1 million seats, and United lost the No. 10 spot to Qatar Airways.
Southwest has also reduced seat capacity relative to where it was in January of this year. Still, most of that reduction is by design and for a specific, social distancing reason. Southwest spokesman Dan Landson told the Washington Examiner, "We are now capping the amount of seats sold on each flight to ensure the middle seats can remain open through at least the end of September," when the government coronavirus bailout money ends.
"This means roughly one-third of each flight's seats will remain open," explained Landson. Throughout January, Southwest had a capacity of almost 3.8 million seats per week. The June figure of 2.4 million seats per week is roughly what you get if you fly the same number of flights as in January and take out the middle seat.
The Washington Examiner asked the three big airlines if they were concerned about this drop in weekly seats and what, if anything, they would do to improve their capacities. United did not reply by press time. Delta declined to comment.
A spokesman for American pointed to a press release celebrating the airline's plans to fly with "more than 55% of its July 2019 domestic capacity in July 2020." However, American CEO Doug Parker also said in a first-quarter earnings call that it's essential for the airline to be "rightsized, properly sized, a good bit smaller than it is today."
United has already announced sizable layoffs for Oct. 1, when recipients of federal bailout money are no longer obligated to keep current workers on the payroll. The airline did so because it does not expect demand for seats to return quickly and so sees little benefit in propping up capacity.
Other airlines may have different estimates of future travel demand and a corresponding willingness to expand capacity to cater to the expected passengers.
"JetBlue announced 30 new routes last week, including an incursion into United's territory in Newark, [which] makes sense for them since they're already strong in the New York area," Gary Leff, author of the influential travel blog View from the Wing, told the Washington Examiner.
Leff also weighed in on Southwest's current dominance and possible future expansion.
"Southwest can at least announce capacity this high — current plans have them at 2019 levels for seats by the end of the year — because they are a primarily domestic operation. Without premium, cabins don't depend as much on premium business travel's return," Leff explained. "They also don't have as heavy a concentration in the markets that were hardest hit by the virus early on, other than Chicago."
Leff pointed out Southwest enjoys a "strong balance sheet." Southwest enjoyed the least debt of any of the large airlines last year and had the most significant "liquidity balance" of any domestic airline except for JetBlue as of March 23 of this year, according to the business data website Statista. He speculated that its strong financial position could allow Southwest to "expand more and potentially take market share from other more risk-averse airlines."
Southwest's bet on flying about as many flights as it used to is costing the airline a lot of money, but it also appears to be slowly paying off and could gain market share. According to the most recent Securities and Exchange Commission filing, Southwest expects June to have had a "burn rate" of about $20 million a day. That's down about $5 million a day from its initial projected losses.
Keep nature illegal Keep nature illegal Eric Felten For the longest time, activists called for the legalization of marijuana as a sort of miracle cure, a medicinal herb good for whatever ails you, whether you suffer from sleeplessness, chronic pain, fibromyalgia, dementia, migraines, Crohn’s, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, or simply a harshed buzz. But now that marijuana is readily available as a wonder drug in a majority of states, what’s the advocate of countercultural cures to do?
‘Shrooms, of course.
Not long ago, a large envelope arrived at my Washington home. In prominent script, I was exhorted to sign onto a ballot initiative to “Decriminalize Nature.” "Well, why ever not?" I thought: The planet has enough woes without Nature herself getting cuffed and interrogated.
But it turns out it wasn’t Nature writ large that has been considered illicit by the law, just certain fungi known to unravel the warp and weft of the mind. Thus, the illustration on the envelope of three little conical-capped “magic mushrooms,” the sort popular with “heads” for their hallucinogenic properties. Initiative 81 would, in the parlance of our times, defund police enforcement of laws against psilocybin, the active ingredient in not only mushrooms but LSD, too.
Enclosed were promotional slicks touting the healing properties of “entheogenic” plants and fungi such as certain mushrooms, cacti, and other psychedelic flora. The sponsor of the ballot initiative told of how the naturally occurring drugs allowed her to “affirm the joys of being alive.” There was a testimonial by Mikhail Kogan, the medical director of the George Washington University Center for Integrative Medicine. Who knew that an institution as establishment-oriented as GWU could be so trippy?
There’s nothing new in taking recreational drugs and packaging them up as cure-alls. The great quack-tonic industry of the 19th century was built on mixing such ingredients as cocaine and opium into a base of high-proof alcohol. “Natural” ingredients were included primarily to distinguish one narcotic cocktail from the other. If Dr. Thacher’s Laxative Compound of Senna and Rhubarb didn’t keep you regular, there was always Dr. Kilmer’s Swamp Root or Taylor’s Cherokee Remedy of Sweet Gum and Mullein. The less said about Sherman’s Worm Lozenges, the better.
It was once thought that moving beyond such dubious remedies was a sign of progress. But such progress requires laws and law enforcement, things that are rather unfashionable at the moment.
Hallucinogenic mushrooms, like their synthetic cousin LSD, are illegal under federal law, and no voter initiative in the District of Columbia is going to change that. But it turns out the initiative to decriminalize “nature” doesn’t actually decriminalize anything. It merely asks police and prosecutors to pretend that the laws against psychedelics don’t exist.
The mushroom movement just goes to show that marijuana is a gateway drug, after all — a gateway to legalization, that is. Now that wacky tobacky is medicine, it was only natural that psychedelics would be next. Once there are dispensaries for hallucinogenic fungi, is there any doubt that opium will take its place in line?
In fact, let me be the first to predict that “medicinal” opium dens are on the horizon. There will be lifestyle columns in fashionable publications that will review the best opium dens — judging not only the quality of the drugs themselves but also their presentation, the luxuriousness of the bedding, and the authenticity of the pipes.
Count me out. As your faithful columnist, I can often be found extolling the virtues of intoxicating spirits and other beverages suitable for convivial adults. I shall not, however, be found touting Mezzrow or mushrooms, hashish or heroin. For whatever reason, I’m not interested in mind-altering cactus plants (and please don’t write to me to say that agave is, when turned into mescal, a mind-altering cactus plant). The woke will find my distinction between the fruit of the vine and the product of the poppy to be hypocritical. But I count on you, dear reader, to share my aversion to dope.
Strong drink is not without its dangers, but so too is fire. The careful handling of each is a sign of civilization. Psychedelics come with a different sort of danger — the risk of losing one’s mind on Ken Kesey’s bus.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How's Your Drink?
Word of the Week: ‘Masters’ Word of the Week: ‘Masters’ Nicholas Clairmont I don't know how the statue of noted pummeler of black men, Rocky Balboa, still stands in Philadelphia when that of Matthias Baldwin was defaced by protesters who scrawled "murderer" and "colonizer" on the Philadelphian locomotive magnate who established a school for black children and campaigned for abolition. I'm only half kidding. America has been seized by a moral fury that is manifesting itself in a fixation over changing the landscape of symbols around us. It takes the form mainly in the desire to graffiti names onto things and pull the names of others, often in deeply incoherent ways.
We are experiencing what in The Analects Confucius said one should do first if put in charge, and what the bureaucracy periodically enforced after that: a "Rectification of Names."
"The name 'The Masters' must go," asserts Deadspin author Rob Parker, who helpfully imagines that a black golfer agrees with him without any evidence: "Tiger Woods, other big-time golfers, and corporate sponsorships should demand it. In the current climate, with all the sweeping changes, it's only right and just." The evidence for why this is justified, although the name of the tournament refers to mastery of the sport, not slavery, is in the author's mind: "Be honest. When you hear anyone say the Masters, you think of slave masters in the South. There's nothing else, nothing special. You don't think of someone mastering the game of golf. When has anyone mastered golf?" Ask Tiger Woods. He won the Masters Tournament four times.
It was a lot like when Harvard's masters changed their titles to deans because of the imagined connotation with slavery. Any classicist at the most prestigious school in America might have explained that "master" comes from "magister" for teacher rather than "dominus" for slave owner. Harvard still offers master's degrees, of course, because this is not about coherence.
The fixation is taking on Washington, D.C., cafes. The proprietor of Colony Club coffee shop recently released a statement saying that it would change its name because customers have concerns "about using the word 'colony,' pointing to its very negative associations with colonialism and further connecting that definition with the in-progress gentrification of the neighborhood." The name, he explained, "comes from my grandparents' flower shop." No matter. He's "learned that the power of that word to hurt is real, no matter the justification for using it."
The biggest rectification yet is the name of one of the 50 United States. Gov. Gina Raimondo of "Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations" is changing policy to avoid that p-word. The change is due to "its slavery connotations." While the word plantation is often associated with slavery, it simply is not what the word means or even meant at the time Rhode Island was named. Per NPR, the state was named by Roger Williams, "an advocate of religious tolerance and the abolition of slavery — who, as the founder of the Rhode Island colony in the 17th century, is believed to have included the Providence Plantations phrase in the name of what was then a newly established British colony. At the time, the word 'plantation' referred to a new settlement and didn't connote an agricultural estate cultivated by slaves."
Are we also going to change the term for coffee plantations or the Dole Pineapple Plantation in Oahu? As with the Masters and Harvard masters and the defaced abolitionist statue, it is all unmoored from any reasonable sense.
People add racial connotations to words and then object to the immorality of what was added, demanding rectification. It is a sort of aggravation of names. As Confucius said, "What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect."
How does a patriot act? How does a patriot act? Zachary Faria Protest is once again patriotic. Or maybe patriotism is no longer politically correct. It's hard to keep track of what counts as patriotism, what counts as "nationalistic," and how good or bad these things are. But that won't stop Americans from trying to measure patriotism and turn it into a competition.
Wallet Hub, a personal finance site, thinks it's got the real ranking on which states are most patriotic. The site polled "experts" on what counted as patriotic and then created an index of civic engagement and military engagement, concluding eventually that New Hampshire was the most patriotic state in the country. But questions abound about its methods. New Hampshire wasn’t in the top half of states in military engagement, and its civic engagement was high because voter turnout is high since they have the first-in-the-nation presidential primary.
Is civic engagement even a good measure of patriotism? In a time when voters are becoming more dissatisfied with their political options, it’s tough to say. And what of states such as Texas, California, or New York that score low in civic engagement? Their voter turnout numbers are depressed in part by their high proportion of immigrants, who consistently vote at lower rates. Does having more aspiring Americans make you less patriotic?
Real estate companies have also tried to define patriotism, because maybe telling people which states are patriotic helps get people to buy houses there. For Movoto in 2014, some factors included people who list America as an interest on Facebook and which states have the most people who try to buy American flags on the internet.
Patriotism is a love of country, but the ways in which it manifests in different people make it unquantifiable. Nearly everyone in the country considers him- or herself a patriot, from Constitution-loving conservatives to “tear down the system” left-wingers to that guy down the street who zones out politics altogether. So with Independence Day around the corner, don’t worry about measuring patriotism. Take the day to consider your own love of the country, and that’s all you’ll need to know.
The great outdoors The great outdoors Kaylee McGhee White “I have some good news,” said Bonnie Combs, marketing director for the Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor. “Nature is not canceled.”
Combs said this back in March, when the lockdown had begun and things to do began to fall by the wayside, one by one. But the one thing that was still available to the public also happens to be the one thing that the coronavirus couldn’t touch: the great outdoors.
“Fresh air and sunshine are good for you. Just practice social distancing,” Combs told the Metro West Daily News.
It seems people took her advice because outdoor activities have surged over the past few months. Retailers in Michigan said that kayaks, bicycles, fishing equipment, and other outdoor gear are hard to come by, and recreational boats are being reserved weeks in advance.
“We’re definitely seeing a big increase in sales,” Tiffany VanDeHey, owner of Riverside Kayak Connection, told the Detroit News. “We'll probably be out of boats in a few weeks. People are looking for rec boats all over the place. There’s just so much outdoor activity these days.”
This move outside is the best possible option for those eager to return to some sense of normalcy. Health experts have confirmed that COVID-19 doesn’t pose nearly as great of a threat outdoors as it does for indoor, enclosed spaces. Even light wind can quickly dilute transmission of the virus, and studies seem to suggest that sunshine and warmer temperatures help mitigate the spread of COVID-19, according to the New York Times.
And more importantly, being outside is simply good for human beings in general. Especially those who have spent months indoors, seeing very few people. For Kate Wathall, a Los Angeles television producer, taking a hike down Trail Canyon Falls was the first time she’d felt “normal” again.
“It was like being back to normal life,” she said. “Obviously, it’s not. But it’s a day where I forgot what was going on.”
J.K. Rowling’s lonely fight for women’s rights J.K. Rowling’s lonely fight for women’s rights Ayaan Hirsi Ali A century ago, on Aug. 18, 1920, the 19th Amendment was ratified and women were guaranteed the right to vote. While we have achieved much else besides since then, not least in terms of our educational and economic and political opportunities, the fight for gender equality still has a long way to go.
Supporters of an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution — passed by Congress in 1972 — haven’t given up on getting it ratified by enough states. The United Nations has an entire campaign for global gender equality. Actresses and other celebrities have come out by the hundreds in support of the #MeToo and the #TIMESUP movement. Taylor Swift released a song last year lamenting that life is easier for men. And last October, Melinda Gates committed $1 billion to expand “women’s power and influence” in the United States. Along with Mackenzie Bezos, she has put up an additional $30 million for a gender equity contest.
There is, in short, no lack of interest in America and around the world in women’s rights and women’s empowerment. And yet none of this appears to count for very much when a female author dares to stand up to an increasingly militant, not to mention intolerant, transgender movement.
J.K. Rowling is a best-selling writer of genius, a mother, a domestic abuse survivor, and a political liberal — a heroine of our time, whose Harry Potter books have introduced millions of children (including my own) to the joys of reading. In a tweet on June 6, she questioned the use of the phrase “people who menstruate” instead of the more usual “women” in a Devex article.
The backlash was immediate and, as usual on social media, intemperate. The advocacy group GLAAD (the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) accused her of being “cruel” and “targeting trans people.”
Yet Rowling stuck to her principles, responding with another tweet that stated: “If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction. If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives. It isn’t hate to speak the truth.”
And the response to her fortitude? The “woke” Left is seeking to “cancel” her — Newspeak for trashing her reputation — for this ideological heresy.
Even the actors made famous by Rowling’s much-acclaimed book series have come out against her. Daniel Radcliffe, who plays Harry Potter in the movies, insisted that “transgender women are women” and banned any further conversation or debate on the topic. Eddie Redmayne, who starred in the movie adaptation of Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts series, also vehemently disagreed with her tweets. And Emma Watson, who has been a staunch advocate for the #TIMESUP movement, refused even to consider Rowling’s opinions and instead responded by stating: “Trans people are who they say they are and deserve to live their lives without being constantly questioned or told they aren’t who they say they are.”
The Blair Partnership, Rowling’s literary agency, saw four of its other authors resign after the agency failed to make a statement “to reaffirm their stance to transgender rights and equality.” After Rowling’s publisher, Hachette, held a meeting over the incident, over 100 staff members signed a letter condemning her.
Whence all this outrage? The tension has been building slowly since last December, when Rowling defended Maya Forstater, a visiting fellow at the Centre for Global Development, after Forstater lost her job due to a tweet that was viewed as transphobic. Rowling’s most recent tweets have caused the fury to boil over.
Let me be clear: by tweeting her thoughts and ideas, J.K. Rowling is not “targeting” or in any way harming anyone. She is simply fighting against the erosion of women’s rights. She is warning of the real-life consequences when women’s rights are subordinated to transgender rights. She is urging all of us to think carefully about what is being done on the basis of a warped ideology of “intersectionality,” which conjures up a strange, inverted hierarchy of victimhood and grievance.
When transgender women and women are indistinguishable, women are unable to access the rights they would have if they were distinctive. Thus far, we’ve seen women lose to transgender women in sports across the board, such as in weightlifting or track racing. In women’s prisons — tense environments to begin with — there have been reports of transgender women sexually assaulting other inmates in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K.
Transgender inmates, it is true, face their own unique risks in the prison system, reporting significantly higher rates of assault. They face discrimination more generally. Yet being tolerant of transgender women does not mean that one loses the ability to defend the rights of women who were born female. As Rowling says, “when you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman … then you open to door to any and all men who wish to come inside.” These are legitimate concerns about complex, fraught subjects.
In this controversy, I find the silence of women’s rights advocates troubling. Over the past few years, they have demonstrated in Handmaid’s Tale outfits, donned Pussyhats to join Women’s Marches, and expressed online support for the various hashtag movements. But where are our well-known women’s rights activists now? Why have we not heard from Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Margaret Atwood, Angelina Jolie, or Meryl Streep? Does not one of them have the guts to defend the most successful female author of our time?
The main reason for this silence, as I see it, is the twisted logic of identity politics and its adherents. This ideology promotes a worldview that is wholly based on power structures and relationships. All of society is viewed through the prism of oppressors and oppressed. The ideology focuses on traits, such as race, gender or sexual orientation, some of which are deemed unalterable, others a matter of personal choice. Yet individual agency is generally devalued, to the benefit of collective identities that are increasingly ideologically fixed. An individual has less and less room to carve out room for her own views within each collective. A matrix has formed where those who have a higher number of marginalized traits rank higher on the victimhood ladder; their “truth” therefore counts more.
Unfortunately, those who are alarmed by the rigid dogmas of identity politics are increasingly quiet, perhaps fearful the “woke” mob will come after them next. The aim of mobs committed to “woke” social justice increasingly appears to be to pressurize dissenters into conformity or, if that fails, into an uneasy silence.
In woke ideology, anything that challenges the power matrix is considered to be not a difference in perspective, but violence. Freedom of speech appears to be protected only when it supports the “correct” viewpoint. Three of the authors who recently quit The Blair Partnership wrote in a statement that: “Freedom of speech can only be upheld if the structural inequalities that hinder equal opportunities for underrepresented groups are challenged and changed.” The Rowling incident highlights the present danger facing not only women’s rights, but also our core values. In my view, there is nothing more suspect than the formulation “Freedom of speech … but only for approved speech.”
What, then, should we do?
To answer this, we have to understand where this destructive ideology came from and why it is that so many young people have come to adopt it.
For too long, we have left the institutions of education — in particular, teacher-training colleges — in the hands of an unrepresentative political fringe. As a result, growing number of teachers today are not teaching our children real critical thinking. Rather, those who view themselves as agents of “social justice” in university lecture halls and classrooms value orthodoxy, conformity and moral condemnation more than they do free thought and free speech. This is particularly true when it comes to the foundations of intersectionality, gender studies and critical race studies.
The phenomenon is not new. As far back as 1994, Daphne Patai and Noretta Koerge — both staunchly committed to women’s rights — warned against increasing pressures in women’s studies departments across the United States to conform to certain fixed ideological viewpoints. But academic trends toward “progressive” conformity and orthodoxy have only intensified in recent years. Those who challenge the woke culture — within or outside of academia — can find themselves fired, doxed, de-platformed or canceled (not forgetting “erased,” another favorite term of our time).
This does not apply just to the educators themselves. According to a survey by the Knight Foundation, more than two-thirds (68%) of American college students say their campus climate precludes students from expressing their true opinions because their classmates might find them offensive. Gradually, universities have come to view themselves less as institutions of vigorous intellectual debate and discussion, and more as zones of psychological “safety,” where the main goal is to prevent students’ emotional discomfort.
The media and the entertainment industry are at fault as well. Influenced by their younger employees, who have successfully imported campus norms to corporate America, newspaper and television executives cower in the face of the “Great Awokening.”
We must rethink what all this means for us and for future generations, and we must push back against it while there is still a chance to do so. We need to challenge the identity-politics narrative by focusing on individual freedom, personal agency, and critical thinking. These concepts are not inimical to human tolerance or to the emancipation of vulnerable individuals. On the contrary, they are the indispensable foundations of a tolerant society.
I therefore praise J.K. Rowling for — so far — standing her ground against a torrent of deeply personal criticism. She is a hero of our times simply for engaging in an act of heterodox thinking and refusing to be intimidated by the Twitter mob. She is not transphobic and neither am I. This fight to preserve the free exchange of ideas is worth having, not only to protect the hard-won rights of women but also to uphold the first principles of a free society.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and Founder of the AHA Foundation.
Judging Trump: Confirmations overshadowed by stinging defeats in the Supreme Court Judging Trump: Confirmations overshadowed by stinging defeats in the Supreme Court W. James Antle III President Trump celebrated the confirmation of his 200th federal judge this month, a significant milestone in his reshaping of the judiciary in less than four years. But it wasn't all a party. "Do you get the impression that the Supreme Court doesn't like me?" Trump asked on Twitter less than a week earlier.
The source of this discordant note was a pair of Supreme Court rulings in which GOP appointees sided with the liberal bloc to deliver outcomes that were potentially demoralizing to portions of Trump's base in the middle of a tough election year. A big part of the case for Trump's reelection rests on the conservative judges he has worked with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to install throughout the federal court system. The conservative majority on the highest court seems more fragile and less reliable than previously thought, leading a few prominent Republicans to question the whole project.
Bostock v. Clayton County was likely the more important of the two. In the case, the majority found that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned discrimination against gay and transgender workers through its broad prohibition against discriminating based on sex. Justice Neil Gorsuch, Antonin Scalia's successor and Trump's first Supreme Court nominee, wrote the opinion.
"Justice Scalia would be disappointed that his successor has bungled textualism so badly today for the sake of appealing to college campuses and editorial boards," protested Carrie Severino, president of the conservative Judicial Crisis Network. "You can't redefine the meaning of words themselves and still be doing textualism. This is an ominous sign for anyone concerned about the future of representative democracy."
"The Supreme Court unilaterally 'updated' the 1964 statute in a manner that legislature clearly did not intend at the time they wrote the term 'sex' based on the court's policy preferences, which is an unconstitutional violation of the separation of powers," said Jenna Ellis, a senior adviser to Trump's reelection campaign on legal matters.
According to most public opinion polls, the general nondiscrimination policy that Bostock v. Clayton County resulted in is popular, including among Republicans. But social conservatives worried about its impact on religious liberty, especially the hiring practices of religious schools, hospitals, and social services agencies. The decision did not attempt to resolve these tensions, but some fear that Christian adoption agencies and academies will face a litigation nightmare.
Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, went a step further than that. "It represents the end of the conservative legal movement, or the conservative legal project, as we know it," he said on the Senate floor, adding, "If we've been fighting for originalism and textualism, and this is the result of that, then I have to say it turns out we haven't been fighting for very much. Or maybe we've been fighting for quite a lot, but it's been exactly the opposite of what we thought we were fighting for."
The second decision concerned Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, an Obama-era initiative for shielding some young undocumented immigrants from deportation that Trump considered illegal executive overreach and vowed to end. DACA also polls well but is opposed by many immigration hawks who support the president. The Supreme Court rebuffed Trump's cancellation of the program on procedural grounds, with Chief Justice John Roberts joining the liberal bloc.
Republican-appointed justices have disappointed conservatives before, upholding abortion and affirmative action or ruling that there is a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. John Paul Stevens and David Souter became full-time members of the court's liberal bloc. But Gorsuch and Roberts were vetted and vouched for by the best conservative legal minds, leading to Hawley's consternation. Trump can ill afford diminished enthusiasm from any part of his base, and "but Gorsuch" was the rallying cry of conservatives who voted for Trump despite misgivings about his tweets and temperament.
Most conservatives nevertheless reaffirmed the importance of a Republican president picking judges. "Gorsuch has been the most conservative justice," said Timothy Head, executive director of the Faith and Freedom Coalition. "His rulings in the first year plus have run basically in tandem with Thomas and Alito."
"President Trump, working closely with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, has successfully, positively reshaped the Federal Judiciary," March for Life Action President Tom McClusky said in a statement. "The judges nominated by President Trump are committed to upholding the rule of law and the Constitution. Already, we have seen positive developments in cases involving women and the unborn."
Vice President Mike Pence has embarked on a "Faith in America" tour to help shore up the evangelical and conservative Catholic vote.
Trump’s in trouble Trump’s in trouble Fred Barnes Until his misguided response to the pandemic and the protests and riots following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, President Trump had at least a 50-50 chance of winning reelection.
But by pushing himself front and center in 2020 with defenses of his decision-making, unflagging self-promotion, and his idle thoughts, Trump undercut his prospects for a second term. Winning on Nov. 3 will require an impressive comeback.
Democrats, with Joe Biden as their presidential candidate, hadn’t expected to be in such a strong position with the election just over four months away. Trump, for all his bluster, had united Republicans and solidified a working-class base.
This had seemed nearly impossible when Trump took office. He was an outsider, untutored in the presidency, lacking a clear set of political principles, and suspected by Democrats of having gotten Russian help in winning the 2016 election.
Republicans were worried about the ideological direction he would take in the White House. To their pleasant surprise, he emerged as a conservative. And this, more than anything else, brought the party together behind Trump. He cut taxes, nominated two conservatives to the Supreme Court, and adopted the anti-abortion position he had spurned years earlier as a Democrat. Nor did he follow an isolationist foreign policy as had been feared.
His behavior was hardly “presidential.” Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans focused on his fits of anger, exaggerations, untruths, penchant for stirring bitter controversies, and unnecessary disputes with foreign leaders, among others.
Democrats failed at fighting Trump. They did themselves no favor by vowing to reject compromise with the president to be the resistance. The effect was to further strengthen Trump in his own party. Nasty opposition by the elite press had similar effects.
Perhaps Democrats couldn’t help themselves from trying character assassination against Trump’s two Supreme Court nominees. When they failed, Trump got the credit. He filled all 53 vacancies on the 12 federal appeals court, a record for a president’s first term.
Trump had one more triumph. Democrats and the media created a “narrative” about collusion between Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin in the 2016 election. A special prosecutor with a huge and predominantly anti-Trump staff investigated the case. Alas, there was no collusion: Trump had won again, embarrassing Democrats and shaming the press.
By 2020, Trump began to act as if success was his Godly inheritance. Yes, Democrats had regained the House in the 2018 midterm election. This was normal. The “out” party usually wins the first midterm for a new president.
When word spread about the COVID-19 virus, a cocky Trump was quick to insist that it posed little danger. He was what’s known as “winging it” on this. His optimism was make-believe. In fact, he barely had a clue.
As the virus worsened, the president and two medical experts held daily briefings. Then Trump began to stay after the experts departed to respond to questions. He was over his head. And it showed. Hostile reporters prevailed.
Once the pandemic began to wane, Trump faced a tough choice. There was plenty of evidence the time had come to reopen the economy. It had been closed down to keep people from mingling, thus spreading the virus.
Besides, the jobless rate was soaring to record highs. Trump opted to free the economy from restraints, and this appeared to work — at first. Then with the rate of infection climbing, states imposed new rules. Polls, reflecting the views of the press and Democrats, showed most people favored a new clampdown.
A second crisis of demonstrations alongside riots and violence erupted in dozens of cities. A radical group known as Black Lives Matter, which calls for emptying prisons and firing police, insisted “systemic” racism and anti-black police were oppressing black people. Democrats and the media agreed.
What was Trump to do? He didn’t have a plan or a high-toned speech to deliver. He tried a stunt. He walked to nearby St. John’s Episcopal Church, which had been firebombed earlier, and held up a Bible. The media sneered at the president. Their news judgment was that protesters who had been pushed aside to let Trump through were the story. Weeks later, the Washington Post was still covering that story.
Two big events in 2020, both at Trump’s expense, and an economy he had driven to new heights, now sidelined by a contagious disease. Trump has a big job on his hands.
Fred Barnes is a Washington Examiner senior columnist.
Trump wants to replace New START with a treaty that includes China Trump wants to replace New START with a treaty that includes China Jamie McIntyre When President Trump exited the landmark 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia in August 2018, it left in force only one agreement limiting nuclear arms: the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, negotiated by the Obama administration and signed by the United States and Russia in 2010.
New START, which limits each side to 1,550 deployed warheads, expires in February of next year but can be renewed for five more years if Washington and Moscow both agree.
Currently, the Trump administration is disinclined to extend the treaty because it suffers from some of the same deficiencies as the now-defunct INF treaty: Namely, it’s a bilateral agreement between the U.S. and Russia that leaves out China, which is rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal, and it doesn’t cover a range of new Russians weapons such as hypersonic and cruise missiles, some of which Russia has already deployed in violation of the old INF treaty.
In a statement marking the demise of the INF treaty, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called upon Russia and China to join the U.S. in beginning “a new era of arms control that moves beyond the bilateral treaties of the past.”
On June 22, U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Arms Control Marshall Billingslea sat down in Vienna with his Russian counterpart, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, and began to see whether Russia was willing to explore a new arms control framework that would go beyond the Cold War construct of just two world superpowers.
The U.S. invited China to take part in the discussions, but, as Billingslea tweeted from Austria, “China is a no-show. Beijing still hiding behind #GreatWallofSecrecy on its crash nuclear build-up, and so many other things.”
China is estimated to have roughly 300 nuclear warheads but is believed to be on a path to at least double, perhaps more than triple, the size of its strategic arsenal over the next decade.
“China, after many years of proclaiming its minimum nuclear deterrent, has developed its own nuclear triad to directly rival America,” wrote Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming in a letter to Trump this month.
In addition to modernizing its nuclear arsenal, China is developing maneuverable reentry vehicles and hypersonic glide weapons to evade U.S. missile defenses and topping its ICBMs with multiple independently targeted warheads.
The Cheney letter, signed by 40 Republican colleagues, expresses “strong support” for Trump’s efforts to ensure “China is included in meaningful U.S. arms control efforts.”
“The notion of trying to pull the Chinese into that agreement is, in theory, a good idea. In practice? Impossible,” said former Defense Secretary Robert Gates in a session with the Center for Strategic and International Studies four days before the Vienna talks began.
“The Chinese have no incentive whatsoever to participate,” said Gates, who was a CIA analyst for the very first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty talks in 1969. “And the irony is if they were to level out their military, their number of nuclear weapons, an agreement would have to authorize the Chinese to build dramatically more, far more, nuclear weapons than we think they have at the current time to get level with the United States in China.”
Beijing’s answer, as tweeted by a spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign affairs, is that the way to get China on board is for the U.S. and China to “reduce its nuclear arms stockpile, creating conditions for other nuclear-weapon states to join in multilateral nuclear disarmament talks.”
Billingslea tweeted that his first round of Vienna talks was “very positive,” with “detailed discussions on full-range of nuclear topics, technical working groups launched" and an “agreement in principle on second round.”
But without China at the table, the prospects for an ambitious new accord to replace New START seem remote — the treaty is set to lapse in just over seven months.
The question now is whether to allow New START to die a quiet death as a relic of the Cold War or to revive it as a placeholder to give time for new efforts to engage China and address new Russian capabilities, including short-range tactical systems that are not covered by the current accord.
“Yes, Russia is developing new nuclear weapons not covered by the treaty, and yes, China is not in the treaty at all. Options to address these issues can be explored for a follow-on agreement but will simply take too long to consider by early 2021,” writes former Defense Secretary William Perry and co-author Tom Collina in their new book on arms control, The Button.
Proponents of extending New START argue that whatever its limitations, the treaty’s verification regime provides a window into what Russia is doing that would otherwise slam shut in February.
In May, Billingslea said that New START has “a very weak verification regime” with “significant loopholes in the way verification is physically conducted, which the Russians have been exploiting.”
But Rose Gottemoeller, who was President Barack Obama’s chief U.S. negotiator for the treaty, says it’s a mistake to focus solely on on-site inspections.
“It is the whole panoply of capacity and capability in the verification regime for the New START Treaty that gives us 24-7 insight into the status of Russian nuclear forces,” she told reporters in January.
“I really hope that they will renew New START, both for verification purposes and because of the predictability it brings into the arms control, into the strategic arms arena,” says Gates. “I think there are some opportunities for arms control with China. I don’t think strategic arms right now is one of them.”
The fate of the last surviving arms control treaty between the U.S. and Russia may well be determined by the November presidential election.
“President Trump may do nothing or oppose extension,” write Perry and Collina, “In that case, a new president who takes office in January 2021 would have just weeks to pick up the pieces.”
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.
Election-year politics stall police reform efforts Election-year politics stall police reform efforts Susan Ferrechio It's not very often that Republicans and Democrats agree on significant policy matters, so when the two parties simultaneously called for quick passage of law enforcement reform legislation to address police brutality and racial bias, a rare bipartisan deal seemed possible.
But rather than sending a bill to President Trump's desk, Republicans and Democrats by the end of last week were nowhere near a compromise, and the upcoming election may be to blame.
"We've got a very, very good piece of legislation that will improve our criminal justice system, that will restore a measure of trust in some of our most important local institutions, and the only thing between us and achieving that outcome is political calculation, cynical political calculation," Sen. Todd Young, an Indiana Republican who runs the Senate GOP campaign arm, said after Democrats indicated they would block consideration of a police reform measure authored by South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott.
Instead of passing a bill last week, the two parties were left bitterly slinging accusations involving murder and racism at each other. At the same time, hopes for substantial bipartisan reform legislation before July 4 faded away almost entirely.
Scott, the lead author of the GOP measure and one of only three black lawmakers in the Senate, played anonymous voicemail death threats that he'd received to Republican lawmakers in a closed-door lunch on Thursday.
Across the Capitol, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat who opposes the GOP bill, accused Republicans of "trying to get away with murder, actually — the murder of George Floyd" by taking up Scott's reform measure, which she deemed insufficient to address racial bias and misconduct in policing.
Republicans blamed the heightened partisan infighting on the upcoming November election and what they said they believe is an effort by Democrats to block any legislation that Trump could tout to voters as a win.
Trump is suffering from lower approval ratings following the coronavirus outbreak and the economic standstill created by the lockdowns, some polls have shown. Polls show voters disapprove of Trump's handling of civil unrest prompted by the death of George Floyd, who died while in the custody of a white police officer.
Last week, a Washington Post/Ipsos poll gave Trump a 36% approval rating and 62% disapproval rating for his handling of the protests and riots that have gripped the nation in recent weeks. However, the poll queried "American adults" and not registered or likely voters.
Democrats would rather block legislation until next year, Republicans said, when the possibility of a Democrat in the White House and perhaps a GOP-led Senate would allow them to pass a police reform bill that includes everything on their wish list, including the elimination of qualified immunity for police officers.
"The only place this is in a holdup is the Democrats' partisanship to try to make this political instead of finding a solution," Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, said.
On Wednesday, Democrats blocked Scott's JUSTICE Act from moving to the Senate floor for debate despite a rare offer from GOP leaders that would have allowed debate on an unlimited number of amendments.
Hours earlier, the New York Times published a national poll showing Joe Biden with a 14-point lead over Trump.
"They've decided to punt this bill until the election. You know why?" Scott said on Wednesday. "Because they believe the polls reflect a 15-point deficit on our side. Therefore, they can get the vote they want in November. All they have to do is win the election, then roll in January and get the chance to write the police reform bill without our support at all."
Republicans last appeared ready to compromise with the Democrats.
Scott said he was willing to use Democratic language on banning chokeholds, and other Republicans said they were ready to discuss a compromise on qualified immunity.
Sen. Mike Braun, an Indiana Republican, introduced a measure to reform qualified immunity for police officers to remove a "misguided protection that has been extended to those who act under the color of the law to illegally deprive citizens of the rights, privileges, and immunities secured by the Constitution and our country's laws."
But by Thursday, talks appeared dead in the Senate, and floor action had moved to a significant defense spending authorization measure. It's not clear when or if the Senate will try again to take up a police reform measure. They leave Friday for a two-week recess.
Democrats deny election-year politics are behind their opposition to the GOP measure. Sen. Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat, acknowledged "virtues in both" bills but said Democrats want to start over with bipartisan negotiations to create an entirely new compromise bill.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, said the amendment process offered by the GOP on the Scott bill would have left the measure "unsalvageable" and pointed to unanimous opposition to the GOP bill from civil rights organizations.
Despite Senate Democrats calling for a two-party compromise, there was no sign of bipartisan negotiations in the House.
There is little chance McConnell will bring the House measure to the floor in the Senate.
Senate Democrats remained hopeful that negotiations could begin anew on a compromise reform bill in the Judiciary Committee, but panel Chairman Lindsey Graham said the Democratic Party is far too worried about its far-left base and winning in November to negotiate with the GOP or Trump on major legislation.
"Every elected Democrat in office and every Democrat running for office lives in fear of the mob and 'the Squad,'" Graham said on Wednesday. "The idea of working with Donald Trump to accomplish objectives to help America is a one-way ticket to political exile."
Government helps boost savings and then spending for lower income households Government helps boost savings and then spending for lower income households Nihal Krishan Lower-income households saw a disproportionate increase in savings and then a rebound in spending during the first few months of the pandemic thanks in large part to the federal government's relief programs, which helped ease the economic downturn, according to a new study published.
Those in the lowest income quartile, earning less than $27,000, had the largest increase in savings, going from having approximately $2,000 in savings pre-pandemic to $3,000 in May, according to household bank account data analyzed by scholars from the University of Chicago, Princeton University, and the JPMorgan Chase Institute.
“The fact that the poorest households are saving more percentage-wise than richer households is fairly surprising,” said Joseph Vavra, an associate professor of economics at the University of Chicago and one of the authors of the study.
Savings for low-income households went up by 25%, and savings for higher income households went up by 15% when looking at year-to-year changes, Vavra said. Higher income households are those with incomes approximately $58,000 and greater.
“This is big when you consider these people are the most likely to be losing their jobs, losing much more of their income compared to high-income households. That’s what makes it surprising,” said Vavra.
The study shows that there is suggestive evidence that this occurred because of federal government relief programs like the $1,200 stimulus checks, the expanded unemployment insurance, and the small-business relief program known as the Paycheck Protection Program — all of which are a result of the $2.3 trillion CARES Act coronavirus legislation passed by Congress in March.
Vavra said that during the initial stages of the pandemic, everyone cut their spending, but lower income households cut their spending more than others, which caused their savings to rise. Then, when the government relief programs started kicking in, low-income households, which were helped the most by these programs, were then able to spend more money as a result of the aid.
The study shows that low-income households' savings rose in conjunction with the dispersal of government relief programs. This suggests the government programs had a positive effect on the savings and spending of low-income households, said Vavra.
One of the conclusions the study came to, Vavra said, was that while spending is increasing and the economy is on the path to recovery, the economy is still much worse than the worst period of the Great Recession.
“We are nowhere near back to normal, so we should be really cautious about phasing out government help too soon. We should be nervous about cutting back on spending too much,” Vavra said.
Vavra said that people should be open to continued government spending and using "automatic triggers" to provide more or less financial aid depending on employment levels and economic growth. This is also the strategy that a bipartisan group of prominent economists suggested earlier in June.
According to another new economic study, consumer behavior has been and will continue to depend mostly on individual choices in relation to coronavirus fears or lack thereof rather than government lockdown orders.
The study, authored by University of Chicago professor and former economic adviser to President Barack Obama Austan Goolsbee and another Chicago professor, Chad Syverson, confirms what President Trump's economic adviser Tomas Philipson said last month. Philipson said during an interview with the Washington Examiner that voluntary caution, not state lockdown orders, drove the shutdown in commerce when the coronavirus hit. Furthermore, individual confidence to go out and spend will drive growth now, not lockdown orders being lifted by the government.
Goolsbee's study shows that while consumer spending overall fell by 60 percentage points, government lockdowns explain only 7 percentage points of this. The study used cellphone records and data on customer visits to more than 2.25 million individual businesses across 110 different industries to draw its conclusions.
Although the government shutdown orders had little impact on spending overall, the study found they did have a significant effect in reallocating consumer activity away from “nonessential” to “essential” businesses — from restaurants and bars to groceries and other food sellers.
Ohio senator wants to shake up privacy regulations Ohio senator wants to shake up privacy regulations Grant Gross In recent months, members of Congress have introduced several bills designed to protect consumer privacy, but one senator said he believes most current legislation doesn’t go far enough. This month, Sen. Sherrod Brown has released draft legislation that would prohibit companies from collecting personal data in many cases, allowing them only to collect it when “strictly necessary.” Brown’s Data Accountability and Transparency Act would end the current privacy practices of many online companies in which they get consumers to consent to data collection described in lengthy and rarely read privacy policies.
The proposal has little chance of passing in an election year, especially when several less expansive privacy bills seem to be going nowhere. But the proposal advances the debate when it’s time for a new privacy model, Brown argued.
“Sen. Brown believes this is the first step in moving the privacy debate away from the common notice-and-consent framework and in shifting the responsibility for protecting our data from consumers to corporations,” said a spokeswoman for the Senate Banking Committee, where Brown serves as the senior Democrat. “Consumers should not have to agree to invasive data collection in order to use basic online services.”
Some privacy groups, including the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Public Interest Research Group, praised Brown’s proposal, saying a major change in privacy regulations is needed. Critics, however, said Brown’s proposal would destroy many online business models.
The proposal would “bankrupt companies and shift priorities to compliance vs. entrepreneurship,” said Ivan Assenov, founder of Michigan software and web development firm Scale Campaign. “This will increase the price tag and slow down the information flow to almost zero.”
The proposal also gives “huge power” to state attorneys general to prosecute companies accused of violating regulations. "And it will eventually be used to outmaneuver competitors,” added Assenov, a long-time developer of compliance software.
Brown’s spokeswoman argued that online business models don’t need massive personal data collection to survive. “Advertising and marketing firms have been profitable for years without invasively collecting data — tech companies can use those models or innovate new ones that protect our privacy,” she said.
Brown’s proposal, in addition to allowing personal data collection only when “strictly necessary,” would also ban the use of facial recognition technology and would create a new data privacy enforcement. It would allow both individuals and state attorneys general to go to court to force companies to comply with the privacy regulations, and it would not preempt stronger state privacy laws. Many Republicans in Congress have opposed a private right to file lawsuits and have demanded preemption of state privacy laws in other privacy regulation efforts.
The proposal’s impact on current business models may be a feature, not a bug, said Yoav Aviram, founder of YourDigitalRights.org, a free service that helps people request organizations to delete their personal data. “If adopted, this regulation would mark the end for many business models, not just for internet companies,” he said. “I think it's a mistake to see this as a side effect of the new proposal. On the contrary — it's the main intended consequence.”
There’s now a wide understanding that the current level of personal data collection is “untenable,” Aviram added.
“When tech companies started to collect data, it was done innocently,” he said. “No one could have predicted how lucrative this trade would become, and it took the world a little while to catch up with this realization. When the world did catch up, everyone wanted to be in on it.”
But Brown’s proposal, with its private right of action and lack of state preemption, will be too big of a step for many people in Congress, countered Kevin Coy, privacy group co-chairman at the Arnall Golden Gregory law firm in Washington.
The blanket ban on facial recognition technology is also problematic, Coy said. There’s no “effort to distinguish between beneficial uses of the technology and other use cases that raise mass surveillance and other civil liberties concerns,” he said.
The proposal also appears to prohibit any kind of online advertising that’s targeted to users based on their web searches and other preferences, he said. The proposal will be a “magnet” for class-action lawsuits and huge administrative penalties, he said.
“There is a strong case to be made for national privacy legislation that provides enhanced privacy protections for individuals and clearer, more uniform rules of the road for businesses,” Coy added. “The devil is in the details, of course, and Sen. Brown’s draft bill appears to go too far in a number of respects.”
We can see the thinning blue line We can see the thinning blue line Hugo Gurdon The nadir of President Barack Obama’s relations with Capitol Hill Democrats came in his first term when he abandoned immigration reform, and Rep. Luis Gutierrez threatened “civil war” in the party. Instead of fixing the problem, Obama used it as an unresolved grievance in his 2012 reelection campaign.
Empty vessels make the most noise, and the party shouting loudest about an issue often has least incentive to deal with it. If empty rhetoric lost votes, politicians would avoid it. Conversely, when voters back a party making promises with no sell-by date, that party can keep campaigning on problems rather than resolving them.
Democrats blocking Sen. Tim Scott’s police reform bill this month display cynicism of the same stripe. They make electoral hay blasting the police, alleging systemic racism, poor training, etc. But they’d rather keep the issue and bash President Trump with it before November’s vote than tackle it seriously, give the president a legislative win, and take the issue off the table.
Why throw away a weapon that can win you power? Why, except, as Speaker Paul Ryan once told Gutierrez, because it’s “the right thing to do.” It would show you care more about America than about seizing power. But (chuckle), the suckers will never notice.
Police forces need reform and better training, particularly for tense encounters with racial minorities. Reform is not anti-police but pro-police. It would support them, help them do their jobs better, restore public faith in them, and restore their own faith in their leadership, which lets them twist in the wind.
But Democrats on Capitol Hill and in city governments would rather throttle the subdued police, just as a Minneapolis cop did to George Floyd, igniting today’s urban conflagrations.
The disaster of “defund the police” and collapsing police morale is the subject of our cover story, “Cops Out!” Karol Markowicz reports that more and more police are turning in their badges — abuse and abandonment are not what they signed up for — leaving law-abiding citizens, especially minorities, to the scant mercies of criminals and political militants.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a fighter for women’s rights worldwide, leaps to defend author J.K. Rowling, whom trans activists are trying to “cancel” for rejecting their dangerous falsehoods.
Byron York interviews Michael Pack, new head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, who is laughably accused of working for Steve Bannon to turn America’s international voice into a Trumpist propaganda outfit.
Nick Clairmont profiles Elon Musk, a modern-day entrepreneurial Houdini, and Dhruva Jaishankar steps into the clash between China and India on the roof of the world.
Charlotte Allen revisits Gone With the Wind, the great novel rather than the film, after the latter’s defenestration in the blundering frenzy of our new culture war. Brad Polumbo reviews How Innovation Works, And Why It Flourishes in Freedom, Matt Ridley’s thorough debunking of the precautionary principle that ties progress up in red tape. Eric Felten resists magic mushrooms.
Fake friends Fake friends Rob Long According to legend, Frank Sinatra once said this to a close friend: "I wish that someone would hurt your family so that I could find that person and hurt them back."
To which, I suppose, the only polite response was, “Gosh. Thanks, Frank. I hope so, too.”
There are probably better ways to put it, of course, but it must have been nice to know that Sinatra, the "chairman of the board of all show business," liked you enough to vow a terrible vengeance upon your enemies.
Hollywood friendships, in other words, are weird.
Martha Stewart is the world-famous queen of home decorating and entertaining. She's known for her prim and highly controlled public persona and her obsession with details.
Snoop Dogg, the Los Angeles-native rapper and recording artist, is famous for being a casual, shambling figure: He speaks in his own special patois and has never once expressed an interest in arranging flowers for an attractive centerpiece or the correct spoon to use with sorbet.
And yet, Stewart and Snoop Dogg are good friends. They are close enough, in fact, to have starred in a reality television show together in which the unlikely pair hosted dinner parties with other celebrity guests.
The correct spoon to use with sorbet, by the way, is the runcible spoon, or what some people (not me, and certainly not Martha) might call a “spork.”
The so-called friendship between Stewart and Snoop Dogg may seem strange, but inside the bubble that encloses much of the New York and Los Angeles mediaopolis, it makes perfect sense. Famous people may have little else in common with each other aside from fame, but that's often enough. The paparazzi and publicity machines that surround well-known people act, in a way, like celebrity sheepdogs, herding the famous and the infamous together into a tightly formed knot of bold-faced names.
These days, as we all know, the word "friend" can have a very elastic meaning. For the past four years, there has been an almost chilling photograph floating around the internet — how chilling depends, I suppose, on your political leanings — showing a beaming Bill and Hillary Clinton, both dressed in their formal best, embracing an ebullient Donald and Melania Trump on the latter couple’s wedding day. At the time the image was snapped, the four were a merry and mutually supportive quartet, all smiles and winks and let’s-do-lunch giggles.
Now, not so much.
The question arises: Were they ever really friends, the way nonfamous You and nonentity Me define the word?
On the other hand, maybe we’re thinking about friendship in the wrong way.
In 2016, Alex Pentland, a social and computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, completed a study that revealed some disturbing statistics. Barely half of all friendships are mutual. When he asked a group of people to rank each other in terms of the closeness of their friendship, they only matched up 53% of the time. In other words, the people you think of as your close friends may not think of you the same way.
It gets worse: In the survey, a subject who reported a "close friendship" with a person who did not reciprocate was 94% more likely to expect the opposite. The study managed to deliver two uneasy messages to the socially paranoid: One, a lot of your friends probably don't like you that much, and two, you have no idea which ones do and which ones don't.
Clearly, Donald and Melania and Hillary and Bill are evidence that this study is sound science, though maybe it doesn't apply in cases like that.
It’s impossible to imagine that at the precise moment the famous Happy Foursome picture was snapped that any of the principals involved really thought they were friends. In fact, if the gossip is true, there isn’t much friendship within the couples, let alone among the group as a whole. It’s a picture of four smart and strategic individuals, forming a temporary alliance to serve the immediate needs of each. It’s positively Ayn Randian in its depiction of ruthless efficiency.
Perhaps if Pentland had studied celebrities and politicians, his conclusions would have been different. That kind of study would surely have revealed that something closer to 100% of the celebrity subjects surveyed disliked their celebrity friends 100% of the time and were 100% certain that their famous friends felt exactly the same way.
The lone, heroic exception, as always, is Sinatra, who knew a thing or two about what friendship really means — and how to express it.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
Joel Schumacher, 1939-2020 Joel Schumacher, 1939-2020 Peter Tonguette If you were a regular theatergoer during the 1990s, the movies of Joel Schumacher were as ubiquitous and as comforting as a tub of popcorn with extra butter, a box of Junior Mints, and a whole bunch of coming attractions.
For most of that decade, Schumacher, who died last week at the age of 80, was entrusted with some of Hollywood’s most prized properties. The director made the most entertaining, least pretentious entries in the then-popular subgenre of John Grisham legal thrillers: 1994’s The Client, starring Susan Sarandon as a force-of-nature attorney, and 1996’s A Time to Kill, a potent courtroom drama that gave great parts to three of the decade’s biggest rising stars: Matthew McConaughey, Sandra Bullock, and Samuel L. Jackson. Like the beach reads they were based on, the films were gripping, intense, and compulsively watchable.
More controversial were Schumacher’s infamously campy Batman movies. He took over the original franchise from Tim Burton, whose dark, dingy vision of Gotham City he tossed out in favor of production and costume design that suggested a cinematic version of one of Roy Lichtenstein’s comic book-inspired paintings. Batman Forever (1995) and Batman & Robin (1997) are bright, splashy, jam-packed with side characters (remember Tommy Lee Jones’s Two-Face? Uma Thurman’s Poison Ivy?), and anchored by Batmen — Val Kilmer and George Clooney, respectively — who seem slightly overwhelmed by the circuslike quality of the productions. Nonetheless, Schumacher’s two Batman films now look like glossy, up-tempo interludes between the glumness of Burton and Schumacher’s successor in all things Batman, Christopher Nolan.
A native of New York City who matriculated at the Parsons School of Design, Schumacher came to directing from costume design, creating the wardrobes for several signature films from the early 1970s, including Paul Mazursky’s Blume in Love, Woody Allen’s Sleeper, and Herbert Ross’s The Last of Sheila. He first tried his hand at directing with a 1973 TV movie about the significant other of Bugsy Siegel — Virginia Hill, starring Last of Sheila star Dyan Cannon — but did not earn the right to make features until the early 1980s, when he was assigned a series of slightly cheesy, supposedly commercial projects, including The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981), starring Lily Tomlin in miniaturized form, and D.C. Cab (1983), which did not advance the big-screen prospects of Mr. T.
Finally, Schumacher found his comfort zone with the amiable Brat Pack pastiche St. Elmo’s Fire (1985), which the filmmaker, who had been penning screenplays since the mid-1970s, including the film version of the musical The Wiz, also co-wrote. Yet Schumacher’s real talent was not in generating material but applying his rather shameless, audience-pleasing instincts to scripts by others. If there are better films to curl up with on a Saturday night than The Lost Boys (1987) or Dying Young (1991), I’m not aware of them. Like LBJ, Schumacher did not seek, nor did he seem to accept, critical approval. “Because of advice Woody gave me,” the director told Vulture, referring to Allen, “I didn’t read reviews. ... I was never out of the box as the critic’s darling.” Yet the smartest reviewers noted the qualities the director brought to otherwise questionable projects. Reviewing Flatliners (1990), Chicago Tribune critic Dave Kehr wrote, “Schumacher has yet to define himself as an artist, but he is certainly a hired gun of superior talent.”
To be sure, Schumacher flirted with artistry a few times over the years — see the searing study of middle-class meltdown, Falling Down (1993) — but he was, at heart, a showman with some taste. In the contest of Andrew Lloyd Webber-derived musicals, just compare Schumacher’s professional, carefully made adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera (2004) with Tom Hooper’s inept, desperate, instantly notorious version of Cats.
Schumacher led a life marked by some controversy. In a 2000 profile, he told the Guardian that his acid trips numbered in the thousands during a stretch from 1965 to 1970. But he knew where to put the camera.
At the time of his death, Schumacher had not made a feature film in nine years — his last directorial credits of any kind were episodes of House of Cards — but that does not make his absence any more palatable. We will feel the loss next summer when the multiplexes will be back and the popcorn will be buttery, but Joel Schumacher won’t be there to greet us.
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including The Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Humanities.
The universal themes of Waves The universal themes of Waves Zaid Jilani The production company A24 has made a name for itself by picking up and producing some of the strongest independent offerings in cinema, including 2015’s sci-fi cult hit Ex Machina and Room, which nabbed an Oscar for Brie Larson’s performance the same year.
Waves, released quietly late last year, is now available to stream on Amazon Prime. It continues A24’s legacy of putting out some of the most moving independent films on the market.
The film tells the story of a family living a modern suburban life in South Florida. It initially focuses on Tyler, played by the 25-year-old Kelvin Harrison Jr., who, between this film and last year’s Luce, is becoming a staple in indie breakout movies.
Tyler is an ambitious high schooler driven to succeed by his domineering father, Ronald (portrayed by Emmy winner Sterling Brown). He’s a star athlete who sees himself as invincible.
He spends his nights in the wrestling ring and his days at the beach with his devoted girlfriend, Alexis. His mother, Catharine (Renee Goldsberry), and sister, Emily (Taylor Russell), love and respect him, and after seeing the family’s palatial upper-middle-class house, it’s easy to assume that this is a story about people who have made it and are living the good life.
But behind the glamour of writer-director Trey Shults’s cinematography — the film’s sweeping shots are reminiscent of Terrence Malick, for whom the millennial Shults once interned — we start to sense that the feeling of triumph that permeates Tyler’s life cannot last.
Ronald, a self-made man who grew up black and working class in the South, cautions Tyler that he can’t ever afford to slack off. His advice will sound familiar to those of us whose parents came from meager backgrounds but who were able to give us childhoods they could never have dreamed of. “We are not afforded the luxury of being average,” Ronald tells his son. “Got to work 10 times as hard just to get anywhere. Listen, I don’t push you because I want to. I push you because I have to.”
Ronald’s well-meaning but overbearing parenting exacerbates Tyler’s stress. We see him straining himself in increasingly unhealthy ways. He continues to compete in wrestling even after his doctor tells him that the sport is harming his body. When his relationship with Alexis takes a more fractious turn, he’s unable to cope. Eventually, these stresses lead to a tragedy that changes the family’s trajectory.
Without giving anything away, it is sufficient to say that this event shifts the tone and direction of the film, forcing the family to deal with an unprecedented event and the family's role in creating it.
“I’m the one who’s trying to hold this family together,” says Ronald, defending his choices.
“You pushed him!” protests Catharine.
At this point, Shults carefully shifts the focus of the plot away from Tyler and toward Emily, a turn that allows us to see inside the mind of a character who, for the first half of the film, has resided in the background.
Emily struggles to deal with the stress of the family’s crisis, which is only compounded by stigma that comes from the surrounding community. But she finds solace in Luke, a boy at her high school who offers her comfort and sympathy at a time when many others treat her like an outcast.
They eventually become a couple and fall deeply in love, the second such relationship we see play out across cultural lines in the film — Luke is white, with a father who lives in Missouri.
These relationships are the foundation of Waves’s message. As the trials and turmoil of life bear down on us like waves in a stormy ocean, we are kept afloat by our ties to loved ones.
What Shults has created here is a film that recognizes the nuance and depth of the human experience. Unlike many movies, which present us with cookie-cutter villains and heroes, Waves challenges us to look at Tyler and his family as flawed but sympathetic characters navigating a world that can force any of us to be either heroic or villainous.
We see that depth in a scene between Ronald and Emily in the latter half of the film, in which Ronald finally drops his pride and cries, confessing that he doesn’t have anyone else to talk to. Emily quickly reassures him and tells him she’s happy he’s able to talk to her about the family’s problems. But when she expresses anger at her brother for throwing the family into turmoil, Ronald is able to regain his role as the supportive father. “He’s not evil. He’s just a human being,” he reminds her.
That’s a lesson the film gives us over and over again as characters hurt each other and then find it within themselves to seek compassion and embrace forgiveness.
It’s remarkable that Waves was snubbed during awards season, winning only a few titles in minor competitions. One reviewer at the London newspaper the Times suggested that this may have been because “something about the marketing optics (a white filmmaker from Texas directs a quintessentially black movie) didn’t play well.”
If true, that would be a shame, as the film is a Molotov cocktail in the face of essentialism and the idea that racial categorizations define our lives. The message of Waves is universal, not limited by the color of its cast or crew.
Zaid Jilani is a Bridging Differences writing fellow at the University of California, Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center and a freelance journalist.
Opening up the Legion Opening up the Legion Trent Reedy Spring 2020 may have had the same number of days as any other spring, but being stuck at home for months, with all our businesses, churches, and other gathering places shut down, made this spring feel longer than ever. That’s part of the reason why the reopening of American Legion Post 72 in Cheney, Washington, was so special and well attended. A lot of old service members were more than ready to celebrate the end of the quarantine.
The American Legion is always a great place to find military and veterans' stories, and as soon as I stepped into the Legion hall, I knew at once the place was ready for a new story, for a return to the freedom and fellowship that has always made the Legion great. The walls had been newly painted, and new upholstery had been applied to the bar rail and stools.
The reopening was a potluck dinner starting at 1500 hours (that is, 3 p.m.), and despite the early start time, it didn't take long for the place to fill up. Soon enough, the hall was full of veterans and the ladies auxiliary talking, laughing, or shooting pool.
There was a man there named Sam Cutter who was new to our post. He was having a good night: Earlier that day, he had graduated from Eastern Washington University, up the hill from the Legion hall. He had completed his time as an ROTC cadet and received his commission as an Army second lieutenant. Cutter’s father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were all Navy men, so his decision to join the Army came as something of a shock to his family. Very soon, he'll be off to combat engineer school to learn about explosives, mobility, and counter-mobility tactics. This old combat engineer ended up talking the new lieutenant's ear off with old explosives stories.
Eventually, Cutter joined the crowd shooting pool, sinking the three ball on an open table after the break. "Good one, sir!" I said. On his next shot, he sunk the eight ball and lost. "That's more like the lieutenants I remember!" I said. Everybody laughed, for young lieutenants have a hard time. They catch a lot of crap. But everyone wished him well. I don’t think he had to buy a drink for himself all night.
Fifties and '60s music played, and people enjoyed great food. There was a potato soup contest. I'm not sure which of the two excellent treats won most-favored status, but I know we all won by getting to eat it.
Amid this festive atmosphere, there remained a few signs of the coronavirus. The bartender wore a mask. Half the bar stools had been removed. But that was as far as the precautions went. Without stools, people simply stood at the bar. Nobody else wore a mask.
Weaving my way among the many different conversations, I heard people talking about how great it was to be back with their fellow legionnaires and auxiliary members. Many said they were “done” with the coronavirus — ready to go back to normal life. Footage of protests and riots played on the news on a TV on the wall, and the consensus among the legionnaires seemed to be that if such large gatherings were approved of and even supported by various government authorities, then the legionnaires no longer cared about limitations placed on other gatherings.
My friends, I won't tell you what to do in response to the coronavirus. I hope you and yours remain happy and healthy. But if the attitude present at the American Legion Post 72 is shared by others across the country, the authorities may have a hard time putting America back in quarantine again. The club was packed with veterans who once fought for our freedom and who were very happy to be free of strict quarantine protocols. I pray we can all remain safe and free of such restrictions in the future.
Trent Reedy served as a combat engineer in the Iowa National Guard from 1999 to 2005, including a tour of duty in Afghanistan. Some names in this story may have been changed due to security or privacy concerns.
Scientists claim deep-sea mining could forever harm ‘pristine’ ocean ecosystems Scientists claim deep-sea mining could forever harm ‘pristine’ ocean ecosystems Abby Smith Mining the deep seabed could cause irreversible damage to ocean ecosystems, a group of international scientists say, raising questions as to whether the seafloor’s wealth of critical minerals is worth the risk.
The potential harms they outline are only the ones researchers know about today. In fact, the world has explored very little of the deep seas, leaving a knowledge gap seemingly as vast as the ocean itself.
“If mining was to go ahead with the current state of knowledge, species and functions could be lost before they are known and understood,” the group of scientists wrote in a June 24 report produced for the High Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy. That panel consists of world leaders from 14 coastal countries, including Australia, Canada, Japan, Mexico, and Portugal, and is supported by the United Nations’s special envoy for the ocean.
The group's cautionary findings come as the world is at a critical juncture. Governments around the world are considering tapping into the resources housed under the ocean floor, especially amid the realization that the world will need much greater access to critical minerals such as lithium, cobalt, and rare-earth elements to meet the demands of economies powered by more and more renewable energy and with millions more electric cars on the roads.
And this year, the International Seabed Authority, of which most countries around the world are members, is crafting regulations to govern deep-sea mining. The United States is not a member but participates as an observer.
Once those regulations are adopted, it would pave the way for commercial mining to begin in international waters. The ISA has already granted 30 contracts to countries, including Japan, China, India, and Russia, allowing them to explore areas of the deep sea known to be rich with minerals for 15 years.
“Basically, society has to choose whether it wants to go into what’s effectively a pristine system, and really the largest one on the planet, and do some damage,” said Lisa Levin, a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego and a lead author of the Ocean Panel paper.
“Everybody knows mining is going to cause some damage. I don’t think that’s in question no matter who you talk to,” she told the Washington Examiner. “It’s just a question of whether that is acceptable.”
In the report, Levin and her co-authors outline a need for much more research — not just on how mining would affect deep-sea environments but also to better characterize what those ecosystems look like and what species live in them.
“We need to understand what those thresholds and tipping points are for the ecosystems and biodiversity so we can use that to inform what technology is being developed,” said Diva Amon, a deep-sea biologist and scientific associate at London’s Natural History Museum who was a contributing author to the paper.
Amon, during remarks on a June 24 webinar launching the report, said more time is needed for researchers to gather scientific data about deep-sea ecosystems.
“On the seafloor, when you look at the lifespan of these [areas], they may be from 10 [million] to 50 million years old,” said Kristina Gjerde, senior high seas adviser at the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Global Marine and Polar Programme. Gjerde was not involved in the report.
“The life that’s growing on there and around it is never going to return in humanity’s lifetime, most likely,” she told the Washington Examiner.
Gjerde pointed to studies that show even microbes would take decades to recover from the disturbances caused by mining. Those include wholesale removal of parts of the seafloor as well as sediment plumes.
“We’re talking about creating dead zones for swaths of the ocean, for which we really have no clue the consequences,” Gjerde said.
Governments around the world are ramping up efforts to study the oceans. The U.N. is launching a “decade of ocean science” next year aimed to deepen the world’s knowledge of the oceans’ response to pressures such as climate change and human activity and to develop policies to reduce harm to the oceans.
The U.S., too, is boosting efforts on ocean science. Just last month, the Trump White House released national strategies to map the Alaska coastline and the U.S. exclusive economic zone, an area bigger than the landmass of all 50 states. The White House also released recommendations to speed permitting for mapping and exploration activities in the exclusive economic zone.
“The Trump Administration is committed to a comprehensive understanding of our ocean and efficient permitting for ocean exploration generally, including for advancing science, building ocean-related industries, informing decisions that balance ocean use and conservation, and enhanc[ing] the nation’s prosperity and security,” said Dan Schneider, associate director for communications for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, in a statement.
Scientists have concerns, though, if the U.S. and other governments attempt to rush the process.
The ISA has come under increasing scrutiny amid questions about whether it is including the viewpoints of all nations, especially developing countries, and whether it has the capacity to oversee environmental risks from deep-sea mining. Researchers have suggested the creation of an independent environmental and scientific committee within the ISA to assess how deep-sea mining could affect ecosystems and biodiversity.
Ultimately, the Ocean Panel paper raises questions about the need to mine the seafloor for critical minerals. It recommends boosting research and development of alternative minerals, minerals recycling, and renewable energy technologies that don’t rely so heavily on critical minerals.
For example, the research is bullish on the potential for offshore wind power to expand significantly, even becoming cheaper than onshore wind. But that doesn’t necessarily mean a corresponding expansion of mining for critical minerals, even though current offshore turbine designs use permanent magnets that require rare-earth elements, said Peter Haugan, program director of the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research and an author of the paper.
“We shouldn’t underestimate the capability of the industry to develop competitive alternatives if one particular mineral is scarce,” he told the Washington Examiner.
Above all else, researchers urge caution in any decisions regarding deep-sea mining and say governments shouldn’t jump the gun without considering alternatives and the environmental harm.
“In the dream for a transformative green economy, you don’t just want to transform one form of pollution on land to another form of pollution at sea,” Gjerde said.
High time for flags High time for flags Timothy P. Carney Statues are center stage in the culture wars these days, but flags are also getting a bigger share of the spotlight.
President Trump, reigniting the old culture-war battles of the 1990s, promised a year in jail for anyone caught burning the American flag. Trump was responding to the violence and destruction of protesters around the country. When Portland, Oregon, protesters tore down a George Washington statue, tagging it with “1619” and “genocidal colonist,” they also wrapped the head with an American flag that they lit on fire.
Throughout June, images of the stars and stripes aflame poured in from around the country. Protesters burned flags to express disappointment in the United States or fundamental objection to the nation as a whole.
But it’s more complicated than that. The U.S. Flag Code (which carries no penalties for disobedience) actually endorses burning flags that have reached the end of their service life. It violates flag code to fly a ragged, torn, or overworn flag. You’re also not supposed to just toss one in the trash. That’s why this year, on June 14 — Flag Day, of course — you could find American Legion members around the country burning flags. They were burning them not out of protest, but out of love.
The ubiquity of face masks has also provided an opportunity for red, white, and blue patriotism. Check Etsy, Amazon, Zazzle, or TheFlagShirt.com, and you’ll find plenty of patriotic face coverings. It’s a bit ironic to market a muzzle honoring a country founded on the freedom of speech, but such are the times.
Other flags made headlines as well. NASCAR banned the Confederate flag, a decision that sparked minor blowback but also led to a major kerfuffle when a crew member for African American driver Bubba Wallace apparently mistook a pull rope for a noose.
Meanwhile, Mississippi is under pressure to change its flag, which includes the old stars and bars from the Confederate battle flag. The NCAA announced in June that it would not host championships in Mississippi as long as the Confederate battle flag is prominent in the state flag.
All of this went on in June, when businesses were showing their devotion to contemporary morality by flying six-colored rainbow-ish flags for gay pride.
And it was a year ago when Nike felt the need to remove the Betsy Ross flag from a pair of shoes after activists said the flag represented slavery.
You can bet that this Independence Day, flags of all shapes, colors, sizes, and states of combustion will be on display across the land of the free and the home of the brave.
India and China peace pacts are disintegrating India and China peace pacts are disintegrating Dhruva Jaishankar On June 16, reports trickled in from the remote mountainous region of Ladakh that Indian soldiers had died in violence the previous night along the disputed border with China. Many details are still uncertain, with the Indian and Chinese governments trading blame for the incident, but what is clear is that a fight broke out between Indian and Chinese troops in the isolated Galwan River Valley. It resulted in 20 Indian Army deaths, including that of a senior officer, along with dozens of injuries, some inflicted using sticks covered in nails or barbed wire. China’s People’s Liberation Army also suffered casualties, although the Chinese government has not released the number and names of those killed.
The victims represent the first violent deaths on the India-China border since 1975 and the most fatalities at that location since 1967.
The Galwan River clash also marks a significant turn in relations between India and China — and that, in turn, will have long-lasting implications for the rest of the world.
It’s worth briefly reviewing what that relationship is, exactly, and how it got that way. Although China and India both consider themselves ancient civilization-states, historical contacts between them were limited yet important — premodern trade, plus religious and cultural exchanges, notably the spread of Buddhism from its birthplace in India to China.
Political relations were shaped by the colonial period, when India became part of the British Empire and China experienced intervention and subjugation by a number of imperial powers. The British recognized Chinese suzerainty (but not sovereignty) over Tibet, partly to preempt the possibility of encroachment by the Russian Empire. A number of border agreements were concluded in this period between British India and the Qing dynasty, although they were often vague, incomplete, or subsequently contested.
The Communist Revolution of 1949 and the annexation of Tibet by the People’s Liberation Army in 1950, coming shortly after Indian independence in 1947, meant that for the first time, China and India were immediate neighbors. India was initially quick to establish diplomatic relations with the communist government in Beijing, and the two cooperated to establish an anti-colonial consensus among Asian and African countries. But it soon became apparent that there would be trouble on the border.
The term “border dispute” tends to evoke images of a limited standoff, but the India-China row is over territory larger than the state of Pennsylvania. It consists of three distinct sectors. Disputes in the middle sector are relatively small and include grazing grounds and passes that link India with Tibet. The eastern sector includes China’s claim to almost the entire Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, home to more people than Montana, which China calls “South Tibet.” That section includes the town of Tawang, birthplace of the sixth Dalai Lama, and thus has particular significance for Tibetans, and by extension, for Chinese claims to Tibet.
The western sector is in the Indian union territory of Ladakh, which was, until last year, part of the state of Jammu and Kashmir. Here, the borders with Tibet were never clearly demarcated. This land resembles a high-altitude desert: impossibly rough terrain with steep ravines, glaciers, and peaks rising to over 20,000 feet. In the virtually treeless landscape, landslides and dust storms are frequent, and the altitude makes it difficult to breathe without proper acclimatization.
Nonetheless, this territory is strategically important for both China and India. China constructed a vital highway through an area claimed by India in the 1950s to connect the restive regions of Xinjiang and Tibet. Ladakh is important for India not only for its own sake, but for supplying Indian forces along the disputed Line of Control with Pakistan, meaning this area is considered crucial to Indian security and to the geopolitical balance of power across a large part of Asia.
In some ways, this faceoff is a long time coming. In the 1950s, a series of developments led to an escalation of tensions on the border. One was India’s realization that China was moving the goalposts and making more aggressive territorial claims. The status of Tibet was an added complication: In the 1950s, a revolt in eastern Tibet against communist China resulted in a brutal crackdown by Chinese forces, during which the Dalai Lama and some of his followers fled to India. Amid the catastrophe of Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” and inadequate Indian military preparation, a short but sharp border war broke out in late 1962. China decisively won, advancing over some territory in the western sector. In the east, China inflicted a humiliating defeat but withdrew before the onset of winter, believing it had taught India a lesson.
India-China relations remained strained for another 15 years. Violent skirmishes erupted in 1967 in Sikkim in the eastern sector. Negotiations eventually restarted following the resumption of full diplomatic relations, and for a brief period in the early 1980s, Beijing floated the possibility of resolving the boundary once and for all. That changed abruptly in 1985, when China once again made aggressive claims, a policy that has continued. Despite another standoff in the eastern sector in 1986-87, steps toward normalization began after 1988.
Then, in a series of unusual agreements between 1993 and 2013, the two maintained a peaceful posture on the disputed border. This opened pathways to cooperation on other matters, including trade. The two sides agreed that if Indian and Chinese patrols came into face-to-face contact, they would “exercise self-restraint,” not “threaten to use force,” and “enter into immediate consultations” to resolve the problem. In practice, this resulted in both Indian and Chinese military units patrolling some of the same ground, where their claims overlapped. Despite frequent run-ins between their patrols, there was rarely violence and never any that resulted in serious injury, let alone death.
But this period also saw the beginnings of a new kind of arms race as both sides attempted to improve infrastructure — roads, bridges, and airfields — near the Line of Actual Control, the vaguely defined, de facto boundary. China moved first and more quickly, driven by a combination of political will, more favorable terrain, and, eventually, greater resources. But India soon started to catch up. The run-ins between patrols became more frequent.
In 2013, the first major standoff between India and China in 26 years occurred on the remote Depsang Plains when China attempted to establish a permanent presence in disputed territory just as India prepared to open a high-altitude airfield at nearby Daulat Beg Oldi. This was resolved when India threatened to cancel the visit of the Chinese premier. But in 2014, as Chinese President Xi Jinping was in India, another flare-up occurred in Chumar, farther south. A more significant standoff occurred in 2017, involving China’s territorial dispute with Bhutan, an Indian ally. Indian forces intervened to stop Chinese road-building in disputed territory, resulting in a brief spike in tensions.
Earlier this year, as a critical Indian road to Daulat Beg Oldi came closer to completion, Chinese forces deployed in larger numbers at the LAC, and as Indian troops matched them, standoffs occurred at four points. One was the Galwan River Valley, an area that had witnessed fighting in 1962 but had not been a major source of friction since. To the south, by a picturesque lake called Pangong Tso, Chinese and Indian forces entered into a tussle in May. In between, near an area known as Hot Springs, two smaller buildups took place.
On June 6, senior military commanders from India and China met and agreed to a road map for phased disengagement by both militaries at the Galwan River and Hot Springs. It was as this disengagement was taking place that violence erupted on the night of June 15. The Indian government accuses China of not having adhered to the disengagement road map, while China claims Indian forces crossed the LAC.
The melee in the Galwan River Valley has a number of clear consequences. The first is that China has embarked upon a massive military buildup far out of proportion to any real military threat. While observers can speculate about Chinese motives, the intimidatory nature of its actions is evident. The second is that the clash calls into question protocols that had been carefully established between the two governments since 1993. Resuscitating any level of trust on the border will now be difficult since existing agreements proved unable to prevent deadly conflict. The third is that Indian public opinion toward China has become markedly more hostile, something China has sought to avoid in the past.
But the friction also has implications for the wider world, including the United States. They bring into focus similar concerns that India, the U.S., and others — including Japan, Australia, Taiwan, and allies in Southeast Asia — have when it comes to China’s growing assertiveness. Accelerated efforts by India and the U.S. to share intelligence and assessments, improve military cooperation, and build up defense capabilities would be a natural consequence.
Since 2005, New Delhi and Washington have concluded a defense framework agreement, a civilian nuclear deal, and military agreements on logistics, secure communications, and industrial security. U.S. secretaries of state and defense often hold regular strategic dialogues (called “2+2”) with their Indian counterparts. The American and Indian armies, air forces, and navies conduct regular exercises, including a new triservice amphibious exercise. India has also acquired seven major weapons platforms, including reconnaissance and transport aircraft, attack helicopters, and artillery, from the U.S. Such tangible forms of security cooperation may now intensify.
But despite healthy cooperation on security matters, Washington and New Delhi have sparred on other issues. India-China competition over the medium-term future will not be restricted to military affairs. Should Washington reach agreements with India on matters such as trade, investment, and immigration, it would go a long way toward preserving a favorable balance of power in Asia amid China’s continued assertiveness.
Dhruva Jaishankar is the director of the U.S. Initiative of the Observer Research Foundation, a New Delhi-based think tank. He previously worked at the Brookings Institution and German Marshall Fund.
The new voice of America breaks his silence The new voice of America breaks his silence Byron York A new boss arrives and fires a number of top executives. It's a common occurrence in the business world. In the federal government, it is built into the system, happening with the inauguration of every new president.
Now, however, some in Washington are aflame over the housecleaning — it's been portrayed occasionally as a bloodletting — at the United States Agency for Global Media, which oversees the government's international broadcasting entities: Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting.
In 2018, President Trump nominated Michael Pack, a veteran documentary filmmaker, to be the new chief executive at USAGM. Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez, who that same year was "severely admonished" by the Senate Ethics Committee for accepting gifts that "violated Senate rules, federal law, and applicable standards of conduct," set out to stop the Pack nomination.
A senator as powerful as Menendez is — he’s the minority's ranking member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — can do a lot to stall a nomination, especially one at a relatively small agency. Menendez managed to block the nomination until the Senate finally confirmed Pack on June 4.
Democrats and their allies in the media portray Pack as the leading edge of a "right-wing" takeover of USAGM. Pack is universally referred to as an "ally" or "acolyte" of Steve Bannon, the former Trump campaign and White House adviser who also headed Breitbart News. Thus do Democrats worry Pack will destroy an American beacon of freedom for the world.
Some of the news coverage has bordered on slander. The Week ran a story under the headline "Is Trump putting fascists in charge of the Voice of America?" An article at the Atlantic alleged that "Pack's coup d'etat" has "actually set out to destroy America's international broadcasters." According to one writer at Vox, "Pack could ruin one of America's best foreign policy tools."
The commentary seems surreal when one looks at Pack's career. In the course of 40 years as a documentary filmmaker, Pack has made more than a dozen films that have been shown on the Public Broadcasting Service. That is PBS — not Breitbart, not One America News, not a right-wing outlet. His most recent effort is this year's well-received Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words, which premiered on PBS in May, in which the famously media-shy Supreme Court justice opened up about his life.
Pack also made Rickover: The Birth of Nuclear Power, about Adm. Hyman Rickover's quest to bring nuclear power to the Navy. It was broadcast on PBS in 2014. He made two documentaries on America's founders, one on Alexander Hamilton that aired on PBS in 2011 and one on George Washington that aired on PBS in 2002.
He also made The Last 600 Meters, a film about the Battle of Fallujah in the Iraq War, which, although made in 2008, has yet to be released. "This film, uncaptured by politics or ideology, reveals the most bruising ethical environment on Earth and the character of the young men that our nation sends in harm's way," Marine Gen. James Mattis said. "[It] is a classic, unique in its approach and unique in what it reveals."
And it was all decidedly mainstream.
In 2002, President George W. Bush nominated Pack to serve on the National Council on the Humanities. He was confirmed by the Senate and served until 2005. Overlapping with that time, 2003 to 2006, he headed television programming at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, creating America at a Crossroads, a series of 20 documentary films that balanced a number of ideological perspectives. It premiered on PBS in 2007.
Again, all mainstream. No fascism, no coups d'etat, no ruination.
The Bannon charge came from Pack's enlisting Bannon to help on two of his pictures — the Rickover film, finished in 2014, and the one about Fallujah, finished six years before that. "He was essentially an unpaid consultant," Pack told the Washington Examiner. "He gave me advice. I did not work for him. He worked for me."
Bannon has not been a part of any Pack project since then, nor has Pack been a part of any Bannon project. There is simply nothing to the "acolyte" charge — Pack was making documentaries for 30 years before his limited association with Bannon. But the real test is the pictures themselves. Please watch them, Pack said. "I encourage everybody to search for the Bannonism in them," he said. "Steve gave me creative and development advice on these films. Not political opinion — they weren't about immigration or any other hot-button issue."
There were also rumors, spread by CNN, that Pack would bring former Trump aide and current radio host Sebastian Gorka to USAGM. "There is nothing to those rumors," Pack said. "I never approached Seb Gorka. I think those rumors are a variation of the Bannon rumors."
It is a measure of the opposition to Pack that adversaries note darkly that he is under "criminal investigation" for allegedly funneling donations to a nonprofit organization he runs into his private film company. In fact, he is not under "criminal investigation" but is embroiled in a civil matter that is clearly rooted in the controversy over his appointment.
On the eve of a critical hearing to consider his nomination, the attorney general of the District of Columbia served Pack with a subpoena for a decade's worth of financial information. It made for headlines and allowed Pack's opponents to say he should not be confirmed because of an ongoing investigation, but it appears to be much ado about nothing.
Pack, who has been a friend of mine for many years, runs a production company called Manifold Productions. He also has a nonprofit organization called the Public Media Lab. Corporations and wealthy individuals make tax-deductible donations to the Public Media Lab for the purpose of funding a specific project. The Public Media Lab then pays Manifold Productions to actually produce the film. That is a common way of doing things in the documentary-making world. Do you know all those films on PBS that say they are made possible by a generous grant from so-and-so? It is that kind of thing.
By the way, the films that Pack has made that aired on PBS always listed the donors in the credits. It is an entirely transparent process. But because of the subpoena, Pack's opponents say he is under "criminal investigation."
Now on the job, Pack has one big goal for USAGM, and that is to return the agency to its original mission. In 1977, Congress passed the VOA charter into law. It has three simple parts:
1) VOA will serve as a consistently reliable and authoritative source of news. VOA news will be accurate, objective, and comprehensive.
2) VOA will represent America, not any single segment of American society, and will therefore present a balanced and comprehensive projection of significant American thought and institutions.
3) VOA will present the policies of the United States clearly and effectively, and will also present responsible discussions and opinion on these policies.
"There is a general perception that the information war, the war of ideas, is way more important at the moment than ever before," Pack said. "China is stepping up its propaganda campaigns. So are other adversaries like Iran and North Korea. And I don't think we're doing as well as we should in the war of ideas, putting our values and our ideas out there — and that is the principal mission of these agencies."
"It's a legal obligation," Pack continued. "And that's the point, really. My plan is to bring this agency back to what it was legally required to do. I want them to adhere to the VOA charter. And it's not my perception that they are quite doing that."
Pack made headlines on virtually his first day on the job when he fired a number of top executives. First, the director and deputy director of the Voice of America resigned, writing that, "As the Senate-confirmed CEO, [Pack] has the right to replace us with his own VOA leadership." (The headline of the New York Times report: "VOA Directors Resign After Bannon Ally Takes Charge of U.S. Media Agency.")
Then, Pack dismissed the heads of the four news agencies under his command — Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting. The move was condemned on both the Left and the Right. Some on the Left said Pack was trying to clear out Obama holdovers to impose Trump's worldview on USAGM, while some on the Right decried the fact that those fired included Alberto Fernandez, head of the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, who was a favorite of conservatives.
Pack explained that the point was a fresh start, not to render judgment on any particular executive. "It was my view that on day one, by changing senior leadership, I could create this change," Pack said. "It seemed better to clean house and start fresh. Far from being a witch hunt of Democrats, it is a very fair, let's-start-over process."
"It is not atypical to do that," Pack continued, "especially at the beginning of an administration, when new leadership comes to a government agency. And it is far from atypical in the corporate world, and especially network television and news."
Pack has a three-year appointment. But realistically speaking, because of Menendez's delays, Pack is taking office in the last four months before the 2020 presidential election. The president who appointed him might, or might not, be reelected. If he wants to make changes at USAGM, with the administration's support, Pack does not have much time to act.
That point was hammered home on Thursday, when Democratic candidate Joe Biden vowed that, if elected, he would fire Pack. Vox reported that Biden believes Pack — a "close ally ... of Steve Bannon," of course — is "trying to turn one of the world's largest media networks into something akin to Breitbart or Trump TV."
Despite the inevitably bumpy start, the hope is that he will make USAGM a better place. Certainly, its employees have been unhappy under the old order. Each year, the Office of Personnel Management conducts what it calls the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey to measure attitudes among government workers. A nonprofit group, the Partnership for Public Service, compiles that information into a measure of employee morale, the Best Places to Work in the Federal Government Rankings.
In 2019, USAGM ranked 23rd out of 25 in morale in the mid-sized agency category. In 2018 and 2017, it ranked 25th out of 27. And in 2016, it ranked 27th out of 27.
Pack wants to change that. And he hopes that someday, his opponents will be able to get beyond their agitation to look at what he actually does.
"When I came to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, it was widely reported that I was going to try to turn it into a right-wing news organization," he said. "There was a piece in the New Yorker entitled 'Big Bird Flies Right.' But I did not do that. For CPB, just like for these agencies, I've tried to bring objectivity and balance to their programming. And it will be the same here at USAGM. All I'm trying to do is bring the agency back in keeping with its mission. And I think when I leave here, that's the way it will be perceived."
Byron York is chief political correspondent for the Washington Examiner.
Power to the people Power to the people Grant Addison On June 25, Common Good launched a campaign to cut “legacy” red tape to enable the federal government to confront the range of challenges it’s facing, from policing to pandemic preparedness to crumbling infrastructure and failing institutions. Leading the effort is Philip K. Howard, who has recruited former politicians such as Mitch Daniels and Bill Bradley, social theorists such as Jonathan Haidt and Yuval Levin, and healthcare academics such as former Johns Hopkins President Bill Brody and former Harvard Medical School Dean Jeffrey Flier. The Washington Examiner’s J. Grant Addison spoke with Howard ahead of the launch. The following is a condensed version of their conversation.
Washington Examiner: What is the Campaign for Common Sense?
Philip K. Howard: In the last 50 years, government has become more and more sclerotic — where not only can it not do things, but it doesn’t let other people do what’s needed. Teachers have lost control of the classroom; they don’t have the authority to maintain order. Officials can’t give a permit for new infrastructure, so President Obama gets $800 billion in 2009 to stimulate the economy, most of which is supposed to be spent on infrastructure, but five years later, turns out only 3.6% was spent on transportation/infrastructure. And now, this year, we have this sort of botched response to the COVID epidemic where public health officials in Seattle sit on their hands for weeks while they wait for approvals to pass through the eye of the Washington needle. Meanwhile, the pandemic is spreading. In the case of the George Floyd killing, the policeman involved pretty obviously didn’t have the right character to be a policeman. He’d had something like 18 complaints in his 19 years on the force, only two of which resulted in discipline, but that’s because under the union rules, it’s almost impossible to discipline police for anything, much less terminate them. Colleagues described him as “tightly wound,” and that’s just maybe not the type of person you want walking the streets with a loaded gun. But the people in charge of the police department didn’t have authority to make those types of judgments.
Every day, you get another example of this kind of powerlessness that this modern red-tape state has created. So, we’re arguing that you can’t repair the system — you need to replace it. You need to replace it with a system more like what the framers intended, which is one that sets lofty goals and that has guiding principles but where human beings actually have the authority to take responsibility and other people have the authority to hold them accountable.
WEX: You've talked a lot about Washington, and you've written that “common sense is illegal in Washington.” I would posit that it's also illegal in many statehouses, in many school boards, and many city councils. So, how do you get buy-in at the point of implementation, at the state-local-community level, not just from Washington?
PH: You actually have to get the American people, ultimately, to understand that we've built government on a false premise: that, somehow, governing can be better than people, and it can't. We elect people; who we elect ought to be important. They ought to be allowed to make decisions, and we ought to be able to kick them out of office if they don't make the right ones. If the schools are not working, then we ought to kick people out and put new people in schools, but we can't do that today because we don't give the principals the authority to run a school. It's this disempowerment all the way up the chain of responsibility. Teachers have lost control of the classroom; principals have lost control over deciding who's a good teacher and who's not.
And then, the result of all these broken links in the chain is it doesn't actually matter that much whom we elect because the pattern of democracy, really for the last 34 years, has been a kind of alternating power of parties, as if they're in their own deal: kind of "First you fail, then I fail." So, in our forums, for example, in schools and healthcare, we're going to focus on what will it take to give back to teachers, or to nurses and doctors, the freedom to focus on doing their jobs.
WEX: I'm going to play devil's advocate a little bit. You mentioned returning to a system closer to what the framers imagined. On the accountability point, the easiest way to have accountability is at the lowest level of connection to the issue at hand. So, our current system, and just living in a 21st-century world power with a globalized economy, not to mention the Left's distrust of federalism, seems very difficult to bring back to ideas of subsidiary and localism, which were on the framers' minds in terms of decision-making, representative democracy, and the scope of government. How would you envision localizing accountability?
As a second question: The framers' conception of government was buoyed by an understanding of the necessity for strong families and strong external institutions, private and religious. That's something Yuval Levin writes on often. Our institutions are failing and flailing, and some of that is definitely government's fault in suffocating them out of healthy existence, but some of the fault should also lie with the inability of our institutions to faithfully perform their respective missions and functions. How does a platform focused on government reform think about the issues and institutions that influence society and governance that are themselves outside of government reform?
PH: OK. So, you have two questions, and they're really, really good questions. How does subsidiary work in a crowded, interdependent society with global trade and all that kind of stuff? That's the first question. And the answer is, there are some levels of decisions, such as trade policy, where decisions have to be made on a national basis by people in the White House. There's just no way around it. We're not going to have 50 different treaties with the same country, or whatever. But, one advantage of moving to a regulatory framework that's more principles-based is that it has a built-in aspect of subsidiarity.
I'll give you an example of a program in Australia a couple of decades ago. They replaced their thick rulebook on nursing homes with 31 general principles. Have a home-like setting, respect the dignity of the residents, and such. Experts scoffed. But before, the nursing-home operators were getting away with murder; within the year, the nursing homes were twice as good. They ran a study, and what they found was when people came to work and they didn't have their noses in the rulebooks, they could internalize these principles, and they could focus on what the residents needed. And they could run their nursing homes in different ways. Most states have something like a thousand rules for their nursing homes. It's just absurd. You've got to have two pictures on the wall, the window has to be this big, so many peas on the plate. It's unbelievably granular.
When you create the principles-based system, it's not deregulation. The state regulator still comes in and looks and sees how the nursing home is doing, and if something isn't good in one way or another, it tells the nursing home, and they have an argument about it, and then there's discussion, and generally, they work things out. That's what happens in Australia. But it allows the people in the nursing homes, all the stakeholders, including the residents and their family and such, to have much more of a say in how it works. So, principles-based government allows people to solve problems in their own ways. It embodies subsidiary, whereas command-and-control rules is just central planning.
The second question, about the decline of institutions, family institutions, extra-government institutions, is indeed a tragic weakness of our society — the breakdown of the family and other institutions, such as those that Yuval Levin has written about and I've written about. You know, in my last book, I said, "Everybody talks about the rise of individuals. Nobody talks about the rights of institutions." But institutions are, in fact, the mechanism through which most people actually derive much of their identity. We work with other people in an institution, we're able to accomplish things because we're working together in this business or this nursing home, or whatever it is. And one of the aspects of institutional weakness — it's really just killed them — is not only the central planning aspect of government that doesn't let institutions do things in their own way, but also the absence of accountability. You cannot have a healthy institution if people know it doesn't matter, that performance doesn't matter.
The reason is not because there are lots of bad people that you want to fire. It's because the knowledge that performance doesn't matter makes the energy dissipate, like letting the air out of a balloon. Why should you work hard and do the extra mile when the person next door isn't, or might not be? And so, the combination of central planning rules that doesn't let people think for themselves and innovate and the absence of accountability has resulted in these kind of very moribund, listless institutions, particularly with social institutions, because they don't have the energy and the excitement of making a difference.
WEX: The Campaign for Common Sense was in the works, obviously, before the coronavirus, and you've touched on this a little bit, but can you speak to the ways that the COVID pandemic and its handling, and even the protests, has influenced or changed the ways that you or your colleagues were thinking about the campaign and the problems you seek to approach? Not that tens of thousands of people dying is an opportunity, but do you see the moment as one that lends itself to structural change?
PH: I think the COVID tragedy and the George Floyd tragedy both underscore the need for a governing system that allows the people in charge to make practical, sensible choices, and those choices will always be complex and involve risk. There is no such thing as one correct way to come out of COVID.
But, just from the get-go, when the red tape got in the way of dealing with the pandemic, and then when the pandemic had spread and the hospitals in the big cities started to be overwhelmed, how did the hospitals deal with it? They threw out the rulebooks. So, what does that tell you about the rulebooks? You couldn't possibly follow the rules and deal with these issues. And it's a really important point: The rulebooks that are thrown out are not ones that say, "You need to have a safe hospital" or "have a clean hospital." They're rules that dictate exactly how to accomplish that. They tell you exactly what kind of disinfectant to use. It's that kind of granularity that causes failure.
Back to your question, COVID illustrates it with the botched response at the beginning. It illustrates it with the need for the hospitals to throw away the rulebooks. And it illustrates the need for government. We can't deal with COVID without government. We can't. We are going to need some protocols. We do need to do a much better job providing personal protective equipment. There are all kinds of things government needs to do that it didn't do very well. But, it also can't get in the way of people doing their jobs, and that's what it did.
WEX: What does the time horizon for a campaign such as this look like, and what does a win look like?
PH: The short-term goal is to enter the 2020 debates. We want people to talk, we want the candidates to talk about system overhaul, and we want there to be public demand for them to talk about system overhaul.
The longer-term goal is to build constituencies for reforms in all the areas that we're going to be dealing with and more: accountability of police and other public employees. We're going to do something on the legal framework for COVID recovery, where we're going to talk about COVID liability — the need to prevent this country from getting bogged down in the litigation nightmare of all time. Things like that. How would we reduce red tape in schools and in hospitals? We're going to come up with specific reform proposals.
We're not trying to do this all alone. We're trying to engage the interest and involvement in leading institutions and universities and think tanks like AEI and Progressive Policy Institute and Competitive Enterprise Institute. So, we've got a number of institutions who have already agreed to co-host forums with us. So, we view our role, in part, as a catalyst for people to think bigger, for the institutions who have been talking about reforms or why things don't work for a long time to think a little bigger and say, "Well, what would happen if we just remade these institutions? If we remade the laws? What happens if we actually could hold people accountable?”
And, I think if you look, a lot of the things, reforms that changed through history, you'll find people who created a kind of a new vision that people found attractive, and that powered it. That's the idea here. And it could turn into many different things, but mainly, the idea is to have people think about how government should work, and how schools should work and such, in a different way. We empower people. Let people wake up in the morning, think that they can make a difference because of the way they do things, because of their ideas and their hard work. That's really what America's about.
The committee to overturn the world The committee to overturn the world Tara Isabella Burton In November 2016, just days after Donald Trump’s election to the presidency, Buzzfeed ran a curious article about the sympathies of Trump’s then-right-hand man, former Breitbart Chairman Steve Bannon. According to the article, titled “This is how Steve Bannon sees the world,” Bannon had given a 2014 talk at the Vatican that revealed a decidedly spiritualized, highly Manichean worldview: one that foretold “new barbarity,” a civilizational clash between the “Judeo-Christian West” and Islam, and the downfall of capitalism itself. Perhaps most strikingly, Bannon had cited the work of Julius Evola — a relatively obscure far-right occultist of the early 20th century best known for his jeremiads against liberal modernity — and its seemingly positive influence on one of Vladimir Putin’s advisers. Bannon did not name the man, but it was a reference to Aleksandr Dugin, whose no less spiritualized vision of Moscow’s world-historical mission has allegedly shaped Russian policy.
It is difficult for the casual observer to keep track of all the strange and esoteric voices in contemporary post-liberal politics, of the fine lines between integralists and occultists, white supremacist neo-pagans and religious members of the alt-Right. But Benjamin Teitelbaum’s War for Eternity, a study of one particular strain of far-right thought, the 19th-century occult school of traditionalism, is a necessary primer. In this briskly written analysis-cum-reportage, Teitelbaum, a musicology professor whose work on neofolk music has made him an expert on the contemporary Scandinavian far Right, takes on the persona of the learned everyman in a conspiracy thriller: an academic who discovers that his niche area of research, reactionary occultism, is at the heart of a vast, global conspiracy.

Teitelbaum is at his best when he’s connecting the dots, explaining how “traditionalism” — which here refers to the ideas that all religions are but bastardizations of one true source of knowledge, that history occurs in clearly delineated cycles, and that people are divided into no less clearly delineated castes — has come to shape the worldviews of some of the internet’s best-known reactionaries. The traditionalist ethos is one that envisions the entire political landscape as secondary to a cosmic battleground: one in which democracy, capitalism, and globalization are all conspiring to homogenize human beings, reducing people from primal warriors to sclerotic bureaucrats. The world, for the traditionalist, is thus fundamentally upside down. As Teitelbaum recounts Bannon telling him: “Everything you think is good is bad. Every change you consider progress is actually regression. Every apparent instance of justice is actually oppression. Every extension of credentials ought to disqualify the recipient.”
At its most unsubtle, traditionalism leads to explicit white supremacy: the division of human beings into different bloodlines and castes. But the more insidious version, the one that Bannon and Dugin share, sees human differences in terms not of race but of spirit. There are certain people with spiritual gifts who can see the truth of the world — and certain people who cannot.
The book is, unfortunately, somewhat hampered by its structure. One of Teitelbaum’s selling points, his access to Bannon for several hours of interviews, turns out to be something of a drawback. While we get a few odd tidbits that seem drawn from a midcentury spy novel (apparently, to get Bannon, Teitelbaum is told to ask for Alec Guinness at the hotel reception) and some juicy quotes from Bannon on his identification with traditionalism, Teitelbaum is all too conscious of the compromises he’s had to make for access and the limits of that access. An extended section on some minor figures involved in a shady, traditionalism-tinged, alt-right deal ends in something of a whimper: Teitelbaum informs us that he thinks he’s discovered the identity of the mysterious “Londoner” we’ve been chasing for some of the book, only to tell us he’s been informed it’s not safe to reach out to the Londoner directly, let alone disclose his name to the reader.
Teitelbaum is at his best when he’s exploring the appeal of traditionalism. What is it about the promise of spiritual heroism, occult mysticism, and overturning the world order that attracted so many on the far Right’s fringe? How did so many seeming “bit players” — publishers of far-right Evola translations living in Indian ashrams (Arktos editor John Morgan), internet nationalists, and minor conspiracy theorists such as Jason Jorjani — get the ear of people like Bannon?
At the core of War for Eternity is its participants’ self-glamorizing hunger for not only meaning but secret revelation: the sense, shared by Bannon and Dugin but also by the publishers and minor reactionaries desperate to get their ear, that they understand the mysteries of an ever-more unenchanted world. Ultimately, theirs is a fetishization of the end of history at which they are the chosen witnesses. And though Teitelbaum begins and ends with Bannon and Dugin, we can see this hunger for the end of the world far beyond the bounds of his book — in the spiritualized contrarianism of Peter Thiel; in the neoreactionary movement, which calls for the end of democracy; and in the watered-down religious traditionalism of pop gurus such as Jordan Peterson, whose dragon-slaying rhetoric and imagery hearken back to a mythic, imagined time of heroes and demigods: primal figures free of the atrophy of modern urban society.
In his recent book The Decadent Society, Ross Douthat identifies the fundamental problem of our age not as libertinage but as disaffection: Ours is a world in which the political landscape has been reduced to “a kind of digital-age playacting in which young people dissatisfied with decadence pretend to be Fascist and Marxist on the Internet, reenacting the 1930s and 1960s with fewer street fights and more memes.” If this is so, then the Dugins and the Bannons of the world are the biggest play-actors of all: reenacting the twilight of the gods, just with more memes.
Tara Isabella Burton is a contributing editor at the American Interest, a columnist at Religion News Service, and the author of Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World.
The NFL team that refuses to be canceled The NFL team that refuses to be canceled Kaylee McGhee White In light of recent protests over perceived racial inequality and injustice, the National Football League has vowed to do more to promote diversity throughout its various teams. But one team in particular will have a complete makeover if the mob has its way.
The Washington Redskins have been embroiled in controversy for several years now because their team name is considered a derogatory racial slur by certain activists. (For what it's worth, a 2016 poll of Native Americans found almost none were offended by the team name.) Dan Snyder, the team’s owner, has refused to budge despite national pressure to change the team’s name. Because at the end of the day, Redskins fans “understand the great tradition and what it’s all about and what it means,” he said back in 2013.
But one look around the room confirms that Snyder’s position will be hard to maintain. Quaker Oats, owned by PepsiCo, announced last week that it will do away with its “Aunt Jemima” breakfast line, apologizing for the “racial stereotypes” on which the brand was founded. HBO Max pulled Gone with the Wind, one of the most popular films of all time, from its library because of the way the film depicts slavery. And across the country, statues dedicated to great men and problematic figures alike are being torn down by mobs armed with spray paint and pitchforks.
And they’ve already chosen their next target: Snyder. The Washington Post, which has always referred to the team as the Washington Redskins in print, published an editorial with the headline "Change the name of the Washington NFL team. Now." And D.C. City Council members are refusing to allow the team's stadium to move back into the district and out of Maryland until Snyder agrees to change the name.
“One wonders if Dan Snyder can hold out much longer, in the face of what looks as if it is a revolutionary change in what people will anymore tolerate,” Eleanor Holmes Norton, Washington's congressional delegate, told the Wall Street Journal. “I understand that the word ‘Redskins’ is not about an African-American, but it is equally racist and equally opposed by African-Americans.”
The NFL has defended Snyder’s decision to keep the team’s name as it is in the past, though executives have privately urged him to reconsider. But now that the league has publicly sided with the activists, it won’t be long before a public break between Snyder and the NFL appears. The only question is: Will Snyder fold?
Dancing on the edge of a volcano Dancing on the edge of a volcano Ian Marcus Corbin We are Weimar Germany, or so we are told. Our wild, apocalyptic present is, in the view of a hundred professors and columnists, best understood by comparison to those restive interwar years, when Germany simmered with violence, poverty, occultisms, wild creativities, and extreme ideologies. That ferment eventually gave birth to the historical monstrosity of Adolf Hitler, just as, today, a suite of overlapping crises — the failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the economic collapse of 2007–08, deindustrialization, the breakdown of civil society, racial animus, you name it — has left us dancing, as the historian Peter Gay said of Weimar, “on the edge of a volcano.”
Happily, this story is fatuous. The United States in 2020 is not where Germany was in the 1920s and ’30s. Writing in the Point, the critic Morten Hoi Jensen recently argued that as despondent and feverish as we may be, we lack the one big factor that made Nazism possible: the utter devastation visited upon Germany in World War I and its wake. As Hoi Jensen wrote, “the collapse in the value of human life, the destruction of existing social structures, the moral vacuum that followed ... most of us today cannot be said to have undergone anything like that.”
He’s right. And yet, on both sides of the political spectrum, people feel as if the country is falling apart, as if it is hurtling toward some grim future that they can neither understand nor avoid. If we’re not Weimar Germany, how do we understand our condition?
To begin with, we have to acknowledge that Hoi Jensen is right to qualify. Most of us have not experienced that Weimar-style disintegration, but some of us have. We all know about places in America where human life is cheap, social structures have decayed, and morality seems to have been upended. These are generally areas occupied by the poor, a category that disproportionately includes those whose ancestors were brought here as slaves. The video-recorded death of George Floyd, a black man, at the hands of Derek Chauvin, a white Minneapolis police officer, has pulled the plight of black Americans to the fore, touching off a massive wave of protests, some tipping into riots and looting, across the country and around the world.
The anger is not mysterious; Floyd didn’t deserve to die. The video of the incident, in which Floyd pleads for mercy and calls for his dead mother while a police officer kneels on his neck, is excruciating. And yet, there is something here that needs explaining. Close to 1,000 unarmed people, roughly one-third of them black, were killed by police officers between 2013 and 2019. A few of these deaths were caught on video and shared widely. Why has this one thrown us into such turmoil? Injustice, cruelty, poverty, murder — these always call for redress, but they don’t always summon hundreds of thousands of people into the streets.
For a more illuminating historical parallel to our moment, we should turn not to Weimar but to the decades before the First World War. They were, in some ways, a time of tremendous growth and progress. The Industrial Revolution had consolidated its gains. Science was advancing rapidly, information was whizzing around the globe, gender equality was advancing, and travel, via train and steamships, was shrinking distances and expanding human horizons.
Yet this was not only a period of excitement and invention. It was also one of anxious restlessness. The world was moving at a speed and a scale unfamiliar to humans. People were living and working in spaces — cities, factories, schools — more confined and controlled than ever before. Women complained to their doctors of frayed nerves and claustrophobia; men felt enervated, like their lives were beyond their control. Birthrates were falling, and masculinity was thought to be in crisis. Men who spent their waking lives tending machines or sitting in offices pined for heroism, adventure, and strength. Snake oils abounded. Ideologies jockeyed for position.
In his “Futurist Manifesto,” penned in 1909, the Italian poet F.T. Marinetti complained that “literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy, and slumber. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist.” He went on: “We want to glorify war — the only cure for the world — militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.” We have, one hopes, learned enough from the disasters of the 20th century not to reenact Marinetti’s program, but his unfocused energy, his rage, his desire to finally do something all feel very much of our moment.
The feeling of being caged in, of having been dragged away from the real life of the body and village into a technologically mediated pseudoexistence, is as old as the Industrial Revolution. Ever since the English set up the first factories in Manchester, Romantics have cursed the flattened, disembodied, and mechanical aspects of modernity, the way that they separate us from simplicity and stability and community. The coronavirus lockdown has been an extreme dramatization of this modern condition, staged in our tiny, expensive apartments. Many of us now have no human contact at all; we live our lives entirely through screens; our finances are a mess; our agency has been stripped away; in many cases, we are forbidden from taking part in the social rituals that give our lives sense and meaning. It’s a totalizing dystopia that a prewar vitalist such as Marinetti could only dimly imagine. It is the modern condition writ small.
The death of Floyd is evil in its own right, but the consuming rage that has followed it has many fathers. Among them is a deep discontentment with the modern world that the coronavirus lockdown did not create but which it did make more palpable than ever before. The discontentment amounts to this: that our transition to industrial civilization involved traumatic losses — of faith, community, proximity to nature, and certainty about our place in the world — that were meant to be compensated with previously unimaginable freedom and prosperity. By leaving behind the things we once thought made us human, we would become gods. But only at particular times and places have there been sufficient funds to cash that check. More often than not, it cashes only for a few.
Sometimes, the bread and circuses that keep our anxiety in check vanish or grow stale, and bloodshed and fire spread through our gleaming cities. In 1914, it was something even worse. We’ve probably learned enough not to repeat anything like the Great War’s orgy of destruction. But we haven’t learned, we still haven’t learned, how to make a modernity that doesn’t make us want to take more than we could possibly have or smash the world in heartbroken protest. We’re awash in think pieces, but no one is venturing, just yet, to think about addressing this deeper current of discontent. And so back into the cycle we go. The fire of revolt was hot this time but short-lived. Next time, you never know.
Ian Marcus Corbin is a writer, academic, and entrepreneur in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Latin America is bearing the brunt of the coronavirus Latin America is bearing the brunt of the coronavirus Cassidy Morrison Flawed healthcare systems in several Latin American countries are fueling the world’s worst coronavirus outbreak.
Brazil, Mexico, and Peru have collectively reported about 1.6 million cases, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. Dr. Marcos Espinal, chief of the Department of Communicable Diseases and Health Analysis at the Pan American Health Organization, said the tally is almost certainly an undercount.
“It is higher because no country in the world has the real number of cases,” Espinal told Scientific American. “Remember, even in rich countries, some people decided not to go and be tested. But it’s clear that the number of cases in Latin America is underestimated.”
Brazil
Latin America is the new epicenter of the pandemic, and Brazil is ground zero. The first case in Brazil was reported in February, and now, the country is second only to the United States in number of cases — with more than 1.1 million reported. President Jair Bolsonaro, Paulo Lotufo at the University of Sao Paulo said, “is responsible for everything.”
Bolsonaro, who tested positive for the virus in March, refused to wear a protective face mask, called the coronavirus a “little flu,” and continued to hold political rallies where he shook hands with constituents. A right-wing populist, Bolsonaro has also sidelined public health experts tasked with responding to the pandemic. Two health ministers resigned in the span of about a month after Bolsonaro repeatedly encouraged Brazilian workers to defy lockdown measures and urged wider use of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine, which was once believed to be a treatment for COVID-19, Reuters reported.
Brazil is also conducting far too few tests to keep up with the daily increase in new cases. As of May 12, Brazil had processed 337,595 diagnostic tests, according to Reuters. That same day, the number of tests performed in the U.S. had exceeded 9.7 million, according to COVID Tracking Project data.
Mexico
Mexico has the second-highest death toll in Latin America, trailing behind Brazil. The number of cases has surpassed 191,000 and has steadily increased since mid-May. Mexico City has experienced the worst of the outbreak due in part to a high rate of transmission among workers at the Central de Abasto, Latin America’s biggest food market.
Mexico’s president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, implemented a lockdown in March that lasted almost two months. He sent mixed messages during the lockdown, however, holding political rallies early on and showing supporters his “good luck charms” — Catholic amulets, a four-leaf clover, and a U.S. $2 bill, according to Mexican news outlet Informador.
“They are my bodyguards,” he said in March.
Lopez Obrador has resumed travel across the country and said in a press conference earlier this month that “we have to enter a new normality,” according to the Washington Post.
Much of Mexico’s population lives in poverty, paycheck to paycheck. Essential workers who cannot afford to stay away from work resumed daily activities, often working close to one another in confined spaces. The neighborhood in Mexico City where the Central de Abasto market is located has reported at least 869 coronavirus-related deaths, according to data compiled by Forbes.
The coronavirus has also crippled Mexico’s healthcare workforce. More than 11,000 healthcare workers in Mexico have tested positive for the coronavirus, according to government health officials. Doctors make up more than half of COVID-19 deaths among healthcare workers, 55%. Nurses make up 17% of deaths among healthcare workers. About 28% of deaths in the health workforce include ambulance workers, maintenance staff, lab technicians, and more, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Peru
Peru has roughly 261,000 coronavirus cases, with more than 100,000 cases in the capital city alone, according to La Republica. President Martin Vizcarra announced a nationwide lockdown in March, but most Peruvians who work informal jobs that include housekeeping and selling goods on the streets continued working in order to get by.
Peru’s public health system struggled to deal with a precipitous rise in new cases, having been underfunded for years prior to the start of the outbreak. Peru’s health minister, Victor Zamora, announced in April that the country was short on oxygen by about 180 metric tons and announced that the government was launching a $28 million initiative to import oxygen and build plants to produce necessary oxygen, according to Peruvian news outlet Gestion.
However, price gouging for oxygen tanks is out of control as the black market fills the void that the underinvested healthcare system left behind. Individuals with COVID-19 who need oxygen are now resorting to paying for oxygen supplies online at roughly a 1,000% markup, the Washington Post reported.
Peru is expected to exceed hospital bed capacity by July, according to data generated by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. The IHME also predicts that as many as 21,000 people could die by August. The country has already exceeded 8,400 deaths.
Fireworks-gate Fireworks-gate Kaylee McGhee White If you live in a big city or one of its surrounding suburbs, you’ve probably heard the fireworks — lots of them, at all times of night, creating a never-ending barrage of noise.
Fireworks are always prevalent this time of year, but there has been an uptick in sales and usage over the past couple of months. And there’s a simple explanation for this: People have been cooped up in their homes for the past three months, and they’re tired of being bored.
The more elaborate explanation being floated by online conspiracy theorists over the past week or so is that state governments are handing out professional fireworks displays to random children in an effort to disrupt Black Lives Matter protests. This theory gained so much attention that New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio actually launched a new illegal fireworks investigation unit.
But like most conspiracy theories, Fireworks-gate is little more than an attempt to explain away something that is actually quite simple. There are two elements to this story: free time and boredom.
"Everybody is having fun and celebrating," Matt Shea, the vice president of Atlas Fireworks in New Hampshire, told Business Insider. "We were locked up for two months as a country, and the weather's warm, people are all having fun. Many are still unemployed, and everybody is overly excited to celebrate summer with fireworks."
Another factor to consider is the gradual relaxation of fireworks laws across the United States, including in New York City, where fireworks complaints are 236 times greater this month than they were last year. In other words, consumer fireworks are much easier to get ahold of nowadays, so more people are buying them. And since most cities have canceled their Fourth of July displays, people have decided to take matters into their own hands.
But when will it end? Probably not for a while, according to some retailers — at least, not until the pandemic ends.
The ESPYs: More last place than Last Dance The ESPYs: More last place than Last Dance Zachary Faria At a time when sports fans are desperate for anything even remotely resembling sports, ESPN found the thing nobody would watch.
The 2020 ESPYs came in at an all-time low — 482,000 viewers, down from the previous record of 1.98 million in 2011. The ESPYs were doomed to fail in this environment. But did it have to be this way?
By April 19, it had been more than a month since the sports apocalypse, brought on by Utah Jazz stars Rudy Gobert and Donovan Mitchell contracting the virus. It was still a month out from the return of NASCAR, which signaled the slow return of sports without spectators. It should have been another empty Sunday for ESPN, but thanks to a heads-up schedule change, they were about to take the sporting world by storm.
The Last Dance, the docuseries about Michael Jordan’s time with the Chicago Bulls, was set to air in June. It was pushed up to fill the void left by an absence of sports. The debut episodes did 6.1 million viewers, and for the next five weeks, it became must-watch viewing. Over 10 episodes, the series averaged 5.6 million viewers.
The ESPYs have gone political before, and tapping soccer star (and political activist) Megan Rapinoe to co-host was a pretty clear indication what direction the broadcast would be going this year. If you heard anything about this year’s version, it was probably the Black Lives Matter PSA to start the show. It flopped.
Can Snowpiercer keep moving? Can Snowpiercer keep moving? Graham Hillard Among the many questions that must be answered in a review of Snowpiercer, TNT’s new 10-part adaptation of a French graphic novel, one stands out: How does the television show compare to the 2013 film by Bong Joon-ho, who went on to make last year’s Academy Award winner, Parasite? For audience members who thrilled to the movie’s campy tone and highly stylized violence, I have bad news: The TV series is a far more traditional affair. Yet for viewers who found Bong’s film to be a laughably bad take on a great idea (or who are still traumatized by Tilda Swinton’s searingly awful performance), the verdict is somewhat happier.
Like its feature-length cousin, TNT’s series takes as its starting point a world encased in ice due to a disastrous global warming intervention. Circling the globe in perpetuity are the 3,000 passengers of Snowpiercer, a 1,001-car train whose marvel of an engine is the only thing standing between humanity and total extinction. For fare-holders, the class of one’s ticket determines everything from one’s rations to one’s sleeping accommodations: First-class passengers eat sushi and live in suites while third-classers make do with grilled cheese and cots. For stowaways, or “Tailies,” life is an uninterrupted ordeal of protein mush and windowless misery. But relax, everyone! In the early days, Tailies were forced to eat one another.
Leading the dual societies aboard Snowpiercer are two characters whose relationship drives the show throughout much of its inaugural season. Among the Tailies, informal command belongs to Andre Layton (Daveed Diggs of Hamilton fame), a former police detective whose wife left him for a staff position in third class. Nearer the engine, passengers obey the steely hospitality chief Melanie Cavill (Jennifer Connelly), who may or may not report to Snowpiercer’s unseen creator, Mr. Wilford. When a gruesome murder occurs up-train, Melanie enlists a reluctant Andre to find the culprit. Aware that a criminal investigation will necessarily delay a planned Tailie uprising, Andre vows to use his unprecedented freedom of access in behalf of his fellow stowaways.
As is often the case with television dramas, Snowpiercer’s strengths and weaknesses are both on full display in its early episodes. In Diggs and Connelly, the show has secured a pair of watchable leads to anchor a cast that is uniformly competent. (Alison Wright, who played the unwitting Soviet stooge Martha Hanson on The Americans, is a particularly welcome sight.) In the Snowpiercer itself, the series has on its hands a set designer’s dream: a whirring wonderland of depravity and opulence whose interiors are all the more impressive for being (loosely) bound by a train’s dimensions. Though the show’s writing is occasionally ponderous — “justice never boarded,” one character intones — the questions that attend its concept remain as intriguing as they were in 2013. To what extremes can human beings be driven in the pursuit of survival? Does equality remain an unalloyed good when resources are literally approaching the vanishing point?
Alas, like the film that preceded it, Snowpiercer the series lacks the confidence to pursue the second of those queries as vigorously as it does the first. Thus, while showrunner Graeme Manson dutifully treats viewers to shots of chopped-up organs and shattered limbs, his program has almost nothing to say about the respective ethical positions of the Tailies and their nemeses in first class. The latter are simply wrong — their control of the train’s wealth is not merely problematic but evil. As a result, Snowpiercer falls into the same trap that snared the similarly one-dimensional series The Handmaid’s Tale. Uncomplicatedly good characters can only battle thoroughly wicked ones for so long before tedium sets in.
Yet even if Snowpiercer were to muddy its thematic waters, significant problems would remain. The first, a general lack of character development, might eventually be solved by the introduction of Lost-style flashbacks in which the show turns its attention to life before the freeze. (Through its first five episodes, the series contains exactly zero scenes of that kind.) The second, a dearth of meaningful plot options, is by far the crueler conundrum. Having created a world whose class system is not just harsh but unendurable, Snowpiercer’s writers have little choice but to stage a series of revolutions and counterrevolutions. A murder up-train is a fine thing if one needs to get the protagonist out of the caboose, but what difference does normal human drama make when the planet is a frozen wasteland and the social order that remains is horrifically unjust?
Perhaps the more interesting question, given the rigors of “cancel culture,” is whether Snowpiercer can survive to address these flaws in a future season. Among the complaints that accrued for The Handmaid’s Tale, after all, was Emily Nussbaum’s gibe in the New Yorker that “[its] society is unconvincingly color-blind,” and a similar grenade could easily be lobbed TNT’s way. Will a newly emboldened Twitter Left tolerate a fictional world whose persecuted caste includes white people? Or thrill to the vision of a white passenger encouraging a Korean woman to check her privilege?
Maybe not. Yet should the mob choose to overlook Snowpiercer’s political peccadilloes, viewers could conceivably be in for that rarest of television experiences: a show whose evolution leaves it not just stylish, not just exciting, but smart.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
Philip Morris CEO spends waking hours getting people to quit smoking cigarettes Philip Morris CEO spends waking hours getting people to quit smoking cigarettes Jay Heflin Martin King is CEO of Philip Morris International America and leads the company’s charge to get people around the world to quit smoking cigarettes. He has worked abroad on this issue but has recently returned to the United States.
The company’s motive in getting smokers to quit cigarettes is not wholly altruistic. Cigarette sales have recently declined, but “smoke-free" products have seen a surge in demand, according to CNN. And while PMI strongly advocates for people to stop smoking altogether, it also provides a smoke-free alternative for people who are looking for a change in their smoking behavior.
In 2014, PMI launched its IQOS device, which is a "heat-not-burn" device that uses a battery-powered system to heat tobacco to a point at which it is not on fire but generates an aerosol that can be inhaled. The FDA recently allowed it to be marketed in the U.S.
King is in charge of educating the world about the device. He joined Philip Morris USA in 1991 and in 2003 joined PMI. He is a graduate of Harvard University with a bachelor’s degree in government. He also holds an MBA from the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia.
King recently spoke to the Washington Examiner to discuss the rollout of IQOS.
Washington Examiner: The WHO recently reported that overall, tobacco use has fallen worldwide over the past two decades. Your objective with IQOS is for people to quit smoking cigarettes and either stop smoking altogether or do it in a safer manner, correct?
King: Correct. When we talk about a smoke-free future, our vision for the company is to be able to have all the smokers in the world eventually either stop smoking, which is the best choice, by the way. ... But if people are going to continue smoking, which is most of them — let’s face reality — then the goal is to switch them over to a noncombustible, scientifically substantiated, ideally regulated product. … We believe these products are a much better choice for smokers.
Washington Examiner: But products like IQOS are safer, not safe, right?
King: That’s correct. We have never said that. IQOS does have risks. Any tobacco product has some residual risk.
Washington Examiner: The FDA on April 30, 2019, permitted the marketing of IQOS in the U.S. It also reported that the “IQOS Tobacco Heating System contains fewer toxic chemicals than cigarette smoke” and that the “levels of acrolein and formaldehyde are 89% to 95% and 66% to 91% lower than from combustible cigarettes, respectively.” While these are encouraging results, what does that mean in terms of reducing your risk of becoming ill from using an IQOS device?
King: What you can’t tell definitively is: What reduction in harm does that give you as a result? In other words, what happens to the disease [that is] caused? So if IQOS reduces harm by 95%, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the disease is reduced by 95%. It could be reduced by more. It could be reduced by less. We don’t really know for sure and won’t know for many years. So we’re very, very, very careful to say that your best option is to quit entirely.
Washington Examiner: You recently moved back to the U.S after working abroad on IQOS. How did efforts go in other countries in converting cigarette smokers into IQOS users?
King: We’ve been knocking on the doors of [roughly] 15 million IQOS users. Almost 11 million are fully converted internationally, and we’re trying to replicate that success here in the U.S.
Washington Examiner: What about the others?
King: The rest are using it mixed with cigarettes and in the process of conversion, if you will. It takes them a while to get fully converted over to IQOS.
Washington Examiner: How are you tracking this?
King: We have panels that we put together in the countries where we have launched, and they’re large, representative panels of smokers. We ask them whether they are using [IQOS] exclusively or not, how many cigarettes have they used in the past week. There are questions that go to each of the panels, and [that] allows us to access what stage of conversion they’re in or whether they have fully converted.
Washington Examiner: Do you have a goal in mind for how many smokers you want to convert?
King: We have some objectives. By 2025, our objective is to have over 40 million smokers switch to IQOS. That happens to be, by the way, the approximate number of smokers in the United States.
Washington Examiner: How confident are you that you will hit that target?
King: We’re pretty confident that we’re going to do this because we already have a track record, and we’re close to 15 [million], so we’re [roughly] a third of the way there.
Washington Examiner: How long have you been trying to convert smokers into IQOS users?
King: We launched for the very first time in late 2014 in Japan and Italy. … This hasn’t been going that long.
Washington Examiner: What makes a smoker convert?
King: The product is designed to be a cigarette from the point of view that you get a similar length of experience. You get a similar number of puffs. It’s shaped somewhat like a cigarette and has a filter on it so it feels like a cigarette in your mouth. … The taste, the ritual, the weight — it’s designed to satisfy smokers. … It’s 70% successful or more, on average, in getting someone to fully convert … once [they] buy it. … It’s very similar to what they are used to — except instead of lighting it with a match or lighter, you turn on your button that heats the [tobacco].
Washington Examiner: IQOS is not an e-cigarette, correct?*
King: That’s correct. It uses electronics from the point of view that you are controlling a heater that slips into the tobacco and heats it to a very specific temperature below the temperature of combustion.
Washington Examiner: How is this different from an e-cigarette?
King: The difference is rather than using a liquid with nicotine in it that is derived from tobacco, [IQOS] uses tobacco itself. … I think it is important to say that this product is different from e-cigarettes. … It literally has tobacco in it. It’s not based on a liquid [like e-cigarettes].
Washington Examiner: So the tragic deaths related to vaping that occurred recently could not occur using IQOS?
King: Yes, correct. … That was caused by a type of liquid that should never be used. … If you vape in oil and inhale it into your lungs, it’s a big problem because your lungs can’t clear the oil. The oil is not water-soluble, and in order to clear something like that, it has to be water-soluble. … [With IQOS], there’s no liquid at all.
Washington Examiner: The focus of your campaign is aimed at smokers — you’re not trying to entice a nonsmoker to try an IQOS. How are you accomplishing this?
King: We have a strict marketing code, and we are very careful. If you walk into an IQOS store anywhere in the world … the first thing I want to do is make sure you’re of age. … The second thing that we’re going to ask is, "Are you a cigarette smoker?" If you say no, even though you are 54 years old, we’re going to say, "Look, this really isn’t for you. This is for smokers."
Washington Examiner: So if I walk in to my local 7-11 convenience store to purchase an IQOS, the clerk is going to ask me if I smoke and deny the sale if I say no?
King: I’m talking about the device. This is how you are going to buy your device, and it is much more controlled by us. … I’m talking about the initial start, where you can’t use the consumables without buying the device.
Washington Examiner: Do you track the number of sales lost because the person did not smoke cigarettes?
King: I don’t think we track that, but in several countries, we have had people go in and test to see whether we really are living up to that. I know in the U.K.* they went in [a store] and tested, and they came out saying, "They wouldn’t sell it to me." … So we have had a number of tests, but we don’t have [anything] specific.
Washington Examiner: Earlier, you talked about the 2025 goal to convert smokers to IQOS. Do you have a projection for when cigarettes will no longer be smoked around the world?
King: To the last person lighting a cigarette around the world might take a while. I think there are a number of countries where we could see within 10 to 15 years being able to get rid of cigarettes.
Washington Examiner: Which countries?
King: The country furthest along right now is Japan. … Almost a third of all smokers in Japan have switched to heat-not-burn products. … Will that be true for every country? Maybe not. It might take longer.
*Clarifications:
The question originally stated that IQOS is “less dangerous, according to the FDA.” The FDA has not made a decision on this.
The tracking of possible sales lost occurred in the U.K., not the U.S. as was originally reported.
Crossword: Independents Day Crossword: Independents Day Brendan Emmett Quigley
‘Defund the police’ is just another way for the Left to push its usual agenda ‘Defund the police’ is just another way for the Left to push its usual agenda Washington Examiner "Defund the police" has been one of the defining phrases in the weeks of protests following the death of George Floyd. Although there has been considerable debate about the meaning of the phrase, it’s clear that it's really just another excuse for the Left to push its usual standard and destructive policy agenda.
There are two broad definitions that have been given for “defund the police.” Some activists have pushed for the most straightforward, literal definition — abolishing police departments and replacing them with ... well, that part of the plan hasn’t quite been hashed out yet.
A larger group, which includes liberal columnists and some elected officials, pushes a more benign definition. They argue that defunding the police merely means shifting some money currently spent on police into other priorities, such as housing, education, and healthcare.
But that’s really just a fancier way of saying everybody should support the same big-spending, left-wing agenda they were pushing long before Floyd became a national figure.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gave away the game early on in the protests when she put people on notice that “if you’re out here calling for the end to unrest, then you better be calling for healthcare as a human right.”
Ocasio-Cortez has been her usual self over the course of the protests — a font of disinformation. “Teachers are paying out of pocket for school supplies, yet police are given extra tanks,” she wrote on Twitter. “Budgets convey priorities. We should question ours.”
In reality, in her home of New York City, the operating budget of the Department of Education is $24 billion — more than 4 times the $5.6 billion operating budget of the NYPD.
She then came up with what she thought was a clever example of “defund” in action.
"What a lot of folks are talking about when it comes to the movement, is that they’re asking for the same budget priorities that many affluent suburbs already have,” she said. “And it may sound strange, but many affluent suburbs have essentially already begun pursuing a defunding of the police in that they fund schools, they fund housing, and they fund healthcare more as their No. 1 priorities."
In reality, the governments of affluent suburbs did not come up with funds for healthcare, housing, or schools by defunding their police departments. In reality, people living in the suburbs purchase their homes at a premium and pay significant property taxes to fund their local school systems. Most residents have employer-based health coverage or other private insurance and do not depend on the local city government to pay for their healthcare. There is also less crime in these neighborhoods, hence less need for a large police force, but that doesn't mean their police forces were larger previously.
Even if Ocasio-Cortez wanted to make a separate argument about income inequality, it would not have any bearing on how the budget is allocated in wealthy, suburban neighborhoods, or what “defund the police” would look like in an urban setting. Moreover, the militarization of the police has less to do with localities overspending on law enforcement than it does with the controversial decision to bestow upon police forces leftover military equipment from recent wars. There is no budget for "extra tanks" that can be cut or diverted into teachers' salaries.
Ocasio-Cortez’s squad-mate, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, tweeted, “When we say #DefundPolice, what we mean is people are dying and we need to invest in people's livelihoods instead. EXAMPLE: Detroit spent $294 million on police last year, and $9 million on health. This is systemic oppression in numbers.”
But this is misleading. Tlaib is ignoring billions in healthcare spending in Detroit by federal, state, and county governments. Whereas cities mostly fund their own police forces, the healthcare budget in cities such as Detroit comes almost entirely from non-city programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare.
The “defund the police” movement is thus using the same left-wing tactic often deployed at the federal level, where liberals claim, falsely, that the government is neglecting social spending because of the military budget. In reality, the federal government spent $2.6 trillion in 2019 on Social Security, healthcare programs, and income support programs — more than three and a half times the $719 billion spent on national defense.
Should Joe Biden become president and move to enact the sweeping agenda he has proposed, with activists clamoring for more, arguments about structural racism will become excuses to expand Obamacare, spend hundreds of billions on subsidized housing, and so on.
Many conservatives are willing to debate in good faith ways to reform police departments — specifically to demilitarize police forces and make bad police officers more accountable. There may also be good arguments that some functions of police departments may be better handled by mental health professionals or social workers.
But it isn’t hard to see where this is heading. Liberals are ready to argue that the only way to really show you care about racism and police reform is to support the full domestic agenda they've been flogging ineffectually for years. By now, it's worn pretty thin.
A dirty dozen terms used to manipulate your thoughts A dirty dozen terms used to manipulate your thoughts Hugo Gurdon Before he died in January, Sir Roger Scruton wrote in the Daily Mail about his mission secretly educating people living under communist tyranny. He described being in Prague and “addressing a room of criminals whose ‘crimes’ consisted of uttering the wrong word.”
Controlling language is like “pawn to king four” in chess — a classic early move by would-be dictators — not that their efforts to police words and thoughts ever cease.
Watching television or reading about current affairs is a constant reminder of this. Politicians, whether they have been elected or have merely emerged from the mob, and news media constantly seek to shape perceptions of events and policies according to their opinions.
It’s therefore a good idea to know what is intended by their use of certain key words and phrases when you’re watching or reading the news, whether it be coverage of standard political hackery or of the violence and vandalism now afflicting our country.
Examples are legion, and a glossary within the short space of a column such as this can hardly scratch the surface. But here, in alphabetical order, are a dozen terms you’re bound to come across, accompanied by their modern meanings. They aren’t what you thought they were.
Brave: Parroting the latest left-wing ideas or acting on them without incurring any danger to one’s reputation. An EU commissioner recently described Twitter as “brave” for censoring President Trump. Silly you. You thought bravery meant accepting personal risk, as would have been the case if, for example, a New York Times staffer publicly agreed with Sen. Tom Cotton that the military should be used to subdue urban rioters.
Fair share: An arbitrarily determined portion of someone else’s income or wealth that, if you skate over economics and math, can be made to sound as though it will cover the vast cost of social programs promised by Democrats. President Barack Obama (2012) — “We don’t envy the wealthy, but we do expect everybody to do their fair share"; Joe Biden (2017) — We need a progressive tax structure where everyone “pays their fair share”; Bernie Sanders (2019) — “Make the wealthy pay their fair share”; Elizabeth Warren (2019) — “I want billionaires to stop being freeloaders … I want them to pick up their fair share.” People in the top 1% earn 19.7% of the nation’s annual income and pay 37.3% of all individual income taxes.
Free: Things paid for by someone else, as in free healthcare, free college, free food at demonstrations, and free stuff behind the windowpanes of Main Street stores.
Patriotism: Any expression of hatred or contempt for America, especially the incineration of our flag, once a unifying national symbol. Patriotism is most obvious in those who condemn the nation’s past wholesale, know its ideals are lies, and fight to consign the reputations of its beloved Founding Fathers to history’s ash heap.
Man: A human — at least, being human was still a prerequisite when this article went to press — who claims to be male. This has nothing to do with biological sex or having X and Y chromosomes rather than only X chromosomes. Men are just as able to menstruate, get pregnant, and exercise their right to have abortions.
Pig: A police officer of any race or either sex. Not to be confused with yahoos trying to provoke the police by screaming insults in their faces from a fraction of the 6-foot distance recommended by epidemiologists to avoid the spread of COVID-19. Pigs are not those who trash every district they occupy.
Protesters: A mob bent on destruction but given the heavy gloss of a legitimate cause by sympathetic left-liberal news organizations.
Racist: Anyone who won’t endorse Black Lives Matter or other organizations trying to foment Marxist revolution. Anyone who rejects the idea that America and all its institutions are “systemically” hostile to minorities.
Speech: Nonverbal violence in pursuit of a left-wing cause. The late, great jurist Robert Bork, arguing for the constitutionality of a flag-burning ban, made the lapidary observation that both words in the phrase “free speech” are vital to its meaning. The First Amendment, therefore, should protect words, not all acts of expression. The idea is that people should be able to speak their minds so they don’t express their political views by vandalizing statues, looting stores, and incinerating police precincts.
Talking points: Opinions contrary to one’s own that, not being conclusions arrived after thoughtful, good-faith consideration by intelligent people, can be dismissed without debate or evidence.
Violence: Free speech with which one disagrees.
Woman: Anyone who “identifies” as female. This may include men convicted of rape who, before sentencing, identify as women and so are sent to women’s prisons, where they can (and have) sexually assaulted other prisoners.
You will doubtless have your own list, but this one is perhaps a start.
Removing Theodore Roosevelt statue is a step too far Removing Theodore Roosevelt statue is a step too far Washington Examiner The decision to remove a statue of Theodore Roosevelt that has stood outside the entrance to the American Museum of Natural History for over 80 years is an inflection point in the battle over public monuments.
To be sure, there are certain nuances to the statue’s removal that distinguish it from other, more ridiculous recent cases. Importantly, the decision to remove the statue was not done by an angry mob, such as the outrageous toppling of statues of George Washington and Ulysses S. Grant. Instead, it was proposed by the museum and accepted by the New York City government, which owns the building. One of those supporting the statue’s removal was Theodore Roosevelt IV, a great-grandson of the president, who serves as a trustee of the museum.
What’s especially complicated here is that the objection isn’t to Roosevelt himself. The statue, which has been controversial for decades, features Roosevelt mounted on a horse with an American Indian on one side and an African tribesman on the other. Roosevelt is not being canceled — in fact, when the statue is removed, the museum will rename a wing after him.
All of this having been said, we believe that it is a mistake to remove the statue.
Roosevelt’s prominent place in front of the museum is no accident. His father founded the museum, and he spent his life as a passionate naturalist and writer about natural history. As president, he led conservation efforts.
Opponents of the particular statue have complained that having Roosevelt towering over the African and American Indian figures is evocative of the subjugation of other races. They also point to his own jarring statements about American Indians and race.
However, like many figures in history, Roosevelt is complicated. For instance, he took a lot of heat when he invited friend Booker T. Washington to dine with him in the White House — the first time such a thing had ever happened.
"African-Americans were invited to meet in offices,” explained Deborah Davis, author of a book on the famous dinner. “They built the White House. They worked for the various presidents. But they were never, ever invited to sit down at the president's table. And when that happened, the outrage was just unbelievable.”
Like its subject, the history of the statue itself, which is stunning as a sheer work of art, was also complex. In a video produced by the museum about the statue controversy, Harriet F. Senie, director of art museum studies at the City College of New York, explained that sculptor James Earle Fraser did not intend for the statue to portray subjugation of supposedly inferior races.
“The entire group, not just Roosevelt, was intended to be heroic,” Senie said. “The allegorical figures — and these are Fraser’s words — may stand for ‘Roosevelt’s friendliness to all races.’ The figures represent the continents on which he hunted, as either gun-bearers or guides or both.”
Even if one were to argue that the effect of the statue is different today than when it was first commissioned in 1925 and unveiled in 1940, that’s how history works. We study the past, and we try to understand both the heroic aspects and grapple with the rougher edges and earn insight into how attitudes have changed over time. There is even a “woke” argument against removing the statue because doing so erases and sanitizes uncomfortable parts of our past rather than forcing us to confront them.
It's one thing to discuss the removal of Confederate statues that were intended to honor those who betrayed the United States to preserve and expand slavery. But taking down Roosevelt as the city also debates removing a Thomas Jefferson statue means that there is no conceivable endpoint in the campaign to erase the past.