The Arab Spring has ended in failure The Arab Spring has ended in failure Dan Hannan
The Arab Spring has ended in total ruin.
I don’t just mean that it has failed to deliver the freedoms for which its authors hoped in 2011. I mean, it has, from a very low base, made life even worse in the countries it affected.
WOKERY COLONIZES EGYPT
Libya, Syria, and Yemen quickly descended into civil wars. Soon afterward, Egypt fell to a military dictatorship worse than that of Hosni Mubarak, who had never gone so far as to order peaceful demonstrators to be gunned down in the streets.
Tunisia, where it all began, could plausibly claim some successes at first. Its exiled politicians, including those affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, came back, and negotiated a pluralist constitution. Power changed hands peacefully at elections.
This was no small achievement, given the challenges that nation faced. A terrorist campaign succeeded in driving away the beach tourism that had been Tunisia’s main foreign revenue earner, especially following two devastating attacks in 2015 — one at the national museum and the second, three months later, at a holiday resort.
Despite all this, Tunisia remained a constitutional democracy until July 2021 when, under cover of COVID lockdowns, President Kais Saied closed down Parliament and sent troops into the streets. Since then, he has turned into an almost comic-book dictator, banning novels he dislikes, exiling or imprisoning opponents, and harassing critical media. Last month, he arrested Rached Ghannouchi, leader of the Ennahda Party, and the last speaker of Parliament before its dissolution.
Why should this matter to us? Tunisia, with the best will in the world, is hardly of critical strategic interest to the West. Authoritarianism, as this column keeps plangently noting, is on the march globally. What is one more dictator among many?
Part of the answer is that Tunisia was a test of whether multiparty democracies could flourish within the world’s fastest-growing religion. Superficially, Tunisia and Egypt started from similar places in 2011. Strongmen backed by the military, who had justified their autocracy by claiming to repress jihadi extremists, were toppled, and religious parties won the first free elections. But whereas Egypt’s Islamic opposition had been exiled to Riyadh, Tunisia’s, led by Ghannouchi, had been exiled to London, where it developed a very different sense of the relationship between state and citizen.
For example, the previous Tunisian constitution, under Ben Ali’s secular dictatorship, had prohibited relations with Israel. Ghannouchi’s followers, the supposed Islamists, understood that this was a question of day-to-day foreign policy, not basic constitutional law, and removed that clause. They went on to govern as mainstream conservatives, allowing religion in the public sphere but insisting on multiparty democracy and the supremacy of secular law.
They made mistakes, no question. But Ghannouchi was, for a while, the best hope for those who wanted a space within the political spectrum for tolerant Muslims. Instead of being presented with a choice between two kinds of authoritarians — one lot with long beards and the other with military uniforms — Tunisia offered the option of moderate conservatism, a kind of Muslim democracy, analogous to the Christian democracy that dominated the center-right in postwar Europe.
But it did not last. As in other North African countries, the generals had too much at stake to risk majoritarian rule, and a suitable front man was found to prop up the old order. Twelve years after the market trader Mohamed Bouazizi was driven to the terrible extreme of burning himself to death in protest against arbitrary state power and the confiscation of his property, Tunisia was back where it had started.
It is important not to misdiagnose the failure. What we see is not evidence that Islam is incompatible with democracy. From Bouazizi’s self-immolation onwards, Tunisians longed to create a state where leaders would no longer be able to make up the rules as they went along. No, what we see is the lengths to which local elites will go to preserve their privileges.
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What can the rest of the world do about it? Our options are limited. We are plainly not going to intervene to topple Saied’s squalid little despotism. But we can at least make clear that we do not regard his actions as legitimate. We can decline to subsidize his country, whether through the IMF or the various development banks we fund. We can refuse to train his cadets. We can ban his more autocratic supporters from our countries. At the very least, we can make clear that we still believe in representative democracy.
If we’re not prepared to say it, who will?
President Joe Biden’s mortgage adjustment plan brings critics home President Joe Biden’s mortgage adjustment plan brings critics home Haisten Willis
President Joe Biden's administration has once again hatched conservative outrage, this time by adjusting mortgage rates at the colossal Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae enterprises.
The administration says these changes are simply a long-anticipated update intended to "bolster safety and soundness," while its critics call it a misguided attempt to inject the wrong kind of equity into the housing market.
HOW THE TREASURY IS SCRAMBLING TO STOP DEFAULT — OR MITIGATE ITS FALLOUT
"Where diversity, equity, and inclusion and redistribution reign over incentives to promote opportunity and growth, we have a new outrage," former National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow said on Fox News. "It's another example of Biden's war against success."
The controversy erupted when Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Sandra Thompson announced a rejigging of mortgage fees at Fannie and Freddie, which collectively originate more than half of all mortgages in the U.S. The change would, in the aggregate, see costs go up for buyers with good credit and down for those with bad credit.
The backlash was fierce and widespread.
Kudlow, a top economic adviser in former President Donald Trump's administration, was joined by other conservatives and by mortgage industry groups.
Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), a Republican and likely presidential candidate, said the move could make it harder for middle-class families to make homeownership a reality. And 18 Republican senators issued a letter blasting the proposal, while a group of House Republicans announced it is seeking to overturn the rule.
“The FHFA, led by a President Biden-appointed director, is punishing financially responsible mortgage borrowers,” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) said in news first reported by the Washington Examiner. “Their agenda of equity over equality defies common sense and will endanger the stability of the housing market."
To be clear, home buyers with good credit scores and larger down payments will still pay less overall than those with bad credit scores and smaller down payments.
However, the rate changes are mostly negative for those with credit scores above 680 and universally neutral or positive for those with credit scores below 680 and those making a down payment of 5% or less. For those with higher credit scores, the new fees could be up to $3,200 higher over the course of a loan. The rule went into effect May 1.
The FHFA responded to the outcry with a press release on April 25 that promised to set the record straight. Thompson said the fee increases were part of a wider effort to raise rates on second-home loans, high-balance loans, and cash-out refinances, while lowering fees for first-time homebuyers with lower incomes.
"They do not represent pure decreases for high-risk borrowers or pure increases for low-risk borrowers," she said. "Many borrowers with high credit scores or large down payments will see their fees decrease or remain flat."
FHFA officials also point out that those with exceptionally high credit scores of 780 and above will mostly see their fees go down relative to the old scale.
The White House referred questions from the Washington Examiner back to the FHFA.
Urban Institute fellow Jim Parrott made largely the same argument as Thompson, writing that the agency increased prices for loans with less justification for government support in order to decrease costs for people who "genuinely need help," meaning borrowers with limited wealth or income.
The question is how those changes will affect the risk profile going forward for both individual borrowers and the market as a whole. Kudlow was one of many critics who pointed to the 2008 financial crisis as an example of what happens when mortgages are approved for people who will struggle to pay them.
The Republican National Committee even cried racism with a newsletter blast titled "Biden Admin Targets Asian American Homebuyers."
"The American dream has always offered people hope that if they work hard and save responsibly, they can get ahead and buy a home," RNC spokesman Tommy Pigott said. "Democrats want to destroy that American dream, and if you’re Asian American, there’s seemingly no policy they won’t enact to hold you down."
The housing industry mostly opposes the move as well.
Mortgage Bankers Association CEO Robert Broeksmit sent his own letter arguing the timing is bad — mortgage payments overall have soared by 85% since 2020, and the summer buying peak is nigh. The National Association of Realtors and National Association of Home Builders also spoke out against the measure.
One key issue is whether or not the adjustments amount to creating a cross-subsidy of payments from those with better credit scores to those with worse. Government officials fiercely deny that this is the case, while conservative scholars such as the Cato Institute's Mark Calabria say it is.
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But the Biden administration's FHFA insists the move is simply about giving would-be homeowners a fair shot at achieving the American dream.
"It had been many years since a comprehensive review of the Enterprises’ pricing framework was conducted," Thompson said in her statement. "The objectives were to maintain support for purchase borrowers limited by income or wealth, ensure a level playing field for large and small lenders, foster capital accumulation at the Enterprises, and achieve commercially viable returns on capital over time."
Biden and news media — culpably incurious Biden and news media — culpably incurious Hugo Gurdon
When former President Donald Trump, at his town hall meeting, said Republicans should let the United States default on its debts if President Joe Biden won’t cut spending, CNN interlocutor Kaitlan Collins interjected: “You once said that using the debt ceiling as a negotiating wedge just could not happen.”
Trump (nonchalantly): “That’s when I was president.”
Collins: “So, why is it different now that you are out of office?”
Trump (smirking): “Because now I’m not president.”
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He knows how to deliver a laugh line, and his audience duly laughed. Sickening though Trump’s cynicism is, it also has a sort of contemptuous honesty that makes some people believe he “tells it like it is” rather than the opposite, which is often the case. The combination makes comedian Dave Chappelle call Trump “an honest liar” who “tells the commoners, ‘We are doing everything [bad] you think we are doing.’”
Trump is manifestly unfit to be president, but you have to be obtuse not to see his appeal. His insouciant admission that there is one standard when you’re in power and another when you’re out — one rule for oneself and another rule for everyone else — casts a glaring light on the way Washington continues to work under Biden.
Two recent news cycles, the first about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and the second about the Biden family's financial dealings, reveal this with crystal clarity.
To undermine the Supreme Court now that they don’t control it, Democrats are smearing Thomas as corrupt with a series of flimsy revelations. One supposed scandal, breathlessly reported, is that Thomas’s rich friend Harlan Crow paid two years’ tuition at a private school for Thomas’s grandnephew. The Left pilloried Thomas because, having devoted a portion of his life and money to caring for a somewhat distant relative, he didn’t insist on bearing all the costs and let a wealthy friend contribute.
In Washington, no good turn by a political enemy is left unstoned. The Left wants Thomas impeached for years of active familial charity toward a benighted child. There isn’t a scintilla of evidence that Crow influenced Thomas’s work, but Democrats are fulminating nevertheless.
They aren’t fulminating and are deafeningly silent, however, as evidence piles up that Biden’s family, with his knowledge, collected millions of dollars during and after his vice presidency by peddling his name to nefarious foreigners. Biden’s son Hunter ran an obviously corrupt network for payments of at least $10 million from sources such as a front company for the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. The money was tagged for various Bidens, including Joe’s grandchildren.
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Joe Biden claims not to have known anything or ever talked about these family business transactions, but this is implausible. No evidence has yet been produced of his receiving dirty money, but the best that can be said — and this is a stretch — is that he displayed culpable incuriosity about his son’s business dealings.
Don’t expect the president’s ideological friends in the news media to pay nearly as much attention to the Biden family wheeling and dealing as they do traducing those they regard as his enemies. Like him, they are culpably incurious. And like Trump at the town hall, it makes them smirk.
Glenn Youngkin on the secrets to Republican success in Virginia Glenn Youngkin on the secrets to Republican success in Virginia Salena Zito GLEN ALLEN, Virginia — Sixteen months after going from underdog Republican candidate for governor in a solidly blue state to the avatar of substantive conservative governing, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s lanky frame glides with ease through J.J.’s Grille in suburban Richmond as he chats with locals there for a late lunch. The first Generation X governor of the Dominion State talked to the Washington Examiner about the results of the first conservative Virginia government in a dozen years and what lies ahead for Youngkin and the GOP nationally.
Washington Examiner: You signed an executive order expanding treatment for those addicted to fentanyl and directing harsher punishments for those who manufacture or deal it, among other details. What brought you to this order?
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Gov. Glenn Youngkin: We have a crisis. We truly have a crisis. It's an epidemic, and sadly, it's one that has recently been let loose. The fentanyl overdoses today are 20 times what they were just 10 years ago. This is just a matter of getting, first, the word out. Second of all, making sure people understand what to do, so we're training people all over Virginia today.
Third of all is holding people accountable on the dealer side of it, so we passed a bill that classified fentanyl as a weapon of terrorism, and that allows us to unleash a harsher set of penalties. I'm frustrated we didn't get a very straightforward bill that would be able to charge a dealer who knowingly deals fentanyl [to] someone [who] dies with a felony homicide.
But then, finally, we are literally going to work in our Right Help, Right Now program, which is our overhaul of our own health system, in order to coordinate, not just in our health departments but across all of our agencies, a coordinated response to this epidemic. It's just critical. The first lady and I have very close friends who lost a son, and he was poisoned, and the dealer was not held accountable. We just got to get on this.
It is horrific. It's not just Virginia. It's all over the country. I am particularly frustrated that our president doesn't seem to care, honestly.
We know the whole process here, and our president doesn't do anything about it. Let's just be clear. Title 42 has been a mask, hiding a complete failure of the administration to secure the border and to stop this horrific flow of people that has ended up with human tragedy and with illegal drugs and empowered really the drug cartels to dictate everything that's going on. And it all starts in China.
We know it. There's no question about this — 75% of the overdoses in Virginia today are fentanyl that comes directly from China through Mexico, and the president's not doing anything about that. I just cannot believe that this is what we get out of Joe Biden. Americans deserve better. Virginians deserve better.
Washington Examiner: If you look at the problem of fentanyl, but also the problem in our cities with homelessness and with gun violence, why don’t we address mental illness in a meaningful way?
Youngkin: When we were fortunate enough to get hired and I was interviewing our secretary of health and human resources, John Littel, we talked about, in his interview, overhauling our behavioral health system completely. We went to work right out of the box, and it took about eight months for us to design a new system. We rolled it out last fall, the Right Help, Right Now program. It is a complete overhaul because we need it.
Our behavioral health system in Virginia and in the country was not constructed to deal with what we're dealing with, which is beyond the imagination about how bad it is, where 50% of high school girls have at least contemplated suicide. We have just record numbers of kids who are depressed, and we have self-harm and then harming others. Our system was, unfortunately, so focused on hospitals that we now are overwhelming our hospitals, and as a result, we're not able to render any support to people when they need it, the day they need it. Instead, they get an appointment in a month or they get an appointment in six weeks. It's just awful.
This is why Right Help, Right Now is so important. It's, first, recognizing this has to be a complete transformation. It's going to take us three years. We're getting a huge chunk done in one year, but anybody who thinks that there's a magic wand here is completely missing it. We've got a comprehensive system to overhaul, first, pre-crisis. We can put resources into schools and so elderly can find help. This is critical pre-crisis so that folks can get help when they need it.
Then during crisis, we now have budget proposals in to have mobile crisis units across the entire Commonwealth of Virginia, crisis receiving centers that are outside the hospital so that folks can go to a specific facility that is designed for a behavioral health crisis. Then also investing in our acute psychiatric hospitals so that we can deal with these toughest cases, but we can triage and have people go where they need and have us go where they are. It's hugely important.
Then, finally, post-crisis to give people a path back to their communities, but they need someplace to go first where they can get support. So we put in a comprehensive overhaul plan. It's on top of the extraordinary amount that we already spend. There's about $600 million more between last year's budget and our proposals this year to invest in our behavioral health system. This will be a huge step. It'll get us about halfway home, and then we'll finish up the next two years beyond that. We can't wait.
This is not a Republican versus Democrat issue, and yet my Senate Democrat friends are in the way because they won't send me a budget. They won't send me a budget. I'm so frustrated with them because all they have to do is sit down and look at the facts. We've got $3.6 billion surplus. We're actually running hundreds of millions of dollars ahead of plan, ahead of the projected $3.6 billion surplus. We have plenty of money to cut taxes and invest in these most important things, and yet they're playing politics. I just think Virginians are so tired of people playing politics over their personal needs. The Senate Democrats are just out of bounds, and Virginians know it.
Washington Examiner: Then is the solution to get the upper chamber to have a Republican majority? Both former Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump lost state houses and state senate seats in their midterms. How do you intend to rebuild in Virginia?
Youngkin: Well, I'll just remind you that when I launched our campaign at the beginning of 2021, Republicans had not won a statewide election for 12 years. The bottom line was we'd forgotten one basic truth, which is we have a lot in common. In fact, we have to fill the tent up, not restrict people from coming in it.
This was all about party building. Of course, what we found is that the issues are not just Republican issues — they're Virginian issues. Safe communities, so let's back law enforcement. Good schools, let's stand for excellence and put equity off to the side and stand for excellence. Let's support parents, and let's recognize that God put parents in charge of their children, not politicians and bureaucrats, and let's stand up for them. Let's recognize that Virginia's overtaxing Virginians, and let's go cut taxes and lower the cost of living. Finally, let's run government better.
Lo and behold, when common sense was given space, people want common sense. We won the Hispanic vote and the Asian vote. We got a larger percentage of the black vote in a long, long, long, long time. Women came back to the Republican Party, and we won Greater Richmond and Hampton Roads, which we had lost for a long period of time.
It's that same approach in 2023 that we now don't have to talk about what we will do. We can talk about what we're doing and the fact that it is working. In our first 16 months now in office, we got moving. Promises made should be promises kept. We were able to cut taxes by $4 billion, and we were able to deliver the largest increase in pay for law enforcement and in training and equipment. We were able to empower parents to make a decision for their child.
We've seen huge companies move here. Boeing and Raytheon and Lego have moved here, and we've seen companies that are here expanding. Finally, when we bring common sense to schools and law enforcement and a behavioral health plan and how to run government, it works. I think Virginians like what's going on. We can see momentum.
Washington Examiner: Do you think that Virginia could, if you get to the majority in the state Senate and you hold it in the House of Delegates, do you think that this state could go red in '24?
Youngkin: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. What we've seen in Virginia, and I think this is why the nation is so interested in what's going on in Virginia, was we took a state that was truly blue. I mean, let's just be blunt, it was totally blue. In 2021, we demonstrated that Virginians were receptive to common sense, conservative principles, and a governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general who were going to deliver on this, and they gave us our House. Now in 2023, I think we can do it again. What we see here is a moment for us to demonstrate to the nation that a state that really is very much a microcosm of our nation can choose Republicans to lead, Republicans can deliver, and we can get things moving. Results matter.
Washington Examiner: Are you running for president?
Youngkin: As everybody's asked me this, I continue to be incredibly humbled. Listen, this kid 40 years ago was washing dishes and taking out trash because I needed a job.
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Washington Examiner: You're Gen X?
Youngkin: I'm a latchkey kid. My mom was a nurse. For people to even ask me this question about running for president, I'm kind of overwhelmed with it. I pinch myself every day as I walk out of that governor's mansion. My focus is to win these [state Senate] elections. This is a statement for Virginia, and I think it's a statement for the nation — that we can do this. We can press forward with common sense, conservative policies. We can lead. We can deliver. It works. If we can do it in Virginia, we can do it anywhere.
Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race To Go Viral by Ben Smith reviewed Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race To Go Viral by Ben Smith reviewed Derek Robertson Ben Smith’s Traffic bears no relation to Steven Soderbergh’s 2000 war-on-drugs epic of the same title, a film about the absurd and society-rending lengths people will go to profit from the self-obliteration of others. But it might as well. Subtitled “Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race To Go Viral,” the debut book from the former BuzzFeed News chief, New York Times media columnist, and Semafor co-founder tells the story of the Obama-Trump era’s click-driven revolution in digital news. I trust it’s not spoiling anything to say the story doesn’t end well.
While he’s not “the Tom Wolfe of our digital age,” as he’s breathlessly described on the book’s back jacket, Smith is a reporter’s reporter who also happens to be capable of telling a good story. The book is an ensemble dramedy with a cast of characters both familiar (hello, Steve Bannon) and forgotten (if you’ve thought about Ze Frank in the past half-decade, congratulations, you’re more online than your author), and Smith wisely chooses twin protagonists, Gawker founder Nick Denton and BuzzFeed impresario Jonah Peretti, two men whose move-fast-and-break-things recklessness defined the era.
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The first half of the story focuses on Denton’s New York City media scene surrounding “peak Gawker” in the waning years of “indie sleaze,” with a healthy dose of coke, booze, sex, and fortifying, self-righteous idealism to help the inside-baseball media-biz narrative go down. Denton’s social milieu and his vision for the news business were an odd combination of “grubby” and “utopian.” He imagined a world where in the flickering, cleansing light of a leaked sex tape, the mighty would be brought low and the low made mighty.
Peretti’s approach to the media couldn’t have been more different. An MIT Media Lab graduate with a single-minded, nigh-autistic obsession with manipulating and driving web traffic, Peretti’s vision for online news was summed up in BuzzFeed’s once-ubiquitous red-and-white arrow logo, a symbol for a chart of webpage views going eternally up.
BuzzFeed News, the honest-to-God newsroom that brought Smith into the Buzzfeed fold (and shuttered less than two weeks before Traffic was published), was essentially an ornament to help the website more famous for publishing articles like “50 Toddlers Who Are Best Friends With Their Dogs” find some ad-sales-driving legitimacy. “No more explaining memes to ad buyers for the phone company,” Smith writes, “even as most of the traffic did, in fact, continue to come from the lists of memes whose reach grew with Facebook’s.”
The true story of Traffic, more than Denton and Peretti’s behind-the-scenes exploits (and Smith’s picaresque self-insertion into the narrative), is how that economic equation eventually inverted in favor of “traditional” media. But to get there, we have to understand the force that stalked Denton, Peretti, Smith, and their peers through the otherwise hopey-and-changey Obama era: the stubborn insistence of America’s right wing on crashing the digital party.
Conservative gadflies like Matt Drudge and Andrew Breitbart haunt their mainstream counterparts throughout the narrative. For every Denton, with his self-righteous crusade to find a closeted gay conservative Christian to out, the New York City downtown scene has someone like Gavin McInnes, the Vice founder and later Proud Boy whose “anarchist” Republicanism became less and less ironic. Ariana Huffington, an early patron of Peretti’s mad scientist traffic-driving efforts, was nakedly imitating the Drudge Report with her Huffington Post. (One of her co-founders was named … Andrew Breitbart.) Later, Breitbart modeled early incarnations of his news website on Gawker’s pioneering, stylish blogginess. But he actually figured out how to make money from it.
Nearly all of these conflicts ended up shaking out in the Right’s favor. Smith is painfully, if not quite guiltily, aware of this, devoting entire chapters to the legacies of figures like the plagiarist Benny Johnson (a onetime BuzzFeed News employee and now Turning Point USA maven) and livestreamer Baked Alaska (another former BuzzFeed-er, last seen in federal prison for his participation in the Jan. 6 Capitol riots). The Jonah Perettis of the world saw the book’s titular traffic as a utopian, cleansing force that would erase political division and bring us all together to look at cute puppies or even stop African warlords. Breitbart and his heirs were cannier: They clocked it immediately as a neutral, world-breakingly powerful tool to wield against their enemies.
But not every way online media warped politics favored the Right. Years later, Peretti would warn in an internal BuzzFeed email that “racially controversial content” like “21 Things That Almost All White People Are Guilty of Saying” was dominating Facebook. The article’s substance was totally anodyne and inoffensive, but its basic premise provided an irresistible opportunity for users to fling accusations of racial bias in all directions. The incentives of web traffic, and the nebulous metric of “engagement,” rewarded the flame wars that ensued in the comments sections of said articles, rendering their content all but irrelevant. Sound familiar?
Maybe the most intriguing political argument Smith advances is that Jezebel, Gawker’s feminist-oriented sister website, catalyzed the pugilistic, social justice-minded tone that now dominates online progressive discourse. Reflected in the site’s mobbish, bloodthirsty comments sections that foreshadowed the “cancel culture” firestorms that would come soon to Twitter and Facebook, former Jezebel writer Moe Tkacik tells Smith, “It felt like we had unleashed something that was more volatile than we realized.”
“[Right-wing] leaders’ success on Facebook was no more complicated than their success on the mainstream media: They fed controversy and engagement,” Smith writes. “But while CNN and other mainstream broadcasters eventually began to rein in their own hunger for ratings … Facebook had no comparable mechanism. … Trump wasn’t doing anything to game Facebook. He simply was what Facebook liked.”
We all know what happened next. Trump won, the media freaked out, and Facebook disincentivized viral content in favor of “meaningful social interactions” with friends and family, helping send BuzzFeed into a spiral of layoffs that most recently culminated in its news division’s shuttering. Gawker’s bratty tabloid ethos caught up with it in the form of the Peter Thiel-Hulk Hogan legal saga that put the company out of business in 2016. Traditional media institutions like the New York Times reinvented themselves for the digital era with far more sustainable business models than their would-have-been disruptors ever boasted.
“The best even a genius can do, most of the time, is usually to see those forces coming and catch their drag,” Smith writes in conclusion about the populism that this new internet unleashed. It's a somewhat remarkable note to end on for someone who has now launched a media company that explicitly aims to earn readers’ trust by demystifying the journalistic process. There’s something noble about Smith’s impulse to downplay the impact of the media, contra the industry’s usual grandiosity and hyperfixation on its own importance. And it’s refreshing to see information looked at from the demand side, not the supply side, in the age of “misinformation” being blamed for every social ill. Still, it’s an awfully convenient stance for the publisher of the Steele dossier to take despite the ambivalent reevaluation of that episode Smith provides.
It’s surely true that, as Traffic suggests, bigger cultural, economic, and geopolitical forces shape our lives more than the media we consume. But if Peretti, Denton, et al. had the power to remake the media landscape thoroughly enough that it justified an entire book, it beggars belief to claim there was really nothing they could have done differently to make it more worthy of America. It would take a reader with colder blood than mine not to damn them for lack of effort.
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Derek Robertson co-authors Politico's Digital Future Daily newsletter and is a contributor to Politico Magazine.
Savings rate: After a slew of bank failures, is the worst turmoil in the industry behind us? Savings rate: After a slew of bank failures, is the worst turmoil in the industry behind us? Zach Halaschak It has been over two months since Silicon Valley Bank failed. Since then, several other banks have met their demise. But with the industry largely stabilized, is the crisis already over?
The most recent bank to fade into the sunset was First Republic Bank. First Republic was a regional bank that circled the drain for weeks following the collapses of both SVB and crypto lender Signature Bank. This month, it was announced that First Republic was being taken over by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and was then purchased by JPMorgan Chase.
MORE REGIONAL BANKS UNDER SIEGE IN WAKE OF FIRST REPUBLIC FAILURE
Some saw the absorption of First Republic as the beginning of the end of the banking crisis. But there are still several regional banks that are flailing in the fallout of SVB’s failure. Robert Van Order, professor of finance and economics at George Washington University, told the Washington Examiner that he thinks that the worst of the banking system turmoil is now in the rearview mirror, albeit regional banking woes haven’t yet ended.
“It’s not clear exactly what’s in the rest of the banks’ portfolios, so there may be more banks that go under,” he said, although he added that the risk from big systemic problems and bank runs has greatly declined.
Van Order pointed out that there are big differences between what happened with SVB and the situations of many other banks. An enormous share of SVB’s deposits — in the order of 95% — were uninsured, meaning that the deposits were in excess of $250,000.
“So, in a sense, it was a different sort of bank. Most banks have nowhere near that [number] of uninsured deposits, and so people were worried,” he said.
SVB’s collapse marked the biggest bank failure since the 2008 financial crisis, and federal regulators acted quickly to clean up the mess.
Amid growing panic from depositors and investors fearing the collapse could evolve into a full-on banking crisis, the government quickly announced that all of SVB’s depositors would be made whole, even those who banked in excess of the federally insured $250,000. The Fed also formed the Bank Term Funding Program as a new source of funding for banks that might face depositor runs.
Desmond Lachman, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said that going forward, it is unlikely the U.S. will experience a sudden and dramatic collapse featuring investors all trying to pull their money out of banks, like what happened during the SVB collapse. That is because the federal government has effectively shown that it is safeguarding uninsured deposits.
“I don’t think you’re going to get a run on the banks as we had with Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, but the regional banks are going to have trouble,” Lachman told the Washington Examiner.
He said the tumult in regional banks is in large part because they have too much of their loan portfolios in the real commercial property sector. Lachman noted that the sector is having trouble right now, so because there are more defaults on those debts, those banks will come under pressure.
“I think that the term one would use is it’s going to be a slow-rolling regional bank crisis,” he said. Lachman added that he thinks there will be other regional banks going under before the situation is wrapped up.
There will be an increasing number of deposits flowing from these smaller banks into the big banks such as JPMorgan. And as a result, more of the smaller banks will end up getting consolidated, akin to what happened with First Republic earlier this month, Lachman said.
But the situation in the banking system also has broader implications for the economy. Right now, the Federal Reserve is in the midst of a historic tightening cycle. The Fed has been raising interest rates for more than a year in order to drive down inflation, although the downside of doing so is the risk of recession.
The turmoil in the banking system further complicates the economic landscape and has raised the odds that the economy will fall into a recession, which could mean the unemployment rate rising and gross domestic product growth shrinking.
“That’s really a key part of it,” Lachman said about how the bank failures tie into the probability of a broader economic downturn.
Indeed, after SVB’s collapse, projections for how high the central bank will raise its federal funds rate, now sitting at 5% to 5.25% as of the May rate hike, quickly plunged.
Investors assign about a 98% chance that the Fed will pause rate hiking at its June meeting, according to CME Group’s FedWatch tool, which calculates the probability using futures contract prices for rates in the short-term market targeted by the Fed.
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Additionally, the consensus among investors is that the Fed will begin slashing rates later this year in an effort to pull off a much-desired “soft landing,” which means inflation is meaningfully driven down while a recession is averted. A mere 1% of investors are betting that rates will be as high as they are now or higher come November.
Still, many economists think the chance of a mild recession is still high. Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers recently pegged the odds at 70% in the next year, the Conference Board’s Leading Economic Index suggests a recession will hit sometime in the middle of the year, and the Fed’s probability modeling indicates about a 68% chance of a recession in the next 12 months.
The once and future monarchy The once and future monarchy Dominic Green LONDON — Britain is another country. They do things differently there. Occasionally, they do things that no one else still does. The coronation of King Charles III confirms that the British are the past masters of royal ceremonial occasions. It also shows that there is still a demand for it, and not just among the British themselves. The whole world watches these royal theatricals. They are entertaining, but they are more than entertainment. Only the pope attracts such sustained interest from so many peoples. And he, though he doesn’t advertise it, is also a monarch.
When observers note that the outfits at the coronation resemble the costumes in Disney movies or Star Wars, they have it back to front. The movies lift the look and the plotlines from the real thing, but they miss the reality of the thing. The House of Windsor is a dysfunctional family business, and it is also a sacred cult. The royal family members are amateur social workers, and they are also professional political symbols. It is this dimension, where the sacred cult meets the soap opera, that gave the coronation its uncanny power.
Monarchy is supposed to represent timeless principles and unchanging foundations, but the House of Windsor has undergone drastic renovation in the last few years. Charles's coronation follows the marriage of Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex (2018), the death of Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh (2021), the celebrations for Queen Elizabeth II’s 70th year on the throne (2022), and then her funeral (September 2022). The divine showrunner has shaken things up. The guard is changing.
HOW THE TREASURY IS SCRAMBLING TO STOP DEFAULT — OR MITIGATE ITS FALLOUT
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What will Charles’s reign be like? Short, probably. At 74, he is the oldest monarch to ascend the throne. He kept himself in good working order during his decades of waiting, but the job is harder than it looks: the foreign tours and formal dinners, the endless feigning of polite interest, the constant awareness of the cameras. There is also his real work, reading the stack of state papers that arrives daily from No. 10 Downing Street. Like any grandparents, Charles and Queen Camilla will want to spend time with their grandchildren, especially as two of them are in California.
At his coronation, Charles looked tired, distressed, and overwhelmed, like a man who has got halfway around Home Depot before realizing that his trolley has a squeaky wheel. It is all too late. He is too old to be an active monarch. He and Camilla can never recover the lost years when they were having children with other people. Still, he must push on into the dusk, for the sake of duty, the children, self-respect, and common sense. As Macbeth says, “I am in blood / Stepped in so far, that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er.”
In 1953, Charles’s mother bore the 5-pound weight of St. Edward’s Crown with a ramrod back. But she was 25. Charles and Camilla sagged under the weight of their crowns. The more the regalia was piled on, the smaller Charles seemed. A little, white-haired old man in the golden bathrobe of a Byzantine emperor and a crown like a diamond-crusted puffball, with sacred sticks in his hands and a look of mild confusion on his face, he looked like the loneliest man in the world. A president of the United States can always phone his predecessors for a chat. They understand what it’s like. That is why the ex-presidents are a gang of friends. No one knows what it’s like to be the king of England. If Charles could call his mother or grandfather, he would not be king.
It must be strange to be 74 years old when you finally start the job for which you were born and stranger still to get it finally because your mother, the only other person who understands what it is like to be you, has died. It is less than a year since Charles lost his mother and little more than two since he lost his father. It is little more than three years since Meghan and Harry announced their decision to “step back as ‘senior members’ of the royal family,” causing the worst rift since King Edward VIII announced his intention to marry Wallis Simpson.
No wonder Charles looked a little sad. Or was it that, looking out at the audience members who were looking at him, he saw not just the wreckage of his family but also the wrack of time? The new king is a philosophical sort and a sensitive soul. He is also tougher than he looks. The peasants on social media mock his sausagelike fingers, but he has his hands on the crown after all. The House of Windsor is the winner of the real game of thrones.
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The 20th century was a disaster for monarchies. Like many rare species, they were hunted to the point of extinction. Today, there are just over 200 states in the world, but there are only 26 working royal families. Yet the picture is not quite as bad, if you are a monarch, or good, if you are a republican, as the numbers suggest.
Forty-three sovereign states, a fifth of the total, have a monarch as head of state. Two of them, Malaysia, which is very large, and the Vatican, which is very small but has global authority, are ruled by elected monarchs. One of them is, uniquely, a co-principality: Andorra, a valley in the high Pyrenees between France and Spain, is ruled jointly by the bishop of Urgell and the president of France. This makes Emmanuel Macron simultaneously the standard-bearer of European republicanism and also an unelected monarch, or half of one.
The remaining 40 states have hereditary rulers. A few, most of them in the Gulf and Africa, are absolute monarchies. A few are absolute jokes. Monaco, for instance, is in the south of France but not of it. With less than a single square mile of territory and with only 68,000 tax-averse residents, Monaco is little more than a money laundry with a brothel and casino attached. In 2021, the New European newspaper described Monaco as “a melanoma on the French Riviera,” a “glittering square mile of riches, glamour and some of the most ostentatious displays of depravity anywhere on our planet.” In Monaco, “anything goes — except for the payment of taxes.”
There has been a king in England for a thousand years. The royal houses of Denmark and Morocco may be older. The imperial family of Japan, tracing its installation to 600 B.C., is older than them all. But only Charles rules more than one state. His Majesty’s realms are 15 in number. They include numerous island states in the Caribbean and the Pacific (the Bahamas, Jamaica, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, and so forth), but he is also on the bank notes in major states such as Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.
An arc of constitutional monarchies survives on Europe’s western edge: Spain, the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden. Europe also has its micro-monarchies. Monaco is less than a mile square. Lichtenstein, hiding its financial services in the fold of the map between Austria and Switzerland, is only 600 miles square. Luxembourg, doing its best not to be noticed between Belgium, France, and Germany, is 800 miles square. Charles’s estate around Balmoral Castle in Scotland covers 2,428 square miles. This is enough to accommodate Monaco, Andorra, Luxembourg, and Lichtenstein in a kind of royal safari park — and with plenty of room left over for the deer.
The other European monarchies have surrendered all their pomp and become hereditary civil servants. The Windsors are the last European monarchy to have kept their cash and land along with their crowns. Forbes magazine values The Firm’s collective value at $28 billion, give or take a palace or two. Most of this is in assets, not cash, and most of it belongs to the Crown, not the king. Should Charles need cash, he cannot sell Buckingham Palace ($4.9 billion) or Kensington Palace (a bargain at $630 million). But he will probably not need cash, as his mother left him an estimated $500 million.
The biggest chunk is a corporation called the Crown Estate, valued at $19.5 billion. In 1760, King George III agreed to manage the family’s land holdings on behalf of Parliament and transfer all surplus revenues to the Treasury. The current arrangement is more transparent. In 2020, the Crown Estate generated 475 million pounds, or just under $600 million. The Treasury refunded about a quarter, 86.3 million pounds, or just over $100 million, to cover the Crown Estate’s running costs. The Sovereign Grant, as it is called, includes paying the staff, maintaining the property portfolio, heating the castles, running the public relations offices and the airplanes, and generally keeping one in the style to which one is accustomed. The Windsors are the world’s biggest welfare claimants.
If Charles were to stop his subjects in the street and demand their cash as well as their loyalty, each Briton would pay 1.29 pounds ($1.61) into the Sovereign Grant. A Salted Caramel Mocha from the Starbucks near Buckingham Palace is 3.30 pounds ($4.16). One of these is a bargain. The economic argument for keeping the monarchy in business is inarguable. Not only are Charles & Co. a cheap date, but they are also the greeters for the fastest-growing sector of the British economy. Tourism now constitutes nearly 10% of Britain’s GDP. By 2025, the government’s VisitBritain website claims, the tourism sector will be worth over 257 billion pounds, or $323 billion, and employ more than a tenth of British workers.
The Crown is a licensed partner of Parliament, but the royals are the face of Britain. Parliament makes the laws and raises the taxes, but the royals embody legitimacy, the essence of authority. As the coronation showed, the third pillar of the state, the Church of England, confers ritual mystique and divine license.
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When the officiants produced the gilded swords and holy spoons, Charles looked bemused, like a man who did not understand all the implements that came with his Weber grill. At one point, he donned a single glove, as if paying tribute to the late "King of Pop," Michael Jackson. The generally theatrical atmosphere was augmented by the presence of random celebrities, including a gaggle of servile nonentities from British TV; Katy Perry, looking regal in a lilac hat modeled after one of the rings of Saturn; Lionel Richie, his expression frozen in the death rictus of a hamster; and John Kerry, rouged like Dirk Bogarde in the closing scenes of Death in Venice.
As with all family gatherings, the seating plan was tricky. Four presences loomed over the proceedings, and two of them actually attended. Least bothersome was Andrew Parker Bowles, Camilla’s ex-husband and the father of her two children. Charles and Camilla continued their affair throughout their marriages to other people. This drove Princess Diana mad, but Parker Bowles seems to have embraced the role of cuckold royal with gusto. He attended cheerfully in the cheap seats.
Prince Harry looked like thunder and did not stay for the family photograph. Having resigned from royal service, he was placed in the third row in Westminster Abbey, along with the disgraced Prince Andrew. Meghan turned down the invitation, claiming that as little Archie’s fourth birthday fell on the day of the coronation, she would be at home in Montecito, organizing a party. No one in Britain believes this. If you want to give Archie a memorable birthday, flying to London to see grandpa crowned in mock-Byzantine splendor beats a cake and a magician.
Diana was nowhere at all. Her name was not mentioned. If she was missed, and her sons surely missed her as they saw Camilla crowned, no one said anything. The monarchy is bigger than the monarch. The monarch, as King Henry VIII demonstrated rather too extensively, is bigger than his wives. The institution rolls forward like a steamroller, massively heavy and slow. When Diana died in 1997, the public blamed Camilla. The other woman had to go into hiding for two years. Last Saturday, she completed her replacement of Diana, and all anyone said was that her hair looked nice.
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Armed police were everywhere on the day, but the only shots were fired in the badlands of East London, where police were obliged to dispatch two pit bulls for resisting their owner’s arrest. The neighbors watching from their windows said nothing as the man was tasered and pinned to the ground but objected vociferously to the gangland-style slaying of his pets. A similar care for the underdog explains the chorus of complaints that followed a preemptive swoop on members of the anti-monarchist group Republic. Bundled off as they unloaded from their buses in central London, they were held until the balcony scene was over, then released without charge.
The police claimed that some of Republic’s members were carrying the kind of materials you might use should you wish to attach yourself to a royal carriage or the emperor of Japan. Republic claimed that the chains and ties were for securing bicycles. Even the conservative press felt that the police had overreached themselves. It is unsporting to persecute an eccentric minority. Later in the day, the remainder of Republic held a small protest. Unlike the much larger crowd in Westminster Abbey, the Republic protesters were uniformly grubby, bitter, middle class, and entirely white. The coronation was uniformly glamourous, cheerful, classless, religiously plural, and racially mixed.
Unlike the Republic rally, the royal rally was designed for the future. This is especially impressive because the designers are happier in the past. On the afternoon before the coronation, I went to inspect the crowds camping out along the processional route. Near Buckingham Palace, I found myself squashed against a royal flunky who was escorting an American guest. I knew he was a royal flunky because he was wearing a crumpled black suit with a dusting of dried egg and dandruff and holding forth like he was in a Noel Coward comedy.
“You, of course, elect a George III every four years,” he trilled. “Our monarchy, meanwhile, has continued to evolve.” It was rude of him to say it. No one likes to be reminded of their misfortune. But what he said was roughly accurate. George had extensive executive powers, including a veto. He could propose legislation and appoint his own ministers, but he could not govern without Parliament and did not control the purse strings. The American presidency inherited those checks and balances. The powers of the U.S. presidency are frozen in Article 2 of the Constitution, but the British monarchy has adapted itself to the reduction of its powers and status.
Britain’s monarchy has survived the 20th century. Will the U.S. survive the 21st? In polls, Americans keep saying they expect a civil war soon or a semi-amicable “national divorce.” If the U.K. sheds Northern Ireland or Scotland, it will make little difference to the Crown. If the U.S. loses a single state, let alone a big one such as California, then there will be no U.S. If the emotional temperature of politics is lower in Britain than in France or the U.S., it is because the monarchy absorbs the heat. This is the positive case for hereditary privilege. The negative case is Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
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The royals may sound like toffs, but their real constituency is no longer the aristocracy. The Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867 made the middle-class vote the arbiter of elected government. The monarchy has tracked that trend, mirroring the ostensible uxoriousness of the middle classes, vacationing in the British Isles as the middle classes tended to do even in Charles’s youth, and imitating a modern nuclear family for the television cameras.
Britain’s middle classes are increasingly liberal. This is an electoral problem for the Conservatives, but it is the modern monarchy’s opportunity. Charles, a pioneer of lifestyle liberalism, has been waiting for his people for years as they slowly disentangled themselves from Thatcherism and plastic bags. They are his people: environmentalist, organic, hippy-dippy, multiculti. He is their king, and Prince William and his wife, Kate, are their kind of people, too. A monarchy, if you can keep it.

Parent involvement matters for student success Parent involvement matters for student success Frederick M. Hess It’s been an infuriating and decidedly odd few years for the nation’s parents.
In spring 2020, schools closed and states told parents to home-school their children, with the assistance of intermittent Zoom sessions and semifunctional online resources. Across much of the land, parents settled into an extended period of remote learning, during which they had to do their jobs, supervise their children, and keep the wheels from coming off.
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As schools reopened, a host of new challenges emerged. There were heated fights over masking, vaccination mandates, and politicized “anti-racist” practices. Those fights were soon followed by clashes over how schools should approach gender identity, what books belong in school libraries, and whether educators should teach first graders about sex. Parents who objected to district policies risked being smeared as bigots, with the National School Boards Association urging the FBI to investigate wrong-headed parents as possible “domestic terrorists.”
Like I said, it’s been an odd, frustrating time. After all of this, it’s no great surprise that support for school choice is soaring, that most parents say the nation’s schools are on the wrong track, or that an array of new parent groups, such as Parents Defending Education and Moms for Liberty, has risen up.
But there’s another, less obvious and less politicized, development. As I observe in The Great School Rethink, all this has given us an opportunity to rethink the relationship between families and schools. And that’s long overdue.
During the pandemic, Baltimore City Public Schools CEO Sonja Santelises penned a thoughtful essay for Education Week, noting, “I have been struck by the number of principals telling me about staff who have said they were wrong about this parent or that grandmother, now seen more as a vital ally rather than an unwanted adversary.” She wrote, “No longer can we dust off the welcome mats for back-to-school nights and parent-teacher conferences and then swiftly roll them back up, shooing parents away and telling them, ‘Trust us.’ We are now guests in their homes.”
For 20 years or more, too many parents felt like they were treated as adversaries or nuisances. Amid COVID-19, parents in learning pods reported this type of resistance from school systems, with researchers documenting a spate of “aggressive emails” and “vengeful” responses from school officials. And parental frustrations aren’t unreasonable, especially given that half of teachers report spending less than an hour a week engaging with parents, guardians, and the community.
It shouldn’t need to be said, but it apparently does: Parent involvement matters a lot for student success. A 2017 study of 11,000 households analyzed the impact of sending parents half a dozen reminders during the year about the importance of student attendance. The result: a big drop in absenteeism, especially chronic absenteeism. A study of Title I elementary schools found that sending materials home, face-to-face parent-teacher meetings, and phone check-ins boosted academic performance. As one influential survey of the research concluded, “No matter their income or background, students with involved parents are more likely to have higher grades and test scores, attend school regularly, [and] have better social skills.”
A toxic relationship
When schools went remote in 2020, parents could suddenly see what children and teachers were doing all day. When that happened, the phrase I heard most often from parents was: “I had no idea.” They were unaware this teacher was juggling so much or how little learning actually occurred in a school day.
Shuttered schools needed parents to get children online, monitor their engagement, navigate balky web portals, handle lunch, supervise breaks, and serve as teacher aides. It was a stark reminder that schools don’t work without parents. At the same time, parents charged with printing out materials, explaining confusing concepts, keeping their children on task, and troubleshooting tech headaches gained a new appreciation for a teacher’s daily burdens.
In many communities, the parent-school relationship is a toxic one, featuring too much passive-aggressive distrust and too little straight talk. Ask veteran educators about their feelings toward parents, and they’ll echo the party line about how much they value parent engagement. But when you get those same educators in safe environs, they’ll voice doubts: that some parents don’t want to be involved, that some parents don’t know what to do, or that they get blamed when students or parents aren’t willing to meet them halfway.
These are all fair points. And we shouldn’t be afraid to say so. Education is in essence a partnership between families and teachers, between students and schools.
A partnership is a two-way street. Teachers must be competent and committed to educating every child. But parents and guardians have a job, too: to send children to school who are responsible, respectful, and ready to learn. This means getting their children to school on time, making sure they do their homework, and teaching them to treat their peers with basic courtesy.
If parents don’t know how to supervise homework, schools need to offer mentoring. If parents won’t step up, they need to be challenged, and if they struggle to do so, they need support. But the answer is not to ignore or excuse parental inaction. That’s not the empathy of an “ally.” It’s the negligence of an enabler.
Once upon a time, back in the 1980s and 1990s, it was all too easy to find educators who would say, “I can’t teach that kid.” Complaints that parents weren’t doing their part were invoked as an all-purpose excuse and mostly met with resigned shrugs. Thankfully, the world today has changed. When educators say such things, they mutter them discreetly. It’s become conventional wisdom that educators should expect every child to learn. This is a seismic shift, and it’s a very good thing.
But it’s also meant that, today, public officials and school leaders hesitate to talk about whether parents are doing their part to equip their children to succeed in school. Terrified of being labeled a bigot or an enemy of equity, they fear saying anything that might raise the ire of the social justice police. As a result, too many parents aren’t even clear about what role they should play in their child’s schooling, and teachers can feel like convenient scapegoats.
This is bad for students, parents, and educators alike. It implies that whole classes of parents are incapable of agency in their own lives or those of their children. That’s not empathy. It’s disrespect.
Fortunately, we don’t need to look that hard to find better models of what a healthy partnership between schools and families looks like.
Every child, every day
In Arizona’s Phoenix Union High School District, Superintendent Chad Gestson had an intriguing response when schools went remote in March 2020. Worried that the district was going to lose track of many of its 30,000 high schoolers, which was what ultimately happened to something like 20% of the nation’s students, he announced that school staff would be connecting with “every student, every day.”
With schools shuttered and staff working from home, Gestson reminded employees that everyone was still on the clock and directed every district employee, whether they were a teacher, member of the support staff, or administrator, to check in with 10 students or their parents every day.
The exercise surfaced all manner of challenges. For one thing, it turned out that a huge chunk of the district’s contact numbers was inaccurate. Gestson recalled that, at first, he had working numbers for just 4 of his 10 students. “Those first few days were spent trying backup numbers, calling aunts or other family members, and just trying to make sure we knew how to find our students,” he said.
Early calls mostly addressed technical problems with remote learning. Soon, though, the focus shifted to how students and families were faring. Gestson said, “Sometimes we’d talk to the student every day. In other families, the parent said, ‘Call me instead [of my child].’” Staff just followed the families’ leads, which helped to build trust between family and school.
Gestson said the calls both strengthened the school-family bond and surfaced useful insights. “One thing we learned was that a lot of students had strong relationships [with school personnel]. Kids would tell us, ‘I just talked to my math teacher or that coach.’ We also learned which students didn’t have those relationships. We heard about families struggling with food or housing.”
Along the way, the school district stitched together software that enabled staff to connect students with someone who could assist them.
Of course, Gestson wasn’t the only leader to rethink parent engagement during the pandemic. At New York City’s Concourse Village Elementary School, communication with families used to be sporadic. The principal thought parents liked it that way. During COVID-19, though, the school began weekly check-ins. Finding pent-up parent interest, the school built out a strategy of monthly surveys, follow-up phone calls, and virtual visits. At Urban Assembly Maker Academy in New York, the assistant principal and staff would spend three Fridays a month knocking on doors to reconnect with students who had logged off or stopped engaging.
While such developments seem both heartening and sensible, one can’t help but wonder why they’re the exception and not the rule — or why it took a pandemic to get schools to embrace them.
Driver’s ed and digital devices
Where are the big opportunities for parents and schools to sidestep some of the ideological clashes and roll up their sleeves? The world of social media is one such place. Today’s tweens and teens spend a staggering amount of time online. In 2021, researchers reported that, during the pandemic, aside from school-related screen time, 12- to 14-year-olds said they spent 7.7 hours on a screen each day. What’s the right response for parents and educators?
A useful model here, believe it or not, is oft-maligned driver’s education. Driver’s ed became a staple in the last century when driving became a rite of passage and cars were the most powerful technology a student would encounter. Schools tapped their institutional muscle and instructional acumen to support parents who lacked the time, know-how, or temperament to teach students how to handle a ton of speeding metal.
Reams of data on youth mental health and well-being have made it clear that a tween’s phone should be seen similarly, less as a candy-colored bauble than as a powerful piece of equipment that needs to be handled responsibly. Unfortunately, today’s approach is more like tossing a 12-year-old the keys to a Harley and saying, “Drive safely. And please stay away from the biker bars.” That’s a problem. As Yuval Levin, author of A Time to Build, has observed, “If Instagram and TikTok were brick-and-mortar spaces in your neighborhood, you probably would never let even your teenager go to them alone.”
We’ve seemingly decided that most tweens and teens are going to have devices. They need them to access class materials, arrange rides home, listen to music, take pictures, pay for things, talk to their friends, and much else. If that’s the case, teaching them to use these responsibly can’t be the province of either parents or educators alone. Parents need to set boundaries and model responsible behavior. Schools can support those efforts by coaching parents who want help and teaching students sensible practices. It must be a partnership.
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Rethinking the parent-school partnership
As students have experienced epidemics of learning loss, emotional trauma, and social isolation, it’s clear that parents and educators are both in need of help. This provides the opportunity to rethink the parent-school relationship.
Striking that deal requires educators to see parents as partners. That means keeping parents apprised of what’s happening in school and asking how things are going at home. It means making it easy for parents to see what’s being taught. It means valuing parental concerns. And it also means being clear about what parents, in turn, need to do.
Moreover, in an age of information overload and expanding options, school systems should learn to play a role as trusted community hubs. For parents seeking assistance or advice, school systems can be reliable conduits to quality instructional videos, coaching programs, tutors, learning pods, and more.
Put another way, the local school system’s relationship with parents needs to evolve from the factory-era role of being the purveyor of schooling to one that engages parents where they are. That won’t be easy. But if the pandemic and its aftermath have taught us anything, it’s just how necessary such evolution is.
Frederick M. Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and author of the new book The Great School Rethink (Harvard Education Press 2023).

What policymakers and pundits miss when they call for a ‘new Marshall Plan’ What policymakers and pundits miss when they call for a ‘new Marshall Plan’ Benn Steil Last month marked the 75th anniversary of the launch of the Marshall Plan — by any reasonable metric, the most successful aid program in history, as well as the most celebrated of all American diplomatic initiatives. The legislation authorizing large-scale economic aid to 16 nations under what was called the European Recovery Program, passed by Congress and signed by President Harry Truman, led to a remarkable revival in output over the subsequent four years and enabled the recipient nations to resist foreign and domestic pressures to turn to extremist political ideologies — most notably, in the context of the period, communism.
Though it was at the time attacked by both the Right (as socialism) and the Left (as imperialism), its achievements in resurrecting Europe and laying the foundations for Cold War American alliances are taken for granted now. Not surprisingly, there have, over the decades that followed, been repeated calls to launch new “Marshall Plans” for war-torn nations and troubled regions around the globe. Syria and Ukraine are only the most prominent of the many recently proposed beneficiaries.
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But what exactly makes a plan “Marshall?" Beyond the spending of big bucks, there is no common understanding. Yet once we begin examining the old, original plan, it becomes clear just how sui generis the geopolitical conditions were in (mainly Western) Europe in the late 1940s, how carefully designed the aid allocation mechanisms were, and how difficult it would be to replicate the Marshall Plan itself. Yet understanding why that is the case provides valuable lessons of its own to today’s policymakers and diplomats.
First, let us consider the sums involved. The Marshall Plan dedicated $13.2 billion across 16 recipient countries. This is $165 billion in today’s money. But if we were to launch a Marshall Plan today equivalent in size in terms of U.S. GDP, we would be talking $1 trillion. So the Marshall Plan was large, no doubt. The money was also in the form of grants and not loans, distinguishing it clearly from China’s prodigious “Belt and Road” initiative, which has piled hundreds of billions of dollars of new debt onto nations already heavily in debt.
Yet the Marshall Plan was not, in fact, unprecedentedly large, even in terms of grants. The United States spent $210 billion on reconstruction alone in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan — nearly $50 billion more than the total value of Marshall aid in current dollars. Yet the Iraqi and Afghan aid programs were a dismal failure. The countries have undergone no economic renaissance. Washington achieved virtually nothing politically in Iraq and less than nothing in Afghanistan — which is once again ruled by the Taliban, the same brutal authoritarians who ruled it when the U.S. invaded in 2001.
What, then, accounts for the success of Marshall aid and the failure of much greater amounts of aid after recent wars? In answering that question, we need to be careful about ascribing too much of Europe’s Marshall-era recovery to money. As I document in my recent book The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War, statistical analyses of the aid’s impact suggest that it can account for no more than a modest portion of that recovery. In short, it was not the money alone, or even in large part, that created the recovery. It was, rather, the massive change in the political and security conditions on the ground in Western Europe, wrought by huge changes in U.S. foreign policy, that prompted the revival of private investment and trade that drove the exceptional economic growth over the period. The money provided fuel for the engine of private investment and reason for the masses to shun extremist parties that opposed private enterprise and U.S. aid itself (in particular, the French and Italian communists). But it would never have done much on its own.
The two critical U.S. policy changes were the reversal in German occupation doctrine and a new commitment to underwrite the security of Western Europe.
From September 1944, occupation policy in Germany was widely known as the “Morgenthau Plan.” Named for Franklin Roosevelt’s longtime treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, its main element was deindustrializing the country so that it might never again have the manufacturing capacity to threaten its neighbors militarily. By the spring of 1947, as the Marshall Plan was being formulated, it had become clear that the policy was antithetical to stabilizing western Germany and reviving Western European production as rapidly as possible. But the French, in particular, were wedded to the idea of “pastoralizing” their historic enemy.
The price for French and British participation in an American scheme to integrate their economies with western Germany’s was U.S. security guarantees. These were enshrined on April 4, 1949, a year and a day after the signing of the Marshall aid legislation, in the Washington Treaty, NATO’s founding act.
Between 1945 and 1948, U.S. defense spending had plummeted from $963 billion to $95 billion, before turning sharply upward in 1949. The new American security commitment represented a huge shift in the Marshall Plan’s geo-strategy, which had initially been to use economic aid and cross-border integration as an alternative to military engagement in Europe. The aid had been intended to allow the Europeans to provide for their own security against the threat of communism and fascism, both from within and abroad. Instead, Washington was forced to accept that security was a precondition for positive economic and political reform. This is a lesson that was ignored in Iraq and Afghanistan, where it was wrongly believed that security could be managed separately from economic reconstruction and democratization and on a separate timetable.
In 1948, it was not, however, possible to provide credible security guarantees to all European governments anxious to take part in the Marshall Plan. Geography dictated that countries bordering the Soviet Union, such as Czechoslovakia, were at vastly greater risk of successful Soviet invasion than countries further west. And so after Stalin instigated a communist coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948, with the purpose of keeping the country out of the Marshall Plan, the State Department chose not to intervene. This decision, as uncomfortable as it was from a humanitarian perspective, was necessary to satisfy the fundamental dual objective of the Marshall Plan, which was to secure American vital interests in Europe without having to go to war with the Soviet Union.
Such considerations complicate modern versions of the Marshall Plan. For example, when we speak of the possibility of a “Marshall Plan for Ukraine” today, we must similarly be cognizant of the fact that the country shares over 1,200 miles of land border with a hostile Russia and is therefore incapable of attracting the private investment needed for its successful economic reconstruction and development without either a vast lethal Western military presence or the tacit cooperation of Moscow. Only the latter appears to be remotely feasible or sensible — and even then would require long and disciplined diplomatic engagement. This does not mean those conditions must be present for any aid to Ukraine to have a positive impact, only that geopolitical conditions necessarily limit how much can be accomplished by money alone.
Beyond security, Marshall aid was not just a matter of writing checks but of implementing carefully crafted procedures to affect incentives and distribute risks. “Counterpart funds,” for example, were used to harness the power of economic self-interest on the ground in recipient nations. To access Marshall money, France had to rely on the initiative of its own people. A French farmer, say, would buy an American tractor with his own francs. Those francs were then sent not to the U.S. but to an account managed by the French central bank, to which the French government was required to put in matching funds. The French government was then empowered to use those funds for an economic modernization program agreed in coordination with the U.S. And France, of course, was a highly developed nation with a long tradition of democracy and an impartial and uncorrupted civil service capable of implementing countrywide programs.
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The risks of trading with France’s war-torn neighbors, in particular an insolvent Germany, were then eliminated by a European Payments Union underwritten by U.S. capital. Using innovative mechanisms such as counterpart funds and a payments union, the U.S. was able to stimulate investment, production, consumption, and trade in ways in which simple government-to-government transfers never could. Yet I have never heard an aspiring contemporary Marshall Planner speak in terms of actual mechanisms to manage incentives and allocate risks in the specific geopolitical contexts of target recipient nations.
In short, whereas the U.S., the West, and indeed the entire civilized world should be generous with humanitarian and reconstruction aid to Ukraine, we should be under no illusions that that money can generate the sort of rapid and thoroughgoing economic renaissance and embrace of liberal democracy that we witnessed in most Marshall countries after World War II. Prior to the Russian invasion, Ukraine’s GDP per capita was a mere 15% of the European Union average. With no history of a clean and competent civil service capable of instituting a private-sector-led modernization program and, most importantly, with no prospect of securing its eastern borders while Vladimir Putin remains at the helm in the Kremlin, the country resembles the Czechoslovakia of 1948 far more than it does the 16 Marshall nations. The bracing truth behind the success of the Marshall Plan is that we see “success” because of the way the Truman administration chose to define the word in 1948 — that is, by excluding from the Marshall Plan those nations that the U.S. could not protect from the predations of its neighbors without risking World War III.
Benn Steil is director of the international economics program at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author, most recently, of The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War.
Will an emphasis on transportation lead to the Washington governor’s mansion? Will an emphasis on transportation lead to the Washington governor’s mansion? Jeremy Lott
Thrice-elected Gov. Jay Inslee (D-WA) will stand down rather than run for an unprecedented fourth term. When he departs the governor’s mansion in January 2025, the Democratic governor will have spent 12 years as Washington’s chief executive.
Governors have great latitude in setting transportation policy in state capitols around the country, affecting the future of gas tax rates, transit service, highway expansion, and the rollout of the 2021 federal infrastructure law.
HOW THE TREASURY IS SCRAMBLING TO STOP DEFAULT — OR MITIGATE ITS FALLOUT
Washington, with a population that grew every year between 2010 and 2021, offers a test case in the future of transportation policy. In the nation’s northwest corner and sharing a 427-mile border with Canada, Washington is increasingly a living destination for disgruntled California residents and those in other places with high costs of living — in no small part due to its lack of state income tax.
So how has transportation fared under Inslee? And might that transportation policy record be a key to voters’ decision in November 2024 on who should be the state’s next governor?
The national “27th Annual Highway Report,” released in April by the Reason Foundation, gives his state low marks for its roads. Washington ranks 46 out of 50 states and has slipped recently.
The report explained that the state’s “costs are disproportionately high and the biggest driver of its poor overall rankings.” Washington’s spending on road maintenance, capital projects, and bridges per lane is the most expensive in the country and much more money than neighboring Oregon spends on comparable projects.
Moreover, Washingtonians aren’t seeing much bang for that buck, on highways or on byways. “4.10% of Washington’s rural Interstate pavement is in poor condition, 6.2 times more than Oregon’s,” the report states. “17.50% of Washington’s urban arterial pavement is in poor condition, 2.3 times more than Oregon’s [pavement].”
The governor’s office wouldn’t stipulate to the report’s findings about Washington’s transportation record. Jaime Smith, Inslee’s executive director of communications, said, in reality, it’s one to be proud of.
“We haven’t reviewed the report or its methodology, so it’s difficult to comment on this specific ranking,” Smith told the Washington Examiner. “There are significant investments underway across the state to improve roadway safety and provide more efficient, greener transportation options, thanks to the Connecting Washington and Move Ahead Washington packages from 2015 and 2022.”
Yet there are also other worrying trends only hinted at in the “Highway Report.” The Washington Traffic Safety Commission, in particular, is worried about vehicle fatalities on Washington roads. The website declares the state a “national leader in traffic safety” and casts a “vision ... to reduce traffic fatalities and serious injuries to zero by 2030.”
But that’s a trend currently headed in the other direction. Vehicular fatalities in the state have risen markedly over the last decade, which happens to overlap Inslee’s tenure. There were 436 fatalities on Washington roads in 2013, according to the WTSC dashboard. Last year, the number of fatalities came to 750.
Connecting Washington and Move Ahead Washington are initiatives Inslee championed and signed into law. As with many infrastructure bills championed by Democrats in recent years, they both make a great deal of money available for broad categories of “transportation” and “infrastructure” but don’t particularly prioritize improving the state’s roads for drivers.
Democratic state Sen. Marko Liias, architect of the almost $17 billion Move Ahead Washington package of bills, said, “Washington is a nationwide leader on so many issues, and we can continue to show our progressive values in the transportation sector. From letting kids ride free on transit and ferries, to increasing public transit options, and investing in pedestrian and road safety projects, this is a win for our entire state,” according to the Center Square newswire.
To fund projects motivated by the state’s progressive values, the Washington legislature also enacted a cap-and-trade carbon tax that has started to hike prices at the gas pump this year.
The average price of a regular gallon of gas in the state stood at $4.58 on May 10, according to numbers compiled by AAA. That was more than $1 above the national average of $3.55 and the fourth-highest average pump price in the nation, behind California, Hawaii, and Arizona.
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The dysfunction of Washington transportation doesn’t appear to be a motivating factor for the ruling Democrats who have announced bids for the governorship — so far, state Attorney General Bob Ferguson and state Public Lands Commissioner Hilary Franz.
For Republicans, who have not won the Washington governorship since 1980, the high cost and low quality of Washington’s roads could be a tempting wedge issue. Perhaps they can use it to tempt independent voters to start their internal combustion engines.
How Finnish action film Sisu sums up our golden movie moment How Finnish action film Sisu sums up our golden movie moment Nicholas Clairmont For now, it is impossible to know what the citizens of the future will mean when they talk about “2020s movies.” The eye cannot see itself, and the present cannot have historical perspective on its own culture. But I have a few guesses about what the moment we’re in will eventually be remembered for. This will be a nadir for music, literature, and a handful of other dying arts, but also a renaissance age for one of the great rituals of American mass catharsis: the ass-kicking action film.
Comedy films died in the 2020s as a popular art form. “What a weird period it was,” they’ll say, “when they were afraid to laugh.” But we were not completely shot through with artistic cowardice back in the 2020s. They will admire us for our action movies. I’m sure of this because I just saw the ambitious, fun, confident, and shocking Nazi-killin’ masterpiece Sisu, released April 28.
LEVEL THE PLAYING FIELD FOR INDEPENDENT MEDIA
The ‘80s had bulging forearms with popping veins, like the ones Arnold wielded in Predator or Bruce rocked in Die Hard — not to mention Sly Stallone, Jean-Claude van Damme, or Dolph Lundgren. Today, our action hero looks like a moderately fit father who just dropped his child off at college and maybe put off a haircut for a few too many weeks but who is actually more dangerous for being exhausted and beaten down because his very exhaustion fuels his resolve. He is covered in the blood of the men he just killed, each of whom got a solid shot at his face before going down. He is a reluctant hero. He’s got to do what he’s got to do.
More serious stakes for more reluctantly violent men allow the violence that is portrayed to be, ultimately, way more rad. And the filmmakers have risen to the occasion. In other words, the action itself is better than ever. The most flat-out exciting action film ever released before Sisu was released on March 24. It was called John Wick: Chapter 4, the final film about the titular character’s quest to avenge his dead wife and dog. For the fourth entry, the idea was that the first scene should outdo whatever was the most intense action sequence previously made (the long nuclear-bomb-defusal-slash-helicopter-chase climax scene of 2018’s Mission Impossible: Fallout, probably), and things should then escalate by a large step in every ensuing scene for three hours.
It succeeds. Keanu Reeves, now 58, takes hit after hit. He is stabbed. He is shot. He is thrown off a mezzanine. He falls down exactly 220 stairs, then battles his way to their summit. Watching an older guy take great punishment that doesn’t fell him is the action film calling card of our age.
Something about the character’s apparent weakness and exhaustion encourages the filmmakers to go all-in on supernatural fighting abilities and violence, as if they really have to keep convincing us (and themselves) of the hero's powers. Stallone’s iconic John Rambo, wielding a 10-inch knife, an M60 machine gun, and an RPG-7, killed exactly one person in 1982’s First Blood. John Wick kills 140 people in John Wick 4.
So, Sisu. We’re in 1944 in Finnish Lapland. Our hero, Aatami Korpi, has lost his family, and his country has been invaded from both sides by Russians and Germans for the past five years. After years of fighting as a “one-man death squad,” the most feared soldier in Finland’s fearsome army, he has removed himself to the barren wilderness to dig the land and pan the river for gold, alone except for a chipper and well-trained dog. (The parallels to John Wick appear to be intentional.)
In a long and beautiful wordless opening sequence that recalls the Tom Waits-starring vignette from the Coen brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, you watch him live a day as a prospector in nature. You wouldn’t know he was in Europe in World War II until you see him watch the fighter planes pass low overhead. One day, as the retreating Nazis are burning and looting and killing their way home, he finds a huge pocket of gold.
He sets off to deposit the gold at the nearest bank, over 500 war-torn miles away, but he and his horse and his dog happen past some Nazis. When they stop him, taking shots at his dog and trying to kill him for his treasure, the taciturn Finn has to put a knife through one of their skulls. And we’re off. End bucolic nature shots, enter gunslinger. Aatami is going to kill those Nazis.
Our hero survives more than John Wick's mere gunshots and three-story falls. He survives a walk through a minefield and a plane crash. He survives being hanged, set on fire, and being forced underwater for 10 minutes (he slits the throats of pursuing Nazis and inhales the air from their lungs). No wonder the Soviets he used to hunt nicknamed him “the immortal.” But according to one of the girls the Nazis keep as sex slaves, “He’s not immortal. He just refuses to die.” That refusal is “sisu,” the impossible-to-translate Finnish national virtue that means something like stoic determination.
Nazis, sex slaves, extreme gore: Does this all make this movie sound dark? It is not. It’s a feel-good romp. Because it’s so well done and because it’s committed against Nazis, the viscerally believable violence is somehow also Bugs Bunny-like fun. When our hero takes a hit, you wince, yet when a mine flies through the air and explodes a Nazi minion into a red mist, you laugh.
If subterranean messages about what makes for a real man in pop culture have fled to the action genre, so too have jokes. As of this writing, while rom-coms stream regularly and there are great jokes delivered in sci-fi and fantasy releases — think Guardians of the Galaxy — no comedy film as such is even out in theaters in wide release, or will be for some time. The next straightforward comedy on the calendar (No Hard Feelings, starring Jennifer Lawrence) will be released in a month and a half. The culture writers of the near future will almost certainly remember us for having not had almost any tentpole comedies, and few comedies of any kind whatsoever. And for, even more weirdly, having not noticed that in real time. What is the Dodgeball or The Hangover or Wedding Crashers of, say, last year, 2022? In the 2020s, if you want to laugh, you’re probably buying a ticket for a movie where people get shot.
Which, again, brings us back to Sisu. A lot of influences go into preparing you to process Sisu, a graphic, gory, foreign film set in a Nazi-occupied Eastern European country, as something at the lighter end of dark comedy. Any Finnish movie (even in English) would have been an unlikely wide U.S. release just a few years ago, but in the age of Squid Game and Money Heist, American audiences know foreign films do not equal boring arthouse fare. Cathartic rewriting of World War II history with spaghetti Western themes? That’s Inglourious Basterds, with a dash of True Grit. A retired trained killer who gets back in the game when a gang harms his pet? John Wick, yes, but the trope runs deeper. Tony Jaa, heir to Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan as the best martial arts action star of his generation, starred in 2005’s The Protector, about a man who takes on a criminal syndicate who stole the elephant he is sworn to watch over. By the climax, when a panting Jaa finds his elephant killed for its bones, he has broken a thousand limbs. Maybe the trained killer with a beloved animal is an archetypal reminder to the modern audience that a violent man and a caring man aren’t always two different people, at least if he uses it to protect the innocent.
The end of Sisu somehow evokes Philip Roth’s immortal 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint about the nature of American male Jewish neuroticism. The titular Portnoy finally finishes retelling the entire story of his humiliating life for several hundred pages, and the gag is that this was all the set up to a joke in which the punchline is the book’s last line: Spielvogel, Portnoy’s therapist, has been listening to him unload. He replies, "Now vee may perhaps to begin." In Sisu, Aatami, quite unlike Portnoy, doesn’t talk for the entire duration. But after two hours of some of the best action sequences you’ve ever seen (I saw this movie with my mother, and 40 minutes in, she had to leave when her Apple watch told her she had a dangerously high heart rate), it ends on a similarly existential punchline.
All of these cultural threads twist together into the bloody rope that is Sisu, which, though it is not a piece of great or maybe even good art, is a fantastic action movie. Gratuitously violent, fundamentally anti-violence, and thrillingly choreographed, I think it may be remembered as the quintessential 2020s movie. It’s so good, it makes me think action movies are what 2020s movies will be known for. We just may be living in a golden age.
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Nicholas Clairmont is the Life and Arts editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
US air defense system sent to Ukraine is not your father’s anti-missile missile US air defense system sent to Ukraine is not your father’s anti-missile missile Jamie McIntyre There was a rush of excitement on the first Saturday in May when Ukraine reported that, for the first time, it was able to shoot down one of Russia’s advanced hypersonic missiles with the recently acquired, U.S.-made Patriot air defense system.
Ukraine’s air force commander said the Russian Kh-47 Kinzhal missile was launched from a MiG-31 fighter bomber over Russian airspace and intercepted with a Patriot missile before it reached its target in the capital Kyiv.
HOW THE TREASURY IS SCRAMBLING TO STOP DEFAULT — OR MITIGATE ITS FALLOUT
Russia claimed its first use of the hypersonic weapon in March, and at the time, the U.S. said Ukraine had no effective defense against the air-launched Kinzhal, which can fly at 10 times the speed of sound.
“Hypersonic missiles are generally very, very difficult to counter, and it wouldn't surprise me that Ukrainian air defenses are limited in their ability to go after hypersonic missiles,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said on CNN.
But after Ukrainian crews were trained in the U.S. and Germany, Patriot systems arrived last month, supplied by the U.S., Netherlands, and Germany.
On Twitter, Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov was ebullient. He pronounced the Patriots “a new powerful tool of Ukrainian air defense” while mocking Vladimir Putin for boasting that “Russian weapons are the best in the world.”
A few days later, the Pentagon validated the kill shot.
“We can confirm that the Ukrainians took down this Russian missile with a Patriot missile defense system,” said Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman.
“My first reaction was elation, ‘This is great,’ followed quickly by, ‘We've seen this movie before,’’’ said Joe Cirincione, a veteran arms control expert.
Cirincione had reason to be wary. He was the lead staffer for a House Government Operations Committee investigation into the inflated claims of the Patriot’s performance during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
After the war, the Army claimed a nearly 100% success rate, saying that of 42 Iraqi Scuds engaged by Patriots, 41 were destroyed, but the subsequent bipartisan investigation found Patriot missiles, at best, hit four Scuds but also may have missed every time.
That was 30 years ago, when the Patriot relied on 1980s technology, including a blast fragmentation warhead that was better suited to downing aircraft than missiles.
The most current model, known as the PAC-3, for “Patriot Advanced Capability,” employs a newer interceptor with a more effective “hit-to-kill” warhead, along with more advanced radars and updated command and control systems.
But two launchers given to Ukraine by the Netherlands are the older PAC-2 versions of the Patriot system that still use the less-lethal fragmentation warhead, and the Pentagon won’t say which version was credited with shooting down the Russian missile.
All of this is reason for caution, argued Cirincione.
“This is a much-improved Patriot from what we deployed in the Gulf War, or even in the 2003 Iraq War," he told the Washington Examiner. "It should be able to do this, but this is a very hard mission, and we don't want to overpromise. The worst thing is to have the public or troops believe they have more protection than we can actually offer.”
One problem uncovered by the 1992 investigation was that the system itself indicates whether the intercept resulted in a hit or a miss, based on radar tracking and computer algorithms.
“In the Gulf War, they would fire the missile. There would be an explosion in the sky. The Patriot would send a probable kill indicator because it [has] exploded at the point in space where [it] was designed to explode. There would be no reports of damage on the ground, and they would call it a hit,” Cirincione explained.
But the Scuds, which were highly inaccurate to begin with, were rarely, if ever, destroyed. They simply went down in remote parts of the desert or fell into the sea.
“We just need more data, including ground damage assessments,” Cirincione said. “We have to look for proof of intercept beyond the positive indicators the system generates and the explosion in the sky. We know that that's not enough to prove an intercept.”
And then there’s the debate over whether the Russian Kinzhal missile, which is a modified short-range Iskander ground-launched ballistic missile, is a truly revolutionary weapon.
“There’s nothing special or particularly exciting about this system,” tweeted Michael Kofman, director of the Russia Studies Program at the Center for Naval Analysis. “Iskander-M is a long-standing system. Hundreds have been fired. Kinzhal is an air-launched variant of this system. It uses the aircraft for added range and initial velocity. Otherwise it seems unremarkable. It is 'hypersonic' in the same way as many other ballistic missiles.”
In 2018, when Putin first boasted that Russian engineers were developing a new generation of missiles “absolutely invulnerable to any air or missile defense system,” Putin was referring to an intercontinental ballistic missile dubbed “Avangard,” which he claimed would travel 20 times the speed of sound and launch a highly maneuverable hypersonic, potentially nuclear, warhead.
“That’s not what this is,” Cirincione said. “It is not a hypervelocity maneuvering cruise missile, which is considered an extremely difficult target to hit. It can make some minor twists and turns as it hones in on the target, but nothing like the kind of maneuverability that a true hypervelocity cruise missile would have. All ballistic missiles travel faster than Mach 5 as they close in on their target.”
Still, the Pentagon insists the Patriot is one of the world’s most advanced air defense systems with a proven capability against cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and aircraft.
At a May 23 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Vice Adm. Jon Hill, director of the Missile Defense Agency, testified the Patriot system has a “natural” capability against hypersonic weapons.
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“It's a cruise missile killer, and if you have a fast-maneuvering cruise missile, it can bite off part of that threat,” said Hill, who, under questioning, also revealed a single Patriot missile is a very expensive silver bullet, costing roughly $4 million a shot.
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.
Bob Odenkirk plays it down the middle in the TV series Lucky Hank Bob Odenkirk plays it down the middle in the TV series Lucky Hank Daniel Ross Goodman You can’t get any more “mittelmaßig,” or middling, as Thomas Mann would have described him, than Hank, the protagonist of the new show Lucky Hank. “Hank” is the middle nickname of William Henry Devereaux, Jr., a middle-aged English professor at the midpoint of his career in a middling college in middle-of-nowhere Pennsylvania. As a teacher, he is tired and apathetic, doing only the minimum to keep his classes humming along. As a scholar, he is unremarkable, having published little of note. As a writer, he was once promising but has not written a single thing since his first novel came out years ago. As an adviser, he can barely be made to follow through on the letter of recommendation he’d promised to write for one of his students. And as a father, he appears to do just as much as he needs to skate by as well. And as a son, let’s just say Dr. “please-don’t-call-me-‘junior’” Devereaux has got some major daddy issues.
If you presented this character description to the public and asked if it would be interested in watching a movie or TV series about such a person, the vast majority of people (including myself) would politely shake their heads and wonder how and why such a series could even get made. But if you were to tell them that this character is being played by the Emmy-winning Better Call Saul star Bob Odenkirk and the show is aired on AMC? “Well, why didn’t you say so! Where can I watch it?!” And they’d be right. Odenkirk’s charisma makes the difference between a predictable, cliche-ridden show we’d lose interest in and one that leaves us Googling “Lucky Hank season 2 release when.”
KERI RUSSELL SAVES THE DIPLOMAT FROM ITSELF
Lucky Hank is set at the fictional Railton College, the English department of which is populated by all the sorts of stereotypical people you might expect at a small liberal arts school in the 21st century. Vainglorious teachers believe their monographs of feminist critiques on early 17th-century English literature are the best thing since 90-second microwavable bags of quinoa. Supercilious Gen-Z students demand an apology if a professor says they need to work rather than just be praised. Grad students tend bar after finishing their dissertations and pine for that first full-time job. The infighting faculty is only made more bitter because budget cuts are coming for the non-STEM departments, threatening layoffs in the English department.
It may seem like it’d be hard for you, as a viewer, to relate to anyone. But Odenkirk is able to play Hank as an ornery outsider to his own life, and you want to be there with him. The key to what makes Hank so “lucky,” as well as so easy to root for, is his dry humor. It starts when a particularly self-serious student irritates Hank enough to get him to let loose some (as the kids would say) real talk: Railton is nothing more than a “middling college,” and the unexceptional student is nothing more than a part of what has allowed the school to become “mediocrity’s capital.” Anyone even remotely familiar with universities in the 21st century knows what happens next: A student demands a professor’s apology. The school newspaper runs an article about the incident. The dean confronts the professor using language built as a sort of trap. The professor faces disciplinary action. Finally, the professor is de-chaired.
Which, you might ask, is what, exactly? “’De-chaired.’ I think it’s an outpatient procedure these days,” Hank quips. But his de-chairing turns out only to be a temporary condition. The series, based on the novel Straight Man by Richard Russo, at this point could have easily gone the way of campus novels such as J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace or Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, chronicling the misadventures of a small liberal arts college professor whose life spirals out after a generational culture clash with students. But Russo and a talented writing team give us, instead, a fun, erudite, occasionally poignant series firmly grounded in the contemporary college campus that satirizes campus life through its lovably cantankerous main character. Lucky for Hank — even luckier for us.
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Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and the author, most recently, of Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema.
A burning dissent from overbearing environmental policy in the kitchen A burning dissent from overbearing environmental policy in the kitchen Eric Felten
The next thing you know, they’ll be banning the Blue Blazer. No, not the dark navy sport coat, but the cocktail for which the legendary 19th-century bartender, Jerry Thomas, was rightly famous. Thomas would take two silver-plated mugs, and into one of them, he would put two ounces of scotch and two ounces of boiling water. Ignite the liquid with a match and then pour the flaming contents from one mug to another and back again half a dozen times. “If well done," Thomas wrote in his 1862 bartender’s guide, “this will have the appearance of a continued stream of liquid fire.” The burnt whiskey is poured into a tumbler with some sugar.
OK, no one is coming to regulate the Blue Blazer, but that’s only because no one is foolhardy enough to try the trick without asbestos gloves. But just about every other cuisine that depends on fire — let’s call them the combustible comestibles — is the target of a nanny state gone mad. Yes, the government is coming for our stoves, and any other appliance that runs on natural gas.
SENATE LEADERS PLAY DEBT CEILING BLAME GAME WHILE AIDES NEGOTIATE BEHIND THE SCENES
The issue flared up early this year when it was discovered that the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission had declared that “any option is on the table” in protecting the poor dears of our feeble citizenry from the dangers of gas ranges. “Products that can’t be made safe can be banned.”
Since it was a PR flame-out, the press were quick to suppress the gas leak. “But,” sputtered the capital’s sophisticates, “wait!” That’s just a MAGA fever dream. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nobody’s coming for your stove, you yokels.
“No, Biden Is Not Trying to Ban Gas Stoves,” said the New York Times, patting everyone on the head. Politico offered to explain “What the right’s gas stove freakout was really about.” Fact-checkers from the Associated Press were at the ready to extinguish the heated rhetoric. “CLAIM: The Biden administration is planning a ban on gas stoves nationwide.” “THE FACTS: The White House says President Joe Biden would not support a ban, and the commission, an independent agency, says no such ban is in the works.” Well, if the White House says so…
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For a month or two, the range wars have been quiet, as if to show there never had been any threat to the gas burners of America. But this week, politicians in Washington, D.C., were at it again. The D.C. Council heard testimony last Tuesday from a parade of left-wing activists hot to trot for Bill 25-0119, the Healthy Homes and Residential Electrification Amendment Act of 2023. The bill calls for subsidized housing to go electric, and if you want to install “appliances or other systems that combust fossil fuels on site,” (in other words, that burn natural gas) you will have to pay for the privilege in the form of increased permit fees.
I would protest by firing up a batch of Blue Blazer, but I might just set myself on fire. Bent out of shape as I may be by relentless busy-bodyism, self-immolation isn’t my preferred protest. But how about a less dangerous flaming drink? Trader Vic used to make a drink called the Black Stripe with rum, honey, cinnamon, and cloves, topped with flammable overproof rum that was served on fire. Enjoy it while you can.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
DeSantis set for Nevada return to headline Basque fry GOP event DeSantis set for Nevada return to headline Basque fry GOP event David Mark
Las Vegas is a popular destination for candidates of both parties to collect campaign cash from high-rolling political contributors. But Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), while headed to Nevada for a June 17 political event, will be far from the Vegas Strip.
DeSantis will headline the Eighth Annual Basque Fry in Gardnerville, Nevada, in the state’s sparsely populated northern tier. The event, sponsored by Morning in Nevada PAC, is taking place at the Corley Ranch and will last from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
DESANTIS TO HEADLINE CONSERVATIVE NEVADA PAC'S ANNUAL BASQUE FRY AMID 2024 SPECULATION
Morning in Nevada PAC is closely tied to DeSantis ally and former Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt, who once served as its president. Laxalt, the grandson of Paul Laxalt, a revered late governor and senator from Nevada, lost races for governor in 2018 and Senate in 2022.
DeSantis is widely considered the most potent Republican primary rival to former President Donald Trump. DeSantis, in the run-up to his likely jump into the 2024 presidential waters, has traveled somewhat to early-voting states such as Iowa and New Hampshire, along with Wisconsin and a few other stops.
DeSantis left Florida even less in 2022, though it was clear he would easily win a second term as governor (his winning margin ended up being 19 points.) DeSantis made only a few out-of-state campaign appearances as he was increasingly mentioned as a 2024 presidential candidate. That included an event for Laxalt’s ill-fated Senate bid. The two have known each other since they were Navy judge advocate generals and served in Iraq.
Northern Nevada has long been home to a significant number of residents of Basque lineage. They’re descendants of a people who live in Spain and France in areas bordering the Bay of Biscay and encompassing the western foothills of the Pyrenees Mountains. Basques first emigrated to Nevada for gold in the 19th century and then again later to put their shepherding skills to use in northern Nevada’s rugged mountainous terrain.
The 2024 Nevada Republican presidential caucuses will be held on Feb. 24, 2024. DeSantis’s name recognition in Nevada at this point still pales in comparison to Trump’s, president from 2017-21, and before that, a business mogul whose name has long adorned high-rise hotels in and around Las Vegas.
Haley a comet of activity in early-voting states
Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations for most of the Trump administration’s first two years, is headed back to the traditional early-voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire.
Haley has kept an active campaign schedule since declaring her presidential bid in February and now facing declared GOP primary rivals Trump, former Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R-AR), and “anti-woke” entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. They’re vying to challenge President Joe Biden in November 2024, as the incumbent faces only nuisance Democratic primary challenges, from writer and spiritualist Marianne Williamson and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., scion of the nation’s most famous modern political dynasty and an anti-vaccine activist many consider a conspiracy theorist.
Haley is heading back to Iowa for a series of town halls. It will be her fourth swing through the state as a presidential candidate. Haley events will be held May 17 in Ankeny, May 18 in Cedar Falls and Dubuque, and May 19 in Davenport.
Haley will make her fourth trip to New Hampshire. Planned events include a May 23 Rockingham County Republican Committee Freedom Founders Dinner, at Atkinson Resort, within walking distance of the Massachusetts line.
Then, it’s on to a staple of campaigning in the New Hampshire primary, the Politics and Eggs event at St. Anselm College, on May 24, followed that day with a campaign barbecue hosted by former Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA), who was in the diplomatic corps at the same time as Haley during his Trump-era stint as U.S. ambassador to New Zealand.
Asa Hutchinson’s Iowa blitz
Iowa Republicans, after a somewhat slow start to Hawkeye State campaign activity, are seeing a lot more of the 2024 aspirants. That includes several busy campaign days for Hutchinson, governor of Arkansas from 2015-2023, who held a pair of high-ranking roles in former President George W. Bush’s administration and, before that, was a House member for four-plus years.
Hutchinson is, so far, the most explicitly anti-Trump Republican in the race. While largely focusing on his conservative record as Arkansas governor, Hutchinson has said Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, at the very least helping to inspire the violence, is disqualifying for another White House term.
Hutchinson will be in Waterloo, Iowa, on May 17, for a 5:30-7 p.m. “Ask Asa Meet and Greet” with the Black Hawk County GOP. On May 18, it’s on to Quad Cities for another meet-and-greet, from 9-10:30 a.m., in Davenport. Followed that day by “Pints and Politics with Asa Hutchinson,” from 6-7:30 p.m., in Davenport. On May 19, Hutchinson is slated for a 6-7:30 p.m. meet-and-greet in Clinton, Iowa, with the Iowa County GOP.
The Clinton County event has a certain historical resonance for Hutchinson’s presidential bid. Hutchinson was a House “manager” (prosecutor) in the 1999 Senate impeachment trial of Democratic President Bill Clinton. And the careers of the twin Arkansans from opposing parties had intertwined a decade-and-a-half earlier.
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In 1984, Hutchinson, amid his five-year run as U.S. attorney for western Arkansas, prosecuted then-Gov. Bill Clinton’s half-brother, Roger Clinton, on federal drug charges. Roger Clinton was sentenced to two years in prison and, under a plea bargain, agreed to testify in other cocaine-related cases.
Global health says coronavirus pandemic is over amid virus origin questions Global health says coronavirus pandemic is over amid virus origin questions Jessica Dobrinsky Harris
After three long years, the COVID-19 global health emergency is over.
So says the World Health Organization, which made that declaration on May 5. WHO is the sole agency tasked with orchestrating global responses to health threats. And WHO says that while the coronavirus pandemic is not entirely over, with recent spikes in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, the situation is no longer a global emergency.
WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION DOWNGRADES COVID-19 FROM GLOBAL EMERGENCY
That marks a major milestone since the emergence of the virus. The announcement comes more than three years after the pandemic began in early 2020, resulting in 1,124,063 U.S. deaths from confirmed cases. In 2022, COVID-19 was the fourth leading cause of death, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Globally, the pandemic triggered several social and economic disruptions, including widespread supply and food shortages.
But the rapid fall in cases led WHO to call an end to the pandemic. After having declared the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern on Jan. 30, 2020, the WHO began referring to it as a pandemic on March 11, 2020.
"This trend has allowed most countries to return to life as we knew it before COVID-19. It’s with great hope that I declare COVID-19 over as a global health emergency,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
In a press conference, Tedros said the pandemic has been on a consistent downward trend for over a year. It's a change in tone from the height of the pandemic when the director-general fiercely fought countries who hoarded COVID-19 vaccines, warning of “catastrophic moral failure.”
“That does not mean COVID-19 is over as a global health threat,” he added, “This virus is here to stay. It's still killing, and it's still changing.”
When the United Nations first declared COVID-19 an international crisis in January 2020, there were no major outbreaks outside of China. However, after three years, the virus has caused an estimated 764 million cases globally and more than 6 million deaths globally. Millions of others report they still suffer from the long-term effects of the virus.
Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of WHO’s Health Emergencies Program, said, “There’s still a public health threat out there, and we all see that every day in terms of the evolution of this virus, in terms of its global presence, its continued evolution and continued vulnerabilities in our communities, both societal vulnerabilities, age vulnerabilities, protection vulnerabilities, and many other things. So, we fully expect that this virus will continue to transmit.”
And WHO’s COVID-19 technical lead, Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, warned COVID-19 could still be a threat.
“While we’re not in crisis mode, we can’t let our guard down,” Van Kerkhove said. The disease is “here to stay.”
According to WHO, over 13 billion doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been administered around the globe.
WHO’s decision to conclude the emergency status comes days before the U.S. public health emergency declaration expires on May 11. The U.S. public health emergency’s expiration would mark the end of a significant number of measures that bolstered pandemic response, including some vaccine mandates and free testing.
WHO has been controversial in some quarters since the pandemic began. Many have considered the organization a contributor to its longevity and severity. It got involved in the politically thorny issue of the virus's origins, including potentially a Chinese lab.
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After a visit to China in 2021, WHO released a report that concluded COVID-19 likely came from animals but shortly backtracked, stating “key pieces of data” were still missing and, therefore, conceded the possibility of its origination from a lab leak.
And in January 2020, WHO praised China for its speedy and transparent responses. Meanwhile, private meetings obtained by the Associated Press showed top officials were frustrated with China’s lack of cooperation on the issue.
Big Tech couldn’t target children online with impunity, under bipartisan Senate bill Big Tech couldn’t target children online with impunity, under bipartisan Senate bill Samantha-Jo Roth
In a bitterly divided Congress, expectations are low for enacting bipartisan legislation. But one matter, based on a bipartisan consensus that social media can be harmful to children's mental health, has a shot of its legislation becoming law.
Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) see an opening to make the tech industry factor minors' mental health and well-being into its business models rather than exploiting their vulnerabilities. It's an effort in earnest on Capitol Hill after Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen shed light in 2021 on internal Facebook studies about Instagram, the photo-sharing site it owns.
CHILDREN'S ONLINE SAFETY BILL REINTRODUCED WITH CHANGES MEANT TO WIN PASSAGE
Per Haugen, Facebook research showed nearly one-third of teenage girls said that “when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse.” And “14% of boys in the U.S. said Instagram made them feel worse about themselves.” Another study found 6% of teenagers who had suicidal thoughts connected them to Instagram use.
President Joe Biden, in his State of the Union address, highlighted the need to protect children online. It was the second time he's called on Congress to act. It's time, Biden said, “to pass bipartisan legislation to stop Big Tech from collecting personal data on kids and teenagers online.”
Blackburn and Blumenthal, an unlikely bipartisan duo, recently introduced a revamped version of their Kids Online Safety Act. The legislation would require social media platforms to give parents and children more tools and safeguards to prevent and mitigate content promoting things such as suicide, self-harm, sexual exploitation, or eating disorders.
The bill would, among other things, require social media companies to provide options to protect the information of minors, opt out of algorithms giving recommendations, and shut off features that can be addictive. It would also require the social media giants to participate in annual independent audits, examining their risks to minors and requiring them to set the strongest privacy settings on default for children.
The legislation would also mandate social media companies implement controls for users, such as options for limiting screen time, restricting addictive features, and limiting access to user profiles. The controls would be set by default to the strictest settings for users younger than 17.
“Our bill provides specific tools to stop Big Tech companies from driving toxic content at kids and to hold them accountable for putting profits over safety,” Blumenthal said in a statement provided to the Washington Examiner. “Record levels of hopelessness and despair, a national teen health crisis, have been fueled by black box algorithms featuring eating disorders, bullying, suicidal thoughts, and more.”
Last Congress, the bill passed unanimously out of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. It was not included in the massive year-end spending bill and did not receive a floor vote. Blackburn believes there’s a renewed push to get this legislation over the finish line.
“This is the year that we will see some success with this,” Blackburn said confidently during an interview with the Washington Examiner in her Capitol Hill office. “These parents that we have worked with and teens that we have worked with, they had hoped that we could get this passed by the time school was out. Now, they’re saying before we go back to school in the fall, let’s have this signed into law by the president so that parents can have some recourse.”
The senators made a few changes to the bill — the text limits the duty of care requirement for social media companies to a list of specific harms to mental health. There are also tightened rules around platforms’ data collection. In addition, there are added protections for services, such as the national suicide hotline, LGBT youth centers, and substance abuse groups, to ensure they aren’t hurt by the bill’s guidelines.
“What we have done is to make certain it is narrowly tailored, that the enforcement mechanism is with the FTC and with the states’ attorneys general. We made certain that it is focused on the process and the work of these platforms, not on content,” Blackburn said. “This has moved us to the point that we filed this with one-third of the U.S. Senate as original co-sponsors.”
Civil liberties and privacy concerns
The new bill has earned the support of advocacy groups such as the American Psychological Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, Eating Disorders Coalition, Fairplay, Mental Health America, and more. But some tech trade associations and digital rights groups expressed concerns that the changes don’t go far enough and that the bill could undermine free speech and hurt personal privacy.
It's part of a broader debate about protecting minors from harmful material on the internet that's been roiling since the Communications Decency Act was enacted in 1996. That law attempted to prevent minors from gaining access to sexually explicit materials on the internet, and many of its provisions were struck down in court.
When it comes to the social media bill sponsored by Blackburn and Blumenthal, “the modifications are not that big in my opinion,” said Joe Mullin, a policy analyst with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Mullin and several other groups believe the bill would allow broad content filtering in an effort to limit the access of minors to specific online content. The decisions would be left up to the Federal Trade Commission and 50 individual state attorneys general, which could make political points about what kind of information they deem appropriate for minors.
“They are leaving the content regulation up to attorneys general in 50 states. The thing about this stuff is that it’s just extremely subjective,” Mullin said, emphasizing the bill is ambiguous enough that an attorney general in a conservative state could censor content regarding abortion. Or an attorney general in a liberal state could block content regarding gun ownership, arguing that under the Kids Online Safety Act, it has harmful effects on young people.
“In one of the 50 states, an attorney general would say, 'You’re hurting kids. You’re violating KOSA, and I’m going to shut you down.' I think the First Amendment threats are that clear,” he added.
Blackburn disputed these viewpoints and said the bill outlines very specific harms to avoid online surveillance or censorship.
“There’s no way it allows the government to dictate the online experience. Because it requires the social media platform to make available to parents and kids the toolbox to, as I term it, ‘protect their virtual you,’ which is their presence online, to tailor the experience on a Snapchat or an Instagram so that it fits for that family and for that child.”
Blumenthal defended the legislation during a press conference and said legal obligations on tech companies had been “very purposefully narrowed” to target certain harms.
“I think we’ve met that kind of suggestion very directly and effectively,” said Blumenthal, a former Connecticut attorney general and U.S. attorney. “Obviously, our door remains open. We’re willing to hear and talk to other kinds of suggestions that are made.”
The legislation has also been criticized by several groups that represent or take funding from social media companies. However, the opposition from the social media giants doesn’t discourage Blackburn.
“We’ve had pushback from the lobbyists since day one since we were working on this. They’ve never been for it because kids are their product,” she said.
“So we had expected that they would fight it. What they did not expect is that this bill would be reintroduced with 33 co-sponsors, original co-sponsors," Blackburn said. "They know that this is moving. They know that it’s going to get a floor vote. They know that we’ll be able to pass this bill.”
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Blackburn, elected to the Senate from Tennessee in 2018 after 16 years in the House, believes this session, Senate Republican leadership can be convinced of the bill's merits and back it. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) had previously voiced some concerns about a prior version.
“We have talked quite a bit with Senate leadership, and we are continuing to work with him," Blackburn said.
And with Democrats holding a 51-49 Senate edge, "Sen. Blumenthal is working with Democratic leadership to be certain that we’re all moving forward,” Blackburn added.
The sordid history of ‘earned media’ advertising The sordid history of ‘earned media’ advertising Rob Long When Hal Roach Studios released the classic comedy Safety Last! in 1923, it knew it needed a big publicity splash to launch the picture. So it hired a famous stunt climber, Harry F. Young, known in show business as the “Human Fly,” to climb up the side of the Martinique Hotel in Manhattan and cause a commotion.
If you’re an old movie buff, you might remember why. Safety Last! is one of Harold Lloyd’s classic silent movie comedies. The most well-known sequence of the movie, and one of the most famous shots in movie history, has the actor dangling from the spire of a downtown Los Angeles skyscraper, clinging for life to the minute hand of the tower’s clock. It’s a hilarious, scary-funny moment that still works 100 years later.
LEVEL THE PLAYING FIELD FOR INDEPENDENT MEDIA
What Lloyd and his studio were aiming for when they hired the Human Fly was something that people in show business have always prized: free publicity. A guy climbing up the side of a tall building, in a direct imitation of the movie’s signature moment, would get people talking, and it would generate more buzz than a million dollars of paid advertising. It’s called “earned media” — meaning, I guess, that the attention is earned rather than bought and paid for.
No one earned it more than the Human Fly, who lost his grip about 10 stories up and plunged to his death, creating exactly the kind of buzzy spectacle that movie studio marketing departments dream of. Even better than a successful climb was one that ended in a tragic splat! on the pavement, reinforcing the idea that Lloyd’s stunt in the movie was seriously risky. (Which it wasn’t. The camera was angled in such a way that viewers didn’t see the wide ledge just beneath the dangling star.)
I can only imagine the scene: A young studio executive bursts into the chief’s office, beaming and shouting for joy. “Great news, boss! The guy we hired to shimmy up the building did a triple gainer down to the sidewalk in front of the crowd and the newspaper boys and everyone!” The boss whoops merrily and passes out cigars, predicting that Safety Last! will be one of that year’s biggest pictures.
And then some killjoy says something dreary and negative like, Hey, fellas, a man died; have some respect. They all pause for a moment and mutter something along the lines of yes, yes, terrible tragedy, mysteries of life, God’s unfathomable plan, etc., etc. And everyone quickly gets back to counting the money.
That’s how it still goes. The combined net worth of the Kardashian family enterprise is estimated at nearly $2.8 billion, but it’s worth remembering that the USS Kardashian was launched with a bit of notorious earned media of its own. In 2007, under the murkiest of circumstances, a homemade sex tape was “leaked” to an internet pornographer, depicting Kim Kardashian (current net worth: $1.8 billion) and her then-boyfriend engaged in intimate adult activities. It has long been rumored that the entire stunt was orchestrated by Kim’s mother, Kris Kardashian (current net worth: $200 million), as a way to launch Kim and her siblings (current net worth of Khloe Kardashian: $100 million; current net worth of Kylie Jenner: $800 million). Whether or not that was the strategy, it all adds up to a pretty solid return for someone who is not, to my knowledge, a certified financial planner.
To put it another way, studio boss Kris Jenner knew that if she hired her daughter to climb up the side of her boyfriend, it would generate more buzz than a million dollars of paid advertising. And it was a lot easier than having any actual talent. But now I feel like that killjoy in the movie studio president’s office, reminding everyone that “earned media” only feels free.
People will tell you there’s no such thing as bad publicity, and if you’re a Kardashian or Harold Lloyd or pretty much anyone currently making noise in that other show business we call politics, that may be true. But I’m pretty sure that if you or I tried to get a little earned media of our own, we’d end up like the Human Fly. Famous for a few thrilling seconds, and then splat!
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Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and he is the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
If you can perform surgery on fetuses, then maybe they have value after all If you can perform surgery on fetuses, then maybe they have value after all Madeline Fry Schultz “A procedure with two patients,” read the subheading of a CNN article about a groundbreaking surgery that took place in March. “For this surgery,” the report noted, “there were two patients: Kenyatta and her baby.”
If you guessed that the procedure was a surgery performed on a preborn baby, you’d be right — and you’d be forgiven for wondering how CNN could be so accidentally pro-life.
HOW CYBORG FEMINISM CONFUSES TECHNOLOGY WITH PROGRESS
Doctors in Boston recently performed a successful brain surgery on a 34-week-old fetus to treat a rare condition that often results in brain injuries or heart failure immediately after birth. Waiting to treat until after the baby was born could’ve risked her life.
So, guided by an ultrasound, doctors threaded tiny metal coils through a catheter into the fetus's brain, relieving a dangerous buildup of blood. Before the surgery, the unborn baby received an injection to keep her from moving and to alleviate pain.
Two days afterward, Denver Coleman, a healthy baby girl, was born.
“I heard her cry for the first time and that just, I — I can’t even put into words how I felt at that moment,” her mother, Kenyatta Coleman, said. “It was just, you know, the most beautiful moment being able to hold her, gaze up on her and then hear her cry.”
This isn't the first time doctors have performed surgery on a fetus, but the American Heart Association called it the “first in-utero brain surgery.” Now seven weeks old, Denver Coleman is a marvel of medical technology and a testament to the value of the unborn.
"She's shown us from the very beginning that she was a fighter. She’s demonstrated … 'Hey, I wanna be here,'" Kenyatta Coleman said.
Even CNN, no bastion of pro-life thought, was eager to characterize baby Denver as a person. Notable as well is that the doctors, realizing fetuses’ capacity for pain, provided her with pain relief during the surgery.
Our society may not have much respect for the unborn, but developing medical technology makes their humanity that much clearer. If you can perform life-saving brain surgery on fetuses, then maybe they have value after all.
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Heather Armstrong, 1975-2023 Heather Armstrong, 1975-2023 Emily Zanotti Heather Armstrong, author and one of the pioneers of lifestyle blogging, and a woman who came to define the “mommy blogger” era of online content, died last week at the age of 47 after decades of laying bare her own experiences with parenting and mental illness, often in full view of millions of readers. Armstrong, known to her internet community as “Dooce,” a nickname coined after she made a typing error trying to write “Dude” to coworkers, was one of the first — and for years, one of the most prolific, profane, and popular — “mommy bloggers,” who, despite the derisive moniker, set the stage for the popularity of blogging and, later, lifestyle content, Instagram influencers, and the modern era of “living online,” sharing all of life’s wonderful, and often terrible, moments. DEFLORIDA BLUEPRINT: HOW DESANTIS HAS PURSUED A TEDDY ROOSEVELT CONSERVATIONIST IMAGE She also struggled publicly with mental illness and substance abuse, returning to her blog in 2016 after a hiatus to document her often extreme treatment for what she called a “resistant” form of depression that took root after the birth of her first child and worsened, she said, because of the torrent of hate Armstrong received from online haters. Her third and most recent book, The Valedictorian of Being Dead, chronicled an experimental “brain death” clinical trial on depression at the University of Utah’s Neuropathic Institute, where she was put into a minuteslong coma three times a week in order to simulate brain death. Armstrong was one of the early adopters of the blogging format, and her witty and often salty way of narrating events in her own life proved a successful model at attracting readership, particularly from women who, in the early 2000s, were starting to trickle away from women’s magazines and typical lifestyle content that seemed mired in a previous era. When she started her blog in 2001, Armstrong wrote about her coworkers at a California tech company, and she was fired a year later when her boss discovered her posts. She and her new husband, who later became her business partner, Jon Armstrong, moved back to Salt Lake City, and in 2004, Heather shifted “Dooce’s” focus to her life navigating early motherhood. “I looked at myself as someone who happened to be able to talk about parenthood in a way many women wanted to be able to but were afraid to,” Armstrong famously told Vox in an interview about her return to blogging in 2016. Her timing was nearly perfect, catching an early blogging wave. Armstrong’s unfiltered narrative skyrocketed her to internet fame, attracting legions of fans who followed her day-to-day life raising her infant daughter. She also attracted legions of critics, who chronicled their disdain for Heather (and other mommy bloggers). “Mommy blogging” became a phenomenon, drawing thousands of women to online diaries, and ultimately birthing a movement of first-person online narrative that only expanded with the advent of social media. Blogging became a lucrative profession for many mothers, who inked tens of thousands of dollars in advertising contracts and in-kind promotional deals, ostensibly making “mommy bloggers” the first wave of online influencers. While things such as divorce, child-rearing, work-life balance, and even depression can make life difficult for women, the same hardships made for both excellent content and an emotional bridge to other women in an era in which friendship was growing ever distant, experienced often through smartphone and computer screens. Dooce was at the forefront of this new and refreshing online honesty, and Armstrong became the “queen of mommy blogging” almost overnight. At its peak, Dooce had 8 million readers per month, and Armstrong was making close to $40,000 each month from ad revenue. In 2009, Armstrong wrote a memoir, the first of three books, and made headlining appearances at women’s blogging conferences and on the Oprah Winfrey Show. By the early 2010s, blogging had mostly faded as a medium, with more experienced writers moving on to mainstream outlets, which were finally catching up to the more realistic, personalized content women were consuming on their own. Social media was taking off, and parenting influencers and content creators were supplanting “mommy bloggers.” CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER Traffic waned for Armstrong, and after a backlash from her audience in response to her 2012 divorce, Armstrong quit her daily writing to focus on other pursuits, but after dealing with terrifying, treatment-resistant depression that began when her first daughter was just 6 months old, she returned to the internet, this time as an advocate for mental illness and for overcoming addiction. Ultimately, Armstrong lost that battle. Her partner, Pete Ashdown, confirmed to the Associated Press that Armstrong had taken her own life. She leaves behind two daughters. Emily Zanotti is a writer and editor living in Nashville, Tennessee. California teachers unions strike over social issues while students get left behind California teachers unions strike over social issues while students get left behind Conn Carroll What if I offered you a retroactive 10% pay raise covering this year, a $5,000 signing bonus, and a 22% pay raise starting next year?
Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?
SPACEX VS. THE BIRDS: ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVISTS SUE FAA OVER TEXAS ROCKET LAUNCH
It’s not enough for the Oakland Education Association, the teachers union in Oakland, California, however. In addition to extremely generous financial concessions, the OEA is also demanding “common good” goals be included in the union contract, including measures on climate change, shared governance with the school board, and reparations for black students.
“They’ve been telling us all week they couldn’t negotiate common good, and last night, we broke through,” OEA President Ismael Armendariz said after three days of the teachers' strike. “They told us they could bargain a memorandum of understanding.”
California already has some of the worst public school systems in the country. The no-show rate for students statewide was at a ridiculously high 15% pre-COVID, and it has soared to 30% post-COVID. All that missed schooling has had predictably terrible results on student learning. Over half of students statewide are below grade level in English, and two-thirds of students are below grade level in math. The results are predictably worse for black students, with almost 85% of them failing to meet the state's math standards.
According to the World Population Review, California now leads the country in adult illiteracy.
Considering the abysmal results of students in California’s public education system, it is not surprising that so many parents opt to take their children out of it entirely. Between 2019 and 2021, California public schools lost 175,761 students. If present trends continue, they will lose another 524,000 students by 2031.
Most parents just want their children to be taught the basics: reading, writing, and arithmetic. But that is not the priority of the teachers unions that control California’s government. Instead of being taught how to read and add, California students are taught about “empire-building and its relationship to white supremacy, racism, and other forms of power and oppression,” in line with the state’s ethnic studies curriculum standards.
No wonder so many parents have already pulled their children out of California’s public schools. And as Oakland’s teachers strike drags along in the name of reparations, I’m sure many more will join them.
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Welcome to the sideshow: Rowdy motorcyclists stall San Francisco’s Bay Bridge Welcome to the sideshow: Rowdy motorcyclists stall San Francisco’s Bay Bridge Zachary Faria A “sideshow” is often used to refer derisively to stories or events that distract from something far more important. But what about when you can’t turn around, or even drive away, from that distraction?
These “sideshows” occur when motorcyclists decide to put on a show for fellow commuters who do not have the option to do anything other than watch. The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge was home to a recent one, with around 100 bikers bringing traffic to a halt so they could spin donuts and pop wheelies to a crowd of hundreds of drivers who had no other choice but to sit in their cars and have their time wasted.
DOWNTOWN SAN FRANCISCO'S COLLAPSE REFLECTS THE CITY'S DECAY
The entire display lasted for an eternity in road rage time, which translates to about two minutes in real time. The bikers sped off, well before any police officers could arrive on the scene, and drivers were free to continue on their way. No one was arrested because the police couldn’t get there fast enough to arrest anyone, and drivers were left with a story they could laugh (or fume) over with friends.
Those drivers may have had a better time than the ones who sat through a 15-20 minute sideshow on the Golden Gate Bridge in March. A California Highway Patrol officer was on the scene but couldn’t begin a pursuit because, of course, he was stuck in the freshly created traffic mob.
These sideshows are becoming far too common and should not be tolerated. When criminals feel empowered to break the law at will, lawbreaking will not stay a sideshow for long.
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Review of The Age of Palmer: Pro Golf in the 1960s, Its Greatest Era by Patrick Hand Review of The Age of Palmer: Pro Golf in the 1960s, Its Greatest Era by Patrick Hand Michael Taube The modern game of golf can be traced back to 15th-century Scotland. Since then, the Game of Kings has witnessed strange weather conditions, wildlife invasions during tournaments, a ban by King James II of Scotland in 1457 for serving as distractions to archery practice for the battlefield, and the Masters being turned into a cattle farm during World War II. But the game thrived, and so did the personalities of its greats. Sam Snead, Ben Hogan, Tom Watson, and Bobby Jones all transformed the game with their exceptional play and media-savvy approaches. Modern talents such as Phil Mickelson, Hideki Matsuyama, Sergio Garcia, and Tiger Woods became larger than life, too.
What’s the greatest era of golf? It’s hard to answer, though Patrick Hand’s new The Age of Palmer: Pro Golf in the 1960s, Its Greatest Era tries. It’s an intriguing examination of the legends who dominated this game: Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino, Gary Player, and others. The author, a lawyer by trade, contributes to Global Golf Post and has written for Golf Journal, the Washington Post, LA Weekly, and the Washington City Paper. He has a unique talent for combining extensive golf research, interviews, and storytelling into fascinating, light-hearted pieces.
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In Hand’s view, the sport began to evolve in the 1960s. “Golf became colorized, both on television and in glossy magazines such as Sports Illustrated and Golf Digest,” he wrote, and had a “different, livelier vibe than before.” Most PGA Tour members, with the notable exceptions of Palmer and Nicklaus, “car-pooled to tournaments, shared motel rooms, and ate in cafeterias. They had a middle-class lifestyle, not much different than many of the fans who attended the tournaments.” Golf also experienced significant “cultural change,” with the PGA of America going from being “only open to members of the Caucasian race” in 1960 to having three African American golfers (Lee Elder, Charlie Sifford, and Pete Brown) who became “tour mainstays” by 1969.
Hand readily admits The Age of Palmer isn’t an “encyclopedia of pro golf.” The sport’s growth and development in the 1960s are seen through the players’ eyes and multiple rounds of golf. Palmer, for instance, played a memorable tournament to win his second Masters in 1960. He birdied the 17th and 18th holes to claim a one-stroke victory over Ken Venturi. The crowd was in the palm of his hands with every agonizing twist, turn, and swing. “For almost an hour, Palmer had the national television audience almost all to himself,” Hand writes. “They saw his powerful corkscrew swing and unusual putting stance with his knees touching. They saw him smoking cigarettes between shots, stalking the greens, and placing his hands on his hips as he viewed the next shot."
This was the early rise of “Arnie’s Army,” the loyal fan base who followed their champion through thick and thin. “He was the No. 1 king in the sports world,” Frank Beard said in an interview.
Palmer’s stardom made golf on television and was made by it. Now that the sport was showbiz, it needed drama driven by conflict, and few rivalries in golf have compared to Palmer’s competition with Nicklaus, personally friendly but professionally intense. They were joined at the heights of stardom and athletic performance by the likes of Lee Trevino. The Dallas assistant golf pro and ex-Marine started his PGA career by finishing fifth at the 1966 Panama Open. By ‘68, he battled Bert Yancey at the U.S. Open and saved his opponent from a penalty and possible disqualification when he noticed the coin marker he had asked him to lift hadn’t been replaced. This was a level of sportsmanship that defined the man known as “Mighty Mex.” He would ultimately beat Nicklaus, the defending champion, and win his first major.
“I’m a golfer who never knew who Sam Snead, Ben Hogan, [Gene] Sarazen, [Bobby] Jones were until I went on tour,” Trevino recounted. “I came up in a house with no plumbing, no electricity — we didn’t have televisions, we didn’t have radios, we didn’t have newspapers — and golf wasn’t one of my deals, so I sure wasn’t watching anybody.”
The Age of Palmer contains some other eye-opening stories about what the majors were like back then. Namely, shockingly normal guys playing a shockingly accessible sport in the age of television’s ascendance. Sam Snead admitted he threw the 1960 World Champion Golf made-for-TV event against Mason Rudolph. It was with “the best of intentions” because he realized he had 15 golf clubs in his bag instead of the regulation 14, meaning “he had lost the 11 holes he already had played.” We find one of the best golfers in the world, Gary Player, describing how he traveled to some tournaments in a Greyhound bus. (He also posited some eye-raising remarks after winning the 1961 Lucky International Open. The South African discussed how his diet consisting of “honey, nuts and dried fruit” helped lift up his game, whereas he felt the “trouble with most Americans, they eat too many greasy foods.”)
Palmer, as it happens, won the final two PGA tournaments of the 1960s. He would earn several more tournament victories and dominated the Seniors Tour before ending his career. When he died in 2016, his ashes were scattered over the Latrobe Country Club, and a “rainbow appeared.” It’s a poetic ending to Hand’s enjoyable book and the golfer “who, more than any other player, defined pro golf in the 1960s” and made this great game even greater.
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Michael Taube, a columnist for four publications (Troy Media, Loonie Politics, the National Post, and the Epoch Times), was a speechwriter for former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia by David Graeber reviewed Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia by David Graeber reviewed Michael M. Rosen “The only rules,” Captain Jack Sparrow of the Pirates of the Caribbean series once said, “are these: what a man can do and what a man can’t do.” This tension between stricture and freedom and the codification of social norms characterizes a certain group of real-life pirates, whose motley tale the late anthropologist David Graeber tells in his final book, Pirate Enlightenment.
Graeber focused much of his legendary career on excavating the non-Western roots of some of the most putatively Euro-American political and philosophical concepts, such as democracy and individual rights. In his magisterial, counterintuitive 2021 opus, The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and co-author David Wengrow demonstrate how traditional Western historical understandings of the evolution of agriculture and modern societal structures oversimplify extremely nuanced and complicated developments. Along similar lines, in Pirate Enlightenment, a concise and elegant tract published after his untimely death, Graeber, a self-described anarchist, makes the case that long before European scholars first advanced their vision of liberal democracy, 17th-century Indian Ocean pirates and the Madagascar settlements they influenced produced relatively free and egalitarian civil societies, espousing “a profoundly proletarian version of liberation, necessarily violent and ephemeral.”
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In his final book, Graeber relates “a story about magic, lies, sea battles, purloined princesses, slave revolts, manhunts, make-believe kingdoms and fraudulent ambassadors, spies, jewel thieves, poisoners, devil worship, and sexual obsession that lies at the origins of modern freedom.” While it’s sometimes difficult to untangle fact and fiction, Graeber’s account doesn’t disappoint.
The tale begins in the 17th century as buccaneers plied the waters off the coast of Madagascar. In general, pirate ships, choked with people from a wide variety of cultures and faiths, occupying a range of social stations, constituted “perfect laboratories of democratic experiment.”
Why did the northeastern coast of Madagascar present such a congenial base for piracy? Off the coast of Africa, in the Indian Ocean, it sits at what was then the fulcrum of the spice and silk trades being plied through the Red Sea. Precious metals also traversed the naval lanes commanded by the island. Madagascar lay in an administrative twilight zone between, but not covered by, the jurisdictions of the British Royal African Company and the East India Company. And no powerful African kingdoms could be found within a thousand miles of the island’s shores.
As Westerners, Asians, and Africans made landfall, their interactions with the locals created a unique laboratory for sociopolitical experimentation. In A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates, a book published in 1726 by Captain Charles Johnson (widely considered a pseudonym for Daniel Defoe), the Western world is introduced to Libertalia, an idyllic section of Madagascar where all men (and even most women) were free and equal.
In fact, contemporaneous English records describe the settlement of Ambonavola as “a kind of utopian experiment, an attempt to apply the democratic principles of organization typical of pirate ships to a settled community on land.” Graeber asserts that the local Betsimisaraka Confederation were “in many ways self-conscious experiments in radical democracy” and represented “some of the first stirrings of Enlightenment political thought, exploring ideas and principles that were ultimately to be developed by political philosophers and put in practice by revolutionary regimes a century later.”
What were the interactions like between the seamen and the landlubbers?
Johnson wrote that “the Pyrates interposed, and endeavoured to reconcile all differences” between feuding natives. The Bermudan renegade Nathaniel North “decid[ed] their disputes not seldom, with that Impartiality and strict Regard to distributive Justice.” Indeed, Johnson reckoned that the “inclinations which the Pyrates shewed to peace” and “the Example they set of an amicable Way of Life” placed them in excellent standing among the natives.
A relatively egalitarian ethos permeated these settlements as well. “In any given village,” Graeber reports, “there was a Great Hall where everyone ate their midday meal together, and collective granaries where each family kept their own stock, but also a collective store any family could draw on in case of shortfall.” Communal decisions were rendered by a gathering of leaders deliberating issues of importance.
One particular leader named Ratsimilaho, himself the son of an English pirate and a Malagasy mother, governed in a proto-liberal way. The head of the Betsimisaraka Confederation, Ratsimilaho devolved authority to villages and authorized all citizens to call kabaries to discuss overturning his rulings. “Archaeologists,” Graeber notes, “find no evidence of settlement hierarchies” or that “ritual experts received any systematic recognition or privileges.” These innovations helped secure for Madagascar 30 years’ worth of peace and prosperity and “insulated the Betsimisaraka from the depredations of the slave trade.”
Women, too, enjoyed an uncommon degree of political and sexual empowerment. Oral histories eventually committed to writing reveal that, in addition to participating in kabary, Malagasy women proactively sought husbands — as well as alternatives. One text records that villagers “consider it an understood thing that if a man is not at home, the woman is free to go about to others.” And according to one legend, an unfaithful woman whose cuckolded husband tried to drown her “founded a new village on the bottom of the lake.”
“What we call ‘Enlightenment thought,’” Graeber concludes, “might have come to its full flowering in cities like Paris, Edinburgh, Konigsberg, and Philadelphia, but it was the creation of conversations, arguments, and social experiments that criss-crossed the world.” It’s unclear, of course, just how significantly the piratical experiment in liberal governance influenced any modern political philosophers or, for that matter, any other society. But in uncovering the history of coastal Madagascar, Graeber, in a final contribution to literature, shows just how universal the urge for freedom and equality truly has proven.
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Michael M. Rosen is an attorney and writer in Israel and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
The ‘Blurred Lines’ moral panic, 10 years later The ‘Blurred Lines’ moral panic, 10 years later Washington Examiner In 2013, the song “Blurred Lines” spent almost two months on top of the Billboard Hot 100, earning Robin Thicke, Pharrell Williams, and TI their biggest hit. The song is known for its unrated music video, which featured the three men accompanied by topless models, one of whom is Emily Ratajkowski, whose appearance in the video made her one of the world’s most famous supermodels. For Thicke, who had previously been just a moderately successful songwriter for Usher, Christina Aguilera, and Will Smith, with a performing career highlight of being featured on tracks for Lil Wayne, “Blurred Lines” was his breakout. Ratajkowski was the secret ingredient: “Blurred Lines” accumulated 14.8 million listens right after Billboard started counting streams from YouTube toward its calculations for its charts.
By the end of the 2010s, Billboard listed it as one of the defining songs of the decade. But once it became popular, listeners felt that the song was inflicted on them. A month after its release on March 29, 2013, a blog called Feminist in LA labeled it “Robin Thicke’s rape song.” Eventually, many commentators agreed with that harsh reaction. Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield called it “the worst song of this or any other year,” while journalists described the lyrics as sleazy or misogynistic, interpreted as condoning sexual assault, beginning with its hook, "I know you want it." Then, at the 2013 VMAs, Thicke made everything worse with a surreal and cringeworthy performance of the song, dancing in a pinstripe suit with a scantily clad Miley Cyrus in front of a skeeved-out crowd of thousands in the theater and millions at home. Suddenly, a hit had become a moral abomination, not just a horrible piece of music.
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The scrutiny intensified. A "Law Revue" from the University of New Zealand released a parody called "Defined Lines," reversing the gender roles of the original to reflect the feminist critique. Lily Allen released a song called “Hard Out Here” that parodied the music video by focusing on the mistreatment of women in the pop industry. Thicke critics praised them for flipping the tone of the original track. Then came calls for the song to be removed from public premises. Numerous student associations in Britain banned the track from being played in campus events, with one student at the University of North Carolina objecting to the song being played by a DJ, saying, “In a lot of ways, violent or graphic images that allude to sexual violence are triggers.” A high school coach was fired for playing it during a practice recital. One petition earned more than 75,000 signatures to remove the song from YouTube, while Annie Lennox has called for further regulations of music videos. Not since the heydays of Tipper Gore and the Parents Resource Music Center had a song been held accountable for what it would supposedly do to the morals of younger listeners.
The discourse around the supposedly harmful “Blurred Lines” arrived with the mainstreaming of the phrase “rape culture,” which implied sexual assault was being normalized and excused in broader society because of the regressive cultural attitudes surrounding gender and sexuality. It extended to the song’s popularity, perceived as the straw that broke the camel’s back. For anti-rape advocates, anyone dancing, singing, or defending it becomes part of something called a “systemic” problem. (The meaning of this word is that its user went to college and thinks people should not be socially permitted to disagree with her or him.)
One thing that was mostly lost amid how much fun people were having 10 years ago using this bad song to fight over power is that they were causing the song’s meaning to be grossly distorted. Back then, thinking outside the herd, music critic Maura Johnston pointed out how, actually, “this is just a cheesy pickup line song and everyone was like: 'No, it's about forcing a woman against her will.’” Yet aside from Johnston, the monolithic class of online criticism assessed pop culture not just as a reflection of society but as its driver.
The “Blurred Lines” cultural controversy set the stage for a decade of small-minded fights over whether popular art should refuse to depict the reality from the perspective of the “male gaze.” It was the beginning of a major cultural change, one with upsides and downsides, one that saw the assumption that it's normal and healthy to acknowledge male lust as a huge part of the way the world works fall away to be replaced by a sort of progressive Victorianism under which the theory seems to be that if we never depict or acknowledge undesirable sexual behaviors, we can discourage them.
But, even still, the biggest impact of “Blurred Lines” may not be the culture war it created. The song may have an even more important legal history.
After “Blurred Lines” became a hit, the Marvin Gaye estate sued Thicke and Pharrell for allegedly plagiarizing “Got To Give It Up,” in a case with reverberations for all “sampling” musicians. Now, anyone who has cursorily heard “Blurred Lines” would be certain that there’s a direct artistic connection to “Got To Give It Up.” But that doesn’t prove that the piece was stolen from Gaye. Still, the Gayes’ attorney, Richard S. Busch, claimed “Blurred Lines” deserved to lose because the computer technology they were using made the “plagiarism” of melodies and harmonies much easier. “Blurred Lines” lost in a verdict that shocked songwriters because it made it difficult to know when a copyright was violated.
Some of the people involved with the song and its music video have moved on from the song entirely. In a 2018 profile for GQ, Pharrell expressed remorse for making it. Ratajkowski claimed in 2021 that Thicke had groped her during the music video. (He denies it.) Thicke never again scored a hit as hot as “Blurred Lines.” His follow-up, Paula, an album designed to publicly fix his marriage with Paula Patton, became a critical and commercial flop, selling 24,000 copies in the United States.
With some hindsight, some of the “Blurred Lines” fracas seems almost quaint. Because it artistically owed to a superior song by Marvin Gaye, “Blurred Lines” did not stand on its own musically. But the idea that the lyrics were atypical for a song in the history of rock, hip-hop, or R&B about a man trying to seduce a woman never made any sense. Thicke was scapegoated after a brief moment in the limelight by content-hungry and culturally panicked writers and a social media mob. It now remains a regressive piece of art, left with no owner. A decade later, maybe it’s time to admit it’s just a regular old mediocre piece of pop music. Unless we’re still in a moral panic.
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Adrian Nguyen is a culture writer based in Sydney, Australia.
Hags by Victoria Smith reviewed Hags by Victoria Smith reviewed Katherine Dee “Rethinking sex,” as Christine Emba eloquently wrote in her book of the same name, is all well and good. But what do we do with the women who have lost their value in the sexual marketplace (or who never had it at all)? What do we do with the women who forcibly exited because they are already married or already mothers? What do we do with those who are, once again, being told to sit down and shut up, to make space for the younger cohort, who, by virtue of their youth, are more “in touch” and thereby know better?
I sought out Victoria Smith’s Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women on a quest to find contemporary feminist literature that touched on female invisibility.
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Everywhere in feminism is the presupposition that women are first seen: To be a victim, one must first be acknowledged. To be objectified, you must first be an object. The elephant in the room is that not every woman is an object, and feminism seems curiously stuck on the idea that we all retain positive sexual value. The ugly truth is that some women go their whole lives beneath objectification, and, as many women are surprised to learn, all women eventually hit “the wall” of realizing they’ve ceased to be an object. Once they reach middle age, they’re “ghosted by life itself,” suddenly not even worthy of being dehumanized. Or, as Smith reframes the sentiment slightly more charitably, “you’re still an object; you’ve just changed in status from painting or sculpture to, say, a hat stand.”
Feminism is changing its tune. There’s been a departure from the “raunch feminism,” variously known as sex-positive, choice, or liberal feminism of the ‘90s and ‘00s, a feminism that touted a vision of womanhood where women could be freely “one of the boys” without stigma to a more critical feminism, with voices on the Left, Right, and everywhere in between. But still, everyone operates on the assumption of visibility. Not just visibility but sexual capital. We are now rethinking what to do with that sexual capital and how to retain our humanity while doing it.
Finally, the question of whether there’s an upper limit to what kind of sex and with how many partners is no longer just for finger-wagging Phyllis Schlafly wannabes. Everyone has become hip to kink-shaming, once the domain of moralizing prudes.
In a recent episode of the Female Dating Strategy podcast, which serves as one of the better examples of this new type of feminism, somewhat confusingly labeled "conservative" despite addressing themes shared by many leftists, the hosts discussed a Twitter conversation in which younger women from Generation Z voiced their concerns about millennials promoting uncomfortable and even unsafe sexual practices. The hosts quoted @postnuclearjoan, who wrote: “i'm not done talking about this because i'm so sick of millennials harassing gen z-ers and grooming them into thinking that sexual abuse is empowering and then having the audacity to get mad when we feel uncomfortable because young people setting boundaries is unacceptable.”
Discussions like this are emblematic of the types of changes feminism is undergoing across the political spectrum. “Anything goes” is no longer the mantra. No longer are we under the delusion that liberation and endless choice are one and the same, that the completely unbounded, autonomous individual is the natural endpoint for a feminism that truly champions women. This is clearly progress.
There’s a flavor of feminist thought for everyone that acknowledges, finally, that maybe, just maybe, the girl power women like me grew up with was little more than an empty slogan. Maybe, just maybe, those pesky second wavers weren’t all big, bad, frigid uglies trying to suck the fun out of womanhood. Yet curiously missing in these conversations is any acknowledgment of the women who are nonentities. The women who are no longer, as Smith puts it, “feminine, fertile, and f***able,” who are “squatting in womanhood despite the space now being reserved for the young and the pretty.”
Today’s conversation is an improvement. But we are still saying: Feminism is for those of us who are still in the sexual marketplace. We just know how to navigate it better now.
For Smith, the solution doesn’t lie in expanding the sexual marketplace or simply navigating it more carefully. Her advice is familiar but welcome. We must recognize that women are women the entirety of their lives, that menopause and all that comes after is not an exit from womanhood but another stage of it. Womanhood is diverse, and the erasure of older women is the erasure of all women. Every maiden becomes a mother who eventually becomes a crone. We should nurture the relationship between women and other women, between women and themselves.
We may ignore our mothers’ advice, Smith says, but mother still knows best. Not because of some specter of “matriarchal oppression” or “societal feminization,” as recently become trendy to invoke, or because of the tyranny of what we now recognize as a “Karen,” a clever mask for ageist misogyny, but because your mother lived a long and full life. She knows the score because she’s been at the game since the beginning.
We must stop living in the perpetual now of new feminisms that rewrite past ones and recognize the importance of an intergenerational story. We must work together as women — not as disjointed cohorts correcting the mistakes of the women who came before us but as a whole.
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Katherine Dee is a writer and co-host of the podcast After the Orgy. Find more of her work at defaultfriend.substack.com or on Twitter @default_friend.
Crossword: Downward Spiral Crossword: Downward Spiral Brendan Emmett Quigley

Another example of botched priorities in Washington Another example of botched priorities in Washington Kaylee McGhee White Opinion Another example of botched priorities in Washington By Kaylee McGhee White, Restoring America Editor May 11, 2023 11:45 PM Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Email Print Opinion Another example of botched priorities in Washington By Kaylee McGhee White, Restoring America Editor May 11, 2023 11:45 PM Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Email Print Overall crime in Washington, D.C., is up by 25% since last year, with homicides up by 20% and vehicle theft by 106% in the past several months alone. But the district's top law enforcement official has more important things to worry about — namely, how to stop residents from purchasing and using gas stoves.
“Today, I'm leading 11 AGs calling for federal action to address the health & safety risks of gas stoves, which emit pollutants that have a disparate negative impact on children & underserved communities and put DC residents at risk of asthma and other respiratory illnesses," Attorney General Brian Schwalb tweeted this week.
SCHUMER IS ON THE CUSP OF DEFUNDING THE DC POLICE DEPARTMENT AS CRIME EXPLODES
A letter signed by the attorneys general indicates that “a significant amount of evidence has accumulated raising concerns about the pollutants from gas stoves found in U.S households,” and it urges the Consumer Product Safety Commission to study the “harms” caused by gas stoves and then take action to mitigate them.
"District residents are entitled to carry out everyday tasks like cooking without risk to their health and well-being," Schwalb added.
Schwalb’s crusade against gas stoves is not just an example of bad priorities — it’s also bad science. The largest peer-reviewed analysis of a link between gas stoves and childhood asthma found “no evidence of an association between the use of gas as a cooking fuel and either asthma symptoms or asthma diagnosis,” according to the National Institutes of Health.
There’s also the inconvenient fact that many consumers prefer gas stoves to electric stoves in spite of any supposed health risks. Close to 40% of homes in the United States use gas stoves, as do the majority of restaurants.
Schwalb should stop trying to micromanage consumer decisions and instead turn his attention to the real problems plaguing the district's residents, such as the U.S. attorney's failure to prosecute nearly 70% of the people arrested by police in 2022.
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More from Examiner China is capitalizing on Hamas terrorist attacks December 22, 2023 06:00 AM Why this Japanese company's offer to buy US Steel is good news for the American economy December 22, 2023 06:00 AM No to a bailout for debt-riven economies and the climate fund December 22, 2023 06:00 AM Opinion The spirt of the American Revolution is alive and well By: Paul F. Petrick Federal Trade Commission doesn't have the evidence in its Amazon case By: David McGarry Constantly wrong economist warns of 'economists who won’t admit they were wrong' By: Brady Leonard Videos California Democrats want gender-neutral bathrooms mandatory in all K-12 schools DeSantis threatens removal of all AP high school classes in war with College Board Biden student loan forgiveness will cost $400 billion over 10 years, CBO estimates Newsletters Sign up now to get the Washington Examiner’s breaking news and timely commentary delivered right to your inbox. Opinion Natural Gas Washington D.C. Crime Regulation Opinion Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Email Print Share your thoughts with friends. How does a president most Americans don’t believe is fit to serve run for reelection? How does a president most Americans don’t believe is fit to serve run for reelection? Byron York HOW DOES A PRESIDENT MOST AMERICANS DON'T BELIEVE IS FIT TO SERVE RUN FOR REELECTION? A few days ago, this newsletter looked at the dramatic finding of a new ABC News-Washington Post poll that 63% of registered voters do not believe 80-year-old President Joe Biden is mentally or physically up to the job of president of the United States.
In response to two questions — "Do you think Biden has the mental sharpness it takes to serve effectively as president, or not?" and "Do you think Biden is in good enough physical health to serve as president, or not?" — 63% said Biden does not have the mental sharpness to serve, and 62% said he is not in good enough physical health to serve.
Those answers lead to another question: When voters believe that, how does a president run for reelection? The fundamental voter concern is that, at 80, Biden is already too old to be president. He will be 82 in 2024 and, if reelected, will serve until he is 86. On what basis would voters vote to keep him in office?
Plus, there's another factor to consider. Who will Biden run against? If he runs against Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), who is 36 years younger than Biden, there is nothing Biden can do to neutralize the age matter. If he runs against former Gov. Nikki Haley (R-SC), who is 29 years younger than Biden, there is nothing he can do. If he runs against Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), who is 23 years younger, there is nothing he can do. Even if he runs against former Vice President Mike Pence, after former President Donald Trump the most senior Republican in the race but 17 years younger than Biden, there is nothing he can do.
You get the idea. Of course, all those Republicans are currently far, far behind Trump in the race for the GOP nomination. Since Trump will be 78 years old in 2024 and, if elected, would serve until he is 82, there are serious age concerns about him, too.
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But there is bad news for Biden on the age matter, even when compared to Trump. The short version is that voters see Trump as more vigorous than Biden. When asked if Trump has the mental sharpness to serve, 54% said yes, and when asked if Trump is in good enough physical health to serve, 64% said yes. So even though Trump as president would be as old as Biden is now — and it is a gamble for voters to bet Trump will remain in good enough health to serve — more voters think he is fundamentally capable of being president than Biden.
And besides, how could Biden use age against Trump in a campaign? Of course, he can't.
There is another complicating factor in a Biden vs. Trump race. On what will likely be the most important matter in voters' minds, the economy, voters give Trump the edge over Biden. The ABC-Washington Post pollsters asked, "Who do you think did a better job handling the economy, Donald Trump when he was president or Joe Biden during his presidency so far?" Fifty-four percent said Trump, while 36% said Biden. That's a clear advantage for Trump.
Given all that, what does Biden do? In a race against any non-Trump Republican, he suffers terribly from the age difference. That alone might defeat him. In a race against Trump, he still suffers, although less so, from the age problem, plus he is on the losing end of what is likely to be the race's most important matter. It's a bleak picture. What to do?
Biden has already revealed the answer: Cast Trump as a MAGA threat to the future, the very existence, of the U.S. and democracy itself. Or, should Trump not be his opponent, portray any other Republican as a Trump-like MAGA threat to the future, the very existence, of the U.S. and democracy itself.

Democrats gave the strategy a test run in 2022, with significant success. Yes, the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade was an important factor working against Republicans in some races. And yes, individual candidate qualities in hundreds of House and Senate races played a role. But the anti-MAGA argument — the accusation that Republicans posed a MAGA threat to the future, the very existence, of the U.S. and democracy itself — was a winner for Democrats.
During the midterm elections, one Democratic strategist, Simon Rosenberg, was a lonely voice arguing that there would not be a red wave, that, in fact, the "anti-MAGA majority" would turn out to save the day for Democrats. As it happened, Democrats did lose the House, although by a smaller margin than predicted, but they actually picked up a seat in the Senate on the strength of that "anti-MAGA majority."
In 2024, the presence of an "anti-MAGA majority," should one exist, could be Biden's last chance. How else could an 82-year-old man, visibly slow in his mental and physical abilities, win reelection when a majority of people don't think he's up to the job? With that always in mind, Biden and his party will run against MAGA, no matter who their GOP adversary is.
One last thing. An anti-MAGA campaign will be a very, very ugly campaign. There will be daily slanders, daily outrages, and daily combat. Republicans and conservatives who rankle at being called Nazis and fascists and traitors and insurrectionists and authoritarians and much, much more should be prepared. It will be hard to take. But if Biden is on the ballot in November 2024, it will be his best, and perhaps only, hope.
For a deeper dive into many of the topics covered in the Daily Memo, please listen to my podcast, The Byron York Show — available on the Ricochet Audio Network and everywhere else podcasts can be found. You can use this link to subscribe.
After another high-profile media scandal, maybe the industry should revisit the ‘Pence Rule’ After another high-profile media scandal, maybe the industry should revisit the ‘Pence Rule’ Timothy P. Carney Most Americans — especially most women — don’t believe that married men ought to go out for one-on-one dinners or drinks with female colleagues and subordinates, polls indicate.
The big outlier from this consensus is the national news media, which reacted with near unanimous scorn in 2017 to news reports that Mike Pence had a rule against one-on-one dinners or drinks with other women.
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Here are some of the media freakouts from back then, as collected by conservative Mollie Hemingway:
How Mike Pence’s Dumb Dinner Rule Puts Women at a Disadvantage: “I thought I’d heard just about everything over the course of my 13-year career on Wall Street, but Vice President Mike Pence’s statement from 2002 about not dining with a woman unless his wife, Karen, was present, left me baffled.” Why It Matters That Pence Won’t Have Dinner With A Woman Who Isn’t His Wife: “In Pence’s worldview, men have no self-control, and women are either temptresses or guardians of virtue.” Mike Pence won’t dine alone with a woman who’s not his wife. Is that sexist? Mike Pence’s Dinner Rule Shows Donald Trump Team’s Fear of Powerful Women: “Women Are Binary in Trump World: Mike Pence and Donald Trump see women as sexual prey or altogether invisible.” How Pence’s Dudely Dinners Hurt Women: “The vice president — and other powerful men — regularly avoid one-on-one meetings with women in the name of protecting their families. In the end, what suffers is women’s progress.” Vox.com alone had three articles attacking the "Pence Rule." CNN ran an op-ed by sexual-misconduct lawyer Roberta Kaplan opposing guardrails against male colleagues having intimate get-togethers with female colleagues.
What has happened since then? We’ve had at least three media scandals resulting in resignations involving sexual affairs between prominent colleagues at major news outlets.
CNN honcho Jeff Zucker hired Allison Gollust, made her his mentee and eventually promoted her to executive vice president. Zucker called Gollust his “closest colleague,” and Katie Couric said the two had a “cozy arrangement” and were “joined at the hip.” As the Guardian reported, “Inside CNN, those familiar with Gollust described her as a stalwart member of Zucker’s inner circle, attending meetings with Zucker and traveling with him on work trips.”
Gollust got divorced in 2017, and Zucker got divorced the next year. There are disputes about when the sexual relationship between the two began, but in any event, the relationship was considered inappropriate enough that both Zucker and Gollust resigned for violating CNN standards.
It seems that if CNN thought secret relationships between bosses and subordinates were inappropriate, they could have erected more robust norms about how employees spend time together.
In late 2022, it was Good Morning America’s turn in the colleague-affair-dismissal spotlight. Co-anchors Amy Robach and T.J. Holmes, both married at the time, traveled together to England to cover Queen Elizabeth’s jubilee, and that reportedly is when their sexual affair began. Their relationship also included “flirty post-filming sessions at a New York City bar,” according to the Daily Mail article that exposed their cheating.
The New York Post reported that Holmes had serially cheated on his wife with Good Morning America colleagues. That is, this newsroom appears to have been a hotbed of sexual impropriety, and it could have benefited from more guardrails.
This year, NBC got its workplace-affair scandal. CEO Jeff Shell was ousted from the company, while his former mistress, who accused him of sexual harassment and discrimination, has left CNBC. Shell and Gamble reportedly had an off-and-on affair — under duress, Gamble says — beginning over a decade ago.
Check out how the relationship started, as described by Gamble’s complaint:
“The complaint alleged that Mr. Shell invited Ms. Gamble to dinner in London — the complaint does not say what year — when she was a relatively junior producer, and he was the head of NBC International. After the dinner, Mr. Shell accompanied Ms. Gamble back to her hotel, and he pressured her to start a sexual relationship but was rebuffed….
“Ms. Gamble and Mr. Shell eventually did begin a sexual relationship, according to the complaint, after it became clear to her that rebutting his advances would probably damage her career.”
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A vast majority of male and female colleagues who spend one-on-one time together, even at dinner or drinks, will not have an affair. A small minority will. That small minority can be very disruptive to a workplace, as these three stories show.
Seems that in the news industry, a little bit of prudence could go a long way.