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| by Jakub Grygiel via Science Direct The United States, and more broadly, the West, is prone to be surprised. We are surprised by China’s pursuit of hegemony through economic and military means; by Russia’s engaging in the largest conventional war in Europe since 1945; by the United Kingdom leaving the European Union. |
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Listen to: "We the people?" What a novel idea but that is what our constitution is all about. People and their rights and restraints placed on an omnipotent government.
https://youtu.be/Yv2PBDg7y80?s
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The Luxury Beliefs of the Elites
by Jonathan Rosenblum Mishpacha Magazine
The danger posed by the holders of luxury beliefs lies not only in their pernicious cultural influence
The major lesson that reviewer Christine Rosen extracts from Rob Henderson's new memoir, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, is: "The people who control a great deal of our cultural and political conversations are a rarified elite with little understanding of how most people live their lives." (I have not yet read Troubled, though I'm eager to do so. What follows draws primarily on Rosen's review in the Free Beacon and on Henderson's op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.)
To comprehend the gap between those elites and the vast majority of Americans, consider a recent Rasmussen survey of what the authors call "elites" — more than one post-graduate degree, an annual income of $150,000 — and a subset of those "elites," who attended an Ivy League school, or another elite private school, such as Stanford or University of Chicago, whom Rasmussen dubs "super-elites."
Three-quarters of the elites and nearly 90 percent of the super elites describe their personal incomes as on the upswing, while almost none describe their incomes as on the decline. For all Americans, however, nearly twice as many view their income as worsening as view their financial situation as improving — 40 percent to 20 percent.
Despite having eventually made it to Yale as an undergraduate in his mid-twenties and later earning a PhD in psychology at Cambridge University, Henderson most certainly did not stem from the elite class from which so many of his classmates came. Students at Yale from families in the upper 1 percent of wealth are more numerous than those from the bottom 60 percent.
One of Henderson's Yale classmates, who had attended Phillips Exeter Academy, America's top prep school, once lectured Henderson on his white privilege — even though he is actually half Asian and half Hispanic. Yet it would take a certain obliviousness to label Henderson a child of privilege. One of his earliest memories is of his drug-addict mother being pulled away from him in handcuffs and hauled off to jail, when he was three. He never knew his father.
After that, he was shuttled between various foster homes, none of them stable, until he joined the US Air Force after high school. The discipline of the military helped him overcome some of the chaos that had characterized his life until then. But many of the old demons remained, including his penchant for self-medicating with alcohol, and he ended up in a detox program, where a talented therapist helped him work through some of those demons.
One of the central messages of Henderson's memoir is that a non-stable childhood family life is not just bad because it hurts your chances of getting into an elite college or attaining a high-paying job later in life, but also because those raised in such an environment experience "pain that etches itself into their bodies and brains and propels them to do things in the pursuit of relief that often inflict even more harm."
Given their difference in backgrounds, Henderson found many of the social rituals of his classmates incomprehensible. One example was when the Yale campus erupted in hysteria over an email from Erika Christakis to the students of Silliman residential college, of which she served as co-master with her husband Nicholas, suggesting that they were old enough to work out themselves which Halloween costumes to wear, without asking the administration to issue an elaborate set of rules to avoid "microaggressions" or "cultural appropriation" — e.g., a white student wearing a sombrero. After the childhood and teenage years he experienced, a fellow student in a sombrero did not seem like such a big deal to Henderson.
Erika was eventually force to resign her position in Silliman and on the Yale faculty, much to Henderson's disappointment, as he had been eager to take her course on early childhood development. Meanwhile, the black undergraduate who confronted Nicholas Christakis in the Silliman courtyard, in an expletive-laden tirade, in front of a group of students cheering her on, was given an award for extracurricular excellence at the next Yale graduation.
Henderson offers an invaluable term to describe the opinions expressed so fiercely and with no tolerance of opposing views by his fellow undergrads: "luxury beliefs." Luxury beliefs, as Henderson defines them, "confer status on the upper class at little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes." The conspicuous displays of wealth and leisure activities that broadcast elite status in Thorstein Veblen's time have been replaced by opinions and beliefs that give proof of one's elite education. After all, Henderson notes ironically, how many non-Ivy-League-educated Americans can easily toss off terms like "cisgender" or "heteronormative"?
Mantras such as "defund the police" are luxury beliefs because their impact on those living in gated communities or the most affluent neighborhoods is likely to be negligible. Henderson comments about the policies implemented to combat white privilege, "It won't be Yale graduates who are harmed. Poor white people will bear the brunt."
He recounts the story of a refugee from the North Korean police state, attending Columbia University, who raised concerns about the anti-free speech movement on campus, only to be taunted with "Go back to Pyongyang" on a social media site for Ivy League students. Normally, nothing will earn faster exile to social media purgatory than telling an immigrant, "Go back to where you came from," but this particular refugee was deemed deserving of insult, writes Henderson, because she "undermined these people's view of themselves as morally righteous."
Incidentally, I would rank as near the top of "luxury beliefs" the familiar chants about Israeli genocide and apartheid. They cost their proponents nothing, yet effectively broadcast one's moral righteousness and humanity, not to mention elite education, especially when terms like settler-colonialism and intersectionality are thrown into the mix.
Henderson is primarily concerned with the way that bad ideas — e.g., dismissal of matrimony and monogamy as passé, decriminalization of drugs — filter downstream in the culture, where they wreak havoc. As Charles Murray thoroughly documents in Breaking Apart, rates of marriage, children living in two-parent homes, and attendance at religious services have remained more or less constant in the most affluent quintile of the population, while plummeting in the lower quintiles. But on elite campuses, marriage is more likely to be portrayed as a prison for women, just as the same students for whom the words "capitalist oppression" roll trippingly off their tongues can be found the same day lining up for interviews with Goldman Sachs.
But the danger posed by the holders of luxury beliefs lies not only in their pernicious cultural influence. Holders of those views are quite comfortable with the use of coercion to advance their beliefs. Four-fifths of the super elites, interviewed in the Rasmussen poll cited above, would ban gas-powered cars. Just under 90 percent support strict rationing of meat, gas, and electricity, and 70 percent would ban all nonessential air travel.
The impact of these restrictions on the most affluent would likely be relatively small. They can afford electric cars, and would buy carbon offsets to circumvent some of the most onerous rationing or purchase them on the black market. And dollars to donuts that their air travel would be deemed necessary. The impact of such policies on the less affluent doesn't figure into their calculations.
Elite campuses have been focal points for the limitations on free speech, and over half of the super elites educated on those campuses describe Americans as possessing too much freedom. That goes with a general contempt for markets, which allocate equal weight to the choices of the unenlightened and the enlightened.
That concern with "too much" freedom goes together with a remarkable trust in government among 70 percent of the elites and 90 percent of the super elites. Government is beneficent, in their eyes, because it can force people to do what the enlightened have determined is good. The elites know that their hands will be on the levers of coercion, particularly administrative agencies. (I would wager that the majority of those lower-level staffers staging mini-rebellions in the White House and the State Department over American support for Israel's war on Hamas are holders of elite credentials.) Ronald Reagan's quip, "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help,' " does not resonate with the elites.
SIXTY YEARS BEFORE Rob Henderson first stepped onto the Yale campus, another man already in his mid-twenties entered Harvard as an undergraduate. Like Henderson, Thomas Sowell came from a deprived background and served in the military before entering college. He was born in the Jim-Crow-era South, in a home without electricity, and served in the Marines during the Korean War, after dropping out of high school.
The 1969 black student riots at Cornell, where Sowell was an economics professor, and subsequent pressure at UCLA to lower his standards for students, soured Sowell on academia, which he left for a position as senior fellow at the Hoover Institution almost half a century ago.
Over 50 years and almost 40 books, most still in print and many of them standard texts in economics, and ten volumes of collected columns, Sowell has leveled a sustained critique at the dominant intellectual doctrines of our day, in particular those of his fellow black intellectuals, whom he views as having spectacularly failed the black masses by advocating for policies that may serve their interests but not those of the large majority of American blacks. (Only about one-third of his writing concerns issues of race, and he has penned classic works in intellectual, social, and economic history.) Jason Riley's intellectual biography of Sowell is appropriately titled Maverick.
In a short new work, Social Justice Fallacies, which I would commend to every college student and social justice warrior, Sowell fleshes out many of Henderson's observations, including the detachment of elite theorists from the lives of those whom they purport to advocate, and their sometimes subtle, sometimes not, contempt for those whom they view as their inferiors.
The second chapter compares the Progressive movement of the early decades of the 20th century to present-day progressives. At first glance, it would appear that little connects the two groups, apart from their position on the political left of their day. A strong streak of racial determinism characterized the early progressives, and many of their leading lights fretted about the disastrous impact of an influx of people of inferior races to America. By contrast, today's progressives start from the premise that there are no differences between races and that all differential outcomes are a result of systemic racism.
In the earlier period, Professor Edward Ross, the chairman of the American Sociological Society, warned that America was headed toward "race suicide" by virtue of being inundated by people of "inferior types." American universities and colleges taught hundreds of courses in eugenics, defined as the reduction or prevention of the survival of people considered genetically inferior. The most famous economist of the 20th century, John Maynard Keynes, was founder of the Eugenics Society at Cambridge.
Irving Fisher of Yale, the leading monetary economist of the period, advocated for the isolation or sterilization of those inferior types. Or as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, "Three generations of idiots are enough." Sowell remarks upon how casually Fisher spoke of imprisonment of those who had committed no crime and the denial of normal life to all regarded as inferior. Not by accident did Hitler yemach shemo term a work on eugenics by Madison Grant, a leading conservationist and advocate for national parks and the protection of endangered species, his Bible.
At first glance, today's progressives could not seem further removed from their namesakes. They are the opposite of racial determinists. In the modern progressive creed, all differences in outcomes between people of different races can have one and only one explanation: discrimination by the majority group.
Despite the opposite views on race, Sowell finds important continuities between the progressive movement of the early 20th century and that of today. Today's progressives share, according to Sowell, their predecessors' aversion to confronting empirical evidence that challenges their fixed verities, and a similar inclination to respond to empirical challenges with ad hominem insults — racist being the most powerful — rather than with counter-arguments and evidence.
And they are similarly inclined to use government power to coerce the less enlightened to behave in accord with their "expert" opinions, and too frequently oblivious to or unconcerned with the impact of their policy prescriptions on those constituting the "lower orders," in their minds.
Woodrow Wilson, perhaps the leading figure of the Progressive era, served as president of Princeton before being elected president. Like many of his fellow progressives, he was an unabashed racist who insisted that black employees in government offices be physically segregated.
But what joins him to present-day progressives is his enormous confidence in government by experts. He presided over a massive expansion of the federal government and the creation of many of the largest administrative agencies, run by "experts." He viewed the Constitution as outmoded for a modern age. But not to worry, government agencies headed by experts would usher in a "new freedom," albeit not quite the freedom of a constitution limiting the power of government and enshrining individual rights.
Today, DEI bureaucracies on almost every campus seek to enforce right-thinking and enter into every aspect of university governance, including faculty hiring. Those mushrooming bureaucracies account for a large part in the explosion in higher education costs.
Sowell takes aim at the racial theories of the early progressives and contemporary ones alike. He seeks to empirically refute the claim that each race has a different "ceiling" for intelligence. (If anecdotes were data, his own genius would serve as refutation.) He met with and debated Professor Albert Jensen, one of the leading modern proponents of that view.
Sowell argues that environment, not inherent ceilings, underlies much of the difference in IQ between races. For instance, those raised in the Hebrides Isles and the hill country of Kentucky, though of pure Anglo-Saxon stock, have IQs comparable to American blacks. And like American blacks, their IQs tend to decline from childhood to adulthood. Social isolation appears to be the key. Sowell cites another study that blacks raised by white adoptive parents had IQs six points above the national average.
As an amusing example of the fallibility of IQ tests as measures of inherent capabilities, Sowell quotes Carl Brigham, who developed the SAT test. Brigham claimed on the basis of army mental tests administered in World War I that the myth that Jews are on average highly intelligent had been refuted. At least he had the good grace to admit by 1930, as Jews excelled on standardized tests, that his earlier conclusions had been without merit, and had failed to take into account that most immigrant children were raised in non-English-speaking homes.
Sowell is equally effective skewering the present-day progressive belief that all differences in outcomes are explained as products of racial discrimination. He chafes at the resultant cult of victimization that stands in the way of examination of cultural behavioral factors that prevent black advancement.
He insists that behaviors count and explain a great deal of the differences in income levels between different racial groups. For instance, black married couples have experienced poverty rates of less than 10 percent for decades, which is less than the national poverty rate for all families. And black married couples have higher income levels than white single-parent families. The problem is that black marriage rates overall are lower.
It is often said that the high illegitimacy rate in the black community is attributable to the "legacy of slavery." But for nearly a century after slavery, the rates were relatively low. In 1940, they were one-quarter of what they are today. Sowell suggests that the rapid expansion of the welfare state in the 1960s explains much of that rise, as births to single mothers have also risen rapidly in Sweden, the welfare paradise, where there is no legacy of slavery.
Evidence cited to show discrimination against black children by "white supremacists" — e.g., discipline rates two and a half times those of white students — proves the opposite, Sowell suggests. For white students are themselves twice as likely to be disciplined as Asian students. Perhaps, then, disruptive behavior, rather than discrimination, explains differential rates of discipline. To get rid of school discipline in the name of equity leads to schools in which it is impossible to learn, and ends up harming black students, he argues. Attacks on discriminatory school discipline is thus another one of those "luxury beliefs," like defunding the police.
One of the major causes of the burst housing bubble of 2007, which Sowell predicted, was government pressure on lenders to greatly reduce credit requirements for mortgages. The regulators' theory was that blacks were being discriminated against in the mortgage market, as evidenced by the higher rate of rejection for black mortgage applicants. The only problem with the discrimination hypothesis, Sowell shows, was that black-owned banks rejected black mortgage applicants at even higher rates.
The hypothesis that different income levels are exclusively a function of discrimination founders on the fact that other minority groups — e.g., Asians — have, on average, incomes well above the medium national income, and dark-skinned Asian Indians earn on average $39,000 more per annum than full-time, year-round white workers.
The victimization narrative, in Sowell's eyes, is not only unhelpful but damaging to blacks, as it shifts the focus from one of encouraging the types of behaviors that are associated with success. In the immediate wake of slavery, and for nearly a century afterwards, almost all graduates of all-black Dunbar High in Washington, D.C., went on to college. Black and Hispanic kids in New York City charter schools are six times as likely to pass city math proficiency exams as their counterparts in the regular public schools. Why? Sowell wants to know.
Focusing on the behaviors that foster success rather than wallowing in a narrative of discrimination — which he personally experienced in his younger years and does not deny still exists today — is for Sowell the key to black advancement. And that requires more empirical study and less airy theorizing.
Many of the panaceas that derive from au courant theories have been conclusively refuted on the ground. Black political power in most of America's largest cities, for instance, has done little to change the lives of the vast majority of black citizens. And affirmative action has, in Sowell's view, reinforced stereotypes of black inferiority, among whites and, even worse, among blacks themselves, while doing little to help inner city blacks.
Without a clear-eyed attention to empirical evidence and an openness to debate based on facts and logic, in Sowell's terminology, we are forever consigned to the realm of "luxury beliefs."
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Biden’s ‘Trojan Pier’ for Gaza
Nothing about the plan to build a floating pier off Gaza makes sense. The Biden administration is creating a gateway to Gaza that Israel isn’t supposed to control. Op-ed.
Aid to Gaza airdropped by the US
Five Americans are still being held hostage by Hamas, and Biden has sent no troops to help them, but at the State of the Union address, he promised to send troops to build a pier for Gaza.
The estimated over 1,000 troops will spend as long as 2 months laboring to build a floating pier in a war zone under potential attack to help transfer aid to the Hamas supporters living in Gaza.
Nothing about this plan makes sense.
The media has taken to falsely claiming that the Arab Muslims occupying parts of Gaza are starving. Vice President Kamala Harris attacked Israel, claiming ridiculously that she had “seen reports of families eating leaves or animal feed.” Social media videos however show the locals gorging themselves on schwarma and other foods in preparation for the Islamic period of Ramadan.
But if the Biden administration really believed that Gazans were starving right now, what would be the purpose of spending two months building a pier to deliver aid? A program with a two month lead time will not help people who are starving right now. It would be a grim joke.
And the pier plan only gets stranger from there.
According to the administration, there will be no ‘boots on the ground’ constructing the pier and according to a Pentagon spokesman, “it will not be U.S. military personnel that are transporting the aid off of the causeway into Gaza.” So who has the trucks and capability to actually do it?
The United States will build a pier for smaller ships to transfer to a temporary causeway. According to the spokesman, the administration is “coordinating with other nations to assist with operating the causeway and distributing aid into Gaza.”
Who are those nations? They’re clearly not Israel or the United States. While the Pentagon spokesman mentions Israel as a partner nation, the Israelis are already able to deliver aid.
The Pentagon spokesman mentioned the UN and nameless “ally and partner nations”.
“Why not just use those existing ports and have Israel look at what’s going through and bring it in? It seems like this is a lot of work for 60 days out when there are people starving, frankly,” a reporter asked.
And the spokesman responded with a confusing word salad because he had no good answer.
The actual answer is that the Biden administration does not actually believe that the Arab Muslim occupiers in Gaza are starving, let alone starving to death, otherwise it would be doing more than air dropping 11,000 meals and promising to have meal delivery running in 60 days.
The temporary pier setup is about bypassing Israel to provide long term access to Gaza.
While administration officials describe the pier as “temporary”, a senior official also admitted that “we look forward to the port transitioning to a commercially operated facility over time.”
That means it’s not actually meant to be temporary, but a permanent port for the terrorists.
The administration claims that it needs this port “to enable humanitarian partners to safely distribute lifesaving aid throughout Gaza”, but the claim that this is about safety makes no sense since it’s not actually providing security for the aid deliveries. A Pentagon spokesman shrugged off the question of whether Hamas might open fire on American forces or the aid deliveries.
“I mean, that’s certainly a risk, again, but if Hamas truly does care about the Palestinian people, then again, one would hope that this international mission to deliver aid to people who need it would be able to happen unhindered,” he argued. Is Biden still hoping that Hamas cares?
The Pentagon spokesman emphasized however that American forces would not be on the ground, would not be in a position to secure the aid deliveries or stop Hamas from taking them.
So what we know about the temporary pier to safely deliver supplies into Gaza is that it’s not temporary and the administration is taking no responsibility for the safety of the aid deliveries.
So what is the permanent pier actually for?
Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore (JLOTS), the Navy-Army capability exercised here, has as its goal the deployment of “LOTS assets to deploy and sustain a force” overcoming the lack of port facilities or “port denial”. Israel certainly has ports, so the issue then is port denial.
The Biden administration claims that it personally will not put troops on the ground in Gaza, but there’s no word on whether other nations might do so. The Pentagon has claimed that security arrangements are still being discussed with partner nations. And some of those partner nations could include Hamas allies like Qatar or Turkey. Any armed foreign nation entering Gaza would amount to an invasion of Israeli territory with the ultimate aim of aiding the terrorists living on it.
There is no reason to assume that moving troops is a primary goal here, but certainly ending Israel’s blockade of Gaza is. Beyond any immediate MREs, the causeway will be inevitably used to move supplies for the “reconstruction” of Gaza as part of a new “Palestinian State”.
The Biden administration is creating a gateway to Gaza that Israel isn’t supposed to control.
The Trojan pier is not only about bypassing Israel, but also Egypt. The administration’s vision is that the new arrangement will allow it to directly move materials into Gaza without having to get permission from either Israel or Egypt. And that’s a major victory for the terrorists.
Currently, the Israeli military is saying that it will coordinate the construction and inspect the cargo being transferred into Gaza, but that is yet another mistake in a series of them. Once the system is in place and if Israel has been pressured into withdrawing, it gives the terrorists a direct connection to their allies on the outside. And that includes so-called humanitarian groups.
Biden’s actions are a violation of Israel’s sovereignty. After a decade and a half of trying to bottle up Hamas after the group seized power due to Condoleezza Rice’s push for elections, Biden has decided to uncork the bottle. And while that’s bad for Israel, it’s also bad for America.
The last quarter century has been a series of painful lessons in the cost of trying to win the hearts and minds of Islamic terrorists. Having learned nothing from Afghanistan and Iraq, Biden is bent on repeating the same lunatic experiment by “flooding” Gaza with aid and rebuilding it. If he’s hoping for gratitude, the locals throwing U.S. aid packages in the trash aren’t showing it.
Nor will they.
The United States spent American lives bailing out Iraqi Shiites and Syrian Sunnis only to have them kill Americans. Obama’s Arab Spring toppled Yemen’s government and turned the Red Sea into a terror zone for international shipping. The Iran Deal gave the terror regime in Tehran billions of dollars that it used to wage war across the region. And the Biden administration helped negotiate the deals to appease Hamas that led directly to the Oct 7 atrocities.
After all that, the Biden administration wants to open up Gaza to the rest of the world.
If this latest treasonous episode of nation building succeeds, the Israelis will pay the price, but so will all of us. The ‘Trojan Pier’ is not about delivering aid, it’s about giving the terrorists a gateway to the world. And when that gateway is in place, the world will burn even faster.
Daniel Greenfieldis a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine and was sent to Arutz Sheva by the writer.
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BBC Ignored Complaints About Journalists’ Anti-Israel ‘Terrorist’ Posts for Over a Year -
The BBC ignored complaints about several journalists, including one who called Israel a “terrorist apartheid state,” for more than a year and even allowed them to report on the current Israel-Hamas war.
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Dear Dick, Iran-backed terrorists are attacking Israel on several fronts. Today the IDF confirmed that a suspicious aerial target that crashed into southern Israel yesterday was a cruise missile launched by Houthi terrorists in Yemen. The attack marks the first time a Houthi projectile struck inside Israeli territory. Meanwhile in the north, Hezbollah launched seven attacks on Israeli communities and IDF bases near the border with Lebanon. Two IDF soldiers were wounded in the attack and were taken to a hospital for treatment. Israeli fighter jets struck Hezbollah buildings and weapons depots in response to the attacks, both in Lebanon and in Syria. As Iran orchestrates attacks against Israel from all sides, America must continue to stand with our ally and ensure Israel has the resources it needs to protect its families. Click below to download an AIPAC fact sheet detailing the multiple threats Israel is forced to defend against  |
Sincerely,
Alisha Tischler
AIPAC Southeast Regional Director
Biden Weakens America’s Global Clout
Step one for renewed respect is a serious defense budget. Step two: Kill some crows.
By Walter Russell Mead
With Niger’s gross domestic product at a miserable $545 per person in 2022, the United Nations ranks the landlocked country as one of the five least-developed nations on the planet.
Over the weekend Niger’s government responded to American accusations that it was negotiating to sell uranium to Iran by ending military cooperation with the U.S. The decision is another win for Vladimir Putin’s effort to extend Russian power, a welcome boost to Iran, and a serious blow to America’s plans for combating the return of jihadist violence across a swath of Africa.
It is also one more sign that the Biden administration is losing its ability to shape international events.
In blowing off President Biden, Niger’s military junta is joining a global trend. Mr. Putin renews his threats of nuclear use, rejects talk of diplomacy and hints at even greater ambitions as he grinds out bloody conquests in Ukraine. Iran is helping one of its proxies close the Red Sea while another fires missiles and rockets into Israel. North Korea is beefing up its nuclear and conventional forces. China is massively boosting defense spending while pressing its advantages across the Indo-Pacific and into the Western hemisphere. From Haiti to Sudan, warlords and gang bosses thumb their noses at American diplomatic efforts to restore stability.
The administration’s declining power to deter our adversaries is the biggest problem for American foreign policy, for world peace and, potentially, for Mr. Biden’s re-election. Like a scarecrow that no longer keeps hungry birds from pecking at the corn, Team Biden is losing the ability to prevent hostile powers from picking at the foundations of the American-led world order.
It isn’t all Mr. Biden’s fault. American foreign policy has been on a losing streak since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and some bills for past foolishness are coming due on his watch. Under presidents of both parties, we haven’t kept pace with China’s military buildup even as we allowed the industrial infrastructure that supports our military power to decay. Mr. Putin attacked Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014. The U.S. and its European allies failed to respond effectively in either case.
Internal American politics continue to diminish America’s global clout. The possibility that Donald Trump will return to the White House in 2025 and reverse many Biden-era policies undercuts Team Biden’s credibility with friends and foes alike. And polls pointing to rising isolationist sentiment in the U.S. have many foreign leaders believing that America is a diminishing force in global affairs.
But if the erosion of America’s deterrent power isn’t all Mr. Biden’s fault, his policies aren’t reversing the decline. From the catastrophically bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan to the delay in sending advanced weapons to Ukraine in the face of Mr. Putin’s threats, Mr. Biden’s White House takes step after step that cumulatively teach friends and foes to see the U.S. as a declining power that is easily cowed and in retreat.
The shockingly inadequate fiscal 2025 defense budget request the administration released last week is an incitement to our enemies to step up their war plans. Team Biden is telling the world that America is cutting defense in real terms even as threats of war mount on every side. In his most recent State of the Union address, Mr. Biden compared 2024 to 1941 as a year of critical danger for freedom worldwide. In 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt more than quadrupled defense spending. Nothing could be further from the Biden plan.
A declining real defense budget is one of many signals of retreat the White House is broadcasting to the world. We have made clear to Mr. Putin that his nuclear threats over Ukraine weaken our resolve rather than stiffen our spine. North Korea believes it has nothing to fear from the U.S.
Then there is the Middle East. The Red Sea is nearly closed. Gaza is in flames. A quasi-war simmers on Israel’s northern border. Iranian militias gather strength in Iraq as Iran’s ally Bashar al-Assad tightens his grip on Syria. Iran aids Russia’s aggression in Ukraine while simultaneously strengthening ties with criminal groups and rogue regimes in the Western hemisphere.
As China thinks about the consequences of blockading Taiwan, it is carefully watching how Team Biden handles Iran. So far, it sees little to fear.
Crows cluster where scarecrows fail. If Team Biden wants a world with fewer challenges to the American order, it must restore respect for American power, competence and will. Step one would be to submit a serious defense budget to the Congress, one that demonstrates American resolve to support our friends and deter our adversaries in key global theaters.
Step two is to kill some crows.
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Do black women have a bigger chip on their shoulders than black men? Does Letitia's hatred of Trump motivate/dictate her behaviour?
Lynn and I watched the movie: "Helen Reddy" this evening (19/3) She was an inspirational woman and the impact she made was earth shocking. We are still reverberating to this day.
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Letitia James Turns the Screws on Trump
The inflated $464 million bond required to appeal effectively denies him due process.
By The Editorial Board
Mr. Trump’s lawyers wrote Monday in a court filing that they’ve been unable to obtain a bond to guarantee last month’s $464 million judgment. Defendants are required to post bonds to appeal verdicts. Mr. Trump’s lawyers say securing the full bond would be “impossible” since most of his assets are illiquid.
One wa to satisfy the bond would be to borrow against his real-estate holdings. But Mr. Trump’s lawyers say that only a handful of insurance companies have “both the financial capability and willingness to underwrite a bond of this magnitude,” and “the vast majority are unwilling to accept the risk associated with such a large bond.”
What’s more, his lawyers say that none of the insurers that Mr. Trump’s team approached “are willing to accept hard assets such as real estate as collateral for appeal bonds.” This isn’t surprising given the recent write-downs in commercial real estate and enormous uncertainty about their valuations, especially in places like New York. Insurers may also fear Ms. James’s legal retribution if they provide the bond to Mr. Trump.
Thus in order to appeal the judgment, Mr. Trump could have to unload property in a fire sale. If he were later to win on appeal, his lawyers rightly argue that he would have suffered an enormous, irreparable loss.
Ms. James no doubt knows she has Mr. Trump in a bind. She and courts have opposed his requests to reduce the bond even though a court-appointed independent monitor overseeing his businesses eliminates the risk he could dispose of or transfer his assets to make the judgment harder for the state to enforce.
As we wrote last month, the judgment is overkill. None of Mr. Trump’s business partners lost money lending to him or claimed to have been deceived by his erroneous financial statements. No witness during the trial said his alleged misrepresentations changed its loan terms or prices, and there was no evidence that he profited from his alleged deceptions.
Nonetheless, state trial judge Arthur Engoron ordered him to “disgorge” $355 million in “ill-gotten gains.” This sum was based on the interest-rate savings that a financial expert retained by Ms. James estimated Mr. Trump netted from his legerdemain. But this calculation seems dubious since banks said they didn’t alter their loan terms.
The judge also tacked on profits that Mr. Trump putatively made on properties for which he submitted false financial statements without demonstrating that the latter enable the former. He also added “pre-judgment interest” dating back to the day Ms. James launched her investigation in 2019. This makes Mr. Trump liable for alleged wrongdoings before he was even charged. All of this provides plausible grounds for appeal.
Whatever his transgressions, defendants are entitled to due process, which includes the right to appeal. Ms. James is trying to short-circuit the justice system to get Mr. Trump, as she promised she would during her 2018 campaign. Anyone who does business in New York ought to worry about how Ms. James could likewise twist the screws on them.
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DEI nonsense is right out of Karl Marx's philosophy which made Communism mainstream. because it established oppressors and separated them from the oppressed.
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Ban DEI Quackery in Medical Schools
A new bill would deny money to institutions that engage in the worst practices.
By Greg Murphy and Stanley Goldfarb
The ideology of “diversity, equity and inclusion” is dangerous everywhere, but especially in medical education. Its influence has become entrenched nationwide. Accrediting institutions are pushing all of America’s 158 accredited medical schools to train future physicians in political activism, wasting precious time and resources that could be spent on rigorous coursework and preparation for medical practice. The result will likely be future physicians less qualified to meet patients’ needs.
To restore medical education to its life-saving mission, Congress should ensure that taxpayer dollars don’t fund its decline. One of us, Rep. Murphy, will introduce the Educate Act on Tuesday. It would eliminate all federal funding, including student loans, for medical schools that engage in the worst DEI practices. Schools would have to agree to the following:
• No racist teaching. Medical schools teach about “intersectionality,” “colonization” and “white supremacy” while promoting the idea that people are either “oppressors” or “oppressed.” These concepts push medical students to treat patients differently based on race, sex or “gender identity.” In 2021 two physicians proposed giving preferential treatment to “Black and Latinx heart failure patients” at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School.
• No rac ial discrimination. Medical schools increasingly offer scholarships, classes and programming designed for—and sometimes available only to—students of specific races. This includes “affinity groups” students can join voluntarily, as well as classes that segregate students for the sake of learning.
• No loyalty oaths. Medical schools routinely require applicants and faculty to write DEI statements as a condition of acceptance or employment. Such requirements violate freedom of speech and eviscerate merit. Schools reject candidates for not being “progressive” enough while choosing others for their devotion to DEI.
• No DEI offices. Most medical schools have a department, team or office dedicated to DEI. These bureaucracies exist to spread a divisive ideology across campus, from the curriculum to extracurricular activities.
In addition to denying federal money to schools that engage in these practices, the Educate Act would prevent accrediting organizations, such as the Liaison Committee on Medical Education and the Association of American Medical Colleges, from requiring DEI education at medical schools.
Lawmakers and the public should recognize DEI for what it is: a dangerous and contagious philosophy. Until Congress takes action, this ideology will continue to corrupt the institutions that train physicians. Medicine and the people it’s meant to serve will suffer.
Dr. Murphy is a practicing urologist. A Republican, he represents North Carolina’s Third Congressional District. Dr. Goldfarb, a nephrologist, is chairman of Do No Harm
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Are American's getting too close to the helicopter propeller?
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America Isn’t Nazi Germany, but It Looks a Little Like 1933
Trump’s firebrand words and the left’s obsession with race are reminiscent of far darker times.
Gerard Baker
By Gerard Baker
Last year we learned that American men supposedly spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the Roman empire. Since the source of this information was a series of viral TikTok videos, we have to take it with a pinch of salt. Perhaps it will emerge that it was some cunning plan by the Chinese Communist Party to remind the American male that the U.S. is merely the latest in a long line of empires set for decline and fall, a social-media memento mori for America’s global leadership.
For my part—for more obvious contemporary reasons—I have been thinking a lot lately about the Third Reich.
Like all English schoolboys I was taught about interwar Germany from an early age. Supplementing our history books on the Nazi horrors was an endless diet of films and TV shows that variously documented and caricatured Adolf Hitler and his regime. The effect was always to underscore the historical singularity of the Nazis—and of course their Germanness. It all helped develop the comforting thought that there was something so uniquely wicked about their life and times that “never again” was less of an exhortation than a confident forecast.
But with time comes a more subtle appreciation of the enduring universalities of political culture. The interwar Germans and their leaders weren’t another species, or laboratory-created monsters sent to tyrannize humanity. They were ordinary men and women. It is their very ordinariness, the commonalities they shared—and still share—with the rest of us that should terrify us. It is for the banality of their evil, in Hannah Arendt’s famous description, that many of these otherwise normal people must be understood.
With that in mind, and looking for clues about the direction of our darkening world, I have been catching up on the period with the help of some famous histories—among them Richard Evans’s brilliant trilogy and American journalist William Shirer’s gripping eyewitness account, “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.”
It isn’t the obvious historical geopolitical parallels with the present that interest me, though there are plenty: a major land war in Europe as an expansionist dictator seeks to annex a neighbor, the rise of nationalist political movements across the world, the chilling return of antisemitic hate, the challenge to Western hegemony from the emergence of a rival Pacific power. My interest is primarily in the human factor. In what conditions do civilized people become eager progenitors of a regime that ends up murdering tens of millions of people?
To be clear, I don’t think, as hyperventilating polemicists argue all the time, that America is walking into a replay of 1933 under You Know Who. The conditions of Germany then were so far removed from what obtains in the U.S. today that constantly invoking Hitler blinds us to the real lessons of the time. Weimar Germany was a fledgling democracy traumatized by catastrophic defeat in war, hyperinflation and depression. An electoral system almost designed to generate paralyzing political instability invited both acts of political violence and executive authoritarianism. Above all, Weimar and its institutions were still teenagers when they succumbed so meekly to Hitler’s putsch. The American republic is 247 years old and counting.
But there are still lessons for our current political culture. We can see in contemporary extremists of both left and right echoes of the tactics the Nazis deployed—especially the way in which they mobilize language.
Take how Shirer explains the success of national socialism, tracing its roots in Hitler’s early years and writings. Amid the vomit of hatred and paranoia that characterizes most of his autobiographical Mein Kampf, consider how this passage resonates today: “All great movements are popular movements, volcanic eruptions of human passions and sentiments, stirred either by the cruel Goddess of Distress or by the firebrand of the word hurled among the masses; they are not lemonade-like outpourings of literary esthetics and drawing room heroes.”
This is an essential political truth—arguments, ideas and theories are no match for the ability to channel the raw power of popular sentiment, which can be raucous and savage. The history of the Republican Party in the past 10 years has been exactly this: the triumph of “the firebrand of the word” over the “lemonade-like outpourings of drawing room heroes.”
But there are also warnings about the left from those interwar years. In “The Third Reich in Power,” the second book in Evans’s trilogy, he examines how the National Socialist government went about literally implementing the totalitarian idea that sought to harness every aspect of life to the regnant ideology. So in science, we had “Aryan physics” and “Nazi mathematics.” The latter emphasized geometry over algebra because it was thought to be closer to the supposed model of perfection of their race.
This mad—but dangerous—derogation of scientific truth to an ideology of human racial identity sounds disturbingly close to what our dominant “progressive” ideologues are doing on campuses and in public spaces when they tell us that math is racist and seek to silence dissenting ideas.
We aren’t Nazi Germany. But history is full of examples of how ordinary people can be driven by exigent circumstances and manipulative leaders into some very dark places.
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