It is the poisoned fruit of teaching a generation of college students to despise their own civilization.

Jesse Jackson famously led a chant at Stanford University in 1987, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go.” He was talking about the college course, but he might as well have been talking about the thing itself.

Jackson and his allies had extraordinary success in extinguishing the teaching of Western Civ. Not only have we largely stopped transmitting the story of our own civilization, we have substituted an alternative narrative that the West is reducible to racism, imperialism and colonialism.

It is in this context that the current outburst of anti-Zionism has to be understood. Yes, it has been fed by anti-Israel agitation on campus over the decades and yes, students are susceptible to witless radicalism in the best of circumstances. Yet the loathing of Israel is particularly intense because it is viewed as an outpost of Western civilization and all its alleged ills.

The hatred of Israel is tainted by and, in some cases, driven by antisemitism. Another way to look at it, though, is that it’s not so much about hatred of the “the other,” as progressives put it, as hatred of ourselves and all our works.

It is, on one level, incorrect to consider Israel exclusively an artifact of the West. The Jews are indigenous to the region going back to Abraham, with their story caught up in the story of the land. A large proportion of the current population traces its origins from the Middle East and North Africa, rather than Europe.

But there is no doubt that Israel is a Western society — in its political system, in its respects for rights, in its innovative economy, in its mores.

From any rational perspective, this would be something to celebrate. Many legitimate criticisms can be made of Israel, and indeed are a feature of the Israeli domestic debate itself, but there’s no doubt that it is a flourishing society.

If Gaza were equally Westernized, it would be worrying about whether it’s overbuilding seaside real estate rather than having to get water and electricity from the neighboring country its governing authority — a savage terror group — is trying to destroy.

Yet this is the society that anti-Western opinion holds up and wants to sweep all before it. This point of view loves Gaza for its failure and hates Israel for its success; loves Gaza for its terror and hates Israel for its self-defense; loves Gaza for its vicious anti-Western sponsors and hates Israel for its Western allies, especially the United States.

Violence is part of the radical anti-Western vision. The anti-colonial bible, “The Wretched of the Earth,” written by Frantz Fanon in 1961, is widely taught on campus.

Fanon wrote that “decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.”

By this standard, Hamas is a good and worthy anti-colonial organization, and there’s no wonder it has found supporters and useful idiots among the West’s self-loathing radicals.

Rich Lowry is editor in chief of the National Review

Chutkan is hearing the Jan. 6 case against Trump brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith and has decided to partially muzzle Trump with an order that is nonsensical and possibly unconstitutional.

It stipulates that Trump can still criticize the Biden administration and the Department of Justice and the “campaign platforms and policies” of his GOP rivals, including former Vice President Mike Pence. And Trump can continue to say he’s “innocent of the charges against him.”

Chutkan has forbidden Trump from statements targeting the special counsel, Jack Smith, who brought the charges against him, or “any reasonably foreseeable witness or the substance of their testimony.”

There’s no doubt that Trump’s commentary about the case has been lurid, at best. He shouldn’t call Jack Smith “deranged” or a “thug,” but this, alas, is how the former president expresses himself. And he has the right to comment on an inherently political case with massive political implications.

It’s not as though Trump is charged with a random personal offense. The alleged crimes have to do with his conduct after the 2020 election. Everything about the case is a matter of hot political dispute.

It is absurd to try to ban Trump from attacking the special counsel when he is the Justice Department’s instrument for bringing the charges. Besides, such prosecutors are always criticized by their targets. If, for some reason, attacks on Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr had been ruled out of bounds during the Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky investigations, Bill Clinton’s defenders would have been rendered practically mute.

As for the potential witnesses, one of them is Mike Pence, who is running against Trump for president. It is mighty generous of Judge Chutkan to allow Trump to address Pence’s policy plans. The chief political dispute between the two candidates, though, has to do with Jan. 6 and their clashing interpretations of who was right on that day.
Pence discusses this on the campaign trail, and Trump should be able to offer his rival interpretation. Welcome to life in a free society.

Chutkan wants to shut up Trump about questions that will be absolutely central to the 2024 campaign if he’s the Republican nominee. Joe Biden will run, to a large extent, on Jan. 6, and Trump will run, to a large extent, on the justice system being manipulated against him by the likes of Jack Smith.

Chutkan may think she has no choice. But the decision to charge Trump in this case was discretionary; the decision to schedule the trial in the midst of a presidential election was discretionary; and her unwillingness to see the obvious flaws in her order is discretionary, too.

A federal judge shouldn’t be the one setting the rules of the road for a presidential election.

Rich Lowry is editor in chief of the National Review

Donald Trump’s relatively crisis-free presidency in foreign affairs has created a sense, perhaps an accurate one, that he cowed enemies into not challenging the U.S.

As Sen. Tom Cotton has pointed out, Kabul didn’t collapse on Trump’s watch, Russia didn’t invade Ukraine and Hamas didn’t launch a historic terror attack on Israel.

Now this may have just been good fortune. Four years isn’t a large sample size. But the argument that adversaries feared him, and therefore acted with a measure of restraint, is quite intuitive.

No one is going to mistake Trump for Henry Kissinger. His view of the world was highly personal and reflected a few obsessions, especially the notion that we were getting ripped off by foreigners.

Yet, despite the feeling of chaos created by his constant shoot-from-the-hip bombast, things basically stayed on the rails.

The fact that Trump was erratic and took perceived slights so seriously made it difficult to know how he would react to any given provocation. It was personal unpredictability elevated to the level of game theory.

Maybe he was just blustering.  But who would want to find out?

It’s worth noting that he followed through on his promise to bomb ISIS into near-oblivion, and when given the chance to hit a committed enemy of the United States, the notorious Iranian operative Qasem Soleimani, he targeted him for killing despite the considerable risks.

The New York Times reported at the time: “After initially rejecting the Suleimani option on Dec. 28 and authorizing airstrikes on an Iranian-backed Shiite militia group instead, a few days later Mr. Trump watched, fuming, as television reports showed Iranian-backed attacks on the American Embassy in Baghdad, according to Defense Department and administration officials.

“By late Thursday, the president had gone for the extreme option. Top Pentagon officials were stunned.”

If U.S. officials were stunned, how must anyone around the world with American blood on his hands have felt? And wouldn’t it have made adversaries think twice about doing anything to set the president to “fuming”?

In an interview with Bret Baier back in June, Trump made vague reference to a threat he issued to Vladimir Putin about a prospective invasion of Ukraine that supposedly stayed Putin’s hand. Who knows the accuracy of this? But Trump characterized Putin as believing his threat only about 10 percent, and that gets at what was probably a key element of the Trump deterrent effect — a nagging sense that he might not be bluffing, even if it seemed likely he was.

In short, when Trump says that Hamas wouldn’t have done this on his watch, many Republicans, and perhaps independents in a general election, will tend to believe him.

To his credit, Biden has said the appropriate things in the wake of the Hamas attack, but sentiments go only so far. A more important question is whether the right people fear President Biden as they appeared to be scared of his predecessor.

Rich Lowry is editor in chief of the National Review

The Hamas terror attack, together with the ongoing Ukraine war and the looming Chinese threat to Taiwan, is putting a spotlight on the pitiful state of our capacity to manufacture the weapons necessary to the defense of our allies and ourselves.

According to a CNN report, an Israel ground invasion of Gaza would “create a new and entirely unexpected demand for 155 mm artillery ammunition and other weapons at a time when the U.S. and its allies and partners have been stretched thin from more than 18 months of fighting in Ukraine.”

We are learning to our regret that we are using an attenuated post-Cold War, “end of history” defense-industrial base to try to meet the security needs of a newly threatening international environment with the real risk of Great Power conflict.

It now should be a matter of the highest national priority to use every lever of government and the private sector to bolster the defense-industrial base in all its aspects.

The Biden administration should care about this at least as much as incentivizing the production of electric vehicles most people don’t want to buy.

We aren’t being asked, by the way, to fight a three-front war in Europe, the Middle East and Asia ourselves. No, the call is simply to provide arms to allies under attack or threat. If we can’t do that, what does it say about our status as the world’s preeminent power?

In Ukraine, the hopes of Moscow for a lightning victory and of the West for a sweepingly successful Ukraine counteroffensive both appear to have come a cropper. Now, it’s a grinding artillery war.

Ukraine is estimated to need 1.5 million shells a year, and has been firing as many as 6,000 a day. The U.S. had supplied 2 million artillery shells to Ukraine as of July, and has been scrounging around — along with other Western powers — to feed whatever supplies it can find into the maw of the war.

If we can’t supply Ukraine, what if we become embroiled in a major war with China?

War games conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies have the U.S. firing 5,000 long-range missiles in the first weeks of war, instantly depleting our stocks. According to CSIS, the U.S. would expend all its Long-Range Anti-Ship Missiles within the first week of a conflict — when it requires almost two years to manufacture one of the missiles.

There is no easy way out of the hole we’ve dug ourselves. It will require more spending on defense; more reliable, long-term contracts for the production of key weapons; a focus on securing the supply chain necessary to the production of high-tech munitions; and assistance to manufacturers in training workers, among other things.

The history of empires and nations that don’t mind the need for up-to-date weapons at the scale necessary to defeat or deter adversaries isn’t a happy one. It’s in our power to avoid this fate.

Rich Lowry is editor in chief of the National Review

After the spasm of Hamas murder, rape, and kidnapping over the weekend, the U.S. Palestinian Community Network exclaimed, “Our people are waging an anti-colonial, anti-occupation, and anti-Zionist liberation struggle!”

According to an anti-Israel statement signed by dozens of student groups at Harvard, Israel is undertaking “colonial retaliation.”

An academic cottage industry is devoted to deeming Israel a decades-long exercise in “settler colonialism,” and Hamas itself is partial to the term.

The use of the word “colonial” in all its forms isn’t meant to accurately describe reality or clarify anything; rather it is a term of abuse wielded to delegitimize Israel and justify every means of resisting its very existence.

The “colonial” smear can’t survive contact with the slightest critical scrutiny.

First of all, the original Jewish settlers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries weren’t sent by any mother country to set up enclaves for the honor and profit of the homeland. To the contrary, they were escaping countries that, in many cases, didn’t want them. It would have been perverse for Jews to have sought, say, to establish an outpost of Russia in the Levant, given the atrocities routinely carried out against them on Russian soil.

They thought of their venture as a return to a place that Jews had inhabited for thousands of years.

Indeed, the colonialism charge raises the question of how an indigenous people can be colonizers?

The Jewish people have had a connection to Israel since Abraham. The people became fundamentally identified with the land; indeed, they were synonymous. The land was a locus of the Jewish faith — the site of its holy city, Jerusalem; the place where many religious commandments, the mitzvot, were supposed to be performed; the object of yearning after the dispossession of Ancient Israel (“Next year in Jerusalem”).

There is a reason that Zionists had no interest in settling in Uganda, as was proposed in the early 20th century.

On top of this, Israel has been willing at key junctures, notably right at the beginning in 1948, to accept a two-state solution.

The Palestinians must be counted among the worst nationalists the world has ever known: They have repeatedly rejected opportunities to obtain a nation-state because they hate Israel’s legitimate national aspirations more than they love their own.

In one sense, Israel’s ultimate offense is to have won defensive wars fought against antagonists seeking to wipe it from the map.

As for Gaza, Israel ended its occupation nearly 20 years ago. It wanted to wash its hands of the place as much as possible, an understandable impulse but one that has proved unsustainable.

Hamas won legislative elections in 2006 and then expelled the rival Palestinian group Fatah in a factional war. In total control, Hamas proceeded to make Gaza a base for conducting armed operations against Israel.

Israel’s failing here wasn’t so much heavy-handedness — although it took measures to protect itself from the threat in Gaza, as did Egypt — but the naive belief it could reach a de facto accommodation with a Hamas that would misrule Gaza for its own ends while not becoming too dire a threat to Israel.

Its mass terror attack on Israel ends that delusion.

If nothing else, the accusation of colonialism is very telling. There is one country in the roll call of nations that doesn’t deserve to exist. One people that doesn’t deserve a homeland. One people who, despite being subjected to hideous persecutions over the centuries and being constantly attacked today, is supposedly guilty of every possible crime.

And it happens to be Israel and its Jewish inhabitants.

The Hamas attack was just a taste of what it would do to Israel if it had the power — extricate an indigenous people from their homeland in the most brutal fashion possible, in the name, of course, of anti-colonialism.

(Rich Lowry is on Twitter @RichLowry) (c) 2023 by King Features Syndicate

Trump’s court dates and legal entanglements aren’t a distraction from his campaign, as some observers predicted; in large part, they are the campaign.

We’re all familiar with the so-called front-porch campaigns of the late-19th century, most famously the Republican William McKinley who would have delegations of supporters visit him at his home in Canton, Ohio. Joe Biden built on the concept with his lockdown-compliant basement campaign during the 2020 campaign (at least McKinley interacted with real people).

Now, Trump has come up with another variant of this concept — the courtroom campaign.

It involves massive media attention before, during and after court appearances; images and statements of bold, unadorned defiance; and inflamed Republican emotions from the sense that he is being treated unfairly.

This is the potent political cocktail that Trump has used to build what appears to be a nearly unassailable lead in the Republican primaries. Perhaps GOP voters were going to swing toward Trump no matter what, or maybe the struggles of the Ron DeSantis campaign have played a big role. But everything suggests that, so far, Trump’s legal travails have been political gold.

Every key juncture of Trump’s legal drama has allowed him to dominate the fight for media coverage, which, as we learned in the 2016 nomination battle, is key terrain in a primary.

It used to be that candidate debates were, besides some traditional occasions (a state fair, a party dinner), the most important events on the political calendar. No more.

So there was a nice initial Republican debate in August? Well, the next day there was an instantly iconic Trump mugshot everywhere on TV and social media.

There was another, not-so-great Republican debate in September. Who cares? Trump showed up at his civil fraud trial in New York City the following Monday.

When much of the Republican Party is in a state of high alarm about the instruments of the establishment being used against the right, Donald Trump is starring in a real-life drama about partisan prosecutors and the Biden Justice Department trying to annihilate his business and jail him ahead of the 2024 election.

What else is going to generate more interest and sympathy among perhaps a decisive proportion of Republicans
than that?

It only helps Trump that, despite his sundry deceptions and disgraceful conduct, the myriad legal actions against him are generally ridiculous at worst and ambiguous and legally adventurous at best, while almost all represent blatant selective prosecution.

Not for the first time, Trump and his enemies have a symbiotic relationship — they want to destroy him by any means necessary, and he uses their enmity as his chief political calling card.

This time, the stakes are higher than ever, and we could be heading to a true “Gotterdammerung” next year, with a major-party presidential candidate at risk of going to jail months before a national election.

Rich Lowry is editor in chief of the National Review

The former president has paid no discernible price for skipping the Republican debates. Arguably, he’s been winning them by diminishing the rest of the field through his absence, while his polling has held steady or gone up a little.

The latest forum, at the Reagan Library, will not be long remembered, or perhaps remembered at all.

The candidates tended either to overpromise about what they’d do as president in frenzied, rapid-fire fashion, or to talk over one another in squabbles difficult to watch or listen to.

If Trump was hoping that, if he failed to show, his opponents would tear at each other in pursuit of marginal advantage in the race for second, third or fourth place, it hardly could have gone better.

In fact, it went so swimmingly that one of Trump’s advisors took the opportunity to announce that he won’t show up for the third debate, scheduled for November in Miami, either. Why mess with a successful formula?

It’s another instance where Trump has a set of political rules all to himself. Everyone else has been desperate to secure a place, even at the farthest edge, of the debate stage, while Trump has foregone an opportunity to occupy its center.

The difference between Trump and the other candidates is that they seek attention, but Trump himself is attention.

This isn’t a criticism of the other candidates who almost all are public-spirited people. It’s simply a fact of life as they grapple with running against a de facto incumbent president who is also a massive celebrity.

Chris Christie hoped to take down Trump in the debates, but now many of his anti-Trump gibes are meant to goad Trump into showing up or to slam him for not doing so.

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with contention, by the way.

Arguments can be clarifying and important, although not so much if they are carefully prepared attacks on an opponent based on not terribly significant opposition research.

Is it a good thing for the Republican Party that its frontrunner won’t show up at, traditionally, some of the highest profile, most consequential events of the campaign season? No. It is clearly a disservice to the voters and to the process. Chris Christie and Ron DeSantis, who has also been pressing the point, are both right about this.

It is insulting to Republican voters that Trump feels that he doesn’t need to show them the basic consideration of standing on a debate stage for two hours. But what is to be done if Republican voters refuse to be insulted?

While Trump doesn’t deserve a coronation, a significant portion of Republican voters are ready to outfit him with St. Edward’s Crown.
There’s no good political answer for this phenomenon, except for the other candidates to keep making their case, hope there’s a breakout or the field begins to winnow — and, yes, continue to show up at the debates, whether the frontrunner, calculating his own self-interest above all, deigns to make an appearance.

Rich Lowry is editor-in-chief of the National Review

Both of them caused ripples when their praise for Harris in recent TV interviews was notably cool, as if they were at a high-end fundraising dinner and hated the escargot but had to try to convince the hostess that they really loved it.

The Biden campaign reportedly contacted both Raskin and Pelosi. The Maryland congressman revised his remarks to say that Harris is “unquestionably the best running mate for President Biden in 2024,” while the former House Speaker’s office pointed to the favorable things she said about Harris in her initial interview.

What Raskin and Pelosi clearly know, if they can’t say it out loud, is that Joe Biden botched his vice-presidential pick; it is the worst pick in half a century and easily one of the worst in the last 80 years.

As Democrats begin to realize Biden’s political weakness, with Donald Trump barreling down the pike, Harris is one of the factors — although not the main one — keeping them from doing anything about it.

What if someone did convince Biden to step aside for the good of the party? Well, that might open the way for Harris herself to become the nominee. In other words, out of the pan and into the fire.

Even if she lost in an open nominating process, it’d be quite the spectacle for Democrats to turn away a potentially “historic” presidential nominee for someone else.

So, she’s at least a playing a role in the propping up of what may prove the weakest incumbent presidential candidate since George H.W. Bush.

This isn’t the only downside. Harris is going to be an issue next year because everyone realizes there’s a significant chance that Biden wouldn’t be able to serve out a full second term.

Typically, a vice president’s popularity matters only for his or her own political ambitions; this time, it could make a difference in the presidential race because her standing is, in a word, abysmal.

In the new NBC News poll, the theme of which is that Biden and Trump are both abidingly unpopular, Harris is right there with them. At 31%, her positive rating is lower than both of theirs, and her negative rating, 51%, is higher than Biden’s.

The bar Biden needed to clear in his vice-presidential pick wasn’t high. He either needed a political nonentity or a popular entity who ideally had some governing credibility; instead, he went with the unpopular nonentity.

I think to find a worse major-party pick — and actual vice president — you have to go back to Spiro Agnew. At least, as far as we know, Harris hasn’t been taking kickbacks that will force her to resign — in fact, she may be the relatively ethical half of the Biden-Harris ticket.

Wherever you rank Kamala Harris, there’s no doubt that she’s a poor selection that Democrats will almost certainly have to tolerate because of an ideological trap of their own making.

Rich Lowry is editor in chief of the National Review

Joe Biden’s incredible stories have finally generated more mainstream attention, particularly after he erroneously claimed to have gone to Ground Zero the day after Sept. 11 and stared into “the gates of hell.”

The president even got an extensive, excoriating fact check from CNN — not usually known for humiliating Democratic politicians — about all his false and exaggerated yarns.

So why does Biden do this? To understand the source of his constant flagrant departures from reality, it’s worth reverting to the late philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt’s analysis in his classic essay “On Bullshit.”

“It is impossible,” Frankfurt writes, “for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.” The person doing it cares about the facts only “insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.”

What is Biden’s purpose? Self-valorization, of course — literally from the moment of his birth, which he has repeatedly mischaracterized. Biden likes to say that his grandfather died in the same hospital where he was born days later, but it’s not true.

His stories are almost always supposed to be dramatic, moving and pointed, with Biden himself the center of the action — overcoming adversity, fighting injustice, righting wrongs, witnessing great events and acts of courage.

The psychologist might have trouble disentangling Biden’s chip on his shoulder and sense of inadequacy from his excessive self-regard, with the latter certainly compensating for, to some extent, the former.
For instance, Biden’s classic, falsehood-laden fusillade at a New Hampshire campaign event in 1987 about his own brilliance and accomplishment as a student was disturbing, hilarious and, at the end of the day, simply pathetic.

Biden is a talker, and of the worst sort. It’s one thing to be a talented conversationalist, brimming with interesting and funny things to say. Or a gifted speaker, whose remarks never leave anyone dissatisfied.

Biden, on the other hand, is notable only for the amount of his talking, not its quality.

Biden wasn’t particularly careful when he was a much younger man in the U.S. Senate. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have blown himself up in 1987 cribbing from British politician Neil Kinnock to say false things about his own family background.

Now, he’s older. That means some of these stories have been related over and over, and stories never get worse in the retelling, only better. On top of this, he’s almost certainly more genuinely confused about timelines and facts than he was in his prime.

Now, his malarkey, to use his term from his vice-presidential debate with Paul Ryan back in 2012, is more obvious and discrediting than ever. His words as a Biden are usually insufferable and, at times, complete bullshit.

Rich Lowry is editor in chief of the National Review

What the Missouri Compromise was to Henry Clay, what the Second Reply to Hayne was to Daniel Webster, what the Civil Rights Act of 1957 was to Lyndon Johnson, Carhartt sweatshirts and baggy shorts will be to John Fetterman.

The Pennsylvania senator is the poster boy — if self-indulgent sloppiness is your thing — for the Senate dropping a dress code that required senators to dress in business attire when appearing on the Senate floor.

Fetterman briefly complied with the rule by making the sacrifice of putting on a suit and tie after he was first elected. Then, he reverted to his standard uniform that makes it look like he just arrived after sitting on his couch, surrounded by empty pizza boxes, watching football games all weekend.

There’s business casual, then there’s Fetterman’s garb. If he showed up at almost any service or working class job in America dressed this way, his supervisor would give him a stern talking to and insist that he have more respect for himself, his colleagues, and his customers.

But, as it happens, he’s only a United States senator, so he can wear whatever he damn pleases.

When the history of the decline of American institutions is written, the jettisoning of the Senate dress code may not be more than a footnote, yet it will deserve mention.

It has long been remarked that it matters how we dress. Mark Twain is sometimes said to have written (in what’s actually a paraphrase), “Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.”
It turns out that slovenly people do, however.

The unraveling began several decades ago with the advent of Casual Friday, which eventually spread into Casual Everyday.

The Senate giving way to this ethos after a couple of centuries of a higher standard is a sign of the times.

We no longer reliably produce people willing to conform themselves to the norms and expectations of their institutions; personal brands are considered more important. And the leaders of institutions tend to lack the courage to insist on rules that may no longer fashionable, even if they still serve an important function.

It’s not that John Fetterman is going to be a better or worse senator depending on how he dresses — he’ll be a party-line vote regardless. But his dress speaks to how he regards his position.

This would be obvious in other contexts. If someone shows up at a funeral or a wedding in jeans and a T-shirt, it is taken, understandably, as a sign of disrespect, as an unwillingness to make the basic effort to acknowledge the solemnity of the occasion.

A session of the Senate isn’t as fraught and meaningful as a wedding or a funeral, but it should be considered an event of some consequence. The history of the body stretches back to the beginning of the republic, and it is invested with considerable power. Dressing appropriately acknowledges this; dressing as if it’s a bowling alley disregards it.

Fetterman has won this battle, but at the price of beclowning himself and his institution — not that he cares.

Rich Lowry is editor in chief of the National Review

To the contrary, we already know that Biden was complicit in an inherently corrupt enterprise that centered on selling access to him when he was a high government official.

Consider Burisma, the shady Ukrainian energy company that paid his son lavishly to serve on its board. At any point, Biden could have shut down this operation to use his son to get to him, and at any number of junctures, it should have been obvious — if it wasn’t from the beginning — what was happening. Biden did nothing and, in fact, played along.

Burisma was founded by Mykola “Nikolay” Zlochevsky, who had to go on the lam after the government of Viktor Yanukovych fell in the Maidan Revolution. The new government of Petro Poroshenko put Zlochevsky under investigation.

So, Burisma needed a helping hand. The company put Hunter Biden on the board in 2014 for $1 million a year. Assuming for the sake of argument that Joe Biden wasn’t aware of the arrangement beforehand, as soon he found out, the upstanding thing to do would have been to say, “Sorry — there’s no way a son of mine is going to be on the take in a foreign country that’s part of my policy portfolio.”

Instead, Burisma immediately began to ask for what it was paying for. Shortly after Hunter joined, the CFO of Burisma, Vadym Pozharsky, sent an email requesting that he and his business partner, Devon Archer, “use your influence” (they don’t call it influence-peddling for nothing) to bring a halt to the investigation into Zlochevsky and Burisma.

Burisma had a board meeting in Dubai. Afterward, Nikolay Zlochevsky and Vadym Pozharsky requested an urgent private meeting with Hunter and Archer.

Pozharsky asked Hunter, “Can you ring your dad?” This request was astonishingly inappropriate. But, lo and behold, Hunter rang his dad.

Hunter told the vice president that he was with “Nikolay and Vadym,” and the vice president apparently didn’t need a refresher on who they were. Hunter insisted that his Ukrainian associates and benefactors “need our support.”

Yet again, here’s a moment for righteous indignation. “How dare you call me to advance your shady dealings with sleazy foreigners?”

As it happens, within days, Joe Biden traveled to Ukraine and met with President Poroshenko to urge him to fire the prosecutor, Viktor Shokin.

This was a blatant conflict of interest. Politicians who want to be above reproach stay a hundred miles away from such situations. The then-vice president didn’t, clearly, because the family business depended on two things: Biden being in powerful positions and Hunter taking advantage of his proximity to power.

What’s more, Biden helped cover for Hunter by approving a statement from his communications director whitewashing his dealings.

A better steward of the public trust wouldn’t have tolerated any of this for a minute — indeed, would have felt embarrassed and disgusted by it. Instead, Joe Biden was on board, and we have plenty evidence of it.

It’s a label, though, that Joe Biden clearly deserves on immigration, an area where — along with inflation and the Afghan debacle — there are echoes of the Carter years.

Back in 1980, an overwhelmed Carter administration struggled to cope with the Mariel boatlift, a rapid surge of Cubans into South Florida, just as the hapless Biden White House is watching the current migrant crisis strain communities around the country.

A promising young Democratic governor, Bill Clinton, ended up collateral damage when boatlift migrants housed at a fort in Arkansas rioted. Clinton’s predicament brings to mind the political agony of New York City Mayor Eric Adams and other Democratic officeholders now paying the price for a failed border policy outside their direct control.

Of course, the two crises, separated by more than 40 years, aren’t the same. The scale of the influx today, running into the millions, is much larger than the boatlift of about 125,000 people; the 1980 crisis largely involved just one city, Miami; and no foreign leader is manipulating the situation with the blatant cynicism of Fidel Castro.

No, rather than a communist dictator flooding the U.S. with migrants out of spite, it is Joe Biden doing it to himself and his country with his incompetence and willful negligence at the border.

That’s not to say that Jimmy Carter wasn’t indecisive and ineffectual. Embarrassed by thousands of Cubans who crowded the Peruvian embassy seeking asylum, Castro said that anyone could leave the port of Mariel as long as someone came to pick them up, catalyzing a mad dash of Cubans from Miami in boats who wanted to pick up their compatriots.

Carter equivocated. One day, he said the flow would be cut off; the next day, he said that “ours is a country of refugees.” The day after those remarks, 4,500 Cubans arrived, more in a single day than the total Carter had talked about taking in at the outset.

Tens of thousands of people showing up with nothing is going to be a burden at any time and any place. Miami begged for federal aid and used the Orange Bowl for temporary shelter.

But the governor at the time, Democrat Bob Graham, sounded a lot like today’s Democrats in areas struggling to cope with the mass arrival of migrants. Graham warned of the threat migrants “pose in terms of jobs, pressure on schools, and welfare support. We are in a period where national sympathy for refugees is at a low point.”

Just as we’ve heard during the current crisis in places like Chicago, African Americans in Miami complained about so much focus and energy getting devoted to people who just arrived. “The feeling is that the Black community was waiting in line and now our time had come,” an influential Black lawyer said. “Only it hasn’t.”

In the fall of 1980, Castro ended the boatlift.

In 2023, there’s no indication that the man most responsible for today’s crisis, a president of the United States beholden to his party’s left, wants to stop the ongoing debacle at the border.

Rich Lowry is editor in chief of the National Review

The European Union wants to ban gas-powered cars in 2035. California, New Jersey and Massachusetts are doing the same.

The goals here would make Soviet central planners blush. Last year, electric vehicle accounted for about 7% of U.S. sales, but according to the panjandrums at the Environmental Protection Agency, they’ll have to be nearly 40% by 2027. A couple of years after that, they’re supposed to be higher than 60%.

And why not? All that’s missing is the charging capacity and supply and processing of the minerals necessary to build the 1,000-pound batteries, not to mention the consumer demand.

For Biden and his allies, though, what kind of automobiles we drive is not a practical question but almost a theological one.

Insofar a rush to electric cars throws us into the arms of Chinese manufacturers and suppliers, it should rightfully be thought of as an anti-industrial policy.

We foolishly haven’t made adequate arrangements for mining or processing the minerals the batteries require, and it’s hard to ramp up quickly. Fortunately, there’s a country that’s a leader this area.

Unfortunately, it’s China.

China is projected in the years ahead to maintain near total domination of the production of anode and cathode materials, key components of electric car batteries.

The U.S. has stiff tariffs against Chinese imports, but there’s still the question of the supply chain. Morgan Stanley writes, “The path we’re on now, despite existing legislation that attempts to incentivize onshoring, pushes rapid EV adoption which inherently increases reliance on a China-dominated battery supply chain.”

It’s not as though there’s anything inherently wrong with electric cars. If they are reliable, affordable, and valued by consumers — no problem. There’s no slighting the engineering achievement of Tesla or its genuine appeal to high-end consumers.

As Mark Mills of the Manhattan Institute points out, electric cars are overwhelmingly part of the luxury market, and 90% of electric cars sold in the U.S. are second or third cars. What the U.S. government is insisting is that this niche market be imposed on the rest of the country.

The sales of electric vehicles in the U.S. have been growing but appear to be plateauing. Electric vehicles were 8.6% of new light-duty vehicle sales in the first quarter of this year, basically flat compared to the last quarter of 2022, at 8.5%.

The climate case for forcing these numbers higher is not as strong as advertised. It’s not clear exactly how much electric cars reduce emissions once all the inputs are factored in. On top of this, transportation accounts for less than 30% of U.S. emissions, and air and rail travel, as well as shipping, make a not-insignificant contribution.

Electric vehicles should be considered a nice, promising addition to the variety of the car market, not a quasi-holy obligation to be pursued at all costs.

Rich Lowry is editor in chief of the National Review

The piece, written by the co-author of a new book, “Why Empires Fall: Rome, America, and the Future of the West,” shows that the cottage industry in comparisons between the United States and Rome is as robust as ever.

Both conservatives and progressives are prone to their own versions of this narrative, tending to emphasize either moral decline or imperial overstretch respectively.

But the most important thing to know about us and our supposed imperial forebear is that we aren’t Rome and aren’t experiencing any of the most direct, spectacular causes of its fall.

It is true that Rome’s fall — a long, messy process — didn’t unfold with the pleasing cinematic simplicity the popular imagination might believe; the extent of the barbarian population transfers have been exaggerated; and the eastern half of the empire lived on for another 1,000 years.

Still, the Western Roman Empire unquestionably fell, with disastrous consequences for a long time. It’s just that dragging us into it is wildly off base.

Rome tore itself apart with constant assassinations, usurpations and civil wars.

It weakened itself economically and militarily while confronting challenges from armed bands on its borders it became incapable of handling as it steadily lost its territory and tax base to barbarian groups.

Is this happening to America?

Well, an armed contingent of Quebecers isn’t (like the Visigoths in Rome) wandering throughout the United States, fighting periodic battles with the US military and seeking subsidies from the US Senate before besieging — and eventually sacking — Washington, DC.

Migrants to the United States don’t settle en masse in national groupings led by military leaders seeking power and preferment.

They disperse throughout the country and take illegal jobs as busboys and the like.

US presidents have to worry about declining poll numbers, a recalcitrant congressional opposition and re-election campaigns.

They don’t, like Roman emperors, need to think all the time about potential assassination and armed usurpers.

They don’t need to worry that if they assign a general to take over, say, CENTCOM, he will use the position to muster the troops and resources to challenge for power himself.

The 1st Infantry Division isn’t marching on Washington, DC, from Fort Riley, Kansas, and fighting a pitched battle with the 4th Marine Division devastating to the countryside somewhere in Ohio.

None of this is to deny the United States and the West may have entered a period of what will ultimately prove to be terminal decline or that rivals, most notably China, are on the rise.

It is to say that unless our representative democracy degenerates into an unelected dictatorship with no reliable means of succession and Canada and Mexico begin to eat away at our territory, the story of our decline is not going to track closely with that of Rome, a vastly different polity, at a different time.

Rich Lowry is editor in chief of the National Review

The former vice president is a MAGA villain for doing his constitutional duty on Jan. 6, so Ramaswamy has to find a way to wiggle out of endorsing his conduct on that day, no matter how convoluted or inane.

On “Meet the Press” the other day, he went with an alternative-reality critique of Pence. According to Ramaswamy, the then-vice president missed “a historic opportunity.” Pence could have forged “a national compromise” by leading the way on an election-reform package of single-day voting on Election Day (which would become a federal holiday), paper ballots, and government-issued ID.

And that’s what Ramaswamy would have done — forge “national consensus,” whereas Pence missed his chance to “reunite” the country.

As it happens, the only parties to whom Ramaswamy’s posited grand bargain would have been unsatisfactory are a) the United States Congress and b) President Donald J. Trump.

If we indulge this little make-believe, what Ramaswamy outlines would have been a massive federal overhaul of the election system, the kind of change it takes years to build a consensus around — through advocacy, committee hearings, horse-trading, and all the other elements of legislative sausage-making.

One way or the other, this legislation would have entailed overturning the voting rules in most states in the union. Of course, Democrats would have been wholly opposed.

What would Ramaswamy’s bargaining chip have been to get them to accept a deal? He would have presumably threatened not to do his constitutional duty.

Rather than creating a national consensus, it would have taken Trump’s post-election scheme to an entirely new level. The Jan. 6 riot was shameful, but there was never any hope of a true constitutional crisis that day because Pence was clear-eyed about his obligation and stalwart in carrying it out. What Ramaswamy is saying is that his role would have been up for grabs, potentially throwing the entire, well-established process into disorder.

And everyone would supposedly have been fine with it, indeed rallied around him as the nation’s healer.

Let’s extend the fantasy further and say that Ramaswamy, from out of nowhere, got this electoral package through Congress in a matter of weeks, days, or even hours.

You know who would have been outraged by it? The incumbent president Ramaswamy would have been serving. Trump didn’t want a package of election reforms; he wanted the result of the 2020 election blocked or overturned, and he wanted his vice president to use the leverage of Jan. 6 to do it.

Anything short of this would have been anathema to him. So, the legislative magician, Vivek Ramaswamy, would have been as dastardly a traitor as Mike Pence.

.In short, Ramaswamy’s counterfactual history is preposterous at every level. But it gives him something to say to keep his distance from Pence, in another piece of insincere salesmanship at which he has so excelled in the 2024 campaign.

Rich Lowry is editor-in-chief of the National Review

“Why are Republicans so obsessed with Harris?” asked a Boston Globe columnist.

Jemele Hill, the former ESPN journalist currently with The Atlantic, rapped Nikki Haley in lurid terms for warning of a President Harris: “So part of the reason racism is such a terrible sickness in this country is because politicians like this know they can rally a certain base with the fear of OH MY GOD A BLACK WOMAN MIGHT BE PRESIDENT IF YOU DON’T VOTE FOR ME.”

Hill then connected Haley’s sentiment with racist violence. Q.E.D.

It is simply a fact that, should Joe Biden win a second term, Kamala Harris has the greatest chance to become president of any sitting vice president since Harry Truman.

There is no reason, thank goodness, to believe that Biden’s health is as poor as FDR’s near the end.

Between his bouts of rambling near-incoherence, rickety gait, and cadaver-like beach physique, though, Biden is not convincing anyone he has a youthful vigor that belies his years.

At a time of deep political division, Biden unites Americans in a common view of his complete unsuitability for a second term. An Associated Press/NORC poll found that 77% of voters think he’s too old to serve again, including 69% percent of Democrats. They are being driven to this conclusion by the unadorned evidence of Biden’s disturbingly uneven performance.

Of course, this is why Kamala Harris looms so large.

Anyone who thinks Harris is getting unprecedentedly hostile treatment because she’s a history-making minority woman has clearly never heard of Dan Quayle or Dick Cheney, punching-bag veeps who were very unhistoric white males. Quayle was relentlessly and unfairly pilloried during George H.W. Bush’s presidency, while Cheney was made out to be the evil genius of the George W. Bush administration.

It’s no wonder that Harris, an off-puttingly poor political performer who is a stereotypical identity-politics-obsessed California progressive, should be a political target. She has managed to be both undistinguished on the one hand and widely disliked on the other. In late June, an NBC News poll had her positive rating at 32 and negative rating at 49, clocking in at the lowest ratings for a vice president in the history of the poll.

Usually, someone has her kind of rock-bottom numbers after being associated with a deeply unpopular new initiative or a major scandal. But the only baggage Vice President Harris has is her own political persona.

Democrats seek to build a defensive ring around the vice president based on accusations of racism and sexism. It won’t work. Everyone knows President Harris is a real possibility, and the fact that she’s next in line will be an inevitable part of the 2024 debate.

Rich Lowry is editor-in-chief of the National Review

He’s so far ahead in the polls that he felt comfortable skipping the first GOP presidential debate in Milwaukee, while on the actual debate stage, his epigone, Vivek Ramaswamy, soaked up an outsized portion of the attention.

The 38-year-old billionaire biotech entrepreneur shows that the Trump brand is so strong that it can create successful subsidiaries, the Trump storyline so compelling that subplots can be spun off into their own programs.

Thursday night was a ‘MAGA’ tag team, with Trump trying to detract from the debate from the outside and Ramaswamy shaking it up on the inside.

When Trump declared a victor afterwards, it was, unsurprisingly, Ramaswamy — for having the courage and perspicacity to declare Donald Trump the greatest president of the 21st century.

If Ramaswamy minds these occasional condescending pats on the head, he hasn’t yet showed any sign of it. He is making history as the first presidential candidate to be in the tank for his leading opponent.

Ramaswamy’s devotion to Trump raises the natural question why he’s in the race and running the risk of denying everyone the benefits of a Trump second term? Why should the pilot fish try to supplant the shark?
Ramaswamy has learned shrewdly from the power of the Trump phenomenon.

The first lesson is that if you want to benefit from the energetic support of MAGA, you have to be pro-Trump. Many candidates, media figures, and social media influencers long ago figured this out. Ramaswamy’s truly audacious innovation is to apply this insight to his own presidential campaign.

If Ramaswamy leaps ahead of Gov. Ron DeSantis into second place in national polls, the top of the GOP field will consist of Donald Trump and a pro-Trump alternative who is zealous in defense of Trump’s interests and loath to criticize him for anything.

The second lesson is that whatever gets the spotlight directed your way is a good thing. If it means, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, accusing all your opponents on the debate stage of being “bought and paid for,” go for it. If it means attributing the hawkishness of Nikki Haley on Ukraine to her intention to get lucrative seats on the boards of defense contractors, why not?

Finally, never get separated from Trump on anything important. As Trump has defended Jan. 6, so has Ramaswamy found unpersuasive justifications for it. Since Mike Pence has been cast into the outer darkness by MAGA for doing his constitutional duty on Jan. 6, Ramaswamy is going to have nothing to do with the former vice president. He refused to say on the debate stage that Pence had done the right thing that day but did want to make it clear that he would absolutely pardon Donald Trump as president.

The answer to the paradox of a pro-Trump candidate running against Trump is that every vote Ramaswamy gets is denied to some other non-Trump contender who might be a more serious threat to the former president.

Rich Lowry is editor in chief of the National Review

A new national CBS poll has Donald Trump leading second-place Ron DeSantis by 46 points, 62-16. The latest Fox News poll had a more modest 37-point Trump lead. (Vivek Ramaswamy is third in both surveys, at 7 and 11% respectively.)

It’s sometimes said that Trump is the de facto incumbent in the race, and indeed these are the kind of numbers you’d expect of a sitting president who is sweeping marginal opponents to the side as he secures his party’s renomination.

The top-line results aren’t that different from the primacy race — such as it is — on the Democratic side. The Fox poll has Joe Biden beating Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. 64 to 17, with Marianne Williamson at 9.

Is there a mercy rule in presidential politics?

Trump could be forgiven for looking at his opponents and seeing: a highly touted governor whose campaign has steadily sunk in national polls; a young, smooth-talking entrepreneur who isn’t a threat to him but is helpfully soaking up some share of the non-Trump vote; a sunny senator who has made some gains but certainly hasn’t broken out; a former vice president who is hated by MAGA (for all the wrong reasons); a former governor who is a gifted political pugilist but is unpopular in the party; and a bunch of others whose names he doesn’t necessarily need to know.

What’s not to like?

Even if one of the candidates surges and sweeps up all the current non-Trump vote, there’s simply not enough of it to get to 50 right now. No wonder Trump is talking as if the race is over, the Trump super PAC is running spots hitting Biden, and Trump says there’s no need for him to show up at the Republican debates.

The cockiness could well be justified, but a sense of inevitability can be a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it disheartens the opposition and communicates strength; on the other, it can fade into a high-handed sense of taking the voters for granted.

And Trump still has to win Iowa, where his support is a little softer.

The new NBC News/Des Moines Register poll has Trump at 42%, with DeSantis at 19% and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott at 9%. That’s a substantial lead, but both DeSantis and Scott have large portions of the electorate saying they are their second choice or that they are actively considering them. Both also have high favorable ratings comparable to Trump’s.

In the portion of the survey conducted prior to the Georgia indictment, his lead was 38–20 over DeSantis — again, sizable, but not nearly enough to say he has this thing put away, not in the middle of August.
Iowa can break late. Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who won Iowa in 2012, didn’t really start moving until late December. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who won four years earlier, started his upward march around November.

So it looks late out there, no doubt, and has for some time, but it’s not over.

Rich Lowry is editor in chief of the National Review

By the same token, the definition of a convert to immigration restrictionism is a big-city mayor dealing with a surge of illegal immigration in his city.

In his desperate pleas for federal help to deal with about 100,000 migrants who have come to New York City since the spring of 2022, Mayor Eric Adams is vindicating the hawkish position on immigration with almost every utterance.

All that it has taken to explode the lazy cliches that have defined the progressive position on the issue is a heavy flow of illegal immigration.

If immigration is an unalloyed good, this influx should be a boon to New York City and its future. Why stop at 100,000 if the city could have 200,000, or 300,000? If immigration has no cost, why is New York spending $5 billion this year absorbing this flow?

According to Adams, New York City “is being destroyed by the migrant crisis.”

Long gone are the days when Adams pledged during his campaign to “lift up immigrants as high as Lady Liberty lifts her torch in our harbor, as a beacon of hope for all who come to our shores.” Now, he sounds a lot like Donald Trump.

New York has been actively discouraging immigrants, or, to use the progressive line, “slamming the door on new migrants.” Flyers distributed by the city at the border say, “Housing in NYC is very expensive,” and no one can say that isn’t truth in advertising. “Please consider,” the message pleads, “another city as you make your decision about where to settle in the U.S.”

What Adams is learning is that the key questions when it comes to immigration are: how many, from where, with what skills, and what will they do once here.

The fact is — as border areas already realized — low-skilled migrants with few connections in the community showing up en masse constitutes an intolerable fiscal and social burden.

It is true that there are unique circumstances at play for Adams. Asylum seekers can’t work until their applications have been considered for six months; New York City has a right-to-shelter law that has added to the expense.

Even places without New York’s shelter laws are strained by the arrival of the Biden-era illegal immigrants and have been declaring states of emergency.

The wave of migrants over the last couple of years aside, immigrants to the U.S. are heavily reliant on public resources since they tend to be poor and have low levels of education. An analysis of Census Bureau data by the Center for Immigration Studies shows that 58% of households in New York State headed by immigrants use at least one welfare program.

And as we see in the current crisis, if people show up who need housing, medical care, and education, no one is simply going to say no.

What New York City is seeking, after all the rote invocations of the Statue of Liberty, is fewer migrants competing with people already living in the city for resources and attention.

Welcome to reality, Mayor Adams.

Rich Lowry is editor in chief of the National Review

Donald Trump finally issued a complete denunciation of his former vice president, who now has been downgraded all the way to Marco Rubio-circa-2016 territory.

Pence becomes the highest official to have disappointed Trump with his supposed poor judgment and low character — a status that Pence will maintain until such time Trump is elected president again and inevitably let down by everyone around him, up to and including his next vice president.

The latest Jack Smith indictment has intensified the breach between Pence and Trump created by Jan. 6.

Pence got to the crux of the matter in saying that the indictment was a reminder that “anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be president of the United States,” and Trump got to the crux of the matter in saying that Pence has embraced the “Dark Side,” is “delusional,” wants “to show he’s a tough guy,” was once the subject of a negative “major magazine article,” and is, of course, liddle.

In political terms, this showdown can’t be good news for Pence. On paper, he should have been positioned to inherit at least an element of the Trump base and add Republicans who are more traditional for a competitive primary coalition.

This possibility got blown up by Trump’s pressure campaign to get the former vice president to do his bidding on Jan. 6.

Pence did the honorable and constitutionally correct thing, and his reward has been Trump’s inveighing against him on that day, declining approval ratings in the party, and now the row with Trump that will further push Pence into the minority non-Trump wing of the party.

Pence didn’t even get praised much by left-of-center commentators after Jan. 6 because he has remained a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, and they’ll never forgive him for being Trump’s vice president in the first place.

Many still have the attitude that Pence has basically gotten what he deserves and should have known things with Trump would end badly.

Pence’s choices, though, were reasonable ones.

When Trump came to him about the vice presidency in 2016, he had already sewed up the nomination — nothing Pence could do, including declining to join the ticket, was going to change that.

During the administration, he played an important role as the chief internal advocate of social conservatives and also was a healthy influence on the president.

The fact that he was the one in the crucible on Jan. 6 and that he had the conscience and backbone to do the right thing should be enough, in and of itself, to vindicate his decision to serve.

Should we discount what he did on that day since it was simply what was expected of any person in that role? Well, maybe, but when their career is on the line, politicians have a way of finding a way to defend the indefensible or wiggle out of a tough choice. Pence didn’t waver.

Now, the explosive indictment gives Pence, even if he were inclined to do otherwise, no choice but to robustly defend his historic role at the sorry end of the administration he served so loyally.

Trump would never admit as much, of course, but what he needed on Jan. 6 was someone who genuinely was small, who could be intimidated and swayed, and who was willing to put his own selfish interests over and above the constitutional order. What he got instead was Mike Pence.

Rich Lowry is editor in chief of the National Review

In a 3,500-word essay on “The Weaponization of Loneliness” in The Atlantic, the former secretary of state and presidential candidate says her jejune 1996 book, “It Takes a Village,” forecast the country’s current crisis of loneliness and offered still-relevant solutions.

And, oh yeah, hapless lonely people exploited by authoritarian right-wingers basically kept her from the White House in 2016 (and here you thought it was Russia).

Now, social isolation is a real social problem in America, as Hillary correctly recounts in her essay, and it has contributed to the Trump phenomenon. But that it has been uniquely weaponized against progressives, or that conventional progressive policies are the antidote to this deep-seated phenomenon is as absurd and self-serving as you’d expect from a woman who managed one of the more shocking losses in U.S. presidential history and has been offering excuses ever since.

In her telling, an army of so-called incels, or involuntarily celibate men, organized by Steve Bannon is part of a growing threat to U.S. democracy.

Rather than shadowy forces, from Russian hackers to Bannon’s a-socialized acolytes, determining the course of the country, it is the middle of the electorate that remains crucially important, and it is open to persuasion on the big questions.

To read Hillary, you might think that no one who supports the Democrats is ever lonely.

As it happens, Republicans are the party of married people. As Conn Carroll pointed out at The Washington Examiner, in the 2022 House races, Republicans won married men by 20 points and unmarried men by 7, and won married women by 14 points. The GOP, on the other hand, got wiped out with unmarried women by nearly 40 points.

According to a Gallup survey in 2020, 41% of single people reported being lonely the day before, whereas only 16% of people who were married or in a domestic partnership said the same thing. New England has the highest rate of loneliness, and big cities are significantly more lonely than rural areas.

This means that Hillary forged a coalition of the lonely (or at least the more lonely) in 2016, and the worst thing that could happen to her party is more people getting married and living in small places with a stronger sense of community.

Of course, Hillary doesn’t offer either of those as potential solutions to the crisis of loneliness. She’s heartened by parents protesting “book bans” and workers engaged in union organizing. Left-wing activism, apparently, is what can knit us all back together.

She invokes “the wisdom and power of the American village,” and says, “we have more in common than we think,” without ever giving any sense that she acknowledges the values of the other side.

She’s a case study in the myopic self-righteousness of the left. It’s no wonder that if Hillary’s “village” is the community on offer, millions of rational, happy Americans want nothing to do with it.

Rich Lowry is editor in chief of the National Review

It’s another episode that raises the question: Can someone who is afraid of Trump defeat him?

Of all the advantages that Trump has in the competition for the 2024 Republican nomination — immediate past president, ability to generate enormous media attention, etc. — perhaps foremost among them is the fact that the other Republican candidates are afraid.

It’s hard to think of anyone who has ever won a major-party nomination while showing fear, especially of someone else in the field.

A successful candidate might be careful around certain issues or constituencies, or back off of an unpopular position. But being clearly scared by an opponent is something else, entirely.

Until now.

When asked about Trump, most of the candidates might not actually lick their lips, or swallow hard or begin to blink faster, but you wouldn’t be surprised if they did. Generally, they’ll evade questions, reject the premise or revert to an answer that has been as carefully crafted as an official statement by one of the parties negotiating the Paris Peace Accords.

You can almost see them thinking:

Maybe he’ll leave me alone.

Maybe he’ll make me his veep.

Maybe there will be a better time to attack him later.

If they can help it, his opponents will never say Trump’s name — he’s the most unnamed major politician in American history. Mike Pence has tended to call him “my former running mate.”

This means that Donald Trump’s political dominance of the rest of the field extends to a kind of personal and psychological dominance.

The only one who’s really not playing this game is Chris Christie, who gives as good as he gets and also needles Trump and initiates fights against him. If Christie can achieve a breakout in New Hampshire, it will be based, in part, on winning points on strength and courage while doing and saying what no one else dares. (Also-rans Will Hurd and Asa Hutchinson criticize Trump, too, but more politely and conventionally.)

All that said, the other candidates are reacting to a genuine conundrum — Republican voters might be open to an alternative to Trump in theory, but they don’t want anyone to criticize him. How to square that circle is the biggest challenge for the rest of the field, at least those members of it genuinely running to win.

To be fair, Governor Ron DeSantis, as Trump’s main target, has been willing to push back as necessary, and he makes a constant, implicit critique of Trump’s electoral prospects and governing abilities. But the Florida governor is always careful to stay on the right side of the line, biding his time for later or hoping that his message catches on without having to grasp the nettle. This isn’t unreasonable, but, again, it exposes a disparity — he has a strategy, while Trump has a sledgehammer.

So long as everyone believes that Trump has one and they don’t — and acts accordingly — the fear factor will continue to work in Trump’s favor.

Rich Lowry is editor in chief of the National Review

The incumbent president — rather than being the indispensable political antidote to Trump that Democrat imagine him as — may well prove the key to his predecessor’s return to the White House.

Biden is an asset to Trump’s primary campaign and could, through his weakness and ineptitude, end up electing him in 2024.

Biden is indicting Trump; he’s making Republicans pine for the days when Trump was president; and he’s lackluster in prospective head-to-head polling matchups.

All of which is boosting his adversary’s prospects. The indictments, of course, create a rally-around-the flag effect among Republicans. It was the shoddy indictment from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg that launched Trump onto a new, higher trajectory in the primary race. But the federal indictments from Special Counsel Jack Smith have reinforced the effect.

That the indictments come with a split screen of the Biden Justice Department coddling Hunter Biden only makes Trump’s argument that there’s a two-tier system of justice that’s been weaponized against him more potent.

Meanwhile, Biden’s poor record in office drives GOP nostalgia for the Trump presidency, a significant benefit to the former president looking for a restoration.

Finally, Gov. Ron DeSantis and other Republicans want to argue that Trump isn’t electable, but Biden’s dismal political standing vitiates this case. Every time there’s a poll showing Trump competitive with Biden, it’s harder to portray him as a sure loser. The RealClearPolitics polling average has Biden leading Trump by less than a point, and a recent Marquette University poll had the two tied 50-50.

Democrats may figure that all this is good — Trump is so toxic that he’s the weakest of the plausible Republican candidates, no matter what polls more than a year before the election might say. Biden beat him once before, right?

Yes, but it’s not as though he trounced Trump the first time around. Biden’s Electoral College victory was built on a series of razor-thin victories in places like Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin. Who’s to say that in the right circumstances for Trump they couldn’t tip the other way? Trump narrowly won in 2016 and narrowly lost in 2020, so why is another narrow victory supposed to be out of the question?

It’s often said that Trump hasn’t done anything to win one swing voter back to his side since 2020. True enough, but Biden, who hasn’t been the norm-honoring moderate as advertised, has certainly done things to shed voters.

Democrats act as if Biden is a once-in-a-generation political talent when he’s an 80-year-old man whose foremost political achievement is beating an unpopular incumbent in the midst of a pandemic with a basement campaign. In his 10th quarter in office, Gallup has his approval rating at 40%, the lowest rating for post-World War II presidents at that point with the exception of Jimmy Carter.

As the 2016 election demonstrated, running two candidates who are deeply unpopular is a recipe for volatility.

Rich Lowry is editor-in-chief of the National Review

Donald Trump and his adversaries want profoundly different things in the long run — Trump wants to be back in the White House; Democrats want him in an orange jumpsuit.

Yet, in the shorter term, they both are seeking the same thing — Trump as the Republican nominee, either so he can sweep to victory (Trump’s view) or be beaten again and held to account for his crimes (the Democrats’ view).

The serial indictments of Trump, even if it’s not their primary purpose, advance this mutual interest. With every indictment, Trump dominates media attention and rallies Republicans to his side based on charges of selective prosecution.

The routine is so predictable, it’s become boring.

The pushback against the notion that Trump’s prosecutorial pursuers know that they might as well be ‘MAGA’ agents is that it’s too clever by half, that Trump has these legal vulnerabilities and is simply paying the price. No theories about underhanded political motivation are necessary.

It’s certainly true that Trump had major exposure in the documents case, but the Alvin Bragg indictment is gossamer-thin, and we don’t know yet what Special Counsel Jack Smith has next or what District Attorney Fani Willis is working with in Fulton County, Georgia.

Consider this thought experiment: If the Justice Department and the other prosecutors knew that the indictments guaranteed a Ron DeSantis or Tim Scott nomination, would they still go through with them? If they thought they made Trump a stronger general election candidate and the favorite to beat Joe Biden, would they still pull the trigger? Or would they find some reason for forbearance when there’s plenty to be said for forbearance in the first place?

It doesn’t require a fine-grained understanding of Republican politics to grasp what’s going on. Certainly, after the passionately pro-Trump GOP reaction to the Mar-a-Lago search, it was obvious that targeting Trump would benefit him. If there were any doubt, the Trump surge in the polls after the Bragg indictment should have removed it.

Still, Trump’s pursuers have persisted.

Of course, Trump doesn’t like getting indicted more than anyone else. His denunciations of “these vicious Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Democrats,” “THESE LUNATICS AND THUGS” who are out to get him are wholly sincere. But without the vicious Communists et al., he might well be 10 points lower in the polls.

The legal handiwork of the “LUNATICS AND THUGS” is one of the former president’s most valuable political assets.
Trump and his enemies may despise one other, but they are working toward the same immediate outcome, i.e., a high-stakes, hate-filled, Third World–ish Trump-Biden rematch with the possibility of jail for one of the contenders if he loses and intense prosecutorial scrutiny for the other if he comes up short.

And everything so far indicates that they’re going to get it.

Rich Lowry is editor in chief of the National Review

The provision was one of a number of anti-“woke” measures in the House-passed National Defense Authorization Act that have occasioned sputtering outrage.

According to National Security Council spokesman John Kirby, there’s no way that President Joe Biden would ever sign such legislation “that would put our troops at greater risk or put our readiness at risk.”

America’s leaders used to worry that we wouldn’t have enough stopping power to defend against Soviet tanks potentially pouring through the Fulda Gap or a survivable nuclear force in the event of a nuclear first strike; now they worry servicemembers might not be learning enough about microaggressions.

Last year, Bishop Garrison, serving at the time as the senior advisor to the Secretary of Defense for human capital and diversity, equity and inclusion, said that diversity, equity and inclusion needs to be part of every decision that the military makes — it’s a “force multiplier,” and will make the military more lethal.

It’s not clear how this could possibly be true. Is the Marine operating a howitzer going to be more proficient if he’s familiar with the work of Ibram X. Kendi? Are our submariners lacking so long as they don’t know that it’s supposedly offensive to ask someone with an accent where he or she is from?

The U.S. military has been a model for decades of how to build a racially diverse institution that is united by common purpose and standards. That doesn’t mean it is perfect — nothing is — but it was notably diverse long before anyone thought it needed diversity, equity and inclusion training.

Thankfully, by its standards, the Pentagon doesn’t spend much on diversity, equity and inclusion. It requested just $115 million in 2023, although that was an increase of nearly $30 million. This suggests that the personnel and programming around diversity, equity and inclusion can be easily axed, and they should be.

Diversity, equity and inclusion is a scammy fad that has ballooned into a more than $3 billion industry even though there’s no solid evidence that it works, and it may well make things worse.

As the left-of-center author and podcaster Jesse Singal writes, diversity, equity and inclusion programs often “seem geared more toward sparking a revolutionary re-understanding of race relations than solving organizations’ specific problems.”

At the very least, diversity, equity and inclusion is another administrative burden. A recent report on the fighting culture of the U.S. Navy prepared at the direction of Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton and several Republican congressmen noted that “non-combat curricula consume Navy resources, clog inboxes, create administrative quagmires, and monopolize precious training time.”

At worst, it is injecting a poisonous ideology into a fighting force that needs to look past racial and other divisions and needs to believe in this country’s worth.

Rich Lowry is editor in chief of the National Review

It isn’t, she believes, doing a good enough job protecting Joe Biden from the effects of being 80 years old and increasingly frail.

She insists that it needs “to clear a pathway” whenever he is walking somewhere, and make sure it is “there and telling him what’s next” when he’s at an event and going from Point A to Point B.

It’s not clear what presidency Brzezinski has been watching, because it’s not as though the White House staff is working Biden like a dog, or as though there isn’t plenty of pointing and directing whenever Biden is out in public.

Axios reported a couple of months ago that “some White House officials say it’s difficult to schedule public or private events with the president in the morning, in the evening, or on weekends.” That does leave weekdays between about noon and 4 p.m., when most of his public events are scheduled.

Obviously, the problem isn’t staff inattention or unawareness of the limitations of their boss, but the difficult balance involved in maintaining the image of Biden as a robust, fully in-control president of the United States, on the one hand, and in giving him the help he needs as someone who is visibly shaky on his feet and unsure of what to do with himself at public events, on the other.

To her credit, Brzezinski isn’t denying Biden’s infirmities — as many Democrats do, at least in public — so much as shifting the blame for them.

The latest discussion of Biden’s age was occasioned by his use of King Charles as a bit of a crutch during a visit the other day, while the king had some difficulty negotiating Biden where he needed to go during an inspection of the Welsh Guards.

In the scheme of things, this wasn’t a big event, but it’s part of a pattern and one that suggests more trouble ahead — the minor stumbles and wobbles will inevitably get worse, since aging is a progressive condition.

Even if the White House staff were to dispatch the advance team to remove every pebble in Biden’s path, as Brzezinski hopes, there is simply no way to protect an 80-year-old man from every potential misstep.

In the end, there is a reliable way to keep him upright, which is a walker. Would the White House ever want to have him use one, given that he’s in the most demanding office in the world and a walker is a symbol of decrepitude associated with assisted living facilities?

No, of course not. Every incentive is to keep trotting Biden out like nothing is wrong — 80 is the new 70 — and hope for the best.

Maybe he shuffles through the raindrops and nothing bad happens between now and November 2024. But there is some significant chance that it does, that there is a fateful sandbag out there that is going to bring home the fragility of the leader of the free world in a disturbing and undeniable way.

Maybe Biden gets lucky, and certainly everyone of good will should hope that he does.

If he has an ill-timed mishap, though, Democrats will have no one — not even the White House staff — to blame but themselves.

Rich Lowry is editor in chief of the National Review

The Double-A minor league affiliate of the Boston Red Sox, the Sea Dogs play in a cozy ballpark in Portland, Maine, and are having a pretty good year — their 2-1 victory over the Binghamton Rumble Ponies was their fourth in a row and they’re in first place in the Northeast Division of the Eastern League.

I attended the Sunday afternoon ballgame during a summer stay in Maine, and I, too, went home satisfied, even though I have no rooting interest in the Sea Dogs, the Rumble Ponies, or any other Eastern League team, not even the Akron RubberDucks.

No, I was content to bask in the glow of minor league baseball, one of the glories of an American summer. The mascots loom large, the between-innings entertainment is amusingly inventive, the scores don’t matter (much), and everything is geared to creating warm memories around the game that still occupies an outsized place in the national consciousness.

At its best, minor league baseball combines the feel of a small-town parade and a meeting of the local Rotary Club, with nine innings of baseball interspersed.

The level of competition is, obviously, nothing like the majors; there’s no Shohei Ohtani on the field. On the other side of the coin, there’s usually no insane traffic and hassle, no highway-robbery prices, and no jerks cursing at the top of their lungs.

You can get general admission tickets for a Portland Sea Dog games for a whopping $11.

The allure of minor league baseball in the ordinary course of things isn’t a high-stakes series against a bitter rival or a particular star. (The title of one book about the minors is “Where Nobody Knows Your Name.”) Rather, it’s the experience; everything is smaller scale and friendlier.

In Portland, the ballpark staff is so cheerful and solicitous you almost wouldn’t be surprised if they invited you to come by their place for a clambake after the game.

On this afternoon, the team was honoring Special Olympians from Maine. A number of the athletes were part of a group that threw out first pitches, and one sang the national anthem, in a particularly heartfelt and moving rendition.

Meanwhile, the team’s mascot, Slugger, who looks like a dog but is supposed to be a harbor seal, performed in skits between innings, including his tradition of losing a race with a kid around the bases. (His entry in the Mascot Hall of Fame puts his lifetime record in these races at 0-1,928.)

It all happens at Hadlock Field, considered one of the best of the minor league parks. It opened in 1994 but feels like more of a throwback. It is nestled among the city’s streets, the way the classic major league ballparks once were. Railroad tracks run behind left field and an old brick exhibition center abuts the right-field line.

With a capacity of about 7,000, there isn’t a bad seat in the place. Balls fouled back behind home plate routinely leave the facility entirely. In a homage to the Green Monster in Fenway Park, left field has a 37-foot-high green fence topped by a Citgo sign and giant Coke bottle.

It’s always one, two, three strikes, you’re out, at the old ball game, but the minor leagues offer a particularly charming version of the timeless game.

Rich Lowry is editor in chief of the National Review

On the other, they were about what you’d expect in a Russia that, across the long centuries of its existence, has never managed to achieve Western standards of self-government.

Everything we need to know about Russia was made clear by its brutish, cynical and incompetent invasion of Ukraine. But the blowback from the invasion in the form Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s brief armed revolt fills out the picture.

Revolutions, attempted rebellions, assassinations and coups dot the Russian historical landscape. This isn’t unusual in old nations. What makes Russia different is that it is dealing with them to this day.

England had a no-kidding war between the king and parliament … more than 350 years ago. Boris Yeltsin had a battle with the parliament that resulted in the parliamentary building getting shelled by tanks … in 1993.

If Prigozhin hadn’t turned back, Russian tanks might have been battling in the streets of Moscow once again.

“Getting to Denmark” is the phrase social scientists use for achieving the modern standard of government.

“For people in developing countries,” Francis Fukuyama has written, “‘Denmark’ is a mythical place that is known to have good political and economic institutions: It is stable, democratic, peaceful, prosperous, inclusive, and has extremely low levels of political corruption. Everyone would like to figure out how to transform Somalia, Haiti, Nigeria, Iraq or Afghanistan into ‘Denmark’.”

Russia has never gotten to Denmark, either, although if it ever succeeded in taking back the Baltics by force, at least it’d be geographically closer.

Establishing a norm of the peaceful transfer of power is one of the most valuable achievements of the modern West.

Otherwise, history tells us, rival contenders for power will kill one another and cut paths of destruction through their societies.  Opacity, conspiracy, double-dealing, and lies are endemic to human nature, and all politics. But the West manages to circumscribe them somewhat through accountable government, the rule of law, and norms around transparency. In Russia, it’s different. It may be a very long time before we know everything that was going on with Prigozhin’s revolt, if ever.

In a speech last year, Vladimir Putin railed against the West’s “undivided dominance over world affairs” and blamed it for holding down what it regards as “second-class civilizations.”

The sense of bristling defensiveness in that statement is understandable. A couple millennia after Athens and a couple hundred years after the modern democratic revolution, Russia still has a de facto tsar. Whereas we read about poisonings in history books telling the story of medieval Europe, they still happen in Russia. If he’s going to maintain his sense of dominance, Putin isn’t ultimately going to defeat Prigozhin in an election or simply fire or reprimand him; he’s going to have to kill him.

The West may be naïve, feckless, foolhardy or self-destructive, but its model of stable, accountable, democratic government is a great advance in human welfare. Without it, you get a Vladimir Putin reportedly fleeing his capital in fear and a Yevgeny Prigozhin likely to experience an unfortunate fall out of a window sometime soon.

Rich Lowry is editor in chief of the National Review

In taking a shot at Republicans Tim Scott and Nikki Haley, Obama told his former campaign manager, David Axelrod, in a podcast interview, “I think there’s a long history of African American or other minority candidates within the Republican Party who will validate America and say, ‘Everything’s great, and we can make it.'”

And who would want that dangerous message spreading across the land?

Citing America’s racial history, Obama said: “If somebody is not proposing, both acknowledging and proposing elements that say, ‘No, we can’t just ignore all that and pretend as if everything’s equal and fair. We actually have to walk the walk and not just talk the talk.’ If they’re not doing that, then I think people are rightly skeptical.”

Obama’s statement was a classic expression of the disdain that progressives feel for minority conservatives. The left considers them traitors to their racial groups, who use their personal credibility to counter the conventional narrative on racism in a way that is profoundly threatening.

Scott replied to Obama with one of his characteristic lines, “The truth of my life disproves the lies of the radical left.”
There are several things to say about this exchange. First, it’s rich for Obama, the son of a white mother and a Kenyan economist, who attended a prestigious Hawaii prep school, to lecture the descendant of slaves about the realities of race in America.

Two, when the mood of the left was more optimistic and less obsessed with so-called white supremacy, Barack Obama used to sound a lot like Tim Scott. He emphasized uplift and how his success showed what’s possible in America. People actually chanted, “Race doesn’t matter” at Obama’s victory party when he won the 2008 South Carolina primary. Now, no one attending a party for a major national Democrat would dare think such a thing, let alone say it.

Three, it’s wrong to imply that Tim Scott doesn’t have a plan for the betterment of America and minorities, it’s just not the kind of plan that Obama supports as a man of the left who believes that the state is the essential agent of change.

Finally, Tim Scott’s more hopeful view of America is the correct one. Despite its past and its flaws, the country is open, fair-minded, and in no way the nightmarish regime of white privilege portrayed in left-wing caricature. Otherwise, one wonders, why would so many people who will be minorities in America be so eager to leave their own countries to come here?

As Wilfred Reilly of Kentucky State University noted in Commentary Magazine, Indian Americans have roughly double the median household income of white Americans. Ghanaians and the Guyanese earn more than whites, while Nigerians are the best educated group in the country and earn about the same as whites. The same is true of West Indians.

“West Indian English-speakers and second-generation Ghanaian Americans,” Reilly writes, “look and sound almost exactly like black Americans: Bigots are unlikely to put their prejudices aside when they meet one.” Yet, by and large, they thrive here.

Back in his famous DNC speech in 2004, addressing a pre-“woke” Democratic Party, Obama said, “I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that, in no other country on earth, is my story even possible.”

He was right the first time.

Rich Lowry is editor in chief of the National Review

“Spahn, Sain, and pray for rain!” was the famous refrain of Boston Braves fans in 1948, when they wanted their exceptional pitchers Warren Spahn and Johnny Sain to start as many games as possible.

In the long history of sports, though, it seems unlikely that anyone has ever felt compelled to pray over the spiritual hurt caused by a team — until now. Los Angeles Archbishop José H. Gomez dedicated a service to praying for “healing due to the harm caused by” the Los Angeles Dodgers.

And he’s not referring to the team’s disappointing exit from the playoffs last year at the hands of the San Diego Padres or its relatively soft 38-30 start this year. No, rather its “decision to honor a group that intentionally denigrates and profanes the Christian faith.”

He’s speaking of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group of drag queens who dress up as Roman Catholic nuns and mock their faith. In the most embarrassing to-and-fro since Yankee owner George Steinbrenner fired and rehired manager Billy Martin multiple times, the Dodgers announced that they’d honor the “Sisters” on the team’s “LGBTQ+ Pride Night,” then backed off when people of faith were offended, then decided to honor them after all in response to LGBTQ backlash to the backlash.

This shameful cowardice comes courtesy of one of baseball’s most storied franchises, one that used to hold “Nun’s Day” at the stadium.

It’s a symptom of the sheer unavoidability of “woke” cultural politics that they’ve come to baseball, once the most mainstream and arguably still the most traditional of major sports league.

The Toronto Blue Jays just cut one of their relief pitchers, Anthony Bass, for not getting with the LGBTQ program. On May 29, Bass shared a video from Bible-themed Instagram page supporting the boycotts of Bud Light and Target. In response to the resulting furor, he apologized and promised to do better, but that wasn’t close to being enough.

The last straw came when he tried to explain himself again about two weeks into the controversy. He said, “I stand by my personal beliefs,” adding — very naively, as it turns out — “and everyone is entitled to their personal beliefs, right?”

The demand of Bass wasn’t that he say bland and nice things but that he repudiate part of his belief system as a Christian.
Fans were booing him, and sports journalists were out for blood.

He got fired. No one can accuse the Blue Jays of not fully embracing the spirit of pride ideology, including the illiberalism.

Back in the early 1950s, before the Dodgers had moved from Brooklyn, the team’s churchgoing first baseman Gil Hodges entered into a terrible slump. Instead of turning on him, the fans encouraged him. Father Redmond of St. Francis Church famously said one day: “It’s too hot for a sermon today. Go home, keep the commandments, and say a prayer for Gil Hodges.”
Hodges eventually found his groove, making for a nice piece of Dodgers lore. These days, he’d presumably have to watch what he said.

Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review