Lessons from a Turkish Coup

The idea of the “Deep State” took root in the American mind in response to the “Resistance” against Donald Trump’s election as president in 2016. Proponents of the term use it casually, as an epithet against the political establishment, often without due regard to the concrete historical experiences that gave rise to it. Critics of the idea claim that it oversimplifies complex governmental dynamics and amounts to nothing more than political fabulism or conspiracy-mongering. 

But this issue is not just a food fight for cable TV. Considering it in polemical terms obscures the troubling reality of the problem and its deeply damaging impact on American governance.

Part of the difficulty with the Deep State discourse in America is that the concept is a foreign import, requiring some translation. It comes from Turkey, a country with a rich, ancient, and sophisticated non-Western civilizational heritage. Turkey also has a long, complex, and difficult experience with Westernized modernity and democratization, including at least four military coups d’etat since 1960—the most recent a failed bloody putsch in 2016. Nevertheless, with the rise of the administrative state in the United States, particularly in the wake of the Cold War and the first decades of the 21st century, the Deep State idea serves as a useful Turkish contribution to political discussion in a society once considered by many to be poor soil for such activities due to its liberal political culture, history, and legal and governmental traditions.

Deep State operations have been a fact of life in Turkey since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk established the secularist Turkish Republic on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire in 1923. The term itself, Derin Devlet in Turkish, emerged by the late 20th century to explain the actual workings of the ideologically rigid and authoritarian Kemalist regime, in contrast to its formal, Western-influenced constitutional arrangements. Among Turkish citizens of different political persuasions, raised in a political culture in which public military pressure campaigns, threats, and outright coups against nominal civilian rulers had become commonplace, the Deep State has long been understood as encompassing the informal, extrajudicial, or illegal networks among state bureaucracies and oligarchic interests. 

Of particular importance to the Kemalist Deep State were the military and security services, business interests including mainstream media establishments, academia, and organized crime operations. These networks operated behind the scenes of formal political life, with scant regard for, and even openly hostile to, the formal authority of elected civilians. They functioned as the formation and implementation nexus of any policy the Kemalist establishment deemed important to maintaining its ascendancy. 

The Kemalists portrayed every issue as a matter of vital national security. This made it easier for them to assert their prerogatives in a country that had long been vulnerable to instability at home and manipulation and meddling from abroad. Moreover, the Deep State thrived on the corruption inevitable in any bureaucratic environment lacking the transparency that, in theory, is a bedrock of republican government.

***

The Deep State had long been accustomed to public deference to its dominance of state and society. Eventually, however, it faced a genuine challenge from an unconventional politician, animated largely by profound dissatisfaction with the status quo that, after simmering for decades, finally erupted into view first among more traditional, non-elite elements. Jealous of what it considered its rightful equities, the Deep State launched a coordinated and wide-ranging counterattack. The goal was to eliminate from public life not only the challenger himself but all manifestations of opposition to the dominant ideology that served as the basis of authority and power.

At the tip of the spear was the media, dominated by corrupt corporate oligarchs who entrenched their position by cultivating and maintaining close relations with the state. It was staffed by a journalistic elite deeply indoctrinated in the official ideology of the Deep State, submissive to the permanent bureaucracy. The media barons and their subordinates willfully operated under the direction of the state’s censorship proponents, dutifully inciting public fear of instability, and occasionally even lacking in self-awareness as to their role as establishment tools. “Mainstream” politicians, bureaucrats, the judiciary, military leaders, and academic experts made headlines on a daily basis by accusing the challenger and his supporters—directly or through purported leaks—of exhibiting anti-progressive attitudes, denying science, and plotting violent insurrection. 

Military leaders, claiming to represent the most revered institution in the country, appropriated the public’s respect for serving soldiers as an endorsement of the leadership’s political interests and post-retirement perks. Protecting their position in the state hierarchy, the generals issued veiled warnings and eventually directly confronted the challenger precisely at the moment it appeared he might succeed. They reiterated their commitment to the dominant ideology and conducted high-profile military maneuvers near the capital to show the world they meant business. They investigated and drew public attention to the alleged threat posed by the challenger and his supporters. Among the generals’ favorite targets were the adherents to ancient religious rites, demonized as enemies of the state. The military’s eager journalistic handmaidens underscored to anyone who didn’t get the message that the military was ready to act. 

Prominent members of the elite managerial and professorial class, ensconced in their stylish metropolitan bubbles and generally clueless about the wider society, called on the military to save the establishment, which they equated with democracy itself. They feared what they saw as the rising power of the political reactionaries in their cheap suits, their religious obscurantism, and their unwashed supporters from the hinterlands. 

Mass demonstrations were organized, castigating the traditional religious values important to the challenger’s voters as inherently theocratic and unacceptable. They underscored the message that when it came to political thought, no diversity was to be permitted. Conformity to elite delineation of what constituted acceptable discourse was rigidly enforced. Media organs that on rare occasions permitted deviation from the establishment view were silenced—sometimes their stay in the penalty box was short-lived, on other occasions it was permanent. 

The political leader was subjected to investigation and prosecution, hounded from office, and banned from the public square. Anti-establishment activists and critics, political moderates who simply questioned the wisdom of the established order, pious citizens, and others were threatened with exposure as closet reactionaries, shunned, and purged from public life. They were condemned by judges and bureaucrats relying on establishment media “reporting” as evidence of criminality. 

Education bureaucrats stepped up their efforts to indoctrinate school children in the dominant ideology and undercut religious instruction and values. Many students, particularly women, who did not affirmatively support the ideological line were denied access to universities. 

The enforcement of the dominant ideology and the establishment regime, one top general proclaimed, would continue for 1,000 years under the watchful eye of the security apparatus.

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This coup is often referred to in Turkey as “the February 28 Process,” an acknowledgment of its campaign-like nature and continuation in force even after the Erbakan government was brought down in June of that year. It stands as a testament to precisely the kind of surreptitious political engineering that has long been common in parts of the world thought by many in the West to be insufficiently evolved and enlightened. In this case, the coup orchestrators saw themselves as the vanguard of progress against the backwardness of religiosity and traditional social structures. That there are similarities between these events in Turkey and the current American political climate, including a strong polarization between a progressive elite cadre and a more traditional populace, suggests the model applies in the era of the administrative state even across distinct cultural environments.

Despite the judicial banning of Refah and the Turkish military’s insistence that the February 28 Process would endure, the political movement once nurtured by Erbakan came roaring back. The charismatic Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who as a young Erbakan associate and popular mayor of Istanbul was stripped of his office and jailed as part of the accompanying crackdown, returned to politics as the leader of the Justice and Development Party (AKP). He became prime minister shortly after the AKP won its first election in 2002. Erdogan’s AKP benefitted from the fervent commitment of its core supporters, the growing public sense of the secularist elite’s disconnectedness from the aspirations and interests of the electorate, and the generally catastrophic political performance of the secularist governments that followed Refah. All in all, the AKP’s emergence was a resounding rebuke to the February 28 Process and its pretensions.

Or so some might have thought. Rather than accept the AKP as a reflection of deeply rooted political realities, the Kemalist establishment, blinded by ideology and power interests, resumed what it perceived as its existential struggle against the forces of reaction—acting, in the words of an old Kemalist saying, “for the people, in spite of the people.” Erdogan and his party faced daily pressure from the generals, including open threats of intervention, military-orchestrated efforts by the Kemalist judiciary to destabilize the government through novel interpretations of Turkish election laws, and even a Constitutional Court case in 2008 to outlaw the AKP that was defeated by the slimmest margin amid elite concerns of a popular backlash.

The last chance for compromise on the rules of the game in Turkey ended on July 15, 2016, with an attempted military coup that left about 250 people dead and another 2,194 injured. For Erdogan, who in 2014 became Turkey’s first popularly elected president, the February 28 Process had been a politically formative experience. He and his associates had learned well the Kemalist regime’s harsh lessons. Their response to the failed 2016 coup—which ran aground after Erdogan called for his supporters to take to the streets in protest—was a broad purge of the state bureaucracy along the lines established by earlier military purges against their enemies. The targets included the followers of Fethullah Gulen, an erstwhile AKP ally, who under pressure from the Kemalists left Turkey for the U.S. shortly after the February 28 Process began. Gulen’s own movement, once influential in Turkish bureaucratic life, is widely believed in Turkey to have been behind the coup attempt. The other targets were the Kemalists themselves, in the military apparatus and elsewhere.

America is not Turkey. Nevertheless, the ease with which the Deep State narrative has planted itself in the American political consciousness owes a great deal to the increasingly evident factors America now indisputably shares with that particular Turkish experience. The consolidation of elite, oligarchic, managerial, bureaucratic, and ideological class interests at the apex of power, the casual equation of those “progressive” interests with the public good, the eagerness with which many ruling class representatives seek to manipulate and limit public discourse, and demonize non-progressive opponents as unenlightened, deplorable, traitorous, and unworthy of consideration—with scant regard to the consequences of such framing—suggest little willingness to accommodate. Indeed, among American elites, notions of prudence and tolerance have given way to a radical impulse to impose upon society—for the people, in spite of the people. 

Perhaps the congressional elections in November will provide an opportunity for America’s Kemalists to take stock and reassess their trajectory. But if the Turkish experience with the Deep State is any guide, don’t count on it.

Nicholas Spyridon Kass served with the U.S. Government for 31 years, retiring on January 20, 2021. Most recently he was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, Director for European Affairs (twice) and Director of Intelligence Programs at the White House/National Security Council, and Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Europe at the National Intelligence Council. A Turkish and Kurdish speaker, for many years he was at the U.S. Embassy in Ankara, Turkey. He also served at the Central Intelligence Agency, including as Intelligence Briefer to the Director of Central Intelligence, and was awarded for unique contributions to the CIA HUMINT mission. Now in the private sector, he is responsible for international corporate affairs at the Alexandrion Group, headquartered near Bucharest, Romania. He can be found on LinkedIn.

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Biden at 500 Days

Joe Biden at about 500 days in office is testing the limits of those who claimed 501 days ago that “anybody” would be better than Donald Trump. With the threat of nuclear war now well alive, Biden presides over the highest gas prices, the worst inflation, and the saddest stock market in generations. It is not morning in America anymore. It’s late on Sunday afternoon, and it’s raining.

Start with his record-breaking vacation time. It became a meme during the Trump years to criticize him for weekends at Mar-a-Lago, and to point out how much the Secret Service paid him for their accommodations. Yet as he marks Day 500, Biden is preparing for another weekend scram, and is on track to take more vacation than any of his predecessors. Since taking office, Biden has spent 191 days away from the White House vacationing in either of his two Delaware properties, at Camp David, or on Nantucket. Trump spent 381 days away from the White House over four years.

And as for those Secret Service room bills, the Service pays them for every president. Members of the Service are prohibited from accepting “gifts,” even the free accommodations necessary to protect the president. At Biden’s home in Delaware he charged the Secret Service $2,200 a month in rent for a cottage on his property when he was vice president. He made $66,000 in total off of the Service in 2013, and while contemporary figures are not available, they are certainly tallying up as they did under Trump and the others. Hillary bought a second house in upstate New York just for the Secret Service, anticipating her victory in 2016.

But what of the time Joe Biden has spent actually in the White House? How have the 500 days gone so far? Biden succeeded primarily in engineering a new form of war in Ukraine—not quite cold and not quite hot. American special forces may soon be on the ground in Kiev and American ships in the Black Sea. The Ukrainians have boasted how American intelligence and targeting information have been used to kill Russian ships, tanks, and generals. With no regard for what leakage into the global black-arms market might mean, Biden is sending billions of top-notch weapons into the nation with the avowed aim of bleeding out Russia. When something like this was tried in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the U.S. had the common courtesy to do it through the CIA and keep at least some of it secret. No more.

Vladimir Putin in return has reminded the world several times that he has nuclear weapons he is not all that opposed to using. Joe Biden has succeeded where presidents since 1989 have failed: He sends Americans to bed at night worrying about nuclear holocaust. That is his greatest foreign-policy accomplishment absent the disastrous evacuation from Afghanistan and a soon-to-really-happen trip to forgive the Saudis for their sins and become the first president since the 1970s to overtly beg for more oil.

For the record, Trump was the only president in some 20 years who did not start a new war during his term and the only one in that same period who made an effort to seek peace with North Korea, a country Joe Biden continues to ignore as official policy. When asked in Seoul if he had a message for Kim Jong Un, Biden said, “Hello. Period.”

In other Leader of the Free World accomplishments, Biden has been snubbed by Mexico, which refused to attend the Summit of the Americas because Biden would not also invite Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, all Cold War hissy-fits Joe is keeping alive for a new millennium. “There cannot be a summit if all countries are not invited,” Mexico’s president said at a press conference. “Or there can be one but that is to continue with all politics of interventionism.” It really is 1980 again.

Additional leadership has been shown in Europe, where Germany and France agreed to U.S. demands to stop buying Russian energy—but just not for a couple more months, okay? They have stopped buying energy delivered by ship as a face-saving gesture, just as they keep lapping up the massive pipeline-delivered materials. But Biden did travel twice to Europe and declared “America is back,” so there’s that.

As for domestic achievements, everyone in America knows about Joe’s gas pains. Biden apparently sees no connection between his restrictions on domestic production and sanctions against Russian energy, cutting supply at a time when demand is rising, and inflationary prices. The good news is, we imposed sanctions on Russia—well, no, it’s not good news; Russia is still fighting away in Ukraine, which means the sanctions have failed in their primary function. Biden will give them more time, apparently, as the U.S. is not seeking negotiations to otherwise curtail or end the fight.

Of course, Joe did finally pass a $1.2 trillion infrastructure spending bill, which in no way could have contributed to inflation by dumping money into an economy still chasing goods scarce from supply-chain issues. He also signed that $1.9 trillion Covid-relief bill which also could not have contributed to inflation by dumping money into an economy still chasing goods scarce from supply-chain issues. At least wages are up, which pours more money into an already inflationary economy.

The media actually listed Joe’s Biggest Achievements for us in case they were hard to pick, including appointing a boatload of judges, 80 percent of whom are women and 53 percent are people of color (“judges that reflect our nation”).

Biden has also strategically secured America by overturning the Trump ban on transgender people serving in the military.

In fact, the White House brags it has the first majority non-white Cabinet in history, with the most women of any Cabinet, including the first woman Treasury Secretary, the first LGBTQ and Native American Cabinet officials, and the first woman Director of National Intelligence.

But it is always best to go to the source, and the White House has kept its own list of “record firsts” in Joe’s presidency. You can read them yourself, but you’ll run into the same problem everyone else does: it is all boasting with no links, sources, or details attached. So we hear, for instance, that Joe was the “most significant by economic impact of any first-year president,” but nothing more. Um, okay.

A lot of the rest of the stuff—e.g., unemployment and child poverty—really did get better by the numbers, but there is not a word about how anything Joe did caused those things to improve. It is kind of like taking credit for a comet that passed overhead on your watch, especially given how much “not our fault” garbage this administration tosses around when someone brings up a topic like inflation.

As for issues important to Democrats like gun control, abortion, and climate change, Biden rates a zero. The EPA continues to recommend Flint, Michigan, residents use filters in their homes to remove lead from public water. Joe has driven home the idea that unless a president has a super-majority in both houses and the Supreme Court, you better not expect much from him. Indeed, Biden can’t even wrangle his own party, with two key Democratic senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, stymieing much of his legislative agenda.

On the other side of the aisle, Biden predicted that Republicans would have an “epiphany” after Trump left office, but that has not yet materialized. The Democratic midterm loss scheduled for November 2022 will not help. And we haven’t even talked about Biden’s dead-man-walking lifestyle and walk-it-back gaffes.

So it has only been 500 days. There’s plenty of time still left.

Peter Van Buren is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, Hooper’s War: A Novel of WWII Japan, and Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the 99 Percent.

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A Defense of Ron DeSantis, Professional Politician 

WASHINGTON– This is not an endorsement. 

I plan to write at length on the 2024 campaign, which promises to be the greatest show on Earth. When I was on the primary path earlier this spring, Senate and governor’s primaries had presidential energy, an inevitable byproduct, one supposes, of not having a campaign to speak of in 2020. Donald Trump’s protestations about the result that year clearly have political staying power in part because of a generally felt sense that that year was unconscionably off. This has damaged everyone. President Brandon’s—er, Biden’s time in the White House, it is plain now, lacks some real punch. 

Another rival to the 45th president appears to be emerging, whose name isn’t Joe Biden.

Two basically superb treatments of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis were published this week. They were written by liberal journalists and DeSantis himself did not comply with the coverage, but they’re pretty good. If interested, you can read the palatial  “Can Ron DeSantis Displace Donald Trump as the G.O.P.’s Combatant-in-Chief?” by Dexter Filkins, and Ronny & Nancy of Tallahassee from Tina Nguyen in Puck, which expands on prior coverage of the impossibly powerful presence of DeSantis’s wife, Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis. That relationship is compared there, of course, to Ronald and Nancy Reagan. The assertion is that their Floridian pairing has taken on the appearance of a true Sunshine State duumvirate. DeSantis’ old Yale, Harvard and military chums seem less important.

Close perhaps only with his wife, the 40th president and former California governor was shrouded, ultimately, in enigma, and that comparison is now being made to the current Florida governor. Such relationships in politics can be a double-edged sword: enviable stuff in good times (who wouldn’t want to be in love?), but the source of all evil in bad times. If DeSantis was less successful, this duo would be compared negatively to the likes of the unknowable leftist president Daniel Ortaga and his spouse Rosario Murillo of Nicaragua, and not to a legendary Republican predecessor. Indeed, what is probably most unusual about DeSantis, now a major contender in the presidential arena, is that he is a certified introvert. 

Now to assert some “street cred” and a disclosure: Your writer voted for Trump in the 2016 primaries, and presidential elections, and if needed, one can poll my friends, girlfriends, and family as I shocked and awed them with enthusiasm from July 2015 on. In fact, I took him seriously from about May that year on, when front-runner Jeb Bush was running on trade protection authority for President Obama, or whatever. Trump presented what I felt was a more accurate snapshot of the state of the union: “This country is a hellhole.”  I remain today much the kind of voter I was then: If history had played differently, I would have gladly voted for Bernie Sanders over Jeb Bush, or whatever version of Marco Rubio we were on back then. But that time changed it all: My generation would be defined by a miserable street fight between right and left, not anti-establishment versus establishment. Besides, today the left is the American establishment, par excellence.  

And yet, doubts about Trump’s ability to change this country for the better surfaced from the beginning: the endless personnel carousel, the insidious refusal to play the ultimate presidential Trump card, appearing above-the-fray. Then-White House chief strategist Steve Bannon told the Weekly Standard upon his August 2017 ouster: “The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over. … It’ll be something else. … And there’ll be all kinds of fights, and there’ll be good days and bad days, but that presidency is over.” And true enough, it was something else, and the world since March 2020 has made 2017-2019 seem like a pleasant hallucination, surely the main fount of Trump’s enduring appeal. Times were pretty great, even if we didn’t know it. 

But back to the future. 

Times columnist Ross Douthat sees a 2016 redux. Citing a very positive single poll for DeSantis in New Hampshire, Douthat diagnoses, “I read this as evidence DeSantis is consolidating the ideological, high-information conservative voter — the ‘movement’ bloc that Cruz won in 2016. Trump still has more of the disaffected, less-political, populist bloc.” I could not disagree more, and would gently remind the very talented Mr. Douthat that he picked Marco Rubio as the winner of the 2016 primary. DeSantis’s appeal is far less “Bible-thumping” (putting aside how religious Cruz really is, and putting aside the crude hatred of the faithful in corners of this country) than was Cruz’s image. DeSantis’s culture-warring is far more suited for new American fault lines, if you buy the now-infamous “Hochman Thesis.” 

Now, to “steelman” the DeSantis case. 

Florida in the age of the coronavirus has become a true countermodel, known not only in the rest of the United States, but positively notorious as well in Europe, as a place to collectively escape Western hysteria and do some business. Every day brings news of a fresh relocation, the latest being Ken Griffin’s bad boy hedge fund, appropriately named for these purposes Citadel, which is packing up from Chicago and getting on I-24 full-speed to Miami. Even Trump now lives most of the year closer to the Gulf of Mexico than Manhattan. Covid-19, its still-unexplained origins, and the schizophrenic reaction to it from the American establishment have supplanted 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, and the 2016 election as the touchstone of most Americans’ political lives. Especially conservatives. Especially younger votes. I turned thirty in July 2020, certifiably marking the closure of my childhood.

And so, politically maxed out, DeSantis is not Ted Cruz circa 2016 (please) but rather a combination of Trump in 2016 (a proven fighter) and Glenn Youngkin in 2021. He won’t revolt suburbanites, at least not in the same way. Aesthetically, DeSantis’s classic smarts and non-boomerism, played correctly, could engender him broader respect, or at least a less catatonic response from people who do not vote for him. One imagines him a relatively more palliative choice, one that won’t up the ante still further on America’s increasingly egregious gender divide. 

The rap on DeSantis from the hardcore, though, is that you can’t trust him.

Indeed, as Douthat’s audience on Twitter correctly responded to a poll he put out, opposition to DeSantis may intellectually come most passionately from “early Trump adopters.” In the most extreme critique, they see a Bushie in a nationalist’s clothing. The most incendiary condemnation surfaced in the Filkins dispatch is that the Florida governor is standoffish, impersonal, cold, imperious. That has not been my limited experience. In my one interaction, he was social, drank Cabernet Sauvignon, answered all questions politely, even when he began to doubt the response out of Washington on the pandemic, a lockdown response one reminds that was originally led by President Donald Trump (‘”late March [2020],’ DeSantis answered quickly, on when his doubts surfaced”). Sure enough, news of that fissure broke months later, with DeSantis saying he only wished he doubted Trump sooner.

It is probably true enough that DeSantis would not have moved the “Overton window” on what is possible in American politics as Trump did in 2016, putting an end to the stale Obama-era paradigm, drearily Fukuyaman in its own way. But if my coverage and sporadic access to political VIP’s has taught me anything, it is respect for an open will to power. Politicians are not philosophers, and if they are, they cannot be philosophers first. Results matter. DeSantis may have not been the man for 2017-2019, but in the Covid-19 complex (and attendant cultural revolution), the Florida governor found his crisis. He did not shrink from it. Despite his elite background, he distrusted the elite when it mattered most. 

The knock on getting through Harvard and Yale is not that that you are naturally stupid or evil (of course not, if anything the opposite), it’s that to get through those institutions today you have to become stupid or evil. But at age 43, that DeSantis comes out of those places then is a testament to his work ethic and discipline, not his ideology. By all evidence, a DeSantis administration would not be trojan-horsed old medicine. Not the “realism” and “restraint” of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Not the “nationalism” of Ted Cruz (that speech happened). 

If one had to close out this case, age would be the determining factor. Now 76, Trump remains hilariously energetic for a man in his eighth decade. But the difference between the two men’s ages is greater than this writer’s lifespan. Finally having a president young enough for the job would feel like a jump off the high-dive. In the end, competence matters, too. If it really is the “Flight 93” era, then it would seem incumbent to remorselessly pick the most-skilled pilot. 

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The Push for Permanent Vote-by-Mail

Leftists fell in love with all-mail elections in 2020. Now they want to make vote-by-mail permanent.

Transforming our country’s elections into a mail-in fiasco is a big step toward handing power over elections from the states to the federal government, empowering professional activists, inviting fraud, and damaging America’s constitutional system. It places the integrity of the republic in the hands of the U.S. Postal Service, the government agency that routinely delivers your neighbor’s mail to your house. And it promises to undermine public trust in electoral outcomes from now until doomsday, which could make the problems of the 2020 election routine.

I’ve documented progressives’ relentless effort to federalize elections, from the $400-million flood of private cash Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg sent to elections officials in 2020 to the $80 million “dark money” campaign for permanent vote-by-mail ahead of the 2022 and 2024 elections. That reporting builds on Capital Research Center’s year-and-a-half long investigation into the role of “Zuck bucks” in battleground states and our discovery that they targeted areas rich with Democratic votes, like Philadelphia and Atlanta.

At the heart of that misadventure are the Center for Tech and Civic Life, Arabella Advisors’ $1.7 billion activist empire, and the National Vote at Home Institute. But Americans should be familiar with the true face of vote-by-mail: Amber McReynolds.

She’s often labeled a reform-minded “independent” and is listed on the website of the National Association of Nonpartisan Reformers and in Governing Magazine’s 2018 Top Public Officials of the Year. In interview after gushing interview with left-leaning outlets, she’s touted as a good-government advocate uninterested in petty partisan goals.

But make no mistake: Amber McReynolds is a product of Activism, Inc.

McReynolds started her career registering voters in Iowa—a key primary state—in the 2004 election with the New Voters Project, part of a multi-million-dollar activist nexus called the Public Interest Network, whose oldest elements—the Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs)—started in the 1970s under legendary community organizer Ralph Nader.

If you’ve ever been solicited on the street for a donation to the American Civil Liberties Union or Sierra Club by a “clipboard kid,” you’ve probably had a run-in with these guys, who are famous for generating new liberal activists—and a president. As Barack Obama put it in 2004, “I used to be a PIRG guy. You guys trained me well.”

Revealingly, the network lauds McReynolds alongside two other notable progressive alumni: Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and eco-activist-turned-Colorado State Sen. Faith Winter.

In 2005, McReynolds was hired by the Denver Elections Commission. In 2011, she became the agency’s director. A year later, the city’s Democratic mayor awarded her with the “rising star” award for overseeing the creation of Denver’s ballot-tracking and electronic petition-gathering software (Ballot TRACE). A year after that, in 2013, McReynolds successfully pushed for Colorado’s adoption of all-mail voting and election-day registration, reportedly downplaying the threat of voter fraud in her testimony before the state legislature by claiming ignorance of the concept: “I’m not sure, to be honest, what is an illegal vote…. What does that mean?”

McReynolds was key to many of the last-minute voting-law changes in Pennsylvania ahead of the 2020 election, which conservatives criticized as unconstitutional and vulnerable to fraud. She’s cited extensively in an amicus briefing filed by the League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania, Common Cause Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia-based Black Political Empowerment Project, and the Latino-focused Make the Road PA—all left-wing get-out-the-vote groups—supporting the Pennsylvania Democratic Party’s lawsuit against Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, a Democrat, demanding the state adopt drop boxes and “alternatives to in-person voting.”

McReynolds’ sworn testimony (paid for at a rate of $225 per hour) notes that “ballot drop-boxes can be an important component of implementing expanded mail-in voting,” “do not create an increased opportunity for fraud,” and “are generally more secure than…post office boxes.” She also supports the adoption of “text-to-cure,” a system adopted in 2020 in Colorado wherein voters are invited to email, fax, or send a text message to “cure” mistakes in their ballots (e.g., a missing signature) instead of sending an affidavit.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ultimately ruled in the Democratic Party’s favor, determining that county elections boards may accept mail-in ballots in “unmanned drop-boxes” and extending the deadline for mail-in and absentee ballots by three days—even for ballots missing a postmark.

All of these controversial factors later featured prominently in the 2020 election in Pennsylvania and other battleground states, thanks to funding from Mark Zuckerberg and the Center for Tech and Civic Life.

Pennsylvania’s Republican-controlled state Senate banned both private funding for elections and drop-boxes in April 2022; the bill is expected to be vetoed by Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf, and drop boxes were still in place for the state’s June primary. In Wisconsin, the state supreme court ruled drop boxes were illegal in February 2022 after 570 were used in 66 of the state’s 72 counties between 2020 and early 2021.

Interestingly, McReynolds also oversaw Denver’s adoption of the now-controversial Dominion Voting Systems in May 2015, lauding the system in a presentation before election officials (only a grainy image of her presentation exists). The liberal Brennan Center for Justice profiled Denver’s adoption of Dominion in a 2015 case study, noting that it was designed to promote vote-by-mail given that 95 percent of Denver voters cast their ballot by mail under the state’s all-mail system. McReynolds later defended Dominion against claims of ballot fraud days after the 2020 election, tweeting:

No, Dominion voting machines did not cause widespread voting problems. Don’t be fooled by conspiracies & disinformation. Instead rely on trusted sources of information like election officials.

In a Denver Post op-ed in 2017, McReynolds in her capacity as Denver’s director of elections accused President Donald Trump’s new Commission on Election Integrity of “frightening away Denver voters” and leading voters to withdraw their registration due to its supposed partisanship (it was bipartisan) and unclear mission. The commission was formed to investigate “improper voter registrations,” “voter suppression,” and fraud. In late 2017, the left-wing group United to Protect Democracy sued the commission for attempting to gather voter information from the states. McReynolds provided sworn testimony alleging that the commission had caused Denver voter registration withdrawals to surge.

In 2018, McReynolds left Denver to lead the National Vote at Home Institute and Coalition, a pair of tiny nonprofits in Washington, D.C., formed the year prior to promote vote-by-mail everywhere.

Like all 501(c) nonprofits, both Vote at Home groups are officially nonpartisan, per IRS tax exempt rules. Yet they were created with start-up funding from the liberal National Association of Letter Carriers (the postal workers’ union), which hosted the group’s kick-off event at its union headquarters in Washington. The event was attended by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon (a Democrat elected in the country’s first-ever all-mail federal election), and Oregon Secretary of State Phil Keisling, who later joined the board of Vote at Home. At the event, Keisling illustrated his vision of voting, with my emphasis:

Imagine a state where voters never have to show a photo ID; wait in voting lines; leave home or work early to get to their designated polling place; or worry about bad weather, traffic jams, finding parking or public transportation, or arranging childcare.

AVR’s [automatic voter registration] underlying policy premise is identical to vote-at home’s; if the government knows you’re a citizen, you become a registered voter. [Emphasis added.]

Brian Renfroe, executive vice president of the postal workers’ union, leads Vote at Home’s board of directors. Also on the board is Emily Persaud-Zamora, director of the Nevada affiliate of the liberal get-out-the-vote group State Voices, and 2018 Democratic Maryland gubernatorial candidate and former NAACP president Ben Jealous, who now heads the far-left judicial activist group People for the American Way, infamous for the original “borking” of judge Robert Bork, and later their attempted “borkings” of President Trump’s Supreme Court appointees.

Also on Vote at Home’s board is Stephen Silberstein, one of the top 20 donors to the Hillary Clinton-aligned super PAC Priorities USA Action in 2016, a board member for the anti-electoral college group National Popular Vote, and a member of the Democracy Alliance, where the left’s most powerful donors regularly meet to discuss funding of political and get-out-the-vote groups. The Silberstein Foundation has donated at least $425,000 to the National Vote at Home Institute since 2018.

McReynolds herself spoke at the Democracy Alliance’s 2018 fall conference (on an unknown topic) alongside Black Lives Matter co-founder and “trained Marxist” Alicia Garza, then-Leadership Conference president Vanita Gupta (who’s now associate attorney general in the Biden Department of Justice), and the “civic-engagement” (read: voter-turnout) group For Freedoms.

The Vote at Home nonprofits have also received funding from eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund Voice, various AFL-CIO unions, and the Arabella-run dark-money groups Hopewell Fund and New Venture Fund.

Under McReynolds, Vote at Home released its first national vote-by-mail proposal in mid-2020, “catapulting” this tiny organization into the center of the left’s scheme to use Covid-19 to transform the 2020 election.

As the election loomed, Vote at Home supplied secretaries of state with drop box locations—many of them paid for by CTCL’s “Zuck bucks”—and pushed for hasty adoption of mail-in ballots in at least 37 states and D.C.

California hired McReynolds to consult on its massive vote-by-mail expansion plans in mid-2020. And in the Atlanta suburb of DeKalb County, Georgia, Vote at Home published a 60-page report to help the county “create a modern, lean vote-by-mail program.” DeKalb received $9.6 million in Zuck bucks—$12.59 for every person living there—and gave Joe Biden 300,000 votes.

Meddling in the States

In Wisconsin, the Vote by Mail operative Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein effectively ran Green Bay’s election as the city’s “de facto elections administrator,” according to a later investigation by Wisconsin Spotlight. Email chains exposed Green Bay Mayor Eric Genrich “usurping” the city clerk’s authority over election administration and giving it to the Vote at Home crew—placing the state’s third-largest election in the hands of private, partisan actors. In the clerk’s words, Green Bay “went rogue” under Vote at Home and its Democratic allies.

Spitzer-Rubenstein reportedly controlled four of the five keys to the room where ballots were stored and counted, had access to absentee ballots days before the 2020 election, and asked the county clerk if he and his team could “cure” faulty absentee ballots as they’d done in Milwaukee.

Vote at Home launched a Wisconsin “communications toolkit” in August “to support outreach around absentee voting” in coordination with an allied left-wing group, the Center for Civic Design, which “share[d] research insights about how to engage people who might not trust the vote by mail process.” (It’s also worth noting that CTCL, which spent $10.1 million in Wisconsin, lists the National Vote at Home Institute as a partner in its schemes.)

But Vote at Home didn’t only target Wisconsin. A since-removed list of state leads on Vote at Home’s website reveals other operatives in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Texas, Michigan, Ohio, New York, and New Jersey.

Little is known about these operatives’ meddling in the 2020 election, and most of them don’t list (or perhaps have dropped) National Vote at Home Institute from their LinkedIn profiles. But in Ohio and Georgia, at least, Vote at Home operatives coordinated their efforts with the Leadership Now Project, formed by Obama administration alumni to trick conservative voters into supporting the Left’s gerrymandering and vote-by-mail schemes—a project it called “Fix the System.” Fix the System was run by Nilmini Rubin, who now runs public policy affairs for Facebook.

Your Opinion Is Disinformation

Since the 2020 election, McReynolds has pivoted to dismissing any claims of election irregularities, fraud, or mischief as “disinformation”—such as in one left-leaning podcast in which she’s described as a “progressive”:

In an election where one side isn’t happy with the outcome their immediate response is to blame the process, or blame the system, and so we’re going to have a lot of work to do to dispel the myths and the misinformation and disinformation because that’s just spreading like wildfire.

Elsewhere, she’s claimed that “the 2020 election was the most secure election that we’ve ever had” (CTCL makes the same extreme claim) and that “the biggest challenge in 2020 was the disinformation and misinformation that occurred.” Limits on mail-in voting, in her view, “are aimed at restricting election officials from doing their jobs,” not preventing illegal voting, while “partisan actors” (read: Republicans) are “play[ing] games and try[ing] to tip the scales in the election process.”

This is pundit language and a dead giveaway for partisan leanings. “I think on the policy front, part of the reason the disinformation spreads… is that there are not many federal standards,” she told the Associated Press in May 2021. “We need to think about some federal standards [for elections] because it’s easy for bad actors to spread the wrong information because the rules vary so much by state.”

“Federal standards” to combat “disinformation” means placing control over how the elections are run in the hands of Washington bureaucrats. It means ignoring the Constitution’s stipulation that the states alone may prescribe “the times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives” (Article 1, Sectiom 4) and instead instituting the sort of top-down election system the Founders tried to prevent.

Anyone familiar with how the left suddenly adopts a new phrase or buzzword to fit political needs won’t be surprised by the sudden popularity of a once-obscure word—“disinformation”—previously used by intelligence services to describe false-flag operations in espionage and wartime, which is now used to describe right-wing voter-suppression conspiracy theories. It’s designed to shut down debate.

Delivering the Votes

Shortly after Joe Biden was sworn in as the nation’s 46th president, McReynolds got her reward: an appointment to the U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors, which oversees the agency.

There’s a catch. By law, a maximum of five members of either party may serve on the nine-person board. As of writing, the USPS Board of Governors has four Republicans and three Democrats, plus the “independent” McReynolds. If the Senate confirms Biden’s newest nominees—a Republican who’s served under both Trump and Obama, Derek Kan, and a Democrat, Derek Tangherlini, who heads Laurene Powell Jobs’ philanthropy Emerson Collective—it would bring the total to five Republicans, four Democrats, and McReynolds.

By presenting McReynolds as an “independent” during her 2021 confirmation process, the Biden administration quietly freed up a future Democratic seat, potentially gifting the party six seats and total control over the Postal Service in the near future.

But is McReynolds really an independent? For one thing, McReynolds was a registered Democrat in 2010, according to the conservative American Accountability Foundation.

She was also an advisor to the Election Validation Project, a campaign by Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund to advise public officials on conducting election audits. The project is headed by Jennifer Morrell, an ex-Colorado elections official who also runs the Elections Group, a CTCL ally that provides “guidance” to officials on implementing mail-in ballots.

Just 10 days prior to McReynolds’ appointment to the Board of Governors in February 2021, the National Vote at Home Institute’s website showed a list of partners, almost all of them left-wing political groups.

By March, the list had been scrubbed from Vote at Home’s website.

Notables included the Democracy Fund, Rock the Vote, the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), Center for Civic Design, the far-left Represent.US, Arabella-run Center for Secure and Modern Elections, National Association of Letter Carriers, ACLU, Common Cause, and Democratic consultancy Uprising Strategies, whose co-founder, Nick Rathod, runs Democrat Beto O’Rourke’s Texas gubernatorial campaign.

McReynolds was confirmed to the USPS Board of Governors in May 2021 by a vote of 59 to 38 as an independent. Republican William D. Zollars’ term expires in December 2022. With the left pinning so many of its hopes on vote-by-mail in the future, skeptics might rightly wonder why Biden wouldn’t try to replace him with another Democrat in order to gain an illegal supermajority on the board.

This is hardly speculation. Senate Democrats started calling on Biden to remove Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a Trump appointee, earlier this year. Why? DeJoy is a vote-by-mail skeptic. Democrats and activists have accused him of intentionally slowing down the delivery of mail—and mail-in ballots—ahead of the 2020 election, which DeJoy denies. (It is more likely that, as with everything else in 2020, Covid-19 was responsible for slow delivery times.)

A left-wing majority would have the power to replace DeJoy with a more pliable candidate. Common Cause, a liberal litigation group and Vote at Home partner, has an entire lobbying campaign for creating a Biden-appointed, “reform-minded majority” on the USPS Board of Governors to “fix Trump’s manufactured USPS crisis and fire DeJoy.”

Biden’s nominees uniformly count speedier delivery of mail-in ballots as central to their proposed “sweeping reforms” to the Postal Service. One can expect the other Democrats and McReynolds to support transforming the declining agency into a ballot-delivery service, since vote-by-mail is central to the Democrats’ future election strategy.

This risky strategy relies on propping up the Postal Service. USPS lost $4.6 billion in 2021 alone and has predicted it will run out of money by 2024. Trump proposed privatizing the agency in 2018. A bipartisan postal-reform bill, signed into law in April, promises to save $50 billion over the next decade, though critics see it as throwing good money after bad.

In March, Biden asked Congress for $10 billion to fund “election infrastructure”—half of which would be used to boost USPS’s capacity for mail-in voting “in underserved areas” (translation: rich with Democratic votes), including free postage for ballots for an agency that has lost money for the past 15 years.

But the strategy makes more sense when viewed in concert with other elements designed to give Democrats a permanent edge in future elections, like CTCL’s $80 million campaign to get Uncle Sam to pay for the things Mark Zuckerberg funded in 2020: more mail-in paper ballots, and taxpayer funding for drop boxes to bypass USPS should it fail to deliver the necessary votes.

They’re already making headway. In April the Postal Service, Democracy Fund, and Vote at Home invited election officials to a two-day retreat in Phoenix, Arizona, where they were schooled in best practices related to “voter-roll maintenance,” “envelope and application design,” and other vote-by-mail elements.

A Better Strategy for the Nation

What can conservatives and their allies do? Here are a few simple ideas.

First, make states the battlefield for election integrity, not the federal government. As of writing, 20 states have banned or restricted Zuck bucks, others are eliminating private drop boxes, and more have shored up voter ID laws. In Republican-controlled states, this is low-hanging fruit.

Second, election administration must be transparent and free from private influence. That means keeping government agencies honest and above partisanship. The Left’s entire election strategy after the 2020 election hinges on co-opting government offices and subordinating them to the interests of the Democratic Party. Show Americans how this is deeply unfair and they’ll oppose it every time.

Third, recognize that this opponent is a paper tiger, and chin up. The professional, entrenched left isn’t weak, but it isn’t as powerful as it pretends to be. Exposing this novel, partisan campaign for what it is—a blatant attempt to codify permanent control in Washington—is a winning issue for constitutionalists. After all, CTCL’s pivot from Zuckerberg funding in 2020 to federal funding in 2021–22 is as good as admitting that they don’t believe private funding for elections is sustainable or popular with the American people.

Clever conservatives will demand their opponents answer a simple question: Do you believe private, special interests ought to fund public elections agencies?

This is a fight we can win.

Hayden Ludwig is a senior investigative researcher at the Capital Research Center

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Fire the Lawless Attorneys

Attorneys who work in the public sector have the unique experience and responsibility of representing not a private client, but the people, the taxpayers, society itself. Along with the blessed privilege of not having to bill clients with high hourly rates—a privilege I thank God for every day as a county solicitor—public sector attorneys have a solemn duty not simply to provide zealous representation to their client and win their case, but to pursue what is proper under the law regardless of what that means for the outcome.

When public sector attorneys in general and prosecutors in particular fail to live up to their lofty calling, the results are truly dangerous. A politically motivated prosecutor can use his power to unevenly apply the law and prosecute political or ideological enemies. An unscrupulous prosecutor may decide his goal is to win criminal cases at any cost, covering up unfavorable evidence and trampling on the rights of defendants. An ideological left-wing prosecutor may choose to use his power not to uphold and enforce the criminal law, but to enact social reform.

This effort is prevalent today and conservatives need to coherently identify and defeat it wherever it rears its lawless head. As Justice Robert Jackson (then United States Attorney General Jackson) noted in his famous 1940 speech about the role of prosecutors, “while the prosecutor at his best is one of the most beneficent forces in our society, when he acts from malice or other base motives, he is one of the worst.” Any criminal prosecutor who is acting from base motives, from any motive other than impartially enforcing the criminal law as written to advance the common good, cannot be tolerated in civil society.

Between the recent recall of San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, the impending recall of Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon, and the Pennsylvania legislature’s recent decision to introduce articles of impeachment against Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, there is potential for a movement here. As Katya Sedgwick recently wrote for The American Conservative, the recall of the San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin “has yet to morph into a full-fledged political movement with a coherent ideology capable of delivering true change.” But it can. And it needs to. There is the potential to unite a voting coalition that could create a real law-and-order reform movement and remove the dangerous progressives currently occupying many district attorney offices.

First, we should distinguish between two different types of bad prosecutors mentioned earlier. The type of prosecutor who enforces the law unevenly, using the law as a weapon against his personal or political enemies, is quite different from the left-wing activist prosecutor. The central issue in the current moment is that we have powerful prosecutors in major cities motivated by political ideologies that, in many cases, discourage the prosecution and imprisonment of criminals. The prevalent issue is not that officials use criminal prosecution as a personal weapon, but rather that for ideological reasons they are choosing not to wield the weapon at all. As a result, they offer shocking plea deals to dangerous criminals. Or they make public announcements that they will not prosecute certain types of crimes.

This is unacceptable. The prosecutor’s role is to enforce the criminal laws as they are written. The legislatures have passed criminal codes reflecting the will of the people as to which behaviors ought to be prosecuted as criminal. The prosecutor’s job is to enforce those decisions, not to make the decisions. Of course, district attorneys’ offices have limited resources and have to make case by case decisions about which prosecutions to focus on. But announcing that certain actions defined by law as criminal will never be prosecuted goes beyond prosecutorial discretion. It is an abuse of office.

An analogy between the role of judges and the role of prosecutors helps explain the abuse. Justice Antonin Scalia was convinced that the death penalty was legally permitted under the Eighth Amendment, but he seriously wrestled with the question of whether the death penalty was moral according to his conscience and religious beliefs. He concluded that it was. He remarked wisely that if he was ever convinced what the law required of him was immoral, his proper recourse would be “resignation rather than simply ignoring duly enacted constitutional laws.”

Left-wing district attorneys ought to take note. If they believe that the criminal laws passed by the legislature are immoral or ineffective, they should resign from their prosecutorial roles and run for the state legislature. These activists are occupying the wrong office.

Sadly, I am not optimistic that any left-wing prosecutors will heed the call to do some soul-searching, realize they are acting lawlessly and disregarding the core duties of their office, and resign. Therefore, the political efforts to recall and impeach wayward prosecutors are necessary to stop what is becoming a crisis.

This movement can succeed, even in cities that consistently vote Democrat. In the 1993 election for mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani managed to become the Republican mayor of an intensely Democratic city. Granted, Giuliani’s platform was rather liberal on many social issues, and he was endorsed by the Liberal Party. But the point remains: New York City was devastated by violent crime, as well as “a general sense of unrest…a feeling that the city was uncontrollable and that the general quality of life in the city had declined.” This feeling of unrest and a lack of control in a major Democrat-controlled city led the people to reject lawlessness and actually elect a Republican promising law and order.

The examples of New York City in 1993 and San Francisco in 2022 provide a valuable lesson. When violent crime invades a community, when a sense of unrest, chaos and decline envelops a society, the people act. They choose law and order; they opt for safe and stable communities. Conservatives need to seize these opportunities, come together with a message that will attract independent and Democrat voters, and take back control of the city streets from violent criminals and the progressives who enable them.

This is not mere partisan politics. This is common sense. Without the rule of law, no other issue matters and communities fall apart. This toxic atmosphere of lawlessness and crime, of chaos and unrest, is prevalent in major cities all across the nation. District attorneys that fail to zealously enforce the law are a major part of the problem. They need to do their job or by hook or by crook, by impeachment or recall, they need to go.

Frank DeVito is an attorney and a current fellow in the Napa Legal Good Counselor Project. His work has previously been published in The American Conservative, the Quinnipiac Law Review, the Federalist, and the Penn State Online Law Review. He lives in eastern Pennsylvania with his wife and three young children.

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January 6 Was Not a Coup

Was there a coup attempt on January 6? For the answer to be “yes,” there had to have been a realistic path by which some action on that day could have resulted in Donald Trump remaining president of the United States.

Watching the show trial on television, you could believe it might have been possible. The special committee’s TV show is dedicated to convincing a lay audience the Trump administration came “that close” to tossing away our democracy, with some mechanism almost clicking into place that would have left Trump in power.

It would be easier to take the Democrats seriously if they would coolly outline just how Trump could have stayed in office without the military, who were clearly not taking a partisan stance on January 6. Absent that, you had political theater and a riot, not a coup attempt. Think back to the 1960s and ask yourself if occupying the administration building on campus would have stopped the Vietnam War in its tracks. This is politically much ado about not much, except Democratic Party 2024 electioneering.

To stage a coup, you need tanks on the White House lawn. Instead, America transitioned peacefully from one administration to another. That hard reality is wholly missing from the Democrats’ January 6 committee hearings and all the frou-frou that accompanies them.

Could Trump have used the Capitol riot to declare martial law and stay in power? No. The president cannot use the military domestically in a way Congress does not agree with. The “web of laws” Congress enacted to govern the domestic activities of the armed forces—including the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of federal troops to execute the law without express congressional authorization—would stop Trump cold.

According to well-settled principles of constitutional practice, the president cannot act in a way Congress has forbidden unless the Constitution gives the president “conclusive and preclusive” power over the issue in dispute. Martial law has been declared nine times since World War II, five of which were to counter resistance to desegregation in the South. Although an uneasy climate of mutual aid has always existed between the military and civilian law enforcement, Department of Defense personnel are limited in what they can do to enforce civil law. They can’t extend a presidential term. That business of tanks on the White House lawn? Someone has already thought it through.

The Insurrection Act of 1807 is the one statutory exception to the Posse Comitatus Act that does allow the president to deploy the military domestically, but, by precedent, the armed forces can only be used to suppress armed insurrections or to execute the laws when local or state authorities are unable or unwilling to do so. The military’s role under this law is limited, and the existence of the Insurrection Act in no way puts the military “in charge” and does not suspend the normal functions and authorities of Congress, state legislatures, or the courts.

More importantly, troops in the streets have nothing to do with votes that are already in ballot boxes. Same for seizing voting machines or ballots, which were already counted by January 6.

Anything Trump might have tried to do on January 6 would have required the military to play along, which there is no evidence the military did. Just the opposite, in fact. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, took a number of steps to ensure any dramatic orders out of the White House would be confirmed, checked, and likely delayed, perhaps indefinitely. While some of Milley’s actions raise constitutional issues of their own, particularly his interference with the nuclear chain of command, clearly Milley was in no way priming his forces to participate in any sort of executive coup.

It is critical to point out how deeply the idea of civilian control of the military, and the separation of powers, is drummed into America’s officer corps. It’s like a religion. Unlike many countries in the developing world, America has a professional corps well-removed from politics, which sits atop an organization built from the ground up to respond to legal, civilian orders. If Trump had ordered the 82nd Airborne into the streets, their officers would have almost certainly said no.

With martial options well off the board, a coup would have had to rely on some sort of legalistic maneuver to exploit America’s complex electoral system. The biggest issue there is the 20th Amendment, which states unambiguously that a president’s term ends after four years. If Trump had somehow succeeded in preventing Joe Biden from being inaugurated, he still would have ceased to be president at noon on January 20, and Nancy Pelosi, as Speaker of the House, would have become president. There was no mechanism to stop that succession, ironic as it would have been.

The most quoted Trump plan ran something like this: “Somehow,” even though the Electoral College had met on December 14 and decided Biden was to be president, Republican-friendly legislatures in Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania would “ignore” the popular vote in their states and appoint their own pro-Trump electors. The law (the 19th-century Electoral Count Act) does allow legislatures to do this in the never-seen, highly unlikely event that a state fails to make a choice by the day the Electoral College meets, which, in this case, had passed before January 6.

Never mind the details; the idea, for Trump, was to introduce enough chaos into the system to force everyone in the United States to believe the only solution was to force the election, two months after voting, into Congress, where Vice President Pence himself would break the tie after every Republican agreed to play along with the scheme and choose Trump for another term.

In addition to every other problem with that scenario, Pence had no intention of doing any such thing. Trump maintained “The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors,” when in fact, Pence’s January 6 role was entirely ceremonial, presiding as electoral votes, conveyed by the states, were counted and certified, and then announcing the outcome.

The location of the riots did not matter. Although the riots slightly delayed the final announcement of the results, which still occurred at the Capitol, there is nothing in the Constitution that requires the receipt and certification to take place in the Capitol. Pence could have met with Congress at a truck stop outside Philadelphia and wrapped up business there. Pence, in a 2022 speech, said “I had no right to overturn the election. Frankly, there is almost no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president.”

To imagine a dystopian fiction where one state legislature blows past the vote to choose pro-Trump electors is difficult. To imagine several doing so simultaneously to gin up enough Trump electors, and then to imagine the Electoral College changing its mind, is impossible.

There was no indication Republicans in these important states considered going along with this anyway. Pennsylvania’s top state GOP official indicated his party would follow the law and award electors to the winner of the popular vote. He stated the state legislature “does not have and will not have a hand in choosing the state’s presidential electors or in deciding the outcome of the presidential election.” Besides, the borderline states all had Democratic governors who would have refused to approve after-the-fact Trump electors.

Such goofy schemes were also in the wind in 2016, when both Trump and many progressives looked to little-known electoral law for some sort of failsafe. They failed, too. Despite the many claims about how close we came to democracy failing, in reality, our complex system proved at least twice in recent years to be made of stiffer stuff.

What is missing most of all from the January 6 Democratic telethon is any acknowledgment that the system worked. The Constitution held. Officials from Vice President Pence on down did their jobs.

All the fear mongering, all the what-ifs Democrats now hope will distract Americans from their party’s failures of governance—war, inflation, gas prices, gun violence—miss the most important point of all. There was no attempted coup. That the committee does not plan to send a referral to the Justice Department is proof enough.

Democrats can’t win in 2024 on what they have to offer. With all the efforts to prosecute Donald Trump for something (including January 6) having failed, their sole strategy is to make people believe Trump tried to overturn the last election, and, upon failing to do so, chose t0 re-embrace the electoral process. This is little more than Trump’s third impeachment, televised.

If you are about preserving the rule of law, judgment for Trump’s actions must not come from a kangaroo court. The real message echoing from January 6? The system works. We were never even close to losing our democracy.

Peter Van Buren is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, Hooper’s War: A Novel of WWII Japan, and Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the 99 Percent.

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On Assassination Attempts

More masks have been coming off lately than just the KN95s (though one fears this is a reference whose significance will be soon forgotten, because of, not despite, its enormity). Of course, if you see a mask as a mask then you know something lies under it, and liberal proceduralism has always been a manufactured friendly face for the naked realities of politics. Indeed, that was liberalism’s point, to paint some lines and make a war a sport. But that artificiality has become a little more inescapable, and so I hope more people clinging naively to a consensus that no longer exists will wake up to the acrid burning smell. 

The Dobbs opinion leak was that recent alarm for some, a final realization that the fiction of judicial sacredness, an institution set apart from the partisanship of every other piece of American life, was just that: fiction atop faction. But if that was not alarming enough, last Wednesday saw a man arrested in an attempted assassination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. A media firestorm erupted—I kid, of course. The reality today is that we have entered a period of political history where the attempt on a Supreme Court justice’s life is largely considered a yawn. Major papers and cable news channels, with the exception of Fox, hardly touched the story, and the implicit of course we aren’t calling for anyone to actually die but he’d deserve it if he did from liberal pundits on Twitter was barely subtextual. There was a very brief reckoning of sorts when Congressman Steve Scalise and the Republican Congressional baseball team were almost killed by a lib in 2017. It was theatrical, and only happened at all because Scalise came so near to dying of his wounds. We barely remember it now. 

With the January 6 committee show trial, quite literally a professionally produced special television event, the contours of the moment become clearer. Even more clear, if we step back to actually look, are the most recent arrests related to the circus. Peter Navarro was arrested earlier this month, publicly and aggressively, after Democrats held him in contempt for refusing to testify before the committee. That arrest came a day after the former White House economic advisor promised to work to impeach President Joe Biden when the GOP takes control of Congress in the midterm elections this November. Meanwhile, last Thursday, Michigan Republican gubernatorial candidate Ryan Kelley was arrested by the FBI on charges related to January 6, never mind it being a year and a half later. MSNBC acknowledged the arrest to be unprecedented, with Kelley the first candidate for major public office charged in connection to the riot.

But we are only getting started. On Sunday, since years of Russiagate and a “shadow campaign” to “fortify” the 2020 election have not been enough to banish MAGA, members of the January 6 committee announced they had enough evidence for the Justice Department to “consider an unprecedented criminal indictment against former President Donald Trump.” That would certainly be a boost for ratings, since the miniseries has been thus far, as far as infotainment goes, a snoozefest. The show’s historic interest is largely in the abstract, that it is happening at all, not the particulars. But rolling out the Watergate red carpet for an already dethroned emperor marks another step toward criminalizing losing national elections. That might be where heads already were in the Clinton and Biden family machines, Obama somewhere still present behind the scenes, but apparently it is time for the rest of us to see it: win, or it’s not just the election you might lose.

None of this is, in a long enough view, really unprecedented. It is hard for the popular consciousness to remember the chaos and violence of the 1960s and ’70s. Presidents and officials and public figures have been actually assassinated. And America fought a formal Civil War, of course, back when it was possible to fight one, the seceding states fielding regular armies against the federal troops. Today, however, after many successive administrative and judicial consolidations of our national government, that sort of professional Caesar vs. Pompey fight seems impossible. Unrest last century looked the way it did for not-yet-abrogated reasons, and so escalating future civil conflict would resemble far more the sort seen in Argentina, or Lebanon, or, God help us, Spain. And that means the line that divides rising inflation and homelessness and crime from political violence will be blurry, the point between declining standards of living and disintegrating order one we risk tripping on.

Grim, I know. But attempted assassinations should be taken seriously, and things like the apparent firebombing of a pregnancy resource center in Gresham, Oregon, now being investigated by the ATF and FBI, put one in a grim state of mind. Nevertheless, as the angels say, fear not. This too will pass, though we may not like its passage. Tend what is given to you to tend. As a mad farmer once said,

Listen to carrion—put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.

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Wish List of a Swing Voter

Being raised in 1970s Ohio meant I was raised Democrat. In my northern industrial area, Republicans were old people, or those three good-natured guys from the Jaycees who always joked about “next year” at the get-out-the-vote rallies.

It’s true. I used to write for the Nation, even a couple of articles for the New York Times. I didn’t change much, but my party did, and one day a few years ago I woke up being yelled at by women in pink hats clamoring that I was a racist—if not an outright Nazi—for supporting the free expression they called “hate speech.”

I didn’t leave the Democratic Party as much as I was abandoned by it. With the midterm crushing of the party coming this autumn, as sure as the good guy wins in professional wrestling (big in Ohio), I can’t say I’m ready to go back. But if Democrats want to lure people like me home, here are some things they will need to do.

Dems, third-trimester abortions, really? And just because I personally support limited abortion rights, you say I also have to buy into a whole full-meal deal of unrelated-to-everyone-but-you LGBETC.? Didn’t you get the memo? Trying to bundle all these things with the Equal Rights Amendment and various other woke measures cost you support, not earned you it. 

Jettison the Blue-Anon rhetoric. I barely made it through four years under Trump, hearing every day that the sky was falling, the walls were closing in, and that damn clock would not stop tick-tocking. It turns out every tweet by Trump was not the end of democracy, fall of the Republic, or wrap party for the rule of law.

When the Supreme Court moves against your wishes, I don’t need to wake up to a headline like “The Supreme Court Is a Tool of Tyrants” or worse, “Time for Canada to Offer Gender Asylum to American Women.” Same for when the Electoral College or the Senate does not bounce your way. These institutions were crafted by the Founders to achieve a balance of power, and they do it fairly well.

Accept that “balance” means occasionally things will go the other way. The same court that rewrote society implementing Roe can do it again taking down Roe. So no more op-eds demanding a packed Court, or a change to equal representation in the Senate, or the end of the Electoral College, or more weight on the popular vote, or any of that. Shut down MSDNC and its hemorrhage of fake news. We’re tired of the media taping the chosen candidate’s latest statement on the national refrigerator door.

The Founders still matter as examples, despite their flaws. Many were only in their 20s as they wrote the code running beneath the United States, kids, who for the first time in history created a nation based on a synthesis of ideas. They risked “Our Lives, Our Fortunes And Our Sacred Honor” to do that, a dandy example for pols today who are unwilling to stand up and offer an opinion without polling advice.

They weren’t perfect, but they are deserving of our respect and admiration. Find something more important to fritter away political capital on. What we see in modern “wokeness” is the difference between a small mind and a great mind, between people who ignore their own flaws to pick at others’ out of time and context. Men like Jefferson were prime movers, men who set in place the thing that led to the next thing. That is worthy of a statue or two.

Parties should be big tents, and that does not mean we all have to give up our seats for the meme-of-the-day. Democrats pandering to one racial group (black lives do not matter more than any other lives, such as my own), or to gay folks—until they got boring and the party switched to the All Trans Network—is tiring.

Stop elevating shallow clowns like AOC and her Squad. They are hypocrites, demanding we not judge by color or gender while shoving white men to the back of the bus. Look back to the 1950s and ’60s Civil Rights movements, which stressed the inclusiveness of human dignity, not special treatment for every high-school kid wanting to annoy his parents by wearing dresses junior year.

Many of us currently outside your tent care as much about the First Amendment as any of the above-listed issues. Speech is the fundamental right, the base that supports and drives forward all the others. That beautiful haiku of the First Amendment certainly protects what you call “hate speech,” an idea that, if it started with good intentions, has gone on to suck dirt, and conveniently meaning anything that offends anyone, anytime.

The Supreme Court has found, over and again, that that nasty stuff is protected by the First Amendment. Let them sing, the rude and radical, and get back to fighting bad speech with better speech. Leave Elon alone. Twitter before him sold censorship, the promise to pretty-little-flower people that they would never encounter challenging ideas in their social-media stream, but that is anathema to a democracy that must thrive on the marketplace of ideas.

No more wars. Nobody, after two decades of failures and lies and body bags in the Middle East, voted for Joe Biden to restart the Cold War. The United States, I thought, had learned some sort of lesson in the pathetic finale in Kabul, until Old Joe reminded us it was 1980 again, by his watch. How in the hell did I end up worrying about nuclear war again? Trump (say what you will, I’ll wait) did not restart the Cold War. He did not go to war as you said he would with China, Venezuela, or Iran. He even tried to make peace with North Korea. I want more of that, not this.

Please, Dems, if you want anyone back, really retire Hillary. She represents little beyond corruption, with all those “contributions” to the Clinton Foundation—which dried up alongside her political chances, funny thing—and a near-endless appetite for power.

Spare us “but the other party…” Voters understand nobody is perfect, as is no party. Give it all some thought as you’re licking your wounds over the loss of Roe, and the very likely thumping in the midterms. You have two years to find a real candidate and avoid the easy outs of clones like Harris, Beto, or Buttigieg. It’s a hint that someone does not have what it takes if they’re available to run for the White House because they lost locally and were given a patronage job.

In 2016, Democrats asked for change, and instead watched the party drive Bernie out to the marshes. In 2020, we got the sad skeleton of Joe Biden. No more rigged primaries. No more Hillaries and “debates” with some shmuck playing the Washington Generals. Learn the lesson before 2024 if you would like people like me to be part of the party’s future. Otherwise, we’re going to vote Trump.

Peter Van Buren is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, Hooper’s War: A Novel of WWII Japan, and Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the 99 Percent.

The post Wish List of a Swing Voter appeared first on The American Conservative.

A Countdown for Joe Biden

For half a decade now, America’s media elite have been obsessed with former President Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s conversion to Trumpism.

Press and TV are daily consumed with his actions and prospects and the future of the party he captured in 2016.

Perhaps it is time to consider the prospects of President Joe Biden and the political future of his embattled presidency.

What are the odds that Biden, like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama before him, will run again in 2024, win reelection, serve out a second term and transfer his office to the 47th president on Jan. 20, 2029?

My guess: The odds of that happening are roughly the same as the odds that last-minute entry Rich Strike would win the Kentucky Derby, as he left the starting gate at Churchill Downs at 80-1.

Consider the first hurdle Biden faces on the way to renomination in 2024—the midterm elections five months off.

Since the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 reached record highs in January, both have seen eight weeks of wipeouts of trillions of dollars in value as we have approached bear-market territory.

Stock portfolios, pensions and retirement benefit plans have been gutted. These massive market losses are also a lead indicator pointing to a recession right ahead, just as voters pass judgment on a Democratic Party that controls the White House and both houses of Congress.

But even before we reach recession, Americans have already been living with a Biden inflation of 8 percent that has lasted for months and affected all the necessities of normal life, such as groceries and gasoline.

And the worst seems yet to come.

The Federal Reserve has reversed course from its easy money days and begun to raise interest rates to squeeze the Biden inflation out of the economy. What lies ahead may remind people who were around then of Jimmy Carter’s “stagflation,” where interest rates hit 21 percent to kill an inflation that reached 13 percent.

As for the crisis on the southern border, it is deeper than ever. Some 234,000 migrants were caught illegally entering the U.S. in April alone, with thousands of others evading any contact with U.S. authorities.

This is an invasion rate of some 3 million illegal migrants a year.

Shootings, killings, carjackings, criminal assaults, and smash-and-grab robberies in record numbers are the subject of our nightly news.

And the latest national polls suggest the country is holding Biden responsible. The president’s approval rating is down to 39 percent, and only 1 in 3 Americans think he is doing a good job handling the economy and that the nation is headed in the right direction.

Now the omicron variant of Covid-19 is making a comeback; infections are again over 100,000 a day.

Biden might find consolation from how his predecessors overcame midterm defeats. Clinton in 1994 lost 54 House seats and won reelection easily in 1996. Obama lost 63 House seats in 2010 to come back and win handily over Mitt Romney in 2012.

Why cannot Biden ride out the anticipated storm in this year’s midterms and come back to win election in 2024, as did Clinton and Obama?

Age has something to do with it. Clinton was 50 in his reelection year 1996. Obama was 51 in his reelection year 2012. And both were at the peak of their political powers.

Biden, on election day 2024, will be two weeks shy of his 82nd birthday. Should he serve out a second term, he would not leave the White House until he had turned 86. Biden has been America’s oldest president since the day he took office.

Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers wrote of “energy in the executive” as being an indispensable attribute of good government.

Does Biden, with his shuffling gait, regular gaffes, and physical and cognitive decline manifest that attribute of which Hamilton wrote?

The likely scenario for Biden?

His party sustains a crushing defeat in November comparable to what Clinton and Obama suffered. But the party does not immediately rally around Biden as present and future leader, as it did with Clinton and Obama. Critics inside the Democratic coalition begin to blame Biden for the loss.

Ambitious Democrats, sensing disaster if Biden tops the ticket in 2024, begin to call for him to stand down and give way to a younger candidate, a new face, in 2024.

One or two progressives declare for president, and the pressure builds on Biden to avoid a personal and political humiliation in the 2024 primaries by standing down, as Harry Truman did in 1952 and Lyndon Johnson did in 1968.

By early 2023, Biden will have adopted the line that dealing with the challenge of China and Russia and, at the same time, coping with recession and inflation require his full attention. And these preclude a national political campaign for reelection.

And then President Joe Biden announces he will not run again.

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Get Smart on Intelligence

The Heian period of Japanese history saw the slow shriveling of imperial rule. Overshadowed by powerful court families and hostage to palace intrigues and a generally effete highbrow culture (princes in those days cried a lot, and weren’t ashamed to write girly poems about their feelings), the Heian capital lost interest in, and then control of, the hinterlands.

The source of the trouble was a military detachment that Emperor Kanmu, who founded the Heian capital in 794, had sent to the Far North, which thereafter lingered on as a weaponized brigade. One suspects that Kanmu had played up the “Far North” bit and sent the toughs as far away from the center as possible just to keep them from meddling in government affairs. 

In any event, what began as an emperor-centered polity in Heian-kyō devolved into ruder rule by spear and bicep. As the imperial center waned, the semi-unemployed platoons whose forebears had once laid waste to the Northern barbarians began to tax the surrounding provinces for their own benefit. Because, honestly, why ride a thousand miles for conquest when there are fat, unarmed suckers right next door? It was becoming martial law without civilian control.

Over time, local strongmen, at first hired to guard farms and estates from these half-deputized, half-freelancing, quasi-ministerial marauders, got an idea.

“We have a lot of weapons,” the strongmen bethought themselves. “So why are we carrying on with the fiction of answering to the roving bands, who themselves have pretty much dropped the charade of answering to the schmucks in the capital in the flowing silk robes?”

Thus was born the samurai, the men who realized they were the real government. Flip that switch, dear reader, and it’s lights out. Power sorts itself out, and there is really no confusion, among those in the know, about who calls the shots.

The episode above unfolded between roughly the time of Charlamagne and the Third Crusade. But the same thing, mutatis mutandis, has played out in our own time. Only it’s not the military that runs the show any longer. It’s the spooks. 

It used to be that the gods were the keystones of rule. Then it was the generals. But as statecraft has become more and more the business of controlling and manipulating information—a process that has moved along slowly, at different paces and by different steps in different places—it has been, increasingly, the spies and secret police who have come to call the shots. A long time ago, court historians faked history to support sovereigns. Now, court historians write history in advance. It’s called a “daily intelligence briefing.” It’s a map of how the spymasters will the future to unfold.

Understanding this, getting smart on intelligence and how it is the real power behind what we euphemistically call our democratic republic, is indispensable for the modern American. Fail to know how our government really works, and we will forever be led around by the nose, from one bloody debacle and canceled civil liberty to the next.

The end of the American Heian period came when we started conquering Apaches and Filipinos instead of minding our business at home. American intelligence grew out of the United States’s shift from being an agrarian democratic republic to an urbanizing, progressive empire feeding on deficit spending for war.

A good book on the consequences of this intelligence capture of American government is James Bamford’s 1983 Puzzle Palace. The book’s “Prelude” section  tells the story of Herbert Osborne Yardley (1889-1958), the Indiana man who helped set the United States government onto the fateful course of, as Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson would later call it, the ungentlemanly practice of reading other people’s mail. During the First World War, Yardley and his MI-8 (“MI” standing for “Military Intelligence”) group helped Washington win the information battle both abroad and at home. The Bill of Rights was the real casualty of that useless conflict. Washington used its chokehold on information to maintain the most important monopoly that any government can and must hold: not that on violence, pace Weber, but on violence’s legitimator, information.

After that war, Washington kept on reading other people’s mail, especially that of the Japanese, imperial rivals with whom the D.C.-types would tangle in earnest in 1941. The same Henry Stimson who had chided Yardley for peeping on the enemy became a convert to the cause of espionage. As America went deeper and deeper into its century-long (and counting) imperial-war quagmire, intelligence burrowed deeper and deeper into the American governmental soul. After World War II the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) gave way to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). This was, in essence, the final coup of the intelligence clan. The military, and Washington in general, was now in the thrall of black ops.

The Cold War, Vietnam as an outpost within it, and all the wars since (can you say “slam dunk on WMD”?) have been the creatures of intelligence. Budgets and budgetary oversight are punchlines in that world. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Nobody, my friends. The money is inexhaustible when you are writing your own checks. The logic is bureaucratic to its core.

History is a motley art and the words “always” and “never” are pretty much off limits. But perhaps I can be permitted a sweeping generalization just this once: There are no great men in a bureaucracy. The career bureaucrat is a parasite, always, and never acts but for his own next paycheck, which is a compelling interest inseparable from the ever-expanding income of his department. This is the American intelligence “community” (in the same sense that pirates are “entrepreneurs”) in full monty. It is mercenary pencil-pushing, installing and assassinating tinhorn dictators until one makes retirement and can buy a Winnebago.

Once you know the secret, then secret service takes on a whole different cast. Those who have seen a James Bond movie will know that our hero works on “Her Majesty’s Secret Service.” But does he? Or does the queen do his bidding in the end? Bond’s interests and Buckingham Palace’s very nicely align, to be sure. But which is the tail and which is the dog? As with the samurai, perhaps it also occurred to Mr. Bond at some point that having a license to kill was a very convenient thing when killing was how one made a living anyway. Her Royal Highness is safe in her bed, protected by James Bond on his unpleasant errands abroad. So surely he must be servant, and she master.

Switch cultural registers a bit and wade around in the cesspool to test this theory. In 2016, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, James Comey, exonerated, on no authority save his own ego, the Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary R. Clinton, of wrongdoing in the to-do about her secret servers and the e-mails she deleted from when she was running guns and uranium as a side business while secretary of State. Well, many said (including me), it seems the FBI is in the tank for the Clintons. But then, in a wild October surprise, Comey reopened the investigation into Hillary’s crooked schemes after it came to light that a Hillary aide’s pervert husband had a mammoth trove of Hillary e-mails on his laptop. Ouch, that smarts. Hillary lost. 

So, did Comey throw the election to Trump? Or did he play it straight and just follow the evidence without fear or favor? The answer is neither. The answer is that it doesn’t matter, when you’re a spy, who wins or loses. You own them all. We now know that Comey’s FBI was already thick in its plans to run a coup against Trump should he get in the White House. That was their “insurance policy.” In fact, when Trump did get in, that is precisely what Comey’s FBI did.

But in October of 2016, Comey still unconsciously believed Hillary would win. Here’s Comey’s spin on that moment and those e-mails on the pervert’s laptop: “[Hillary is] going to be elected president and if I hide this from the American people, she’ll be illegitimate the moment she’s elected, the moment this comes out.” Here’s the translation: “If Hillary gets in, I own her. And if she doesn’t, then in four years I’ll own her still.”

Comey had nothing to worry about with Trump. He owned him already. Hillary had been feeding the FBI fake news about Trump in Russia with delegates from the Prostitutes for Putin club. Or something. But so brazen is the game that the FBI doesn’t even try to hide its corruption any longer. Prostitutes for Putin? Whether we believed that nonsense or not made no difference. The FBI owns us, too. Comey’s deputy’s wife had taken pallets of cash from Hillary’s top bundler, but nobody with political horse sense was going to say anything about it. Because the spooks run the show.

The one thing Comey didn’t factor in was anybody’s fighting back. Trump did, firing Comey in May of 2017. Trump fought hard. He tried to make Washington an American town again. But the latter-day samurai won in the end. The eavesdroppers rule the world. It was all too easy. One of the men who used to do Comey’s job parachuted in, issuing a “report” after conducting an “investigation” on the whole tawdry business, and then doddering off into the sunset while the Bureau waited for the Washington machinery to finish chewing up the first president in modern history who bucked the intelligence regime.  

All the loose ends have now been tied up from that little escapade, too. Just last week, a Democrat judge rigged a “trial” so that a D.C. jury would have no choice but to exonerate the bottom-feeding Democrat lawyer who fed the FBI the completely false fairy tales about Trump. The FBI has no need to drag this all out any further. The point was proven long ago. And, besides, after more than 40 years of FISA courts’ rubber-stamping intelligence ops against Americans, why would a bought-and-paid-for judge feel the need to demonstrate independence of thought? Who gives up a pension for a fool’s errand?

As Minamoto no Yoritomo might have said were he Christopher Wray, “Get smart. No matter what it looks like, the fact is I don’t work for the folks in the long black robes. The folks in the long black robes work for me.”

This is “intelligence” in the USA. The spooks own Washington. It has been a cliché since the days of J. Edgar Hoover that the people reading the mail are the ones who rule the world. Want to keep a useful idiot on the throne? “Hunter Biden’s laptop is Russian disinformation,” say the leading lights of the “intelligence community.” Want to make sure troublemakers stay out of power? January 6. 

On Friday, June 3, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the one that ran the coup against President Trump based on fake oppo research from Hillary Clinton, arrested Peter Navarro, an actual American patriot. What set the G-Men in motion? Why, they were “acting on a referral from the Democrat-run House that held [Navarro] in contempt for refusing to testify at the partisan January 6 Committee.”

Remember when James Clapper lied to Congress? But Clapper was the DNI, so arresting him would be like accusing the manorial lord of stealing his own silverware. But Navarro is guileless. Guileless, and frank. Therefore, he is a sitting duck. Guess what happened just one day before the arrest? “Navarro,” Breitbart reported, “appeared on left-wing MSNBC to promise that he would lead efforts to promote the impeachment of President Joe Biden if Republicans take Congress in the midterm elections, which they are expected to do.”

Funny how that works. Hunter Biden’s laptop is Russian disinformation. Now, Peter Navarro is facing jail. Freedom and democracy. Long live the republic. Get smart on intelligence, my fellow Americans. Until we end the spooks’ stranglehold on our government, we will all be like the medieval Japanese emperors, praying that we don’t offend the people who really run the show.

Jason Morgan is associate professor at Reitaku University in Kashiwa, Japan.

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The Big Apple’s Rotten Core

I went home to visit New York with that same curiosity that makes you slow down when passing a wreck on the highway. I had read of a city gone feral, zombie homeless armies in Midtown, the deserted office blocks, and crime stepping in for Darwin to take care of what was left. It was morbid, harsh, and cynical curiosity.

The overall feeling one gets in New York is that it is used up, a failed place that somehow is still around, like an abandoned industrial park. The irony; it was Wall Street dealers who helped turn the once-prosperous Midwest into the Rust Belt. Now the brokers are gone, too. 

Just as in Weirton or Gary you drive past empty mills, so you do in Wall Street. There are no trading houses; the last international, Deutsche Bank, left and is leasing space Uptown. I found myself largely alone on the old streets off Wall, the ones that went all the way back, Beaver, Pine, and Stone. Most of the old Gilded-era banks are being converted into condos for people who aren’t here yet and may never come. Recent Census numbers show a 300,000-person drop through last summer. Even now, more people are moving out than in.

At the same New York time-space that you see empty condos you see a fair number of homeless in the shadows. The city commandeered empty hotels in the area for them during the worst of the Covid winters.

And then there is the Stock Exchange, left out of the place it created. The building is still there, but near-zero trades occur in it. Most everything is remote now, a trend started after 9/11 and completed by Covid. On my next visit it wouldn’t surprise me to see the space converted into a Target.

Like some elaborate joke about canaries in the coal mine, the condition of New York’s subways points to the direction the rest of the city is headed. With parts of the system still in use that were built 118 years ago, the thing is a testament to just how far the least amount of maintenance will go. You expect it to be too cold in winter, too hot in summer, that rare mix of urine and street-gravy smell, and layers of filth that may be what is actually holding it all together.

But the purpose of the subway has changed. With fewer people working out of offices, and more of those that do driving private cars in the city (parking is a new thing to complain about, as car theft is up double-digit percent from pre-Covid) the subway is no longer common ground for New Yorkers.

Vast numbers of visibly mentally ill people inhabit the subway. It is their home, their kitchen, and their toilet. Is that liquid on the floor Gatorade, or…? Did it leak from the guy nearby, a silent poet of this apocalypse, or will it be what consumes him? The almost obscene level of noise from the tired machinery begs you to contemplate these things as a distraction.

The person in Union Square Station pushing a shopping cart and yelling racial slurs may not physically hurt anybody, but he is a symbol of a city that just gave up caring while lying to itself about being compassionate. There is no compassion in allowing thousands of sick people to live like rats inside public infrastructure.

The subway is an angry place; assaults are up 50 percent over last year. And last year, there were more assaults than at any time in the last 25 years, including a Covid-era trend of randomly pushing people into the path of an incoming train just to watch them die. I didn’t see that, but I saw its secondary effects: passengers bunched up like herbivores on the African savanna with their backs against a wall for protection. Fewer people looking at their phones so as to stay more alert. Unlike in any other city in the world, the five subway shootings during my stay were not remarkable, which itself is remarkable.

If you use the subway, you acknowledge that you must share it with the predators, under their rules. Like everywhere in this city, navigating around the mentally ill, the homeless, and the criminal element is just another part of life. People treat each other as threats, and just accept that. To an outsider, it seems a helluva way to live.

A couple of those “only-in-New York places” are holding on, but their ambience is grim, not scrappy. Passing the United Nations compound, you’re left with the memory that in the 1950s, this was once the most powerful city on the globe. Where’s the value now?

My favorite pizzeria, the original Patsy’s at First and 117th in Harlem, is still open and still one of the oldest, the last, and the best—somehow still staffed by old Italian men in an otherwise all-black neighborhood. Nearby Rao’s, an old-school red-sauce joint, is in much the same state, both places in some sort of time-vortex, or the DNA from which someone will someday genetically re-engineer New York for a future museum.

The NYPD has reoccupied Times Square military-style (I’m sure many of the cops are Iraq and Afghan vets). The problem is, Times Square shares a border with the rest of New York, and a block or two away, places like the Port Authority bus terminal are decaying, returning to their primordial state. There are no obvious hookers there like there were in the 1970s, but the girls’ space in the ecosystem is taken by the homeless and those who provide them services, usually quick, sharp black kids selling what the cops told me was fentanyl, N.Y.’s current favorite opioid.

Every measure of Covid was made worse by bad decision-making. Lockdowns decimated whole industries while still leaving New York one of America’s “red zones.” Defanging the police, coupled with no-bail policies, drove the mark of crime deeper into the fabric of neighborhoods. The tax base crumbled. Pre-Covid, the vacating top 1 percent in NYC paid nearly 50 percent of all personal income taxes. Property taxes add in more than a billion dollars a year in revenue, about half of that once generated by office space. Who’ll pay for any comeback? Disney? The Chinese? It won’t be the Russians this time.

Left in New York is the largest homeless population of any American metropolis, including 114,000 children. The number of people living below the poverty line is larger than the population of Philadelphia, and would be the country’s seventh-largest city. More than 400,000 reside in public housing. Another 235,000 take rent assistance. They live in the third world. You look at it and you cannot believe this is the same country in which you live. 

The relief only comes on an individual basis. Doormen keep the riff-raff out (you-betcha residents ponied up for the new contract to avert a strike), giving them money for Uber instead of the subway, money for exclusive clubs and restaurants, money for private security. After all, it is your building’s thugs against theirs.

Yes, I hear your sigh. Yes, I get it. Yes, every generation proclaims New York is dead or dying. Yes, it was better under Giuliani, or Bloomberg, or Bourdain. And sure, some of what you read today is exaggerated, composed by writers unfamiliar with “New York Normal,” the things we—they—take sadly for granted in a city that perpetually has seen better days.

Why do we live this way? While NYC is worse, “nice” places like Denver and Honolulu suffer from the same ailments, albeit in scaled-down form. Why do we accept that homeless drug users live on our subways, which should serve as the public transport our taxes paid for and our society needs? “Go Green” we’re told, but doing so means risking your life. It isn’t this way in Europe and it isn’t this way in Asia.

Like a last visit to a Covid patient’s bedside, I needed to see it. New York was a good place to live for a while, a kind of an adventure, but its time is over. I said goodbye like an old friend. I hadn’t felt like this in a departing plane since I left Baghdad.

Peter Van Buren is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, Hooper’s War: A Novel of WWII Japan, and Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the 99 Percent.

 

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Is the Red Wave Starting in California?

LOS ANGELES— California used to be as red as its pinot noir.

Which is to say: slightly, but decidedly and famously. The launchpad of Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, as well as latter-day projects such as “the Governator,” that all seem like yesterday’s news in 2022. Yes, large swaths of the Golden State outside of the major metros are quite conservative. And indeed, America seems poised to soon swap one Californian speaker of the House, a Democrat from San Francisco, for another, a Republican from Bakersfield. Also true, many of Donald Trump’s team in office (from Steve Bannon to National Security Advisor Robert C. O’Brien, Stephen Miller to Orange County’s own Mike Pompeo, to the wider media ecosystem) had bonafide California roots.

But Trump as a candidate, and as a president, hardly visited the place…and who could blame him? But large numbers and lands of wonky promise are weird things: Trump literally received more Californian votes for president in 2020 than any other Republican presidential candidate has. And despite its reputation as a leader of resistance, California saw “more pro-Trump crowds than any other state during the president’s term in office,” the Los Angeles Times grimly noted on the day Trump was booted from Washington in 2021. Still, Bannonism would seem an odd fit for Laguna Beach, or as the former White House chief strategist himself once said, on why he stopped residing in the area: “Bad vibes.”

But could California Republicans and independents be the ultimate beneficiaries of “the vibe shift”?

There has been cautious optimism from Democrat haters before, only for them to swiftly suffer humiliation. Case in point: the disastrous performance of California conservative eminence grise Larry Elder, “the Sage of South Central,” in last year’s gubernatorial recall. Still, that was before the full fallout from Afghanistan, the comeuppance to the White House on inflation, eight-dollar gas, and the astonishing sight of the parked-ships supply chain crunch I saw firsthand dotting the paradisiacal sunset in Huntington Beach last fall.

Agitants in a more conservative direction caution that any “return to form” may take election cycles, and not just this one. Still, the state’s demographics are striking: notably Hispanic and Asian at a time when the Democrats are plainly bleeding those votes. And the state-level and national mood is as sour as ever. As a contemporary in San Francisco once remarked, “California is still the future. The future just sucks.” Or as Republican candidate for Senate Jon Elist told me, “California is worth fighting for.”

Elist, 37, is potentially in poll position in Tuesday’s “jungle primary” to take on appointed incumbent Alex Padilla, a Democrat, in the general election in the fall. He told me he’s been somewhat frustrated by the apathy of conservative bigwigs in the state, loath to dispense with resources in a Blue Mecca, considering themselves exiles in their own land. He attributes Elder’s poor performance, yes, to a vibe shift so to speak, but also to a high number of Republican voters who stayed home in 2021, believing the election integrity frustrations out of Mar-A-Lago. It is a line I’ve not heard so much before in real life. It is, of course, always the anxiety of Mitch McConnell, or a Mitt Romney, and the voter fraud narrative did plausibly cost the GOP two Senate seats in Georgia. But Elist says he cares about the subject on two fronts: you’ve got to vote, and the establishment has to care about making election integrity a priority: “voter ID,” “poll observers,” the works, “this should not be partisan.”

As anecdotal as it gets: Most Americans seem unhappy, but what, exactly, does opposing the Democrats mean?

Conservative elites, such as they are, can’t even agree on the subject, the whole “vision thing” as George H.W. Bush once put it. Rising star Nate Hochman posited in the New York Times over the weekend that the Culture War is alive and well, but this time, it is far less religious. It’s a piece you should read.

Hochman himself in the piece denounces “the Republican porn star,” Brandi Love, who caused a minor brouhaha by both attending and then got booted from a right-leaning event last year. But he concedes his religious conservative side of things is but a coalition partner, and not necessarily the one calling the shots, in any effort to overthrow Democratic hegemony. And, indeed, the Culture War is different this go ’round, and potentially one the right can win: not gay marriage and national abortion bans, but should we teach transexuality in preschool?

Hochman the native Oregonian knows his neighboring California. Elist, a Princeton and Stanford graduate who was mentored by Condaleeza Rice, is now in an interesting niche of medical devices sales. As Elist told me: he is “going to have to sell a lot more penile implants” to make his mark.

For now, for many Californians, the order of the day is the first thing they see in the morning when they step outside their doorsteps (if they’re lucky to have one): a society in disrepair. Homelessness. Off-the-rails drug use. Anomie and alienation. Everyone knows it; it’s only a matter of if they deny it. Ever the cultural Machiavellian, comedic grandee Bill Maher’s guests over the weekend here in the City of Angels were Douglas Murray, the elegant author of the subtly-titled The War on the West and Michael Shellenberger, the independent gubernatorial aspirant and author of San Fransicko. If Republicans won’t seize this mantle, anyone willing to call themselves not-a-Democrat, or all but, will.

Elist says he could surprise against Padilla, who he notes has abysmal name recognition for a man who has been in politics for a quarter-century. Padilla, frankly, seems like sort of a non-entity. More prominently, ex-Republican billionaire Rick Caruso, a nominal Democrat, is the favorite to take the L.A. mayor’s mansion in downtown. His is a law-and-order message, backed by Kim Kardashian and Elon Musk—say what you will, the duo have an eye for winners.

The conservative Hoover Institution’s own Lanhee Chen is making a concerted effort for California controller and looks like the man to beat, winning even the L.A. Times’ endorsement. And in a development that would warm the late Andrew Breitbart’s heart, ten years after his stunning death in Beverly Hills, literal Weather Underground scion Chesa Boudin, the Sorosist D.A. of San Francisco, looks poised for downfall in the world’s most beautiful and benighted city.

There are, of course, other races here too. There is even another Nathan Hochman, who thinks he’s got a shot at being state attorney general. Once upon a time, in the last Republican midterm wave election, one Kamala Harris almost blew this race. And Southern California is a panoply of promised land for the GOP. For anyone who dreams of a “working class, multiethnic party,” there are conservative Asian American congresswomen and Hispanic veteran House members galore. And take Kevin Kiley, like Elist also 37, but from up north near Sacramento, who passed on running for governor again this year and instead is gunning for Congress. In my own view, he’d be a rare cogent voice in the nation’s lower chamber.

For a Republican Party toying with making “nationalism” its official credo, it might not be insane to include its most populous, most powerful, and politically disparate state. Certainly, Californication is never the boring move.

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Putin’s Mirror Image

Whatever else is wrong with Vladimir Putin besides an evil heart—psychosis, incipient madness,  some unrevealed terminal illness—the man plainly suffers from a keen awareness of the fragility of his regime, which causes him to perceive dangers that do not exist and to magnify those that do. His enemies in the West have insisted for years that this constitutes “paranoia” on his part, proof of a psychologically ill person to whom political systems other than the one he has created appear as mortal threats to the Russian nation and his own imperial project. They are correct about that—but they fail to recognize that Putin’s neurotically suspicious mind is in this respect a reverse image of their own.

The United States is incomparably less fragile than Russia, but the regime that dominates the country in this third decade of the century is fragile indeed, a fact well understood by its leaders. Commentators have noted for the past year the suddenly ubiquitous term “our democracy,” now regularly resorted to by politicians and journalists, usually liberal ones. The two words always appear to suggest democracy in America is under threat from authoritarians on the right, who are attempting to destroy it and replace it with a reactionary, racist, post-constitutional system. “Our democracy” sounds natural, innocent, and unobjectionable, before one gets around to wondering whose democracy “our” connotes. 

The obvious answer is that “our” refers to the liberal regime that has been running America for many decades now. It is the regime of the Democratic Party, academia, the cultural establishment, the entertainment industry. It is definitely not the America of Republicans, the 74,223,369 Americans who voted for President Trump in 2020, rural dwellers, people without college degrees, or the red states that cover the larger part of every map of the United States, all of whom together comprise at least half of the total American population. The liberal regime, of course, is nervously cognizant of the fact a possible majority in the country opposes its rule. As it attempts to seize control of the entire nation and impose its progressive vision across all of the fifty states, it reasonably enough anticipates resistance from red America, stays alert to the slightest evidence of it, and is determined to set its heel upon such resistance the moment it shows itself. 

Uneasy lies the head, and all that. American liberals view conservatives, populists, the National Rifle Association, gun owners, country folk, enthusiasts for Donald Trump, and similar enemies of their Democracy in a way that is precisely analogous to how Putin views democratic nations and democratic societies, NATO, and the European Union. Where Putin imagines liberal-democratic imperialists the world over relentlessly and ceaselessly at work to sabotage and destroy his government and his country, the American liberal regime imagines “white supremacists”—identified by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security as the greatest existing threat to the peace and security of the United States—hiding under President Biden’s bed, placing bombs in Nancy Pelosi’s freezer chest, infiltrating local police departments for the purpose of murdering black citizens, and Republican politicians scheming with the Federal Security Service in the Kremlin to disenfranchise people of color and steal every election in America from now until Kingdom Come.

Hillary Clinton and her campaigning gang of anti-deplorables knew perfectly well Trump was not coordinating his campaign with the Russians. While the majority of Democrats and liberals just went along with the lie in order to get her elected, no doubt plenty of others actually believed it. Just as Putin is ready to suppose the entire world with the exception of China is eager to destroy him, so many American liberals are prepared to accept that all Republicans are either traitors or potential ones.

Unless he is indeed mentally unbalanced, it is likely that Putin is secretly aware the dream of recreating the tsarist empire is fatally unrealistic and will never be achieved. The same, I suspect, is true of the American liberal regime: It, and its left wing especially, recognizes that the dream of transforming the United States into a progressive utopia along the lines outlined by the theorists of Black Lives Matter is actually a crackpot one. 

Chilton Williamson Jr. is the author of The End of Liberalism and a novel, The Last Westerner, both forthcoming from St. Augustine Press.

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Hillary Was In on Russiagate

Hillary Clinton lied about Russiagate. Hillary paid experts to create two data sets, one purportedly showing Russian cellphones accessing Trump Wi-Fi networks, and another allegedly showing a Trump computer pinging an Alfa Bank server in Russia. We’ve seen the lipstick on the collar before, but how do we know this time she was in on it all?

Because former Clinton campaign lawyer Marc Elias, on May 18, 2022, during the trial of his former partner, Michael Sussmann, swore to it under oath. Special Counsel John Durham brought Sussmann to trial for allegedly lying to the FBI and committing perjury. Sussmann claimed he was not working for a client when he was, in fact, surreptitiously representing the Clinton campaign. Small world: Sussmann previously represented the DNC in litigation surrounding the server break-in.

Elias also admitted to briefing Clinton campaign officials, including Clinton herself, campaign chair John Podesta, spokesperson Jennifer Palmieri, and policy director Jake Sullivan, now Joe Biden’s national-security adviser. Elias also personally briefed campaign manager Robby Mook.

In a bombshell moment in the Sussmann trial, Mook testified that Hillary Clinton signed off on the plan to push out the information about the link between Trump and Alfa Bank despite concerns that the connection was dubious at best. Mook’s testimony is the first confirmation that Clinton was directly involved in the decision to feed the Trump-Alfa story. It explains some of her later actions.

Here’s the new timeline of events, revealing the “why” behind the timing of Russiagate:

On July 5, 2016, FBI Director James Comey issued a statement clearing Hillary Clinton of any wrong doing in connection with her private email server. That removed what was thought to be her last major hurdle to nomination.

Then, Wikileaks released information taken from the DNC servers which showed, inter alia, the Clinton campaign’s efforts to disparage Bernie Sanders. The leaks broke during the Democratic Convention (July 25 to 28) and threatened to split the party. It was crisis time for Democrats.

Concurrent with the Wikileaks disclosure and the sense of panic inside the campaign at the 2016 Democratic National Convention came Clinton’s sign-off to begin the Russiagate dirty tricks campaign (as Mook testified to, Smoking Gun One). That is the specific “why” behind the timing of the Russiagate narrative.

On July 28, 2016, CIA Director John Brennan briefed President Obama on Hillary Clinton’s plan to tie candidate Trump to Russia as a means of distracting the public (Smoking Gun Two). Why Brennan, from CIA, was briefing Obama on internal Democratic Party strategy is unclear. However, a highly redacted document states, “We’re getting additional insight into Russian activities from [REDACTED]. Cite alleged approved by Hillary Clinton on July 26 a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.”

The FBI then opened its omnibus investigation into all things Trump-Russia, Crossfire Hurricane, on July 31, 2016, a Sunday, coincidentally only days after Clinton initially approved the dirty-tricks campaign and just as the Democratic convention ended with Clinton’s nomination.

Crossfire Hurricane was opened on the ostensible basis of information about Trump campaign member George Papadopoulos relayed to investigators by an Australian diplomat. Many believe the timing of the investigation suggests it was actually based the Clinton campaign’s disclosures of the Steele dossier to the FBI, not diplomatic gossip about Papadopoulos. Steele himself ran the dossier data to the FBI and media the same way Sussmann ran the Alfa Bank data to the FBI and media, claiming no link to the Clinton campaign.

Brennan may have been personally tipped off by Jake Sullivan, now Joe Biden’s national-security advisor and the most likely “foreign-policy advisor” inside the Clinton campaign to have run the Russiagate caper. As CIA Director, Brennan briefed Obama on Clinton’s July 26 sign-off on the dirty-tricks campaign. His own agency would not come to the same conclusions until September 2016, when it forwarded to the FBI an investigative referral about Hillary Clinton. If not for a tip-off, then how did Brennan, always a public Hillary supporter, know before his agency did?

Aiming for an October surprise (a game-changing political event breaking in late October, early enough to influence the election but too late for the opposition to effectively rebut), Sussmann then met with FBI attorney James Baker (now working at Twitter) to lay out the Alfa Bank and smartphone story on September 18, 2016.

The FBI (via fraud) on October 21 obtained the first FISA warrant against a Trump team member. And following a press release by Jake Sullivan, Hillary tweeted on October 31, 2016, that Trump had a secret server communicating with Russia (Smoking Gun Three). She knew her campaign paid to create that information and push it into the public eye via Sussmann and a woman named Laura Seago.

Seago was an analyst at Fusion GPS, the organization that commissioned the infamous Steele dossier on behalf of Clinton. Seago testified at the Sussmann trial that she and others went to journalist Franklin Foer’s house to pitch the story, telling him it had been vetted by “highly credible computer scientists” who “seemed to think these allegations were credible.” Foer ran the story on October 31, 2016, timed with Sullivan’s statement and Hillary’s tweet suggesting the server connecting Trump with Alfa Bank was used as a clandestine-communications tool. The story stated “the knee was hit in Moscow, the leg kicked in New York.”

Clearer? Comey cleared Clinton of legal trouble over her emails. The last barrier to nomination was thought to have been breached. Then WikiLeaks disclosures threatened to derail the convention. Something else was needed. Hillary signed off on the Russiagate dirty-tricks campaign per Mook and Brennan. Just days later, the FBI opened Crossfire Hurricane based on either flimsy foreign gossip or the Clinton paid-for Steele dossier. Hillary and Sullivan timed their disclosures with the media making near-identical claims.

So does all this matter? Yes. “The trial is the vehicle Durham is using to help bring out the truth, to tell a story of a political campaign that in two instances pursued information that was totally fabricated… to mislead the American voter,” said Kevin Brock, the FBI’s former assistant director for intelligence. The Sussmann trial shows that if nothing else, Hillary Clinton herself was personally the start and the end of Russiagate’s false story. As dirty tricks go, this was a helluva tale to sell to a gullible public and a credulous media.

But so what? Politicians approve dirt being spread on their opponents all the time. The short answer? They don’t peddle outright, fabricated lies, which constitutes defamation. And Jake Sullivan, Biden’s active national-security advisor, played a still-hidden role in all of it.

And what kind of president would Hillary have made if she was willing to lie like this to get elected? She is all appetite, still active in her party, and still a dangerous animal. The spiteful Clinton still maintains that Trump has ties to Russia and, through surrogates, kept Russiagate alive to defang the Trump administration even after she lost the election.

The real insurrection—the fact that Russiagate did not end with Trump’s victory—is chilling. Comey and Brennan repurposed the false information from a campaign smear and turned it into bait, which they dangled in front of Robert Mueller for three years in hopes he would stumble on to something illegal once he exercised his powers as special prosecutor. This was a coup attempt against a sitting president.

Meanwhile, Twitter has still not removed the Clinton and Sullivan Russiagate tweets from 2016 nor marked them as “disinformation.” That silence allows the lie a second life, which is important, because Trump is almost certainly going to run for president again, and polls show almost half of Americans still think he colluded with Russia.

It is easy enough to still say “so what?” Most people who did not support Hillary Clinton long ago concluded that she is a liar and untrustworthy. Her supporters know she’ll never run for public office again, hence the sense of anti-climax.

What matters in the end is less the details of Hillary’s lie than that as someone close to being elected as her would lie about such a thing, treason, claiming her opponent was working for Russia against the interests of the United States to which he would soon swear an oath. This week’s revelations and the way they fill in “motive” in the timeline are bombshells, if you blow the smoke away.

No doubt that, in many minds, Clinton’s manipulations are measured alongside Trump’s transgressions, “whataboutism.” Those who think that way may have missed the day in kindergarten when everyone else was taught how two wrongs don’t make a right. Trump did not win to absolve Hillary of her sins.

And those who worry about the 2024 election being stolen over simple vote miscounts are thinking way too small. If you want to really worry, think like a Clinton.

Peter Van Buren is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, Hooper’s War: A Novel of WWII Japan, and Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the 99 Percent.

 

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The Medicine of Mercy

San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordelione announced Friday that he has barred Speaker Nancy Pelosi from receiving the Eucharist in his diocese until she repudiates her support for permissive abortion laws. In a letter to Pelosi, the archbishop indicated that he reached out to her privately in the past year to warn that her public support for abortion could trigger canon 915 in the Code of Canon Law, which prevents those who “obstinately persist in manifest grave sin” from receiving Holy Communion. The archbishop announced the move weeks after Pelosi called the potential overturning of Roe v. Wade “an abomination.”

The archbishop’s statement drew predictable backlash. One progressive friar called it a “scandal.” The canon lawyers over at the San Francisco Examiner said the act constituted “open defiance of Pope Francis” and called on the pope to remove the archbishop from his post. The director of the Cardinal Bernardin Center argued that Pelosi’s support for abortion “just doesn’t matter” because she is acting “as the people’s agent” and the way she “represents the people she represents is not a religious or moral matter.” Would the professor would apply that theory to Herman Talmadge?

In any case, it is understandable that so many people, even those within the Church, are taken aback by the archbishop’s sacramental discipline. To partisans of a certain vision of post-conciliar reform in the Catholic Church, denying someone the Eucharist is a return to the days before the Second Vatican Council, and a rejection of the soft universalism that has reigned in corners of the Church’s human element since the middle of the 20th century. To deny a person the Eucharist suggests that it is possible for someone to place himself outside the boundaries of Catholic communion and, therefore, outside the bounds of Christ’s Church.

It’s not just Hans Küng disciples who bristle at the archbishop’s actions. Many Catholics, as a result of the intentional neglect of progressive priests and prelates, have no idea what the Church teaches on the worthy reception of the Eucharist and are therefore scandalized by his apparently “exclusionary” practice.

St. Paul says that anyone who consumes the Eucharistic species unworthily “eateth and drinketh judgment to himself.” The Church has historically interpreted this passage to mean that all Catholics in a state of mortal sin, with few exceptions, are to avoid receiving the Eucharist until they’ve made a valid sacramental confession, which requires the penitent to have a firm purpose of amendment to avoid the sin in the future.

Many Catholics are unfamiliar with the Church’s teaching. If you attend a Mass in the suburban United States, it shows. Most or all of the parishioners approach the priest for Communion after the Agnus Dei prayers. How many have gone to confession? It’s unknown, and not for me to speculate, but I do know that many well-to-do parishes hold confessions just once per week for about 30 minutes. It is not uncommon for the priests at those parishes to hear fewer than five confessions in their half-hour in the box. It is possible that the Catholics of Strathmere, New Jersey, are an extraordinarily holy bunch, but it’s more likely that something else—a lost sense of sin or poor catechesis—is at work.

Abstaining from the Eucharist is not, of itself, a virtue. The only reason one should do is if—speaking from some experience here—one is conscious of having committed a mortal sin. I only mean to say that taking the Church’s teaching on the Eucharist seriously involves regularly examining one’s conscience, which is uncomfortable, and militates against the therapeutic ethos of the age. At many parishes, suburban and otherwise, it seems like only sin is to believe that sin exists at all.

Some in the hierarchy refuse to exercise sacramental discipline. Their refusal is, in part, a response to perceived disciplinary excesses in the pre-conciliar Church. This, in effect, has lead some of the faithful to believe that the Church’s teaching on the reception of Holy Communion has changed. It has not. And the unwillingness of certain elements  within the Church to let their “yes” mean “yes” and their “no” mean “no” on the question of Eucharistic discipline has produced the absurdity of a Speaker of the House in one breath calling herself a “Catholic mother of five” and in the next endorsing the right to abort a child in defiance of the Fathers, the earliest writings of the apostles, and two millennia of magisterial teaching.

No Catholic ought to rejoice at Nancy Pelosi’s being denied Communion. The Eucharist is the source and summit of Catholic sacramental life. To be deprived of it for even one week is a terrible privation. I am an awful sinner and in no position to act as judge of the Speaker or anyone else. But before consuming the Eucharist, Nancy Pelosi, like all Catholics, must form her conscience and examine herself. If she refuses to do so, Archbishop Cordelione’s intervention in the matter is nothing less than an act of charity.

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Stumbling Toward War On Two Fronts

So much for strategic ambiguity. Speaking at a news conference in Tokyo on Monday, President Joe Biden committed the United States to militarily defend Taiwan in response to a potential Chinese invasion. A reporter asked Biden, “Are you willing to get involved militarily to defend Taiwan if it comes to that?” To which the president replied, flatly, “Yes.” The reporter followed up: “You are?” The president was adamant: “That’s the commitment we made.”

Pardon me if I sound unduly alarmed, but can we please not go down this road? For the love of God, can America avoid opening up a direct confrontation with the nuclear-armed People’s Republic while we are already engaged in an openly acknowledged proxy war with Russia, another nuclear power?

Biden’s words in Tokyo were so direct and unambiguous they left his aides in the room visibly surprised, according to the New York Times. And understandably so: The commander-in-chief erased what little remained of America’s longstanding policy of leaving it up to Beijing to decide whether it thinks Washington will come to Taiwan’s defense, the idea being that ambiguity and unpredictability can serve as deterrents. If the Chinese know that an attack will be met by a U.S. military response, the only question from their point of view becomes when best to mount it, given the political climate and balance of forces.

Biden’s “commitment,” moreover, would upend decades of American policy: Taiwan isn’t a treaty ally like, say, Japan or Poland, and hasn’t been seen as such by successive administrations. Under the Taiwan Relations Act, which has structured America’s ties to Taiwan since 1979, the U.S. government is obliged to help arm the Taiwanese, but not to directly defend the island.

The White House quickly went into damage-control mode, with a spokesperson telling Fox News, implausibly, that “our policy has not changed.” Rather, the president merely “reiterated our commitment under the Taiwan Relations Act to provide Taiwan with the military means to defend itself.”

This marks the second time in as many years that the Biden administration has had to clarify Biden’s remarks on Taiwan. Last year, CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked Biden a nearly identical question: “Are you saying the U.S. would come to Taiwan’s defense if China were to attack?” Biden replied in the affirmative, adding ominously that the rest of the world “knows” that America fields the most powerful military force on earth. That time, too, the administration quickly clarified that Washington wasn’t departing from the parameters of the one-China policy and the Taiwan Relations Act.

“Doddering old fool making gaffes” is the easiest way to account for these alarming statements. The more likely and discomfiting explanation is that Biden is giving voice, if a little too enthusiastically, to a new consensus gathering inside the Washington uniparty. Other signs include recent delegations of current and former officials to Taipei, not least the ultra-hawkish former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Plus there are rumors of a planned visit by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, as well as the growing drumbeat of pro-war propaganda.

Biden’s words are also of a piece with a broader mood of general Western belligerence on both sides of the Atlantic. Read the major international editorial pages, and voices calling for even a modicum of restraint or prudent reserve are an extreme minority, if allowed to be heard at all.

The liberal internationalists are leading the charge once more for “defending democracy” with bombs and drones, of course. But it isn’t just them. As I’ve noted at Compact, with the honorable exception of Hungary, the “new nationalists” across the West are increasingly playing second fiddle to the liberal hawks, and often outflanking them in tub-thumping for the expansion of the very transnational institutions (NATO, the E.U.) they were elected to limit. With Poland’s President Andrzej Duda calling for rapid E.U. absorption of Ukraine, who needs Anne Applebaum? With Chris DeMuth a leader in the “national-conservative” movement, tub-thumping for war with Russia and China, who needs the Atlantic Council?

The whole scene is perfectly surreal. America is struggling to deliver baby formula to its newborns. Inflation is skyrocketing. Gas costs $7 a gallon. Similar supply and energy crises grip Europe. And yet the trans-Atlantic political class is seriously comfortable with the prospect of a two-front war with Russia and China. The feebler the West becomes in hard material terms—the more its political economy shifts toward financial extraction and useless apps—the deeper its internal cultural rot, and the more aggressive and unhinged it becomes on the world stage.

Get ready for a turbulent century.

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Biden Admin Takes Steps Toward a Digital Dollar

“Give me control of a nation’s money,” an 18th-century banking oligarch once said, “and I care not who makes its laws.” That may have sounded like hubris at the time, but digital technology could soon make it an understatement.

Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), currently in various stages of development around the world, are being created as a new form of money that, depending on how they are structured, could give government bureaucrats more control over citizens than any law ever could. In contrast to what most Americans today understand as money, commercial bank deposits denominated as dollars, a U.S. CBDC could be issued directly by our central bank to individuals in the form of a “digital wallet.” A digital dollar could also be programmable with controlling features.

On March 9, President Biden took a first step toward creating a U.S. CBDC, directing his administration to report to him by this fall on whether and how to implement a federal digital dollar. And in February, the Boston Fed completed the first phase of Project Hamilton, a CBDC simulation it has been developing together with MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative.

“My Administration places the highest urgency on research and development efforts into the potential design and deployment options of a United States CBDC,” Biden’s order stated. Among the goals he cited for a U.S. CBDC were faster and cheaper payments, financial stability, fighting financial crime, maintaining the preeminence and security of America’s currency, and “financial inclusion and equity.” Biden also ordered a report on “the potential for these technologies to impede or advance efforts to tackle climate change.”

Biden instructed Attorney General Merrick Garland to determine whether or not he will need congressional approval to implement a CBDC, and if so, to draft legislation by October, leading some observers to speculate that Democrats may try to introduce a bill before the midterms. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said in March 2021 that he would not move forward with establishing a U.S. CBDC “without support from Congress, and I think that would ideally come in the form of an authorizing law, rather than us trying to interpret our law to enable this.” But what the administration would do if it cannot get legislation passed is unclear.

Nine countries have established CBDCs thus far, and 15 others, including China, Russia, and Sweden, currently have pilot programs in place. Altogether, 87 countries that collectively represent 90 percent of global GDP are in some stage in the development of CBDCs. The European Central Bank (ECB) is also moving forward with the implementation of its own CBDC, the digital euro, and Deutsche Bank predicts that central banks collectively representing one-fifth of the world’s population will issue CBDCs by 2025.

Agustin Carstens, general manager of the Bank of International Settlements, explained one of the key motivations to create CBDCs at an October 2020 IMF seminar: “We don’t know who is using a $100 bill today, we don’t know who’s using a 1,000-peso bill today. The key difference with a CBDC is the central bank will have absolute control of the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that central bank liability, and also we will have the technology to enforce that.”

China has taken the lead on implementation among the world’s major economies, issuing its e-CNY, or digital yuan, in 2020. By the end of 2021, the digital yuan had 261 million users, representing about one-fifth of China’s population, according to the People’s Bank of China.

China issues the e-CNY directly from its central bank to consumers, who set up a digital-wallet app that allows them to buy from vendors by scanning their phone at the point of sale, thereby transferring digital yuan directly from the buyer’s government account to the vendor’s without transaction fees. For those who don’t have a smartphone, a British company called Walletmor now offers microchips that are implanted into a person’s palm. The buyer makes payments by placing his hand over a vendor’s card reader.

China touts the privacy of these transactions; users can set the app so that purchases are anonymous between buyer and seller, just as with cash. Unlike cash, however, the Chinese government can observe and track every transaction.

“They’re dealing with vast amounts of data, so it’s difficult even today with the computers we have to handle it all,” said former Fed official Chris Whalen, chairman of Whalen Global Advisors. “But over time, these networks are only going to get more efficient and more robust, and they’ll be able to chew on this data and follow everything you do, financially.

“A central bank digital currency is not a herald call for freedom,” Whalen said. “In an authoritarian society, it will be used as a means of control.”

“China’s reasons for doing this ought to horrify us all,” said former Fed Vice Chair Randal Quarles, now chairman of the Cynosure Group, “but there’s a concern that we’ll somehow fall behind them.”

“There is a concern that the ECB is doing this, Sweden is doing this, the Brits are looking at it, the world is moving forward, and we’ll be left behind,” Quarles said. “I just don’t think any of that is true. Anyone who has a teenager has heard this argument and pushed back against it. It can’t be just: everyone is doing it, so I need to.”

* * *

In January, Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota introduced a bill to ban the Fed from establishing retail CBDC accounts, stating that “not only would this CBDC model centralize Americans’ financial information, leaving it vulnerable to attack, but it could be used as a surveillance tool that Americans should never tolerate from their own government.”

Among American consumers, there does not appear to be significant demand for the government to replace private commercial banks. According to an FDIC report, 94.6 percent of U.S. households had at least one bank account as of 2019, and 97.3 percent of account holders were “very or somewhat satisfied with their bank.”

Private initiatives such as the nonprofit Cities For Financial Empowerment Fund’s Bank On project are working to connect underserved people with affordable banking services, which may prove a simpler and more effective way to achieve inclusion than turning the Fed into a retail bank. Furthermore, it is questionable whether the Fed, or any government agency, realistically could handle hundreds of millions of individual accounts, process trillions of transactions, respond to customer inquiries, and conduct the required anti-money laundering and “Know Your Customer” inquiries that private banks currently perform.

Whether or not private banks remain as intermediaries, however, the Fed’s ability to control the economy would be greatly enhanced if the CBDC were programmable.

“When the White House was asked about the CBDC, they talked about how the currency could be used to improve diversity and equity and inclusion and all these other things,” said Justin Haskins, a director at the Heartland Institute. “The only way that any of this works the way they’re promising is if it is a programmable currency, and that means it can be controlled.”

“This fits right in line with all the ideological justifications for having more regulations, for having the Federal Reserve print more money, for giant welfare programs, for diversity, equity, and inclusion,” Haskins said. “You could accomplish all of those goals with a CBDC that is programmable in a much more effective way, and in a way that gives you political cover because you don’t need to pass a law to do it. You could just do it all through the Federal Reserve.”

In order to make stimulus payments more effective, for example, CBDCs could include negative interest rates, which are a tax on savings, or even expiration dates. This would impel Americans to spend rather than save.

The Fed could also pose restrictions on what CBDCs can be used for. Environmental policy could be implemented through the Fed by, for example, limiting the amount of CBDC a person can spend on gasoline. If the federal government wanted to expand gun control, it could limit CBDC payments for firearms and ammunition. Americans’ ability to access their digital wallets could even be tied to something like vaccination status.

Another critical issue related to CBDCs is their effect on credit. Under our current system, banks leverage dollar deposits and lend them out, effectively creating money for our economy. According to the FDIC, the percentage of households that used credit cards or bank loans increased from 67.9 percent in 2015 to 72.5 percent in 2019. A CBDC system could reduce the availability of credit and lead to its politicization.

“We think of [Europe] as more instinctively socialist than the United States, but there’s not pressure from the left there to disintermediate the private banking system and have the [European Central Bank] become a retail bank,” Quarles explained. But even with private commercial banks still in place, “they estimate that [a digital euro] will still end up taking 12 to 20 percent of the deposits out of the banking system into the central bank, and they have to figure out some way to put that back in. That will come with strings.”

Banks would be unable to leverage CBDC into loans, and it would be left to government authorities to dole out these funds to those individuals whom it favors. Indeed, the ECB is already pursuing a policy of Green Quantitative Easing, in which the central bank provides financing to “non-polluting” companies. Some U.S. officials would like the Fed to also become more active in promoting climate and social justice policies.

Lael Brainard, the current Fed vice-chair, stated in October 2021 that the Fed should get in step with the ECB and other central banks and develop new ways to fight climate change. She pointed to the Fed’s recently established Stability Climate Committee and a Supervision Climate Committee. Regarding social issues, the San Francisco Fed stated that “achieving racial equity fits into the Federal Reserve’s mandate for maximum employment, which is central to our mission.”

The Biden administration has fervently pursued these political and social goals, but many believe this single-minded approach has come at the expense of Americans’ civil liberties. This perception could undermine public trust regarding a digital dollar.

“It will never be a priority of the Biden Administration to defend individual liberty or to ensure that the design of a central-bank digital currency is not going to prevent people from purchasing the products they want or doing things they want,” Haskins said.

Biden-administration agencies, including the CDC, OSHA, the SEC, and the DHS, have been accused, often with the concurrence of federal judges, of unlawfully exceeding the authority given to them by Congress. The administration’s actions have raised concerns about individual liberty, like its attempt to force Covid vaccines on American workers (which a federal judge overturned), its institution of an unpopular mask mandates (also overturned), its proposal that the IRS monitor bank transactions more than $600, its establishment of a Disinformation Board within the Department of Homeland Security (likely to be shut down after public backlash), and the Justice Department’s intimidation of parents who protested at school-board meetings.

But even under ideal leadership, many say the federal government is not the best vehicle to foster financial innovation. America’s private banking and payments system is generally efficient and affordable, and conservatives argue that whatever improvements and innovations Americans may want should come from the private sector, not the Fed.

“The reason the U.S. economy is so resilient and able to generate the growth that we do is because we have a private financial system,” Whalen said. “People who argue for efficiency and say, ‘Let’s have one big public bank,’ they don’t understand. There’s no leverage in a system like that. Then you essentially have China… an allocation system.”

“I’m 100 percent in favor of advances in digital technology,” Quarles said. “But if we want to lead the world in this, we will do that by allowing our private-sector companies to do that, as opposed to having the government come in and do that, with all of the attendant problems of politicization of credit and sacrifice of privacy that come with that.”

Actor Jeff Goldblum famously told dinosaur-engineering geneticists in the blockbuster movie Jurassic Park that their “scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they never stopped to think if they should.”  Likewise, much of the discussion from central bankers and tech consultants regarding CBDCs has focused on solving logistical problems, with less thought going toward what sort of society the technology would usher in.

“People come at this as just a technical discussion,” Whalen said, “but it is much more. A lot of the researchers I interact with are fascinated by the functionality, but they don’t consider the implications for our system of political economy.”

“It’s one thing to have the government recognize that individuals should be able to have an electronic version of their money, just like we are able to have cash, and not have to hold most of our money in a bank,” said former Assistant Treasury Secretary Greg Zerzan, now an attorney at Jordan Ramis. “But the danger is that well-meaning government officials decide: This is how you should use your money, or we want to take a look and see where your money is going, or we don’t like how you’re using your money so we’re just going to freeze your account.”

Requests sent to the Federal Reserve and MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative for comment for this article were declined.

Kevin Stocklin is a writer, film director, and founder of Second Act Films, an independent production house specializing in educational media and feature films. Previously, he worked in international banking for more than a decade.

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