NATIONAL REVIEW
MAY 10, 2024 |
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◼ Out: cognitive tests for candidates. In: brain-worm tests.
◼ On the same day President Biden gave a speech linking the Holocaust to Hamas's October 7 massacre, it was confirmed that his administration had paused delivery of lethal aid to Israel over its intention to invade Rafah in southern Gaza—an invasion necessary to destroy Hamas and prevent future attacks. It seems contradictory. Biden made clear in his speech that, for him, "Never again" means "Never forget." But "Never again" requires taking actions today that may be politically difficult in real time. Mounting pressure within the Democratic Party has crushed Biden's prior resolve. To say as the Biden administration does that an attack on Rafah threatens too many civilians—in a war against an enemy that deliberately hides behind civilians—is to say that Israel cannot be allowed to defeat Hamas. The foolishness of such a policy was made clear just before Israel entered Rafah, when a Hamas "cease-fire" proposal turned out to be a charade: Among other things, it stipulated that the 33 hostages to be traded in exchange for a cease-fire would include hostages already dead. Biden's indulgence of Hamas and pressure on Israel encourage precisely such behavior. His actions also embolden Iran and its other terror proxies. If "Never again" actually means "Never again," then it requires supporting the world's only Jewish state in its efforts to destroy the terrorist group that is responsible for that horrific attack so that it can never massacre Jews again.
◼ We don't typically praise the instincts of New York City officials, but the way they reacted to the desecration of a World War I memorial by anti-Israel protesters was heartening. On their way to try to disrupt the Met Gala, the agitators sprayed graffiti on the memorial to the 107th Infantry and burned an American flag at its base. The NYPD made it clear that it considered the act a "heinous crime," and Mayor Eric Adams held a press conference at the memorial to denounce the vandals. The protesters made their anti-Americanism plain, and New York City has reacted with appropriate scorn and resolve to find the perpetrators.
◼ Early morning on May 7, the University of Chicago administration finally acted on its stated position and cleared the main quadrangle of the campus of its protester encampment. The move signals, first, that UChicago is willing to remain true to the standards of intellectual and social discourse it set (and has led the way on), which have kept it a bulwark of academic excellence even as its peers have devolved into rote mass indoctrination. But more ominously, for those with an eye on the calendar and circumstances, it signals trouble in the months ahead: The university administration had to rely on its own campus police, assisted by the Cook County Sheriff's Department, to get the job done, rather than on the Chicago Police Department, which was held back by ultra-progressive mayor Brandon Johnson. The Democratic National Convention awaits in August, inauspiciously.
◼ The Trump criminal trial in Manhattan has descended into such farce that even Judge Juan Merchan, a partisan who has consistently abetted elected progressive district attorney Alvin Bragg, has now remonstrated prosecutors. Naturally, he did so only after the prosecutors did exactly what Merchan had told them they could do, over vehement defense objections: elicit from Stormy Daniels the graphic details of an extramarital sexual encounter with Donald Trump—one the porn star now intimates was nonconsensual—for the supposed purpose of proving that Trump ordered his business records to be falsified eleven years later. The Daniels testimony was unnecessary and blatantly prejudicial: The allegation in the case is that Trump distorted his books to conceal that 2017 payments to "fixer" Michael Cohen were actually repayment of a 2016 debt, not ongoing legal fees. The defense does not dispute that Cohen advanced $130,000 to pay Daniels for her silence about the alleged 2006 tryst and that Trump repaid him. The trial is about alleged bookkeeping fraud, not sex. Patently, Bragg put Daniels on the stand to inflame the jury—and the electorate—against Trump. Merchan denied defense mistrial motions even as he scolded prosecutors. This adds to the slew of reasons that it is hard to imagine any convictions surviving appellate review.
◼ Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.), having extracted no concessions from House Speaker Mike Johnson with a prior threat, brought to the House floor a motion to vacate the chair and suffered an immediate, predictable, and resounding defeat. A majority of both party caucuses, for a total of 359 members, voted to table the motion; only 43, including Greene and ten other Republicans, voted to consider it. Even Donald Trump denounced the motion as a poorly timed folly in light of the narrow GOP House majority, although he did so publicly only after the vote. Johnson now emerges looking secure in his position, at least through the end of this Congress. The mid-session motion to vacate has been exposed as a tactic of diminishing returns that not only damages the party in power but also impedes the House from functioning at all—which doubtless explains why Democrats grew tired of the spectacle even when it suited some of their short-term partisan interests. We hope that no future speaker will follow Kevin McCarthy's lead in agreeing to let this sword hang over his head as a condition of taking the job. |
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◼ Donald Trump has not committed to accepting the results of the 2024 election. He did not commit in 2016 or 2020, either, before those elections. Senator Tim Scott (R., S.C.) is one of Trump's potential running mates. On Meet the Press, Kristen Welker asked Scott whether he would accept the results of the election. He said, "At the end of the day, the 47th president of the United States will be President Donald Trump." Welker asked him again. Scott said, "That is my statement," referring to his previous answer. Welker asked him again. He said, "I look forward to President Trump being the 47th president." She asked again. He said, "This is why so many Americans believe that NBC is an extension of the Democrat Party." She asked again. He said, "I expect President Trump to win the next election." It is sad to watch Senator Scott provide another example of how Trump's lies about 2020 have diminished those who seek his favor.
◼ Rallying in Wisconsin, Donald Trump said, "We're going to give our police their power back, and we are going to give them immunity from prosecution." This would be a bad idea even if the president had the power to do it, which he does not. The good news about Trump's ignorance of the principles of American government is that it accompanies an ignorance of its practice.
◼ Like Senator Bob Menendez (D., N.J.), Representative Henry Cuellar (D., Texas) has been indicted after apparently being caught taking foreign payoffs. In Cuellar's case, there were no gold bars but rather a more prosaic scheme to take bribes from a Mexican bank and an oil-and-gas company linked to the government of Azerbaijan. As in the Menendez case, his indictment resulted in removal from committee assignments. Cuellar has survived progressive primary challenges but faces a yet-to-be-determined Republican opponent in November. Some on the right, including Donald Trump, have suggested that Cuellar and Menendez were targeted for dissenting from the Biden administration: in Cuellar's case, on border policy, and in Menendez's case, on Iran policy. Both men appear, however, to have engaged in egregious public corruption. A more fruitful line of partisan critique would be that Democrats—unlike Republicans, who helped expel former representative George Santos—have done nothing to eject either man from their caucuses in the closely divided chambers of Congress.
◼ Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida signed a bill that prohibits the production and sale of lab-grown meat in the Sunshine State. We must ask: Why? DeSantis's answer is that "Florida is fighting back against the global elite's plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals." Odd as it may sound, it's true that the ultimate aim of many of those who champion lab-grown meat is to decree that the people of the world adopt diets that they would never choose on their own. But there is a difference between fighting back against mandates and prohibiting consumer products. The bill's authors talk of bans, but they just issued one; they fret about mandates, but they just added one. The result has been not an increase in liberty but a reduction, and, as such, it represents an overreach—and worse still: a precedent. |
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◼ Three Indian citizens have been charged in Canada with the murder, in a Vancouver suburb, of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, an activist for the establishment of an independent Sikh state, Khalistan. Such demands for their own state led to a violent insurgency during the 1980s. It met a fierce response and eventually faded, but support for Khalistan has thrived in the Sikh diaspora. Nijjar traveled to Canada in 1997, claiming that he had been persecuted. The claims were rejected, and his marriage shortly thereafter was found to be one of convenience. Nevertheless, he became a Canadian citizen in 2007. India later designated Nijjar a terrorist (which he denied) and called for his arrest. Canada, citing both its own investigations and information received from the U.S., suspects that New Delhi may have had a hand in the killing. Meanwhile the U.S. is alleging Indian-government involvement in a murder plot against a Sikh activist in this country. There is nothing new about a region's sometimes violent politics following its diaspora—something worth remembering amid talk of accepting refugees from Gaza—and this matter is complicated by India's geopolitical importance. Nevertheless, we and Canada should insist that in our countries, our rules apply.
◼ Ukrainian authorities announced the arrest of two colonels in its State Protection Department, the agency tasked with the personal protection of President Volodymyr Zelensky and other senior government officials. The two men were allegedly plotting with the Russian Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB, to take Zelensky hostage and kill him. Another target was Kyrylo Budanov, the chief of Ukraine's military-intelligence service. The plotters, according to the Ukrainians, had hoped that Budanov would "be eliminated" before Orthodox Easter as an inauguration gift to Vladimir Putin, who was sworn in for a fifth term as Russia's president this week at the Kremlin. As Russian dissidents and those who would resist Putin's imperium have repeatedly learned, few are entirely safe from the Kremlin's murderous plans.
◼ Demonstrators in Tbilisi, Georgia, have been gathering by the thousands. They oppose a bill that would designate any nongovernmental organization an "agent of foreign influence" if funding from abroad accounted for more than 20 percent of its revenue. NGOs have been crucial to the functioning of the post-Soviet government of this nation of 4 million people in the South Caucasus, promoting policies and values consistent with Western liberal democracy. Bills that would have crippled NGOs provoked mass protests in March 2023 and were soon withdrawn or defeated in parliament. Last month, the ruling party announced plans to revive the legislation, and demonstrators returned to the streets. "No to Russian law," the placards read; the underlying conflict between Georgia's pro-Russian government and its pro-European public bears striking resemblance to Ukraine during the Euromaidan protests of 2013–14. Georgia applied for membership in the European Union in 2022 and was denied on grounds of government corruption. Now a Putinist minority pressures the ruling party to placate Moscow even as crowds in the streets wave the flag of Europe. The U.S. State Department has indicated support for the protesters and should consider their call to sanction officials pushing the "foreign influence" law.
◼ MIT announced last week that it will no longer require diversity statements for potential faculty hires. Sally Kornbluth, last woman standing among the three elite university presidents who testified before the House last winter about the post-10/7 outbreak of antisemitism on campuses, wrote, to mark the occasion, that "compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they don't work." One can only agree, while wondering why they were considered to work prior to this moment.
◼ Vladimir Kara-Murza is a Russian journalist, historian, democracy leader, and political prisoner. Twice, agents of the Russian state tried to kill him with poison: once in 2015, once in 2017. He was imprisoned shortly after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. He was sentenced to 25 years. He is in terrible health, and his family and friends worry that he will soon die, as another Russian political prisoner, Alexei Navalny, did last February. In 2017, Kara-Murza started to write columns for the Washington Post. While in prison, he has managed to send some columns through a lawyer—risking worse treatment as a result. He has now won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. This puts a spotlight on a political prisoner, who needs a spotlight. But it also rewards an outstanding writer and thinker. President Biden should consider giving him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. There is precedent for this: In 2007, President George W. Bush gave the award to a Cuban political prisoner, Óscar Elías Biscet, in absentia. It perhaps helped keep him alive. Biscet was released in 2011, and he eventually received his medal from Bush, by then an ex-president, in person: a precedent that we should hope will be followed for Kara-Murza.
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