NATIONAL REVIEW
OCT 25, 2024 |
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◼ A Senate candidate in Missouri shot a reporter, and we think the pandering has gone far enough.
◼ In an NBC interview with Hallie Jackson, Kamala Harris was asked about whether she believed in any religious exemptions when it came to national abortion legislation. "I don't believe we should be making concessions when we're talking about a fundamental freedom to control one's own body," Harris said. In some ways this should not be surprising. She has called for a repeal of the Hyde amendment, which prevents taxpayer dollars from funding abortions through Medicaid. Harris has promised that under her administration her Department of Justice would review every state-level pro-life law. And she introduced the Do No Harm Act, which narrowed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to nullify religious-liberty protections against abortion mandates. She supported the Equality Act, which would also mandate religious hospitals and doctors to perform abortions, even against their conscience. Harris believes that abortion is a fundamental right, and the First Amendment is just some niggling exception to it that ought to be curtailed.
◼ Once again demonstrating his genius for the publicity stunt, Trump worked a shift at the drive-through window of a McDonald's in a swing county of Pennsylvania. The photo op was intended to needle Harris over her unsubstantiated claim that she worked at a McDonald's around the time she was an undergraduate. But it also highlighted Trump's star power and showbiz chops, his skill at retail politics, and his ability to deploy humor and fun against his notably joyless opponents. The media coverage was, of course, apoplectic. Newsweek deployed investigative reporters to suss out whether the McDonald's franchise in question had failed recent health inspections. MSNBC whined that the McDonald's visit distracted from Trump's lack of an economic plan. One could say that they weren't lovin' it.
◼ The Secret Service was one head twitch away from failing to stop the murder of Donald Trump. That's according to a Senate report on the agency's work at the July rally in Butler, Pa. Convoluted communication channels left agents and law enforcement unsure who was in charge of what. It says that people raised concerns about lines of sight to Trump from nearby buildings but that those concerns were not acted upon. Nearly 30 minutes before the would-be assassin fired on Trump, the Secret Service got word of a suspicious person with a range-finder. The Secret Service has admitted to "complacency" among some of its agents and promised discipline. But incompetence and lack of professionalism have pervaded the agency for more than a decade, with several security breaches at the White House and various scandals. Senator Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) is now raising concerns from a whistleblower who alleges financial mismanagement. Congress should rebuild the agency from the ground up, beginning with its authorizing statutes, and demand that anyone associated with the Butler failure be fired. We cannot just hope our luck continues.
◼ "President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country," ABC News' David Muir said, seemingly fact-checking Donald Trump during his debate with Kamala Harris. But those statistics count only crimes that are reported to police and often omit cities that haven't turned in their data. There's another, better source for calculating crime rates: the National Crime Victimization Survey. Each year since 2001, the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics has collected data from a nationally representative sample of about 240,000 people in about 150,000 households. The survey indicates that, in 2023, the rate of nonfatal violent victimization in the United States was 22.5 per 1,000 people age twelve or older. The 2022 rate was 23.5. That decline is nothing to brag about. Perhaps most troublingly, "a smaller percentage of robbery victimizations that occurred in 2023 (42%) than in 2022 (64%) were reported to police, and the percentage of motor vehicle thefts reported to police decreased from 81 percent in 2022 to 72 percent in 2023." Important categories of crime are down a little, but Americans' confidence that law enforcement will do anything about it is down a lot. |
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◼ With both Joe Biden's presidency and the 2024 election nearing their end, the Biden-Harris administration has announced yet another round of student-loan "forgiveness." Last week, the White House divulged that taxpayers would cover $4.5 billion of loans taken out by public-sector workers. This week, the White House granted yet another six-month repayment freeze for up to 8 million borrowers. The Biden-Harris administration has now spent $175 billion transferring or delaying student debt. Understanding that Congress would never have consented to spend that much public money in this manner, the White House has consistently sought to exclude its conduct from the customary constitutional processes. After the Supreme Court struck down his initial plan, Biden announced he would find another way of achieving the same end, whatever it took. He has done so, separation of powers be damned. The cost has been immense. Our deficits are greater, our debt is higher, and our constitutional order has been damaged. It is tough to imagine a less appropriate use of these funds than the one with which the Biden-Harris administration has become obsessed. Unless, that is, one can see the program for what it is: a cynical vote-buying exercise that has been informed by the personal interests of the progressive staffers who populate the White House and Naval Observatory. If Kamala Harris loses the election, the scheme will end. For now, however, President Biden has made sure that it'll get at least one final, well-timed hurrah.
◼ A ballot initiative in Florida would amend the state constitution to erase protections for unborn children. In a post-Dobbs world, many professed pro-life politicians have been running for cover, fearing that they can only be hurt by talking about the issue. By contrast, Governor Ron DeSantis (R.), as on so many other issues, has studied the law assiduously and understands that Amendment 4 would eliminate not just Florida's post-six-week abortion ban but even the possibility of instituting a ban on late-term abortions. He has contended that the language of the measure has been designed to eliminate laws requiring that minors seeking abortions obtain parental consent and that only licensed doctors perform abortions—but without making any of that clear to the voters. Crucially, DeSantis has appointed pro-life medical personnel to the state health department. Together with them, he has clarified that protections for unborn children do not require doctors to delay a minute in acting to protect women's lives. He has used the bully pulpit and his considerable political capital in the state to challenge the media and its "blizzard of lies" on the issue. At a time when we need them, he has been a pro-lifer in courage. |
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◼ Thomas Jefferson High School in Fairfax County, Va., has for years been America's best science, technology, engineering, and math school—so successful that Chinese Communist Party–linked entities bought the curriculum and cloned the public school at least 20 times across China as part of a state-sponsored program called "Thomas Schools." In the last decade, three Chinese institutions have given $3.6 million to a nonprofit affiliated with the school in exchange for its curriculum, floor plans, and intellectual property. Parental-advocacy group Parents Defending Education claimed this month that school administrators, via the affiliated nonprofit, falsely earmarked the $3.6 million as "charitable donations," when the cash payments actually gave Chinese delegations unfettered access to TJ. After National Review reported on the claim, a spokesman for Governor Youngkin vowed that the state's department of education would "get to the bottom" of the CCP's "deeply disturbing efforts to infiltrate educational institutions in the United States." Virginia's attorney general has placed the case under review. The report comes after a recent investigation by the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party revealed that partnerships between U.S. universities and Chinese schools have helped China develop more-advanced equipment and technology for the People's Liberation Army. Evidently China is working on even earlier parts of the pipeline.
◼ The Portland Press Herald released a searching report on Maine's mental-health laws, which, had they been applied, might have prevented the October 2023 mass shooting in Lewiston by 40-year-old Robert Card. Card killed 18 people and shot another 13 that day. To the surprise of his acquaintances, he had been released from a New York psychiatric hospital in August. He had been acting strangely for months, believing that more and more people were out to get him. Medical staff diagnosed psychosis. He had a growing "hit list." But after he made promises to take his meds and attend follow-ups, he walked out. Eighty-three days later, the massacre. Maine has a law to compel people like Card to comply with outpatient treatment or face involuntary commitment. But law-enforcement officials in the state hardly knew such a law existed, and the legislature has done little to fund programs that would make the law easier to use. What lies at the bottom of the Card case are a thicket of regulations, precedents, and prejudices that bias law enforcement and health-care workers toward releasing obviously psychotic patients into their own care. Those who might do so are discouraged from intervening decisively even in the presence of threats and are given a clear go-ahead only when psychotic patients do hurt someone. Not just safety but common decency and justice require that those suffering dangerous psychosis be put into the care of those trained to deal with them.
◼ Volodymyr Zelensky has spent October presenting a so-called Plan for Victory to the leaders of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the United States, and a gathering of NATO defense ministers in Brussels. Zelensky should be credited for his use of the word "victory"—a word infrequently heard from the mouths of Western statesmen since 1945—instead of mealy-mouthed euphemisms for "not winning," such as the need for a "cease-fire" or a "peace process." Ukrainians intend to defeat the Russian invasion of their country. They intend to win. But can they under Zelensky's plan? Zelensky asks for a formal invitation to join NATO, increased military and economic aid, and the lifting of restrictions on the use of Western-provided munitions to attack targets inside the Russian Federation. Notably, Ukraine's president once again categorically rejected trading away Ukraine's territory or sovereignty for peace. In truth, there's not much in Zelensky's plan that he hasn't already asked for piecemeal in other formats. Ukrainians deserve American sympathy and, yes, help in the battle to keep their country free. But they should husband their resources and manpower by moving to an operationally defensive strategy, one that concentrates on training their reserve forces and bleeding the Kremlin's armies instead of trying to repeat 2023's failed counteroffensive. No matter what aid the U.S. and its European allies can give Ukraine, all should understand that there will be no quick end to this war. Victory, if it comes, will come with much patience and at a greater cost.
◼ Alexei Navalny was the foremost opposition leader in Russia, which, of course, made him a political prisoner. He died—was finished off—on February 16, 2024. He was 47. His last prison was one of the harshest in Russia, up in the Arctic Circle, known as "Polar Wolf." In various prisons, Navalny managed to keep diaries, which his wife edited into a book that has now been published. In one passage, Navalny speaks of Russia's rulers and how to combat them: "We must do what they fear—tell the truth, spread the truth. This is the most powerful weapon against this regime of liars, thieves, and hypocrites. Everyone has this weapon. So make use of it."
◼ That Britain's University of Nottingham has attached a trigger warning to The Canterbury Tales is yet another reminder that peak woke has yet to be reached. True, Chaucer himself, at the conclusion of the Tales, wrote—we think; authorship is disputed—a "retraction" of some of his racier works, in which he asked his readers to "preye . . . that Crist have Mercy" on him and forgive him for some of his work dedicated to "Worldly vanitees." He stood by duller-sounding works, such as his "bookes of legendes of seintes, and omelies and moralite and devocioun." Nottingham's note sounded the alarm about descriptions of "violence and mental illness" and "expressions of Christian faith"—"expressions" that even the most lightly educated student must already have been braced to expect in writings from the Middle Ages. Taboos change but perhaps grow no less strict.
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