Those are words President Joe Biden's climate czar, John Kerry, would do well to ponder as he prepares to board his fossil-fuel emitting jet to Beijing this weekend to resume in-person climate negotiations with his communist counterpart, Xie Zhenhua. If the trip yields commitments from China to "accelerate its phase-out of coal," Kerry said, it will be a success.

Low bar. China has long pledged to do as much, only to ramp up its coal consumption and carbon emissions. In 2014, one year after CCP head Xi Jinping became president, China unveiled a plan—to much fanfare from the American press—to cap its annual coal consumption at 4.2 billion tons by 2020. China's commitment to lower emissions, former president Barack Obama said at the time, "shows what's possible when we work together on an urgent global challenge." Today, the Chinese have blown past that number and burn more coal than the rest of the world combined.

Kerry has nonetheless argued that, in the case of the Chinese, words alone are proof of climate "progress." He has lauded the genocidal dictator for using the term "climate crisis" and for pledging to cut emissions as part of an "ecological strategy."

"I’d rather have those words than not," Kerry told lawmakers in 2021.

A wise man once said to "trust but verify." A year later, in 2022, Xi approved the equivalent of two new coal power plants per week.

That unfortunately is not the way the Biden administration conducts diplomacy. Kerry in March expressed regret that "other tensions" between China and the United States—you know, spy balloons, concentration camps, and the hacking of America’s commerce secretary—had "gotten mixed up" with climate cooperation.

It is revealing that Kerry and his allies in the Biden administration take the measure of a man by the extent to which he has adopted their own woke rhetoric. We can be sure that Xi understands perfectly who will come out ahead.

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When he returned home, Pence explained why assistance to Ukraine is essential to American security. "We’re there because it’s in our national interest to give the Ukrainian military the ability to rebut and defeat Russian aggression," Pence told Jonathan Karl of ABC News. "Because if Russia overran Ukraine, I have no doubt, John, that it wouldn’t be too long before they crossed a border where American servicemen and women would be required to go and fight."

Pence said that President Biden has failed to make a compelling case for American leadership. Biden rarely discusses Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He would rather devote his limited energy to domestic policy. On the few occasions when he does address the conflict, Biden says that Ukraine is part of a global contest between democracy and authoritarianism. This abstract framework, Pence said, is too closely related to Biden’s partisan agenda to attract support from Republicans and independents.

Nor does Biden’s grand rhetoric match his overly cautious actions. Biden continually delays sending Ukraine the platforms required to defeat the Russian invaders, needlessly extending the war and undermining Western resolve. And Biden rejects the defense buildup necessary to replenish U.S. weapons stocks, bolster allies, and deter further aggression. "The Biden administration has been cutting back on our defense spending at a time that the world is becoming more dangerous by the day," Pence told radio host Hugh Hewitt on Wednesday.

Pence says that Biden’s lassitude on Ukraine is connected to his disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, his foolish pursuit of a nuclear deal with Iran, and his recent turn toward dovishness on China. Pence offers a full-spectrum critique of Biden’s progressive foreign policy that one rarely hears from the other GOP presidential candidates, who tend to harp on one or two discrete issues when they mention international affairs at all. Pence’s trip not only demonstrated his commitment to advancing freedom abroad. It revealed his intention to resist those in his own party who are prepared to abandon Ukraine and the West.

Pence is not alone in this fight. Republican views on Ukraine are more complicated than a casual observer of conservative media might assume. For example, a late spring poll conducted by Beacon Research and Shaw & Company Research on behalf of the Ronald Reagan Institute found that GOP voters back increased defense and security spending and American leadership and engagement in the world. A 71-percent majority of Republicans said that Ukrainian victory is important to the United States. Fifty percent of Republicans support further military aid to Ukraine.

The Reagan Institute survey suggests that GOP support for aid to Ukraine will rise if figures such as Pence continue to inform voters of the war’s stakes. For instance, after pollsters explained that U.S. aid to Ukraine is a small percentage of the Pentagon’s budget, that Ukraine controls most of its territory, and that the war has seriously degraded the Russian military, the percentage of Republicans who said that U.S. assistance has been worth it jumped by 18 points, to 59 percent.

The data imply that, in the absence of energetic and effective leadership, negative partisanship determines voter attitudes. Republicans soured on aid to Ukraine not because they side with Russia, but because they consider the war to be another wasteful Biden project. When Republicans learn the facts behind U.S. involvement, however, their instinctual hawkishness kicks in. What they have lacked is a prominent GOP spokesman for freedom.

Mike Pence has stepped into the breach. Of course, at this stage, Republican support for Ukraine is considerably stronger than Republican support for Pence’s campaign. He trails both former president Donald Trump and Florida governor Ron DeSantis in national and state polls—distantly.

Nonetheless, Pence’s decision to highlight his support for Ukraine is not only courageous, but also savvy. It draws a contrast with DeSantis, who hasn’t found his footing on the issue, as well as with Trump, who says that he will end the war in 24 hours, with details to be worked out later. Aid to Ukraine, moreover, is the one place where Republican voters disagree with the former president. It’s a wedge issue in a GOP primary that, unlike criminal indictments, separates Trump from many in his party.

Foreign policy can pop up in unusual ways in presidential elections. Pence must recall how John McCain rode the success of the surge in Iraq to a late-breaking win in the 2008 Republican contest. Pence might benefit from a similar vindication this fall if the Ukrainian counteroffensive bears fruit and Russian lines collapse.

Even if Pence loses the GOP nomination, he may galvanize enough Republican voters to dissuade Trump from appeasing Putin. His stand for American strength and leadership in defense of democracy sustains a noble tradition of conservative internationalism. "I’m a guy who believes in that old Reagan Doctrine," Pence told Hugh Hewitt. "If you’re willing to fight the enemies of the United States on your soil, we’ll give you the means to fight them there so our men and women in uniform don’t have to fight them."

Ukraine’s resistance to Russian aggression has proven that there’s nothing old about the Reagan Doctrine. It’s as necessary today as it was 40 years ago. Reminding voters of this fact, and of America’s role as a beacon of hope for those without freedom, is Mike Pence’s mission. And most Americans—and Republicans—share his cause.

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In recent years, left-wingers have directed a sustained attack against America’s Founding Fathers. Elite institutions like the New York Times have claimed that "the beginning of American slavery" was "our true founding," not the Declaration of Independence, and that "one critical reason" the colonists fought for independence was "to protect the institution of slavery." After getting lambasted by serious historians, the Times sneakily edited out its most egregious errors but left these misbegotten essays online. Other lefty ingrates have torn down statues of the Founders, and some vandals in Portland, citing the Times, spray-painted "Genocidal Colonist" on a statue of our first president.

To see a real genocidal colonist, look no further than Yevgeny Prigozhin. A Russian petty criminal who rose to prominence as Putin’s caterer, Prigozhin linked up with a bunch of Russian Nazi enthusiasts and in 2014 founded the Wagner Group. Over the next several years, Wagner’s thugs looted, murdered, raped, and tortured across Africa and the Middle East while serving as one of Putin’s proxies. In 2018, several hundred Wagner fighters and their allies attacked an American unit in Syria, only to discover that you don’t mess with Uncle Sam. Reportedly, Prigozhin was furious that the Russian Air Force stood by as American drones, helicopters, stealth fighters, and heavy bombers annihilated his mercenaries.

Prigozhin’s frustrations with Putin finally boiled over in June. For months, he had complained that the Russian government had given Wagner insufficient support in Ukraine. Among his grievances are that the Russian rubber-stamp parliament is "useless" and that Russian defense officials are sitting "like fat cats" and withholding ammunition and equipment from his convict army. On June 23, Prigozhin declared a "march for justice" and sent a column of Wagner tanks and armored vehicles on its way to Moscow, shooting down several Russian aircrafts before abruptly halting his mutinous uprising the next day and decamping to Belarus under mysterious circumstances.

During the Revolutionary War, General Washington encountered similar problems. The trials of Valley Forge, where American troops left a trail of bloody footprints as they marched barefoot to winter quarters without sufficient blankets or food, are legendary. But the army’s supply problems started years before and continued for years after: In October 1775, Washington was already writing home, "We are obliged to Submit to an almost daily Cannonade without returning a Shott [sic] from our scarcity of [gun] Powder." And throughout the war, Washington and his army had to fend off backbiting mediocrities like Horatio Gates, Thomas Conway, and their congressional supporters.

After eight years of shortchanges and broken promises, Washington’s officers had enough of the Continental Congress and were ready to mutiny. Shortly after he initially took command in 1775, Washington had told his army that it was constituted "in defence of the common Rights and Liberties of mankind," not for personal gain or profit. As rumors of the plot spread throughout the army, he summoned his officers and condemned the plan, saying there was "something so shocking in it, that humanity revolts at the idea." Pausing to find his glasses at one point, he asked, "Gentleman, you must pardon me, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in service to my country." His shamefaced subordinates burst into tears; the mutiny was broken.

This is only one of the many times that Washington saved the republic. If he wanted power, his army would have followed him in an uprising against the elected government. He might have become a dictator, or he might have failed and plunged the country into a civil war, but in either case our experiment in self-government would have failed in the prototype stage. Leftwing cranks today denounce Washington as a murderous tyrant, but when he had the chance to become one, he turned away.

Toward the end of the war, King George III asked the American painter Benjamin West if Washington would remain in command of the army or take over the government instead. When West told him that Washington would resign his command and go home quietly, he replied, "If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world." As usual, George III got it wrong. Washington was not just the greatest man of that time, he is the greatest man in the history of the greatest country on earth—because of what he did not do.

Mike Watson is the associate director of Hudson Institute's Center for the Future of Liberal Society.

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The timing of the decision is meaningful, coming days before the July 4th holiday: The Court’s 6-3 ruling vindicates the country’s founding principles and the idea of equal treatment enshrined in the 14th Amendment.

The most important aspect of the ruling, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, is the affirmation that the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees to all citizens the equal protection of the law, means that the same law applies in the same way to every person—without regard to race. The Court rejected the so-called antisubordination view, which holds that the Fourteenth Amendment forbids only laws that hurt minorities, not those that help them—that is, that different treatment under the same law is permissible in light of historical inequities.

They made clear that the law guarantees equality of opportunity, not outcome. Justice Clarence Thomas, in his concurrence, addressed this point powerfully. Advocates of the 14th Amendment, he wrote, "explicitly clarified that the equality sought by the law was not one in which all men shall be ‘six feet high’; rather, it strove to ensure that freedmen enjoy ‘equal rights before the law’ such that ‘each man shall have the right to pursue in his own way life, liberty, and happiness.’"

For decades, we have heard from college administrators that they only employed a little bit of racial discrimination—in cases of two equally qualified applicants, in borderline cases, and so on. If the data unearthed in the litigation wasn’t damning enough, the Ivy League’s collective meltdown over the ruling was itself an embarrassing refutation of those claims. Harvard immediately encouraged applicants to write about their race in their personal essays, while Princeton’s execrable Christopher Eisgruber said the Court had "significantly" narrowed the school’s discretion to admit applicants.

Those responses demonstrate how rampant and pervasive the discrimination in university admissions has been, and how salutary Thursday’s verdict might be. Three cheers.

But now comes the hard part. It is clear from the response of President Biden and the many universities that have already spoken out that they plan to use every means at their disposal to circumvent the law and impose a new regime of racial discrimination relying on proxies for race. A new battle begins today, but the forces of equality have won an important victory over the forces of equity—we can enjoy that for a moment, at least.

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Solution: Talk up job numbers and investment figures. Boast about factory construction. Note that inflation is on a downward slope. Highlight your ties to organized labor. Remind the electorate that you are doing your best to eliminate annoying consumer fees. Admit that more work needs to be done, but that America's brightest days are ahead. "There is nothing beyond our capacity if we work together," Biden said in Chicago on Wednesday. Clap, clap, clap. End of speech.

The strategy is familiar. Use rhetoric as a substitute for performance. If voters dislike what you are selling, don't change the product. Market it differently. Call it Bidenomics. Light fire once more to the "trickle-down" straw man. Barack Obama did this all the time.

Nor is an aggressive economic message new to Biden. His arguments in Chicago were the same ones he's been making for years. He rehearsed these lines at the last State of the Union address in February. Biden's job approval average that night: 43 percent. His approval average today: 43 percent.

The words have no effect. Why? Because neither the cleverest slogan nor the most eloquent spokesman can disguise the underlying reality: Not only has Biden presided over a decline in real average hourly earnings, his policies are responsible for the loss of purchasing power.

The worst inflation in 40 years did not come out of nowhere. It was goosed by Biden's American Rescue Plan Act. That bill, passed early in 2021, flooded a recovering economy with $2 trillion in fiscal stimulus on top of the trillions spent the previous year to sustain America during the pandemic. The spending splurge, in combination with restrictive energy and trade policies, generated the inflation that has dogged Biden's presidency.

Biden has no answer for it. He cherry-picks the positive data while hoping that the Federal Reserve and the tendency of economies to find equilibrium will solve the problem for him. All he needs is for inflation to reach 2 percent and for real hourly wages to climb into positive territory. Then he can declare victory. The tenor of his speeches would harmonize with the public mood. He could campaign for reelection not as the least bad alternative, but as a genuine bringer of prosperity.

Or so the theory runs. A lot must go right for the public to judge Bidenomics a success. The Fed, for example, must fine-tune its coming interest rate hikes. If not, the central bank could set off a long-predicted recession just as the presidential election gets underway. Higher interest rates might also trigger additional bank failures along the lines of spring's financial mini-crisis. Neither outcome is desirable; both are plausible. The Fed's track record is not encouraging. And inflation has been more persistent than anyone would like.

Biden faces other dangers. To quote the late great Jack Germond: When the economy is bad, it's the only issue. When the economy is good, different issues come to the fore. Issues that may not play to Biden's strengths.

Say Fed chairman Jerome Powell is a genius—in other words, suspend your sense of disbelief—and the economy avoids recession and financial implosion. Inflation subsides. Real wages recover and grow. Would Biden be a sure bet for reelection? He'd be helped, of course. But this economy is not the president's sole liability. The public doesn't just reject Bidenomics. It also rejects Bidenomics's namesake.

Biden's fitness for office is already in doubt. Americans have grave concerns over the 80-year-old president's physical and mental capacity. And people age in only one direction. Nothing in Biden's domestic program will make the president any younger. Not only do voters prefer the Trump economy—when real wages were rising faster than prices—they also say the 77-year-old former president is in better condition than his successor.

The worries over Biden's infirmity spill over into views of his vice president. Kamala Harris, who would inherit the office of president if something happens to Biden, is the most unpopular vice president in the history of the NBC poll. Bidenomics may make Democratic partisans feel better about the economy. Nothing can make them feel good about Harris.

Meanwhile, IRS whistleblowers have revealed the true meaning of Bidenomics: The term well describes the buckraking schemes that some members of the Biden family, including the president's son Hunter, have used to get rich while avoiding federal taxes. Biden's entanglement in this scandal is sure to grow in the coming year, as the House of Representatives and intrepid reporters seek to uncover, or restate, the details of the Biden family operation. What they find won't make the president more popular.

It would be a mistake to ascribe Biden's political position to the economy alone. A decline in the standard of living has interacted with, and intensified, the public's revised attitude toward Biden the man. No longer is he the genial grandpa who issues reassuring platitudes from his Delaware basement. He is rather a cranky and out-of-it octogenarian with a spotty record and an estranged relationship to the truth.

This transformation in how voters perceive Biden explains why the presidential election is competitive. Biden led Donald Trump throughout 2019 and 2020. Now the two candidates are neck-and-neck. Indeed, Trump is slightly ahead. The coming presidential election looks like it will resemble 2016 more than 2020. Which helps Donald Trump.

The nation is on autopilot, gliding toward a general election that voters do not want, determined by sure-to-be-narrow outcomes in three or four states: Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Nevada. The president's fate rests not on Bidenomics but on long-running trends in the electorate. Biden's future depends not on his agenda, nor on his charisma, but on the anti-MAGA coalition that cost Republicans in 2017, 2018, 2020, and 2022. He's counted on this coalition before. Will it save him again?

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Turns out the IRS is quite effective at ferreting out wealthy tax cheats, but sometimes the Department of Justice is not so good at prosecuting them.

According to whistleblower testimony from IRS agent Gary Shapley, the agency uncovered an array of tax crimes committed by Hunter Biden after receiving a tip from the FBI. The younger Biden routinely wrote off almost every part of his hedonistic, depraved, and criminal lifestyle as a business expense, Shapley and a colleague say: hookers (and their travel), a sex club membership, and swanky hotel rooms for his drug dealer and father.

Since 2002, Shapley’s unidentified colleague told Congress, Hunter Biden has brazenly flouted the nation’s tax laws. That’s why the feds recommended a litany of charges including tax evasion, a felony. Shapley called it a "slam dunk case."

But Merrick Garland’s DOJ was able to pick up what the elder Biden was putting down when he insisted his son "has done nothing wrong." Hence the sweetheart plea deal struck Tuesday between Hunter Biden and the DOJ that is a middle finger to the American people.

The attorney general on Friday responded to critics of this deal by gaslighting them: "Some have chosen to attack the integrity of the Justice Department by claiming that we do not treat cases alike. This constitutes an attack on an institution that is essential to American democracy." He added: "Nothing could be further from the truth."

If Democrats like Garland want their political opponents to take seriously actual attacks on our institutions of government, such as occurred on January 6, 2021, maybe it’s time to cut the crap.

The bottom line is that the IRS appears well-equipped to sniff out missing tax dollars. A Department of Justice that administers the law without fear or favor—now, that’s something that might be worth $80 billion.

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A good part of the nation’s press went wild over the news. Livermore’s own publicity department called the new fusion reactor "a shot for the ages." Wired magazine declared, "It’s Time to Fall in Love With Nuclear Fusion—Again," while ABC explained, "Scientific ‘breakthrough’ in nuclear fusion could launch new era of clean energy." As it happens, even on the most optimistic of timetables, we’re still 20 years away from commercial reactors, but that didn’t stop the nation’s press from proclaiming the arrival of the new fusion age.

Such hype about engineering breakthroughs is hardly unique. And much of that hype is premised on the idea that advancement, any kind of scientific change, is likely to change the world. Unfortunately, many technological breakthroughs are just that: breakthroughs, a step beyond what had previously been done, without much purpose beyond breaking through. The pursuit of technology for the sake of advancement rather than for human flourishing is folly.

As Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure reminds us, the history of science is filled with broken promises and unfulfilled hopes. By providing an account of the real history of science, Vaclav Smil, a much-published environmental professor at the University of Manitoba, wants to tamp down our inflated optimism about new technology. (He only mentions A.I. in passing—the book came out just as ChatGPT was making headlines.)

People who fawn over technology—you can’t scatter birdseed on a Silicon Valley sidewalk without attracting the attention of a dozen of them, and hundreds more are perched in academia—have the view that some inventions (often their own) will save the world. In his 2021 book, The Decadent Society, Ross Douthat called this the "spiritualized reaction" to technological breakthroughs, as though salvation itself were on offer.

With his nine case studies in Invention and Innovation, Smil tracks such hyped inventions, especially ones that either failed to deliver on their promise or produced bad consequences the inventors had not foreseen. What he wants us to recognize is the silliness of hyped claims of technological breakthroughs. Think, for example, of CFCs, the refrigerants developed in the 1920s as a safer alternative to propane and ammonia. By 1952 CFCs were used in 90 percent of America’s air conditioners. The CFC known as Freon provided a low-cost solution to cooling buildings and refrigerating foods, incalculably improving the quality of life.

Unfortunately, CFCs were also terrible for the ozone layer. Had they been used only for cooling, the effects might not have been so bad, but after they started showing up in aerosol cans, from hair spray to deodorants, they were essentially banned in 1987. And so CFCs gave way to HCFCs, and HCFCs to HFCs. Smil observes that all "of this seems to amount to a continuing, and accelerating, sequence of, if not failures, then repeatedly imperfect solutions."

Smil similarly traces the rise and fall of leaded gasoline and DDT: breakthroughs with histories parallel to that of CFCs. We started out enthusiastic, but the unforeseen consequences of widespread use soon left us sour. He then gives three case studies of much-touted breakthroughs that simply failed to capture the market: blimps and hydrogen airships, for example, along with nuclear fission and supersonic flight. And his case studies conclude with three much-hyped breakthroughs that somehow never actually arrived: the always almost here of trains whisked along vacuum tubes, for example, along with the promise of nitrogen-fixing cereals and our own fascination with fusion, as the media frenzy about Lawrence Livermore proves.

As an antidote to irrational enthusiasm about technological change, Invention and Innovation is worth the read. Not so much the conclusions Smil draws from them. The book is so determined to find failed hype that it can’t quite see much good technology. At nearly every point, Smil overstates his case, not seeming to realize that a progression from bad to less bad, even if it doesn’t reach the perfect, is historically natural and marks genuine progress.

Smil reprints, as both the book’s cover and an interior illustration, William Heath’s 1829 etching, "A Futuristic Vision."  It’s a lovely, goofy example of the anti-progress genre. In the middle of the etching, for example, is the "Grand Vacuum Tube Company Direct to Bengal," loading passengers into an intricate metallic vacuum transport for a menial trip across the river: an innovation without much purpose. Surrounding the tube are detailed sketches of absurdly unchecked and unguided innovations. The state of civic life does not fare much better. A noose atop an office building is labeled "Designed to elevate the architects." A castle in the clouds is the "Scheme for the Payment of the National Debt."

Heath’s etching mocks the idea of technological progress, and Smil is right to use it to illustrate his skepticism. The problem is that nuclear fusion, say, could not find a place in Heath’s catalog of absurdities and horrors. Though fusion may be far-fetched, it is not without merit. Renewed interest in the energy source comes in spurts, in reaction to threats of national and energy security from such foreign actions as Russia’s war on Ukraine, which threatened natural-gas supplies to much of Europe. It also gives future scientists and engineers something to be excited about. Can hype be good, after all?

At the end of the book, Smil offers a few suggestions for what he believes would be worthwhile. Inventions, he thinks, should improve the human condition, with minimal, long-lasting impact on the environment. We should focus on fundamentals for human life before reaching for supersonic speeds.

Such suggestions are all rather abstract. They are not live wires, capable of carrying enough current to power technological progress. The Stone Age, he thinks, was about survival. The Agricultural Age allowed the building of societies. The Industrial Age was aimed at raising the quality of life. The Technological Age of the 20th century was about mastering the world. So what aim should we have now in our decadent Digital Age?

Smil evaluates new innovations not by what tasks they accomplish but on what they do or don’t do to reduce emissions and the depletion of the earth’s resources. Seeking innovations that do more with less—that help us "dematerialize" (a term from his 2013 work, Making the Modern World: Materials & Dematerialization)—Smil leaves us with a waning progress in human flourishing.

Invention and Innovation is a useful commentary on the shortcomings of inventions and innovations. Smil explains how each of his examples was invented and commercialized, and how they later turned disastrous or failed to meet expectations. His skepticism about the hype around breakthroughs is exact, correct, and devastating.

Still, such lofty projects as supersonic flight and commercial space travel are more likely to inspire the next generation of engineers and scientists than desalination projects. Perhaps it is just hype, but that hype can still get students into a discipline short on labor. Hype, it turns out, is actually good. Sometimes.

Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure
by Vaclav Smil
MIT Press, 232 pp., $24.95

Matthew Phillips is a doctoral student in aerospace engineering at North Carolina State University.

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Would you be inclined to bargain with such a regime? If your answer—against all evidence—is yes, then you can look forward to a short and unhappy career in Joe Biden’s State Department. For President Biden is on the verge of betraying Congress and the American people by rewarding the Islamic Republic of Iran for its various misdeeds.

According to news reports, Biden is prepared to authorize billions of dollars in payments to Iran in exchange for the release of U.S. prisoners, a halt to militia attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria, cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, a moratorium on ballistic missile sales to Russia, and a freeze on uranium enrichment at 60 percent (90 percent enriched uranium is considered weapons-grade). Biden will say this perverse arrangement is necessary to free innocents and prevent the outbreak of war. What he won’t be able to do is call it a deal.

Biden can’t call the agreement a deal because he wants to avoid congressional review. The Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015 forbids the president from relieving nuclear-related sanctions on the Islamic Republic without congressional approval. The administration’s end-run around the law is clever. It is also pathetic.

This deal that dare not speak its name will have no force. It will rely entirely on the goodwill of the 84-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a grizzled trickster and ally of Vladimir Putin. The New York Times reports that Khamenei has authorized the deal because it leaves Iran’s nuclear infrastructure in place. The second Biden begins to doubt the wisdom of paying further ransom money, Khamenei will start spinning his centrifuges once more. And if paramilitaries controlled by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps fire mortars on Americans—well, he could say the bloodshed came from militants over whom he exercises no control.

Notice that the deal-that-is-no-deal says nothing about Iran’s deadliest proxy, Hezbollah, or about Iran’s drone traffic. This omission is consistent with Biden’s nasty habit of selling out America’s allies whether it be the democratic government of Afghanistan, the peoples of Lebanon, Syria, and, of course, Israel, or the Ukrainians resisting Russian occupation. Biden’s bribe—what Richard Goldberg of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies calls Biden’s "pay and pray" strategy of fueling the Iranian terror machine in the hope that it doesn’t go nuclear—is limited in scope, bereft of accountability, brazenly desperate, and lacking in strategic purpose. Its aims are political.

Biden wants to keep the Middle East quiet ahead of Election Day 2024. That is why his support for the Iranian rebellion was merely gestural. Why he allowed these talks in Oman to continue despite Iran’s assistance to Russia. Why his government welcomed the détente between Saudi Arabia and Iran that China brokered in April. And why he has submitted to the humiliation of paying off rogues for promises of good behavior in a few select areas.

This is partly a story of diminished diplomatic expectations. Biden’s old boss, Barack Obama, dreamed of subletting the Greater Middle East to Iran. Now Biden is left paying the bully to leave him alone. It is also another entry in the saga of Joe Biden’s incompetence. In his rare discussions of foreign policy, President Biden has portrayed international relations as a struggle between democracy and authoritarianism. I am inclined to agree with him. Then I look at his actions—where he has an awful tendency to give the authoritarians the upper hand.

Appeasing Iran does nothing to further the cause of democracy. Nor does attempting détente with a China that has grown in belligerence since the spy balloon incident earlier this year. Nor does slow-walking weapons deliveries to Ukraine while hemming and hawing over Ukraine’s future in NATO. If Joe Biden wanted to preserve and promote democracy abroad, he would do more than give the occasional speech on the subject. He would mobilize hard power to confront authoritarians and deter them from hostile acts.

Biden has made a career out of misjudgment. This sure-to-fail bargain with Iran is another entry in a depressing catalogue.

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The first topic Reagan mentioned was crime. Then he discussed welfare reform and education. He brought up radicalism on campus. He called for lower taxes and fiscal discipline.

What strikes the contemporary reader is Reagan's rhetorical framework. All these individual issues, he said, were aspects of a general relationship between government and the people. As today's Republicans and conservatives grapple with inflation, crime, illegal immigration, and a culture of repudiation, they might take note of how the most popular and successful GOP president of the last century thought about the social contract.

For Reagan, the American government was not omnipotent. The Founders did not mean for government to be fickle or arbitrary. They did not intend for it to lord over subjects. They wanted the law to reflect the consensus of self-governed citizens. Rather than build a "Great Society" engineered by politicians and bureaucrats in Sacramento or Washington, D.C., Reagan evoked a "Creative Society" where "government will lead but not rule, listen but not lecture."

Reagan seems to have dropped the "Creative Society" tagline not long after taking office, but the principles behind the slogan continued to inform his rhetoric and politics. Reagan saw public officials as intermediaries between voters and government. Their job is to keep government in check. They represent taxpayers and must ensure that "no permanent structure of government ever encroaches on freedom." The tasks of office include fulfilling the basic duties of government—rule of law, administration of justice, and national defense—as well as removing obstacles to human flourishing.

Reagan restated these themes in his first presidential Inaugural Address. He tried to quell voter anxiety by distancing himself from extreme libertarianism. "It's not my intention to do away with government," he said on January 20, 1981. "It is rather to make it work—work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back. Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it." The Creative Society lived on, though not by that name.

When Reagan became president, the country was in the middle of an economic crisis. Stagflation—the combination of recession and inflation—was lowering the standard of living. Rising prices and nominal wages pushed voters into higher tax brackets, draining their discretionary income.

During the Republican primary, Reagan had adopted the program of supply-side economics. Following the lead of New York congressman Jack Kemp, he called for price stability, deregulation, tighter social spending, free trade, energy production, and a massive, across-the-board tax cut that included inflation indexing.

The supply-side agenda fit comfortably within the structure of the Creative Society. Its goal was to remove barriers to work, savings, and investment and generate economic growth through innovation. It was compatible with Reagan's mystical belief in the power of technology to improve the material conditions of life and advance the cause of civilization.

Such progress was connected, in Reagan's mind, to a public commitment to human freedom. Government's purpose was not found in remaking human nature or in divvying up resources and honors among groups. It was found in acts of self-restraint that gave space to individuals to better their condition.

"Democracy is less a system of government than it is a system to keep government limited, unintrusive," Reagan told the students at Moscow State University in 1988, "a system of constraints on power to keep politics and government secondary to the important things in life, the true sources of value found only in family and faith."

An advocate of the Creative Society in the year 2023 would agree with this hierarchy. Family and faith are seedbeds of virtue where government ought not to intrude. Meddling with the home and church is destructive and corrosive. Government should work with the people, not against them, to unlock latent potential in the earth, in schools, in labs, in factories, in cities. And the way to do this is a new supply-side economics aimed at increased productivity and abundance.

The Progressive Left is not the place for a supply-side revival. Liberal intellectuals don't understand the economics. Democratic interest groups won't like the politics. It's the Conservative Right that must map out the topography of the Creative Society in the 21st century. That picture won't look exactly like Reagan's, but it will incorporate his insights.

Spending restraint and monetary sanity would end inflation and restore price stability. Deregulation would take precedence over further tax cuts. The permitting process would be streamlined. The federal government would open more properties to oil and gas exploration and development. An all-of-government effort would promote nuclear power and enhancements to the electric grid. Research and development on hard sciences and applied engineering would increase, and the grant-making process would be made easier.

The federal government would search for ways to copy or to promote state-level workforce initiatives that abolish occupational licensing or incentivize new home construction. Immigration levels must be regularized, by finishing construction of the border wall, normalizing asylum law, privileging high-skilled workers, and creating systems to match low-skilled workers with employers before migrants attempt illegal crossings. Protectionist measures that contribute to inflation and harm our relationships with strategic allies would be repealed. (Trade with adversaries such as China would be handled differently.)

A winning Republican or conservative doesn't need to get lost in the weeds of policy detail. What's more important is his ability to situate these particulars in a larger concept of the American future. That concept would put hardware over software and national pride over group loyalty. And it would drive home the idea that traditional social practices are the bedrock of prosperity and peace.

Look for the candidate who refines Reagan's vision to meet this moment. Nostalgia or necromancy has nothing to do with it. Gratitude toward the achievements of the past, and a willingness to build upon them, is the essence of conservatism. "The Creative Society is not a retreat into the past," Reagan said back in 1967. "It is taking the dream that gave birth to this nation, and updating it, and making it practical for the 20th century. It is a good dream. It is a dream that is worthy of your generation." And ours.

The post Ronald Reagan's Path for American Renewal appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Krepinevich, the author of several well-regarded books on warfare, spent years at the Department of Defense’s famed Office of Net Assessment, an inhouse think tank. In his latest volume, the scholar shows that militaries that successfully pursue "disruptive innovation" can "gain a major advantage over their rivals, while those that fail to do so risk exposing their countries to great danger."

The topic couldn’t be timelier.

For the first time in modern history, the United States is confronted with a potential war with a peer competitor, China. Beijing has designs on Taiwan and seeks to impose its will far from its shores, reshaping the global order to its benefit.

Meanwhile, as Krepinevich demonstrates, the United States will not be able to avail itself of many of the advantages it possessed in previous great power conflicts. Rather, the nation finds itself in the unenviable position of being thoroughly reliant on an enemy that seeks to destroy American hegemony.

A key component of this competition is in the realm of technology. Artificial intelligence will be a decisive battleground. A.I. has received a lot of attention lately, with the advent of Chat GPT and warnings from luminaries like Henry Kissinger and Elon Musk that A.I. will transform the world. It will also, Krepinevich makes clear, change war.

In 2017, when Air Force Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan witnessed Project Maven, a Pentagon effort that utilized A.I. and machine learning, he was so impressed that he suggested "the Department of Defense should never buy another weapon system … without artificial intelligence baked into it."

A.I.’s potential to change warfare spans the gamut, from basic logistics to how war itself is fought. Once largely confined to air, sea, and land, the wars of the future will extend to the realms of space and cyber. And disturbingly, the United States no longer holds a homefield advantage.

A 2021 report by Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs warned that China has "become a serious competitor in the foundational technologies of the 21st century" and "will overtake the U.S. in the next decade." The Origins of Victory makes clear this isn’t hyperbole—and that the costs of inaction would be disastrous. Urgency is a necessity.

Yet, the book’s greatest merit rests in framing the future—and the rapidly changing present—in the past.

Krepinevich manages to put the rise of A.I., drone swarms, the internet of things, and big data in their proper historical context. Disruptive technologies are almost as old as warfare itself. He offers a study of modern history that focuses on several momentous changes that, while known to others in his field, might have escaped the general reader.

"History shows," Krepinevich writes, "that a military that first masters the new form of warfare enjoys a clear and potentially decisive advantage over its rivals." And he offers numerous examples.

In the middle of the 19th century, Prussia stood at the forefront of the "Railroad, Rifle and Telegraph Revolution." Trains offered land forces "the advantage of increased speed in mobilization and maneuver at the strategic and operational levels of war" while greatly reducing the wear and tear brought by long marches. They also enabled militaries to rapidly move supplies, further enhancing both their staying power and size.

The use of the telegraph increased a commander’s ability to direct and move troops. And improvements in small arms offered both better accuracy and the ability to engage at longer distances.

Prussia used this revolution in military affairs to its benefit, forging the nation of Germany and defeating the once mighty French empire. Other countries, notably the United States, which itself was fighting a war to unify a continent, soon followed.

The Fisher (or "Dreadnought") Revolution transformed naval warfare. Led by Great Britain, navies began to emphasize speed and were able to operate at greater ranges. New technology in the form of diesel engines and better torpedoes led to a seismic growth in submarine warfare. These advents, coupled with the rise of air warfare and greater mechanization, led to a greater emphasis on geolocating and scouting.

During World War II, signals intelligence and cryptography played a crucial role in defeating Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Radar, and eventually satellites, became increasingly important as America stood at the forefront of the nuclear age. The Soviets and others soon followed.

Perhaps the most instructive historical lesson that Krepinevich cites is the "Precision-Warfare Revolution," best demonstrated by the quick and relatively painless victory achieved by a U.S.-led coalition against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the first Gulf war. Stealth aircraft linked to a nascent battle network coupled with laser-guided "smart bombs" changed warfare.

As Gen. Buster C. Glosson, the U.S. military’s director of air campaign plans, noted, "One need only look back to our raids on Schweinfurt, Germany, in World War II to see how dramatically precision weapons have enhanced our capabilities. … Two raids of 300 B-17 bombers could not achieve with 3,000 bombs what two F-117’s can do with only four."

But contrary to appearances, American victory wasn’t achieved overnight. As Krepinevich rightly notes, that revolution in military affairs could be traced back to the 1970s, when the Pentagon began to invest heavily in researching new technologies. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously observed, you "go to war with the army that you have, not the army that you might want or wish to have at a later time." Victory isn’t built overnight. Preparation is key.

Uniquely, the United States maintained its dominance for more than a decade. Potential competitors like Russia and China, beset with economic and development issues, were unable to take the field.

But times change. And so too does warfare. The nature of man, however, does not. "Only the dead have seen the end of war," Plato famously observed. And if war does come, innovation will be key to preserving life, liberty, and freedom against the greatest police state the world has ever known.

As Krepinevich warns, "Silver medals are not awarded to those who come in second."

The Origins of Victory: How Disruptive Military Innovation Determines the Fates of Great Powers
by Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr.
Yale University Press, 568 pp., $40

Sean Durns is a Washington, D.C.-based foreign affairs analyst.

The post In a War Against China, America Could Be the Underdog appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The legislation doesn't restore fiscal sanity to the federal budget—only changes to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid would do that—but it is a step in the right direction. Since becoming speaker in January, McCarthy has faced a test: Could he strike a fiscal bargain with President Biden that would earn Republican support and avoid a breach of the debt ceiling and a government shutdown? Well, the grade is in. He aced the exam.

Consider where the parties started. Biden spent much of this year demanding that Congress raise the debt ceiling without preconditions. He refused to negotiate with McCarthy. At one point the White House floated the idea of tax increases. The speaker, by contrast, said that he was willing to work with the president to raise the debt ceiling in exchange for cuts.

Now look at where the two sides ended up: The Fiscal Responsibility Act is much closer to McCarthy's original position than it is to Biden's. It doesn't hike taxes. It reduces spending. It contains measures the Left can't stand. The public supports the deal by a two-to-one margin. Most Republicans and Democrats voted for it.

The media, as usual, highlight McCarthy's internal critics. They are a distraction. The press is so obsessed with Republican infighting that it overlooks the real story: Kevin McCarthy is shaping up to be the most effective House GOP leader in decades. Biden, the Democrats, and the liberal culture have been unable to transform him into a bogeyman. To the contrary: His net approval rating has risen by double digits since January. Biden's numbers have dropped. Nor is McCarthy's favorability the result of playing to the media crowd and appeasing the Left. The Fiscal Responsibility Act is the latest piece of significant center-right legislation that the House has passed this year.

What, then, is McCarthy's secret? He succeeds because it pays to be underestimated. He's not the first Republican to surprise a Beltway media that holds him in low regard. The rap on McCarthy has long been that he's an amiable politician with no ideological core. This lack of substance was exposed, according to conventional wisdom, by the disappointing outcome of last year's midterm election. The same conventional wisdom took as a sign of weakness the unprecedented concessions McCarthy made to the House Freedom Caucus to end the agonizing, 4-day, 15-ballot vote for speaker in January.

All these assumptions were wrong. McCarthy's amiability and flexibility are not liabilities but assets. The narrow Republican majority hasn't stopped the House from moving bills on the floor. Nor have McCarthy's concessions to the Freedom Caucus hindered him. Putting Freedom Caucus members on the important Rules Committee gave figures such as Rep. Thomas Massie (R., Ky.) a stake in the legislative process. And the lowered threshold to remove the speaker is meaningless if a substitute is not waiting offstage.

McCarthy's superpower is his desire to be speaker. He likes and wants his job—a rarity for the GOP. He's the first public-facing Republican speaker since 1994 to be in sync with both his office and his conference. The talents that aided Newt Gingrich in his quest to build the first GOP House majority in 40 years did not necessarily translate to the speaker's office. Gingrich is a revolutionary, not an institutionalist. He's more interested in figuring out how America can ride the Third Wave into a technological utopia than in legislative detail and intra-party bargaining. His record of welfare reform and balanced budgets was impressive, but his tenure was chaotic.

Gingrich's successor, the disgraced Denny Hastert, avoided the limelight. President George W. Bush's compassionate conservatism and Freedom Agenda overshadowed Hastert, who delegated most of his authority to Tom "the Hammer" DeLay. By the time DeLay resigned over scandal in 2006, the Republican House majority was on the verge of collapse. Democrats took over Congress soon after. It fell to John Boehner to pick up the pieces.

Boehner became speaker in 2010, thanks in part to McCarthy's recruiting skills. The problem was that Boehner belonged to a different political era. He was a product of the 1990s and the early 2000s whose party was increasingly shaped by the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis, bank and auto bailouts, and Barack Obama's "New Foundation" for America. Boehner hated living in "Crazytown," and it showed. The Tea Party Republicans didn't care for him either. The mismatch made Boehner miserable. As soon as he brought Pope Francis to Capitol Hill, he left.

The next Republican speaker, Paul Ryan, had the title forced on him. Ryan is a supply-sider and wonk. He understands dollars and cents. He's a protégé of Jack Kemp who felt out of place in Donald Trump's Washington. His main priority was the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Once it had Trump's signature, Ryan was ready to leave. Democrats won the House the following year. Ryan was out.

McCarthy, unlike his predecessors, has no earth-shattering plans. Holding the speaker's gavel is enough. He doesn't shy away from the camera. He doesn't represent a faction of the GOP; he tries to enact the party consensus. He isn't at war with Tea Party (now MAGA) conservatives. He wants to be on the rostrum. He alone commands majority support.

Maybe McCarthy will lose his touch in upcoming fights over assistance to Ukraine. Maybe one day an alternative to McCarthy will emerge, someone who can unify the Freedom Caucus along with the rest of the GOP conference. Maybe Democrats will take back the House next year. For the moment, at least, Kevin McCarthy is the rare Republican who both understands and is satisfied by the role he's been given and the responsibilities it entails. He wants nothing more nor less. And he's winning.

The post The Secret to McCarthy's Success appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Quoting a "queer" University of Florida student, Eisgruber, in a commencement address that would have fit right in at a Democratic political rally, warned that it is becoming harder for students and professors to speak their minds about controversial issues. Not because of the campus censors on the left, of course, but due to red state laws that prohibit either "discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity" or "teaching disfavored views about race, racism, and American history." In other Republican-controlled hellholes, he said, lawmakers seek to "abolish tenure, thereby enabling politicians to control what professors can teach or publish."

Eisgruber and Princeton, of course, made headlines last May when the school dismissed a star classics professor, Joshua Katz, who had been a vocal critic of the school’s racial politics. The reason given for the ouster—Katz’s consensual affair with a former student decades earlier—was widely seen as pretextual, and pundits accused Princeton of retaliating against a tenured faculty member for political speech.

Eisgruber had publicly condemned an essay Katz wrote in 2020 attacking the university’s campus activists. And Princeton had included the professor on a list of racists—presented to freshmen at a mandatory orientation session—who’d allegedly harmed the school’s good name.

That history was one of many ironies in a tone-deaf speech. Set aside Eisgruber’s facile distortion of laws like Florida’s, which bar public school instruction on gender identity. It takes a special kind of blindness, hypocrisy, and sheer partisan animus to conclude in this day and age that Republicans are the biggest threat to free expression on college campuses.

A recent survey of Princeton seniors found that just 3 percent of "leftist" students are afraid to share their views, compared with 64 percent of those who identify as "very" conservative. At Ohio State, 45 percent of conservative students say they self-censor "several times a month" while just 16 percent of liberals say the same.

You wouldn’t know it from Eisgruber’s speech. It is "wrong," he told Princeton’s 276th class, to frame "diversity and inclusivity" as threats to academic freedom. When you hear the enlightened tell you there are no trade offs or tough choices to be made, run.

In fact, Princeton’s own free speech policies make nearly the opposite point: "Concerns about civility and mutual respect," they say, "can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable." It’s an admirable ideal that perished long ago in Princeton. Eisgruber’s address was an embarrassing epitaph. RIP.

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DeSantis would make a point on some issue and then Musk would respond, calmly and commandingly, in his mellow South African accent. It was easy to forget that you were listening to a campaign launch and not the Wall Street Journal’s "Future of Everything Festival." Occasionally DeSantis would fall silent, and Sacks and Musk carried on without him. Musk might as well have been the candidate—and there is reason to think that, but for the Constitution, he would be.

The Twitter glitches got most of the attention, but what fascinated me were the exchanges between DeSantis, Sacks, Musk, and others. The dialogue not only revealed aspects of DeSantis’s primary strategy. It also clarified some of the animating ideas behind DeSantis’s corner of the New Right. For the contest between former president Donald Trump and DeSantis is not just over who will lead the GOP. It is also a struggle between two concepts of the New Right, pitting the former president’s MAGA populism against the Florida governor’s institutional culture war.

No one needs a lesson in Trump’s impulses and grudges. They have been at the center of our public life for six years. What’s important to recognize is that, despite his personal idiosyncrasies, Trump is an archetypal American figure.

Tribunes of the people have sprung up to rail against the Eastern elites for centuries. Jackson, Bryan, Wallace, Buchanan, Perot, Palin—the list is long. All of them have identified scapegoats, indulged in conspiracy theories, and cultivated personal followings. All of them have spoken in straightforward, declarative language. All of them have drawn huge crowds by telling the dispossessed that social status can be reclaimed by throwing out the corrupt elite and replacing it with the leader’s steady hand. Their nationalism and traditionalism have been leavened by a folk libertarianism that distrusts centralized power and is individualistic and entrepreneurial in spirit.

Populists may criticize institutions as dysfunctional and debased, but they don’t really know what to do with them. Populists are rarely put in charge. When they do find themselves in positions of authority, the result is often confusion and disarray. They possess neither the expertise necessary to manage a bureaucracy nor the professional networks where they might find such expertise. Populists must incorporate parts of the establishment into their government just to make it function. The clash of priorities and interests within this populist-elitist coalition would be difficult to harmonize for any chief executive. If the person in charge is ill-tempered, thrives on conflict, and easily persuaded, problems are made worse.

The populist’s main strength is rhetorical. Trump always is on message, and the message is simple. MAGA, build the wall, lock her up, USA, USA, let’s go Brandon, and the nicknames stick with you. Agreeing or disagreeing with them does not require much reflection. There is no jargon. Nothing is obscure. Everything relates to the binary of Trump is good and non-Trump is bad.

DeSantis is more esoteric than Trump. Listening to him on Twitter Spaces was not easy. First you had to figure out what Twitter Spaces is, then how to log on, then how to get back on when the servers kicked you off. The back-and-forth between DeSantis and Musk was no less complicated. They weren’t talking about how the elite has shipped jobs to China or how the war in Ukraine can be resolved in one day. They were talking about how government, tech platforms, and corporate media work together to suppress freedom and entrench progressivism. I hadn’t heard the word "collude" so much since I last tuned into MSNBC. This wasn’t Russian collusion. It was collusion involving Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden, YouTube, and Twitter’s previous owners.

Musk and DeSantis aren’t fighting Democrats so much as they are fighting the media narratives that Democrats promote to stigmatize the Right and push the country to the left. The latest in this string of narratives is the NAACP "travel advisory" warning African Americans to stay away from Florida. DeSantis rightly knocked it down as condescending drivel. He also pummeled the narrative that he's banning books. Shouldn’t parents have a right to remove pornographic material from school libraries, he asked? What about the progressives banning outright classics of American literature such as Huckleberry Finn and To Kill A Mockingbird? DeSantis went after the "medical authoritarianism" that imposed and maintained lockdowns, social distancing, masking in schools, and vaccine mandates long after these public health measures were revealed to be useless or harmful.

DeSantis's attitude isn't the "LOL nothing matters" or "burn it all down" mentality you find among some MAGA devotees. He isn't anti-institutional. He wants to use the institution he controls—government—to rescue or defang other institutions consumed by wokeness. He came across less as a populist than a shrewd technocrat. The choice of topics highlighted his culture war against progressives. Musk and DeSantis delved into the coronavirus pandemic. They talked about DeSantis’s fight with Disney and his educational reforms. (There was a moment of unintentional hilarity when Musk admitted that he thought DeSantis really did ban books.) Christopher Rufo said that DeSantis was an effective fighter against Critical Race Theory. A radio talk show host asked about the border. Another talked about guns and de-banking. Sacks wanted to know DeSantis's opinions on cryptocurrency.

DeSantis went into details. He brought up the intricacies of college accreditation. He focused on culture and the law, at one point mentioning "Chevron Deference," which most people might assume is a premium gasoline. Trump, by contrast, continues to speak on the level of generality. He emphasizes economics and foreign policy. DeSantis avoided both subjects on Twitter Spaces.

For all the oddity and embarrassment of the launch event, I couldn’t help thinking that it might be a sign of the future. This was the post-2020 Right on display. The events of 2020 radicalized a portion of the New Right and sped up its rejection of politics-as-usual and its embrace of state power. The aftermath of 2020 sent Elon Musk on a journey from Biden voter to staunch Republican.

This is a Right shaped by the government response to the pandemic, by the "mostly peaceful protests" over George Floyd, by the tech suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story. It is a Right that distrusts every word it hears from its left, because it believes official narratives are by nature false. For the post-2020 Right, free speech is more than a political principle. It is a way to tick off the wine moms. It's a rallying cry against institutional arrangements dedicated to American decline.

This Right is more willing to use state power than 20th century conservatives, because it believes the state to be its only remaining leverage against decadent institutions. The key media figures in this post-2020 Right are not Rupert Murdoch and Rush Limbaugh, but Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson. Indeed, I half expected Carlson to make a cameo appearance because his worldview is so like Musk’s and DeSantis’s. "This moment is too inherently ridiculous to continue," Carlson said in a statement on Twitter after Fox News Channel canceled his show. "And so it won’t."

Ron DeSantis is betting that he will bring this ridiculous moment to a close. He's betting that his institution-based culture war will prove more attractive to GOP voters than MAGA populism. It’s not just a wager on his own talents. It’s a gamble that 2020 changed the Right as much as the Left—and that Donald Trump belongs to a receding past.

The post The DeSantis Doctrine appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Yet Trump is far and away the leader for the 2024 Republican nomination and is neck-and-neck with Joe Biden in general election matchups. In the RCP average he has a 30-point lead over the next closest GOP competitor, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, and is essentially tied with the incumbent president. Both the primary and general contests are a long way away, of course—but early GOP frontrunners tend to win the nomination, and Biden's age and economic record are reasons for Democrats to worry.

Why is Trump doing so well? Is it because he has constructed "an impenetrable political force field," as National Review editor in chief Rich Lowry suggests? I'm skeptical. Polls are not the same as elections, and Trump's electoral record is not especially impressive. Most voters do not like him, have voted against him, and more likely than not will vote against him again. Nor has Trump’s force field repelled attacks from his fellow Republicans. There haven't been attacks to repel. Trump is advancing toward the GOP nomination and looks competitive against Biden for a simple reason: He faces no resistance.

This has been a truly invisible primary. Historically, the frontrunner comes under attack from his or her rivals. Think Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton in 2008, Mitt Romney in 2012, Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton in 2016, or Joe Biden in 2020. The rivals make the case that they, not the frontrunner, should lead their party in the next election. They base their arguments on policy differences. They share their concerns about the frontrunner's character. They draw specific contrasts between candidacies, and they are not afraid to say that the frontrunner is wrong or incompetent or unelectable. Republican primaries since 2008 have been especially raucous. Candidates all but fling themselves at each other.

Not this year. It's as if we have two incumbent presidents in this race, and neither faces a serious internal threat. Besides Trump, at present there are four declared Republican candidates with 1 percent or more of the GOP primary vote. Only one, former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, has said that the verdict in the E. Jean Carroll rape and defamation case "should be treated with seriousness and is another example of the indefensible behavior of Donald Trump."

Radio talk show host Larry Elder responded to the Trump news by naming women who have accused President Biden and former president Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct. Entrepreneur and author Vivek Ramaswamy defended Trump and said that Carroll's suit was politically motivated. Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley told radio host Hugh Hewitt that "I'm not going to get into that," that "we've gotta leave the baggage and the negativity behind," and that "it's not my case, it's his case."

Most of the Republicans who might launch presidential bids in the coming months are just as evasive. They mix praise of Trump while lamenting his weaknesses. They pretend that he doesn't exist while dropping implied criticisms of his effectiveness and demeanor. Only former New Jersey governor Chris Christie slams Trump in the manner that you would expect from a competitor. Responding to Trump's refusal in a CNN town hall to say which side he preferred to win the war in Ukraine, Christie told Hewitt, "I think he's a coward, and I think he's a puppet of Putin." Now them's fightin' words.

And they are rare. Trump's closest rival, DeSantis, seems to be moving toward a June campaign launch. His book rollout, international trade mission, and successful legislative session have not reversed his decline in the polls. Nor have the millions of dollars a pro-DeSantis super PAC has spent in TV ads highlighting his biography. Other than a sly remark ahead of Trump's indictment over hush money payments to a stripper, DeSantis hasn't gone after the former president either directly or indirectly. His pre-announcement strategy has been to out-MAGA Trump on foreign policy and the culture war while avoiding a one-on-one clash with the frontrunner.

The results have been disappointing. Trump's positions appear closer to the center of the electorate on entitlements, abortion, and the economy, while his ferocious political and personal attacks on DeSantis have been left unanswered. His lead over the Florida governor has grown.

Maybe that will change when DeSantis makes his candidacy official. An anti-Trump tweet and statement from the DeSantis-supporting super PAC after the CNN town hall suggests that things may get spicy; we don't know. The point is that DeSantis will have to go high on the Scoville scale if he wants to catch up with Trump. His current approach is not working.

The reluctance of the Republican field to confront the frontrunner has created a weird situation in which Trump inadvertently delivers the arguments both for and against his candidacy. Trump's political cunning, rhetorical talent, and gut connection with the grassroots are evident in his public appearances and speeches. His serious liabilities are on display when he is the subject of legal action or defends his remarks on the infamous Access Hollywood tape.

We are so used to Republican presidential candidates praising, ignoring, or appeasing the former president that it came as a shock when Sen. Todd Young of Indiana told CNN on May 11 that he won't support Trump and, when pressed for a reason, said, "Where do I begin?" It's hard to imagine a candidate other than Hutchinson or Christie saying the same. Which is why Trump looks untouchable.

He's not, though. It's at least plausible that a Republican could consolidate college-educated GOP voters and make inroads into Trump's non-college coalition, especially if that Republican narrows the field to two candidates. First, though, that Republican would have to explain why he or she should be the nominee instead of Trump.

The Democrats understand that Joe Biden's best—perhaps sole—chance for a second term is to remobilize the anti-Trump coalition that has appeared in every post-2016 cycle except 2021. This primary may end up an exercise in obeisance, but the general won't be. Contrasts will be drawn. Memories will be jogged. Fears will be revived. If Republican challengers won't say why Donald Trump should be denied the presidency, Democrats will.

The post The Very Invisible Republican Primary appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The article previewed the day’s meeting between Vice President Kamala Harris and the CEOs of corporations at the forefront of artificial intelligence research and production, including Alphabet (the parent company of Google), Anthropic, Microsoft, and OpenAI.

Harris planned to announce funding for "seven new AI research institutes" and outline the government’s next moves on this important topic, according to the story. "The government leaders’ message to the companies," wrote correspondent Josh Boak, "is that they have a role to play in reducing the risks and that they can work together with the government."

That’s what shook me awake. Since ChatGPT was released last November, there has been a lot of debate over the potential consequences of artificial intelligence. All the talk has been speculative, and most of it catastrophic in outlook. It was presumably inevitable that at some point lawmakers would become involved in the regulation of such groundbreaking technology. But does it have to be Kamala Harris? Does it have to be President Joe Biden who tackles the problems and dilemmas arising from Generative AI? Haven’t Harris and Biden caused enough harm?

The hubris of Progressives never ceases to amaze. They flit about, from issue to issue, never bothering to consider the real-world effects and unintended consequences of the policies they take up and impose at whim. What’s been happening on the border since Biden took office, for example, is the definition of a man-made disaster. By overturning Trump-era enforcement policies, and by raising the prospect of a comprehensive immigration reform that would provide amnesty for illegal immigrants, this administration contributed to record-levels of unauthorized border crossings and to a spiraling humanitarian crisis that affects not just the southwest but also far-flung cities like Chicago and New York.

In March 2021, Biden said that Harris would run the government’s response to the border meltdown. More than two years later, on the same day that Harris planned to meet with the tech executives, the Pentagon was busy deploying military personnel on the southern border to brace for the coming surge in illegal immigration when emergency protocols end on May 11.

No one at the White House seems to have noticed the jarring, continent-sized disparity between the president’s goals and his vice president’s competence. One can only imagine the scene earlier this year, when Biden, reviewing the deteriorating situation along the Rio Grande, turned to his second-in-command and said: Heck of a job, Kamala. Now go figure out this AI thing.

No matter how long the unfinished to-do list, no matter the evidence of public sector failure, Biden, Harris, and the Progressives in the executive branch press on, searching for additional causes to adopt, and exploring novel ways to intervene in America’s economic, social, and cultural life. Consider the efforts of Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who on May 2 declared that "loneliness and isolation" is an "epidemic," an "underappreciated public health crisis that has harmed individual and social health."

Murthy issued an 82-page public health advisory on the subject. He warned that loneliness can be as physically damaging as cigarette smoke. He described "six pillars to advance social connection." A "lightbulb moment" on a listening tour in benighted America, he wrote, convinced him that "we have an opportunity, and an obligation, to make the same investments in addressing social connection that we have made in addressing tobacco use, obesity, and the addiction crisis."

Left unmentioned are the returns on these "investments." Tobacco use is down, to be sure, thanks to decades of punitive and regressive taxation and the paternalistic regulation of public spaces. That’s the success story. There aren’t many others.

The federal government took up obesity as a cause during George W. Bush’s administration, but American waistlines, like the cosmos, keep on expanding. As for addiction, drug overdose death rates continue to climb. Alcohol-related deaths are on the rise, as well. Somehow excessive drinking, which surely is worse for your health than feeling lonesome, is not as urgent a priority for the surgeon general as the abstract concept of "social connection."

But I don’t want to give Murthy ideas. He might start to meddle with cocktail hour. His report on loneliness is noteworthy for its total lack of self-consciousness, its determined refusal to take responsibility for the public health establishment’s conduct during the coronavirus pandemic. "The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated trends in declining social participation," writes the surgeon general, but it wasn’t the pandemic that closed schools, shuttered churches, drove people from offices and downtowns, and instructed the citizenry that outdoor gatherings were okay so long as you were engaging in mostly peaceful protest. It was the government. A government taking direction from—and hiding behind the credibility of—public health experts.

The very week that the surgeon general launched his war on loneliness, we learned that America’s eighth graders earned the lowest-recorded scores on the history assessment portion of the "Nation’s Report Card." Civics test scores were also down, for the first time since the subject began to be assessed in 1998. The dismal news followed catastrophic drops in reading and math. Again, Biden officials blamed the "pandemic" in general, thereby excusing the specific teachers’ unions and public health authorities that collaborated to keep children away from places of learning and "social connection."

Having made a hash of the border, reintroduced inflation into the economy, allowed the Taliban to reconquer Afghanistan, and excused and catered to the organizations responsible for the greatest learning loss in American history, Biden and his team look to the horizon, toward future exercises in ineptitude. If past is precedent, by the time Biden and Harris have "solved" Generative AI, ChatGPT will be running the executive branch. We could do worse. Artificial intelligence is intelligent, after all. The same can’t be said of America’s Progressive elite.

The post Biden Finds New Ways to Fail appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

McCarthy had beaten expectations. Again. And he wanted to let the world know it. "Every question you continue to raise," he told the media, "you guys have been wrong. You’ve underestimated us."

Many people have. Conventional wisdom is set against McCarthy, who presides over a 222-213 Republican majority and can afford to lose only four votes on a given bill or resolution. His bid for speaker appeared doomed right up until the moment that he won the office on the 15th ballot. Press coverage focuses almost entirely on divisions within the GOP conference, leading to a sense of surprise in the Beltway whenever the House comes together to rescind funding for additional IRS agents, incentivize oil and gas exploration and production, repeal onerous environmental and financial regulations, broaden parental rights in education, and hike the debt limit.

Meanwhile, the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party is off to a strong and bipartisan start. Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R., Ohio) Judiciary Committee won its fight with Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg. Rep. James Comer’s (R., Ky.) Oversight Committee is building its case against Biden family influence peddling. Compared with past Congresses, the legislative and investigative process under McCarthy may be slow and unpredictable. But they are working.

Indeed, on two occasions Speaker McCarthy has outplayed Biden and the Democrats. In February the House voted 250-173 to overturn D.C.’s incorrigible criminal justice reform. The next month, the resolution passed the Senate and Biden signed it into law. Also in February, the House voted 229-197 to end the national COVID emergency. And again, the next month, the resolution passed the Senate and Biden signed it into law. House Democrats were outraged that Biden ultimately sided with these House Republican initiatives. But the politics were on McCarthy’s side. And the same was the case last year, when then-minority leader McCarthy forced an end to the military’s COVID vaccine mandate.

The Limit, Save, Grow Act may not become law, but it holds symbolic value for the speaker. For months, McCarthy has wanted to enter negotiations with Biden on raising the debt ceiling. The president has refused. McCarthy wants to follow the precedent of earlier GOP Houses and leverage a debt ceiling raise for spending cuts and budget reforms. Biden doesn’t want to play that game. The standoff persists. Default on U.S. government obligations draws near.

McCarthy understands that his negotiating position will improve if House Republicans appear to be doing what they can to avoid default. He wants Biden, not his conference, to look obdurate and uninterested in the potential economic fallout. Two weeks ago, McCarthy traveled to the New York Stock Exchange and pledged that the House would vote on a bill that raised the debt limit while reducing spending. It did. By demonstrating unity and seriousness of purpose, House Republicans have put the ball in Biden’s court. And congressional Democrats from swing districts and battleground states—who are given to low-level political anxiety on the best of days—will tell the White House that talks with McCarthy may well be in order.

The situation could have been much worse for Republicans. If the Limit, Save, Grow Act had failed, then the GOP would have been in disarray, McCarthy would have looked hapless, Biden would have been able to tell Democrats that his strategy is working, and pressure would build on Senate leaders Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) to figure out a compromise. McCarthy avoided that scenario. How? By following the method that won him the speakership.

Call it "concede to lead." To become speaker, McCarthy gave the House Freedom Caucus enormous influence over committees, floor activity, and the legislative calendar. By drawing the Freedom Caucus into the inner circle—and by giving its members seats on the prestigious Rules Committee—McCarthy turned outsiders into insiders. His conservative outreach delivered results when outside groups normally opposed to GOP leadership, such as Heritage Action and the Center for Renewing America, came onboard the Limit, Save, Grow Act.

Similarly, when Republican members from corn states demanded that ethanol subsidies remain untouched in the debt ceiling bill, McCarthy agreed with them. And when conservatives wanted more stringent work requirements, he said yes again. McCarthy knows that the bill won’t become law. There’s little cost in such concessions. He’s willing to accommodate practically everyone, so long as it helps him attain his desired end. In January, his goal was becoming speaker. This week, it was passing Limit, Save, Grow. McCarthy is practicing a Republican form of diversity, equity, and inclusion that encompasses the moderates in the New York delegation, conservatives from Texas, and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.).

Success is far from assured. The Limit, Save, Grow Act is an opening gambit, not part of the endgame. No number of concessions may be enough to persuade 218 Republicans to back a deal this summer that lifts the debt ceiling for a few budget victories but not much else. Some in the GOP may want to see just how much a default would really hurt.

Right now, though, Speaker McCarthy can enjoy another win. Don't underestimate him again.

The post The Underestimated Kevin McCarthy appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Rosen was 16 years ahead of schedule. Not only was his essay on the political and legal consequences of overturning Roe v. Wade prescient. Its speculative insights apply to today’s post-Roe world.

The lengthy and complex piece defies summary. It demands a fair reading. One of its major arguments is that the electorate’s view of abortion has long been consistent: As a whole, most Americans support abortion access early in a pregnancy. But they are increasingly willing to entertain restrictions on the procedure as a fetus develops—so long as exceptions are made for cases of rape, incest, and life of the mother. They also oppose taxpayer funding for abortions.

This consensus is reflected in the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 and in the "Hyde Amendment" barring direct federal funding of abortion. Put down the U.S. Code, however, and things become complicated.

State law is lopsided. There are no-restrictions states such as California and New York, and there are no-exceptions states such as South Dakota and Idaho. Many states had "trigger laws" banning abortion that went into effect when Roe disappeared.

The difference between the federal government’s mushy middle ground and state governments’ extreme landscapes is a paradox of abortion politics in America. And it’s not the only paradox.

For example: If we distinguish between abortion policy at the federal and state levels, so must we also distinguish between direct democracy and representative democracy. The two systems produce divergent outcomes.

Wisconsin recently elected a State Supreme Court judge, Janet Protasiewicz, who based her campaign on opposition to the no-exceptions ban that has been in place in her state since June 2022. Yet the same day as Protasiewicz’s big win, voters in Wisconsin’s eighth state Senate district narrowly elected a conservative, Dan Knodl. That gave the GOP a pro-life legislative supermajority. And in November 2022, pro-life senator Ron Johnson (R.) also won a narrow reelection.

What’s going on? Where voters are given the opportunity to vote up or down, they will vote in favor of abortion access. That’s what happened with the Protasiewicz race. It’s what happened last year with ballot initiatives in six states, including in red states such as Kansas and Montana.

However: When voters are asked to choose between alternative candidates, other factors come into play. Pro-choice candidates might have an advantage if, like Protasiewicz, they turn their contests into pseudo-referenda on abortion or if, like Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D., Va.), they define or expose their opponent as outside the national consensus.

If neither condition applies, then abortion becomes one of many variables in a voter’s electoral calculus. Abortion loses its "salience." The economy, crime, the border, education, health care—these subjects become just as, or even more, important than abortion access. Incumbency and candidate quality matter too.

Those who argue that the GOP is doomed post-Roe forget that Republicans won a majority of the House popular vote last year. They overlook the fact that, prior to Election Day, Republican governors Brian Kemp of Georgia, Greg Abbott of Texas, Kim Reynolds of Iowa, and Mike DeWine of Ohio signed into law first-trimester abortions bans—so-called heartbeat bills. And they won reelection by 7 points, 11 points, 18 points, and 25 points, respectively.

You can understand, then, why Florida governor Ron DeSantis (R.) signed a six-week abortion ban, including some exceptions, into law. The cost of thwarting or vetoing the bill would have been much higher than in following the path set by fellow GOP governors. What’s more difficult to gauge is how abortion referenda will interact with non-abortion-focused campaigns. What would have happened, for example, if Protasiewicz had been on the ballot in 2022? Would Ron Johnson still be in the Senate?

We do know that Michigan’s Proposition 3, establishing a state constitutional right to abortion, ran ahead of incumbent governor Gretchen Whitmer (D.). And Whitmer won by 11 points. Prop 3 carried the Democrats into a state legislative majority, as well.

It would be in the Democrats’ interests, therefore, to hold referenda in key states next year. Which is exactly what they want to do in states such as Ohio.

If Democrats use pro-choice referenda to boost turnout for their presidential nominee, it would be a historic irony. Their strategy would be the same as opponents of same-sex marriage in 2004. Back then, initiatives forbidding gay marriage appeared on ballots in 11 states. The bans won everywhere. And George W. Bush won in 10 of the 11 states.

Bush’s two Supreme Court appointments occurred during his second term. They became the news hook for Jeffrey Rosen’s Atlantic article. "For what it’s worth," Rosen said at one point, "I wouldn’t bet on Chief Justice Roberts's siding unequivocally with the anti-Roe forces." Indeed. "Republicans," Rosen observed later, "might get too many Court appointment opportunities to prolong this exquisite balancing act, and Roe could indeed fall."

The fall was the result of former president Donald Trump’s three appointments to the Court. Yet Trump, a crucial agent in the demise of Roe v. Wade, has been critical of the pro-life movement since the 2022 election. Republicans failed to win larger majorities, Trump wrote in January, because the "‘abortion issue’" was "poorly handled by many Republicans, especially those that firmly insisted on No Exceptions, even in the case of Rape, Incest, or Life of the Mother, that lost large numbers of Voters."

More recently a (thinly sourced) report in the Guardian suggests that Trump is opposed to federal abortion legislation such as the 15-week ban sponsored by Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) and backed by former vice president Mike Pence.

On abortion, as on entitlements, Trump is closer to the center of the general electorate than is Pence, or for that matter DeSantis. What would it mean if Trump, the Republican presidential frontrunner, opposes federal abortion restrictions, or runs against the pro-life wing of his party? Which force would prove more powerful—Trump’s personality or institutional tradition?

I think we know the answer. Trump has modified the GOP before. And there is nothing written in stone that says the Republican Party must be pro-life. When Roe was decided, George H.W. Bush and Gerald Ford were ambivalent about abortion. First Lady Betty Ford was outspokenly pro-choice. It wasn’t until 1980 that the Republican platform became firmly pro-life.

That commitment lasted for more than 40 years. In 2020, however, there was no GOP platform. And if Trump is the nominee, there probably won’t be one in 2024. Donald Trump is the platform. He’s what you’re going to get if you vote Republican.

And by November 5, 2024, Trump’s views on abortion may be at variance not only with the historical legacy of the pro-life movement but with what the movement is saying at this very moment. And pro-life Republicans could well vote for him anyway. And he could well win a second term. In which case, not only would Donald Trump be partly responsible for ending Roe. He also would end up fundamentally revising the alliance between the pro-life movement and the GOP. On his terms.

Jeff Rosen didn’t see that coming.

The post The Paradoxes of Post-Roe Abortion Politics appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

It would be bad enough if the U.S. government couldn’t protect some of its most sensitive assessments of Russia’s military, Egypt’s diplomacy, and South Korean politics from public disclosure.

But it is particularly troubling that the same government that can’t keep American state secrets off of social media is devoting itself to far less pressing endeavors.

Just this week we learned that the FBI, responsible for enforcing the laws against the unauthorized disclosure of classified information, is monitoring the threat of "Involuntary Celibate Violent Extremism." They’ve even created a word cloud! The FBI associates incels with the use online of run-of-the-mill conservative terms like "red-pilled" and "based." And we know thanks to Elon Musk’s release of the Twitter files how closely the FBI worked with the country’s largest social media companies to keep so-called disinformation offline.

Do we really need FBI agents monitoring online edge-lords when someone is picking the Pentagon’s pockets like this? We wish we could say that the only thing needed is a shift in focus.

Unfortunately, the bureau’s recent investigative priorities reflect a broader trend of law enforcement being weaponized against some citizens, while favored classes are treated with kid gloves. How else does one explain why the home of a first time offending pro-life activist (who was later acquitted) was raided by armed G-men before dawn in September. And yet there have been no flashy raids of suspects behind the wave of attacks on pregnancy crisis centers since last year’s Dobbs decision.

There are many reasons for this, but a big one is that we aren’t exactly sending our best and brightest to the FBI. Just look at the parade of partisans, from former officials like Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and Andrew McCabe, who have recently been drummed out and who are demonstrating in their new roles as cable news analysts that we trusted our national security to power hungry zealots who are also not very smart.

This latest leak should be a wake-up call to go back to the basics. That includes hiring the best and brightest people passionate about safeguarding the country’s most sensitive material and hunting down those who expose it unlawfully.

The post The FBI Should Go Back to the Basics appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Kelly had been rejected by voters before, in 2020, and hadn't exactly spent the intervening years moderating his views or improving his favorability rating. The Badger State, of course, is as swingy as you can get: It went for Trump in 2016 by about 23,000 votes and Biden in 2020 by about 20,000; boasts a Democratic governor and a Republican legislative supermajority; and has a U.S. senator from each party. Its House delegation is 6-2 Republican—partially thanks to congressional maps Protasiewicz may soon throw out.

Protasiewicz defeated Kelly by a whopping 11 points. She successfully framed the election as a referendum on Wisconsin's current no-exceptions abortion ban, which went into effect last summer when the U.S. Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade. Wisconsin governor Tony Evers has challenged the ban in court. Protasiewicz has made it clear that she's ready to strike it down. Her state's electorate is too.

The election reinforced two political trends. The first is that if voters believe abortion is on the ballot, they will mobilize to protect access to it. That is what happened in Kansas last summer and, among other places, in Michigan last November. The centrality of abortion is what explains the difference in outcome between this week in Wisconsin and last November's Senate race.

Both contests took place after the end of Roe. And yet, six months ago, Republican pro-life senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin was narrowly reelected over his state's then-lieutenant governor, Democrat Mandela Barnes. Why did Johnson win by 1 point while Kelly lost by 11? Because Johnson had plenty else to talk about, including President Biden's job performance, inflation, and crime.

The judicial election presented a binary choice on a single issue. Nor did it help Kelly that the Wisconsin abortion ban is total. Even pro-choice polling data show that voters are willing to restrict abortion—as long as provisions are made for rape, incest, and life of the mother. Remove those conditions, and the public veers in a pro-choice direction. "What you have to do is argue for protections that the American people see as reasonable versus the extremism of no exceptions, even late-term abortion," GOP strategist Frank Cannon told the AP recently. "And if you do that, it's a winning combination."

Winning combinations are proving difficult for Republicans these days. Republicans still flourish in a post-Roe world—look at the GOP House, and Governors Ron DeSantis, Brian Kemp, Glenn Youngkin, and Mike DeWine, for starters—but only if they draw support from middle-class voters in the suburbs.

Which is why the second trend underscored by the Wisconsin Supreme Court race ought to alarm the GOP. Kelly failed to mobilize the Republican vote in Wisconsin's "WOW" counties: Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington. While Kelly did win these historically Republican Milwaukee suburbs, he did so by considerably smaller margins than Johnson in 2022. Johnson, for example, won Waukesha County by 25 points; Kelly won by 16. Johnson won Ozaukee County by 16 points; Kelly won by 4. And Johnson won Washington County by 42 points; Kelly won by 32. The drop-off cost him the election.

If Republicans dominate in rural precincts and Democrats in urban enclaves, then the suburbs are majority makers. Yet the suburbs have been receding from the GOP since the dawn of the Trump era.

Consider: In 2014, the last election before Trump descended on his escalator, Republicans won the suburban vote 55 percent to 45 percent. They won both the white non-college vote and the white college vote by double digits. They won voters making between $50,000 per year and $100,000 per year by 10 points.

By the end of Barack Obama's presidency, majorities among suburban white voters near the middle of the income distribution fueled the GOP's greatest electoral strength in close to a century. Unease over Trump shrank this coalition in 2016: Republicans won the suburbs by 5 points, white non-college voters by 39 points, white college voters by 4 points, and middle-income voters by 4 points. That gave Trump the Electoral College, but not a popular vote majority.

Then Trump entered office. He retained his support among white voters without college degrees in 2018. But the remaining pillars of Republican rule crumbled beneath him. White voters with college degrees voted for Democrats by 4 points. Middle-income voters went for Democrats by 2 points. And the suburbs turned against Republicans, voting Democratic by 11 points.

The same pattern was visible in the 2020 results: Trump won non-college white votes (though by a smaller margin than four years earlier). White college voters went for Joe Biden by 7 points. Middle-income voters split evenly between the parties. And the suburbs voted for Biden by 10 points.

In 2022, non-college white voters turned out for Republicans once more, but Democrats won white college voters by 1 point and the suburbs by 1 point. Middle-income voters returned to the Republican column, 52 percent to 45 percent. The narrowing demographic gaps produced the mixed result of a Republican House and Democratic Senate.

If Republicans were serious about winning Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin in 2024 and thus the White House, they would try to add white voters with college degrees and suburban America atop their non-college rural base. To do so, they would have to replace Donald Trump as party leader. They would have to find a nominee who is pro-life and who can speak about abortion restrictions—with exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the mother—in a nonthreatening way. They would have to learn the lessons not only of Wisconsin this week, but of every election cycle since 2016. And they would have to move quickly, before 2024 escapes the GOP's grasp.

The post What's the Matter With Wisconsin? appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

On March 27, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that his government would pause the progress through the Knesset of a controversial judicial bill until later this spring. Netanyahu’s decision came after weeks of mounting street protests over the reform, which would allow the legislature to rein in the judiciary. Military reservists stopped reporting for duty. Israel’s largest union declared a general strike. U.S. officials were critical.

So, when Netanyahu suspended the measure, U.S. ambassador to Israel Tom Nides welcomed the move. Asked when Netanyahu might visit President Biden in the White House, Nides said: "I’m sure he’ll be coming relatively soon."

Nides didn’t check with his boss. He extended an open hand to Israel’s elected leader. Biden slapped it down. On March 28, during a visit to North Carolina, the president spoke to reporters. Calling himself a "strong supporter of Israel," Biden said he was nonetheless concerned that Israelis "get this straight. They can’t continue down this road"—the road, presumably, of a democratic majority following due process of law. A reporter asked Biden if he’d be welcoming Netanyahu in Washington. "Not in the near term," Biden replied.

Some friend. No matter your opinion of the judicial reform—and there are plenty of committed Zionists who are leery of it—there is no question that Biden’s rebuke of Netanyahu was a breach in U.S.-Israel relations. Americans and Israelis scrambled to repair the damage. Netanyahu posted a Twitter thread underscoring his commitment to the alliance, while reminding Biden that Israel is a sovereign nation that will determine its own course. Or, as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir put it: "Israel is an independent country, not another star in the American flag." On March 29, White House national security spokesman John Kirby played down the differences as best he could.

This is why the White House keeps Biden away from the press. When he lacks a script, he goes haywire. Biden spoke his mind—what’s left of it—and caused an international incident. The double standard he applies to Israel is glaring. It is also offensive. Israel accommodated protesters. Iran murders them. Where is Biden’s outrage at the butchers in Tehran?

Every democracy has its internal debates. In recent weeks Paris has been the site of violent demonstrations over French president Emmanuel Macron’s unilateral hike in the retirement age. Farmers in the Netherlands have taken direct action against environmental regulation. In Mexico, where President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has gutted the electoral commission, democratic backsliding is not theoretical. It is happening in real time. Then there are the nondemocracies worthy of condemnation: Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, to name a few in our hemisphere. Maybe Biden could find time to meddle with them.

Yet Israel is singled out. Israel is where pressure is brought to bear. Why? Three reasons:

PERSONAL. Media coverage has focused on the long history between Biden and Netanyahu. "There is no love lost between the two leaders, despite their polite façade when it comes to their decades-long relationship and their common commitment to Israel’s defense," wrote Katie Rogers and Michael Crowley of the New York Times. The White House, meanwhile, suggested that Biden’s familiarity with Netanyahu gives him the freedom to be intrusive. "These two gentlemen have known each other for 40-some-odd years," John Kirby said this week. "And the great thing about a deep friendship is you can be that candid with one another."

Biden assumes that his past with Netanyahu will help him now. He’s wrong. For one, the idea that he and Bibi are pals who enjoy Grotto slices on the Rehoboth boardwalk or smoke hookah along Aviv Beach is ridiculous. For another, personal diplomacy does not work. No world leader ever made a concession because the other guy was nice. Successful politicians believe that charm counts most. It doesn’t. Charm fades when it reaches the world stage.

POLITICAL. Compare Biden’s stalwart posture toward Netanyahu with his kindness toward the previous Israeli government, led by Naftali Bennett and then Yaïr Lapid. The last coalition was an oddity—it included parties of the right, center, left, and Arab sector—formed around opposition to Netanyahu. Biden left it alone. He was cheery when he visited Israel last summer. He worked with Lapid to negotiate an energy deal with Lebanon meant to boost the coalition ahead of elections. It didn’t work. Netanyahu joined forces with a united bloc of the Israeli far right and won a substantial victory.

Biden is constrained. Pro-Israel Democrats have grown tired of Netanyahu, whose ruling coalition is too nationalist and too religious for them to stomach. Biden’s favorite newspaper columnist has embarked on a barely literate anti-Bibi jihad. According to public survey data, Democrats as a whole sympathize more with Palestinians than they do Israelis. And the Progressive Left is outright hostile to Israel and to the very idea of a Jewish State. What better way for Biden to shore up his base than to confront Netanyahu—even if he destabilizes Israel as a result?

GLOBAL. Biden’s comments make a successful negotiation between Netanyahu and the opposition less likely. After all, opposition leader Lapid knows Biden is on his side. He will therefore make maximalist demands. The goal isn’t to scuttle the judicial reform. The goal is to collapse Netanyahu’s coalition and drive him from office.

Biden has wasted his hand. The year began with Israel’s first stable government in years, Iran in a prerevolutionary situation, and a stable Iraq. The Iran nuclear deal was a dead letter, the Saudis were interested in diplomacy with Israel, and the Abraham Accords were a model for economic and security cooperation in the region.

Look at what’s happened since. Israel has been consumed by infighting. China brokered a détente between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Iranian-backed militias have attacked U.S. personnel in Syria, killing one American and injuring others. Iran suppressed the protest movement. It could produce enough fissile material for a nuclear bomb "in about 12 days."

Our response? Secretary of State Antony Blinken welcomed the Iran-Saudi deal. Biden retaliated against the Iranian-backed militia—but because the strike was limited in size and scope, it will fail to restore deterrence. The administration continues to say that it’s ready to sign a nuclear deal with Iran. And it spends more time using a magnifying glass to read the fine print of Knesset bills than it does applying hard power to the brutal realities of the Greater Middle East.

America needs to bolster her traditional allies in the region—not bully or shun them—to prepare for a confrontation with Iran. A true friend would know that. He’d know the difference between partners and adversaries. And he’d know when to hold his tongue.

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