The Left Against Biden Argument

Joe Biden

BENJAMIN STUDEBAKER

• ABOUT
 
• POLITICS
 
• ECONOMICS
 
• INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Yet Another Attempt to Make the World a Better Place by Writing Things

The Left Case Against Supporting Joe Biden in the General Election

by Benjamin Studebaker

At the Democratic Convention, Bernie Sanders argued that the left should hold its nose and vote for Joe Biden:

The future of our democracy is at stake. The future of our economy is at stake. The future of our planet is at stake. We must come together to defeat Donald Trump and elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as president and vice president. My friends, the price of failure is just too great to imagine.

My friend Nathan Robinson, at Current Affairs, made a similar argument, claiming that this is our “last chance” to stop Donald Trump, and that we will be “fighting for our lives against an aspiring dictator” if he wins.

This is a grave mistake. Trump, for all his faults, poses no existential threat to the republic. What’s more, Sanders and Robinson are deeply underestimating the damage a Biden presidency will cause. The Republican Party has become what it is because of Democrats like Joe Biden. These Democrats are pushing the Republican Party further and further right, and a Biden presidency will make the Republican Party even more dangerous going forward. Let me show you how it works.

Democratic Presidents Push the Republicans to the Right

Since World War II, every two-term Republican president has been more right wing than the one before. Dwight Eisenhower was first. Then Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump. In between these five Republican presidents, there were four sets of Democratic administrations: Kennedy/Johnson, Carter, Clinton, and Obama.

Each of these Democratic administrations made key concessions to the right, and these concessions produced resentment and frustration. Kennedy/Johnson went to war in Vietnam to prove that they were just as tough and anti-communist as the Republicans. Carter appointed Paul Volcker Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and began pursuing a ruthless anti-inflation policy that drove up unemployment and laid the foundation for the neoliberal era. Clinton sliced the federal budget and attacked the welfare system. Obama signed the Budget Control Act of 2011, starving the recovery of necessary stimulus and allowing extraordinarily unequal growth.

Carter, Clinton, and Obama all oversaw increases in inequality. The top 1%’s share of income increased under all three:

Democrats promise to help us and then let the oligarchs get their way. The frustrated American has nowhere to turn but the Republican Party, and Republicans attract them by becoming steadily more nationalist and more committed to liquidating the establishment and its institutions. Ordinary rank and file Republicans hate government because they think it’s too corrupt to do any good for them. Every chance the Democrats get to prove them wrong, they fail. Worse, they reinforce the view.

When Americans vote for Republicans, they’re often voting against the consequences of the right wing policies of Democrats. Think about it:

• Nixon won in part because Americans didn’t trust the Democrats to end Vietnam, a war the Democrats started because they were afraid of looking soft on communism. Of course, Nixon then escalated the Vietnam War.
• Reagan won in part because Americans believed that Carter’s economic policies–the right-wing policies of Paul Volcker’s Federal Reserve–hadn’t made them better off than they were four years ago. Of course, Reagan then escalated Volcker’s war on inflation.
• Bush won in part because he promised to return the surplus Clinton had accumulated through miserly right-wing budgeting to the American people via tax cuts. Bush then gave that money to rich people and spent trillions on insane vanity wars.
• Trump won in part because he promised that the people who were left out of Obama’s recovery–the “forgotten people”–would be his priority. Of course, he has continued to give piles of money to rich people and to prioritise inflating the stock market over ensuring ordinary Americans can pay their bills.

It wasn’t always like this. Franklin Roosevelt forced the Republican Party to adapt to him. Before Roosevelt, the Republicans were the party of Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover. They had little regard for the government’s ability to step in and protect its citizens’ fundamental economic rights. But after Roosevelt, the Republicans became the party of Eisenhower. They became a party that was comfortable building interstate highways with public money and wouldn’t dare raise a hand to Social Security.

McCarthyism broke the domination of Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition, and with it, the ability of the Democratic Party to set the agenda. From that point forward, the Democrats have adjusted to the Republican Party, and in the process they have normalized its excesses and encouraged it to go further. Nixon was comfortable secretly bombing Cambodia because Kennedy and Johnson lied about their wars. Reagan was comfortable driving unemployment through the roof in the early 80s because Carter had already begun the experiment. Bush was comfortable cutting taxes for the rich because Clinton had given him the surplus he could use to fund it. Trump has been able to prioritise the stock market portfolios of the rich because under Obama a skewed recovery had become our new normal.

Joe Biden loves to tell us that “nothing will fundamentally change”. If nothing changes, another Democrat will normalise what Trump has done and frustrate the American people into voting for someone even more right-wing.

Look at what’s happened with Bush. He’s more popular than ever before. In the 00s, we recognised that Bush was nuts. Bush believed the God wanted him to bring peace to the Middle East by spreading democracy by the sword. That’s crazy! He killed hundreds of thousands of people and accomplished absolutely nothing.

But Barack Obama destroyed Libya in 2011. The civil war in that country continues to this day. And many of the people who recognised that Bush was nuts made excuses for that, and they made excuses for Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State who urged him to do it. They acted like it was no big deal. And now people don’t think Bush’s wars were a big deal, either. They miss him. When Obama was first elected, the American people knew Bush was a terrible president. In January of 2009, Bush had a net favorability rating of negative 19. In the summer of 2016, it was plus 9. A year after that, it was plus 22.

The experience of the Obama administration made the American people decide that George W. Bush was okay. Worse, it made Trump possible. Some Americans moved from Obama to Trump, looking once more for hope and change. Many others stopped voting, because Obama broke their confidence in our political system’s ability to help them. They believed in Obama, and Obama let the rich get richer and let the forgotten stay forgotten.

The Democrats are a big part of how we got to where we are. And if we think that the Republicans are authoritarian nationalists, it is the Democrats who have encouraged them to become that way. The ordinary American cannot look to the Democrats to resist the ravenous elite. They look to the nationalist firebrands of the right because there is nothing else on the menu. The Democratic Party is the party of the Ivy League technocrats who scorn them and tell them to “learn to code”.

Joe Biden solidifies all of this all over again. He is the embodiment of keeping things exactly the way they’ve always been. The American people have been bludgeoned for forty years by oligarchs. They can’t take it anymore. They’ll vote for anyone who promises to make it stop. If the Democrats won’t stop it, they’ll vote for someone who will. The next Republican will be worse than Trump, and Joe Biden will make it happen if given the chance.

Donald Trump Doesn’t Pose an Existential Threat to Democracy

The Democrats say we have to stop Trump because Trump is an authoritarian who poses an existential threat to democracy. But for Trump to be a dictator, he would have to stage sham elections or ignore the results of elections that are free and fair. Trump hasn’t tried to hold a sham election–he’s tried to delay one that’s free and fair, because he knows that if he loses he won’t be able to ignore the result. He hasn’t even managed to secure his delay, much less anything more than that.

Authoritarians use crises to seize power. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán used coronavirus to consolidate power around himself. But Trump responded to coronavirus by running away from decision-making responsibility. Instead, he kicked decisions to governors and mayors. Coronavirus gave Trump an opportunity to centralise power around himself, but he chose to decentralise power instead. He likes the trappings of power, but is afraid of the real deal.

Trump talks a big game about cutting trade links with countries all over the world. But his trade wars usually bring us back where we started, with trade deals that are almost indistinguishable from those that came before. His new version of NAFTA is virtually identical to the old version of NAFTA. He has tried to push jobs and investment out of China, but they’ve been sliding down the coast to Vietnam instead of returning to America. His bark is worse than his bite.

Ultimately, an authoritarian needs the backing of the military. The military has to allow the authoritarian to hold sham elections, or to ignore the results of elections that are free and fair. But America’s leading generals largely despise the president. Our intelligence services loathe him. The military remains committed to the constitution and will arrest Trump if he loses and attempts to carry on. Trump knows this, and that’s why he suggested delaying the election–he knows he could lose, and he knows that if he loses he won’t be able to keep going.

Trump has treated protesters terribly–but he’s not the first American president to do so. The Hoover administration used tanks to bulldoze the bonus army’s camp in 1932, killing two demonstrators and injuring dozens. It was a brutal and shameful act, but it wasn’t the end of American democracy:

The Democrats said Bush had an “imperial presidency“. Then Barack Obama tried to outflank congress with a series of outrageous, unconstitutional executive orders, and many of the same people cheered him on. Now when Donald Trump throws out piles of orders that are probably unconstitutional, the Democrats try to get us outraged again. But the American people are used to the president trying to get away with things. Barack Obama made it cool.

Many of Obama’s unconstitutional orders were struck down by the courts. The Democrats tell us we should be worried that Trump is packing the courts full of stooges who will approve of everything he does. But judges aren’t very predictable. Neil Gorsuch has already voted against the president’s wishes on transgender employees. John Roberts increasingly votes against the president’s wishes to protect the court’s legitimacy. Many of the court’s liberals have historically been appointed by Republicans. Earl Warren was appointed by Eisenhower. John Paul Stevens was appointed by Gerald Ford. David Souter was appointed by George H.W. Bush.

Even if Trump really does pack the court, many on the left have called for packing the judiciary or reforming its structure. In the past, they’ve suggested doing this simply because they don’t agree with the politics of the current judges–not because they believe the judges to be authoritarian. If it’s really the case that Trump manages to load the judiciary up with raving authoritarian nationalists, the judicial reforms already under consideration by the left could be used to undo the damage.

The real concern is not a president who is allied with judges–it’s an authoritarian ruler who is allied with the military. Donald Trump alienated all the leading figures in our armed forces by ignoring their advice, leaking classified information to the press, and blatantly disparaging both them and the intelligence they gathered. Because of this, they will never support any authoritarian bid emanating from him.

We need to articulate a compelling left-wing alternative to the politics of the past 40 years. When Republicans are in office, we flip out over every little thing they do. We oppose it all. People who reject the status quo come to the left and look to the left for a new way forward. But when Democrats are in office, there is no meaningful left-wing opposition. Intellectuals point out the failings of Democratic presidents, but they are derided as bad sports. People who reject the status quo are pushed toward the Republican Party, and pushed into authoritarian nationalism.

A Biden Administration Will Create a Whole New Generation of Bad Democrats

The left hopes that replacing Trump with Biden will buy the left time. But Biden will pack his administration full of a whole new generation of vulgar careerists. It will be these people–not the left–who inherit the Democratic Party when he leaves. They will have the institutional knowledge and connections and access to money that are needed for success in American politics. They will continue servicing the oligarchs. And the Republican Party will respond by growing ever more bellicose, ever more grandiose, ever more willing to tear the whole thing down. Biden will accelerate the rise of new nationalist figures who might be able to do all the things Trump can’t even dream of doing.

We can’t have that, and for that reason I can’t support Biden, even as a matter of strategy. To give the left more time, we need to give the left something to oppose. We can oppose the Trump administration in its second term. But if it’s Biden, we’ll be stuck defending him as he slugs the ordinary American in the face. The American people won’t forget the black eye we’ve given them, and they’ll vote for the leaders who will be the death of us.

Attorney General William P. Barr Announces Updates on Operation Legend

Attorney General William P. Barr

Department of Justice
Office of Public Affairs
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Wednesday, August 19, 2020
Attorney General William P. Barr Announces Updates on Operation Legend at Press Conference in Kansas City, Missouri


At a press conference in Kansas City, Missouri, today, Attorney General William P. Barr announced updates on Operation Legend.

Since the operation’s launch, there have been more than 1,000 arrests, including defendants who have been charged in state and local courts. Of those arrests, approximately 217 defendants have been charged with federal crimes. These numbers exclude Indianapolis, whose operation was just announced last Friday. In addition, nearly 400 firearms have been seized by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.

The Attorney General launched the operation on July 8, 2020, as a sustained, systematic, and coordinated law enforcement initiative in which federal law enforcement agencies work in conjunction with state and local law enforcement officials to fight violent crime. The initiative is named in honor of four-year-old LeGend Taliferro, who was shot and killed while he slept early in the morning of June 29 in Kansas City.

Launched first in Kansas City, MO., on July 8, 2020, the operation was expanded to Chicago and Albuquerque on July 22, 2020, to Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee on July 29, 2020, to St. Louis and Memphis on Aug. 6, 2020, and to Indianapolis on Aug. 14, 2020. A breakdown of the federal charges in each district, with the exception of Indianapolis, is below.

Kansas City, MO.

Forty-three defendants have been charged with federal crimes outlined below, with some defendants charged with multiple offenses. In addition to the federal charges, the operation has led to the arrests of 17 state defendants on homicide charges.
20 defendants have been charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm;
17 defendants have been charged with drug trafficking;
Four defendants have been charged with being a drug user in possession of a firearm;
Six defendants have been charged with being in possession of a firearm in furtherance of drug trafficking;
Four defendants have been charged with being in possession of a firearm in furtherance of violent crime;
One defendant has been charged with being a felon in possession of ammunition;
Three defendants have been charged with armed robbery;
One defendant has been charged with carjacking; and
One defendant has been charged with arson.

Chicago, Ill.

Sixty-one defendants have been charged with federal crimes outlined below, with some defendants charged with multiple offenses.
34 defendants have been charged with firearms-related offenses;
26 defendants have been charged with narcotics-related offenses;
One defendant has been charged with possession of machine gun;
One defendant has been charged with illegally dealing firearms without a license;
One defendant has been charged with the illegal sale of a firearm to prohibited person; and
One defendant has been charged with bank fraud.

Albuquerque, NM.

Sixteen defendants have been charged with federal crimes outlined below, with some defendants charged with multiple offenses.
Six defendants have been charged with conspiracy to distribute controlled substances;
Four defendants have been charged with distribution of controlled substances;
Six defendants have been charged with possession with intent to distribute a controlled substance;
Four defendants have been charged with being in possession of a firearm in furtherance of drug trafficking;
Eight defendants have been charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm;
One defendant has been charged with being in possession of a stolen firearm;
Two defendants have been charged with Hobbs Act violations; and
One defendant has been charged with carjacking.

Cleveland, OH.

Thirty-two defendants have been charged with federal crimes outlined below, with some defendants charged with multiple offenses. Two defendants remain fugitives.
22 defendants have been charged with federal drug trafficking charges;
Nine defendants have been charged with federal firearms violations; and
One defendant had been charged with carjacking.

Detroit, MI.

Twenty-two defendants have been charged with federal offenses outlined below, with some defendants charged with multiple offenses.
14 defendants have been charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm;
Two defendants have been charged with possession with the intent to distribute controlled substances;
Two defendants have been charged with possession of a firearm in furtherance of drug trafficking;
Three defendants have been charged with receipt of a firearm while under indictment;
Four defendants have been charged with making a false statement to a licensed firearm dealer; and
Two defendants have been charged with carjacking.

Milwaukee, WI.

Eleven defendants have been charged with federal crimes outlined below, with some defendants charged with multiple offenses. In addition, thus far, 28 firearms have been seized.
Eight defendants have been charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm;
Five defendants have been charged with possession with intent to distribute narcotics;
Four defendants have been charged with possession of a firearm in furtherance of drug trafficking;
Two defendants have been charged with making false statements to a licensed firearm dealer;
One defendant has been charged with possession of a firearm while being an unlawful user of narcotics;
One defendant has been charged with being a felon in possession of ammunition; and
One defendant has been charged with the distribution of narcotics.

St. Louis, MO.

Twenty-five defendants have been charged with federal crimes, with some defendants charged with multiple offenses.
One defendant has been charged with drug trafficking and possession of a firearm in furtherance of a drug trafficking crime following the USMS’s execution of a state arrest warrant;
One defendant has been charged with robbery of an item affecting interstate commerce and possession of a firearm in furtherance of a crime of violence following a joint ATF, SLMPD-initiated undercover operation targeting a known shooter;
One defendant has been charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm following ATF’s execution of a federal search warrant directed towards the residence of a suspected murderer;
21 defendants have been charged with drug trafficking offenses; and
One defendant has been charged with being a drug user in possession of a firearm.

Memphis, Tenn.

Seven defendants have been charged with federal offenses, with some defendants charged with multiple offenses.
One defendant has been charged with being an alien in possession of a firearm while illegally or unlawfully in the United States;
One defendant, who lives in Memphis, was charged in an out-of-district federal case with conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine;
Two defendants have been charged with being unlawful users of a controlled substance in possession of a firearm and making a material false statement when acquiring a firearm from a Federal Firearms Licensee (FFL); and
Two cases remain under seal, but the charges are as follows:
One defendant has been charged with bank robbery
Two defendants charged with theft from an FFL.
Component(s):
Office of the Attorney General
Press Release Number:
20-792

Conrad Black: I Trust The People

Despite Constant Libel of Trump, I Trust the People

By CONRAD BLACK, Special to the Sun | August 14, 2020

The appointment of Senator Harris as Democratic candidate for vice president is a suitable final step in the increasingly goofy Joe Biden campaign, prior to next week’s virtual Democratic convention. She was a catastrophic candidate for the presidential nomination, starting out as a strong rival to the Marxist Senator Bernie Sanders, and like Mr. Biden himself and all the others except Mayor Pete Buttigieg, her candidacy sank like a rock. Almost every policy question was answered with a pious assertion of the need for “a national conversation.”

If her proposals had been acted upon, the country would have been swept by a pandemic of logorrhea. Ms. Harris favors open borders and compared the Immigration and Customs Enforcement service to the Ku Klux Klan.

She favors the entire Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Green Terror, including abolition of fracking and ultimately of fossil fuel consumption and use, and the now customary Democratic hare-brained nonsense about windmills and solar panels. (At the confirmation hearing for James Mattis as secretary of defense, she asked him how he would combat climate change.)

Ms. Harris favors free full-service public healthcare for everyone, sharply increased taxes, and the confiscation of privately owned firearms — Beto O’Rourke could soon be on every doorstep in America.

Ms. Harris has many critics among the 98% of Democrats who did not support her candidacy for president. The Left is displeased with her performance as San Francisco’s district attorney and as attorney general of California: she always called for maximum sentences and condoned the widespread American practice of prosecutors extorting or suborning inculpatory false evidence by threats of indictment if that evidence is not forthcoming, and promises of immunity from prosecution for perjury if it is.

Loyola law professor Lara Bazelon recently accused Ms. Harris in the New York Times of having “fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony, and the suppression of crucial information.”

President Trump has made serious efforts at penal reform and sentence reduction for nonviolent offenders. By contrast, Ms. Harris sent over 1,000 marijuana users to prison but acknowledged having tried it herself. Ms. Harris’s performance as a prosecutor clashes with the general current Democratic enthusiasm for defunding and discouraging the police and turning a blind eye to urban vandalism, arson, and looting.

Mr. Biden backed himself into a corner through his malapropistic aspersions of African Americans and the claims against him about molestation of women (claims Ms. Harris once endorsed), and pledged a black female candidate (or, as some have suggested, a dark-skinned person with a cervix).

Those who met those criteria were a pretty job lot. Representative Val Demings of Georgia was promising but obscure; former National Security Advisor Susan Rice is tainted by the Benghazi fiasco and her role in the persecution of General Michael Flynn, and is sometimes unacceptably abrasive. Rep. Karen Bass of California is, on her record (including her public condolences to the people of Cuba over the hardly premature death of Fidel Castro), a Communist; and unsuccessful Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacy Abrams is a deluded fabulist and would have been a preposterous choice.

In the valley of the bumbling or belligerent African-American Democratic female politicians, the half-Jamaican, half-East Indian, chronic “conversationalist,” Senator Harris wins. The Democratic National Committee and its media allies have already warned that any criticism will be portrayed as sexist and racist, but that charade has become tiresome.

The vice presidential nominee’s prospects are clouded by the apparent expectation (according to a Rasmussen poll) of 59% of Americans that, if elected, Mr. Biden will not finish his term for medical reasons (despite his well-filmed weekend bicycle ride of 75 yards).

So more than half the electorate thinks a vote for the Democrats will be for both Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris to be president. There is nothing in her performance in office or as a presidential candidate to indicate that Americans would greet a Harris presidency with equanimity.

Whatever happens, she wins. If the ticket is successful, her chances of being president are excellent. If Mr. Biden completes his term, Ms. Harris is the principal candidate to follow him. And if the Democrats lose, the ranks of defeated vice presidential candidates include many who went on to greater things: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Earl Warren, Edmund Muskie, Robert Dole, Walter Mondale, and Lloyd Bentsen.

The Biden-Harris tandem kicked off with Ms. Biden’s monstrous lie that Mr. Trump demonstrated his support for Nazism at the violent demonstrations in Charlottesville in 2017, one of the opening guns in the Democratic media character assassination of the President. What he actually said was that there was merit to the arguments of both sides in the original controversy in Charlottesville over what to do with the statue of Robert E. Lee, and that in the violence that ensued both sides were equally odious.

In the ensuing false controversy whipped up by the Trump-hating press, there were some hilarious acts of moral posturing, such as corporate raider Carl Icahn resigning from a White House cultural committee. (Mr. Trump abolished the committee as redundant.) This is where the Democrats have arrived: where they began, accusing Donald Trump of every conceivable permutation of bigotry and corruption.

The Democratic press made no reference whatever to the shooting of 21 African Americans in Washington, D.C. in one incident last weekend, but the Democratic mayor, the egregious Muriel Bowser, ignored the shooting and complained that her ban on assemblies of more than 50 persons was sometimes not observed. World-famous Michigan Avenue in Chicago was smashed up which at least caused the hopeless mayor, Lori Lightfoot, to acknowledge for the first time that some of the peaceful protesters were committing crimes, but she publicly warned her police chief not to “bait” her.

The Big Apple naturally has the most incompetent mayor of all: Bill de Blasio blamed his city’s skyrocketing violent crime rate on the summer and the coronavirus. His abrupt chopping of the entire crime prevention unit and of $1 billion from the city police budget, of course, had nothing to do with it.

New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, ducked his own responsibility in sending COVID-19 sufferers back to homes for the elderly and blamed unspecified Trump regulations and visitors and nurses for 19,000 deaths in those facilities, a number greater than the combined total of coronavirus fatalities of Germany and Canada, countries which have a total population of 120 million.

In Washington, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi returned to her script of four years ago and incanted: “With Trump, all roads lead to Putin.” She said that it didn’t matter that China favors Mr. Biden in the election because the United States has no problems with China.

For nearly four years the Democrats and the self-shamed legions of their national political media accomplices have had no narrative except constant, 360 degrees, stentorian defamation of the president. It is the most protracted and despicable performance of a major American party in opposition since the Democrats betrayed their own president (Lyndon Johnson), spuriously destroyed President Nixon, and completed the trifecta by withdrawing all aid to Indochina and consigning it to the tender mercies of the North Vietnamese Communists and Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.

 Millions died.

In 12 weeks we will have the election result; I trust the people.

________

CMBLetters@gmail.com. From American Greatness.

Alison Schrager: Do Not Keep Schools Closed

Don’t Cancel School
Prolonged closures are their own crisis.

Allison Schrager, August 5, 2020, City Journal

In early June, America was united, briefly, on the need to reopen schools. Other countries had managed to do so successfully, and evidence suggested that children were at low risk from severe Covid-19 complications. But that was before President Donald Trump tweeted his support for reopening. Soon thereafter, states that previously dodged the coronavirus experienced major outbreaks. Suddenly, the conversation, divided along party lines, went from how to reopen to whether it was even an option.

Today, school officials, teachers, and pundits question if schools should reopen this fall, or at all if the pandemic continues, which presumably means no school until fall 2021 at the earliest. The debate isn’t limited to the U.S., either. Bolivia, for example, just canceled its school year.

There is no reason to cancel school, however. Health experts suggest delaying school reopenings in hard-hit areas until the virus is under control—with luck, by early fall. They encourage states with low infection rates to open on time. So far there is no correlation between school openings and infection levels. Despite high infection rates, Florida plans to reopen public schools in the next few weeks, while New York City, which now has among the lowest rates in the country, will apparently proceed with its plan for children to attend school perhaps only one day a week—though much uncertainty remains. Chicago schools, meantime, won’t open until November, at least.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has stressed that reopening is critical for children’s emotional and educational development. There is also an overwhelming economic case to be made in favor of reopening. In fact, the cost of not reopening schools will last a generation. The benefits of universal education are so deep and well-documented that it’s unthinkable to consider discounting it for another semester. Education is the most effective means of economic mobility and is critical for long-term success. It explains much of America’s income growth and development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Today, moreover, schools provide important child-care services. As Goldman Sachs found, if schools don’t open, an estimated 15 percent of America’s labor force can’t return to work.

The negative effects of closed schools will be profound and generational. Economists reviewed the loss of earnings from school disruptions during World War II in Austria and Germany. They found that missing a year of school means 9.4 percent to 16.2 percent lower earnings for up to 40 years, with bigger losses for children with less-educated parents. More recent estimates from 139 countries indicate a year of schooling increases earnings by 9 percent. Even brief school closures, such as the 1916 polio pandemic, lowered levels of educational attainment.

The costs won’t be suffered uniformly. Online schooling is better than no school, but it’s hardly an improvement for many students. As in wartime Germany and Austria, better-educated parents can make up the difference by helping their children with online education and adding more homeschooling. Some parents will hire tutors, create learning pods, move to communities that offer in-person education, or find private schools that reopen. Children from low-income households, however, will pay the biggest cost. Indeed, the impact on low-income families will last for years, creating a level of inequality so large that even Bernie Sanders-style levels of taxation won’t fix it. And yet progressives, who normally obsess over inequality, respond by asking affluent parents to forgo educating their children, in an act of class solidarity.

Prolonged school closures will also strain communities and undermine cities. Public schools, which remain the foundation of a healthy economy and society, bring children of different socioeconomic backgrounds together. Time away from these schools is associated with more crime and drug use. The longer the pandemic continues, the harder it will be to open schools, especially as students become unaccustomed to classroom discipline. It could take years to reacclimate children to school attendance. In recent decades, decent schools and safety were reasons why many upper- and middle-class families stayed in cities. Their presence served as a significant part of the modern urban renaissance. In their absence, cities revert to retaining the very rich, the very poor, and a handful of childless twentysomethings—in other words, communities with limited interaction.

If cities like New York fail to offer decent in-person schooling options for the next year, many middle- and upper-middle-class families will go elsewhere—and once they enroll their children in suburban schools, it’s unlikely they’ll return. Considering what’s at stake, it’s inexcusable that cities like New York wasted time instead of deploying every possible resource to open schools in a meaningful way. It could prove the biggest policy failure of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration—one that will take years for the city to overcome.

It’s true that, while Covid-19 may not pose a risk to children, some evidence suggests that they can spread it—especially to vulnerable teachers and staff. Yet this risk can be mitigated without shutting schools down. Risk mitigation is crucial; otherwise, schools could contribute to outbreaks that lead to longer closures. As European and Asian countries show, opening carefully is possible (and too important to get wrong).

The biggest risk would come from school closures lasting longer than a year. It may take two years, or longer before America is completely safe from Covid-19. Each crisis, though, tends to ratchet up standards for safety. Keep-the-schools-closed advocates claim that we can’t open until it’s safe. What “safe” means varies. Some teachers demand better hygiene, testing, and smaller classes. Others say that schools can’t open until we have an effective vaccine. But a typical flu season kills more children than Covid-19 has so far. By current standards of safety, school closures will become the norm.

Seth Barron: People Have The Right to Freedom of Speech But Not To Riot and Loot

People do not have the right to riot

By Seth Barron, NY POST, August 2, 2020

Protesters in Gotham and other cities around the ­nation are so used to getting their way, they’ve been spoiled. Their illegal occupation of our streets and parks has ­become so routine that the protesting class throws tantrums when it faces consequences, however rarely that happens.

Last week’s arrest of Nikki Stone, wanted for alleged serial vandalism of police cameras, was a case in point. The 18-year-old homeless woman was marching in a “peaceful,” though non-permitted, march down Second Avenue when plainclothes NYPD ­officers arrested her and put her in an unmarked van.

Stone had been filmed on multiple occasions painting over NYPD security cameras around City Hall Park during the last month’s occupation. Her alleged actions suggest a flagrant lawlessness and enmity against the public good.

Yet Stone became a cause celebre, with supporters claiming she had been “disappeared,” as if by a right-wing regime in Latin America circa 1982. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted: “There is no excuse for snatching women off the street and throwing them into unmarked vans.” Cable host Chris Hayes called it “kidnapping.”

The City Council’s Progressive Caucus claimed that “this arrest was a tactic meant to intimidate protesters and discourage civil disobedience.” Lawmakers accused Mayor Bill de Blasio of failing to hold “the NYPD accountable for the brutality unleashed on those exercising” fundamental rights.

Back in the real world, plainclothes officers with unmarked cars arrest wanted suspects like Stone every day, because it is the most effective way to approach them without tipping them off and letting them escape. It is only “kidnapping” if one ­believes that law enforcement, operating with judicial warrants, has no authority to bring criminals to court.

Moreover, progressive councilmembers radically confuse “civil disobedience” and “First Amendment rights.”

The First Amendment protects the right “peaceably to assemble,” but that doesn’t mean you can block traffic any time you want to. Ask Chris Hayes if you can sit in his MSNBC office or studio for a week in the name of your favorite cause.

Civil disobedience means ­intentionally breaking the law to draw attention to the (alleged) unfairness of the law. But de Blasio has been so spinelessly ­indulgent of anti-cop protests, allowing wildcat marches to take place every day, all over the city, that the protesters have come to believe that they have the right to break the law. When confronted, they exhibit the outrage of a pampered toddler denied a toy at nap-time.

Similarly petulant, VOCAL-NY, a government-funded nonprofit, is stamping its feet because the city is no longer planning to pay for the construction of its new headquarters. VOCAL-NY was the prime mover behind the “Defund the Police” encampment, marches, and protests that dominated downtown in the run-up to the city budget deal. The group’s chief organizer, Jawanza James Williams, proudly declared: “We will occupy. We will not leave here until the mayor listens to us!!!”

VOCAL-NY receives about $500,000 from the city each year, mostly for drug-abuse-prevention and other health programs. Taxpayers didn’t allocate money to the group so it could establish an illegal campsite, stage marches across the Brooklyn Bridge, harass and attack law ­enforcers, destroy public property, or demand abolition of the police. Members of the group went to the homes of local politicians, and even the home of Speaker Corey Johnson’s boyfriend, screaming at them.

When Johnson removed several million dollars in capital spending that had been earmarked for VOCAL-NY to build a new headquarters, the group shrieked that he was being spiteful and violating their constitutional rights: “There can be no place in New York City’s politics for this kind of attack on our First Amendment rights.” Yeah, cry more.

VOCAL-NY, like many other ostensible “charities,” is used to taking millions of dollars in taxpayer funding for explicitly political activity. They’ve gotten used to it — because no one in charge says no.

Johnson insists that the money was removed as a fiscal measure and had nothing to do with the way that VOCAL-NY portrayed him as a cop-loving bootlicker during the budget process, embarrassing him ahead of a possible mayoral run, or that they threw paint at his boyfriend’s front door. But VOCAL-NY, and the protesters who want to dictate the time and manner of their arrests and the clothing of their arresting agents, need to relearn a key lesson of toddlerhood: ­Actions have consequences.

Seth Barron is an associate editor of City Journal.

Twitter: @SethBarronNYC

New Heroine of the Press Bari Weiss Blasts Cancel Culture as 'Social Murder"

Bari Weiss

Former New York Times opinion editor blasts cancel culture as 'social murder' on Bill Maher's show     

‘Twitter is the assigning editor of The New York Times’

Former New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss ripped cancel culture and had some parting shots at her former employer during her appearance on "Real Time with Bill Maher" on Friday.

"We're used to criticism. Criticism is kosher in the work that we do," Weiss told Bill Maher. "Criticism is great. What cancel culture is about is not criticism. It is about punishment. It is about making a person radioactive. It is about taking away their job."

"The writer Jonathan Rauch [of The Atlantic] called it social murder. And I think that's right," she said.

"It's not just about punishing the sinner. It's not just about punishing the person for being insufficiently pure," Weiss explained. "It's about this sort of secondary boycott of people who would deign to speak to that person or appear on a platform with that person."

"And we see just very obviously where that kind of politics gets us," she continued. "If the conversation with people that we disagree with becomes impossible, what is the way that we solve conflict."

gccel culture': It's a form of 'social murder'

'If conversation with people that we disagree with becomes impossible, what is the way that we solve conflict?' Bari Weiss aske

"That's an enormous problem because what it's meant is the collapse of moderates," the former Times writer said. "It's meant the collapse of the center and the retribalization of this country and the whole deal with this country, the reason that it's exceptional with all of its flaws is that we depart from history."

"We say that clannishness, tribalism, that we can overcome that, that there's something bigger than lineage or kin or the political tribe we belong to," she said on the HBO talk show. "And I think what we're seeing right now, and it's a very scary moment, is a kind of returning to the mean of history. And I think it is up to us to defend the ideas that made this country unique and a departure of history."

Weiss said that "politics has come to supplant religion," where people on the right see President Donald Trump as a "deity," and people on the left who believe "anything less than defunding the police or abolish the police to choose the issue of the day, makes you something like a heretic."

Weiss resigned from The New York Times last month with a scathing public letter to publisher A.G. Sulzberger. Weiss wrote that her "forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views." She alleges that coworkers called her a "Nazi and a racist," making for a "hostile work environment."

"Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action," she wrote. "Showing up for work as a centrist at an American newspaper should not require bravery."

Weiss also talked about her fiery departure from the New York Times and provided some criticisms of the newspaper of record.

"The reason that Twitter is the assigning editor of The New York Times is because the printing press isn't the printing press anymore. It's because the printing press is in each one of our pockets," Weiss said.

"To do our job well, writers and editors, we need to have a level of bravery and thick skin and fearlessness," she said. "And when you're living in fear of an online mob, you know, all it takes is a dozen people to repeat a lie about you — that you're a racist, that you're a transphobe, that you're a bigot — for that lie to become true and that's extremely dangerous."

This week's episode of "Real-Time" also featured Harper's Magazine columnist Thomas Chatterton Williams, who was one of 150 liberal writers, journalists, and academics who signed an open letter calling for an end to cancel culture. Others who signed the open letter include Weiss, "Harry Potter" creator J.K. Rowling, philosopher Noam Chomsky, and feminist Gloria Steinem.

"What strikes me about it is the pushback is coming from liberals and almost everyone who signs this letter ... is a liberal!" Maher said. "Bari, the fact that you -- they call you a centrist or right-winger! I mean, if a hip, millennial, Jewish bisexual girl living in San Francisco is not a liberal ... who is, these days?"

"What we're trying to say with the letter – and what Thomas did in forming it – was saying what's happening now with this growing culture of illiberalism is different from criticism," Weiss stated.

Williams said that "cancellation" isn't about "bringing down elites back to Earth" but instead causes an "onlooker effect" that has "a chilling and stifling and narrowing influence on all of our behaviors."

Maher panel blasts 'cancel culture': It's a form of 'social murder'

'If a conversation with people that we disagree with becomes impossible, what is the way that we solve conflict?' Bari Weiss asked

By Joseph A. Wulfsohn | Fox News, August 1, 20

Former New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss and Harper's Magazine columnist Thomas Chatterton Williams appeared on "Real Time with Bill Maher" on Friday to explain the open letter they penned decrying "cancel culture."

Earlier this month, Chatterton spearheaded a letter signed by prominent liberals including "Harry Potter" author J.K. Rowling, political activist Noam Chomsky, and feminist icon Gloria Steinem, all defending open debate without fear of repercussions for expressing a point of view.

As Bill Maher noted, the letter faced heavy criticism from the left.

"What strikes me about it is the pushback is coming from liberals and almost everyone who signs this letter ... is a liberal!" Maher exclaimed. "Bari, the fact that you -- they call you a centrist or right-winger! I mean, if a hip, millennial, Jewish bisexual girl living in San Francisco is not a liberal ... who is these days?"

Weiss called the open letter a "warning cry from inside the institutions" and linked cancel culture to "social murder."

BARI WEISS: TWITTER NOW 'EDITOR' OF NY TIMES, PAPER 'LIVING IN FEAR OF AN ONLINE MOB'

"What we're trying to say with the letter -- and what Thomas did in forming it -- was saying what's happening now with this growing culture of illiberalism is different from criticism," Weiss explained. "Thomas and I, you, Bill, we're used to criticism. Criticism is kosher in the work that we do. Criticism is great. What cancel culture is about is not criticism. It is about punishment. It is about making a person radioactive. It is about taking away their job."

"Cancel culture ... is about punishment. It is about making a person radioactive. It is about taking away their job."

— Bari Weiss, journalist  "It's not just about punishing the sinner, it's not just about punishing the person for being insufficiently pure. It's about this sort of secondary boycott of people who would deign to speak to that person or appear on a platform with that person. And we see just very obviously where that kind of politics gets us. If conversation with people that we disagree with becomes impossible, what is the way that we solve conflict?... It's violence."