biden talks about his team as if he asked to see headshots over resumes. Ultimately, that’s a surefire way to upset just about everyone.
joe biden is incredibly proud of his staff’s sexual and racial diversity. You don’t even have to ask. He’ll tell you that his choices were tailor-made to “look like the country,” meeting he demands of his party’s identity-focused base. Yet, as we’ve seen time and time again, staffing based on immutable characteristics instead of earned qualifications can only end poorly.
Party activists oftentimes stubbornly adhere to a radical worldview, a position much easier to hold when not implementing plans. They expect whomever they support to be just as rigid.
But when any appointee takes on a job for an administration, he or she meets the undeniable reality that ideological obedience isn’t always practical. That’s especially true when trying to please more than just the party base ahead of a crucial midterm election. Equally true? Many mainstream politicians aren’t nearly as woke as their virtue-signaling buzzwords suggest.
The moment a bureaucrat veers away from the positions he or she is “supposed” to hold, activists quickly forget the excitement of a diversity hire. In all their rage at administration officials not pursuing exactly what they demand, activists seldom realize that maybe they shouldn’t have judged the book by its cover.
You needn’t look outside of Seattle to see the chaos and disappointment that comes from blindly embracing tribalism. Activists once celebrated many Seattle “firsts” as they earned leadership posts. Years later, the same activists ran those “firsts” out of town for not being leftist enough. Indeed, if there’s a lesson here, it’s that Seattle’s trouble could soon become biden’s.
Seattle’s first black, female police chief Carmen Best somehow shocked the activist community for being too supportive of law enforcement. Mitzi Johanknecht, King County’s first lesbian sheriff, wouldn’t blindly back radical police reforms. Activists weren’t pleased.
Seattle’s first lesbian and American Indian school Superintendent Denise Juneau didn’t super-serve non-white people the way activists demanded. And it wasn’t enough that Seattle’s first lesbian Mayor Jenny Durkan gave radicals space for an illegal (and ultimately deadly) occupation. When she didn’t give in to every whim of the increasingly radical black lives matter and antifa movements, she became their enemy.
It’s not so much that these leaders were bad at their jobs; that’s obviously subjective. It’s that they didn’t meet the expectations of a leftist movement that assumed these leaders could effectively hold positions based exclusively on their identities. They all mostly delivered what they said they would, or at least tried. But when all you see is identity, you pay little attention to anything else.
Identity politics is an innately pernicious concept promoted by America’s leftists. Meant to eradicate perceived institutional or systemic bias, it does the opposite, creating a system where one gains an unearned advantage due to membership in a marginalized community. It’s institutionalized tokenism.
The concept has evolved into the practice of electing, appointing, or hiring a variety of people that “look like the country.” In other words, whether it’s biden’s cabinet, the local police force, or the boards of corporations, it must represent a menagerie of different demographics.
It’s no longer about one’s qualifications based on skills or ideas; instead, you’re the right choice merely because of the group you belong to. It renders us into marks on a checklist meant to satisfy the demands of groups promoting the most superficial aspects of diversity.
This is in no way, shape, or form a good way to pick leaders. Indeed, the events in Seattle over the last several months show you the limitations of this condescending ideological view.
As a black woman, Best was supposed to understand the strained relationships between black Americans and law enforcement. No doubt, she did. Johanknecht, as a lesbian in a field dominated by straight men, is supposed to fight for marginalized communities. She fights for everyone.
Both fell short of expectations because neither reformed their agencies to meet the demands of radicals. The anti-police movement claimed to Best that they had the right to “peacefully protest” by throwing rocks, bottles, and explosives at police officers. Johanknecht was supposed to usher in a new era of police reforms, handing overly broad investigative powers to an oversight committee that views police as the enemy.
After dealing with a recalcitrant mob enabled by a vindictive Seattle City Council, Best retired. The radical defund movement was too much for any reasonable person to handle. She told the city, “I’m done.”
The defund movement also claimed Johanknecht, albeit in a different way. The majority-Democrat King County Council quickly pushed through charter amendments that Seattle voters overwhelmingly supported last November. It took away the entire county’s ability to vote for sheriff, transferring the power to an appointment. Soon, she will be out of a job.
The same scripts played out with Durkan and Juneau. Durkan bent over backward to satisfy the ravenous demands of an increasingly out-of-control activist community, even giving them an autonomous zone known as the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. Still, it wasn’t enough.
The pride of electing its first lesbian mayor wore off when she wouldn’t defund the police by 50 percent. After facing a recall election (tossed by the court before signature gathering), Durkan saw the writing on the wall. Facing a tough road to re-election, she announced she would not seek a second term.
The city’s latest victim has been Juneau. Facing scorn from area activists for not doing enough to help black students succeed and a school board sending overt messages they wouldn’t extend her contract, the city’s “historic” school leader announced she’s out at the end of her contract.
When these women came to power, Seattleites lauded their identities. They tweeted their delight in electing a lesbian mayor and posted Facebook updates to declare Seattle a progressive city with an American Indian superintendent — along with an acknowledgment that we live on stolen Duwamish land, of course.
Too often, leftists view all minorities monolithically. As they think all of one identity group necessarily hold the same values, ideas, experiences, and lack of privilege, so they think all such people categorized by race and sexuality will naturally pursue policies and programs that satisfy leftist ideologues. How utterly demeaning.
Activists sprinted further away from what was supposed to be a societal ideal: judging people on their character and skills, not on their race, sex, or sexuality. We’ve regressed in the name of tolerance.
Press most Seattleites on why they celebrated any of the women at the time, and they won’t tell you much about policy positions or specific values those leaders held. You’d get a lot of assumptions based on expectations and a lot of people let down. When you focus on the least interesting part about someone (his identity), at the expense of the most interesting (his beliefs and actions), you set yourself up for disappointment.
biden promised us “the most diverse Cabinet representative of all … Asian Americans, African Americans, Latinos, LGBTQ, across the board.” Most of us would have been happy with forward-thinking, unifying thinkers, with an assumption that it would generate a diverse staff on its own. But biden talks about his team as if he asked to see headshots over resumes. Ultimately, that’s a surefire way to upset just about everyone.
Now is the time to demand accountability in America’s higher education institutions. Our national security depends on it.
As President Biden takes office, America faces a new chapter in the China challenge, a major part of which involves protecting American higher education.
China’s Thousand Talents Plan has ensnared thousands of American scholars and researchers, including former Harvard University professor and Chemistry Chair Charles Lieber, indicted in June by the Justice Department for lying about China’s $50,000 monthly payments to him in exchange for research expertise.
Confucius Institutes — campus centers run by the Chinese government — spread propaganda and serve as nodes in China’s soft power campaign. What’s more, China’s People’s Liberation Army has sent some 2,500 military officers undercover as graduate students in Western universities, including in the United States.
While Biden hasn’t commented directly on Confucius Institutes, China Daily, the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda mouthpiece, is already calling for him to begin “correcting” the Trump administration’s “fearmongering of the Confucius Institute.”
Meanwhile, Biden’s pick for United Nations ambassador, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, spent a large portion of her confirmation hearing attempting to backpedal her paid speech at a Confucius Institute in 2019. Thomas-Greenfield had spoken optimistically of “Big Brother China” investing in Africa and modeling for African nations the path from poverty to an industrialized economy.
With American higher education vulnerable to foreign interference, one fundamentally necessary policy is transparency. We need transparency from colleges and universities about any gifts they receive from foreign powers.
Transparency provides the sunlight that discourages colleges and universities from entering shady foreign deals in the first place. It affords the data that makes more targeted policies possible. It helps watchdogs, like my organization, the National Association of Scholars, distinguish benign from potentially pernicious foreign gifts. It permits the public to see what foreign money is flowing into their local college or alma mater and make informed decisions about where to send their kids, where to donate, or whether to enroll.
Since the 1980s, federal law has required colleges and universities to report gifts and contracts with foreign sources when they total $250,000 or more in a single calendar year. But this legal provision — called “Section 117” for its place in the Higher Education Act — was never enforced. As a result, colleges and universities racked up foreign benefactors, frequently behind closed doors in hush-hush deals. They routinely failed to file the legally required disclosures, sometimes going to elaborate lengths to avoid public scrutiny.
Two years ago, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos launched investigations into non-compliant universities — the first time any secretary had enforced Section 117 since President Ronald Reagan signed it into law in 1986. Colleges and universities began to back-file old disclosure forms, with unreported sums totaling more than $6.5 billion.
The sheer scale of these numbers is staggering, amounting to $6.5 billion flowing to American institutions of higher education from foreigners. The influence and dependency produced by such sums show why transparency is so important.
Unlike many regulatory requirements, transparency requirements pose few burdens on the subject but offer great benefits for the public. Filing disclosures is not technologically difficult for colleges and universities, sophisticated entities with professional finance and accounting offices that successfully solicit and track contributions from thousands of sources with relative ease.
Last year the U.S. Department of Education further simplified the process by launching a new online portal to receive such reports. The department even found that institutions it investigated “produced data at a very high level of granularity,” including retrieving records of individual gifts totaling $100 or less, according to its most recent report issued in November.
Yet higher education has fought foreign gift transparency at every step. For years colleges simply refused to file disclosure reports. Once the Trump administration began enforcing the law, colleges and universities declared it unfair.
In a recent letter to Biden outlining its policy wish list, the American Council on Education — the strongest arm of the DC higher education lobby, as well as some three dozen co-signers — targeted Section 117 reporting requirements, calling for a “halt” in the new enforcement efforts. What are they hiding?
Back-pedaling on foreign gift transparency would be a mistake. It is imperative that state legislatures enact state-level transparency laws. Boards of regents should initiate public reports on any foreign gifts or contracts received by universities. Parents, alumni, students, and taxpayers should demand transparency of colleges and universities.
In addition to maintaining and building upon the current transparency guidelines, at a minimum, the Biden administration must:
Now is the time to demand accountability in America’s higher education institutions. Our national security depends on it.
Impeachment is addressed in eight of the 85 ‘Federalist Papers,’ yet there is no discussion of separating the punishments of removal and disqualification.
On Jan. 22, the Wall Street Journal published Princeton University professor of politics Keith E. Whittington’s defense of the disqualification-from-future-office purpose of the Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump scheduled to begin on Feb. 8. The day before, more than 100 legal scholars, including Federalist Society co-founder Steven Calabresi, released a statement making the same argument.
Whittington holds that “for the Founders,” a Senate trial merely to “disqualify” a former federal official was a “traditionally understood” principle “imported to America from England.” Likewise, the scholars argue that “history,” including “English impeachment” history as well as the intentions of “the Framers” of the Constitution, is the source of the alleged constitutional power to convict “prior officeholders as well as current ones.” What is more, a Constitution without an independent disqualification power would be a Constitution that could be “easily undermined.”
In support of their scholarship, neither the scholars nor the professor cites nor quotes the “Federalist Papers.” Yet the “history” and meaning of the American Constitution begins with and is dependent on those papers which, like the Constitution itself, are unique in all of human and political history. Impeachment is dealt with in eight of the 85 papers (numbers 39, 65, 66, 69, 77, 79, 81, 84). Nowhere in any of the Federalist Papers is there a discussion of or attempt to separate between the two impeachment punishments of removal and disqualification.
In “Federalist No. 65,” whose subject is the suitability of the Senate as the court of impeachment, disqualification is not separately considered. The subject of “Federalist No. 66” is the argument that the impeachment provisions dangerously combine both legislative and judicial authority in the Congress.
Hamilton, the author, answers by pointing to the constitutional requirement that the House and Senate act separately and independently in the impeachment process. When Hamilton contends impeachment is properly assigned to the Congress, rather than the Supreme Court, “disqualification” is not mentioned at all. In neither paper is there a discussion distinguishing between “removal from office” and “disqualification.”
In “Federalist No. 39,” Madison says that “the President of the United States is impeachable at any time during his continuance in office.” In “Federalist No. 66,” Hamilton explains that the fundamental purpose of impeachment is to protect the Congress against “encroachments of the executive.” Obviously, there can be no such encroachments by a former executive.
It is inconceivable that the Federalist authors — who were, of course, subject to the criticisms of and corrections by their fellow Founders — would have left such a major constitutional power, the stand-alone power of disqualification, uncommented on. Both the assumption and the plain text of the Constitution and the “Federalist Papers” is that the two punishments, removal and disqualification, go together.
For Democrats intent on keeping their fierce pursuit of Trump in the public eye, the Constitution establishes more powerful means than simple removal and disqualification. Article I, 3 states that impeachment shall not extend “further than” than removal and disqualification, “but the party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment, and Punishment, according to law.” And he need not be “convicted” under impeachment.
In specifically discussing the presidency in “Federalist No. 65” and “Federalist No. 69,” Hamilton points out that a former president would “afterwards” — that is, after he is no longer president — be “liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law.” Hamilton highlights this dramatic difference from English law concerning “the person of the king,” who is forever exempt from impeachment and prosecution.
During his term in office, a president may not be prosecuted in an outside court, only charged/impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate of “High Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Now that he is out of office, however, and for the rest of his life, Trump may be criminally indicted in any state or federal court for anything he ever did both during and outside his presidency.
In Nixon v. Fitzgerald, the Supreme Court ruled that a president is forever immune from civil liability for his official acts while in office. Not so, however, for non-official civil acts. In Clinton v. Jones, the Supreme Court held that a sitting president may be sued for his private, non-official pre-presidency conduct. Furthermore, in the 2020 decision of Trump v. Vance, the Supreme Court ruled that Trump’s tax records could be subpoenaed by New York state prosecutor Cyrus Vance Jr. while he was still in office.
Both the scholars and the professor mention that a perfidious president or other officials could commit heinous acts against the country and the government and then avoid all consequences by resigning before an impeachment trial. As already pointed out and proven by the text of the Constitution and Hamilton’s discussion of it, this contention is simply false.
Such a terminally criminal former president would continue to be liable to criminal prosecution for his in-office, terminally criminal acts. What is more, it is more than obvious that American popular and political opinion would never endure an attempt by such a person to regain public office. Finally, it is also refuted by American history insofar as no public figure has ever thought to commit such acts.
The scholars and Whittington bring up the impeachment and disqualification of resigned and no-longer-in-office Secretary of War William Belknap in 1876, who was acquitted in the Senate. But historical accounts are readily available with which to conclude that a significant number of those voting for acquittal had already decided that there was no impeachment jurisdiction over a former official. Also, of course, Belknap was an appointed official rather than an elected one, much less the president.
In a separate article in The New York Times, Calabresi along with Norman Eisen, one of the Democrats’s House 2020 impeachment counsels, have cited no authority for their unique claim that after the two-thirds impeachment vote, a disqualification vote “only requires a simple majority” vote in the Senate. Anyone is entitled to his or her opinion about the meaning of constitutional texts, of course. “Scholarship,” however, requires something more.
Over these past few weeks, Apple has experienced something it isn’t used to: bad PR in the wake of essentially banning popular social media app Parler from its phones without publicly providing any truthful explanation.
War is brewing in Silicon Valley. A long-simmering fight between Apple and Facebook — two of the architects of Big Tech — spilled into the avenue this past week, with commercial and legal threats hitting the pages of both tech publications and broader media.
To read the Cult of Mac journalists who dominate Big Tech reporting, you’d think America had flipped the calendar back 10 years to a simpler time when Apple, Inc. was seen as some white knight fighting for innovation, user privacy, and a freer, cooler future. Facebook, on the other hand, you might read, stands for old-fashioned corporate greed.
It’s garbage, of course — the good guy part, anyways.
So why now? Over these past few weeks, Apple has experienced something it isn’t used to: bad PR in the wake of essentially banning popular social media app Parler from its phones without publicly providing any truthful explanation. As its carefully crafted rebel chic began to look a more and more like polished corporate liberalism, what did Apple’s Tim Cook do? He attacked Facebook’s privacy-last profit model.
At first glance this might seem strange, but it isn’t. Indeed, fake battles and shiny objects are the core of Apple’s PR strategy.
Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook have been feuding over business practices and reputation for years. After reports emerged this week that Facebook is nearing a launch point for an antitrust lawsuit against Apple’s controlling and greedy App Store, Cook struck back, successfully shifting the conversation from Parler, the App Store, and antitrust to Facebook’s commoditization of its users.
It’s ground Apple likes to fight on. Why talk about how we’re profiting from religious genocide in China? Instead, let’s talk about how Apple sued mean old North Carolina for saying men can’t use women’s bathrooms and little girl’s locker rooms.
Why talk about the suffocating control the App Store exercises to ban politically or financially troublesome nuisances like the app Hong Kong democracy protesters were using to escape arrest? Instead, let’s talk about how Apple stood firm when the U.S. Department of Justice asked for help accessing the phones of domestic Islamic terrorists targeting American soldiers and office Christmas parties.
Why talk about how Apple moved first (and very likely colluded with other companies) to destroy Parler for daring to think they could build a tech company that might compete and didn’t suppress Americans’ free speech? The important thing to remember is that Facebook is bad.
Perfectly enough, the first public shot fired in Cook’s longstanding battle with Zuckerberg’s business model was during a long 2014 interview with Charlie Rose after iCloud was reportedly hacked for hundreds of private naked photos of Hollywood actresses. Let that sink in a moment: In an interview about a massive, humiliating, and illegal breach of Apple customer’s privacy, Cook turned the subject to Facebook’s privacy policies.
To be clear, Facebook is no friend of the consumer either. As Cook correctly pointed out in his Thursday speech attacking the social media site, their business is mining our data with a deeply disturbing level of granularity and invasiveness obscured behind hundreds of pages of legal “privacy agreements.”
Their world is built around constant and mindless addiction to a flashing advertising platform, powered by short and empty endorphin bursts. Facebook, like all of its peers at the pinnacle of the Valley, takes more from us, our children, and our society than it gives back.
Of course, a company that profits from the vast Chinese slave state doesn’t really care if Facebook mines you for cash, and just behind the thin rebel veneer and corporate libertarian buzzwords lies Cook’s true motivation for war with Facebook: control. Here’s more from Cook’s speech:
What are the consequences of prioritizing conspiracy theories and violent incitement simply because of the high rates of engagement?
What are the consequences of not just tolerating but rewarding content that undermines public trust in life-saving vaccinations?
What are the consequences of seeing thousands of users joining extremist groups and then perpetuating an algorithm that recommends even more?
It is long past time to stop pretending that this approach doesn’t come with a cost. A polarization of lost trust, and yes, of violence.
See, in addition to having a different but similarly unethical business model, Zuckerberg is the sole tech titan to resist the left-wing plan to control and censor speech and people deemed threatening to the woke left. Faceless foreign organizations performing external fact-checks on conservative American media, for example, are an outgrowth of Zuckerberg’s resistance to becoming the arbiter of which speech is true and which speech is not allowed — a role Cook, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and their woke allies have enthusiastically embraced.
Influential tech journalist Kara Swisher perfectly laid out the left’s scorn for Zuckerberg not devoting himself fully enough to their new religion in a Jan. 16 edition of Politico’s Playbook, writing:
Most of all, they have tried to duck responsibility. I have always been amazed by Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg’s statement that he did not want to be an ‘arbiter of the truth.’ My question for him: Why then did he build a platform that requires it?
Got that? How could they not arbitrate truth? Facebook groups, these people claim, are why Americans rejected obvious moral choice Hillary Clinton and elected bad orange man Donald Trump. If Facebook were responsible little liberals, they would rush to become “arbiters of truth” just like their properly pious peers.
Shiny garbage fights like these are crucial to Apple. They allow the first publicly traded American corporation to earn $2 trillion in a single year to play the hip, innovative rebel in a black turtleneck. They allow a company that stubbornly refuses to shift manufacturing from a communist slave state to American states to play defender of the oppressed. They allow a sprawling monopoly committed to controlling your speech to play champion of your privacy.
If there’s a path to roll back and reconfigure Big Tech’s data-mining business models, we should absolutely take it. Just don’t let yourself be distracted — Tim Cook is not your friend.
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