Trump's Post-Presidency; Britain's Covid Revelations; & Dutch Farmers in the Drivers Seat
Trump's Post-Presidency; Britain's Covid Revelations; & Dutch Farmers in the Drivers Seat
Enemies of the People: Donald J. Trump
Michael Walsh’s Editor’s Column this week is about former president Donald Trump’s assertion that he will be arrested this week, what it would mean for him and for the country, and how he and the rest of us should respond.
The Leaving of It
Donald J. Trump, most recently the 45th president of the United States, may—to use the favorite phrase of the New York Times—"make history" this week by becoming the first chief executive ever to be indicted after leaving office. Not for anything he did while in office (that would be unconstitutional, although at this point what difference does it make?) but for... wait for it... paying $130,000 in hush money to a hitherto unknown "porn star" to keep quiet about an alleged one-off sexual tryst in 2006.
Now a transaction, however trashy and unsavory, between consenting adults 17 years ago, which became a political issue in 2018 (you remember that; it was in all the papers), is hardly the crime of the century. The rogue local prosecutor, Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, Jr., is ostensibly in charge of this precedent-shattering miscarriage of justice, but everyone knows he's just a front man for the brains of the outfit, including his deputy, social-justice warrior Meg Reiss, the Clintons, and, ultimately the Biden White House.
In the brave new world of the Panopticon, anything you've done at any time your life from birth and the present can now bring you down, the corrupt cur media baying at your heels.
The alleged crime, which has something to do with campaign financing laws involving how Trump reimbursed his sleazy former lawyer and recent jailbird, Michael Cohen, who was the front man on the deal. You may rightly think that such a charge—a philandering playboy businessman paying a woman who, as a working professional, will have sex with anybody for money—is right up there with spitting on the sidewalk or picking your feet in Poughkeepsie. And cooler heads may yet prevail if, as rumored, Cohen's own former legal adviser, Robert J. Costello, appears before the grand jury today to shred what little is left of Cohen's credibility.
But when that man is named Trump...
Trump broke the news of what he said was his impending arrest tomorrow via social media (all caps his):
THE FAR & AWAY LEADING REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE AND FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, WILL BE ARRESTED ON TUESDAY OF NEXT WEEK. PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!
And...
“IT’S TIME!!! WE JUST CAN’T ALLOW THIS ANYMORE. THEY’RE KILLING OUR NATION AS WE SIT BACK & WATCH. WE MUST SAVE AMERICA!PROTEST, PROTEST, PROTEST!!!”
That is the last thing anybody should do. Or didn't we learn anything from the Jan. 6 fiasco, which has landed hundreds of innocents in what JJ Sefton, the morning blogger at Ace of Spades, has taken to calling the Garland Archipelago. The Left's inability to ever stop (they never stop, they never sleep, they never quit) because the dictates of Marxist "progressivism" make it impossible for them to stop, means that should protests get even a little bit out of hand, the red-diaper babies and their amigos in the media will view it as the next Reichstag Fire, starring conservatives as the hapless Marinus van der Lubbe, and act accordingly.
There's no question but that the Bragg/Reiss tag team is trying to provoke a confrontation with their absurd legal theories about the Trump/Daniels frolic, but one of their additional goals is to fan the flames of the Trump/Ron DeSantis rivalry. There's been talk of ringing Mar-a-Lago with Trump supporters and demanding that Ron DeSantis call out the Florida National Guard to prevent Trump's possible extradition….
DeSantis would be smart to say nothing about Trump (as indeed he did not in this statement today), but instead to issue a warning about the unprecedented political chutzpah of Democrat stooges arresting and trying not only a former president but a current candidate for the office again. Despite Trump's constant whining about how the Florida governor "owes" him "loyalty" for Trump's endorsement back in 2018, DeSantis owes Trump bupkis; as Mr. Dooley famously said, politics ain't beanbag and nobody owes nobody nothing once the bell sounds.
But what should Trump do? If and when he's arrested, or voluntarily surrenders, he should take the high road. He should utterly reject Bragg's legitimacy or authority to bring charges against him, that on behalf of all living former presidents and all future presidents he will not be a party, on constitutional grounds, to a precedent-setting farce, to wit partisan attempts to use a local legal system to affect the outcome of a national election and in defiance of the will of the people.
And then he should say "not guilty" and just walk out. No speeches to the media, no preening, no playing to the crowd, but instead cloaking his worst instincts in the solemnity of his demeanor. He should not encourage the people to rally to his side, but instead play the martyr, and let his bloody shirt wave itself.
Our Founding Editor, John O’Sullivan, contributed a piece about Britain’s recent WhatsApp leak which pulled back the curtain on high-level government decision making, vanity, and incompetence during the darkest days of Covid.
Private Jokesters, Public Enemies
One year ago Canadian truckers drove into Ottawa, halted their trucks outside Parliament, and held an impromptu fiesta to protest the anti-Covid regulations that instructed them to accept vaccines in order to safeguard the world from harm as they made their lonely drives along the great North American expressways. It wasn’t the first protest against the anti-Covid lockdowns and other regulations—there had been many in Europe and North America—but it was the first such demonstration that won mass sympathy around the world. It marked a turning point.
As more and more people shared their doubts with each other, they realized that doubters like themselves were in the majority. What happened next is called a “preference cascade”: it’s the moment when everyone wakes up and says: “Hey, that man behind the curtain is an emperor, and he hasn’t got a stitch of argument on.” An orthodoxy sustained by groupthink began to crumble….
There had to be a better way—and there was. While Britain had been following the lockdown orthodoxy, Sweden had adopted a less restrictive model: reliance on the personal responsibility of ordinary citizens to make sensible choices. What did a comparison show? Britain’s death rate was almost twice as high as Sweden’s; its accumulated indebtedness was twice as high; and its economic recovery much slower.
Even governments now began to crumble too. Rishi Sunak, then the U.K.’s Chancellor of the Exchequer and now its prime minister, gave an interview in which he revealed that there had never been a proper cost-benefit analysis to test the lockdown decision against other policy options; described how he had secretly gone to private sector researchers to compare official forecasts of future risks against their findings; and he discovered that the official figures were massively wrong.
This interview had less impact than it deserved. Too many people had an interest in not making a bigger fuss about it. It wasn’t only ministers and officials who had backed the wrong policies—the opposition parties, the media, the BBC, the medical journals, and the Whitehall scientists had mostly been calling for a tougher lockdown approach and more restrictions on personal liberty. They weren’t interested in exposing themselves. Something more was needed to get people's attention. And then was heard a shot from a smoking gun.
In order to write his own account of how he had helped to save Britain from Covid-19, health secretary Matthew Hancock who had been forced to resign for unrelated reasons (i.e., he was caught cuddling a senior advisor on security cameras, thus violating his own Covid regulations on personal distancing), gave his ghost writer, Isabel Oakeshott, a stack of WhatsApp messages between himself and other ministers at the center of the management of lockdown politics.
When the Hancock-Oakeshott writing team had finished their manuscript and sold it to The Times, Ms. Oakeshott coolly took the treasure trove of informal discussions between all the senior lockdown players and then she handed it to the Daily Telegraph, the Times’ main rival broadsheet. And for the last week the Telegraph has been breaking scoop after scoop revealing the foolish, unconstitutional, undemocratic, and absurd ways that the lockdown decisions were imposed by a few politicians high on their cut-price authoritarianism in full technicolor on a wide screen….
How could such things happen? The surprisingly simple answer is that a small subset of cabinet ministers, civil servants, and scientific advisors in key positions—prime minister Boris Johnson, Hancock, the head of the civil service, Simon Case, the chief medical officer, Chris Witty, etc., etc.—removed political decision-making from both parliamentary debate and scrutiny and from the full cabinet in order to made the management of the crisis more timely and efficient. They further concentrated power by determining that since Covid-19 was a medical crisis, they should be advised principally by a committee of doctors when they needed advice from a range of experts from different disciplines (if only to be aware of new problems and the inadequacy of some solutions).
With such a limited range of advice and without the benefit of informed scrutiny, they exaggerated their own capacities, took draconian power over peoples’ freedoms, and ran campaigns to frighten them into accepting that these extraordinary powers were necessary. Inevitably, they kept making more mistakes because, having frightened the public and themselves into a panic, they felt that they needed to keep announcing new measures to calm the public down again, thus making new mistakes, and thus refusing to correct them.
Elizabeth Nickson wrote about what over-regulation has done to her beloved British Columbia.
To Solve 'Food Insecurity,' Cut Bureaucrats
In Canada, the British Columbia government in order to increase “food security” is handing out $200,000,000 to farmers in the province. Food insecurity, which means crazy high food prices, comes to us courtesy of the sequestration of the vast amounts of oil and gas in the province and the ever increasing carbon tax, which (like a VAT in Europe), as you probably know, is levied at every single step in food production. Add the hand-over-fist borrowing in which the government has indulged for the last 20 years, and you have created your own mini-disaster.
Ever since multinational environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) took over public opinion in the province, our economy has been wrenched from resource extraction to tourism. Tourism is, supposedly, low-impact. The fact that it pays $15 an hour instead of $50 an hour and contributes very much less to the public purse than forestry, mining, farming, ranching, oil and gas, means we have had borrow to pay for health care and schooling. This madness spiked during Covid, and, as in every ‘post-industrial’ state, has contributed to making food very, very much more expensive, despite the fact that British Columbia where I live, is anything but a food desert. We could feed all of Canada and throw in Washington State.
Inflation comes from a real place, it has a source, it is not mysterious and arcane. Regionally, it comes from "green" government decisions. I pay almost 70 percent more for food now than I did five years ago. Of course one cannot know with any confidence how much the real increase is. The Canadian government was caught last week hiding food price statistics and well they might. The Liberal government leads with its “compassion,” blandishing the weak and foolish, hiding the fact that in this vast freezing country they are trying to make it even colder by starving and freezing the lower 50 percent of the population.
Even the Wasp hegemony that ran this country pre-Pierre Elliot Trudeau knew not to try that. But not this crew! It doesn’t touch them. They don’t see and wouldn’t care if they did, about the single mother working in a truck stop on the Trans-Canada Highway, who steals food for her kids because all her money is going towards keeping them warm.
One was struck by Sheila Malcomson, who so compassionately announced this massive giveaway. Every country and region has several Sheilas, who are blithely ignorant of the rules of economics, and who have been promoted because ‘equity.’ They are filled with a sense of power and righteousness. Sheila used to ‘govern’ our mini-region and was relentless in refusing land use in the region to landowners. For more than a decade, she layered regulation upon regulation upon regulation, so that even building a chicken coop is a vertiginously expensive exercise. Essentially, her job was the sequestration of land, despite the fact that British Columbia is only 6 percent developed….
If the only tool you have is a hammer, it's tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail. It is only the most arcane and numerate think tanks who bang on and on about over-regulation and how destructive it is. Regulation is so complex that most people would rather do anything than think about it, much less deconstruct it.
Tom Finnerty contributed two blog posts this past week. The first was about the work of the Canadian organization InvestNow, which is dedicated to combating the spread of the anti-natural resource Divestment movement.
Down With 'Divestment,' Up with Freedom
And the second was about the surprise electoral success of the Dutch farmers’ political party, which has been trying to beat back their government’s insane environmental regulations whose object was to put them out of business.
Dutch Farmers Strike Back
Pleasantly surprising news out of Holland – the BoerBurgerBeweging, or the Farmer–Citizen Movement, a political party founded in 2019 to protest the Dutch governments' mistreatment of the country's farmers, won big in this past week's elections. From The Telegraph:
A farmers' protest party angered by new green laws triumphed in shock Dutch election results, prompting its leader to ask: “People, what the f--- happened?” Caroline van der Plas’s Farmers-Citizen Movement (BBB) is projected to become the equal largest party in the senate, taking 15 seats from none before the vote. The Left-wing GroenLinks/PvdA is also expected to win 15 seats, in the wake of months of turbulent farmer protests against government plans to cut nitrogen emissions.
Regular readers will be familiar with the Dutch farmer protests. The short version of their story is that the E.U. has been pressuring the Dutch government to reduce emissions by 50 percent by the end of the decade. Since Holland is the world’s second-biggest agricultural exporter, after the United States, the agricultural sector is the most obvious place to make cuts.
Of course, farming isn't just abstract economic sector, or even just a job. It's a historic way of life in the Netherlands. So when the Dutch government started pressuring farmers to significantly reduce their livestock numbers; implemented emissions licenses, required for any expansions of existing farms; and announced plans for shutting down at least 3,000 farmers (which included threats of confiscation of farmland if farmers refused to sell); the farmers fought back.
And, finally, our very own acclimatised beauty Jenny Kennedy, deals with a crisis in paradise.
Diary of an Acclimatised Beauty: Neckering
Thanks for reading, and keep a look out for upcoming pieces by Peter Smith, Tom Finnerty, and Steven Hayward. All this and more this week at The Pipeline!