Plus: Nikki Haley soldiers on towards South Carolina.
• Google is having second thoughts about having trained Gemini exclusively on runs of Hamilton.
• Nikki Haley is soldiering on toward what is likely to be a lopsided defeat in her home state’s February 24 Republican primary, with no prospect of finding states she can win. She gave a defiant speech on February 20, vowing that even if she lost South Carolina she was “not going anywhere,” would campaign “until the last person votes,” and will resist “the herd mentality” according to which she should exit the presidential race and get behind Donald Trump. We’ve heard that before from candidates just before they dropped out. Haley, who praised Trump while working for him and even said she would not run in 2024 if he ran, is undoubtedly right to say today that “many of the same politicians who now publicly embrace Trump privately dread him.” If she follows through by staying in the race for the long haul, it will be solely as a protest, albeit a defensible protest. If Trump wants the votes of her supporters in the fall, it will, as always, be the candidate’s job to earn them.
• In Los Angeles, President Biden announced that 153,000 more borrowers would have their student loans “canceled” by his administration—which, in practice, means paid by the people who didn’t take them out and spend them. In January, Biden “canceled” 74,000 loans. Together, these moves cost $5 billion and brought the total expense of Biden’s program to more than $130 billion. By the time he is finished, the president will have spent $475 billion. Never in the history of buying votes have so many been so fleeced for so few. As policy, the initiative is a disaster. The administration has made no effort to reduce the cost of college; it has proposed no changes to the way higher education works; and it has done nothing to alter the funding mechanisms for anyone beyond the current tranche of debtors. By now, it ought to be clear that the “opportunity” Biden speaks of is the opportunity to shore up his political base in an election year. And boy does he intend to take it.
• A danger in chasing a political scandal is that witnesses who tell you what you want to hear may not only end up discredited but can give cover to the other side to dismiss the whole story. Enter Alexander Smirnov. There’s extensive evidence that Hunter and Jim Biden peddled Joe Biden’s influence to shady actors in Ukraine, China, and elsewhere, receiving millions in return, getting help from Joe in doing so, and setting some of it aside for “the big guy.” Investigations by media, law enforcement, and Congress have verified money trails and electronic communications (including by Joe under a false name) and have pinpointed travel and meetings to carry out the influence-peddling business—requiring the White House to back off prior denials. None of this rested on the testimony of Smirnov, which is why his name was never even mentioned until this month in National Review’s extensive coverage of the story. But after House and Senate Republicans cited sensational charges by Smirnov of a Ukrainian businessman bribing Joe and Hunter, special counsel David Weiss sprang the trap, indicting Smirnov for lying to the FBI and painting him as a Russian-intelligence op. (That’s the same Weiss who tried to give Hunter a sweetheart deal and let the statute of limitations expire on charges for Hunter’s foreign-influence-peddling.) Democrats are now trumpeting the notion that this proves that anything questioning the ethics of the Bidens is “Russian disinformation.” What rot. But Republicans should have been more careful in handling the Smirnov allegations.
• Former vice president Mike Pence has launched a new initiative: the American Solutions Project. He intends it to serve as an alternative to “the populist Right and the progressive Left” (in his words). On Pence’s board is Ed Feulner, a co-founder of the Heritage Foundation in the 1970s. “Our nation was founded on conservative principles that have stood the test of time,” said Pence. “Many in the conservative movement have walked away from these principles, chasing the siren song of populism.” The compatibility of conservatism and populism, and the tensions between them, have been a subject of debate for conservatives for decades; we ran articles on both sides of it in the 1980s. We look forward to Pence’s contributions to this ongoing conversation. He may be out of the electoral arena, but he can still do much good in the political arena.
• On Fox News, Laura Ingraham asked Donald Trump about the fine levied against his businesses after a civil trial. He responded, “It’s a form of Navalny” and “It’s happening in our country too.” The moral grossness of this response is typical of the man. And he has yet to criticize the Putin dictatorship for its persecution of Alexei Navalny or to praise the late opposition leader for his courage. Trump’s political fortunes rise and fall, but his basic character, unfortunately, is constant.
• Say what you will of Vladimir Putin, he has been a great strengthener of NATO. Member states have boosted military spending in response to his aggressions, while neighbor Finland has joined the alliance and near-neighbor Sweden is about to do so. Meanwhile, Donald Trump chips away at it. At a rally in South Carolina, he described how he demanded that NATO allies meet the guideline of spending 2 percent of GDP on defense. “One of the presidents of a big country” allegedly asked him whether the U.S. would defend it against Russia if it had fallen short of that goal. Trump said he told him no. “In fact I would encourage [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay.” Many NATO members are laggard, and all U.S. presidents urge them to spend more. More disturbing were his thoughts at a rally in Nevada two weeks earlier. “I hate to tell you this about NATO—if we ever needed their help, let’s say we were attacked, I don’t believe they’d be there.” But we were attacked, on 9/11, and NATO allies, as per Article 5 of the treaty, joined us in the invasion of Afghanistan. It’s the only time Article 5 has been invoked. If a former president doesn’t know this, it is shocking. If he knows it and ignores it for demagogic purposes, it is worse.
• Congress created the Emergency Broadband Benefit Program in its end-of-the-year spending bill in 2020. Supposedly to address a crisis of broadband access during the pandemic, it started only in May 2021 and has since evolved into the Affordable Connectivity Program, which pays $30 per month to qualifying households to cover internet bills. More than 20 million households are currently enrolled. The program has been subject to fraud. One way to qualify is by having a child who receives free or reduced-price lunch; the FCC’s inspector general has found dozens of schools across the country with more ACP enrollees than students. And even if the program were squeaky-clean, the federal government should not be subsidizing internet bills. A chunk of the subsidy goes to internet-service providers, which have branded their service as “free” after aggressively encouraging customers to enroll in the Affordable Connectivity Program and buy service that costs $30 per month. Fortunately, Congress can end the program by doing what it does best: absolutely nothing. Funding is scheduled to run out in April, and the FCC is already winding down the program, with no new applicants having been accepted after February 8. Congress should let the ACP be the exception proving the rule that there’s no such thing as a temporary government program.
• A massive collection of documents from a Shanghai-based firm that contracts with China’s security services appeared online, revealing new details about Beijing’s cyber-espionage campaigns. The company, I-Soon, sells software to Chinese-government security agencies. These products enable surveillance, propaganda, and hacking activities that target foreign countries and domestic enemies of the Chinese Communist Party. The documents show how Chinese operatives compromise foreign Wi-Fi routers, hack into email and social-media accounts, and surveil Uyghurs and Tibetans. The leak mostly concerns Asian countries; the documents don’t provide much information on hacking operations targeting the U.S. and NATO members. One takeaway (among many others) that should alarm Americans is the revelation that I-Soon claimed to be able to hack accounts on X and Outlook. When we talk about internet privacy, we don’t usually have the CCP in mind—but maybe we should.
• With wars raging in Gaza and Ukraine, Secretary of State Antony Blinken found time to confront the scourge of gendered language. In an official February 5 cable obtained by National Review, Blinken informed State Department staff that making assumptions about other people’s gender identity based on their appearance or name “can be problematic” and send a “harmful, exclusionary message.” In order to avoid offending their co-workers and, presumably, all of the Oberlin graduates they’ll encounter in the course of their diplomatic work around the world, department employees should avoid using terms such as “mother/father,” “son/daughter,” and “husband/wife,” Blinken wrote. He also urged his staff to give their pronouns in email signatures and when introducing themselves in meetings, “to show respect and avoid misunderstandings.” “Commonly used pronouns could include she/her, he/him, they/them, and ze/zir,” the cable says, adding that some people use more than one set and some people may accept all pronouns. “This is a personal decision that should be respected.” America (she/her?) could use better leaders.
• Yale University announced that it would return to requiring standardized-test scores for all applicants. Following the lead of Dartmouth College, which earlier this month announced its reinstatement of a standardized-testing requirement, Yale explained that “among all application components, test scores are the single greatest predictor of a student’s future Yale grades.” Children without connections, consultants, or access to numerous extracurricular opportunities often have no other way of distinguishing themselves on their applications. Congratulations to Yale for taking a critical step back toward sanity.
• The latest ranking of “presidential greatness” based on surveying members of the American Political Science Association (APSA) is out. Trump ranked dead last. Biden ranked 14th; he, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and former APSA president Woodrow Wilson all ranked above Ronald Reagan. Other rankings reflected partisan and ideological bias, including FDR above George Washington and Jimmy Carter above Calvin Coolidge. Lyndon Johnson made the top ten; all is forgiven for Vietnam. No president has declined so much in the last decade as Andrew Jackson, which was overdue; the two to improve the most were Obama and Ulysses S. Grant, only the latter of whom deserves the upgrade. The data that APSA released imply that less than 10 percent of respondents were conservatives or Republicans. The rankings reflect not just the leftist drift of the academy and the press in an election featuring both Biden and Trump but also the lack of agreed standards for “greatness.” Making a large mess is not actually superior to preventing one. The rankings should not be taken too seriously, nor the people who make them.
• Users of the new Google Gemini AI chatbot discovered that the service responds to prompts in a politically correct and ahistorical fashion: Requests for images of popes and the Founding Fathers yielded hilariously inaccurate results (for the former, a Southeast Asian woman; for the latter, black and Native American men). Even images of Nazi soldiers got a racially diverse treatment. Amid widespread criticism and mockery of the image-generation feature, Google has paused it, allegedly to work out the kinks. Let’s hope that this befuddled, PC Gemini chatbot can be relegated to the history it so clumsily miscasts.