Dear Weekend Jolter,
Everywhere we look these days, Robert Conquest’s “laws” of politics are being affirmed, notably the one about how the best way to understand a bureaucratic organization is to assume it’s controlled by a cabal of enemies. How else to explain California’s high-speed-rail debacle? Or, more significantly, the scope of pandemic-era fraud that’s only now being discovered?
Writing for NR Capital Matters this week, the Manhattan Institute’s Brian Riedl shows us the dark side of Covid-relief aid. The abuse goes beyond the ordinary cost of doing government business, into almost ludicrous territory:
A Florida man fraudulently used a $7.2 million emergency loan to purchase a 12,579-square-foot mansion and several cars. A California couple fraudulently collected $18 million and purchased “three houses, diamonds, gold coins, luxury watches, expensive furniture and other valuables.” Another man forged enough applications to collect $27 million in Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) funds.
“The biggest fraud in a generation.” That’s how a former U.S. attorney described the immense waste and abuse from the federal government’s emergency pandemic aid. . . .
The numbers are staggering. Approximately $80 billion of the $800 billion disbursed by the PPP program was likely fraudulent. Added to that, the Small Business Administration also disbursed as much as $80 billion in fraudulent Economic Injury Disaster loans. And on top of that, the unemployment-insurance system lost as much as $163 billion of its $1 trillion in pandemic-era disbursements to fraud and overpayments.
That’s just the fraud stuff, within programs that were otherwise worthy and vital during the pandemic emergency. State and local governments also received billions they didn’t need, money that is now sitting in accounts or paying for extravagances or going to new-age feel-gooderies. Riedl estimates that the total figure for money squandered in the realms of waste, fraud, and unnecessary nonsense spanning the Trump and Biden administrations could approach $1 trillion.
Credit to those engaged in the Sisyphean task of tracking this down and ideally clawing some of it back. Michael Horowitz, the pandemic-response oversight chair whom you might recognize from his day job as Justice Department IG, said last month that the Labor Department watchdog alone had charged more than 1,000 people with unemployment-insurance fraud. He noted efforts to improve anti-fraud controls — but aside from being a reminder of how obscenely mismanaged these programs are, and of how exploitative some of our fellow countrymen can be during moments of national vulnerability, this level of waste belies the cries for ever more of it.
The pandemic-oversight committee notes it is trying to keep track of over $5 trillion in related spending. We’ve since committed another $1 trillion (half of it new spending) for infrastructure and given up an estimated $400 billion via Biden’s student-debt “forgiveness” (if it holds up in court), among other projects. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that the Biden administration has enacted policies that will add nearly $2.5 trillion to deficits over the next decade, not counting the Covid-linked American Rescue Plan. This is kindling, of course, for our inflation and national-debt problems.
At the very least, as Riedl says, taxpayers deserve better than the “avalanche” of pandemic fraud and waste. The most recent head-shaker, described as the “largest pandemic relief fraud scheme charged to date,” involved a network of dozens of people in Minnesota who allegedly obtained nearly $250 million meant for feeding needy kids. The details need no embellishment, and can be found here. Credit, again, to the feds for catching this. That $250 million can be siphoned away before somebody notices, however, is a reasonably strong sign that our policy-making has lost touch with the meaning of money.
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One last thing: A hearty thank you to everyone who responded to last week’s subscription-drive appeal and signed up for NRPlus (which you can still do). I should also mention one related troubleshooting point that comes up from time to time. If you are an NRPlus member and ever find yourself hitting the paywall, do check to make sure you’re logged in. Sometimes that’s the issue.
And that, dear friends, is where my IT knowledge runs out. The best of the week follows.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
If we really are facing the threat of “Armageddon,” then our defenses are going to need some crash enhancements: We Need More Missile Defenses
In Biden’s defense, the law was simply in the way: On Obamacare, Biden Goes Where Even Obama Wouldn’t
The Golden State needs better governance: California Crazy
ARTICLES
Rich Lowry: Mandela Barnes and the Limits of Post–George Floyd Politics
Charles C. W. Cooke: The Media Can’t Gaslight the Public about John Fetterman’s Health
Ryan Mills: The Man MAGA Missed: Brian Kemp Defying Predictions in Rematch with Stacey Abrams Despite Trump Clash
Isaac Schorr: LA City Council President Resigns from Leadership amid Backlash over Racist Remarks, Will Remain on Council
Jay Nordlinger: Freedom Fighter
Caroline Downey: Vanderbilt Medical Center Suspends Gender-Transition Surgeries for Minors following Backlash
Dan McLaughlin: Saying ‘Regime’ Is Bad, Except When We Say It
Dan McLaughlin: Still Just One Cheer for Kanye West
John McCormack: Mandela Barnes Admits He Opposes Any Legal Limit on Abortion Until Birth
Brittany Bernstein: Allan Fung Hopes to Lead a Moderate ‘Rebirth’ in the GOP Caucus. First He Has to Defy the Odds
Jimmy Quinn: Taiwan’s Civilian Defenders Are Clamoring for U.S. Military Training
Andrew McCarthy: Durham’s Danchenko Trial Looks a Lot Like His Sussmann Trial
CAPITAL MATTERS
A boondoggle is exposed, yet again. From Dominic Pino: The Entirely Predictable Failure of California High-Speed Rail
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Brian Allen offers a lively and measured analysis of the messy strike at Philadelphia’s most famous museum: Art-Museum Strike in the City of Brotherly Love
Armond White lauds a “sobering revival of two artists,” in a new concert film: David Johansen Makes Scorsese Great Again
FROM THE NEW, OCTOBER 31, 2022, ISSUE OF NR
Sebastian Junger: Inside the Shameful Cancellation of Jihad Rehab
Jimmy Quinn: Taiwan Needs Quills
Nate Hochman: Seeing Red in the Rio Grande Valley
Rachel Lu: Confessions of a ‘Christian Nationalist’
Dan McLaughlin: Purple-and-Blue-State Blues
IF WE COULD JUST SAY A FEW MORE WORDS . . .
Sebastian Junger’s cover story in the latest issue of NR is a must-read, inside account of how a cancel mob destroyed a highly praised documentary, and a career along with it:
At the beginning of director Meg Smaker’s documentary Jihad Rehab, we hear a former Guantanamo detainee saying, “Meg, can I tell you something?” Sure, a woman’s voice says. “In every story there is good and bad,” the man goes on in a gentle Saudi accent. “But . . . it’s a thin line. The American government did bad, bad, bad things against us. But at least I am honest with what I did.”
The voice belongs to a former al-Qaeda bomb-maker named “Khalid” who claims he was tortured by Americans at Guantanamo. In an extraordinary scene, he also admits to being deeply troubled by the people his bombs killed. He is one of five men profiled in Smaker’s film who say they went to Afghanistan to train at al-Qaeda’s al-Farouq training camp, outside Kandahar, and were detained by the U.S. military following the attacks of September 11. (Khalid is Saudi, but the other four men are Yemeni.) The men were flown to Guantanamo and detained without charges for years or decades before being released to a Saudi-run program dedicated to preparing former al-Qaeda members for civilian life.
Smaker speaks Arabic and spent around ten years, off and on, living in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Yemen. That includes a stint training Yemenis in modern firefighting techniques, which was where she first heard about the Saudi program. Smaker says it took two years just to get permission from the Saudi government and then another three years of shooting to get enough material to make the film. (Smaker had a significant financial backer in Abigail Disney, a well-known supporter of women filmmakers, but had to invest much of her own savings as well.) The bin Salman regime, which seized power in 2018, shut down the project towards the end of principal shooting, but Smaker had gotten what she needed: hundreds of hours of extraordinarily candid and intimate conversations with four men who had been swept up in America’s “War on Terror.”
Two years of editing produced a film that stunned virtually everyone who saw it. Smaker’s combination of access to the men, compassion for what they had gone through, and willingness to ask tough questions about their violent pasts made her film unique. “EVERY sales agent that saw the film wanted to rep it,” Smaker told me by email. “EVERY PR firm who saw the film wanted to rep it. EVERY big festival we applied to, we got into, except Cannes and Berlin.”
After six years of hard work, Smaker was living out a filmmaker’s fantasy. She was selected to premiere her film at Sundance, which many consider to be the top independent-film festival in the world, and accepted screenings at a slew of other festivals, including South by Southwest. Because she would not be ready in time, she turned down the Toronto International Film Festival, but Thom Powers, the director, remained a strong advocate. So it was with enormous anticipation that Smaker and her team — spread between the Middle East, Europe, South America, and the United States — waited for Sundance’s announcement of the 2022 slate.
The big day arrived on December 9, 2021, and the announcement triggered an avalanche of congratulations and praise. One odd note stood out, though: An American-born filmmaker of South Asian descent named A. K. Sandhu posted on Facebook, “Congratulations on all the hard work, Meg. I didn’t know that some Muslim filmmakers felt hurt by the film title. . . . I hope it can be navigated with sensitivity.”
The note didn’t seem particularly ominous, but Smaker’s Yemeni executive producer still sent a polite response that said, in part, “As an Arab Muslim, I couldn’t be more proud of this work and have ZERO issues with the title. . . . Meg and her team worked closely with several respected Islamic Scholars making sure nothing in it would be offensive to our community.”
Sandhu’s comment wasn’t a random one-off, however; it was the opening probe of what quickly grew into a well -organized campaign to “deplatform” the film and thwart its release. Shortly after, Smaker’s phone began lighting up with increasingly strident and puzzling denunciations of her, her film, and the whole idea that a white filmmaker could presume to tackle such a subject. The race issue was raised on social media by numerous people involved in documentary film — though it has since been disavowed as a legitimate critique of the film. The “authorship” or “inclusion” principle, as this is known, insists that filmmakers share the ethnic and cultural identity of their subjects. According to these standards, not only are outsiders incapable of understanding the experiences of others, they don’t even have the right to try; to do otherwise would be to take an opportunity away from a better-qualified person of color. As a white American, Smaker would be wildly inappropriate for a film about the Muslim world.
Ryan Mills has an excellent account of Governor Brian Kemp’s strategy in a campaign that has weathered the kind of Trump attacks that have felled lesser politicians:
Despite Kemp’s conservative successes, ousting him from office has remained one of Trump’s top political priorities. In September 2021, the former president told Georgia rallygoers, “It would be okay with me” if [Stacey] Abrams dethroned Kemp. “Of course, having her, I think, might be better than having your existing governor, if you want to know what I think,” he said.
Trump threw his weight — and about $3 million — behind [David] Perdue’s campaign. Perdue, who had initially indicated his intention to challenge Democrat Raphael Warnock for his Senate seat, blamed Kemp and Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger for dividing the state and failing to sufficiently back Trump. “Instead of protecting our elections, he caved to Abrams and cost us two Senate seats, the Senate majority, and gave Joe Biden free rein,” Perdue said.
But Kemp, using political cunning and his powers as an incumbent governor, essentially kneecapped Perdue’s campaign before it even got started. According to a Politico report, one Kemp adviser told hundreds of well-heeled donors and contributors earlier this year that they had a plan to “go f***ing scorched earth” in the primary. Kemp used the levers of power to win the support of Georgia power players, including many of Perdue’s former backers, and to court the state’s biggest donors, leaving Perdue’s campaign financially devastated, Politico reported.
Kemp told National Review he doesn’t know about the “scorched earth” talk. “I just know this: When David Perdue got in the race, the first day he attacked me. He took the gloves off,” Kemp said. “My thing to my folks was, we’ve got a more conservative record than he does, and we’re not going to let him attack us and get away with it.”
“We played hardball in the primaries, as Republicans do,” he added. “But the primary is over now. David’s supporting me. We’re united.” . . . Heading into November, Kemp said he believes Republicans are more united around him than Democrats are around Abrams.
Jimmy Quinn just got back from a reporting trip to Taiwan, which you can catch up on here. His final feature spotlights a group of civilian defenders training for the possibility of a Chinese invasion:
A Ukrainian flag fluttered in the yard of a Presbyterian church located a stone’s throw from Taiwan’s legislature, as a crowd gathered inside on a recent weekend for a wedding rehearsal. Meanwhile, in a conference room below, a few dozen people prepared for an expected Chinese invasion of their country.
Although some officials and experts have attempted to offer a timeline, no one knows precisely when Beijing might launch an assault, should the regime ultimately choose that path. Nevertheless, with Chinese military threats escalating and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at front of mind, at least a handful of Taiwan’s 23 million citizens are preparing for an attack.
During a recent full-day session, which National Review attended, participants in the training listened to lectures on People’s Liberation Army military tactics, learned how to spot and debunk Chinese disinformation, and practiced tying tourniquets for simultaneous injuries on multiple limbs.
Dedicated to civil-defense activities, these groups do not closely resemble the territorial-defense militias that have come to play a significant role in Ukraine’s defense against the Russian invasion. But that war has spurred people to action here in Taiwan.
At what scale remains to be seen. Organizers from the group that held the training course, called Kuma Academy, said that around 35 people, mostly from the Taipei area, attended the weekend’s training, and that these classes take place just about every two weeks. They’d like to eventually get U.S. military trainers involved — though the likelihood of such a request being honored is unclear at this stage. . . .
“I think the most important element in our national defense is your mental defense and also your civilian defense,” Cheng-hui Ho, one of the co-founders of Kuma Academy, told NR through a translator. “If we spend so much money on building our national military power but our people have no will to fight, those investments, our military budget, will mainly be wasted.”
Dan McLaughlin offers some wise counsel for conservatives about Kanye West:
There are good reasons why Kanye West has millions of fans outside of politics. He’s been a creative musical force for two decades, and everyone from rap aficionados to rap-dislikers (I count myself in the latter camp) recognizes that he is a fantastically talented musician, maybe the most inventive in the history of rap. He’s won two dozen Grammys and sold over 150 million records.
There are also good reasons why conservatives have taken positive notice of Kanye’s periodic forays into right-leaning politics, from denouncing abortion’s effects on black Americans to boosting Donald Trump to trolling the Black Lives Matter organization to going on Tucker Carlson. There is likewise value in the openly Christian elements of his music and his public speech. He’s bringing some conservative or right-leaning messages to people who don’t hear those messages very often, and he’s showing the courage to buck the leftist conformity of the industry and genre in which he swims. It helps that Kanye is, like J. K. Rowling or Elon Musk, too big to cancel. Moreover, like Trump, he simply has a gift for drawing attention to whatever he does.
So, one cheer for Kanye. But it will never be more than one, and to understand why, consider this weekend’s entirely self-inflicted controversy over tweets in which Kanye said, among other things, “I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE. The funny thing is I actually can’t be Anti Semitic because black people are actually Jew also.” There really is no way to read any of this as anything but textbook, open antisemitism. . . .
A healthy culture can recognize him as a talented artist and an occasionally useful partner in the culture wars, but we need not choose between excusing him at his worst or permanently “canceling” him for it. On this occasion, there is no excusing.
Shout-Outs
Madeline Malisa, at RealClearPolicy: How Winners Are Losing in American Elections
Dakota Smith & James Rainey, at the Los Angeles Times: Racist leaked audio. Corruption. City Hall in chaos. L.A. politics faces a perilous moment
Eric Boehm, at Reason: Texas Roofer Arrested in Florida for Helping Hurricane Victims
Noelle Fitchett, at Campus Reform: Students recite woke pledge during white coat ceremony
CODA
Cover songs can be risky business. The line between defiling (Madonna’s “American Pie”) and honoring (Faith No More’s “War Pigs”), even elevating, the original isn’t always visible to the one paying tribute. Then again, sometimes you encounter a cover song that simply defies description because it’s so blasphemous. Not necessarily bad or good, but blasphemous — a version that scarcely draws from the source, a source you can’t quite place the first few listens until, pop, it hits you, and then you wonder how they’re getting away with this at all. That was my experience, anyway, realizing that A Perfect Circle was actually covering “When the Levee Breaks” here (part of an album of covers released nearly 20 years ago). The most famous version of that song, and a damn good one, must be Zeppelin’s, though it’s originally a 1920s blues song by “Kansas Joe” McCoy and Memphis Minnie. See what you think of Maynard’s take. As for me: I don’t not like it.
Have you heard any blasphemous covers lately? Send ’em my way, if you’d like to share with this list, at jberger@nationalreview.com. And thanks for reading.