Young American Men; A Lost Generation

I don’t have the precise reference, but I am confident that someone somewhere told us that women’s advancement would not be at the expense of men. A rising tide lifts all boats, they say.

Feminists might not have wanted to use the phrase, because it makes them sound stupid, but they have promised women that they could have it all. 

Feminists also promised that men, as soon as they got over their patriarchal toxic masculinity, would happily welcome women into the workplace and onto the battlefield. And they also told us that said men would happily do half the household chores. 

Anyway, contemporary feminism has been around for some five decades now, and women have never had it so good. At least, to be fair, if they do not mind being alone, without male partners. They have made progress in the world of work and warfare. And they have learned to hookup. Another victory for feminism.

One begins on this note because it is conspicuously absent from the most recent Wall Street Journal article on the sorry state of American men. To think that this has nothing to do with feminism is naive to an extreme. 

According to the Journal, these future masters of the universe, male chauvinist oppressors, incipient raging patriarchs have dropped out of school, can barely hold a job, are living at home and are helping Mom do the dishes.

The Journal reports:

Presented with a more-equal playing field, young women are seizing the opportunities in front of them, while young men are floundering. The phenomenon has developed over the past decade, but was supercharged by the pandemic, which derailed careers, schooling and isolated friends and families. The result has big implications for the economy.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, but we are not talking about a level playing field. We are seeing the outcome of the ongoing war against boys. Christina Hoff Sommers wrote about more than two decades ago, and apparently it persists. 

Boys are disparaged and denigrated. They attend schools run by women, for girls, and are brought up by enlightened mothers who refuse to let them be boys.  And when they suffer from any level of emotional distress they are sent packing, to a female therapist who wants them to get in touch with their feelings.

And of course, the full throated assault on the role of male breadwinner has left many young men confused, feeling useless. If a woman can do everything for herself by herself, why should he work to provide for her and for their children?

In her Journal piece, Rachel Wolfe mistakes the problem for the solution. She offers various forms of therapy as a cure for men’s failure as men. And therapy is hawking feminist and feminine values. 

“They’re not as able to talk about their feelings, so they are going to have fewer friendships with other men and suffer more psychologically,” says Niobe Way, a professor of developmental psychology at New York University.

It’s nice to have a professorial opinion, even if it is grossly wrong headed. Men do not connect with other men by sharing their feelings. Women do connect with other women by doing so.

Men connect with other men by participating in male dominant activities. Joining a bowling league, going to the ballgame, playing golf together, going fishing-- these forms of male bonding do not involve whining over the soup.

Wolfe offers another example of a man who has found the way to become more like a woman. The man in question, a recovering alcoholic, has done therapy. From it, he learned about “emotional honesty.” If you join a baseball team or a military unit no one much cares about your emotional honesty. Everyone cares about how well you wear the uniform and follow the rules.

He has also overhauled his approach to friendship to prioritize emotional honesty. “It’s definitely a true stereotype that men say they’re fine instead of getting feedback and criticism and all the useful things you need to grow,” he says. And he has gone to individual and group therapy to overcome his depression.

Are we about to find a way out of this labyrinth? Apparently not.

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Whiner in Chief

Friday in New York City the prime minister of Israel laid down the gauntlet, for America and the world to see. As it racks up an increasingly impressive number of successes against Hezbollah in Lebanon, it gains respect and even admiration in the international community.

The London Telegraph wrote this:

The implications of today’s action cannot be understated. Israel has seized the initiative in the most extraordinary manner, and this demonstration of military brilliance may well even convince Tehran to direct its other terror proxy Hamas to release the remaining hostages and sue for peace across the region. We can only hope.

Israel’s success in Lebanon, from the exploding pagers attack to the killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah,  was done on its own initiative. The Biden administration was not informed and did not participate.

Naturally, this torques those who belong to the whiners’ chorus, led by New York Times columnist Tommy Friedman. Where Israel chalks up more and more successes, Tommy believes that Israel has chalked up more and more failures. The reason, it has not listened to the Biden counsel of cowardice and the whining of Tommy Friedman himself. He believes that Israel has set out on a “road to ruin encircled by a ring of fire” that will ultimately destroy the nation. He, like the Biden team, continue to drool over the prospect of a cease fire.

At a time when Israel has taken the fight to Hezbollah and has shown superior military abilities, this defeatest rhetoric is the last thing anyone needs. People should feel proud of Israel and should feel pride in their successes. Only the cowardly lions of the Biden administration are upset to see what is happening.

With friends like that, you do not need enemies. Because after all, the Tommy approach is simply to surrender. It makes a certain amount of sense, since America has not been winning too many wars lately. The Biden administration has presided over some very serious chaos, in the Middle East and in Eastern Europe, but when Israel decides that it will do what it has to do in order to win, the Biden flunkies take out their whining towels and offer the road to retreat.

So, Tommy says that Israel is a pariah state. As for Hamas, the Saudis told Israel, via back channels, to “waste” Hamas. Anyone who knows the least smidgeon about Middle East politics knows that the Saudis despise the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas and also the Iranian proxies like Hezbollah and the Houthis.

We recall that when Egyptians voted for a president who had been a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, that is, Mohamed Morsi, the Saudis cut off Egypt’s credit line, and thus its access to grain. Facing mass starvation, the military mounted a coup and installed General al Sisi.

And we also know that when the Israelis killed Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran the Saudi Crown Prince declared that no one in the kingdom would be allowed to mourn his death.

Surely, the Saudis are not grieving the death of Hassan Hasrallah. They have never wanted to have anything to do with the Iran-backed madness. 

It might be less than overt support, but to say that Israel is a pariah state feels like wishful thinking by Tommy Friedman. He is saying, in a not very subtle way, that Israel must be punished for not following his lame advice.

As of now Tommy counts as one of the few remaining nitwits who still believe in the two state solution. He considers that the root of the problem in Gaza is Israeli intransigence, an unwillingness to allow moderate Palestinians to rule that swath of land. He must be the only person who believes in the myth of moderate Palestinians and who believes that a Hamas that survives the Israeli attack will be more willing to compromise and to live in peace.

Despite the best efforts of the Biden administration to get Israel to surrender, that small beleaguered nation is showing the world that it commands its own destiny. Consider how much better it would be doing if the Biden team had not stopped sending it certain armaments and munitions.

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Saturday Miscellany

First, remember Stephanie Ruhle. She is the MSNBC pseudo-journalist who scored a Kamala Harris sit-down interview by saying something stupid.

When arguing about whether or not Harris should answer questions from the press, Ruhle told Bret Stephens that she did not have to do so because we do not live in Nirvana.

So, Ruhle interviewed Harris and did her best to run cover for the mentally challenged candidate:

One could watch and say she didn't give a clear and direct answer. And that's okay, because we're not talking about clear and direct issues.

But at least we could thrill to the fact that Harris, like a diligent student, had learned a new word. She repeated it over and over again, apparently because that was a way to let people see that she did not understand it.

For example, some of the work is going to be through what we do in terms of giving benefits and assistance to state and local governments around transit dollars,' she first replied….

 and looking holistically at the connection between that and housing, and looking holistically at the incentives we in the federal government can create for local and state governments to actually engage in planning in a holistic manner that includes prioritizing affordable housing for working people,' 

It is not merely that she is remotely qualified to hold the highest office in the land. She is a walking embarrassment, an argument against democracy.

Second, Stephenie Ruhle has gone the way of Oprah. She imagined that Harris could not possibly be as stupid as people said she was, so she allowed Harris to make a fool of her.

Third, from Alex Jones, a point that I made in a post on Tuesday of this week:

Kamala Harris is a soulless, truly empty flesh bag who was admittedly a sex operative...it's clear that Kamala Harris was a political sex operative. Willie Brown's talked about it all of it. And then she was so soulless and would put innocent people in prison, know they were innocent on death row, home invasions, looking for legal guns, saying she'd do it. Then when she was the attorney general, she would put pro-lifers that exposed the illegal killing of babies right at nine months when they were already born and the selling of their organs, including still beating baby hearts. She would put the journalists in jail for many years. That's her famous cases. So the system has seen her, has passed her around. They know she's super stupid. And they can bring her in like Biden blame everything that bad happens on her. And so she is the greatest example of a mindless puppet that they want to put in to further demoralize us to think that that's America, to make America a further joke around the world. So that's who Kamala Harris is, a clear and present danger and a meat puppet."

Fourth, you may or may not be aware of it, but interesting things are happening in Argentina. A new president Javier Milei has managed to cancel many of the remaining socialist economic policies that had damaged the country and had produced rampant inflation.

This week, Milei was in New York addressing the United Nations. Here is an excerpt from his speech:

"In this very house, that claims to defend human rights, they have allowed the entry of bloody dictatorships, like those of Cuba and Venezuela, without the slightest reproach.

"In this very house, that claims to defend the rights of women, it allows countries that punish their women for showing skin, to enter the committee for the elimination of discrimination against women.

"In this very house, there has been systematic voting against the state of Israel, which is the only country in the Middle East that defends liberal democracy, while simultaneously demonstrating a total inability to respond to the scourge of terrorism."

Fifth, and then there is the USNS ship, The Little Big Horn, a replenishment oiler that went aground in the Gulf of Oman. Since it was the only oiler the Navy has, this was not good news.

As for the salient issue, who was in charge of this ship, we note that it was not being run by the Pentagon, but by the Department of Transportation, led by Pete Buttigieg. It belongs to the nation’s maritime fleet.

Who is directly in charge of said fleet? The responsible party is Read Admiral Ann Phillips. She has said nothing about the latest accident.

Sixth, comparing China and Russia in the Financial Times, Gideon Rachman makes an interesting point or two.

Amer­ica’s sin­gu­lar strength is its mil­it­ary might and its will­ing­ness to offer secur­ity guar­an­tees to its allies. The US has col­lect­ive defence agree­ments with 56 coun­tries around the world — in Europe, Asia and the Amer­icas. It also provides cru­cial mil­it­ary aid to other coun­tries, such as Israel and Ukraine, that are not formal treaty allies.

China, by con­trast, has a mutual defence treaty with just one coun­try — North Korea. Unlike the US, it also has ter­rit­orial dis­putes with many of its neigh­bours, which tends to push them in the dir­ec­tion of Amer­ica.

But, that’s not all, folks.

Aus­tralia’s Lowy Insti­tute cal­cu­lates that 128 coun­tries now trade more with China than with the US. Over the last dec­ade, China has spent more than a tril­lion dol­lars in over 140 coun­tries on infra­struc­ture invest­ment, becom­ing the world’s largest cred­itor and the world’s largest trad­ing power in the pro­cess. The res­ults are on dis­play all over the world, whether it is high-speed rail in Indone­sia, ports and bridges in Africa or an inter­con­tin­ental high­way cross­ing cent­ral Asia.

West­ern coun­tries can and do point to the flaws in China’s Belt and Road Ini­ti­at­ive, not­ably the huge debts owed to Chinese lenders that weigh on coun­tries such as Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Zam­bia. But for devel­op­ing coun­tries that are seek­ing to make rapid eco­nomic pro­gress, the Chinese offer remains attract­ive.

As Daniel Runde, a former USAID offi­cial, told Con­gress this year: “From project iden­ti­fic­a­tion to sign­ing, com­men­cing and com­plet­ing — China is much faster and cheaper than the United States at vir­tu­ally every stage.”

Anyway, we all know that a Chinese submarine sank the other day. We concluded that the Chinese are militarily well behind us, and that we can now break out the champagne.

The Rachman observation suggests that we ought to be a little more circumspect.

Seventh, Franklin Foer is puzzled at the failure of the Biden administration Middle East policy. It takes a special form of blindness not to see the obvious, but clearly Foer cannot bring himself to affix blame where blame is required.

Keep in mind that the Democratic mantra is: it’s someone else’s fault.

Over at Pajamas Media Stephen Green lays out the anatomy of a massive foreign policy failure.

Less than one month into his solitary, sad little term, Biden lifted former president Donald Trump’s restoration of U.N. sanctions on Iran. The White House and the State Steno Pool sold the move as something that "could help Washington move toward rejoining the 2015 nuclear agreement aimed at reining in the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program." Trump had withdrawn from Barack Obama's "Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, in 2018, accusing Iran of serious violations.

Trump had Iran broke and boxed in. Biden unleashed the Kraken.

In addition to that, Biden restored US funding to UNRWA (a virtual arm of Hamas) and removed the Houthis from the Foreign Terrorist Organization and Specially Designated Global Terrorist lists that Trump had finally put them on late in his term.

But perhaps the most bone-headed move was Biden's rejection of Mike Pompeo and Jared Kushner's Abraham Accords, negotiated under Donald Trump's auspices between Israel and a growing number of Arab states.

How could they be so stupid? Simple. They were so completely enthralled by the notion that Trump is evil that they felt obliged to undo everything Trump had done, indiscriminately.

The result is visible on our television screens every day.

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Abigail's Case Fiction Concludes

Herewith the conclusion of Abigail’s case fiction.

Back in the day, when Freudian psychoanalysis ruled the mental health roost, an analyst would have wanted to uncover the desire that Abigail was repressing with her systematically bad behavior. He might have considered that she was punishing men for what one boy did to her during childhood. He might have wanted to suss out the hidden desire, that is, whether or not she really wanted to be sexually abused by the neighbor.

Seymour was aware of all this, but he was not in the psycho analysis business. Coaching was different. It involved changing behavior, changing the way one conducted one’s life. And it invited the client to follow instructions laid down by the coach, better to learn how to play the game. In this case, the game involved seduction and socialization. 

Whereas therapy sought the why, coaching looked for the how. Therapy, whether psycho analytic of otherwise, sought to provide the patient with an understanding of why she was doing what she was doing. Presumably, this insight would lead to  more constructive behaviors.

With coaching the question was how the client could learn to function differently. Clearly, Abigail’s behavior, her studied rudeness and her insistence of doing what she wanted when she wanted, was a way to manage the anxiety that attended her trauma. 

And yet, she believed that it was authentic. She believed that she would suffer if she repressed it. This meant that her path out of her dilemma would require her to listen carefully to Seymour. Her instincts were thoroughly embroiled with her childhood trauma. If she continued to follow their lead she would never overcome it. That is, she would never banish the ghost of Delbert.

At the least, Seymour wanted her to refrain from carnal relations for the time being. Admittedly, this would require something like repression, but being a hookup queen was obviously not doing her very much good.

Abigail complied, though she did not like complying. She was quickly losing her faith in Seymour. Nevertheless, refraining from sex did not feel all that bad after all. It required her to find other ways to connect.

When Bertram invited her to have dinner in Chinatown, at the Golden Unicorn, she bit her tongue and refrained from announcing that the place felt to her like a cafeteria. She merely asked him when he wanted to pick her up.

She was disconcerted at having manifested a compliance that she barely recognized as her own. Seymour, however, thought it a sign of progress. Refraining from insulting Bertram was precisely what he wanted her to do.

For her part Abigail had no real confidence in her ability to conduct the burgeoning relationship. All she really knew was her feelings. She believed that expressing them was the right thing to do. Seymour tried, with some success, to explain that she was really functioning like a character in a movie or play, someone who needed to express feelings more flagrantly because otherwise they would go unnoticed.

Besides making a spectacle of one’s feelings ignored the other person. How could she allow Bertram to tell her about himself if she was monopolizing the conversation with  dramatic display. Thereby, Seymour introduced the notion of moderation, of temperance. Rather than see the relationship as a way to learn about herself, she might consider it a way to connect with another human being.

So Seymour asked a series of questions about Bertram. “Tell me what you know about him. Who is he, where does he come from, what kind of family does he have, have you ever met his friends. 

And then there remained the question of what Abigail was looking for herself. She had declared herself opposed to marriage, and that was convenient if Bertram was just another hookup, but what if he wanted more. Would she need to overcome her compunctions about wifedom? 

Of course, Seymur wanted Abigail to be flexible. He did not want her wed to the no-marriage position, something that would almost guarantee that she would eventually be dumped.

Four days later Abigail returned to report on her date with Bertram. It had been something of a disappointment. She had learned that he was a distinguished member of his profession, that he liked mountain biking and basketball. 

Abigail had to strain to show any interest. Besides, the air conditioning at the restaurant was too cold and the service was slipshod. Yet, the food was very good.

She blamed Seymour for the dull date. “Were it not for you I would have been more spontaneous and more fiery.” Seymour replied glibly: “Sometimes one can be thankful for little things.”

Over the next few weeks Abigail found herself spending more time with Bertram. She liked him but she was far from enraptured. She was even enjoying conversation with him. On those few occasions when she came out with a gross insult, about the way he dressed, for example, he laughed it off.

The only thing that was missing in this budding romance was the sex. By all evidence Bertram was not interested. Abigail knew how to seduce men; she was rather good at it; but for a time nothing worked on her new lover.

Since she had tried every way she knew to show she was ready, willing and able to have sex, none of it had worked. So she explained to Seymour that he had to find another ruse, or else, she would lose her mind.

Seymour was up to the task. He recommended that she try showing a studied disinterest in sex. Let him come to you, he offered, rather than making him feel that he is in pursuit.

Abigail had already concluded that Bertram had been injured by a previous relationship, but she willingly dialed down her interest.

Yet, Abigail liked to spend time with Bertram. She enjoyed his company and she liked the fact that he valued her opinions. She was thinking to herself that he would not be quite so accommodating if he knew what she was really thinking, but this new version of a relationship was not entirely unsatisfying, the absence of great sex notwithstanding.

Eventually, they did manage to do the deed. Abigail described it as “non-descript” whatever that meant. Bertram was not very passionate and did not seem to know how to please her. Following instructions, Abigail did not tell him how inadequate he was. She had learned that such criticisms were ultimately self-defeating.

Obviously, the more she told herself that she could do a lot worse than to spend her life with him, the less the less-than-passionate sex bothered her.

But then, three months into their relationship, they were just about to settle into dinner at his house, when the phone rang. Abigail was in his kitchen heating up the sauce for the poached salmon, but she overheard the conversation. 

When Bertram picked up the phone the tone of his voice changed. A warmth and intimacy suddenly appeared, different from the tone that she knew well. When they sat down to dinner she asked, innocently, “Who was that?” Bertram replied curtly, “an old friend.” She continued to pry: “Does the friend have a name?” Bertram replied, “It was Leda.” Abigail let slip that she had never heard the name before. And she added that she was surprised that he did not trust her enough to tell her about Leda. 

Finally, Bertram told her the story of Leda. Twelve years ago the two had been in love. They had known each other since their days at Princeton and had planned to marry after college. Leda wanted to finish her medical training, so they waited until she had passed her oncology boards before setting a date. 

It was going to be a large and very lavish wedding. And then,  two weeks before the wedding, Leda came to him and announced that she could not go through with it. She had fallen in love with someone else, her mentor in oncology, the sponsor of her fellowship, Dr. Wenkels.

Bertram had met the doctor, but had not given much thought to the prospect of a relationship with Leda. He was in his late forties, with wife and children. So far so good. Yet, he had recently separated from his wife and declared his love for Leda. She greeted the news with distress, because she became aware that she had long since longed for Dr. Wenkels. 

Bertram was crushed, and publicly humiliated. He had sworn off women until the moment when he met Abigail. 

And yet, Abigail was strangely consoled by this information. She now understood that Bertram’s reticence and detachment had a cause. She had learned enough to know not to confront him over his nostalgia, so she changed the subject to the fashion shows.

At her next appointment with Seymour, Abigail explained what had happened and asked, plaintively, “What do I do now?”

Seymour replied that it was not always necessary to do something. Perhaps the situation would resolve itself. 

Abigail was not pleased with that suggestion, so Seymour tried another. He suggested that Bertram was probably not trying to deceive her, but was not sharing a large scale public humiliation. On the other side, his friends and family must have known what happened with Leda, and thus, were looking at her in a context that she did not know about.

Working together Seymour and Abigail decided that it would be best if she considered Leda to be their, and not just his problem. She had the right to express anger at Leda for her perfidy, and she ought to suggest that Bertram do best to cease all communication with her. 

This brought them closer together and their sex life began to improve. Bertram was not going to be a world class lover, but he was becoming more than competent. Abigail found herself more capable of responding to him.

Fourteen months later Abigail and Bertram were married on St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue. In the weeks preceding the wedding they had only one dispute. Bertram wanted to invite Leda and her family. Abigail refused categorically. They both wanted Seymour to attend the ceremony, but he demurred. He did not feel it was his place.

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Firing Gen Z

I have done my best to keep you apprised of the fate of Gen Z in the workplace. After all, they are our future, so one does well, while offering sage thoughts about how we are going to stoke an economic recovery, to take a look at the human capital needed for said recovery.

Politicians of every stripe explain how they are going to return manufacturing to America. They do not bother us with the simple fact that the American educational system is not producing people who can function in the workplace, in any workplace.

One recalls the comment by one Kenny Xu regarding the people who run Silicon Valley. It turns out that nearly two thirds of the tech staff at these great firms are Chinese. Not Chinese-American, Xu pointed out, but Chinese-Chinese.

And one knows that the efforts to build new semiconductor plants in Arizona have been delayed because we do not have the human capital necessary to build or operate the plants. We spend our time shipping in engineers from Taiwan and sending poorly trained Americans to Taiwan to learn how to do the job.

It ought to be evident by now that our educational system and even our parenting has failed Gen Z. Some companies have resigned themselves to the need to provide special training for this singularly inept group. Others are simply firing their Gen Z staff. They have very little tolerance for spoiled brats who cannot do the job and who do not even want to learn how to do the job.

The Daily Mail reports:

Companies are axing Gen Z workers just months after hiring them fresh from college, a new report has found.

Six in ten employers had already fired some college graduates they had recruited earlier in the year, a survey conducted by Intelligent.com found.

One in seven the employers said they also might not hire fresh college grads next year after finding a raft of problems with young workers. 

Business leaders listed concerns in areas such as communications skills and professionalism that made them wary of hiring Gen Z. 

They also said the workers of that age are often unmotivated and need to be constantly told what to do - rather than using their initiative - is another issue. 

One appreciates the pungent irony. A generation of young people who never learned how to follow directions or even rules cannot take any initiative. Perhaps they know how to express their sacred creativity or even to follow their bliss, but they do not know how to make decisions on their own.

And they are not even motivated. They do not want to learn. They do not want to show up on time. They do not take pride in a job well done. 

The picture is bleak, indeed.

The Daily Mail continues:

'Many recent college graduates may struggle with entering the workforce for the first time as it can be a huge contrast from what they are used to throughout their education journey,' Intelligent's Huy Nguyen wrote in the report. 

'They are often unprepared for a less structured environment, workplace cultural dynamics, and the expectation of autonomous work,' he explained. 

Three-quarters of companies surveyed said some or all of their recent graduate hires were unsatisfactory in some way. 

A half said their Gen Z hires had a lack of motivation, making them difficult to work with. 

I have mentioned it before, but why not bring it up again. In a world where people are supposed to be hired and promoted based on extraneous characteristics, that is, to fulfill diversity quotas, people do not have any incentive to work hard to get ahead. Why would you bust your butt to do a great job when you might lose out on the next promotion to someone who was promoted on the grounds of skin color.

The Daily Mail quoted one consultant who explained that the school system is not preparing students for the rigors of the business world. And this, on the most elementary level. Young people do not know what is appropriate dress or grooming. They do not think that they need to show up on time and put in a full day’s work.

Colleges teach theory, not practice. I have no problems with theory, but most of what passes as theory is vapid and vacuous. And yet, placing too much emphasis on ideas, and on ideology, makes young people believe that they need to hold certain correct beliefs, and that if they hold the right beliefs, they do not need to do much more. 

Demonstrated competence is out of fashion. We even have a presidential candidate today who has never demonstrated any competence whatever. When the jobs start moving overseas, don’t say you weren’t warned.

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Wednesday Potpourri

First, I have made the point before, but it is good to find an expert who sustains it:

According to psychiatrist and body language expert Carol Lieberman, Kamala Harris suffers from "imposter syndrome," a psychological condition where a person lacks confidence in their competence and feels they don't deserve to succeed.

Second, Kamala Harris had a teleprompter for her interview with Oprah. That explains it all.

Third, yesterday Joe Biden came to my neighborhood to announce to the world that his administration had been a rousing success.

If you believe that, you will believe anything.

At the same time Walter Russell Mead was explaining in the Wall Street Journal that Biden had failed miserably at Middle East diplomacy. The Biden administration will surely go down as one of the most inept and incompetent in recent memory.

As tensions escalate and bombs fall across the Middle East, President Biden’s emissaries continue to urge all parties to calm down and dial back the violence. No one is listening, and this brings us to the central paradox of a troubled presidency stumbling toward an inglorious close. Mr. Biden may love diplomacy, but diplomacy doesn’t love him back.

No administration in American history has been as committed to Middle East diplomacy as this one. Yet have an administration’s diplomats ever had less success? Mr. Biden tried and failed to get Iran back into a nuclear agreement with the U.S. He tried and failed to get a new Israeli-Palestinian dialogue on track. He tried and failed to stop the civil war in Sudan. He tried and failed to get Saudi Arabia to open formal diplomatic relations with Israel. He tried to settle the war in Yemen through diplomacy, and when that failed and the Houthis began attacking shipping in the Red Sea, the ever-undaunted president sought a diplomatic solution to that problem too. He failed again.

Get the picture.

By now, no one in the region listens to the Biden team. Its greatest error was its wish to restore the Iran Nuclear Deal, and thus to insist on a moral equivalence between the two sides in the current conflicts.

Fourth, the current propaganda war against disinformation and misinformation is an invitation to tyranny. As Thomas Sowell once opined, who is to decide what is fact and what is fiction.

Victor Davis Hanson returns to the subject:

One of the most preposterous recent trends has been the political use of supposed expert letters and declarations of support from so-called “authorities.”

These pretentious testimonies of purported professionalism are different from the usual inane candidate endorsements from celebrities and politicos.

Instead, they are used by politicians to impress and persuade the public to follow the “expertise,” “science,” or “authorities” to support all sorts of injurious initiatives and policies—of dubious value and otherwise without much political support.

Think of all the health experts who collectively swore to us that the COVID mRNA vaccinations would give us ironclad and lasting protection from being either infectious or infected and were without any side effects.

Other “authorities” assured us the first nationwide lockdown in U.S. history would stop COVID without hurting the social or economic life of the country.

Ditto testimonies about the pangolin-bat origins of COVID or the authenticity of the bogus Steele dossier.

Do we still remember the 1,200 healthcare “professionals” who in June 2020 told us that hitting the streets in mass numbers to protest during the post-George Floyd riots was a legitimate exemption from their own prior insistence on a complete nationwide quarantine? 

And also,

Would that such suddenly tight-fisted, inflation-hawk Nobel laureates had earlier warned us of their concerns in 2021, before the inevitable Biden inflation emasculated the middle class.

In other words, when Biden wished to print trillions of dollars, partisan Nobel Prize winners in advance discounted the crippling hyperinflation that followed. But now, given their dislike of Trump, they reversed course, warning the country that Trump’s likely deficit spending was “irresponsible.”

As for the state of the world, Hanson explains that we should ignore the entreaties of the recent batch of former government employees, vouching for Kamala’s foreign policy competence….

No matter. Our Republican experts nevertheless assure us that Trump “is unfit to serve again as President, or indeed in any office of public trust,” while Harris, they insist, has “consistently championed the rule of law, democracy, and our constitutional principles.”

In such Orwellian language, destroying the border and federal immigration law with it, helping to unleash an unprecedented lawfare at election time to ruin a presidential rival, or urging court packing, an end to the electoral college and the senate filibuster are all championing “the rule of law, democracy, and our constitutional principles.”

Fifth, as for crime, it is obviously difficult to find accurate statistics. The FBI counts crimes, but it ignores the crime rates in certain large blue cities.

The Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed that purports to be more accurate.

Left-leaning commentators and advocates have insisted over the past year that crime rates are falling. ABC’s David Muir asserted so while rebutting Donald Trump during the recent presidential debate. The nation’s largest crime survey says otherwise: Crime rates haven’t been falling, and urban crime is far worse than it was in the pre-George Floyd era.

The new findings were released this month by the National Crime Victimization Survey. Run by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and administered by the Census Bureau, the NCVS dates to the Nixon administration and is one of the largest federal surveys on any topic. It asks some 230,000 U.S. residents annually whether they’ve been the victims of crimes. It then asks about the nature of the crime, whether it was reported to the police, the demographics of the perpetrator and other particulars.

The NCVS report for 2023 finds no statistically significant evidence that violent crime or property crime is dropping in America. Excluding simple assault—the type of violent crime least likely to be charged as a felony—the violent crime rate in 2023 was 19% higher than in 2019, the last year before the defund-the-police movement swept the country.

But crime hasn’t risen equally across the nation. America’s recent crime spike has been concentrated in urban areas. These are the areas in which leftist prosecutors have gained the strongest footholds, where police have been the most heavily scrutinized, and where lax enforcement and prosecution have become common.

The results aren’t pretty. According to the NCVS, the urban violent-crime rate increased 40% from 2019 to 2023. Excluding simple assault, the urban violent-crime rate rose 54% over that span. From 2022 to 2023, the urban violent-crime rate didn’t change to a statistically significant degree, so these higher crime rates appear to be the new norm in America’s cities.

The urban property-crime rate is also getting worse. It rose from 176.1 victimizations per 1,000 households in 2022 to 192.3 in 2023. That’s part of a 26% increase in the urban property-crime rate since 2019. These numbers exclude rampant shoplifting, since the NCVS is a survey of households and not of businesses.

In contrast, violent-crime rates in suburban and rural areas have been essentially unchanged since 2019. In suburban areas in 2019, there were 22.3 violent victimizations per 1,000 persons 12 or older, compared with 23.3 in 2023—a statistically insignificant change. In rural areas, the rate was 16.3 in 2019 and 15.3 in 2023—again, not a statistically significant change. Our recent crime spike is essentially limited to cities.

Sixth, a few words from JP Morgan Chase CEO, Jamie Dimon:

If you do not control the borders, you are going to destroy our country... Now that they are sending migrants into New York... all my super liberal friends realize what a problem it is.

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