The trouble with courage is that the situations where it’s most needed tend also to be the ones where it’s least common. Case in point: the abject failure of the Covid-19 vaccines that the Trump administration rushed through development and the Biden administration tried to force on America’s workforce, military, and federal employees, and is still forcing on healthcare workers.

Americans are subjected to emotionally-manipulative messages painting these shots as not only safe and effective but morally obligatory to protect their neighbors, while social networks take it upon themselves to police medical “misinformation” suggesting otherwise, in coordination with the federal government—all with the backing of the public health bureaucracy and prestigious medical institutions. But the truth is very, very different—and not just in their belatedly-acknowledged failure to prevent infection.

One peer-reviewed study by researchers from Stanford, UCLA, and the University of Maryland (Vaccine, Sept. 2022) found the mRNA-based Covid vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna to exhibit a 16% increased risk of “serious adverse events,” including myocarditis, kidney or liver injury, respiratory distress, and pancreatitis, over the placebo group. Data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention’s V-Safe reporting system shows that 7.7% of participants reported needing medical care after vaccination, according to medical freedom attorney Aaron Siri of the Informed Consent Action Network. “Twenty-five percent of those people needed emergency care or were hospitalized, and another 48 percent sought urgent care,” Siri told the Senate last December. “Also, another 25 percent on top of the 7.7 percent reported being unable to work or go to school.”

As of August 25, 2023 the national Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System has more than 1.5 million reports on the Covid vaccines, including 36,080 deaths, 209,218 hospitalizations, 152,224 urgent care visits, 20,740 heart attacks, 67,564 permanent disabilities, and 33,348 other life-threatening events. While VAERS is not conclusive on its own (because anyone can submit an uncorroborated report), CDC researchers have acknowledged a “high verification rate of reports of myocarditis to VAERS” after Covid vaccination, and admitted that “under-reporting is more likely” than over-reporting (JAMA, Jan. 2022). In 2021, Project Veritas interviewed Jodi O’Malley, at the time a registered nurse at the federally-funded Phoenix Indian Medical Center in Arizona. She obtained footage of a fellow nurse admitting she saw “a lot” of people who “got sick from the side effects” of the Covid vaccines, but “nobody” was reporting them to VAERS “because it takes over a half hour to write the damn thing.”Top of FormBottom of Form

Pentagon medical billing data publicized by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) shows that 2021, the first year of the shots’ widespread use, saw massive spikes in diagnoses for multiple sclerosis, Guillain-Barre syndrome, breast and testicular cancers, pulmonary embolism, ovarian dysfunction, tachycardia, female infertility, and neurological disorders over the preceding five-year averages. The official explanation from the Defense Health Agency Armed Forces Surveillance Division was that a conveniently-timed “data corruption” glitch, which supposedly only affected the five years in question (convenient!), made the pre-2021 numbers appear far lower than the actual numbers of cases for those years. (Naturally, this answer was good enough for the “fact-checkers” at PolitiFact.)

The strongest counter to these concerns is the simple fact that millions of people have been vaccinated and boosted, and every single person reading this sees every day that they aren’t collapsing in droves, or experiencing any otherwise-unexplainable health problems. How can that be if credible studies and data sources are turning out such alarming numbers? Cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough, one of the Covid establishment’s most prominent critics, writes that there’s some indication the discrepancy may be due to variables that only affect specific batches (such as contamination, excessive doses, etc.). Under this theory, while only a small fraction of the Covid vaccines would be dangerous, there would be no way for you the patient to tell which you’re getting. That makes sense to this layman, and if true, would mean that investigation and recalls could have resolved this a long time ago—leaving Americans with a still-important but much less frightening debate over the need for whatever useless-but-otherwise-safe vaccines remained.

Regardless, it’s clear why the Democrats don’t care about any of this: Big Pharma tosses big bucks at politicians, and vaccine mandates are highly effective at weeding conservatives and independent thinkers out of institutions like the military, healthcare, and education. But why aren’t the majority of national elected Republicans speaking out? Partly because plenty of them receive Pharma money too, and no doubt because some of them fear crossing former President Donald Trump on one of his only lasting accomplishments, Operation Warp Speed. But mostly, this writer suspects, because they fear being branded as anti-science crackpots.

Admittedly, this fear is not completely unfounded. Most vaccines are obvious blessings, and before Covid, the “anti-vax” label earned its unseemly reputation through junk science and association with celebrity cranks. Arguably the biggest of those cranks, Democrat presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has enjoyed some strange new respect from some corners of the Right lately (even a blind squirrel occasionally stumbles onto a nut, and the Covid era shook more than a few trees), but conservatives who made the leap to “RFK is right about everything!” were only setting themselves up to be disappointed and embarrassed.

For all the well-deserved stigma of historical anti-vax sentiment, there’s no honest comparison between long-proven, exhaustively-vetted vaccines and new products that were developed in a tenth of the time, and questioning the latter is no more a rejection of the concept of vaccines than an aversion to driving Pintos is a repudiation of the automobile. Recognizing such rational distinctions, and acting on them when necessary, is part of the job our elected representatives sign up for.

It’s true that Republicans are generally solid when it comes to opposing vaccine mandates, but that’s only half the battle. The other half is fully investigating whether the things being mandated should be approved for use at all, let alone recommended. But with rare exceptions, the GOP is AWOL on that question—and before us currently stands a presidential primary choice that would either drag the party in a more responsible direction, or reinforce its current passivity until it’s too late to course-correct.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is tackling the issue head-on, having elevated a state surgeon general who is willing to speak clearly about the shots’ defects, directed his administration to conduct its own analysis of their outcomes, and petitioned for a grand jury investigation of their manufacturers. This has naturally provoked hand-wringing among the National Review crowd (which incredibly has refused to learn any lessons from the beating its reputation took during the Trump era), but is absolutely essential: following actual data even when it leads to politically-incorrect conclusions is what made DeSantis a national hero, after all, and forcing the issue into the limelight, armed with real evidence instead of the junk science of years past, will also forcibly shift the default positions of more than a few rank-and-file GOP politicians…if, that is, DeSantis ultimately becomes the GOP’s standard-bearer.

However, if Republicans instead renominate Jabfather Trump, who continues to brush off safety concerns and suggest the shots saved “100 million people” because his entire thought process on the issue begins and ends with the fact that Operation Warp Speed is one of the only elements of his legacy that the cultural elite and mainstream media embrace (the other, of course, being Trump’s abominable First Step Act), then most Republicans will find it safer and easier to continue ignoring the controversy, and we can forget any chance of the next administration getting any real answers even if Trump wins (which he probably won’t anyway).

Further, because the average Republican is incapable of thinking two steps ahead (let alone playing 12-dimensional chess), they would easily follow Trump straight into a trap. As evidence continues to accumulate and Biden seeks funding to develop new vaccines in the name of busting new variants, Democrats could easily seize on that evidence and turn against the old, Trump-associated shots, laying the blame at the feet of the man who ran with the idea of rushing a vaccine to market, (bogusly) explaining away the reversal by claiming to have simply placed too much trust in Trump and Warp Speed in a spirit of naïve-yet-noble bipartisanship. Trump and those hitched to him would have no good answer.

But that trap only fits the Jabfather, who also happens to be a generally incompetent failure who repulses most Americans. If Republican voters aren’t stupid, and instead go with the wildly successful, morally-unblemished, non-moron conservative who isn’t uniquely vulnerable on the issue, Democrats would have to settle for a more conventional attack framing DeSantis’s position as anti-vax quackery, which he can counter with a simple message: “I’ve always embraced most vaccines, I had high hopes for the Covid ones and distributed them myself to the most vulnerable when the initial data looked promising, but I reevaluated once new information came in, just like any responsible leader should.”

As rare as courage is, self-interest is much more common; often it’s just obscured by the biases through which one views the world (from the D.C. swamp to a social media echo chamber to a bubble formed by a candidate’s combination suicide cult/cottage industry). The real challenge, then, will come down to convincing politicians and voters alike that doing the right thing also happens to be the most politically advantageous.

On August 29, The American Spectator published an article by Melissa Mackenzie titled “The Magical Thinking of NeverTrump,” asking why “they” supposedly “believe the problems he has faced will miraculously disappear for their preferred candidate.” It’s been promoted by The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway and Joy Pullmann, Breitbart’s John Nolte, and American Majority’s Ned Ryun, among others. Which goes to show one thing: the state of conservative argument isn’t what it used to be.

The article is primarily a response to a piece published the day before by Spectator associate editor Luther Ray Abel, a writer with whom I’m unfamiliar but whose title makes me slightly jealous I didn’t think of it: “Trump Is Political Fentanyl.”

His piece, responding to previous commentary by Mackenzie and another Spectator writer, unfortunately begins with promotion of some undeserving candidates (the most egregious being Tim Scott). But while every one of them but Ron DeSantis is a distraction, the underlying point is sound: any one of them is more electable than Trump, regardless of their merits as potential presidents. Abel also undermines himself by going out on the January 6 impeachment limb (abuse of the impeachment process is intolerable no matter how tempting the immediate result). But the gist is dead-on:

Trump is fentanyl: He promises to take away all the evil things while insisting that there can be no success without him. This is a lie, and it has always been a lie. Like mustard gas that is found to kill cancer cells, his contributions to exposing D.C. corruption are acknowledged but don’t merit absolution. Those who champion Trump are addicts to ego who have given up on America’s ordered strength, its economic dynamism, and the possibility of adult leadership.

Mackenzie begins her response by asking:

Why does the Never-Trump crowd, the earnest viewers of the Republican primary debate, believe that the tactics used against Donald Trump won’t be used against their preferred candidate?

The first tell that we’re not dealing with good-faith analysis here is the frequent references to “the Never-Trump crowd.” The term Never-Trump was never just a label for anyone who dislikes him, even stridently so; it refers specifically to those who oppose him in general elections even at the cost of Democrat presidents. Yet Mackenzie now uses it as a catchall for conservatives who want a different primary candidate.

Or how does Ron DeSantis overcome the structural fraud problems in every state with a Soros secretary of state?

Simple: by employing ballot harvesting himself in states where the law allows Democrats to do it (which DeSantis has already said, repeatedly), by not actively repulsing enough voters to put the real vote within stealing distance (or making stealing unnecessary), and by being able to judge and retain competent representation for whatever fraud arises (due to being a lawyer himself, not being a moron, and not being a client from hell).

To answer the last question first: Because to acknowledge that the Democrat machine is utterly efficient and capable of manufacturing just enough votes to beat any Republican (including Donald Trump) is to acknowledge that Donald Trump and his supporters have legitimate concerns. For Never-Trump voters to face that would mean extending grace and giving credence to disturbing systemic problems.

Pretending everyone who opposes renominating Trump is Never-Trump enables Mackenzie to smear movement conservatives with establishment sins that we’ve condemned all along. Of course vote fraud is a major problem. That’s why we’re supporting a candidate who worked to stop it in his state, who recognizes the problems with the 2020 election as well as Trump’s contribution to those problems, and who didn’t spend an entire presidential term doing nothing useful about it and a post-presidency making everything worse.

Let’s start with Ron DeSantis. It’s helpful to examine the media’s treatment of him. He is “worse than Trump.” He is, according to the media, to the right of Donald Trump and more effective. DeSantis is a demon and deserves demonization. It’s already happened. How does DeSantis, rhetorically tarred and feathered, win over women across the country, especially in all the swingy of swing states, with his record on abortion? (A stance that this writer whole-heartedly supports, by the way.) Does Ron DeSantis win Arizona? Georgia? How?

First, “according to the media” DeSantis is “to the right of Donald Trump and more effective”? Not according to Melissa’s own two eyes? Any suggestion that it’s anything other than obviously true, or that it’s not enough to make him the clearly preferable option, is a massive red flag.   

Another red flag: how often defending Trump against “Republican elites” seems to entail echoing those elites’ very same concern-trolling about the alleged political toxicity of being strongly pro-life, as if it’s something that hasn’t been addressed thousands of times.

Republicans have always been branded as scary extremists no matter what exceptions they might support, and it’s never been the political Kryptonite it’s presented as. Abortion was at most a marginal boon to Democrats in 2022, but nothing massive or insurmountable; most incumbents kept their seats regardless of their stance, and no governor’s mansion or legislature to have banned abortion flipped. If the GOP had fixed any number of unrelated problems and screw-ups, the midterms would have been far more successful without handling abortion any differently.

Hell, Trump won in 2016 despite Democrats having him on video saying women should get “some form of punishment” for abortion, a soundbite they’d sell their grandmothers to have on any Republican in any election. It didn’t help, certainly, and Trump’s mountain of other defects helped make 2016 close and 2020 a loss, but it tells us the issue on its own should not terrify candidates who do not have mountains of other defects.

Inasmuch as DeSantis is not burdened by such a mountain, he navigates the issue in a general pretty much by continuing to do what he’s doing: focus on the electorate’s primary concerns and his ability to handle them, and when the subject comes up focus on Democrats’ extremism while compassionately highlighting the humanity of abortion’s victims. (Indeed, DeSantis’s only problem in that area right now is being too cautious toward abortion squishes.)

Even more absurd is the fretting about how DeSantis could possibly win Arizona, Georgia, or other swing states when he polls better than Trump among swing voters and independent voters, and in every swing state that Trump won in 2016 but lost in 2020.

How does any Republican candidate beat the universal mail-in ballot debacle in Oregon, Nevada, and Colorado? The not-Trump candidates on the stage at the Republican debate will have to address these issues too. This is not a problem for Trump alone. Since the Republican National Committee is worthless, how will each candidate address this?

See above for the answer to how DeSantis addresses it (which strikes me as the sort of information that professional writers are supposed to look up before publishing articles treating the question like a mystery). And note well that “how will others do X?” is in no way a substitute for explaining how Trump will. Yet Mackenzie projects her own side’s “quiet about actual means and methods of winning” and “mystical faith that it will all just work out” onto those taking the election seriously.

Trump, by the way, has also claimed his campaign will become “masters of ballot harvesting”; too bad that claim is preposterious on its face given his history of general incompetence and unkept promises, the unlikelihood he’ll have the money for such an operation, and the fact that he already seems to have forgotten the promise, let alone any need for it.

Abel gives short shrift to these lawsuits, breezily acknowledging that they’re troublesome but somehow blaming the victim for the inconvenience. The injustices against Trump, he implies, are Trump’s alone. No other Republican will face such malice. This, of course, is the opinion of one who has amnesia of the Bush years when Bush and Cheney were threatened with lawsuits for their nerve to enact policies that the Left and the media disagreed with. With Trump, the threats from the left came to fruition.

Here is one of the MAGA Grift Industry’s central lies: the idea that non-Trumpy Republicans think Democrats would treat any other Republican with kid gloves.

Virtually nobody thinks that; Trump apologists never produce examples of anyone saying it. It’s a strawman invented for fanboys to repeat ad nauseam in lieu of making the effort to formulate or grapple with actual arguments. What people do say is that Democrats have a much easier time hanging people who hand them rope first.

There’s a reason “Don’t Say Gay,” “DeathSantis,” etc. were totally ineffective in Florida. There’s a reason that leftists who hated George W. Bush every bit as much as they hate Trump (notably with some of the same talking points MAGA themselves now say about Bush and “neocons”) never got impeachment off the ground. And there’s a reason Democrats are now getting the opportunity to do to Trump what they dreamed of doing to Bush.

Yes, the charges against Trump are a politically-motivated collection of things that either aren’t crimes at all or are at worst technical violations that pale in comparison to what Democrats routinely get away with. Yes, they are disgraceful abuses of power that need to be opposed and punished. No, that doesn’t mean we play dumb about who gave them the opening.

Try as one might, there is simply no escaping the reality that most Republicans don’t pay porn stars to keep quiet about alleged affairs, tell state officials that they “just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have” after elections, gather angry and naïve supporters in one place and fill them with false hope of reversing an election at the last minute, or show off “highly confidential” documents they admit they didn’t declassify just to vent about former subordinates. Just because these acts are not everything prosecutors say they are doesn’t mean they aren’t monumentally reckless and self-destructive for their own sake, or that prosecutors could have launched these cases without them.

As for the inevitable rejoinder that the Left would have simply fabricated some other pretext for prosecuting Trump had Trump not “embraced his inner retard after losing” (as Taki’s David Cole put it in a fantastic article last month), that’s speculation at best. Reality tells us that as evil as the Left is, their capacity to act out their worst desires on Republican candidates still requires those candidates to give them something to work with. Without the incomparably fertile ground of Trump’s behavior, nothing they tried would be nearly as successful—see, for instance, how the Russia Hoax investigation and quid-pro-quo impeachment ultimately turned out.

The Never-Trump crowd […are] blind to the fact that once the Democrats succeed in their mission to destroy Trump, that template will be used for any Republican. Those Republicans do not have the vast resources and internal fortitude of Trump. They’ll simply be destroyed and discarded.

The gaslighting here is nothing short of obscene. As noted above, Trump’s “vast resources” are being drained at an alarming rate, and it’s still an open question how much he’s willing to dig into his own pockets to win (note well that he decided to pay for his legal fees by depleting money that was donated to win an election before touching his personal wealth). And “internal fortitude”? Really? There’s no fortitude to spending a presidency constantly being led around by the nose, no courageous discipline exhibited by self-pitying rants, no inner strength behind obsessively clinging to hope of being president again, not because it’s good for the country but because you want the glory and the validation, consequences of near-certain Democrat victory be damned.

At the heart of the arguments about Trump is a visceral contempt for Trump voters […] The premise is that American voters are too stupid to vote in their own interests.

I recognize that playing to the masses’ egos is central to populism, but back in the world of conservatism we’re supposed to keep a more realistic understanding of human nature in mind. I’m sorry, but voting for Trump in a primary (as opposed to a general election) objectively is stupid and contrary to voters’ interests, because it will result in the Democrat becoming president, and any professional conservative unwilling to level with their readers about that does not have their best interests at heart—particularly when much of that vote comes not from deep emotional connection to Trump, but from their primary sources of political news withholding information that would lead them to think twice.

Not only have the Democrats changed the rules, but they’ve created a playing field where only they win, and the Republicans, should the Trump haters get their way, end up a regional party winning nothing and governing their own pointless squabbling.

That’s what Democrats are aiming for, all right, but to make it happen they need the Trump lovers to get their way in the primary, to deliver to them a general-election opponent tailor-made to lose. If that happens, here’s hoping the DNC remembers to drop Melissa a thank-you card for getting her readers to play right into their hands.

It’s hard to think of a current political media figure whose evolution has been more bizarre than Tucker Carlson’s.

Once upon a time, he was just another mild-mannered conservative talking head, with his trademark bowties accurately letting viewers know just how mild. Which is not to say his commentary was bad; I distinctly recall perking up whenever he would fill in on Hannity & Colmes, because if nothing else he was consistently less vapid than Sean. Carlson co-founded the Daily Caller in 2010, which was a solid enough conservative news site, but nothing revolutionary.

But something strange happened when he replaced Fox News mainstay Bill O’Reilly in 2017. Before long, his primetime show became known for some of the fieriest monologues in the field and confrontational interviews with all manner of hacks almost unheard of on cable news. He developed a special knack for channeling the frustrations of the sane and all-too-rare contempt for peddlers of madness—including many within the Republican establishment. Somehow, the bowtie guy had become what the kids call based (no, I’ve never entirely understood the term either).

If that had been where his evolution stopped, Carlson would be the most important figure in conservative media today, hands-down. He would be absolutely deserving of the Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’s description as a “fearless American who is unafraid to challenge the Washington regime, ask tough questions, and hold the ruling elite accountable.”

But something else was happening too. While he was becoming the surprise king of conservative media, there were signs that his common-sense-for-the-common-man posture was morphing into a brand of kooky populism under which government should ban driverless cars specifically because they’d take jobs from truckers (and the real reason to ban them, public safety, is just a pretext), and anyone to the right of isolationism is to be demonized as a bloodthirsty neocon warmonger.

Today, those tendencies are in full bloom, and Tucker Carlson has fully embraced his niche as a more presentable Alex Jones, telling the nation’s crackpots exactly what they want to hear, no matter how sick or how stupid. The garbage he’s peddled on the Russia-Ukraine invasion alone could fill a book. Helpfully, however, this week he gave us a soundbite so transparently insane that it manages to capture his entire schtick in miniature.

Speaking to Adam Carolla, Carlson said the following about Donald Trump’s odds of returning to the White House:

They protested him, they called him names. He won anyway. They impeached him –twice– on ridiculous pretenses. They fabricated a lot about what happened on January 6 in order to impeach him. It didn’t work, he came back. And then they indicted him. It didn’t work. He became more popular. Then they indicted him three more times! And every single time his popularity rose. If you begin with criticism, then you go to protest, then you go to impeachment, now you go to indictment, and none of them work, what’s next? Graph it out, man. We are speeding towards assassination, obviously. No one will say that but I don’t know how you can’t reach that conclusion. Do you know what I mean? They have decided, permanent Washington and both parties, have decided that there’s something about Trump that’s so threatening to them, they just can’t have it.

Tucker may be monetizing the simpleminded, but rest assured he’s smart enough to not believe a word of this. He knows Trump’s 2016 win, while unexpected, was one of the closest in presidential history, heavily dependent on deep longstanding contempt for his opponent. He knows Trump’s 2020 loss is a big enough wrench in this narrative to skip it entirely. He knows the indictments have only made him more popular among Republican primary voters; the voters who actually decide elections hate his guts.

Most of all, he knows that “permanent Washington” does not consider anything about Trump the least bit threatening. We can safely deduce this from three simple points: having lived through one Trump presidency and witnessing how unthreatening it was, the overwhelming unlikelihood of him winning another general election (see aforementioned point and links about voters hating his guts), and my personal favorite, the fact that we know from Carlson’s own words—texted in private after the 2020 election—that Carlson himself did not consider the Trump presidency threatening.

Quote: “That’s the last four years. We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There isn’t really an upside to Trump.” (Carlson’s only explanation so far? Claiming he was mad not at Trump, but at a random Trump campaign staffer for sending him bad information. Yes, really.)

But assassination isn’t the only option. Carlson pitched another possibility, and it’s a doozy:

Once you start indicting your political opponents, you know that you have to win or else they’re going to indict you if they win. So they can’t lose. They will do anything to win […] What are they going to do? They’re going to go to war with Russia is what they’re going to do. There will be a hot war between the United States and Russia in this next year. Of course, they want it anyway.

Why? Because “they need to declare war footing in order to assume war powers in order to win. I believe that and I think the evidence shows that is true […] I think we could Tonkin Gulf our way into it where all of a sudden missiles land in Poland and “the Russians did it” and we’re going to war. I could see that happening very easily.

“I would bet my house on it, we’re going to war with Russia,” Carlson says. Spoiler alert: he is not going to bet his house on it.

This is so mind-shatteringly stupid that nobody who takes it seriously should be entrusted with anything as complicated as shoelaces, starting with the fact that they don’t need “war footing” in order to win. They don’t need to convince anyone to assume the massive lifetime risk that would come with killing a former president. They just need Trump to be their opponent.

Beyond that, while the Right’s populist faction may be convinced we live in a Code Pink fever dream where everyone in politics loves war more than anything else, here in the real world that would be the last thing Joe Biden—you know, the guy who initially suggested a “minor incursion” into Ukraine would be no big deal, and whose actual Ukraine policy has been to withhold critical aid over fear of escalation—or his handlers would want politically.

Mismanaging foreign policy to the point where a hot war with a nuclear power breaks out on his watch would be one of the few scenarios that could possibly top the political disastrousness that Covid-19 wreaked on Trump in 2020. It would be a failure of historic proportions, a situation ugly and frightening enough that even Trump might well seem worth taking a chance on again, even under indictment. In more than a few voters’ eyes, it would even transform Trump’s self-declared ability to end war in 24 hours from obvious BS to something genuinely tempting.

None of this analysis is particularly complicated; it just requires basic reasoning skills and paying a reasonable amount of attention to current events—two things that Tucker Carlson’s current grift counts on his audience lacking.

Once upon a time, we were told that Donald Trump not being “ideological” (a gentler way of saying he didn’t have a conservative bone in his body) would be a blessing in disguise, because it supposedly meant he wouldn’t be beholden to constraints of dogma or imagination that kept so many conventional Republicans from avoiding past failures, finding fresh solutions to problems, or appealing to normally-elusive voting blocs. Things didn’t quite work out that way.

Now he wants to be president again, and it’s clear his experiences have done nothing to impress upon him a deeper appreciation for the things he doesn’t understand. Case in point: during yet another lapdog interview this week, the generally useless Glenn Beck broached the subject of one of Trump’s earliest abandonments of his tough campaign promises (albeit in the most pathetically charitable framing possible):

BECK: You said in 2016, you know, ‘lock her up.’ And then when you became president, you said, ‘We don’t do that in America.’ That’s just not the right thing to do. That’s what they’re doing. Do you regret not locking her up? And if you’re president again, will you lock people up?

TRUMP: Well, I’ll give you an example. The answer is you have no choice because they’re doing it to us. I always had such great respect for the office of the president and the presidency and but the office of the president. And I never hit Biden as hard as I could have. And then I heard he was trying to indict me and it was him that was doing it […] these are sick people. These are evil people.

Not “we can’t let them get away with their crimes and abuses of power.” Not “we have to restore one standard of justice in this country.” Not “we have to remind Democrats they’re not above the law.” No, we have to lock up Democrats simply “because they’re doing it to us.”

As should surprise absolutely nobody at this point, the man has no comprehension whatsoever of justice, constitutionalism, or the rule of law. His brain reduces such concepts to a sophomoric question of personal relationships and retribution—which, as we see here and saw countless times since he came down the escalator, translates to either doing the wrong thing or doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. They were bad to me, so why wouldn’t I be bad to them?

The point here is not some David French-style handwringing that a second Trump presidency would be an authoritarian assault on democratic norms (there probably won’t be a second Trump presidency, and the man’s too cripplingly incompetent to see any revenge fantasies through to completion). It’s that a man who doesn’t even have a high school civics-level understanding of American constitutional principles—and plainly feels no obligation to develop one—cannot help but feed perceptions to that effect, and perceptions that he simply isn’t qualified for a job like the presidency.

There’s a very good reason for that second one: because he isn’t. Far more important than any perception issue is the fact that Trump’s answer reinforces that he truly doesn’t understand why any of this is so serious or how to fix it. The rule of law for its own sake is something he simply doesn’t think or care deeply about; it’s just another backdrop for people’s love or hatred of him to be acted out against. It’s the reason why his administration was constant chaos, why he did nothing to reform the Justice Department or punish those who weaponized federal agencies during the Obama years, why those being jailed and prosecuted for supporting him seem barely worthy of his notice: because he doesn’t take any of it seriously.

If the past seven years weren’t enough to make Trump shape up by now, he’s never going to. The odds of him finally becoming the serious, focused statesman we need in a second term are even lower than Biden deciding tomorrow that he doesn’t want to stand before the Pearly Gates as a remorseless babykiller. Which should be a big deal to those of us who actually want to stop the “sick, evil people” from doing sick, evil things (especially those of us who style themselves as authorities on the Constitution and the law).

Because it turns out that proverbial bulls in China shops aren’t any good at dismantling Deep States. You actually do have to know how the system is supposed to work—and why—in order to recognize the ways it’s been corrupted, and how to clean it out. If Trump puts his hand on a Bible again and swears another oath to the Constitution without appreciating what its words mean, expect it to turn out the same way—more words, more chaos, and more scandal that will ultimately leave the “sick, evil people” still standing.

If some high-level Democrat Party operator was to find a magic lamp, he could do far worse than to spend his three wishes as follows:

1) “Give us an election opponent our unimpressive candidate has beaten before and we know he can beat again.”

2) “For added insurance, give us a way to make him completely toxic to anyone who might be on the fence about tossing us out of office.”

3) “Make the opposing party complete oblivious to what we’re doing until it’s too late to do anything about it.”

This is exactly what’s happening right now with the 2024 Republican presidential primary, with one crucial difference—there’s no magic involved, and Democrats’ opponents are ultimately doing it to themselves.

The first wish is granted with Donald Trump, who for the reasons explained Friday is uniquely situated to lose to Joe Biden, a corrupt, senile extremist with an abysmal job performance that any normal Republican should be able to put away without breaking a sweat. Indeed, in any other scenario Biden would be exactly the sort of foe that Republicans would ask the genie for. Yet against Trump, he was able to win once despite barely campaigning. And all signs point to a repeat matchup ending the same way.

The second wish takes the form of a slate of wide-ranging and transparently political criminal charges across multiple jurisdictions that trigger Republican primary voters’ senses of sympathy and unfair play to make them rally around Trump—and do the opposite in the eyes of everyone else. As also explained Friday, these cases have drained and will continue to drain millions of dollars from the Trump campaign’s war chest, severely depleting the amount it will be able to spend on advertising, get-out-the-vote operations, and ballot harvesting, not to mention the courtroom schedule keeping him from a lot of campaign stops. And the voters he’s not reaching out to won’t flock to Truth Social to seek out his campaign pitch, let alone his side of the legal story.

In April, a CNN/SSRS poll found that 76% of respondents recognized that the weakest and pettiest indictment against Trump, concerning the payment to pornstar Stormy Daniels, was politically motivated to one degree or another…but 60% supported it anyway, including 62% of independents. Now that Trump is formally accused of much, much graver things, a Navigator Research poll released Friday finds that 62% of registered voters think he committed a crime, including 67% of independents. Strong majorities of overall and independent voters see all four indictments as serious.

Show of hands: who thinks numbers like these are going to get better once actual trials begin, and the media bombards every screen in every American home with a constant stream of the most dramatic, salacious, and one-sided details of every government claim and every piece of witness testimony. If you think Trump’s standing with the general public is bad now (and yes, folks at The Federalist, “only slightly less disliked than Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi” is bad by any sane measure), just wait. Trump could easily go down in history as the new Walter Mondale.

But here’s the kicker: Trump isn’t the Republican nominee yet. He doesn’t have to be. None of this works unless we make him the nominee. We, conservative and Republican voters, right now have it completely within our power to utterly gut the Democrats’ scheme.

Unfortunately, that’s where the third wish comes in: a perfect storm of influences giving Trump a ridiculously durable lead in the GOP primary field. As a Ron DeSantis supporter, I know all the counters by heart: no votes have been cast yet, Ron’s got a great ground game in the early states, an early win in Iowa will start a chain reaction, etc. I hope they’re all true. But we can’t just ignore that the overall situation. DeSantis’s debate performance did help a little, but not nearly enough. Part of that is due to mistakes the DeSantis campaign has made and keeps making, which I’ve talked about before and will continue to hammer in the future.

But it’s also due to the fundamental corruption of the conservative infotainment landscape—talk radio, the Fox primetime lineup, the big-name conservative websites and online personalities. With a handful of exceptions, the biggest and most influential names in right-wing media are content to feed their audiences a steady diet of Trump positivity and victimhood accompanied by generic choir-preaching about the Left’s every outrage, idiocy, or hypocrisy—with adult conversation about how we really got here or what to do about any of it nowhere in sight.

One of the most surreal displays of all this came from Glenn Beck reacting Monday to news that one of Trump’s cases is slated to begin just before Super Tuesday. He recognizes the timing as “election interference,” and even that he thinks Democrats “want him to be the candidate, and then put him in jail”…but treats that bombshell as some kind of footnote observation rather than the key to the whole mess with obvious implications for listeners’ choices (it certainly didn’t inform Beck’s slobbering interview with The Failure the next day).

Polls have shown throughout the primary that most of Trump’s current support is not comprised of creepy cultist types who would sooner sell their kids than vote for any Republican but Trump. They are defaulting to Trump when asked to pick, but almost half also say they’re not exclusive; they’re still open to other candidates. So why are they defaulting to Trump? One big factor is because the primary media they consume gives them no reason not to (fun fact: to date, The Federalist still has not informed its readers that the Trump campaign raised $250 million in 2020 by telling people their donations were going to an “election defense fund” that didn’t exist).

This is no magic spell, but for the way it’s got Republican primary voters happily walking straight toward a cliff, it might as well be. Unless Republican voters snap out of it, it won’t be long before Democrats don’t need a genie to make all the rest of their nightmarish wishes come true.

Almost a year after the fall 2022 midterms, politicians and politicos are still wringing their hands over the electoral ramifications of opposing abortion now that Roe v. Wade no longer insulates the butchery from the democratic process. The loudest voices insist that the midterms vindicated claims that the country fears a world without “choice” so much that it guarantees Republicans are doomed if they stick with what has been the party’s official stance since Ronald Reagan.

Closer examination reveals that the truth isn’t nearly that dire…but the situation is still challenging and complicated enough that pro-lifers need to think carefully about their next steps.

It’s not hard to see why people are getting cold feet. Despite polls suggesting that voters cared far more about inflation than abortion, or that Democrats’ abysmal stewardship of the economy was driving independents into Republicans’ arms, the much-anticipated “red wave” turned out to be merely a drizzle. But how much of that can be blamed on abortion?

Post-midterm exit polls were frustratingly inconsistent. The National Election Pool found that abortion was a shockingly close runner-up to inflation in voters’ priorities (27% to 31%), but also that female abortion supporters didn’t turn out more heavily than in past elections. By contrast, AP VoteCast found that a paltry 9% said abortion was their biggest issue, compared to 47% who prioritized economic concerns. Despite their other discrepancies, both sets of polling found that keeping abortion legal in all or most circumstances was more popular than making it either completely illegal or illegal with exceptions for situations like rape or incest.

The actual election results were similarly mixed. Five abortion-related ballot initiatives all yielded pro-abortion outcomes, and while three of those were in liberal states (California, Michigan, and Vermont) that don’t represent national trends, the defeat of the other two extremely modest measures (to ensure the Kentucky Constitution left the issue to voters and require basic medical care for newborns who survived abortions in Montana) ought to alarm us.

On the other hand, no state that enacted a near-total abortion ban ousted the governor or legislature responsible last year, so there was clearly no widespread “pro-choice” backlash. To the extent that any consistent bias could be gleaned from November’s results, it was in favor of incumbency, regardless of party (94% of existing officeholders kept their seats).

Between the above and various other factors at work (among them uninspiring Republican messaging, Democrats’ superior harvesting of mail ballots and encouragement of early voting, and a certain former president’s endorsement of weak primary candidates he happened to personally like), it’s clear that whatever pro-abortion turnout boost may have occurred was neither massive nor insurmountable. But that’s not to say pro-lifers should merely stay the course.

While Americans soundly reject the extremes of pro-abortion dogma, Gallup, Pew, and Marist polls agree that overall, “choice” has outpaced life for several years—and with Roe’s overturn dropping a megaton bomb on the status quo, those intuitions cannot help but be shaken. For nearly half a century, debating whether or not we should ban abortion was largely theoretical. To many, the fact that it couldn’t actually happen diluted the urgency of settling on an answer, and meant that neither side’s claims about prohibition’s real-world consequences could be conclusively demonstrated.

That’s all changed, and any cultural shift this massive requires an adjustment period. With abortion, that means giving Americans time to live with the newly-enforceable pro-life laws that are already on the books, and watch for themselves as the Left’s fearmongering lies about women dying, going to jail, losing jobs, and being forced to drop out of college en masse fail to materialize.

(This makes referendums a particularly poor tool for pro-lifers; proposals that haven’t been implemented yet are easy to scaremonger with misinformation. It’s much more feasible to implement changes through the usual legislative process, then see whether the public deems those changes acceptable in the next election.)

In the near term, pro-lifers should focus on recruiting and training principled, savvy candidates who can parry the abortion lobby’s demagoguery and keep the focus on voters’ most immediate concerns during campaign season, but will be reliably pro-life when the time comes to pass whatever preborn protections a state is ready to accept in the off years.

Over the long term comes the more difficult work. For decades, the pro-life movement has toiled on college campuses, in pregnancy centers, and outside abortion mills to convert hearts and minds and show women in crisis that they and their babies have options. These ground-level efforts are nothing short of heroic, but individual engagement simply cannot match the scale at which educational institutions, popular culture, and major media condition large segments of entire generations to accept abortion as intrinsic to women’s health and freedom.

Overcoming these forces and instilling in the public a more widespread, durable respect for the preborn will require pro-lifers to adopt better and more widespread messaging on multiple fronts. The most potent would be a campaign to mandate accurate fetal development information in public science education, modeled after the successful work currently underway in several states to replace critical race theory curricula with more classical civics material. Making clear that “individual human life begins at conception” is a settled biological fact, rather than primarily or exclusively a theological belief, would make abortion unthinkable to millions of otherwise-apolitical students before they ever heard a single abortion argument.

The 2022 midterms were not the disaster for life many insist (many driven by their own social liberalism rather than earnest prudential calculations), but the hard fact remains that our cause is not gaining the ground it should. Unless the pro-life movement learns to pair conventional political activism and personal apologetics with strategies to uproot and replace the forces working against it on the institutional level, it should expect pro-life prospects at the ballot box to keep getting worse.

Donald Trump did not deliberately incite a violent insurrection, try to get his own vice president killed, or attempt to subvert American democracy following his 2020 defeat. Such hysterics distract us from the 45th president’s actual offenses: reducing public perception of the election integrity cause to a conspiratorial clown show, and warping Republican voters’ understanding of electoral politics into a suicide pact.

Continue reading →

Preliminary evidence suggests that Ron DeSantis helped himself overall during last night’s first Republican 2024 primary debate, although he could have helped himself much more.

As a staunch DeSantis supporter who thinks we desperately need him to be the nominee in order to prevent electoral disaster, I was not particularly impressed by his performance. His answers were mostly fine as far as they went, but they didn’t go much beyond the basics: this is what I think, this is what I’ve done, this is what I’ll do as president. He didn’t connect most of it to Donald Trump’s record despite several openings, or impress upon voters that Democrats will win unless Republicans nominate DeSantis. It was the performance one would expect in a normal primary, with normal candidates, and everyone who mattered present on stage—not in a crisis situation where getting this wrong could very well lead to political Armageddon.   

The good news is, his performance seems to have been effective enough to make the evening a net positive. DeSantis was a hit with Fox News’s post-debate focus group, and a FiveThirtyEight/Washington Post/Ipsos poll found his performance got the highest average grade and the largest share of viewers who thought he did the best, with the share of viewers considering him jumping from 63% (which was already the second highest in the field) to 67.5%—while cowardly no-show Trump’s share dropped from 66.2% to 61.4%. His overall favorability also jumped from 67.5% to 72.4%, while Trump’s dipped from 64.7% to 59.8%. (Nikki Haley, Doug Burgum, and fake candidate/Trump cabinet auditioner Vivek Ramaswamy all enjoyed larger rises in potential support, but all were starting from a much lower place than DeSantis.)

All of this—assuming it’s accurate and translates to actual primary votes when the time comes—is encouraging. It suggests that, as long as viewership is reasonably reflective of the general GOP electorate, Trump’s current support isn’t at all the locked-in inevitability he and his goon squad insist, and DeSantis is well positioned to win a majority of Republicans over by the time they reach voting booth.

Still, given the stakes it’s worth identifying some of the ways DeSantis can strengthen his messaging further still. The pre-debate advice I offered Tuesday still holds, and there were a few instances last night where not following it hurt him:

Delayed Hand-Raising—On the merits, it shouldn’t matter that he glanced around the room before raising his hand to affirm he would support Trump in the general even if convicted of a crime. He’s already on the record as committed to support the eventual nominee no matter who it is, and Trump himself refuses to make the same commitment without the conviction qualifier. But the optics were terrible. The apparent hesitation is easy to spin as indecision because that’s exactly what it looked like, and on a vital topic—the need to unite for the greater good of protecting America from the Democrats—that is one of Trump’s most potent vulnerabilities among Republican outside the MAGA cult. DeSantis needs to make sure it’s an unmistakable contrast between the two of them.

Federal Preborn Protection—DeSantis’s reluctance to say he would sign a federal abortion ban has been a recurring problem in the primary, and one he and his team don’t yet recognize the need to address. He signed a heartbeat law in Florida, and has a 100% pro-life voting record from his time in Congress indicating that of course he’d sign the same kinds of things as president. But apparently he’s been convinced that, in our current post-Roe, post-midterms climate, a straight “yes” is politically risky. Which is nonsense—his own senior adviser Ryan Tyson has already recognized that Democrats will do what they’ve always done and treat any GOP foe as an extremist no matter what their actual position is, and that the only pro-life candidates harmed in the midterms were ones who were also “piss-poor” for other reasons. Evasiveness is recognizable even to the non-politically astute. Anything that can be perceived as weakness on the gravest moral issue the conservative coalition is potentially lethal in a GOP primary; the last time DeSantis made this mistake, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America pounced on it. Yes, SBA was wildly hypocritical for doing that after giving Trump a pass on shirking their own ultimatum—but again, merits and optics are two different things. And as far as not alienating squishier voters for the general, all that’s needed to thread the needle is saying “I will sign any new protection for the preborn that Congress sends me, but you the voters will ultimately decide what to send me by who you send to Congress in the future.” (Look for this point to be expanded upon in a future article.)

Take a Page from…Nikki?—DeSantis had a great moment when he was the only guy on stage to point out that turning the election into a January 6 referendum would be a gift to Democrats. This is part of the broader theme of how nominating DeSantis is the alternative to the electoral disaster nominating Trump would bring, which I’ve wanted him to emphasize and expand on for a long time. And one of the best examples of how to do that surprisingly came from a Fox appearance by Haley this week: “[Trump’s] gonna spend more time in a courtroom than he’s gonna spend on the campaign trail…we have to win that general election, and you can’t do that when literally three-fourths of the American people don’t want to see Biden and Trump run again, and to the majority of Americans, he is the most disliked politician in all of America. That’s a reality, and that person can’t win a general election, and we can’t afford” a Democrat victory. That is exactly what one of DeSantis’s core themes needs to be, hammered in every single debate, interview, and speech. Convince people not only that you’re the best man for the job, but the only way to ensure a Republican wins to do the job.

I don’t think it’s too strong to say that Elon Musk purchasing Twitter (sorry, I’m not calling it X just yet) is one of the most positive developments for society in the past decade. One of the world’s top social media platforms without a thumb on the scale tipping the flow of information leftward is massive, and Community Notes alone do more to effectively combat propaganda than anything the Republican Party or national conservative media have come up with in, well, ever.

That said, Musk has recently started teasing a change that could blow up all the progress he’s made so far. As I covered on LifeSite last week, for reasons that he hasn’t really made clear, Musk wants to remove the ability to block other users from engaging with your public posts, arguing that merely muting them is sufficient to deal with trolls. This got an overwhelmingly negative reception, and with good reason — the results would be a disaster.

While blocking can of course be abused to shield oneself from valid criticism or inconvenient arguments (I’m proud to have amassed a rogue’s gallery of blockers for precisely that reason), it ought to be every user’s prerogative to determine how much of their time and attention they devote to strangers on the internet, no matter their reasons. Further, there are plenty of legitimate reasons for wanting to cut off certain people from interacting with you: malcontents and trolls who reply with nothing but ad hominem or intentionally waste your time with repetitive bad-faith claims, abusive or stalkerish people who spew venom or even threats at anything you post, cretins who pollute your tweets and discussion threads with foul language or imagery, and run-of-the-mill bots and spam that slips through the cracks.

Muting, which stops you from seeing them but doesn’t stop them from tweeting at you, addresses none of this. Not even the best content moderation in the world can catch everything that shouldn’t be allowed, and users’ reasonable standards for what they’re willing to put up with can easily differ from the platform’s rules. Indeed, robust user controls to tailor their experience to suit their preferences and sensibilities is the alternative to the heavyhanded censorship practices that Musk bought Twitter to stand against.

Without the ability to protect oneself from bad actors, targets would have no recourse but to make their accounts private or readable/followable by request only. For millions of us, that would defeat the purpose of being on Twitter in the first place, and kneecap Musk’s stated vision for the platform as a virtual public square (in physical public squares, stalkers don’t have the right to invade someone’s personal space to the point of breathing down his neck, with the victim unable to do anything about it).

Since the announcement, Twitter software engineer Aqueel Miqdad suggested they “can make mutes stronger, like not allow people you mute to reply or quote you. We can also transfer you block list to mute list.” Musk later endorsed “strengthen[ing] the mute function,” albeit without confirming exactly what that would mean. If Miqdad’s statement really is what we can expect, that the essential function of muting will be kept and simply renamed “muting,” then this really is much ado about nothing (except for Musk and company failing to make that clear from the outset). Either way, the sooner they clarify, the better.

They’re right that keeping the blocked from seeing your content is worthless; that can be circumvented simply by reading from a different account or opening Twitter in a browser without logging in. But at a minimum, a user’s ability to cut off unwanted interactions should be considered non-negotiable.

Tread carefully here, Elon. Take the fears seriously. You’re making great progress toward making Twitter the best social media platform on the net; it would be a shame if one false move turned it into one of the worst.

One of the reasons it’s so difficult to feel sympathy for Donald Trump’s current legal woes (selective and politically motivated though they are) is Trump’s own abandonment of his most loyal supporters to malicious prosecution, people who unlike Trump don’t have a fortune to spend on legal defenses and are only in trouble because they answered his call to attend a protest that not only never had any chance of overturning the 2020 election, but his own campaign staff never even expected to overturn the election.  

Other than the government officials who are actively perpetuating selective, disproportionate punishment of non-violent January 6 defendants without regard for their due process rights, nobody bears more responsibility for their predicament than Trump. And putting aside the question of how much more he could be doing for them beyond collaborating on a song or addressing the occasional fundraiser while dealing with his own legal problems, it is an inescapable fact that before leaving office, he could have prevented nearly all of the suffering they have endured over the past two and a half years, by issuing a blanket pardon to everyone present at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 (exempting those determined to have been credibly accused of violence against other people by January 20).

Alas, Poor Donald can never be at fault for anything in MAGA’s eyes, which means this must be either ignored or denied. One of the worst offenders on that score is “journalist” Julie Kelly, who carved out a niche in conservative media as a supposed warrior for J6 detainees, yet who is suspiciously blasé about replacing the current president with someone who could actually end their persecution.

Since Ron DeSantis announced his candidacy, Kelly has taken to frequently sniping at him with pedantic and disingenuous claims that he is somehow questionable on the issue of dismantling weaponized government.

Admittedly, I believe DeSantis’s comments here have suffered from his instincts as a lawyer getting in the way of the need for direct answers that frontload a simple “yes” to the pardon questions. But on the merits, the idea that the guy who has been more aggressive and proactive in fighting the Left than any other officeholder in America, who said on day two of his campaign that he would be “aggressive at issuing pardons” on “day one” of his presidency, who has been developing a comprehensive plan to rein in a rogue Justice Department, and who has ousted George Soros-backed prosecutors is not clearly preferable to the guy who abandoned his pledge to prosecute Hillary Clinton the moment it was no longer politically useful and spent his presidency doing nothing to clean up the rot in the executive branch, to the point that he appointed one of the US attorneys who went on to screw him solely because a couple of Democrat senators asked him to…well, it doesn’t pass the laugh test.

In response to this, several tweeters (who have yet to be blocked by her, unlike yours truly) have pointed out how Trump left the J6ers out to dry by not pardoning them…to which Kelly has incredibly suggested that he couldn’t have pardoned them.

“Blanket pardon is absurd—who knew DOJ would round up and charge 2k people, did you?” Kelly tweeted on May 24. On July 28, she again dismissed the possibility as “absurd,” and upon receiving pushback retorted, “what would the crime be? Explain how this pardon would’ve worked.”

Multiple respondents did just that. Kelly, naturally, did not respond to any of them.

The point is worth taking a few moments to set the record straight on: Trump absolutely could have issued a blanket pardon preventing the persecutions, with historical precedent readily demonstrating how.

On September 8, 1974, Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon “for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9,1974.”

On January 21, 1977, Jimmy Carter pardoned “all persons who may have committed any offense between August 4, 1964 and March 28, 1973 in violation of the Military Selective Service Act or any rule or regulation promulgated thereunder,” with language excluding any offense “involving force or violence” or representatives of the “Military Selective Service system.”

The subjects did not need to be identified. Their alleged crimes did not need to be specified. Their cases did not need to have been adjudicated.

It should not have been remotely difficult for White House lawyers to draft a pardon, for instance, covering “all persons who may have committed any offense within the United States Capitol or on the Capitol grounds on January 6, 2021,” with language clarifying that it “does not apply to individuals who may have committed any offense involving force or violence against another human being.”

As for the idea that the Justice Department’s persecution of J6 protesters was some unforeseeable surprise…really? After years of Democrat efforts to demonize conservatives as “domestic extremists” and everything they tried to criminalize Trump himself throughout his presidency? As far back as I can remember, the Left has itched to brand peaceful conservative protests as breeding grounds for violence. Now that they finally had one that did turn violent, of course they were going to make the most of it.

I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say that people who lead their followers into catastrophe then leave them there should not be entrusted with the task of getting them out of it. Nor should self-styled experts on their plight who actively mislead their readers about the most basic solutions that were available.