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Fresh Laundry Or Chemical Comfort

It was a miserable start to one of the more miserable Monday mornings in recent memory, but President Donald Trump was in no hurry to soothe tensions. As the nation was still processing the brutal tragedy at Brown University, where two students were killed and at least nine others were injured on Saturday, Trump had his mind elsewhere. The Hollywood film director Rob Reiner, one of Trump’s betes noirs, had just been murdered with his wife Michele the day before. Trump was not in a conciliatory mood.  The president fired up his Truth Social account: “Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.” But instead of laughter and support, Trump’s post was met with condemnation from a wide cross-section of pundits and politicians regardless of political affiliation. For the first time in a long time, both Democrats and Republicans alike appeared to be equally horrified by Trump’s nasty comments. In a country overwhelmed by division, one quiet consensus still remains: Dancing on another human’s grave, rival or not, is a moral line best left uncrossed. In life, Reiner was one of the most bellicose critics of Trump. In 2017, the then-71-year-old film director called Trump “mentally unfit” and suggested Trump was the “single most unqualified human being to ever assume the presidency of the United States.” The Emmy Award-winning director was a darling of the progressive left and made himself an enemy of Trump’s when he established a nonprofit to investigate Russia’s President Vladimir Putin’s alleged role in the 2016 election. A harsh critic of Trump’s relationship with Putin, Reiner warned that Trump’s ascendancy to the Oval Office signaled creeping fascism that mirrored that of the Russian state.  But criticism is part of the deal when you become president. It’s something Trump has always struggled with. The president surrounds himself with outspoken loyalists and, especially in the second administration, the sort of swamp creatures he once promised to slay. At this point, it’s clear the best way to enter and stay in Trump’s inner circle is by telling him what he wants to hear when he wants to hear it—and not a word more. As a result, there evidently was no one in the president’s camp on Monday morning willing to suggest that maybe it would be best to let sleeping dogs lie as the nation mourned another horrific headline after another horrific weekend. Instead, we saw the worst of Trump: mean, old, uncharismatic Trump. Speaking of the slain director at an afternoon press conference on Monday, Trump doubled down on his morning dispatch.  “He was a deranged person, as far as Trump was concerned,” the president said, referring to himself in third person. “I was not a fan of Rob Reiner at all in any shape or form. I thought he was very bad for our country.” Spotted in the halls of Congress later in the day, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) did his best to wiggle out of answering honestly about Trump’s comments. “I don’t do ongoing commentary about everything that’s said by everybody in government every day,” Johnson said, pivoting toward his attempts to “bring down health care costs for the American people.”  But those whose job is not to pivot away from such sordid fare were animated in their response to Trump’s dig at Reiner. “Rob Reiner and his wife were tragically killed at the hands of their own son, who reportedly had drug addiction and other issues, and their remaining children are left in serious mourning and heartbreak,” Trump-ally-turned-critic Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) wrote in response to Trump’s post. “This is a family tragedy, not about politics or political enemies.” Trump’s former lawyer Jenna Ellis also criticized Trump’s lowbrow tweet. “A man and his wife were murdered last night. This is NOT the appropriate response.” Though Trump is correct in asserting that Reiner did spend many of his final years as an unofficial spokesman for the anti-Trump left, it’s undeniable that Reiner also found it within himself to speak out against political violence and seek consensus when Turning Point USA’s founder Charlie Kirk was gunned down on the campus of Utah Valley University in September. “It’s beyond belief what happened to him,” Reiner said in the days following Kirk’s assassination. “That should never happen to anybody. I don’t care what your political beliefs are. That’s not acceptable, that’s not a solution to solving problems.” To steal the words right from Reiner’s mouth, the way Trump reacted to the director’s death on Monday morning was “not acceptable.” Despite the bitterness and animosity that have marked the Trump era on all sides, the fragile bonds holding our American society together are at their greatest strength when we insist on a basic standard of decency and respect for one another. Reiner’s comments about Kirk were a small measure of grace that some in our America were unable to similarly afford the slain conservative. I saw it with my own eyes when a roadside poster of Kirk in Culpeper, Virginia was vandalized to blot out his face this fall, a reminder that even in a relatively rural and conservative part of the country, there is a palpable anger haunting our nation.  Trump could have played an integral role in tamping down such agitations but his post about Reiner on Monday morning says all you need to know about the sitting president. He’s vindictive, corrosive, petty, and more than anything, a disappointment. Instead of working tirelessly to fulfill his campaign promises to kickstart the American economy and keep us out of foreign wars, he’s done the opposite. Unemployment is at a four-year high, Trump insists affordability is a “hoax,” and we’re teetering on the edge of a shooting war with Venezuela. Gas prices are falling—but only because demand is falling. Trump, meanwhile, is busy building his ballroom, gilding the White House, and poking fun at the brutal murder of another human being. “It’s nightmarish, what is happening in America,” Reiner said of Trump and America only weeks before his death. “I’m hoping we’ll survive this. And if we do, it’s going to take a long time to rebuild the shining city on the hill, the beacon to the rest of the world.” He was right about that, at least. What is happening in our America right now is nightmarish. Trump’s statement about Reiner is a stain on his office. It will be rightfully used to highlight the true nature of a man who proudly spoke peace but often preferred war.  To the surviving Reiners, and especially the daughter who found her parents slaughtered on the first night of Hannukah: Please understand that the president’s remarks on Monday morning do not reflect the views or values of millions of Americans who voted for him. Let our condemnation of his words stand as evidence that there still is a united America somewhere out there, and it’s full of people who still believe in the sanctity of human life. The post The Trump Mean Streak appeared first on The American Conservative.

When I first heard the term “neurodivergence” about fifteen years ago, I thought it might be the latest sci-fi dystopia from the author William Gibson. It actually means, well, whatever you want it to mean. But generally, people who talk about neurodivergence are referring to a range of conditions such as autism, ADHD, Asperger’s syndrome, Tourette’s, etc.—things that often used to be called learning difficulties. Nowadays, everyone has it. It’s cool to have a dash of neurodivergence, and it is one of the first things people tell you about themselves at middle-class dinner parties. But for others less privileged, it is a route to a lifetime languishing on what the Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch MP, has dubbed “Benefits Street”.   Neurodivergence has become a key to accessing the United Kingdom’s uniquely generous system of disability payments. Benefits such as Personal Independence Payments, which help people with mental and behavioural health conditions, have been awarded for about as long as neurodivergence has existed. But this system of subsidized living is now out of control . The number of working-age recipients of disability benefits in the UK has reached nearly four million, up 40 percent in the last five years alone. Disability payments used to go to people with observable physical disabilities such as blindness, physical incapacity, and severe mental distress. Now, increasingly, they go to people with disorders such as anxiety, depression, and autism spectrum conditions.  Last year, 44 percent of disability payments went to claimants with mental and behavioural illnesses that, in many cases, barely existed 30 years ago. Seventy percent of new sickness claimants under 25 years of age cite mental or behavioural conditions, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. One in 10 people of working age in Britain is now claiming at least one kind of sickness or disability benefit. Everyone knows this is unsustainable. The cost of this neurodemic is catastrophic. The bill for incapacity and disability benefits is already higher than the amount spent on defence and is expected to reach £100 billion ($129 billion) by 2030. It is now a major component of Britain’s massive £330 billion ($440 billion) welfare bill which has doubled since the financial crisis. The Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said the benefits bill is “unsustainable, indefensible, and unfair.” He has hired the veteran former Labour minister from the Tony Blair era, Alan Milburn, to “think the unthinkable.” But when the Labour Chancellor Rachel Reeves tried to trim sickness benefits by a modest £5 billion earlier this year, she had to back down because of a threatened backbench rebellion by Labour MPs. Yet everyone agrees that having working-age people languishing on benefits does no one any good, especially not young people with self-diagnosed psychological conditions. Neurodivergence is very much a young person’s disease. One in five British children between the ages of 8 and 25 claim to have a mental health disorder.  One million young people aged 16–24 in Britain are now officially NEET—not in employment, education or training. That is one in eight young people. Half of them have a disability, according to the Youth Futures Foundation, and most of those cite mental and behavioural issues. Half of all secondary-school pupils have taken time off school in the past year for anxiety.  Neurodiversity is not, of course, unique to Britain. The term was coined by an Australian sociologist, Judy Singer, in the late 1990s and became a touchstone of American therapy culture. But the scale of it in Britain is unique. No other Western country has experienced a similar rise in mental health–related benefit claims since the pandemic.  The right says this is simply because benefits are too easily claimed. Claimants are gaming the system. And it is true that it seems easy to get onto the benefits process after a brief telephone interview. The left says, rather, that many psychological disorders that were once stigmatized, such as depression, have now been recognized as the serious medical conditions they truly are. These illnesses are real—doctors say so—and so they must be treated like any other medical condition. There is something in both accounts, but fraud and undiagnosed illness does not account for what is happening in Britain. This mental health crisis is underpinned by a collapse of national morale and self-worth similar to defeat in wartime.  People with neurodivergent conditions can often be spectacularly successful. The Virgin boss, Richard Branson, is dyslexic. Great national leaders such as Winston Churchill were depressives. ADHD used to be classed as hyperactivity and was claimed by the Olympic swimming champion Michael Phelps as the source of his drive to win.  This is not to say that these mental conditions are always a gift in disguise, but there is a noticeable decline in resilience in the UK. It looks rather as if young people in Britain, instead of engaging with the world, are hiding in their bedrooms haunted by nameless dread, often over the state of the planet. There is an economic dimension too. If people see nothing worth getting out of bed for, they simply will not. Britain compounded its psychological malaise during Covid by conducting what looks like the world’s greatest experiment in universal basic income (UBI). It was not a success. At the height of the pandemic, after the entire nation was placed under effective house arrest called “lockdown”, the Conservative Chancellor Rishi Sunak introduced a furlough scheme that gave people 80 per cent of their previous income to stay at home.  By late 2020, the UK government was paying the wages of more than half of all adults if you include those on benefits and public-sector workers. Britain had become a socialist country by default.  Free furlough money was, of course, an invitation to fraud, which has cost the Exchequer an estimated £11 billion. But it was also a test of the theory, beloved of many left-wing academics, that if you paid people not to work, they would turn into gifted artists, philosophers, and bedroom businessmen. It didn’t happen that way. The UK may have proved conclusively that UBI is not a liberator of universal creativity and is more likely to lead to inactivity, purposelessness, and anomie. That the name of Britain’s welfare system, Universal Credit, echoes “universal basic income” is perhaps no accident. Many young people simply gave up on the whole idea of getting a job. Why bother when you can get almost as much on benefits? Young women with children and a neurodivergent condition can earn far more than the national minimum wage, according to the Centre for Social Justice. But there may also be a cultural dimension to this malaise. Britons have always been a notoriously apologetic people. They say “sorry” when you bump into them in the street. The country’s intelligentsia is saturated with guilt and is addicted to apologizing for Britain’s imperial past. Schools lecture children on the evils of  racism, colonialism and inequality—even though Britain was the first empire in history to abolish slavery and despite the fact that the UK is one of the least racially prejudiced nations in Europe, as repeatedly confirmed even  by research from the EU-funded European Social Survey. Yet every museum exhibit now seems to carry a lecture about the iniquities of slavery. Anticolonialist academics such as David Olusoga are feted by the BBC. Edinburgh University even cancelled one of the country’s greatest philosophers, David Hume, because of a racially offensive footnote in an essay from the 18th century. Britain seems to lack any sense of national destiny or purpose, and sees very little worth celebrating in its own culture. Raising the English flag is condemned as racially offensive. Little girls are sent home if they wear dresses depicting the Union Jack as an expression of their cultural identity. More seriously, the mass rape of young white girls by Pakistani grooming gangs in northern towns such as Rochdale was covered up by the authorities terrified of appearing racist. There it is: a country that no longer believes in itself, a workforce that has come to expect the state to provide, and a society in thrall to mental illness. A collision with reality cannot be far off for Benefits Britain. As the national debt approaches 100 per cent of GDP, there is simply no money to fund this neurodivergent lifestyle. Yet there is no political will to change the system or to restore a sense of national self-worth. Indeed, Britain’s “self-loathing” cultural elites seem to rather approve of living in a country on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The post Benefits Britain Is on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs Ukrainian Security Guarantees Are Dangerous and Counterproductive Western military commitments will destabilize the neighborhood rather than fostering peace. Rumors are swirling that the Trump administration is willing to offer Ukraine “Article 5–like” security guarantees in its effort to end the almost four-year Russia–Ukraine war. The exact terms of the offer remain uncertain. In broad form, however, the guarantee appears to involve an American commitment to support a European-led “multinational force”; to lead monitoring and verification efforts that will enforce any peace deal and provide Kiev warning of an impending Russian attack; to help arm Ukraine in peacetime; and, most importantly, via a legally binding pledge “subject to national procedures, to take measures to restore peace and security” if war again erupts.  A security guarantee for Ukraine is a terrible idea. Even as it would reverse Trump’s long-standing opposition to further enmeshing the United States with Ukraine, a guarantee carries a range of dangers for the United States, Ukraine, and the European NATO allies while delivering few benefits. Whether offered as part of a peace deal or ceasefire, the guarantee may do little to deter Russia. Further, should a conflict break out, the arrangement is poised to trigger a fundamental crisis in U.S.–European relations. Above all, the guarantee promises to complicate rather than ameliorate Ukraine’s own understandable desire to find security for itself in the shadow of its Russian neighbor. Rather than continuing the security guarantee conversation, Washington would be wise to back away from the pledge. The central problem for any security guarantee is the asymmetry of interests between the United States and Russia vis-à-vis Ukraine. Russia’s willingness to invade Ukraine and then stay in the fight for nearly four years demonstrates that it views Ukraine as an interest worth sacrificing blood, treasure, and even other interests to pursue. The United States, in contrast, was and remains unwilling to go to war on Ukraine’s behalf—indeed, policymakers across two administrations and the American public alike have converged on this point. Ukraine simply matters less to the United States than it does to Russia. As a direct result, any American promise is inherently less credible than are Russian threats when it comes to shaping Ukraine’s future.  Russia has already borne enormous costs in Ukraine, just as Ukrainian sacrifices have contributed to the future deterrence of Russian aggression. Against this backdrop, an American security guarantee to Ukraine could set Moscow and the United States on a dangerous collision course. The ambiguity of a security guarantee committing the U.S. to “restore peace and security” in Ukraine invites Moscow to test the United States’ resolve and to see how far it could aggress without provoking a serious American response. Moscow’s incentive for doing so is that by probing the U.S. guarantee, it would determine exactly where and in what ways it could resume acting at Ukraine’s expense. Indeed, Russian leaders could reasonably hope to show that the security guarantee is not worth the paper it is printed on. Under such circumstances, however, the United States would be caught in an exposed position.  On the one hand, acting on the guarantee and truly coming to Ukraine’s defense—as Ukrainian leaders would demand—would be contrary to the U.S. national interest. Barring a sea change in policymakers’ understanding of Ukraine’s importance to the U.S., rolling the iron dice on Kiev’s behalf does not seem likely. On the other hand, tolerating Russian probes would reveal the non-credible nature of the American guarantee. This could quickly pave the way for conflict to resume: After all, if Moscow concludes that a U.S. security guarantee does not mean American entry into the war, Russia has little reason not to resume hostilities and see what else it might win on the battlefield. Additional conflict—rather a durable peace—could well be the ironic result, along with additional damage to the United States’ reputation. These same circumstances are poised to generate a crisis within NATO. Since the United States is marketing its security guarantee to Ukraine as “Article 5–like,” should Washington reveal that it interpreted such a commitment narrowly, then NATO allies such as the Baltic states might reasonably question whether Washington’s interpretation of NATO Article 5 itself would likewise leave them in the lurch in the event of a crisis. Moscow could be left asking which NATO commitments were more like those to the major European powers and which were more like the undefended commitment to Ukraine. Even if these concerns can be finessed, questions over whether NATO is a tiered alliance are likely to endure.  Similar problems abound when it comes to the nominal U.S. pledge to backstop a European-led security force in Ukraine. This issue is wrapped up with the Trump administration’s efforts to encourage the European allies to invest in their militaries and take responsibility for continental defense. On the face of it, that the European force will be deployed at all might seem proof that the Trump push is working. In reality, however, discussions of a European-led force for Ukraine have been under way for over a year; crucially, key allies such as Germany have long resisted the idea without U.S. support for the operation, while even proponents of the operation such as Britain recognize that the effort cannot move forward without the United States acting as a “tripwire” tied to the “assurance force.”  Viewed in this light, the U.S. offer to support a European-led force in Ukraine as part of a security guarantee is less about Europe stepping up and more about continuing European reliance on the United States under fraught circumstances. Indeed, by backstopping European efforts as part of a security guarantee, Washington could end up creating conditions that allow the European allies to hold off arranging the logistics, command and control, and intelligence systems needed for Europe to take greater responsibility for continental defense. At the same time, should the force actually be called upon to fight, the same interest gap that invites Russian opportunism means that the United States may be more likely to abandon the operation than continue the backstop. Not only would this undermine the force’s ability to fulfill any militarily useful mission, but it would similarly lead to an alliance rupture. Finally, the security guarantee misleads Ukraine, risking dangerous consequences for all parties. On one level, after the current war ends, Kiev will still need to find some way of creating security for itself in the shadow of its Russian neighbor. So far, Ukrainian leaders have pinned their hopes on a two-pronged strategy of building up Ukrainian military capabilities while seeking external allies. The latter effort traditionally focused on gaining membership in NATO but, given allied ambivalence on admitting Ukraine given the risks with Russia, this has now shifted towards the sort of NATO-like security guarantees on offer from Washington.  The problem, however, is that the U.S. offer continues leading Ukraine down what John Mearsheimer termed “the primrose path.” No matter what is pledged in peacetime, Ukraine is unlikely to be able to call upon the U.S. as an ally in wartime. Instead, Ukraine’s best security bet lies in a combination of arming—acquiring the capability to defend itself by itself—and diplomacy—trying to forestall additional conflicts with Russia before they start. With the prospect of a security guarantee before it, however, Ukraine is likely to seek as strong of a security guarantee from the United States in the near term as possible, and to try to further upgrade the commitment in the years ahead (ideally paving the way for NATO accession). American domestic politics may reinforce Kiev’s ambitions, as Democrats eager to distinguish themselves from the Trump administration and those Republicans still committed to U.S. dominance in Europe would probably encourage Ukrainian efforts. Far from taking steps to provide security for itself against Russia, Kiev would be incentivized to adopt the political and military efforts that it thinks will curry favor with Washington. The result could leave Ukraine further vulnerable to future Russian aggression. Meanwhile, the same incentive to extract further U.S. concessions may also lead Ukraine to adopt provocative policies of its own in order to create favorable political conditions for Ukraine in the U.S. The current conflict has already produced this sort of behavior, for example when Ukraine sought baselessly to pin the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline on Russia, or claimed that Russian missiles had hit Poland when in fact the missiles were errant Ukrainian assets. A security guarantee could amplify these incentives, encouraging Ukraine to try to provoke Russia in hopes that the appearance of Russian aggression would translate into greater U.S. support for Kiev. From Kiev’s perspective, this action would be entirely understandable and reasonable. Still, Ukrainian moral hazard risks causing renewed hostilities—with deleterious consequences for the U.S., Ukraine, and others.  A U.S. security guarantee may appear reasonable on paper, but is risky and strategically problematic in practice. The Trump administration would be wise to back away from the idea as expeditiously as possible. It is time for frank and honest talk among the parties to the war about their real future roles in Ukraine.  Such discussions would be more than diplomatic niceties: just as wars erupt when states disagree over the balance of power between them, so too does a stable peace deal require clarity on the enduring distribution of power between Kiev and Moscow, given what the countries themselves can mobilize and credibly call upon from their partners. Given demonstrated U.S. unwillingness to enter the war, and declining European and American interest in supporting Ukraine’s war effort, all parties would be wise to end the myth-making and instead determine what (if any) sort of long-term Western backing for Ukraine is realistic. Only at that point will conditions be favorable for a stable arrangement. A security guarantee is not credible, but the United States can foster a situation that will help end the current conflict, prevent future violence, and allow the U.S. to turn its attention elsewhere. The post Ukrainian Security Guarantees Are Dangerous and Counterproductive appeared first on The American Conservative.

An interesting comparison. The post The venue David Byrne said matched CBGB: “People would eat, drink, talk, and socialise” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.