E-Pluribus | April 12, 2024
Nothing new under the sun; J.K. Rowling in the crosshairs; and the Gaza Health Ministry lets the truth slip out.
A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Kevin R. Kosar: Old Lessons for the New Right
Power corrupts, and even those who generally rail against the ever-increasing power of the federal government can’t seem to resist. Kevin Kosar at The Dispatch warns those on the right who think they’ve found a righteous use of government power to take a trip down memory lane to see how such attempts have ended (or perhaps more to the point, not ended) in the past.
Media personalities and think tankers alike have proposed using federal power for a wide array of purposes, from banning pornography to empowering the Department of Labor to “encourage” businesses to observe the Sabbath. Like Rubio, some Republican politicians have proposed enlarging the scope of federal authority. Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, for example, has put forward legislation empowering officials at the Department of Commerce and the Department of Defense to decide what goods should be subjected to federal regulations requiring companies to meet “made in America” dictates. And of course, candidate Donald Trump would tax the endowments of private universities and even direct the Justice Department to “dismantle every gang, street crew, and drug network in America,” among other examples.
It’s peculiar to see these ideas proposed by the same people who call for cutting federal spending, “draining the swamp,” and getting the feds off Americans’ backs. They seem to think they can reconcile these competing notions by empowering the president to yoke and direct the federal beast more firmly via Schedule F. If it takes a Red Caesar to right the republic, so be it.
[. . .]
What right-leaning advocates of a bigger government overlooked then and now is that federal policymaking is an inherently fraught enterprise. So many things can go wrong even when you have the smartest people with the best intentions in the room. One need only look at the Casa Grande Farm experiment, which the conservative luminary Edward C. Banfield described in his brilliant 1951 book Government Project, which I republished late last year.
In 1937, a combination of Dust Bowl-era weather, collapsing food prices during the Great Depression, and the rise of mechanized mega-farms displacing family farms produced a migrant crisis. To respond, President Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order establishing the Farm Security Administration (FSA) to propose solutions for rural poverty.
[. . .]
There is a corpus of case studies, policy histories, and social scientific literature that show the myriad ways policymaking goes awry. Policymakers often disagree over how to solve problems, and the bargains they cut may impart conflicting objectives. Conceptual flaws and officials’ hesitance to end programs means public policies frequently have more long-run costs than benefits. Studies of bureaucracies illustrate that agencies develop their own interests that may diverge from the public interest, that they can be captured by special interests and form corrupt iron triangles with legislators. Almost inevitably, federal programs spawn new classes of beneficiaries who set up shop permanently in Washington to ensure their preferred policies endure.
Read it all here.
Joan Smith: Queen of the Gender Crits
One can imagine after her success with Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling might have simply wanted to live out a quiet and peaceful existence. Her stance on women versus radical transgender ideology, however, made that impossible. At Quillette, Joan Smith looks at the latest chapter in Rowling’s personal saga in her adopted home of Scotland.
The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act came into effect on April 1—April Fools’ day, as critics were quick to point out. It’s been on the statute books since 2021, but implementation was delayed because no one could say with any certainty what it actually criminalised.
Officially described as an act “to make provision about the aggravation of offences by prejudice; to make provision about an offence of racially aggravated harassment; to make provision about offences relating to stirring up hatred against a group of persons” and various other “connected purposes,” the law extends existing protections against racial hatred to cover age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity and variations in sex characteristics. Women are not explicitly protected. And so the female half of the population will have to wait for a separate piece of legislation that addresses misogyny at an unspecified time in the future.
[. . .]
[As] everyone predicted, one of the first targets when the legislation came into operation was another English novelist who has made Scotland her home.
J.K. Rowling has lived in Edinburgh since 1993, before she published her first Harry Potter novel. Her increasingly stellar fame was initially seen as an ornament to the city and she became one of Scotland’s foremost philanthropists, setting up a charity in 2006 that supports children in orphanages in Eastern Europe, Africa, and Latin America. More recently, after Edinburgh’s rape crisis centre appointed a trans-identified male as its CEO, Rowling set up and funded Beira’s Place, a women-only service for victims of sexual violence. In any sane world, such generous acts would have won plaudits from government ministers. Not in Scotland, however, where the SNP is convinced that even the mildest resistance to the intemperate demands of gender warriors is tantamount to heresy.
[. . .]
[As] the Hate Crime Act came into force and reports to Police Scotland soared, the First Minister became tetchy. He said he was “very, very concerned” about the high volume of “vexatious” complaints, and pleaded with people to stop wasting police time. It was quite an admission, given that he’d repeatedly said that the Act wouldn’t be misused to stifle free speech.
But Yousaf knew exactly who to blame—and it wasn’t himself. He rounded on Rowling, claiming that her posts about the Act on X (formerly Twitter) were “offensive, upsetting and insulting to trans people.”
[. . .]
One of the mysteries about the Scottish hate crime law is why it is needed at all. Rudeness to strangers is an unappealing feature of social media, but threats of rape and murder can be dealt with under existing legislation. There is clearly a problem with people who fail to regulate their emotions on platforms such as X, but neither the police nor the courts have expertise in mental health or counselling.
Yousaf has repeatedly claimed that there is a “rising tide of hatred” in Scotland, but official figures tell a different story. The total number of charges with a hate-crime element was 5,738 in 2022–23, which is a small reduction (2%) on the previous twelve months. One figure is particularly striking in view of ministers’ insistence that trans people are in urgent need of protection, and that is the fact that recorded hate crimes against this demographic showed a substantial reduction in 2022–23 (55 compared with 86 in the previous twelve months).
Of course we don’t know how many are not reported, but we also don’t know whether such “crimes” are really motivated by hate. Police Scotland’s website defines a hate crime as “any crime which is understood by the victim or any other person as being motivated (wholly or partly) by malice or ill will towards a social group.” It’s an entirely subjective judgment, which might lead someone who’s easily offended to mistake abruptness or disagreement for hate. One of Scotland’s foremost legal scholars, Michael Foran, thinks the public information campaign around the new Act has actively encouraged the confusion, as it focuses almost exclusively on “hurt feelings.” And that was always going to lead to uncertainty and discrepancies in the application of the law.
[. . .]
Swallowing nonsensical claims about the unique oppression of trans people may have produced a warm feeling of righteousness in Scotland’s political parties, all of which—with the honourable exception of the Tories—toed the line and supported a blatant assault on free speech. But they’ve ended up with a law that very few people like and nobody understands. Ministers have been reduced to making the feeble defence that the legislation isn’t as bad as its opponents suggest while one of the few clear outcomes, ironically, is that people in Scotland can now call a man a man without fear of prosecution.
That’s thanks to Rowling, whom everyone agrees has played a blinder. It’s not so much an Ealing comedy as a farce in which a group of zealots tried to control an entire nation’s speech, only to be outwitted by a woman who knows how to use words to devastating effect.
Read the whole thing.
Foundation for Defense of Democracies: Hamas-Run Gaza Health Ministry Admits to Flaws in Casualty Data
The willingness of many in the press to run with casualty figures provided by the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry and the willingness of many politicians to parrot those numbers (President Joe Biden, for one) flies in the face of the expressed desire of many of those same people to stamp out “mis-” and “disinformation.” Now an analysis of recent Gaza Health Ministry statements by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies suggests even the Gaza Health Ministry can’t stand by its own figures.
The Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health said on April 6 that it had “incomplete data” for 11,371 of the 33,091 Palestinian fatalities it claims to have documented. In a statistical report, the ministry notes that it considers an individual record to be incomplete if it is missing any of the following key data points: identity number, full name, date of birth, or date of death. The health ministry also released a report on April 3 that acknowledged the presence of incomplete data but did not define what it meant by “incomplete.” In that earlier report, the ministry acknowledged the incompleteness of 12,263 records. It is unclear why, after just three more days, the number fell to 11,371 — a decrease of more than 900 records.
Prior to its admissions of incomplete data, the health ministry asserted that the information in more than 15,000 fatality records had stemmed from “reliable media sources.” However, the ministry never identified the sources in question and Gaza has no independent media.
“The sudden shifts in the ministry’s reporting methods suggest it is scrambling to prevent exposure of its shoddy work. For months, U.S. media have taken for granted that the ministry’s top-line figure for casualties was reliable enough to include in daily updates on the war. Even President Biden has cited its numbers. Now we’re seeing that a third or more of the ministry’s data may be incomplete at best — and fictional at worst.” — David Adesnik, Senior Fellow and Director of Research
“It is important to recognize that Hamas is deeply invested in shaping the narrative that emerges from Gaza, particularly regarding the number of casualties in the war. Moreover, this control of data extends beyond the statistics provided by the Hamas-controlled health ministry, as there is also a deliberate effort to downplay the number of terrorists who have been killed by Israel in the war, potentially numbering more than 10,000.” — Joe Truzman, Senior Research Analyst at FDD’s Long War Journal
Read it all.
Around Twitter (X)
Via the Wall Street Journal, trouble in paradise at The New York Times again:
Another shocking incident from UCLA, again via Aaron Sibarium. Click for more audio and full thread:
And finally, the Associated Press (h/t @redsteeze) beats all comers with this tweet on the death of O.J. Simpson: