I want to take exception with Marc Thiessen’s recent Washington Post column. In the column Mr. Thiessen asserts that President Trump is 14 days from victory in Iran:

Here is the bottom line: The Iran war must end with a decisive victory. And that victory can only be achieved in one of two ways: either Iran capitulates or the U.S. launches a final flurry of military strikes.

Trump has given the regime every opportunity to sue for peace, and it has rejected his overtures. It is admirable that Trump is taking his time. He understands that what he is doing is important and cannot be rushed. But it is also true that he cannot declare victory until either Iran cries uncle — or he finishes the job.

He contends that the “job will be finished” in two weeks.

It was about a century ago that the philosopher George Santayana wrote that only the dead have seen an end to war. I suspect that is particularly true of the war against Iran. I think Mr. Thiessen is making two errors.

First, who in Iran would surrender to us? How would that surrender be made to hold? At this point there does not appear to be any unitary leadership in the country. One faction might surrender but that would leave the others.

Second, I think he’s expressing a grave misunderstanding of religion. Some Iranian actors operate within a framework where martyrdom and resistance have intrinsic value. That does not make them irrational but it does mean that the cost-benefit calculus Thiessen assumes may not apply in the way he suggests.

About twenty years ago a unit of time, roughly six months, called “the Friedman unit” was proposed in jocular reaction to columnist Tom Frieman’s repeated assertions, over a multi-year period, whether a decent outcome would be forthcoming in the war in Iraq. If Mr. Thiessen continues his assertions we may need a “Thiessen unit”. There would be 12 Thiessen units in a Friedman unit.

At the Wall Street Journal Avi Shafran responds to Pope Leo XIV’s condemnation of the U. S.-Israeli war against Iran. Here’s a snippet from his op-ed:

Celebrating Mass in St. Peter’s Square on Palm Sunday amid the Iran war, Pope Leo XIV declared that God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.” He also recalled the prophet Isaiah’s words: “Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood.”

Yom HaZikaron, Israel’s official day of remembrance for fallen soldiers and victims of terrorism, came a few weeks later, on April 20. Warren Goldstein, chief rabbi of the Union of Orthodox Synagogues of South Africa, used the occasion to deliver a stern reply to Pope Leo.

On Yom HaZikaron, he said, we note how “our soldiers who fell in battle” are “holy and pure.” He declared that “the wars that Israel has fought since its inception are just wars,” something that must be said in this “world of moral confusion.”

But the pope, Rabbi Goldstein said, “had the audacity and the brazenness and the cruelty to say that all of those who wage war will be turned away by God.”

concluding:

Pope Leo’s sermon and Rabbi Goldstein’s response may be simply a blip in the relations of Catholics and Jews that have improved so much over the past 60 years. I hope they do not mark a more lasting and more dangerous turn toward enmity.

I think a number of things are being bundled up in the column which deserve to be separated including:

• Interest
• casus belli
• Morality

I am an American and I am a Catholic. The remarks are at least as applicable to the United States as to Israel, and may plausibly be read as aimed at U.S. interventionism. I will refrain from commenting on Israel’s interests, whether Iran’s actions were an imminent threat to Israel, and the morality of Israel’s actions, restricting my comments to America’s interests, its casus belli for war with Iran, the legality of the U. S.’s going to war with Iran, and the morality of our going to war with Iran.

Robert Prevost (Pope Leo) is an American and a Catholic, too. He must be at least as aware as I am that Catholics are not pacifists. Furthermore, even if the pope would like to be a pacifist, his advisors have surely warned him that taking such a position would destroy the Church by undermining its teaching authority, a major distinction between Catholicism and other Christian denominations. The pope is constrained by a millennium-old teachings that allow just wars. Consequently, I believe that interpreting the pope’s remarks as directed towards Israel is mistaken: he was talking about the United States.

I see the war as yet another instance of what I call the “Batman theory” of America’s role in the world—i.e. that America has not just a right but a responsibility to right global wrongs as we see fit without reference to law or authority.

Among the many problems is that the United States is a signatory to the UN Charter and going to war other than in immediate self-defense, i.e. imminent threat, without Security Council authorization or Congressional authority is illegal. A reasonable retort to that is that the U. S. has done so many times over the last 40 years including in Yugoslavia, in Libya, in Iraq, and elsewhere. One might point out that in the instance of Libya there as a Security Council resolution. However, both Russia and China complained that U. S. action in Libya greatly exceeded the UNSC resolution which was limited to protecting civilians, not attacking or overthrowing the Qaddafi government.

In addition engaging in war other than as a last resort is immoral. Had diplomatic channels been exhausted? Was our response proportional? is there a reasonable chance of success? I believe the answer to all of those questions is “no”.

U. S. interests are not synonymous with Israeli interests and we should not pursue Israeli interests as our own. The United States is not Israel, and its obligations whether legal, strategic, and moral are its own. Treating Israeli interests as interchangeable with American interests obscures the very questions that must be answered before any resort to force: what threat we face, under what authority we act, and whether war is truly the last resort.

Those questions cannot be answered by invocation or by alliance. They require argument. And when they are not answered, appeals to justice ring hollow, however sincerely made.

If Pope Leo’s words have any proper application here, it is not as a blanket condemnation of war, but as a challenge to the presumption that American power, once engaged, is thereby justified. That presumption deserves more scrutiny than it has received.

I rarely do this but I am going to quote James Taranto’s piece in the Wall Street Journal on the federal case against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in full, not necessarily because I agree with him but because I think it is highly informative.

Perhaps the most contentious statement of Donald Trump’s career has been his assertion in August 2017 that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the agitation in Charlottesville, Va. Mr. Trump was right in more ways than he realized—at least one person was on both sides. Meet F-37, a figure in the indictment a federal grand jury in Montgomery, Ala., handed up last week against the self-styled antiracist nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center.

“F-37 was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ event . . . and attended the event at the direction of the SPLC,” the grand jury alleges. “F-37 made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees. Between 2015 and 2023, the SPLC secretly paid F-37 more than $270,000.00.”

F is for “field source,” the SPLC’s term for inside informants it paid to gather intelligence on white-supremacist groups. According to the indictment, “between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly funneled more than $3 million in SPLC funds to Fs who were associated with various violent extremist groups.” Among these, the indictment says, were F-9, who got a cool million over a decade for activities that included stealing documents from the neo-Nazi National Alliance, and F-39, whom the SPLC paid $6,000 to take the rap for F-9’s theft.

The SPLC raises money and sustains its relevance by stoking the perception that white supremacy is pervasive and influential. I have argued since 2008 that this aligns the center’s interests with those of supremacist groups. My point received insider validation from a 2019 New Yorker article by journalist Bob Moser, whom the SPLC hired as a writer in 2001. “Though the center claimed to be effective in fighting extremism, ‘hate’ always continued to be on the rise, more dangerous than ever, with each year’s report on hate groups,” Mr. Moser wrote. He and his colleagues came up with a mordant slogan: “The SPLC—making hate pay.”

If the indictment’s allegations are true, the SPLC’s fundraising efforts went beyond hyping hate groups to providing them material support. Several of the field sources were allegedly leaders of the organizations on which they were informing, including F-unknown, “the Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America”; F-30, who “led the National Socialist Party of America”; and another F-unknown, a Ku Klux Klansman of unspecified sex who was “married to an Exalted Cyclops.” F-9, the million-dollar document thief, was a fundraiser for the National Alliance. There’s no way he found a more generous patron than the SPLC.

Supporting white supremacy through lawful means is constitutionally protected speech. It may be a scandal, but it isn’t a crime. The prosecutors’ theory, however, is that the SPLC criminally defrauded its donors “through materially false representations and omissions about what the donated funds would be used for”—that is, by promising to spend the contributors’ money to oppose racism, then supporting it instead. The center also allegedly used fictitious business entities to pay the informants and is charged with money laundering and lying to a federally insured bank in connection with those transactions.

In a video statement, the SPLC’s interim president, Bryan Fair, neither denied nor admitted the criminal accusations but implied that they were politically motivated: “The federal government has been weaponized to dismantle the rights of our nation’s most vulnerable people and any organization like ours that tries to stand in the breach.” He acknowledged that the SPLC had used paid confidential informants and said that although the practice was necessary “to protect the safety of our staff and the public,” it has ended. (The events alleged in the indictment all occurred in 2023 or before.)

Mr. Fair added that “we frequently shared what we learned from informants with local and federal law enforcement, including the FBI.” The SPLC repeated that claim in a motion filed Tuesday in federal court, which seeks an order that acting Attorney General Todd Blanche retract a “false and unfairly prejudicial statement” to the contrary that he made in a TV interview.

Mr. Fair doesn’t explain what function the informants served for the SPLC. Even the center’s supporters are at a loss about that. Columnist Clarence Page writes that “a key question will be whether prosecutors can distinguish SPLC’s informant practices from those long used by law enforcement.” The distinction is obvious: The SPLC is a private organization, not a law-enforcement agency. Mr. Page’s framing sidesteps the central question.

Making sense of all this requires a look at the SPLC’s history. When the center was founded in 1971, it mainly did legal work for clients who were indigent or had civil-liberties complaints. “A decade or so later,” Mr. Moser reported, it “began to abandon poverty law . . . to focus on taking down the Ku Klux Klan.” The center filed lawsuits aimed at bankrupting Klan organizations, unsympathetic defendants that made easy targets.

In explaining the SPLC’s concern for its employees’ safety, Mr. Fair noted in his video that the center’s offices were firebombed in 1983. That was during the heyday of the anti-Klan litigation campaign. But those lawsuits tailed off after the 1990s as the center increasingly focused on what it calls “tracking hate.”

Around the time the SPLC began the litigation campaign, it launched a project called Klanwatch to monitor and report on KKK activities. Klanwatch ultimately grew into “the broader-based Intelligence Project, which tracks extremists and produces the S.P.L.C.’s annual hate-group list,” Mr. Moser wrote.

According to the indictment, between 2014 and 2023 the field sources contributed information to at least three SPLC publications: Intelligence Report, “a magazine-like periodical”; Hatewatch, a blog; and Intelligence Project Dispatch, “a monthly online publication issued by the Hatewatch Staff.” This seems to have been the informants’ main function in recent decades. The SPLC’s principal activity has been gathering information and presenting it to the public in printed and online media. That is known as journalism.

Here’s what SPLC journalism looks like: The indictment alleges that “a high-level SPLC employee” used the documents F-9 stole from the National Alliance as the basis for a Hatewatch story. A former chairman of the same group, F-42, “was featured on the SPLC’s ‘Extremist File’ webpage.” The center denounced F-42 as an extremist with one hand and paid him $140,000 with the other, according to the indictment.

To observe that the SPLC practices journalism isn’t to give it a seal of approval. To the contrary, it is to insist that the center’s work be judged by the ethical standards of journalism. In America at least, respectable journalists don’t pay sources for information—much less hire sources to obtain information illegally, as the SPLC allegedly did with F-9. We don’t deliberately deceive our readers, as the SPLC allegedly did by attributing F-9’s theft to F-39 and by publishing an exposé of F-42 that concealed the most interesting and pertinent fact about him—that he was on the SPLC payroll.

Journalists like Mr. Page don’t understand the SPLC because such clarity would reveal that this journalism scandal implicates their own organizations. Mr. Moser noted in 2019 that the SPLC’s hate-group list “remains a valuable resource for journalists.” News outlets frequently pass along other SPLC work with a gloss of expert authority. They couldn’t do that if they acknowledged the center for what it actually is—a competitor, and a particularly disreputable one.

Racism is vile. By “racism” I mean conduct such as discrimination or violence directed at people because of their race; such actions are both immoral and, in many cases, unlawful. Distinct from that is the belief that one race is inherently superior or inferior to another. That belief is equally reprehensible, but under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution it is generally protected when expressed, however offensive it may be. Similarly, expressing support for individuals or organizations that hold such views is ordinarily protected speech, unless it crosses into material support for unlawful acts.

As I understand the allegations concerning the Southern Poverty Law Center, they are not that the organization itself engaged in racist conduct or advocacy but that it may have defrauded donors, specifically, that it provided funds to individuals within racist organizations (for example, as informants) in a manner inconsistent with how its activities were represented to contributors. That is a different question entirely.

Whether fraud occurred turns on familiar elements: whether there was a material misrepresentation or omission, whether it was made knowingly, whether donors reasonably relied on it, and whether they were harmed as a result. The key issue, therefore, is not simply whether the organization paid informants, but whether it accurately disclosed the nature and extent of those activities. If donors understood that such payments were being made as part of the organization’s work, then the case for fraud is weak; if they were misled about that point in a way that would matter to a reasonable donor, the case becomes stronger.

I wanted to comment on some things I think that Yascha Mounk and his guest miss in their conversation about why Americans are disillusioned with higher education.

1. Most Americans see college degrees as instrumental.

Relatively few Americans pursue college degree through a love of learning. Most see it as a means to an end with the end being a better job and higher lifetime earnings. Even if college still pays economically, disillusionment can grow if the perceived return is overstated or increasingly uncertain.

2. The “college income premium” has always been exaggerated.

There is a small premium that results from having a college education but is not huge and it’s getting smaller. The explanations for the premium usually rely on mean incomes. When you discount the top 5% of income earners, the picture looks considerably different. A disproportionate share of the very highest earners are in professions that require postgraduate credentials. When those outcomes are included in estimates of the “college premium” they blur an important distinction: the returns to a bachelor’s degree alone versus the returns to extended, credential-dependent educational pathways.

That top 5% include physicians, lawyers working for big firms, and MBAs working for major banks whose incomes distort the results. Median, mode, and standard deviation are all revealing.

3. What matters is what you study.

Some degrees have a very high return on investment. Others may be zero or negative.

4. The benefits are backloaded.

To obtain a college education you defer earnings for several years. That means that a college education actually has negative benefits at first with the positive benefits appearing later.

How confident are you about what the economic conditions will be in 20 years?

5. Offshoring

Over the last twenty years in particular a significant number of jobs that require a college education have been offshored, many to South Asia. The positions that have proven particularly vulnerable to offshoring have been engineers, accountants, analysts, and backoffice professionals, particularly in customer support and HR. Basically, anything that is codifiable, deliverable digitally, and modular, i.e. it can be divided into pieces.

There are hundreds of millions of people in South Asia who speak English and have college educations. We don’t know how many jobs have been offshored because we don’t keep track of them.

6. AI

Very much the same positions vulnerable to offshoring are increasingly vulnerable to AI.

The bottom line is that Americans are making rational decisions based on the facts on the ground.

I’m of mixed minds regarding yesterday’s SCOTUS decision regarding racial gerrymandering. For a complete rundown of the decision see Amy Howe’s post at SCOTUSBlog.

As I see it there are two distinct but interrelated matter—the policy issue and the legal issue. As Ms. Howe’s post should make clear most of the commentary including the dissents by three Supreme Court justices are on the policy issue. I am more concerned about the legal concerns in the decision. If anyone can point me to a good, dispassionate discussion of those, I would greatly appreciate it.

There’s a clear problem: roughly a third of Louisiana’s voting age population is black. All else equal one might expect roughly a third of Louisianas’s Congressional representatives to be black, too. That would be two representatives. Sometimes one, sometimes three, but generally two.

Now consider the proposed map of districts at the top of this post which the SCOTUS decision declared unconstitutional. The proposed 6th district is rather obviously ferociously gerrymandered. At the current scale, congressional districts are too coarse to reflect underlying demographic realities without distortion; increasing granularity reduces the need for those distortions. My preferred solution to the problem would be for Congress to double the number of Congressional representatives. Since the size of Congress was fixed in 1929 by the Permanent Apportionment Act, an act of Congress would be sufficient to change that. Let’s engage in a thought experiment and imagine doubling the size of the House. Louisiana’s Congressional districts would increase from six to twelve. That would allow one majority black district around New Orleans, one majority black district around Baton Rouge, one majority black district around Shreveport, and, possibly one additional majority black district, much less gerrymandered than the proposed Sixth District.

In other words, the problem that’s being addressed isn’t simply racism or partisanship. It’s racism and partisanship and the lack of granularity in Congressional districts. The point isn’t that increasing the number of districts would eliminate gerrymandering or resolve the legal tensions in voting-rights law. It’s that it would change the incentives. With smaller, more numerous districts, the payoff from any single act of line-drawing is reduced, and the need for extreme, long-distance stitching of populations, whether for partisan or racial purposes, is correspondingly diminished.

I wanted to call attention to this piece by Paul D. Thacker at RealClearInvestigations. In the piece Mr. Thacker explores researcher Paul Baric’s loss of NIH grants, suspension, and an alleged cover-up surrounding his role in the development of SARS-CoV-2. Here’s a snippet:

Since the pandemic’s outbreak six years ago, a slew of emails and documents released by Congress and through public records requests cast a dark shadow on the NIH and the virologists it funded, with nearly two-thirds of Americans now believing the virus came from a laboratory in China. Although the question of whether the virus that causes COVID-19 originated in a lab or in the wild is still a subject of debate, there is no doubt that scientists at the highest level worked to dismiss the lab-leak theory and shut down their connections to the work in Wuhan. Efforts by Collins and Fauci to delegitimize dissenting voices have been reported, but the central role played by Baric has been obscured. The UNC researcher’s work on coronaviruses and his connection to the Wuhan lab are now receiving renewed attention after RealClearInvestigations learned that the federal government has quietly removed Baric from all his NIH grants. RCI has also learned that UNC placed Baric on leave. UNC has also refused to cooperate with NIH officials as they have attempted to gather more facts and emails about Baric’s coronavirus research, which evidence leads them to believe led to the coronavirus pandemic.

I don’t see that this reveals as much as its author seems to think it does. There is a sizeable gap between being interested in gain-of-function and novel coronaviruses and actually developing them. The article relies heavily on stacking implications: each individually ambiguous fact is presented in a way that encourages the reader to infer a conclusion that none of the facts independently establish.

As I see it the case Mr. Thacker builds would be dismissed in criminal court since it doesn’t meet the standard of “guilty beyond reasonable doubt” and, while it might survive early dismissal in a civil case where the standard is “preponderance of the evidence”, whether that case would be decided in favor of the plaintiffs remains to be seen. While the article strengthens the case that a lab origin was prematurely and self-interestedly stigmatized and that U.S.-funded coronavirus research deserves much more scrutiny, it does not prove that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered or that Dr. Baric, UNC, EcoHealth, or WIV created the pandemic virus.

I continue to believe as I have for some time that we do not know the origins of the virus and the sole prospective way of identifying it for sure is in the discovery phase of a civil suit if such a thing were allowed to go through, a very long shot.

The fifth and final season of the French police series HPI has dropped at Hulu. The series has been remade in the States as HIP. In the French series Morgane is a 38 year old single mother—brilliant, beautiful, sexy and a complete screw-up in her personal life. I’ve watched a couple of episodes of the final season and it is every bit as good as the previous four.

There really is no comparison between the French series and the American—the French series is that much better. I don’t quite know what it is but the French are not afraid to mock just about anyone—Morgane, the police (particularly the higher-ranking officers). I tried to watch an episode of the American version but it just took everyone too seriously.

What struck me about the media reactions to the security breach at the White House correspondents’ dinner was how rote the media responses have been. They reminded me of the obituaries of elderly public figures, obviously written years before and taken from the file when needed.

The outlets that oppose Trump blame it on Trump. Those that support him blame it on those who oppose him. There are kernels of truth in both of those positions but mere kernels. What is most notable is the utter lack of self-awareness.

Consider the Washington Post report by Emily Davies, Isaac Arnsdorf, Jeremy Roebuck and Joe Heim. Superficially, it’s a dispassionate analysis. Pragmatically, it criticizes the Trump Administration members for attending the dinner and for inadequate security at the dinner. It was not officially a National Security Event.

White House correspondents’ dinners have never been officially deemed national security events. Unlike, for example, the State of the Union message they are private events and private events are rarely if ever designated as national security events. That is adequate to explain the security posture. In other words the report is another way of saying it’s Trump’s fault.

Rep. Ro Khanna has called for a federal commission on violence. That, too, is a completely predictable reaction to the events.

A particularly unhelpful response was the one offered by President Obama, that we do not fully understand the prospective assassin’s motives for his actions. We do not fully understand John Wilkes Booth’s motives for assassinating President Lincoln and that was over 150 years ago. How often do we fully understand anything?

We do have the “gunman’s” manifesto. The manifesto is sufficient to establish a political motive consistent with widely circulating rhetoric. We do not need omniscience to act on that. The motives expressed in his manifesto were not unlike those expressed on the placards being carried by those protesting President Trump’s appearance at the dinner outside, including “Death to kings” and “Death to them all”.

My advice is stand down. Reduce the temperature. I have been warning about the risks of this for some time. The cognitive changes wrought by post-literacy encourage more agonistic modes of expression. Those are to be expected given the shift from linear, text-based reasoning to image-driven, affective cognition, something I have dubbed “visualcy”. In a country of more than 330 million people highly agonistic modes of expression inevitably motivate some to take violent action.

An alternative title for this post might have been “Round up the usual suspects”.

I was astonished at this report by Rick Pearson in the Chicago Tribune. 34% of the Chicagoans polled approved of Mayor Brandon Johnson’s performance? Where have they been?

That calls into question the methodology of the poll. Were members of the CTU overrepresented? That would explain it.