* * *

I had been disappointed that Norway had not qualified for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, because I had wanted to see Norwegian phenom Erling Haaland. But, in the just-concluded 2026 World Cup, many casual viewers got a chance to enjoy the Viking Row (1, 2) and to see some crisp matches, some featuring Norway with yet others featuring the top competitors. And then there was … Cape Verde? Where did those guys come from?

For the most part, these matches seemed crisper than most, even by World Cup standards. The World Cup featured the usual controversies that attend futbol—I myself think Egypt was robbed of a beautiful counterattack and goal against Argentina—but I will credit the governance of this edition of the tournament with containing the usual volume of game-stopping flip-flopping and hysterics. Which brings to mind a sport that reaches into an ancient tradition that affirmatively discourages flip-flopping and hysterics, and, rather, elevates, an ethos of stoic sportsmanship. And that, my friends, would be Sumo. The Shinto kami (spirits) do not like flip-flopping and hysterics.

Admittedly, like football/soccer, Sumo can impose demands on the viewer. Equipping oneself to appreciate its finer points can require a nontrivial investment of time and concentrated attention on the part of the viewer. But, I am going to suggest that there is something to it. At first sight (to me), a Sumo match is a short battle between a pair of big, fat, strong fellows with the result determined by a coin flip. But, really, a match usually amounts to a short battle between a pair of big, fat, strong fellows that features interesting technique. Add to that a lot of Shinto ritual and quietly colorful crowd participation. That crowd participation will include some number of younger and older ladies in their kimono taking up prime seats in direct view of the television cameras. Some of these people are professional viewers who make a quiet business of being part of the spectacle. It’s fun.

Then there is the motivation for this essay, the matter of the governance of Sumo tournaments. The governance of tournaments stands in (in my mind) as a metaphor for governance in Japan itself in that it features a blend of ritual, hierarchy and seemingly inviolable rules with subtle rule-bending discretion. Rules are inviolable on pain of death until they’re not. Who decides and how?

* * *

The title of this essay is a play on The Master of Go (Kawabata, 1951), a book I periodically cite. The subtitle is a play on In Praise of Shadows (Tanizaki, 1933; PDF), an entertaining essay about keeping it real, not being blinded by glitz and appreciating the small things.

The Master of Go uses the governance of Go tournaments before and after the War as a metaphor for the shift from more traditional ways of governing society—ways that had depended more on deference to age and rank—to (dare I say it?) “rules-based,” technocratic governance that, by virtue of operating out of rules, was ostensibly more democratic. The former mode of governance permitted more scope for discretion in what we might recognize as the rules-versus-discretion tradeoff. The latter mode assigned more weight to rules in the rules-versus-discretion tradeoff. And, one point of the book was that there are tradeoffs: something might be gained in moving away from one pole towards the other, but something is also lost. And the second point elaborates on the first: rules-based, ostensibly democratic governance is susceptible to manipulation and, so, may not be as democratic as presented. It can be quite anti-democratic.

Sound familiar?

In Praise of Shadows is a meandering essay in which Tanizaki recounts his transition from a young man who had been taken with the brassy, glassy glitz of the Westernized metropolis to an older man who had ventured out from a clean, well-lighted place to one in which an organic, Zen wabi-sabi aesthetic had been permitted to reestablish itself.

I have attended Sumo tournaments on three occasions. By “attend,” I mean that I showed up for one day of matches in each of three different tournaments. The Japan Sumo Association sponsors six tournaments each year. The Association puts on two tournaments in Tokyo, two in Osaka, one in Fukuoka, and one in Nagoya. Each tournament runs for 15 straight days with each wrestler competing once in each of those days.

The 2026 July tournament in Nagoya just wrapped up. The winner of the tournament was determined on the last day. Three wrestlers (rikishi) finished the tournament with 12-3 records, and, so, there was a three-way play-off. That made for an exciting finish.

In speaking of tournaments, I am concentrating attention on the top “Makuuchi Division.” Sometimes competitors in Makuuchi succumb to injuries and drop out during the course of a tournament. The Association might then elevate a wrestler from the junior “Juryo Division” right in the middle of the tournament.

Forty-two wrestlers populate the Makuuchi Division, and, on a given day of a tournament, those wrestlers will participate in 21 matches. (Towards the end of this last tournament, the Association cut the number of matches to 20 in order to accommodate withdrawals due to injury.) The Association will then do something very East Asian: It will assign each wrestler a rank that he will maintain through the course of the tournament. The Association updates rankings after each tournament.

Note that 21 matches a day over 15 days amounts to 315 matches. Three-hundred-fifteen matches is well below the 42*41/2 = 861 matches the Association would require were 42 wrestlers to participate in a round-robin. (In a round-robin, each of 42 wrestlers would eventually be matched up with each of the 41 other wrestlers. That makes for 861 matches.) So, how does the Association distribute 315 matches across as many of 861 distinct pairings?

A lot of discretion goes into this, surely, and, in fact, the Association does not commit to a fixed, 15-day assignment of matches at the start of the tournament. Instead, the Association crafts a schedule for the next day right after conclusion of a given day’s matches.

The Association does make a point of pairing all of the most-highly ranked wrestlers at some point (usually late) in the tournament. Wrestlers trolling a lower stratum will do just that: troll that lower stratum, unless they start doing very well or very poorly in that lower stratum. The Association seems to get around to pairing a wrestler that has been dominating a lower stratum with wrestlers occupying higher strata. Less successful wrestlers will end up trolling the lowest stratum, and the Association might even relegate them to the lower Juryo Division in the succeeding tournament. Successful competitors in Juryo may yet be elevated to Makuuchi.

The Association divides the 42 wrestlers into two sides, “East” and “West.” Most matches pair a wrestler from one side with a wrestler from the other side, but the Association will pair-up wrestlers from the same side when it comes time to pair the highest-ranked wrestlers in the most consequential, potential match-ups.

The highest rank a wrestler can secure is Yokozuna, and I get the sense that the Association prefers to have one Yokozuna on each side. Right below the Yokozuna are, in descending order, the Ozeki followed by the Sekiwake and Komusubi. Below those top ranks are the Maegashira.

The Association tries to balance the distribution of wrestlers on each side. In a symmetrical distribution, each side could feature one Yokozuna, one Ozeki, one Sekiwake, one Komusubi followed by a cadre of Maegashira ranked from 1 to 17. But, in any given tournament, the roster may deviate from this distribution and may deviate from pure symmetry. One side or the other may feature more than one wrestler in a given top rank. Going into the just-concluded Nagoya tournament, the Makuuchi Division was symmetrical but featured two “East Sekiwake” and two “West Sekiwake.”

A given wrestler may end up rising and falling and rising again in the rankings over the course of a few seasons. Some number of Maegashira will have occupied the rank of Ozeki at some point before falling back into the lower ranks and even falling out of the Makuuchi Division … before making it back into the Makuuchi Division and making another run for higher rank. The highest rank of Yokozuna is exceptional not merely for being highest but also for indicating an absorbing state. A Yokozuna can’t be demoted.

So, how does the Association determine promotions and demotions? And what does the Association do about an aging Yokozuna who is no longer capable of beating most competitors?

Good questions, and I do not have much insight into this, but a lot discretion seems to be a work. Consider, specifically, this business of elevating a wrestler to Yokozuna status. There are tradeoffs, and a given wrestler might not be too keen to (yet) be elevated. Demotion might afford a wrestler an opportunity to recover from a disappointing streak of performances. A Yokozuna going through a bad stretch might, in contrast, end up facing rising demands from the back office to retire.

So, what would the optimal trajectory of a Sumo career at the highest ranks look like? Should one aspire to reach the rank of Ozeki early in one’s career and then to troll the highest ranks for many years before being elevated to Yokozuna? But, in those years, might injury take its toll, and would one’s prospect of ever rising to Yokozuna diminish? Alternatively, should the optimal program involve just going for it and endeavoring to secure the status of Yokozuna as early as possible?

My understanding is that the Association found itself short of Yokozuna and made a point of expediting the elevation of the wrestler Hoshoryu to “East Yokozuna” . (“Hoshoryu” is the “Ring Name” of the wrestler Sugarragchaa Byambasuren from Mongolia. As I understand it, “Hoshoryu” means something like “Rising Dragon.”)

Hoshoryu is 27 years old and has won two non-consecutive tournaments. My understanding is that it is customary to consider the candidacy to Yokozuna status of a wrestler who had managed the great feat of winning two consecutive tournaments. But, custom was a little strained in this case.

Meanwhile, 22-year-old Danylo Yavhusishyn (“Aonishiki”) has just won the Nagoya tournament in a three-way playoff—very exciting!—and will return to the rank of Ozeki after having fallen out of that rank earlier this year.

Aonishiki’s has now won three tournaments, and Hoshoryu has yet to win a tournament since being elevated to Yokozuna last year. Chatter about elevating Aonishiki to Yokozuna will surely start picking up again, but would Aonishiki really aspire to Yokozuna status at such a young age? Meanwhile, Hoshoryu, who is an excellent, exciting wrestler, must be feeling increasing pressure to finally win another tournament post-elevation to Yokozuna. He is not an old man, either, but will having been elevated prove to be more of a burden than an honor? What does the Association think of this?

The old man in this last tournament was “Takayasu,” whose real name, it turns out, is “Takayasu!” He is 36 and entered the Nagoya tournament as a Maegashira #7, having fallen far from the rank of Sekiwake, a rank he had occupied two tournaments ago. He had a very good tournament in Nagoya, finishing 11-4. He has never won a tournament but has often threatened to do just that. He just can’t seem to get that one or two extra wins over the top wrestlers that winning a tournament would require.

I myself assign names to the rikishi. I call Takayasu “Hairy Bear,” because he is a bear of a man, and he is the most hirsute of the bunch. It’s no contest. I call Hoshoryu “Mean Cat,” and I call the Ozeki Kotozakura “Fat Cat.” Hoshoryu really is kind of mean. He likes to stare down his opponents at the start of a match, and his pre-match ritual includes staring into—or rather, through—the television camera and making his hissing, mean face. That may be his game face, but it’s genuine. Hence Mean Cat. Kotozakura, meanwhile, has his own pre-match ritual: roll one shoulder; pause while staring impassively through the camera; roll the other shoulder; reach down for a big, heaping handful of salt; rise up, stare through the camera, roll both shoulders simultaneously and make his mean face before turning around tossing the salt into the ring (the dohyo) with a whip of the wrist. These rituals make for entertaining, comfortably predictable performances.

Now, what is this business of tossing salt into the dohyo before each engagement? “Shinto purification ritual” would seem to encompass much of what goes on in the lead up to a match as well as at the opening and closing of the day’s proceedings. Dispelling evil spirits is also part of the opening and closing programs.

An interesting thing is that each match involves a sequence of salt throwing: The wrestlers step up to the raised competition surface, the clay dohyo. They go through a sequence of the Sumo foot stomps and hand clapping before retiring to their respective corners and gathering up some salt. At the direction of the gyoji (the referee), they will toss the salt into the ring before facing each other and assuming their starting positions. Along the way they will very ostentatiously slap their belts (mawashi) as a way of signaling (I am guessing) to opponents that they do not hide any salt residues on their hands. (These days, the belt slapping is mostly just for show, surely, and Takayasu makes belt slapping a big part of his warm up ritual even before he has taken up any salt. He just likes the percussive sound of slapping his belt.) The wrestlers will rise up from their starting positions after some amount of staring each other down and go through the salt-throwing exercise again. They may do this like four times.

The gyoji will finally direct his “war fan” (a wooden paddle) toward the center of the ring, signaling that it is time for business. No more salt throwing. Business starts once both wrestlers touch the surface of the dohyo with both hands.

The Tachiai is the initial contact, and there is some expectation that the wrestlers will not avoid a violent tachiai by, say, side-stepping a charging opponent. Although, wrestlers will sometimes do that, especially smaller wrestlers.

The smallest wrestler in the last several tournaments has been Fujinokawa (East Maegashira #1) who weighs in at 123 kg (271 lbs). He looks small compared to other wrestlers, but still, 123 kg!

In this last tournament, the biggest wrestler was newcomer Kazuma (West Maegashira #15) who weighed in at 205 kg (451 lbs). He had a disappointing debut in the Makuuchi Division, which is interesting, because just being a big load is not good enough to have success in the dohyo. Meanwhile, the other biggest rikishi is a young fellow Atamifuji (East Sekiwake) who weighs in at a 197 kg (433 lbs.). My name for him is “Atomic Fuji.”

Atamfuji has had some success and has been climbing up the ranks, and he was within inches of winning the January tournament. Both Atamifuji and Aonishiki were tied at the end 15 days of competition, so the competition went to a playoff. Atamifuji absorbed the tachiai and started advancing steadily like Godzilla, but, at the edge of the ring, Aonishiki threw a headlock in desperation, and somehow this caused Atamifuji to lose his balance. The big guy fell to the side, and Aonishiki ended up winning his second tournament.

Aonishiki and Atomic Fuji met on the last day of the Nagoya tournament, and Atamifuji managed to avoid losing his balance. He methodically pushed Aonishiki out of the ring, and this mattered, because now Aonishiki and Atamifuji would again go to a playoff, but, this time, they would be joined by the Mongolian Kirishima. Aonishiki masterfully won both his matches in the three-match playoff.

So, how did Aonishiki manage to prevail over Atomic Fuji in their second meeting of the day? At the tachiai, he managed to get a good grip with his left hand on Atamifuji’s belt (the mawashi). And then he stepped to his left, wheeled away from the edge of the ring and started to get Atamifuji turning. The big guy just could not recover and start mounting offense of his own. He ended up wheeling around and then stepping out of the ring. If you can’t knock ‘em down or win a straight-on pushing contest, then get them on the defensive and wheel them around in circles. Maybe throw in a trip.

The result of a given match can look like a coin-flip, but the most successful wrestlers do include (it seems to me), some measure of finesse in their game. There can be, for example, a lot of uncertainty at the tachiai: What will the opponent do? Will the opponent go for an inside grip of the mawashi with the left or right hand? Alternatively, will the opponent merely smash into oneself and avoid committing to a grip? Might an opponent step sideways after the tachiai or step sideways even before initial contact?

The very top rikishi like Hoshoryu, Aonishiki and Kirishima can do it all. They can take advantage of strong grips on the mawashi, but they can be a little elusive and outflank an opponent. The commentators, meanwhile, will distinguish between wrestlers who tend to be “pusher-thrusters” from those who prefer exploiting grips on the mawashi. “So-and-so is a mawashi man. He prefers the inside grip with the left hand…” Or, “This match features a pair of pusher-thrusters …”

Gonoyama is a fellow in mid-career who had a very good experience in the March 2026 tournament, but, as the commentator Murray Johnson observed, “This man only knows one thing: How to bash into his opponent!” And, so, Gonoyama started his March tournament dominating everyone in the lower Maegashira ranks. The Association then started to match him up with top-ranked wrestlers in the second week of the tournament, and while he made a gamely effort, his predictable (and usually potent) technique, was not enough to win against the best wrestlers. In his match with the big guy Atomic Fuji, he launched himself and bashed away. Atamifuji slowly retreated to the very edge of the ring, and, in fact, Gonoyama came within an inch of forcing Atamifuji to make contact with the exterior of the ring with the heel of his foot. Gonoyama would have won the match had Atamifuji made external contact, but it wasn’t enough. Atamifuji managed (just barely) to absorb the tachiai and the successive round of bashing. He recovered his balance, centered himself and started to mount his own offense. He mechanically advanced, ultimately pushing Gonoyama out of the ring. Gonoyama could stand for a little more finesse in his game.

Aonishiki, meanwhile, continues to develop his repertoire of tricks, and, he has had to do that, because other wrestlers had started to figure out how to counter his most winning technique. That winning technique had involved assuming a lower stance than most wrestlers. So, at the tachiai, Aonishiki would go in low and endeavor to secure a good grip, preferably with both hands, on the opponent’s mawashi. Aonishiki would then mechanically advance and secure a very straight-forward win by something like yorikiri (“frontal force out”) or oshidashi (“frontal push out”). This is interesting, because assuming a very low stance makes a wrestler vulnerable to hatakikomi (“slap down”) and falling on his belly. But not Aonishiki. He’s got a very strong core, and getting a good grip on the opponent’s mawashi enables him, like a cantilevered bridge, to avoid collapsing in on himself.

So, how do opposing wrestlers counter this? They have to stand Aonishiki up; keep him from getting (or staying low). It was in the March 2026 tournament or so that the Yokozuna Onosato managed to masterfully do just this. In that match, Onosato launched himself into the tachiai with a secret weapon: Instead of, say, putting his right arm up in order to protect himself from initial contact, he brought his big right hand up like an open-handed upper-cut and managed to stand Aonishiki up. He then grabbed Aonishiki’s mawashi with both hands and tossed him sideways out of the ring like a rag doll. It made for a decisive win and a short match. Aonishiki has since made a point of putting on a little more weight—not an easy thing to do!—and to be less predictable at the tachiai.

That said, Aonishiki still manages to deploy his favorite, winning technique with some regularity. In the Nagoya tournament, he managed to pull it off against the big guy Kotozakura. At the tachiai, Aonishiki managed to get on the inside of Kotozakura’s reach and to press his forehead straight into Kotozakura’s sternum. He failed, however, to get a grip with either hand on Kotozakura’s mawashi. But, he effectively managed to stand Kotozakura up, and Kotozakura could not mount effective offense of his own. He tried to back up and shake Aonishiki off (much less effect a “slap down”), but Aonishiki steadily advanced, and Kotozakura ended up stepping out the ring. The victory went to Aonishiki.

Note this business of formally assigning labels to modes of winning matches. That’s a very Japanese thing. The culture loves taxonomies! It loves labeling everything. One will see this, for example, in samurai films: “So-and-so is an adherent of the Such-and-such School of Swordsmanship… So-and-so is an expert in the This-and-that technique.” In Sword of Desperation (2010), the protagonist perfects his winning technique, “the sword of desperation!” In The Twilight Samurai (2002), the protagonist is an expert of a particular short sword technique, which comes in handy when he gets stuck with the job of rousting a master swordsman out of a confined space.

Sumo recognizes something like 82 winning techniques. “Frontal Force Out” and “Frontal Push Out” may be the most common, but then there is yoritaoshi, “Frontal Crush Out”. Then there are mawashi-centric techniques like uwatenage (“over arm throw”), or uwatedashinage (“pulling over arm throw”). Hoshoryu is a dangerous practitioner of any number of arm throws.

Most of these techniques are just that: techniques. Others, however seem (to me) to be a given technique blended with incidental effects of no making of one’s own. And, sometimes, of course, there can be uncertainty about how to categorize a given, winning result. Was that a win by oshidashi or yoritaoshi? That was a wicked sukuinage (“beltless arm throw”)! Or was it more of a kotenage (“armlock throw”)? And was that guy “pushed out,” “forced out,” or “crushed out?” It can be a bit of a mystery. But, these things must be labelled and filed away!

Note the kinds of techniques one does not see in Sumo. Wrestlers can’t touch the surface of the dohyo with anything other than their feet once the match begins, so wrestlers will not be wearing knee-pads and will thus not sweep in low, brushing a knee along the clay of the dohyo, in an effort to execute a take-down of the sort one would expect to see in collegiate wrestling. Also, Sumo does not sort wrestlers by weight classes. Finally, the ring is not so big that a smaller opponent could spend his time running a larger opponent around the ring indefinitely like, say, the small fellow thrust into gladiatorial combat in that scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1976). Rather, the rules of the game really do favor the biggest men. (Would a larger dohyo favor smaller opponents?) Force equals mass times acceleration, and fat counts as competitive mass. Some fat might also cushion the impact from the tachiai.

That said, I have already noted that mass alone does not strictly dominate. Fujinokawa has made a career of bringing more acceleration into the formula. Famously, in the 1990’s, the relatively small wrestler Mainoumi (about 220 pounds) made a career of sometimes prevailing over much larger opponents like Konishiki by combining speed and a wide range of techniques. If he could keep his opponents from centering themselves and mounting their own offense, he could win. These days, Mainoumi often provides ring-side commentary in the big tournaments.

Konishiki was exceptional for being the first non-Japanese rikishi to secure the status of Ozeki. He also may have been the biggest rikishi to compete in the Makuuchi Division—or any division—in that he weighed over 500 pounds and even maxed out, at some point, well in excess of 600 pounds. At the same time, however, he never secured the rank of Yokozuna, and, while I have not studied the matter, the matter did seem to inspire some controversy. Then, as the 1990’s wore on, the demands of all that mass must have wore him down. He retired and, one would guess, made a point of losing some weight and relieving the stress on his joints.

I have already noted that Hoshoryu’s elevation to Yokozuna seemed to depend on a flexible interpretation of custom. Hoshoryu had a disappointing tournament in Nagoya. He looked good, but he dropped a few matches here and there and then faded from contention in the Yusho race (the race to secure the best record in the 15-day tournament). In fact, he even dropped out of the last two days of the tournament in Nagoya, and that comes after having retired after only one match in the May tournament in Osaka.

The Osaka tournament was unusual in that both Yokozuna ended up retiring early. The Yokozuna Onosato had not even participated in the preceding March tournament, and one can imagine that this kind of thing gives the Sumo Association heartburn. How should the Association manage these apparently under-performing Yokozuna? Should the Association mask under-performance by blaming injuries? Or have injuries been a real concern that themselves require management? Or are injuries a reflection of long-term wear-and-tear, in which case one or the other Yokozuna should start contemplating the prospect of retirement?

Onosato had a slow start in the Nagoya tournament but ultimately secured a winning record. That must have given the Association some relief.

All that said, part of the ethos of Sumo is to win and lose with dignity and stoicism. No complaining. No hotdogging. No excuses. No big talk. Leave it to the Association to manage the business of making excuses and assigning some blame to injuries.

It is really kind of refreshing. This is not futbol … or NBA basketball, WNBA basketball, or a matter ripe for adjudication according to the long-standing tradition we know as “Monday morning quarterbacking.”

At the end of a match, both rikishi will return to the ring. (One or both of them may have gone flying out of the ring, and the ring is elevated. One can imagine that rikishi can get badly injured merely by falling off of the platform.) The rikishi will bow to each other, and the loser will march out impassively, head up, from the arena. The winner will remain in the ring, assume a low stance, and make what in my mind looks almost like the sign of the cross before accepting from the gyoji some number of envelopes, each of which contains 70,000 yen from a corporate sponsor. (Ten-thousand yen from each sponsorship goes to the Association.) Hoshoryu routinely walks out with what looks like two bricks of sponsorships. He will accept them with two hands and make a slight but earnest bow before retiring. Most winning rikishi retire with more like three sponsorships.

The Association seems to informally manage the business of reporting injuries. I am not aware of formal announcements. Rather, an understanding that So-and-so has been dealing with a nagging back issue or another rikishi has been dealing with some other nagging injury seems to just become common knowledge. In fact, extracting information directly from anyone seems impossible. I would even suggest that the worst job would be to be tasked with interviewing a rikishi after one of them has won an important bout. The rikishi say all the right things: “I was pleased with the result today; I just want to perform my brand of Sumo; I am not thinking about the Yusho race. I am just concentrating on each match in succession. We are only half-way through the tournament …” The rikishi do a good job of presenting themselves with modesty.

Less modest, arguably, are some of the spectators who make a point of securing seats in clear and constant view of the television cameras. Celebrities will show up in those ring-side seats that are in view of the cameras, but, more interesting are the younger and older women who show up one day after another all dolled up and wearing different and fabulous kimono.

There is this one mysterious woman from Tokyo who (evidently) makes a point of attending each day of the November tournament (in Fukuoka). She assumes a very specific pose and manages to hold it through the entirety of the afternoon’s proceedings. (Amazing, really. I would lose all circulation in my legs.) She always maintains a pleasant smile.

She has declined interviews. People want to know what her story is.

I call her “Mama-san.” But, the well-dressed attendees in Fukuoka also include this other well-dressed woman who shows up just after the Makuuchi Division matches get going. She sits impassively in the same place every day. Statuesque. It was only on the last day or two of the last Fukuoka tournament that she broke character and showed up nicely dressed, but not in any one her fabulous kimono.

Then there is the occasional roving gang of geisha.

Here are some entertaining scenes:

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I admit some surprise to find myself having taken an interest in Sumo. As a kid I had the great privilege of spending some months in early spring in Kyoto. (My dad was visiting Kyoto University.) On television, I did casually watch some number of days of the March tournament of that year. It made for an edifying experience. I very much appreciated the body of Shinto ritual in which the whole enterprise is embedded. I also came to appreciate that much smaller wrestlers could prevail over much bigger opponents. They have to either side-step the tachiai or somehow absorb the tachiai, seize the initiative and launch a quick, set-piece offense.

More recently, I have attended tournament days at the November tournament (in Fukuoka) three times. I started to concentrate more energy in figuring out how it is that the most successful rikishi are the most successful, because any one match looks like a coin-flip. One fellow effectively wins the initial contact (the tachiai), assumes the initiative, and mounts his offense. But the other fellow often recovers and manages to mount some offense of his own. Crazy stuff happens. Not always, but half the time.

The best wrestlers will manage to win 60% of their matches much of the time and will put themselves in contention to win a tournament now and then by winning at least 80% of their matches. The best wrestlers will also have disappointing tournaments and may forfeit their high ranks before (possibly) returning to the highest ranks. All this winning and losing goes on without either remonstration or celebration. The entire business is very courtly notwithstanding the fact that it is also a violent business.

For readers who might have some interest in looking into it: I suggest pulling up the 27-minute highlight reels that NHK World assembles some hours after each day’s competition. The reel presents every match but without most of the (time-consuming) Shinto ritual. The commentators are really very good, and one can access the highlights on-demand free-of-charge after NHK first posts them.

You can find the content here: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/shows/sumo/

I did catch a glimpse of Mama-san on one installment of the NHK highlights from the Nagoya tournament. I might attend a day of the November 2026 tournament in Fukuoka. Look for me farther up in the stands.

In earlier essays I have posed ideas that could rationalize the apparent, conspicuous declines in crime. Even so, evidence has emerged over the last few months that the Metropolitan Police of Washington, DC have surreptitiously maintained a campaign of under-reporting the volume of the most serious crimes since at least the start of the tenure of police chief Pamela Smith in late 2023. Chief Smith resigned in December 2025, and, as of early May 2026, thirteen senior Metropolitan Police officials have been put on administrative leave.

My understanding is that the under-reporting implicates data I am using for the years 2024 and 2025, although I question how easy it would be to under-report certain types of crime like homicide or motor vehicle theft. Bodies and cars can just disappear without anyone noticing? That said, a robust Trump effect still emerges. That said, the question still remains: What are the nuts-and-bolts mechanics by which a “surge” in policing would sharply reduce the incidence of many varieties of crime? “Surging” more resources alone may amount to little more than throwing money at problems with the hope that those problems will magically go away. Can outside observers extract clues from imperfect public data about what is really going on?

I have previously suggested two set of ideas. First, I have suggested that it can be useful to analogize much policing with counterinsurgency: It may appear inefficient and ineffective to maintain a large, conspicuous presence of personnel who appear to be doing little more than standing around, but that standing around may be denying erstwhile perpetrators access to crimes of opportunity. Holding up tourists and stealing cars from heavily touristed areas may be harder to get away with when National Guardsmen are walking around. Second, I have suggested something in the spirit of “Broken Windows Policing”: The surge may have not so much involved an increase in resources as a renewed concentration on the part of the Metropolitan Police on apprehending criminals (for lesser crimes); the kind of people who commit the greatest share of lesser crimes tend to be the same people who commit the most serious crimes; getting them off of the street would result in the reduction in the volumes of both lesser crimes and more serious crimes like homicide. A question then is: Will the justice system keep such people off of the street, in which case the reduction in crime might prove to be durable? Or will a norm of judicial non-enforcement persist?

That broken windows hypothesis is elaborate, but I have suggested that available evidence is consistent with it. Specifically, I had noted that “violent crime” (including homicide) has been concentrated in non-touristed, historically high-crime neighborhoods. New York Times reporters have complained that National Guard troops have not made a point of patrolling outlying neighborhoods—admittedly only after complaining that National Guard troops had showed up anywhere at all—but these same reporters have failed to note that violent crime declined sharply in these same un-patrolled, historically high-crime areas. Why would that be? Because, erstwhile murderers are being picked up (I think) for lesser crimes and have been taken off of the streets—for now.

I have looked for more data that could substantiate this idea that taking people off the streets for lesser crimes could result in a sharp decline in more serious crimes. But, one can imagine an alternative hypothesis: The police really are going after people specifically for committing serious crimes and are having some success in apprehending people. To get a grip on this kind of thing, I did manage to secure data on “juvenile arrests” and “adult arrests”. Have arrests for serious classes of crime increased? The problem with this data is that, as of right now, they only extend into 2024. None of the arrest data overlap with the “surge,” so I can’t say anything about the police actually making (or not making) more arrests. These data don’t yet provide any visibility into changes in policing through the course of the surge.

All that said, I do present some data analysis that is a little more elaborate that what I had been able to do before. In previous analyses, I graphically compared the volume of certain classes of crime by year for the interval each year corresponding to the “surge”. (Thus, I ignored crime in the months January through July of each year.) In this essay, I use all available data from 2018 through April 2026. I aggregate data by month, and then I run a simple, linear regression with month dummy variables and year dummy variables. I also toss in a surge dummy variable.

The algorithm treats each year like a new experiment and estimates a baseline average monthly volume of crime for each year. So, each year is a new year! Roll the dice and see if you get lucky.

The algorithm estimates year-specific effects, but it does not tell you anything about why a given year might exhibit more crime or less crime. It just amounts to a descriptive exercise, although it does go some way toward accommodating the fact that crime really can go up and down from year to year for no obvious reason.

The algorithm then uses the data from all years to estimate monthly effects. These monthly effects provide a rough way of capturing the fact that much crime is seasonal. Crime, especially violent crime, tends to rise sharply in the warmer months and the moderate in the cooler months.

The algorithm then characterizes a “surge” effect as a deviation from the 2025 baseline. Note that the surge continues to run from August 2025 through 2026. Note, also, however, that the algorithm does not use 2026 data to characterize the surge effect, because it can’t distinguish a surge effect from a plain-old, baseline 2026 effect. So, for example, crime in 2026 might turn out to be really low without a surge, just because we got a really good roll of the dice. Or, 2026 would have been really bad but for the surge. The algorithm can’t tell the difference, so it just uses the 2026 data to estimate a baseline 2026 effect. That said, what do we get?

If we accept the regression results at face-value, then we can say this about the ongoing surge treatment:

Down sharply: Homicides, Motor Vehicle Theft, Robbery, Theft, Theft from auto

Unchanged: Assault

I leave out examination of “burglary,” “sex abuse” and “arson,” because the regression results amount to little more than noise. The frequencies of the reported instances of these crimes are relatively low; the algorithm can’t really illuminate much structure from the data. (The F-statistics are very small, meaning that, collectively, all year effects, month effects and surge effect appear as noise.)

Before exhibiting selected regression results in a series of graphs, let’s consider what the results suggest. I pose this narrative: Over the last several years, especially in cities like Oakland, California, Los Angeles and Chicago, we have witnessed episodes of “street takeovers”: Younger people mob a street and end up shutting down traffic. It is all for fun, but the fun invariably turns in to some volume of fighting. Hence, “assault.” The “surge” has not dampened fighting between mobs of young people. But, the surge has put a damper on crimes that align with “car-jacking,” specifically “homicides” and “motor vehicle theft.” It is not obvious that the surge itself has directly stopped homicides and motor vehicle theft. Stopping crime is not like an action film in which the authorities swoop in and stop crimes in process. Rather, the authorities have managed to get the kind of people who would commit such crimes off of the street—at least until a lax judicial system allows erstwhile car thieves and murderers to walk away from lesser crimes.

Again, it would be great to get a hold of arrest data through 2026. Are the police making more arrests through the course of the surge? If so, it would be easier to argue that they are getting bad guys off the streets and that these are the same kinds of people who would be committing the bulk of violent crimes.

I note also that robberies are down sharply. Because a large proportion of robberies occur in heavily touristed areas and entertainment districts, but the presence of National Guard troops discourages robberies in these areas? Or the police are doing a better job? Arrest statistics could be informative.

The fact that “thefts from automobiles” is down is interesting, because it means that young people are not going around, smashing car windows, and stealing things. Were “thefts from auto” concentrated in the entertainment districts? Were they kind of a Saturday night thing? The crime data indicate that they are concentrated in certain neighborhoods that do support much nightlife as well as a lot of on-street, residential parking. (I am thinking of the bustling Mount Pleasant neighborhood.)

Here are some graphical results. I will start with “motor vehicle thefts,” because it is the easiest to absorb:

The dashed line reflects annual baseline rates of motor vehicle thefts, but the solid line folds in estimated monthly effects. The yellow columns indicate the actual monthly frequencies of motor vehicle thefts. The pink columns are stacked on top of the yellow columns and indicate the extra number of motor vehicle thefts that would have occurred absent the surge. (I take the estimated surge effect and stack that on top of the actual number of motor vehicle thefts that occurred after the surge started. That makes for a half-defensible counterfactual calculation.)

The more conspicuous the pink region, the more conspicuous the effect of the surge. Motor vehicle thefts had been trending up from 2018 through 2023 before moderating somewhat. They also exhibit some non-trivial seasonal effects. Motor vehicle thefts dropped off sharply after the start of the surge and have remained depressed.

The result for homicides is not as clean but exhibits similar qualitative patterns: Homicides had edged up through 2023 before moderating in 2024 and 2025. They also declined discernibly after the start of the surge.

Robberies had been steady in 2018 through 2022 before increasing sharply in 2023. 2023 definitely stands out as a bad year! They moderated in 2024 and moderated again during the course of the surge.

The algorithm distinguishes no effect, positive or negative, of the surge on the incidence of assaults. Assaults had bubbled along at an average just below 140 per month before moderating. They did not increase in 2023 and have since moderated a little more, although the early results from 2026 suggest some modest increase.

Why the profile of assaults deviates from those of homicides, robberies and automobile thefts is interesting. And I think it provides a clue. My own guess is that assaults are concentrated among younger people who are otherwise out just having fun whereas the increases (if not baseline rates) in robberies, homicides and automobile thefts were concentrated on victims outside of social networks. Let me restate that: Crimes like homicide do tend to be concentrated in social networks. But, I wonder that the increases of 2023 were driven by things like the carjacking phenomenon—that is, by crimes that were increasing committed against people outside of social networks.

So many puzzles and questions. One does wonder if the Metropolitan Police conduct any interesting analysis internally. I am not confident that they do, and, after reading the report, “Leadership Breakdown,” of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (August 25, 2025), I am not confident that data-literate people run the police department. I wish I could go in there and direct a team of the people who sit on top of the data to assemble a report.

For background on “redistricting,” please feel free to see my previous essay: https://dvwilliamson.substack.com/p/operationalizing-voting-rights

Many observers will have wondered if the SCOVA would have approved the referendum results had those results weighed heavily in favor of adopting the new map. Such a conclusion makes for a dark business in that it suggests that not everyone believes that the judicial system is committed to maintaining the integrity of constitutional governance. Indeed, one can easily imagine that the SCOVA could have advanced a contrary 4-3 opinion by which it would have accepted the administration’s gambit. Accepting the administration’s gambit would have amounted to ignoring the state constitution. In which case, what are constitutions for if the judiciary will arbitrarily ignore it or honor it? And note that the Supreme Court of the State of California had recently done just that: ignored constitutionally-mandated processes governing redistricting in California and accepted a new map proposed by administration of Governor Gavin Newsom. The deed was done in the name of “Fairness!” And something about “Trump!” When in doubt, blame Trump.

Earlier this week, the Supreme Court of the United States came out with its 6-3 opinion in Louisiana v. Callais. That opinion outlaws “racial gerrymandering” of voting districts and thereby overrules the 1993 Supreme Court opinion in in Shaw v. Reno, 509 U.S. 630. Shaw v. Reno effectively made the crafting of “majority minority” voting districts a requirement of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Now, like it or not, states have always been able to engage in partisan gerrymandering, and an examination of voting districts in many states vividly exhibit just that. (As a reader had suggested, the Congressional district map of Illinois makes for a vivid example.) But, not all states have gone all-in on partisan gerrymandering. Some states have, like Virginia (and had, like California), assigned redistricting to “non-partisan” commissions. Casual observation does suggest that these commissions have had some success in drawing maps that appear less than completely gerrymandered along partisan lines.

So, what does it all mean? In the immediate term, it means that a few states like Louisiana may be able to redraw their Congressional maps in time for the 2026 midterm elections (in November) and will be able to redraw their maps without considering the racial composition of new districts. In the long term: States can still gerrymander districts, and partisan gerrymandering may yet generate “majority minority” districts in some states.

Meanwhile, Britain went to the polls on Thursday, May 7 for elections in 136 of 317 local councils. Wales and Scotland also went to the polls to vote in new legislatures.

The biggest news is that, as expected, the Labour Party lost control of large host of local councils (36), dropping from control of 48% of the 136 councils to 21% of the 136 councils. (I get my numbers from The Telegraph.) Meanwhile, Nigel Farage’s relatively new Reform Party picked up control of 10% of the 136 councils, and the almost-as-new Green Party picked up 4%. The biggest winner, however, is “No Overall Control” with no party securing strict control across 46% of the 136 councils. That result reflects sharp losses of seats to Reform and Green candidates.

Labour lost more than half of its seats on those 136 local councils. The Conservative Party itself continued to lose seats as well as control of some number of local councils.

What to get from all of this?

• Some observers suggest that the results of local elections reflect the re-coalescing of the Brexit coalition. That coalition joins a large share of working-class folks concentrated in the urban centers and middle-class folks concentrated outside of the urban centers.

• That coalition has had a hard time staying together since the Brexit vote of 2016 as its leadership has splintered it into a number of new parties. But, the Reform Party seems now to have secured well more than a beachhead in British politics.

• Among other things, the vote amounts to a rejection of unlimited and unvetted immigration of peoples from countries that endeavor to supplant liberal, democratic governance with Sharia, and, indeed, those flows of immigration partly reflect the incompleteness of Brexit. Post-Brexit, Britain’s leadership has (as I understand it) hewed to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and has used the ECHR to justify maintaining substantial flows of “irregular” immigration. We all puzzle about why.

• The administration’s redistricting gambit in Virginia was doubly unconstitutional in that it finessed constitutionally-mandated process for conducting referenda, and the referendum itself amounted to an effort to finesse constitutionally-mandated process for redistricting. Some observers would further argue that the wording of the referendum item itself was illegal.

• SCOVA rejected the referendum after voting results had rolled in, but the SCOVA could just as well have rejected the referendum before any voting had started.

• The administration could make a point of pursuing another referendum, and one can only wonder if the SCOVA, which had split 4-to-3, would narrowly approve a proposal to aggressively gerrymander the state. Approval of such a proposal would effectively render the non-partisan commission moribund and would amount to ignoring constitutionally-mandated process.

• Recent efforts in states like Texas and then California to engage in hyper-partisan redistricting have been interpreted (incorrectly, I think) as evidence that the states of the United States have collectively entered a “Redistricting War.” But, casual observation suggests that the United States has long been operating in a high-gerrymandering equilibrium.

• The opinion in Louisiana v. Callais (2026) takes away from states the capacity to gerrymander their districts by explicitly appealing to racial considerations. One can imagine, however, that, going forward, partisan gerrymandering may yet yield de facto racial gerrymandering.

And, as Walter Cronkite might observe, “That’s the way it is!” as of the middle of May 2026.

Let me open with a thumbnail sketch of post-Civil War history:

The Civil War ended in 1865. The 13^th Amendment to the Constitution (ratified in 1865) abolished slavery. The point of the 14^th Amendment (1868) was to neutralize the prospect that the authorities in the former slave states might find legalistic ways to deny former slaves full citizenship. The 15^th Amendment (1870) imposed more structure by declaring that no citizens could be denied their rights to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” (Some citizens, such as convicts, might yet be denied voting rights.) Further, Congress could come up with legislation were enforcement of the 15^th Amendment to prove to be an issue.

Vigorous political competition did emerge in the former slave-holding states of the South, but, enforcement did start to become an issue. Through the course of the 1880’s, Southern states did manage to frustrate access to voting by implementing various mechanisms such as poll taxes or literacy tests. By the 1890’s, the legalistic mechanisms of what we would come to recognize as the “Jim Crow” South had become formalized across much of the South.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) swept away the vestiges of formal Jim Crow processes. These Acts made way for decentralized efforts to roll back the mechanisms of Jim Crow by enabling private litigation. The Acts started to create “protected classes” of people, and a person in a protected class might have more standing than they otherwise would to assert discrimination.

The Acts also made way for centralized efforts to roll back oppressive processes by enabling the Federal Government to launch litigation on its own initiative as well as by vesting the Federal Government with capacity to regulate voting processes in Southern states. Among other things, Section 5 of the VRA would require Southern states enumerated in the VRA to secure pre-approval from the Federal Government before implementing changes to voting processes. Changes would include the redrawing of Congressional voting districts.

The Constitution provides for the allocation of representation in the House of Representatives across the states in the Union proportionally by population. “Population” has come to include non-citizens (legal or illegal residents), and that has made for a contentious issue of its own and is a matter of Constitutional challenge. That said, the existing process assigns each state some share of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives as a proportion of population. Population has been measured every ten years in Constitutionally-mandated censuses. Some modest reallocation of seats usually succeeds each census.

It is up to each state to select its allotment of representatives by voting processes. There was a time when states could select their Senators by non-elective processes, but the 17^th Amendment (1913) subsequently required the “direct election” of Senators to the Senate of the US Congress in the much the way states have organized the direct election of Representatives to the House of Representatives in the US Congress.

Each state partitions itself into voting districts with each district selecting a single representative. “Partition” means breaking the state up into contiguous geographic regions that encompass the entire state but do not overlap. Districts are supposed to be proportionate with respect to population.

Now, proportional representation does not preclude “gerrymandering”. Gerrymandering is the business of crafting voting districts that concentrate voters likely to favor candidates in a given party in a small number of districts thereby enabling competing parties to likely win elections in the larger number of remaining districts. Gerrymandering can generate districts that span areas that are not “compact.” A two-dimensional space (like a voting district) is strictly compact if you can draw a line between any two randomly-selected points in the space without traversing the borders of the space. It is reasonable to expect that a state that has partitioned itself into districts that appear more compact-ish (rather than egregiously non-compact) is less likely to have been aggressively gerrymandered.

I would suggest that the redistricting in the state of North Carolina in early 1990’s amounted to an egregious exercise in gerrymandering. The census of 1990 elevated the number of seats in the House of Representatives assigned to North Carolina from 11 to 12. The new district map was implemented in 1993. The map featured a new 12^th congressional district (red) and supplanted a map that had appeared much more compact with one that appeared much less compact overall.

The state subsequently drew up a new map in 1999 that made the districts look a little more compact, although one can see that certain districts still appear very non-compact, especially districts 1, 3 and 12.

Now, the amazing thing about the 1993 Congressional district map in North Carolina is that, while it may be grotesquely gerrymandered, the Federal Government—not the state legislature—required that grotesque gerrymandering. Why? The state of North Carolina had been subject to the requirement of the VRA to secure pre-approval for the redrawing of Congressional districts. The state had proposed a compact-ish map. The Clinton Administration objected to the state’s proposed map and demanded that the state craft some number of “majority minority” districts. That is, the Federal Government required “racial gerrymandering” that would generate some number of majority-black districts.

The state sued the Federal Government, and matter went all the way up to the Supreme Court in Shaw v. Reno, 509 U.S. 630 (1993). (Janet Reno was the Attorney General of the US Department of Justice during the Clinton Administration.) The Supreme Court approved the racial gerrymander, noting that the state’s “racial gerrymandering claims must be examined against the backdrop of this country’s long history of racial discrimination in voting.” In 1993, racial gerrymandering effectively became an affirmative requirement in implementation of the Voting Rights Act.

The Supreme Court opinion in Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013) relieved states from the pre-approval requirement indicated in Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Opponents complained hysterically that relieving states of having to secure Section 5 pre-approvals amounted to “gutting the Voting Rights Act.” The larger suggestion was that “gutting” the Act amounted to re-instituting the mechanisms of Jim Crow. The Old South would rise again!

Eric Holder was the was the Attorney General of the US Department of Justice during the most of the Obama Administration.

Here’s another egregious “racial gerrymander” from the state of Louisiana:

The 2^nd and 6^th districts (blue) are explicitly racially-gerrymandered districts. But, the recent Supreme Court opinion in Louisiana v. Calais (2026) tells the state that it can redraw its district map with less consideration for explicit racial gerrymandering.

Barack Obama complains that the Supreme Court opinion in Louisiana v. Calais “guts a key pillar in the Voting Rights Act.” (How does one “gut” a “pillar”?)

I would suggest that the Supreme Court opinion does begin to draw some attention to a key pillar of race-based policy making: “disparate impact doctrine.” “Disparate Impact Doctrine” says that a given policy may not be racist per se, but were it to impose a “disparate impact” on a “protected class” of people, then that policy might yet be deemed illegal. So, for example, subjecting candidates for entry level jobs at Chicago fire departments to written exams had been declared illegal in the Supreme Court opinion in Lewis v. Chicago, 560 U.S. 205 (2010), because testing “had a disparate impact on African-Americans in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

In passing, the Court in Louisiana v. Calais notes:

[A] law that seeks to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment by prohibiting mere disparate impact would fail to enforce a right that the Amendment secures… [T]he focus of §2 [of the Voting Rights Act] must be enforcement of the Fifteenth Amendment’s prohibition on intentional racial discrimination... In short, §2 imposes liability only when the evidence supports a strong inference that the State [of Louisiana] intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity [to vote] because of their race.

So, redrawing districts “on nonracial factors” does not preclude anyone, black or white or other, from voting! And the VRA does not obviously require states to craft districts in accordance with racial criteria. But the ghost of Jim Crow!

The recent referendum in the state of Virginia involves this proposed gerrymander:

This gerrymander is less obviously motivated by race, but it does anchor four of eleven proposed districts in Fairfax County. Fairfax County lies right outside of Washington, DC and is heavily populated with constituents that tend to heavily favor Democrats over Republicans. Those constituents include a lot of Federal Government employees as well as a lot of foreign-born residents. A lot of Vietnamese people live in that area—and they tend to favor Republicans—but everyone else (Indians, Koreans, Chinese, Central Americans, South Americans, Middle Easterners, Africans) tend to heavily favor Democrats.

The purpose of the map is to flip Virginia’s representation in Congress from “6-to-5” (6 Democrats and 5 Republicans) to “10-to-1” with Republicans likely only prevailing in (the Burgundy colored) district 9. Virginia state senator Louise Lucas has loudly, proudly and frequently framed the matter as “Ten Fuckin’ One”:

Our Democracy™ at work!

As I reported in my last essay, Barack Obama supports this proposed 10-to-1 gerrymander notwithstanding the fact that, when it suits his purposes, he will complain about gerrymandering.

His rhetoric conforms to his usual Obama Two-step: Say something reasonable to draw in the Mid-Wits while using the next breath to declare something entirely contrary to what he just said.

Here’s an example from the mailers that showed up in my mailbox:

What to make all of this gerrymandering business? Can’t states simply commit to “non-partisan” processes that yield compact-ish maps?

Well, yes, they can. And Virginia had committed to just that in 2020, which is what makes this latest gerrymandering ploy likely to be deemed illegal. (We await the less-than-courageous Virginia Supreme Court to either weigh in or decline to weigh in and allow lower court injunctions against implementation of the proposed redistricting to stand.)

Some observers complain that the states of the United States are now falling in to a high-gerrymandering equilibrium. We get it, but some observers note that many states appear to have long been gerrymandered. Why, for example, does nary one state of New England (the states east of the Hudson River) support a single Republican representative in Congress notwithstanding the fact that more that well more 40% of voters has supported Donald Trump in the last three elections?

My main proposition here is: The Federal Government itself has aggressively required gerrymandering ever since the Clinton Administration swept in and explicitly started to interpret the Voting Rights Act as requiring racially-gerrymandered districts. The Supreme Court has started to push back on the racialization of everything with opinions like that of Shelby County v. Holder (2013) and Louisiana v. Calais (2026). The proponents of racial politics complain that any rollback of racialization is racist.

What’s really going on is that the proponents of racial gerrymandering perceive it as no more than a means of securing power, and they secure power in order to elevate their favored racial groups over all others.

How do I know this? Because people who, for the last 35 years, have provided expert testimony in court to support racial gerrymandering have explicitly explained this to me. I am thinking principally of J. Morgan Kousser, the author of the magisterial The Shaping of Southern Politics (1973).

I like Morgan, and I learned a lot from him as a graduate student. I never expected to have interest in Southern politics, but being required to sit in his class exposed me to content about which I have found that I have much to say. But, Morgan is a proponent of the Manichaean oppressor-oppressed view of the world.

Lenin would speak of the “exploiters” and the “oppressed” or “Who/Whom” as in “Who exploits whom?” In this Lenin-ized view, the self-anointed Whom-people are charged with forcing those they identify as the Who-people to live and die in the ghettoes and gulags of Whoville. Or, barring that, the Whom-people are charged with putting bullets in the back of the heads of the Who-people. Either way, no Who’s in Whoville shall be granted equal protection under the law.

These people do not, not, not believe in deliberative, democratic process or in equal protection under the law. Which leads me to this:

That democracy is the best, not to mention the only legitimate, form of government is undoubtedly the most vigorously asserted and least examined political opinion of our day.

That is how Delba Winthrop opens Aristotle: Democracy and Political Science (2019).

One may agree or disagree with any one dimension of that proposition, but we get it.

We also get that the proposition requires a lot of motivation. Like, whaddya mean by “Democracy”? Are we talking about Our Democracy™, which stands in for the political monopoly of a class of self-anointed Best-and-brightest technocrats who codify and then dictate what they believe are the uniquely correct policies? And, as far as I can tell, what makes their governing “democratic” is the uniquely correct bit: only someone who is either misinformed, stupid, or just plain corrupt would resist implementation of the correct policies. Cue Rousseau on “Censorship” in Section VII of Book IV in The Social Contract: Resisting the correct policies is anti-demos, anti-democratic. Or cue Rousseau’s most prominent American disciple, Woodrow Wilson, in “The Study of Administration” (1887): Constitutionally-ordered representative government had subordinated the business of running the country to “public opinion.” Better it would be to liberate the “Bureaucracy” from “the common political life of the people,” Because Progress!

For Progressives, politics is something you have to put up with. It’s the messy business of getting along with the misinformed, the stupid and the corrupt all while trying to finesse one’s way into securing political monopoly. Which brings us back to this business of gerrymandering.

Gerrymandering, of course, has a long history. The neologism “gerrymander” was new (“neo”) as of the redrawing of state senate election districts in Massachusetts in 1812. This was during the tenure of Governor Elbridge Gerry. Here’s the infamous “Gerry-mander” cartoon itself from the March 26, 1812 issue of the Boston Gazette:

The gerrymander of 1812 inflamed public opinion, because it aggressively redrew districts in Boston. (The “gerrymander” figure grasps the Boston districts in its talons. The other districts do not obviously appear arbitrary.) But, surely, the practice of strategically drawing voting districts pre-dates the 1812 exercise.

Note that in a republic modeled after Plato’s Republic, there would be no concern about gerrymandering, because the Platonic ideal admits no scope for representative government. Plato’s Philosopher Kings (models for the self-anointed Best-and-Brightest) run everything. Aristotle’s Politics, however, concentrated some energy on the fact that society is populated with competing interests. A question then emerges about how to manage those interests. Such questions make it possible to talk about representation: Should everyone in society represent themselves by getting a vote on any given policy matter? Or does everyone get to vote for representatives to whom we delegate some measure of authority to sort out policy questions? Can representative government be unstable in that demagogues may secure representative office and then distort constitutionally-mandated processes going forward? If so, would it better to counter the prospect of the political monopoly of demagogues by instituting something in the spirit of constitutional monarchy?

All I can say for myself is that I am sympathetic to the fact that Aristotle posed questions about how to operationalize “Our Democracy” whereas the actual proponents of Our Democracy™ are really just proponents of their flavor of the totalitarian, Platonic ideal. I would argue that, for all of their messiness, ostensibly “non-partisan” processes have demonstrated some capacity for committing states to compact-ish, actually-representative voting districts, and such non-partisan processes can prevent the Platonists from imposing their dictatorship on the rest of us.

Each of the 50 states is responsible for partitioning its own state into Congressional districts. There are 435 districts distributed across the 50 states with each district representing about 760,000 people as of the 2020 census. The country conducts a census every ten years and subsequently adjusts the number of districts assigned to each state. States like California, New York and Illinois have been losing population and are therefore expected to lose some number of districts after the 2030 census comes in. Losing districts amounts to losing seats in Congress. States like Texas, Tennessee and Florida are expected to gain seats in Congress after the 2030 census comes in.

It turns out that non-citizens get counted in the census, and it further turns out that non-citizens, including tens of millions of illegal aliens, tend to be concentrated in states that have set themselves up as “sanctuaries” for illegal aliens. The greater the number of illegal aliens in a given state —> the greater the population counted in the census —> the greater the number of seats assigned to a given state. Some observers suggest that states like California, New York and Illinois would collectively lose more than twenty seats were non-citizens not counted in the census.

Taken separately or together, decennial redistricting and illegal immigration make for heated politicking, but in 2026, the new leadership in the state of Virginia has jumped the gun. The leadership has gone out of its way to ignore regulations governing the redistricting process and has forced voters to vote on a new, proposed map of Congressional districts. The effort to realign districts is the subject of litigation, and the matter has gone all the way up the state supreme court. But, the court declined to adjudicate the matter without first allowing the electorate to vote on the matter.

The concern is that the state supreme court will affirm the new district map were the ballot initiative to succeed in the April 21 voting. Declining to adjudicate the matter before the voting proceeds amounts to abdication of its responsibility to maintain the integrity of electoral processes that are already in the books. Proceeding to affirm the new, proposed district maps would amount to an exercise in lawlessness.

Here is an image of the current district map:

https://www.virginiaredistricting.org/legdistricting/comments/plan/547/1

Here is an image of the proposed map:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Virginia_Congressional_Districts,_120th_Congress_(2026_Redistricting_Amendment).svg

Both maps feature eleven districts. The greatest mass of Democrat-aligned voters is concentrated right outside of Washington DC in Alexandria and in Fairfax and Arlington counties. The proposed map anchors four of the eleven proposed Congressional districts in Alexandria, Fairfax county and Arlington county. Critics complain that these communities in Northern Virginia effectively end up lording it over rural counties in central Virginia.

As of 2024, the Virginia delegation in the US House of Representative has featured five Republicans and six Democrats. The Democrats who have proposed the new map understand that the delegation would shift to ten Democrats and one Republican were the new map to be adopted in time for elections in November 2026.

The political motivation is obvious: The Republicans hold a slim majority in the US House of Representatives. A shift of four seats alone would give the Democrats the majority. They would then set off on their principal project of impeaching the President, Donald Trump, and thereby tying up the energies of the Trump administration for its remaining two years.

Now, if you are a voter and you think Trump and Republicans are total Nazis, then you might be disposed to vote affirmatively to adopt the new, heavily-gerrymandered map. You might think that gerrymandering is a bad business, but Our Democracy™ is at stake! We therefore have to put “democratic norms” aside and do what’s expedient.

Another view, if you are a Democrat party insider, is that this gerrymandering exercise may prove to be the next thing to permanent. It may mark an important step toward securing political monopoly over federal policy and enforcement and may enable the Party to literally imprison Republican officials who currently hold elected or appointed offices. Obama alumni like Susan Rice go further and threaten parties in the private sector who have “enabled” Donald Trump:

[T]here will be an accountability agenda. Companies already are starting to hear they better preserve their documents. They better be ready for subpoenas. If they’ve done something wrong, they’ll be held accountable.

Democrat Cajun consigliere James Carville sketched in an April 16 podcast some of the Democratic party program that we have been hearing about for some years:

If the Democrats win the Presidency and both houses of Congress [in 2028], I think on day one, they should make Puerto Rico [and] DC a state, [and thereby secure four more Democrat-friendly seats in the Senate,] and they should expand the Supreme Court [from nine justices] to thirteen.

Fuck it. Eat our dust. [The Republicans have] done everything they could. They held up the 2020 election, … they’ve stolen Supreme Court seats, they’ve gerrymandered everything they can. And the only way to fight it is don’t run on it, don’t talk about it, just do it!

Meanwhile, quite a number of mailers have shown up in my mailbox. A few of them urge voters to vote affirmatively for the proposed district map—specifically to vote affirmatively in response to this Orwellian ballot formulation:

Should the Constitution of Virginia be amended to allow the General Assembly to temporarily adopt new congressional districts [in order] to restore fairness in the upcoming elections [in November 2026], while ensuring Virginia’s standard redistricting process resumes for all future redistricting after the 2030 census?

One of the mailers illuminate this exact language. Because Our Democracy™!

Note the enticement to those voters who might understand that this redistricting exercise is illegal: The measure is “temporary,” whatever that means. And the measures promote “Fairness”! And, if you’re still in doubt, then invoke “Donald Trump!”

Democratic party luminaries such as Barack Obama have urged voters to approve of the new map.

Meanwhile, most of the mailers urge voters to vote against the ballot measure (and thus in favor of maintaining the current district map), and many of those mailers throw earlier pronouncements of Democratic party luminaries back in their faces:

I almost feel sorry for those voters who believe that Donald Trump and anyone who doesn’t want to go along with their program of open borders, industrialized NGO fraud, non-citizen voting, federally-subsidized abortions, and federally-subsidized gender surgeries are Nazis. If you think other people are Nazis, then maybe a little lawlessness is more than justified. But, if you do believe that the great mass of people who maintain sometimes-contrary, sometimes-amenable policy preferences are deserving of the same rights and dignity as oneself, then lawlessness is just lawlessness. And, it’s worse if the judiciary sanctions it, all the while passing it off as just and legal.

This Virginia redistricting stunt is just another example of lawlessness being passed off as an exercise in Our Democracy™. It’s a bad business.

Two words that would set an almost impossible target for the greatest military force the world has ever known – “Unconditional Surrender.”

– The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum

As of the writing of this short essay, threats to begin disabling civilian infrastructure in Iran remain in place. In fact, Donald Trump himself has come out with a statement that is Trumpy even by Trump standards:

A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, …, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, …

Trumpy Trumpissimo!

I am no better situated than anyone to opine imperiously about what is or what is not going on, but my sense is that the deadline of “tonight” marks a threat to start nibbling away at electrical grids and other infrastructure. But, to what ultimate effect?

The fairytale result contemplates the 39-day war ending with the eventual collapse of the regime and the rise of a new polity and new leadership. The new leadership would replace the Chiliastic aims of the current regime with something that enables the country to prosper without threatening the prosperity of other nations.

Recall what the Chiliastic aims of the current regime officially include. From the preamble to the constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran: to develop military capacity …

… not only for safeguarding the borders, but also for accomplishing an ideological mission, that is, the Jihad for the sake of Allah, as well as for struggling to open the way for the sovereignty of the Word of Allah throughout the world.

Collapse might yet deviate from the fairytale in that it itself likely contemplates the defection of some number of regime insiders… Indeed, results short of collapse would also likely involve the defection of regime insiders. We could end up replacing Regime-Classic with something like Nuke-free Regime-Lite. But, Nuke-free is still nuke-free, although a nuke-free regime could still yet require costly adult supervision for some time.

How disabling civilian infrastructure facilitates the collapse of the regime or the transition of the regime to regime-lite is not entirely obvious. Disabling the capacity of the regime to commercialize oil might be effective insofar as oil revenues comprise the regime’s principal source of revenues. Disabling the distribution or generation of electricity might also disrupt revenue-generating activity, but it could also impose immediate hardships on the general population. If I were Iranian, I would feel blessed to find myself occupied with herding sheep out in the country where I might have access to well water and to the produce of my own field. City folk might have a harder time taking care of themselves were public services to be disrupted.

One might yet wonder why the United States has not already disabled the capacity of the regime to commercialize oil. One reason would be that allowing the Iranians to sell oil helps contain the rise in global oil prices. Some observers note that the United States procures a small volume of oil from the Persian Gulf whereas the Chinese procure a large volume from the Gulf. “Closing the Strait of Hormuz” should therefore amount to a larger problem for the Chinese than the Americans, right? But restricting the volume coming out of the Gulf—whether it’s Saudi oil, or Kuwaiti oil, or Iraqi oil or Iranian oil—merely amounts to restricting the global supply of oil. Restricting global supply amounts to imposing upward pressure on global prices. Even the United States will have to deal with higher prices, and that amounts to a politically sensitive matter.

As of right now, West Texas Intermediate crude oil (WTI) is selling for about $113 per barrel. The following graph features WTI prices adjusted for inflation going back to 1946. What it shows is that WTI had been selling for about $68 at the end of February. At the current price of $113, it yet remains lower than what it had been in 1979-1981, 2007-2014 and 2022... No one complained in 2007-2014?

Another reason, of course, that the United States has not yet destroyed the capacity of the regime to commercialize oil is that it hopes to preserve that capacity for the regime that would succeed the current regime. It hopes to preserve the capacity of Iran to finance the rebuilding of its own country after the war wraps up. But, will the Trump administration decide that it really does have to inflict more damage in order to effect something approaching regime-change?

Inflicting damage was a much easier matter to justify during the Second World War. Franklin Roosevelt met with Winston Churchill in Casablanca in 1943 not long after the United States landed troops in North Africa. The Americans were pressing down on Rommel’s Afrika Korps from the West. The British were pressing in from the East. American and British forces would soon meet up in Tunisia.

It was at that conference that Roosevelt publicly committed to the “Unconditional Surrender” of Germany and Japan.

Note what committing to unconditional surrender both entailed and did not entail. First, it involved to committing to a hard bargaining position and taking away from the Germans and Japanese some capacity to cut deals that would preserve their respective regimes. The leadership of each country would have more incentive to commit their armed forces to fighting to the bitter end. Note, for example, that the end of the war in Europe included the Battle of Berlin. The Soviets lost more than 80,000 men fighting block-to-block. The Germans lost at least as many combatants as well as another 125,000 civilians. I am not sure whether to count German pre-teens among the civilians or the combatants:

Would cutting deals well short of unconditional surrender have obviated the Battle of Berlin or, say, the battle for Okinawa? Would deals have obviated the atomic bombings of Hiroshima or Nagasaki?

Second, unconditional surrender did not entirely involve replacing all regime personnel with new personnel. Indeed, some observers complained that post-war German government included many of the same people who had managed the administrative apparatus of the war-time government. But, why not, for it was these people who were already well situated to help turn things around in the immediate aftermath of war. The same thing in the Japanese experience: The British, for example, needed to impose some order in the Southeast Asia. But, the Japanese military, still intact, was still there. Britain’s agent, Lord Louis Mountbatten cut a deal with the Japanese by which the Japanese military would continue to provide security until local authorities or the British themselves could build up capacity. Meanwhile, back in Japan itself, the Americans worked with many of the Japanese who had been running the old system in making the transition to the new system.

So, what is going to happen in Iran? The Trump administration seems committed to definitively ending the Iranian nuclear program. That program includes both the development of nuclear warheads as well as the development of the ballistic missiles that could deliver those warheads. The Americans and the Israelis now seem committed to starting a campaign of whittling away at civilian infrastructure. This kind of thing made for a much less politically-fraught business during the Second World War. Back then, the political will built up not merely to destroy infrastructure that could support continued war efforts but also to raze German and Japanese cities. The West has since operated under increasingly strict political constraints. The East, not so much. Islamic-inspired violence looks much like it did through the course of the Mahdist State in the Sudan (1881-1898) or the Seventh Century: Unconstrained.

The opening proposition here is that, more often than not, the appeal to “Anti-Zionism” is a ploy. It dresses up hatred as righteous indignation.

The question then moves to where this hatred comes from. I advance three conjectures. First, committed jihadis don’t require much motivation. They hate, because their prophet obligates them to hate, and they’re happy to have license to do what they were otherwise disposed to do, anyway. Liberal democrats, however, require more motivation. Hence a second conjecture: hatred dressed up as righteous indignation enables them to enjoy a fellowship of righteous indignation. They fuse with a mass of like-minded individuals and enthusiastically submit to the hive-mind. It’s like taking ecstasy at the rave. But, yet a third conjecture: Indulging hatred dressed up as righteous indignation enables many others to rise above the masses. It enables them to assume a chic, edgy, and conspicuous pose. The hatred amounts to a “luxury belief.”

* * *

The anti-Israel crowd appeals to “Anti-Zionism,” because it plays into their Manichaean fairytale by which everything in the Levant was great until “the Zionists” barged in and imposed their “European, settler colonialism.” Hence The Nakba (“The Catastrophe!”) of 1948. Proponents of this fairytale include the indefatigable Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, etc.

Recall that Manichaeanism lends itself to the idea of being “on the right side of history,” because it reduces everything to a grand, cosmic struggle between the forces of Good and Evil. The Anti-Zionism crowd unambiguously identifies with the forces of Good. That said, I am going to ask the reader to look at the world not through the lens of binary moralizing but to make some allowance for some complexity and an appreciation of strategic behaviors. I then ask the reader to roll the clock back from 1948 to 1914:

Contemplate the perspective of the many non-Muslim communities as well as the perspective of some of the Muslim communities that had been situated in the Levant when the First World War (1914-1918) was still unfolding. The First World War would soon become their war, for the British would soon start pressing down on the Ottoman Turks in and around Gaza.

Quick aside: The bit about “around Gaza” set the stage for the spectacular (and astonishingly successful) charge of the Australian Lighthorse regiments into the Turkish machine guns and field guns on the east side of the desert oasis of Beersheba.

It all went down in the setting sun of a late Wednesday afternoon, October 31, 1917. Halloween! The action enabled British forces to capture the wells at Beersheba—an immediate concern—and to outflank Turkish forces that had been protecting the approaches from the Sinai peninsula into Palestine. The way to Jerusalem had opened.

Recall that the Ottomans governed the Levant as of 1914. They had aligned themselves with the Germans and the Austrians during the First World War, and, as of the start of the war, the Ottoman Empire encompassed the Fertile Crescent (much of present-day Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Israel) as well as the Hejaz (much of the Arabian Peninsula along the Red Sea), and the Anatolian Peninsula (Turkey itself). A century earlier, the Greeks had relieved themselves of Ottoman authority. Nearly fifty years earlier (1776), the Russians had pushed the Ottomans out of the Crimea and the Ukraine. The Balkan Wars of the late 19^th century and early 20^th century eventually blew up into the First World War itself, but not before various re-emerging Balkan states had managed to roll back the Ottomans. The Bulgarians even went so far as to threaten to take Constantinople.

The British made a point of taking the Turks out of the war. They pursued four initiatives:

1. The Gallipoli Campaign (1915) by which they and their ANZAC cohorts would move up the Turkish Straits from the Aegean or along the Gallipoli peninsula, take Constantinople and thereby knock Turkey out of the war. That was the theory, and it made for an inspired plan but ultimately proved to be a costly failure;

2. The Mesopotamian Campaign by which the British moved up the ancient waterways from the Persian Gulf with the aim of taking Baghdad. That campaign got hung up when Turkish forces managed to surround and then besiege British forces at Kut only half the way to Baghdad (1915-1916);

3. Support for “The Arab Revolt.” The British sent T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”) and other agents into the Hejaz to help the King of the Hejaz expel the Turks. The King endeavored to secure from the British a commitment to help him supplant the Ottoman Caliphate with a “true Arab” Caliphate with himself installed as Caliph. The British said “We’ll talk about it.”;

4. The Sinai and Palestine Campaign by which the British drove from coastal Egypt through and around Gaza. In December 1917, the local authorities in Jerusalem informed British General Allenby that the Turks had absconded and that he could quietly walk into the city himself. His forces would not have to fight their way in.

The British did not manage to force the Turks to make an early exit from the war, but they went as far as pushing them all they way back to Turkey. Among other things, they secured Aleppo in northern Syria by October, 1918, one month before the armistice of November 11, 1918. Effectively, the British had run the Turks out of present-day Israel, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq by the end of the war. Turkish authority anywhere on the Arabian peninsula had also disintegrated.

With the Ottoman Turks out of the way, there was a question about what new authorities would take their place. Again, were the King of the Hejaz to have had his way, all the liberated territories would be absorbed within an Arab super-state elevated to the status of Caliphate. Everyone within the Caliphate would have to submit to Sharia law, and that would entail subordinating all non-Muslims to a superior class of Muslim overlords. It should be no surprise—but, evidently, it broadly is—that not everyone was keen to trade subordination to the Ottoman Caliphate with subordination to an Arab Caliphate. Why not trade up from subordination to a polity in which all citizens enjoy equal status and equal protection under the law?

Long story short: The formal Zionist project had been launched in 1897. That project had involved buying properties in many communities that are currently encompassed by the state of Israel. The Zionist project had contemplated a “Jewish homeland” within the Ottoman sphere under Ottoman law, but, now, with the Ottomans out of the way, the idea of assembling a Jewish homeland within a formal state of its own would surely have appeared as a realizable project. More than that, the project of establishing a state would have emerged as an exigency: better to organize a state on your own terms before some external party—like the King of the Hejaz and his cohorts—imposes its oppressive superstate on you. Establishing a liberal, democratic state would amount to the ultimate exercise in “decolonization.”

Longer story short: The British and the French ended up having much say over the disposition of former Ottoman territories. The British did install one of the sons of the King of the Hejaz as king of the new state of Iraq, and they installed another son as the King of Jordan. The French ended up governing Syria and Lebanon, but Lebanon ended up securing independence in 1943. It was only with the formal end of the “British Mandate in Palestine” in 1948 that the Israelis managed to secure the fleeting opportunity to declare a State of Israel. Arab forces from Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Jordan invaded Israel, but, amazingly, the Israelis managed to throw them back. The most potent of these forces were the 30,000 troops from Jordan that the British had both trained and armed.

A lot of sorting went on right after the 1948 war. My guess is that most of this sorting was voluntary as, say, the many Jews in the Arab countries decided it would make for a good bet to migrate to Israel. Before the end of the Second World War, there were about 800,000 Jews in Palestine, and the newspapers of the day recognized these Jews as—wait for it!—Palestinians! Most of the Jews of Europe who managed (somehow) to survive the War—the great majority of them did not!—migrated mostly to the United States, but a modest number, generally understood to number less than 100,000, ventured to the new state of Israel. The less-than-100,000 comprised the great “European, settler colonial” project. Note that 100,000 migrants amounts to about the number of illegal aliens who streamed over the southern border of the United States in any given week during the Biden Administration (2021-2025). In other words, this idea that a Golden Horde of European Jews invaded the Holy Land and colonized it right after the end of the Second World War is ridiculous.

There are about 16 million Jews in the world today. That amounts to a population smaller than that of two New York Cities. There were about 17 million Jews in 1939 just before the Germans and the Russians invaded Poland. There were about 11 million Jews by the end of 1945. About 6 million Jews perished through the course of the war in what amounted to an actual genocide. Meanwhile, Joe Rogan had been operating under the misapprehension that there were about 1 billion Jews in the world today. He was off by a factor of 63.

The fact that one has to recount these numbers for Joe Rogan and for his historically illiterate and innumerate Gen Z listeners is disappointing. But, perhaps one may yet tap into their (possibly limited) powers of imagination. Perhaps they can be encouraged to rub two neurons together and fire up a few synapses:

Imagine it is 1880, and you’re a Jew living in your mostly-Jewish, Levantine community. Your heritage may trace back to Iron Age Judea—that place where the Jews are from which is situated to the south and east of Jerusalem.

You’re living under Ottoman authority. The Ottoman Sultan also holds the title of Caliph in the Ottoman Caliphate.

Your people have been living under Ottoman authority since the early 16^th century when the Ottoman Turks swept in and swept out the Mamluk authorities. The Mamluks themselves had swept in from Egypt in the 13^th century. One body of Islamic overlords thus ended up supplanting another body of Islamic overlords.

Now, being non-Muslim, and therefore a second or lower-class member of society, were things generally easier under the Ottoman Turks or under the Mamluks? I’d pose the same question to all other non-Muslims in the Levant.

I have yet to study this matter, but one may note that the modest but non-trivial migration of European Jews (out of the Russian Empire, out of Central Europe) to the Levant started to pick up in the 1880’s. Proto-Zionist projects had already been the subject of on-and-off discussion well before the World Jewish Congress formally declared its Zionist project in 1897, but modest migration to the Holy Land was already in process.

Note, also, that non-trivial migration of European Jews to America started to pick up in 1880’s. Indeed, the phenomenon principally driving migration of Jews out of Europe may have had little to do with Zionism per se and a lot more to do with conditions in the Russian Empire and Central Europe. Opportunity in a liberal, democratic West—the closest thing to liberal democracy the world had ever witnessed—surely had something to do with motivating that migration. The fact that other Central Europeans and Southern Europeans streamed West is surely no accident.

Not that everything in the West was easy. Books like The Jungle (Upton Sinclair, 1906) by the Progressive Era, “muckraking” journalists made the point. There was opportunity but no social safety net. The immigrants came anyway, and they included Poles, Polish Jews, Russian Jews, Italians…

Not long after the massacres of October 7, 2023, author James Kunstler posted an essay, “The Jewish American Dilemma,” in which he adopted an uncharacteristically delicate, feline approach and addressed the matter of a Jewish homeland. He proceeded to suggest that America makes for an excellent Promised Land; no need to scratch one out in the Holy Land surrounded by ornery, avaricious neighbors who have demonstrated enthusiasm for gathering themselves up in massed, jealous rages. But, what of those Jews and other non-Muslims who had been living in Levant since the Iron Age in an area a fraction the size of New Jersey? In the post-war era, they opted to stay, and they assembled a polity that respects equality before the law. That equality, of course, contemplates everyone—Jews, Druze, Christians, Muslims—everyone. Not like Lebanon, a case in which the Druze and Christian communities failed to defend themselves against more aggressive and acquisitive Muslim invaders. They’ve allowed themselves to be subjugated and bullied in their own country. In contrast, the Zionist project has turned out to be the one actually successful, genuinely inclusive Liberal Democratic project in the whole of the Middle East. But, the ersatz Liberals in the West hate it. Why?

I wish I had a crisp understanding of this, but I will pose three sets of ideas:

First, I can say that some observers argue that hate for Israel really amounts to straight up hate of Jews… And, maybe there is something to that, but ethnic hatreds seem so unsophisticated that they are difficult to understand, although the perspective of a jihadist would seem more accessible: Israel occupies lands that had been overrun and absorbed within the Ummah centuries ago; it is intolerable to cede such lands to unbelievers; our religion imposes on us the obligation to subjugate the unbelievers and restore the lands to Muslim rule. Some volume of rape, torture and slavery might be involved. But it is all good, because the Prophet told us so.

So, guess what? Islam is inconsistent with the stuff like equality-before-the-law that makes Liberal Democratic governance Liberal and Democratic. That’s a problem!

Liberals in the West don’t have the excuse of being bound by the jihadist project. So, what is their excuse for hating Jews and Israel? A second idea:

Some observers advance hypotheses like that of Gad Saad’s “suicidal empathy.” I have already suggested one version of this: History began in the 1948 with The Nakba! The “European settler colonial” project that is Zionism pushed Palestinian Arabs out of Palestine; an historical wrong demands redress!

According to another version of “suicidal empathy,” history began on October 8, 2023. The Israelis started to attack Gaza. The Gaza war has gone on for some years, and the fighting has been asymmetric with the Israelis subjecting the Palestinian Arabs in Gaza to “genocide.”

A great difficulty with this Gaza cartoon is that it should at least roll back history to 2005. The Israelis had occupied the Gaza since the 1967 war. They had established more than 20 communities in the Gaza Strip, but in 2005, the Israeli government committed to a vigorous, disruptive “disengagement”: The Israelis would uproot all Israeli communities in the Gaza and cede non-trivial control of the Gaza to the Palestinians. The Palestinians committed to putting on elections and would take over governance. Hamas may or may not have entirely prevailed in those elections, but it did expel (or kill) rival Palestinian factions. UN monies by the $billions then started to flow into Gaza. But, rather than dedicate those monies to building a vibrant Palestinian state, Hamas turned Gaza into a vast subterranean fortress spanned by hundreds of miles of tunnels. Hamas immediately started its on-and-off campaign of launching rockets into Israel. After 17 years of harassing the Israelis, Hamas launched the attacks of October 7. The Israelis fought back, and this time the Israelis endeavored to extirpate the hazard. Hamas pretends history began on October 8 and calls Israeli retaliation—which was 17 years in the making—“genocide.”

The historically illiterate and innumerate Mid-Wit class of Normies in the West buy into the genocide narrative. Hence a third idea:

The Normies enjoy the opportunity to assume a new, edgy, fashionable pose: demonstrating in favor of jihad is cool; being pro-Israel is so stodgy and old. But hating on Jews and Israelis is a kind of “luxury belief.” C’est si chic!

Authors like Tom Wolfe (Radical Chic, 1970), Tom Stoppard (Rock ‘n’ Roll, 2006), and Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 1984) made fun of such posing. In The Unbearable Lightness, the value of posing is that one gets to do it with everyone! It’s like taking Ecstasy at a “rave” and getting absorbed in the fellowship of a great mass of right-minded travelers. Getting lost with the masses in the hive-mind is fun and liberating! Rock ‘n’ Roll and Radical Chic pose some contrast in that the pose is about being cool and elevating oneself above the masses, not merging with them. But, in all three cases it’s about craving the affirmation that comes with being a slave to one’s own ego.

So, is that the ultimate conclusion?: For Jihadis, the hate is about fulfilling a religious mission, but for the Normies, hate is affirming.

Hate is affirming? Really? Is that all they got?

That’s all they’ve got.

Was this just nonsense? No one really knows, but markets have assigned some weight to the prospect that the United States and some faction ostensibly representing the Iranian regime may have serious talks and subsequently cut a deal. Oil prices instantly dropped more than 10%.

I am no better situated than anyone to know what is really going on, but my own sense is that the announcement of impending talks could amount to something approaching “cheap talk.”

In game theoretic terms, cheap talk is sometimes understood as cheap-and-easy messaging that, by virtue of being cheap-and easy, might be hard to take seriously … but might yet help parties caught up in fraught negotiations to concentrate on certain plausible, commonly-understood, candidate outcomes. Cheap talk can promote coordination. That’s the theory.

My own working view of Trump’s negotiating tactics is that quasi-cheap talk is an important component. He may put out these grand-sounding pronouncements. If these pronouncements lead to desired results, then there we are. And, if they lead nowhere?: Trump will just let it slide.

For example, nothing came of efforts to discourage the North Koreans from developing nukes as well as intercontinental delivery systems. But, no one really expects the mafia regime that is the ruling clique in North Korea to offensively use these things. The regime develops the capability in order to discourage others—the United States, South Korea, Japan, whomever—from interfering in its internal affairs. So, Trump lets it go. No one notices, and that is that.

The Iranians, in contrast … Trump and others—especially the Israelis—assign non-trivial weight to the prospect that the Iranians would be disposed to loose-off with a nuke.

I myself have a hard time believing that any party who could be unambiguously identified as the culprit would deploy nukes. But, that would not preclude that same party from deploying nukes through channels that might provide plausible deniability. Why not give Hezbollah a nuclear device? And how could anyone retaliate? Would that party nuke Lebanon merely to get back at Hezbollah? In other words: Does exploiting stateless actors enable a mischief maker to get away with great mischief?

We will see where this talk of negotiation goes. An idea that occurred to me is that making the announcement could really confound the various parties that currently comprise the regime. Who are the Americans talking to, some of them must wonder? “They’re not talking to us. And if some other Iranian faction is talking on our behalf … that could be bad. That faction could sell us out.”

The Iranians have carried on about how their leadership has been decentralized and is thus resilient in the face of efforts to “decapitate” it. But, this-announcing-we’re-talking business could make various factions wonder which capo the Trump people are cutting deals with. No one wants to get cut out.

That is as political I am going to get in this essay. I am going to focus more on the seamlessness of the operation. Didja notice, for example, that the Arab Gulf States have not complained? They have not complained despite the fact that Iran has lobbed missiles at their cities and oil infrastructure, all in an effort (surely) to compel them to complain.

That suggests that the Gulf States have understood what they were getting into. They had some understanding of what might yet unfold, and they did not make a public effort to block the air campaign over Iran. They may even approve of it. They may even be privately cheering it on giddily. And no one leaked the plan.

That’s amazing. The Gulf States have taken blows but have yet fallen into line. They’re with the program. And no one has noticed?

What else have we not noticed? Over the course of a few days, the Israeli and American forces have first eluded and then neutralized Iran’s vaunted air defenses. Those would be air defenses of Russian and Chinese design and manufacture. So much for Russian and Chinese engineering prowess.

In following days, the Iranians launched their Chinese-made “carrier killer” missiles at the USS Abraham Lincoln. No hits. Just noise. In fact, there was even some question of whether the Iranians had launched any of their carrier-killer missiles at all. So much for making a statement.

It is true that the American carriers operate some distance from Iranian shores, and this gets to long-running debate about the future of naval forces. Does the future make room for aircraft carriers, or will anti-ship technologies render them obsolete in peer-to-peer engagements? I don’t know, but not yet, it seems.

Operations in the Persian Gulf reveal much about the capacity of the United States to project hard power. It remains something that cannot be dialed up at scale on short notice. Iranian protesters flooded the streets by the hundreds-of-thousands (millions?) in January. Over the course of two days, the Iranian authorities gunned down 32-to-50 thousand of them. (The Gaza “genocide” brigades have issued nary a sound. They don’t care.) No surprise, the mass killings put an end to the protests. The USS Abraham Lincoln was already under sail, venturing from Southeast Asia, through the Straits of Malacca, enroute to the Arabian Sea. “Help is on the way,” Trump declared.

But, was it all bluff? Was the blood in the streets of Iranian cities all for nothing?

The most senior Iranian leadership seemed to take it all as bluster, for why else would it concentrate at a single site in Tehran on a Saturday morning? But, the Abraham Lincoln was in place, and Israeli units took to the air. The Spiritual Leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei, and about 40 other senior personnel were pulverized in a single strike.

We are about two weeks into this business, and critics from many quarters glibly complain that the Trump administration has no plan. The administration has articulated no clear objectives! The war will escalate into another Forever War! Oh, and gasoline prices will go up!

War does make for an uncertain business. Unintended consequences, the stuff of Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns,” can upset best-laid plans. But, best-laid plans can work. One can anticipate that demands to adapt will emerge as the inconvenient realities of the thing unfold, but a glib response to glib complaints about the lack of objectives would include a Reaganesque declaration that the plan is: “We Win; They Lose!”

The war planners have surely ranked potential outcomes and objectives. Their preferred outcome would surely include (A) the substitution of the theocratic regime in Iran with a polity uninterested in exporting Islamic revolution or in the prospect of nuking the Great Satan (the United States) and the Little Satan (Israel). Short of that, objectives would include (B) taking away Iran’s capacity to fund global and regional jihad by taking away its capacity to commercialize its oil. Then there is the matter of (C) destroying remaining nuclear infrastructure and (D) destroying home-grown nuclear know-how. The latter affair could involve some very rough dealings with nuclear personnel. Finally, there is (E) the matter of rendering Iran’s existing stock of refined uranium unavailable… I would not want to be one of the people who might end up assigned to the job of physically relocating radioactive materials. How does one pull off such an engineering feat in a potentially hostile environment?

The war planners have also had to factor in likely Iranian responses. You know, like, “Closing the Strait of Hormuz!” Many observers complain that the administration had no plan for the prospect of the Iranians “closing” the Strait … notwithstanding the fact that people have puzzled over such a gambit since at least 1948: What would we do were some party to endeavor to close the Strait? One can imagine a James Bond Goldfinger gambit: a cabal of Texas oilmen organize the sinking of some number of tankers in the Strait or the mining of the Strait. Global prices shoot up!

I confess that, at this stage, I have no idea what securing the Strait would entail. Would naval escorts merely make themselves vulnerable to attack by aerial drones, seaborne drones, or missiles? At the same time, however, I puzzle over how disruptive an effort to close the Strait would be. The Saudis have operationalized a pipeline that runs from the Gulf to the Red Sea, and Oman has operationalized a pipeline that runs from the Gulf to the Arabian Sea (just beyond the Strait). Ramping up volume through these channels must surely amount to resorting to next-best least-cost transportation options, but a bigger question in my mind revolves around whether these channels are constrained to the point that they really can’t make up for the entire volume of oil that would otherwise flow through the Strait. These channels might make up for much of the volume, but would closing the Strait still yet constrain global supply of oil?

Then there is the non-trivial question of maritime insurance. Even if naval vessels could be made available for escort service, would insurers still yet decline to insure commercial vessels going through the Strait?

Last, and most importantly, there is the question of Iran’s incentive to “close” the Strait. One can imagine that the regime right now maintains much interest in seeing its own oil go through the Strait. But, were the Americans to disable Iran’s capacity to deliver oil by, say, seizing Iran’s principal export terminal on Kharg Island on the north side of the Persian Gulf, then Iran may be disposed to make it best effort to shut down all traffic through the Strait.

The Administration knows this. Hence its talk about seizing Kharg Island. Which amounts to talk about not seizing it. Which is all part of a larger campaign to “flip” regime insiders and to thereby get them to commit to a Venezuelization of Iran: Go along with a robust de-Islamization and de-nuclearization of the regime, and you get to keep your heads, your jobs, and your villas.

This is all very Trumpy, and I heartily approve. His public pronouncements are always about cutting deals. Trump declares this or that, but this or that are really bargaining points framed as either offers or threats. But, he never definitively commits to a given offer or threat. Everything is conditional on how the other side responds.

Observers opportunistically misinterpret this. “Trump Always Chickens Out!” (“TACO!”) But, really, it is Trump bargaining with the other side. It works.

* * *

The campaign in the Gulf has been going on for about two weeks. It turned out that help really was on the way, but even the United States requires massive capacity and a lot of time to assemble that capacity to launch an effective campaign.

The campaign has been spectacular much as the operation last June during which the Israelis and Americans incapacitated the Iranian nuclear program. It is spectacular much like the four-hour Forever War in Venezuela to nab Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro and to incapacitate the Venezuelan regime. It is also spectacular much as the 1991 campaign over Kuwait.

Do you remember that campaign? The Iraqi army had dug-in and robustly fortified itself in Kuwait. The United States assembled an army of a quarter-million soldiers in the desert of Saudi Arabia. Other countries nominally contributed forces, although Britain sent over a potent force.

It took months to assemble all those people and hardware, but the campaign to run the Iraqis out of Kuwait started in earnest in January 1991 with a bombing campaign. It went on for about five weeks. It seemed to go on and on. The news was dominated with video of planes at high altitude releasing their bombs. But, were they hitting their targets? Was the bombing effective?

Then the First Infantry Division of the US Army, “Big Red One,” swept into the desert west of Kuwait and flanked the Iraqi positions. The ground war was on, an anxious business. We soon learned, however, that the rout was on!

It all looked so easy, but I remember being puzzled about the deployment of forces. It looked so static, stationary, anachronistic, and, every day CNN would bring on a “consultant” who would exclaim that fighting with Iraq would degenerate into a stalemate. “Quagmire” and “Like Vietnam” were operative phrases. But, how could desert fighting degenerate into a “quagmire” like that of “Vietnam,” I wondered.

Of course, it did not, and we learned a few things about the new battlefield. First, once the ground war started, the military treated us with video of its bomb strikes, not merely video of planes dropping bombs from high altitude. We were bedazzled with the “smart bombs.” Video of bombs dropping into the air vents of concrete bunkers made it all look like a harmless video game. All that technology we’d been overpaying for for decades actually worked. What a relief.

A less obvious, but no less important innovation, was GPS. Without GPS, the Big Red One would not have been able to navigate swiftly through the featureless desert and complete its missions. But, it did sweep through the desert and catch Iraqi armored units by surprise. Again and again. The rout was on.

Since then, technologies have improved, and we could then see the militaries of the world engaged in a new race to either outpace each others’ capabilities or to avoid being too sorely outpaced. The United States had raised the ante.

For its part, the United States subsequently put more energy into developing its military communications. (I have some insight into this by virtue of working on some antitrust investigations that looked into just such matters.) Different services and different units might have been operating off of different radio platforms. These platforms might operate on different frequencies and could not talk to each other. The capacity to talk to each other could facilitate coordination on the battlefield and could, in turn, help avoid “friendly fire” incidents such as an infamous encounter in Kuwait in which an American helicopter unit mistook a British armored personnel unit for an Iraqi unit. It made for a bad business.

The race was on to move from hardware-based communication platforms to software-based platforms that, being software-based, could be easily upgraded or tuned to different frequencies. These software-based platforms would also support hardware units that could talk to each other anywhere on the battlefield. Each unit would operate like a moving cell-phone tower, and you’d end up with a dynamic, moving network connecting units on the ground with units in the sky.

In the race the keep up with each other, all militaries endeavor to do this kind of thing. The networked battlefield may have been a big aspiration in, say, 1998. It is now closer to standard practice.

* * *

The campaign over Iran has been going on for two weeks. The crowd complaining about Forever Wars has re-engaged. For its part, the Washington Post virtually eulogized the Ayatollah Khamenei:

With his bushy white beard and easy smile, Ayatollah Khamenei cut a more avuncular figure in public than his perpetually scowling but much more revered mentor [the Ayatollah Khomeini], and he was known to be fond of Persian poetry and classic Western novels, especially Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables.”

The piece in the Post spent more time passive-aggressively criticizing Trump than criticizing a murderous regime. Meanwhile, professional Israel critic John Mearsheimer dismisses the action as “wonderful news for Vladimir Putin.”

We’re not winning against Iran. We’re not winning.

What message are we sending? We’re sending a message that we’re a bunch of fools — that we started a war we can’t win.

The Financial Times had a big editorial today. The Financial Times is usually very sympathetic to the United States and the various cockamamie schemes that we come up with. The Financial Times usually supports us.

They’re saying we had no objective, no clear objective. We didn’t have the required military forces to achieve any of the objectives that we were floating, and we had no plan.

That’s what they say. And of course, they’re correct.

So the question you want to ask yourself is: What does this tell the Chinese, and what does it tell the Russians?

It tells them that we are incompetent.

I am not well situated to judge these things, but I’d be willing to bet that there are people situated to know better who would be inclined to understand that United States and Israel have demonstrated competence far beyond what critics could have imagined. Throw in some observations about the much-hyped but ultimately useless Russian and Chinese anti-aircraft and anti-ship hardware. That said, destroying the capacity of the Iranian regime to project power may be the easier project. Setting the stage for a popular uprising may make for a trickier affair, and actually expecting an uprising to succeed may make for an unlikely fairytale ending. Encouraging some regime elements to relent might be more realistic, in which case a Venezuela-like scenario may play out. Will the coming weeks or month or two prove pivotal?

These two young Persian ladies who are doing the Trump dance hope so:

A sequence of propositions:

1. Before the Enlightenment, revolutions tended to be more in the spirit of peasant revolts or the rebellion of nobles. All were motivated by parochial economic interests.

2. The American Revolution paved the way for the American Experiment: Can you establish central government and still yet preserve decentralized exchange and some scope for localized, independent governance? That experiment operationalized the concept of “checks-and-balances.”

3. Checks-and-balances includes political accountability (by way of elections) and judicial accountability (by way of decentralized, common law process). But, does it work?

4. The French Revolution merely replaced the royal, centralized administration with yet other centralized administration. But, …

5. This time administration would be guided by scientific, Enlightenment-era principles.

6. Indeed, in place of checks-and-balances, the central government would remain largely insulated from either political accountability or judicial accountability, because those things can get in the way of hyper-optimized governance. Parliamentary elections would mostly amount to window-dressing, and judges would be reduced to citing civil code. There would be no scope for “judge-made law” by way of common law process.

7. The Bolshevik coup of 1917 demonstrated that a cabal of fanatics could seize the levers of government and then impose its enlightened program on an atomized populace. Counter-revolutionaries fought back, and the Russian Civil War imposed a toll on Russia greater than that of the First World War, but the Bolsheviks ultimately prevailed.

8. Developments in the run up to the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) constitute merely one example in which parties on the Left perceived the Bolshevik experience as a user manual. In Spain 1936, a cabal of fanatics managed to finesse their way into monopoly of the levers of government and started to implement its enlightened program, but this time counter-revolutionaries fought back and won. The War was the counter-revolution.

9. The Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 enabled a cabal of fanatics to depose the Shah and institute their enlightened program. There was no effective counter-revolution, and the new regime even went so far as to export the revolution to neighboring Iraq. But, before that program could get off the ground, Saddam Hussein and his people seized the initiative and invaded Iran. Hence the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1988.

10. Millennialism ties together the revolutions that followed the American Revolution. These revolutions had their own flavors—Islamic or post-Enlightenment—but all of them justified the centralization of government by appealing to higher principles.

Peasant Revolts

Starting in at least 1775, they stopped making revolutions like they used to.

In the good old days, peasant revolts were often just that: the rebellion of peasants demanding better terms of exchange between themselves (the people who worked the fields and the rice paddies) and the owners of the great estates, latifundia, plantations. Wheat or rice wasn’t gonna harvest itself. Got to get those serfs into the fields of Flanders or the Ukraine or the Midlands or the Mekong delta. Hence developments like the Peasant Revolt of 1381.

No one expects the Peasant Revolt! But, were we to dig into it, we would find (I am guessing) that the English lords were dismayed to find that there just were not enough peasants to go around to work every lord’s estate to capacity. Why? Bubonic plague had taken away something on the order of half the population from the 1340’s through the 1360’s. Smaller population, hence less demand for agricultural produce as well as fewer peasants to work the estates. But there was no reduction in estates and thus no reduction in lords endeavoring to maintain the productivity of their estates! Lords are replenishable with a new cohort of lords.

A simple economic model: Before the plague, labor was abundant. The binding constraint on agricultural production was the land. Indeed, land owners worked hard to relieve that constraint by drawing land of marginal quality into production. Drain a swamp here; turn up all the boulders out of the soil there. Costly investments. But, after the plague, there was an abundance of high-quality land lying fallow. Whole communities disappeared, and was only in the 15^th century that populations started to recover and peasants started to recolonize the land. Hence the emergence of surnames like Villeneuve, Villanova or Villaneuva, …“New Town,” … Newtown, Newton?

But, it was 1381, and the Newtons had yet to move into the neighborhood. One can imagine the lords competing for scarce labor. Being on the short side of a market—the laborers in a labor market in this case— can be a good thing, because the other side would be long on bidders for that labor. Land owners would be disposed to bid up the terms for that scarce labor. Better compensation and better deals for laborers all around! … unless the lords start appealing to the older, traditional terms of the feudal contract: But for some number of “freemen,” most of you laborers had been tied to the land. You couldn’t just decamp to another lord’s demesne were that other lord to offer superior terms. We had become lax in policing the traditional terms of the labor contract, but we’re imposing them now! The peasants revolted.

In Native Realm (1968), Czeslaw Milosz illuminates this business of reanimating feudal contract—what he called “recurrent feudalism”—with respect to wheat production in 19th century Poland. Grain markets had globalized to the extent that they tapped into Poland; the noble land owners had been operating below capacity, but now was their chance to maximize output; they required labor to do that, hence the reassertion of older, feudal norms.

Here’s the same story recast in different terms: You have ten factories and ten factory owners. Everyone is producing widgets, and they ostensibly compete to sell widgets in a widget market. But, there is so much demand that each factory ends up operating at capacity, and there is no easy way to expand capacity. So, effectively, there is no competition. Each factory owner operates like a monopolist; no one owner needs to concern himself with how other owners are pricing widgets or with how much other owners are producing. All those other owners are capacity-constrained, and each owner’s optimal program is simply to run at full capacity, dump all produce on the market, and enjoy monopolistic pricing. It’s great!

But, then demand is halved, and there is not enough demand to support all ten factories operating at capacity. Maybe five operating at capacity could supply the market. Or, maybe, all ten factories operating at 50% capacity would be adequate. But, now, factory owners fight among themselves over who gets to maintain higher throughput/capacity utilization, and they resort to gimmicks to tamp down competition between themselves for scarce labor. The laborers form a union and go on strike to demand better terms.

There’s my sketch of the canonical peasant revolt. There might be something to it.

The American Experiment

The 18^th century rearranged the chess board.

1763. Britain and France settle the Seven Years War. The Seven Years War might qualify as the first World War in that it was fought in Europe, North America, the Caribbean, and India.

The French and Indian War amounted to the North American theater of the Seven Years War. (That theater of war involved our Indians in the West, not their Indian Indians from India in the East.) Many of the combatants from both sides of the American Revolution ended up fighting next to each other against the French and their Indian cohorts. Colonials like a young George Washington fought with British. The British also brought their own Indian cohorts, members of the Iroquois confederation, into the fray. Our Indians fought Their Indians.

But, 1763. The relationship between Britain and its North American colonies started to sour. Long story short: Britain virtually bankrupted itself in its global war with France. The Motherland had allowed the policing of the Mercantilist Contract with America to go lax for some time, but now there were prodigious debts to be paid. The British started to tighten up that contract and complement it with a raft of new taxes and prohibitions. Among other things, the colonists were forbidden from venturing over the mountains and into the Ohio River Valley, notwithstanding the fact that many of those colonists fought in the war so that they could do just that.

American Revolution (1775-1783), blah, blah, blah … Then the Northwest Ordinance of 1787: The Americans set up formal processes for settling the Ohio River Valley and then converting Northwest territories (eventually) into states in the Union. Then the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

Checks-and-Balances

The Constitutional Convention took up the question of how you set up a “rules-based order” that respects individualism, free exchange and individual rights while nonetheless setting up some capacity for the central government to do things … like deliver the mail, wage war, and raise revenue to support the business of delivering the mail and waging war. But, does setting up a central authority merely doom the project of preserving decentralization?

A remedy encompassed “checks-and-balances” as contemplated by the Anglo-Scottish conceptualization of the “separation of powers,” the “tripartite ideal of government organization, wherein all power delegated by the people [had been] … divided neatly between legislative, executive and judicial” (James Landis in The Administrative Process, 1938).

So, the storybook caricature is that the Legislature (Congress) makes the laws, the Executive (the President) enforces the laws, and the courts determine whether or not the laws accord with the Constitution if and when some party with standing challenges those laws.

The question of how well the storybook version of “checks-and-balances” accords with practice has been the subject, in passing, of some my essays, but I will not take up that question here. I will, however, introduce checks-and-balances to contrast it with the Continental conceptualization of the separation of powers. And, I think certain contributors are right when they illuminate the connection of it to the “Royal Prerogative,” basically, the idea that the Executive’s agents in the administrative agencies should operate without interference from the legislature, from the courts, and, conceivably, from the Executive itself. Which brings us to The French Revolution.

The French Revolution on Political Accountability and Judicial Review

The French Revolution substituted the Royal Prerogative of the Bourbon Kings with the Royal Prerogative of the Napoleonic Administrative State. The point of la séparation des pouvoirs was to insulate the Imperial Administration from political accountability and from judicial accountability.

(So, what was the point of the Revolution, then? Mostly the culling of the class of aristocrats?)

Before the Iran business blew up, I had been tuning up an essay titled “The Return of Politics,” and I was going to explore—and will yet explore—recent developments in Japanese politics to make the point that political accountability is not a bad thing! It is through Parliamentary elections and Presidential elections that the Administrative State can yet be subject to a non-trivial degree of political accountability. And a point of the essay will be that politics in Japan may finally be emerging for the first time since being buried under Occupation Era (1945-1952) democratic reforms. I contend that those reforms had paralyzed elected officials with so many rules that there was no place for discretion and policy-making to go but into the administrative agencies.

Policy-making thus became opaque and insulated from political accountability, which would help explain why policy-making has become so unresponsive to the preferences of the electorate. (Does this not sound familiar?) Everyone loves policy when they love it, but they hate it when they can’t weigh in and encourage a course-correction when policy deviates from the will of the electorate.

But, back to the Napoleonic tradition. It has two parts. First, cut the administrative agencies loose from the legislature. That’s the legacy of the Royal Prerogative. Second, insulate the administrative agencies from judicial accountability by supplanting common law process with the Codification of Everything. Call it “the Napoleonic Code” if you like.

Proposition: The revolutions of Continental Europe merely replaced the overweening Ancien Régime Administrative State with another overweening Administrative State, except this time the Administrative State would operate everything in accordance with finely-tuned, scientifique principles.

The Bolshevik Coup as User Manual

Skip forward through the Revolutions of 1848, the Paris Commune of 1870 and right to the Bolshevik coup in St. Petersburg 1917. From Francis Spufford, Red Plenty (2010):

In the chaos and economic collapse following the overthrow of the Tsar by disorganized liberals, they were able to use the discipline of the cult’s membership to mount a coup d’etat—and then to finesse themselves into the leadership of all those in Russia who were resisting the armed return of the old regime. Suddenly, a small collection of fanatics and opportunists found themselves running the country that least resembled Marx’s description of a place ready for socialist revolution.

From my (still ongoing) readings about such things as The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), I get the sense that anti-liberationists look to the Bolshevik experience as a user manual: Never mind democratic process and the hard work bringing people to your cause. Just go in there and seize the levers of government, and aggressively use the levers of government to compel the atomized populace to conform to your program. Install a government of administrative agencies. Populate the administration with experts. Let them run the country unencumbered by either political accountability or judicial accountability; appeal to the Royal Prerogative; ignore the backwards American model of “checks-and-balances.” And, you are right to do this, because you have the right, finely-tuned, scientifique principled, Chiliastic program. You’re on a Mission from God. “Democracy” and constitutionalism are for losers, but feel free to dress up your totalizing program as Our Democracy™.

Recall that it was the Germans who had delivered Lenin to St. Petersburg to organize the Bolshevik coup. Their mission was to motivate Russia’s exit from the Eastern Front of the First World War. The gambit worked.

The Spanish Civil War as Counter-revolution

The Spanish committed to a new constitution in 1931. Constitutions lay out “rules of the game,” but it is not obvious that all parties on the Right or that any parties on the Left were serious about respecting their own rules-based order. Parties on the Left explicitly understood the Bolshevik experience as a model for seizing control of government. They published articles about such a ploy, and they went so far as to stage an insurrection in 1934. The teetering Republic managed to suppress the insurrection, but, two years later, in something of a quiet coup, the Left managed to expel Rightist factions from government. The Leftist faction in government then set about implementing its militant, Chiliastic vision of Heaven on Earth. Certain factions on the Right managed to stage their own counter-revolution, and they prevailed after three years of fighting.

The Islamic Revolution

Flash forward to 1979. The French delivered the Ayatollah Khomeini from Paris to Tehran. The purpose was to tip the scale against the Shah’s regime in Iran. That gambit worked. A cabal of fanatics seized the levers of government and aggressively used the levers of government to compel an atomized populace to conform to its Messianic program.

In 1980, the Ayatollah Khomeini broadcast a message by which he encouraged members of the Iraqi military to expel the regime of Saddam Hussein. Hussein’s people did not wait around. They took the initiative and invaded Iran. Better, they thought, to have our Shiites fight their Shiites on our terms rather than wait for our Shiites to extinguish our Sunni regime.

The gambit worked, although eight years of war exhausted both sides.

Millennialism

The Islamic Revolution looks a lot different than the French Revolution, but the one installed a Supreme Leader, and the other installed an Emperor. Both installed government that endeavored to institute totalizing programs. The former would ostensibly involve the strict implementation of Sharia. The latter would involve the implementation of technocratic government informed by science and reason.

Woodrow Wilson was not around, of course, to observe the Iranian experience but he did seem to admire the Napoleonic experiment. In his 1887 essay, “The Study of Administration,” Wilson averred that “the science of administration” could “perfect” the “civil machinery” of public administration. He illuminated administration in Napoleonic France and in Prussia under Frederick the Great as proof-of-concept.

The main proposition of his essay was that the United States could yet raise administration to Continental standards, but the project would have to be more ambitious than those of Prussia and France in that it would have to negotiate the great edifice and obstacle of “modern constitutional government.” By design, constitutionalism had broken the “monopoly” of kingly authorities on government—the “royal prerogative”—and had “enthroned public opinion.” Preoccupation with public opinion gave way, in Wilson’s view, to partisan politics, and it was through partisan politics that public opinion could unduly influence the business of government. The principal objective, then, of a new “science of administration” should be to determine how “Bureaucracy [could be] removed from the common political life of the people, its chiefs as well as its rank and file.”

My next essay on “The Return of Politics” will take up the proposition that “the science of administration” is a mirage and that politics is a good thing. We all complain about politics, but how else do we make government responsive to the policy preferences of the electorate? We do it through politics, and initiatives that supplant electoral processes with, say, processes by which insiders in government merely appoint their own successors makes for unresponsive government by the self-anointed best-and-brightest, of the self-anointed best-and-brightest, and for the self-anointed best-and-brightest.

For some time I’ve been writing about horizontal relationships—free exchange between people operating boss-to-boss, say—and vertical relationship, the stuff of tight, top-down, hierarchical control and overweening bureaucracy.

Everyone likes hierarchies when the philosopher king at the top sweeps in like the deus ex machina and implements their preferred policies. Everyone hates hierarchies when the self-anointed best-and-brightest impose policies they don’t like. So, there’s always a tension: how and when do we enable hierarchy to do its thing, and how and when do we restrain it? Can we come up with (dare I say it) a “rules-based order” that can do a good job of judiciously enabling the hierarchy and judiciously restraining the hierarchy?

Anyway, this Epstein business has never attracted much of my own attention, but let me pipe in with one point: There is a lot of conspiratorial commentary that confidently situates Jeffrey Epstein as an agent operating in a tight, vertical hierarchy. Some observers situate the Israelis and Mossad at the top of that hierarchy. Others situate Epstein in a grand scheme run by Putin. The CIA fits into some narratives. And so on. But, my own guess would be that Epstein was not any one party’s agent or even a double-agent but was more of a free agent working to cultivate a network of casual, horizontal relationships. Someone like the real Sidney Reilly (“Ace of Spies”) might provide a better (albeit, extremely generous) model.

Reilly was definitely a free agent. I would guess that, as a free agent, Epstein had been more of a connector, a fellow who insinuated his way into various social networks and had set himself up as the guy who could connect people and resources from one network with people and resources in another network. He occupied a node in various networks thereby bringing all these networks loosely together in one grand, fluid network.

“Elites” like to socialize with each other, because you never know when you might want to call on a particular relationship. So, for example, it was no accident that the Clintons had always been chummy with people like Trump—going so far as to attend Trump’s 2005 wedding to Melania and whatnot—because a given relationship could prove useful ... until it proves adversarial. Epstein would float in elites’ social networks and could hook up politicians with contributions here … and hook up unsatiated, unsatisfied, lascivious wealthy nerds with young women there.

Wealthy nerds were just the kind of men who would be susceptible to being hooked up with young women, because they never had their Augustinian experience as younger men with sowing their wild oats. St. Augustine knew from abundant and rich experience of the sins about which he voluminously spoke. Augustine would have been impervious to the solicitations of an Epstein to participate in anything involving an Epstein. He already had the experience of operating at the center of a well-populated social network.

As a young man of much careerist promise in the late Roman Empire, Augustine had plenty of experience with being just the kind of fellow to whom young women would hope to attach themselves. And some number of them managed just that… fleetingly. Augustine ultimately returned to his backwater hometown of Hippo in North Africa and set up a monastery. His days of partying and self-indulgence were over.

I look at this Epstein business and remain skeptical that there is much in the way of tight, vertical, hierarchical relationships at work. I look at it and anticipate that there was much more in the way of fluid, on-and-off, horizontal relationships in play.

Relatedly, there ain’t no literal Black Book of blackmail targets. In the Cassavetes film Gloria (1980), good, old school mobsters were hunting for a young lad whose father had charged with delivering a Black Book to the authorities, but there’s nothing like that here. Also, let me go so far as to suggest that, while Trump is surely no saint, he does share with Augustine the experience of … not having had to go out of his way as either a younger man or older man to attract the attentions of women. (Indeed, the Clinton campaign effectively exploited this fact against Trump in 2016. Cue the infamous Billy Bush interview. Meanwhile, in his 1999 comedy special, Bigger and Blacker, comedian Chris Rock had joked that “Men are only as faithful as their options.”) Trump didn’t need an Epstein to connect him to women, and, it seems, he didn’t need Epstein to connect him to anything. In fact, Epstein proved to be a trouble-maker (in Trump’s correct estimation), and Trump kicked him out of his own sphere more than twenty years ago. So, yes, wealthy New Yorkers have this way of showing up at social events—weddings, Met Galas and such—attended by other wealthy New Yorkers, but, if there really were something in the fictitious “Epstein Files,” we can sure bet that the Democrat Party establishment would have exploited that material years ago.

The main proposition here is that “the rule of law” only works if a critical mass of people in the system actively choose to do the right thing when their number gets called. Success is a choice. The great tragedy is that we can’t deterministically program success. Failure is also a choice, and we have abundant historical examples of societies choosing failure. Choosing to do the right thing, in both small and grand ways, amounts to lubricating the mechanisms of governance and tightening loose screws when and where one finds them.

On paper, we can design the best rules, the best processes, the best constitutions, the best mechanisms. We even have theories of “mechanism design” in our literatures on why and how institutions matter. But we can yet end up with arbitrary rule and institutional sclerosis. The system only works if a critical mass of people in positions of authority as well as people subjected to that authority make a point of making the system work for everyone.

Why? Because, we can’t deterministically program people to do the right thing. Rather, opportunities to choose between doing the right thing and committing grievous mischief will arise. There is no “complete [social] contract” that will cover all contingencies. Any given crisis may inspire a lot of (possibly messy) process, and as messy processes unfold, those in leadership may find themselves gifted the option of “never letting a crisis go to waste.” And what will the leadership choose? Will those in leadership choose to exploit a given matter for personal gain? Will they choose to chip away at the integrity of the system? Worse, will those in leadership even choose to manufacture crises? Alternatively, would the people in leadership find their inner Cincinnatis (plural) and do the right thing? What may constitute the right thing in any given instance might not be entirely obvious, but would the leadership, at least, endeavor to restore the integrity of the system?

Manufacturing crises from within the system is one thing. External threats are another. Programs concentrating on globalized governance present external threats.

Globalists are globalists, because they endeavor to establish centralized, global governance. It turns out, however, that there is some number of (sometimes competing) globalist programs. Islamists, for example, endeavor to subject the whole of human society to Sharia. Hence calls to “Globalize the Intifada!” They’ve been fitfully pursuing this program since the 7^th century. Meanwhile, the Colectivos of places like Venezuela and Cuba remain part of the larger on-and-off program started in the early 20^th century to subject the world to global, communist governance. Then there is the Neo-Liberal program—or, depending on who you are reading, the Neo-Con program—of sweeping away national boundaries and subjecting the world to a global “rules-based order.”

* * *

This essay was inspired by evidence of mounting external threats to the United States. That’s a big statement. But, first, a confession: I was deeply gratified to wake up on the morning of Saturday, January 3, 2026 to learn that American forces had managed to sweep into Caracas and surgically extract Venezuelan bad guy Nicolás Maduro.

This confession is important, because many of my essays concern arbitrary governance (the stuff of Realpolitik) and its principal remedy, the rule of law. So, how can I align with an act that seems so arbitrary? The reason is that you may not be interested in Realpolitik, but Realpolitik is deeply interested in you.

Each of us will have to choose a side. If everyone were committed to playing by the rules of the game, then we would be spared the matter of choosing. But, everyone isn’t. In fact, many factions out there may strategically appeal to “the rule of law” or a “rules-based order” or “international law” when it suits their purposes, but they will blithely ignore these things when otherwise making an ostentatious show of honoring them no longer suits their purposes. These people really doth protest too much in that their behaviors align with something worse than mere lawlessness. Their behaviors and preferences align with governing under the “color of law”: arbitrary governance while pretending, like Obama operative Susan Rice, to operate “by the book.”

In this essay, I make contact with two reflections on arbitrary governance. One of these reflections involves content I have periodically discussed, but the second installment is new (to me): Marc Bloch’s reflection in Strange Defeat (1940) on the spectacular failure of the French to hold up the German invasion in May 1940.

On my reading, Strange Defeat makes contact with an enduring problem: It is one thing to design (intendedly) optimal rules, but the universe really does have a way of making out the technocratic conceit of optimal design as just that: a conceit. A familiar rules-versus-discretion tradeoff obtains, and it’s the kind of thing some business school professors have carried on about (and should carry on about) in different guises: how do we enable people to optimally sweep in and deviate from the rules when deviating from the rules makes sense? But, once we make some provision for some party to break rules, are we not creating opportunities for affirmatively destructive deviations from the rules? Are we not creating some scope for arbitrary governance?

Stated differently: Might there not be some optimal level of rule-breaking arbitrariness? Can we design rules in the spirit of a pressure-release valves that enable that optimal level of arbitrariness? But, would that optimal level of arbitrariness yet require us to put up with some volume of the arbitrariness that we had hoped to contain? How do we screen out the bad and channel the good? Can we only manage to screen out some of the bad stuff? Do we have to put up with some volume of “false positives” (deviations from rules that are accepted as good when, in fact, they’re bad) and “false negatives” (failures to deviate when deviating would make sense)?

Let me start with Yasunari Kawabata’s The Master of Go (1951).

Kawabata used the governance of Go tournaments as a metaphor for rules-versus-discretion tradeoffs. Japan had just emerged, shattered, from the Second World War. Through the course of the Occupation (1945-1952), the Americans had a strong hand in implementing formal democratic processes in Japanese government.

Democracy! Sounds good, dun-nit? Kawabata explicitly identified democratic process with rules-based governance. Rules would ostensibly contain arbitrary governance, and it was broadly understood, after all, that it was a lot arbitrary governance through the course of the 1930’s, that had led Japan down the path to conflict with (first) China and then Britain and the United States. Conflict inspired an effort to cocoon the Japanese islands within a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” spanning much of East Asia, Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific. The program started off with spectacular military successes but ultimately inspired a slow-rolling yet inexorable response from both Britain and the United States. That response rose up gently at first, like a tsunami sweeping almost imperceptibly across the seas before monstrously cresting and crashing down on Japan’s shores. The United States crushed Japan’s capacity to project power and pulverized any number of its cities.

Kawabata goes on to observe, almost in passing, that the effort to supplant the old way of doing things—a way that assigned much weight to discretion exercised by those of superior “age and rank”—did come at some cost. A deficiency of the book (in my estimation) is that he did not elaborate on how that cost became manifest. My sense is that the old way of doing things did, in fact, impose a lot of strict rules… on people not endowed with the privileges attending age and rank. But the old ways did afford those invested with age and rank with much capacity to exercise discretion.

This is a very Confucian thing: The exercise of discretion is very hierarchical in that it is up to subordinates to fall in line and implement orders from above, although it is up to superiors to look after the well-being of subordinates.

How “banzai charges” and kamikaze attacks factor into the well-being of subordinates is a question. Further, one can imagine superiors sometimes failing to do the right thing and exploiting their place high up in the hierarchy and imposing arbitrary demands on subordinates. At the same time, however, someone somewhere in any hierarchy has to make decisions and craft adaptations when plans don’t unfold on schedule. Someone may have to do something that appears arbitrary, and, indeed, some degree of apparent arbitrariness will be something we should have to factor into our thinking about how hierarchy could be made to work.

I would pose the avoidable loss of life attending the sinking of the South Korean vessel Sewol in 2014 as an example of how a hierarchy failed to work, because no one in the hierarchy chose to break protocol and do the right thing. An overloaded, poorly loaded, and top-heavy ferry en route from Incheon, South Korea to Jeju-do (a volcanic, almost-tropical island south of the Korean peninsula) made a hard turn in the narrow waters of the Maenggol Channel. Cargoes ended up sliding to one side of the ship, and it began slowly to list. Passengers were instructed to remain in their cabins, but no one thought to direct passengers to leave their cabins even as the list began to exceed 45%. The captain and crew managed to jump ship, but no one in the crew bothered to countermand the order to restrict passengers to their cabins, and few (if any) passengers bothered to exercise initiative of their own and leave their cabins.

More than 300 passengers went down with the ship, with most of them in their cabins awaiting further instruction, all because no one could bear the psychic cost of breaking protocol. None of the crew and few, if any, of the passengers had the presence of mind to Do the Right Thing: exercise some leadership, and lead passengers to the upper decks where they might at least have had some chance of getting off the ship and surviving. The ship ultimately capsized.

On my reading, the great innovation of the new rules-based governance in post-war Japan was to impose more rules on those operating at the top of Japanese hierarchies—that is, on people of age and rank who had formerly been able to exercise much discretion. Instead of a Council of Elders getting together and deciding, “Let’s invade Korea,” the proposal to do such a thing would have to go through formal (rather than informal) committee processes and might not ever make it out on to the floor of a deliberative body for a vote. (Would Hideyoshi’s invasion of Korea in 1592 have made it out of committee?)

Under the old ways, the Council of Elders would informally come up with a program, and it would be up to everyone populating the machinery lower down in the hierarchy to get on with it. Under the new, democratic, rules-based way of doing things, big proposals like “Let’s build a nuclear deterrent,” might never go anywhere. Even so, decision-making capacity (and the exercise of discretion that goes with it), does not entirely disappear. What comes of it?

My sense is that much decision-making capacity and discretion moves from the metaphorical Council of Elders and gets buried from sight in new administrative agencies. Kawabata does not make explicit contact with administrative agencies, but he does make a very important observation relevant to the conduct of administrative agencies: Rules can enable something worse than explicit exercises in arbitrary governance. They can enable arbitrariness exercised under the color of law—that is, people in authority could rule arbitrarily while pretending to abide by the democratic, rules-based order.

We end up having to do something of a “comparative institutional analysis.” The old ways will have had their advantages, but they could also enable a small clique of fanatics to fall into Groupthink and lead the country into disastrous projects like “Invade Manchuria” or (in the German case) “Invade the Soviet Union.” Ostensibly rules-based governance might diminish the capacity of small cliques to concentrate the resources of the entire country on crazed projects, but, as Kawabata observes, “When a law is made, the cunning that finds loopholes goes to work.” That cunning becomes manifest as “a slyness which, when rules are written to prevent slyness, makes use of the rules themselves.” Further, what happens when there really is an emerging threat and someone needs to make some heavy decisions?

On heavy, pressing decisions, let me return to Marc Bloch’s Strange Defeat (1940).

Marc Bloch was a veteran of the First World War and found himself volunteering his services again for the Second World War. After the Fall of France, he ended up assuming important leadership in the French Resistance.

He ended up being hunted down and executed for his potent efforts. But, before the Gestapo could get around to that, he managed to put down his own thoughts on the organizational failures of the French military. These failures went some way toward enabling the German blitzkrieg of May 1940 to be such a success that even Hitler and the Nazi leadership were astonished.

On my reading, Bloch makes the point that (1) you can institute the best plans and the best processes, but that may amount to very little unless you have people who are committed to making the processes work. You need a host of Cincinnatis, both high up in a hierarchy and low down in the hierarchy, to make things work.

That said, (2) your processes might not be optimal. They might not conform to “best practices.” It’s hard to know. It’s easier to prepare for “the last war” (World War I) than to be able to anticipate the innovations (yet to be witnessed) in the forthcoming conflict (World War II).

That said, (3) one can anticipate that demands to adapt will make themselves manifest. As Professor of Organizational Economics Mike Tyson has observed, everyone has an optimal plan until he gets punched in the face. So, anticipating a metaphorical punch in the face, should we not impose some demands and expectation on ourselves to be adaptable? But how do we collectively decide when to break the from the finely-tuned, hyper-optimized rules, break from hierarchy and enable parties anywhere in the hierarchy to adapt?

Tricky questions, and if it were all so easy, then we wouldn’t need to study how to enable efficient adaptation. But, Bloch seems to suggest that the French military was so stuck in over-engineered hierarchical sclerosis masked as progressive, hyper-rationalized, scientifique solutions that the question of ever having to anticipate deviations from a rigid script never attracted the attention and mental energy it deserved. (The mirage of hyper-rationality is the subject of a very nice essay by Gary Saul Morson, “The Greatest of all Novels,” The New Criterion, March 2019.)

Bloch found himself in a position of some authority somewhere in the middle of the hierarchy. He had a hand in coordinating the logistics of fuel supply. It did occur to him that merely rolling out a map and setting up a static network of fuel depots might not amount to an adequate effort to address the dynamic problem of defending the country. It could be the case that, once hostilities got going, advancing French forces would require supplies to keep up with them. So, how should they anticipate uncertain demands to extend supply lines beyond the French (or Belgian) frontiers into Germany itself? Of course, it could also be the case that French forces could find themselves retreating in a particular sector. Should the logistics team then come up with plans for denying advancing German forces access to fuel? Further, should the logistics team invest in greater capacity to communicate with team members and with active forces across a dynamic, changing battlefield?

Bloch found himself breaking with protocol (a very big deal) in his own effort to make the logistics of fuel supply a little more flexible and adaptable. He had a contact in “a small neutral country about an equal distance from the French and German frontiers” (Luxembourg?) The contact operated a fuel dump and posed to Bloch the prospect of topping off fuel supplies in anticipation of French forces requiring them. Alternatively, should he allow supplies to dissipate to peace-time levels in anticipation of the Germans rushing in and securing them? Bloch took the decision himself and advised to keep supplies low. He was not confident that the French would manage an effective advance; better to deny the Germans access. He broke protocol and unilaterally made the decision, because he was also not confident that his senior leadership would get around to addressing the matter before the bullets started to fly. He proved to be correct.

On this last point, Bloch reveals something of the brittleness of the French strategy. The strategy was very defensive and seemed to involve waiting for the Germans to come to them and to then envelop the enemy and annihilate it—or at least, drive it back—by sheer mass of arms. All well and good, and perhaps the strategy could have worked, but the blitzkrieg really did operate so quickly that French decision-makers were never equipped to know what was going on and where to attempt any effort to envelop the enemy. Communication lines were brittle (and thus susceptible to disruption) and, no less importantly, parties on the front line had been neither trained nor instructed to exercise discretion. They were stuck depending on leadership from the top of the hierarchy, but the top leadership was so out of touch as to be worse than useless.

Contrast the French over-reliance on rules and hierarchy with the German approach. In Bloch’s telling, the Germans literally demonstrated a much more “democratic” approach to decision-making. (Kawabata identified “democracy” with rules being applied up and down a hierarchy. Bloch identified “democracy,” in this case, with rule-breaking far down the hierarchy.) The Germans came into the fight with a broadly-held appreciation of the fact that best-laid-plans have a way of blowing up on encounters with reality, and the personnel on the front line in the immediate line of fire need to have some capacity to extemporize. Senior leadership gave personnel on the ground the capacity to choose to do the right thing.

But, giving people license to extemporize can also be problematic. One person’s extemporization may be another person’s failure to exercise initiative. “Yes, we ignored orders to take the high ground, Because Reasons [and our failure to advance messed up the entire army’s advance, and here we all are stuck in a trench and surrounded].” (The American failure to take the Alban Hills above Anzio, Italy in 1944 comes to mind.) Or, extemporizing may work: “We ignored orders to hold up and wait for supplies to catch up, because we wanted to take the high ground before the enemy showed up. [Our gamble worked, and we managed to hold the enemy off when it finally did show up.]” (Guderian’s and Rommel’s romp through France in May 1940 looks like a prime example.) Or, extemporizing may have made for an inspired idea, but things didn’t quite work out: “Our gamble to take the high ground did not work, because, while we did get there, reinforcements and supplies were too slow to catch up. So, here we are surrounded.” (The opening days of the Gallipoli experience in 1915 seems apposite.)

It is true that being something of a maverick and exercising initiative without approval from higher up in the hierarchy will result in some failures. But, the French, in Bloch’s estimation, were very poorly equipped to even contemplate on-the-ground adaptations. It got worse, and this is the most important point that Bloch makes: Best-laid, hyper-optimized plans are great, but stuff can still break down if your people do not share an esprit de corps and thus end up less than completely committed to doing what it takes to make stuff work. The Germans had it. The French didn’t.

Interesting, no? In Japan, democratization involved saddling the top of the hierarchy with rules, in which case real, discretionary decision-making capacity migrated, for better and for worse, to the administrative agencies. In the Battle of France, the Original Nazi Gangstas democratized battlefield decision-making by granting their people far down the hierarchy much license to exercise discretion. But, those people were committed to the mission, so they actually performed well rather than choosing to shirk their duties and shift burdens to other units. And note what commitment involved. It involved senior leadership not lining up and shooting junior leadership for taking risks, especially when a given initiative failed to pan out, and it involved junior leadership knowing it had license to be aggressive and then doing a good job of deciding when and where to take risks.

* * *

Did Donald Trump do the right thing in apprehending Nicolás Maduro?

Millions of Venezuelan emigres around the world demonstrably think so, although the project of restoring something that looks like democratic governance in Venezuela will involve a lot more, surely, than just “decapitating” the leadership of a narco-state. That said, the usual suspects have lined up to criticize the move: It deviates from “international law.” It sets a precedent for sweeping in and nabbing countries and amounts to granting license to China to nab Taiwan. It gives cover to Putin and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The action amounts to the start of another “forever war.” The Just-asking-questions-Brigade, both of them, reliably piped in: Candace Owens suggests that “Zionists” have something to do with it. (The Libertarians have done the same thing: “Maduro’s Kidnapping is Part of a Larger Zionist Operation.”) Then, on the X platform, Russia Today (@RT_com) posted a clip of Tucker Carlson suggesting that a motivation for the apprehension of Maduro is a campaign to institute the “Globo-Homo” agenda (“gay marriage,” “transgenderism”) in Venezuela. Venezuela isn’t gay enough. It all makes sense now; Thank you Tucker …

My focus is on the bit about “international law” and “forever war,” although let me note that the Russians and the Chinese rank among the most vociferous critics of the American action. If the apprehension of Maduro really does give Russia and China license to do whatever they want to do, then one might have expected them to quietly approve. Why do they affirmatively not approve? Do they privately approve but publicly disapprove?

Anyway, it is hard for me to document exactly what has been going on in Venezuela, but we have been hearing for years that Venezuela has been an important node in a network involving illicit commerce in oil and drugs. Some of the oil has kept Cuba on life support, although electricity in Cuba has been available only hours a day the last few months. Hours a day may soon diminish to far less than that, and one can wonder what will come of the Cuban leadership.

The apprehension of Maduro follows a months-long campaign of destroying drug-running boats in the Caribbean and a more recent campaign of seizing oil tankers. The campaign has also involved the impressive concentration of naval forces in the Caribbean. Why all of the military force? Is it part of an invasion bluff, and bluffing might induce certain factions in Venezuela to cooperate? Or, do you really need many of those vessels to police a blockade?

It turns out that federal indictments for a host of regime personnel, including Maduro himself, had been filed in the Southern District of New York way back in 2020. (This is the infamous S.D.N.Y through which the Democrats have waged war on Trump since at least 2020.) It also turns out that the Biden Administration had put out a $25 million bounty on Maduro’s head on January 25, 2025, just days before the inauguration of Donald Trump to his second term. From the self-anointed “paper of record,” The New York Times:

The Biden administration said on Friday that it was offering $25 million for information leading to the arrest of Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela, after he assumed a third term in office despite evidence suggesting that he lost Venezuela’s recent election.

The announcement was a retaliatory measure by Washington, which does not recognize Mr. Maduro as the rightful president of Venezuela. Mr. Maduro has presented no evidence that he won a July election, while his opponent Edmundo González has presented thousands of publicly available vote tallies that he says indicate he easily won the most votes.

The United States has said that Mr. González is the president-elect of Venezuela and has urged Mr. Maduro to step aside…

In 2020 Mr. Maduro was indicted in the United States, accused in a decades-long narco-terrorism and international cocaine trafficking conspiracy.

You can read the indictments here, including the one specific to Maduro.

Maybe going after Maduro and his people is like going after Al Capone for tax evasion:

Al Capone

In the “roaring twenties,” Al Capone ruled an empire of crime in the Windy City [Chicago]: gambling, prostitution, bootlegging, bribery, narcotics trafficking, robbery, “protection” rackets, and murder. And it seemed that law enforcement couldn’t touch him.

The early Bureau [FBI] would have been happy to join the fight to take Capone down. But we needed a federal crime to hang our case on—and the evidence to back it up. Eventually, that day would come…

On June 16, 1931, Al Capone pled guilty to tax evasion and prohibition charges.

The ultimate objective in Venezuela may have little to do with either oil or drugs and a lot more to do with ridding Venezuela of Chinese, Russian, Iranian and Cuban influence. On that count, I note that the Cubans report that 32 of their people perished in the operation to apprehend Maduro. The Cubans were providing Maduro with security. Interesting, no? Like, why are Cubans providing ample security for Venezuelan officials? Got to protect those streams of oil without which their country goes permanently into the dark.

Here’s an image from the press release of March 26, 2020 attending the 2020 indictment:

Meanwhile, here is presidential candidate Joe Biden castigating the Trump administration in 2020 for not going after Maduro:

The forever war in Venezuela lasted about four hours. The US military stopped the stopwatch at about 4 am Caracas time on the morning of Saturday, January 3. So, to the protesters of the day after who demanded that we “stop the bombing”: You missed the bus on that one. We will yet see how things unfold going forward, but, the exercise of that Saturday morning amounts to the end of modest displays of pyrotechnics. Surely anyone underneath that stuff experienced “shock and awe,” but the exercise was vanishingly small compared to the exercise in shock-and-awe that Donald Rumsfeld had a hand in organizing in Iraq in 2003. Trump ain’t no Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld ain’t no Trump.

Now, some protesters will have appealed to an elusive “international law” on this matter. Let me suggest to the reader in John Lennon fashion that we imagine what international law would look like… I am thinking that national borders will have dissolved. We’d be subject to the rule of technocrats cloistered in New York and Geneva. There’d be no war, because the rules-based order would iron out regional disputes.

In fact, that invites an interesting question: If “our rules-based order” already prevails, why is there any war, anywhere, ever? And, given there is a lot of war going on, doesn’t it mean that some party has contravened the global order and is therefore an outlaw who has committed crimes against humanity?

There is more: The usual suspects claim that only Congress maintains the constitutional authority to “declare war,” and therefore Trump Bad. I note, however, that Congress has not formally declared war since June 4, 1942 when it declared war against—wait for it!—Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. (These countries had allied themselves with Nazi Germany.) The United States had declared war on Japan on December 8, 1941 but still remained nominally neutral with respect to the war in Europe up to that time. To the great puzzlement of Hitler’s generals, Germany went ahead and declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941. It was only later that day that the United States formally gave up the fiction of neutrality and reciprocated with a declaration of war on Germany.

Since 1942, the United States has fought major wars in Korea (1950-1952), Vietnam (1965-1973) and Iraq (1991). Throw in the “nation-building” fiascos in Iraq (2003-2021) and Afghanistan (2002-2021). Then there are the various interventions, replete with bombing campaigns, in Serbia, Syria and Libya. “We came, we saw, he died!” Hillary Clinton joked with respect to the killing of Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. No one complained.

Engaging military force is a serious business, but it is not obvious that a formal declaration of war has ever amounted to more than rhetoric. The Executive branch of government has availed itself of constitutionally-consistent processes for engaging military force, although Congress has sometimes endeavored to impose more structure and limits on the Executive’s capacity to wage war. (See, for example, the War Powers Act of 1973, the constitutionality of which is itself an enduring subject of debate.)

One view of what is going on—a view that I think imposes much needed structure—is the view that the current Executive has made a point of seriously recognizing the new “Great Powers” competition. An important aspect of recognizing this new reality is reinvigorating the Monroe Doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine goes back to the early Republic. It put the (European) powers of the time on notice that meddling in affairs in America’s back yard would invite scrutiny from the young Republic, and that scrutiny could turn into offensive action. So, think carefully before meddling.

The French decided to meddle in the 1860’s when the United States was distracted, dissipating its prodigious energies in the American Civil War (1861-1865). The French invaded Mexico in 1861 and elevated Archduke Maximilian of Austria to leadership. The French withdrew in 1867 under American pressure. The Mexican Republican forces subsequently captured the self-proclaimed Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico and executed him by firing squad. The films Major Dundee (with Charlton Heston, 1965) and Two Mules for Sister Sara (with Clint Eastwood and Shirley MacLaine, 1970) make heavy contact with the French occupation of Mexico.

That is a such a beautiful scene, the French charging across the Rio Grande …

Anyway… I lost my train of thought …

Here we go: A few years ago, I attended a “peace rally” on the National Mall, right there in front of the Lincoln Memorial. In these pages I posed the question in the spirit of “Are Left and Right coming together over the war in Ukraine?” I posed reasons why that might be the case. Might.

Here are two scenes from the “peace rally”:

Since then, I’ve revisited (in these same pages) reasons why that is affirmatively not the case. And, for a long time, I’ve puzzled about a simple way of explaining what is really going on. So, here we go, a hyper-simplified hypothesis. The thrust of this exercise is The Matrix:

Note that “Pro-Israel” might as well be “Pro-America” or “Pro-Western Civilization,” even with all the “globo-homo” stuff thrown in. “Anti-Israel” would conform to “Anti-America,” “Never-Trump,” and “Anti-Western Civilization.”

So, what I am suggesting here? That “peace rally” I attended in 2023 wasn’t about peace. It was about “pro-Russia” (about which I have no problem, per se) and “anti-West” (about which I have a lot problems). For most of the protesters there, the issue wasn’t peace and prosperity for all. It was just an excuse for an expression of anti-Western sentiment. So, no. Left and Right were not coming together over Ukraine. A syphilitic, anti-Westernism was being celebrated.

What else? The fact that globalists adhere to a rabid anti-Putinism separates them from the other anti-Western factions, but the European leadership is (oddly) deeply anti-European. How else to explain the industrial importation of peoples from North Africa, East Africa, the Middle East and the Hindu Kush who demonstrate no respect for “doing the right thing” as measured by liberal democratic norms?

It is hard not to conclude that the pro-Maduro crowd is virtually identical to the anti-Israel crowd, and that crowd largely conforms to the anti-America crowd and anti-West crowd. None of these people care one whit for institutional integrity or “the rule of law.” They might strategically appeal to those things, but those strategic appeals are no more than that: strategic but disingenuous appeals to things they don’t believe in. Because they have to tear down the West. “Western Civ has got to go!” And, “Globalize the Intifada.” Believe them when they tell you who they are.

“What kind of people could do such a thing,” some observers have incredulously asked? One obvious hypothesis: The kind of people who would do such things would be those who don’t have anything better going on in this world. They include the people to whom a 7^th century Bedouin’s febrile dream of paradise as a reward for “martyrdom” through the course of jihad would seem like a good bet. The dream amounts to the opium of the incels.

Other cultures have offered similar bets on rewards in the afterlife for committing war and atrocities against people of yet other cultures and societies. For example, pre-Christian Norse and Germanic warriors who fell in battle could anticipate their reward in Valhalla. (Dancing, drinking, fighting, whoring. What’s not to like?) Aztec warriors could look forward to assuming places of honor with Huitzilopochtli, the god of war and human sacrifice.

The promise of rewards in the afterlife was just that: a lottery for rewards of uncertain value for performance in the here-and-now. It made for an economical way of providing performance incentives. One might then wonder why other famously pagan cultures did not also avail themselves of such low-cost incentives but rather bore the heavy cost of providing incentives in the here-and-now for performance in the here-and-now. What did Julius Caesar tell his legionaries on venturing into Gaul?: “Everyone will be generously compensated in cash or land… I hear that the Aquitaine is nice!”

An advantage, surely, of the Roman incentive scheme was that the rewards were more certain in the here-and-now whereas the prospect of rewards in the afterlife is more speculative. That said, promises of paradise remain potent and yet inspire much Islamic violence. Indeed, in our here-and-now, Islamic-inspired violence has become an increasingly conspicuous phenomenon. “Albo,” the Australian prime minister (Anthony Albanese) has found himself having to explicitly recognize the Bondi Beach atrocity as an incidence of “terrorism”—which is really striking, because he and the members of his clique have been vigorous proponents of the mutli-kulti project in Australia and have consistently dismissed concerns about Islamic-inspired violence as “Islamophobia.” For Albo to recognize terrorism suggests that he feels some pressure to recognize reality.

* * *

This essay is not about antisemitism per se. It is not about Islamists, the people who get bedazzled by the ideas that jihad is holy and infinite reward attends martyrdom. It is, like most of my essays, about the wickedest people who walk the earth: the Normies.

The Normies. The people who might have woken up to the news of the massacre on Bondi Beach and thought, yeah, that’s bad. That amounts to a great tragedy for the families of the people who either lost their lives or were grievously wounded. But—and here’s the moral relativism and propagandistic framing at work—it’s no worse than the “genocide” that the Israelis have inflicted on “the Palestinians.” In fact, what’s a small number of fatalities compared to the tens of thousands of fatalities in Gaza? And, is not terrorism (on “the West Bank,” on a beach in Australia, anywhere) really just a righteous expression of “resistance”—resistance to European colonialism and Western hegemony? Ultimately, isn’t jihad kinda-sorta justified?

And, while we’re at it, the Normie thinks, what about this business of “Trump” bombing “fishing boats” in the Caribbean? Yes, these boats are equipped to run drugs. Yes, they are equipped with as many as four outboard motors and can (therefore) outrun patrol boats and deep-water naval vessels. But, running drugs … isn’t that really just the kind of thing that “fishermen” who are already having a hard time scraping by would do? Can we really blame them? Further, isn’t bombing them really out of hand? Does bombing them not amount to a kind of terrorism itself? “Trump” might justify this by labeling these bombings acts of self-defense against narco-terrorists, but don’t we have good, Old School legal processes for dealing with this kind of thing? What happened to “due process”? After all, we’ve managed to extradite some Mexican cartel leaders, and we are running those people through legal process. How can we get away with unilaterally labeling some low-level drug runners “terrorists” and then bombing them? Is “Trump” not committing “war crimes”? Doesn’t “international law” proscribe these kinds of unilateral acts?

Rules of War, States and Non-state actors

“Rules of war.” It sounds like an oxymoron, no? But, how do the rules implicate “Non-state actors,” “Terrorists” and “Terrorism”?

I am no great authority on these things, but, I am going to suggest that some modest research puts structure on how we think about our world post-October 7. That would be “10/7,” of course, October 7, 2023. But let me roll the clock back to December 11, 1917, the day that British General Edmund Allenby walked through the Jaffa Gate into Jerusalem.

Long story short: The British had been fighting the Ottoman Turks. The Turks were an ally of the Germans, and Europe was busy destroying itself through the course of “The Great War” (1914-1918). By the time the Second World War got into full swing, the Great War had to be relabeled the First World War.

Now, one can wonder why the British would engage any efforts in fighting the Turks during the First World War. Why not just fight the Germans and worry about the Turks later? That’s a question for another day, but the important point for this essay is the fact that the British ended up running the Turks out the Arabian peninsula, the Arabian desert and the Fertile Crescent (which would encompass the Levant and Mesopotamia, the lands between the rivers). Having relieved the region of Ottoman authority, it was up to other parties to fill the void. The British, already on the ground with an army of their own, were well situated to impose some authority and to then start managing the process of establishing new states. As there were a lot of (often bitterly competing) interests in the region, the business of establishing new states could make for a fraught affair.

So, what is a “state,” and who decides what territories a particular state should encompass? Hold the question in your mind. But, first, how did the British end up on the ground with an army?:

The British ended up fighting against the Turks on three fronts. First there was the Gallipoli campaign, so I really have to roll the clock back to at least February 19, 1915 when the Brits first ventured into the Dardanelles (the straits connecting the Aegean Sea to the Sea of Marmara, half way to the Black Sea). The plan was to seize Constantinople and secure the channels between the Black Sea and the Aegean. The theory was that such a feat would knock Turkey out of the war.

Old School British understatement: That effort did not work. But the plucky Brits adapted and came up with a new plan: land ANZAC troops and British troops on the Gallipoli peninsula, run up the peninsula, and seize Constantinople from there. British pluck; some non-trivial volume of ANZAC (“Australian and New Zealand Army Corps”) and British blood. The plan failed.

The Gallipoli campaign did inspire ANZAC Day a generation later, and it further inspired some great film a generation and more after that. (See, for example, Peter Weir’s film, Gallipoli [1981] with a young Mel Gibson. The Albinoni theme still rings in my head …) ANZAC Day originally commemorates the great sacrifices made by the ANZAC’s in the Great War.

Other nice film includes: ANZAC Girls (six-part mini-series, 2014), and 1915 (seven-part miniseries, 1982).

Distinct from the Gallipoli campaign was the effort to run up from the Persian Gulf along the Tigris River to (at least) Baghdad, but (more understatement) that didn’t work. By the time the troops had reached Kut (far down river from Baghdad but deep, deep, deep in enemy territory), the slender, precarious supply line gave out, and that was that.

Finally, there were the parallel efforts to tap into “The Arab Revolt” as well as press a British army from Egypt along the coast through Gaza and further up along the Mediterranean coast of the Levant. Yet more understatement: T’was no easy thing, but the multi-pronged effort yielded important results. The British ultimately managed to knock the Turks out of the war, and with the rulers of the Levant out of business after 401 years, there was a power vacuum. As the only serious power on the ground in the Levant, the Brits found themselves puzzling over how to establish new states and (intendedly) an enduring peace.

The Arab Revolt is interesting, because it did not represent all Arabs. Rather, a certain Arab faction inspired the revolt, and, on my reading, that faction did this as a way of situating itself to influence the redrawing of the post-Ottoman Middle East. Getting pole position would amount to boxing out other factions from exercising influence. In this endeavor, it had partial success.

That faction was led by the King of the Hejaz, Hussein bin Ali al-Hashimi. The Hejaz is that strip of the Arabian peninsula, 200 miles deep and 800 miles long, abutting the Red Sea. It runs from Mecca in the south all the way to the Gulf of Aqaba (one of the rabbit ears of the Red Sea) in the north.

King Hussein hoped to cajole the Brits into helping him establish a new Caliphate. That new Caliphate would supplant the Ottoman Caliphate in the Middle East … and he himself would serve the role of Caliph, Allah’s deputy on earth. Long story short—a story of overlapping palace intrigues and coups—the king did get around to declaring himself Caliph in 1924, although there was little support for this move either within or outside the Arab world. In fact, the Saudis invaded the Hejaz that same year and incorporated it within their domains by the end of 1925. The Saudis managed to consolidate control over most of the Arabian peninsula and, in 1932, to declare the state of Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, the British did help install Hussein’s brother, Prince Faisal, as King of the newly-formed state of Iraq in Mesopotamia, and they helped install Hussein’s son, Abdullah, as King of Transjordan. Faisal did try to install himself as king of Syria, but the French pushed him out. In 1958 in Iraq, Faisal’s grandson was deposed in a coup (largely instigated by Egyptian President Nasser). Abdullah was assassinated in 1951, but the Hashemite family still rules Jordan to this day.

Conclusion: The romantic concept of “Pan-Arabism” or of a monolithic, unified “Arab Street” is and was a fiction. The data abundantly demonstrate that competing personal ambitions and tribal interests have driven Arab affairs. Even so, a Disney version of events post-World War I persists in which the British and French undermined Arab efforts to re-establish a Caliphate in Arab hands that would span “Arab lands.” Most notably, critics will point to the second of the ten letters comprising “The McMahon-Hussein Correspondence” of 1915/16. In the first letter, King Hussein advances the fiction of “the whole of the Arab nation” and purports to speak for it. He makes many demands of the British, including a demand that the British recognize an “Arab Caliphate of Islam” that would encompass territories expected to be vacated by the Ottoman Turks. (In Nisi Dominus: A Survey of the Palestine Controversy, 1946, Nevill Barbour leaves out the bit about an “Arab Caliphate of Islam” when reproducing a part of the King’s first letter. Puzzling.) The Caliphate would encompass the region occupied by modern Iraq, Jordan, Syria Lebanon and Israel. The Brits replied that they “welcome the resumption of the Khalifate by an Arab of true race.” (Also left out of Nisi Dominus.) But, the question of boundaries would yet require much discussion and, indeed, would depend on developments in the field:

With regard to the questions of limits and boundaries, it would appear to be premature to consume our time in discussing such details in the heat of war, and while, in many portions of them, the Turk is up to now in effective occupation; …

One can imagine that much of the further discussion would have to do with the fact that the lands under consideration were not strictly “Arab countries.” In Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1923), T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”) dedicated an entire chapter to cataloguing the many non-Arab and non-Muslim peoples who heavily populated the lands between the River and the Sea (between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean) as well as in present-day Lebanon and coastal Syria. Those peoples included Jews who had been living there forever, albeit in the station that all non-Muslims would also occupy in the Arab Caliphate of Islam. The station of “second-class citizens” would be a generous way of putting it.

Those second-class citizens also included a Jewish cluster of “German-inspired” “late comers”. That was as close to acknowledging the Zionist project as Lawrence would get.

My own sense is that Lawrence was a proponent of a romantic, Disney concept of a pan-Arab state, an Arab Caliphate, although he is too slippery in his book to pin down.

The film Lawrence of Arabia (1962) does contribute to the Disney romance, although a casual observer might find himself stepping back and wondering about the preoccupation with establishing an Arab state. Given the opportunity to replace a state (the Ottoman Empire) with a new state or cluster of new states, why not organize them around liberal, democratic norms—you know, the stuff of freedom of religion and equality before the law; no more second-class citizenship; full citizenship, and the entire menu of liberal, democratic rights that attend citizenship?! For everyone! Each new state could comprise a Multicultural Wonderland.

Perhaps that would constitute the actual Disney version of things: liberal democracy out of a box; toss in a heavy portion of Multiculturalism; add water, stir and bake.

The reality, of course, is that a Caliphate amounts to a totalizing mode of organizing society, and it is hostile to liberal, democratic process and norms. “Democracy is Man’s law; Sharia is Allah’s law.” Allah’s law prevails in the Caliphate.

So, if you’re the British, what do you do? Do you submit to the idea of carving out a small, Jewish-majority enclave hugging the Mediterranean coast of the Levant? Do you support the formula (such as it was) economically sketched by the “Balfour Declaration” of 1917:

His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

Alternatively, do you do in the land between “the River and the Sea” what the Lebanese did after securing independence from France in 1943: establish a government that allocated offices between Maronite Christians, Shia Muslims, Sunni Muslims and Greek Orthodox Christians?

Or do you submit to the demands of the King of Hejaz, who presented a false picture of a monolithic, united, Arab community that suffered uniquely for 400 years under the Turkish yoke? That picture contemplates folding the lands between the River and the Sea in an Arab superstate that also encompasses Iraq, Syria, Jordan and most of the Arabian peninsula.

To recount: The Lebanese experiment had some success but proved less than durable. US Marines had to go in there in 1958 to keep it from collapsing. (My high school wrestling coach was one of those marines.) This was the same year that certain Arab factions undermined the Hashemite regime in Iraq and killed Hussein’s progeny. These events were related. Earlier, in 1951, Arab factions endeavored to overthrow the Hashemite regime in Jordan. They did manage to assassinate Hussein’s son Abdullah, but the regime survived. Back in the Hejaz, the Hashemite regime ended up being subordinated to the Saudis. The Saudis eventually ended up consolidating most of the Arabian peninsula and forming the state of Saudi Arabia. In 1948, Zionists did manage to declare the Jewish enclave on the coast of the Mediterranean as the state of Israel, but Arab armies from Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt invaded. Amazingly, the Israelis managed to fight them off.

The Israelis also fought off Arab invaders in 1967, 1973 … and 2023… all that on top of all of the other violence Arab forces have inflicted on the Israelis.

Other notable developments: Palestinian Arabs flooded Jordan after the 1967 war. (These people came from “the West Bank,” Samaria and Judea, although many also stayed in the West Bank.) The refugees then destabilized Jordan and attempted to overthrow the Hashemite regime in 1970. But, that effort failed, and many of those Palestinian Arabs migrated to Lebanon … which they proceeded to destabilize. Lebanon experienced civil war from 1975 to 1990. Hezbollah subsequently carved out a quasi-state of its own within Lebanon.

Meanwhile, an interesting aspect of the Hamas’s 2023 invasion of Israel is that formidable forces in Lebanon failed to effectively attack Israel as had been planned. Hezbollah and its Iranian patrons boasted for years about how Hezbollah was armed with tens-of-thousands of missiles and was situated to rain down hell on Israel from the hills of southern Lebanon, but, as Arabic-language insiders observe, the Israelis had managed to destroy Hezbollah’s command structure and to physically diminish much of its material capacity in 2023 and 2024. With the help of Google Translate:

In the last months before his assassination, the former Secretary-General of «Hezbollah», Hassan Nasrallah, believed that the «support war» would remain until its end under the roof of the «rules of engagement», and that Iran would not leave 4 decades of «Islamic resistance» in Lebanon as easy prey. However, miscalculations are what hindered the party from making decisive decisions regarding the war, which by September 2024 had become bloody and comprehensive.

This investigation reveals that «field secrets were buried with party leaders assassinated by Israel, and with them Nasrallah lost effectiveness with their replacements stripped of field knowledge», although a contrary account stated that the party’s problem was not with the leaders, but with the loss of missile operators, «rare currency» in the party and the war.

The investigation is based on interviews with Lebanese and Iraqi figures who were in contact with the party leadership in 2024, conducted between August and October 2025, and varied between former leaders, clerics, and security personnel, the identities of some of whom were withheld for security reasons.

So, … the 10/7 phenomenon was supposed to be a much bigger affair. It was supposed to destroy Israel.

Credit to the Israelis for containing it. T’was a close run thing.

* * *

Now. Who gets to declare a “state”?

A state of Israel, for example? A state of Saudi Arabia? Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, or Syria?

In 1776, a critical mass of Americans declared a state. The British contested the claim. With much financial and material assistance from France—as well as with French blood spilled on the field and on the seas—those Americans managed to wear down the British. In 1783, the British acquiesced and recognized the United States of America.

Quasi-states of the Caribbean

Defining a state matters, because it informs the “rules of war” and implicates “Non-state actors.” Pirates, for example, have historically qualified as non-state actors, and, even in 1718 actual states maintained norms for dealing with non-state actors. Edward Teach (“Blackbeard”) ended up with his severed head suspended from the bowsprit of a British navy sloop. That amounted to due process by the standards of the day. Lesson: Don’t commit acts of terrorism such as bombarding coastal cities as in Blackbeard’s assault on Charleston, South Carolina!

Blackbeard and other pirates operated out of Nassau in the Bahamas and out of enclaves on the coast of what is now Belize. Belize and the Bahamas were great places to operate out of, because they’re nested in rings of shoals and reefs. Navies could not just sweep in and roust out the pirates.

Rousting out pirates did make for an ambitious project, but eventually, the British authorities did succeed, although the effort did involve turning some pirates into their own agents. Blackbeard’s former operating partner, Benjamin Hornigold comes to mind: “In 1718, word spread of a general pardon for pirates. Hornigold accepted the pardon offer, and was commissioned as a pirate hunter for the new governor of the Bahamas, Woodes Rogers.”

Hornigold and others had set up a quasi-state in the Bahamas, but they and their “pirate republic” would surely qualify as “non-state actors” by modern standards. An actual state, Great Britain, made a point of formally absorbing the Bahamas into its control. That marked the end of a romantic age of English pirates, the one that inspired Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883).

Non-state actors: Drug-runners of the Caribbean

Over the last several months, the Trump administration has made an ostentatious point of publicizing military strikes on drug-runners operating in the international waters of the Caribbean. Ostensibly, the object of the strikes is to stop the flow of drugs from South America coming in to the United States, and, while there might be something to that, some observers do wonder if larger, less well articulated objectives inform what is going on.

Speculation about larger objectives include: A coalition of actual states (China, Venezuela and Iran, for example) may have been waging an undeclared war on the United States. That war may include something in the spirit of an “Opium War” insofar as it has involved flooding the United States with drugs from South America as well as drugs from China itself channeled through Mexico.

Admittedly, I find myself “just asking questions” like a Candace Owens. But, unlike a Candance Owens, I would impose more structure on things if I could. But here we are, and “here” includes undeclared combatants (drug runners) operating in support of formal states that are occupied in undeclared hostilities… Traditionally, the rules of war have applied to formally declared combatants operating explicitly in the service of recognized states. Such issues were central in (for example) the litigation against Harry “the Breaker” Morant and his cohorts with respect to their conduct in the Boer War (1899-1902). The phrase “customs of war” shows up nine times in the Scapegoats of the Empire (19XX), a memoir by one of the Breaker’s co-defendants, Lieutenant George Witton. Witton cites the Manual of Military Law operational at the time:

“War must be conducted by persons acting under the control of some recognised Government, having power to put an end to hostilities, in order that the enemy may know the authority to which he may resort when desirous of making peace.” Under ordinary circumstances, therefore, persons committing acts of hostility who do not belong to an organised body, authorised by some recognised Government, and do not wear a military uniform, or some conspicuous dress or mark, showing them to be part of an organised military body, incur the risk of being treated as marauders and punished accordingly.

The experience of the Breaker and George Witton inspired the stage production Breaker Morant (Kenneth Ross, 1979). The stage production inspired the film Breaker Morant (1980).

My brother tells me that this film helped inspire him to go to law school and become a lawyer. The production really is something, and one can see how it suits the stage. The stage production would have revolved around dialogues in military barracks and in a military court. The film augments those scenes with flashbacks to action in the field.

A few things that make you go “Hmmmm …”.

I am not an expert on the rules of war, but whenever matters involving hostilities come up, armchair experts do seem to make themselves available. And they do make prodigious appeals to “international law,” albeit, without ever actually making contact with law or other text. So, I put it to the reader: An empire is decaying around you. The empire may have been oppressive (or not—maybe it was great), but other factions anticipate the fall of empire and endeavor to impose their authority over your community. And they may be very oppressive. Do you and your community give obeisance to the new pretenders, or does your community strike out on its own and set up its own governance structure? Do you declare a state and fight for it? Like Asterix the Gaul and his cohorts, do you carve out your enclave on the coast and endeavor to resist The Empire and preserve your community’s freedom and dignity? Do you anoint yourselves with not a little of the blood of your compatriots who fall in the fight?

Consider this example of “Palestinians” returning to fight “in their native land” in 1948 after the five Arab armies invaded the new state of Israel. From the New York Times, May 5, 1948:

PALESTINIANS SAIL; WILL JOIN IN FIGHT

The American Export Lines passenger ship Marine Carp sailed for the Mediterranean yesterday with 265 passengers, among them a group of Palestinians returning to their native land.

According to representatives of Americans for Haganah, Inc., 38 West Sixty-ninth Street, the Palestine group, ranging in age from 19 to 35, most of them students, were en route to join the fighting forces opposing the Arabs.

“I feel that my place is over there together with my friends,” said Israel Frumkin, 22 years old, who came here last August to study banking. “We are going back to Palestine to join our brothers and friends in the fighting at the front.”

Mr. Frumkin, who will serve with the Haganah Army, is the son of Justice Gad Frumkin of the Supreme Court in Palestine.

Alternatively, do you organize a society in which you allow incels like the Bondi Beach assailants to get away with their atrocities, because sump’n about these murderers being oppressed, and their oppression gives them license to oppress?

When other states (such as Iran) furnish non-state actors just across your borders (in Lebanon, in Gaza, in Syria, in “the West Bank”) with capacity to rain hell down hell on you, what do you do? When these same non-state actors build concrete fortresses, furnish them with missiles, but label such sites “schools” and “hospitals,” what do you do? Similarly, when states (such as China, Mexico, Colombia or Venezuela) use the services of non-state actors to covertly channel drugs and criminals into your country, what do you do? Do you just accept it, because, again sump’n about oppression and this oppression gives these states license to oppress?

The Thanksgiving essay amounts to an expression of thanks for our 17^th century and 18^th institutional heritage. It takes that seemingly parochial business about Pilgrims and Puritans seeking religious freedom and demonstrates that that entire episode in early American colonial history merely comprised prologue to an epic adventure in discovering and then institutionalizing liberal values. And I mean classically liberal values, the stuff motivating equality before the law, not the Disney concept of liberal values which elevates inequality before the law. Inequality manifests itself as arbitrary rule by way of such exercises as cheap and easy appeals to “equity” over equality.

The Puritan experience came out of the English Civil Wars of the 17^th century. Those wars comprised the English installments in Europe’s wars of religion. The wars of religion involved conflicts between Reformation and Counter-reformation.

An important conclusion is that those wars of religion were less about religion per se and more about politics. They were more about politics, power and the design of polities. In the English experience the main question was: Is the king above the law? Did allowing the King (Henry VIII) to install himself as the leader of the Church of England amount to fusing the power of the State with the power of the Church, and did that fusing of Church and State afford the same king and his successors ways to operate above the secular law when it would suit their purposes? Could the king arbitrarily choose to skirt the law by making appeals to the mandate of heaven? And, if so, should we not institute the “Separation of Church and State” in order to frustrate the arbitrary rule of the king? Indeed, would separating Church and State go some way toward making the king accountable to the law, and does that not amount to an important step in institutionalizing constitutional governance? And, is not the ultimate purpose of constitutionalism to force government to respect the rights of the individual?

In 2025, the following proposition has made it back into the news: killing and war that may appear inspired by religion tend to be more about politics than religion. Appeals to religion is just noise. The signal is in politics and power. In just the last few weeks, for example, many observers have suggested that religious war (jihad) has not been the principal driver of mass atrocities against Christians in Nigeria (and elsewhere). “Islamism,” one observer suggests, “is more of a useful rallying cry to lure recruits than [Islamists’] core activity, …” Moreover, “Muslims are just as likely to suffer violence at [Islamists’] hands.”

The author of Islam, Israel and the West (2025) might superficially appear to agree: Islam[ism] is less about religion per se and more about imposing a totalizing mode of governing the whole of society. I would go further and suggest that, historically, Islam had been about mobilizing the whole of society toward the great project of imposing Islam on the whole of all societies. But there are even modern expressions of the great totalitarian project. Consider the constitution, such as it is, of the Islamic Republic of Iran (1, 2):

In the organization and equipping of the country’s defense forces, there must be regard for faith and religion as their basis and rules. And so the Islamic Republic’s army, and the corps of Revolutionary Guards must be organized in accordance with this aim. They have responsibility not only for the safeguarding of the frontiers, but also for a religious mission, which is Holy War (JIHAD) along the way of God, and the struggle to extend the supremacy of God’s Law in the world.

“Against them make ready your strength to the utmost of your power, including steeds of war, to strike terror into the hearts of the enemies of God and your enemies, and others beside”. (Holy Quran, [8:60])

The work of the Islamic revolution is never done. Viva la Revolución!

Meanwhile, I qualify “constitution” with “such as it is,” because the Iranian constitution is more a statement of work projects (never-ending revolution) than a statement of administrative rules and processes. Indeed, the constitution goes out of the way to explain that there really are not going to be any processes for governing “The Executive Branch of Government,” because processes get in the way of the mission of universal jihad:

In view of its special importance in implementing Islamic laws and regulations to achieve just and appropriate relations in society, and in view of its vital role in preparing the ground for the attainment of the ultimate goal of life, the Executive Branch must pave the way for the creation of an Islamic society.

Consequently, its confinement by any kind of complicated and obstructive system that delays or hinders the attainment of this goal is rejected by Islam. Hence, the system of bureaucracy - which is the outcome and product of tyrannical rules - will be firmly rejected in order to create an executive system with more efficient operation and greater speed in the fulfillment of administrative obligations.

Islam is the State. Islam is the official religion of the State. There is no separation of Church and State. And, moreover, Islamism mandates inequality: The adherents of Islam are obligated to subordinate those non-adherents who fail to convert. Even so, it turns out that not all adherents to Islam have themselves always adhered closely to Islam’s harshest mandates. Hence manifestations of “Cafeteria Islamism” as well as of episodes of revivalism to redress those deviations from the true practice of the true faith.

Those episodes of revivalism harken back to the earliest 7^th century mission of Islam: to force everyone to “submit,” and I might have understood that revivalism would have faded away by, say, the 14^th century, but examining episodes like the Mahdist revolt in the Sudan (1881) and the Caliphate in the Sudan that succeeded the revolt (1881-1898) was illuminating. The most striking feature (to me) of the experience in the Sudan in the late 19^th century is that it reads like a user manual for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) as well of for on-and-off jihad in the Sudan (and Nigeria and everywhere) to this day.

Alas, some things have not faded away by the 14^th century, and I would suggest that a reason is that old school Islamism provides an incentive program for restless young men. Jihad is a great way to seize what you want in this world by force, and Islamism provides not merely license to exercise force but rather the obligation to join jihad and exercise that force. Force includes rape, torture, mutilation on top of plain old pillage and slavery. Anything goes, and all methods are blessed. What’s not to like?

A propagandistic advantage Islamism has, I would suggest, is that it appears to Western viewers to be a parody of itself. It is so extreme and cartoonish that it just can’t be real. It’s the stuff of Hollywood caricatures, right? But it is real, and Islamists are not joking when they claim that “democracy is man’s law; Sharia is Allah’s law.” And guess whose law prevails in the Islamic state?

So, if there is a big difference between the West’s Judeo-Christian heritage and Near East’s Islamic heritage, it is that the former made way for individual rights and equality before the law in hoc seculo (“in this world”) whereas the latter made a point of violently discriminating between adherents and non-adherents in this world.

That said, we can find evidence of conflict between Islamist revivalists and those adherents of more accommodating interpretations of Islam. Critics of Saudi Arabia, for example, might illuminate the fact that all of the “9/11” terrorists came from Saudi Arabia, and one can find adherents of Wahhabist revivalism in the Kingdom. But, not everyone in the Kingdom has been a proponent of Wahhabism. Indeed, the current regime in Saudi Arabia had made a point of expelling Wahhabist cohorts from its own ranks. The Kingdom is not monolithic in this respect, and neither are the other Arab states.

The notion of Islam as an incentive program first really came to me decades ago when poring through The Empire of the Steppes: A History of Central Asia (Rene Grousset 1970). In the 8^th century, Arab armies showed up out of nowhere and started pressing through Central Asia onto the western approaches to China. This was about one century to the day after Islam had consolidated control of the Arabian peninsula. Over time, certain Central Asian peoples (Seljuq Turks, for example) adopted Islam, and all of the Buddhist communities along the Silk Road were either destroyed and abandoned or destroyed and forcibly converted to Islam. What motivated these people? What advantages did Islam offer over Buddhism?

Consider, also, the movement of Islam in the other direction, from East (in the Arabian peninsula) to West, all the way through North Africa and then through Spain and into central France where, finally, a Frankish army turned back an invading Muslim army at Tours in 732. What advantages did Islam offer over Christianity in the Arabian peninsula, in Egypt, in the rest of North Africa and in Spain? Both license and obligation to wage jihad on non-adherents—including license to dispose of non-adherents as one chooses—would seem to have something to do with it.

Here’s a reminder that it hasn’t always been this way and does not have to be this way:

But, back to our regular programming. Links to my perennial Thanksgiving essay:

A Tale of Three Thanksgivings in Two Acts

The 17th century experience with Puritanical excess helped America make the jump from a tribalistic identity politics to an actually “inclusive” live-and-let-live liberalism.

Table of contents:

The Main Propositions

Act I – In which English settlers and native Americans resolve to collaborate rather than fight

• Squanto – International Man of Mystery

Act II – In which America begins to realize a revolution in individual rights

• The Accidental Constitutionalist

The essay proceeds in four parts. The first part illuminates the apparent amnesia public health authorities have experienced with respect to long-held understandings of how to manage infectious disease. Among other things, the public health authorities themselves had observed by 1919 that mask mandates are ineffective. They figured that out after the first waves of Spanish Flu swept through the population.

The second part illuminates the unwitting emptiness of criticism of vaccine critics. The proponents of vaccinations appear no less religious in their faith in vaccines than they claim vaccine critics are in their rejection of vaccines.

The third part updates analysis I have not done in a long time: Examine excess mortality post-COVID across age cohorts and across states. Evidence consistent with vaccine harms are in the data, although the analysis can neither definitely prove nor dispel claims of vaccine-induced mortality. There is also evidence that willfully uncontrolled, illegal immigration during the Biden years contributed to the diffusion of disease (not just COVID) in border states.

The last part concludes.

1. The historical amnesia of the public health authorities

Fightin’ Joe Hooker is infamous for two things: giving prostitutes, “Hookers’ Girls,” free license to grace his Washington, DC headquarters with their charms; allowing Robert E. Lee to outflank his own much larger army and run it off the field at Chancellorsville, Virginia (1863). Union pickets streamed in through much of May 2, 1863—Stonewall Jackson is flanking our right!; Stonewall Jackson is flanking our right!—but Hooker seemed either unwilling or incapable of responding. Both sides puzzled over this as the flanking action unfolded and after the flanking action unfolded. Historians puzzle about this now and forever more.

One may wonder how such people rise to such senior positions of authority (in the military, in government, in large corporations), but Hooker is credited with being a very good administrator. That army he had sent in to the wilderness around Chancellorsville was (in his own estimation) “the finest army on the planet.” No one argued the point, and, in fact, the point informed subsequent criticism: How could Hooker have fumbled so badly given he had built up such a formidable war machine?

Hooker’s success as an administrator may explain his rise to the most senior command in the Union army, and a big part of effective administration involved public health policy. By the time Hooker assumed command of the Army of the Potomac, a “best practice” seems to have been to concentrate new recruits in large numbers in camp and to allow them to stew in their own viruses. Better for everyone who had not developed natural resistance to measles (for example) to get infected and develop that resistance while idling in camp than to become debilitated while out in the field.

My understanding is that new recruits coming in from the West (from the countryside) had a harder experience in camp than had recruits coming in from the cities in the East. Easterners who survived childhood had already been exposed to a broad menu of viruses and bacteriological hazards in the cities. The Westerners may have had more exposure to zoonotic diseases (did they?), but the cities had remained the death traps that they had always been. Anyone who survived city life was immunologically well fortified.

A lot of questions come to mind. When, for example, had the idea of allowing new recruits to share all of their diseases first become standard practice? Did the Romans do that kind of thing 2,000 years ago? The Chinese 4,000 years ago? Was ancient Rome a death trap, or was a Roman living in Rome more likely to survive childhood and live far into old age by virtue of the fact that the city had equipped itself with substantial public water works and a system of public baths? Perhaps only certain neighborhoods, less well served with running water, remained death traps? Does growing up in a more sanitary environment make one, like the Westerners coming in to Union army camps, more susceptible to the diseases of the city when and if one is heavily exposed to those diseases? Or, are there tradeoffs?: Does growing up in the city (and thus being more immunologically fortified) come at a cost? Does directing the body towards making one’s immune system more robust amount to making the body less robust in other respects? The body may adapt to constant exposure to pathogens, but does that constant exposure diminish one’s longer-run health prospects?

And then there are questions about nutrition and the spread of viruses. Are better nourished populations more likely to shake off measles or other viruses? So, is the healthy, well-nourished Western army recruit more likely to shake off the diseases of the city even when heavily exposed?

One would expect that the science of public health would have sorted out answers to many such questions, but the conduct of public health authorities through the course of the COVID experience suggests that a lot of questions remain under-explored … or the authorities have committed to retrograde narratives about the diffusion and persistence of communicable disease. Consider, for example, the wisdom of masking. By 1919, some health officials in California remained committed to masking as a way of containing the diffusion of the Spanish Flu, but other officials observed that masking demonstrated no effect on the incidence of Spanish Flu. In Influenza: A Study of Measures Adopted for the Control of the Epidemic (California State Board of Health, Special Bulletin No. 31, January 1919), Wilfred Kellogg observed that a masking mandate in San Francisco had no discernible effect on mortality attributed to Spanish Flu. Specifically, he compared rates of mortality across four cities (San Francisco, Boston, Washington and Buffalo). Mortality in each city exhibited the expected skewed, bell-shaped trajectories: Mortality ramped up sharply before finally cresting and falling back. Mortality subsequently picked up again across all four cities as a second wave of Spanish Flu swept over them.

Only San Francisco had implemented a mask mandate, but visual inspection of the data makes it hard to argue that the mask mandate had diminished the toll of Spanish Flu. Kellogg’s graph is difficult to read—I reproduce it here—but I also reproduce his results in a new graph.

Kellogg’s original graph:

The regenerated graph:

In the following graph, I feature the same data in cumulative form. I also fit a skewed, bell-shaped curve (a Morgan-Mercer-Flodin curve) to the first ten weeks of data from San Francisco.

Representing the Kellogg data in cumulative form makes it easier to see that San Francisco had performed marginally better than Boston and Washington through ten weeks, and one can even observe that San Francisco performed very slightly better than Buffalo through ten weeks, but then San Francisco started to perform worse than each of those cities as a second wave of Spanish Flu swept through. The fitted curve (the dotted green line) suggests that the first wave of flu generated about 470 fatalities per 100,000 in San Francisco, but the toll increased to about 650-per-100,000 over the succeeding four weeks.

Eventually, that second wave of Spanish Flu settled down to zero fatalities per week just as all waves of flu eventually do. Even so, Fred Ramen could observe in Influenza (2001) that the health authorities in San Francisco had made a point of (unduly) crediting the fall in mortality during the first wave of Spanish Flu in 1918 to the implementation of the city’s mask mandate. The authorities lifted the mandate after fatalities had fallen to near-zero but imposed it again as fatalities from the second wave started to ramp up. The authorities claimed credit for the inevitable fall in fatalities that amounted to the eventual receding of the second wave, notwithstanding the fact that the second wave, like the first wave or any other wave, would conform to Farr’s Law, the idea that certain processes ramp up with no end in sight before unpredictably breaking and ramping down.

I have written before about Farr’s Law:

In a “Letter to the Registrar-General from William Farr, Esq.,” dated June, 1840, William Farr observed that “Five [people] die weekly of smallpox in the metropolis [London] when the disease is not epidemic; …” So, smallpox was always out there in the miasma. But why would smallpox (1) sometimes breakout in epidemics and then (2) recede on its own back its baseline rate of about five fatalities a week? “Why do the five deaths become 10, 15, 20, 31, 58, 88 weekly, and then progressively fall through the same measured steps?”

Farr’s Law is not so much of a law as say, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, as it is an observation of a regularity. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is basically a statement of the conservation of energy: If one mass of stuff gets hotter, then another mass of stuff will have gotten colder, and vice-versa. Farr’s regularity is that epidemics have this way of winding down that looks much like the mirror image of the way they had wound up; something clicks and seemingly exponential increase gives way to something that looks a lot like exponential decay.

The difficulty with Farr’s Law is that it says nothing about how far an outbreak (of small pox, of flu, of SARS, of COVID) will ramp up before receding. When does the ramping up click off? It does tell us something qualitative—that outbreaks follow something of a (possibly skewed) bell-shaped trajectory, but it does not tell us how to calibrate that trajectory. And that is a major problem when it comes to identifying the effects of interventions: If the trajectories of hospitalizations, cases, and deaths are going to recede with or without interventions, how can we disentangle and identify the effects of a given intervention?

I made these observations about Farr’s Law with specific reference to claims that the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) had made about the effect of the COVID mRNA therapies—the “vaccines”—on COVID mortality and diffusion. HHS claimed that an observed decline in COVID fatalities could be attributed to vaccine uptake. And, that may very well be true, but the method the HHS used did not account for Farr’s Law—that is, the analysis made no accommodation for the fact that COVID mortality would eventually decline with or without interventions, in which case it would not be obvious that interventions would have had any effect, positive or negative.

Like, how dumb are these people? Or disingenuous? Or both?

Alas, that sophomoric analysis is what we get from an agency that had been receiving about $120 billion—billion!—every year.

I’d be tempted to suggest that these people should be made to face some very harsh consequences. “What the public likes are public executions!” Such phrases come to mind.

2. The bonfire of the vaccine proponents

All this talk of hookers, military logistics, public health initiatives and public executions is preamble to an update I’ve been meaning to do for a few years about the heavy costs COVID initiatives have imposed on the population. Specifically, I’ve been meaning to update analyses I’ve done in the past about “excess mortality.” Excess mortality provides vivid (albeit indirect) clues about the successes and failures of public health policy, and I would suggest that the record since the beginning of the COVID phenomenon has been one of failures with nary an episode of success yet to mitigate it.

Ideally, I would not have to study excess mortality but would directly study the effects of the COVID vaccines. Absent such data, it is difficult to illuminate (or dispel) COVID vaccine hazards. Indeed, I remain surprised that no one (that I know of so far) has managed to estimate individual-level “hazard rates” relating to the vaccines. Someone gets the vax and drops dead the next day. How likely is that? A standard type of “survival analysis” by which we estimate personalized “hazard rates” could get grip on such questions. The likelihood of dying the day after a given event may be very small, but, if we had data spanning a large number of individual experiences with vaccination and non-vaccination, we might observe that the vax did (or did not) increase that small likelihood to something a little less small. I still believe that there are people out there sitting on top of data that could enable analysis, but where are these people, and where are these data? Is our lavishly funded HHS not capable of assembling good data and conducting a plausible analysis?

That is just another way of me saying that I am surprised, annoyed, and deeply disappointed that the science of public health still proves that it is worse than useless. It has been affirmatively destructive and anti-science. Meanwhile, there are people out there who seem interested in pressing our public health authorities to start producing. One might even expect that these same people would be well situated to start compelling performance. I am thinking principally of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the chief of the HHS in the Trump administration. Indeed, a question in my mind is: Can’t RFK, Jr. organize a meeting with the staff who would be situated to gather actionable data, and could he not direct them to do some basic analyses? But, we have yet to see off-the-shelf survival analyses relating to COVID vaccines. What we have seen, instead, is much criticism of those comments (if not all comments) by RFK Jr. that could be framed as skepticism of the efficacy and safety of the mRNA therapies and of vaccines more generally.

I myself have had the privilege one time of seeing RFK Jr. speak in public. This was in front of the Lincoln Memorial in January 2022. He definitely projects the Kennedy presence, and I enjoyed listening to him. That said, he did roll out a number of big claims relating to vaccines. All of the claims sound plausible but were, in my view, susceptible to the criticism that “correlation does not constitute causation.” But, that said, I was not too concerned with a politician’s rhetoric in a given speech. I’d be less forgiving were a politician less willing to develop his claims in a long-form interview or in a policy paper, but this was a speech in front of a crowd standing up to oppose vaccine mandates. Nothing wrong with some red meat for the crowd.

I can imagine observers having some important criticisms of RFK, Jr’s rhetoric, but I have not been more than passively tracking it, because most of the critics who dismiss RFK and others as cranks neglect to motivate any of their criticisms with hard numbers or anything that itself comprises more than a casual correlation. The critics are insufferably lazy. For example …

The other day this brick landed on my plate: “The toxic cult of Andrew Wakefield” by Kathleen Stock in Unherd (October 24, 2025). Andrew Wakefield and 12 coauthors, recall, published a paper in The Lancet in 1998 that illuminated a correlation between childhood vaccinations for Mumps, Measles and Rubella (MMR) and autism. The paper explored 12 cases of children who had been “referred to a paediatric gastroenterology unit with a history of normal development followed by loss of acquired skills, including language, together with diarrhoea and abdominal pain.” In 8 of the 12 cases, parents ascribed the onset of “behavioural symptoms” to MMR vaccination. The authors closed by observing that “[i]n most cases, onset of symptoms was after measles, mumps, and rubella immunisation. Further investigations are needed to examine this syndrome [of symptoms] and its possible relation to this vaccine.” The conclusion sounds mild enough, but The Lancet retracted the paper in 2010. Why did retraction take so long?

I myself have not pored through research that succeeded the Wakefield et al. paper, but I have had the privilege of seeing a recent interview in which Andrew Wakefield recounts his side of the story: The 1998 paper illuminated a correlation and argued that further work should concentrate on establishing (or dispelling) causation. Reasonable enough, but one can wonder (and I do wonder) whether Wakefield had used the 1998 paper to make a name for himself by making stronger claims. Has he had time to recast his presentation, and has he chosen to retreat from claims of causation to more defensible claims of correlation? I don’t know, but Stock’s piece did not do the work of establishing the point. It merely linked the reader to a book on sale at Amazon in which the book author “criticised” the methodology featured in the 1998 paper. But, no one is going to impulsively buy the book and read it, but they might look up links to papers that illuminate some of the history of the matter… Such as this paper, which I found by doing a quick search: “The MMR vaccine and autism: Sensation, refutation, retraction, and fraud” (Rao and Andrade, 2011). So, to the critics I suggest: Please take the time to sketch your arguments in plain language rather than glibly pass them off with no more than a few dodgy appeals to authority. Unless, of course, you don’t have the competence to sketch the arguments. In which case, keeping quiet would be advisable.

Stock proceeds to observe that Wakefield had long ago reestablished himself in Austin, Texas and, guess what?:

This year, Texas has had its highest incidence of measles this century, with two fatalities in unvaccinated and otherwise healthy children. Relative to 2024, the US has seen a staggering 460% increase in measles cases generally — from 285 to over 1,300 — with Texas the biggest contributor.

So, the argument is that Wakefield publishes a garbage paper in 1998, takes his anti-vaccine gospel to Texas, and Texas experiences a spectacular increase in the incidence of measles (if not other viral infections) in 2025. Connect the dots.

That’s a little ambitious. Meanwhile, one thing I get out of CDC data on all-cause mortality is that the “border states” of Texas, Arizona and New Mexico have performed much worse than almost all other states in the United States. One thing I have also learned from all-cause mortality from Central America and South America is that the countries of Central and South America have experienced most of the worst excess mortality in the world since the advent of the COVID phenomenon. Why, I do not know, but we all know that millions of people illegally streamed in to the United States during the course of the Biden years, and they were not scanned for any diseases. They were not even scanned for COVID notwithstanding the fact that legal alien visitors had to submit to COVID vaccinations. On top of that, we know that a host of people were flown in from places like Afghanistan, and they brought their measles with them. These people were disproportionately concentrated in places like … Plano, Texas! So, I’d like to propose a test that, perhaps, a John Snow could appreciate: Have outbreaks of measles in the United States, and especially in Texas, been concentrated around the sites of new mosques such as those new mega mosques recently opened in north Texas? The East Plano Islamic Center would be a good candidate.

Meanwhile, health authorities in Afghanistan and Pakistan had observed the increasing incidence of measles in Afghanistan in 2021. And, yet, “[d]espite [Afghanistan] receiving nutritional aid, vaccines (reduce measles spread) and funding from international organizations” efforts to diminish measles “fell short …” The authors blamed COVID, “political instability and lack of sustained support.” Of course. My own guess is that the authors can’t explain the apparent rise in measles, but they may convince themselves that they can come up with some flavor of rationalization.

Now, I do not know what to make of the effects (if any) of prodigious streams of illegal immigration as well as of selected episodes of emergency migration from Afghanistan. All my previous questions about how communities act as reservoirs for communicable disease come to the fore. I just wish others would also take the time to identify good questions. That said, Andrew Wakefield may really just be a crank who has learned to mask his crankiness with silkier, reasonable-sounding language. Or, he may have adapted to the fact that he had been “struck off [the medical register by the General Medical Council] and, needing to pay the rent, has reinvented himself as a documentary film maker who merely repackages crowd-pleasing content over and over again. (What else was he going to do? Raise chickens in the Cotswolds before the British health authorities randomly swoop in and euthanize his birds for “bird flu”?)

Given the fact that a British Prime Minister can pass off a politically-correct television drama, “Adolescence,” as a “documentary,” Wakefield’s anti-vaccine documentary evangelizing sounds almost responsible. Meanwhile, I’d be lying if I were not to admit that it’s been hard for me to not dismiss many of Wakefield’s own critics as cranks when, wittingly or not, they fail to take the time to craft thoughtful criticisms. Casually tossing out a few cheap appeals to authority is not going to cut it.

How vaccinated are these people? Are many of them pro-vaccine zealots?

3. Elevated mortality in the United States post-COVID

In my mind, the Wakefield business constitutes an example of the self-anointed guardians of public health straining to bully the rest of us into accepting their conceit of a surveillance-and-vaccination paradigm. Entities like the CDC, for example, religiously maintain a number of “surveillance” programs, and it explicitly presents vaccinations as “safe and effective.” As of today, “CDC is using its flu surveillance systems to monitor for H5 bird flu activity in people... CDC will continue to report any additional human cases of H5 bird flu here and in FluView.” Then, of course, there is ongoing COVID surveillance.

One might have guessed that public health authorities had expunged the phrase “safe and effective” from their public statements, but here we are. It turns out, however, that the medical profession has concentrated nontrivial attention on one aspect of neither-safe-nor-effective. Medical researchers have not dismissed the concept of “Long Vax” out of the hand—that is the idea that the mRNA therapies may have induced symptoms that observers might have otherwise attributed to “Long COVID.” Indeed, an online search for “long covid” and “long vax” draws up an impressive number of hits from establishment sources, and those establishment sources have assigned “Long Vax” a formal name: “Post Acute Covid Vaccination Syndrome” (PACVS).

Admitting some scope for “Long Vax” amounts to an important development, but, alas, vax-induced mortality remains something that the authorities such as the CDC endeavor to obscure. Don’t Talk about vaccine deaths! But over at the CDC you can talk in circles about “factors” that “influence vaccine effectiveness”. So, the vaccines are “effective,” except when they’re not and when they induce harm. But, again, don’t talk explicitly about vaccine-induced mortality.

Many observers outside of the establishment have argued that the mRNA “vaccines” did induce a conspicuous wave of fatalities, especially among younger people. That accords with my own view, and I present results which are consistent with that conclusion, but I note that neither I nor any other observers have (as far as I know) managed to get a hold of data that would enable estimation of individualized hazards rates. Absent an analysis that works out of individual-level data, it is hard (for me, anyway) to imagine an analysis that could robustly address the question of vaccine-induced mortality and not afford the pro-vaccine crowd some capacity to explain-away any inconvenient conclusions. That said, I update an exercise I haven’t done in a few years: I work out of CDC data posted between 2015 through April 2023 and generate weekly estimates of all-cause excess mortality. I would use data posted through to the present, but the CDC stopped posting weekly all-cause mortality data in 2023 and has since only posted quarterly all-cause mortality data. That said, here are the main propositions:

• The COVID phenomenon has imposed a disproportionately heavy toll on young people. That toll is distributed over some number of years and may still be piling up.

Young people are the people most likely to shake off COVID—I did some cross-country analysis on this matter before—and thus the least likely to experience any benefits from the mRNA vaccines. For them, the vaccines are all cost and no benefit.

Rates of mortality among young people may be small, and doubling small rates yields rates that are still small. But the signal of harm is vivid to anyone who bothers to look.

• The COVID phenomenon has imposed a disproportionately heavy toll people of prime working age (ages 25-44).

• Excess mortality among people of prime working age exhibits a conspicuous peak about 9 months after the initial roll out of the mRNA vaccines.

• Excess mortality for older people looks almost normal in that it looks more like the experience they would have had with a sequence of flu seasons of diminishing potency.

• Excess mortality across most states has converged over time.

Specifically, excess mortality in New York, California and Florida converged on the national average notwithstanding the fact that the establishment media ostentatiously celebrated California’s and New York’s COVID responses and heavily criticized Florida’s COVID response. Outliers include Hawaii (which has exhibited lower excess mortality) and the border states of Texas, Arizona and New Mexico (which have exhibited much higher excess mortality).

I would further observe that California’s performance did not converge as tightly on the national average as had the performances of New York and Florida, and I’d be willing to attribute that worse performance to California’s status as a border state. The border state effect may be less conspicuous, and one could imagine a number of reasons for that, but my own view is that the border state effect is a real thing and does show up in the California data.

These results are consistent with results I’ve reported before. It is hard not to conclude that vaccine harms generated many of these results, but, again, I note that data on excess mortality alone can’t prove or disprove that. We still await a proper analysis of individualized hazard rates—analysis of the sort that critics of vaccine critics never get around to doing themselves.

* * *

On to the graphic results. For starts, consider excess mortality post-2019 in the whole of the United States. There are a number of ways to generate abundantly serviceable estimates of excess mortality, and I do an exercise I’ve done before: estimate a non-linear regression for all-cause mortality for weeks ending January 10, 2015 through January 4, 2020. The regression is non-linear in that it incorporates a sine wave. The sine wave accommodates the obvious seasonality in weekly mortality data. I could also have used month dummy variables in a linear regression to achieve very much the same result.

The regression equation provides a measure of benchmark mortality. I then project this benchmark into the years 2020-2023 and define weekly excess mortality in 2020-2023 as the difference between actual weekly mortality and benchmark mortality. Here is what we get:

The smooth orange line is the benchmark. The benchmark amounts to a sine wave buzzing around a modestly increasing trend line. The underlying trend line is indicated by the dashed orange line labeled “Linear (Benchmark)”.

I also included an alternative measure of benchmark mortality (“Alternative Benchmark”) that I get from estimating a linear regression with month dummy variables. I include it here just to demonstrate to the reader that either benchmark is serviceable.

Both methods of estimating benchmark mortality have an important feature: They yield benchmarks by which the sum of excess mortality over the range of data used to estimate the benchmarks (January 10, 2015 through January 4, 2020) nets out to zero. That result amounts to an underlying hypothesis that enables analysis of excess mortality post-2019. The hypothesis is that weekly mortality pre-2020 was representative of the normal course of affairs, hence zero net excess mortality pre-2020 by construction.

Now, the question is, of course, how much actual mortality deviated from benchmark mortality post-2019. If mortality behaved normally (“normal” defined as deviating from the benchmark in no more than a “noisy” manner), then total excess mortality post-2019 should also net out to something close to zero. It might exhibit some sharp peaks or even some sharp valleys. But, summed up over time, it shouldn’t deviate too much from zero. But, it does. The green area in the graph above represents weekly excess mortality, and it exhibits seven conspicuous peaks post-2019 but hardly ventures into negative territory. Over time, it will have summed up not to something close to zero but to a number exceeding 1.3 million by April 1, 2023.

Does 1.3 million “excess” fatalities over 3 years and 4 months constitute a disproportionately large number? I ask, because the linear trend in benchmark mortality had reached as high as 58,000 fatalities per week by April 2023. Overall, total benchmark mortality summed up to 9.6 million post-2019. Excess mortality thus exceeded benchmark mortality by 13.7%. I would suggest that 13.7% excess amounts to a big number.

Now, we cannot (and should not) attribute all of that excess to COVID. Some of it we would endeavor to attribute to vaccine-induced fatalities, but, again, it’s hard to know how to compute such fatalities absent better, individual-level data. We may also want to attribute some volume of excess mortality to indirect COVID effects such as suicides that we could attribute to the strains imposed by stone-age level COVID-mitigation strategies. That’s why I speak of the “COVID phenomenon” rather than just COVID. The phenomenon includes the many dimensions and consequences of willfully poor public policy.

The CDC did break down the data into six age cohorts: Under 25, ages 25-44, ages 45-64, ages 65-74, ages 75-84, 85-and-older. Let’s examine those in sequence.

The estimated benchmark for the Under-25’s does not fit the data as neatly as the benchmark for the total population does, but one can see that even mortality for younger people exhibited some seasonality. It also exhibited a downward trend, reflecting the fact that the population in the United States had, in 2015-2019, included fewer and fewer young people. That said, young people experienced obvious excess mortality post-2019 with excess mortality often exceeding more than 200 fatalities per week. Pre-2020, younger people experienced about 1,200 fatalities per week. Post-2019, they sometimes experienced more than 1,400 fatalities per week—about a 17% increase! That’s a large number.

Now, consider the 25-44 age cohort:

Here, excess mortality really does not exhibit strong seasonality; the curve nearly conforms to a straight line, and that straight line slopes upwards.

Total mortality for people of prime working age (25-44) was about 2,800 per week by the beginning of 2020, but total mortality approached 4,000 many times post-2019 and exceeded 5,000 per week in September 2021. Mortality of 5,000 per week amounted to excess mortality of about 40%, a very big number.

Some observers would suggest that that big peak in mortality around September 2021 was driven by vaccine fatalities. I have no reason yet to doubt that.

Let’s examine the 45-64 age cohort:

Total mortality for the 45-64 age cohort is much higher than it is for the 25-44 age cohort. No surprise. That’s just the harsh reality of the universe. But, one can see that the benchmark curve fits the data from 2015-2019 much better, and those data exhibit obvious seasonality. The data also exhibit sharp peaks in excess mortality in 2020, 2021 and 2022. It’s hard not to suggest that vaccine harm induced much of those fatalities in 2021 and (maybe) 2022, but the candidate vaccine harm signal seems most conspicuous in the data for the 25-44 age cohort.

Now, the 65-74 age cohort:

The data projects a profile that looks much like that for the 45-64 age cohort. The magnitudes are similar. The principal difference is that the (linear) trend in total mortality had been appreciably increasing pre-2019. That’s evidence that the population has been getting older; more and more people occupy the 65-74 age cohort.

I would make the same observations about the 75-84 age cohort (the following graph), but the 84-and-older graph is different in an important way.

The Over-84 cohort:

The time trend here is nearly flat; over the course of an average week in a normal year, mortality totals about 17,000. There was obvious excess mortality in 2020 and 2021, but there were also important episodes of negative excess mortality. That reflects a pattern one might have normally expected with a pandemic: peaks of mortality take away the people who are most immunocompromised; the surviving population ends up being a little healthier on average, in which case we episodes of relatively low mortality. But, there may be successive waves of high mortality followed by troughs of low mortality. Note also that the peaks in excess mortality have moderated from one year to the next. By 2024, the rate of mortality may very well have returned to numbers that look normal.

The next graph helps distinguish which age cohorts bore the greatest burden post-2019. This graph features cumulative excess mortality as a proportion of cumulative benchmark mortality starting in January 2020.

The heavy black line indicates cumulative excess mortality for the country as a whole. That locus of points reaches a peak of about 18% in early 2021 (some months after the vaccines first became available). That is, as of early 2021, the number of people who died since the beginning of 2020 was 18% higher than normal. Excess mortality never dropped below 15% until the beginning of 2023; between the beginning of 2020 and the beginning of 2023, 15% more people died than would otherwise have been expected.

At some point, excess mortality will return to 0%, but as of April 2023, there was still much ground to make up.

Meanwhile, note the great variation in performance across age cohorts. The 25-44 age cohort performed the worst. It performed worse than all other age cohorts from April 2020 through April 2023. All but the youngest age cohort experienced a local peak in excess mortality around February 2022, and for the 24-44 age cohort, excess mortality approached 30%, a very high number.

All cohorts but the youngest age cohort followed similarly-shaped trajectories, but the 45-64 age cohort performed the best by far. Why? Because a large proportion of those people were able to leave the workforce and to then organize their lives in ways that were less stressful? The youngest cohort, meanwhile, is the only one that has not exhibited improved performance. Excess mortality for that cohort appears to have topped out at about 13% by early 2023.

The performance of the youngest cohort may not appear high compared most of the other cohorts, but the fact that excess mortality was ever persistently high for this cohort is a puzzle. Young people are the kind of people who proved to be the most resilient in the face of COVID. Young people just shake it off. So, what has been driving excess mortality among these younger people? Is the excess mortality largely driven by vaccine harms? But, what of the appreciable excess mortality before the vaccines became available? Perhaps the pre-vaccine rate of 8% excess mortality really did reflect COVID fatalities. Baseline mortality among younger people would have been very small. So, a modest but discernible volume of COVID fatalities could have generated 8% excess mortality. COVID itself was a real phenomenon, and it shows up even in the data for the youngest people. But, it was not the plague or the Spanish Flu. Instead, COVID was like a bad, over-hyped flu.

Now consider performance across states.

This graph features the performance of California, Florida and New York. The heavy black line indicates the performance of the United States as a whole.

Note that New York starts out very poorly in 2020, but by late 2021, it ends up performing better than Florida. Even so, the difference in performance between Florida and New York is almost indiscernible by the beginning of 2023. Moreover, the performances of both New York and Florida converge on the national average performance.

Both New York and Florida perform discernibly better than California, although California also appears to have been converging on the national average by late 2021, but it never completely closes the gap.

I speculate that California’s failure to completely converge on the national average reflects the fact that it is a border state. Prodigious streams of illegal aliens will have streamed across the border with Mexico during the Biden years. These illegal aliens were not screened for disease but were, instead, encouraged to enter the country. The Biden administration signed these people up for cash benefits and health benefits and gave them work permits. It turns out, however, that populations in the Latin America (including Mexico itself) exhibited the most aggravated rates of excess mortality post-2019. These people may have inflated the mortality numbers in border states by importing disease.

The next graph includes the other border states (Arizona, New Mexico and Texas) and features other states that failed to converge on the national average.

Hawaii stands out as having maintained excess mortality near zero until September 2021. One can speculate that, being isolated in the middle of the Pacific, Hawaii was better situated to avoid importing COVID, but mortality numbers in Hawaii appear to have exhibited vaccine harms by late 2021.

The border states of Texas, Arizona and New Mexico perform similarly to each other, but all of them perform notably worse than the national average.

South Dakota and North Dakota follow similarly shaped trajectories, but North Dakota performs notably better than South Dakota. Perhaps that reflects the fact that South Dakota is an attractive tourist destination whereas North Dakota attracts little traffic from outside the state. I take that as evidence consistent with COVID hazards having been a real thing. The “COVID phenomenon” may be much bigger than COVID alone, but it is hard not to conclude that COVID itself was, at least in the early going, a prominent driver of total mortality. It really was like a very bad flu.

Finally, look at Vermont. Vermont had performed much better than the national average until late 2021 when, many observers suggest, vaccine harms started to make themselves conspicuous. Vermont has since performed worse than the national average and has failed to converge. I do not have good ideas about how to rationalize the Vermont experience, but I do wonder that the Vermont experience has something to do with the fact that the state has long been colonized by wealthy outsiders like New Yorkers. The colonizers may have fled cities like New York during peak COVID and ensconced themselves in their vacation homes in Vermont… and something.

I had expected to see broader convergence across the states on the national average. Convergence would have been consistent with the proposition that differences in states’ mitigation strategies really had no positive effect on performance, and, indeed, it is interesting that Florida and New York ended up performing about as well as each other notwithstanding the fact that the media criticized Florida for its mitigation strategies (or lack of mitigation strategies) and heaped praise on New York for its mitigation strategies. The media even awarded New York governor Andrew Cuomo an Emmy award for ostensibly putting on such good, televised COVID briefings.

The media also celebrated California’s performance even though it was the administration of governor Gavin Newsom that had instructed the police to go out and arrest lone beach goers and otherwise frustrate outdoor activities. Forcing people to stay indoors and to breath stale air may have contributed to the COVID toll. But Newsom is a Democrat. Andrew Cuomo is a Democrat. Florida governor Ron DeSantis is a Republican, and that fact amounts to the entire basis for the media’s presentation of Florida’s handling of COVID. Sheer stupidity and gaslighting.

That said, we do see important variation in performance across states as late as April 2023. Some of that variation is rationalizable without (I would suggest) being too ambitious. But, ultimately, all performance will converge as we project further into the future.

4. Conclusion

What to make of all of this?

I admit pleasant surprise that politically-incorrect topics like “Long Vax” have attracted some serious attention among some public health researchers. At the same time, I admit disappointment that the CDC continues to talk in circles around inconvenient evidence of vaccine hazards and still aggressively promotes the mRNA therapies. Why hasn’t the senior leadership at the Department of Health & Human Services required the CDC to clean up its public presentation?

Meanwhile, mortality data demonstrate that the COVID phenomenon imposed heavy costs on young people as well as on people of prime working age. The data also send a vivid signal consistent with vaccine-induced mortality. “Long vax” may be a topic of research, but the public health authorities seem interested in talking their way out of doing serious research on fatalities induced by the vax.

Finally, I await both public health authorities and self-anointed public intellectuals to catch up with the wisdom of the ancients with respect to “NPI’s” (“non-pharmacological interventions” like masking and quarantines). I also look forward to them sorting out long-standing, difficult questions with respect to vaccinations and to stop marketing the combination of AI and mRNA “platforms” as the key to personalized, highly-tailored medicine. It amounts to playing God, and the record of public health authorities the last several years give us no reason to believe that they know what they’re doing or they even know that they don’t know what they’re doing.

Stated differently: Getting people off the streets for having committed any offenses reduces the total volume of all offenses.

The Trump “surge” of policing in Washington, DC in August/September 2025 has reduced the volume of all crimes. That surge has included an increase in arrests on the part of the Metropolitan Police Department. So far, so good in that data suggest that these arrests have gotten many of the worst people off of the streets, but will the city authorities keep these perpetrators off of the streets indefinitely? If not, the volume of all crime, including the most serious crime, may increase to pre-surge levels.

* * *

On August 11, 2025, the Trump Administration invoked a provision in the “Home Rule Act of 1973” that would enable the federal government to assume control of the city’s police force for 30 days. The Administration also sent a few thousand national guard troops into the city to patrol selected neighborhoods. All varieties of crime discernibly decreased.

The DC mayor originally complained that the federal takeover was “authoritarian” but then, days later, proceeded to express “appreciation” for the “surge” in policing forces.

The 30-day mandate expired on September 10, and Congress did not elect to further extend the mandate. Even so, the national guard has maintained a presence in the city and continues to collaborate with the Metropolitan Police Department.

Crime remains diminished.

In an earlier essay, I speculated about why the sharp decline in crime might not survive the wind-down of the “surge,” but I also speculated about how the decline in crime could survive the end of the surge. The principal mechanism for a sustained decline would be getting bad guys off of the streets during the course of the surge and keeping them off of the streets after the wind-down of the surge. I further suggested that the decline in homicides was consistent with the authorities managing to apprehend bad guys, albeit for minor crimes.

It turns out that even the New York Times observed that the surge had resulted in an increase in arrests, although the Times complained that these arrests have concentrated on minor crimes. The surge had not thus far resulted in an increase in arrests for major crimes like homicide. But, why should it? My own point had been that the kind of people who commit the greatest share of serious crimes are also the kind of people who commit most of the lesser crime. And, so, sweeping them up for whatever crime should bring all crime down.

Data from daily Federal Surge Data Reports indicate that the Metropolitan Police Department had, indeed, increased arrests during the course of the “surge.” The question remains: Will those people who have been arrested be kept off the streets for some time?

An appreciable amount of time has yet to pass, but we can still update our numbers of total crime since August 11. I present here an updated version of graph I had posted in an essay two weeks ago:

This graph indicates the volume of crime for the interval August 11 – September 22 for each of the years 2018 through 2025. This interval, August 11 – September 22, corresponds to the “surge” to date. Comparing the same interval over several years amounts to controlling for seasonal effects.

So, crime in time of the actual surge (2025) is notably lower than that of all other years 2018 – 2024. “Assault with a dangerous weapon,” “motor vehicle theft,” “robbery” are definitely down. Let’s zoom in on crimes associated more with “car-jacking” (“motor vehicle theft” and “robbery”) as well as on “homicide”:

We see, as in my previous essays, that motor vehicle theft started to become a more prominent phenomenon in 2020. Indeed, in earlier analyses, one can see that the rise in motor vehicle theft really looks like a COVID-era innovation. But, in 2025, it has diminished to the lowest level since the pre-COVID year of 2019. Meanwhile, homicide and robbery have declined to the lowest levels in the interval 2018 – 2025.

Now, the federal mandate to run the policing services expired on September 10. Has crime risen since then? How does crime in the interval September 11 – 22 compare to previous years?:

The profile of this graph maintains much the profile of the graph for August 11 – September 22. Crime is still down across the board.

Let’s zoom in on motor vehicle theft, robbery and homicide:

It turns out that 2018 looks a lot like 2025 for the interval September 11 – 22. That interval made for a good week-and-a-half (by DC standards) in 2018. It looks as good again in 2025.

* * *

What to make of all of this? It looks like the most anti-social people who commit the great volume of very serious crimes also maintain vigorous careers committing less serious crimes. So, if you get them off the streets for having committed those less serious crimes, you can avoid most of the very serious crime like homicide as well as the various crimes that comprise “car-jacking.”

One can now see a rationale for things like “three-strikes laws.” These laws appear so harsh. Are we really going to warehouse people in prison from some years merely for having committed some number of minor offenses? An affirmative rationale would be the apparent fact that these are the same people who murder their neighbors and commit other serious offenses. Something like a three-strikes law … or six-strikes law or even a twelve-strikes law would have spared Iryna Zarutska a fatal encounter on the light rail in Charlotte, North Carolina.

One can also wonder if there is a flavor of “broken windows policing” at work here, although I am not certain. Going into this essay, I had the idea that “broken windows policing” amounted to some version of the proposition that taking care of the small stuff goes some way toward discouraging the big stuff. But, in its original formulation in “Broken Windows” (George Kelling and James Q. Wilson in The Atlantic, March 1982), it really was more about encouraging residents to respect higher aesthetics rather than submit to mischievous instincts and contribute to the physical degradation of the neighborhood.

Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods as in rundown ones. Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. (It has always been fun.)

…

Untended property becomes fair game for people out for fun or plunder and even for people who ordinarily would not dream of doing such things and who probably consider themselves law-abiding. Because of the nature of community life in the Bronx—its anonymity, the frequency with which cars are abandoned and things are stolen or broken, the past experience of “no one caring”—vandalism begins much more quickly than it does in staid Palo Alto, where people have come to believe that private possessions are cared for, and that mischievous behavior is costly. But vandalism can occur anywhere once communal barriers—the sense of mutual regard and the obligations of civility—are lowered by actions that seem to signal that “no one cares.”

But then there is this:

[T]he link between order-maintenance and crime-prevention, so obvious to earlier generations, was forgotten.

That link is similar to the process whereby one broken window becomes many. The citizen who fears the ill-smelling drunk, the rowdy teenager, or the importuning beggar is not merely expressing his distaste for unseemly behavior; he is also giving voice to a bit of folk wisdom that happens to be a correct generalization—namely, that serious street crime flourishes in areas in which disorderly behavior goes unchecked. The unchecked panhandler is, in effect, the first broken window. Muggers and robbers, whether opportunistic or professional, believe they reduce their chances of being caught or even identified if they operate on streets where potential victims are already intimidated by prevailing conditions. If the neighborhood cannot keep a bothersome panhandler from annoying passersby, the thief may reason, it is even less likely to call the police to identify a potential mugger or to interfere if the mugging actually takes place.

W.E.B. DuBois was one of the founders of the N.A.A.C.P. (1909). About 20 years earlier, DuBois spent some time living in Ward 7 of the city of Philadelphia, and it was out of that experience that he composed The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1890). He many times distinguishes between “respectable and decent [working] people,” “some of a better class,” a “semi-criminal class,” and the genuinely “ignorant, vicious and criminal.” I have been meaning to read this book for some time, but I do wonder if buried in it might be some version of the proposition that getting the “vicious and criminal” semi-permanently off of the streets sharply reduces crime and broadly promotes the welfare of the neighborhood.

None of these ideas conform to politically-correct dogma, even if a civil rights icon like W.E.B. DuBois contributed to such ideas. And, anyone who has read any of my essays will appreciate that I explore a lot of politically-incorrect content. Because we shouldn’t live in lies and submit to the dogma.

humility(n.)

early 14c., “quality of being humble,” from Old French umelite “humility, modesty, sweetness” (Modern French humilité), from Latin humilitatem (nominative humilitas) “lowness, small stature; insignificance; baseness, littleness of mind,” in Church Latin “meekness,” from humilis “lowly, humble,” literally “on the ground,” from humus “earth” (from PIE root *dhghem- “earth”). In the Mercian hymns, Latin humilitatem is glossed by Old English eaðmodnisse.

And, yes. I thus call out my younger brother Tucker Carlson. What is wrong with my brother? I love my brother. All that said and asked:

The original title for this essay was “Constitutional Governance versus the Public Interest.” Sounds boring, dun’nit? The main proposition was but a variation on a theme that I periodically tee up. In this rendition: Investing an Administrative State with the capacity to police “free speech” and “the Public Interest” sets up government to rule arbitrarily in that it sets up that same Administrative State to disrespect individual rights under the “color of law”:

Color of law refers to the appearance of legal authority or an apparently legal right that may not exist. The term is often used to describe the abuse of power under the guise of state authority, and is therefore illegal.

That is still the main proposition of this essay, but I have to illuminate the fact that the kind of people who hate Charlie Kirk and dismiss Charlie and everyone else as Nazis—and thus worthy of being extinguished—are working hard to make themselves the victims of their own iniquity. They do this by making cheap appeals to “free speech.” Indeed, they endeavor to dismiss the still-emerging Charlie Kirk phenomenon as an assault on their speech. They endeavor to neutralize criticisms like this:

I’m not a fan of censorship, but this wasn’t about free speech. It was about consequences for saying something vile.

It is not hard to find examples of “vile” speech in the Charlie Kirk context. There are, for example, a lot of people out there giddily celebrating the assassination of Charlie Kirk and hoping to tee up more assassinations. And the “It” being referenced above was the dismissal of a comedian from a lucrative network television gig for “vile” speech. Even so, it was in the next breath that that same commentator (himself a comedian) observed:

You can say what you want, but [television] networks don’t have to pay you to say it.

As readers may know, that was Jimmy Kimmel back on May 29, 2018 celebrating the firing of Roseanne Barr from the ABC network sitcom Roseanne on that same day. The Roseanne series subsequently proceeded without Roseanne under the name The Conners.

Readers may also know that, on September 17, 2025, the ABC network “indefinitely suspended” Jimmy Kimmel and the ABC program Jimmy Kimmel Live! for “vile” comments relating to the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Three things make this interesting, tragically comical, and disappointing. First, the day before the “suspension,” the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Brendan Carr, had suggested that the Commission could investigate the prospect of withdrawing the licenses of local TV stations that (being local TV stations) broadcast content on over-the-air radio spectra. The Commission would do this by pressing the claim that these spectrum licensees had broadcast content that it would purport was contrary to “the public interest.” The content in question was the Jimmy Kimmel monologue in which Kimmel argued (among other things) that Charlie Kirk’s assassin was a “MAGA” right-wing Nazi. Or something, other than what the assassin was: A raging, angry lefty absorbed in a relationship with another angry young man who identifies himself as a woman.

Brendan Carr made an interesting statement on the Benny Show, the podcast of Benny Johnson, a close associate of Charlie Kirk. Carr’s statement amounted to a threat to disrupt the capacity of the ABC network to distribute content, and the purpose of that threat was to encourage ABC to pre-empt any prospect of FCC action by itself going ahead and suspending Jimmy Kimmel Live!

Brendan Carr can pose vague threats to suspend broadcast licenses, because the FCC Act of 1934 enables him to pose threats. That said, I am not up on the case law, insofar as there is any, on how the courts interpret “public interest.” My understanding is that, nearly a century on, it remains up in the air.

Second, ABC had been losing $tens-of-millions a year on Jimmy Kimmel Live! for some years. The bigger puzzle in my mind: Why hadn’t ABC dismissed Jimmy Kimmel some years ago?

Third, “the Left” (comprised of anyone who, in all self-seriousness and unawareness, labels anyone else who disagrees with They or Them as “Nazis”) disingenuously pitch the Jimmy Kimmel suspension as a matter of “Free Speech!” But, again, I agree with the 2018 incarnation of Jimmy Kimmel:

You can say what you want, but [television] networks don’t have to pay you to say it.

This is up there with the cancelation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert this last July, notwithstanding the fact that The Late Show was imposing losses on the CBS network at a rate of $40 million a year.

What a great gig: Get a subsidy of $40 million a year to spew whatever nonsense (or awesome content) one wants. I can imagine doing some real damage with a no-consequence, no-strings-attached budget of $40 million a year…

Phrases like “Self-entitled” do come to mind.

Meanwhile, Charlie Kirk’s speech proved not to be free. He took his speech to college campuses and invited any others who wished to speak to join him in debate. But, alas, the Self-entitled unilaterally determined that his speech should be stopped. They assassinated him.

* * *

I recast a proposition I had posed in an earlier essay: When we design government to affirmatively do stuff, we shouldn’t be too surprised when it starts aggressively doing stuff or threatens to do stuff. And we shouldn’t be surprised when much of that stuff amounts to arbitrary governance and infringes individual rights.

Take, for example, demands to police “hate speech” or mandates to promote “the public interest.” It all sounds so good. Surely hate speech is bad and we must suppress it. And surely we must design laws and regulations that promote the “public interest,” for we would not want to design laws and regulations that harm the public interest.

A fatal problem is that these warm, fuzzy concepts may be difficult to operationalize and thus become susceptible to arbitrary interpretations. And that’s only one fatal problem. Arbitrary interpretations make for arbitrary governance under the “color of law.” Again:

Color of law refers to the appearance of legal authority or an apparently legal right that may not exist. The term is often used to describe the abuse of power under the guise of state authority, and is therefore illegal.

These concepts may be difficult to operationalize in one-shot exercises such as the crafting of statutory law. They may prove to be too vague and thus open to arbitrary interpretation and application. One might then hope that the case law process, the evolutionary processes from which we interpret statutory law and develop and maintain common law, could ultimately take statutory language and yield formulations that prove to be less susceptible to arbitrary interpretation. Bringing cases and forcing the authorities to defend their interpretations in court-ordered processes could yield badly-needed refinements. Hard experience reveals, however, that refinements may prove elusive in certain contexts, and it can get worse in that statutory law may invest administrative agencies with the authority to interpret these things. These concepts would then get swept up in that most arbitrary body of law, administrative law. That is, the business of interpretating these concepts may get swept up in regulations that administrative agencies design, re-design, interpret and apply differently with every change in administration. (In his consenting opinion in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo 2024, Justice Neil Gorsuch illuminated this problem of arbitrary changes in interpretations that can attend changes in administrations.) Administrative law is ripe for arbitrary application and interpretation.

In contrast, one might understand constitutionalism as a matter of designing government to govern and constrain government. That was a radical idea in 1787—Plato and our self-anointed, Best-and-Brightest Philosopher Kings would be appalled—and it amounts to the antithesis of designing government to govern the shit out of the population by means of administrative process. One faction assumes control of the administrative machinery of government and endeavors to implement its preferred flavor of Nirvana. Another faction may stage a coup and assume control of that same machinery. It directs that machinery toward implementing its preferred flavor of Nirvana.

The slippery Bari Weiss and equally slippery Ted Cruz, Senator from Texas, rue the fact that certain personages and idols on the Left (Jimmy Kimmel, for example) seem to have been subject to “cancelation.” They advise us that, once the Left reassumes control of the machinery of government, it will get down to the business of canceling personages and idols on the Right. But, many observers note that cancelation had been an active, and sometimes violent, program on the Left for some time; the question is not if the Left would implement cancelations en masse; the question is when. I broadly agree with this assessment.

On this count, Benny Johnson suggested, enabling government to (arbitrarily) define and appeal to concepts like “free speech” and “the public interest” amounts to the exercise of “soft power.”:

The Left uses [soft power] all the time. Thanks to President Trump, the Right has learned how to wield power as well.

That may be, that may be.

But, the larger problem is, I would suggest, the business of enabling government to behave badly. It’s kind of like what Hitler’s most Nazi lieutenant, Joseph Goebbels, expressed toward the end of the (oft-lampooned) Downfall (2004) about the will of the people in enabling Hitler, Goebbels and the Nazis:

They gave us a mandate, and now their little throats are being cut!

Sie haben uns das Mandat gegeben, und jetzt werden ihre kleinen Hälse durchgeschnitten!

They did call this upon themselves. “We have met the enemy, and He is Us!”

This includes Bari Weiss and the deluded Tikkun Olam crowd. (I am sorry, but there it is, this sorry business, a sorry exercise in hubris, not “humus”.) This includes Ted Cruz and the self-proclaimed “Libertarians.” You’re part of the problem. You are the problem. We are the problem. We have wittingly built up a Leviathan to harness the Power of the State to “Do Good” in the world, to promote the “Public Interest,” and now we complain about threats to “free speech” even though some of us perceive license to kill one of the best of us, an enterprising young man (Charlie Kirk) from suburban Chicago, who had the temerity to debate people in language that did not conform to the filtered, distorted, diluted, poisoned, or (often) honey-tongued rhetoric and euphemisms that pass for orthodoxy (“right-way,” correct thinking) on the university campus.

* * *

Imagine you’re a Keffiyeh-wearing anti-Capitalist, and you might think: Lawyers! Wherever lawyers show up, bad things happen. Right? They just tie things up and frustrate commerce and investment, and society ends up worse off…. Oh, wait … Maybe we do want to frustrate commerce and investment. Let the lawyers tie everything up in knots and thereby promote the collapse of the System. Ban Capitalism!

As a very young person, I had the privilege of querying a big-name economist (John Sutton) about the prospect that commerce in market-oriented economies had fallen into something of a bad equilibrium. Had it not become absorbed in too much litigation? Could it make sense to understand that lots of resources were being wasted on lawyers, and all that litigation was holding up investments that would actually contribute to something that approximates the “Common Good” or the “Public Interest”? Like, could anyone build a Hoover Dam in this day and age? Admittedly, a project like the Hoover Dam could impose some costs on certain parties (like the person or endangered rodent who would have to move to higher ground), but as a matter of “social choice,” wouldn’t such a project generate way more benefit than harm? It was worth it, right?

John Sutton is a very gracious fellow, and I think he did his best to suggest some ideas to think about—could there have been something about contrasts between common law processes and civil code traditions in that discussion?—but I was not at that time really prepared to recognize good investigative leads. And, maybe John himself had not given much thought to my admittedly amorphous, formative questions. But, that unfocused exchange did unwittingly mark for me a step along a winding path. Some of that path has been well-trod by many others over the last few centuries, but much it still yet leads in and around almost impassable thickets.

Along that path, one does encounter some of the important thinking our forebears have done on “social choice.” That thinking includes important ideas about how “decentralized” processes (free exchange, la libre concurrence, “the market,” the free exchange of ideas) and centralized processes (administration, vertical control) channel “social choice” where social choice is the matter of how society collectively decides whether or not to do things like build a Hoover Dam. Or build a dam on the Dnipro River in Ukraine in the 1930’s with slave labor. Surely, the Ukrainian kulaks who were impressed into service were not too keen on this exercise in social choice and may have perceived that, for whatever “public interest” the exercise might have served, it was up to them to bear a disproportionate share of the costs of enabling the stream of benefits that would ultimately proceed from the project.

So, again: The ”public interest” has made it into the news this last week with the chairman of an administrative agency, the Federal Communications Commission, claiming (correctly) that the Commission has some capacity to compel private conduct that conforms with some party’s arbitrary understanding of “the public interest.”

What do we think of that? The government has the competence to discern, delineate, define, limn, illuminate, elaborate “the public interest”?

All this business helps me appreciate the design of the First Amendment to the Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

So, the people can say obnoxious stuff, and organize themselves into political parties. They can even organize a Nazi party. They can lobby the government, and even get other parties to pay them a lot of money to lobby government officials. And, they (We, as in the “We” of “We the People”) can … should be able to do all of this, no matter how noxious some of us may find any one instance of it, because Leviathan does not have the competence to judge what conforms to “the public interest.”

This poison of “the public interest” is Progressive Era garbage that enables any volume of predations that the random Borg in power imposes on individuals that the same random Borg decides it doesn’t like on a random Friday afternoon.

* * *

I am not a religious person. But even I have some knowledge of humility. And, were I to know it better, I might yet transcend ego…

Still working on it.

Czech-born playwright Tom Stoppard made contact with this kind of thing when he made fun of “the 68-ers” in Rock ‘N’ Roll (2006). Czech writer Milan Kundera had even more fun sending these people up in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984). I have discussed their contributions several times before. For example: https://dvwilliamson.substack.com/p/protests-of-the-elites

Hipster revolutionism encompasses an old, flaccid, facile idea that “democracy” is corrupt, because it can enable non-believers, counter-revolutionaries to get in the way of implementing and maintaining the politically-correct program. Some people would identify the program with “the Common Good.” Rousseau called it “the General Will” of the whole of society. Getting in the way of implementing the Common Good is something that only Fascists would do, because there is a politically-correct program [singular]. There is no space for diversity of opinion. There is no need for deliberative, democratic process for either (a) working things out or (b) punting on contentious issues that can never be worked out. The objective is to dictate policies consistent with the Common Good.

Don’t believe me? Allow me to illuminate the experience of Spain in the run up to the Spanish Civil War.

Nobody expects the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). Indeed, was it not just an isolated experience tucked away in one corner of Europe, quickly forgotten once the rest of Europe got swept up in the Second World War? But, I have been casually reading about Spain in the 1930’s for some time, and one thing that has come out of my reading is the idea that the civil war was not a development insulated from larger currents in Europe. Rather, it was inspired by Europe-wide enthusiasm for the idea of reproducing the spectacular success of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917.

In the Russian experience, a small cabal of fanatics managed to secure control of the machinery of government. That new government-by-fanatics held sway over a vast Euro-Asian empire. Unbelievable.

Observers like Ernst Toller (I Was a German 1933) giddily anticipated reproducing the Bolshevik takeover in Germany in the few years after the First World War. Much the same in Italy as “anarchists” endeavored to seize, and then monopolize, power.

In his semi-autobiographical novel, Journey to the End of the Night (1934), Louis-Ferdinand Céline stumbled physically intact out of the killing fields of the Western Front of the First World War and onto the streets of a bustling New York City. He then ended up in the boom town of Detroit where he walked up to an automobile assembly plant, got a job, and started work that minute. There was still great demand for labor, including immigrant labor, in the United States, but, shockingly, the United States shut down immigration in 1924.

Where did the political will and energy to do something so drastic come from? I can only suspect that the motivation for shutting down immigration involved much the same kind of energy that went into the trial of suspected anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. And that energy, I am guessing, involved concern about Eastern Europeans and Southern Europeans importing their new enthusiasm for Bolshevik revolution. What went on in Russia did not stay in Russia, and not everyone was interested in importing it.

By the early 1930’s, affirmatively anti-Bolshevik, actually-Fascist regimes had assumed control in Italy and Germany. (So much for the Revolution!) In Spain, however, things were only starting to kick off. The Spanish had been struggling through the 1920’s with implementing a constitutional monarchy, but that experiment ended in 1931 with the self-exile of King Alphonso XIII. Spain adopted a new constitution by end of the year. The constitution laid out the processes that would intendedly govern the government.

This marked the inauguration of the Second Republic of Spain, although, it looks as though not all parties were actually interested in constitutional process. For some of the parties on the Right and for all of the parties on the Left, constitutionalism was just a phase, a necessary phase that had the great virtue (in their view) of ending the monarchy, but it amounted to a necessary evil in that the objective was ultimately to establish the dictatorship of the right people who would implement the right policies. And, here, the Bolshevik experience was inspiring, because it demonstrated that palace intrigues could enable a small faction to secure control and establish its dictatorship. Never mind the hard work of building up democratic institutions or building grass-roots support. Just go in there, find the opportunity to seize control, and then seize it.

Now, that stick-figure caricature of constitutionalism in Spain in the run up to the civil war amounts to my working hypothesis about what was going on. Some ideas were inspired by my still-unfinished reading of The Collapse of the Spanish Republic: 1933-1936 (Stanley Payne 2006). I get two things (so far) from this book. First, leaders of many of the various shifting factions were explicit about keeping rival factions out of government and about how constitutional process—the stuff of democracy—was corrupt. It was inherently corrupt, they believed, because it would bar them from expelling rival factions. George Orwell could have spared himself his own experience of taking a sniper’s bullet through the neck on the front lines of the civil war had he read any of this stuff.

To recount: Orwell joined the Socialist P.O.U.M. forces who went on to fight Franco’s ostensibly Fascist forces. (Thousands of other expats joined the brigadas internacionales.) In Homage to Catalonia (1937), he proceeded to observe that the anti-fascist forces were not really interested in preserving “The Republic”. They were interested in preserving democratic process no more than the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) has ever been in establishing and preserving the institutions of actual democratic process.

Caught in the middle of factions competing to institute their preferred flavor of one-party monopoly might have been some cluster of Classical Liberals who really were committed to constitutionalism.

Now, I call Franco forces ostensibly Fascist, because it is not so obvious that Franco and his people had strong ideas about governance. In Native Realm (1968), Czeslaw Milosz (The Captive Mind 1951) complained that just such people “on the Right” in Poland had nothing “intellectual” to contribute. They were all about God, country, family and really nothing else. I can believe it. Franco and his people were reactionaries, and they were reacting against the aspiring Bolsheviks in Spanish society who so desperately yearned to expel (and, perhaps, execute) anyone not willing to go along with their program, just as Lenin and his cabal and then Stalin and his cabal had done in Russia.

So, what was the proximate cause of the Spanish Civil War? It was factions of the Left taking over the government and expelling Rightist factions. “The Republic” sounds nice and republican, but constitutional process and political competition were dead by 1936.

The second point: It is not obvious that there really was much scope for a Lincolnesque reset. Recall the closing passage from Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address in 1865. The conclusion of the American Civil War was approaching. This was common knowledge. Lincoln anticipated the reconstruction of the American polity:

With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan ~ to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Neither side of the Spanish Civil War offered charity to the other. Both sides played for keeps, and one is tempted to think that that was a big mistake. But, one idea I get from The Collapse of the Spanish Republic is that pro-constitution factions in Spain already had a bad experience cutting slack for certain Leftist factions that had attempted to overthrow the Republic through the course of the “October revolution” of 1934, two years before the civil war kicked off.

The October revolution achieved critical mass in Asturias (in the northwest of Spain) but sputtered in Barcelona and other big cities. Competing factions went on to debate whether the subsequent pro-Republican crack-down was too harsh or not harsh enough. Was there really charity for all, or would charity merely enable anti-constitutional forces to regroup and launch another insurrection?

There was another insurrection—the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939—and the Rightist factions did not offer charity to the factions on the Left in 1939.

Imagine being a young person in Spain in 1936. You have three options: Join the anti-Franco forces. Join Franco. Demur, and possibly hold oneself out as a conscientious objector or as an advocate for constitutionalism.

The constitutionalist opportunity had been crushed, and most factions left and right had a hand in chipping away at it. Factions on the Left endeavored to sabotage it in 1934 and again in 1936. Reactionary forces thwarted the actually-anti-republican Republican forces but then proceeded to institute their own anti-republican program.

In Warsaw 1944, Czeslaw Milosz faced a similar choice: Join the Uprising against the most Nazi of the Nazis (the SS joined by Ukrainian and Hungarian cohorts); wait underground with the Communists for the SS to wipe out the non-Communist Polish partisans; avoid the violence and do nothing.

Milosz opted to do nothing and (barely) managed to avoid taking either a Nazi bullet or Communist bullet in 1944. The Communist faction ultimately succeeded. Non-Communist factions were wiped out, and, after the Soviet armies rolled through, the Communist factions could finally implement their own Bolshevik revolution.

In all of this—in Germany, in Italy, in Spain, in Central Europe, in Eastern Europe—it is hard to find any strong, pro-constitutional factions. And, is that not largely true even today, especially among the ranks of Hipster revolutionists on our university campuses? Like this one:

Then there’s this one, a crusty 68er who did come to understand that maybe he should have exercised better judgment:

This garbage is all over social media. How representative is it? I don’t have hard numbers, but there’s a lot of this content, and there are a lot of folks who perceive no issues with mischaracterizing the views of people they don’t like and then celebrating assassinations of those same people.

“I was not angry … Until this instant.” Politics in the 21^st century does share important features with politics post-WWI, and not for the better. These Fascist “anti-fascists” are playing for keeps. Their predecessors were so hopeful in 1968, but 1972 put a lid on things. (No wonder Richard Nixon was worse than Hitler in their view.) The predecessors of 68 desperately wanted to see the Stalinist experiment succeed in the early 1930’s. And I think now that their predecessors understood the Leninist takeover of government in 1917 as a user manual and not as an example of what it was: explicitly anti-constitutional, anti-democratic governance.

Crime really is down in DC these last few weeks, but what are the mechanisms at work? They may be:

1. Increasing patrols on the streets reduces opportunities for crime, and

2. Getting bad hombres off the streets matters. Arresting such people and keeping them off the streets may invest the reduction in crime with some durability.

The emerging evidence?:

Increased patrols have been concentrated (it seems) not in neighborhoods in the Southeast quadrant of DC (especially south of the Anacostia River) where homicides tend to concentrate, but homicide has nonetheless receded. Interesting.

The suggestion in the data seems to be that the “surge” in policing may have involved increasing patrols in heavily touristed areas mostly in the Northwest quadrant or Southwest quadrant of the city, but the surge may also have resulted in the apprehension of bad hombres who would otherwise be committing violent crimes in the Southeast. I speculate that these bad hombres have tended to be apprehended outside of the Southeast (where they would steal cars and rob people) and not in their own neighborhoods. The people who rob the tourists and “carjack” residents outside of the Southeast are the same people who then go home to the Southeast and commit assault and homicide.

This motivates the main proposition: Getting bad hombres off the street and keeping them off the street really does drive down crime of all types.

Indeed, there may be a kind of “broken windows policing” at work: Getting people off of the streets for having committed for lesser (if not grievous) crimes can go some way toward suppressing the volume of even more serious crimes.

* * *

Muriel Bowser, the mayor of Washington, DC, made a tactical retreat. After first trying to craft a crowd-pleasing statement about how the federal takeover of policing in DC had been “unsettling and unprecedented” and amounted to an “authoritarian push” to diminish the city’s “autonomy,” the mayor proceeded little more than two weeks later to back up the claim that crime had dropped precipitously over the course of that same authoritarian push.

Recall the context. The Trump administration organized the federal takeover of the city’s policing on August 11. Democrats complained notwithstanding the fact that the administration can do this under the terms of the “Home Rule Act” of 1973. Muriel Bowser has stopped complaining and has proceeded to express “appreciation” for “the surge in officers.”

The principal question on which I have endeavored to impose some structure is: Will a surge diminish crime only to the extent that a police presence remains conspicuous, or is there more to this policing initiative than merely increasing the number of personnel patrolling the streets? Specifically:

1. It really does look like that crime across all categories has declined over the short span of the federal takeover. Have those declines mostly resulted from the greater, visible presence of police forces on the street, in which case crime rates might rebound after the surge ends?

2. The surge in policing may have also resulted in a surge in arrests. (Has it?) Does getting bad hombres off the streets tend to reduce certain classes of crime… so long as the system does not allow those same bad hombres to return to the streets in short order?

Let me draw a distant parallel between the problem of policing the streets of American cities to that of suppressing insurgencies. A classic lesson in counter-insurgency (which I think is correct) is that the authorities will have to flood the zone with personnel, most of whom end up doing a lot of nothing other than standing around; all that standing around in inconvenient locations denies insurgents easy access to resources. It is up to the remaining small share of personnel to run down the insurgents.

In the context of police enforcement on the streets, flooding the zone is not so much about denying insurgents access to resources as denying erstwhile criminals easy opportunities for crime. Further, the counterpart to running down insurgents (and taking them out of circulation) would be to arrest actual criminals and taking them out of circulation by warehousing them indefinitely in jail. But, back to counter-insurgency:

The United States had gotten around to implementing a classic counter-insurgency program in Vietnam. The troop presence ballooned to something like half-a-million, but it was up to the small number of units sent out into “the bush” to conduct “search-and-destroy” missions. These missions involved finding enemy concentrations and then calling in heavy ordnance.

So, why did the Vietnam program fail? One can imagine the problematic “optics” of counterinsurgency. Do you really need the massive troop presence? Does the massive presence reflect not prospective success but rather the failure of the program to suppress insurgency? And, ultimately, does poor optics undermine the political will to press on with counterinsurgency?

The British also implemented a similar counterinsurgency program during the course of the Boer War (1899-1902). (Absent further research on my part, I’d even suggest that the British stumbled into innovating modern counterinsurgency.) The Boer commandos enjoyed spectacular success through the course of the first year of the war, but the British subsequently changed strategy and charged new leadership with implementing that new strategy. The British leadership under Lord Roberts went home, and in came a new team under Lord Kitchener. “New Orders from Kitchener … The gentlemen’s war is over.”

The new strategy worked, although, like the Americans in Vietnam, the British ended up with a presence of about half-a-million troops in South Africa during Kitchener’s tenure. Those half-million troops outnumbered the Boer commandos by about ten-to-one. Do you really need such numbers?

The classic lesson of counterinsurgency is: Yes, you do. A “surge” may make for “poor optics,” but then it is up to the political leadership to lead and make the case for the surge. Counterinsurgency makes for a politically-fraught business. The Vietnamese came to understand this.

Now, changes in strategy reflect crisis, and not all changes in strategy resolve crisis. For example, no one credits the “surge” for which David Petraeus advocated in Afghanistan in 2009 as a success. The “surge” in Afghanistan may have been far too small, and it concentrated a lot of energies on “hearts-and-minds” bonhomie which critics argued merely exposed troops to more IED hazards. It would not be original to compare certain neighborhoods in certain American cities to either Iraq nor Afghanistan—”Chicago” + “Iraq” = “Chiraq,” for example—but American cities are neither Iraq nor Afghanistan. Even so, one can still be skeptical about whether a “surge” in Washington, DC will work.

The initial indications are that the “surge” in DC has markedly discouraged crime. The mere matter of increasing patrols on the streets may have reduced opportunities for crime. I am going to suggest, however, that the surge has also taken certain bad hombres off the streets and that getting these people out of circulation has had an effect. And, if the system keeps these people off of the streets rather than engage in “catch-and-release,” then the effects of the surge may exhibit some persistence. DC may experience something of reboot and end up in a lower-crime equilibrium.

The “surge” in DC started on August 11, 2025, and I gathered daily crime data from the Metropolitan Police Department of Washington, DC going back to January 1, 2018. Let me first examine the interval August 11-29 for the years 2018 through 2025:

The idea here is to control for seasonal factors by concentrating on the same interval of time in each year. And, what do we see?

We see substantial variation in crime in this sliver of time from one year to the next. But, crime in the time of the Trump surge is markedly lower. But, had it already achieved lower levels by the time the surge started? Let’s take a look:

In this graph, I highlight the interval August 11-29 for the years 2024 and 2025 in light blue. Crime was falling through the course of the “surge,” but one can see substantial variation in crime through the course of the year. A short, sharp increase or decrease is not entirely exceptional, but for many categories of crime, levels are as low as they had been since the middle of 2024. Look, for example, at “Motor Vehicle Theft” (purple), “Theft from Auto” (brown) and “Robbery” (green).

Homicide is also down:

Now, let’s look back as far 2018. Has crime been declining or increasing, and does the experiment of the last few weeks even show up?

There is a lot of action in this graph, and it is hard to immediately distinguish a Trump effect, but crime is lower overall. Even so, what accounts for the broad swings over the course of a given year in certain categories of crime?

The “COVID” experience looks like it had important effects. “Theft/Other” and “Theft from Auto” both declined sharply in early 2020, but “Motor Vehicle Theft” started to emerge as a more important phenomenon. And, then, in late 2022 “Motor Vehicle Theft” seemed to rise to a new level. Did this mark the rise of young people going out to “carjack” DC residents?

So, what was going on in the early COVID experience? The City did not impose harsh lockdowns, but both the city government and the federal government implemented relaxed work-at-home policies. Downtown DC became a ghost town. So, fewer vehicles (from Virginia or Maryland) were in the city? DC residents were more likely to be home in their neighborhoods, and that denied erstwhile thieves of opportunities? But, “car-jackings,” as evidenced by instances of “motor vehicle theft,” started to emerge as an important phenomenon?

Puzzling, but less puzzling and yet illuminating is the geographic distribution of types of crime. Consider the layout of the city. The city is partitioned into eight “wards”:

Wards 7 and 8 occupy all of DC that is south of the Anacostia River, although Wards 7 and 8 also occupy a few neighborhoods north of the river.

The map indicates the population of each ward as indicated in the 2020 census. Each ward maintains a population of about 85,000. Note, however, that Wards 7 and 8 account for well more than their share of homicide and assault year after year but less than their share of “Theft from Auto” or “Theft/Other”:

If crime had been distributed in proportion to population, then Wards 7 & 8 would collectively account for about 25% of each category of crime. But, these wards have consistently accounted for about 60% of homicides, 50% of assaults, 40% of “sex abuse” but under 20% of thefts, excluding vehicle thefts. If, however, we were to lump all instances of crime together, then Wards 7 and 8 converge on their collective share of 25% of crime… even slightly less than that:

Note that Ward 3, tucked away in the northwest of the Northwest quadrant, performs the best. It performs the best by far across all categories. That’s where the big money from big law firms, the consultant class, and NGO’s lives.

So, it looks to me that the denizens of Wards 7 and 8 tend to concentrate much violent crime on themselves but will share the joys of carjacking with the other wards excepting Wards 3 and 4. They will also rob their neighbors but will concentrate much of their energies robbing people in the bustling Mount Pleasant neighborhood (Ward 1) and in certain parts of Northeast DC.

What to make of all of this? I suggest that the data provide a very rough experiment that exploits variation across both time and space. The data seem consistent with the proposition that just increasing patrols can discourage certain types of crime (theft and robbery) in patrolled neighborhoods, but certain indications of violent crime (most notably homicide) also appear to have decreased notwithstanding the fact that patrols have not been concentrated in neighborhoods that tend to generate the most homicide. That suggests to me that the “surge” may be actually taking erstwhile murderers off the street… and the reason such people are being taken off the street is because they are the same people who would otherwise be out robbing people, breaking into cars, and stealing cars.

For the time being, I would maintain that narrative as my best guess of what is going on in DC. And, if the justice system does not indulge in a game of “catch-and-release,” then the discernible declines in crime we can observe through the very early course of the “surge” in DC may persist. But, we await the unforgiving test of the immediate future. We will see how well this narrative holds up.

* * *

The main proposition here is that de-policing is a manifestation of DEI. DEI is the political spit-and-polish for the abolishment of standards and performance benchmarks. The purpose of abolishing standards and benchmarks is to implement equality-of-outcome. Call it “equity” if one must. The under or over-representation of “protected classes” of people in certain outcome metrics indicate the “marginalization” of those protected classes of people. The over-representation of certain classes of people in law enforcement actions constitutes one such example of marginalization. One way to remedy this over-representation is to suspend law enforcement! In place of equality before the law we get equality with respect to enforcement and adjudication by neutralizing the law. In the limit, no “protected class” of people ends up performing below average, because everyone will show up in the enforcement data at the average. In the limit, that average amounts to zero enforcement for everyone. We call such DEI-consistent enforcement “anti-racist.”

The anti-racism of DEI-policing (and DEI policies more generally) is justified by “disparate impact” doctrine, the idea that a certain “protected class” of people—blacks in this case—have tended to be disproportionately the subject of police enforcement actions; any deviation from proportionality reveals underlying “systemic racism.” De-policing thus results in proportionate applications of policing by virtue of no policing at all. Hence, no more “disparate impact,” but, ironically, DEI-policing has resulted in an increasingly disparate concentration of crime on those same “protected classes” of people. Most notably, DEI-policing has not remedied the fact that blacks may comprise about one-eighth (12.5%) of the American population but have consistently accounted for more than half of the perpetrators of homicide and more than half of the victims of homicide both before and after the implementation of DEI-policing. If DEI actually worked, should blacks not account for about one-eighth of both the perpetrators and victims of homicide? Should performance outcomes, not just enforcement outcomes, not be equal across legally-defined classes of people?

Key words: deterrence, “disparate impact,” “restorative justice,” “school-to-prison pipeline,” blah-blah-blah…

* * *

What would a low-crime equilibrium look like? Would it involve a lot resources directed into policing? Would we have to put up with living in a virtual police state? Or would the mere expectation of vigorous enforcement deter much crime, in which case society might be able to get away with a modest investment in policing resources? Alternatively, as some observers would argue, is any volume of policing part of the problem? Does it aggravate crime, and should we substitute it with a magic, non-policing program? We could call it “restorative justice.”

Separately, what would it take to shock the system out of a high-crime equilibrium into a low-crime equilibrium? Can the system be shocked from one equilibrium to another? What would it take to restore deterrence? Would the project require flooding the zone with police forces?

This last bit about flooding the zone has made it into the news with the federal government exercising its prerogative (as indicated in the “Home Rule Act” of 1973) to take over policing in Washington, DC. The “D” in “DC” stands for “District.” DC is a “federal district.” It is not a state. The city government really is situated to operate as a de jure agent of the federal government.

Critics of the takeover charge that crime had reached “30-year lows,” lows compared to the highs of the “Crack Wars” of the early 1990’s. Thus, do we really need more policing? Proponents observe that crime has increased sharply. The data (such as they are) indicate that crime has increased appreciably. It’s been bubbling up since 2015.

Data from Washington, DC are incomplete, but I was able to assemble this record of homicides by month from 1999 through 2023:

The data come from the CDC’s record of “causes of death.” It tracks homicides.

The red, dashed line indicates a 12-month moving average. The moving average ignores missing values.

Note that there are a lot of missing values, and monthly totals lower than 10 are not reported.

Missing values and truncation aside, the numbers do tell a story: Homicides had been running as high as 20 per month in 2002/2003 before moderating, but they started to ratchet up again in 2015 and had bounced around the 20-per-month benchmark by the end of 2023.

Data for 2024 and 2025 are not yet available, but it is not obvious that this harsh measure of crime (homicides) has achieved “30-year lows.” More likely they’ve reached highs not seen since 2003. The “30-year lows” ploy is just that: a ploy backed up by nothing more than empty rhetoric.

In my mind, 2015 really is when things really started kicking off across the country.

A proximate cause was the shooting of Michael Brown. Police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown in 2014. As far the media was concerned, the important details involved the fact that a white police officer had shot a young, black man. This was in Ferguson, Missouri, just outside of St. Louis. Long story short: Michael Brown was a big fellow, a “gentle giant,” we were told, notwithstanding the fact that he had roughed up a convenience store owner some minutes before his fateful encounter with Ferguson police. The subsequent encounter with the police had nothing to do with the episode in the convenience store, but the video from the store’s security camera surely colored understandings of that police encounter.

The media seized on a wild tale: Michael had put his hands up, they said, and called out “Don’t shoot!” That turned out to be total fabrication, but it helped inspire riots and much destruction in Ferguson.

The district attorney endeavored to charge Darren Wilson with any version of homicide, anything ranging between first-degree murder (at the high end) and involuntary manslaughter (at the low end). The grand jury didn’t buy any of it and did not vote to indict Darren Wilson.

There had already been some rioting in Ferguson, and more rioting succeeded the grand jury’s vote. Our friends from Black Lives Matter exploited the situation. For many of us, the Ferguson experience comprised the first experience with “BLM”.

The Ferguson experience of 2014/15 seemed to set the stage for further agitation. In 2020, George Floyd staggered onto that stage. A big, middle-aged black man stoked up on a cocktail of methamphetamines and fentanyl tried to pass off a counterfeit bill at a retail establishment. Minneapolis police were called to deal with the matter, which was what? In addition to passing on counterfeit cash, George was being disruptive? He wouldn’t leave the establishment? Something else?

In any case, the police spent more than half-an-hour trying to take him away without exerting much force. But, it looks like the police lost patience, and we all got to see the clip of video close to the end of this encounter: George was face-down in the street, and police officer Derek Chauvin was pressing his knee into the middle of George’s upper back. George could be heard complaining that he couldn’t breathe, although there is evidence from many minutes earlier—when the police had been encouraging George to get into their police car—during which George also complained that he could not breathe.

We all know what subsequently happened. George expired. He really couldn’t breathe. The Hennepin County Medical Examiner found “No life-threatening injuries” but did find likely fatal concentrations of drugs as well as pre-existing cardiovascular conditions. The report did not fit the politically-convenient narrative. The politically-convenient narrative was, again, white-cop-kills-black-man.

A “George Floyd Effect” is conspicuous in crime data from the largest cities in the nation, and I would even suggest that one might discern a “Ferguson Effect” in data from some municipalities. But what to make of it? What is the George Floyd Effect or the Ferguson Effect … or the Freddie Gray Effect in Baltimore? The US Department of Justice (DOJ) had this to say about the Freddie Gray matter:

On May 1, 2015, the Baltimore State’s Attorney’s Office (SAO) charged BPD Officers Caesar Goodson, William Porter, Garrett Miller, and Edward Nero; Lieutenant Brian Rice; and Sergeant Alicia White with criminal offenses related to Gray’s arrest and death. The charged offenses included reckless endangerment, involuntary manslaughter, and second degree depraved heart murder. Ultimately, four out of the six officers took their cases to trial, and in each instance, the prosecution was unable to secure a conviction.

“Second-degree depraved heart murder?” In Maryland state law, “’Depraved-heart’ second-degree murder holds that the suspect held a reckless disregard for another person's life.” So says the Washington Post.

Put another way, “It is a deliberate act that is so dangerous that it shows total indifference to someone else’s life,” said David Moyse, also a Maryland defense attorney.

The state prosecutors may have failed to secure convictions in the four of the six matters that did go to trial, but the Freddie Gray affair inspired the kind of destruction we witnessed in Minneapolis in the wake of the George Floyd affair, notwithstanding the fact that none of the officers involved were white. Even so, the mayor forced the police to stand down during the ensuing riots, indicating that “we … gave those who wished to destroy space to do that...” Never get in the way of arson and a good riot!

There is a larger story in here about how the DOJ under the beatified, sainted Obama imposed “consent decrees” on police departments around the country in the name of “police reform.” That is a story for another day. But, in developing such a story, my expectation would be that “police reform” really amounted to de-policing. The Obama administration swept up the police departments of both Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland into the de-policing initiative.

De-policing is DEI-policing

Now, why the motivation for de-policing? Good question, and I pose this idea: De-policing fits into a larger narrative about the “disparate impact” of disciplinary processes on “protected classes” of people. De-policing addresses the disparate impact of policing on the streets, but the de-policing of initiatives of the DOJ under the beatified and sainted Obama really just compromised one set of initiatives motivated by “disparate impact. The Department of Education (DOE) and the DOJ, for example, jointly imposed initiatives informed by disparate impact doctrine on the public schools and the universities. In January 2014, for example, the Obama DOE issued its infamous “Dear Colleague Letter on the Nondiscriminatory Administration of School Discipline.” The DOE and DOJ effectively threatened public schools with “investigations of student discipline policies and practices … based on complaints the Departments receive from students, parents, community members, and others about possible racial discrimination in student discipline.” Such investigations could result in consent decrees and the withholding of federal funds. “Student discipline policies” might not be explicitly racist, but the Departments would judge them as racist were policies found to have imposed “disparate impact … on students of a particular race.”

An operationally easy (if not fraught) way of avoiding scrutiny by “the Departments” would be for schools to effectively suspend all discipline; treat all students equally by not subjecting any of them to discipline.

I should really do some research on violence in the public schools, but for now let me post this result from our friends at Google Trends:

The people who compose official statements like “Dear Colleague Letters” seem to understand that they just can’t throw terms like “racism” around. They have to first arm themselves with legalistic language. Hence the great volume of ink and air-time they dedicate to talking about “disparate impact.” The appeal to disparate impact allows them to eventually get around to condemning certain non-discriminatory policies as racist, but outside observers don’t have to do so much dancing around. They can come up with narratives like the “School-to-prison Pipeline.” They have observed that black kids had been disproportionately the subject of discipline in the schools, and they further observed that black kids were more likely to leave school and end up in prison as young adults. The disproportionality of school discipline (the “disparate impact”) demonstrated that the same school discipline was “racist.” But, it gets worse in that school discipline set up these kids to be anti-social and thus likelier subjects of policing after leaving school. Hence, school-to-prison pipeline, and hence the demand to get rid of disciplinary policies in the schools as well as policing in the streets. Replace all that discipline and enforcement with “restorative justice!”

So, what has this campaign for restorative justice yielded? Not obviously anything positive. Over the past 10 years, for example, blacks have comprised more than 58% of the known perpetrators of homicide in the United Sates, and they have comprised more than 54% of known victims. That’s according to the FBI. (“Unknown” race or “unspecified” race are non-trivial categories in the FBI data.) These proportions have been stable over the years. (See the graph below.) One can’t discern an Obama Effect according to which “restorative justice” and de-policing had somehow generated “equitable” outcomes. Things, remain the same. Until a few years ago, one was able to match the race of victims to the race of perpetrators. My recollection is that black perpetrators had accounted for anywhere between 85% and 94% of the murderers of black victims. Basically, most victims and offenders know each other. Homicide is concentrated within social networks. It does not generally traverse social networks.

* * *

In the remainder of this essay, I get back to data from three cities—or, specifically, from three large counties that each encompass a large city. I examine Cook County, Illinois (which encompasses Chicago), Los Angeles County, California (Los Angeles) and Harris County, Texas (Houston).

I consolidated CDC data on homicides by race with annual estimates of county populations by race. I was thus able to come up with homicides rates by race and by year (1968-2023) and month (1999-2023). Data from 2024 are not yet available.

I would examine other counties corresponding to large cities, but the data for these three counties were the most complete.

The data from these three counties exhibit some rationalizable patterns. For example, the influence of the “Crack Wars” of the late 80’s/early 90’s seems obvious. A “George Floyd effect” also seems obvious—except in Los Angeles County where there seems to have had little effect. Interesting.

Let me start with this graph:

The red line indicates homicide rates (homicides per 100,000 residents) in Harris County, Texas (Houston) from 1968 through 2023. Homicide rates have reverted to where they were in the mid 1990’s, but it is true that they remain about half as high as the peak achieved during the years of the “Crack Wars” in the early 1990’s. It is also true, however, that they have bubbled upwards from the actual “30-year lows” of about 2010. Note, however, that the homicide rates were much higher in the late 1970’s/early 1980’s, and rates had already been elevated through the entire decade of the 1970’s.

The high homicide rates of the 1970’s and then the 1980’s were the kind of things that inspired the Dirty Harry films (with Clint Eastwood) and the Death Wish films (with Charles Bronson). It is really too bad that data pre-1968 are not obviously available, because we would likely see that crime, including violent crime had climbed sharply since the early 1960’s. Meanwhile, the experience with the Crack Wars inspired films like Original Gangstas (1996 with Fred Williamson, Jim Brown of American football fame, blaxploitation film veteran Pam Grier, and musician and activist Oscar Brown, Jr.) It is a dark film about people coming back to the old neighborhood to take it back by any means necessary from the gangs that had taken it over.

The Crack Wars are interesting, because they really did inspire a sharp increase in homicide. Why would that be? It is not as though drug dealing was an innovation. Films like Super Fly (1971) had glamorized drug dealers.

This dude is bad. And he ain’t just fly. He’s Super Fly. When it comes to women, they come to him. But, it’s still not enough. He wants a big score. A $million in cash [in 1972 dollars]. Yeah. The Big One …

Super Fly would not make for a compelling story but for the fact that logistics matter. They don’t come for free. The protagonist, a cocaine dealer named Priest, endeavors to “score one more super deal and retire.” Being a dealer, he occupies an important node in a distribution network. But, coming in and pressing the network to organize and process “a super deal” might strain the network and strain relationships. Which it does. Hence the film.

The Crack Wars involved an innovation in cocaine markets. Someone figured out how to deliver small doses (“crack”) in a way that would yet yield a vivid high. Cocaine had been the preserve of people with money, but “crack” would open up cocaine to the economy-class crowd. The lower end of the market, thus far untapped, turned out to be huge. That was the 1980’s.

My guess is that the “crack” innovation set off a race between street gangs to grab market share in local retail distribution. Put it that way. Gangs found themselves fighting turf wars over distribution. This was when the rest of us Normies back in suburbia might have learned about gangs like the (LA-based) Crips and the Bloods. “The Crips and the Bloods!”

The Crack Wars went some way toward motivating “tough-on-crime” policies, and, by 1994, one could find LA gang members and their rapper friends carrying on about how to “Increase the Peace.” What we do know is that the volume of homicides involving young black men declined precipitously, especially in Los Angeles? Why? Because tough-on-crime policies were effectively getting bad guys off the street? Or, also, because gangs had been episodically decimating each other and cohort-replacement could not keep up? But, also, might there not have been some inertia to the gang wars by which vendettas and cohort-replacement might keep up for some years … as they appeared to do?

All that is to say that patterns involving homicides are probably subject to much more complex dynamics than most other types of crime, and it might be challenging to come up with some really solid stories. But, publicly available data do indicate patterns about which, I think, we can opine with confidence. More on that below with respect to monthly homicide statistics.

Back to the preceding graph: Harris County/Houston appears as notably more violent than Cook County (Chicago) and Los Angeles County in the 1970’s and 1980’s, but Cook County comes off as the most violent from the mid-1990’s through 2023. Indeed, the volume of homicide in Chicago the last few years seems to rival that of the “Crack Wars.” Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, homicide rates had declined to all-time lows by 2019 in the post-1968 era. The post-Crack Wars experience in Los Angeles is the kind of thing we have hoped would prevail everywhere else.

What to make of this? Again, the Crack War experience had made it into the consciousness of the general public. Consider films like Colors (with Robert Duvall as an experienced LA policeman paired with hot-headed rookie, Sean Penn; directed by Dennis Hopper 1988). Gang warfare was the subject of Colors, although Colors did not explicitly make contact with the crack cocaine business. Even so, public consciousness surely went some way towards motivating tough-on-crime policies. Those policies included the expansion of “three-strikes laws” across more states, and enforcement of those laws really did seem to get the members of warring gangs off of the streets. Incarceration increased; homicides declined sharply post-1994. Meanwhile, the “George Floyd Effect” seems to highlight the results of a broad reversal of tough-on-crime policing. And, there seems to be something to it, but not uniformly everywhere.

In my earlier essay, I highlighted results illuminating the apparent relaxation of traffic enforcement post-George Floyd. Traffic fatalities increased across all racial groups post-George Floyd and mostly remain elevated. Can we interpret the relaxation of traffic enforcement as an indication of broader relaxation of enforcement? And, if so, should we expect to see higher rates of crime? Should we see higher rates of homicide?

Now, homicide could be more difficult to analyze than other types of crime, because the victims of homicide also tend to be likelier perpetrators of homicide. Homicide takes bad hombres out of circulation. So, if erstwhile bad guys get taken out of circulation at high rates, do they not get replaced at high rates by new bad hombres? Might the homicide rate yet go down even under a low-enforcement regime?

Many times in earlier work I’ve shown how total homicides in Chicago nearly doubled post-George Floyd but have been declining linearly since 2020 such that, by now, the total volume of homicides has reached pre-George Floyd levels. But, examination of homicides rates by race suggest that rates have not obviously declined in Cook County/Chicago. Consider the following graph:

The data post-2014 in Chicago indicate that homicide rates among blacks rival the rates among blacks during the years of the Crack Wars (the peak in the middle). Those rates have been about ten times higher than those for whites and more like 25 times higher than those for everyone else. So, it is hard not to suggest that DEI-policing really has operative in Cook County/Chicago, but the results show that homicide rates among blacks, which were already high, nearly doubled which those for everyone else have hardly moved. Well done, DEI!

Consider the contrast with Los Angeles County:

Homicide rates for blacks peaked in 1980 and then reverted to 1970’s rates. Those 1970’s rates were about five times higher than those for whites and ten times higher than those for everyone else. Rates for everyone bubbled upwards through the course of the Crack Wars before dropping about 50% (for everyone) post-1994. Rates moderated again by 2010. There may some indications of a George Floyd Effect, but it not obvious. I cannot distinguish homicide rates by race post-2020, but later data would help tell a more complete story.

In any case, Los Angeles County comes off as less violent than Cook County these last several years. What about Harris County/Houston?:

Harris County looks more like Los Angeles County than Cook County. The rates of homicides were also high in the 1970’s, and there is an obvious Crack Wars peak. Homicides moderate tremendously post-1991. There might be something of a George Floyd Effect, but, again, it is not as conspicuous as the results in Cook County would suggest.

A distinguishing feature of the Harris County data might be the fact that homicide rates among “Other” non-blacks very nearly match those of whites from 1980 through 2006. I can only speculate why. A lot Cubans showed up in 1980 in the wake of the Mariel Boatlift, and “the disproportionately young, male Cubans’ characteristics highly correlate[d] with illicit activity”? This was the Houston rendition of Scarface (with Al Pacino as Tony Montana, 1983)? They set up cocaine distribution in competition with existing networks? … Is that why homicides peaked in some of the biggest cities in 1980? (Note to self: Where had Cubans and Haitians who came over in 1980 concentrated themselves? Where did they set up their networks other than Miami?)

* * *

Consider the following graph of monthly homicide rates:

This graph indicates monthly homicide rates for each of the three counties. The dashed lines indicate 12-month moving averages. One can understand a given point on a 12-month moving average as the annual homicide rate for the preceding 12 months.

What do we see? Note the saw-tooth pattern in homicides. We’ve seen this many times before. Homicides in cities with large black populations exhibit such saw-tooth patterns but not other cities. It reveals that homicides in certain (but not all) black communities exhibit seasonal patterns. (So far, I have not observed strong seasonality involving non-black, urban populations.) Homicides increase sharply in the warmest months, and decrease sharply in the coldest months. Why? Because people hang out in large groups in the warmer months, and that creates opportunities for fraught interactions. Fraught interactions inspire people to pull out their guns and start shooting. The dead often include bystanders.

This dynamic is consistent with my own experience on a grand jury investigating “violent crime” in Washington, DC. And, yes, most homicides in these, certain black communities are as stupid as that. There are a small number of communities in the big cities that generate well more than most of the homicides. And it is stupid stuff within social networks that gets people killed.

That said, we can still see important variation between Los Angeles, Houston (Harris County) and Chicago (Cook County). Since 1999, Chicago has simply been more violent than the other two cities. Homicides in Chicago also exhibit what looks like a “Ferguson Effect” (an increase post-2015) as well as an even more robust “George Floyd Effect” in 2020. Both Los Angeles and Houston also exhibit George Floyd Effects if not Ferguson Effects.

I examined these data more systematically by running a few regressions. I ran the homicide rate for each city against each month’s average low temperature (in order to control for seasonal effects), and I tossed in “dummy variables” and time trends to crudely capture the effects (if any) of the George Floyd phenomenon and the Ferguson phenomenon. Here’s what a “fitted” line looks like for the Chicago data:

The heavy blue line (the fitted line) tracks the actual data very well. It vividly captures the seasonal effect—the seasonal effect is a real thing—and it even captures a George Floyd Effect. It would even seem to capture a Ferguson Effect, but some comments are in order:

• The seasonality of homicides is a real thing. A great volume of homicides really does come out of casual social interactions in social networks within certain black communities. These people drive most of the murder in America. Harsh but true, and (the real point) no post-Obama DEI policies have changed that fact.

• The George Floyd phenomenon shows up robustly in the data, although, as I have reported many times before, the volume of homicides has declined almost linearly post-George Floyd after nearly doubling in the immediate wake of the George Floyd experience.

• This regression exercise does not robustly demonstrate a Ferguson effect. There are important hints of it, but it is not robust. It does show up if I account for inertia in the data…

• The particular regression line I exhibit here featured a lag of the dependent variable (homicide rate). What does that mean? I still puzzle over it, but it does indicate that there is much inertia in homicides. Meaning: The city can randomly have a really bad month. That bad shock to the system can reverberate for some time. (Related technical note: a single lag of the dependent variable is mathematically isomorphic to an infinite, albeit weighted, moving average of shocks to the system. A single lag of the dependent variable thus amounts to a parsimonious way of capturing reverberations.) A bad shock seems to inspire vendettas. At the same time however, a good draw from the deck can tamp down the further incidence of homicides. Reverberations can be either positive or negative.

• A Ferguson Effect shows up more prominently after I make some accommodation for vendettas.

It seems to me that inertia and reverberations—vendettas or “beefs” in the language of the street—are important phenomena. But, I will also suggest that these data are consistent with the more ambitious proposition that DEI-inspired de-policing is also important. DEI policing may have had success insofar as it leveled rates of enforcement across legally-defined classes of people, but it will have failed in achieving “equity” when it comes down to the numbers that matter most: the volume of homicides. Mostly what DEI-policing has achieved is waves, each spanning a few years, of more black victims. And these extra victims were not killed by “White” people or by “Asians and Pacific Islanders.” They were killed, and are being killed, by other black people. Are you proud of that, Obama? Do you even look at the data generated in the neighborhood of your vain monument to yourself, your “presidential center” in Hyde Park, Chicago?

* * *

A theme motivating these last two essays about violent crime and enforcement involved “deterrence”: How deterrence gets lost and what it can take to re-establish it. And, given the kinds of data that are publicly available, can we identify quasi-experiments in policy changes that might allow us to say something about how to lose or how to re-establish deterrence?

To tie policy initiatives to outcomes, one probably has to go city-by-city and dig deeply into city-specific initiatives. Posing broad atmospheric effects like a George Floyd Effect or Ferguson Effect can make for good, exploratory work, but those things are proxies for important changes in enforcement. One can imagine important diversity in the both the quality and timing of policy changes relating to enforcement, and that variation might help tease out effects. My broad sense, however, is that atmospheric initiatives coming from the very top—things like “Dear Colleague Letters” and the threats of punishing municipalities that they bear—really do set the stage for state-level and city-level policy changes. Dear Colleague Letters do not even amount to formal rule changes in formal, administrative “rule-making” processes. They really are just threats backed up with a few examples of the bullying of selected municipalities and police departments in order to make the threat commonly understood. One can decide for oneself whether or not one approves of the direction such informal, administrative initiatives nudge local policy.

The nudging considered here really does involve orienting local law enforcement toward DEI-consistent objectives, and those objectives included neutralizing disproportional applications of enforcement actions across both “protected classes” of people and non-protected classes. An easy way to do that would be to suspend enforcement! But, the ultimate result: lower enforcement and incarceration, to be sure, but higher traffic fatalities and greater crime, including greater violent crime. And the ultimate kicker: Most of that increase in fatalities and other crime has been concentrated on certain “protected classes” of people. The DEI project is ultimately unimplementable in that has too few instruments to pursue way too many, ambitious objectives.