Or:

(These are my parodies, but you get the idea.)

Usually, the response to these missives is, "That didn't happen." And, often, that's correct. But the more important question, I think, is: "Why did the person who tweeted it want it to be true in the first place, and who did they think they'd be convincing if it were?" If Harriet or Tarquin really were talking to their parents like this, what exactly would it show, other than that their parents are not especially good at their jobs? Is there really a significant group of voters in America whose views about, say, immigration policy can be changed by the second-hand mutterings of a seven-year-old?

I understand that it's hard to find the exact line here — civics is important, and nobody likes an over-coddled child — but I will happily admit that I am consciously trying to do the exact opposite of this with my own kids. If they hear something political from someone at school, I will talk to them about it within reason. And I have, of course, attempted to confer the basics: treat everyone with respect, understand that people have different views, the Boston Red Sox are evil, etc. But, for now, I don't think it would be at all helpful, or healthy, for me to worry them about a vast array of problems that, at the ages of four and six, are so far removed from their control. It's not just that my small children do not know who the governor of Florida is (or whether I like him or dislike him), it's that they don't know we have a governor, or what a governor even is. And why would they? At this stage, it's just not that important to their world.

The most common emotion reported by the people who talk to their kids about politics all the time is fear. And of course it is! I have lost count of the number of times I have heard prominent people explain that their children are just terrified these days — be it of Donald Trump, or of climate change, or of crime, or of the end of Roe v. Wade — and then, either directly or indirectly, confirm that they have exploited their kids' ignorance, innocence, and implicit trust to achieve exactly that aim. I do not mean to imply that the world is perfect, or that parents ought to pretend to their children that the world is perfect. It's not, although it's a hell of a lot better than it's been at pretty much any point in human history — especially in the West. I do mean to imply that — absent a genuine cataclysm that requires even the kids in the family to immediately grasp the gravity of the situation — a parent's primary job is to make their children feel safe. At some point, I will have to teach my kids about the horrors of slavery and about the Holocaust and about the Gulag Archipelago. I'll have to tell them about 9/11, too. But to sit them down and do it now — at the ages of four and six — would be absurd.

A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times ran a symposium on how one should talk to one's children about what had happened in Uvalde. This was among the submissions:

The hardest part about talking to our kids, 11 and 13, about the killing of these children and their teachers was finding a way to answer this question: “Are we safe when we go to school tomorrow?” We couldn’t say yes or no. We had to tell them that their schools have lots of measures in place to try to keep them safe. To try.

This is downright grotesque. At 11 and 13, this person's children are guaranteed to hear about what happened. But they are not guaranteed to be told by their parents that they themselves are at risk. To grasp this, one needs only to imagine how a similar, less political, question might be answered. After all, if a parent can't say "yes, you are safe!" when asked about a risk whose likelihood is one in 1.3 million, then in what circumstance can they offer such a reassurance? When they know I'm traveling on an airplane, my children sometimes ask if I am going to be safe. Am I really supposed to say, "look, guys, I can't say yes or no, but I can tell you that the pilot has lots of measures in place to try to keep me safe, so I'll see you on Wednesday if I make it back alive"? What about the car — which, statistically, is a far, far more dangerous place for my kids than their school? In the interest of realism, am I expected to say, "come on guys, let's go to Grandma and Grandad's house, and let's hope we don't die on the way!"? If not, why would I elsewhere?

The only honest answer is that one of those questions is politically charged, while the other two is not, and that some parents seem to think that it is their job to get in early with their kids to ensure that they share their neuroses. I reject this wholeheartedly — not because politics doesn't matter, but because it is abusive to turn people who lack knowledge, maturity, or interest into pawns in a game that they're not playing. In my estimation, there is no great difference between what hyper-political parents do to their unfortunate children and what the protestors around D.C. are doing to Amy Coney Barrett's kids. In both cases, they are targeting people outside of the political system, and using their fear to manipulate other adults.

They ought to knock it off. Childhood is a precious time, and it is over pretty fast. We live in a very free, very safe country, at a truly great time in history, and there is time enough in adulthood for people to fight with one other about how that country should best be run. A seven-year-old who spends his time worrying about the impending 2022 midterms is a seven-year-old who is wasting an opportunity for which most kids in world history would have done anything. Shame on those who can't see it.

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On Monday, I responded to my friend David French, who had written at The Dispatch that "the threat to America’s gun culture comes from the gun rights movement itself," because "gun idolatry, a form of gun fetish that’s fundamentally aggressive, grotesquely irresponsible, and potentially destabilizing to American democracy" has "become so prevalent." In his piece, David lamented that, in 2018, he'd defended the same gun culture in the Atlantic. If he were asked to do so again now, David concluded, he would not. My point was that nothing David was citing as evidence of the change is, in fact, new, and that none of the people he was writing about are guilty of any of the crimes about which he seems to be worried. Perhaps, I suggested: "it’s not 'gun culture' that has changed, but David?"

On Wednesday, I wrote about the fracas at the Washington Post, and proposed that it "illustrates in microcosm the growing threat that Twitter poses to the fortunes of America’s progressive movement, and to the institutions that the movement has taken over bit by bit." The problem here is multifaceted. First, the Internet provides an outlet for people to stage meltdowns that would previously have been private:

There are many good things about the Internet’s relative lack of gatekeepers, but there are also a great number of circumstances in which it can hurt, rather than help, users. Absent social media, there would be no forum in which a figure such as Felicia Sonmez could have performed her bizarre little show. Where, in, say, the 1990s, could such a demonstration even have occurred? She could not have stood on her desk in the Post’s offices and shouted for five days straight. She could not have behaved as she currently is in the opinion pages of a newspaper, or on the evening news. I suppose she could have walked erratically around a public park muttering to herself — but, if she had, she would not have had a band of maladjusted sycophants telling her she was correct.

Second, social media allows to see who people really are:

Because far more conservative crazies than progressive crazies have been kicked off social media — and because progressive ideologues are more likely to demand cancelation, even of their friends — the emergence of the technology has ended up doing more damage to the left than to the right. This damage has taken two forms. At the micro level, Twitter has ruined the public reputation of influential individuals who had been previously assumed to be sane. At the macro level, it has created a suicidal feedback loop that has made the media, academia, and the Democratic Party badly out of touch with the real world. Together, these trends are proving catastrophic for progressives. Before I joined Twitter, I believed that the majority of journalists and academics were normal, well-adjusted people who, while typically left-wing, were interested in doing good work. Ten years later, I no longer think anything of the sort — and neither, I suspect, does anyone else.

And, third, it creates an inescapable system, within which political actors are able to submit preposterous presumptions and then to act according to them with impunity:

This problem obtains at a broader level, too. Joe Biden won the 2020 election in large part because he recognized that Twitter was not real life; Joe Biden is enduring a failed presidency in large part because he has forgotten that Twitter is not real life. It is difficult to overstate just how weird and unrepresentative a place Twitter actually is — and yet, inexplicably, President Good Ol’ Joe and his merry team seem to be laser-focused on its users’ every whim. The obsession with student loans is pure Twitter, as are the relentless focus on transgenderism and race-essentialism, the preference for neologisms such as “Latinx” and “birthing people,” and the belief that anyone who matters is going to notice when the White House pulls stunts such as this one. “Defund the Police” was a Twitter thing. “Jim Crow 2.0” was a Twitter thing. “Mint the coin” was a Twitter thing. They all led to electoral annihilation.

Sometimes, I concluded, being in charge of the commanding heights of the culture can hurt, as well as help.

On Friday, I expressed my astonishment that the Democratic Party is still — still — pursuing inflationary policies. Our current crisis is, of course, not entirely Joe Biden's fault. But pretty much everything that he and his party have done since January 2021 has made the problem worse. And they're still doing it!

President Biden has, at long last, recognized that he is obliged to look as if he cares about this problem. Granted, it has taken the better part of a year and a half but, finally, the man has grasped that flitting between “it’s not going to happen,” “it’s not happening,” and “it’s happening but it won’t last long” is not a sustainable strategy. But there are two parts to showing that you care about an issue. The first involves telling people that you care. The second involves refusing to make it worse. Cowed as he is by the greediest members of his party, Biden seems flatly unable to achieve the second step. A savvy politician — a Bill Clinton, say — would have realized a year ago that events had intruded upon his presidency, and changed course as a result. Joe Biden is not a savvy politician. Indeed, at this point, he is barely a politician at all. He is a cipher, for dreamers, dead-enders, and monomaniacs. The house is on fire and, ignoring all the buckets marked “water,” he can only think to pour more kerosene onto the blaze. (Which, at these prices . . .) One can easily comprehend why a president with Biden’s basement-level approval rating would be reluctant to take the unpopular, proactive steps that might help to diminish the problem. One cannot comprehend why he is finding it so hard to avoid making matters worse.

And he is trying to make matters worse. The $2 trillion the Democrats spent in March of last year was highly inflationary. And now:

President Biden is still hoping to increase the discretionary income of middle- and upper-middle-class Americans by writing at least $10,000 off the student-loan debt they owe taxpayers. That is an inflationary policy. At the same time, Senate Democrats have rekindled reconciliation talks, and seem currently to be seeking a deal that combines one inflationary policy with another. Most of the Democratic caucus still want a trillion dollars or more in new spending. That would be inflationary. Senator Joe Manchin is not as interested in this as his colleagues, but he has signaled a willingness to go along with it if he can couple the spending with an increase in the corporate tax rate that would, by definition, lead to an increase in consumer prices. That, too, would be inflationary. Even now, the Democrats have not got the message.

For my full archive at National Review, you can click here.

I was on one episode of The Editors this week. We discussed Biden’s faltering White House, the internal upheaval at the Washington Post, Ilya Shapiro’s resignation from Georgetown Law, and much more. You can subscribe to The Editors on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and more, or listen online at National Review.

Listening To: 'A Matter of Interpretation' by Antonin Scalia

Audible has a version of Antonin Scalia's magisterial series of essays, A Matter of Interpretation. Unfortunately, unlike Clarence Thomas's autobiography, this one isn't read by the author. But it's worth listening to all the same. The package consists of an introduction, a preemptive critique by Akhil Reed Amar, the Scalia-penned submissions, and then a series of responses from the likes of Gordon S. Wood and Laurence Tribe.

I listened carefully to the whole thing during a recent driving journey, and I think it holds up extremely well. Indeed, while the rejoinders are mostly thoughtful, the only quibble I found myself agreeing with wholeheartedly was Amar's contention that Scalia's limited defense of stare decisis was something of a cop-out. Amar writes:

He suggested that 'stare decisis is not part of my originalist philosophy; it is a pragmatic exception to it.' Say what? Why is it okay to discard originalism in cases when it is rather inconvenient? If pragmatism ultimately determines when we do originalism, this is in the end pragmatism, not originalism.

This is a fair point, and one to which Scalia never had a good answer. I'd note, though, that the best answer to this question is not provided by the pragmatists, who are subject to all of the other criticisms in Scalia's book, but by Clarence Thomas, who takes Scalia's originalist approach and applies it without respect for bad precedent.

Listening to the work in 2022, one is struck by something: That Scalia, like Whittaker Chambers, did not expect to win. A Matter of Interpretation was first published in 1997, and it is full of exasperation, gloom, and the assumption that, while correct, the approach it recommends will never be adopted. But here's the thing: It has been. Or, at least, it has been far, far more than it was in 1997. Bit by bit, Scalia has won. I wonder if he ever knew it.

Knowing that I'm a big fan of Dire Straits, a reader sent me this video of a guitarist playing Sweet Child O' Mine in the style of Mark Knopfler. (That amp, by the way, is entirely virtual.) Pretty good!

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