The 1939 Project

I have a really hard time taking Tucker Carlson seriously, to say nothing of Candace Owens. However, I've met Dr. Heinrichs professionally and I know she is a smart cookie. In addition to her work at the Hudson Institute, she is a contributing editor to Providence, a Christian national security journal. If she says it's a problem, it's at worth considering that it might be a problem.

Not all the claims she mentions are absurd.

Tucker Carlson suggested that the fact that the Trump DOJ found that there is no Jeffrey Epstein client list misses the real question. “The real question is,” he said, “why was he doing this, on whose behalf, and where did the money come from?” Carlson then offered his own theory: The deceased convicted child sex trafficker was working for Israel’s Mossad. He said it is “extremely obvious” that Epstein “had direct connections to a foreign government.”

I don't think that it's 'extremely obvious,' but it is plausible; though I suspect that it is at least as likely that it was British Intelligence as Israeli. The fact that British royals were wrapped up in it indicates that they were a target, which is of more interest to the British civil service than it would be to the Israelis. (That there were Jews involved, which some seem to think points so clearly to Mossad, hasn't been surprising in the UK since Disraeli). Or, even more plausible to me, it may have been an international intelligence operation designed to rope in the rich and powerful everywhere. James pointed out that this may well be why they're 'trying to make the elephant disappear' -- allied governments may still be using these levers, and they don't want to grant permission to give them up.

Others are half-baked, but half.

In January, Carlson speculated openly to an aghast Piers Morgan whether modern Europe would have been better off under Nazi rule: “I’m not defending Nazis. I’m just saying, where is Western Civilization? What did [Churchill] preserve?”

Implicit here is the grotesque suggestion that defeating Hitler’s Germany directly led to Europe’s modern “woke” culture—in other words, that a Nazi victory might have preserved traditional, Christian civilization.

On the one hand, Carlson is definitely wrong about Churchill. Nor is it remotely plausible that the Nazis intended to preserve 'traditional, Christian civilization' even in Germany. At the end of the war, they were already beginning to expand their internal purge -- already grown from 'Jews' to people with one Jewish grandparent -- to actual Germans with unwanted eugenic traits. Like the French Revolution or the Khmer Rouge, they intended to overturn everything to establish their new order. 

On the other hand, it has long been suspected and argued academically that the CIA was behind the modern art 'abstract expressionism' movement. As we've seen in the USAID disassembly, support for 'woke' organizations -- especially transgender ones -- has been a US foreign policy tool, presumably because it allows them to establish networks in traditional societies of people who have a basic complaint with the whole project. The elite schools from which the CIA and State Department both recruit have been the nurseries of all of this critical theory; which is why we saw the absurdities of 'Pride marches' and festivals at US Embassy Baghdad or Kabul, and the pushing of a whole host of similar theories upon those traditional societies. The complaint that the US Federal Government -- and the British one, even more so -- has been a particular enemy of traditional society has weight. 

I think Dr. Heinrichs is right to say that these people have lost the President's ear, and as such I don't regard them as particularly dangerous. They may, at times, even raise critiques that are worth considering. That is a function of extending free speech even to the more radical thinkers and speakers. 

And indeed, she takes a moment to field a few critiques herself:

Policymakers from both parties assumed trade and diplomacy alone could soften adversaries like China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. Since the apex of American power at the end of the Cold War, policymakers turned their focus on the global war on terrorism, but rather than end its just post-9/11 military campaign in Afghanistan after destroying jihadist cells, the Bush administration grew its ambition and engaged in nation-building efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq that proved foolish—and led to an emboldened Iran.

If the liberal idealist fantasy of building liberal democracies in the Middle East wasn’t bad enough, the United States failed to maintain a defense industrial base capable of maintaining the production capacity to produce weapons at the scale necessary to deter a major power war. Today, for the first time in the nation’s history, the United States must deter not just one peer nuclear adversary like it did during the Cold War, but two: China and Russia.

I suspect that she is right that the Global War on Terror, the War in Iraq, and the two-decade mission in Afghanistan cost America its leading stature. It soured the public, and demonstrably damaged its military officers corps: the officers who started that war would never have ended it as ham-handedly as the ones who did so. She's also right about the industrial base as an issue that will now be hard to fix, if it can be fixed at all.

Likewise, as I have said here before and will now reiterate, I don't think antisemitism is a good operating theory even pragmatically. It leads you to bad analysis. Critics of Israel rarely compare it fairly with its actual neighbors, instead comparing it (as AVI said) to places like Switzerland. Compare its campaign in Gaza with the recent civil war in Syria, and suddenly the campaign looks intensely discriminate and careful; compare it with the current slaughter of Druze and others by the new government in Syria; compare it, for that matter, with our war in Iraq as we fought in Fallujah, Ramadi, or Mosul. Speaking as one who's done it, they're keeping casualties remarkably low for an intensely-fought war in an urban environment against Islamists using guerrilla and terrorist tactics. We can't claim to have done it better ourselves, and we certainly tried to be discriminate and to avoid war crimes. (Most of us, at least; some units like the one at Abu Ghraib didn't hold up that general standard.)

Israel has its own interests sometimes, and they aren't always the same as ours. Well, so too France; Saudi Arabia; Qatar(!); NATO 'ally' Turkey(!!!); that whole business of 'entangling alliances' is fraught, as Washington himself said it would be. We can field specific criticisms fairly. 

So again, I don't know that I can take Carlson et al seriously enough to suit Dr. Heinrichs; but I take her seriously, so I'll try.