UFOs, Spy Balloons, and the Woke Murder of Competence.
The Other Shoe Drops — the “UFOs” were Chinese spy balloons, but the Pentagon didn’t want us to know. According to Holman Jenkins in the Walls Street Journal:
The fluffing of the UFO misdirection, despite what government officials have been telling the New York Times, was not a spontaneous public misunderstanding. Read the inquiries by Reason magazine, the New Yorker and the Times itself. Ask any of the blogging academics who assigned new merit to the alien visitation hypothesis.
As this column pointed out, foreign adversaries were also seeing the UFO snow job. To the extent that the Chinese deliberately sailed their balloon across the continental U.S., they did so in full knowledge that Chinese aerial spying was already being progressively stripteased for the American people by U.S. intelligence-community leakage. The Biden administration had apparently decided the UFO smokescreen was no longer compatible with the heightened geopolitical moment.
It should be obvious now why it was always a mistake. The Chinese profess puzzlement over what they portray as an overreaction to their known incursions. Why the fuss now? Only because the American people had been kept in the dark about China’s actions, jollied along with the UFO distraction.
The story has two parts. The U.S. government has become bad at investigating, apparently — i.e., finding and sharing truths relevant to its domain.
The Supreme Court, with the help of U.S. marshals, can’t get to the bottom of who stole and leaked a draft opinion. The IRS hasn’t solved who stole and leaked a decade of tax data on more than 10,000 U.S. taxpayers. The FBI never examined the Democratic National Committee server allegedly hacked by the Russians. It was “forensically precluded” from recovering Hillary Clinton’s missing emails. It remained even fairly oblivious to their disappearance while under a congressional subpoena.
We can add to this the inability to crack the Las Vegas shooter case, or the Epstein case. We watched the FBIs complete inability to anticipate where and when Antifa violence would break out in 2020, while rushing resources to cover garage door pulls at NASCAR races. We are currently watching the FBI target Catholics who dissent from Pope Francis. On the other hand, the FBI repeatedly fails to take action against people it knows will become mass shooters.
The government has become incompetent at just the moment when our elites are deciding that competence is less important than a Proper Political Attitude about things like DEI and January 6. As Victor Davis Hanson documents, everyone has opinions on subjects outside their area of expertise and those with the right opinions are rewarded or exempted accordingly. Contrariwise, those with the wrong opinions are destroyed, notwithstanding their competence. The Vice President of the AMA was fired for questioning the religious faith of systemic bias in medicine. Dr. Matt Taylor had his career ruined because of his shirt.
This Wall Street Journal explains how Texas Tech University eliminates competent biologists from the student body because they don’t know the ideological vernacular. If this doesn’t put you in mind of the Communist Party United States of America’s endless purging of yesterday’s leaders when the winds from Moscow shifted a notch, then you don’t know history.
We haven’t seen such wholesale ideological purging of competence since Stalin “reformed” Soviet genetics at the behest of Trofim Lysenko while purging the Soviet military. There is no reason to expect a different result this time.
We can’t expect people to be good at their nominal job — astronomy, fighting crime, etc. — and their real job — kissing political arse — at the same time. One is going to get prioritized. We know which one that will be.
But that is a topic for another day.
