Still: although you are a wise and brave woman in other contexts, such as in announcing your conversion to Christianity, I do not understand why you want the U.S. to keep stoking the war in Ukraine. This war benefits U.S. arms manufacturers and those funds who now own much of the land area and mineral wealth in Ukraine. It does not benefit the Ukrainians, and Vladimir Putin is no threat to NATO or Europe.
I cannot imagine that you want an all-out war between the U.S. and Russia, one that the U.S. would have a hard time winning with its woke, feminized military, but before the inevitable American defeat, Europe would be wiped out. Since I live there, I have some interest in not being incinerated.
What is it about Russia and Putin that makes otherwise sensible people so determined to spill other people's blood?
“Vladimir Putin is no threat to NATO or Europe” The British citizens poisoned as collateral damage during March 2018 Novichok attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter, the Swedes and the Finns who’ve just joined NATO as well as all those who paid more for gas bills as a result of Gasprom depleting stocks in Germany before Putin invaded Ukraine would disagree with this egregiously false statement.
"What is it" about Putin? It's that he & his BFFs in the PRC and Iran are at war with the liberal (small "l") international order - Namely, they seek to break and displace the entire Western structure of freedom that, since the end of WWII, has fostered more broad-based liberty and human flourishing than anything else in human history. (e.g.: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/column_article/putin-has-declared-war-on-the-west-its-time-to-take-the-fight-to-russia). That they (Russia, China, Iran et al) are doing this incrementally blinds many complacent Western elites into thinking this is just business as usual, all amenable to diplomacy and summits. Well, it's not - Ukraine & the Israel/Gaza border are just a foreshadowing of much worse to come - starting in the Taiwan Straits, and eventually closer to Western capitals.
Thank you for the excellent analysis! I am here in Grand Rapids, waiting for Trump/Vance to appear on TV at 5 pm EDT in a rally. We love them here and are touched that we are the first after the Convention. Pres. Trump visited us last in 2015 and what an exciting time that was! I read Hillbilly Elegy quite a while ago. I am now listening to it on Audible and it has reinforced my view that J.D. Vance possesses a first rate intellect, a strong Christian faith and solid judgment.
100% - Another home run essay! And BTW as regards China: It also was Trump, not Biden, whose DOJ went after the PRC’s massive intellectual property theft operation - the “Thousand Talents Program” et al., estimated by the Congressional Research Service to be stealing $300 billion per year from US industry. ( know - I was there in DOJ). Team Biden shut down the program, falsely claiming it was “racially profiling” Chinese researchers at US universities. No, it was investigatively pursuing the biggest global theft ring in human history. Yet again, the Ds used DEI falsehoods to imperil America. See: https://www.politico.com/news/2022/02/23/doj-shuts-down-china-focused-anti-espionage-program-00011065
“It can be difficult for the adult convert not to compromise on the tenets of his new faith by holding onto secular platitudes and liberal pieties. Vance’s pro-life stance, which seems considerably stronger than that of Trump himself, reflects his genuine belief in the sanctity of life. By contrast, Harris, who is a Baptist, has insisted without justification that “to support a woman’s ability – not her government, but her – to make that decision [to have an abortion] does not require anyone to abandon their faith or their beliefs.”
So what exactly are your views on abortion these days, Ayaan? I always used to enjoy your work for your original and insightful, centre-right perspective and your support for the emancipation of women, no doubt informed by your own experiences growing up under a repressive regime, but you seem to be moving ever further to the Trumpian right.
Ostensibly Vance is a very interesting candidate. It does give me pause that you say he’s been “influenced” by Curtis Yarvis, an actual monarchist. I’ve watched 2 interviews with Yarvis and I was not impressed. He struck me as deranged, to be honest. I’d like to hear more about what you mean that Vance has been influenced by him.
My sense is that JD’s views are evolving and will continue to evolve. So I’m a bit nervous about that evolution, but I’ll take my chances vs Kamala, who has become a metaphor for incompetence.
As for American global commitments, sorry, but there is no way we can defend Taiwan without massive loss of American lives. China is a near peer militarily, very motivated and with no DEI handicaps. Taiwan is 90 miles from China’s coast, and some 3m Taiwanese residents are in favor of unification. We need to sit this one out.
Once again, there is nothing substantive to disagree with in Ayaan’s highly intelligent and nuanced analysis. The biggest upsurge of hope emerging from this last tumultuous week is Trump’s manifest resilience and toughness and JD’s superior brain power/eloquence and decent, even “virtuous” character. There is a future there! Ben Shapiro, who is always sharp on what can work in terms of ‘conservative’ (Milton Friedman/free-market style) economics, questions whether JD’s ideas about bringing manufacturing jobs back to the ‘rust belt’ are realistic when placed against the countervailing pressures of globalization. But it is those hard-working people who have been most ignored and demoralized that JD is trying to lift up and that are behind much of the new GOP’s resurgence. JD is a smart guy; let’s see what he can do. Maybe he can find a way that will open up new paths for those willing to work, regardless of their ‘intersectional’ identity markers. Love his connection to Girard and contemporary Catholic philosophers. In any event, in this current fraught moment, Ayaan’s words and thoughts get us to focus on what is most important — those inflection points in public policy that will define our future.
"But it is the latter’s interests he now champions: the industrious factory-workers whose jobs were exported to China, and whose sons and brothers were killed, wounded or traumatized in “global war on terror” after 2001".
I absolutely hate the constant equivication of trade and jobs, with war and Bombs. Leaving aside the actual enemy states, which China may be, "globalization" has dramatically helped the poor and not hurt them. Vance at times acknowledges this, but then sidesteps it by minimizing economic growth; what's more important is some hazy notion of socialism directed to aid the poor by building them factories, so they can find meaning - given to them by the State. That is F-ing scary. If we want the masses to find meaning, not the 1776 meaning of independent free people with rights pursuing happiness, but in the Glorious pursuit of National Honor - watch the Hell out. Because historically that is ruin, tyranny, and destruction.
Yes, wars to promote Democratic institutions in the Middle East are bad. But the deaths and maiming of our soldiers for useless and even self defeating goals are absolutely not the same as people losing jobs to technology; war is a lose-lose proposition. No one gains in death and destruction, the person who fights off a mugger or terrorist does not *gain* anything, they merely keep what they have already earned (including their own life).
In free trade we *all* ultimately gain. We are richer now than ever, including in the back country and urban poor neighborhoods - every one of which has cellphones, internet, food - there are no neighborhoods in America where you have starvation and famine.
So this is really fundamentally a question of how you find meaning in life, rather than an economic one. If the answer is that each individual is their own end, pursue their own life and happiness consistent with reason and rights, we will have a free nation. If the answer is a State driven Nationalism, or Vance's National Conservatism, we will not remain a free country for long.
What struck me the most was the interest and then insistence JD felt to go home. So in his comeuppance he would be representing his roots. That’s American - to want to represent your country and especially your hometown in a good vein. To defend her.
And his wife just wanting him to be a good person.
“Good thoughts, good words, good deeds.” - Freddie Mercury’s mom and dad in Bohemian Rhapsody 🙏❤️🇺🇸
Vance is totally enamored with big government, the last thing this country needs. Below are a few excerpts from comments in the press:
“Washington’s top business lobbyists are leery of Vance’s support of corporate regulation and his willingness to consider corporate tax hikes,” wrote Greg Valliere, chief U.S. policy strategist at AGF Investments, in a Monday note to clients.
Vance has bucked Republican orthodoxy by declaring his willingness to raise taxes on corporations, his support for the Biden administration’s antitrust enforcers like FTC chair Lina Khan and his embrace of tariffs as a tool for protecting U.S. manufacturing jobs.
Vance has pushed for other policies that have long been associated with the Democratic Party, including his work alongside Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts on bank-executive “clawback” legislation and with Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois on legislation to promote competition in the credit-card industry.
"I look at Lina Khan as one of the few people in the Biden administration that I think is doing a pretty good job,” Vance said"
“CEOs are shocked as this is quite an odd choice to try to balance the ticket with [someone] so hostile to business,” Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, president of Yale University’s Chief Executive Leadership Institute, was quoted as having told Semafor Monday.
A private-equity investor reportedly told the Financial Times that, while Trump was preferable to Democratic President Joe Biden for “Wall Street as well as business broadly,” he had reservations about Vance.
Trump “needs to stick to a pro-business agenda and he’ll win,” the investor said. “We don’t need a Republican Bernie Sanders.”
He has a speech I just started watching where he explicitly separates what he wants from Conservatism from libertarianism. In otherwords, he wants the traditions and unity of Nation, without that pesky "people have rights" part. It's Americanism, minus the exceptionalism. America as a tribe, just like any other landmass with a flag. In otherwords, not America at all.
Once again I repeat Your Clear arguments are so balanced and scholarly I am truly beginning to Hope
that many reading this will indeed understand andaccept what you presenting. When two Unlike persons come together ( so unlikely) for a common cause "The Common Good" for The Greater Glory of The Divine - above and beyond human realms, there can be Miracles orJust One "Big Miracle 2024" ?
Thank you for an interesting and honest writing. I'm curious ... I find the photo of Anthony Blinken being sworn in by Kamala Harris a bit baffling. What on earth is he putting his hand on to swear an oath? His notebook?
We completely agree about JD Vance.
Still: although you are a wise and brave woman in other contexts, such as in announcing your conversion to Christianity, I do not understand why you want the U.S. to keep stoking the war in Ukraine. This war benefits U.S. arms manufacturers and those funds who now own much of the land area and mineral wealth in Ukraine. It does not benefit the Ukrainians, and Vladimir Putin is no threat to NATO or Europe.
I cannot imagine that you want an all-out war between the U.S. and Russia, one that the U.S. would have a hard time winning with its woke, feminized military, but before the inevitable American defeat, Europe would be wiped out. Since I live there, I have some interest in not being incinerated.
What is it about Russia and Putin that makes otherwise sensible people so determined to spill other people's blood?
I just do not get it.
“Vladimir Putin is no threat to NATO or Europe” The British citizens poisoned as collateral damage during March 2018 Novichok attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter, the Swedes and the Finns who’ve just joined NATO as well as all those who paid more for gas bills as a result of Gasprom depleting stocks in Germany before Putin invaded Ukraine would disagree with this egregiously false statement.
"What is it" about Putin? It's that he & his BFFs in the PRC and Iran are at war with the liberal (small "l") international order - Namely, they seek to break and displace the entire Western structure of freedom that, since the end of WWII, has fostered more broad-based liberty and human flourishing than anything else in human history. (e.g.: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/column_article/putin-has-declared-war-on-the-west-its-time-to-take-the-fight-to-russia). That they (Russia, China, Iran et al) are doing this incrementally blinds many complacent Western elites into thinking this is just business as usual, all amenable to diplomacy and summits. Well, it's not - Ukraine & the Israel/Gaza border are just a foreshadowing of much worse to come - starting in the Taiwan Straits, and eventually closer to Western capitals.
Thank you for the excellent analysis! I am here in Grand Rapids, waiting for Trump/Vance to appear on TV at 5 pm EDT in a rally. We love them here and are touched that we are the first after the Convention. Pres. Trump visited us last in 2015 and what an exciting time that was! I read Hillbilly Elegy quite a while ago. I am now listening to it on Audible and it has reinforced my view that J.D. Vance possesses a first rate intellect, a strong Christian faith and solid judgment.
100% - Another home run essay! And BTW as regards China: It also was Trump, not Biden, whose DOJ went after the PRC’s massive intellectual property theft operation - the “Thousand Talents Program” et al., estimated by the Congressional Research Service to be stealing $300 billion per year from US industry. ( know - I was there in DOJ). Team Biden shut down the program, falsely claiming it was “racially profiling” Chinese researchers at US universities. No, it was investigatively pursuing the biggest global theft ring in human history. Yet again, the Ds used DEI falsehoods to imperil America. See: https://www.politico.com/news/2022/02/23/doj-shuts-down-china-focused-anti-espionage-program-00011065
“It can be difficult for the adult convert not to compromise on the tenets of his new faith by holding onto secular platitudes and liberal pieties. Vance’s pro-life stance, which seems considerably stronger than that of Trump himself, reflects his genuine belief in the sanctity of life. By contrast, Harris, who is a Baptist, has insisted without justification that “to support a woman’s ability – not her government, but her – to make that decision [to have an abortion] does not require anyone to abandon their faith or their beliefs.”
So what exactly are your views on abortion these days, Ayaan? I always used to enjoy your work for your original and insightful, centre-right perspective and your support for the emancipation of women, no doubt informed by your own experiences growing up under a repressive regime, but you seem to be moving ever further to the Trumpian right.
Ostensibly Vance is a very interesting candidate. It does give me pause that you say he’s been “influenced” by Curtis Yarvis, an actual monarchist. I’ve watched 2 interviews with Yarvis and I was not impressed. He struck me as deranged, to be honest. I’d like to hear more about what you mean that Vance has been influenced by him.
My sense is that JD’s views are evolving and will continue to evolve. So I’m a bit nervous about that evolution, but I’ll take my chances vs Kamala, who has become a metaphor for incompetence.
We in the rest of the world would like to see the US kept out of forever unwinnable wars. A peace agreement would be the best thing in Ukraine.
As for American global commitments, sorry, but there is no way we can defend Taiwan without massive loss of American lives. China is a near peer militarily, very motivated and with no DEI handicaps. Taiwan is 90 miles from China’s coast, and some 3m Taiwanese residents are in favor of unification. We need to sit this one out.
Once again, there is nothing substantive to disagree with in Ayaan’s highly intelligent and nuanced analysis. The biggest upsurge of hope emerging from this last tumultuous week is Trump’s manifest resilience and toughness and JD’s superior brain power/eloquence and decent, even “virtuous” character. There is a future there! Ben Shapiro, who is always sharp on what can work in terms of ‘conservative’ (Milton Friedman/free-market style) economics, questions whether JD’s ideas about bringing manufacturing jobs back to the ‘rust belt’ are realistic when placed against the countervailing pressures of globalization. But it is those hard-working people who have been most ignored and demoralized that JD is trying to lift up and that are behind much of the new GOP’s resurgence. JD is a smart guy; let’s see what he can do. Maybe he can find a way that will open up new paths for those willing to work, regardless of their ‘intersectional’ identity markers. Love his connection to Girard and contemporary Catholic philosophers. In any event, in this current fraught moment, Ayaan’s words and thoughts get us to focus on what is most important — those inflection points in public policy that will define our future.
"But it is the latter’s interests he now champions: the industrious factory-workers whose jobs were exported to China, and whose sons and brothers were killed, wounded or traumatized in “global war on terror” after 2001".
I absolutely hate the constant equivication of trade and jobs, with war and Bombs. Leaving aside the actual enemy states, which China may be, "globalization" has dramatically helped the poor and not hurt them. Vance at times acknowledges this, but then sidesteps it by minimizing economic growth; what's more important is some hazy notion of socialism directed to aid the poor by building them factories, so they can find meaning - given to them by the State. That is F-ing scary. If we want the masses to find meaning, not the 1776 meaning of independent free people with rights pursuing happiness, but in the Glorious pursuit of National Honor - watch the Hell out. Because historically that is ruin, tyranny, and destruction.
Yes, wars to promote Democratic institutions in the Middle East are bad. But the deaths and maiming of our soldiers for useless and even self defeating goals are absolutely not the same as people losing jobs to technology; war is a lose-lose proposition. No one gains in death and destruction, the person who fights off a mugger or terrorist does not *gain* anything, they merely keep what they have already earned (including their own life).
In free trade we *all* ultimately gain. We are richer now than ever, including in the back country and urban poor neighborhoods - every one of which has cellphones, internet, food - there are no neighborhoods in America where you have starvation and famine.
So this is really fundamentally a question of how you find meaning in life, rather than an economic one. If the answer is that each individual is their own end, pursue their own life and happiness consistent with reason and rights, we will have a free nation. If the answer is a State driven Nationalism, or Vance's National Conservatism, we will not remain a free country for long.
What struck me the most was the interest and then insistence JD felt to go home. So in his comeuppance he would be representing his roots. That’s American - to want to represent your country and especially your hometown in a good vein. To defend her.
And his wife just wanting him to be a good person.
“Good thoughts, good words, good deeds.” - Freddie Mercury’s mom and dad in Bohemian Rhapsody 🙏❤️🇺🇸
Vance is totally enamored with big government, the last thing this country needs. Below are a few excerpts from comments in the press:
“Washington’s top business lobbyists are leery of Vance’s support of corporate regulation and his willingness to consider corporate tax hikes,” wrote Greg Valliere, chief U.S. policy strategist at AGF Investments, in a Monday note to clients.
Vance has bucked Republican orthodoxy by declaring his willingness to raise taxes on corporations, his support for the Biden administration’s antitrust enforcers like FTC chair Lina Khan and his embrace of tariffs as a tool for protecting U.S. manufacturing jobs.
Vance has pushed for other policies that have long been associated with the Democratic Party, including his work alongside Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts on bank-executive “clawback” legislation and with Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois on legislation to promote competition in the credit-card industry.
"I look at Lina Khan as one of the few people in the Biden administration that I think is doing a pretty good job,” Vance said"
“CEOs are shocked as this is quite an odd choice to try to balance the ticket with [someone] so hostile to business,” Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, president of Yale University’s Chief Executive Leadership Institute, was quoted as having told Semafor Monday.
A private-equity investor reportedly told the Financial Times that, while Trump was preferable to Democratic President Joe Biden for “Wall Street as well as business broadly,” he had reservations about Vance.
Trump “needs to stick to a pro-business agenda and he’ll win,” the investor said. “We don’t need a Republican Bernie Sanders.”
He has a speech I just started watching where he explicitly separates what he wants from Conservatism from libertarianism. In otherwords, he wants the traditions and unity of Nation, without that pesky "people have rights" part. It's Americanism, minus the exceptionalism. America as a tribe, just like any other landmass with a flag. In otherwords, not America at all.
Once again I repeat Your Clear arguments are so balanced and scholarly I am truly beginning to Hope
that many reading this will indeed understand andaccept what you presenting. When two Unlike persons come together ( so unlikely) for a common cause "The Common Good" for The Greater Glory of The Divine - above and beyond human realms, there can be Miracles orJust One "Big Miracle 2024" ?
Thank you for an interesting and honest writing. I'm curious ... I find the photo of Anthony Blinken being sworn in by Kamala Harris a bit baffling. What on earth is he putting his hand on to swear an oath? His notebook?
Great article by Ayaan HirsiAli (as usual).
Vance is obviously in sync with the rational 60% of voters in the middle.
He and Trump should waste no time pandering to the mainstream media, or to the extreme Left or Right of both parties.
Also just shared Ayaan's article in X.
Thank-you, Ms Ali, and it was a pleasure to hear your thoughts in person Friday evening