| ◼ Thomas Jefferson High School in Fairfax County, Va., has for years been America’s best science, technology, engineering, and math school—so successful that Chinese Communist Party–linked entities bought the curriculum and cloned the public school at least 20 times across China as part of a state-sponsored program called “Thomas Schools.” In the last decade, three Chinese institutions have given $3.6 million to a nonprofit affiliated with the school in exchange for its curriculum, floor plans, and intellectual property. Parental-advocacy group Parents Defending Education claimed this month that school administrators, via the affiliated nonprofit, falsely earmarked the $3.6 million as “charitable donations,” when the cash payments actually gave Chinese delegations unfettered access to TJ. After National Review reported on the claim, a spokesman for Governor Youngkin vowed that the state’s department of education would “get to the bottom” of the CCP’s “deeply disturbing efforts to infiltrate educational institutions in the United States.” Virginia’s attorney general has placed the case under review. The report comes after a recent investigation by the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party revealed that partnerships between U.S. universities and Chinese schools have helped China develop more-advanced equipment and technology for the People’s Liberation Army. Evidently China is working on even earlier parts of the pipeline.
◼ The Portland Press Herald released a searching report on Maine’s mental-health laws, which, had they been applied, might have prevented the October 2023 mass shooting in Lewiston by 40-year-old Robert Card. Card killed 18 people and shot another 13 that day. To the surprise of his acquaintances, he had been released from a New York psychiatric hospital in August. He had been acting strangely for months, believing that more and more people were out to get him. Medical staff diagnosed psychosis. He had a growing “hit list.” But after he made promises to take his meds and attend follow-ups, he walked out. Eighty-three days later, the massacre. Maine has a law to compel people like Card to comply with outpatient treatment or face involuntary commitment. But law-enforcement officials in the state hardly knew such a law existed, and the legislature has done little to fund programs that would make the law easier to use. What lies at the bottom of the Card case are a thicket of regulations, precedents, and prejudices that bias law enforcement and health-care workers toward releasing obviously psychotic patients into their own care. Those who might do so are discouraged from intervening decisively even in the presence of threats and are given a clear go-ahead only when psychotic patients do hurt someone. Not just safety but common decency and justice require that those suffering dangerous psychosis be put into the care of those trained to deal with them.
◼ Volodymyr Zelensky has spent October presenting a so-called Plan for Victory to the leaders of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the United States, and a gathering of NATO defense ministers in Brussels. Zelensky should be credited for his use of the word “victory”—a word infrequently heard from the mouths of Western statesmen since 1945—instead of mealy-mouthed euphemisms for “not winning,” such as the need for a “cease-fire” or a “peace process.” Ukrainians intend to defeat the Russian invasion of their country. They intend to win. But can they under Zelensky’s plan? Zelensky asks for a formal invitation to join NATO, increased military and economic aid, and the lifting of restrictions on the use of Western-provided munitions to attack targets inside the Russian Federation. Notably, Ukraine’s president once again categorically rejected trading away Ukraine’s territory or sovereignty for peace. In truth, there’s not much in Zelensky’s plan that he hasn’t already asked for piecemeal in other formats. Ukrainians deserve American sympathy and, yes, help in the battle to keep their country free. But they should husband their resources and manpower by moving to an operationally defensive strategy, one that concentrates on training their reserve forces and bleeding the Kremlin’s armies instead of trying to repeat 2023’s failed counteroffensive. No matter what aid the U.S. and its European allies can give Ukraine, all should understand that there will be no quick end to this war. Victory, if it comes, will come with much patience and at a greater cost.
◼ Alexei Navalny was the foremost opposition leader in Russia, which, of course, made him a political prisoner. He died—was finished off—on February 16, 2024. He was 47. His last prison was one of the harshest in Russia, up in the Arctic Circle, known as “Polar Wolf.” In various prisons, Navalny managed to keep diaries, which his wife edited into a book that has now been published. In one passage, Navalny speaks of Russia’s rulers and how to combat them: “We must do what they fear—tell the truth, spread the truth. This is the most powerful weapon against this regime of liars, thieves, and hypocrites. Everyone has this weapon. So make use of it.”
◼ That Britain’s University of Nottingham has attached a trigger warning to The Canterbury Tales is yet another reminder that peak woke has yet to be reached. True, Chaucer himself, at the conclusion of the Tales, wrote—we think; authorship is disputed—a “retraction” of some of his racier works, in which he asked his readers to “preye . . . that Crist have Mercy” on him and forgive him for some of his work dedicated to “Worldly vanitees.” He stood by duller-sounding works, such as his “bookes of legendes of seintes, and omelies and moralite and devocioun.” Nottingham’s note sounded the alarm about descriptions of “violence and mental illness” and “expressions of Christian faith”—“expressions” that even the most lightly educated student must already have been braced to expect in writings from the Middle Ages. Taboos change but perhaps grow no less strict. |
