Tragedy over the Potomac

◼ A fatal commercial plane crash happened in the United States for the first time in nearly 16 years. At Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, an American Airlines CRJ700 in the process of landing collided with a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter. All 64 people on the plane died, as did all three soldiers on the helicopter. In an average year in this country, 800 million passengers are flown on more than 16 million flights. Since the last fatal incident—back in 2009—more than 10 billion people have completed flights. What happened near Washington, D.C., was a terrible tragedy. But it was also an aberration. Naturally, this did not stop political partisans. Immediately after the news broke, a handful of journalists attempted to link the crash to the federal hiring freeze that President Trump had announced eight days earlier. This was ridiculous. The following day, President Trump suggested that, instead, the problem had been the DEI programs instituted by Presidents Obama and Biden. This was wholly unsubstantiated. It would, of course, be a good idea to ensure that air traffic controllers are hired on solely meritocratic grounds, but so far there is no evidence linking existing policy to this disaster. Sometimes, even within the safest systems, awful things happen. When they do, our eyes are better focused skyward than at one another’s throats.

◼ The Senate has many reasons to reject Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health and human services. His track record shows him to be an authoritarian foe of free speech on climate, an advocate of socialized medicine, an enemy of energy development, an unscrupulous ally of the plaintiffs’ trial bar, an intemperate critic of vaccines, a legal challenger to prior Trump administration health policies, an all-purpose conspiracy theorist in areas ranging from elections to assassinations, and an inveterate liar and scoundrel. Pro-lifers should be especially wary of a man who publicly advocated legislation to codify Roe v. Wade in 2023 and affirmed in 2024 that he supported legal abortion “even if it’s full term.” The Biden-Harris HHS was determined to bend every lever of power to promote and subsidize abortion. That must change. Not only must HHS carry out Trump’s salutary executive order enforcing the Hyde amendment. It must strengthen conscience protections for medical workers and hospitals opposed to abortion. It must reverse the energetic promotion of the abortion pill by the Food and Drug Administration. It must limit medical and scientific research on human embryos and fetuses. HHS has its hand in so many different areas of medicine that it will require both an HHS secretary and senior staff devoted to the pro-life cause to drain that swamp. Who expects RFK to take the lead on this?

◼ Several Senate Republicans seemed skeptical during the confirmation hearings for former Democratic representative Tulsi Gabbard, nominated to serve as director of national intelligence. They were unsatisfied with her refusal to concede that Edward Snowden was a “traitor.” They were perplexed by her inexplicable unfamiliarity with the latest intelligence linking “Havana syndrome” to the activities of hostile foreign powers. Indeed, Gabbard confirmed her detractors’ suspicions when she said she had rejected the intelligence indicating that Assad had gassed his own people, out of “fear” that it would be “used as a pretext” to justify regime change. In other words, she didn’t believe the intelligence because it was inconvenient. That is precisely why she should not have the power to curate the intelligence to which the president is privy every morning.

◼ DeepSeek, a Chinese AI firm, has developed a competitive large language model (LLM), supposedly for a fraction of the cost of development in the U.S.: $5.6 million as opposed to between $100 million and $1 billion. Moreover, DeepSeek supposedly did so with far fewer (and less advanced) chips than used in American AI ventures. An LLM “learns” how to make itself useful (or, pessimists warn, engineer humanity’s extinction) by analyzing enormous amounts of data, a process believed to require massive, energy-intensive computing power. DeepSeek has shown that’s not necessarily so, even if its bills and, almost certainly, reliance on American technology were much higher than headlines suggest. DeepSeek’s model is now out in the wild, and a canny open-source approach ensures that it will multiply—and evolve. Like warfare after the tanks broke through at Cambrai, AI’s competitive landscape has been transformed. The stormy stock market reaction, a reasonable reaction to the discovery that America’s AI lead had been overstated, reflects uncertainty over what comes next. Our guess: The race is on to identify AI’s killer apps. The U.S. can prevail, but it should retain light-touch regulation—except where dealings with China are concerned.

◼ In a first-day memorandum, President Trump ordered agency heads to make federal workers return to their offices. The headquarters of most federal departments have occupancy below 25 percent, and some are in single digits. Government union contracts have sought to enshrine working from home as a right, especially since Covid. To any workers who do not want to come to the office, the Office of Personnel Management has subsequently made an offer: Resign by February 6 and receive full pay and benefits through September 30. Workers who accept the offer do not have to work at all in the meantime. As anyone who has lost his job knows, this is an extremely generous offer that even well-paid workers in the private sector do not normally receive. Nobody is saying these people can’t work from home, and if they really want to keep doing so, they will have eight months with full pay and benefits to find a new job that allows it, preferably not on the taxpayer’s dime.

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◼ One of the best among President Trump’s early executive orders is his rescission of President Biden’s electric vehicle mandate, the ultimate purpose of which was to reorient the automobile industry so as to make the production of nonelectric cars uneconomical. Because this was politically unpopular—by the end of her run, Kamala Harris had disavowed it—the Biden administration came to downplay its effects over time. But those effects remained clear. In the short term, the edict required the supermajority of Americans who have no interest in electric cars to subsidize the 7 or so percent of Americans who do. In the long term, the edict aimed to make electric cars the only option for everyone. By reversing it, President Trump has ended many of those subsidies, and, more important, he has removed the perverse incentives that had manufacturers ignoring the desires of their consumers in favor of an environmental vanity project directed from Washington, D.C. “Common sense” is an overused term in politics, but here it quite clearly applies.

◼ The Central Intelligence Agency, now under the direction of John Ratcliffe, declared that its analysts “now favor the lab theory” for the origin of Covid-19, “based in part on a closer look at the conditions in the high security labs in Wuhan province before the pandemic outbreak.” By April 2020, intrepid sleuths outside the intelligence community were pointing to the unlikely coincidence of SARS-CoV-2, the contagious virus that caused Covid-19, emerging in a location so close to a lab conducting what was later revealed to be gain-of-function research on coronaviruses found in horseshoe bats. The inconclusive answer of the U.S. intelligence community to President Biden’s inquiry in August 2021 never quite added up; the authors of the eventually declassified 18-page report seemed to bend over backwards to downplay the possibility of a lab leak. (You would think the whole point of having a multibillion-dollar intelligence apparatus would be to provide policy-makers and the public with clearer answers about life-and-death issues involving the secretive actions of hostile foreign countries.) After that report, the interest of the U.S. government in determining the origin of a pandemic that killed, at minimum, 7 million people around the globe seemed to dwindle, although the FBI and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory also offered brief statements that they concluded that a lab leak was the more likely explanation. Judging from how the CIA’s public assessment changed almost immediately after Trump took office, we now have good reason to fear that assessments of the intelligence community are highly dependent on who’s sitting in the director’s chair and what the man in the Oval Office wants to hear.

◼ At the height of MLB’s steroids era, when juiced sluggers broke home run records by breaking the league’s rule against the use of performance-enhancing drugs, Ichiro Suzuki began his quiet work of reviving for American fans the faded art of hitting singles. “If I’m allowed to hit .220, I could probably hit 40” home runs, he said, “but nobody wants that.” A superstar and seasoned veteran of Nippon Professional Baseball, he crossed the Pacific to make his MLB debut with the Seattle Mariners in 2001. His 4,367 base hits in 28 seasons, divided between NPB and MLB, are unmatched in the history of professional baseball. A hitter’s hitter, à la Ted Williams and Tony Gwynn, he was an artist at the plate and a disciplined athlete. In his first year of eligibility for the Hall of Fame, Suzuki has become the first Japanese player to be voted in, unanimously except for one holdout. “I would like to invite him over to my house,” Suzuki said. “We’ll have a drink together, and we’ll have a good chat.” Cooperstown has enshrined his example of playing the long game by hitting the short ball, so to speak, in a long-ball era. Bravo.

◼ Stephan Thernstrom was an eminent historian of the United States. He concentrated on social and ethnic history. He was born in Port Huron, Mich., in 1934 and grew up in Battle Creek. He went to Northwestern University and then to Harvard, where he worked under Oscar Handlin. At Harvard, he met Abigail Mann. They married two months later. His dissertation was about social mobility in 19th-century Newburyport, Mass. It became the book Poverty and Progress, which won the Bancroft Prize. About ten years later, he wrote The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880–1970. He spent most of his career teaching at Harvard. Originally on the left, he moved right. Or did others, particularly in his environment, move further left? He and Abby always retained essential beliefs about democracy, equality, and Americanism. Steve was badgered by politically correct students at Harvard and did not receive the support from the university he deserved. In 1997, he and Abby co-authored America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible. Six years later, they co-authored another book: No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning. Both Thernstroms were assets to the nation they studied, criticized, honored, and exemplified. She died in 2020 at 83; he has now died at 90. R.I.P.