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Fred Bauer Profile picture
Fred Bauer
@fredbauerblog
Writing a book on reimagining freedom. @NRO, @CityJournal, @UnHerd, @TheAtlantic, etc. | @CenterClipAudio | fredbauerblog at gmail dot com
Nov 16 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I see this fact tossed around a lot--that much of Western Europe does not put fluoride in its public drinking water.

That's true but incomplete. In many European countries, fluoride is added to salt, so Europeans are still ingesting fluoride supplements, just in a different way. Image In Germany, about 70% of the salt is fluoride-supplemented. It's even higher in Switzerland. tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.108…
May 16 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
For @CityJournal, I dig into some of the challenges facing the Biden campaign.

Perhaps chief among them is the fact that Biden ran as the candidate for restoring "normalcy," but many Americans have seen a broader political unraveling during his presidency.

A 🧵..... The intersection of the five I's has helped destabilize Biden's presidency: international instability, immigration, inflation, and identity.
Dec 29, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
This decision reveals the constitutional fractures risked by a "self-executing 14th Amendment" strategy of ballot disqualification.

A quick 🧵 Bellows argues that she is not bound by usual rules of due process and can pretty much make up criteria for for an "insurrection" as she goes along.

The "self-executing 14A" strategy would mean a free-for-all of electoral officials creating their own 14A tests.
Dec 20, 2023 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
Back in January 2021, I said that, if it were successful, Trump's strategy to overturn the 2020 election would have been a constitutional Rubicon.

In 2023, Trump's opponents have their own Rubicon moment: Using the 14th Amendment to start throwing candidates off the ballot. There's a red flag in this opinion, when the narrow majority says it will not even try to offer a "single, all-encompassing definition" of an "insurrection."
Sep 10, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
This kind of encapsulates the serious civic problems with the 14th Amendment strategy.

Going 14A is a radical break with tradition of open elections--political nitroglycerin.

Rather than being measured in talking about it, CO SoS slips into standard partisan massaging. Big question proponents of 14A strategy have to reckon with: How does that simply not become a vehicle for partisan retribution and the breakdown of the electoral process?
Sep 28, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
One of the things used to hype Trump's supposed absolute domination of the GOP is that he hasn't "just gone away" after leaving office. But most presidents of past 30 years have continued to try to influence US politics (often w/family members) in a major way. Bush 41: Two years after he lost reelection, his sons ran for governor in 2 of the biggest US states. GWB would later become US president.
Clinton: Wife became US senator once he left office and would later run for president in 2008 and 2016 (being D nominee in 2016).
Sep 18, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Via @NRO: The Massachusetts legislature considers a number of bills to institute a “critical approach and pedagogy” for a curriculum of ethnic studies, “decolonization,” and “social justice” instruction. nationalreview.com/2021/09/massac… These bills indicate both the ideological ambition and the power-dynamics of effort to instill "wokeness" in public education. Image
Jul 6, 2021 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
Here are 29 pages promulgated by the state of Oregon laying out standards for "social sciences integrated with ethnic studies." Whether you like it or not, states already have granular requirements for education. oregon.gov/ode/educator-r… Here's one of the standards for kindergarten:
Apr 18, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Via @sullydish. A case could be made that the existential factional conflict that undermines the "liberal order" has in fact accelerated since 2020. andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-american… It's not surprising that hyper-polarization should cloak itself in the language of righteous enmity ("Enemy of the people!....Enemy of democracy!"). But it is nevertheless corrosive.
Apr 16, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
In June 2020, Klain, who is now Biden's chief of staff, was saying that 20K COVID cases a day was a sign of Trump's "failed, feckless response."

Almost 3 months into Biden's term, US is averaging about 70K cases/day. About 200 million vaccination shots have been delivered, so the pool of people who can even get COVID is radically shrinking. Yet US still has tens of 1000s of new infections. If Biden can't suppress COVID even with a vaccine, how was Trump supposed to without one?
Jan 10, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
From a certain member of Congress in the summer of 2020: If you're going to "protest safely," be sure that you wear nondescript clothing so that you can't be identified and bring along some heat-resistant gloves. instagram.com/p/CA0jzCdg_vR/… June 1, 2020: "Since the beginning of this country, riots and violent rhetoric have been markers of patriotism." theatlantic.com/culture/archiv…
Jan 10, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
This is an interesting window into narrative formation.

As videos circulate of Capitol Police officers putting their bodies on the line and being overwhelmed by a violent mob, the former president links to a piece calling their response "tepid." A policeman literally died in defense of the Capitol.
Jan 9, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
One path that does not seem promising for the preservation of "liberal democracy": Increasing agitation for popular violence, sustained efforts at constitutional delegitimization from major stakeholders, roving paranoia, calls for economic/political unpersoning, etc. Whatever it public-health benefits, sustained social distancing is also extremely destructive to political stability.

American elites have all too often sought to channel this instability into factional violence (from May 2020 onward). It's a catastrophic failure of leadership.
Dec 3, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Congressional Research Service report on removing per-country caps on green cards (which unanimously passed the Senate yesterday) reveals how transformative this proposal would be. It basically shuts down high-skilled immigration from most of the world. cis.org/sites/default/… The EB1 visa is for applicants with "extraordinary" abilities in the sciences, research, the arts, business, etc. Currently (outside of India and China), there's only a 1-year wait for this visa. Under HR1044, that will become a 7-year wait.
Apr 7, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
One note of caution about extrapolating too much from this statistic (and related studies): The U.S. economy is balanced very differently compared to 1918--much more dependent on service sector now. Also, many city "lockdowns" in 1918 were less stringent than today. LA as cited as an example of a city that had an effective lockdown to counter the 1918 flu. But, according to the Influenza Encyclopedia, the lockdown was pretty targeted--schools, poolhalls, theaters, etc. Efforts to implement broader lockdowns failed. influenzaarchive.org/cities/city-lo…
May 4, 2019 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
This is the pluralist in me, but here's an issue that arises if major social-media platforms want to start policing the accounts of "dangerous extremists" with more granularity: Who determines what counts as a dangerous or extremist ideology? If you look at the 20th century, one of the ideologies with the most corpses to its discredit was communism. So do postmodern socialists count as dangerous extremists?
Oct 28, 2018 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
As outsider politicians continue to gain power, it's worth remembering one of the reasons why they've had such an opportunity: The political center accepted as conventional wisdom ideas that, in reality, are quite extreme. Maastricht and other treaties that centralized power in Europe were radical in their ambition. Placing so many countries (with so many competing imperatives) under a single currency is almost a recipe for political tensions.
Oct 9, 2018 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
The claim that "attending a White House event is unusual for new justices" (also contained in the story) doesn't seem to be true. See next tweets in this thread for evidence. 1/ 2. Here's Clarence Thomas being sworn in at White House... c-span.org/video/?22161-1…
Jul 20, 2018 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
So many of the forces who have caused such elite lamentation have been given an opening by migration politics. Elite moderation on immigration would seem a plausible way of lessening populist angst. Merkel's extremist refugee policy probably pushed Brexit over the top, gave life to the AfD, and has empowered populists across the continent.
Oct 24, 2017 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Reminder: Jeff Flake's reelection problems were not just about his troubles inside the GOP. His general-elect polling has been terrible. 1/ Recent public polls have shown him at 40% or under in the general. That's not a good position for an incumbent. 2/