Is this Nikki Haley’s moment? As she heads toward a fourth Republican primary debate on Dec. 6, the former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador has risen in the polls. According to FiveThirtyEight’s Nov. 19 aggregate, her support stands at 9.5%, up from 7.2% a month earlier. That’s behind Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ 14.1%, itself up slightly from the 13.4% of Oct. 19. However, both lag far behind former President Donald Trump’s current 59.2% level of support.
Essentially, Haley and DeSantis are fighting for bragging rights for who could take a run at defeating Trump. For that effort, California’s March 5 Republican primary could prove crucial.
Which is why Haley deserves increased scrutiny.
On the positive side, Haley generally supports free markets, low taxes and regulatory reform. On the debate stage she has rightly called out both parties for spending widely once they get into power. The national debt skyrocketed under President Trump, for example, even before the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, that’s about where Haley stops making sense.
She has taken some disturbing stances, especially on censoring and controlling social media.
Last week Haley called for ending anonymous social media accounts. “It is a national security threat,” she said on Fox News Nov. 14. “It gets rid of the Russian bots, the Iranian bots and the Chinese bots. And then, you’re going to get some civility, when people know their name is next to what they say.”
Both DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur running in fourth place in the GOP contest, rightly pointed to the Federalist Papers in response to Haley’s proposal. Those founding documents were written by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison. Without their anonymity, the Constitution might never have passed.
This prompted Haley to backtrack, clarifying the following day on CNBC that “I don’t mind anonymous American people having free speech — what I don’t like is anonymous Russians and Chinese and Iranians having free speech. Russia, Iran and China, North Korea too, know that the cheapest form of warfare is to spread misinformation.”
The problems are the same. Haley wants to use the force of government to somehow police the internet to unmask foreigners and stop them from using the internet to say things. In the best light, this reflects an out-of-touch understanding of how the internet works, and at worse it reveals an authoritarian impulse without any regard for the unintended consequences of such sweeping meddling in the internet.
Haley also has been the most hawkish of this year’s crop of GOP hopefuls, strongly backing President Biden’s policies on the Russia-Ukraine war, vowing to send special forces into Mexico to fight the cartels and long pushing for greater confrontation with Iran. That hawkishness prompted Ramaswamy to brand her in the third debate as “Dick Cheney in three-inch heels.”
This editorial board has long been critical of America’s perpetual involvement in wars on the other side of the planet. The last thing America needs is another hawk in the White House. We have expended far too much blood and treasure for little-to-no perceptible benefit to the American people.
For these reasons, and more, we are skeptical, to say the least, of the case for Nikki Haley.
