The Week

• Whoever said there’s no free lunch never went to a San Francisco Walgreens.

• The Supreme Court heard arguments on December 1 in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, to decide the fate of Mississippi’s ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy and, perhaps, the fate of Roe v. Wade. A decision is unlikely before the end of June. Veterans of Supreme Court cases past know that it is risky to read the tea leaves from questions at argument, but it is hard to see how it could have gone much better for pro-lifers. Nobody seriously defended Roe as a correct reading of the Constitution; its defenders circled the wagons around the institutional importance of precedent. The lawyers for the abortion clinic and for the Biden administration insisted on an all-or-nothing outcome, giving the Court no alternative path to uphold the Mississippi law without overruling Roe. That is a risky strategy when the likeliest way to disappoint pro-lifers is the Court’s incrementalists’ preferring to bend rather than break Roe, but it reflects the calcified, uncompromising extremism of the pro-choice movement. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, regarded as the potential swing vote, stressed how often the Court has jettisoned precedents, and returned again and again to the theme that getting the Court out of abortion is the neutral, small-d democratic middle ground. Chief Justice John Roberts correctly compared Roe to the abortion regimes of China and North Korea. A majority of the Court seems to understand that Roe is bad law. What remains to be seen is whether they have the courage to act on that.

• A jury properly acquitted Kyle Rittenhouse, finding that he acted in self-defense in shooting three men, two of them fatally, in Kenosha, Wis., in August 2020. This case should never have been brought. Rittenhouse, then 17, was on the streets of Kenosha, where he worked and his father lived, on the third night of riots following the police shooting of Jacob Blake. He carried a rifle but did nothing to provoke confrontation. He was attacked in sequence by three men; the second clubbed him over the head with a skateboard, and the third admitted on the stand that he pointed a gun at Rittenhouse. Prosecutors leaned heavily on a dubious gun charge; when the judge dismissed it, they tried to criminalize every armed American’s right to self-defense. The trial was conducted in a shameful circus atmosphere, in which national journalists baselessly called Rittenhouse a “white supremacist” (never mind that all three of the men he shot were white) and demonized the trial judge (a pro-defendant Democrat), the prosecutor pointed a rifle at the jury with his finger on the trigger, and MSNBC had to be kicked out of the courtroom for apparently sending a stringer to stalk the bus carrying the jurors. Especially blameworthy were Wisconsin governor Tony Evers (who fanned the flames rather than restore order in Kenosha) and President Biden (who refused to walk back campaign-season smears of Rittenhouse, but did walk back his initial call to respect the jury’s verdict). Criminal cases are often messy. Trials regularly reveal that the people involved are more complex than efforts to turn them into heroes, villains, or stand-ins for their entire race. It is to the jury’s credit that they did not crack under the pressure.

• Darrell Brooks Jr. stands accused of killing six people and injuring dozens of others by racing his SUV through a crowd of people gathered for a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wis. He should not have been at liberty and thus in a position to commit so depraved an act. A career criminal with a list of offenses stretching back two decades, Brooks was on bail from two separate Milwaukee felony allegations. Bail had been set low thanks to progressive prosecutors. The cost of reforming the justice system as they want continues to soar.

• A Georgia jury justly convicted three men of murdering Ahmaud Arbery. The 25-year-old black man had been seen several times, including on surveillance video, at a residential construction site where there had been property theft. But he was far from the only trespasser, and there was no evidence he’d actually stolen anything. Consequently, the three neighborhood men who pursued him lacked probable cause to make a citizen’s arrest. Their pursuit of, efforts to detain, and ultimate shooting of Arbery were thus crimes: assault, false imprisonment, and murder. The state prosecutor ably proved her case without mentioning the possibility of racism. If there had been compelling motive evidence along those lines, no competent prosecutor would have ignored it and the law would have permitted its admission. The Biden Justice Department nonetheless plans to proceed with a federal civil-rights indictment on the theory that Arbery was killed because of his race, a theory for which it offers no evidence. Justice has already been done here.

• In promoting his new book Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show, ABC reporter Jonathan Karl has released an interview he taped with Trump last March in which the two discussed the January 6 riot. Mike Pence, but not only Pence, will find interesting Trump’s comments on the rioters’ threats to hang him. Karl: “Were you worried about [Pence] during that siege? Were you worried about his safety?” Trump: “No, I thought he was well-protected . . .” Karl: “Because you heard those chants – that was terrible, I mean . . .” Trump: “. . . Well, the people were very angry.” Out of a consuming desire to win, and a pathological desire to avoid the humiliation of loss, outgoing President Trump inflamed supporters with lies about a stolen election and the lame-duck veep’s power to override it, then hid behind the anger he engendered. It’s a Trumpian royal flush. May the day come when it can be savored as a character study, without worrying about the character’s ongoing political relevance.

• Blake Masters, a protégé of tech billionaire Peter Thiel, is running for Senate in Arizona’s Republican primary. He is ruffling some of the right feathers. Masters has emphasized that it ought to be a goal of economic policy to make it possible to raise a family on one income. How to do that is of course no small question, but declaring the goal itself was enough to get the state’s Democrats to condemn him as a reactionary opposed to women’s employment. To his credit, he didn’t back down. To his discredit, he has also run ads saying that “Trump won in 2020,” a statement he won’t, because he can’t, back up with evidence. The attorney general of the state, conservative Mark Brnovich, has by contrast both acknowledged the truth and followed his duty under the election laws. Masters has interesting ideas, both good and bad, but a proven record of doing the right thing ought to count too.

• The Wyoming Republican Party declared Representative Liz Cheney, who represents the whole state in the House, persona non grata. Her sin: continuing to condemn Donald Trump’s lie that he won the 2020 election. Some of her critics believe the lie, and some are annoyed that she keeps talking about it. (As does Trump, still the most popular figure in the party.) Primary voters will soon enough pass judgment on whether Cheney’s priorities are theirs. In the meantime, the Wyoming party has defined what it believes its most important principle is. And it is not the right to life, the limitation of government, or the control of immigration – all issues on which Cheney is in the mainstream or even on the right side of her party – but a refusal to condemn Trump even at his most destructive.

• Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes, the longtime conservative journalists who founded the news site The Dispatch, quit Fox News. They say they had grown less and less comfortable with their affiliation, the final straw being Tucker Carlson’s lavishly promoted conspiracy theorizing about the January 6 Capitol riot. Whether it would have been better to stay at Fox and make the case for a conservatism grounded in reality is a reasonable question. Much of the criticism the duo have received since their announcement has, however, been carping: liberals asking why they didn’t repudiate Fox and conservatism a long time ago, Trump-friendlier conservatives accusing them of just seeking attention. Not many of the critics on the right have gone so far as to defend Carlson’s Patriot Purge, which is a small blessing of this episode.

• Even though Senator Elizabeth Warren (D.) placed third in the presidential primary of her own commonwealth of Massachusetts, the Biden administration has often seemed to be under her sway. In a rare rebuff, however, Biden chose to reappoint Jerome Powell as chairman of the Federal Reserve. Warren had sought a replacement who would be more enthusiastic about regulation, and others on the Left wanted the Fed to lead the fight against climate change. Just setting monetary policy, though, will be challenge enough for Powell, who is going to have to tighten money – shrinking the Fed’s balance sheet and raising interest rates – and do it both quickly enough to avoid a further rise in inflation and gradually enough not to cause a crash. He may soon wonder whether he should have let Warren win.

• Axios reported that five Democratic senators (Jon Tester, Mark Warner, Kyrsten Sinema, John Hickenlooper, and Mark Kelly) would not vote to confirm Saule Omarova, President Biden’s nominee for comptroller of the currency. With unified Republican opposition in a 50–50 Senate, one Democratic defection would sink her nomination. Good. Omarova believes the government should completely upend the financial sector. Born in the Kazakh SSR in 1966, she attended Moscow State University on a Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship. That’s not disqualifying in itself, but she has been less than forthcoming about her college activities and has made comments on Twitter rationalizing the Soviet Union. And it’s not just a bad tweet or college indiscretions. Omarova wrote a 71-page paper last year from her post as a law professor at Cornell in which she “offers a blueprint for a comprehensive restructuring of the central bank balance sheet as the basis for redesigning the core architecture of modern finance.” The paper is called “The People’s Ledger,” and it argues for the Federal Reserve’s taking over ordinary banking functions to “effectively ‘end banking,’ as we know it.” The Left wants to say that opposition to her nomination is based on her sex or ethnicity, but anyone who believes what she believes about banking is unfit to regulate the financial sector.

• Higher gasoline prices are making many middle-class Americans feel more irritable than usual. And so the president has ordered the biggest dump from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in American history. Apparently, Biden believes the “strategic” there is meant to refer to political strategy. In reality, the national petroleum reserve is there as a hedge against a genuine national emergency such as a war or a natural disaster that makes accessing oil in the usual way difficult. The only emergency here is a political crisis for Democrats, who have themselves to blame – it is Democrats who have declared war on critical petroleum infrastructure such as the Keystone XL pipeline and modern natural-gas production. And so we have the unseemly spectacle of President Biden in Glasgow lecturing the world about the pressing need to abandon petroleum and then lobbying OPEC to flood the world markets with cheap crude. The Democrats have come up with a new political law of thermodynamics: For every policy they have an equal and opposite one.

• Biden ran as the anti-Trump, but he is governing, on trade at least, as a Trump acolyte. Biden has doubled tariffs on imported Canadian lumber, adding thousands of dollars to the price of building a new house even as inflation is skyrocketing across the economy as a whole. The U.S. complaint is that Canada doesn’t make it expensive enough for timber producers to harvest trees on public land, and Washington has long insisted that the solution is to make Canadian wood more expensive rather than making U.S. wood more competitive. The U.S. case was rejected by the World Trade Organization years ago. So much for Biden’s return to international commitments. Biden also has maintained practically all of Trump’s China tariffs, which are in reality much less about changing Beijing’s behavior – which isn’t changing, you’ll notice – than about protecting politically connected industrial interests in the United States by imposing billions of dollars in unnecessary costs on consumers. Paying $1 million each to protect $40,000-a-year tire-factory jobs is bad policy, whoever the president insisting on it is.

• Student-loan forgiveness, an idea once confined to the far left of the Democratic Party, is now a pillar of the Democratic platform. Yet while Elizabeth Warren and other progressives pushing debt forgiveness hardly ever shy away from pointing the finger at the culprits of economic injustice, they are unusually demure when it comes to the so-called student-loan crisis. A recent report from Yale University indicates why: Yale now has the same number of non-teaching staff as it has undergraduate students. The growth of administrative staff is not limited to elite universities: U.S. higher-ed institutions spend more on non-teaching staff than their counterparts in every other OECD country. The financial burden of diversity officers, Title IX administrators, and sustainability initiatives falls on indebted students. But don’t expect Senator Warren to take a look at this root cause any time soon.

• A veto-proof majority of Democrats on the New York City Council, backed by incoming mayor Eric Adams, plan to allow over 800,000 holders of green cards and work permits to vote in municipal elections. Adding the votes of non-citizens dilutes the votes of citizens as well as the value of citizenship itself. For perspective, no candidate for mayor has received 800,000 votes since 1993. Even Bill de Blasio vetoed this plan previously because it violates the state constitution. No state permits non-citizens to vote; federal law makes it a crime in federal elections. Ballot initiatives against non-citizen voting passed by overwhelming popular majorities in 2020 in Alabama, Colorado, and Florida. San Francisco is presently the only major city to allow it, and its governance is not a model anyone should emulate. Non-citizen voting is the latest push by progressives – along with felon voting and mass amnesty – who fear that they cannot win elections conducted only among law-abiding American citizens.

• In late October, National Review published a feature about how the combination of organized crime and political fecklessness had made San Francisco and the Bay Area the national capital of retail theft, with tens of millions of dollars of merchandise being hijacked by criminal gangs looting stores ranging from CVS to Target. Since then, the San Francisco crime wave has spread across California, with dozens of robberies, some of them violent, from Santa Clara to Los Angeles. Looters ransacked everything from Home Depot to Louis Vuitton. Because California is still a national bellwether, that crime wave has now spread to other states, mostly to cities with incompetent and impotent Democrat-dominated governments, cities such as Chicago, which set a precedent for lawlessness with its indulgent response to the George Floyd riots. The situation in San Francisco was predictable: A ballot initiative made retail theft of less than $950 a misdemeanor, and the city’s left-wing district attorney – Chesa Boudin, a radical raised by Weather Underground terrorists – stated as a matter of policy that he would not prosecute shoplifting and other “quality of life” crimes. The effect on the quality of life in San Francisco was about what you’d expect. The effects in San Francisco and elsewhere will be felt less by Champagne radicals living in rich communities and more by poor and middle-class people who will be deprived of jobs and commercial services when businesses close up shop, as dozens already are doing in the Bay Area. Law and order are easy to take for granted – until you can’t take them for granted.

• In Washington, convicted male felons identifying as female have been imprisoned in the state’s only women-only prison. A former guard at the Seattle prison, Scott Fleming, told National Review that “the only requirement is that they must proclaim to identify as a woman.” Among the six men transferred was a serial killer of women who was also a convicted child rapist. Fleming recalls discovering the rapist naked in bed with his developmentally disabled female cellmate. In California, where trans-identifying prisoners have a legal right to be imprisoned among their preferred sex, the medical clinic at a woman’s prison responded by distributing birth control and advertising pregnancy services and abortion. The practice of locking up dangerous men with women is an outrage that no ideology, however fashionable, can justify.

• The national and international media ran to their battle stations at the first word of the new “Omicron” variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. While the variant is worth keeping an eye on, there’s a possibility that the first reports of the variant’s rapid spread in South Africa are less dire than the DEFCON 1–level tone of the media coverage. Angelique Coetzee, South Africa Medical Association chairwoman, told the BBC that the cases identified so far are not severe. And both the Mu and Lambda variants generated their share of ominous headlines before fizzling out. The threat may, however, require a modification of existing vaccines – and surely increases the urgency of improving both treatments and testing.

• In the United States, conservatives and progressives generally have very different views regarding climate change, but the recent U.N. climate confab in Glasgow should provide them with a single point of intense agreement: On this issue, as on so many others, the United Nations is an utterly unserious organization. COP26, as the climate conference was known, was a three-ring circus: one ring for official grandstanding by the likes of President Biden and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one ring for the festival of identity politics for knuckleheads who want to abolish capitalism and indigenous peoples who want to abolish Canada, and one ring for corporate rent-seeking and greenwashing. The action, of course, is backstage, where the real business is “climate finance,” i.e., rich countries negotiating how much they’ll have to pay the self-enriching elites of poor countries to pretend to adopt the Davos crowd’s climate agenda. If policymakers were truly in a panic over the prospect of climate change, they would be looking around desperately for some instrument other than the sclerotic and corrupt United Nations through which to implement policy.

• “The Communist Party is celebrating its 100th year. So is JP Morgan. And I’ll make you a bet we last longer,” CEO Jamie Dimon told an audience in Boston, repeating a joke he said he made on a recent trip to Hong Kong. After the comment became public, he expressed his regret for it. Dimon might joke behind closed doors as if he weren’t in the party leadership’s pocket, but he’s a party favorite, a well-deserved status that won his company the right to control its own securities business in China last August and a special exemption from stringent COVID restrictions on his short trip to Hong Kong last month. In an October interview in which he said that his company would strive to “break down systems that have propagated racism and widespread economic inequality,” he also declined to speak out against the Uyghur genocide, saying that it would be a mistake “to gratuitously make public statements.” Dimon’s reputation as a straight shooter is trading at a discount.

• After a “virtual meeting” between Biden and Xi Jinping, the two governments announced that each of the two sides will start issuing visas to the other’s journalists, following freezes on that practice. This is a concession by U.S. officials: “Journalists” from the People’s Republic are actually apparatchiks writing for state media outlets. As Biden rolls out the red carpet for CCP propagandists, U.S. outlets readmitted to China are almost certain to face undue restrictions on their work. Biden is content with deals that are equal only on paper. So is Beijing.

• There are signs that Russia is preparing a winter assault on parts of Ukraine that it left untouched when it annexed the Crimean peninsula and launched a hybrid-warfare campaign against the Eastern Donbas region. Any attack would likely come early next year, around January or February, according to U.S. and Ukrainian intelligence assessments, following a ramped-up political destabilization campaign inside Ukraine. In fact, Volodymyr Zelensky, the country’s president, recently claimed that Kremlin agents are working with a prominent oligarch to carry out a coup. There’s still time to force the Kremlin to back down and abandon this gambit, but only if the U.S. and its allies take steps to prove that a Russian invasion would be met with severe consequences. This ought to entail new sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline (sanctions the administration is actively lobbying against), a maximalist sanctions package targeting members of Putin’s inner circle, and the delivery of advanced air-defense systems to the Ukrainians. We have every incentive to work with them to try to deter what would be a naked and cynical act of aggression even by Vladimir Putin’s standards.

• The case of Peng Shuai should be a clarion call to the sports world to take a stand against the oppressive Chinese government. On November 2, the tennis star posted on Weibo (China’s equivalent of Twitter) claiming that she was coerced into sex by the Communist regime’s former vice premier, Zhang Gaoli. The post disappeared within a half hour, and she was not seen publicly for weeks. In a pleasant surprise given the example of other professional sports leagues, Steve Simon, the leader of the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA), has been stalwart. Simon said he was willing to lose hundreds of millions of dollars of investments that had been made to build up tennis in China to make sure Peng is safe and that her allegations are properly investigated. Though she has since appeared in various videos and photos released through Chinese state-run media, and the corrupt International Olympic Committee claims to have had contact with her, none of this alleviates the concerns about her ability to speak freely. This brings us to the question of China’s hosting of the Winter Olympics. While we have long opposed Beijing as the host city and a general boycott is our preference, we understand it is a fraught issue given what it would mean for the athletes. But President Biden should at the very least announce a diplomatic boycott, which he so far has merely said he is considering. Beyond that, any U.S. sports leagues with business interests in China should join in solidarity with women’s tennis and also threaten to pull out of the totalitarian country. This includes, most prominently, the NBA, which has disgracefully allowed its multibillion-dollar business interests in China to get in the way of speaking out on human rights.

• Princess Mako of Japan has married a commoner, Kei Komuro, her boyfriend since college nearly a decade ago. For years their relationship has elicited sneers from traditional-minded critics who questioned his intentions and deemed him unworthy of the romantic interest of the eldest grandchild of Emperor Emeritus Akihito. Komuro’s origins are humble. His haircut was said to be inappropriate. Insinuations that he was a gold digger were amplified after his mother was reported to owe $36,000 to her former fiancé. By marrying Komuro, Mako lost her royal status and privileges. She declined the departure ceremonies and the dowry, $1.4 million, that her decision entitled her to. “I am very sorry for the inconvenience,” Mako said at a press conference. “For me, Kei is irreplaceable – marriage was a necessary choice for us.” Kei was direct. “I love Mako,” he said. “We only get one life, and I want us to spend it with the one we love.” Well said. Cheers and best wishes to the newlyweds.

• Éric Zemmour is a flavor of the month on the right. A veteran French journalist in his early 60s, he is making waves in French presidential politics. Indeed, he is stealing the thunder of Marine Le Pen and her family. Zemmour is even warmer toward the Putin regime than is Le Pen. And the feeling is mutual. Zemmour has been endorsed by a Moscow-based institute close to Putin. In a recent debate, Zemmour called for the renunciation of his country’s alliances with the United States, Britain, and Germany, in favor of “joining hands with Russia.” A sane and democratic conservatism is badly needed in glorious France.

• In France, there is a building backlash against wokisme. After Le Robert, a major French dictionary, added an entry for a new, non-binary pronoun, iel (a mashup of the masculine il and feminine elle that the dictionary conceded is “rare”), several public officials decried the move. “Inclusive writing is not the future of the French language,” tweeted education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer, adding that Le Robert was no longer suitable for student use. François Jolivet, a parliament member belonging to President Emmanuel Macron’s party, urged the Académie Française to reject iel as a “manifest ideological intrusion” of the type that “results in a defiled language which divides its users rather than unites them.” Not, in short, le mot juste.

• Until now, wokeness has been mainly an American phenomenon. But it has crossed the pond, as seen by an act of the Berlin State Ballet: The company canceled The Nutcracker. How can that be? The Nutcracker is to ballet as Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, let’s say, is to orchestras. But the Chinese and Arabian dances give offense, or so the company pretends. In reality, they give delight and enchantment. May wokeness prove as short-lived as the tulip craze, goldfish-swallowing, or the Pet Rock.

• A tip for those who try to climb the career ladder by adopting a fake ethnic background: Don’t overdo it. Pasty-faced Rachel Dolezal attracted scrutiny after she faked hate crimes against her to back up her purported black ancestry, while Elizabeth Warren trumpeted a DNA test that ended up disproving her claim to a Cherokee background. Now comes news from Canada that Carrie Bourassa, a medical researcher and the national government’s top expert on indigenous health, is not herself indigenous. This came as a surprise to many because she had long played up her self-proclaimed Métis ancestry. She got away with it for a while, but when she started giving speeches dressed in elaborate fake tribal costumes, claimed an additional affiliation with the Assiniboine tribe, and took to calling herself Morning Star Bear, indigenous leaders and others quickly uncovered the ruse. Now Ms. Bear has resigned her government and university posts. We continue to await the day when one’s ethnic heritage is a family treasure instead of a résumé item.

• “We apologize deeply for the email that was sent today. $14.92 was our average donation amount this week,” tweeted the Women’s March – yes, it’s still kicking. “It was an oversight on our part not to make the connection to a year of colonization, conquest, and genocide for Indigenous people, especially before Thanksgiving,” it went on, as if the offense needed any further explanation. Amusing as such self-flagellation may be, we don’t hold the Women’s March any more responsible for the purported sins of settlers in 1492 a.d. than we do Taylor Swift for the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill.

• The University of California system has removed standardized tests from its admissions process, citing racial and socioeconomic inequities. The decision was made notwithstanding a report last year by the UC Standardized Testing Task Force finding that standardized test scores predict student success more accurately than high-school GPA. According to the task force, “comprehensive review” of applications “appears to help compensate for group differences in test scores.” In light of this recent finding, the move to do away with standardized tests looks like a veiled attempt to return de facto affirmative action into public universities barred from incorporating race into admissions. The losers will mainly be Asian Americans, whose stellar test scores have made them a large demographic at California’s top public universities. This is not an unintended consequence.

• Notre Dame in Paris continues to undergo repair. Last year, shooting down rumors that a modernizing redesign was in the works, the office of President Emmanuel Macron affirmed that the reconstruction when completed would be faithful to the Gothic cathedral as it stood before fire tore through and ravaged it in 2019. Already, the rumors are back. In the Telegraph, a source close to the project is quoted as saying that plans are on the table for side chapels to be revamped and for a “visitors’ discovery trail” to be created. It would emphasize Africa and Asia and “provide the keys to half the planet that doesn’t know what a cathedral is.” Granted, cathedrals from the beginning have been visual catechisms. They embody and depict, for the untutored as well as the learned, the stories and dogmas at the heart of the Christian faith. The wish to give Notre Dame a makeover for the unchurched of the 21st century is incompatible with the task of restoring one of the great monuments from a golden age of European church architecture. Don’t conflate the two objectives. Completing the restoration with fidelity to the original will be accomplishment enough.

• The Afrikaans settlers in South Africa practiced apartheid, supposedly an ideology legalizing their superiority over everyone else. A member of the Afrikaans elite, a lawyer who spoke with a growl, F. W. de Klerk entered parliament and became a minister in a government that paid no attention to what the world thought of apartheid. When he then became president in 1989, he seems to have had some sort of conversion, much like Mikhail Gorbachev’s simultaneous rejection of communism in the Soviet Union. De Klerk freed Nelson Mandela, his open rival for the presidency, from a long and unjust imprisonment. Losing a fair election, he had effectively replaced apartheid with democracy. In a posthumous video, he apologized for “the pain and the hurt and the indignity and damage” of apartheid, leaving the legacy to speak for itself. Died of cancer, aged 85. R.I.P.

• For about a half century, Stephen Sondheim was a dominant figure in the musical theater. He was born in New York in 1930. His home was a broken one. He caught a break, however, when he got to be friends with Jamie Hammerstein – son of Oscar Hammerstein II, the great lyricist, who became a surrogate father to “Stevie.” “If Oscar had been a geologist,” Sondheim would say, “I probably would have been a geologist, too.” When he was in his 20s, Sondheim wrote the lyrics to two big shows: West Side Story and Gypsy. Thereafter, he wrote both words and music: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Follies, Sweeney Todd, and on and on. His most famous song, probably, is “Send in the Clowns,” from A Little Night Music. In 2010, they named a theater after him, in New York. “I’m deeply embarrassed,” he said. “Thrilled, but deeply embarrassed. I’ve always hated my last name. It just doesn’t sing.” The man himself certainly did. Stephen Sondheim has died at 91. R.I.P.

• Perhaps the animal spirits of the market are best understood by animals. Mr. Goxx, a cryptocurrency-trading hamster, was at various points outperforming Warren Buffett from the offices of Goxx Capital – an addition to a hamster cage. His office included a hamster wheel, used to select which cryptocurrency he wanted to trade, and two tunnels, one marked “BUY” and the other marked “SELL,” that he crawled through to make trades. Whenever Mr. Goxx entered his office, his movements were livestreamed online, and his trades were automatically posted on Twitter, where he has over 18,000 followers. Mr. Goxx’s anonymous owners announced on November 24 that he had died in his sleep two days earlier. They wrote, “You will be missed, and your memory will live forever on the blockchain.” According to Fortune, as of his last completed trading session, he was up 19.72 percent on the year. R.I.P.

• “A spear-carrier in the cause of freedom” was how Justus Rosenberg saw himself. In fact, he met the brutal 20th century head-on. Born in Danzig, now Gdansk, he was thrown out of school because he was Jewish. His father sent him to be educated in Paris, and he was there in 1940 when the German army took over. He fled to Vichy France, the so-called unoccupied zone. In Marseille, the heroic Varian Fry and Miriam Davenport of the American Rescue Committee were already at work arranging safe passage out of the country for anyone the Germans might arrest. Rosenberg joined the team as its courier, delivering false documents and tickets to hundreds of would-be victims including Hannah Arendt, the Mann brothers, and Marc Chagall. Some he led on foot over the Pyrenees into Spain. After the committee was shut down, he joined a resistance group and was captured, only to escape just in time to avoid deportation and the gas chamber. Reaching the United States in 1946, he spent the rest of his exemplary life at Bard teaching literature and languages. Died at the age of 100. R.I.P.

Inflated Claims

There’s no room for the White House to spin inflation anymore. It’s the biggest issue facing ordinary Americans, and Fed chairman Jerome Powell told Congress on November 30 that he will no longer be using the word “transitory” to describe it. “Clearly the risk of more persistent inflation has risen,” he said.

The sort of inflation we are currently experiencing is different from notable examples in the past. Then the inflation was almost entirely generated by the central bank, which merely had to correct itself. The Federal Reserve should taper its asset purchases, but it cannot do much to solve today’s problems. Given the historic level of federal debt, the Fed doesn’t have much room to raise rates without significantly increasing government interest costs. Furthermore, altering the money supply or raising interest rates will not cause the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to work more efficiently. It will not create more trucks and truck drivers. It will not make it easier to produce and transport energy.

Plenty of the underlying problems that have been exposed by the pandemic recovery predated Biden’s presidency. But his party’s ideology prevents him from being part of the solution. Democrats see the current situation and want more government and more spending.

We need more truck chassis to transport shipping containers, but current trade policy creates a combined tariff of about 250 percent on importing them. Labor policy designed in the early 20th century has allowed unions to entrench inefficiency and freeze labor productivity in the transportation sector. Environmental regulations in California have prevented the expansion of port capacity. The federal government has prioritized transitioning away from fossil fuels while begging OPEC to pump more oil. And post-pandemic spending bills both created disincentives to work and provided generous benefits, well beyond what most other countries provided.

President Biden wants you to believe that passing his legislative agenda will help. But Build Back Better either leaves those problems untouched or exacerbates them. It prescribes more government as the solution to government-created problems.

Our inflation is an outlier by global standards. Now is not the time to take inflationary risks. Now is not the time to experiment with green-energy policies, which will drive up prices. Now is not the time to do a federal takeover of child care, which will drive up prices. The United States has bountiful natural, industrial, and human resources. To fully mobilize them in response to the present inflationary pressures, government needs to step aside, not insert itself into more places.

The president’s approval ratings show that the American people have noticed that his policies aren’t working. They’ve noticed higher prices at the grocery store and the gas station. As we head into winter, they’ll notice higher heating bills.

Inflation won’t disappear if the White House pretends it doesn’t exist. We’ve been fortunate to not have experienced broad-based inflation in any significant way in the past few decades. If prices keep rising and Democrats keep whiffing, the return of inflation will draw wrath from the voters in a way we haven’t seen in a long time.