Dear Weekend Jolter,
Donald Trump was right about one thing: “American carnage.”
He didn’t stop the bloodshed, as he vowed he would in his 2017 inaugural address, and neither has his successor. But the carnage is real, and it’s gotten quantifiably worse over the last two years.
We learned recently that America suffered the sharpest single-year increase in murders on record in 2020, with more than 21,000 homicides. The murder rate and tally were below those of the early ’90s, but it’s increasingly clear that 2021 is continuing this grim trend and that last year was no blip. At least a dozen big cities have seen their annual homicide records shattered (over 500 in Philadelphia), weeks before the end of this calendar year. Their daily tragedies unfold underneath the more spectacular tragedies like those recently endured in Wisconsin and Michigan. Urban anxiety is compounded by the surge of retail theft in places like the Bay Area.
Some headlines from just this week:
12 major Dem controlled cities break homicide records
Chicago Dealership Owner Calls for Crackdown after Smash-and-Grab Looters Strike in Broad Daylight
Man beaten to death while stringing Christmas lights with his young daughter
Teen shot dead outside Virginia high school after basketball game
Analysts and lawmakers point to a range of reasons for this, including the pandemic and the availability of guns, though only one of those aggravating factors is new. But the voices at the municipal level crying out for leaders to reconsider the culture of leniency and lax enforcement that has washed over cities in the wake of last year’s riots over police violence should command our attention. As Brittany Bernstein reports concerning the epidemic of smash-and-grab thefts,
Los Angeles police chief Michel Moore faulted California’s “zero bail” policy for returning 14 suspected smash-and-grab looters back to the streets.
“All the suspects taken into custody are out of custody, either as a result of one juvenile, or the others as a result of bailing out or zero-bail criteria,” Moore said of 14 suspects arrested in connection with eleven robberies late last month that cost businesses some $338,000 in stolen merchandise and more than $40,000 in property damage.
The same concerns are being aired in New York City and elsewhere. Nate Hochman reports on the distinctly tragic decline in Portland and puts a face to the consequences of lawlessness:
For seven months, Dylan Carrico Rogers slept in his bike shop with a shotgun. TriTech Bikes, located in the Montavilla neighborhood of northeast Portland, Ore., where Rogers grew up, had been battered by three break-ins, two nearby shootings, and countless instances of vandalism. Portland’s serially understaffed police force was nowhere to be found. And in the face of $25,000 of stolen bike parts, TriTech’s insurance company was ready to jump ship. “They said, ‘if you claim another one, we’re just gonna drop you,’” Rogers told National Review. “So I’m paying $1,200 every three months to be told that I have to replace [everything] on my own dime. And then at the same time, the cops don’t show up. So we’re just in a free-for-all.”
The lifelong Portland resident finally packed up and left in August.
The White House specifically faults the pandemic for the looting. This surely is a factor, yet much of the crime is organized to a degree — see this multimillion-dollar operation exposed in the Bay Area — that perforates the Covid argument. It is less difficult to imagine how declining to aggressively prosecute retail theft would encourage retail theft.
Of course, the onus to address this falls not on the president of the United States but on countless city leaders coast to coast. We’ve seen glimpses of necessary backbone, from frustrated police chiefs, yes, but also from mayors who are saying enough — or, in the words of born-again crime-fighter London Breed in San Francisco, enough “bullsh**.”
Hopefully, this crime wave will crest, and soon, as more City Halls seek a refund from “Defund.” This past September, a police abolitionist argued, when asked on The Daily Show about the “transitionary period” of high crime that follows any enforcement ebb, that officials should not lose their nerve. “What we do expect people is to be committed to experimentation, to figuring out how to get there,” she said.
Who suffers during this period, exactly? It’s not the cloistered campus-dwellers. It’s not the boardroom activists or the cable-news regulars. It’s not us journos in leafy D.C. commuter towns. It’s folks like Don Samuels in North Minneapolis, who told NR that he hears gunshots every night, that his neighbor’s car was fired upon with a baby in back, that another neighbor had to install a bulletproof headboard as a make-do shield against stray rounds.
Voters there subsequently rejected a plan to disband and “replace” their police department. America’s cities are on notice. Others suffering the consequences of these “experiments” cannot be expected to tolerate their lot as test subjects much longer.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
Stay strong, Joe: Senator Manchin, Keep Holding Out on Build Back Better
Here’s more on the San Francisco mayor’s change of heart: San Fran Mayor Has Defunder’s Remorse
Lia Thomas’s record-breaking streak at UPenn should be setting off alarm bells for anybody in college sports who still values fairness: Women’s Sports Should Be Women Only
No amount of Biden team spin will change the facts on supply chains: Supply-Chain Crisis Isn’t Going Away
ARTICLES
Kevin Williamson: Spending Is Not Going to Save the Democrats
Philip Klein: The Public-Health Mafia
Michael Brendan Dougherty: A Tale of Two Democrats: Jared Polis and Kathy Hochul
Michael Brendan Dougherty: Gone Too Far
Ryan Mills: County Execs Blast Hochul’s Mask Order as a Return to Cuomo Playbook: ‘Complete Waste of Resources’
Alexandra DeSanctis: It’s Not as Simple as Overturning Roe
Jim Inhofe & Trent England: The Uniquely Dangerous Movement to End the Electoral College
Charles C. W. Cooke: There Is No Reason for Anyone Else to Pay Your Student-Loan Debt
Rich Lowry: The Failure of ‘Latinx’
Andrew McCarthy: Barrett and Kavanaugh Supply Another Majority to Deny Religious-Liberty Exemption
CAPITAL MATTERS
Pension-account holders, beware. Richard Morrison explains what a Biden administration rule repeal could mean for you: How ESG Advocates Want to Redefine Your Retirement
Congress and the Biden administration are working on another recipe for inflation, says Joseph Sullivan: Build Back Better: A Recipe for Higher Child-Care Prices
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Armond White has a beef with the Writers Guild of America’s “101 Greatest Screenplays of the 21st Century (*so far)”: When Movie Writing Goes Wrong
Brian Allen swings through Montreal (jealous?) for a banquet of penetrating portraits: In Montreal, a Primer on Yousuf Karsh, Canada’s Great Portraitist
Kyle Smith’s got no time for this web of gimmicks: Spider-Man: No Way Home Is a Fan-Service Boondoggle
FROM THE NEW DECEMBER 27, 2021, ISSUE OF NR
Joseph Loconte: A Brief History of Individual Rights
Victoria Coates: When David Met Lisa
Jay Nordlinger: Bach, Beethoven, and Other Friends of Mankind
Jeremy Tate: The Glory That Is Greece, the Grandeur That Is Rome
THE EXCERPTS, THE EXCERPTS, THE EXCERPTS ARE ON FIRE
Philip Klein discovers and describes a striking parallel when it comes to the public-health community’s conduct:
The public-health community is behaving like the Mafia. They come offering protection. They control the politicians. And they threaten businesses that don’t accede to their demands.
Led by boss Anthony Fauci, and comprising many federal, state, and local officials, they have exploited the Covid pandemic to orchestrate a campaign of fear and intimidation to consolidate their power, and they have no plans to give any of it up.
The protection racket is based on the conceit that if we simply do as they command, we will vanquish Covid. It started with the now-infamous “15 days to slow the spread” and the effort to “flatten the curve” to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. This quickly turned into six weeks and then months of rolling lockdowns and, in some areas, more than a year of closed schools.
Vaccines, they assured us, were to be the end point of the pandemic. But a year after they became available, and eight months after they have been widely available, the medical Cosa Nostra still insist that people who are fully vaccinated — and boosted — need to wear masks in public (even though they initially convinced people that masks were ineffective).
A lot is being written out there about the January 6 riot, with the release of Mark Meadows’s text messages. But Michael Brendan Dougherty manages to find something new, and powerful, to say about what led to that ignominious point:
In the months after January 6, the politically correct move for Trump’s cable-news apologists has been to ignore the fact that the people who set about “investigating” the supposed vote fraud have turned up nothing of consequence or merit. Or, it has been to focus obsessively on the potential involvement of the FBI or other intel agencies in the riots, to speculate about who may have been planted as agent provocateurs in the crowd. This is worth inquiring about, especially after the FBI’s cack-handed work trying to instigate a kidnapping plot against Governor Whitmer went south.
But the riot at the Capitol happened because President Donald Trump simply lied, and lied, and lied. On that very day he lied about what the vice president’s powers were. “All Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recertify, and we become president, and you are the happiest people,” he told the crowd. . . .
There is a kind of partisan kick-reflex that is surely active in many people reading this. The reflex kicks: The Left is at war with the Right. It kicks again: Stop punching to your right. It kicks again: Stop trying to police the Right and stop trying to make it respectable to the Left.
But it’s not them I care about. It’s simply the truth. Treating Trump like a baby whose feelings had to be coddled at the end resulted in Ashli Babbitt’s getting shot as she tried to break into Congress against a lawful order to desist. He could no more Stop the Steal than make Mexico pay for the wall. But, pay for his actions? Some people did.
The case of UPenn swimmer Lia Thomas is an indictment of how school-sports programs are dealing with the transgender debate. From the NR editorial:
Between 2016 and 2019, Will Thomas was an average swimmer for the men’s swimming division. But after adopting a female name (Lia) and identity, Thomas has been smashing records at every turn. Now, Thomas is supposedly the No. 1 female swimmer in the nation, with the fastest 500-yard female freestyle in the country and the all-time record for the Penn women’s team. In a sport that is known for slim margins, Thomas has been crushing the competition. At the Zippy Invitational at the University of Akron, Thomas’s time in the 200-yard race was better than last year’s gold-medal time in the NCAA finals, while notching a 4:34:06 in the 500 freestyle — a margin of victory of more than 14 seconds. And in the 1650 freestyle, Thomas beat the second-place woman by more than 38 seconds.
The explanation for such staggering victories is neither talent nor superpowers — merely biology. Since Thomas is biologically male, and since Thomas underwent male puberty with all the androgenizing benefits that this conferred, he is larger, faster, and stronger than most female athletes.
Just ask Thomas’s female teammates. Despite being “strongly advised” to stay silent, two teammates have anonymously spoken out to the sports website OutKick. “Pretty much everyone individually has spoken to our coaches about not liking this. Our coach [Mike Schnur] just really likes winning. He’s like most coaches. I think secretly everyone just knows it’s the wrong thing to do,” said one. . . .
Even if Thomas is in compliance with the NCAA rules that require testosterone-suppression treatment for one year for male-to-female athletes, this is still risibly insufficient at mitigating sex-based advantages that are years in the making and do not simply disappear with chemical or surgical interventions. Such policies fail on principle, in any case. As politically incorrect as it is to point out, there is no material difference between a man and a trans woman. This is not difficult. The athletes in women’s sports should be women only.
Charles C. W. Cooke is here with a public-service announcement about student-loan forgiveness:
The core problem the loan-forgiveness advocates have is that their cause is motivated by nothing more noble than a desire to have more money. . . .
Recently, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez griped about her own loans. “I’m 32 years old now,” she said. “I have over $17,000 in student-loan debt, and I didn’t go to graduate school because I knew that getting another degree would drown me in debt that I would never be able to surpass. This is unacceptable.” Why? Which part of this, exactly, is “unacceptable”? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has debts because Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took on debts in order to pay for the education that she received — an education that has landed her a plum job in Congress. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t have more debt than she would have had if she’d borrowed more than she did, because, aware of the tradeoffs, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez demurred. I cannot see the problem. Are we really supposed to believe that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s having some more letters next to her name would be of such extraordinary benefit to the nation at large that the rest of us should gratefully pony up and pay for it? Give me a break.
If there is anything “unacceptable” about Ocasio-Cortez’s situation, it is that she seems genuinely to believe that she is a victim. As a member of Congress, Ocasio-Cortez makes $175,000 per year, and as has been widely reported, she is doing sufficiently well to have bought herself a Tesla. And good for her! In all sincerity, I wish her great riches and happiness. But that she would even consider asking for help in repaying the $17,000 worth of debt from which she’s already benefited considerably? That is obscene.
Just pay your bills, slackers. Everyone else has to.
Shout-Outs
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, at UnHerd: Will California ever be safe?
Mark Brnovich, at the Wall Street Journal: Smash and Grab? Don’t Come to Arizona
Jana Winter, at Yahoo News: Inside the secret CBP unit with no rules that investigates Americans
Adam Kredo, at the Washington Free Beacon: Iranian ‘Drone Armies’ Step Up Attacks on US as Nuclear Talks Languish, GOP Lawmakers Say
CODA
How about some Art Blakey to close things out today? Hearing no objections . . .
This track comes from Reflections in Blue, a relatively late-career record he did with the Jazz Messengers, the long-running ensemble of illustrious acolytes Blakey helped bring to stardom. “Mishima” features “lots of surprises,” as the liner notes tease. The song puts a particular spotlight on bassist Dennis Irwin, and the highlights come when he conspires with James Williams on piano to tilt the piece in Latin-flavored directions — pulling everyone else along.
Got a tune? Want to share? Send a link to jberger@nationalreview.com. Thanks for reading.