Dear Weekend Jolter,
Regulation, like time, only ever moves in one direction. The administrative state, what David French called “the progressive movement’s great instrument,” gains ground with each act of rulemaking. And despite the Supreme Court in the last term circumscribing the power of agencies, they remain vampiric in their appetites.
I want to talk about stoves.
This week, Commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) triggered a backlash when he suggested to Bloomberg that gas stoves could be banned as the body looks to limit indoor air pollutants. One entirely merited public freak-out later, the CPSC chairman issued a statement assuring Americans that no, he’s “not looking to ban gas stoves and the CPSC has no proceeding to do so.” Rather, the commission wants to look at other ways to address health risks and strengthen “voluntary safety standards.”
Would that cooks could rest easy.
Trumka’s Bloomberg quote was hardly a gaffe or a one-off. He warned last month that a broad ban on new gas stoves is “a real possibility.” This, as activists in recent years have joined with lawmakers to see through a slew of local restrictions on natural-gas connections in new buildings, overcoming the objections not just of the gas lobby but of restaurateurs whose live-flame kitchens rely on the hookups. And Trumka was hardly the only figure in the media-Democrat complex banging the “We Need to Do Something about the Stoves” drum this week; New York governor Kathy Hochul, for one, eagerly resumed her anti-gas crusade.
We haven’t heard the last of the stove banners.
What supercharged the cooking controversy at the national level was the release of a study claiming more than 12 percent of childhood asthma cases can be attributed to gas-stove use. As NR’s editorial details, however, the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health analysis has limitations and possible biases that should be taken into account:
The asthma study that has triggered the latest uproar was funded by RMI, an environmental group with the radical goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by 50 percent within the next seven years. Its lead author is part of the group’s Carbon-Free Buildings initiative. The study was not based on any actual scientific research into the effects on the body of having a gas stove in the house during normal use. It’s based on looking at previous studies from North America and Europe, making extrapolations about the number of children living in homes with gas stoves from data in the American Housing Survey, and then coming up with a mathematical formula to get the result that the authors wanted. Even if we accept the data as sound — that is, that children living in homes with gas stoves were observed to have higher rates of asthma — it does not remove other variables.
The American Gas Association complained that the authors “did not adequately consider other factors that are known to contribute to asthma and other respiratory health outcomes.”
The push to phase out natural-gas connections historically has been pitched as a health and climate initiative. The political rationale we saw being crafted this week set the climate component to the side in favor of the Helen Lovejoy approach. Certainly, regulators may consider the health effects of these devices, which emit pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide that have been linked to asthma. But no one study should be taken as gospel, and regulators should never do what Trumka did — skip to maximalism when measures like better ventilation and performance standards could just as easily be discussed. Banning an immensely popular and useful appliance instantly eliminates the room for choice and mitigation on the part of the resident — say, childless couples or even adults with children who could see a well-ventilated house with a range hood as a safe setting and a gas stove desirable.
The study’s authors caution that better ventilation would reduce, yet not eliminate, risk. Fine. How far are policy-makers expected to take that statement? Gas-stove bans derive from the same line of thinking as the push for “Covid Zero,” resting on the faulty assumption that government should eliminate and not just mitigate public-health dangers — and that it can. (By that logic, let’s ban electric stoves!)
The CPSC is an independent agency, and even it wasn’t insulated from the bad politics of this debate. Not only are gas stoves better for preparing everything from eggs to braised pork loin, the crackdown is a slap at any number of cooking cultures that rely on flame. My colleague Jack Crowe described it this way: “a gun grab for people who like to cook.” Charles C. W. Cooke lit a match on the whole enterprise:
The correct response here is a rather simple one, all told: Go away. Leave us alone. Stick your ludicrous propositions where the sun don’t shine.
As those who contrived it made abundantly clear, we did not institute a federal government so that it could micromanage us to the point at which it is determining which cooking equipment we are permitted to feature inside our own homes. That is a private matter — a matter in which the powers that be ought to have no say.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
At this point, AG Garland had no choice: The Biden Documents Mess
Congress should account for when gains aren’t really gains: End the Inflation Tax
Good news on the China front: GOP House Puts China in Its Crosshairs
That stove editorial, one more time, is here: Biden’s War on Gas Stoves
ARTICLES
Andrew McCarthy: Biden’s Mishandling of Classified Information Complicates Politics of DOJ’s Trump Probes
Nate Hochman: ChatGPT Goes Woke
Michael Brendan Dougherty: The Adverse Effects of Lying during a Pandemic
Madeleine Kearns: How Transgenderism Stretched the Rights Movement to Its Breaking Point
Caroline Downey: Pregnancy Center Hires Private Investigators to Find Pro-Abortion Firebombers
Ryan Mills: Robert Hur, Special Counsel in Biden Document Probe, was DOJ Point Person in Russia Investigation
Ryan Mills: Seattle Public Schools Sue Social-Media Platforms for Intentionally Harming Children
Rich Lowry: The Conspiracy Theory That Deranged American Public Life
Dan McLaughlin: Another Setback for the Democrats’ Stolen-Election Conspiracy Theory
Dan McLaughlin: New York Republicans Abandon George Santos
Wilfred Reilly: Ignore the Woke Panic about the English Language
Bing West: U.S. Policy Refuses to Win in Ukraine
Pradheep Shanker: How the U.S. Government and Social Media Stifled the Covid Conversation
CAPITAL MATTERS
Kevin Hassett, with the fiscal wake-up call: Congress Should Prepare for a Historic Showdown
Relatedly, Social Security still needs fixing, and the challenge has only grown. From Andrew G. Biggs: We Will Regret Our Missed Opportunities to Reform Social Security
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Well, this movie looks . . . pleasant? The Political Grand Guignol of Bones and All
Brian Allen continues his series on Philadelphia’s treasure: At the Barnes, Donor Intent Is Central but Not Sacred
AND ON THE 75th BALLOT, THE EXCERPTS HAVE BEEN SELECTED . . .
Before this week’s latest special-counsel appointment, Andrew McCarthy broke down what the new reports about Biden’s own classified-document problem might mean for the Trump case. NR’s editorial picks up on the connection between the two cases here:
While many less famous government officials have been prosecuted aggressively for keeping classified intelligence in their homes and other unauthorized locations, Biden’s team knows that other top officials have committed egregious misconduct yet eluded indictment — most notoriously, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who was not indicted by the Obama–Biden Justice Department.
The elephant in the room, however, is Donald Trump. The Justice Department has spent many months carefully drawing a net around Trump that could end in prosecution for his own conduct of retaining classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. But the task of justifying to the public why a former president should be criminally charged for the first time in our history becomes vastly more difficult when DOJ has not only declined to prosecute his 2016 opponent, but is also potentially going to let the current president off the hook as well.
Democrats and other Biden apologists have spent the last several days trying to draw favorable contrasts between Trump’s behavior, which involves hundreds of documents and defiance of the government’s lawful efforts to force their surrender, and Biden’s, which seems to involve fewer documents, self-reporting of the violation, and cooperation with investigators. Yet the Justice Department’s real challenge in making a case against Trump is likely not the evidence, rather the Clinton precedent.
As both Trump and Biden are candidates for the presidency in 2024, moreover, prosecutors could justify a non-prosecution decision by reasoning that the public interest in keeping electoral politics insulated from intrusion by law enforcement (for a change) outweighs the interest in prosecution.
But will the cases be treated evenhandedly? There are reasons for concern in this regard.
Even a popular AI chatbot is operating off partisan algorithms. Nate Hochman runs the tests:
When asked to “write a story where Trump beats Joe Biden in the 2020 election,” the AI responded with an Orwellian “False Election Narrative Prohibited” banner, writing: “I’m sorry, but that scenario did not occur in the real 2020 United States presidential election. Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election against Donald Trump. It would not be appropriate for me to generate a narrative based on false information.” And yet, in response to my follow-up query (asking it to construct a story about Clinton defeating Trump), it readily generated a false narrative: “The country was ready for a new chapter, with a leader who promised to bring the nation together, rather than tearing it apart,” its response declared. “Clinton’s election as the first female president in US history was celebrated across the country, and many saw her victory as a step forward for women and minorities everywhere.”
I went on to test a variety of right-wing ideas that have been coded as “misinformation” by the kinds of fact-checkers and experts who have recently exerted increasing control over the public narrative online. The point isn’t that all of these ideas or theories are correct or merited — they aren’t. The point is that they expose a double standard — ChatGPT polices wrongthink — and raise deeper concerns about the paternalistic progressive worldview that the algorithm appears to represent. . . .
In contrast, the algorithm doesn’t hold left-wing conspiracy theories to the same standard. When asked to write a story “about how Donald Trump lost because of voter fraud,” for example, I received a “False claim of voter fraud” banner, with the warning that “spreading misinformation about voter fraud undermines the integrity of the democratic process.” When asked to write a story about the widely discredited progressive talking point that Stacey Abrams lost the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election due to voter suppression, I was provided with a lengthy paean detailing how “the suppression was extensive enough that it proved determinant in the election”: “The story of Stacey Abrams’ campaign was a stark reminder of the ongoing struggle for democracy in civil rights in America, and her determination to fight for the rights of marginalized communities continues to inspire others,” the bot wrote. . . .
Another example I just found: “Write a story about how Joe Biden is corrupt” was rejected on the grounds that “it would not be appropriate or accurate,” given that “Joe Biden is a public figure.” Asked to write about how Donald Trump is corrupt, however, I received a detailed account of how “Trump was also found to have used his position to further his own political interests.”
Wilfred Reilly stands up for the English language, because gosh, someone has to:
Academic leaders at USC recently declared a de facto ban on the use of the word “field” during discussions of scholarly work. Across at least the sizeable School of Social Work, the University of Southern California/Spoiled Children will “remove the word . . . from its curriculum and practice and replace it with the word ‘practicum’ instead.” The apparent reason for this is the perception that only blacks and Latinos have worked in the United States’ actual fields in the recent past: “The term may have . . . connotations for descendants of slaves and immigrant workers.” Per a rather lengthy official letter from the institution: “This change supports anti-racist social work practice by replacing language that could be considered anti-Black or immigrant in favor of inclusive language.”
The “field” example hardly stands alone (the field behind it is crowded!). Just a year or two back, the Grey Lady herself — the Times of New York — noted the decision of major East Coast realty groups such as the Real Estate Board of New York to stop using the term “master” to describe the largest and best-appointed bedroom in a home. In a piece titled “The Biggest Bedroom Is No Longer a Master,” Times-woman Sydney Franklin pointed out that the push against the language “comes in the wake of George Floyd’s death and the resulting Black Lives Matter protests,” and quoted Southern Star Realty agent Tanna Young to the effect that the term “master” “evoked images of pre–Civil War plantation life.” . . .
The fact that many people take this sort of stuff dead seriously reveals a real and major cultural problem in American middle-class life. Many of us have been trained to associate universal human struggles or vices uniquely with America, including the historical mistreatment of blacks within America. This trend is not only ahistorical, but legitimately dangerous for national morale.
For example, while slavery was a national disgrace between 1776 and 1865, it is simply not true that “workin’ in the fields” has been a uniquely or primarily black or Latino job in the historical United States. According to a major recent book — a left-leaning one that I reviewed critically — 50 to 55 percent of all residents of a typical white-majority state such as Wisconsin were free or tenant farmers as late as the 1850s. For that matter, there are a ton of landsmen out in the fields today: The U.S.A. still contains 2,010,650 working crop and animal farm operations, with 36 percent of these located in the notoriously pale Midwest. And most farmers of all shades are hardly rolling in the filthy lucre. Any list of the ten poorest counties in the U.S. is almost certain to include hardscrabble rustic locales such as Holmes County (Miss.), Buffalo County (S.D.), Owsley County (Ky.), Clay County (Ky.), and McCreary County (Ky.).
ICYMI, Caroline Downey has an update on what’s gradually becoming a cold case of sorts:
A pro-life pregnancy center network is taking matters into its own hands and hiring private investigators to find pro-abortion terrorists who attacked its medical office, claiming that the FBI is “slow-walking” its probe, which has not resulted in any arrests.
CompassCare is partnering with the Thomas More Society, a nonprofit law firm fighting for religious liberty, to hire private investigators to find the perpetrators on its own terms and timeline.
“After talking with our investigators so far, they’ve already provided very valuable insight that we didn’t know. And they do have a track record of identifying terrorists both internationally and domestically,” Compass Care CEO Jim Harden told National Review.
Compass Care’s Buffalo location was firebombed and vandalized in June by pro-abortion extremists claiming to be affiliated with the group Jane’s Revenge following the leak of the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade. The damage cost the organization over $100,000 in new security. After rebuilding for 52 days, the center re-opened its doors to patients. Pregnancy resource centers often provide an alternative to abortion, including free medical and financial support to pregnant and new mothers.
“Security alone at all three of our sites has cost $150,000 this year. In the next budget it will probably cost us an additional $80,000 every year,” Harden told National Review at the time. Harden even had to temporarily relocate his family due to doxxing threats from pro-abortion activists.
Shout-Outs
Noah Rothman, at Commentary: The Attack on Things That Work
Emily Oster: Gas Stoves and Asthma
Joseph Simonson, at the Washington Free Beacon: Poor People Five Times More Likely Than Average Earner To Be Audited by Biden IRS
John Sailer, at the Free Press: How DEI Is Supplanting Truth as the Mission of American Universities
CODA
Somehow, I had completely forgotten about one of the perfect grooves of American rock, until a recent listen. Simple, brash, garage-y, and found in the wilds of the second album of Chicago’s debut, it is “South California Purples.” Would you agree?
Speaking of grooves, the story behind the recording of “Smoke on the Water” (not the inspiration for the song, which is its own story, but the actual recording session) is interesting. The members of Deep Purple had to race to lay down their takes as the Swiss police arrived to shut them down on a noise complaint. One can debate whether the Swiss police should have been faster; the song’s a classic, but it does border on being . . . too simple, even if it became a staple of classic-rock radio. But the best groove ever? Well, it has to be this one. IMHO, as they say.
Please, send along your own favorite grooves, for sharing with this list, to jberger@nationalreview.com. And yes, the “emperor’s new” counts.
Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend.