Dear Weekend Jolter,
So who’s going to tell the Biden administration that oil extracted from Venezuela is just as bad for the environment as oil extracted from Texas?
This week’s scramble to convince mustachioed socialists and dismemberment-prone princes to boost petroleum production certainly served to expose the folly of our energy approach. That is, limits on U.S. oil and gas production (and their transportation) don’t achieve much in the name of climate if we need to ratchet up output elsewhere to keep prices stable. And they lead to clear geopolitical downsides when the “elsewhere” is places such as Caracas.
Kevin Williamson discusses what some foresight could have yielded, had we favored “democratic energy” over that produced under the auspices of maniacs:
The basic geopolitical question is: Should the United States throw a lifeline to the worst tyrant in the Western hemisphere in order to undermine an even worse tyrant in Europe? . . .
Right about now, President Biden must be wishing he had an extra pipeline to Canada. The thought has occurred to Alberta premier Jason Kenney, who observes about Keystone XL: “If President Biden had not vetoed that project, it would be done later this year — 840,000 barrels of democratic energy that could have displaced the 600,000 plus barrels of Russian conflict oil that’s filled with the blood of Ukrainians.”
Oops.
The Biden administration took a bold step this week in shutting down Russian energy imports over Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and it should be commended for this — even if it happened under duress. But the U.S. could have been better positioned for soaring energy prices resulting from global conflict and other factors, reducing the need to solicit the Maduro regime, MBS, and possibly the mullahs for help. While a renewed all-of-the-above energy strategy is not going to solve the immediate crisis, Kevin speculates that, given domestic political pressures, the administration prefers turning to Venezuela rather than pursuing such a strategy even in the long-term.
Charles C. W. Cooke posits the following:
It is true that refusing to purchase Russian oil is the right short-term policy. It is also true that a better long-term policy would have lessened the upward pressure on domestic prices that short-term events such as the war in Ukraine can exert. For a neat illustration of how these two ideas can intersect, one need only to look at Germany.
The U.S. remains the world’s leading oil producer, a fact that gives the White House space to push back on criticism of its “drill, maybe, drill” mantra, but Nate Hochman details here how the administration is still hindering production. This Drew Holden thread has more. The fallout from Russia’s invasion, expectedly, has generated a groundswell of calls, from Joe Manchin, from Republicans, even from Elon Musk, to boost the U.S. energy sector going forward.
American energy security very much includes the continuing pursuit of renewables, which, as the name implies, will vastly expand the power supply once fully developed. But we are not at the point where those renewables (which account for just 20 percent of current electricity generation in the U.S.) can sustain us. Jim Geraghty writes that production of oil and gas — and food, for that matter — is going to need to increase, “unless we want to see what kind of chaos gets unleashed in a world where energy and food prices are skyrocketing all around the globe.”
For the latest inflation figures, see here.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
A no-fly zone over Ukraine would be “limited” in name only: Say No to a No-Fly Zone
Empowering parents should be the aim of lawmakers wading into the transgender debate: Florida and Texas Are Right to Fight Back in the Transgender Debate
The Senate should have returned to sender: The Postal Service Reform Act Is a Bad Deal
ARTICLES
Rich Lowry: What Putin Knew
Will Swaim: A Very California Coup
John Fund: Stalin’s ‘Winter War’ of 1939–40 Offers Hope to Ukrainians
Ryan Mills: Ukrainian Single Mother Recounts Terrifying Escape from Kyiv
Dominic Pino: How Amtrak Expansion Threatens Supply Chains
Kevin Williamson: The Cable-News Bubble
Charles C. W. Cooke: Yes, If America Is Ever Invaded, You Must Take Up Arms and Fight
David Harsanyi: Find Someone Who Looks at You Like Rob Malley Looks at Iran
Asra Q. Nomani: An Anti-Woke Education Activist Goes to Washington
Jim Geraghty: Questioning Vladimir Putin’s Health and Past Unexplained Disappearances
Alexandra DeSanctis: Exclusive: GOP Senator Introduces Bill Requiring Pre-Abortion Ultrasound
Bing West: The Botched Handling of Poland’s MiG-29s
Dan McLaughlin: Is Mike Pence Preparing a Kamikaze Campaign?
Zachary Evans: Young Children Suffer Steep Drop in Literacy following Pandemic Closures
Nate Hochman: Biden HHS Instructing Employees to Watch Their Pronouns, Leaked Documents Show
Philip Klein: The Trans Movement Is Failing Where the Gay-Rights Movement Succeeded
Jay Nordlinger: One Afghan’s Life
CAPITAL MATTERS
Edwin Burton suggests we identify the inflation culprit in order to identify the solution: Inflation: You Can’t Fix It If You Don’t Know Why It Broke
Daniel Pilla delivers a much-deserved fact check on Biden’s tax-rate claims: Fact-Checking the President’s Remarks on Tax Policy
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
With Turning Red, it is clear that Pixar is on a roll, especially compared with its big brother at Disney. From Kyle Smith: A Big, Hairy Pixar Delight
Armond White sticks his neck out for Sam Elliott over his criticism of The Power of the Dog. Get this man a sarsaparilla: Sam Elliott Abides
Brian Allen gives a tour through the Gustave Moreau Museum and Nissim de Camondo Museum in Paris. If nothing else, you must feast your eyes on this staircase: A Tale of Two House Museums in Paris
CHOOSE YOUR OWN EXCERPTS (UP TO 40 POSSIBLE ENDINGS)
Calls for a “limited” no-fly zone over Ukraine intensified this past week. NR’s editorial, while strongly advising against one, examines what this undertaking actually would entail:
It is hard to imagine that a “U.S.-NATO enforced” no-fly zone could avoid direct confrontation with Russian forces. Allied warplanes would, by necessity, be forced to intercept and engage Russian aircraft. And, in a contested battlespace, American pilots would likely be shot at by anti-air batteries on the ground. Unless the Russians unilaterally surrendered — which, again, is highly improbable — we would need to conduct a coordinated, high-intensity Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses campaign to protect our pilots. We would be bombing, shooting at, and launching cruise missiles at Russian radar operators, gun crews, and missile batteries on the ground. Russians would die. Americans would die.
Make no mistake, the imposition of a no-fly zone over Ukraine could well result in the most intense combat to control the skies since the Korean War.
Regardless, the Russians are not winning this war due to air power, and we shouldn’t assume that a no-fly zone would meaningfully change the operational situation. Indeed, with the Ukrainian air force still fighting, the Russians have not even established total air superiority after two weeks of combat.
Moreover, once a nation declares a no-fly zone in a conflict, it owns the war. Assuming we succeeded in establishing a no-fly zone, the Russians would turn to their vast superiority in ground-based artillery and rockets to continue their devastating attacks on Ukrainian civilians. The calls to widen our intervention would begin immediately, and the pressure to act would be intense.
Dan McLaughlin has a 2024 theory, and it’s worth considering:
Republicans in 2024 are likely to once again face a Donald Trump problem — and Mike Pence just might be the solution. . . .
While many Republicans seem to be eying a 2024 bid, thus far, the dynamic seems fairly straightforward: If Trump doesn’t run, Ron DeSantis looks like the heavy favorite; if Trump runs and DeSantis doesn’t, it will be extremely hard to take him down, because there won’t be anyone else in the field with the stature and the goodwill among his voters to supplant him.
So, one challenge will be getting DeSantis to risk the open confrontation with Trump that running against him would involve. And even if DeSantis does get in the race, there will still be the collective-action problem we saw in 2016: DeSantis’s need to inherit Trump’s voters should he win the nomination will tempt him to try Ted Cruz’s 2016 strategy of embracing Trump for as long as possible in the hopes that someone or something else takes the former president down.
Meanwhile, the rest of the field will consist of people who are either too afraid to take on Trump or not influential enough with Republican voters to make their attacks on Trump stick. Chris Christie, who declined to attack Trump in 2016, has given indications that he may run an anti-Trump campaign in 2024; Christie has the personality for it and can point to the years in which he stuck loyally by Trump, but he’s also not a particularly well-respected figure among rank-and-file conservative voters these days. Somebody such as Larry Hogan or Liz Cheney might enter the race and face the same problem. Even former Trump officials such as Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley seem to have little stomach for waging open war on their old boss.
But there is still one man who might not be so reticent: Mike Pence.
Of all the disgruntled senior members of the Trump administration who have fallen out with Trump — which is nearly the lot of them at this point — Pence is the most senior and the most credible. . . .
If Pence runs, his main role will likely be that of a spoiler. A Pence campaign that shies away from confrontation with Trump would be pointless and mostly hopeless. But Pence is the one potential candidate who could mount a successful kamikaze attack on Trump in the Republican primaries, a campaign that denies both men the nomination.
Asra Nomani gives a detailed account of her recent experience testifying before Congress about critical race theory–infused materials in the schools:
Towards the end of the hearing, Representative Jackson Lee took over as chair. She then got her five minutes. To my shock, she began with a dig at Devon [Westhill] and me. She then went on to try to school us about issues of racial discrimination against blacks in America, as if somehow I, as a brown immigrant from India, didn’t care about or were woefully ignorant of this. In fact, two of my political heroes are the Reverend Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. And it was my ancestors who took the example of the colonials in the U.S. to rid my ancestral land of white supremacy and British rule. It was my father who climbed a banyan tree as a boy to support Mahatma Gandhi in his march of nonviolence — a concept that Dr. King embraced to bring civil rights to America. My grandfather was a defense attorney for the Indian citizens who dared to challenge the British, most often losing before British judges, as young men were sentenced to their deaths.
So, I know about historical, systemic racism. I know discrimination. And I know the violence that can happen not only to the body but the soul when discrimination and racism get free rein. I also know what this looks like today. I have witnessed the effect of these prejudices on the many young children, left confused, dismissed, and caricatured by woke teachers, administrators, and school boards. They are told that, because of their skin color, they are inherently evil; that, because of their skin color, they are inherently privileged and must atone for that “sin.” Worse, the same people who peddle these woke lies also tell black children that, rather than having a seat at the American table, they are eternally oppressed — victims purely at the whim of their white oppressors.
Jackson Lee then began a tiresome, ignorant, ill-informed, out-of-touch, and theoretical lecture about critical race theory. It proved that she lives in a bubble. . . .
I knew that I wouldn’t get any more time to speak. So, I stood up a book called Not My Idea, with the pages facing her that showed one of the most ridiculous and cruel ideas of critical race theory: “Whiteness is a bad deal,” with a picture of a contract and the image of the devil beside it. This book is being taught as young as kindergarten in dozens of U.S. public schools.
I filmed the pages as Jackson Lee insisted that critical race theory is harmless. I filmed a copy of the “Oppression Matrix,” an educational reference tool that divides people into “oppressed” and “oppressors” and is used in schools across the country. I filmed a copy of the “Privilege Bingo” card given to children in Fairfax County, Va., schools. In that lesson, all white kids — and even the “Military Kid” — are “privileged” and can only assuage that privilege by obeisance to woke-racist dogma.
One promising takeaway from this past week is that most people are not political weirdos. Axios reports that 75 percent “never tweet.” How about that. Kevin Williamson notes how partisan prime-time cable shows also reach a relatively small audience and considers what to make of that:
I can’t help thinking that there is a lost political opportunity in all of this. I recently had a conversation with an elected official who is a frequent target of cable-news and talk-radio ire, and that media attention was pretty low on his list of things to worry about — he rarely if ever hears anything about that kind of stuff from any of the people who elect him. . . .
In the most recent Gallup poll of issues that Americans care most about, only 1 percent said taxes were their top concern, 1 percent said wages, 1 percent said foreign policy, 1 percent said education. If we set aside the vague (“the government”) and the unusual (Covid), the leading issue, far and away, was inflation — and that concern led the list for only 8 percent of those polled. Joe Biden was elected president by only 24.6 percent of all Americans, and he won the Democratic nomination on an even smaller number of votes — 19 million, or about 5.8 percent of all Americans.
Small, highly motivated groups of people can wield tremendous power at certain democratic bottlenecks, such as primary elections, and broadcast activism of the cable-news and talk-radio variety may have an outsized influence for that reason. But that influence should not be exaggerated: Even the most energetic partisan media is not reliably all that good at selling crazy, even in Texas — ask Don Huffines, the talk-radio hero who got massacred in the Texas GOP gubernatorial primary, or Representative Louie Gohmert, a gadfly on the nut circuit who finished fourth in the AG primary with only 17 percent of the vote.
I don’t know anybody who does a good Greg Abbott impersonation, on Saturday Night Live or anywhere else. But he sure gets a lot of votes.
As a practical matter, what Tucker Carlson thinks about U.S.–Russia relations and the situation in Ukraine has not mattered very much, except maybe to Jon Stewart and SNL and other media figures and media obsessives. And maybe it should matter even less.
Shout-Outs
Andrew Fink, at the Dispatch: Is Belarus Blinking?
Oliver Wiseman, at City Journal: “The Least Woke City in America”
Kate Walters, at KUOW: Kids to continue masking in Seattle Public Schools — possibly for two more months
Margaret Peppiatt, at the College Fix: Obama Homeland chief, accused of ‘violence on marginalized peoples,’ withdraws as grad speaker
CODA
Songs about whiskey tend to be uniquely inspired. The reason is no mystery. “Old Number 7,” by The Devil Makes Three, stands out as something special even among the greats. It goes down easy, unlike the subject of this tribute.
Care to share a song, libationary or otherwise, with this list? Shoot it over my way: jberger@nationalreview.com. Thanks for reading.