Dear Weekend Jolter,
“Children are resilient.” The line, used to excuse pandemic school closures that lasted far longer than they should have, has become something of an ironic creed memorializing the folly of lockdown extremism.
Those of us who have met children were dubious anyway of the claim. (My preschooler’s despondent reaction when I end bath time before he prefers is not what I’d call rolling with the punches.)
What children are is absorbent. They take it all in, they retain information and memories we adults discard almost immediately, they pick up new skills and lessons every day. But if a sponge sits in a tray, it doesn’t absorb much: We are only now, owing to the work of various organizations that sought to quantify the true devastation from those Covid-19 closures, beginning to see how desperately parched the minds of the world’s children became over the last two years.
With the pandemic nominally back in the news (“Hey, Remember Covid-19?” Jim Geraghty asks), it is a fitting time to revisit the policy disaster it spawned in the world of education. What follows is a mere snapshot of those organizations’ findings:
- The current generation of students could lose $21 trillion in lifetime earnings, as a result of closures. (Joint report by the World Bank, UNESCO, UNICEF, U.K. government, USAID, and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation)
- In low-to-middle-income countries, the percentage of ten-year-olds unable to “read and understand a simple text” has risen from 57 percent before the pandemic to about 70 percent. (Aforementioned joint report, the Economist) Put another way: Most of the kids in the countries that house most of the kids cannot read.
- The impact is not limited to the developing world: “Even in high-income countries able to quickly organize real-time online instruction, learning losses appear substantial. . . . Data from an 8-week school shutdown in the Netherlands show a learning loss equivalent to 20 percent of a school year. . . . Evidence from across the United States mirror the situation in Europe, with significant learning losses in math and reading. In Texas, only 30 percent of third graders tested at or above grade level in math in 2021, compared to 48 percent in 2019. Similar learning losses have also been observed in California, Colorado, Tennessee, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia, and Maryland.” (World Bank, UNESCO, and UNICEF joint report)
- “Immediate transitions” from high school to two-year colleges declined 16 percent, and 6 percent for four-year colleges, which “could signal a reduction in future college credentials.” (Brookings)
- Students in more than 80 percent of countries “have fallen behind in their learning.” A total 2 trillion hours of in-person schooling were lost during closures. (UNICEF)
- “Less than half of countries [in a recent study] are implementing learning recovery strategies at scale to help children catch up on what they’ve missed.” (UNICEF)
“Global disaster” is how the Economist described the situation, citing much of this data. The report included estimates that schoolchildren globally may be “eight months behind where they would normally be.” As for the argument that remote schooling served as an adequate substitute, a recent Atlantic piece noted how closures often translated to “no school—literally none at all, for days and even weeks on end.” Many students turned truant; others simply did not participate regularly over Zoom. Poor kids suffered the most.
Ronald Reagan, on more than one occasion, said freedom is “never more than one generation away from extinction.” The same is true of knowledge. The task ahead will be to implement catch-up plans aggressively, of course resisting the urge to shutter schools again but also focusing lesson plans on the crucial, must-know material and offering additional help to those who need it. With great effort and no small amount of good fortune, our educators may yet be able to minimize the damage from what the World Bank and its partners described as “the worst shock to education and learning in a century.”
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Before turning to the week in review, we also would like to thank all the many readers who contributed to our webathon and helped us reach, and surpass, our $100,000 goal. The donations help sustain us financially, but the accompanying comments we’ve received help sustain us in other ways. So many kind and encouraging words — they mean the world.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
Once again, we must insist. Do not pass massive spending bills that will exacerbate the biggest economic problem facing the nation: Inflation Still Rages
Sri Lanka’s collapse is a warning, and policy-makers — especially those in the developing world — should heed its lessons: Collapse of Sri Lanka Is a Failure of Leftism
ARTICLES
Rich Lowry: For the Good of the Country, Biden Shouldn’t Run Again
Kevin Williamson: Down with First Ladies
Charles C. W. Cooke: Democrats Prepare to Throw Biden Overboard
Dan McLaughlin: Joe Biden Hits a New Polling Low: 20 Below
Stanley Kurtz: PolitiFact’s Failed Attack on DeSantis, over Civics Education
Brittany Bernstein: Majority of Democrats Support Abolishing Supreme Court, New Poll Finds
Diana Glebova: Loudoun County School District Fails to Halt AG’s Probe into Bathroom Sex Assault
Jay Nordlinger: Against Numbness
Abigail Anthony: How Universities Weaponize Freshman Orientation
Abigail Anthony: Hearing Witness Claims Hawley Inciting Anti-Trans ‘Violence’ by Asking if Women Get Pregnant
Nate Hochman: What Happened to Alyssa Farah?
Michael Brendan Dougherty: We Must Go on Offense against Transanity
Isaac Schorr: 7-Eleven Encourages Los Angeles Franchises to Close amid String of Armed Robberies, Murders
Jim Geraghty: Inflation Is the Five-Alarm Fire Burning Down the American Economy
ICYMI, Jack Fowler — you know Jack Fowler, Jolter Not-Really-Emeritus, who still holds the master key to all things NR and, I am told, knows with satellite-based accuracy the locations of every last one of the bodies — has kicked off a series on post-Janus fights, so watch this space, as they say: How a Liberal State Defies the First Amendment
CAPITAL MATTERS
Brian Riedl explains what rising interest rates mean for the federal budget, and it’s not pretty: Washington Isn’t Ready for Higher Interest Rates
Jonathan Lesser on New York’s unworkable climate plan: New York’s Climate Virtue-Signaling Will Condemn Millions to Energy Poverty
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
“Enough hues to make a rainbow feel drab.” Brian Allen talks up a dazzling exhibition of pottery known as majolica: Call It Madness, Call It Mania, Call It Magic, but Majolica Comes to Baltimore
Armond White, with a rave: Marx Can Wait: A Haunting Documentary from a Truly Great Filmmaker
Kyle Smith goes deep into the Kubrick oeuvre: Stanley Kubrick’s Most Influential Movie
FROM THE NEW, AUGUST 1, 2022, ISSUE OF NR
Andrew McCarthy: Biden Is the Confounder in Chief
Dan McLaughlin: How the 2012 Election Deranged America
Mary Eberstadt: What the Nurses Knew
Ramesh Ponnuru: In Defense of Dobbs
I FEEL THE NEED, THE NEED FOR EXCERPTS
Jill Biden’s taco tribulations prompted much discussion this week in the chattersphere — this website not excluded — about cultural terminology and also breakfast food. Kevin Williamson, as he often does, took things a step further:
First Lady Jill Biden is an embarrassment, but there is a prior question: Why is there a First Lady Jill Biden at all? Why does this person exist?
Previously, Jill Biden’s great contribution to American public life had been providing regular opportunities to mock education doctorates and the habit of people who hold such degrees of affecting the title “Doctor,” as Mrs. Biden does. But now she is ready to make a real and lasting contribution to American public life by dint of her example.
We have to get rid of first ladies.
First ladies are the worst. All of them, even the ones I like.
We live in a republic, not an elected monarchy, and the fact that a woman happens to be married to the president ought properly to mean absolutely nothing for her role in American life. Of course, it is a curiosity. But that we have made it a position and a rank — first! — smacks of the kind of formal aristocracy that we fought a revolution to liberate ourselves from.
And, inevitably, the “first lady” begat the “second lady,” or, perhaps even more nauseating, the “second gentleman” in the case of Douglas Emhoff, a poor dumb bastard for whom I legitimately feel sorry. Imagine putting in all that hard work being evil at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman and ending up as an accoutrement to an accoutrement to such a nullity as Dr. Jill Biden’s husband. That is practically purgatorial.
If there is a “second lady,” then there must be a “third lady.” I know who the third lady was in the Trump administration — Melania — but who is the third lady/gentleman now? Paul Pelosi, I guess.
We don’t need a “first lady.” I don’t know if IBM CEO Arvind Krishna is married, but I guarantee you that if he is, nobody calls his wife the “first lady” of IBM. Karen S. Lynch’s husband isn’t the “first gentleman” of CVS Health. Surely the government of the United States of America can manage to be at least as republican in its manners as the Fortune 500. Patty Smyth is the woman who sang “Goodbye to You,” not some special weird minor figure ceremonial in the tennis world because of her marriage to that lunatic John McEnroe. Dr. Jill Biden is a lightly accomplished, half-educated Ed.D-holding numbskull who sees the locals in San Antonio and thinks: “Tacos. What these people remind me of is tacos.”
Nobody would care if she weren’t married to the president. Nobody should care, even though she is.
Amid rising interest rates, Brian Riedl exposes the foolishness of so many Washington policy-makers who embraced borrowing on the premise that it would cost next to nothing:
Washington, perched for now on top of a mountain of debt, can ill afford higher interest rates. For the past few years, short-sighted lawmakers, economists, and columnists have demanded that Congress take advantage of low interest rates by engaging in a massive borrowing spree. Indeed, President Biden’s enormous spending agenda was often justified by the low interest rates on government borrowing.
This case never made sense for two reasons. First, Washington was already projected to add $100 trillion in baseline deficits over the next three decades due primarily to Social Security and Medicare shortfalls. Even with low rates, interest costs were projected by the CBO to become the most expensive item in the federal budget and consume half of all tax revenues within a few decades. Additional borrowing would deepen the hole.
Second, Washington never locked in the recent low interest rates. In fact, the average maturity on the federal debt has fallen to 62 months. If interest rates rise at any point in the future, nearly the entire escalating national debt would roll over into those rates within a decade. Consequently, continued federal borrowing means gambling America’s economic future on the hope that interest rates never rise again. And there is no backup plan if rates do rise.
We are now getting a taste of the cost of higher interest rates. The latest CBO budget baseline conservatively assumes that the average interest rate on the federal debt rises to 3.1 percent over the decade, which is just 0.7 percent above what it projected last year before inflation and interest rates began growing. Even that modest forecast shows that, a decade from now, the $1.2 trillion cost of annual federal interest payments will exceed the defense budget, and represent a record 3.3 percent of the economy. And that is the rosy scenario of a strong economic recovery, low inflation, no new spending expansions, and the 2017 tax cuts expiring on schedule.
And what if interest rates surpass the CBO’s projected 3.1 percent rate a decade from now? Each additional percentage point would cost the federal government $2.6 trillion over the decade, and $400 billion annually by 2032.
College has changed. Abigail Anthony explains how:
I arrived at Princeton University in September 2019. I had looked at Princeton online and thought, “one day . . .” Suddenly, I was experiencing day one. My eager arrival on campus was emotionally amplified by bright smiles, copious pamphlets, and dormitory supervisors dancing in tiger suits. Orientation innocently began with introductions of names and hometowns — then descended into divisive lectures and panels. The intention of these programs was not to assimilate us into our new (and intimidating) surroundings, but rather to coerce students into accepting and affirming a resident orthodoxy.
We often hear about how college students are indoctrinated in the classroom. But the brainwashing begins on move-in day.
Ideally, freshman orientation should be a procedural, social assimilation to familiarize students with the resources the university offers and how to access them. However, Princeton University undertook a mission to present incoming students with sexual, moral, and political guidance, wholly omitting widely held perspectives and effectively insulating progressive views from intellectual trial. Moreover, attendance at these events was compulsory, thus constituting an ideological hazing.
The mandatory “Safer Sexpo” event series within orientation provides condoms, lube, and other sexual products; in 2020, the university provided unspecified “sex toys” to students and emphasized “solo sex.” Each year, freshmen are given a “You’re So Sexy When You Aren’t Transmitting STI’s” comic book with crude pornographic drawings, complete with a condom attached to the back; the author’s website clarifies that “the ideal target audience for this book is college campuses and sex positive organizations that are involved with young people and adults.” Students are informed where they can obtain contraception, abortifacients, and abortions, but there’s no mention of local pregnancy centers. There is a mandatory LGBTQ+ panel, which provides flyers of “The Genderbread Person” diagram. The Gender + Sexuality Resource Center Peer Ed Training Terminology handouts include a “primer on trans inclusive feminism” which explains that “trans women are women” and “there’s no ifs, ands or buts about it.” . . .
During my freshman orientation, in 2019, all the new students (totaling just over 1,300) filed into an auditorium for the “Reflections on Diversity” presentation. A moderator announced statements relating to identity, and students were prompted to stand whenever a given statement resonated with them. Pronouncements related to socioeconomic status (“I am from an owning-class family”) and sexuality (“I do not conform to a binary gender”). The presenter said “this is your community” after every identity, as if students of wealthier backgrounds inherently shared a community. As naïve freshmen, we were pressured into revealing intimate details about our lives, yet it was wholly impersonal because we were reduced to whatever categorical boxes we fill by chance. It was public atonement for supposed sins.
Continuing with some themes from last weekend, Charles C. W. Cooke writes about the next phase in Democrats’ (and the media’s) steady separation from Biden:
“President Biden,” the New York Times reports today, “is facing an alarming level of doubt from inside his own party.” And so, as night follows day, President Biden is facing an alarming level of doubt from within the national media, too.
The crucial statistic in the Times’ roundup was not that Biden’s approval rating is at just 33 percent, or that “more than two-thirds of independents also now disapprove of the president’s performance,” or that “only 13 percent of American voters said the nation was on the right track,” or even that, post-Dobbs, “abortion rated as the most important issue for 5 percent of voters.” The crucial statistic in the Times’ roundup was that “only 26 percent of Democratic voters said the party should renominate [Biden] in 2024.” Why? Because therein rests the permission that the press needed to retreat to its pre-2019 assumptions. Après cela, le déluge.
Apologists for Joe Biden — and for the media’s coverage of him — like to insist that his shortcomings have been covered amply since he first announced he was running for president. But that isn’t quite right. It is true that Biden was frequently cast in a negative light during the 2019 primaries: Back when there was a chance that someone else might be the nominee, Biden was often said to be too old, or too gaffe-prone, or too racist, or too law-and-order-ish to be the nominee. It is not true, however, that these criticisms continued in earnest once Biden had secured the Democratic nomination. Remember those SNL skits that showed Biden as a confused, mendacious, out-of-touch, geriatric has-been? Remember how they stopped once he represented the only chance to beat Donald Trump? The same thing happened in the press. In December 2019, Joe Biden was ancient and ineloquent. By the summer of 2020, he was the experienced survivor of a debilitating stutter. . . .
Yet the fact that Biden seems so old and so confused and so chronically out of touch has provided progressives with a valuable opportunity nevertheless: They can argue that the problem isn’t their policies, but the man selling them. “Oh, all that mess?” they can tell voters, if they manage to persuade Biden to make way for new blood in 2024. “Don’t worry about all that. Our new guy is young — and he’s on it.”
Shout-Outs
Megan McArdle, at the Washington Post: A Berkeley professor’s Senate testimony didn’t go how the left thinks it did
Noah Rothman, at Commentary: How to Leverage a Murder
Adam Wray, at RealClearEducation: College Enrollment is Down – But There’s a Silver Lining
Elle Reynolds, at the Federalist: Kamala Harris Quotes As Motivational Posters
CODA
This sign-off has leaned on Soul Coughing for contributions before, but upon reading Andrew Follett’s piece in the last NR issue, I found “So Far I Have Not Found the Science” to be apt. Another one from Soul Coughing, then (you can take the boy out of the ’90s, but you can’t, well . . . you know the rest).
Got a tune you want to share with this list? From the gnarly ’90s, even? Shoot it this way: jberger@nationalreview.com. Thanks for reading.