Dear Weekend Jolter,
By now, many of you are at what I call the post-Thanksgiving “creative” stage, when stacks of leftovers inspire stabs at boundary-pushing fusion. I trust you are enjoying your turkey tacos, cranberry-sauce cosmos, and pumpkin-pie fried rice — and, in that spirit, the blessings of abundance.
These are, by some measures, bleak times. Inflation has squeezed family budgets, as rising mortgage rates put homeownership even more out of reach for many. The state of the presidential race is completely illogical. As NR’s most recent issue explores, geopolitical chaos is spreading.
And yet, these are extraordinary times. How often do you hear about the goals of global government bodies actually being met? In the case of poverty reduction, they were exceeded. More than 1 billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty since 1990, and, while the uplift is not universal, it is widespread. In Asia, the only countries unlikely to eradicate this scourge by 2030 are those doing everything in their power not to: “Afghanistan, Papua New Guinea, and North Korea,” per Brookings.
If you’re born today, almost anywhere, chances are you are much better off than if you’d been born 50 years ago. And if you’re born in America, chances are you have more opportunities to be better off than if you’re born somewhere else. As Dominic Pino wrote earlier this year, “for most people, there’s no economy better than America’s. Zooming out from day-to-day politics, it’s clear that the U.S. free-market system is doing something right.” Among the bullet points to demonstrate this (drawn from an Economist cover story) is that even our poorest state, Mississippi, has a higher average income than France.
The advantages go beyond macroeconomic data, of course. Still, some Americans remain convinced in their view — faith, almost — that they inhabit a sink of iniquity and inequity. The recent (sorry for having to type this term) “TikTok trend” of young people sharing their deep, approving thoughts after stumbling upon Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” is only the latest expression of a misinformed national self-hatred. Bracketing that strange cultural moment, and not unrelated to it, have been weeks of anti-Israel protests with a distinctly anti-Western flavor. Jim Geraghty observed,
There is something like self-loathing at work in our culture, a mentality that refuses to accept the contentions that we are good and worth protecting.
Tocqueville, more than a few news cycles ago, hit upon a paradox that afflicts otherwise flourishing societies, in analyzing how prosperous Americans could be so miserable — how such “strange melancholy . . . in the midst of their abundance” could overcome them. “In America,” he wrote, “I saw the freest and most enlightened men placed in the happiest circumstances that the world affords; it seemed to me as if a cloud habitually hung upon their brow.” The reason, he surmised, is that while poor inhabitants of the “Old World” did not think of “the ills they endure,” Americans “are forever brooding over advantages they do not possess.” Today, he might have added “advantages they do not realize they possess.”
We are, as Tocqueville wrote, restless. It contributes to our dynamism as well as, unfortunately, self-loathing. Yet America is good and worth protecting. Modern society and its advantages, the fruits of free markets and freedoms of liberal democracy, are good and worth protecting. Thanksgiving weekend is an apt time to reaffirm that. If you’re reading this at NR, I probably do not need to convince you of these basic propositions. Still, if TikTok is any barometer, some do need convincing.
Gratitude can be a powerful prophylactic against self-loathing. NR’s Thanksgiving editorial discussed the importance of being conscious of our blessings, even in the face of serious problems. Jack Butler wrote about the need to pause and appreciate the basic things. “A roof over one’s head. A family to love. Food to eat. America.” The first Thanksgiving with my parents since Covid. Dishes carried in from the cold, and those baked fresh, spread across tables. A house full of family and pets. Health. A loving, thoughtful wife. A five-year-old who truly believes the tooth fairy’s real and just came into the hard cash to prove it.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
Our Thanksgiving editorial, once more, is here: Counting Our Blessings
Marking an anniversary of norm-breaking: Harry Reid’s Judiciary
More bar-lowering in public education: New York Gives Up on High-School Education
ARTICLES
Charles C. W. Cooke: Everyone Should Be Thankful for Something
Jeffrey Blehar: A Brief History of Settler-Colonialism
Kayla Bartsch: Progressives Advocated Pandemic School Closures. Now They’re Covering Their Tracks
Jim Geraghty: Biden Turns 81 — Say, How’s That ‘Bridge’ Coming?
Dominic Pino: Javier Milei Is Not Donald Trump
Madeleine Kearns: So Long, Suella, and Farewell, British Tories
Becket Adams: A Tale of Two Protests
David Zimmermann: ‘I’m Asking for Real Help’: Mother of Hamas Hostage Begs U.S. Officials to Secure Son’s Release
Noah Rothman: The Lies Israel Exposed with Its Raid on Shifa Hospital
Noah Rothman: The January 6 Conspiracy Theories Are Still Dumb
Kathryn Jean Lopez: God Bless Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Jay Cost: Don’t Forget the Founding Fathers
Jimmy Quinn: Xinjiang-Born U.S. Official Senses a ‘Trap’ in Biden–Xi Fentanyl Deal
Jimmy Quinn: Dissident Masih Alinejad Slams the Biden Administration’s ‘Irresponsible’ Handling of Iranian Assassination Plot
CAPITAL MATTERS
Andrew Stuttaford breaks down what the heck just happened in Argentina (as does John Fund): Milei and the Consequences of Economic Collapse
Dominic Pino, with a simple Thanksgiving lesson in markets: How Many Turkeys Are Needed for Thanksgiving?
Matthew Lau updates us on new EV data out of Canada: Inconvenient Math for the Electric-Vehicle Revolution
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Brian Allen gets in touch with a tribe called Pequot: Connecticut’s Pequot Museum Recalls War, Despair, Courage, and Reconciliation
Armond White gets in on the Marvels bashing: The Marvels Jumps the Shark
EXCERPTS, OUR OWN VERSION OF RECYCLING
Reporting from the Halifax International Security Forum, Jimmy Quinn gets the perspective of a Xinjiang-born U.S. official on an overlooked Biden–Xi deal:
One of the main outcomes of the November 15 meeting between President Joe Biden and Chinese general secretary Xi Jinping is a deal aimed at restricting the flow of fentanyl into the U.S. Washington lifted sanctions targeting the Chinese Ministry of Public Security’s Institute for Forensic Sciences, which was blacklisted by the U.S. Commerce Department in 2020 for its alleged complicity in abuses against Uyghurs, in exchange for vague promises from Beijing on the trafficking of fentanyl precursors.
Nury Turkel, who was born in a Chinese prison camp in the Xinjiang region and is the most senior political appointee of Uyghur heritage in U.S. government, told me he’s “very disappointed” that Beijing convinced the U.S. to take the deal.
Although it has gone unnoticed beyond Washington’s China-watcher circles, amid other takeaways from the U.S.–China talks and the ongoing war in Gaza, it is in fact a monumental deal: It is the first instance in which the U.S. has rolled back one of the measures it has brought to bear on the Chinese Communist Party atrocities against Uyghurs. The administration itself labeled the abuses “genocide.”
In an interview Sunday on the sidelines of the Halifax International Security Forum, Turkel, a member of the U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom and until recently its chairman, said: “I feel like we got ourselves into another trap, with the Chinese making a promise or symbolic gesture or pledge to address this public-health crisis.”
Jeff Blehar has had it with all of humanity’s conquering and populating. His Thanksgiving story, “A Brief History of Settler-Colonialism,” is a roller-coaster ride through epochs. Buckle up:
Let’s start the clock right where it properly begins to count: that moment 60,000 years ago when something fewer than 10,000 humans straggled together as a group out of Africa into the modern Middle East, supplying the rest of the non-sub-Saharan human race to the world. From middle-easterners to south Indians and Han Chinese, from the Iranian plateau to the Indo-European horselords to all the vast peoples of the New World, from the blue-eyed, red-haired Celts of Ireland to dark-skinned aborigines of Australia or Papua New Guinea: All of them originated from this extremely tight bottleneck of humanity. (The African continent’s human future would be subdivided by the Sahara desert: North Africa’s heritage would belong almost entirely to various waves of these “bottleneck” people, while sub-Saharan Africa remained largely a world unto itself, to this day the most linguistically and genetically diverse region in the world owing to the long millennia of relatively unimpeded free and recombinative gene flow within otherwise circumscribed boundaries.)
Sounds like a pretty neat achievement, you’d think. Humanity breaking free to an unspoiled world! Actually, it’s been a bloodbath since then. Because those first humans out of Africa met some unexpected company once they finally crossed over to the Eurasian mainland in the Middle East: Neanderthals. Yes, Homo sapiens sapiens was not the first intelligent hominid to escape from Africa: The Neanderthals (and their even more primitive ancestors the Denisovans, who headed east into Asia and South Asia before they too were overtaken by the descendants of this initial cloudburst of humanity) had beaten us to the migratory punch long ago. But we as a demographically attenuated species weren’t feeling particularly picky ourselves at the time, whether it came to mass slaughter or to getting horizontal with nonhumans. That’s right: Modern genetic studies have now proven beyond all question that literally all of non-sub-Saharan humanity is at least 3 percent Neanderthal because we are all descendants of that one rather, um . . . awkward initial “mixing event.”
The Neanderthals were extinguished to the last man after that one event, in a brutal demographic struggle that took fully 10,000 years to complete. This suggests that the term “mixing event” is of course white-privileged academic code for “slaughter of the men and haremization of the few surviving women.” There will be many more such “events” throughout the remainder of this story, because of course this hunter-gatherer population of escapee Neanderthal-rapists then subsequently spread all over the world, both west into Europe and — slowly — east across the vast Eurasian plain, splitting in all directions and recombining in various ways until a similarly tight bottleneck of people broke through to the North American continent. In the Neolithic era, hunter-gatherers in a band spanning the Levant to Iran first learned to apply their colonialist “discourse of dominance” to cruelly subject Mother Earth herself, marking another grim milestone: the agricultural revolution. Peaceful farmers these were not: These patriarchal, tribally based societies slowly moved both westward out of Anatolia and southeastward from the Iranian plateau, pitilessly conquering the hunter-gatherers who had arrived before them. These are the sketchy men whose even sketchier descendants ultimately built Mohenjo-Daro and the Indus Valley Civilization, as well as Stonehenge, after fusing with or replacing the natives. As Nigel Tufnel once aptly observed, “no one knows who they were, or what they were doing,” which is all the evidence I need to know that they were up to no good.
Kayla Bartsch calls out the NYT for acting as if the evidence only now reveals the harm to education caused by Covid-era school closures:
Really? Just now the evidence is in?
As early as the fall of 2020, studies showed that such closures had little to no effect on reducing Covid-19 transmission rates in the community. Even in the studies that did suggest transmission rates were slightly lessened by extended school closures, the effect was too marginal to support such a sweeping policy change. It was by no means evident that the community-health gains of closing school for an extended period mitigated the detrimental effects of keeping millions of kids out of school for semesters — even years — at a time. . . .
All told, an estimated 6.5 million more students became chronically absent across the nation due to the pandemic. Absences were most prevalent among Latino, black, and low-income students. In short, school closures were especially devastating to the nation’s most vulnerable students. While progressives wielded claims that school closures protected the students and families of minority and low-income students who were most at risk of contracting Covid-19, such closures ended up destroying their educational and developmental path.
Chronic absenteeism, apart from the obvious setbacks in learning, is positively correlated with delinquency, future incarceration, and drug abuse, among other negative outcomes. What does that look like on a local scale? I will refer to my hometown of Washington, D.C.
Forty-eight percent of students in D.C. public-school districts were “chronically absent” in 2022 — nearly double the rate of 2018, which stood at 29 percent. In other words, nearly one half of students in D.C. regularly missed 10 percent or more of the school year. Currently, at certain DCPS high schools, three out of four students are chronically absent. Many have stopped attending school altogether.
Chronic absenteeism is, unsurprisingly, positively correlated with juvenile delinquency. On November 13, Mayor Muriel Bowser declared a “public emergency on juvenile crime.”
Dominic Pino sets the press straight on the inapt Trump comparisons to Argentina’s new president-elect:
Javier Milei won the presidency in Argentina, and the media can’t stop talking about Donald Trump. Business Insider called Milei “Argentina’s Trump-like presidential candidate.” The Daily Beast called him the “‘Donald Trump’ of Argentina.” A common formulation used in election-recap articles (from the New York Times, CNN, NPR, and the Associated Press) is to say that Milei “drew comparisons” to Trump. Those comparisons were almost invariably drawn by other media outlets in their prior coverage of the campaign.
There’s a grain of truth to the comparison. Milei has said he sees Trump as part of the fight against socialism, and Trump has praised Milei. Milei, like Trump, is an outsider to politics, having previously won only one election, to the Argentine Congress in 2021, and he is on the right of the Argentine political spectrum.
But the similarities basically end there. If every right-wing outsider anywhere in the world is “Donald Trump,” that only shows our media’s myopic obsession with the man and fails to present Americans with an accurate depiction of politics in other countries.
In fact, you don’t even have to be an outsider to get the Trump comparison. Boris Johnson, who was mayor of London and an MP for years before becoming prime minister of the U.K., is frequently likened to Trump. So is Jair Bolsonaro, the former Brazilian president who was a military officer and career politician. Indian prime minister Narendra Modi gets it too, despite being in a completely different political culture and his party’s holding an outright majority in the Indian parliament for nearly ten years now. . . .
Milei has very little in common with Trump in terms of his policy views. He describes himself as a “libertarian” and a “liberal,” in the classical sense of the term. He is promising major austerity, including the elimination of most of Argentina’s government ministries. He wants to privatize all government corporations and slash public-works spending. He supports unilateral free trade and told the Economist that “tariffs should not exist.” He is strongly opposed to Vladimir Putin, whom he describes as an “autocrat,” said he would meet with Volodymyr Zelensky as president, and joined pro-Ukraine protests while waving a Ukrainian flag days after Russia’s invasion in 2022.
Honorable Mention
In case you missed it last weekend, our friends and partners over at National Review Institute are accepting applications for the 2024 Burke to Buckley program. Have a look:
Before you finish that last bite of turkey . . .
Consider applying for our Burke to Buckley Fellowship Program in Miami, New York City, or Philadelphia. The ideal applicant for the program — which helps participants develop a deeper understanding of the foundations of conservative thought — will be a mid-career professional (around 35-55) who works in industries and professions that could include oil and gas, technology, finance, real estate, medicine, sports, law enforcement, legal professions, education, nonprofits, and the arts (these are just some of the professions represented by past fellows!).
The program takes place over eight moderated discussions, most of which take place over dinner at a private club. The 2024 classes will run from late January to early May. Moderators include popular NR writers and leading academics at local universities. The rewards of participating are deep and meaningful discussions around important topics, as well as the chance to meet a new and diverse group of peers. The deadline to apply is December 22, but we encourage interested conservatives, libertarians, and the curious to apply as soon as possible.
You’ll find more information about the program here. What if you don’t live in one of the three program cities, but know folks who do and who might be NRI fellow material? Go ahead and share this link.
Apply now, before that turkey gets cold.
CODA
The Weird Al meta-biopic (a parody of biopics, about the guy who parodies musicians) is still on my need-to-see-soon list, but in the spirit of the holiday weekend — I submit this throwback.