Dear Weekend Jolter,
Somewhere between the Hurricane Ian emergency and the monkeypox emergency and dozens of others was the one whose siren had long since turned to background noise: the pandemic.
The Biden White House, facing this reality at last, announced this week that it plans to end the Covid-19 emergency declarations, the confirmation coming within a statement opposing GOP legislation on the issue. Squeezing every last day out of the emergency that it can, the administration is pushing off the effective date until May 11. Still, good riddance.
In arguing for an immediate stop to the “emergency,” Drew Keyes explains the real motivation in maintaining the declarations all along:
Although the threat posed by the pandemic has really been over for at least a year, the Biden administration has maintained the emergency status to serve its own political interests. . . .
The administration has consistently attempted to use the pandemic to advance its broader agenda, from eviction moratoria to student-debt forgiveness.
The Biden team has gotten spectacularly confused in the process, exposing the sustained states of emergency as the shams that they are. Recall when Biden said last September that the pandemic “is over,” just after the administration had justified its student-debt amnesty by citing the emergency — while separately suggesting that it no longer needed to invoke Title 42 to quickly expel migrants because the “unprecedented public-health dangers” of Covid-19 had passed.
It’s hard to keep up. But a brief survey of the abuses that have been committed in the name of this one emergency should further call into question the executive branch’s overreliance on the practice generally.
Back in the day, Kevin Williamson wrote a good deal in these pages about “emergency” abuse, having compiled some jarring stats about the frequency of the declarations. “Ronald Reagan observed that nothing in this life gets as close to immortality as a federal program, and that is doubly true for a federal emergency,” he wrote. One solution floated was to make Congress affirmatively vote on maintaining the states of emergency: to establish an opt-in system (or opt-to-keep-going), as opposed to an opt-out, as is currently the case.
Absent some such reform, expect the emergencies, and the powers and spending latitude that come with them, to keep piling up. To wit: Even if Biden follows through with ending the Covid emergency this May, at least one other could soon take its place — next, on abortion.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
There’s a lot to say about the Tyre Nichols case, but the essence of it is this: Let Justice Be Done in Memphis
The Colorado government “is neither decent nor liberal”: The Persecution of Jack Phillips Should End
Bravo, Spencer Cox: Utah Reins In Gender Insanity
ARTICLES
Rich Lowry: The Infinite Elasticity of ‘White Supremacy’
Jim Geraghty: Red Zeppelin: What Are We Willing to Do about China’s Spy Balloon?
Dan McLaughlin: Top Biden Legal Adviser Says Election Was Stolen
Brittany Bernstein: $5 Million Reparations Payment for Black Residents Not Enough, San Francisco Official Says
Brittany Bernstein: Pro-Life Activist Arrested by FBI Acquitted on Federal Charges
Jimmy Quinn: China’s Police Station in Manhattan Has Closed Its Doors, State Department Says
Luther Ray Abel: The State Made My Truck Fat
Ryan Mills: The Truth behind the Great Florida Classroom Library Freak-Out
John McCormack: Abortion Extremism on the March in Minnesota
Michael Brendan Dougherty: Trans Rights and Conscience Rights
Andrew McCarthy: The FBI Finally Searches Biden’s Rehoboth Beach Home — What Took So Long?
Rebeccah Heinrichs: Who Are the Real ‘Realists’ on Ukraine?
Stanley Kurtz: Big Win for DeSantis in Battle over AP African-American Studies
Christian Schneider: Unjust Desserts: Another Bakery Gets Bullied by the Regulatory State
CAPITAL MATTERS
Yep, still dumb: Why Minting a Trillion-Dollar Coin Would Be a Horribly Inflationary Idea
The demagoguery was demagoguery, Dominic Pino confirms: So Much for the Robber-Baron Ocean Carriers
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Armond White laments the Oprah imprimatur on this particular product: Oprah Revives the 1619 Project Fabrications
Brian Allen finds a college town where the campus/Main Street relationship is actually going quite well: In Maine, Town and Gown, Together, Mean the Arts Win
Jeffrey Blehar, with an appreciation: Sometimes Nothin’ Can Be a Real Cool Hand
FROM THE NEW, FEBRUARY 20, 2023, ISSUE OF NR
Andrew McCarthy: Biden’s Classified-Documents Scandal Will Save Trump from His
Madeleine Kearns: Trans and Teens: The Social-Contagion Factor Is Real
Jim Geraghty: Mayor Pete’s Canceled Ambitions
Philip Klein: The Real Debt-Ceiling Cowards
Dan McLaughlin: The World and Ron DeSantis
EXCERPTS FOR WHAT AILS YOU
This latest issue of NR features an array of top-flight pieces from top-flight writers (see above), but I’ll sample here Maddy Kearns’s examination of the “social contagion” theory:
Transgenderism is the belief that every person has a “gender identity” (an inner sense of being male, female, something else, or in between) distinct from his or her sex and that, when the two conflict, gender identity should take precedence. It is perhaps surprising that this idea has caught on. And yet it has. According to Pew Research, over 5 percent of Americans under 30 identify as transgender or nonbinary, compared with 1.6 percent of the total adult population and just 0.3 percent of those over 50.
Both those alarmed and those pleased by this trend agree that the mainstreaming of transgenderism has encouraged more people to declare themselves trans. What is disputed is whether the trend has mainly encouraged the true transgender population to make itself known. Or has it mainly encouraged transgender identification among those who are not transgender (either because “true trans” does not exist or because it can be confused with underlying mental-health conditions)? . . .
Over a ten-year period, Britain’s gender-identity youth clinic saw a 4,400 percent increase in referrals for gender-distressed adolescent females seeking medical transition, compared with a 1,000 percent increase among males. Before 2011, gender-dysphoric boys outnumbered girls two to one. Today, gender-dysphoric girls outnumber boys three to one. If the rise in transgender identification were the result only of society’s becoming more tolerant, we would expect to see similar increases in transgender identification across generations and between the two sexes. But that’s not what has happened.
There are regional disparities, too. In May 2022, in an opening monologue for his television show, Bill Maher observed that the proportion of Americans who identify as LGBTQ has roughly doubled in each generation. “If this spike in trans children is all biological, why is it regional?” he asked. “Either Ohio is shaming them, or California is creating them.” California’s rate of transgender identification among young people is nearly 38 percent higher than the national average: Nearly 2 percent of those aged between 13 and 17 identify as transgender. There are striking disparities even within the state. For instance, 6 percent of young people in the Davis Joint Unified School District identify as transgender, which is nearly 4.3 percentage points higher than the national average and three times California’s average.
Some transgender activists have argued that the current increase in transgender identity is like the increase of left-handedness observed in the mid 20th century. Once children were no longer punished for being left-handed — as they had been for roughly 250 years, partly because it limited their ability to work after the Industrial Revolution — left-handedness gradually became more common. Yet its rate of occurrence was roughly the same in 1760 and in 1960, before and after left-handedness had been suppressed, whereas only a tiny minority of children struggled with gender dysphoria before 2010.
Ryan Mills does a deep dive on what’s really going on with classroom libraries in Florida:
What do you get when you take a new law aimed at increasing transparency around public-school materials, add in some misplaced concerns about an existing law that prohibits providing pornography to kids, sprinkle in conflicting directions from local school leaders that provided teachers with no room to use discretion or common sense, and mix them together in a state where the governor — a likely 2024 Republican presidential candidate — is often characterized by the media and his political opponents as akin to a fascist dictator?
The answer: the great Florida classroom library freak-out of 2023.
Several stories popped up in the local, national, and international media last week about teachers in at least two Florida school districts removing their classroom libraries — or completely covering them with construction paper — under the largely unfounded belief that they could be sent to jail for having unvetted books on their shelves.
According to teachers’ union leaders, Florida teachers are living in a state of “fear” and “confusion” after lawmakers last year passed HB 1467, a law aimed at providing transparency about school instructional materials. The law and a newly approved state rule require trained media specialists or school librarians to vet and approve all school reading materials, and to publish a list of all media-center and classroom books on their school’s website.
The law was passed after parents across the country raised concerns about sexually explicit school library books with controversial content that some viewed as pornographic.
In mid January, in response to the new state law, leaders of the Manatee County school district, south of Tampa, sent guidance to their teachers and staff about their classroom libraries. Kevin Chapman, the district’s chief of staff, told National Review their intent was to direct teachers to temporarily remove any unvetted books from their classroom libraries until they could be approved by a trained media specialist. And there was urgency, he claimed, based on an existing law that said “if there was an inappropriate book found in a school, that person or persons could be charged with a third-degree felony.” . . .
Manny Diaz, Florida’s education commissioner, said the social-media posts of empty library shelves and libraries covered with paper are part of a “stunt” to “create a narrative that books are being banned or that teachers are being told they can’t have a classroom library.”
“Those are just not facts,” he told National Review on Monday.
Andrew McCarthy weighs in on the latest twist in the Biden-documents saga — an FBI search at his Delaware shore house:
It is increasingly obvious that Biden, for all his claptrap about “transparency,” did not intend for the public to find out about his classified-information fiasco. The White House did not disclose anything until CBS blindsided the president with its January 9 report. Even when they grudgingly conceded that CBS was accurate in reporting on the November 2 discovery of classified documents in Biden’s private office, Biden officials withheld a critical fact that was not in the CBS report: namely, that more classified documents had been found in Biden’s Wilmington garage on December 20. It only made sense to conceal that explosive discovery if the administration never intended for it to become public — i.e., Biden calculated that if he rode out the CBS report and stressed that his cooperation with authorities made his situation completely different from Trump’s, the press would lose interest. This calculation was wrong, and it went up in smoke on January 12, when additional classified documents were found in the Wilmington den and the earlier garage discovery came to light.
The point of all this is that the administration was caught flat-footed by the January 9 CBS report. If Biden, as he claims, always intended to be transparent, to “self-report,” and to disclose, things would not have been handled the way they’ve been handled. Instead, the White House would have immediately reported the first (November 2) discovery to the Justice Department; Attorney General Garland would have promptly assigned a prosecutor (perhaps a special counsel) to coordinate with the FBI so that all private Biden locations were immediately searched, with Biden’s consent; and then, once that process was completed, a full public disclosure would have been made, explaining the general nature of the documents (e.g., that they were from Biden’s time as vice president and senator), their classification levels, and the locations where they were found.
That didn’t happen because, in character with the Biden we’ve known for decades, the president got this one completely wrong. He thought the story could be buried and the damage contained. You ask the natural question: If this problem started on November 2, 2022, why is the FBI still doing searches on February 1, 2023, and why didn’t the Justice Department just have the FBI do thorough searches in every relevant location back in November? The answer: the administration didn’t prepare because it didn’t suspect that the press had and would report the story. It was surprised by the January 9 CBS report, and it is still scrambling now because it dithered for over two months not dealing with what the Biden White House and Justice Department should have seen as a potential catastrophe.
And in the category of continuing coverage, Brittany Bernstein checks back with San Francisco on its draft recommendation of $5 million reparations payments. As this newsletter noted a few weeks ago, there’s always a higher number:
A San Francisco advisory committee’s recommendation that the city pay out hefty reparations to the city’s longtime black residents does not go far enough toward making things right, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors told National Review on Tuesday.
Supervisor Shamann Walton, who wrote the legislation that formed the committee two years ago, said that the proposed $5 million payment per qualifying person is actually “much less than a lot of the projections that people say black people should receive for reparations here in the United States.”
“You can Google a lot of the reparations work that has been done and look at the monetary formulas that people have put together and most certainly the 5 million is a very minuscule number compared to a lot of research that has been done over the past couple of decades, quite frankly,” said Walton, who has represented the city’s 10th district since 2019 and previously served as board president.
Shout-Outs
Samuel Gregg, at Law & Liberty: When a Classical Liberal Confronted Nazi Terror
Steven Greenhut, at Reason: After Backlash Against Proposed Gas Stove Ban, Progressives Are Gaslighting America
Ian Haworth, at the Washington Examiner: Ilhan Omar thinks you’re really dumb
CODA
And now for something completely different. This is mainly for the ex-kids who watched cartoons in the ’90s, and/or for folks who today have kids or grandkids of their own and want to teach them about world geography. I rediscovered this “song” in pursuit of such a lesson: Yakko (of Animaniacs fame) rattling off the countries of the world. Impressive, and a throwback. They don’t make cartoons like this anymore. Plus you get some choice geopolitical references of that time (“Germany now in one piece,” “both Yemens”).
Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend.