The Week

• We’re not huge fans of Evita, but we’re optimistic about the sequel.

• As the decision time of Iowa and New Hampshire draws nearer, Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley have been sniping at each other. It would be productive if they focused on their actual policy differences. Instead, DeSantis is pretending that Haley is soft on Israel and illegal immigration, and Haley is needling DeSantis over his choice of footwear and pretending that he is against domestic energy production. DeSantis’s fight with Disney and his clumsy positioning on Ukraine provide a more fertile field for real debate about the candidates’ competing visions. Meanwhile, both of them could use the courage to sharpen and amplify their critiques of Donald Trump, if they are not just running for second place. Haley’s endorsement by Americans for Prosperity Action led the DeSantis camp to brand her as part of a “pro-open-borders, pro-jailbreak-bill establishment.” We understand that politics isn’t beanbag, but none of this seems helpful to the cause of providing Republican voters a basis upon which to choose a new leader.

• Senator Tim Scott (R., S.C.) has withdrawn from the presidential race. It was the right thing to do, and we applaud both the decision and the man. Scott is a fine senator and a reliably conservative one. He is also a happy warrior in a time with too few of them. His life story is inspiring, and his love of country is as unfeigned as his faith. He bears without strain the symbolism of being a descendant of slaves who holds the Senate seat once occupied by a man who, within living memory, raised the Confederate flag over the South Carolina capitol. Perhaps greater things -- Senate leadership, a vice-presidential nomination, a more successful presidential bid -- lie in Scott’s future. But this was not his year. Scott made a good introduction but never quite found a message and rationale for his candidacy. If voters are to have a clear alternative to Trump, it is important that the other contenders know when to quit. Mike Pence has done so as well. Remaining marginal candidates should follow their example.

• In a Veterans Day speech, Donald Trump promised to “root out” the “vermin” among us. Some people thought this language was reminiscent of dictators past. A Trump spokesman would have none of it. “Those who try to make that ridiculous assertion,” he said, “are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.” So, nice, normal political rhetoric then.

• House Speaker Mike Johnson has released the full archive of thousands of hours of footage from the Capitol on January 6, 2021. This decision allows sensible and fair-minded observers to gain a deeper understanding of that day’s shameful events. Unfortunately, not everyone is such an observer, and this volume of film is more than enough to sustain political spin and conspiracy theories. Sadly, one of those theories was promoted by Utah senator Mike Lee, who spread the risible idea that the whole Capitol riot was some sort of put-up job by the feds rather than criminal misconduct by Trump supporters. One item of “evidence” for this claim is a man in a MAGA hat supposedly flashing a law-enforcement badge -- never mind that it is not in fact a badge and the man has since pleaded guilty and gone to prison. It is true that Democrats, for their own partisan reasons, had previously selected for release only the footage that most dramatically suited their narrative. But that is no excuse. And even in context, the reality of January 6 is bad enough. Pretending otherwise only encourages a repeat.

• Joe Manchin is out. The West Virginia senator announced in early November that he would not run for another term in the upper chamber of Congress. The announcement relieves West Virginians of the obligation they apparently felt to vote him out of office next year. Polls of the state have consistently found that Manchin, a Democrat, would decisively lose a race against his likeliest opponent, Republican governor Jim Justice. But Manchin may not be ready to call it a career just yet. He plans to spend the next several months “traveling the country and speaking out to see if there’s an interest in creating a movement to mobilize the middle and bring Americans together.” That barely concealed reference to a potential third-party bid for the White House has alarmed Democrats, justifiably. Americans agree on few things as they agree on the undesirability of a Trump–Biden rematch, and a centrist alternative could win unanticipated support.

• Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) thinks the country could be on the verge of a sandwich monopoly. In August, Subway agreed to be purchased by private-equity firm Roark Capital. Roark also owns Inspire Brands, which includes sandwich chain Jimmy John’s, and Focus Brands, which includes McAlister’s Deli. The Federal Trade Commission, as part of its big-is-bad approach to antitrust, is looking at blocking the sale. Warren applauded the FTC, saying that if Subway were owned by the same firm that owns Jimmy John’s and McAlister’s, it could create a “sandwich-shop monopoly.” There’s hardly a more competitive industry in America than the restaurant business, as anyone with access to a smartphone and the ability to type “sandwich” into a navigation app knows. How one could even theoretically have a monopoly on making sandwiches, something anyone over the age of five can manage, is difficult to comprehend. It’s no Wonder progressives’ attempts to rewrite antitrust law continue to go a-rye: Courts rightly view the consumer-welfare standard as just about the greatest thing since sliced bread.

• The House Ethics Committee has released its report on Representative George Santos, the Republican congressman from Long Island and Queens found to have lied -- often in wildly entertaining fashion, it must be granted -- about nearly every aspect of his biography, including his ethnicity and marital history. According to the committee, these lies were part of his attempt to financially exploit a no-hope candidacy for Congress in an overwhelmingly Democratic district: The plan was to raise money from donors for a losing bid against a well-entrenched and high-profile liberal and then take the money and run. Instead, thanks to a last-minute court-ordered redistricting, he won. As a new representative rather than a failed candidate, Santos -- his life and lies -- came under scrutiny, and his fraud was revealed. He has announced that he will not run for reelection, which should give him more time to try to avoid prison.

• MLB announced that the All-Star Game will return to Atlanta in 2025. Atlanta was supposed to host it in 2021, but MLB moved it to Denver because of changes to Georgia’s voting laws. The president of the United States described those changes as “Jim Crow on steroids,” and critics said Georgia Republicans were seeking to suppress black turnout and prevent Democrats from winning elections. Only one year later, a black Democrat won the state’s Senate election. The 2022 elections saw the highest turnout for a midterm cycle in Georgia history. Despite that, lines at polling places were short in both the primary and the general election. Early voting set records, with especially high turnout among racial-minority voters. A University of Georgia survey found that 0 percent of black voters had a poor experience casting their ballots. Governor Brian Kemp (R.) always said the goal of the reforms was to make it “easy to vote and hard to cheat.” He was right, and his opponents were wrong. MLB is implicitly admitting as much. Winners don’t need to sit around waiting for apologies.

• Israel’s war against Hamas has had a clarifying effect on the American political landscape. The conflict has revealed the incompatibility of the activist Left’s views toward Israel with those of center-left institutionalists. But the war has given a stress test to the American Right, too. The Daily Wire’s Candace Owens spent the weeks following the 10/7 massacre retailing some of the most ignorant and outrageous slanders against Israel. Former Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson has defended Owens from her critics by claiming the massacre received “disproportionate” attention at the expense of American domestic affairs; he then produced shows about Spain and Ireland. Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk went so far as to indulge all-but-medieval antisemitic tropes when he observed that the “philosophical foundation of anti-whiteness has been largely financed by Jewish donors in the country.” These and other right-wing commentators maintain that their devout Christianity informs their commentary. But they are neither wise as serpents nor harmless as doves.

• The White House observed “Transgender Day of Remembrance,” during which press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that the United States grieves for the 26 transgender Americans killed so far in 2023. Others speak of a “trans genocide.” But this persecution narrative has little evidence to support it. First, there’s the issue of scale. The Williams Institute estimates that 1.6 million people identify as transgender in the United States. As political scientist Wilfred Reilly noted on our website, that rounds up to a homicide rate of 0.9 per 100,000 people. Blacks, by contrast, have a rate higher than 30. Second, it is not at all clear that these deceased individuals were, as Secretary of State Antony Blinken put it, “targeted and killed for living authentically and courageously.” Among the dead was a thief shot by a security guard, an armed activist killed by police during a shootout, a trans-identifying man killed in a murder-suicide by a romantic partner, and a trans-identifying woman killed by a driver who fled the scene. No doubt people who believe they were “born in the wrong body” face all kinds of challenges. The White House is, however, engaged in a propaganda campaign to bolster one side of the culture wars.

• An advisory committee for New York’s education department recommended that the state make optional its Regents Exams -- standardized tests that have long been required for a high-school diploma. They are now to be offered alongside gauzier options such as class projects or “performance-based assessment.” This is a betrayal of New York parents and students and a depressing if implicit concession by the state that it has lost the hope of educating a new generation of students to the standards of their predecessors. Children aiming for placements at elite colleges will continue to take the tests; making them optional is a way for the education system to push low-performing students -- most often minority students from low-income households -- off the books. The benefit, such as it is, is that unionized teachers will receive less scrutiny over exactly what their students are learning.

• The teachers’ strike in Portland, Ore., came to an end. It lasted nearly the entire month of November, with students missing eleven days of school. The district will make up the lost days by cutting a week from winter break and a few days off in the spring and adding three days to the end of the school year. The tentative three-year contract includes a 13.8 percent pay increase, in between the district’s offer of 10.9 percent and the union’s demand of 23 percent. The union did not get its demand for a hard cap on class sizes (a ploy to require the hiring of more teachers and, consequently, more dues-paying members), but it did secure more planning time for teachers during the school day. In other words, the sides met in the middle. It’s the sort of result one would expect from an arbitration board, which is where the dispute should have been all along. Teacher strikes are illegal in 37 states and should be illegal in all 50. If a contract isn’t signed by the expiration date, the district and union should automatically go to binding arbitration while teachers continue to teach. They could have gotten to roughly the same place without upending the lives of students and parents for a month.

• For one brief shining moment, San Francisco had the trash and human feces cleaned up and the tent cities of homeless people cleared out -- all to make the downtown look as good as possible when the city hosted Chinese dictator Xi Jinping and other foreign leaders in town for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. California governor Gavin Newsom admitted, “I know folks say, ‘Oh, they’re just cleaning up this place because all these fancy leaders are coming into town.’ That’s true . . . because it’s true.” It turns out that dictators do get results, even in the U.S.

• The origins of the recent battle for control of OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT and is trying to develop AGI (artificial general intelligence), a system able to match or exceed human reasoning, lie in primeval fears of “forbidden knowledge.” Those fears informed a corporate structure that put a large, and perhaps too large, premium on safety. Acting on those fears, the board removed CEO Sam Altman -- over the objections of most employees and many shareholders. After a few days, proponents of a more balanced approach -- including major shareholder Microsoft -- rightly prevailed. It may well be that both the promise and the danger of AI have been exaggerated, but the way to explore the former and understand the latter is to continue to develop it (if AGI is possible, its invention is surely inevitable). That will mean turning to proven free-market disciplines and incentives, supplemented, where required, by reasonable external regulation that has been shaped by democratic debate. What it should not mean is a half-hearted effort at AI while other countries show more determination.

• The Supreme Court has published a formal code of ethics guiding the conduct of its members. The code, and an irritated accompanying statement, was pointedly signed by all nine justices, who emphasized that they wished to “dispel” a “misunderstanding” that the Court had no ethical standards. The code makes the Court’s self-imposed ethical rules more transparent and deprives bad-faith critics of a common talking point. But it does not change much. The standards for recusal were already governed by a federal statute and supplemented by principles developed in scattered sources that are now collected in a single authoritative statement. The code denounces influence-peddling, puts some guardrails on outside activities, and defines who counts as a family member bound by rules on gifts. It recommends better software for tracking conflicts of interest but states that justices should not recuse themselves because of conflicts involving groups that file amicus briefs. The justices are still -- properly -- not subject to any outside disciplinary authority that could influence their decisions. The code reiterates a core principle: “A Justice should not be swayed by partisan interests, public clamor, or fear of criticism.” They should not pay too much attention, either, to the current critics, who will not be swayed by anything but a left turn by the Court.

• President Biden’s meeting with Xi marked a critical point in America’s return to a China policy that exalts diplomatic engagement. By 2020, Republicans and Democrats alike seemed to have learned from bitter experience that the Chinese Communist Party is a threat to the United States. The Biden administration continues to pay lip service to that new consensus and claims merely to be managing the competition. It avoids the word “engagement.” But the Biden–Xi meeting shows that the president is taking steps to accommodate the Chinese government. Biden agreed to lift sanctions on a Chinese organization implicated in the repression of Uyghurs, in exchange for Xi’s pledge to curb the export of fentanyl precursors. To keep diplomatic talks on track, the State Department has also held off on imposing new sanctions. While there’s a place for high-level dialogue, it’s not clear what the benefit is in this case: Even the White House acknowledges its skepticism of the CCP’s promises. The engagement should be called off once more.

• In late November, Russian forces launched the biggest drone attack on Kyiv since their full-scale invasion in February 2022. The drones they are using come from Iran, where they are made with stolen Western technology. Russia is partnering with China, too: Moscow and Beijing are now discussing a new project in Crimea. Other members of this alliance include North Korea. Meanwhile, there are reports every day of Russian war crimes: mass murder, mass rape, mass kidnapping, etc. On Russian state television, mouthpieces call for the “liquidation” of Ukraine, routinely. Let no one doubt the Ukrainians are making a valiant stand.

• In Russia, dozens of plaques marking the final residence of people who died in the Stalinist purges of the 1930s have disappeared in the past year, according to Oksana Matievskaya of the Last Address project. “The memory of the Soviet terror challenges the concept of the state always being right and is, therefore, inconvenient for the Russian authorities,” she explains, accusing them of removing memorials and emboldening others to follow suit. Memorials to foreign soldiers who fought in World War II have been vandalized. A concrete cross commemorating Polish prisoners in the Komi Republic was found demolished; police blamed bad weather. As memorials to Stalin’s victims disappear, monuments to his memory proliferate. Government authorities intent on rehabilitating the reputation of the Soviet Union and of Stalin in particular have placed more than 95 monuments to the dictator since Putin rose to power in 1999. Putin has no special regard for the communist ideology of the old USSR; hence his embrace of Christian nationalism with Russian characteristics. He admires Stalin rather for his strongman authoritarian ruthlessness. No, the new boss is not the same as the old boss, but he’s trying.

• The results of the Dutch elections on November 22 were clear evidence of popular discontent with mass immigration and the multiculturalist dogma that accompanies it. The election’s winner, with 37 out of 150 seats in the perpetually fragmented Dutch parliament, was the PVV, a right-wing party headed by Geert Wilders. Owing to Islamist threats, he has lived under heavy police protection for nearly 20 years. This experience has hardened his attitudes, and not for the better. He has called for the banning of the Koran and, as is often the case with Europe’s outsider politicians, is too “understanding” of Vladimir Putin. But Wilders will need allies if he is to form a government, and that will require him to moderate some of his positions. A veteran politician who is more pragmatic than he can sometimes seem, he may be helped by the strong showings by two other insurgent parties, one of which, tellingly, was born of discontent over destructive environmental regulation (a discontent Wilders shares). But whether or not he assembles a governing coalition, The Hague’s battered political establishment would do well to reflect on the message Dutch voters are sending.

• An Algerian-born man who had lived in Ireland for over 20 years, avoiding deportation orders, stabbed three children in the center of Dublin. Bystanders intervened; two of them ended up in critical condition. The reaction on the street turned into the worst rioting Dublin has seen in decades. In response, the government blamed “the far right” and revived efforts to pass a law criminalizing “hate speech.” Its definition of “hatred” is circular: “‘Hatred’ means hatred against [protected persons].” Astonishingly, one need not publish or even utter such speech to be convicted. Mere possession of it -- memes stored on a cellphone, say -- renders a person guilty if a judge later deems the speech “likely” to incite hatred. Refusing to share your text-message history with police or grant them your smartphone password brings a sentence of up to a year in prison. “The person” accused “shall be presumed[,] until the contrary is proved, to have been in possession of the material in contravention” of the law, and the accused must also prove that the speech constituted “a reasonable and genuine contribution to literary, artistic, political, scientific, religious or academic discourse” or “was necessary for another lawful purpose.” Notably, you cannot defend yourself by proving that a statement is true. For decades, Ireland has celebrated itself for overthrowing the traditional censorship that banned “blasphemous, seditious, or indecent matter.” Minister for Justice Helen McEntee recently called for legislation that would repeal entirely the 1929 Censorship of Publications Act. But Ireland retains its faith in the power of certain forms of moralizing censorship to manage or disguise political failures: The new hate-speech laws look like a desperate attempt to preempt debate about Ireland’s demographic transformation. Democratic governments should defend their policies before a public free to express itself, even in bumptious and offensive terms.

• Argentina elected Javier Milei as its next president. Milei is an economist known for his libertarian views, his outgoing public persona, and -- most recently -- a pending conversion to Judaism. He agitates for major reforms: dollarization, the abolition of Argentina’s central bank, the elimination of most of the government’s ministries, and the privatization of government corporations. When he’s not giving animated public speeches decrying Argentina’s political class, he can carry on a lengthy conversation with the Economist about economic theory. Milei is unique, but you wouldn’t know that from the media coverage, which almost uniformly calls him “far right” and frequently compares him to Donald Trump. Believe it or not, the rest of the world isn’t as obsessed with Trump as the media are, and a unilateral free-trader, pro-Ukrainian, anti-welfare-state Argentine economist really doesn’t have much in common with the former U.S. president. Milei’s task will be difficult. Argentina’s official inflation rate is 142 percent, and about 40 percent of people are in poverty after decades of corrupt socialist rule. If there was ever a country that could use some economic sense, it’s Argentina, and we hope Milei can provide it.

• Yundi Li, from China, was one of the leading pianists in the world. He had a big international career. But, starting in October 2021, he was not heard in public. Why? Chinese authorities said that he had solicited a prostitute. (They have a habit of saying this about their critics, or other politically troublesome people.) The Chinese Musicians’ Association revoked Li’s membership. Suddenly, in October 2023, he was playing again: in Australia. What had happened in the first place? Maybe we will know someday. Totalitarian parties are often mysterious about their ways. They are capricious as well as cruel. When he was a young man in New York, Eugene D. Genovese, the late historian, belonged to the Communist Party. He was kicked out at age 20. When asked why in later years, Genovese would shrug and say, “I zigged when I should have zagged.”

• From 2008’s Iron Man through 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) put forth a dizzyingly successful array of interconnected comic-book movies. Its prior 32 entries had grossed almost $30 billion worldwide, making the franchise the biggest Hollywood moneymaker over the last 15 years. But No. 33, The Marvels, released in November, has flopped. The movie’s North American opening-weekend gross of $46 million was the MCU’s worst, as was its 77 percent second-weekend drop, to $10 million. The failure is another sign of serious troubles for post-Endgame Marvel Studios. Casting challenges, from the loss of old standbys to the failure of new ones to make a mark, have hurt. Misguided attempts at cultural relevance -- think of the title character’s feminist rant in She-Hulk -- haven’t helped. But the biggest problem with Marvel is that there is too much of it: an entire suite of Disney+ TV shows as well as the steady churn of movies. This has taxed both visual-effects crews (who have produced substandard material) and viewers (by making the MCU confusing to all but a small and dedicated audience). If things don’t change quickly, Marvel’s days as a pop-culture and box-office superhero may soon come to an end.

• Bulletin from the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Urban Bird Division: It has come to our attention (thank you, New York Times) that birds are favoring certain urban areas because of the “structural racism” and “colonial perspective” of American society. Looking for an explanation for why warblers are more likely to be found in parks where trees are located than on streets where buildings predominate? It’s “the links between structural racism, pernicious landscape features such as urban heat islands, and impacts to biodiversity.” A UC Berkeley ecologist spoke to the Times of “oppression, residential segregation, gentrification and displacement, unjust zoning laws, [and] homelessness.” Whenever “a highway or rail line ripped through a community,” we have seen segregation between common yellowthroats and golden-crowned kinglets. We stand with all marginalized birds. Avian justice is environmental justice is social justice. #NoMoreJimCrow3.0 #BlackbirdLivesMatter

• In 1946, almost-19-year-old Eleanor Rosalynn Smith married Midshipman Jimmy Carter. Their relationship would propel her, after naval life and agribusiness, into local, then national politics. Mrs. Carter -- she went by her middle name, first syllable pronounced “rose” -- was a precedent-setting first lady. Unfortunately her precedent was questionable. There have been political first ladies since Abigail Adams and Dolley Madison. But even Eleanor Roosevelt did not presume to sit in on cabinet meetings as Rosalynn Carter did. This forwardness was a symptom of the praetorianization of the presidency, spreading the office’s manna to family and advisers. She should be remembered rather for her share in an exemplary marriage, advising her husband in private ways that were appropriate, and taking part in their activities during a long retirement. She died, age 96, with Jimmy, age 99, holding her hand. R.I.P.

• Charlie Munger was Warren Buffett’s deputy and closest confidant for over four decades. A native of Omaha, Neb., he dropped out of college to join the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II. Later he would be graduated with honors from Harvard Law School after convincing the dean to let him in without an undergraduate degree. Munger was a successful investor in his own right before he joined forces with Buffett in the 1970s. Buffett credits Munger’s influence with modifying his investing style from merely trying to hunt for bargains to looking for stellar businesses with long-term value that could be had for fair prices. Munger was an admirer of Benjamin Franklin and was known for his own ability to pop off one-liners, e.g., “People calculate too much and think too little.” Buffett is outwardly cheerful and optimistic, while Munger was curmudgeonly -- and while Munger was a Republican, Buffett is a Democrat. Their deep intellectual bond nevertheless led to one of the most successful and enduring partnerships in the history of American business. Dead at 99. R.I.P.

• Roland Lajoie was the kind of man we depended on during the Cold War. He was an officer of the U.S. Army (retiring as a major general). Fluent in Russian, he specialized in the Soviet Union. He monitored the enemy’s weaponry. After the Cold War, he helped former Soviet republics secure and destroy their nuclear arsenals. Lajoie grew up in a poor Francophone family in New Hampshire. He was the youngest of eight children. When he graduated from high school, his siblings pooled their money to send him to the University of New Hampshire. Roland Lajoie has died at 87. Merci, général. R.I.P.

Asymmetric War

As the Israelis closed their grip on Hamas headquarters and tunnels in northern Gaza, the calls from the defeated and their enablers for a cease-fire became deafening. Hamas had trump cards to play: the hostages seized in their October 7 terror raid. So military action mostly ceased (with Hamas committing sporadic violations of the terms) as negotiations liberated hostages taken from Israel in exchange for prisoners held in Israeli jails.

The ratio of release was asymmetrical: So far, freedom has come to about twice as many Hamas partisans as kidnapping victims. There was also asymmetry in who was let go. Israel reclaimed toddlers, Hamas thugs. Israel recovered grandmothers; Hamas welcomed Mesdames Defarge who had plotted crimes such as car bombings. It is Israel’s way, reflecting its self-conception as a family, to go to more than great lengths to recover prisoners. But Israel’s way is not necessarily the best way. How many of the junior criminals now at liberty will go on to attempt the next October 7 attack? Its reported mastermind had himself been released in an earlier lopsided exchange.

The United States, meanwhile, has been guilty of an opposite reaction. As of this writing, ten American hostages remain in captivity. What are their names? Where are their faces? Administration silence may be dictated by diplomatic need. But reporters could show a little interest.

Away from Gaza, Hamas and its allies showed their nature as feral outlaws. Two alleged collaborators with Israel were hanged by a West Bank mob, their bodies desecrated and thrown in the garbage. Execution is a universal punishment for treason; only barbarians violate civilized norms in meting it out. The Houthis of Yemen engaged in piracy, capturing two tankers partly owned by an Israeli; hostile boarders, possibly Somalis, were stopped at a third by the timely action of the destroyer USS Mason. Houthis subsequently fired two missiles at the ship, which did not respond because they fell so far short. This wait-and-see approach to attacks at sea and on U.S. bases in Iraq is prudent -- so long as we are ready to respond in force to casualties.

The war touched the country at home. Polls show that President Biden faces a split in Democratic ranks as leftists and Muslim Americans vow not to support his reelection. Good for him for braving their wrath. Campuses across the country saw an ongoing carnival of vileness and idiocy. The fog of antisemitism at Sarah Lawrence led one student, the son of pop guitarist Jeff Tweedy, to say he felt like a “pariah” and could not continue to attend. Israeli diplomat Michael Oren had to speak at the University of North Florida via Zoom rather than in person thanks to the Jew-bashing ruckus. USC economics professor John Strauss was banned from campus for saying (quite rightly) that Hamas members should be killed. Descending in literal age, if not maturity, radical students at a Queens, N.Y., high school rioted upon discovering that one of their teachers had expressed pro-Israeli sentiments online. Mayor Eric Adams said he was shocked, shocked; we will see what the school system does about it.

Campus radicals and left-wing rent-a-mobs took the Hamas cause to the streets. In Washington, protesters stormed or menaced a Capitol Hill office building and the headquarters of the DNC. In New York, they sat on the Manhattan Bridge and left fake bloodstains on the New York Public Library (focusing, no accident, on an inscription honoring patron Stephen Schwarzman). Southern states passed anti-mask laws to thwart the KKK; New York has one dating from anti-rent riots in the 1840s. Covid put these laws in abeyance. Time to revive them to bring transparency to intimidation.

In Burlington, Vt., three Arab students were shot and wounded on their way to dinner. The alleged perp, a deranged man, should if guilty suffer the full force of the law.

Happily the huge pro-Jewish and pro-Israeli rallies that took place in Washington, D.C., and in London were notable for the peace and good order of the attendees. They also honored the symbols -- flags, a statue of Churchill -- of the countries in which they assembled. Some parts of the Left may have made a political as well as moral mistake by embracing a minority cause -- hatred of Jews. Supporters of justice and right reason in the Middle East have not made that mistake.

The Stat

–1,268,000 barrels per day -- the highest net export of crude oil since 1990, in the week of March 31, 2023, smoothed by a four-week average, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

How is the highest net export of crude oil a giant negative number? Net exports equal exports minus imports. The U.S. is indeed a major crude-oil exporter, but it’s an even bigger crude-oil importer. For the record-setting week of March 31, the U.S. exported 4,946,000 barrels per day and imported 6,214,000 barrels per day.

Politician-speak about “energy independence” might make this seem undesirable. But crude oil isn’t what separates the American energy industry from the rest of the world. Plenty of countries have crude oil, but they don’t have the refineries to make it into something useful. That’s where America shines. The U.S. is a net exporter of petroleum products, and it has been since 2011. The U.S. exported 4,016,000 barrels per day on net of petroleum products the week of March 31. That’s what people mean when they say the U.S. has become an “energy exporter” -- the net exports of petroleum products more than compensate for the net imports of crude oil.

In August 2023, the most recent month for which data are available, 57 percent of U.S. crude-oil imports came from Canada. Canadian oil is difficult to refine because it is “heavy” (thick at room temperature) and “sour” (high in sulfur). Many U.S. refineries are specifically built to refine heavy oil, and much of the world’s oil is heavy. The country of origin for the next-largest share of U.S. crude-oil imports, at 10 percent, is Mexico. In seven of the first eight months of 2023, the U.S. imported more crude oil from Mexico than from all the Persian Gulf countries combined.

So if “energy independence” means independence from the Middle East, the U.S. is basically there. If it means independence from imports, the U.S. is nowhere close, which is fine because that’s a wrongheaded goal anyway. Crude oil and petroleum products are traded on a global market, and it’s good for the U.S. to be such a major player in the international trade of energy.

by Dominic Pino