George Will looks back on 2024. A slice:
According to Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz, socialism is “neighborliness.” Cuba, where neighborliness is strict, cut from 80 grams to 60 grams (2.1 ounces) its subsidized daily ration of bread. When German troops volunteered to help Poland recover from flooding, Poland’s prime minister told his nation, “If you see German soldiers, don’t panic.” It was learned that in 2023 Amtrak lost $1.7 billion but scraped together “incentive” bonuses of more than $200,000 each for 14 executives.
In his 1867 poem “Dover Beach,” noting the decline of religion, Matthew Arnold evoked “the sea of faith” retreating with a “long, withdrawing roar.” In 2024, the ersatz religion of “diversity, equity and inclusion” emitted a long, withdrawing whimper. Many corporations (e.g., Walmart, the nation’s largest private-sector employer) reconsidered the employee indoctrination and racial spoils system dictated by DEI orthodoxy. Even academia, always the last to learn, awakened to the obvious: Wokeness, including mandatory statements of DEI groveling by faculty applicants, is incompatible with intellectual freedom. A federal judge handling litigation concerning the crashes of two Boeing 737 Max jets that killed 346 people was unamused by the Justice Department’s “diversity and equity” provisions when choosing the monitor of Boeing’s compliance with its plea deal. Eighty-four percent of San Francisco voters supported restoring algebra to middle schools, it having been banished to serve “equity.” A Virginia school district paid $575,000 recompense to a teacher fired for mis-pronouning. When the New York-New Jersey region experienced an earthquake, the Green Party candidate for Senate in New Jersey said: “We never get earthquakes. The climate crisis is real.”
Mr. Biden’s entourage and his Cabinet evidently thought that they could run the country themselves. They acted as if their own proximity to power was more important than the danger to the country’s welfare of having a partial President. They certainly did not act as if they wanted to see Kamala Harris in charge.
For the first six months of this year, Mr. Biden’s people invited the voters to elect him for another term! How could you have the gall to do that? How could you be so irresponsible as to do that?
These people are going to get generous advances from publishers for writing their memoirs. They are going to enjoy well-paid sinecures at universities, think tanks, and television networks. Instead, they should be hiding in their homes, ashamed to show their faces anywhere. Laws should be written so that henceforth this sort of behavior is criminalized.
The press totally failed to play its watchdog role. Examine social media over the past decade. Add up the damage done by every social-media falsehood and conspiracy theory, left and right. You would not arrive at a total that comes close to matching the pollution of the pool of public knowledge emitted by the legacy press participating in the Biden Administration’s disinformation campaign.
Andrew Stuttaford isn’t buying the case for industrial policy.
The Second Amendment permits the government to disarm dangerous criminals, but what about people convicted of nonviolent paperwork offenses? Bryan Range pleaded guilty in 1995 to a state misdemeanor for lowballing his income on a form to get food stamps. He was put on probation and paid $2,458 in restitution. Decades later, federal law still bans him from owning a gun.
On Monday, however, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled en banc, 13-2, that this doesn’t satisfy the Bill of Rights. “The record contains no evidence that Range poses a physical danger to others,” Judge Thomas Hardiman writes in Range v. Attorney General United States. “Because the Government has not shown that our Republic has a longstanding history and tradition of depriving people like Range of their firearms,” the law “cannot constitutionally strip him of his Second Amendment rights.”
Brad Birzer looks back on Ghostbusters. Here’s his conclusion:
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to suggest that Ghostbusters is a profound movie in the way that Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope or Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar are profound movies. But, in its own way and in its own time, Ghostbusters is a brilliant libertarian movie. It was the pop cultural expression of the Reagan Revolution. While it might not have spoken “truth to power,” it definitely mocked false or obsolete authority and spoke humor to power.
Michael Cannon predicts that Ezra Klein will die a libertarian.
