Politics

We have all seen a sign, usually in a mom-and-pop business, declaring, “We reserve the right to refuse service to you.” In a free society, it is hard to argue with this assertion. Shouldn’t a business owner, landlord, or proprietor have the right to decide whom to serve to and whom to decline to serve? This is the essence of the freedom of association, which includes the reciprocal right to refrain from association. Or does it? In Colorado, cake artist Jack Phillips was threatened with draconian legal penalties for declining to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple due to his religious objections to such unions. In 2017, the Supreme Court granted Phillips a reprieve from his ordeal, but the litigation continues.

As 2022 comes to a close, the United States finds itself confronting myriad threats. But there is perhaps no more immediate threat to Americans’ safety and security than illicit drugs. The numbers are staggering. Illicit drugs have killed more than 1 million Americans since the turn of the century, with over 108,000 dying in last 12 months alone. One drug in particular, fentanyl, is now the leading cause of accidental death for adults between the ages of 18 and 45 — more than car accidents, violent crime, and suicide. And the flood of fentanyl into the US shows no signs of abating. In view of this rising ride, the Biden administration has embraced a range of new policies focused on harm reduction and treatment, two historically overlooked areas of American drug control efforts.

The news that Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel is planning on conducting an "autopsy" of the 2022 election brought horrible political flashbacks to a decade ago. That was when the post-2012 election autopsy of Mitt Romney's failure gave the GOP all the wrong lessons about what was making them lose. You might remember that 2012 autopsy. It was the one that prescribed moving left on immigration policy as essential to appealing to Hispanic voters. As a now-infamous three sentences put it: We are not a policy committee, but among the steps Republicans take in the Hispanic community and beyond, we must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform. If we do not, our party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only.

The search for the origin of Covid-19 has been a story of investigators who suddenly found themselves under investigation. Virus hunters who had spent years successfully tracking the origins of novel pathogens fell under suspicion of having caused the 2019 novel coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan. An international consortium of scientists, including collaborators in the US, had hunted for novel SARS-like viruses in South China and Southeast Asia, collecting tens of thousands of samples from not only bats but animals and people associated with the wildlife trade or living near bat caves. In the lab, the scientists grew or recreated these viruses and made chimeras to understand how they could infect people.

The most pro-labor president in history? Is Joe Biden the most pro-labor president in history or a ruthless union buster? Last September he declared his intention to be the former, but today brings news that makes him look a bit more like the latter. This morning Biden signed a measure passed by the Senate Thursday that forces an end to the standoff between rail companies and workers that threatened a major freight rail strike. The legislation binds both sides into an agreement that four of the twelve unions involved had opposed because it lacked paid sick leave. Biden sought to ease labor frustration at the measure at this morning’s signing that “we still have more work to do” and expressing his support for paid sick leave.

“I think the former president is a spent political force.” So wrote New York Times columnist Bret Stephens of Donald J. Trump this week. Trump is apparently so spent that Stephens felt the need to pen an 879-word op-ed in the nation’s putatively leading newspaper about who the master of Mar-a-Lago ate dinner with a week earlier. This followed a separate article about the infamous dinner Trump hosted with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes that Stephens wrote with his co-columnist Gail Collins, along with no fewer than seven other pieces about the dinner that have, as of this writing, blessed the former paper of record. The Times is hardly alone. The Washington Post offered its readers six articles about the dinner, while the Wall Street Journal has produced five such pieces.

Why is an alt-right pundit all of a sudden best buds with the artist formerly known as Kanye West? Many have found themselves fascinated and revolted over Ye’s strange new career as a high-profile antisemite. Those familiar with the contours of the contemporary right, including the far-right, are not surprised to see white nationalist Nick Fuentes jumping onboard the Ye train. Those unfamiliar with the openly racist online host have been shocked to learn he exists, has some kind of audience, and has formed an alliance of sorts with arguably the most famous black man in America. This all makes sense when you understand how these people think.

China erupts. What happens next?  In the last few days, growing Chinese frustration at the country’s draconian zero Covid policy has bubbled over. Just weeks after Xi Jinping set his regime on an even more authoritarian and nationalistic course at the Chinese Communist Party’s twentieth national congress, protests have erupted in cities across China. The proximate cause of this wave of anger seems to have been a fire in an apartment block in Urumqi, a city in Xinjiang. Ten died and footage appears to show lockdown measures delaying firefighters trying to save the residents’ lives. And the scale of the protests make this the most significant expression of dissent in China in years.

Well, it was quite a Thanksgiving week at Mar-a-Lago. For those just waking from their food comas, the Cliff Notes version of events is that Donald Trump hosted for dinner not just Kanye West, who of late has appeared utterly out of his mind and uttered deeply antisemitic comments, but also Nick Fuentes, a quite literal Holocaust denier who has compared Jews slaughtered by Nazis to cookies baking in an oven. I guess David Duke must have been busy. When news of the Tuesday night dinner broke, it unleashed a chorus of justified outrage. Trumpworld went into immediate damage control. First, it was claimed that Fuentes was not a participant at the dinner, then that he was but Trump didn’t know who he was.