The Week

• Might we recommend carrier pigeons?

• Donald Trump has struggled to navigate the issue of abortion on the campaign trail, alternately courting pro-lifers and accusing them of dragging down the GOP. But as a Florida resident, he will be voting on an upcoming referendum to overturn the state’s six-week abortion ban and to institute an abortion right that extends throughout pregnancy. At the end of August, he said he opposed the six-week ban and would vote accordingly — which implied a yes vote. Pro-life and socially conservative activists, even some who had ignored or excused previous Trump provocations, were white-hot in outrage. Trump then said he would vote no on the referendum because it is too sweeping. This subplot in the 2024 race demonstrates, among other things, that conservatives shouldn’t be shy about telling Trump where he has gone wrong.

• Taylor Swift is the biggest global celebrity going. Her long “Eras” tour is expected to reap over $4 billion in ticket sales, merchandise, and other revenue sources. The attention she commands can shut down city blocks. Through her romance with a football player, she has even colonized the NFL — perhaps her only true financial rival in the entertainment industry. Minutes after the debate between Kamala Harris and Trump, Swift let the world know she was with Harris and Walz. She has endorsed Democrats in previous elections. Swift has always made it clear that social liberalism is her top political priority. Her endorsements come with plugs for abortion, statements about the importance of diversity, and solidarity with the LGBTQIA+ community. On the plus side, her endorsement did not invoke any of the hysteria that some Democrats attach to this election, and she implicitly extended at least some respect to those of opposing views, encouraging others to do their own research and make their own choices. No such respect was returned by Trump, who fired back on social media, “I hate Taylor Swift.” He thus justified the press in giving the endorsement more attention. We’re a long way from the Lincoln–Douglas debates.

• On August 26, Trump and his campaign team paid a visit to Arlington National Cemetery. His staffers got into an altercation with a cemetery employee, a woman who said that the team was not obeying the rules. Later, the Army, which runs the cemetery, defended the woman robustly. Chris LaCivita, a senior adviser to Trump, called her “a despicable individual.” Campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said she was “clearly suffering a mental-health episode.” Moreover, he suggested that the campaign had video that would demonstrate the employee’s guilt. All right. It has been several weeks. Where is it?

• “The [whale’s] head looks a sort of reproachfully at him, with an ‘Et tu Brute!’ expression.” So wrote Herman Melville in the 65th chapter of Moby-Dick, not knowing that, over a century and a half hence, a former presidential candidate would be investigated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for beheading a dead whale as if he were the Pequod’s Stubb and then disposing of said traditionally subaquatic cranium in New York City. Needless to say, the episode, of course involving Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is farcical in its details but, with decades having elapsed, does not merit prosecution. The federal government should let sleeping whales lie.

• Tucker Carlson — who spoke prominently at the Republican National Convention, advises Trump’s campaign, and was scheduled to appear on stage with J. D. Vance — has made himself famous in recent years for “just asking questions.” Carlson hosted revisionist-history podcaster Darryl Cooper on his interview show on Twitter/X, saying he “may be the best and most honest popular historian” in America. Cooper went on to expound his view that Winston Churchill was the “chief villain” of the Second World War, primarily because the British leader rejected Adolf Hitler’s peace feelers and kept Britain fighting the Nazi tyranny even after the fall of France. And Churchill, wouldn’t you know, was motivated to fight Germany not to protect British liberty but because he was a “psychopath” and perhaps even bought off by Zionist financiers. After an uproar, Cooper produced a long, rambling tweetstorm in which he insisted that Hitler had only wanted peace with Britain and “an acceptable solution to the Jewish problem.” The interview has rocketed Cooper’s formerly obscure podcast to the top of the charts. Is Carlson off his rocker, seeking the viewership of those who are, or both? Just asking.

• Bowing to the inevitable, Hunter Biden pleaded guilty as jury selection was set to begin in his criminal tax trial. The gun case on which a jury found Hunter guilty in the spring was his problem. The tax case was a problem for the White House and, derivatively, the Harris campaign because it involved the younger Biden’s failure to pay his “fair share” ($1.4 million) of the money he raked in peddling his father’s political influence. This being the Bidens, deceit continued to the bitter end. Hunter sought to plead guilty to all charges and end the debacle, but also to maintain his innocence — a so-called Alford plea. It should not have been permitted here since the evidence of knowing guilt is overwhelming. Hunter made so many admissions under oath in questioning by Judge Mark Scarsi that the innocence claim is a joke. Look for a pardon shortly after November 5.

• Attorney General Merrick Garland announced an indictment against two Russians in Russia, alleging that they failed to register as foreign agents in running propaganda websites. The point was not prosecution, as the defendants will never see the inside of an American courtroom. It was to portray as Putin puppets the conservative commentators, including pro-Trumpers, who were (unwittingly, they say) paid by the Russians. Concurrently, the Department of Justice announced that it was shutting down Russian websites. The department further issued a complaint charging six Hamas leaders — three dead, three unreachable — with terrorism conspiracy . . . another case that can never be tried but that enabled Harris and Biden to pose as anti-jihadist scourges of Iran. For good measure, the department seized the airplane of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro — again, there will be no trial, but a pleading whitewashes the Biden-Harris record of freeing Maduro from the shackles Trump had imposed. They may as well put a “Harris for President” banner on the front of the building.

• In a letter to Representative Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized for his company’s acquiescence to the censorship that the Biden administration requested during the heady days of Covid-19. “I believe the government pressure was wrong,” Zuckerberg wrote. “I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.” As Zuckerberg confirmed, the Biden White House “repeatedly pressured” Facebook and Instagram to remove “certain COVID-19 content including humor and satire” and “expressed a lot of frustration” when it refused. Hoping to reassure the public, Zuckerberg vowed that Meta was “ready to push back if something like this happens again.” But the proof of that is in the doing. Back when Meta made its mistake, Zuckerberg and his employees were being accused of murder, genocide, human sacrifice, and deadly “misinformation.” It’s easy to stand up for free expression in quiet times; the challenge comes when the arrows are still in the air.

• Mike Gallagher is the kind of politician the Republican Party, or any party, should prize: bright, earnest, conscientious, etc. For seven years, he served as an intelligence officer in the Marine Corps. He was twice deployed to Iraq. A conservative Republican from Wisconsin, he served four terms in the U.S. House, or just short of that. He resigned last April. He had been the chairman of the Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, a committee devoted to an extremely important subject. He stayed in Congress just long enough to vote for aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. He bowed out at age 39. Why? Gallagher has talked to David Ignatius of the Washington Post, in a series of interviews. The long and the short of it: the threat of violence — against him and his family — from people angered at his deviations from a Trump line. There is a sickness in our politics, one that the decisions to depart by Gallagher and his like will only worsen.

• It is hardly surprising that ABC News moderator David Muir was tougher in fact-checking Donald Trump than Kamala Harris. As for Muir’s mid-debate interjection that, “as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country”: The FBI crime statistics have had serious gaps in their collection of data in recent years — omitting Miami-Dade County, New York City, and Los Angeles in 2021, and never collecting data from 2,000 (often much smaller) jurisdictions even in the best recent year. Just a few days after the debate, the National Crime Victimization Survey released its figures for 2023. The NCVS is a useful tool, because while the more widely discussed FBI crime figures count only crimes reported to the police, the NCVS surveys around 240,000 Americans about whether they were victims of reported or unreported crime. In 2023, 22.5 out of every 1,000 Americans over age eleven was the victim of a nonfatal violent crime. That is only slightly lower than the 2022 rate of 23.5. A decline of one-tenth of 1 percent is nothing to celebrate.

• “As president, I will get rid of the unnecessary degree requirements for federal jobs, to increase jobs for folks without a four-year degree, understanding that requiring a certain degree does not necessarily talk about one’s skills,” Kamala Harris said at a rally in Pennsylvania. That’s a good policy, one she is copying from governors of both parties, who have already removed degree requirements from many state-government jobs. But Harris needs to follow her logic all the way through. If a college degree “does not necessarily talk about one’s skills,” that means there is something seriously wrong with college degrees, which are supposed to certify that their holders have acquired certain skills. Instead, she wants to use taxpayer money to cover the debts of people who already acquired those degrees, and to use more taxpayer money to subsidize more people to get more of them.

• Democrats wanted to raise $200 billion of revenue over ten years from their $80 billion expansion of the IRS. Earlier in the legislative process, the White House was hoping for $400 billion. A Treasury analysis from May 2021 determined that $700 billion was possible. A Treasury analysis, from this year, of what actually passed determined that, if expanded and implemented better, $851 billion was doable. Back during the Build Back Better debate, some congressional Democrats thought they could get $1 trillion. Two years after the so-called Inflation Reduction Act gave the IRS the $80 billion, the Treasury announced with great satisfaction that, by targeting wealthy taxpayers, it had so far recovered a little over $1 billion in unpaid taxes. Only $199 billion–$999 billion to go!

• In Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy earlier this year, the Supreme Court ruled that the constitutional guarantee of the right to trial by jury still counts in administrative cases. Now, a different agency with similarly structured in-house tribunals, the National Labor Relations Board, has been the target of an injunction from a federal judge applying the precedent from Jarkesy. Democrats’ vision for the agency is that every case is an auto-win for unions. They have sought to use the NLRB to overturn union losses in representation elections, eliminate the right for workers to demand a secret-ballot election in the first place, and suppress the speech of employers. For actual illegal labor practices, there’s a wonderful thing called a federal court, with rules of evidence, a presumption of innocence, and the right to a trial by jury. It is slower than the NLRB and less biased against employers — and that’s why it’s better.

• The U.S. Navy’s personnel shortages are now hampering its ability to repair its ships at sea, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report. The report found that 63 percent of executive officers surveyed said that insufficient staffing made it “moderately to extremely difficult to complete repairs while underway.” The GAO highlighted inaccurate guidelines and substandard training as contributing factors. Many sailors in engineering departments also have little practical maintenance experience before reaching the fleet, with computer-based training substituted for hands-on work and with the hope that an experienced sailor will train the initiate once he reaches his first ship. Combine inexperience with tool scarcity, the growing time required to retrieve work authorizations and hazmats, and the churn of sailors to and from the ships, and the U.S. Navy finds itself up a creek.

• American families don’t like the blue-state way of life. Since 2004, they have preferred “expansive red states” to “expensive blue states.” That trend has continued and somewhat accelerated, according to a new study by the Institute for Family Studies. Families are leading an exodus out of blue states including New York, California, Oregon, Washington, Illinois, and Massachusetts. They are headed for Idaho, Montana, South Carolina, South Dakota, Florida, and Texas. Families seem to be lured by cheaper land, leading to cheaper housing, not by subsidies. Red states offer lower taxes and sometimes no state income tax, stronger job growth, and increasingly laws that protect children from progressive educational fads. The trend was also driven by pandemic-era movements that brought kids to schools that were open and maskless. What families want from the state is not more paternalism, but freedom.

• Two progressive Denver nonprofits, ViVe Wellness and Organization Papagayo, have moved thousands of Venezuelan migrants, some of whom belong to the violent street gang Tren de Aragua, into run-down apartments in nearby Aurora. According to an email obtained by NR, the nonprofits chose specific apartment complexes because they were poorly managed — no safety inspections, no vetting of tenants, leniency on maximum occupancies — which suggests that the do-gooders behind the migrant-relocation program were aware the new tenants might be disruptive. And they were right: A former tenant told NR that the apartments fell into chaos after the new arrivals: trash everywhere, drug dealing, loud noise through the night. Local politicians, including Governor Jared Polis (D.), have attributed the residents’ concerns to right-wing fearmongering. Yet crimes and citations have more than doubled at two of the apartment complexes since 2022, while nearly doubling at a third complex. Tren de Aragua now uses formally vacant units to host “parties” where they “serve drugs and child prostitution,” according to a CBS report. What started as a humanitarian project to help Venezuelans improve their circumstances has descended into disorder, depravity — and progressive blindness.

• Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson’s plan to discontinue use of ShotSpotter has been in the works since he took office, and he’s not about to change course because of an inconvenient report from his police force. The report found that, in the last eight months, police made 451 arrests tied to alerts from the gunshot-detection tool. In 20 percent of the cases, the absence of any corresponding 911 call indicates that the alerts led to arrests that would not have otherwise happened. Alerts also led to the recovery of 470 guns that had been obtained or used illegally. Police aided 143 shooting victims after receiving ShotSpotter alerts. The very same people who claim to prioritize the preservation of black life above all else are now stripping police of a powerful tool for saving those, and other, lives.

• For years, New York governor Kathy Hochul (D.) failed to recognize that she was being manipulated by an aide who took directions from the Chinese consulate general in New York City. After the federal government brought charges against the former aide, Linda Sun, Hochul did one thing right: She called on the State Department to expel China’s consul general, Huang Ping, from the U.S. After a few vague comments from State, the dust settled. State and the Chinese claim that Huang is expected to return to China shortly, but only because his term in this post wrapped up. He should have faced expulsion. Court filings by the Department of Justice indicate that Huang personally coordinated Sun’s activities and, through her, got Hochul and former governor Andrew Cuomo to back Beijing on various issues. In 2023, the diplomatic office was also named in the case of a Massachusetts man who harassed pro-democracy advocates and in the indictment of individuals who set up an illegal Chinese-government police station in Manhattan. State Department officials twiddled their thumbs as their colleagues at Justice moved to protect Americans facing Communist China’s repression. Once again, Foggy Bottom has met our low expectations.

• In a divisive presidential campaign, bipartisanship might seem like a relief, but it often leads to bad policies. The Biden administration, with the support of Harris, is taking the same position as Trump and Vance by seeking to block the acquisition of U.S. Steel by Nippon Steel. These pols are blocking investment in the American workforce by a company in Japan: America’s No. 1 source of foreign direct investment, a country whose prime minister addressed Congress this year, and a stalwart ally against China. U.S. Steel has said that, without the investment, it will likely cut jobs and possibly move its headquarters out of Pittsburgh. Nippon Steel is probably overpaying for U.S. Steel and has promised even more investment in the U.S. than it had initially offered to appease the politicians opposed to it. The people who own both companies, their shareholders (they are both publicly traded), approved the merger almost unanimously. It’s a medium-sized merger deal that would have never attracted much attention, except that it’s an election year, and politicians think that blocking it will help them win Pennsylvania. Who will stand up for the forgotten workers when they’re laid off in a non-election year?

• In Hong Kong, two journalists have been convicted of sedition. They are Chung Pui-kuen and Patrick Lam. Theirs are the first such convictions since China took over in 1997. Chu Kai-pong is involved in another deplorable “first.” He is the first person to be convicted of sedition for wearing a T-shirt — a T-shirt with a pro-democracy slogan on it. Yes, Hong Kong was killed off in 2020 (thereabouts). This killing off is old news. But we should still look in on the corpse now and then.

• By the beginning of September, Israel Defense Forces were closing in on well-defended Hamas positions in Rafah. The assault had been delayed as the Biden administration did everything within its power to dissuade the Israelis from mounting a large-scale incursion into that town in the Gaza Strip. But with Rafah’s civilian population now temporarily relocated, the IDF began bearing down on the tunnel network where it (correctly) believed that Hamas was keeping many of the hostages taken on October 7, 2023. As the IDF closed in, the terrorists executed a directive, promulgated following the liberation of some hostages over the summer, by killing six of the civilians they were holding, including U.S. citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin. The Biden White House seems disinclined to impose any consequences on Hamas for this atrocity. Indeed, it has redoubled its efforts to secure a cease-fire deal, undeterred by Hamas’s rejection of many peace overtures. As of September 1, Hamas was still holding 97 hostages, not all of them alive, of the 251 it took on 10/7. Israelis face a terrible choice now, between the safety of their citizens in Hamas’s hands and foreclosing on the prospect of future 10/7s. But at least Israel is making a choice. The Biden White House, by contrast, appears content to dither and hope.

• You have to hand it to the Israeli intelligence services. In July, officials in Hezbollah, the Iranian terrorist proxy based in Lebanon, told Reuters that they had resorted to using lower-technology communications, like pagers, to evade “Israel’s electronic eavesdropping.” This came as no news to the Israelis. According to several media reports, the Israeli spy agency Mossad successfully intercepted those pagers during the manufacturing process and planted a small quantity of the high-explosive PETN in each unit. On September 17, those pagers detonated simultaneously, killing at least eleven Hezbollah fighters and commanders and injuring more than 4,000 across Lebanon and Syria. At press time, reports were circulating that Hezbollah-issued “walkie-talkie” radios were exploding around the country in what appears to be a second round of the affair. This spectacular operation is just the latest Israeli intelligence coup since the outset of the war. Israeli intelligence penetration of Iran and its vassals in the region is so thorough that it may be staying Iran’s hand. The regime had promised retaliation for the July 31 bombing of a Tehran diplomatic facility that killed Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh but never delivered. And this operation may just be the opening salvo in Israel’s long-delayed pivot to the north, where Israeli citizens were forced to evacuate their homes under Hezbollah fire after the 10/7 attacks and have not yet returned.

• The House Foreign Affairs Committee released the conclusions of its multi-year probe into Joe Biden’s disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. Biden and his allies have long maintained that the framework hammered out between the Trump administration and the Taliban tied their hands. But the report demonstrates that the administration did not feel at all bound by that agreement. Not only did the Biden administration amend its terms, often on the fly and sometimes without the Taliban’s input, but its members regarded the agreement as “immaterial” (quoting State Department spokesman Ned Price) to Biden’s commitment to full U.S. withdrawal. The State Department’s point man on Afghanistan, Dean Thompson, “could not recall if his bureau ever offered an assessment of whether the Taliban was meeting their commitments under the Doha Agreement.” Trump did not force the Biden administration to withdraw U.S. soldiers before U.S. civilians, abandon the Bagram air base, or rely on the Taliban for security around Kabul’s airport. The administration contends that the massacre of 13 American soldiers at Abbey Gate could not be prevented, but that’s not true either. If the withdrawal plan, such as it was, had been scrapped, they might still be alive today.

• Mexico’s incoming president, Claudia Sheinbaum, is a leftist and the protégé of outgoing president Andrés Manuel López Obrador. With Sheinbaum’s enthusiastic approval, AMLO rammed through a sweeping change to Mexico’s government, making 1,600 federal judicial posts elected offices, including those on the Supreme Court of Justice. Ryan Berg, director of the Americas program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, explains that “Mexico’s checks and balances” are “being weakened to the point of practical elimination.” In at least five ways, AMLO’s reforms appear to violate the U.S.–Mexico–Canada Agreement. They make judicial decisions vulnerable to political influence and donor interests, ban GMOs, ban fracking, dismantle several independent agencies and transfer their functions to the executive branch, and favor Mexican entities over U.S. and Canadian firms with respect to water use. President Biden’s ambassador to Mexico, former Colorado senator Ken Salazar, was slow to criticize the AMLO proposals and a year ago defended AMLO’s widely rejected claims that Mexico’s 2006 presidential election was rigged. Mexico is becoming more autocratic, and the Biden administration is asleep at the wheel.

• One might assume that if a club boasted Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, and Venezuela as members, the rest of the world’s countries would do anything possible to avoid joining it. Alas, in the case of Brazil, one would assume wrong. The country’s supreme court, with the support of socialist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, banned X, formerly Twitter, from the country, joining that club of despots. This, from the second-most populous country in the Western Hemisphere, should serve as a warning. The U.S. Congress should pass a law that mandates the disclosure of all content-moderation requests that the executive branch makes of social-media networks in the United States and should deny, as well, that any federal agency enjoys the power to determine for others what is and is not “misinformation” online. Simultaneously, it ought to be the policy of the United States to keep as much of the internet’s core infrastructure under American control as possible. Nobody else will stand up for free speech.

• As excuses for sitting out the 2024 presidential election go, “I was stuck in space” is a doozy. And for two American astronauts, Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita Williams, that excuse has the benefit of being indisputably true. To great embarrassment, Boeing has acknowledged that the problems with its Starliner capsule are so severe that Wilmore and Williams cannot return from the International Space Station (ISS) before February. Until then, the Earth for them will be a tantalizing view from the window. The problem with Starliner lies in its thrusters, which, per a series of tests conducted on the ground, pose an unacceptable risk of failure on the journey back home. Back when NASA had a monopoly on space travel, an issue such as this would potentially have been disastrous. But, under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, a backup provider was earmarked for precisely this eventuality. That backup? None other than Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which will send a Crew Dragon capsule up to the ISS next year to rescue the pair from their isolation. Although not being on this planet for the election doesn’t sound so bad.

• A 135-step flight in Rome — known as the Spanish Steps — connects the Piazza di Spagna to the Church of Santissima Trinità dei Monti. King Louis XV had funded the steps’ construction between 1723 and 1725. Alongside several other Roman properties historically linked to France, the grounds of the Trinità dei Monti (including the steps) have been administered by a French institution, whose practices a report by France’s Court of Audit has now critiqued. The court has since clarified that it doesn’t suggest that France should seize a section of central Rome, but Italian officials aren’t assuaged. “What would France be without Italy?” wrote Italy’s tourism minister, Daniela Santanchè. “They cannot do without our luxury, our works of art, our beauty. But now they are exaggerating. They even want to take the Spanish Steps.” The vice president of the Italian legislature’s lower chamber threatened to “send experts to the Louvre to make an updated survey of the assets stolen from Italy throughout history.” Ancient rivalries? Wait ’til the Spaniards get a whiff of this.

• Columbia University established a task force on antisemitism, which interviewed almost 500 students. In its report, the task force said, “The testimonies of hundreds of Jewish and Israeli students have made clear that the University community has not treated them with the standards of civility, respect, and fairness it promises to all its students.” A co-chairman of the task force, Ester R. Fuchs, remarked, “There has been a view among some that this is not a real problem, so we thought it was important to demonstrate what is actually happening to students.” In response, dozens of Columbia faculty signed an open letter criticizing the report. “We write as Jewish faculty,” they began. The report “contributes to a hostile narrative about Columbia,” they said. It “is marked by conspicuous neglectful omissions of context and climate.” It “conflates feelings with facts.” For her part, Fuchs said she was “gobsmacked” by the letter. “It’s just sad, and it’s tragic for students on this campus to have a group of faculty dismiss their experiences as just feelings.” Needless to say, this happens in few other contexts at elite universities.

• The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression keeps a running tally of colleges and universities that have, à la the University of Chicago’s Kalven Report, adopted a position of institutional neutrality on politics. Published by a faculty committee amid the fervor of 1967, the Chicago report declared that a university is “the home and sponsor of critics” but it is “not itself the critic,” and that it must “maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures.” A self-evident principle of higher ed? FIRE lists only 22 institutions that have adopted it. As of September, the august score or so includes Washington State University, the University of Wisconsin system, and the University of Pennsylvania. (The latter’s statement of neutrality was announced by interim president J. Larry Jameson, successor of Liz Magill — who resigned, in late 2023, a few days after she had testified disappointingly before Congress regarding the resurgence of antisemitism on her campus.) Ideally, such declarations would be unnecessary. In these nonideal days, they’re imperative.

• In the second inning at Fenway Park on June 26, catcher Danny Jansen of the Toronto Blue Jays fouled off a pitch, in the rain. Strike one. The umpire called a delay. The grounds crew covered the infield with a tarp. After 108 minutes, rain still falling, the Red Sox announced that the rest of the game was postponed to August. Meanwhile, Jansen was traded to Boston. When the game resumed there on August 26, he was behind the plate again, this time for the home team, when his at-bat for the visiting Jays was completed by a pinch hitter. In that moment, Jansen made history, becoming the first man ever to play for both teams in the same major-league game. An authenticator was there to tag his equipment, including a jersey he sent to Cooperstown. The Hall of Fame requested the official scorecard. “It has to be kind of like the perfect storm for that to happen,” said Red Sox manager Alex Cora, marveling at the improbability. “Starting with the storm.”

• One of the outstanding voices of our age did not speak at all, for a time. James Earl Jones was born in Mississippi in 1931. Abandoned first by his father and then by his mother, he was raised by his grandparents on a Michigan farm. He stammered and stuttered for a while and then went mute altogether. As an actor, he would become one of the most famous of voices. He was the voice of Darth Vader in the Star Wars series, and the voice of Mufasa in The Lion King. He acted onstage and on-screen in an amazing variety of roles, from Shakespeare on down. He was a man of grace: Sometimes confused with James Earl Ray, the assassin of Martin Luther King, he was understanding and forgiving. The great James Earl Jones has died at 93. R.I.P.

Politics

Dismal Prospects

On September 10, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump held their first and very likely last presidential debate.

Harris is not Daniel Webster. She is not even Nancy Pelosi. But she stuck to scripted answers and did not embarrass herself as Joe Biden did in his debate (and being 59, not 81, helped her). Trump had to fight the undertow of ABC, the debate’s host, whose fact-checkers combed his responses for howlers while leaving Harris alone. (Perhaps her most egregious misstatement: She said that no American troops were currently in combat zones, even though several thousand are stationed in the Middle East.) Trump might have evaded the fact-checkers by spewing fewer fictions, e.g., that he lost the 2020 race on a “technicality.” He would certainly have done better if he had bothered to learn a few facts to bolster his lines of attack: numbers of illegal immigrants allowed into the country on Biden’s and Harris’s watch, rather than stories about pet-eating. So much for all the advance buzz about Tulsi Gabbard being a great debate preparer, although trying to teach Trump to change his freewheeling ways is a hopeless assignment.

Then on September 15, Trump was targeted yet again by an assassin. Ryan Routh, a resident of Hawaii with a long rap sheet in his native North Carolina, was spotted with a rifle in the bushes alongside a Trump-owned golf course in West Palm Beach, only 300 yards from where the former president was playing. Trump’s security shot at Routh and chased him, and police finally caught him. Thank God for that.

Rhetorical volleys soon followed, left-wing pundits and Trump blaming each other’s heated language for the attempts on his life. The fact is that crackpots take the law into their own hands without prompting. The Secret Service, twice shamed, must do a better job protecting office-seekers and -holders.

Trump is running a campaign of emotions and gestures, many of them rancid. At an Arizona rally he called Harris a “communist.” That demeans the heroism of those who fought communism and degrades the memory of its millions of victims. He surrounds himself with a menagerie of boobs and goblins: notably Laura Loomer, an unintelligent racist (she said a Harris White House would smell of curry). Running mate Senator J. D. Vance accused Mike Pence of wanting thermonuclear war with Russia.

Trump himself charged that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were eating residents’ pets. Yes, the town of 60,000 is experiencing serious strains from thousands of foreign newcomers. Yes, Haitian culture is tainted by voodoo and poverty. That is no doubt why many Haitians want to leave the island. A responsible critic of the Biden-Harris runaway influx would not shy from complexities or stoke hatred. That would require thought and charity, both rare acquaintances for Trump.

The Cheneys, father and daughter, announced that they were voting for Kamala Harris. Dick Cheney in his announcement said that Trump “tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him.” That is true and damning. Neither Cheney, however, explained why Harris was worthy of support. She offers a raft of bad policies, from Bidenesque dither in support of Israel to a destructive and unadministrable tax on unrealized capital gains. Some deep-seated insecurity makes her a woeful spokesperson. Her party’s intention to term-limit sitting Supreme Court justices recalls FDR’s attempted war on the judicial branch, and belies any argument for her based on the Constitution.

It is a sad election when the average voter is more serious than anyone the major parties have picked.

The Stat

35 percent — how much the payroll-tax rate would have to be raised to fully fund Social Security, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Social Security is funded by the payroll tax, which is currently 12.4 percent of taxable earnings, and by the income tax paid on Social Security benefits. In its 2024 long-term projections for Social Security, the CBO finds that revenue for Social Security will remain stable for the next 75 years, at around 4.5 percent of GDP. That means that Social Security revenue is projected to grow at roughly the same rate as the economy. (This would not be true if Donald Trump gets his wish to eliminate the income tax on Social Security benefits. The CBO projects that payroll-tax revenue will decline as a share of the economy but that the loss will be offset by a relative increase in income-tax revenue from beneficiaries.) The reason for Social Security’s long-term deficit is the increase in outlays, which are projected to rise from 5.1 to 6.7 percent of GDP over the next 75 years. (This increase would be even greater if Kamala Harris gets her wish to expand Social Security benefits.) The old-age trust fund will be exhausted in fiscal year 2034, after which benefits would need to be cut by 23 percent if the program is to be limited by the revenue it takes in. To have enough revenue to pay out benefits as promised, Congress would, the CBO estimates, have to raise the payroll-tax rate from 12.4 percent to 16.7 percent, a 35 percent increase. It would have to do so now and keep the rate that high forever if the program is to break even. Would you rather fork over that money to the government or invest it in your own retirement account?

by Dominic Pino