The Week

• Those Border Patrol horses had better get a union rep fast.

• President Biden joined the pile-on against a few border agents on horseback falsely accused of whipping migrants, a fantasy concocted on social media and amplified by a lazy or complicit media. The agents didn’t have whips, they had reins, and they didn’t strike anyone with them, despite Biden’s saying that he was outraged at seeing “people being strapped.”Anyone paying attention and with an interest in the truth knew, almost immediately after this became a trending topic, that no one was whipped. But Kamala Harris and Jen Psaki pronounced themselves outraged by the allegedly horrific images anyway. Biden said the agents “will pay,” prejudging what is supposed to be a fair investigation of their conduct. Biden has talked much of the importance of restoring norms in Washington. Among the most basic of these, surely, is the obligation of a president not to perpetrate misinformation in the cause of smearing people whose only offense was doing their job.

• Congressional Democrats are spending their time trying to pass a $3.5 trillion increase in spending that achieves left-wing goals on everything from child care to immigration, chastising Republicans for not helping them increase the debt limit, and failing to notice a certain tension between these endeavors. The Republicans’ position is not without its own perplexities: Leading senators are saying both that the debt limit has to be raised so as to avoid a default and that they are not going to vote for the necessary increase. But they have precedent on their side. The party out of the White House typically either votes against raising the debt limit to score points about fiscal irresponsibility – as Barack Obama and Joe Biden both did while in the Senate in 2006 – or votes for it in exchange for policy concessions. Democrats have the power to pass a partisan agenda on a party-line vote (although the parliamentarian has ruled that if they want to change immigration policy, they have to do it with regular legislation subject to the filibuster). If they want to exercise that power, they should pass a debt-limit increase the same way.

• On September 24, for the first time in American history, Congress voted on a bill to enshrine unlimited abortion rights in federal law. The “Women’s Health Protection Act,” which passed the House 218–211, has been sold as a means of “codifying Roe v. Wade.” It would in truth invalidate almost all state laws on abortion, from 24-hour waiting periods to many health and safety regulations designed to protect the lives of women. No state could restrict abortion before viability, or even afterward if a single “health care provider” determines that the continued pregnancy threatens “the pregnant patient’s” life or “health.” The bill’s chief sponsor in the Senate has acknowledged that the legislation “doesn’t distinguish” between mental and physical health, and the text of the bill explicitly instructs courts to interpret the legislation “liberally.” The bill goes even further than Roe, though, by denying conscience protections afforded by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Democrats had never previously risked the political consequences of this abortion extremism. But only one House Democrat, Henry Cuellar of Texas, joined all House Republicans to oppose the bill. It now heads to the Senate, where it may not have 50 votes and certainly lacks the supermajority needed to overcome a filibuster. Republicans should call attention to how far from mainstream sentiment this bill is – since the media certainly won’t.

• President Biden publicly received his COVID-19 booster shot to highlight the need for Americans to get vaccinated. But the moment stood only to highlight another administration blunder. Having vowed during the campaign to “shut down the virus” only to have to grapple with the spread of the Delta variant, Biden in August unveiled an ambitious plan to roll out boosters for the whole population. He told people, “Eight months after your second shot, get a booster shot.” Anthony Fauci joined the CDC in promoting population-wide boosters. But it turns out the Food and Drug Administration never was on board. In the wake of the initial Biden announcement, two top vaccine experts at the FDA resigned in protest over the mounting political pressure to authorize universal boosters, which they believed were not yet necessary. Then an FDA advisory panel rejected the Biden booster plan, and the agency approved of the boosters only for those over 65 and in higher-risk categories. One can debate which side is right, but the mixed messages from the president and the two top health agencies will make it that much harder to convince vaccine holdouts.

• Once again, an investigation into the claim that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” has revealed nothing that changes the outcome. Once again, this has made no difference whatsoever to those behind the claim. In September, the Arizona “audit” arrived, and it showed nothing more than that Joe Biden received 360 more votes than had previously been thought. “There were no substantial differences between the hand count of the ballots provided and the official canvass results for the County,” the auditors concluded, “and there is no reliable evidence that the paper ballots were altered to any material degree.” The report also waved its hands at the idea that 23,444 voters had moved by the date of the election, but contradicted itself with the admission that there was “error” in its own methodology, and an array of ways in which those ballots might not “violate the law” at all. An accompanying claim that 10,342 Arizonans may have voted twice was so ham-fistedly arrived at – the auditors compared the names and birth years of the 2.1 million voters in Maricopa County to the names and birth years of all voters in other Arizona counties – as to be self-refuting. Which is appropriate, given that the report was not the product of good-faith suspicion, but of the self-sustaining premise that Donald Trump must have won because Donald Trump cannot possibly have lost. He did, though, and the Arizona audit has confirmed it once again.

• Former president Donald Trump made an appearance in Georgia on September 25 for a rally meant to demonstrate his enduring hold over the Republican Party. He made a tepid endorsement of the far-left presumptive Democratic nominee in the 2022 Georgia governor’s race, Stacey Abrams. “Having her, I think, might be better than having your existing governor, if you want to know what I think. Stacey, would you like to take his place? It’s okay with me,” declared Trump. If GOP turnout is depressed, and incumbent Republican Brian Kemp is replaced by Abrams, that would be the third major statewide election Trump has cost the party in the Peach State alone – and that’s not even counting his own loss in 2020, the first for the GOP in a presidential campaign since 1992. Speaking of which, the rally came a week after Trump sent a letter to Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger – another Republican – alleging that Kemp and he were doing Georgia and the nation “a tremendous disservice” by not “decertifying” the 2020 election in the state. The only thing crazier than that request is still believing that Trump has the best interests of anyone but himself at heart.

• Anthony Gonzalez, two-term Republican congressman from Ohio’s 16th congressional district, announced he would not seek reelection. Gonzalez, an Ohio State football star and son of a Cuban immigrant, was one of ten Republicans who voted to impeach President Trump after the January 6 riot. A number of factors went into his decision to step down. He was tiring of the commute (he and his wife have two young children). President Trump has endorsed a primary challenger and peppered Gonzalez with insults. There was also the threat of violence, in the form of online messages (“We’re coming to your house”). In the early 19th century, congressmen fought duels, sometimes to the death, and brawled on the floor of the House. Nowadays, it seems, bullying is outsourced to anonymous belligerents on social media.

• Following reporting on his legal advice to President Trump, conservative constitutional scholar John Eastman shared a memorandum he had written in early January. It confirms that Eastman’s goal was to have Vice President Mike Pence throw out the electors from seven states and have Trump declared the victor of the 2020 race. Eastman made no showing of sufficient fraud or illegality to put Biden’s wins in any of those states in doubt. His analysis also ignored that states had already officially certified those wins, and that neither the Constitution nor statute gives Pence any role besides presiding over the count of the electoral votes. Trump and sycophants such as Rudy Giuliani were eager to believe Eastman’s argument, notwithstanding its glaring defects. (The former president seems to have been most intensely focused in his attention to the campaign only after losing it.) This strategy never had much chance of success, but the attempt was shameful enough.

• If a book by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa is to be believed, General Mark Milley tipped off China on his own initiative, in calls in October 2020 and January 2021, that he was worried President Trump would launch a reckless, preemptive attack on China. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, supposedly “went so far as to pledge he would alert his counterpart in the event of a U.S. attack.” If true, this would be insubordination in violation of democratic, civilian control of the military, and an offer to commit treason. Ambiguity about our intentions has been a cornerstone of our China policy for decades. But is the story true? Woodward has told tall tales before. Further reporting indicated that Mark Esper, the acting secretary of defense in October, authorized the first call. Christopher Miller, the acting secretary of defense in January, suggested that he might not have authorized the second. General Milley testified before the Senate that he was a source for Woodward’s book. For now, this seems a case of a general puffing up his role to journalists. But Milley’s instinct to paint himself as a guardian against his own civilian government is troubling. Congress should dig further.

• Politico reported that Ben Schreckinger’s new book, The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty-Year Rise to Power, corroborates some of the New York Post’s pre-election reporting on Hunter Biden’s emails. Two things stand out: The first is a note from a Ukrainian businessman thanking Hunter for the chance to meet then–vice president Joe Biden, and the second is an email from 2017 in which a proposed equity breakdown of a venture with Chinese energy executives included the line “10 held by H for the big guy?” Recall that when the story was first published, initial details of the laptop’s provenance seemed suspect. Rather than attempt to find the truth, though, the press discarded the story. Social-media outlets suppressed it by restricting access to the link and barring the Post’s accounts. Fifty former intelligence officials even signed a statement voicing concern that “the Russian government played a significant role in this case.” Perhaps in another year’s time, another newspaper will follow up on this lead.

• There is more to Russiagate special counsel John Durham’s indictment against Democratic Party lawyer Michael Sussmann than the single false-statements charge it lodges. That’s at the end of a 27-page recitation in which Durham theorizes that the Clinton campaign manufactured the Trump–Russia “collusion” narrative and peddled it to willing media accomplices through Glenn Simpson’s FusionGPS, which retained a former British spy to concoct the infamous Steele dossier. The indictment concerns a claim that email traffic through servers at Russia’s Alfa Bank established a communications back channel between the Kremlin and Donald Trump. Even the FBI, with its low threshold for Trump suspicion, found the claim to be baseless. But the indictment relates that Sussmann and his (unnamed) tech-exec client, who was eyeing a post in the anticipated Clinton administration, were aware that the allegation was bogus even as they hyped it to the bureau. Sussmann allegedly told the FBI he was not representing any client – just being a good citizen, you see. If the indictment is any indication, Durham’s eventual report will be an illuminating read.

• The official 2020 crime statistics are in, and they are grim. According to the Uniform Crime Report of the FBI, murders were up 29.4 percent from 2019. Aggravated assaults rose too, by 12.1 percent. The crime wave did not reach the murder rates of the Eighties and early Nineties, and the rates of some crimes – robbery, rape – dropped. What explains the spike in deadliness? The George Floyd riots caused a nationwide police pullback; who would go the extra mile at the risk of career and even personal destruction? Also unsettling was COVID. People, many suddenly unemployed, were forced to stay home in a tense situation – a recipe for impulsiveness and despair. In any case, the liberal line that concern about rising crime is just hysteria should now be buried, and unmourned.

• The Food and Drug Administration has moved forward with a ban on flavored e-cigarettes from all but the largest brands and may yet ban them too. The agency is responding to widespread complaints that vaping products carry unknown health risks and are often marketed to minors. But conventional cigarettes remain out of the FDA’s reach and very much more dangerous than alternative nicotine-delivery systems. A Yale School of Public Health study found that the rate of cigarette smoking among high-school students doubled in San Francisco after the city’s vaping ban. Unsurprisingly, the FDA has shown itself to be utterly incapable of comprehending trade-offs. The sudden, far-reaching ban poses an existential risk to millions of e-cigarette vendors, largely small businesses, which are struggling to comply with the rule. Addiction to power, too, is a terrible thing.

• Sean Wilentz is a proud liberal and a Democratic partisan. But he is also a distinguished Princeton University historian whose academic work is respected across the political spectrum. In a thoughtful but unsparing essay in the Czech historical journal Opera Historica, Wilentz has fired another salvo against The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project and the intellectual climate of “anti-racist” history. On lead essayist Nikole Hannah-Jones’s preposterous and unsupported claim that “one of the primary reasons” for the American Revolution was American colonial fear that the British would abolish slavery, Wilentz writes, “I instantly wondered how anyone even lightly informed about the history of either slavery or the American Revolution, could write that sentence. . . . There is no evidence of a single colonist expressing support for independence in order to protect slavery.” Recounting the furious, personal attacks against Wilentz and other historians trying to correct the record – attacks that cowed sympathetic scholars into silence – Wilentz reminds his Czech readers of parallels they know only too well: “The style of such attacks on liberal dissenters to toe the ideological line would be depressingly familiar to anyone versed in the politics in Central or Eastern Europe since 1945.” Such historical lessons, though, are increasingly lost on readers of the Times.

• Gabby Petito, a 22-year-old Long Island woman, who disappeared during a cross-country trip with her fiancé, was found dead in a Wyoming park. A terrible fate for her and her loved ones. Adding their mite to the misery are the media, both legacy and social. The press has always feasted on crime, but the hard-boiled ghouls of The Front Page are multiplied by thousands of shoot-from-the-fingertips kibitzers. To crown all we have woke sociologists canting about “missing white women syndrome.” This is actually a term, with its own Wikipedia page. Only comely white women, goes the argument, cause media storms. Where are the victims of color? There is no doubt an imbalance in coverage, fostered by the self-image, real or aspirant, of the greatest number of consumers. But since victims of color suffer overwhelmingly from perps of color, ballyhooing them seems racist, classist, or both. Thank God something limits these awful last rites.

• Nearly 150 protesters with a group named “ShutDownDC” ventured to the home of Brett Kavanaugh. Waving obscene signs and chanting in unison, they demanded that the Supreme Court justice resign. What drew their ire, on this particular day? First, the Supreme Court had just declined to block Texas’s new abortion bill before it went into law. (Justice Kavanaugh had joined the majority’s entirely correct opinion.) Second, the Court is set to hear arguments in another abortion case – Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization – on December 1. The organizers are worried, evidently, that Kavanaugh will vote to upend the abortion regime that’s been constructed over the past half century. Rather than go to the steps of the Court, where such events are typically held, the group sought to intimidate Kavanaugh into ruling as they wish. To their credit, Democratic senators Dick Durbin and Patrick Leahy condemned the gathering outside of the justice’s home. Their colleagues should do likewise.

• Love her or hate her, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) is a master at getting attention. So let’s pay attention to the “Tax the Rich” dress she wore to the Met Gala. The Met Gala is an annual shindig for Gotham’s rich (Bill and Pat Buckley were regulars). As a charitable event, it lowers their tax burden. The dress was created by Aurora James, dubbed by Ocasio-Cortez a “working class” designer. Both the feds and New York State have been trying to get James’s company to disgorge withholdings owed from her workers’ paychecks. As for the rich, they pay a lot in taxes already. As New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Eric Adams put it, “We may have 8 million people, but 65,000 pay 51 percent of our income taxes. [If you encourage] those 65,000 to leave, then we’re not going to have the firefighters, the teachers, all of those basic things.” And if you want to spend multiple trillions for all the basic-plus things demanded by President Biden and progressives such as Ocasio-Cortez, then you must raise taxes on the middle class. Too long for a dress, or a pol who thinks in slogans.

• In 2018, California pension funds tried to use their investment portfolios to impose their state’s gun laws on the whole nation. The California funds’ statement of “Principles for a Responsible Civilian Firearms Industry” was signed by the pension funds of a roster of blue states and cities . . . and Florida, where the Parkland shooting briefly made anti-gun politics fashionable. Our special issue on “woke capital” brought Florida’s participation in this scheme to the attention of the NRA. After it complained, Florida chief financial officer Jimmy Patronis wrote to the outgoing chief investment officer for the State Board of Administration: “I am uncomfortable with the state of Florida being part of any organization with states that are openly hostile towards the Second Amendment. . . . Let’s not delegate our judgment on whether to invest in a firearms business based on a third party created ‘framework’ that originated in California, of all places.” Patronis’s letter got results: Florida withdrew as a signatory in mid August. A heartening example of how woke capital reacts to sunlight.

• Unlike you and your children, who positively thrill to the idea, the mayor of San Francisco does not much enjoy wearing a mask on her evening off. This much was made clear recently, after the press asked her to explain why she saw fit during a visit to a local jazz club to break her own rules, which require wearing a mask at indoor live performances except when eating or drinking. “My drink was sitting at the table,” said Mayor London Breed. “I got up and started dancing because I was feeling the spirit and I wasn’t thinking about a mask.” Driving home the point, Breed added that “we don’t need the fun police to come in and micromanage and tell us what we should or shouldn’t be doing.” Which, well, would be a reasonable argument coming from a put-upon resident of the City by the Bay, but which sounds pretty ridiculous coming from its mayor. Mayor Breed is the fun police. She is the micromanager. And if the policies she’s put in place are so ridiculous that they cannot survive contact with her “feeling the spirit” on a night out, then perhaps it’s a solid indication that they shouldn’t be there in the first place. If only she knew someone who could change them.

• Iron Dome, Israel’s missile-defense system, stopped 90 percent of the 4,000 rockets launched at civilian targets by Hamas last spring. One billion dollars in assistance for Iron Dome was included in a stopgap spending bill before Congress. But when House progressives threatened to bolt on a tight vote, Democratic leadership fast-tracked a stand-alone bill to get the Iron Dome money through. The House approved, 420–9. Progressives withheld their support. “I will not support an effort to enable . . . war crimes, human rights abuses and violence,” said Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. (Shooting missiles at civilians would be the war crime, not stopping them, but whatever.) Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez voted “Present,” and then explained that she had wanted to vote no. One more attack on Israel, shot down hard.

• The surprise unveiling of AUKUS – a stepped-up security partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States – shows that democracies are getting more serious about deterring China in the Pacific and beyond. The three countries will share critical technologies, starting with a project to procure nuclear submarines for Australia. Beijing called the plan dangerous and made its usual threats. The French were not happy either, because the new AUKUS deal replaced an existing contract for diesel subs that Canberra held with a French firm. French foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian called the pact a backstab and made threats about the transatlantic alliance. The three anglophone powers could have handled this more artfully by giving advance notice to Paris, which is an invaluable partner against the jihadist threat from the Sahel and an underestimated player in the Indo-Pacific. Still, AUKUS and the benefits it brings are worth this ruckus.

• Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia economist who leads The Lancet’s commission on COVID, recently confirmed that he disbanded a task force looking into the origins of the disease. The Wall Street Journal reported that his decision was motivated by increasing scrutiny of EcoHealth Alliance, the viral research nonprofit whose head, Peter Daszak, has been implicated in unethical behavior. Daszak has dismissed the lab-leak hypothesis as a “conspiracy theory.” As mounting evidence began to indicate the opposite, growing awareness of Daszak’s work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology led many to question his role in the joint WHO–China study on the disease’s origin. Daszak left the task force in June, but several of its other members had collaborated with EcoHealth Alliance. Sachs deserves credit here. But it increasingly looks as though the investigators need investigating.

• We will let the Wall Street Journal’s headline tell the sad, abhorrent tale: “China’s Xinjiang Crackdown Reaps Millions of Dollars in Assets for the State.” The subheading explains, “Courts sell off property and company shares once belonging to jailed Uyghur business owners.” Comparisons to the Nazis, who similarly expropriated Jewish property, are often exaggerations. But occasionally the truth of them screams at you.

• Negotiations continue in the wake of the German election, but the current “grand coalition” of center-left and center-right parties appears to be over, just as Angela Merkel is retiring as chancellor. Her center-right party was the clear loser on Election Night, and she bears much of the blame. Once celebrated as the leader of Europe and even the free world, she has, by turning her party into an ideological void, moved her country some way to the left and deeper into the green. Rest assured that Germany will still not pay its way in NATO.

• Russian elections are a joke, and a bad one. The Kremlin barely even bothers to put up a pretense. Vladimir Putin got the votes he needed – enough to give him a supermajority in the legislature. Making the news, worldwide, was the removal of a voting app by Apple and Google. Allies of Alexei Navalny, the jailed opposition leader, had created the app to guide supporters in casting their votes. The regime instructed the tech companies to remove the app from their stores, which they did. Navalny, from his prison cell, denounced the companies for their “cowardice.” And yet – the Kremlin had threatened to jail their Russian employees. The dictatorships is, if nothing else, ever vigilant.

• Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau called a snap election to turn his minority Liberal government into a majority. He gained a few seats but will have to trudge on leading a minority government. For the second election in a row, the Conservatives won the most votes nationwide, but their voters are heavily concentrated in western Canada, and the Liberals won the most seats by a large margin. Instead of throwing a fit about why the system is unfair and demanding a complete overhaul of the constitution, or feeding their base a steady diet of lies about the election being stolen, the Conservatives focus on the future and fight another day. Americans could learn a thing or two.

• In London, joining two others whose lives have been touched by Down syndrome, Heidi Crowter filed a lawsuit against the Department of Health and Social Care. They maintain that the British abortion law is discriminatory. It allows for abortion up to 24 weeks but makes an exception in cases where the “risk” is “substantial” that the unborn child would be born “seriously handicapped.” Crowter was born with Down syndrome and, at 26, has established herself as a compelling disability-rights activist. She and her co-plaintiffs cited the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Individuals with Disabilities (2006), which guarantees “to persons with disabilities equal and effective legal protection against discrimination on all grounds.” The two judges who heard the case dismissed it, arguing that it was “far from obvious” that the definition of “persons” includes the unborn. Well, does it? They offered no answer but fell back on the familiar implication that the burden of proof rests with those who would defend anyone’s right not to be aborted. “The fight is not over,” Crowter says. She plans to appeal. Salute her persistence in the pursuit of justice, her courage in speaking the truth.

• The Bloody Assizes they weren’t, but the trials of Britain’s “metric martyrs” in the early 2000s were a small step on the road to Brexit. The first martyr, a greengrocer, was convicted of using the wrong sort of scale when selling some bananas. The offending scale measured weights in pounds and ounces: imperial – yes, that’s the term – measures. No kilos or liters were to be seen. Other cases involved sales of apples, sweet potatoes, plantains, pollack, mackerel, apples, and, naturally, brussels sprouts, illicit transactions all exposed by diligent undercover work on the part of the authorities. These cases raised the issue of whether EU law took precedence over English law. Many who had not been paying attention were none too pleased to discover that it did. Post-Brexit, the British government is now proposing that merchants be allowed to use imperial measures again. It’s a yard gained for freedom.

• At the University of Wisconsin circa 1920, Fredric March and Porter Butts belonged to an honor society that went by the unfortunate name “Ku Klux Klan.” Its leaders rechristened it “Tumas” in 1923, when that other KKK, the notorious white-supremacist organization, had made its push for national recognition. Butts was the managing editor of the student newspaper when it ran an editorial against the national KKK in 1924. March, meanwhile, was working as an actor. By the middle of the century, he had risen to minor Hollywood stardom. He lent his name and gave his time to the civil-rights movement, supporting Marian Anderson in her Lincoln Memorial concert in 1939, speaking before the NAACP in 1964. The University of Wisconsin named two theaters after him; after Butts, an art gallery. Administrators removed the names in recent years, reacting in confusion to the alumni’s membership in the unfortunately named honor society. Butts’s family has rallied to correct the record on his behalf. In defense of March, the Amistad Research Center and more than two dozen other institutions, scholars, and civil-rights advocates sent a letter to university administrators. The vile, familiar KKK had enough injustices in its record without being allowed to besmirch March and Butts.

• Though all sports are sports, not all sports are equal. Golf has always been held to be a gentleman’s game. For instance, you call penalties on yourself. Honor is a key part of the game. Decorum has also been observed by galleries, i.e., spectators at tournaments. At the Ryder Cup, that is all out the window. Crowds now cheer when an opposing player hits a drive into the rough or misses a putt. A lot of people think this is cool, making golf less stuffy, bringing the sport into the modern age. Perhaps it’s the modern age, instead, that ought to give way.

• “Get your kicks on Route 66,” goes an old song. Justin Tucker kicked one for 66 yards. That is, he kicked a field goal of that length, giving his team, the Baltimore Ravens, a win over the Detroit Lions as the clock ran out. Sixty-six yards is an NFL record. Maybe kickers now go to bed at night dreaming of 70 . . .

• Say you’re a China scholar. Say you want to tell the truth about China. Say you also want to go to China, or live in China. What do you do? Because the Chinese government is not comfortable with truth-telling, to put it mildly. Jonathan Mirsky, a China scholar who became a journalist, worked in China, on and off, for almost 20 years. He was one of the first Westerners in, back in 1972. Every day, he expected to be kicked out, but the Chinese government, for reasons unknown to him, declined to take that step. On June 4, 1989, he was in Tiananmen Square. Police agents, on learning that he was a journalist, beat him up. They fractured his arm and knocked out several of his teeth. He dictated his article over the phone anyway. In 1991 – again, for reasons unknown to him – the government finally kicked him out. He became the East Asia editor for the Times of London. He resigned, however, thinking the paper was pulling punches, for business reasons. Jonathan Mirsky was a blunt, brash, brainy New Yorker who shed light on one of the most important and dangerous countries in the world. He has now died at 88. R.I.P.

• The Quebec-born comic Norm Macdonald was a longtime reader of NR (which he called “the Review”) and a Christian who shared our staff’s opposition to abortion and our general disdain for progressive truisms. In 2018, for instance, he said, “It used to be, ‘One hundred women can’t be lying.’ And then it became, ‘One woman can’t lie.’ And that became, ‘I believe all women.’ And then you’re like, ‘What?’” Like much of Macdonald’s material, that remark carried not only truth but a little zing of dissent from established dogma. Macdonald’s persona was that of an ordinary guy sitting on the next barstool (although Macdonald would have been having a Coke; he was a teetotaler) who riffed on the absurdities you’re not supposed to notice. He excelled at classic setup-punchline humor, never better than in the period in which he hosted a notably acerbic iteration of Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update that freely ripped into Hillary Clinton and O. J. Simpson. Infamously, Macdonald was fired by NBC exec Don Ohlmeyer, a friend to Simpson who had equally questionable taste in friends and comedy. After SNL, Macdonald worked the standup circuit and proved to be a favorite guest on the late-night comedy shows. A sports-gambling habit caused several financial reversals. For nine years he struggled with acute leukemia but considered it unseemly to try to leverage his suffering in his stage act, so he never went public with the diagnosis. The end came on September 13 as a sudden shock to all but those closest to him. In retrospect, several classic jokes were reflections on his plight: “I’m not a doctor, but I’m pretty sure if you die, the cancer dies at the same time,” he wisecracked. “That’s not a loss. That’s a draw.” When once asked whether he believed in eternal life, Macdonald told Larry King, “I don’t believe it. I have faith. What people don’t understand about faith is that you have to choose it.” Dead at 61. R.I.P.

A Crisis Is a Terrible Thing to Create

The incredible scenes in Del Rio, Texas, in late September of the formation of an instant migrant encampment of 15,000 people on U.S. soil are a direct result of the Biden administration’s feckless policies at the border.

The administration and its apologists blame the spread of bad information for the decision of Haitian migrants to travel en masse to Del Rio, but it was really the spread of good information – the presumption that they could make it into the U.S. and some significant number of them would be allowed to stay.

In a visit to Del Rio, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, whose job consists in part of giving transparently false assurances about border security, said the border is closed.

Never mind that migrants walked unimpeded across the Rio Grande by the thousands to get to Del Rio, that some of them were shuttling back and forth from the U.S. to Mexico to get supplies, and that upon arriving in U.S. territory, they had to take numbers and wait under the International Bridge to be formally apprehended.

Mayorkas said the migrants would be deported, but this was only partially true. Some indeed were flown back to Haiti, apparently mostly single adults, while, as he admitted later, 10,000 to 12,000 were released into the U.S. These migrants got a so-called notice to appear at a future court proceeding, or an even more toothless “notice to report,” basically a request to check in with immigration authorities. An estimated 600,000 migrants have been released into the United States this year with such notices, and hundreds of thousands of others have been “got-aways,” or escaped into the country without any processing at all.

The enforcement system built at the end of the Trump administration was based on the insight that almost all asylum claims at the southern border are bogus and those making them can’t be permitted into the United States because, even if their claims are ultimately rejected, they will never be deported once here.

This led to the creation of programs and the use of authorities to exclude migrants in the first place and to make them pursue asylum claims elsewhere or to stay in Mexico while their claims are being adjudicated here.

Biden tore much of this up for no good reason and has been letting in migrants who have no legitimate claim to asylum. The Haitian migrants are a case in point. They are obviously desperate and deserve our sympathy. Yet many of them were living in Brazil or Chile for years prior to coming to our border by traveling through other countries. Even if they fear persecution in Haiti, they had ample opportunity to apply for asylum in the countries where they were living or have been transiting.

As the encampment under the bridge dwindled, workers dismantled and carted away temporary shelters. Biden’s border policy ought to meet the same fate.