RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-culture-war-must-go-on-11625608694?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

I happened to mention the phrase “culture war” in a 1996 conversation with Irving Kristol, who was a contributor to these pages and always a penetrating observer of contemporary American life. “The culture war is over,” Irving said, then paused and added: “We lost.” Alive today, Irving would have been sadly reaffirmed in his declaration, surprised perhaps only at the extent of the loss and the cost it has entailed.

His “we” would include those people who believe in the rewards owed to effort and merit, the value of tradition, and the crucial significance of liberty. “We” would distinctly not include those who believe in the importance of spreading “diversity,” “inclusion” and “equity” as conceived by present-day universities. Nor would it include those whose sense of virtue derives from their putative hunger for social justice and their willingness to make severe judgments of others based on lapses from political correctness. These people are “they,” the woke, who have, as Kristol had it, won the culture war.

The extent of the woke victory is perhaps best demonstrated by the long list of cultural institutions they have captured and now control. Two of the country’s important newspapers, the New York Times and the Washington Post, are unashamedly woke. The New Yorker and the Atlantic have ceased to be general-interest magazines and are now specific-interest publications—that interest being the spread of woke ideas. The major television networks early fell in line without a fight.

Universities, in their humanities and social-sciences divisions, are not merely devoted to the propagation of woke ideas but initiate most of them. In turning away from the ideals of authority and objectivity in favor of clearly partisan views, these institutions have lost their former prestige yet are apparently sustained by the confidence that preaching woke doctrine is a higher calling.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/opec-biden-and-gas-prices-11625611235?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

As cognitive dissonance goes, this is a classic. President Biden’s explicit policy goal is to reduce U.S. oil and gas production, limiting the global supply of fossil fuels in the name of fighting climate change. Yet his Administration is now imploring the OPEC oil cartel to pump more oil so U.S. gasoline prices don’t rise more than they already have on Mr. Biden’s watch.

Oil prices climbed to a six-year high on Tuesday after the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and Russia failed to agree on increasing production quotas. Last spring OPEC slashed production quotas after crude prices plunged to $20 per barrel amid economic lockdowns and a price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia.

But energy demand has snapped back in much of the world as Covid-19 vaccines roll out, governments ease lockdowns, and freight shipments surge. U.S. petroleum consumption is now roughly where it was at this time in 2019. OPEC estimates that oil demand in industrialized countries will increase by 2.7 million barrels a day this year.

In early June OPEC modestly raised production quotas, but demand is still rebounding faster than supply. The upshot is that crude prices are averaging around $74 a barrel, up 45% or so this year. OPEC countries naturally want to take advantage of the pandemic recovery to boost production and generate more petrodollars to fund their governments.

But a squabble between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates over quotas is blocking an agreement, sending U.S. gasoline prices to a near seven-year high. Enter the Biden Administration. A White House spokesperson on Monday said it is urging OPEC and its allies to quickly come up with a compromise “that will allow proposed production increases to move forward.”

The Administration is worried that higher gas prices could undermine Mr. Biden’s climate agenda and spending plans. Republicans have been linking his veto of the Keystone XL pipeline with higher gas prices. The two aren’t directly related. But no Keystone does mean that more crude from Canada and the northern Bakken Shale will have to move by rail to U.S. refiners.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/april-powers-condemned-jew-hate-then?token=e

I don’t remember when I first came across Kat Rosenfield’s byline, but I can tell you that for years now I’ve read everything she writes. Her bailiwick is our culture, particularly the strange corners of it that tend to go overlooked by everyone else.

Exhibit A is her ongoing, insightful coverage of the mad world of Young Adult fiction and the moral panics that regularly tend to convulse that industry.

Last week that beat converged with the urgent story of rising Jew-hate in America when a black, Jewish diversity chief named April Powers lost her job in children’s publishing for condemning antisemitism. (You read that right.)

When I came across the story, I immediately reached out to Kat to ask her what it said about the state of the publishing world and, more, what it revealed about how high-minded ideals like intersectionality actually operate in practice.

— BW

On first viewing, it looked like a Tik-Tok riff on The Purge: a caravan of cars rolls down La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles. The passengers — young men in keffiyehs, some draped to mask their faces — stand and shout through sunroofs and windows. The cars honk incessantly. In the back of a slow-moving Jeep, one man waves a billboard-sized Palestinian flag while another shouts through a megaphone: “Israel kills women and children every day!” His companions jeer: “Yeah! Fuck you!”

The next video shows the same men on the sidewalk, shouting and advancing on another man in a grey shirt who’s trying to fend them off with a metal pedestal. In the next: The man in grey is lying on the ground, curled in the fetal position. They punch him, kick him, claw at him.

The last video clip of the evening’s events shows the same sidewalk, now crowded with police. “They’re apparently going around the city, asking who’s Jewish, and beating them up,” says the unseen videographer. “This is America, guys.”

These clips were shot in late May, during the recent war between Israel and Hamas, a month in which there were dozens of similar attacks on Jews and Jewish spaces across America. It was also a moment when corporations and politicians —  many of whom had eagerly released statements unequivocally condemning the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes the previous month, or supporting Black Lives Matter the previous year — suddenly lost their nerve when it came to denouncing violence against minorities.

Those that did speak out against Jew-hate, including high-profile progressives like Bernie Sanders and Ayanna Pressley, tended to speak out against “antisemitism and” — as in, antisemitism and Islamophobia, or antisemitism and all other forms of bigotry. (Tablet’s Noam Blum documented the trend here.)