Weekend Jolt: NR’s Biggest Stories of 2023

WITH JUDSON BERGER

December 30 2023

NR's Biggest Stories of 2023

Dear Weekend Jolter,

It seemed like the year would never end, and yet — it's almost over. Which means it's time for the Weekend Jolt's compilation of NR's biggest stories of the past 26 fortnights.

After having omitted certain candidates from last year's list, I've received the usual threat-stream from colleagues. One representative note advised: "I think you'll find my review of the Westminster dog show worthy of inclusion this time — if you want to see your precious Rex again." Well, joke's on Mark Wright. I don't even have a dog, and I don't know whose fur that was in the envelope.

The rubric I developed to compile this year's list weighs factors including but not limited to audience reach, general impact or significance, and whether the piece eventually led to a heartfelt response by musician Jack White.

So read on, for a walk through the past year in NR. Watch your step:

On the Precipice, Always

We've published more pieces than we can tally here about Hamas's October 7 carnage and its aftermath, including the ugly explosion of antisemitism across the West. But Mike Watson's recent piece for the (newly redesigned) magazine ties together the threads of this year's global unrest and puts the new war in the Middle East in context:

Since the end of the Cold War, much of the Western world has built and inhabited an elaborate fantasy. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, according to this story, the big dragon had been slain, the kingdom was at peace, and the only task left was to clean up the last vestiges of the nasty old world of conflict and chaos. Democracy and human rights could advance around the world, Communist China could learn free trade, Russia could come into the fold, Europe could unite and become a great and independent power, and none of it would require much spending on the military, diplomatic, and aid tools of foreign policy. The future would be like the finale of Independence Day, with all the peoples of the world united behind American leadership to defeat invading aliens — or, sober-minded fantasists believed, more-realistic threats such as the erosion of the ozone layer.

Not every member of the Western foreign-policy elite shared each aspect of this dream, but enough of them picked up enough parts of the story to push the United States and its allies into hubris and overreach. Like the Pompeiians in search of fertile soil, they forgot the wisdom of their ancestors, ignored the dangers, and moved steadily closer to the mouth of Vesuvius.

Now, the rumblings from the caldera are shaking the foundations of this fantasy world. First, the early stages of the pandemic revealed that the supposedly global system of trade would screech to a juddering halt if disease broke out in a handful of Chinese cities, or if the Chinese Communist Party withheld shipments to disfavored nations. Companies around the world discovered that after optimizing for efficiency for decades, they no longer had the resiliency needed to deal with sudden shocks. Next, Vladimir Putin's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine reminded them that hostile dictators cannot be put off forever by threats of sanctions and diplomatic isolation, that steel cuts through paper. And the catastrophe that Hamas unleashed on Israel shows that another part of the fairy tale — that the bad guys will always lose the fight and the good guys can relax — is also made of pixie dust.

The Detransitioners

I touted this series in previous Weekend Jolts, and I'll do so once more before the year's out. Caroline Downey's Detransitioners series amounts to a significant contribution to the public record in explaining what those who gender-transitioned at a young age, and later reversed course, are going through. You can find the article series here. You can find the podcast series that grew out of that reporting here. In this story, Caroline relays the complications one interview subject, Evie, experienced after transitioning:

At 18, Evie and her mom moved to Brooklyn. She was hit with an avalanche of physical side effects from the transition. Her hair started falling out in chunks, for instance.

"My hair line was moving back really far," he said. "I had bald spots all over my head, which you can imagine is very humiliating as an 18-year-old. My body hair started coming in way thicker. My voice didn't go back to normal like they said it would."

The binding, which she'd routinely do for hours longer than recommended, ruined her ribs. Now, the top two ribs flare out.

"I get really bad chest tightness," she said. When I was skinnier, it would hurt when I raised my arms. I could feel my ribs grinding against my skin."

In New York City, there was a supply shortage of testosterone, so Evie was unable to get refills.

"As soon as I stopped taking it, my brain cleared," she said.

Meg White, Definitely Not a Bad Drummer

About that Jack White reference above. No, we didn't hallucinate this. Jeff Blehar summed up the truly bizarre sequence of very-online events that helped kick off 2023 — how "our own Dan McLaughlin loosened a pebble that somehow landslided into Jack White of the White Stripes writing a bizarre public tribute poem to his ex-wife's negligible drumming talents."

It started when Dan posted an item bound to send music nerds to their battle stations, declaring the following:

The White Stripes have announced a reissue of the album Elephant to mark the 20th anniversary of that classic album, which was released April 1, 2003. The album deserves to be consumed and recalled in full, but its memory is dominated by its opening track, "Seven Nation Army." In fact, "Seven Nation Army" has a strong case to be considered the best song of this century thus far.

A bold claim, to be sure, and one that will be disputed by listeners whose preferences run far afield from rock 'n roll and adjacent musical genres. But at least within the genres of new music that have been played on the radio in this century, what else compares? I'd tab Adele's "Rolling in the Deep" as the best song of the century's second decade, with its genre-spanning invocation of an updated version of the sound of Sixties R&B, but "Seven Nation Army" has attained, if anything, an even more iconic position, and earned it. The song's calling cards are its simplicity, its hypnotic rhythm, and most of all its indelible melodic guitar riff. It is Jack White's creation as a songwriter, guitarist, and vocalist, aided only by his ex-wife and drummer Meg White holding down the simplest of beats.

It was a hot take, that. Several of us at NR weighed in. More fatefully, journalist Lachlan Markay joined the fray by remarking on drummer Meg White's mediocrity. Famous musicians and others proceeded to attack him mercilessly until he deleted and apologized, while Jack White eventually posted a poetic tribute to his ex-wife.

So that happened. The incident is now part of official Wikipedia lore. And we don't know what to make of it still. Other than: Meg White is the greatest drummer of all recorded time, across all universes, and heaven help the hapless troll who dares gainsay this gospel.

Trouble in Toronto

Our resident Canadian, Ari Blaff, has assiduously reported on the troubles of the Ontario public-school system all year. You'll find in these stories — here, here, and here — problems and challenges that the U.S. and its northern neighbor share in common. Here, Ari reports on how discipline in the schools has fallen apart, harming everyone in the process:

A 200-pound Ontario middle schooler was getting ready to pummel his classmate when a group of teachers escorted him to an office where they hoped to calm him down — instead, he proceeded to ram into the two adults, a man and a woman, for the better part of an hour, leaving them shaken and bruised. He never faced any consequences.

"You should have seen their bruises. The guy's back is totally messed up. The girl still has arm issues," Margaret, a teacher with over a decade of experience in Ontario's public schools, told National Review.

Worried about the potential repercussions, the teachers who were assaulted were not able to physically restrain the student, nor did senior school administrators expel him.

"All he got was an in-school suspension. His mom came to pick him up, asked if he wanted dumplings, and they left. There were no consequences," Margaret said.

The veteran teacher explained that the administration's indifference to staff members being physically assaulted stemmed from the student's historical behavior: "That's his baseline." Under the school district's present approach to discipline, if aggressive and dangerous behavior is typical for a student, then only behavior that exceeds the norm is dealt with. . . .

The effort to prioritize the emotional experience of students over the need to maintain order had predictable consequences: Whereas only 7 percent of teachers in Ontario schools were the victims of physical abuse in 2005, by 2017 that number had spiked to 54 percent. This academic year is on track to become the most violent in history for the Toronto school district, the largest and most influential in Canada.

All in the Biden Family

Andy McCarthy's coverage all year of the dual-track Biden family and Trump scandals — the investigations, the court battles, the politics — has been essential reading for anyone looking to sort the theater from the substance. In this magazine piece (with great art), he lays out the backstory behind the Biden family's riches. Since the story was published, many more details have surfaced about these transactions and arrangements:

Hunter's personal criminal jeopardy is a sideshow. What matters is that millions of dollars have poured into the Biden-family coffers from agents of foreign regimes, including China, which just happens to be the Biden family's most lucrative cash cow. There is no gainsaying the payments. House Oversight Committee Republicans, under the leadership of chairman James Comer (R., Ky.), have just released an "interim report" detailing over $10 million flowing from foreign sources to accounts of business associates and family members.

This is likely the tip of the iceberg. NBC News reported last year, for example, that Hunter alone raked in around $11 million in just the five years from 2013 to 2018 — i.e., beginning soon after a drug test resulted in his quiet discharge from the armed forces (after the then–vice president's son, at age 42 and with a history of drug and alcohol abuse, was somehow selected to become a commissioned officer in the Navy's public-affairs department). From that debacle, Hunter cruised to an exorbitantly compensated sinecure on the board of Burisma, a corrupt Ukrainian energy company. Did I mention that his father happened to be Obama's point man on American policy in Kyiv? . . .

The Bidens have done business, of a sort, with Chinese Communist Party operatives; with Yelena Baturina, the billionaire wife of the now-deceased Moscow mayor and Vladimir Putin crony Yuri Luzhkov; and with a Russian "escort" service, which Hunter appears to have paid with part of the $100,000 his father wired him in late 2018, apparently intended for drug rehab.

The House interim report is based mainly on evidence generated by Comer's first few bank subpoenas. More digging is under way. Even with the incomplete data set, however, a blaring alarm bell is impossible to muffle: the lack of obvious asset value in exchange for the millions paid to the Bidens.

In legitimate business transactions, it is generally easy to detect the consideration — services, goods, real estate, etc. — swapped for large sums of money. By contrast, the only apparent commodity in many hefty payments to Biden-family members is access to Joe Biden and his political influence. Indeed, in the course of dealings with agents of China, Hunter was heard to brag that they wanted to be in business relationships "with the Bidens" and were willing to pay millions of dollars for "introductions." Joe Biden, while vice president, met with Hunter's principal Chinese partner, Jonathan Li, days before Hunter and Li established an investment fund, Bohai Harvest RST, which Xi's regime backed with substantial funding from the Bank of China as well as from China's development and postal banks — a venture that enabled Beijing to obtain technology with military uses, as well as a cobalt mine in Congo worth $3.8 billion. (Cobalt is an essential component in the batteries of electric cars, which Biden and the Democrats are pressuring Americans to produce and purchase.) Joe Biden later wrote a letter of recommendation to try to help Li's son get into an Ivy League school.

The telltale signs of illegitimate business are reticulated payment arrangements featuring shell companies, complex banking channels, and money transfers to people with no clear — and sometimes no plausible — connection to the provision of goods and services.

The Stove-Ban Crusade

Noah Rothman found a better way to describe nanny-statism in a magazine cover story from the first half of the year — "The War on Things That Work":

Armed with unchecked self-confidence and possessed of an abiding faith in the idea that you must be coerced into altruism, the activists seem to be coming for almost everything you own. In the process, they are waging a crusade against convenience, an assault on comparative advantage, and a war on things that work.

Securing the fossil-fuel-free future that President Joe Biden imagines for us sometime in the 2030s will not be a pain-free proposition — at least that appears to be the conceit of the more radical wing of the environmentalist Left. The scale of the challenge, as they see it, demands sacrifice from us all. One of their most controversial moves is to give up natural-gas-powered appliances, your gas kitchen range foremost among them.

The relentless lobbying of local governments to forbid natural-gas hookups in new buildings had already succeeded in a number of municipalities when the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) sought public comment earlier this year on a proposal to impose a ban nationwide. By then, California had announced its own ban, to begin in the next decade, on the sale of new natural-gas-powered appliances, and New York State was set to follow suit.

Meanwhile, in Trump's Brain

This, by Charles C. W. Cooke, was one of our most-read pieces of the year. Probably because it captured a fundamental truth about Donald Trump, and his tenuous relationship with the real world. The horse-race details are dated by this point, but the descriptions of Trump's Truth Social presence are, sadly, not:

Let's check in on the shadow primary for the 2024 Republican nomination. Nikki Haley is putting together a finance committee, and suggested last week that she's "leaning in" to a run. Mike Pompeo has just published a book called Never Give an Inch, and told CBS yesterday that he'll decide whether to enter the fray over the "next handful of months." Governor Ron DeSantis has continued to pick winning fights in Florida since being reelected in a November landslide, and has stayed assiduously quiet about his future.

And then there's Donald Trump, who, despite being the only candidate who has officially announced his bid, is . . . well, ranting like a deranged hobo in a dilapidated public park. No, don't look at him — he might come over here with his sign.

There was a point in time at which Trump's unusual verbal affect and singular nose for underutilized wedge issues gave him a competitive edge. Now? Now, he's morphing into one of the three witches from Macbeth. To peruse Trump's account on Truth Social is to meet a cast of characters about whom nobody who lives beyond the Trump Extended Universe could possibly care one whit. Here in the real world, the border is a catastrophe, inflation is as bad as it's been in four decades, interest rates have risen to their highest level in 15 years, crime is on the up, and the debt continues to mushroom. And yet, safely ensconced within his own macrocosm, Trump is busy mainlining Edward Lear. Day in, day out, he rambles about the adventures of Coco Chow and the Old Broken Crow; the dastardly Unselect Committee; the (presumably tasty) Stollen Presidential Election; the travails of that famous law-enforcement agency, the Gestopo; Joe Scarborough's wife "Mike"; and other unusual characters from Coromandel. "Where the early pumpkins blow / In the middle of the woods / Lived the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò / Who STOLLE THE ELECTION / Don't you know?"

These characters come and go as the world passes indifferently by. But Trump's heroism remains the one constant.

Renewing Our Vows

As a final item, I'll cite once more the statement NR as an institution put out a couple months back, timed with the magazine's shift to monthly. It includes an editorial, a mission statement, and a listing of priorities, which you can find here. The mission is simply this:

National Review defends and advances the ordered liberty that is necessary to human flourishing and to a free, prosperous, and strong America.

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There's more. Much more. Further highlights from 2023 follow. Happy (almost) New Year, all. And hey, if you forgot to get a special someone something special for the holidays, may I recommend a subscription:

Andrew Stuttaford: The False Promise of Electric Cars

Daniel Hannan: How Shakespeare Changed Everything

Rich Lowry: Yes, Joe Biden Is Corrupt

Will Swaim: The California Reparations Commission Fails State History

Charles C. W. Cooke: Joe Biden Is an Asshole

Brian Allen: The Sixth Floor Museum Puts Us on the Spot, on November 22, 1963

Stanley Kurtz: AP Teacher's Guide Proves DeSantis Right in African-American Studies Clash

John McCormack: Sorry, Trump Lost

Brittany Bernstein: $5 Million Reparations Payment for Black Residents Not Enough, San Francisco Official Says

Ken Buck: Republicans' Moment of Choosing

Asra Q. Nomani: The War on Merit Turns into Systemic Injustice

Bjørn Lomborg: Life after Climate Change