What Happened Today: May 18, 2022

November midterm preview; Princeton University mishigas; Was Sweden Right All Along?

May 18, 2022

The Big Story

Contests across five states holding statewide and congressional primary elections last night offered a preview of the November midterms. For one thing, the evening clarified the limitations of Donald Trump’s power as the Republican Party’s kingmaker, after earlier election results, like JD Vance’s primary win in Ohio, showed Trump’s backing could make the difference in close races. Despite the former president urging voters in North Carolina to give Rep. Madison Cawthorn a second chance after Cawthorn’s failed attempt to bring a gun through an airport and his unsubstantiated smears accusing fellow legislators of cocaine-charged orgies—“some foolish mistakes which I don’t believe he’ll make again,” said Trump this week—Cawthorn still lost his seat to his primary challenger, Chuck Edwards. Trump’s endorsement was notably ineffective as well in the Idaho governor’s race, in which his pick, Janice McGeachin, lost by more than 20 points. In the Oregon house primaries, with votes still coming in, President Biden’s endorsement appears similarly impotent, as his pick, the moderate, seven-term Rep. Kurt Schrader, trails the progressive challenger, Jamie Mcleod-Skinner. But that’s not to say every endorsed candidate was fated for defeat. Trouncing his Republican challenger by 30 points for the Senate seat in North Carolina, Ted Budd claimed a resounding victory that reflected well on his Trump-backing and his own outspoken refusal to accept the 2020 election results and acknowledge President Biden as the duly elected winner. Perhaps no state, though, had as much at stake as Pennsylvania, where the Senate race in November, along with five or six other contests, will be pivotal in determining which party controls the Senate. And whoever wins the upcoming Pennsylvania governor’s race will appoint the secretary of state, who will later oversee the state’s closely watched 2024 presidential vote count. Attorney General Josh Shapiro took the gubernatorial Democratic nomination and also made a high-stakes gamble to try to orchestrate who his challenger will be. Shapiro’s campaign spent $840,000 to help Doug Mastriano secure the Republican nomination by buying ads that painted him as too conservative and “one of Donald Trump’s strongest supporters,”—a gambit that appeared to boost his support among GOP voters but that Shapiro hopes will be a vulnerability in a statewide November election. Meanwhile, Pennsylvania’s carefully followed GOP Senate primary race between the Trump-backed celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz and the financier David McCormick is so close it will likely trigger an automatic recount as required by state law in elections where the results are within a 0.5% margin. As of Wednesday, Oz appeared to be leading by just a few thousand votes in an election for which more than 1.2 million were cast. The Democratic Senate primary nomination went in a resounding 33-point victory to John Fetterman. Despite suffering a stroke over the weekend and being fitted for a pacemaker on Election Day, Fetterman’s quasi-everyman influencer post-politics persona (gym shorts, sweatshirts, Sheetz breakfast sandwiches), advocacy for legal marijuana, a $15 federal minimum wage, and Medicare for All amounted to a strong campaign that ultimately shellacked his opponent, Conor Lamb, a buttoned-down moderate with an extensive list of high-profile Democratic Party endorsements that did little to excite voters looking for a change.

In The Back Pages: Was Sweden Right All Along?

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→ Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) introduced on Tuesday a resolution in Congress that opens by challenging the legitimacy of the 1947 United Nations partition plan that called for separate states of Israel and Palestine and goes on to refer to Israel’s present existence as a continuation of the nakba, an Arabic term roughly translating to “catastrophe” that refers to the creation of Israel and dispossession of Palestinians. Co-sponsored by The Squad members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), and Cori Bush (D-MO), as well as Betty McCollum (D-MN) and Marie Newman (D-IL), the bill quickly and inevitably emerged as a lightning rod, with supporters describing it as a minimal effort to commemorate an event central to Palestinian identity, while critics identified it as a beachhead bill that threatens Israel’s very right to exist. Indeed, taken to its logical conclusion, the bill’s hope for a Palestinian “right of return” would undermine Israel’s Jewish identity completely.

→Professor Joshua Katz, a classicist who has taught at Princeton for almost 25 years, is set to be stripped of tenure and fired because—if one believes the university’s administrators—of a consensual relationship Katz had with a student in 2018 that the Title IX office already investigated (finding no wrongdoing) and that Katz was already disciplined for (a year without pay). What’s more likely, however, is that Katz (B.A. Yale; M. Phil Oxford; PhD Harvard) is being fired for failing to exercise his free speech “responsibly,” as Princeton’s president alleged in a 2020 statement to the school newspaper, in which the president also “object[ed] personally and strongly to [Katz’s] false description of a Princeton student group as a “local terrorist organization.” Katz had published an essay in The Quillette criticizing a petition signed by many Princeton students and faculty that called for, among other things, giving faculty of color summer bonuses as well as extra sabbatical time. “It boggles my mind,” Katz wrote, “that anyone would advocate giving people—extraordinarily privileged people already, let me point out: Princeton professors—extra perks for no reason other than their pigmentation.” Katz then went on to call the school’s Black Justice League, a student group that was championing the petition, a “local terrorist organization,” a move that was condemned by faculty, administrators, and students. Though none of this, the Princeton administrators claim, has anything to do with Katz’s dismissal, which is just deserts for a five-year-old offense he was already punished for and cleared of.

→ Energy prices surged by 51% in the first quarter of this year, with costs climbing from a 2021 rate of $53 to $80 in the same quarter of this year. The rising rates are even more harrowing in New England, which has seen an 83% increase in the first quarter of 2022 compared to 2021. These figures, which come from the PJM wholesale energy market, where producers and consumers buy and sell energy based on real-time prices, reflect both the impact of inflation on our energy markets as well as a pivot, among American natural gas producers, away from domestic markets and toward global ones. The United States usually sits on a surplus of domestically produced liquefied natural gas (LNG) that helps keep costs low, but this supply is now being sold overseas_to China and Europe in particular. Tyson Slocum, the energy program director for Public Citizen, a consumer watchdog group, pointed out on Friday that the United States had zero liquefied natural gas exports in 2015 and is now the largest LNG exporter in the world. Meanwhile, in other unnerving energy news, the price of gas is now more than $4 per gallon in every single U.S. state for the first time in history.

→ Walmart, the largest private employer in the United States, with nearly 1.6 million employees in the United States and 2.3 million worldwide, has developed a slate of new programs to retain workers who, in our currently tight labor market, have more power to negotiate or quit than labor has had in decades. According to the U.S. Labor Department, there were 11.5 million job openings in March—the most ever reported since the department began keeping track in 2000—and a record-breaking 4.5 million Americans quit their jobs that month. Amazon—the second largest private employer in the United States—has been raising wages throughout the pandemic. This hasn’t offset unionization efforts in its warehouses, including the first successful unionization drive in the company’s U.S. history, with the Amazon Labor Union officially forming in April of this year (though notably losing a recent unionization push at another Staten Island Amazon warehouse). Beyond boosting salaries, Walmart is hoping it can close its labor gap with a commitment “to a person’s life beyond what they would expect from an employer,” said the company’s head of human resources, by offering high-wage starting salaries but also promising to train employees for more lucrative positions in the organization. One Walmart retention strategy currently being piloted is the College2Career program, which recruits recent college graduates with a guarantee that, in just two years, they will move from entry-level sales positions to store-management level positions, which can pay as much as $200,000 per year. About 75% of Walmart’s current store managers began their careers as hourly workers for the company.

→ With the volatile cryptocurrency market prone to wild fluctuations (though lately cryptocurrencies have been dependably down, losing some trillion dollars of value over the past two months), more reliable options like “stablecoins,” or cryptocurrencies that have their values pegged to more stable currencies like the U.S. dollar, have increased in popularity. One such stablecoin, TerraUSD, was the third most popular option in this market, valued at $16 billion and backed by $40 billion in reserve funds, amounting to a $56 billion market valuation. Or $56 billion until last week, when an algorithmic error caused the currency to de-peg from the U.S. dollar and dive wildly, losing $56 billion in value. The company, beyond shedding its billions, is also seeing employees leave en masse; the entire in-house legal team at Terraform, the company that created TerraUSD, quit in the wake of the stablecoin’s collapse.

→ Exactly 42,915 Americans died from traffic incidents in 2021—the highest number of such fatalities since 2005, according to data released by the Department of Transportation on Tuesday. This is an 18% increase from 2019, the year before the pandemic, leading DOT officials to speculate that this grim surge stems from behaviors associated with the pandemic. “An increase in dangerous driving—speeding, distracted driving, drug- and alcohol-impaired driving, not buckling up—during the pandemic, combined with roads designed for speed instead of safety, has wiped out a decade and a half of progress in reducing traffic crashes, injuries, and deaths,” according to Russ Martin, senior director of policy and government relations for the Governors Highway Safety Association. Another potential cause is our overreliance on our cars’ new safety features. Jake Nelson, AAA’s director of traffic safety advocacy and research, pointed out that “today’s sophisticated vehicle technology requires more than trial-and-error learning to master it” but noted that drivers “can’t fake it til’ you make it at highway speeds.”

→ GrubHub’s “free lunch” promotion backfired in brutal fashion on Tuesday, earning the company some Pissed-Off-New-Yorker-level bad press. Last week, and without adequately coordinating the promotion with restaurants and delivery workers, GrubHub tweeted out that it would be offering all NYC-based GrubHub users $15 off any order made on Tuesday between 11:00 a.m. and 2:00 pm. This brought legions of hungry people onto the app and website at 11:00 a.m. sharp, promptly bringing down both platforms, leading to many lost orders. Hundreds of thousands of orders did still get through though—6,000 per minute, according to one GrubHub employee—with some restaurants receiving as many as 200 orders in the first five minutes of the promotion. As restaurants struggled to clear these orders, they learned there were not nearly enough delivery workers to shepherd the food all across the city, with bags piling up at checkout counters, never to be picked up and delivered. And so, at last, we can answer the age-old question: Who says there is no such thing as a free lunch? The thousands of New Yorkers still waiting on their sandwiches.

Additional reporting provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman

Was Sweden Right All Along?

A new report from the World Health Organization validates Sweden’s anti-lockdown approach to the pandemic

Ian Miller is the author of Unmasked: The Global Failure of COVID Mask Mandates. He writes at the Unmasked Substack.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Sweden has faced an enormous amount of criticism and international pressure due to its willingness to stick to established public health principles and pre-pandemic planning.

Instead of following the incessant, anti-science groupthink that became part of a virus-induced political religion, Sweden chose instead to not impose the strict lockdowns that Dr. Anthony Fauci recently claimed were not tried in the United States.

Sweden never mandated that masks be worn in indoor public spaces, correctly identifying the lack of evidence supporting their use.

It kept schools open in defiance of teachers’ unions and politically motivated “experts” in the United States who advocated for a policy with zero benefits and tremendous harms.

Essentially, Sweden followed the actual science and not The Science™, with the requisite trademark and capital letters. That would include the guides that were prepared before panic, inaccurate modeling, political motivations, and crisis obsession took over.

Even last year, it became readily apparent that no one in the media or public health establishment was willing to discuss the inarguable reality that Sweden’s results were no worse than those of many countries across the globe—and significantly better than many, many others.

In general, comparisons have been mainly focused on COVID-19 specific outcomes, but now the World Health Organization, fresh off demanding authoritarian powers over sovereign nations whenever it deems necessary, has released a new report on its estimates of excess mortality.

Excess mortality is simply the number of deaths above the expected rate in a given country in a specific time frame.

Excess mortality captures all of the outcomes in a country—it’s not limited to COVID-19-related metrics or any other specific cause.

For that reason, it’s often a better indicator of the true cost of the pandemic, whether that be COVID-19 mortality or the consequences of lockdowns, hospital policy, or mental health breakdowns.

The WHO report contains many illuminating statistics from the first two years of the pandemic that illustrate that Sweden’s approach was undoubtedly the correct one—once again contradicting the expert-derived “consensus” that advocates for endless restrictions on normal life.

Sweden’s relative success is easily visible when comparing 30 European countries in estimated excess mortality rate per 100,000:

Sweden ranks 25th out of the 30 countries.

Twenty-four countries had a higher excess mortality rate per 100,000.

In summary, Sweden, the country that eschewed strict lockdowns, had some of the lowest mask usage anywhere on earth, kept schools open and society functioning as much as possible, and had one of the lowest rates of overall mortality of any country in its region ...

You can read the rest of the article at the Substack “Unmasked.”

https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/a-new-world-health-organization-report?s=r

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What Happened Today: May 18, 2022

November midterm preview; Princeton University mishigas; Was Sweden Right All Along?

The Big Story

The Rest

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