This claim has a dozen things wrong with it — for instance, Democrats tied their gerrymandering legislation to other measures including banning voter ID — but the fundamental problem was that nobody agrees on what gerrymandering is.

For instance, the Democrats’ “gerrymander ban” would have required states to tie together black-majority precincts that may be geographically distant. This is, by any normal definition, a racial gerrymander. To Democrats, this was “banning gerrymanders” because presumably they limit their definition of racial gerrymandering to efforts to reduce minority representation.

I proposed a gerrymandering ban in February, and laid out 5 rules:

1. Require states to respect existing county, city, and town borders. Many states have rules like this. The rule has the virtue of generally, though not perfectly, keeping people with similar interests together. The bigger benefit is that this constraint makes it harder, not impossible, for partisans to draw an unfair gerrymander.
2. Encourage compactness. If a more compact map, which respects county lines as much, would yield less partisan imbalance, that should count as evidence that the less compact map is a partisan gerrymander.
3. End mid-decade redistricting. Expedite any legal challenges to a given map, and make it illegal for states to redistrict mid-decade except in the most extreme circumstances.
4. Make all Voting Rights Act rules on redistricting subordinate to the above rules.
5. Allow districts to vary in population by up to 10% if necessary, with respect to existing boundaries.

This had a mixed response, including many objections:

Again, we don’t agree on what counts as a gerrymander.

Sean Trende, a political scientist with plenty of experience drawing legislative districts, had an essay at the American Enterprise last week that explores the ambiguity of the term:

“Defining a gerrymander is not easy, nor is it scientific. It’s a question that involves deep theoretical questions and policy questions, and voters should be wary of anyone who oversimplifies it. The Supreme Court could not have resolved this debate without making the type of arbitrary choice that it is ill-equipped to make, but that legislatures handle well.”

I recommend the essay. One question he wrestles with: Is a congressional map unfair if it favors one party over another? Behind that question is a debate: Should the maps aim for political fairness and competitiveness, or just for cultural coherence?

Trende’s main question is whether intention matters when calling something a gerrymander. He says yes, and I agree.

I think progress can be made on banning gerrymandering, but I do think we need a more shared definition of the word before we can get far.

Suburbia has long been a favorite target for cultural critics.

Readers of a certain age will remember the genre of white suburban fiction.

The Ice Storm and American Beauty were the 1990s big-screen versions. John Updike’s Rabbit novels and Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road were among the 1960s-inflected novels on these themes.

The message: Suburban life is impossibly stultifying and repressive. Nobody is actually happy living in a brick single-family home with a yard and a white picket fence.

Suburbia-hating of this sort fit perfectly into some strains of feminism, such as Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique: Marriage is a golden cage, and the suburban housewife is either on quaaludes or about to run away with her French lover.

The Left’s favorite bogeymen have all been deployed against the burbs: They are all white (both racist and uncool), sprawl causing global warming, lawns are useless, and destroying the planet.

The subversive, edgy anti-suburban take became a cliched by the end of the 20th century. In the first 10 or 15 years of the new century, America’s cities enjoyed a renaissance, while the suburbs, according to the tastemakers, were knocking on death’s door.

“Manhattan is thriving. Crime is at record lows, and ‘inner cities’ in San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Boston are vital,” wrote Harvard social scientist Robert J. Sampson, author of Great American City. “Meanwhile, many a suburb is hemorrhaging. Vacant homes dot the suburban landscape of the subprime mortgage crisis, and poverty is growing. Suburbs are increasingly seen as culturally stale and boring, especially for those who will define the future—the young.”

Sampson was reviewing The Great Inversion, an acclaimed 2012 book by Alan Ehrenhalt.

“The late 20th century,” Ehrenhalt wrote, “was the age of poor inner cities and wealthy suburbs; the 21st century is emerging as an age of affluent inner neighborhoods and immigrants settling on the outside.”

These counter-cultural, counter-intuitive stories are told so often with so little pushback that they are no longer counter-anything. They are the official dogma. They’re also largely at odds with how Americans live and want to live.

What the people want

And yet, Americans want the suburbs. In particular, American parents want what the suburbs are offering: A home, good schools, low crime, and a tiny patch of earth to call your own.

“After leading a back-to-the-city movement, many Millennials moved to the suburbs,” explained Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies in 2024.

“While there is extensive research and discussion about millennial preferences for walkable urban areas,” the Harvard researchers explained, “we found that the places with the largest increases of early millennials were both suburban and on the periphery of metropolitan areas.”

They explained this in negative terms: “this suburbanization may have been motivated by the lack of affordable and right-sized housing in urban areas….”

Alternatively, people moved to the suburbs because they wanted bigger houses for less money.

Again, Harvard housing scholars can put this negatively, but in truth, a lot of people, especially parents, just want to live in a house with a yard with less traffic and less density than the cities.

Nearly 90% of American homebuyers told Redfin they “would prefer a single-family home with a backyard over a unit in a triplex with a shorter commute.”

A full 79% say their ideal residence is a single-family home, while only 59% live in one. Meanwhile, only 8% say their ideal residence is an apartment, while 24% of Americans live in one.

Sure, single-family homes exist in the city, but really, having your own home typically means living in the burbs.

While suburbs are less dense with amenities (coffee shops, parks, museums) than cities are, the suburbs are much safer, which is crucial, because safety is rated much more valuable than other goods, such as local restaurants or diversity.

That said, many suburbs are incredibly diverse. Within a quarter mile of my home in Fairfax County, Virginia, you can find shops where the primary language is Vietnamese and Spanish. The county is 10% black, 20% Asian, and 17% Hispanic. Nearly one in three residents of my suburban county was born overseas.

Contrary to the suburbs-are-racist-white-enclaves tale, a vast majority of black and Hispanic Americans live in suburban or exurban places, and only a small minority live in the urban core.

They are not all super-isolating, as liberal blogger Noah Smith pointed out. He cited studies finding “Mean unadjusted loneliness scores were lower in suburban compared to urban areas” and “Increased overcrowding and population density were associated with higher levels of loneliness.”

Yes, commuting from the suburbs can be horrible, but this charge against suburbia is also overstated. For one thing, suburbanites are much more able to afford a car (parking is much cheaper and easier, and insurance rates are lower), and driving to work is generally quicker than taking public transit. Also, plenty of suburbanites work in the suburbs, because the suburbs aren’t just residential, they also have commerce and office buildings.

This is also very much a discussion about the birthrate. The Baby Boom happened in the suburbs and because of the suburbs. Young adults — particularly veterans benefitting from the GI bill — could afford a 3-bedroom brick colonial with a yard, which made it easier for lovebirds in their early 20s to tie the knot and start making babies.

If you think a low and falling birthrate represents progress — and many do — then you see suburbia as a den of patriarchy or something. But if you think it’s better when people get married and have kids (and have more of them), then you have to embrace and care about suburbia.

The problems

Part of caring about suburbia is trying to fix its problems, which are real.

One core charge against it is true: Life there is too car-dependent. This was a policy choice. In the second half of the last century, many suburbs were built for cars rather than people, because walking was seen as passe, and driving as modern.

Yes, public transit can alleviate driving, but in most suburbs, it’s not feasible to build out light-rail or subway systems. Instead, suburbs should zone for more mixed-use, allowing residents to walk to coffee shops and office buildings more.

But realistically, Mom & Dad are going to drive to work and the supermarket most of the time, and so the most important thing on walkability is liberating kids from cars (and liberating parents from driving them everywhere).

That requires building more sidewalks and crosswalks, and rethinking wide high-speed arterial roads. In general, it requires slowing down traffic. Don’t let the dream of perfect walkability block the possibility of kid-walkability.

The biggest problem of the suburbs today is not anything that makes them undesirable, but that they are too desirable: Demand is exceeding supply in the walkable suburbs and the ones with good schools, and so prices are too high.  

There’s no easy solution to this problem, but there are plenty of potential tweaks that could improve things.

A SUBURBANITE CONTENDS WITH KUDZU

For instance, school choice could help make less desirable suburbs into more desirable suburbs. That is, married parents would move into lower-cost neighborhoods with worse public schools if they could still afford to send their kids to private school. (Over time, this improvement of the neighborhood would improve the local public schools.)

The ultimate way to fix the problem of high costs is to increase the supply. Expensive suburbs should become a little more dense by allowing a few row houses and reducing minimum lot sizes. States and counties should allow more sprawl, which is called “greenfield” development, where new suburbs are built — and ideally built to allow kids to run around more.

But there’s a related datapoint that’s probably good news: An uptick in multi-generational living.

Rather than your college graduate living in Mom’s basement, this is about Grandma living above Mom & Dad’s garage.

It really does take a village to raise a child. When Hillary Clinton spoke of “the village,” she may have meant the Department of Health and Human Services, but throughout human history, “the village” has mostly meant extended family.

Neighbors, fellow congregants, and best friends can provide great support for families and be excellent babysitters and playmates, but nothing beats family. Yes, home costs are probably the reason why home buyers are buying with the intention of housing aunts, adult brothers, grandmas, and grandchildren (such purchases are up 42% since before the pandemic), but these families are surely seeing the benefit of a live-in village.

Parents who raise a first child with the help of their own parents and siblings are much more likely to have a second child, according to studies from the Netherlands, China, the United Kingdom, and the rest of Europe. Children who were raised with the aid of Grandma and Grandpa are healthier emotionally.

The old folk seem to benefit from it too. “Helping with grandchildren may stave off cognitive decline,” explained the recent headline at Harvard Women’s Health Watch.

All of these findings reaffirm what parents and grandparents have known for centuries, but they cut against the individualistic, autonomy-worshipping spirit of the age.

Not a few baby boomers, members of The Me Generation, say publicly that they have already discharged their child-rearing duties, and those kids are now on their own with regard to the next generation.

Parents believe that parenting is up to them alone, and any supplemental “care work” ought to come from the government or the marketplace.

One feminist Washington Post columnist, after complaining about the lack of government support for families, lamented that she was “mooching child care” from her husband’s parents — that is, her child was being cared for by Grandma. It’s a shift in assumptions that makes family formation seem so much more expensive.

“We can all agree that it takes a supportive village to raise a family, but nowadays we are hiring the village that used to be a normal part of life,” writes Catholic author Johanna Duncan.

Among a certain heavily educated and very ambitious crowd, getting away from Mom & Dad was the definition of success.

HERE IS WHY CHINA WANTED BIDEN TO WIN

“We decided that progress and independence meant separation,” Duncan writes. “That a good life looked like a nuclear unit, self-contained and self-sufficient.”

This progressive and individualistic dream of self-sufficiency, it turns out, is not terribly compatible with family. If the real estate trends tell us anything, we may be relearning that old wisdom.

When the news broke, Trump put Perez on unpaid leave immediately, and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called his behavior a “disgrace.”

It’s natural that Trump would be upset. After all, Perez wasn’t giving Trump a cut.

Around the same time Perez left the White House, the Trump Media and Technology Group announced it would be selling early access to the president’s market-moving social media posts.

TMTG is one of Trump’s businesses. As of the end of 2025, Trump owned about 40% of the company through a personal trust. The company owns and operates Truth Social, a knockoff of Twitter that Trump launched in 2022 after Big Tech firms, including Twitter, banned him from their platforms in the wake of the January 6 riots.

Trump’s company just announced it is selling a top-shelf product called Truth API. This gives anyone willing to pay Trump tens of thousands of dollars an early look at the posts by the “highest-ranking Truth Social accounts.”

Nobody cares what the “highest-ranking Truth Social accounts” say. Lots of people care about the posts from one particular account, @RealDonaldTrump. Nobody will pay a premium to get Trump’s wisdom or wit earlier. Some may pay to get ahead of stock market moves that happen in response to the posts by the president of the United States.

The “firms that prioritize tracking influential Truth posts,” as TMTG’s announcement describes its potential customers, are investors who want to buy and sell stocks based on the policies Trump announces on his platform.

“The president’s social media posts could be more important than the actual economic data,” reported Fortune last year.

When Trump threatened Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell on Truth Social and called him a “major loser,” the Dow dropped nearly 1,000 points. When Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs, stocks fell about 10% over two days. When Trump announced a pause on those tariffs, stocks rebounded about the same 10%.

Crucially, Trump wasn’t simply reporting news that moved markets. Trump’s posts themselves were moving markets.

“We’re one Truth Social post away from being up or down 5% every day,” a JPMorgan portfolio manager said on CNBC last year. “The data is almost secondary at this point.”

If you can get a few seconds ahead of the rest of the market on those posts, you can make a ton of money, similar to how Perez’s advance warning allegedly allowed him to haul in riches.

But if Perez did what he is said to have done, he profited from Trump without kicking anything back to him. Truth API is a way for Trump to collect a toll from anyone who wants to profit off his proclamations.

It’s probably legal. It’s certainly an abuse of power. It’s also totally in keeping with Trump’s character.

The author of The Art of the Deal is thoroughly transactional. He is the quid pro quo president.

It’s worth considering his pardon of corrupt former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, a self-proclaimed “Trumpocrat.” Blagojevich in 2008 tried to sell an appointment to the U.S. Senate after Barack Obama ascended from the Senate to the White House. Blago laid out his philosophy: “I’ve got this thing, and it’s f***ing golden. And I’m just not giving it up for f***in’ nothing. I’m not going to do it.”

This is Trump’s philosophy, too. You see it in how he treats allies — for instance, he complained about U.S. aid to Ukraine because “the United States will get nothing back.” 

Trump, in 2016, when he was mocking Marco Rubio for his awkward drink of water during a nationally televised speech, noted that Rubio even showed the label (Poland Spring) on the bottle. Giving someone free advertising is a crime in Trump’s mind.

FAUCI: CLOSE THE SCHOOLS

Trump is hardly the first self-dealing politician in America. The Clintons were always on the make. Hundreds of Bush and Obama insiders monetized their “public service.” Joe Biden’s family corruptly enriched itself through insider-influence peddling.

But the Swamp Economy of the Trump era is a bit different: Nobody gets to cash out his insider status without first kicking a few bucks back to the Big Guy.

As America’s top infectious disease official during the COVID-19 pandemic, Fauci often brushed off criticisms, insisting that he never shut anything down.

His defense is not a total lie. On the literal level, Fauci didn’t have the authority to close schools. Secondly, he had a mixed record when it came to closing schools and keeping them closed. In fact, Fauci, after the 2020 election, began publicly saying we should open schools and close bars.

But Fauci’s defense against the school-closer charge is still misleading on at least three fronts:

1. He did advocate school closures early on.
2. He promulgated safety standards (most importantly the 6-foot social distancing standard) that were not required by science and did force school closures.
3. Throughout the summer of 2020, when Democrats were attacking President Donald Trump for advocating the reopening of schools in the fall, Fauci took the Democrats’ side.

Fauci’s diaries, published over the weekend, make this third point clear. Fauci went far beyond the science, alleging that letting kids go to school was dangerous for them and for the community. Data shows that this is false. He also basically ignored the negative effects of the closures.

First, Fauci advised local leaders to close schools in March 2020. This was an understandable error (one I made myself). But it undermines his claim that he never closed a school.

Here’s a passage from a March 15, 2020, diary entry: “I spoke with Bill de Blasio (Mayor – NYC) and convinced him based on what I was saying publicly and my conversation tonight to close the NYC schools (he had already decided based on what I was saying on TV)…. I had a similar call with Ann O’Leary, the COS of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California. Ann said that based on my TV appearances today and yesterday, the Governor has decided to close the schools in California as well as the bars and restaurants.”

The next day, he wrote about his official guidance to “close schools where there is community spread.”

Over the summer, Fauci at first expressed interest in reopening schools, but once Trump began calling for the opening of schools, Fauci became very negative about it.

In July, he wrote, “Clearly Trump is pushing to open the schools no matter what. There is concern about the safety of the children and teachers. Yet, Trump together with [CDC Director Robert] Redfield (being pressured) is saying that the CDC guidelines should not stand in the way of opening schools (what???). Glad that I am not involved in that discussion.”

By this point, it was clear that kids were not getting very sick, and there was no evidence that schools were acting as spreaders. The data now generally show that Redfield was right.

Nevertheless, on July 9, Fauci wrote, “Trump wants to open the schools at all costs. Clearly he does not care about the safety of the children.”

This was overheated political talk ungrounded in data.

IT WASN’T THE VIRUS THAT CLOSED THE SCHOOLS IN 2021. IT WAS DEMOCRATS.

Finally, by late November, after Joe Biden won the 2020 election, Fauci said to open the schools and close the bars.

Whatever you think of Fauci’s reasoning, he cannot claim to be innocent of school closures.

The Communist leaders of China took a side in the elections of 2018 and 2020: They wanted Democrats to win.

A recently published intelligence assessment reported that during President Donald Trump’s first term, “The Chinese Communist Party’s policy was to leverage all domestic and foreign elements that were opposed to the U.S. President [Trump] in an effort to reduce the U.S. President’s votes and make him resign or prevent his re-election.”

Specifically, in the 2020 election, China considered “interference efforts” and “influence efforts” to help Joe Biden win, but ultimately decided this was not worth the rest “China did take some steps to try to undermine former President Trump’s reelection.”

The assessment from the National Intelligence Council suggests some reasons why, including that Biden “would be more predictable and eager to initially deescalate bilateral tensions.” Also, China may have thought Biden would dial back Trump’s tariffs.

But the intelligence sources were guessing just as much as anyone. A brief study of Biden’s career and his party’s record on China would provide the Communist Party with plenty of reasons to back Biden.

As a senator Biden advanced policies advantageous to China based on naïve assumptions about the Communist regime. As vice president, he got very chummy with Xi Jinping, now the president of China, and excused some of the regime’s worst human rights abuses. As a candidate in 2020, he denied that China was a competitor. And of course, China was paying millions of dollars to Hunter Biden, and Joe Biden was fine with that.

In short, the Chinese Communist Party had more than enough reasons to think Biden and the Democrats would be good for the cause.

Biden’s record

Biden believed deeply in the China Trade: the idea that the U.S. and Europe, by opening their markets to China, would bring about democratic liberalization and peaceful relations with Beijing.

Biden was hardly alone in this belief, but he was also one of the loudest and most powerful champions of the erroneous idea that free trade would turn the Communist authoritarians into capitalist liberals.

Biden was the Ranking Member (the senior Democrat) on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2000 when Congress voted to grant “Permanent Normal Trade Relations” to China. This tore down U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods and paved the way for China to enter the World Trade Organization.

“I believe we want China to be invested in the international system,” Biden said in a committee hearing. “Over time, that’s the best way to get China to clean up its act.”

Biden was wrong in 2000. When the world opened its markets to China, we enriched the Communist government and gave it increased leverage with which to ward off any U.S. or European pushes for human rights, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and democracy.

Biden never admitted he was wrong, and so China’s rulers in 2020 could reasonably assume that Biden would keep their plush deal going — especially considering his behavior in the interim.

Arguably, Biden’s most shameful moment as vice president took place on his 2011 trip to China to visit with Xi, then the vice president and on a clear path to becoming president of China.  

Unprompted, Biden announced that the U.S. accepted China’s One Child Policy: “Your policy has been one which I fully understand — I’m not second-guessing — of one child per family.”

To enforce the One Child Policy, the Chinese government performed forced abortions and forced sterilizations. Aside from the brutal means, the very idea — banning couples from having the families they want — is grossly inhumane, and et Biden put the U.S. on the record as okay with this.

On that trip, Biden and Xi spent at least 10 hours together and played a game of basketball. The two hung out again in 2012. Xi was president by 2013 when Biden visited again, and Xi called Biden “my old friend.”

In 2014, speaking at Harvard, Biden waved off the idea that China posed a threat to the U.S. “I want China to succeed, it’s in our interest they succeed economically,” he said. “Folks, China has overwhelming problems. China not only has an energy problem, they have no water…. It is a gigantic and multi-trillion-dollar problem for them. We should help them solve the problem.”

Then, when running for president in 2019, Biden likewise mocked his opponents for their combative stance vis-à-vis China. Of the Chinese, Biden said, “You know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what, they’re not, they’re not competition for us.”

Even at that late date, Biden seemed to believe in the China Trade — that by helping China get wealthier, we could reform China. This gullible view was useful to China.

Trump rejected the standard view, and by winning in 2016, he helped smash the old dogma that trade would soften China.

Also, China might have seen a Biden White House as advantageous because China was paying Hunter Biden, and Joe Biden was fine with it.

Hunter worked as a lobbyist and international consultant for more than a decade, raking in many millions by trading on his father’s name. China was one of his biggest sources of funds. Multiple energy clients in China (connected to the Chinese government) paid more than $3 million to Hunter.

The Biden family has even deeper ties with shady government-connected Chinese businessmen. When Patrick Ho, a high-ranking Chinese businessman was charged in 2017 with violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, his first call was to Joe Biden’s brother James, who told officials he believed Ho meant to call Hunter.

Joe Biden repeatedly said that there was nothing wrong with Hunter earning these millions peddling his name to Chinese communists. “My son did nothing wrong,” Biden said time and again.

In short, a Biden victory meant China would have friends in the highest of places.

Democrats’ record

The Democratic Party as a whole was far friendlier to China than the Republican Party.

During Bill Clinton’s presidency, China-connected donors like Johnny Chung, Charlie Trie, James Riady, John Huang, and Maria Hsia gained special access to the White House.

“I see the White House is like a subway: You have to put in coins to open gates,” said Chung, who was funneling money from Chinese intelligence officials to Clinton. Clinton, in turn, weakened export controls to the benefit of China’s military-industrial complex.

The next Democratic administration lacked the brazen corruption and pay-to-play mentality, but was just as prolific in helping Chinese state-owned businesses.

Obamanomics included billions in subsidies for Chinese state-connected companies that did business with American corporations.

THE CHINA TRADE GOES THE WAY OF THE PANDAS

For instance, Obama primarily used the Export-Import Bank — a federal agency that subsidizes foreign buyers of U.S. goods — to subsidize the Chinese government. In Fiscal Year 2014, for example, China was the top recipient of Ex-Im money, and an overwhelming majority of that money went to Chinese state-owned businesses, such as the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and the Export-Import Bank of China. That is, the Obama-Biden administration didn’t merely subsidize China’s government, they subsidized China’s nationalistic industrial policy.

Biden, to his credit, was far more of a China Hawk in the White House than he ever had been before. But given his record up to 2020, it’s no wonder China wanted him in power.

Surprising nobody, these more formidable faregates resulted in more fare revenue. They also resulted in less crime. “Virtually every criminal is a fare evader,” the head of New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority said.

This is almost a happy story demonstrating to local governments that, as the millennial commentators like to say, “You can just do things.” You can reduce crime by enforcing rules and preventing a slide into general disorder (this used to be called the “broken windows” theory of policing).

But it was also a sad story. The new, higher (and uglier) faregates stand today as a memorial to their cities’ decline. For decades, D.C. and New York didn’t need unhoppable gates because only a small sliver (of mostly high schoolers) dodged the fares. In D.C., the gates could just be pushed open with some force, meaning Metro operated on something like an honor system.

When you have no honor, though, you can’t have an honor system.

Now a different sort of fence is going up in America’s subways, as transit systems erect new monuments to another problem: People ending up on the tracks.

New York is putting up odd little metal fences along the edge of some platforms. D.C.’s Metro is planning to spend more than $9 million to put 5-foot-high fences and sliding doors down the entire length of the platforms at Red Line stops.

Already in 2026, 84 people have trespassed onto Metro’s tracks, and 10 people have been killed on those tracks — that’s more than the eight killed all of 2025, which was up from six deaths in 2024, and only two in 2023.

Some of these were suicides. Some were unintentional deaths by intentional trespassers. Some were accidental falls from the platform.

TIMOTHY P. CARNEY: PAY YOUR FARE SHARE

The fencing will probably save lives, but like the faregates, they will stand as monuments to societal dysfunction. Over its first 50 years, Metro didn’t feel the need to build these barriers. Yes, people jumped on the tracks or fell in — or even were pushed in. But such incidents were very rare.

Hundreds of millions of people stood on Metro’s platforms with the ability to enter the tracks, and yet almost nobody did. Now we cannot rely on that normalcy anymore, so we need physical barriers.

But that’s not a scene from Homer’s Odyssey. I’m not saying “let’s go home,” is a loose translation by some feminist scholar. The whole scene, with Odysseus gathering his men on the beaches after sacking Troy, is absent in the epic poem. It was invented by Director Christopher Nolan.

Nolan’s movie included plenty more scenes that weren’t in the original. It omitted many more. Some classicists and other online critics assailed the movie for these variations.

Nolan made judgment calls I disliked, but no one can blame him for making the calls. He had to. Homer didn’t write a movie, he wrote an epic poem. Christopher Nolan didn’t make an epic poem — he made a movie. The movie is an adaptation of the epic.

Nolan was working in a different genre, with a different language, and at a different time. As such, he adapted more than just the dialogue or a few scenes; he adapted the core themes of the story and the character Odysseus.

Nolan understates Odysseus’s tragic hubris and makes him tortured and pensive. Deep loyalty to his men and his family defined him.

Consistently, Nolan replaced Homer’s pagan ethics with a more modern ethics. For instance, the characters showed revulsion at human sacrifice and vengeance killing.

Throughout the film, pagan morality sits uneasily with the protagonists, likely because Nolan knew it would sit uneasily with viewers. So he sanitized some of the film’s violence.

The movie also sanitized Odysseus’s infidelity by removing his affair with Circe and never directly acknowledging his sleeping with Calypso. Most significantly, Nolan gave Odysseus deep guilt for the Greek massacre in Troy.

These changes didn’t wokify the Odyssey. They de-paganized it.

Nolan made the Odyssey a tragedy with a conservative tragic lesson: The Greeks abused and disregarded the old laws and the old Gods that had made their civilization, and now civilization would crumble.

Hubris in this story was not limited to Odysseus, but to all Greeks.

The Greeks cleverly exploited the Trojans’ piety by declaring the Trojan horse a gift to Athena.

To the suitors, Zeus’s law requiring hospitality for strangers was antiquated and pointless. One traditional rationale, that any stranger could be a god in disguise, became a punchline for the suitors, too enlightened for such hoary myths.

No one understood how much these old rules and practices made civilization possible. The Greeks could sleep peacefully in their own beds for generations because of these old rules they now saw as pointless or worse. They took for granted relative peace and prosperity, while denigrating its foundations.

The Greeks were spending down an invaluable inheritance and saw no value in replenishing it.

This central theme is conservative and even Christian.

The characters’ invocation of Zeus’s law echoes Christ’s commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves, and his warning and promise that as we do the least of mankind so we do to Him.

When Odysseus and Penelope lament the end of their civilization and foretell a new civilization, the viewer almost expects to see a cross appear on screen.

Perhaps the most Christian scene — certainly the most Catholic one — happens when Calypso sends Odysseus home after seven years on her island. She tells this cleverest of men to stop trying to do everything himself and to trust in the gods. More striking, she tells Odysseus to admit his sins and repent.

LEGACY MEDIA IS A LEGEND IN HOLLYWOOD’S MIND

For all the fuss about this being a woke movie, it borrows its moral weight from conservative wisdom and Christian ideas. Hollywood, when it wants to tell a good story rather than peddle its ideology, often leans on conservative sentiments and Christian themes.

Nolan, who was raised Catholic, is in this way like the Greeks of his Odyssey. In fact, all of Hollywood is, and so is much of our culture. Nolan didn’t merely adapt the Odyssey for our age, he made a movie indicting even himself.

We have spent a couple of generations at least spending down the cultural wealth of Western civilization. We have wandered so far, and God only knows if we can ever go back home.

For these reasons, cars are naturally very regulated.

Self-driving cars are just coming onto the market in significant numbers, so the regulatory framework will have to be changed at the state and federal levels.

Different industry and advocacy groups have been hashing out legislation to establish this framework. Lawmakers from both parties have been getting closer to a good compromise measure. The biggest opposition, according to all reports, is coming from the trial lawyers.

The American Association of Justice (formerly the Association of Trial Lawyers of America) has been lobbying on this matter, and earlier this year opposed the bipartisan SELF DRIVE Act, arguing “It eliminates all legal accountability for AV failures and collisions” and “strips away victims’ fundamental rights, limiting their right to seek justice.”

In short, victims need to know whom to sue if they get injured by a self-driving car. This is a reasonable-sounding objection, and one you’d expect to hear from the folks who do the suing.

But Democratic and Republican lawmakers both say they’ve bent over backward to address the lawyers’ valid concern.

Check out this report from Government Technology magazine:

“Speaking during a hearing of the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee on Tuesday, U.S. Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., placed blame for the roadblock mostly on trial lawyers, who typically align with Democrats.

‘It should be clear from the history of this process that Republicans and Democrats on this panel worked very hard with your organization to get sign off and support when we first moved this bill,” Walden said. “So you might imagine my disappointment when you all asked for more changes in the Senate, despite the deal we had here in the House with your organization.’

‘But it was even more curious that when Senate Republicans and Democrats ceded to the provisions you were seeking, you still didn’t support the deal,’ Walden continued.”

In other words, the trial lawyers seem dead set on sinking the bill, rather than passing a better bill. This would suggest that the trial lawyers don’t just want to set up a good liability system for self-driving cars — they want to block wide adoption of self-driving cars.

Why would trial lawyers want to block self-driving cars?

Check out this post from Alex Tabarrok:

“Roughly 37,000–40,000 Americans die in auto accidents every year. We now have large‑scale, real‑world evidence—from Waymo and a joint analysis with Swiss Re—that driverless operations can be substantially safer than matched human driving within their current operating domains. The latest data show that over 220 million miles driven, Waymo vehicles–in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, Austin and Atlanta–have 94% fewer serious injuries, 82% fewer air bag deployments, and 93% fewer pedestrian injuries.… The trial lawyers earn a huge amount litigating ordinary auto accidents–Annual U.S. auto insurance payouts (liability + PIP/MedPay) are on the order of $180–220B.”

One doesn’t want to be too cynical, but it is striking that the biggest obstacle to widespread adoption of safer cars is the industry that profits when people get injured or killed in car accidents.

This was hogwash — both parties were the parties of Big Business. Liberals toned down this line of attack a bit when President Donald Trump took over the GOP. But still, this self-conceit persists on the Left, even in the face of very clear facts to the contrary.

Consider this lengthy essay by liberal blogger Matt Yglesias about the “politics of ‘big tobacco.’” He’s mostly making a point not about lobbying (that when you win a legislative battle, sometimes it is over, and you don’t get political credit for it), but the whole context of this 2,300 is about special-interest power. After all, “big tobacco” is in the headline.

Yglesias casts the 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act (and its failed 2008 version) as one in a series of regulatory “blows against the tobacco industry”

“By 2009, the tobacco lobby had lost its grip on Congress,” Yglesias writes.

You would infer from this piece that “big tobacco” was against the bills to regulate their industry. You would be wrong.

If you have a Bloomberg subscription and can read the links Yglesias used to build his case, you will see that this piece from 2008 states the lobbying lay of the land:

“The House voted 326-102 today to approve the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, backed by public health groups and Altria Group Inc.’s Philip Morris USA, the nation’s biggest tobacco maker.… The Bush administration opposes the measure, saying it would undermine the credibility of the FDA.” (Emphasis added.)

In his 2,300 words on Big Tobacco and the 2009 law giving the Food and Drug Administration power to regulate the industry, he never once informs his reader that the biggest tobacco company — controlling 50% of the U.S. market — lobbied for and helped craft the bill.

Here are some details from a news story on the 2007 version of the bill:

“It is also supported by Altria Group unit Philip Morris USA, maker of top-selling Marlboro cigarettes.”

“Industry analysts have said Philip Morris backs the measure because it would help protect the company’s dominant market share by muting rivals’ advertising messages.”

“McConnell, whose state still has tobacco farmers and some small tobacco manufacturers, said some of the manufacturers call the bill the ‘Marlboro Monopoly Act.’”

TIM CARNEY: MORE REGULATION MEANS MORE PROFITS FOR LARGE FIRMS

More generally, regulation adds to overhead, which protects the dominant players from competition.

So no, Big Tobacco had not been defanged by 2009, as Yglesias claims. That’s the year the biggest of Big Tobacco won. Democrats and their friends in the media tried to paint it as a victory of Big Business, while it was nothing of the sort.