The Corner

National Review is looking for two full-time news writers to join our News Department and work out of our New York City office. The ideal candidate would be a news junkie who keeps a constant eye on the headlines, and who is skilled at writing up rapidly evolving situations at speed. The ideal candidate would have at least one year of experience covering breaking news and doing original political reporting. Those interested should send a cover letter, a resume, and some examples of their work to: news.applications@nationalreview.com.

Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign sends along word that last night, he and his campaign staff played a softball game at the legendary Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa. The senator “was the starting pitcher and hit lead-off for our team, The Revolutionaries.”

If you contribute any amount, they’ll send you a Bernie Sanders baseball card. According to his baseball card, Sanders “hits right, bats right.” He also legislates far-left.

Sanders’s baseball passions are authentic. In 1984, Burlington welcomed a new minor league baseball team, and then-mayor Sanders threw out the ceremonial first pitch at the first game. The team was the Burlington Reds . . . but despite lingering rumors that it was some sort of Communist or Socialist nickname, the team was an affiliate of the Cincinnati Reds.

It’s an oversimplification to say that the Dodgers moving from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1957 made Bernie Sanders a Socialist. But the senator has brought it up several times, and pointed to it as an early lesson about how the world works.

Back in 2015, as his previous presidential campaign was heating up, friends told The Guardian that the Dodgers’s departure of shaped young Bernie Sanders’s worldview: “I asked him: ‘Did this have a deep impact on you?’ and he said: ‘Of course! I thought the Dodgers belonged to Brooklyn,’” says Richard Sugarman, who is one of the Democratic frontrunner’s closest friends. “It does lay out the question of who owns what.”

Last year, Sanders talked about the Dodgers move again: “It was a disaster. Walter O’Malley, his name remains in infamy. It really was a very deep thing. Because when you’re a kid and the name of the team is called the Los Angeles Dodgers or the Brooklyn Dodgers, you assume that it belongs to the people of Los Angeles or Brooklyn. The idea that it was a private company who somebody could pick up and move away and break the hearts of millions of people was literally something we did not understand. So it was really a devastating moment. I remember it with great sadness.”

Finally, Sanders had a small role in the 1999 indie film My X-Girlfriend’s Wedding Reception, where he played Rabbi “Manny Shevitz” (groan) who presides over the ceremony and goes off on a rant about the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn and free agency ruining baseball. The scene, now online, is bizarrely fascinating.

National Review, the nation’s leading conservative opinion site, is looking for a dynamic, self-motivated individual to fill a fall internship within the Content Management team. As an intern with the team that produces and displays NR’s online content, you will learn:

• How to produce news videos using the Wochit and JW Player platforms.
• How to select and edit newsworthy photos for use in stories.
• How to use the WordPress CMS to edit and publish articles, as well as curate the visual aspects of the website.
• How to apply best SEO practices to content in order to attract organic viewers.
• How to archive old issues of National Review for an online database.

You will have the opportunity to apply your newly learned skills on the live National Review website, assisting with the daily flow of content as it transitions from idea to publication. Note: This is not an editorial position. Candidates should be interested in the production side of digital media with an emphasis on political news. We’re looking for:

• A currently enrolled college student.
• Proficiency in basic Photoshop (or comparable software).
• The ability to commute to our NYC office at 19 West 44th Street.
• The ability to commit to 16 in-office hours per week. (If you are considered for the position, we will work on fitting office hours within your schedule.)
• A strong desire to work with a dedicated team to disseminate conservative thought as broadly as possible.

To Be Eligible for the Internship:

Please email a cover letter, resume, and at least two references to recruiting@nationalreview.com.

Place ‘CM Fall Internship at NR’ in the subject line.

Planned Parenthood might as well stop wasting money on public-relations officials and marketing campaigns, because media outlets are only too willing to do their dirty work for free.

In the wake of Planned Parenthood’s choice to withdraw from the Title X family planning program over a Trump-administration rule prohibiting providers from performing or referring for abortions, the New York Times editorial board rushed to the group’s defense.

“It Just Got Harder to Get Birth Control in America,” declares the headline, and the subhead is hardly more accurate: “Title X made sure poor women could have access to health care. The Trump administration has compromised that.”

This is precisely the myth that Planned Parenthood and its activist allies have propagated in the wake of the Protect Life rule. As the Times editorial puts it, the Trump administration “has quietly been working to gut the Title X family planning program.”

In reality, the Trump administration hasn’t reduced federal funding for the Title X program by a cent. Instead, the rule forces providers to choose between federal funding and the profits that come from performing abortions. Planned Parenthood has made its decision.

The Trump administration isn’t targeting the abortion provider, nor did it force the group to stop giving out contraception. In fact, there’s no evidence whatsoever that Planned Parenthood’s departure from Title X will affect the group’s ability to provide birth control at all. (According to its own records, Planned Parenthood clinics provided 80,000 fewer contraceptives last year than the year before, making the supposed consternation over this particular issue even less sincere.)

Even if contraception access were to decline, it would be evidence not that the Trump administration has gutted Title X but that Planned Parenthood has gutted its own ability to provide health care in order to keep performing abortions. If the group’s executives were serious about women’s health, they would’ve chosen to maintain federal funding, adapting to the rule and financially distinguishing abortion procedures from the rest of the group’s work.

That they did not is proof of Planned Parenthood’s preeminent commitment to its abortion business — and its ability to continue operating that business smoothly without any federal money at all. It is shameful that our nation’s newspaper of record would promote abortion-industry lies in order to obscure that reality.

“The goal of The 1619 Project, a major initiative from The New York Times that this issue of the magazine inaugurates, is to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year,” The New York Times Magazine editors declare. “Doing so requires us to place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country.”

The scale of the opening offering is massive by the standards of modern journalism: 100 pages (with a few ads), ten essays, a photo essay, and a collection of original poems and stories from 16 additional writers.

But the 1619 Project’s effort to “reframe American history” requires cropping out some significant figures in African-American history. Perhaps no near-100-page collection of essays, poems and photos could cover every significant figure in African-American history, but the number of prominent figures who never even get mentioned or who get only the most cursory treatment is pretty surprising.

Early in Nikole Hannah-Jones’s essay, she reiterates the important point, “in every war this nation has waged since that first one, black Americans have fought — today we are the most likely of all racial groups to serve in the United States military.” The name Crispus Attucks is mentioned three times, but he is, as far as I can tell, the lone black Revolutionary War combatant mentioned. James Armistead was a spy for Lafayette who had access to General Cornwallis’s headquarters. Back in 1996, the New York Times wrote about the First Rhode Island Regiment, who fought at Newport and Pine’s Bridge, and in a regrouped form, Yorktown. By one account, one-quarter of the American forces at the battle of Yorktown were black. The 1619 Project does not mention the Battle of Yorktown.

One might argue that the essay authors preferred to focus on lesser-known African-American historical figures . . . but you really have to strain to contend James Armistead is sufficiently widely known already. Could anyone seriously argue that African-American contributions to the Revolutionary War are too well-known?

Martin Delany was an abolitionist, the first African American accepted to Harvard Medical School (white students quickly forced him out), and the first African-American field grade officer in the U.S. Army in 1865. He’s quoted once in passing.

In the early 1860s, about 179,000 black men enlisted in the U.S. Colored Troops, almost 10 percent of the entire Union army. The U.S. Colored Troops are not mentioned in the 1619 Project. The Buffalo Soldiers are not mentioned in the 1619 Project. There is a brief mention of African-American soldiers heading west after the Civil War: “Even while bearing slavery’s scars, black men found themselves carrying out orders to secure white residents of Western towns, track down ‘‘outlaws’’ (many of whom were people of color), police the federally imposed boundaries of Indian reservations and quell labor strikes.”

In the seven times African-American soldiers mentioned, they are generally described as victims who have merely shifted from one system of subjugation and exploitation to another.

There’s no mention of the Harlem Hellfighters fighting in World War One, and no mention of Dorie Miller’s heroism at Pearl Harbor. The horrors of the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male are discussed, but the Tuskegee Airmen are never mentioned.

African-American heroism on the battlefield doesn’t really fit the narrative that the 1619 Project is trying to tell. In fact, you could argue that the essays are so wedded to a narrative of white brutality and black victimhood that they seem to fear that spotlighting any example of a successful African-American defiance of oppression would undermine their argument.  In the reframing of the 1619 Project, African-American success stories disappear. There’s no mention of Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympic Games. There’s no mention of Jackie Robinson. There’s no mention of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, the African-American mathematicians who worked for NASA as depicted in the film Hidden Figures. Wilberforce University in Ohio, the first college owned and operated by African Americans, is not mentioned.

The attack on Negro Fort in Florida is mentioned, but not the existence of its nearby predecessor Fort Mose, the first free African-American community in North America, founded in the 1730s.

Frederick Douglass is mentioned twice. W.E.B. du Bois is quoted once. Thurgood Marshall is mentioned once.

Harriet Tubman is never mentioned. Nor is Booker T. Washington nor is Bishop Richard Allen, who founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), the first independent black denomination in the United States. Abolitionist Sojourner Truth, Shirley Chisom (the first black woman elected to the U.S. Congress), Benjamin Oliver Davis Sr. (the first African-American general for the U.S. Army), Ida Wells (a journalist who documented lynchings and co-founded the NAACP), Duke Ellington, and Rosa Parks are never mentioned.

Would the country as a whole be better off with a greater understanding of slavery and its legacy in American history? Absolutely. (The country would be better off with more understanding of just about any chapter of American history.) The 1619 Project argues, with considerable justification, that most of us been seeing only one part of the portrait of the founding, formation, and growth of our country . . . and then “reframes” the portrait to leave out some of the most consequential and under-discussed African Americans in our history.

1. How China’s Restrictive Family Planning Policies Have Resulted in Human Rights Violations

2. Pro-Life and Pro-Choice Clinics Have the Same Adoption Referral Rate: 1%

3. An adoptive mother gives thanks:

4. Daily Signal: This Family Approached Intercountry Adoption Differently, and It Worked

5. Ashley Bratcher, the actress who plays Abby Johnson in the movie Unplanned, launches an annual educational scholarship for single mothers of unplanned pregnancies who choose life with Heartbeat International.

6. An Ohio birth mother’s story:

“I mentioned earlier that telling my parents I was pregnant was the second hardest day of my life. Handing her over to a new family was the hardest day of my life,” Lewis said. “She was going to a good family, and that’s what I had to tell myself.”

7. My ‘by the bootstraps’ story: From foster care to software engineer

8. Mark Regnerus on Public Discourse: How the Rise in Unreligious Americans affects Sex and Marriage: Comparative Evidence from New Survey Data 

9. in the WSJ: The Lonely Burden of Today’s Teenage Girls

10. Captures our sometimes-merciless tendencies: Prodigal Son Kicked Back Out After Old Tweets Surface

11. Michael Pakaluk on prayer and asceticism

12. I enjoy Pat Sajak on Twitter:

A small thought for this Sunday: Before you ruin a relationship because of politics, think about how things will be when your bile subsides. Will you still feel good about yourself? Will it really have been worth it?

— Pat Sajak (@patsajak) August 11, 2019

The Jussie Smollett story has been declared not fit for jokes. “It’s a straight-up tragedy,” declares the co-creator of a Comedy Central show, South Side, set in Chicago.

Bashir Salahuddin, a former Jimmy Fallon writer, says “The whole situation is unfortunate. Particularly for the city, there’s bigger problems for them to handle.”

Yes, well, there are bigger problems than fake crimes, which is why causing hundreds of hours of police work to be wasted on a fictitious attack staged for the purposes of ego gratification and publicity ought to be punished both criminally and socially. Instead, Smollett was let off scot free by the justice system and largely let off by the usual cultural leaders. Saturday Night Live did a sketch on him months ago, but things have been notably quiet on the mockery front. Smollett is in a sense being treated as a victim who deserves some space to recover rather than the perpetrator of the most notorious fake hate crime of this century.

Salahuddin vows not to touch the subject of Smollett in any episode of South Side: “There’s nothing funny about it. It’s embarrassing,” he told the showbiz site The Wrap.

A civil suit against Smollett in which the city of Chicago is attempting to recover costs incurred in investigating the case is still pending.

This morning Joe Biden unveils a one-minute ad entitled “Bones” that begins with a narrator declaring, “we know in our bones this election is different.”

Few people on the Trump-backing Right or Woke Left want to hear this, but this is probably the most effective message against Trump. Within the first few seconds, the commercial spotlights the Charlottesville white nationalist rally and associates Trump with that, without getting into the “very fine people” quote argument. The ad defends the Affordable Care Act, without giving much more detail about what additional changes Biden would make to the health care policy, beyond “building on Obamacare.” Notice, Biden rivals, that this ad doesn’t talk about taking away private insurance!

The ad talks about a perennial bipartisan favorite promise, “make a record investment in America’s schools,” — but it doesn’t promise to wipe away everyone’s student debt. It talks about “leading the world on climate,’ but doesn’t promise a Green New Deal that would completely overhaul the entire economy and require retrofitting every building in America. It talks about “restoring our alliances,” but doesn’t make any specific promises about Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, the Persian Gulf, or any other location where our men and women in uniform are at risk. And finally, the ad shows Biden hugging a tearful African-American teenager and declares he’ll “restore the soul of the nation.” (Promises without measurable metrics are among the easiest to keep!)

The Biden message has about as many hard edges and strong flavors as a scoop of vanilla ice cream. A lot of partisans will roll their eyes at this and label it soft-focus happy talk. But a lot of voters like soft-focus happy talk — particularly those who aren’t on Twitter and who don’t think about politics all the time!

Biden’s playing a different game from the rest of the field. He’s not bothering to court the activist left; he’s already making his pitch to the less partisan general election voters.

I wrote today about the newly fashionable insistence on the Left that America was founded on racism and slavery:

Rather than enhancing the moral standing of slavery, the Founding tended to undermine it. “The Revolution suddenly and effectively ended the cultural climate that had allowed black slavery, as well as other forms of bondage and unfreedom, to exist throughout the colonial period without serious challenge,” the historian Gordon Wood writes. In his view, it set in motion the “ideological and social forces” that eventually led to the Civil War.

In the broadest gauge, it’s a mistake to treat the United States as an outlier in terms of its racial attitudes, when it was really an outlier in its embrace of liberty, however imperfect.

“Donald Trump is a racist, white supremacist, white nationalist. So are his supporters.” Some version of that refrain is heard almost hourly somewhere in mainstream media. Democratic politicians seem to proclaim it more often than that.

Listening only to the Left, you’d conclude that more than half a century after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and more than a decade after the election of the first black president, the number of racists and white supremacists in America seems to be reaching levels not seen in a hundred years. (In reality, in 1930, when the nation’s population was approximately 130 million, the number of Klansmen was estimated to be 4 million. Today, the nation’s population is close to 330 million; the number of Klansmen is estimated to be 4,000.)

The rhetoric will get worse over the next year. Progressives and the mainstream media (but I repeat myself) lie about Trump’s remarks in Charlottesville to portray him as a Nazi sympathizer; they claim Michael Brown was “murdered” by a racist cop. Nearly every negative occurrence seems to be attributed to white supremacy stoked by Trump.

What concerns progressives is that despite their relentless rhetorical assault, Trump’s approval ratings among black voters appear to  range between 18–34 percent (among Hispanics that number has reached the forties, even though Trump wants to put them all in cages before deporting them to Greenland). Fourteen months from the next presidential election, those approval numbers are cause not just for Democratic concern, but apoplexy.

A Democratic presidential candidate needs to get approximately 85–95 percent of the black vote to have a chance of winning. According to Roper Center data, in the last eight presidential elections the black vote was cast as follows:

• Dukakis 89 percent, Bush 10 percent
• Clinton 83 percent, Bush 10 percent
• Clinton 84 percent, Dole 12 percent
• Gore 90 percent, Bush 9 percent
• Kerry 88 percent, Bush 11 percent
• Obama 95 percent, McCain 4 percent
• Obama 93 percent, Romney 6 percent
• Clinton 89 percent, Trump 8 percent

Hillary Clinton’s percentage of the black vote was only a few points lower than Obama’s. But Clinton didn’t come close to replicating Obama’s black turnout numbers. It’s estimated she received nearly 4 million fewer black votes than Obama.

Democrats know that to win Michigan, Pennsylvania, and other former “Blue Wall” states, they need to get more than 90 percent of the black vote and dramatically increase black turnout numbers. And Democratic presidential candidates know that, depending on the state, blacks constitute 22–40 percent of  Democratic primary voters. Accordingly, the claims of racism and white supremacy promise to intensify. This is especially so when so many of the policy prescriptions touted by Democratic candidates — from health care for illegal immigrants to the Green New Deal — are either opposed by blacks or met with indifference.

Republican presidential candidates generally cede the black vote to Democrats, but Trump has paid more attention to getting the black vote than any Republican presidential candidate in decades. Despite progressives’ hourly accusations of white supremacy, Trump’s approval ratings among blacks are robust. If Trump’s black vote totals are even half of the lower percentage in 2020, he’d get four more years in office.

So not a day will pass between now and the 2020 election without a mention of racism, white supremacy, and white nationalism, regardless of how unhinged the allegation.

If you have enough money, need organ-transplant surgery, and so immoral you are willing for a stranger to be killed so you can have their organs, you can travel to China and buy a liver, heart, or kidney. And you only have to wait maybe a month, you know, the time it takes to find a suitable political prisoner to execute and harvest.

Human-rights activists have castigated China for allowing this organ bazaar for years. Now, knowledge of the dark harvest has led to fifteen science papers about organ transplantation being retracted out of fear that they were inhumanely and unethically carried out. From the New Scientist story:

Fifteen studies about transplanted organs by researchers in China have been retracted this month due to concerns the work may have used organs from executed prisoners. Three other papers have been the subject of expressions of concern for the same reason, according to the website Retraction Watch which monitors questions raised over published research.

China’s government said in 2015 that the nation had stopped using organs from executed prisoners, which is illegal according to international conventions. But it is suspected that the practice continues in the country, particularly involving prisoners of conscience.

Based on the recent findings of an independent commission, I don’t think there is any question.

Retracting papers should just be the beginning. Chinese organ-transplant doctors should be barred from international symposia and such events in China should be boycotted, as well as refusing or retracting other honors until the country proves that it no longer countenances kill-and-harvest, whether for sale, research, or otherwise.

I would say that those who participated in the human-rights abuses should be punished in a court of law. But we’re talking China here. Rule of law means little and besides: Communist Party leaders almost surely knew what was (is) going on, so good luck with that.

Meagan Rapinoe, the captain of the U.S. Women’s soccer team, told the Guardian last Saturday that she thinks her dad voted for Trump, revealing a staunch divide between her and her parent’s views on the president.

“I feel like I grew up with all of these lessons [about equality], but nothing was ever spoken. No language was ever put around it. Both of my parents should really be progressive — especially my mom — and I don’t get that they’re not. I’m always saying: ‘You guys should really be Democrats! But they’re not, so what’s happening?”

In her interview, Rapinoe describes growing up in a conservative area of California, where her dad runs a construction company. Praising her mother, who grew up with alcoholic parents, Rapinoe said: “Her parents died when she was younger than I am, she raised her younger sister and she has family into drugs. She has extreme mental fortitude and toughness about her, while wearing it all lightly.”

Rapinoe said she first came out as gay while she was a student at the University of Portland in Oregon, and her parents’ immediate responses were: “What are people going to say?” and “We don’t want things to be harder for you.”

Years later, Rapinoe says, she didn’t struggle to come out, and that her parents gradually came to accept her sexuality, while apparently still holding on to rest of their conservative views.

“I’m very similar to how [my parents] are, even though I think my dad voted for Trump,” she said. “I’ll say, ‘I don’t get it. How are you simultaneously as proud as punch of me, and watching Fox News all the time, [who are doing] takedowns of your daughter?”

“That’s why I’m like: ‘You guys need to go to therapy,” she added.

But the mainstream conservative critique on Rapinoe hasn’t been against her sexuality — an issue on which the conservative focus has dissipated since Obergefell. Instead, most criticisms of Rapinoe center on her character, which seems to be cover for some deeply rooted self-image issues.

Emma Brockes, who conducted the interview, lavishes in this behavior, observing: “At last month’s victory parade, she kissed the trophy and yelled: I deserve this! And for a moment, conventions governing women’s conduct in public seemed thrillingly, shockingly to change.” Humility is what naturally endears us to one another, not arrogance. But it’s no surprise that the Left, which relishes breaking taboos, has seized on yet another vice. And the fact that Rapinoe is so unabashedly self-aggrandizing has to make one wonder if she’s truly happy with herself.

At the Salzburg Festival, I talked with Anne-Sophie Mutter, the starry German violinist. You can find this conversation here. Mutter is one of the outstanding musicians of our time. She is also an extraordinary talker, a first-rate interviewee.

She first played at the Salzburg Festival in the mid-1970s, as a girl. Her mentor was Herbert von Karajan, the legendary conductor. I ask her for a few Karajan stories. She obliges.

In the 2000s, she was married to André Previn, the great and versatile American musician who died earlier this year. He could do practically anything. Was there anything he couldn’t do?

Yes, says Mutter: “play the fiddle and cook.” I ask her whether she ever played jazz with André. (In addition to being a classical musician, Previn was a famous jazzman, especially early in his career.) No, she says — she was afraid he would think less of her. (I doubt he would have. I also doubt that Anne-Sophie would be a flop at jazz.)

Just recently, Mutter made a recording with John Williams, the leading film composer. They performed adaptations of his scores for violin. That is another subject of our discussion.

At the end, Mutter gives a little tribute — sings a little hymn — to Bach. This is the composer she has been very close to, and who has been very close to her, since she was a little girl. “If there is something like heaven, I’m sure Bach has the key.”

Again, here.

In case you’ve forgotten, the allegations against former ABC News director, author, and MSNBC commentator Mark Halperin were really bad — violent, explicitly sexual, groping, exhibitionism — and they came from a dozen women. When Halperin departed the scene, he denied the allegations of violence and unwanted physical contact, but said he was “profoundly sorry for the pain and anguish I have caused by my past actions.” (Upon his departure from MSNBC, Mika Brzezinski declared, “I’ll speak for both Joe and myself here, our hearts break for Mark and his family because he is our friend, but we fully support NBC’s decision here.”)

Now Halperin is back in a way, with a new book to be published by Regan Arts, entitled, How to Beat Trump: America’s Top Political Strategists on What It Will Take. For the book, Halperin interviewed more than 75 top Democratic strategists.

Halperin’s accusers are understandably livid about his sudden seeming rehabilitation. This has quite a few people asking why anyone would be eager to help Halperin get back into the profession of political journalism. And the answer appears to be that most of the figures who agreed to talk to Halperin for his book simply forgot about the allegations, which surfaced all the way back in October 2017.

Former Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius told Washingtonian magazine she spoke with Halperin for his book because she was unaware of the allegations. Former Obama advisor David Axelrod said he answered Halperin’s email “without giving enough thought to how my participation would be used or interpreted,” and added, “I did not in any way mean to excuse his past, egregious behavior and, in retrospect, I regret responding at all.”

Former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm wrote on Twitter, “Spoke with him by phone once a few months ago about how to defeat Trump in the Midwest. Did not mean to hurt anyone, ever; should have done more research. My sincere apologies.”

Former Barack Obama spokesperson Ben LaBolt told the Daily Beast, “I treated it as a normal reporter call, but I should have revisited the accusations against him before taking the call.”

Here’s an absolutely fascinating development in #MeToo: A man accused of some really bad behavior can find himself back in the good graces of much of the political world — at least among high-profile Democratic campaign consultants — because everyone simply forgot about it, never heard about it, or didn’t think about it too much when he called.

It’s a frustrating reminder that news events that are well covered can be either missed or forgotten by seemingly well-connected and well-informed people. Recall that Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a member of Congress and chair of the Democratic National Committee, appeared to have absolutely no idea about President Obama’s “kill list” for drone strikes months after it was on the front page of the New York Times.

One of the big debates surrounding the #MeToo movement since it arose in late 2017 was the question of whether it was going too far, or whether minor mistakes were generating career-ending penalties. If so many people who work in politics can forget or simply not care about the allegations about Halperin until a reporter calls up about it . . . what other infamous figures could make a comeback?

Madeleine gives those dopey British royals a hard time for their private-jet lifestyle without even noting that in the photo they are doing the green thing and driving an electric car. Granted, it’s a bespoke electric car, the consumer version of which costs about a half a million dollars. It ain’t easy bein’ green — or cheap.

One of the functions of the British Royal family is to promote fashionable causes without attracting controversy. Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, wife of Prince William, is good at this. She and her husband “raise awareness” about mental health. Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, wife of Prince Harry, is not good this. And neither is her husband. Consider how the couple has taken to “raising awareness” about climate change . . . It’s starting to get on everyone’s nerves.

Last month, for instance, Markle guest-edited a special edition of British Vogue. The cover of which featured Greta Thunberg, a teen girl with Asperger’s, who has become the poster girl of European climate change activism. Prince Harry told Vogue that he and Markle would only be having two children on account of the “terrifying” implications of climate change.  Later, at a “green summit” in Sicily, organized by Google, he delivered a speech barefoot — also, to “raise awareness.” Awareness is evidently something he himself lacks given that he flew to the conference on a private jet. Of course, he wasn’t the only one.

Scores of celebrities and the rich have arrived in Sicily for a Google conference. They came in 114 private jets and a flotilla of super yachts. The conference is on global warming.

— Andrew Neil (@afneil) August 1, 2019

Today, the Times of London reports that the Royal couple just took their fourth flight by private jet in two weeks when they visited Elton John.