Saturday Miscellany

 First, when you have lost James Carville you are in serious trouble. Being interviewed by Bill Maher the other day, Carville offered his opinion of the progressive branch of the Democratic Party:

I find the left to be just annoying. In the western, far left — is habitually the most stupid, naive people you could imagine. And they come up with these really goofy constructs, and it’s all about feeling good about yourself.

It is safe to say that Carville, to his credit, disdains therapy culture.

Second, Fidel Castro’s bastard son, aka Justin Trudeau, has been having a bad week.

Rupa Subramanya reports in the Free Press:

 In the span of five days, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau has managed to alienate the government of the largest democracy on Earth; anger key allies from Washington, D.C. to Canberra; and outrage Jews around the world.

Now, the promise of Trudeau—the young, strapping progressive born into political royalty, with his ostensibly forward-looking ideas about medically assisted suicide, puberty blockers, and the suspension of truckers’ civil liberties—is on the brink of imploding.

Surely, you will agree that it could not have happened to a more deserving jackass.

Third, the ACLU lost a court challenge to a Tennessee law outlawing child mutilation. To which the highly estimable Libs of TikTok Twitter account offers this:

BREAKING: ACLU promises to fight to be able to chop off the breasts of young confused teenagers and inject irreversible drugs which stunts growth into kids

Fourth, back in the day Ronald Reagan recommended that his fellow Republicans not speak ill of other Republicans. Donald Trump has ignored the lesson.

Trump is currently feuding with the following Republican Governors: 

Reynolds- won re-election by 19.5% (Trump won IA by 8%) DeSantis- won re-election by 19.4% (Trump won FL by 3.5%) Kemp- won re-election by 7.5% (Trump lost GA) Youngkin- Won election…

As electoral strategies go, this does not feel like the best or the brightest.

Fifth, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, not a branch of the vast left wing conspiracy, tells Republicans to be cautious about Trump.

It summarized some of the recent posts that Trump has put up on Truth Social:

Donald Trump suggested the other day that Gen. Mark Milley, the nation’s highest military officer, deserves execution—as in death. He said NBC should be investigated for treason and that the FBI should raid the homes of Senate Democrats. Then he accused President Biden of being manipulated by “the Fascists in the White House.”

At present, no one has noticed these slightly incontinent remarks. But, the Journal notes, once the election season begins, Republicans will be required to answer for them.

Sixth, you have doubtless never heard of Ariane Tabatabai. She is the Chief of Staff to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict. The office advises the Secretary of Defense on counterterrorism. 

In the past she has worked for the Iranian government and has promoted, in her writings, the interests of Iran. How, Daniel Greenfield asks, did she ever make it to the Pentagon?

Seventh, Heather Mac Donald reports from the Los Angeles school system. The news is not very good. In truth, it is awful. Not only have the children fallen behind; the administrators are doing nothing to bring them up to speed. They are offering leftist indoctrination in place of learning.

In her words:

In 2022, 61 percent of third-graders in the Los Angeles Unified School District did not meet California’s watered-down, equity-driven standard for English. Children not reading by third grade will fall further and further behind in school, since they will be ill-prepared to absorb ever more complex academic content across a range of fields.

In 2022, 59 percent of third-graders failed to meet the state’s already-low standard for math competency. Over 76 percent of LAUSD eighth-graders did not meet math standards. Eighth-grade math is a make-or-break point, after which poorly performing students become ever less likely to master the skills necessary for STEM careers or admission to selective schools.

The school system is avoiding the problem by indoctrinating children in gender identity politics:

But even if fluency in LGBTQ-speak is a school’s primary concern, how will third-graders parse the words “gender expression” and “sex assigned at birth,” much less fathom their meanings, if they can’t do basic third-grade reading? How will third-graders perform the arithmetical calculations necessary to track the ever-increasing number of LGBTQ categories served up by the LAUSD, without third-grade math skills?

Eighth, one understands, if one is minimally sentient, that gender affirming care is merely a euphemism for mutilating children. It is also a way to affirm a delusional belief, a genuinely bad idea.

The United Kingdom has now reported that up to a third of trans-identified teens, when put on puberty blockers, suffered a decline in mental health. 

As for what is called gender affirming surgery, touted as a treatment, a Swedish study showed that children who had undergone it were 19 times more likely to commit suicide.

Ninth, a Harvard Professor, Dr Robert Paalberg, has declared organic food to be a scam.

In his words, from the Daily Mail:

'There is no reliable evidence showing that organically grown foods are more nutritious or safer to eat,' he said. 

'If we follow science, organic food loses its apparent advantage.' 

Tenth, we have on occasion quoted the former Obama administration auto czar, one Steven Rattner. When President Biden chose to suck up to the unions by marching with the UAW, to support their strike, Rattner was not impressed:

“For him to be going on a picket line is outrageous….There’s no precedent for it. The tradition of the president is to stay neutral in these things. I get the politics. The progressives all said, ‘We don’t want a mediator; we want an advocate.’ And he bowed to the progressives, and now he’s going out there to put his thumb on the scale. And it’s wrong.”

Eleventh, remember Susanna Gibson, candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates, caught selling pornographic pictures of herself and her husband, to raise cash. 

Now that the world knows about her extracurricular activities, Gibson’s electoral prospects have been declining. Before the expose was published in the Washington Post, she was losing by 4 percentage points. Now, she is losing by around 10 percentage points.

Apparently, porn does not pay.

Twelfth, we all know that America’s college students are suffering from severe emotional distress. Many of them insist that they need emotional support animals, the better to get them through their school year.

Now, however, we discover that many of them prefer emotional support Barbies. One assumes, because one is an inveterate sexist, that females are the demographic most inclined to have emotional support Barbies.

Apparently, these young women are terrified at the prospect of growing up, so they go out and buy more Barbies because they want to get in touch with their inner children.

Is this the problem or the solution? Enquiring minds want to know.

Thirteenth, currently, 8 German NGO ships are in the Mediterranean sea, picking up illegal immigrants and unloading them in Italy. The German government is subsidizing the project.

It is bad enough that the German economy is becoming the weak man in Europe, but its leftist government is undermining its own electoral prospects by practicing a Bidenesque open borders policy.

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Our Failing Cultural Revolution

It is always reassuring to discover that you are not alone. This is especially the case when someone is working on an idea that echoes the theme of your new book-- book that he most assuredly has not read, because it has not yet been published! 

Such is the case with a Gerard Baker column in the Wall Street Journal. It bears a close similarity to my new and eventually hopefully forthcoming book, Can’t We All Get Along?

It is fair to say that Baker, in a newspaper column, could not do all that I could do in a long book, but still. His thesis bears a stark similarity to mine.

Baker describes a cultural revolution. He argues that Judeo-Christian civilization has recently been replaced by a secular ethic, one that you will recognize immediately. 

Baker adds that the new culture has lately been failing. He is calling for a return to more traditional ethos. 

In his words:

Over the past 30 years, the values of Judeo-Christian belief that had inspired and sustained Western civilization and culture for centuries have been steadily replaced in a moral, cultural and political revolution of the postmodern ascendancy. But the contradictions and implausibilities inherent in this successor creed have been increasingly exposed, and its failure to supply the needs of the people is discrediting it in the popular mind.

As for the three pillars of the postmodern secular faith, Baker begins with globalism, which presumably supersedes national interest. Of course, nationalism does not preclude free trade.

It is important to emphasize that nations can and should engage in free trade with each other. Yet, ignoring borders, disparaging and defaming the nation, makes for a world in which people do not belong to a nation. They belong to an amorphous mass called humanity. That means, they do not belong.

This means that we ought to forget the fatuous nonsense about being citizens of the world. We, in America, are citizens of the republic. We ought to take pride in it. No more and no less.

The second pillar of the new culture is climate catastrophism. Our culture warriors believe that the world is going to end and that the Industrial Revolution is to blame. Thus, they want to repeal industry and manufacturing, the better to return to a state of nature. By their lights, we are guilty of destroying the pristine innocence of Mother Nature and must mend our ways, lest the world go up in smoke.

Evidently, this has a Biblical antecedent, but the perpetual whining about the damage we are doing to Mother Nature makes it seem that the One God of Judeo-Christianity now has a consort. Thus, we are returning to paganism.

The third pillar denounces traditional Judeo-Christianity as an organized criminal conspiracy, whose successes were purchased at the cost of oppression and exploitation. We should give back everything we earned, because we really stole it.

Baker explains:

Third, a wholesale cultural self-cancellation in which the virtues, values and historic achievements of traditional civilization are rejected and replaced by a cultural hierarchy that inverts old prejudices and obliges the class of white, male heterosexuals to acknowledge their history of exploitation and submit to comprehensive social and economic reparation.

Yes, indeed, attack national pride; attack cultural pride; attack all achievements and accomplishments. Denounce it as criminal and call for universal penance, not to mention reparations.

If you had set out to undermine the culture, you could not have done much better than this attack on the greatness of American civilization.

Anyway, Baker is an optimist, so he believes that the pillars of the new culture are crumbling, before our eyes.

First, the dreams of a borderless world are crumbling in Lampedusa, Italy and Eagle Pass, Texas.

… the idea of permissive migration in an economically unequal world is being tested to destruction. Lampedusa was inundated last week with another surge of migrants from Africa, larger than the population of the island itself. In Texas, the influx across the border with Mexico became a torrent.

Worse yet, according to New York’s mayor, the torrent is in the process of destroying the nation’s largest city.

Besides, the notion that we have limitless resources to support people who have no business being here will eventually, one hopes, cause the politicians who promote such policies to be replaced.

Second, in the matter of climate change, countries that are assessing the cost of going carbon neutral are walking back these absurd policies.

Baker assesses the situation in Great Britain:

Last week, Britain’s notionally Conservative government took a small but symbolically important step in climate apostasy, announcing some sensible tweaks to a program of regulatory decarbonization mandates, such as pushing back by a few years the phasing out of new gasoline-powered cars. The move was precipitated by the high and rising costs to ordinary citizens of these measures and didn’t actually involve—yet—a formal retreat from the ambitious goal of making the country “carbon neutral” by 2050. But the howls from almost the entire establishment were an encouraging sign that the priesthood knows its days are numbered.

In America we all expect another spike in energy costs, the direct consequence of Biden administration Green New Deal policies.

As for the politics of reparations, of redressing grievances, Baker explains what is happening in Australia, where politicians decided that they should offer reparations to indigenous people who were exploited and repressed by the bands of white criminals who founded the country. 

Unfortunately, the people of Australia, who will have a say in the matter through a referendum, are rejecting it, soundly.

The left-wing government there, eager to impress the world with its moral bona fides, has called for a reform to the constitution designed to redress the grievances of the Aboriginal population. Called the Voice to Parliament, the measures would create a constitutional body that Parliament would be required to consult on all legislative and other matters relating to indigenous peoples.

The referendum that was expected to approve this change takes place next month, but the campaign has run into fierce opposition. The most recent polls suggest Australians will reject the move by a large majority. It seems they—like many of us in the rest of the West—have had enough of leaders’ insistence on dividing us by race and other attributes rather than uniting us around our common national identity.

Will we all fulfill Baker’s wish and return to a more sound and sensible culture? We can certainly agree that it would be a step forward.

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Angry Mother Syndrome

You may not be aware of it-- I certainly wasn’t-- but American mothers are being consumed by rage. That’s right, by raw anger. They are incensed because of-- you guessed it-- the patriarchy.

You see, if there were no patriarchy, their husbands would change more diapers, do more breast feeding, supervise more homework and play more dodgeball. Patriarchal oppression has enraged American mothers, to the point where many of them believe that the only solution is the violent overthrow of the government. Down with patriarchy. Down with capitalism. No more angry mothers.

Fair enough, we are not dealing with intellectual heavyweights here. What were you expecting from ideologues?

I probably do not need to tell you, but certain countries spent much of the twentieth century trying to overthrow the patriarchy and capitalism. As a result, over a hundred million people starved to death.

It takes a special sort of feminist debility to insist that we need to keep repeating the experiment. Then again, what good is all that rage if it does not blind you to reality.

The issue today is not that one another dopey feminist, this time named Minna Dubin, has written a screed about how much she hates being a mother, but that The New Yorker has published a long and detailed analysis by one Maeve Emre, wherein she concludes that Dubin is profoundly stupid.

The story begins with Dubin’s three year old son. He was out of control. Emre describes the situation:

Her son would not get into the car, or eat the foods that she wanted him to eat, or let her brush his teeth. He bit other children. He ignored her. She yelled at him, threatened him, squeezed his arms, threw him in his crib, and wanted badly to hit him. 

Mother Dubin knew that she could not do what she wanted to do-- punish her boy violently-- so she allowed her rage to consume her. Therefore, as Blake once opined, she became what she beheld.

The point was to unleash the primal scream of a mother who had regressed—spectacularly, obscenely—into a tantrumming child, not unlike the three-year-old who had spurred her rage in the first place.

But, Dubin does not want to think that she is the only angry mother out there. If such were the case, the cause might be her inability to care for her child. So, she declares that Mom rage is the norm. All women who live under patriarchal oppression feel it. So, she descends into a rant about the patriarchy.

Emre summarizes Dubin’s argument:

The anger of mothers is overdetermined by the “white supremacist, homophobic, classist, ableist, xenophobic, transphobic, misogynistic, capitalist patriarchy,” Dubin writes. The capitalist patriarchy props up the ideology of “capital-M Motherhood,” which “tells mothers we must throw ourselves full throttle into our mothering job—researching, planning, contacting, scheduling, overseeing, washing, tidying, folding, driving, thanking, inviting, hosting, cooking, preparing, and sharing.” Rage is simultaneously “a natural reaction to being systematically stripped of one’s power” and a source of “power in its potential for individual and cultural change.” The remedies Dubin proposes range from state-subsidized child care to communal parenting, art-making (“I recommend the transformative power of creative practice,” she writes), and non-normative sexual arrangements (“I also recommend queerness”).

Of course, this is drivel, offered by someone who took too many Women’s Studies courses. 

To my surprise, Emre sees this clearly:

Reading paraphrases of paraphrases of paraphrases, one starts to feel as if there is something a little hollow and shiftless about the ease with which phrases such as “white supremacist, homophobic, classist, ableist, xenophobic, transphobic, misogynistic, capitalist patriarchy” are trotted out. We get the right words, strung together like marquee lights, but not the structural analysis that puts them in relation to one another.

Emre identifies the problem:

Dubin does not appear to have interviewed any mothers who do not claim to suffer from mom rage. Nor has she interviewed fathers, rageful or otherwise, a renegade pack of mansplaining, gaslighting, happy-go-lucky ne’er-do-wells. 

When you get blinded by your rage, you cannot think coherently.

The argument, such as it is, says that motherhood reduces your freedom. Being responsible for another human being-- especially a helpless human--  means that you cannot do what you please, when you please, with whom you please.

Worse yet, if you are a feminist, you have chosen to become a mother. You could have chosen to abort the whole process. So, if Dubin has become consumed by rage, one reason is that she cannot blame anyone but herself for her free decision.No one forced her to get pregnant or to give birth.

Naturally, being a feminist means blinding yourself to your decisions and believing that your ideology, your membership in the vanguard of a revolution, requires you to live in a constant state of rage.

Emre writes:

If, like Dubin, you are relatively privileged, you know that you have chosen your unfreedom. Yet you may still feel that you did not choose to bind yourself to these people, these intimate strangers, or to this whole life. By this logic, the entire atmosphere of parenthood, no matter how privileged it may appear from the outside, can come to feel like “a scam,” as Dubin puts it. And the decision not to make lunch can seem like the ultimate horizon of liberty.

Dare I say, Emre has exposed this Berkeley feminist for intellectual incoherence. Liberation reduces to being unfree. If she did not understand that, the fault does not lie with her child or even with the patriarchy.

In fact, as long as the decision was hers, undertaken freely, she should feel ashamed at her infantile attitude toward her adult responsibilities.

Unfortunately, our culture has been at war with shame. It has told people that they need not feel ashamed of failing to uphold their responsibilities or even to keep their pants on. 

Thus, we are led to imagine that Dubin believes that the patriarchy has caused her to feel ashamed of herself for being a less than adequate mother. A Tiger Mom she isn’t.

Worse yet, we eventually discover, three quarters of the way through Emre’s article, that Dubin’s boy suffers from autism, among other neurological defects:

Dubin introduces him through his diagnoses: a sensory-processing disorder, fine and gross motor delays, food rigidity, and autism-spectrum disorder. Once we learn this, her mom rage reads differently, as the reaction of a parent facing more than run-of-the-mill challenges. 

Perhaps this makes the situation easier to understand, but clearly Dubin is doing the best in a situation that she did not wish on her child. She did not fail as a mother. Her child has problems, problems that require specialized care. It has nothing to do with the patriarchy or even with capitalism. Dare we say, we cannot universalize her child’s condition and her own mothering challenges. 

Then again, feminist ideology does not allow such a rational approach to her mothering problems. She must grind her personal experience into an affirmation of feminist beliefs. She is not a lousy mother; she is not a mother who is doing her best under difficult circumstances; she is leading the feminist revolution.

One hopes that that will make her feel better.

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Wednesday Potpourri

First, we cannot avoid the story from Canada. You recall that the Canadian prime minister, aka, the bastard son of Fidel Castro, has made a habit of denouncing his political opponents as Nazis. American leftists have acquired the same habit.

And yet, when faced with real Nazis, these same leftists stand up and cheer. It happened in Ottawa, at a meeting of the Canadian parliament, where Justin Trudeau and Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky lustily cheered a Nazi war criminal.

The speaker of the Canadian parliament, Anthony Rota, introduced a great hero of Ukraine, one  Yaroslav Hunka, a 98-year-old veteran of the “First Ukrainian Division,” also known as the “SS Galichina,” or the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division, a military unit of Ukrainian volunteers for the Waffen SS—the paramilitary arm of the Nazi Party. 

Perhaps they are simply incompetent. Perhaps they thought that no one would notice. When they did, Rota issued an apology and resigned. For his part Trudeau came out with a semi-apology, to the effect that he was sorry to have hurt anyone’s feelings. As for Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister, Chrystia Freeland, a woman of Ukrainian heritage, her grandfather had been the editor of a Nazi collaborationist newspaper in occupied Krakow, during the war.

President Zelensky has not bothered to apologize. He may be Jewish, but many of his soldiers sport swastikas on their helmets.

The Anti-Defamation League has been silent throughout.

Second, with his non-apology Justin Trudeau blamed it all on Russian disinformation. Where have we heard that before?

In his words:

Obviously, it's extremely upsetting that this happened... this is something that is deeply embarrassing to the Parliament of Canada... It's going to be really important that all of us push back against Russian propaganda, Russian disinformation, and continue our steadfast and unequivocal support for Ukraine.

Third, an update to the story:

A Polish government minister has launched a bid to extradite Yaroslav Hunka, the 98-year-old Ukrainian-Canadian man who fought in a German-Nazi division during World War Two and last week received a standing ovation in Canada’s parliament. Lets hope so. 

Jewish groups might also be interested in him and any other Nazis that got sheltered in Canada. According to reports there were over 2000 Nazis who were given shelter in Canada after the end of World War 2.

Fourth, on a lighter note, from the satirical Babylon Bee, a commentary on the ongoing auto strike:

 

Auto CEOs Struggling With Whether To Replace Striking Workers With Robots Or Mexicans.

Fifth, on a heavier note, the hapless buffoon who serves as the Biden administration climate czar recommended that, in order to save the planet, people stop eating.

Agriculture contributes about 33% of all the emissions of the world. And we can’t get to net zero — we don’t get this job done — unless agriculture is front and center as part of the solution. You just can’t continue to both warm the planet, while also expecting to feed it. It doesn’t work. So we have to reduce emissions from the food system.

At least, he did not recommend that people stop breathing. Perhaps he is leaving that for later.

Sixth, speaking of food consumption, a law student named Victoria Ferraz replaced her vegan vegetarian diet with a diet comprised of steak, bacon and butter. 

She testifies that her body has deflamed, her acne has gone away, she has more energy and feels less bloated. She is no longer taking medicine for hypothyroidism. 

Calling veganism propaganda, she shared her diet with the New York Post:

“Every day is different for me because your body tells you what it wants. Right now, for breakfast and dinner I eat rib-eyes, top sirloin cap, pork belly, a lot of eggs, bacon, patties, butter, tallow, that whole range of animal-based products,” she explained.

“I completely eliminated sugar of all types: fruits, carbs, and processed sugar. I eat no plants, no veggies.”

Sixth, while we all report on the bad economic news out of China, we are not giving enough attention to the decline and fall of the German economy.

Matthew Lynn wrote about it in the Telegraph:

By contrast, Germany is paralysed by a coalition comprising the Social Democrats, the Greens, and the Free Democrats that can agree on almost nothing….

The coalition’s one big idea was splurging €10bn on getting Intel to build a new chip factory in the country in an attempt to drag Germany into the 21st century.

Given the coming glut of semiconductors on the global market, it already looks like a white elephant. Otherwise, Chancellor Scholz’s coalition appears to have no clue how to fix the mess.

Seventh, speaking of semiconductors, Taiwan Semiconductor is building a new plant in Arizona. Unfortunately, it has had to import workers from Taiwan, because American workers cannot do many of the jobs.

But, local labor unions do not like it that the company is trying to bring in workers from Taiwan. They also do not like it that the company has been hiring non-union contractors. 

For now the plant will likely not be operative until 2025.

Eighth, more about semiconductor manufacturing plants:

Intel says it needs 3,000 people to staff the semiconductor factory it plans to build in eastern Germany by the end of the decade. This year, the local apprentice program for chip-making technicians is training two.

Ninth, a more important matter, Keith Richards has offered his opinion of today’s pop music.

In his words:

I mean, that’s the point of it. They make it as cheap and as easy as possible and therefore it always sounds the same; there’s very little feel in it. I like to hear music by people playing instruments.

He added:

I don’t really like to hear people yelling at me and telling me it’s music, AKA rap. I can get enough of that without ­leaving my house.

Tenth, speaking of crime statistics. We now have so much of it that we ignore the crime problem in other countries, like France.

As it happens, most crime in France is committed by foreign nationals. Obviously, this is one reason why the Biden administration is hellbent on admitting more foreign nationals.

The following is from Denes Albert at Remix News:

Last year, 69 percent of violent robberies and other violent crimes, including sexual assaults, on public transport in the greater Paris region of Île-de-France were perpetrated by foreign nationals, according to the annual figures of the SSMSI, the statistics bureau of the French Ministry of Interior.

However, looking closer at the data, it is revealed that Africans alone are responsible for 52 percent of such crimes while only representing 3.2 percent of the population of France.

Even for all of France, the data clearly shows that African nationals account for 42 percent of the above-mentioned types of crimes, way above their statistical weight within the French population.

Eleventh, Real Clear Politics did a survey about attitudes toward free speech. As you might have guessed, Democrats are more comfortable with restrictions on free expression.

The New York Post reported:

According to the survey, 47% of Democrats say that speech should be legal “only under certain circumstances.”

A slim majority of Democrats (53%) agreed that speech should be legal under any circumstances while a third of Democrats (34%) think Americans have “too much freedom,” according to the poll.

Among registered Republicans, almost three quarters of them (74%) think speech should be legal “under any circumstances” while 61% of independents say the same, the RealClearPolitics survey found.

Just think, Democrats used to pride themselves on their liberality, their willingness to defend all manner of speech.

No longer.

Twelfth, the Daily Mail commissioned a poll about Vice President Kamala Harris.

The results were not encouraging. Among the adjectives chosen to describe Harris were: incompetent, stupid, unqualified, useless, worthless. 

People rated her the worst vice president in recent history, by a lot.

Thirteen, from famed investigative reporter Seymour Hersh:

 "The reality is that Volodymyr Zelensky’s battered army no longer has any chance of a victory." 

Hersh reported the thoughts of an unnamed intelligence source:

That source said that despite some continued and recent attempts to paint the Ukraine counteroffensive as making slow but steady progress, the truth is the opposite. 

"It’s all lies," the source told Hersh. "The war is over. Russia has won. There is no Ukrainian offensive anymore, but the White House and the American media have to keep the lie going."

"The truth is if the Ukrainian army is ordered to continue the offensive, the army would mutiny. The soldiers aren’t willing to die any more, but this doesn’t fit the B.S. that is being authored by the Biden White House," the intelligence source explained. 

Fourteen, Bidenomics in action. From the New York Post:

Organized crime rings in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Houston are targeting retail inventories, causing more financial loss, according to a report by the National Retail Federation, a trade group representing US retailers.

… in 2022, inventory “shrink” as a percentage of total retail sales accounted for $112.1 billion in losses, up from $93.9 billion in 2021, according to the NRF report on Tuesday.

“Retailers are seeing unprecedented levels of theft coupled with rampant crime in their stores, and the situation is only becoming more dire,” said NRF Vice President for Asset Protection and Retail Operations David Johnston.

Retailers are either being forced to close a specific store location, reduce operating hours or alter in-store product selection to deal with the spike in retail crime, the report added.

Some would call it an insurrection.

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