The Week Magazine November 26, 2021

Laugh at Steve Bannon. Go ahead. Snigger at his grizzled, unkempt, soup-kitchen mien and his multiple layers of XXL dress shirts. Roll your eyes at the ogre’s vainglorious rhetoric. “I’m never backing down,” Bannon said after appearing in court this week on contempt charges for defying a subpoena from the House’s Jan. 6 special committee. “We’re taking down the Biden regime.” (See Main Stories.) Who’s we? The populist, nativist movement Bannon helped launch and shape a decade ago through the gleefully racist, misogynistic, and rabidly anti-immigrant website Breitbart.com. In 2015, Bannon harnessed that movement to a New York City real estate mogul named Donald Trump. He’s “a blunt instrument for us,” Bannon explained. For his central role in propelling Trump to the White House, Bannon was rewarded with a West…

What happened A defiant Steve Bannon surrendered to federal authorities and appeared in court this week, after the former President Trump adviser was indicted on contempt of Congress charges for refusing to cooperate with the House special committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection. Bannon vowed in combative terms to fight the charges, escalating a battle between the committee and the former president, who has refused to cooperate and directed his former associates to do likewise. “They took on the wrong guy this time,” said Bannon, who cast the prosecution as a politically motivated gambit by an “illegitimate” administration. “We’re taking down the Biden regime.” After the 2020 election, Bannon took part in a “war room” set up by Trump associates to find a way to overturn the election results,…

What happened The United Nations climate summit in Glasgow ended last week with an agreement among nearly 200 nations to reduce planet-warming emissions and to move away from fossil fuels—a deal that scientists and activists warned lacked the urgency and enforcement mechanisms needed to avert the most disastrous effects of global warming. Some breakthroughs were made at the two-week conference. More than 100 countries agreed to limit emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and the U.S. and China, the world’s two largest emitters of carbon dioxide, pledged to cooperate more on battling climate change. But negotiators failed to agree on emissions-reduction goals to hit the target of the 2015 Paris accord: limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial temperatures. The world is on pace…

When Naomi Pascal was adopted from an Ethiopian orphanage, her adoptive parents gave her a stuffed bear, Teddy, who traveled with her for four years. Then in October 2020, Teddy disappeared on a trip to Montana’s Glacier National Park. Park ranger Tom Mazzarisi visited the same trail days later to do some end-of-season work, and came across the snow-covered Teddy. A family friend visited the park this September and, amazingly, spotted Teddy on the dashboard of Mazzarisi’s pickup, setting the stage for Naomi to be reunited with her bear. The varsity football team at the California School for the Deaf, Riverside, was once considered an easy win for opponents. Now, after seven straight losing seasons, the Cubs are not just beating their opponents: They’re trouncing them. Last week, they notched…

Get ready for “the most expensive Thanksgiving dinner in history,” said Alfredo Ortiz in RealClearPolitics.com. Last week, the U.S. Labor Department confirmed that runaway price inflation is back and threatening to cast the same dark shadow over the 2020s as it did the 1970s. Consumer prices have risen by 6.2 percent since this time last year, the largest year-on-year jump since 1990, with particularly pain-inducing spikes in such vital commodities as meat (up 14.5 percent), gasoline (up 50 percent), and heating oil, which is up a staggering 59 percent as we head into winter. President Biden did his best to sound empathetic this week, calling rising prices “worrisome.” But he helped fuel the problem back in March—pumping $1.9 trillion of Covid stimulus into an economy that was already rebounding—and…

Good week for: Public health, with an Austrian brothel’s offer of free sex “with a lady of your choice” to any customer who takes advantage of its on-site Covid-19 vaccination center. “We have a great vaccination site,” said the brothel’s owner. Snowflakes, with the unveiling during Dubai’s Design Week festival of the Themis, a lamp-size device that monitors human speech and sets off an “extremely annoying” alarm lasting two minutes if it hears any “racist remarks” or “offensive jokes.” Theocrats, after retired Gen. Michael Flynn, former President Trump’s national security adviser, told a crowd on the far-right Reawaken America Tour that “if we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion.” He didn’t specify which one. Bad week for: Legal briefs,…