Hendrickson’s View
Mark W. Hendrickson
Mark Hendrickson is an economist who recently retired from the faculty of Grove City College, where he remains a Fellow for Economic & Social Policy for the college’s The Institute for Faith and Freedom. These essays are republished from The Institute for Faith and Freedom, The American Spectator, and The Epoch Times.
The Secret Democratic Cabal’s Openly Anti-American Agenda — the Democratic Cabal Is the True Threat to Democracy
You’ve got to hand it to the Democratic Party. They have a slick operation going. Four years ago, they hatched a plan to circle the wagons around Joe Biden and somehow convinced all the other contenders for the presidential nomination to step aside. Joe, a notably undistinguished but loyal party apparatchik, had great name recognition and seemed safely normal compared to, say, Bernie Sanders. Sure, he was visibly failing even back then, but with COVID as a cover, they could keep Joe in his basement and hide the truth of his condition. As we know all too well, that strategy was successful.
And now, in 2024: Round Two of the — what, mysterious, unconventional? — Democratic strategy for selecting a presidential candidate. They pulled the plug on Biden, instantly installed Kamala Harris as their candidate, and have already gone through the motions of nominating her democratically via a virtual vote before the Democratic convention. Unsurprisingly, the polls showed that the odds for the Dems winning the November election improved hugely. What else would you expect from a vibrant, photogenic, lively candidate replacing the listless, semi-coherent man who seems more suited for life in a retirement home than in the White House?
Ah, but who exactly are “they”? Who has orchestrated these machinations, giving the American people first Biden, now Harris? It must be a small, tightly knit cabal, for large committees are too unwieldy (dare we say, too democratic) to choose presidential candidates so smoothly, quickly, and quietly. I mean, does anyone really think that either Joe Biden or Kamala Harris has in any meaningful way been leading the Democratic Party? No, they are puppets and figureheads, nothing more.
I suspect that many of us have a pretty clear sense of who composes “the cabal” staging these political dramas, but rather than take educated guesses here about who they are, let’s examine what their agenda is. In short, the agenda of the Democratic cabal is to terminate the American Republic as established by our Constitution. The Democrats want power. The Founders sought to protect us from the depredations of unchecked political power. The whole purpose of the Constitution was to place limits on the powers of government and to defend the rights of individuals to live freely and decide how to maximize their well-being under a system of impartial laws.
The addition of a Bill of Rights to the Constitution underscored the Founders’ emphasis on rights. That emphasis drew upon the Declaration of Independence, the fundamental principles of which are that each human being is endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that the sole purpose of government is to uphold and protect those rights. If you want further confirmation of the priority of individual rights over government powers, take a look at the 9th and 10th Amendments. The 9th basically states that any right not specifically spelled out in the Constitution is presumed to belong to the people, while the 10th states that any power not explicitly delegated to the government is assumed not to be a legitimate power.
A main feature of the design of the Constitution was the separation of powers between three distinct branches of government — the legislative, executive, and judicial. For the past three and a half years, Team Biden has worked overtime to usurp the legislative prerogative of Congress by issuing a flood of regulatory edicts. This tendency is nothing new. For many years, it has been common practice in Washington for unelected bureaucrats in the executive branch to issue 18 or 20 regulations with the force of law for every one actual law passed by Congress.
The Supreme Court has attempted to slow this regulatory onslaught in decisions like West Virginia v. EPA in 2022, but Team Biden has been playing whack-a-mole, promulgating regulations with far greater rapidity than the court will ever be able to keep up with. And now, for trying to preserve our constitutional order and defend us from executive supremacy, the Democratic cabal is attacking the Supreme Court, blustering about bogus ethics concerns and threatening to impose term limits. How blatantly anti-constitutional! The Founders deliberately gave lifetime tenure to the members of the Supreme Court to insulate them from popular political passions. The Supremes were never supposed to be popular or well liked. It was their job to throw cold water on any attempt by the other two branches of government to subvert the Constitution and arrogate more power to themselves.
The cabal saw that Biden could still throw mud at the Supremes. Having already achieved a large degree of dominance over Congress, neutering the other branch of government — the remaining check on executive power — became the next logical step in the cabal’s strategy to achieve rule by fiat for a Democratic elite. The Dems talk a lot about Donald Trump being a threat to democracy, but their actions speak louder than their words. By hand-picking their figureheads and by their agenda of defying the Constitution to grab ever more power, the Democratic cabal is the true threat to democracy.
Joe Biden and the Democratic Party Are Amoral — Don’t Expect Anything Better from His Successor.
Many today would consider the adjective in the phrase “cynical politics” to be a pleonasm. We may look back wistfully at periods in history when statesmen rose above politics; when those running for public office were not afraid to campaign and govern on noble principles; when an office-seeker’s political career took a back seat while he stood up for what was right; when politicians placed a higher value on morality than on demagoguery and the latest public opinion polls.
Lest that sound too gloomy, let us remember that history often moves like a pendulum. We may long with hope and optimism for a future when statesmen will make a comeback over today’s bankrupt ethos of selling your soul if that’s what it takes to win.
For the present, though, we must reckon with the utter amorality of the Democratic Party —which is not to assert that there are no amoral individuals in the Republican Party. In a democratic system in which presidents and legislators gain office by winning elections, the goal of winning becomes paramount. Indeed, all other principles and values recede into the background. Today’s Democrat has one cold calculus: Win regardless of what innocent people may be hurt.
Joe Biden Has Hardly Approached Politics with a Moral Compass — President Joe Biden epitomizes the amoral politician. A lifelong mediocrity of limited ability and questionable ethics (people who went to law school with him remember him as an intellectual dullard and a plagiarizer), Biden went all-in on learning to play the political game at an early age. Like others who have no skills or talents that could translate into achieving distinction in the private workplace (think Bernie and AOC), Biden found a lucrative career in politics by using what can only dubiously be called a “talent” — the ability to spout out glib gobbledygook that pushes voters’ emotional hot buttons and exploits their ignorance, prejudices, and fears. Joe learned the one all-important political lesson: Go along with the leftist mob and pay attention to which way the wind is blowing in the polls.
In Biden, we see a Catholic who found it expedient to reject his church’s teachings on abortion and align himself with the politically powerful pro-abortion forces. He would publicly abuse, bully, and humiliate judicial nominees at Senate confirmation hearings (Judge Robert Bork comes to mind) and subsequently approach the devastated family with a smile and the lame explanation, “Don’t take this personally; it’s just the way the game is played.”
In decades in the Senate, Joe Biden never crafted any significant legislation. He simply bided his time, watched the polls, and went with the flow. As president, his actions have shown us just how dangerous a politician’s self-serving amorality can be.
The President’s Self-Serving Amorality Is Dangerous for Americans — Think of the incompetent withdrawal from Afghanistan: American servicemen and many Afghani friends of America died simply because Joe wanted to score political points by announcing the withdrawal on Sept. 11, 2021 — the 20th anniversary of 9/11 — an artificially rushed date that left our forces without time to organize an orderly withdrawal.
Biden has greatly depleted the Strategic Petroleum Reserve that we maintain to keep us supplied in an emergency. Why? To push gasoline prices lower to mollify voters who were angry about rising gasoline prices. Gaining votes for Democrats was more important to Joe than national security.
Biden has treated the lives of American allies (Israelis) and friends (Ukrainians) as expendable, presuming to tell those allies not to fight for victory. Why? Because he needed the votes of Americans who side with Hamas or want to appease Putin.
In a case of stunning poetic justice, the win-at-all-costs prime directive has come back to bite Biden in the rear. His fellow Democrats turned against his reelection candidacy — not because they objected to his amoral policies, nor because they are opposed to having a doddering, semi-coherent older man struggling with glaringly obvious senility if it advances their socialistic agenda.
Once it became inescapably obvious that Biden could not win the November election, and that his candidacy would cause the Democrats to lose key seats in the House and Senate — only then did his fellow Democrats turn against him. They abandoned Biden like rats jumping off a sinking ship. The cold, amoral calculus of doing whatever is necessary to win asserted itself, so Biden had to be dumped.
I had thought that Biden might use his recent bout with COVID as a face-saving way to exit the presidential race. Instead, Biden tried to sound like a statesman, solemnly stating that he felt he had to step aside for the good of others. Alas, playing the statesman is an unfamiliar role for Biden. He is a partisan through and through, and so he announced that he was withdrawing for his party’s sake first and his country’s sake second. (His exact words were, “I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down. . .”.)
Biden’s departure is no victory for our country. His party will nominate someone similarly amoral in his place.
“Far-right” and “Right-wing” in the So-called “Mainstream Media”
The longstanding usage (or misusage) of “far-right” and “right-wing” in the “mainstream media” (MSM) manifests a bias that has been around for decades. If you are of a certain age, you may remember how during the Cold War it was considered a flagrant faux pas in media and intellectual circles to identify any sort of threat as coming from the political left. Reporters lived in dread of writing anything that might be interpreted as being anti-communist, for that would open them to scorn and disapprobation in the editorial rooms of MSM publications and media outlets. The so-called “establishment” would brand anyone sounding anti-communist as jingoistic, unenlightened, and backward-thinking. In fact, one of the surest ways to solidify one’s reputation as an acceptable journalist was to establish one’s bona fides as an anti-anti-communist. Writers didn’t necessarily have to come out explicitly for the communist side as long as they criticized and denigrated anti-communists.
Two examples of the MSM’s usage of “far-right” or “right-wing” this summer — one focused on Europe, one on the U.S. — illustrate the glaring fatuity of these adjectives.
In the first round of French elections, Marine LePen’s National Rally party was the leading vote-getter, receiving 33 percent of the popular vote. The MSM hastened to sound the alarm about this strong showing by “the far right.” “Watch out for those dangerous extremists” was their message. But isn’t it silly, even nonsensical, to characterize the largest chunk of votes in a democratic election as “extremist”?
Exit polls revealed what motivated so many French citizens to vote for the “far-right” National Rally. Their three primary concerns were crime, uncontrolled immigration, and the falling purchasing power of their money. That sounds pretty normal and mainstream to me. It’s a weird world view that brands anyone as “far right” for wanting to live their lives in safety, to want their money to retain its value, and to have their government forbid entrance into their country to drug runners, supporters of terrorism, those with infectious diseases, etc.
Here in the States, journalists resorted to the “right-wing” canard this summer in their commentary about the Supreme Court decision, Trump v. USA — the case that somewhat extended presidential immunity. This has been a key part of a concerted effort by non-conservatives to tar-and-feather the Supreme Court as “right-wing.” From the MSM point of view, the Court must be extremist since a 6-3 majority held that former President Trump has more immunity from prosecution than progressives wish he had.
What is driving the establishment nuts about Trump v. USA is nothing other than Trump Derangement Syndrome. Because the decision undermines the efforts to cripple Trump’s presidential campaign by bombarding him with questionable charges — the so-called lawfare strategy — they are furious and have gone berserk. In this case, “right-wing” can be translated as “to the benefit of Donald Trump.” By that logic, the MSM are essentially declaring that all 74 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump in 2020 are “far-right.” Is over 40 percent of the electorate “extremist”? Sorry, MSM, that does not compute.
The politically motivated assault on the Supreme Court included sniping reports that the Trump v. USA decision was deemed reasonable only by Republicans and “right-wing commentators.” Once again, we have the absurdity of the most widespread opinion being classified as extremist. Wouldn’t it make more sense for the media to describe the three dissenting justices as “extremist” or “left-wing”? After all, they’re the ones out of step with the majority. Alas, to the MSM (like to Communists) all enemies are on the right.
The partisans and ideologues bleating “right-wing” about Trump v. USA chatter incessantly that Trump is a threat to our democracy. Look in the mirror, people. You are defending an administration that tramples democracy on an almost daily basis, whether by issuing green rules and regulations in contravention of the Supreme Court’s West Virginia v. EPA decision (2022), or usurping a Congressional prerogative by unilaterally pardoning student debt, or by ignoring the national security needs of the country by depleting the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in an attempt to temporarily lower gasoline prices in an election year, etc., etc.
Today’s Democrats and MSM allies warn about their opponents’ alleged tyranny while turning a blind eye to their own tyrannies. This glaring double standard is reminiscent of Communism: Tyranny is bad — unless it’s our tyranny. Then it must be defended at all costs, including by slandering the other side as “extremists.”
The establishment media should be embarrassed by characterizing normalcy as extremism. Those pejorative terms long ago lost any objective definition (if, indeed, there ever was an objective definition to begin with). Their usage has become lazy, unthinking, reflexive, and increasingly absurd. It’s time for the MSM to retire the nonsensical smears “far-right” and “right wing.”
Some Good News on the Climate Change Front
It’s highly encouraging to read of a shift toward taking practical, more affordable steps to incrementally improve our defenses against destructive natural forces.
A recent article in The Wall Street Journal reports:
“Efforts to address the cause of climate change have fallen short so far. That is leading to a big push to treat the symptoms. Government and private money is pouring into plans to control flooding, address extreme heat, and shore up infrastructure to withstand more severe weather caused by climate change.”
What a welcome report! It represents a triumph for wisdom and common sense.
Everyone knows that weather periodically becomes destructive and deadly. We all agree that we need to try to protect ourselves against these mighty forces. It would be unconscionable to passively submit to nature’s fury rather than to combat it. Where we disagree — often passionately — is on the best overall strategy for dealing with the challenge of destructive weather events.
For the past several decades, policy has generally been to try to reduce the frequency and intensity of destructive weather events. How? By trying to stabilize Earth’s climate, particularly the average surface temperature, by imposing radical changes in our energy consumption and lifestyles. I call this the idealistic or absolutist approach. Proponents literally want to change the world.
By contrast, the opponents of these policies, including yours truly, join the proponents in accepting the following facts: The climate is changing, violent weather events happen periodically, and humans need to do what we can to minimize the damage inflicted by such events. But like the WSJ article states, we believe that the focus should be not a Quixote-like obsession to control Earth’s climate, but on building and developing technological and physical tools that enable us to survive and withstand inevitable violent weather events. I call this the realistic approach.
There are two major problems with the idealistic approach: Enormous costs and uncertain, limited effectiveness. Even the proponents themselves have made it clear that trillions and trillions of dollars ($150 trillion by 2050, according to a Bank of America study) must be spent in order to achieve such idealistic goals as “net zero” (achievable at a cost of $275 trillion by 2050, according to a McKinsey study — more than twice as much as the world’s entire gross domestic product). And for what? To shave a few hundredths of a degree to a tenth or two off Earth’s average temperature. Never before in human history has it been proposed to spend so much for so little. And that assumes, contrary to abundant evidence, that scientists have a correct understanding of how all the various forces that affect the climate work. We certainly may question the accuracy of the calculations, given how wildly inaccurate climate change models have been. In short, we could end up wasting trillions of dollars tackling forces that lie beyond human control.
The realistic approach to combating violent weather events involves building out technologies that work — things such as more wind- and rain-resistant structures, more intelligent forest management, and improvements to drainage. One advantage that these measures have over the idealistic attempt to radically transform human society is that we know that these realistic approaches work. A second advantage is that they cost so much less than the unfathomable trillions that changing human society would cost.
In fact, one of the dangers of the idealistic approach is that in addition to there being no guarantee that they can control Earth’s climate (nor is there any guarantee that curbing CO2 emissions will, in fact, lead to fewer floods, hurricanes, droughts, fires, etc.) the enormous expenses of their experiment would leave human society poorer, hence less able to afford improvements to infrastructure and other known ways of protecting people from nature’s convulsive destructiveness.
We need to remember the lesson of the Kuznets curve, named after economist Simon Kuznets. Contrary to 1970s-era environmental alarmism that warned that the more prosperity human beings achieved, the more pollution and environmental damage would accumulate, we found that once societies achieve a certain income per capita (a level far below our current income per capita) pollution lessens rather than increases. That is because humans value environmental quality, and once they are prosperous enough to afford it, they are willing and able to pay for measures that either remediate prior pollution or reduce future pollution.
Similarly, the wealthier people are in the future, the more safeguards they will be able to afford in the ongoing battle against weather and climate. I have long averred that we need an environmentalism as if people matter. Poverty has long been the most lethal condition for human beings. Conversely, wealth, prosperity, affluence, higher standards of living, a richer society, whatever term you prefer, are what will maximize human protections against adverse weather.
It is highly encouraging, then, to read of the important shift from trying to regulate the climate at astronomical, impoverishing costs to taking practical, more affordable steps to incrementally improve our defenses against destructive natural forces year by year. That is good news indeed.
The Green Version of Socialism: What Is Familiar and What Is Different
In my previous column, I described the socialistic character of the greens’ masterplan for American society in the name of “climate change.” In one important way, the current green iteration of socialism is like prior versions: It clearly demonstrates the incompetence of top-down economic central planning. In another way, though, it is strikingly different: There is virtually no rhetoric about uplifting the poor.
Let’s examine the incompetence issue first.
Consider:
The poster child for green socialism’s absurdity undoubtedly is the embarrassing report that $7.5 billion of government investment has so far only produced “7 or 8” EV charging stations.
The Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported that power production from wind is declining even as subsidies to wind energy continue to rise.
Late last summer, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) assessed the five greatest risks to the reliability of the USA’s electric power grid. The top-ranked risk was government energy policy, as the green fanatics insist on replacing time-tested energy sources (primarily fossil fuels) with less reliable and less affordable alternatives (i.e., solar and wind).
Socialistic incompetence is obvious when some of the planners are pushing electric vehicles (EVs) that increase demand for electricity at the same time other planners are imposing green mandates that hamper the production of electricity. Even when the ill-considered detour into EVs eventually becomes a passé fad and a spent force, today’s anti-reliable, supply-crimping electricity policies should be seen as working against a prosperous future. Artificial intelligence, cloud computing, cryptocurrencies, virtual reality, and who knows what other innovations will require massive increases in production of reliable electricity, but the greens are oblivious to this undeniable reality. Did they not learn that the unprecedented economic progress of the past century-plus was a result of harnessing electricity?
And let us not overlook the horrific environmental costs of green socialism. Besides being an economic boondoggle, wind energy in particular is causing an environmental catastrophe. Besides killing right whales, wind turbines kill millions of bats, birds (some endangered species), and insects every year. Yet, environmentalists, who once cheered when Uncle Sam would impose a huge fine on an oil company if a couple of dozen birds perished on their property, now call for the number of wind turbines to be massively increased. Greens, who squeal with indignation if a natural gas company lays a 36-inch pipeline anywhere, now call for 100-mile-wide swaths of natural habitat to be cleared to make room for ever-more turbines and the mind-boggling quantity of transmission lines needed to convey electricity from the remote countryside to crowded cities. Plus, wind turbines collectively shed tons of microplastic annually with as-yet unknown consequences to human health through the air we breathe and the water we drink.
Now let’s look at how green socialism is impacting the poor. Other than some pro forma clichés from a few “climate justice” groupies about how the poor should be spared the costs of addressing climate change, we hear virtually nothing about how Team Biden’s green agenda will actually help the poor. Instead, what we have had is a barrage of green policies that mercilessly and relentlessly hammer the poor.
The poor have been smacked with the inflation unleashed by the Biden spending binge to wage his war against fossil fuels. In the first three years of the Biden presidency, the price of heating oil has risen by over 60 percent, gasoline 37 percent, and electricity 27 percent. Not surprisingly, since energy costs are embedded in virtually every other consumer price, prices in general have risen substantially, too. These have been tough times for the poor.
And there’s more economic pain for the poor: The Biden Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been issuing regulation after regulation mandating increased energy efficiency for stoves, refrigerators, hot water heaters, freezers, dishwashers, air conditioning units, heat pumps, light bulbs, etc. Maybe the good folks at the EPA view such items as luxuries, but to the average American today, they are necessities. The EPA’s regulations will jack up the prices of these modern amenities, in some cases by hundreds or thousands of dollars — far more than any savings from (hopefully) cheaper electricity. That can’t help but hurt the poor the most.
The greens warn us about the alleged danger of increased heat deaths due to global warming. Then by what logic do they pursue policies that dramatically raise the prices of electricity and of air conditioning units, which are human beings’ primary line of defense against heat? Don’t be surprised if you start to encounter occasional heart-tugging reports about poor Americans having to choose between keeping the A/C on and eating three meals per day.
Not only is green socialism aggressively and shamelessly making the poor poorer, the green central plan adds insult to injury by doling out subsidies to upper-income Americans. EVs are unaffordable to poor Americans, but Uncle Sam gives thousands in tax breaks so that richer Americans will buy them.
Similarly, government subsidies incentivize well-to-do Americans to install solar panels on houses. A wealthy friend of mine in Florida received a generous tax break to put solar panels on his roof. Those tax-subsidized panels add to the value of his house. Plus, he receives a monthly payment from the electric utility company because the panels enable him to sell more electricity to the utility than the utility sells to him. Think about it: Poorer Americans are struggling to pay today’s higher electric bills, while richer Americans enjoy an additional income stream from their local power company, thanks to taxpayer-funded subsidies.
Biden’s green version of socialism is typical in its display of arrogant self-righteousness matched by the colossal economic ignorance of the planners. Meanwhile, the green agenda is rushing our society toward a totally unnecessary economic crisis that will be even more tragic because of an oh-so-avoidable humanitarian crisis caused by green policies that unfairly crush the poor.
The Halfway Point of Another Eventful Sports Year
Congratulations to the Boston Celtics for winning the NBA championship and the Florida Panthers for winning the NHL’s Stanley Cup.
We have now officially entered the annual summer lull in North American team sports. With the NFL’s training camps still being more than a month away, only major league baseball, among the four traditional North American team sports, is active. Perhaps this summer lull will provide an opportunity for the fifth team sport — soccer — to ride the coattails of the surrealistically talented Lionel Messi to greater popularity.
The storied Celtics franchise won the NBA championship for an astounding 18th time, prevailing over the Dallas Mavericks four games to one. Sports fans saw the same basic pattern that played out in both the NCAA men’s and women’s basketball championships in April: The team that had the best player (Mavs superstar Luka Doncic) lost to the more balanced team. Once again, while superstars are exciting to watch, the bottom line is that basketball truly is a team sport.
The Stanley Cup finals between Florida and the Edmonton Oilers was one for the ages. The Panthers had been impressive in defeating two powerful teams — first the Boston Bruins and then the New York Rangers — on the way to the final round.
The Oilers’ journey to the finals was even more dramatic. In October and November 2023, the Oilers got off to a horrendous start in the regular season, losing 10 of their first 13 games. At that point, the management of the Oilers made what has turned out to be a brilliant move. They fired the team’s coaching staff and brought in Kris Knoblauch, who had never been a head coach in the NHL before. The Oilers quickly got untracked, winning 26 of their next 32 games.
The Oilers’ resilience continued during the playoffs. In the second round, the Oilers were down three games to two to the Vancouver Canucks, who had finished above the Oilers in the regular season standings, but the Oilers rallied to win the last two games. In the third round, the Oilers faced a Dallas Stars team that had looked unbeatable in the previous round. Once again, the Oilers fell behind, this time two games to one, only to suddenly overwhelm the Stars and reel off three straight victories to advance to the final round.
In the finals, the Panthers raced off to a three-games-to-zero lead. Once again, though, the Oilers rallied, winning the next three games. Were they a team of destiny? It definitely appeared that way, as they were on the verge of becoming only the second NHL team in history to win a Stanley Cup final after losing the first three games.
Alas, it was not to be. Momentum in sports and the bounces of a hockey puck are both very fickle things. Florida carried a 2-1 lead into the third period. The Oilers then mounted a furious effort, buzzing the Panthers’ goal, but they just couldn’t quite get the puck into the net, and the game ended with the score unchanged.
The Panthers-Oilers final will be remembered by hockey fans for a long time. It was one of those years when an impartial observer such as yours truly could say, “It’s a shame one of those teams had to lose.” As it is, I am happy for the Florida team, because they had never won the Stanley Cup before. I am also happy for their head coach, Paul Maurice, who no longer will be known as the NHL coach who has coached the most games in his career without having won the Stanley Cup.
As in the NBA, so in the NHL, the winning team was not the one with the best player. Edmonton’s superstar, Connor McDavid, was awarded the Conn Smythe Trophy as the best player through the four rounds of the playoffs, becoming only the second player ever to have won the award while playing on the losing team.
Individual Sports — Pardon me for the jarring transition, but let’s take a quick look at individual professional sports. Both tennis and golf crowned champions in May and June — a mixture of new and repeating champions.
The men’s French Open tennis tournament may have witnessed the changing of the guard to younger champions after many years of dominance by Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokovic. Federer has retired; 14-time winner (yes, 14!) Nadal, battling age and injuries, lost to eventual runner-up Alexander Zverev in the opening round, and the GOAT, Djokovic, had to withdraw partway through the tournament with a knee injury that required surgery. The winner was Spaniard Carlos Alcaraz (maybe they should call this tournament the Spanish Open, since Spaniards win it so often), who, having just turned 21, has already won three of tennis’ four grand slam tournaments. On the women’s side, Poland’s Iga Swiatek won in dominant fashion. At the tender age of 23, she has already won the French Open four times.
In golf, American Xander Schauffele won his first major title at the PGA Championship in May, and fellow American Bryson DeChambeau won his second U.S. Open Tournament this month. Both were suspenseful matches. Schauffele won by one stroke, scoring a birdie on the last hole to finish 21 under par for 72 holes — the best-ever score in the history of golf’s four major tournaments. DeChambeau likewise won by one shot following a nerve-wracking final few holes when he blew a putt of less than four feet only to have the runner-up, Rory McIlroy, make the same mistake twice.
There were plenty of thrills for us sports fans in the first half of 2024. Now let’s see what the second half of the year gives us! *
