Inflation is raging, and it’s public enemy no. 1 in all the polls, reflecting a heavy dose of consumer pain when it comes to buying groceries or gasoline or home heating fuel.

You’d think President Biden would nominate people to the Federal Reserve who would understand the importance of curbing inflation. Think President Reagan and his Fed chairman, Paul Volcker, 40 years ago. 

Once again, though, Mr. Biden has gone “big woke.”

“Big woke” is Green New Deal thinking — that climate change is an existential threat. “Big woke” means disparities: equity, diversification, and gender and racial disparities. 

Remember last spring when Larry Summers, the Harvard economist, said he feared a new generation of central bankers who are much more interested in climate risk and woke social theories than fighting inflation? He was right.

One of Mr. Biden’s Fed nominees, Sarah Bloom Raskin, was already on record as wanting the Fed to exclude fossil fuel companies from its emergency lending programs during the height of the pandemic. 

“The Fed is ignoring clear warning signs about the economic repercussions of the impending climate crisis by taking action that will lead to increases in greenhouse gas emissions at a time when even in the short-term, fossil fuels are a terrible investment,” she said.

Elsewhere, she has repeatedly said the Fed should allocate capital away from fossil fuel companies — but the Fed is not in the business of credit allocation, nor does its mandate include climate change. Ms. Raskin has her own radical agenda.

By the way, if the Federal Reserve worked to stop banks from lending to oil and gas and coal companies, energy prices would go up even more, because drilling production and investment would drop further than they have already.

Oil is back at $90 a barrel, while gasoline at the pump is $3.47 a gallon, 40 percent more than a year ago. In other words, contrary to the Fed’s mission, and ignoring the current high inflation reality, Mr. Raskin’s radical-left, woke attack on fossil fuels would increase inflation substantially. Her views should disqualify her.

Then, too, she has an ethics problem related to her lobbying the Federal Reserve for a fintech company called Reserve Trust. She did this lobbying after leaving the Federal Reserve and then leaving the Obama Treasury with her coveted Fed privileges that no other fintech company has ever received. She also made about $1.5 million in stock options from that company and failed to report it on time. 

The Biden camp also had an “awokening” when it put forward Lisa Cook, a professor from Michigan State, for a Fed Board position. She is another radical left winger.

I will quote economist John Cochrane of the Hoover Institution, who after scanning her publications, said, “You will find essentially nothing related to monetary policy, monetary effects on employment, interest rates, inflation, financial regulation or other traditional fed topics.”

Mr. Cochrane also points out that Ms. Cook’s most cited paper is on “trade credit and bank finance: financing small firms in Russia.” How good is that? Shades of Saule Omarova and Moscow State University. 

Here’s another one: Ms. Cook has called for replacing the unemployment rate as a key Fed metric with a mandate for the black unemployment rate. In other words, throw away 88 percent of the available info on the labor market. This is nowhere near the mainstream of macroeconomic thinking.

By the way, Ms. Cook hates President Trump even though under Mr. Trump’s policies, we saw the lowest black unemployment rate in the history of that statistic. 

That didn’t stop her from calling him a fascist and saying his administration has led America down the path to a genocide similar to the Holocaust. She believes America is racist. She supported bailing out rioters. She’s called Nascar folks uneducated rednecks and also favors slavery reparations. 

Now, it’s a free country and I respect Ms. Cook’s freedom to say all these things, even though I find her views to be hideous and anti-American. It’s fair to ask, though: Did the Bidens really have to choose her for the Federal Reserve Board? This is our nation’s central bank, controlling the money supply and fighting inflation, and it is a huge influence on the U.S. and world economy. This is the best person they could find for that important job?

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From Mr. Kudlow’s broadcast on Fox Business News.