Are You Ready for Some Summit?  Dear Weekend Jolter, Now if I could reach through this screen and smack you to get your attention about National Review Institute's 2019 Ideas Summit — which has the timely theme of "The Case for the American Experiment" — I . . . wouldn't (smack you). Because you are smart and you already know this will be a terrific two-day event (March 28 – 29 in Washington, D.C., at the Mandarin Oriental) and the fact is, you're just about to reserve your tickets (register here mes amis). But what if you are just about to . . . just about to? If you need a nudge to get to that next step? Well how about this great line-up that seems to be getting better every day. And it seems to be getting better because . . . it is! Already we shared the very good news that Mark Janus, the "average guy" who was the force behind the Supreme Court's landmark 2018 free-speech ruling (named . . . Janus), will be receiving the Whittaker Chambers award at the Summit's Thursday-night dinner). And we've long ago broke the news that the great James L. Buckley (who turns 96 today — HAPPY BIRTHDAY to a truly great American!) will be there to make the case for federalism. But wait, there's more: Adam Carolla has confirmed that he will come and handle the "Night Owl" duties to discuss his new First Amendment film, No Safe Spaces. And Tucker Carlson will be having a conversation with Michael Brendan Dougherty about his now-famous "monologue." And Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has just confirmed that he will be joining us to discuss the Trump Administration's foreign policy. I almost forgot: supercool freshman Congressman Dan Crenshaw has also said yes to our invite (he'll be discussing "The New Socialism"). Will you? Say yes to our invite (consider this such)? Unlike what's between my ears, folks, NRI 2019 Ideas Summit space is limited. Register today, now, here! You've been nudged. Now let's have us a heapin' helpin' of some Jolt. Editorials Apologies mesdams and missyeurs but there warnt none the week past. The New Issue of NR Magazine Has Burst off the Presses, and Its Contents Eagerly Await Your Peepers. The March 25, 2019, issue has gotten ink on paper and is in the mail. While some wait for the postman to bring the jewel of wisdom to your mailbox, NRPLUS subscribers and members enjoy it immediately. That's a pitch for joining, in case you didn't notice. Now that that's done, here are four selections — one, admittedly, rather self-serving — from the issue that should tickle your fancy. 1. Avik Roy and John Yoo make the case for the GOP to be aggressively courting Asian-American voters. From their essay: In just two generations, Asian Americans have become America's most successful ethnic group. As a share of the U.S. population, Asians have grown from barely 1 percent in the early 1960s to more than 6 percent today. Between the 2000 and 2010 censuses, the Asian-American population grew by nearly 50 percent. The Asian vote is now large enough to swing elections in Virginia and Nevada. If conservative values really are the values of family, personal responsibility, education, and hard work, the most conservative demographic group in America is Asians. The divorce rate for non-Hispanic whites is 40 percent; for Asians, it is 21 percent. The teen birth rate for whites is 17 percent; for Asian Americans, it is 8 percent. The illegitimacy rate for whites is 29 percent; for Asian Americans, it is 16 percent. Asians also value merit and hard work, just as conservatives do. Take educational attainment: Thirty-six percent of white Americans have a college degree, while 54 percent of Asian Americans do. Asian families push their children hard to score at the top of standardized tests and achieve sterling grade-point averages. They rightly prize the great benefits of being educated at our world-beating universities. Opposition to race-based affirmative action at Harvard University, the University of California, and New York City schools has brought out Asians in support of conservative arguments for meritocracy and against race-based quotas.
2. Jay Nordlinger grabs us by the lapels and shakes us to make us realize how Nicaragua has become a hellhole. From his report: Here in Mexico City, at a meeting of the Oslo Freedom Forum, journalists and activists from Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba are comparing notes. It seems—astonishingly—that there is now less room for free expression in Nicaragua than there is in those other two despotisms. Protests in Nicaragua are illegal. So are tweets critical of the regime. So is the singing of the national anthem. So is the raising of the national flag. (Those last two acts are interpreted as anti-Ortega.) Since April 2018, 350 people have been killed, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. But that number is based on death certificates. The real number, says Maradiaga, is more than a thousand. In most cases, death certificates are not issued. Officially, there are 620 political prisoners—but there are hundreds more, says Maradiaga, whom the regime does not want to acknowledge as prisoners. Then there is the matter of exile. More than 80,000 people have fled the country, half of them to Costa Rica. Among those in Costa Rica is Edipcia Dubón, a former legislator. "I never thought I would be an exile," she says. Last May, she traveled to the Oslo Freedom Forum in Norway. On her way, she stopped in Miami and met with her fellow Nicaraguans. She also gave interviews, including one to CNN. This got the attention of Laureano Ortega Murillo, the singer, who issued a tweet. He called Dubón an enemy of the state, basically— which made it too dangerous for her to return home.
3. The issue includes a special financial section, which in turn includes a terrific piece by David Bahnsen that asks the frightening question: Did the Financial Crisis end? From his essay with the answer: The economy spent these years of great monetary assist expanding, but only modestly. The significant increase in government spending had the effect of "crowding out" investment in the private sector, and while unemployment slowly but surely declined, wage growth remained stagnant and the lion's share of economic improvement was felt by those who owned financial assets whose valuations were pushed higher as the Fed held its discount rate down. But the Fed did something else as well, and in spades: It re-leveraged corporate America. Mortgage borrowing by home owners leveled out and never picked back up to pre-crisis levels (thank God). Consumer debt likewise leveled out and never re established an upward trajectory. But corporate America returned to pre-crisis levels of debt relative to GDP and then exceeded them. Aggregate U.S. corporate debt sat at $4.5 trillion at the beginning of 2009, the low point of the financial crisis. It sits at $8.5 trillion now, the effect of a 131 percent increase in middle-market lending (lending focused on companies too large for small-business loans and not large enough for traditional senior bank-loan funding),a 160 percent increase in investment-grade-bond issuance for triple-B-rated debt (the lowest credit rating in the investment-grade universe), an 81 percent in crease in senior bank loans (those legally first in line to be paid before any other debt or equity instrument), and a 76 percent increase in private investment-grade debt. This is not cause for alarm, per se. It was the stated objective of the Federal Reserve, in conducting quantitative easing, to reliquefy the American economy, and that reliquefication found its way into the corporate sector. The $4 trillion increase on the Fed's balance sheet coincides almost perfectly with a $4 trillion increase in corporate borrowings. For the most part, that debt has been put to productive use. Hiring has increased, wages have increased, and clearly profits have increased. So why can't the Fed just declare victory and call it a day?
RELATED: David has a new book coming out in early April: The Case for Dividend Growth: Investing in a Post-Crisis World. You can pre-order at Amazon. 4. The cover essay is by Yours Truly (were all the other NR writers drunk or ill?). It is about Mark Janus, the Illinois government worker who took his fight — to protect the First Amendment rights of five million such workers — to the Supreme Court, and won (So long, compulsory dues). It's also about the political aftermath of the Janus ruling. From the piece: Vincent Vernuccio, a senior fellow at Mackinac Center for Public Policy and a labor-policy expert, describes Janus as "a tremendous victory" and says that "the size of the victory was a big surprise to most followers of the Court." Because of the Friedrichs vote in 2016, they felt reasonably sure that in Janus "the Court was goig to uphold the First Amendment rights of public employees." However, "Alito went further and said that all public employees must opt in to their union" if they want to belong to it, rather than being automatically enrolled and allowed to opt out. This "affirmative consent" requirement "breaks new ground," Vernuccio says. It's unambiguous. Now a government employee must, essentially, tell an employer, "Yes, I want to pay dues or agency fees" before funds can be deducted from his pay. The days of automatic withholding ended along with Abood. The unions' reliable money spigot was reliable no longer. The Janus decision could impoverish unions if "affirmative consent" in practice severely reduces the revenue they collect from dues. The political consequences are immense. Unions are fighting the efforts by conservative groups to inform government employees—both union members and nonmembers—of their new Janus rights. Indeed, AFSCME and other government-employee unions, including the powerful Service Employees International Union (SEIU), were reacting even before Janus was handed down. For unions, the Friedrichs decision had been at best a temporary win: Donald Trump's election, and Gorsuch's nomination and confirmation, meant that a defeat of some kind, and likely sooner rather than later, was in the offing.
You Want Scrumptious? We Got Scrumptious! In Fact, A Baker's Dozen of NR Articles That Are So Scrumptious Your Brain Is Growing Taste Buds! 1. The Cato Institute tag team of Ilya Shapiro and Nathan Harvey want to explain to you what left-wing populism — it's legislative name is "H.R. 1" — looks like (hint: approaching ugly). From the piece: One of the most worrisome "reforms" is tucked away in the bill's Federal Election Commission provisions. After Watergate, Congress created the FEC as a six-member, politically independent body so that neither party could use its regulatory power to punish political opponents. H.R. 1 abandons this longstanding structure, refashioning the FEC into a five-member commission that allows a simple majority to investigate and prosecute. The bill does state that no more than two members can be from the same political party, but this wouldn't stop obvious partisans like, say, Bernie Sanders (who's technically an "independent") from being appointed. Adopting these changes would subject the FEC — our election monitor — to partisan control. The partisan implications of this change are clear. If this bill were to become law under a Democratic president in 2021, he or she would get to appoint all five FEC commissioners. Two commissioners would be appointed for three-year terms, and the other three for six years. All terms thereafter would be for six years. So a Democratic president could, in theory, appoint two Republican members to three-year terms expiring in December 2024, and then again in December 2030, and so on. This would essentially guarantee Democratic control of the FEC for at least six years.
2. Renewables are having a tough time of it in San Bernadino and a growing number of other places averse to massive solar projects and wind farms that slap-chop bald eagles and bats. Robert Bryce reports. From his story: There are numerous other examples of the growing land-use conflicts around renewable-energy projects. Rural residents in Spotsylvania County, Va., are fighting a proposed 500-megawatt solar project that, if built, would cover nearly ten square miles. According to the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star, local residents believe "the project is too big to be near homes and that it poses potential health and environmental risks. They also are concerned about impacts to property values." In Henry County, Ind., more than half a dozen small communities have passed measures banning wind turbines within four miles of their borders. In an article last year titled "County Towns Putting Up Walls Against Wind," Darrel Radford, a reporter for the New Castle Courier-Times, wrote that "there's still lots of anti-turbine activity" in the county and that "as many as half" of the incorporated communities in the county had passed anti-wind measures. The land-use fights over renewable energy reflect the urban–rural divide in American politics — a divide that was obvious in the 2016 presidential race. Hillary Clinton won big in urban areas; Donald Trump dominated in rural areas. Big environmental groups and urban liberal voters like the idea of renewable energy and want more of it. But the all-renewable scenario they are pushing depends on what I call the vacant-land myth: There's an endless amount of unused, uninteresting territory out in the boondocks that's ready and waiting to be covered with energy infrastructure.
3. Kevin Williamson says the lefty dodge — "It's anti-Zionism, not anti-Semitism" — ain't cutting it. From his piece: Farrakhan has used the same line of defense. But it doesn't wash. The viciousness and slander of the Democrats' attacks on Israel are unique; give them a Cuban police state or a Venezuelan dictatorship and they're kittens, but give them a polity full of Jews and they're jackals. The double standards and unreasoning hatred of the progressive view of Israel simply does not have an equivalent associated with a non-Jewish state. Even their anti-Americanism is not quite as poisonous. Anti-Semites? Collaborators? Something in between? The Democrats have just been shamed into introducing an anti-anti-Semitism resolution in the House. In remarkably cowardly fashion, it does not name any names or even address the "anti-Zionism" dodge. Strangely, the Democrats can, on occasion, work up some excitement on the question. Democrats love to lambaste the rich for weaponizing their fortunes in political fights. But Representative Jerrold Nadler accused a Republican colleague of anti-Semitism for rendering the name of billionaire progressive activist Tom Steyer as "$teyer." Steyer, who has pledged many millions of dollars in support of sundry left-wing causes, is an Episcopalian, like his mother.
4. More on the Democrats' Jewish problem: Jonathan Tobin argues they need to face the reality that there's room in the inn for bigots. From his piece: It's obvious that Omar and Tlaib have taken the measure of their party's leadership and decided that they have nothing to fear if they continue with their effort to delegitimize supporters of Israel. These controversies are not rooted in a lack of communication. Since their goal is to legitimize both anti-Zionism and a BDS movement whose aim is Israel's destruction, they aim to shut down criticism they've received for their anti-Semitism and falsely link the defense of Israel with anti-Muslim prejudice. Omar and Tlaib are probably right not to fear Pelosi's wrath. They know that support is growing on the left for intersectional libels in which every act of Israeli self-defense against terror is termed a war crime and where self-determination for a Jewish majority is labeled apartheid. Indeed, despite the furor over the "Benjamins" libel, as a New York Times feature questioning whether AIPAC "is too powerful" indicated, there is an appreciative audience for attacks on the pro-Israel lobby and its supporters in both the liberal press and the Democrats base. AIPAC's allegedly limitless power — especially when compared with the power of other political and industry lobbies that operate on Capitol Hill — is more myth than reality, and the group's actual influence is a function of broad support for Israel and Zionism. But attacks on it remain a good indicator of the persistent appeal of anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
5. . . . And I say poh-tah-toe: Charlie Cooke's Political Jargon-o-Accurator 500 XP hears the Left say "Bring people together" and translates it as "Do what I want." Read it here. 6. There's no hypocrisy like the monumental kind, and David French says AOC has it, in galactic proportions. From his article: You can read the FEC complaint yourself, but in a nutshell: It describes an arrangement where Ocasio-Cortez's chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, co-founded two PACs — Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress — and then funneled large sums of money from those PACs into limited-liability companies he controlled, without disclosing Ocasio-Cortez's involvement and without disclosing how that money was ultimately disbursed. Further, the complaint claims that Ocasio-Cortez was a board member of Justice Democrats when it disbursed these funds. In fact, as a comprehensive report by Andrew Kerr at the Daily Caller News Foundation notes, Ocasio-Cortez and Chakrabarti had legal control over the Justice Democrats PAC while it was supporting Ocasio-Cortez's campaign. What's wrong with this? Well, apart from the obvious potential for financial self-dealing, Ocasio-Cortez's team may well have violated disclosure laws and contribution limits. Moreover, as we know from Michael Cohen's guilty plea and the ongoing campaign-finance investigation of President Trump, if evidence emerges that Ocasio-Cortez or Chakrabarti committed knowing or willful violations of campaign-finance law, then they could face criminal prosecution.
7. Democrats on Capitol Hill are proposing a "Wall Street Tax Act" that call for a 0.1 percent fee on all bond, stock, and derivative transactions. David Bahnsen explains just who will pay that tab. From his analysis: What does this mean for investors? The good news, for now, is that it means nothing, because it is going nowhere. The bill will not have anywhere near unanimous Democratic support (there remain some Democrats who can count, and who are not determined to destroy the American financial economy), and it certainly wouldn't have Republican support to get through the Senate, let alone overcome a presidential veto. However, the bill may very well have life in a post-2020 world if the Democrats consolidate power, and it is worth understanding why a "tax on high-frequency trading" is no such thing at all. Rather, this is a tax on middle-class investors. . . . Let's just cut to the chase beyond the inane pretext for the bill. Who really pays the 10-basis-point fee on every single transaction? Middle-class investors do. A $10 additional charge on a $10,000 stock purchase adds 200 percent to the average trading cost of $4.95 per trade. The massive volume of stocks and bonds bought by mutual-fund investors, 401(k) participants, pension funds, and other investors with an average balance of below $250,000 will marginally suffer the most. The American Retirement Association estimates that the net effect of this bill would be to increase 401(k) expenses by 31 percent.
8. Remember the good old days when women's sporting events meant women played against . . . women?! Not big dudes . . . identifying? Rich Lowry defends women's sports. From his column: This is why we have separate female and male competitions to begin with, so women can showcase their talents and get recognition without being overshadowed by men with inherent physiological advantages. This commonsense reason for separate competitions and separate record books is now falling away. The International Olympic Committee has dropped a requirement for sex-reassignment surgery for transgender athletes, and it has set a maximum level of testosterone for transgendered women that's still high for biological females. Even if biologically male athletes get their testosterone levels down, their bodies are still different. A former Olympic volleyball player from Brazil, Ana Paula Henkel, made this point in an open letter opposing the new Olympic policy. "This rushed and heedless decision to include biological men, born and built with testosterone, with their height, their strength and aerobic capacity of men, is beyond the sphere of tolerance," Henkel wrote. "It represses, embarrasses, humiliates and excludes women."
9. Michael Brendan Dougherty offers friendly advice to the President's critics. From his essay: And the remaining Never Trumpers are lashing out at the faults of the movement they were in. They complain of the baleful influence of talk radio. They point to the presence of idiots who learn a little anti-liberal patois and rake in a ton of money. Not so far beneath the surface, they occasionally let a contempt for the masses of conservative voters start to sneak in. They welcome liberal readers to thrill at their denunciations of the Right. Soon, someone, possibly here at National Review, will come along for the kill shot and say of them, "They began by hating the populists. They came to hate their party and this president." But all I can think when I read them is, "I know what that feels like." In 2006, I threw in with conservatives who were against the Iraq War at The American Conservative and who generally had a low opinion of President George W. Bush. We also lamented the state of conservative talk radio. We also poked fun at CPAC. We cared deeply about the lines set by National Review. We cheered that they were against Bush's comprehensive amnesty, but lamented everything else on foreign policy. Like The Bulwark today, we took dissenting Republican congressmen and senators like Ron Paul and Walter Jones on the right, or Lincoln Chafee in the center, and turned them into tea leaves we used to divine a better future. Some among us went all the way to become "Obamacons." Actually, a few among NR's extended family went that way too. We were frustrated and encouraged whenever conservatives that had better standing in the movement admitted that, privately, they agreed with a lot of our criticisms of it. We had a following among writers for The Weekly Standard that probably would embarrass everyone if it were fully understood. What we disliked most of all, I think, was the identification of political conservatism with George W. Bush himself, a man whose second inaugural contained so much revolutionary ambition, it reminded us of comrade Lenin.
10. FCC commissioner Brendan Carr makes the case for the U.S. taking a free-market approach in its "5G" race with China. From the piece: The United States and China are competing for global leadership in 5G — the transformative new Internet technology that will soon power everything from critical infrastructure to artificial intelligence to household appliances. At stake is $500 billion in GDP and a first-mover advantage that could provide the winner with a decade of economic dominance. Even more, the race to 5G is a competition between our two systems of government — the central planning and industrial policies of China versus America's free markets. Yet reports surfaced last week that advisers to the administration are calling for the U.S. to embrace China-style nationalization as our path to 5G. That's like looking to Cuba as inspiration for reforming the U.S. health-care system. The U.S. won the race to 4G and secured billions of dollars in growth for the U.S. economy by relying on America's exceptional free-market values. We must double down on that winning playbook instead of copying China's, and that is what we at the Federal Communications Commission have been doing for the past two years.
11. Donald Trump's planned executive order on free speech might, cautions Adam Kissel, have plenty of devils in its details. From his analysis: Most commonly, institutions fail to provide academic freedom by maintaining speech codes, which are documented restrictions on speech. Most universities have them. Speech codes, by definition, do not pass constitutional muster at public colleges. They also usually conflict with a university's stated commitments to free speech and academic freedom, whether the university is public or private. Unlike social pressures and the general campus climate, speech codes are the explicit policies that a watchdog can most clearly identify as violating public policy or the Constitution. Most such policies are campus-wide. They apply in the research lab and in conversation among researchers, in person and across all media, internally and externally. They apply to faculty members and to students at all levels who are lab assistants. They apply to students in the dorms when they are discussing their research with other students and online when they are engaging with the real world. Therefore, pretty much every unacceptable part of a speech code, wherever and to whomever it applies, should be subject to a federal policy protecting academic freedom for students and faculty members. In contrast, using the executive branch to fight the merely social pressure of "political correctness," which characterizes Bias Incident Response Teams, could become a cure worse than the disease.
12. Kyle Smith watched President Trump's CPAC speech and found he was watching the Entertainer in Chief. From his analysis: When President Trump began the longest speech of his presidency by giving a full-body hug to an unsuspecting American flag at CPAC, it was one of the most cheerfully photogenic moments of his political career. What can top a president giving a PDA to Old Glory? It was wacky, it was unexpected, it was essentially unimaginable in most other countries. Don't hold your breath waiting for Angela Merkel or Emmanuel Macron to follow suit. The responses from the left were confused, disbelieving, snippy. "What the hell was that?" asked Colin Jost on Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update." You would think the point would not need to be explained to a professional entertainer, but in the Trump era many elementary things need to be explained, very slowly, to people suffering acute Trump-related loss of cognitive function. What the hell that was, was entertainment. It was fun, and it was funny. It came across as spontaneous and endearing and very, very American. And it was a reminder that in our two-party system, the more entertaining candidate pretty much always wins the election. Be a boring scold, and your chances fade.
13. Conrad Black takes off on the Cohen hearings and carpet bombs Congressional Democrats determined to acquire President Trump's scalp. From his column: As the Democrats take to the lifeboats from their foundering ship of impeachment, the unsinkables who have eschewed life vests are still declaiming on the tilting deck. Jerry Nadler is claiming the president's 1,100 public references to the Mueller inquiry as a witch-hunt constituted obstruction of justice, and the unstoppable talking head Adam Schiff is still repeating the existence of evidence of Trump–Russian collusion (that he can't identify and no one else has seen). Their fallback position, when they finally take the order to abandon ship on Russian collusion, is to make Trump's entire career their province and try to paw through everything he ever did commercially, back to childhood lemonade stands. Of course, this will be a complete failure. The president can ignore these subpoenas and restrict compliance to specific issues, and endless trips up the court ladder could easily retard the progress of this nonsense until the public has entirely lost interest. These are not the same Nadler and Schiff of two years ago, who had thin lines of foam and saliva at the corners of their mouths as they solemnly announced that they had cornered the president. The Trump-hating media did their best with Michael Cohen, a man who again lied to Congress last week, claimed to have flipped against Trump after Charlottesville nearly two years ago, and affirmed that there was no Trump–Russian collusion, although, while the president had never told him to pay off the stripper who was trying to blackmail Trump (Stormy Daniels), he had used a coded method of urging him to do so, which Cohen couldn't describe. We have descended from hearsay from a self-confessed liar to hear-intuition from the same majestic source, and the Democrats are so desperate they are having him back in the days immediately preceding his incarceration. We have descended from the drama of the conceivable removal of the world's premier officeholder to the squalid fabricated evidence of a pathetic plea bargainer, ground to powder by the partisan Mueller meat-grinder.
Commercial! For a Holy Product! Father George Rutler is well-known beyond the confines of his parish on West 34th Street in NYC. The officiant at Bill Buckley's 2008 Memorial Mass, he's written many a time for NR, he appears frequently on EWTN, and he's penned numerous books. Speaking of which, there is a new one: Grace & Truth: Twenty Steps to Embracing Virtue and Saving Civilization, highlighting numerous Catholic teachings that are essential to living an authentic Christian life. And even in these rough "mortars-incoming" times for the Holy Mother Church, he shares its perennial wisdom that he is confident will remedy society's gravest ills. I told my amigo I was going to give it some love and affection on WJ (this could lead to time off in Purgatory). Amongst the subject matters tackled in the book: - How to keep your imagination trained on God
- How mankind redefines the good to justify its sins
- How you can more effectively witness to the perfection of Christ
- How contempt for innocence deadens faith and love
- How beauty can orient us to God
- How the Catholic Church keeps human traditions alive
- How hard times and evil men highlight forgotten truths
- How evil drowns out truth with sentimentality
- And much more to help you live as a Christian in our difficult days
The cost is a mere $14.95 for the quality paperback (or $9.99 for the e-book), and the publisher is Sophia Institute Press (weird fact: for three days I was chairman of Sophia's board of directors . . . which ended when the cops arrived, but that's a tory for another day). Order your copy directly from Sophia. Lights. Camera. Punditry! 1. Graham Hillard thinks HBO's True Detective is conservative at its core. From his review: What a strange career True Detective has had. Season one of the HBO cop drama swept like a blizzard through the early weeks of 2014, astonishing viewers and critics alike with movie-star performances (Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, both superb) and some of the best set design and cinematography ever seen on television. Season two of the anthology series aired a little over a year later and proved almost immediately divisive, splitting its audience between those who believed that writer and show-runner Nic Pizzolatto could rescue an inscrutable plot and terrible casting and those who had eyes in their heads. Though a full accounting of season two's flaws is beyond the scope of this article, readers who desire a sense of them need only imagine Vince Vaughn saying the words "a good woman mitigates our baser tendencies" in a Very Serious Voice. I tuned in long enough to witness Vaughn and a paunchy Colin Farrell delivering some of the worst screen acting in the history of screens. Then, like a million other viewers, I changed the channel to literally anything else. Given such a history, season three of the series — which concluded this past Sunday night around the time star Mahershala Ali was accepting his second Academy Award — simply had to succeed. And, for the most part, it did. Set in the Arkansan Ozarks during three separate time periods (many spoilers lie ahead), TD3 follows detective Wayne Hays (Ali) on his search for Will and Julie Purcell, a pair of preteen siblings who vanish while riding their bicycles on a November evening in 1980. Over the course of a 35-year, on-and-off-again investigation, Hays ages and leaves the force, marries and is bereaved, and watches his own children grow into adulthood. The story of the season is the story of the missing siblings, yes, but it is to an even greater extent the saga of Wayne Hays's life in all of its complexity.
2. Turner Classic Movies' month-long tribute to journalism films is nothing more than a liberal celebration, says Armond White, of fake news and cynicism. From his essay: Given this evolution, journalism as depicted in Hollywood (much as in real life) no longer simply provides news; it has brazenly shifted its mission from objectivity to advocacy. We no longer have stalwart Humphrey Bogart in Deadline U.S.A. but arrogant Tom Hanks in The Post and sanctimonious Mark Ruffalo in Spotlight — portrayals that promote the #resistance media combine. A character like Sally Field's egoistic careerist in Absence of Malice would be inconceivable in today's Hollywood. TCM's nostalgia is stealth activism; Hollywood's liberal drift is emphasized while journalism's craven ruthlessness — Nathanael West's shocking point in the newspaper melodrama Miss Lonelyhearts (1958) — is ignored, just like the contemporary outrages of newspapers and media outlets that operate as partisan platforms. The mainstream media have misled the public by championing political bias, often hiding sources of information for their own benefit. Today's covey of mainstream journalists don't follow a code, but they all hold hive-mind political perspectives, and they command the same status, prominence, and wealth that high-profile journalists always have. The history of journalism in film is based in narcissistic opportunism, and the difference between the media and the public comes down to a class war. It goes back to ex-newsman and novice screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz's famous 1926 telegram beckoning newsman Ben Hecht to Hollywood: "Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots!" 3. Captain Marvel One: Heather Wilhelm finds the feminist whoop-de-doo about the film exhausting. From her essay: Gird your loins, America, for I have a bone-rattlingly powerful tale to tell: In case you haven't heard, there is a new movie hitting theaters, and it will reportedly change the way you look at the world forever. It is called "Captain Marvel," and it is based on a comic-book superhero, and the superhero is played by . . . here, you might grab your smelling salts, because this is super groundbreaking and wildly controversial in the year 2019 . . . A WOMAN. Whoa! I know! It's mind-boggling! This has never happened before, except when it happened two years ago, when Wonder Woman came out, which was also when an impressively large press cohort collectively and conveniently forgot the countless strong female leads that had occurred even before then! Remember those fevered days? Remember when an alarming number of movie critics simultaneously lost their minds over the sheer raw feminism of Wonder Woman, documenting how they cried at the theater and declaring that viewing Wonder Woman might have been the most powerful experience of their life, which should deeply worry us all if that is indeed really true?
4. Captain Marvel Two: Kyle Smith finds the feminist thought police officers' angry and flibbertigibbet-y review of the reviewers exhausting too. From his take: Social media have been buzzing this week with anger and anguish about the gender breakdown of critics of the new movie Captain Marvel. Most are men. There is an excellent reason for this: Most movie critics are men. And there is an excellent reason for that: Men are much more willing publicly to express opinions than women. There is a natural experiment on the matter, which is the letters pages of newspapers. Anyone can write a letter to the editor; there are no barriers to entry. The vast majority of those who do so are male. "All the negative reviews for #CaptainMarvel are from men," declared a tweet by the feminerd site The Mary Sue. This assertion can easily be disproven, and it immediately was, as helpful readers appended to that ridiculous claim excerpts from negative notices by Stephanie Zacharek of Time, Mara Reinstein from Us, Kristin Lopez of Culturess, Lindsey Bahr of the Associated Press, Laura Clifford of Reeling Reviews, etc. The story linked by the tweet hedges a bit with the headline, "Captain Marvel Is Fun and Most the [sic] Negative Reviews Are Written by Men . . . Shocking" before going on to state, in the body of the story, "It is telling that every negative review of the movie was written by a man." A bit of a waffler, this Mary Sue person. Somewhat of a flibbertigibbet. 5. Captain Marvel Three: To paraphrase FDR, "The only thing to fear, is Twitter itself." Kyle believes that Captain Marvel was directed with liberal tweets in mind. From the beginning of his review: Two years ago, Wonder Woman proved a female-led superhero movie could reach the highest levels of the genre, with Gal Gadot proving robust and redoubtable, yet also charming and feminine. I spent Captain Marvel waiting for Gadot. What I got was Brie Larson: charmless, humorless, a character so without texture that she might as well be made out of aluminum. Captain Marvel might be the first blockbuster movie whose animating idea is fear. Every page of the script betrays terror of what people might say about the film on social media. Give Carol Danvers a love interest? Eek! No, women can't be defined by the men in their lives! Make her vulnerable? OMG, no, that's crazy. Feminine? What century are you from if you think females should be feminine? Toward the end of the movie, when a villain preparing for an epic confrontation with Carol, the fighter pilot turned Superwoman, chides her that she will fail because she can't control her emotions, there is no tension whatsoever. We've just spent two hours watching her be utterly unfazed by anything. Giving Carol actual emotions would, of course, lead to at least 27 people calling the film misogynist on Twitter, and directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck are petrified of that.
6. Captain Marvel Four: Jonah Goldberg thinks it's a shlock-fest. 7. Armond cheers on Steven Spielberg, combatting the redefining of movies to live-streaming, Oscar-contending Netflix fare, for his fortitude (located amongst the family jewels). From the essay: Spielberg's recent box-office flops lost him cultural clout, especially with those who easily fall for the latest trends. In his earlier pronouncement on what's artistically distinctive about theatrical cinema, he dared to oppose the speciously labeled "Golden Age of Television." He has riled the lemmings who gave in to binge-watching (what academics call "corporate autism") and devoted themselves to cable presentations. They don't appreciate the heightened visual and sensual awareness that makes Spielberg's particular art form — the cinema — special. I have not been a fan of Spielberg's recent politically influenced films (Lincoln, Bridge of Spies, The B.F.G., Ready Player One), so it surprises me that he appears to be going against the progressive mob. But Spielberg's plan to address the Academy's board of governors (of which he is the most prestigious member) and propose changing the awards criteria indicates that he has beliefs that go deeper than populist politics. The anticipated articulation of these beliefs (that cinema, unlike television, is an irreducible, visually kinetic art form and is inseparable from the mass human experience) reminds true Spielberg fans that some spark of artistic valor still remains. Maybe Spielberg can no longer woo ticket buyers in the vast numbers he once did, but he seems to have found some testicular fortitude.
Podcastapalooza 1. Let's lead off with Political Beats if only to use this as the chance to praise co-host Scotty "Waddy Doo Doo" Betrman — who is the general manager of Hillsdale College's infamous 101.7 FM — for being named the Michigan Association of Broadcasters' College Radio Station of the Year. Huzzah! All that said, there's no new program . . . maybe Scot is sleeping off the celebration. 2. On The Bookmonger, John J. Miller interviews our pal Victor Davis Hanson about his new book, The Case for Trump. It's always a pleasure to listen to VDH. You can do that here. 3. Next, putting on his The Great Books cape (not sold in stores), JJM is joined by Hillsdale professor Kelly Scott Franklin to discuss Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables. Listen and learn here. 4. Whaddaweek! On the new episode of The Editors, Rich, Charlie, MBD, and David discuss the Nadler subpoenas, follow up on the North Korea summit, and speculate on Congress's upcoming vote over Trump's emergency declaration. Get the wisdom here. 5. Rich then joins up with Andy McCarthy for the new "Waiting for Mueller" episode of The McCarthy Report. Great analysis as usual, heard here. 6. On the new episode of Mad Dogs and Englishmen, Charlie and Kevin consider why the young'uns seem to be heading Left. Listen here. 7. Wretch like me: The once-lost "Night Owl" recording of Jonah and Rob Long's booze-fortified bantering on the recent NR Cruise has now been found, and makes up the content of the new episode of The Remnant. Do listen. 8. I must treat you to the show notes for the new episode of Radio Free California, in which Will and David will discuss the following: State Senator Scott Wiener's bizarro-world campaign for more teen sex; Representative Duncan Hunter's traveling rabbit and the GOP's 2020 prospects; Kamala Harris and Ronald Reagan; and more. As ever, a great show, which you can dig here. 9. In the new episode of Ordered Liberty, David and Alexandra discuss the primacy of the defense of life in the conservative movement, AOC's monumental campaign-finance hypocrisy, the challenges on the border, and much more. Catch it here. 10. Overlooked from a few weeks back, the last episode of Constitutionally Speaking, during which Jay Cost and Luke Thompson discussed the 1800 presidential election, America's first-ever power shift. Listeneth, hereth. The Six 1. Love Affair: At The Imaginative Conservative, Bradley Birzer pens an ode to bookstores. From his piece: At Hyde Brothers Books in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in the fall of 2001, I found a first American edition hardback of Christopher Dawson's seminal 1942 book, The Judgment of Nations, published by Sheed and Ward. Hyde Brothers, to this very day, remains my all-time favorite used bookstore, and I can state with absolute certainly that the discovery of the Judgement of Nations — especially after conversations with Gleaves Whitney and Winston — changed my entire world and outlook upon it. I spent my Thanksgiving break that fall reading and contemplating every aspect of that book — from its sentence structures to its arguments to its implications for academic writing. I can also state with certainty that Sam Hyde, the owner of that glorious Fort Wayne bookstore, knows his stuff.
2. Amigo Chris DeMuth pens the cover essay in Claremont Review of Books. Big, meaty, deep, important — it's about "Trumpism, Nationalism, and Conservatism." From the essay: Now the nationalist insurgencies cast a new light on these issues. The administrative state has emerged since the early 1970s partly in response to two broad social developments — high affluence and high technology. In wealthy, educated societies, many more people have the time, interest, and facility for politics, and they bring many refined, upscale issues to the table. Traditional domestic issues of jobs and economic welfare now jostle with a multitude of new ones concerned with personal health and safety, environmental quality, consumerism, and individual and group identity, dignity, lifestyle, discrimination, and "access." At the same time, modern technology, especially in mass and networked communications, has radically lowered the cost of political organization. The slightest complaint or enthusiasm can now find far-flung allies, achieve self-awareness as a political cause, and press its claims in the public square and in the Congress. On the government side, political aspirants and officeholders can now build their careers as solo entrepreneurs, by joining and servicing networks of ideological and economic interest. Party and legislative hierarchies that had long disciplined political careers and policy platforms have lost their clout. These trends have swamped Congress with demands for action that vastly exceed the capacities of legislative decision-making, with its profuse internal conflicts and elaborate procedures. They are what have led Congress to delegate policymaking to missionary agencies that can be proliferated without limit, and to sigh with relief when courts take prickly issues off the legislative docket. But they have also led to something else. While the United States, United Kingdom, and Europe have become highly affluent, educated, and networked in general, some of us have become so to a much greater degree than others, and the changes in government structure have reflected our proclivities. Declarative government suits the interests and values of Anywheres, while representative government suits the interests and values of Somewheres.
3. Daniel McCarthy's recent First Things essay proposing A New Conservative Agenda comes up for inspection at Law & Liberty, where Richard Reinsch's thoughtful response finds good in it, but warns against "meat-cleaver economic nationalism." From his essay: McCarthy's broader claim is that conservatives must use the state to shore up, if not expand, the middle class to forestall America becoming something that resembles a failed Latin American country: middle class outmigration, a gated and guarded elite, and passive, when they aren't restive, populations who work in service jobs for the elite or the government. It's a haunting specter, and one that you almost see the rudiments of beginning to take shape in California. This reality of an America bereft of widely shared middle class prosperity is the imperative that leads McCarthy to call for a program of state action. But how will the state do this? Some might say that here the arguments are void for vagueness. I would note that in my native state of Tennessee and the Southeastern region, many manufacturing jobs have been created. Much of this can be attributed, though, to good old-fashioned policies like right-to-work, low taxes, and a favorable regulatory environment. But that's old-time religion. On to the state. In a follow-up piece in the Spectator USA, McCarthy says that typical Hayekian and libertarian objections to his plan (you know, the knowledge problem, agency capture, price distortion through clumsy central action) are beside the point. We've got a country to save. That concern, he says, is far more central than any classical liberal or libertarian concerns about crony capitalism, rent-seeking, or the typical problems created by the broad use of state power on behalf of economic nationalism. We need to fortify the middle class or we'll all be gardeners or delivery boys for Bezos. But I embellish. Amazon will have robots delivering its packages. Who will make the robots? Unspoken but hovering in McCarthy's analysis are static economic assumptions, I think. He says, "What factories remain in the emerging America will be ever more automated, while the American workforce will be further channeled into the service sector." There's no sense of what has been true in American economic life: that jobs will be created that we aren't even aware of yet. Put differently, how many Americans will be engaged in jobs whose scope, skills, and worth do not even exist. How many currently hold jobs that did not exist in type when they graduated from high school or college, or first started working?
4. At The Catholic Thing, Robert Royal summarized the Vatican's "Abuse Summit," and the tone-deafness that seemed to permeate. From his report: Reform of the kind we need — however much anger and frustration we are going to feel in the meantime — is going to be a long-term project in which we are all going to have to assume new responsibilities. All the more reason not to be swept away by emotions, but to maintain targeted, reasoned pressure on Rome and everywhere else in the Church. We've been told that stronger procedures, investigations, documents – maybe even files on McCarrick – are forthcoming. But we know how easy it is for such things to give the impression of action without really doing anything. They need sharp scrutiny for years to come. Priests and laity have succeeded in reforming Rome in the past, and we can do it again if we work at it. But first, a candid reckoning of the last few days. The summit suffered from self-inflicted weaknesses from the outset. To identify the main culprit as "abuse of power," i.e., clericalism, was to adopt a Marxist understanding of the world as primarily constituted by power relations. It's also one of the logical results of ideological manipulation, however, carried out earlier by promoters of the sexual revolution. For decades, we were told that rape is not about sex but power (sex per se is always to be defended). But if a priest beats up a young person, that's violence – and abuse of power. When he rapes a young person, it's violence and abuse of power, but also lust, pride, and the whole set of mortal sins. There's little evidence that we use these categories and think like Catholics, even in the Church, anymore.
5. Gary Saul Morson, writing in The New Criterion, explains why Tolstoy's War and Peace is "The Greatest of All Novels." From his essay: Tolstoy's amazing talent to see complexity and irregularities overlooked by others not only explains his astonishing realism but also serves as a counterargument to all the "simplifiers." Readers of Russian literature appreciate its psychological depth, but they are usually unaware that for Tolstoy, as for Dostoevsky and Chekhov, psychology served as an ideological weapon against prevailing ideology. Let me mention a few remarkable instances of how Tolstoy shows that our minds are much more complex than we imagine. Early in the book, the cunning hypocrite Prince Vasily, hovering near the deathbed of Pierre's father, maneuvers to cheat Pierre out of his inheritance. When the old man dies, Prince Vasily unexpectedly acts out of character. " 'Ah my friend,' he murmured, taking Pierre by the elbow, and there was a weakness and sincerity in his voice that Pierre had never heard before. 'How greatly we sin, how we deceive—and for what? I am nearing sixty, my friend — I too — it all ends in death, all . . .' And he wept." Another writer might make this moment a turning point in Vasily's life, or at least allow it to reveal qualities that we will see again, but nothing of the sort happens in War and Peace. So far as we know, Prince Vasily is never sincere again. Tolstoy knows that people are never entirely consistent, that character includes acting out of character; and he demonstrates an uncanny sense of when and how someone might do so. Vasily maneuvers Pierre into marrying his daughter Helen, who is as corrupt as her father. Pierre suspects her of infidelity, perhaps with his old friend Dolokhov. At a banquet, Dolokhov teases Pierre with intimations he knows his wife rather too well. When Dolokhov grabs a program a waiter has handed Pierre, the latter loses his temper and challenges Dolokhov to a duel. It is at this point that he becomes convinced of his wife's guilt "and is severed from her forever." Pierre will doubtless remember, and careless readers do not notice, that he does not challenge Dolokhov because he is convinced Dolokhov is having an affair with his wife. On the contrary, Pierre becomes convinced Dolokhov is having an affair with his wife because he has challenged him. Since that is absurd, memory reverses causality to substitute a more comprehensible story. In this way, people are taken in by the mental equivalent of an optical illusion. No one but Tolstoy would notice this fact about the mind.
6. In Providence magazine, Travis Wussow reports on the disdain Red Chinese officials have for the First Commandment. From his piece: An outlet focused on human rights in China has reported that in November of last year a squad from the "patrol inspection team" for supervising religious practice in Henan Province arrived at a Three-Self Patriotic Movement church in Luoyang city. The squad combed through the church, and a member of the squad stopped and settled on a display of the Ten Commandments under the pulpit. The official determined that the First Commandment, "You shall have no other gods before me," was inconsistent with Chinese policy, and they proceeded to strike it from the display. According to the outlet Bitter Winter Magazine, the Chinese official responded to the pastor by saying, "Xi Jinping opposes this statement. Who dares not to cooperate? If anyone doesn't agree, they are fighting against the country. This is a national policy. You should have a clear understanding of the situation. Don't go against the government." This effort by Chinese authorities to censor the scriptures is an outrageous attempt to assert control on not just the practice of Christianity but the meaning of Christianity itself.
BONUS: At Commentary, Noah Rothman checks out the Dems' failure to call out Anti-Semitism, a mere month after setting an intolerance standard over Virginia governor Ralph Northam's blackface fiasco. From his piece: It was only one month ago that the Democratic Party was united in disgust after Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam admitted to appearing in photographs as a younger man in blackface. Democrats, Nancy Pelosi among them, insisted that no apology would suffice. Northam had to go. Virginia's governor did not consent to his own exile, but Democrats nonetheless established a standard. "It is essentially this," I wrote at the time. "Any act of naked bigotry, even the bourgeois sort that stems from ignorance or social desirability biases, is unacceptable and unforgivable." Confronted today with a kind of prejudice to which not all its members are entirely hostile, Democrats have revealed how hollow those condemnations really were. The battle for the future of the Democratic Party isn't over yet, but, for now, Ilhan Omar is winning.
A Reader Writes. From Sue, in Waterloo, a subscriber to our beloved magazine and consumer of Weekend Jolt and other NR-emailed missives. She is cool and smart and shares her view on how conservatives should be addressing the rising appeal of socialism: Dear Mr. Fowler, Thank you for your daily emails in my Inbox. I read them all. I am also a subscriber to National Review. I am wondering if the recent warnings about how “Socialism doesn’t work – see Venezuela” are the right approach to counter all this talk of how socialism is the answer for America. The way I see it, the fact that socialism doesn’t work, true as it is, isn’t the main point that Americans should be hearing. A few common expenses that benefit everyone, like highway and bridge maintenance, meat inspection, and national defense, do not constitute socialism. “From each according to his ability” is the crux of the matter we should be focusing on when facing all these wide-eyed, idealist utopians. What the socialist tells the worker (or producer of goods or services) is this: “You go ahead and do what you do. Do your best. You just work. WE will decide who receives the fruits of your labor, how much they will pay for it, and how much of the proceeds you get to keep. You do production; we will handle distribution.” The other name for this scenario is Slavery. And that’s what’s wrong with socialism. I believe this is the message we need to get out there, to as many true Americans as possible. Sue
Sue, I like how you think. And you're right. You come to NYC, you come visit. But none of this "Mr. Fowler" lingo allowed! A Dios The Lenten fasting has started. Your Corpulence — whose first memory of buying clothes is Mother Dear taking him to the "Husky Boys" department at Gimbels — is imagining that 40 Days and 40 Nights in the wild (or the suburbs) might inspire the soul and also lessen the girth. In the meanwhile, we give prayers of thanks that John McCormack, a Weekly Standard refugee (but a former NR intern), has become an NRI Fellow and Washington Correspondent for your favorite conservative website. Welcome aboard Johnny Boy! Until next week, when the blarney will be thick (pronounced "tick" by the neighbors in County Woodlawn, Bronx), do be good to all, nice to all, sweet to all. Pet a dog, hug a spouse, and buy a ticket on NR's 2019 Canada / New England Conservative Cruise. God's Graces be with You and Yours, Jack Fowler Who can accept criticisms of his writing skills or lack of such at jfowler@nationalreview.com. | 
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