Buy Me Some Peanuts and Cracker Jacks  Dear Weekend Jolter, Time, friends, to PLAY BALL! Once upon a 1978, your humble servant, hawking vittles at The House that Ruth Built — the lowest of men on the totem pole — was relegated to selling ice cream on cold nights. But for whatever hitch, there was that one sunny Labor Day doubleheader against the Tigers when The Young Vendor was assigned peanuts, and sold many a bag thanks to deadly aim and the guys in Row R, Seat 17, so proud to show My Date in Seat 18 his ability to one-hand the tossed parcel of salted nuts. Yes, sweet memories of The Bronx are possible. But . . . long before September's games in lengthening shadows, there must come Opening Day, in all its glory, unlocking the spirit of spring, providing the opportunity for camaraderie and bonding, for the sounds of cheers and bat-meets-ball cracks and ball-meets-mitt pops and throngs singing the National Anthem, for elevating 'Murica in all its 'Muricany greatness. God bless you Abner Doubleday. Our Esteemed Editor saw fit to make this institution's flagship product boast of an Opening Day-ish cover. Bless him too. See more about the contents of the new issue (April 8, 2019) of National Review below, amidst the usual smorgasbord of links and foolishness. Which we will get to after . . . . . . This Commercial for the NR 2019 Canada/New England Cruise. We Have a Discount! Our Canada/New England Conservative Cruise is sailing August 24 to 31, commencing in Montreal and concluding in Boston, along the way visiting Quebec City; Bar Harbor; Halifax and Sydney in Nova Scotia; Charlottetown on Prince Edward Island; and scenic cruising of the glorious Saint Lawrence River and Gulf. Now do me this favor: Picture yourself, along with hundreds of fellow conservatives and top conservative speakers, enjoying seven full days and nights of revelry and scintillating discussion of the state of the conservative movement, international affairs and the economy, America’s culture, and so much more. Are you one of those folks who always wanted to come on an NR cruise? Well, make it this one. It's a great voyage made even greater by our exclusive program, which consists of: - seven scintillating seminars featuring NR's editors and guest speakers;
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Get complete information — and reserve your beautiful cabin on Holland America Line's luxurious Zaandam — at www.nrcruise.com. And reserve your cabin by April 15 to get a $200 early-booking discount! Editorials 1. Democrat presidential wannabes have an increasing problem with the concept behind the S in US of A. Their new bugaboo is the electoral college. From our editorial defending it: Insofar as there does exist a serious argument against the Electoral College, it is increasingly indistinguishable from the broader argument against the role that the states play within the American constitutional order, and thus from the argument against federalism itself. President Reagan liked to remind Americans that, far from serving as regional administrative areas of the nation-state, the states are the essential building blocks of America's political, legal, and civic life. In our era of viciously divisive politics, the states are arguably more necessary than they have ever been. Critics of the Electoral College bristle at the insistence that it prevents New York and California from imposing their will on the rest of the country. But the Electoral College guarantees that candidates who seek the only nationally elected office in America must attempt to appeal to as broad a geographic constituency as possible — large states and small, populous and rural — rather than retreating to their preferred pockets and running up the score. The alternative to this arrangement is not less political contention or a reduction in anger; it is more of both.
2. See the link below to Rich Lowry's column, but before that, we blast America's most infamous hate-hustling group, the Southern Poverty Law Center. From the editorial: In 1994, the Montgomery Advertiser reported that the Southern Poverty Law Center was a toxic atmosphere for its black employees, who said they "felt threatened and banded together." At the time, SPLC co-founder Morris Dees pooh-poohed the report, claiming that the "most discriminated people in America today are white men when it comes to jobs." This month, SPLC employees notified management that "allegations of mistreatment, sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and racism threaten the moral authority of this organization and our integrity along with it." Dees, 82, was fired. By any fair or rigorous standard, it's difficult to impugn Dees's character based on either the old charge of racial discrimination or the current, still-vague allegations. But Dees's leadership of the SPLC has done enough to impugn his character, and by the SPLC's own standard, both incidents could be enough to designate the organization a "hate group." Far from being a nonpartisan watchdog genuinely dedicated to exposing racism and extremism, the SPLC has spent recent decades stoking fear and hostility for fun and funds. That is Dees's legacy as he departs.
If You Were Looking for Links to 12 Spectacular and Wise NRO Articles and Essays, You Can Stop Looking. Here They Are. 1. An absolutely wonderful treatment, remembrance, love letter to the late Jeff Hart has been written by Jay Nordlinger. Read it here. 2. Matthew Continetti weighs in on "Operation Varsity Blues" and finds the college-admissions scandal another example of the bankruptcy of the elites. From his article: The scandal also points to the flagrant hypocrisy of Hollywood liberalism. No class is more moralistic, more hectoring, more obnoxiously activist than the Hollywood Left. They barrage Americans with displays of their virtue, their calls to humanitarianism, their paeans to multiculturalism and feminism, their slanders of President Trump, Vice President Pence, Republicans in general, and conservatives in particular. And they have great sway in national politics. A Democrat's future depends on the beneficence of Hollywood donors — donors who were well represented among the individuals charged in Operation Varsity Blues. The entertainment-industry liberals talk a good game. But look at their actions. Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey are synonymous with predation. Jussie Smollett was a B-list celebrity until he faked a hate crime against himself and blamed it on supporters of Trump. Now we have actors breaking the law so their kids can go to USC. Why on earth should we take political cues from these people? By what right do they portray themselves as enlightened, as advanced, as more sophisticated than half the country, even while they lie, cheat, steal, and assault? Plenty of baddies doing nasty things understand that donations to the Democratic party and its interest groups insulate them from scrutiny and criticism — right until the moment they go to jail. These people aren't interested in the common good. They are interested in themselves.
3. Joseph Loconte profiles Oxford mathematician John Lennox and his role as the intellectual defender of Christianity. From the piece: Now, at 75, Lennox has distinguished himself internationally for his intellectual defense of Christianity. He has debated — and, according to his admirers, bested — celebrated atheists such as Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Peter Singer. A fellow in the philosophy of science at Oxford, he writes books that explore the essential compatibility between the scientific quest, rightly understood, and religious belief. Newton, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo: All believed in a God who created and sustained the universe. "Instead of the founders of modern science being hindered by their belief in God," Lennox reminds me, "their belief in God was the motor that drove their science." Citing Lewis's approach in works such as The Abolition of Man, Lennox assails the notion that science is the only pathway to truth, or that it can explain the mystery of the human condition. In his sights are thinkers such as Peter Atkins, a professor of chemistry at Oxford who claims that "there is no reason to suppose that science cannot deal with every aspect of existence." Lennox discerns in this a self-defeating materialism. In books such as God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? he argues that the scientist's confidence in reason ultimately depends on the existence of a rational and purposeful Creator. Otherwise, our thoughts are nothing more than electro-chemical events, the chattering of soul-less synapses. "If you take the atheistic, naturalistic, materialistic view, you're going to invalidate the reasoning process," he says, "because in the end you're going to say that the brain is simply the end product of a blind, unguided process. If that's the case, why should you trust it?"
4. America's civic education is in desperate need of reinvigoration. Alexander Khan believes that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson show the way. From his essay: Rebuilding a system of liberal education that teaches our students to become active citizens will be far from easy. Fortunately, we have a guide in the famous friendship between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. These two great Founders, though often at intellectual odds, maintained their roughly 50-year friendship through intellectual discussion, investigation, and a desire to learn. In 1784, John Adams wrote of Jefferson, "He is an old Friend with whom I have often had occasion to labour at many a knotty Problem." Adams later wrote to Jefferson that this "intimate correspondence with you… is one of the most agreeable events in my life." For these two men, friendship and education were intimately connected. What does a spirit of friendship mean in the setting of liberal education? Looking to the letters of Jefferson and Adams, it seems that this spirit is not one of simple open-mindedness, but rather of committed engagement with each topic, idea, and argument. It involves a readiness and ability to defend one's positions and to engage with the ideas of others, and cultivates enthusiasm for that exchange. All involved care enough to prepare, so all are pushed to think their arguments through. The discussion is unencumbered, unrestricted, and free. This leads friends to think deeply, defend vigorously, and argue fully. The best cases are made, and the strongest counters are given. Friendship fosters true intellectual engagement.
5. In his new column, Rich Lowry clobbers the MSM-loving Southern Poverty Law Center, now enduring (how sweet it is!) "a remarkable comeuppance for an organization that has weaponized political correctness for its own money-grubbing." From his piece: Imagine a left-wing outfit with the same shoddy standards as Joe McCarthy, but with a better business sense. Cleareyed, fair-minded people on the left have long recognized the SPLC as a fundraising tool masquerading as a civil-rights group, but its absurd overreach has in recent years earned skeptical coverage from the likes of The Atlantic and PBS. The SPLC never sees honest disagreement over contentious issues if it can see "hate" instead. It named the Family Research Council and Alliance Defending Freedom hate groups for opposing gay marriage. It designated perfectly respectable restrictionist immigration groups like the Center for Immigration Studies for the offense of favoring less immigration. It labeled the American Enterprise Institute scholar Christina Hoff Sommers as complicit in "male supremacy."
6. Rachel Hoff and Roger Zakheim find much to be desired in the Trump Administration's gimmicky plan to further fund America's military. From the beginning of their analysis: As the details of the Trump administration's budget request trickle out in the coming weeks, President Trump is likely to tout it as a fulfillment of his promise to rebuild the military. And, on the surface, it's easy to see why. The $750 billion top-line military-spending request represents the real 3 to 5 percent growth most defense experts believe is necessary to recover from the damaging effects of sequestration and meet the challenges outlined in the National Defense Strategy. But as much as the administration's top-line defense number matters, it's also important to look beneath the surface at how it proposes to spend all that money. And viewed that way, the budget's flaws become much more apparent. The administration's request relies on a number of work-arounds to reach the $750 billion that will allow President Trump and Pentagon leaders to make good on their commitment to rebuilding the military. The most obvious and egregious is an inflated budget for Overseas Contingency Operations, or OCO, which is intended to fund warfighting needs. The president's budget includes $174 billion for OCO, including $9 billion to cover shortfalls in military-construction funding created when President Trump declared a national emergency to fund the border wall.
7. Andy McCarthy finds a piece of proposed legislation — the "Vladimir Putin Transparency Act" — is an example of everything that is wrong with Congress and its bend to delegate its own authority to the Executive Branch. From his analysis: In our system, investigation and prosecution are functions of executive discretion and judicial due process. This is why, to take the most notable examples, the Constitution prohibits bills of attainder (which single out a person for punishment without trial) and ex post facto laws (which criminalize conduct that was legal when committed). The Framers wanted Congress to write the laws but stay out of the enforcement business — the two tasks in one set of hands being, notoriously, a recipe for tyranny. While Congress may urge the executive to conduct an investigation, it has no constitutional authority to direct that this be done. Not surprisingly, then, when we read the legislation closely, we find that that the Putin Act, if ever signed into law, would express the "Sense of Congress" that the executive branch (specifically, U.S. intelligence agencies) "should": (1) "expose key networks that the corrupt political class in Russia uses to hide the money it steals, (2) "stifle Russian use of hidden financial channels," and (3) "do more to expose the corruption of Vladimir Putin." But it would not mandate an investigation. (By the way, did Republicans realize that the provision about Russia's use of hidden financial channels is a shot across the bow at the president? It says investigators should "stifle" Russian "real estate investments"; it has been widely reported that Kremlin-connected Russians have invested heavily in Trump Organization properties. Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff says his sprawling investigation of Trump businesses will focus on money laundering — which obviously entails tracing the potentially criminal sources of Russian funds used to purchase Trump real-estate offerings.)
8. Conrad Black looks at Beto and find a "boutique candidate" who will get consumed by a hectoring MSM and the Woke Police. And then comes the whaling. No words minced here: It is an operation to praise, but when Beto O'Rourke is comparing the Battle of Normandy to saving the earth from carbon use as he waves his arms around in an Iowa high school, the electoral process is becoming worryingly unserious. (Cory Booker, who is no prize for intellectual depth either, was using the same metaphor in a similar Iowa setting, but spared us the frenetic hand signals.) O'Rourke's great and presumably unsought contribution to this campaign is that he is going to attract the fire of all the media, very soon. They are already shifting. The immense, grunting media monsters, snorting fire and pawing the ground and trying in their Jurassic minds to think of how to lay this president low, have picked up the succulent scent of a ludicrous and clangorous political imposture ardently seeking its own destruction. The media of America will not allow this asinine mockery of a presidential campaign to go another week before it picks up this wild, scrawny, noisy, incoherent nincompoop and shreds him. Somehow, he raised $8.5 million running for the U.S. Senate in Texas, and came close to ousting Ted Cruz. A special psychiatric counsel should be appointed to find out what peculiar mass mental infirmity afflicted millions of Texans to consider this quack. Let us be clear: This isn't a matter of policy differences. This man is a boob, a dolt. He is vulgar and ungrammatical, knows nothing, and makes no sense. He can't keep his mouth shut for five seconds and he is wired like an early helicopter with a vertical rotor on its tail: he can't gabble out his nonsense without waving his arms around. He knows everything, meaning nothing, is incapable of making a correct factual statement, and throws in the f-word for emphasis, even where there is nothing to emphasize. Yet he is performing a valuable role: This is the candidate the media have been looking for. They savagely attacked Donald Trump three years ago because they thought he was a rich vulgarian blowhard who couldn't speak in sentences, didn't know anything, couldn't run a two-car funeral, stole his money, and colluded illegally with a foreign power. There was never any truth to any of that, apart from Trump's boorishness at times, which has almost completely ended. But Trump had some weak moments.
BETO RELATED: The subject is rich for parody, and Big Jim Geraghty provides the take-up of a glossy-mag profile. 9. You say you want a revolution: Kevin Williamson gives the psychological forensic profile of today's Democrat leaders who, like many sociopaths, want to burn things down. From the beginning of his essay: The Senate. The Electoral College. The First Amendment. The Second Amendment. The Supreme Court. Is there a part of our constitutional order that the Democrats have not pledged to destroy? There are some Democrats out there in the sticks — a lot of them, in fact — who simply don't understand the constitutional order. They believe that the United States is a democracy, John Adams et al. be damned, and, in fact, they often are confused by the frankly anti-democratic features of the American order, because they have been taught (theirs is a pseudo-education consisting of buzzwords rather than an actual education) that "democratic" means "good" and "undemocratic" means "bad." But the Democrats in Washington are a different story. Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris went to law school. They understand the American constitutional order just fine. And they hate it.
SUGGESTION: Read the piece while Talking Heads' Burning Down the House plays in the background. 10. More Kevin: Gun-manufacturer Remington is being sued over the Sandy Hook school killings, a tort perversion permitted by Connecticut's politicized judiciary. À la Willie Sutton, KDW sees the obvious: This is about money. From his piece: The lawsuit against Remington alleges that the company's marketing practices contributed to the Sandy Hook massacre. "Remington may never have known Adam Lanza, but they had been courting him for years," a lawyer for the plaintiffs said. But it is not clear that Remington courted Lanza at all — and it is quite clear that the company never courted him successfully, inasmuch as he stole the Bushmaster rifle he used in the crimes from his mother, whom he murdered. Connecticut has a law against "unfair trade practices," which is a very odd way of looking at a mass murder. So, in sum: Remington's private-equity owners acquired Bushmaster and formed a new company. That company sold a rifle to a distributor, which in turn sold it to a federally licensed gun dealership, which in turned sold it — legally — to Adam Lanza's mother. She was murdered, and her rifle was used in a horrifying massacre . . . and . . . if you squint . . . this somehow leads back to the marketing department at Remington, which advertised the Bushmaster rifle as a cousin to the standard-issue U.S. military rifle, which it is. The lawsuit against Remington is bogus. It has little to do with Connecticut commercial law and everything to do with a substantive gun-control agenda and the opportunistic inclination to wring money from institutions that have a great deal of it.
11. John Yoo and James Phillips file the tenth and final part of their series, in which they seek to lay out a course for constitutional restoration. This last essay considers the Fourth Amendment, which precludes unreasonable searches and seizures, and how privacy exists in a high-tech world. From the essay's outset: We close our series on the new Roberts Court and restoration of the Constitution's original understanding with the issue most distant from the Framing: the rise of a new high-tech world. We now hold the equivalent of yesterday's supercomputers in our pockets. Communications occur instantly, from encrypted messages to Twitter blasts that reach millions. Entrepreneurs make fortunes by analyzing and harvesting the 2.5 quintillion bytes of data produced each day. Governments search the data to find terrorist networks or launch foreign propaganda. From business to politics, success depends on reading the tea leaves we electronically leave behind with social-media posts, texts and emails, or Google searches. As inevitably as the weather, the hand of regulation has followed. While using the data for itself, the state seeks to regulate the businesses and individuals that create it. We have only begun to figure out whether the rules of privacy that governed paper records, telephone calls, and the mails will continue to apply, and how, to emails, texts, video clips, and social media. Not only does technology create more data that individuals want to protect; it also expands the government's ability to search and manipulate. Where the line will fall between new technologies, regulation, and privacy will likely become the greatest legacy of Chief Justice John Roberts's Supreme Court. The Court will have the opportunity to correct the mistakes of its past. In the 1950s and '60s, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren sought to adapt constitutional rules to electronic technologies such as the telephone. The liberal Warren Court ignored the Bill of Rights' text and original meaning as part of a broader effort to remake the criminal procedure of the Constitution in its own image. We may again be facing a similar revolution, not out of fear of police and prosecutors, but out of unfounded worries about a Big Brother government. How the Roberts Court handles these coming issues will reveal much about how originalist the Court actually is.
12. Brad Polumbo smacks the Democrats' plans to have an LGBT presidential debate later this year as nothing more than a stunt. From his piece: Like much of what's pushed by progressive LGBT advocates, this forum is a purely symbolic gesture that exemplifies the natural consequences of identity politics run amok. Pleasant buzzwords aside, an LGBT-only presidential debate is entirely pointless and only serves to distract from more pressing issues. Worse, it inflates the reputation of hyper-partisan gay-advocacy organizations that often do more harm than good. What exactly would be debated? It's hard to imagine any potential Democratic challenger offering a dissenting viewpoint on issues like gay marriage or transgender inclusion in the military. If anything, this "debate" will likely devolve into a revolving cycle of virtue-signaling agreement, with each candidate competing to sound more sympathetic to the gay plight than the others. That's not productive — it's performative. Indulging such identitarian excesses would come at a cost. After all, there is a finite number of debates to be had during a limited campaign season. So any debate dedicated exclusively to LGBT issues is a debate not dedicated to the opioid crisis, poverty, the national debt, or any of the other countless maladies plaguing our society. In a time when gay-marriage rights are settled law, assigning entire news cycles and presidential forums to "debate" the less significant LGBT issues still in contention seems, well, nonsensical.
I Don't Care If I Ever Get Back . . . From Reading the New Issue of National Review And herewith we share links to and selections from four pieces of brilliance offered by the April 8 issue, which you could be reading right now if you had a subscription to NRPLUS. 1. Michael Brendan Dougherty's cover essay explains Why We Love the Game. (Hey, it's easier when you are a Yankee fan!) Anyway, from the article: If baseball is a republic unto itself, more must be said about the peculiarities and glories of minor baseball leagues that nurture young talent and nurse major-leaguers who are recovering from injury. Compare them with the junior circuits of other sports. College football and basketball exist for the colleges, their alumni, and cable television networks. Big college sports is a moneymaking bonanza for everyone but the athletes who generate all the value. The best college games are played on primetime cable television. These sports belong to specific college towns, and the benefits flow to certain regions. Their pageantry is beautiful and grand, but it exists as if behind a gated community. Unless you belong to the school in some way—a proposition that is expensive—the victories can never truly be "yours." Meanwhile, minor-league baseball is played in most midsize and small cities across the country, leaving only a few Plains states out. The major-league teams, through their affiliates, reach out deep into the country. For some fan bases, minor league teams become extensions of the major-league squad that they love. The most dutiful fans of the Mets from Queens will gather together in Coney Island for their Cyclones. The Boston Red Sox grabbed the Sea Dogs franchise in nearby Portland, and now Mainers can watch balls sail over their own version of the Green Monster in left field. There is a humility in minor-league baseball. The pay is small, perhaps too small. The crowds are usually small, or barely existent in the low-A leagues. Sometimes the towns are small, and the culture of the minor-league game still has something of a local circus and vaudeville about it. Former National League MVPs such as Ryan Howard and future Hall of Famers such as Chase Utley put on their cleats and mash homers in small towns such as Batavia, N.Y., wearing jerseys that say "Muckdogs" on them. But minor-league fans are passionate fans. And these local franchises, often owned and supported by local businessmen, put on a great family-friendly show several nights a week. Aspiring relief pitchers and minor-league lifers throw pails of water at running plastic sausages. And as July comes around you usually get a game and fireworks. The Muckdogs had their own team poet, Bill Kauffman, who once worked for the American Enterprise Institute.
2. Dan McLaughlin, better known to many by his @baseballcrank handle, sings the praises of Tom Seaver, who announced recently his dementia and an end to his public life. It's a beautiful tribute. From its start: There's a saying that "athletes die twice: once when they take their last breath and the other when they hang it up." For baseball legend Tom Seaver, a third death looms: dementia, which led the 74-yearold former pitcher to announce that he will make no further public appearances. He will be missing when the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Miracle Mets is commemorated in June. For a man as proud of his cerebral presence on the ballfield as Seaver was, retiring to a vineyard in California is preferable to being in public when he no longer feels in command. In his 1967–81 heyday, "Tom Terrific" was always in command. He epitomized the perfectly balanced pitcher: power and control, brains and brawn, fastball and slider, talent and work ethic, strong arm and strong legs, consistency and durability, individual success and team triumph. He was handsome, dignified, quotable, a fierce competitor and a respected gentleman, the beau ideal sports hero. Other star athletes got bachelor pads in Manhattan; Seaver lived in Greenwich, Conn. He was often compared to Christy Mathewson, the dashing early-20th-century New York Giants icon of brains, sportsmanship, and integrity. Like Matty, who came from Factoryville, Pa., Seaver seemed a born New York sophisticate despite an uncosmopolitan upbringing in 1950s Fresno, Calif. Seaver made himself into a great pitcher. A skinny teen, he filled into a man's body in the Marines and working in his father's raisin factory. Starting at Fresno City College, he impressed coaches enough to transfer to Rod Dedeaux's storied baseball program at the University of Southern California. Behind the seamless consistency of Seaver's games and seasons were an intense competitive drive, relentless sweat, and an obsessive, scientific study of pitching: the mechanics of throwing, the art of keeping batters off-balance, the business of knowing everyone's weaknesses. After his playing career, he became a broadcaster and expert-at-large on pitching. Into his seventies, Seaver was apt to spend long hours working in his vineyard, and not because he needed the money. It's who he is.
3. Michael Doran provides an insightful examination of Victor Davis Hanson's new bestseller, The Case for Trump. From the review: Three-quarters of Hanson's book focuses not on Trump himself or on his policies but on the awesome gap that has grown between "the two Americas"—the people in Selma and similar towns and cities ravaged by globalism, and the bicoastal elite. "Their once prosperous and stable community did not really deserve to erode," Hanson writes of his fellow townsmen. "They were and are certainly not lazy or stupid people, and they had sought all sorts of remedies to redress their plights and save their town." These people are not in a position to write book-length analyses about why they came to embrace an orange-hued, uncouth Manhattan billionaire as their defender. But Hanson is. The unstated goal of The Case for Trump is to give a voice to these voiceless people. Hanson has been living on the fault line between cosmopolitan and small-town America for all his adult life. Is there a better analyst of it? Is there, for example, another conservative pundit who is as well versed in the intellectual origins of the social-justice movement? Thanks to the losing academic battles that Hanson waged in the 1990s and early 2000s against multiculturalism and intersectionality, the academic fads that spawned contemporary progressivism, his familiarity with these doctrines is thorough. This intimacy adds nuance to his analyses that is lacking in many other conservative writers. On an intellectual level, those movements are shoddy and threadbare, but as tools for imposing discipline on organizations—academic, bureaucratic, or corporate—they are highly effective. They foster an institutional culture that silences dissent. Merely to question the progressives' "diversity" initiatives is to declare oneself a bigot, a person of "privilege" seeking to keep minorities down.
4. Douglas Murray explores the rapidly spreading virus of anti-Semitism among the Left. From his essay: There is a fine example of this in Gregor von Rezzori's luridly titled masterpiece Memoirs of an Anti-Semite (1979). In "Youth," one of the five stories that make up that magnificent novel, he details a proud young man's relationship with an older Jewish woman. For all the benefits she brings him, this "Black Widow" can never fully win over her young gentile lover. For she is on one hand to him an embodiment of a type of Jewish shop owner of the Central European pre-war stripe, and for this he hates her. Where she goes with him, people know whom he is with and that she is a Jew. He worries about being seen with her and is mortified when people he knows from the rest of his life see them at a restaurant. Yet whenever she attempts to bridge the canyon in any way, to adapt, to integrate into the world of her proud young gentile, she makes another mistake. The only thing worse than a Jew who refuses to integrate is a Jew who makes even the slightest effort to integrate. A Jew who is attempting to integrate looks "suspicious," "artificial," and "unsuitable." Rezzori's narrator reveals that "we saw the so-called assimilated Jew as aping us." To be Jewish is to be different. To try to be the same is to be Jewish. It isn't that the accusations and hate can come from a couple of directions. The problem is that they can always come from every direction imaginable. Europe has been relearning this lesson. Last year one of the heads of the Jewish community in Berlin warned German Jews not to wear a kippa or other sign of their faith in public in the major German cities. Of course it is not as though Germany has had any deficit of anti-Semites. But the warning struck an icy chord for at least two reasons. The first was surprise that this situation, of Jews being at risk of attack in public places for being identifiably Jewish, had come about so swiftly again in Germany. The second was that everybody knew, though few wanted to say, just what was the cause of this resurgence in threats to Jews. On this occasion the cause was not the neo-Nazi movements that still bubble in the subterranean recesses of that country. The threat came from the fact that Germany has taken in a large number of migrants from Muslim countries in recent decades and that not all of these people viewed Jews with the eyes of most post-Holocaust Germans.
Podcastapalooza 1. On the new episode of The Editors, Rich, Charlie, David, and Michael discuss the New Zealand shooting, Elizabeth Warren's Electoral College jihad, and Beto's chances. You gotta listen, and you can do that here. 2. Hear me heathens and wizards and servants of sin! And you too. On the new episode of The Great Books, John J. Miller discusses the very first novel, Cervantes' Don Quixote, with Hillsdale professor Todd Mack. It's not an impossible dream: you can indeed listen to the podcast here. 3. The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg does a policy deep-dive into the opioid crisis, with our host picking the big brain of practicing psychiatrist Dr. Sally Satel. Catch it here. 4. More JJM: On the new episode of The Bookmonger, he is joined by Fr. William Miscamble, author of American Priest, to discuss his book and its subject, the legendary, long-time Notre Dame University president, Father Ted Hesburgh. Win one for the Miller and listen here. 5. On a sorta-recent episode of Political Beats, hosts Great Scot Bertram and Jeffy-Pop Blehar are joined by guest Jay Cost — co-host of Constitutionally Speaking — on the new episode of Political Beats to discuss The Black Crowes. Strap on the headphones and listen here. 6. Speaking of Constitutionally Speaking, on the new episode, Jay and Luke discuss Marbury v. Madison and the origins of judicial review. Hear ye, hear ye, here. 7. It's the all-Beto episode of Mad Dogs and Englishmen, with Charlie ("I don't get it.") and Kevin discussing the wannabe's character and chances. Pay attention and gain insight here. 8. On the new episode of Ordered Liberty, David and Alexandra handicap the Democratic field, break down how Twitter is pulling Democrats dangerously left, and mount the ramparts to defend the Electoral College. Ride to the sound of the gunfire, here. 9. On an jam-packed episode of Radio Free California, Will and David discuss Devin Nunes's Twitter suit, how state lawmakers have stepped into the admissions scandal (accompanied by circus music!), Kamala Harris's call for reparations, and much more (March Madness!). Put on your seatbelt and turn up the volume, here. Lights. Cameras. Pundits! 1. Kyle Smith catches Alex Gibney's new HBO documentary — The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley — about Silicon Valley whiz Elizabeth Holmes and her failed biotech startup, Theranos. He finds it a "penetrating" look at hubris. From his review: Gibney, whose many previous docs include Sinatra: All or Nothing at All and Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, chronicles how 700 employees, burning through hundreds of millions of private capital, tried to bring Holmes's vision to life but kept running into barriers — like the laws of physics. Those who pointed out the impossibility of what they were being asked to accomplish would be told, sniffily, that they weren't Silicon Valley material and could easily be replaced. Techs would simply fake results by, for instance, sneaking the samples out of the machines and taking them out to actual labs for analysis. One employee who tried to fix the machines describes what it was like reaching into the Edison, which ground up glass vials as contaminated blood sloshed around, and it sounds like something from a Saw movie. (Playing up the dread, Gibney plasters the soundtrack with intrusive, annoying music that sounds like it came from a movie about demonically possessed children). While all of these technical problems were mounting, Holmes would spend her time doing photo shoots, wooing VIPs, and having long meetings to discuss details like what to call the company cloud service. She came up with "Yoda."
2. Armond White finds Captain Marvel ruins Women's History Month, and that the release of the restored version of Sidney Lumet's 1966 movie, The Group, exposes "the fakery of women's pictures today." From his piece: In time for Women's History Month, Kino has restored Sidney Lumet's 1966 film of Mary McCarthy's novel The Group. An underrated artifact from the era of second-wave feminism, it combines women's melodrama and personal political observation. McCarthy's eight Vassar graduates facing the adult world in The Group's 1933–40 setting personify women's ambivalence about their social roles and WASP privilege. Lumet interweaves vignettes crudely, yet through McCarthy's sexual frankness and the actresses' emotional honesty (especially Shirley Knight's Polly, Joan Hackett's Dottie, and Joanna Pettet's Kay), The Group exposes the fakery of women's pictures today. Nora Ephron's legacy is many steps down from McCarthy's. We have settled for shrill exploitation in chick flicks, superheroine parity, and the devious political propaganda now disguised as monthly social-group "celebration." The Group anatomizes its upper-middle-class clique through their individual romantic exploration, New Deal zealotry, selfish careerism, even their sexual impulses. (Elizabeth Hartman's Democratic character, Priss Hartshorn Crockett, conforms to her Republican obstetrician husband, and Candace Bergen's lesbian, Lakey Eastlake, unnerves them all.) These period exploits are part of anti-Communist McCarthy's foundational portrait of pre-'60s political confusion; an a capella girls' glee-club soundtrack provides daring, ironic commentary. The Group doesn't seem dated but feels even more timely — more necessary — now that crass Hollywood suppresses basic sexual instincts and progressive indie filmmakers attempt to redefine sexual ideology.
3. Kyle goes to the movies and states something that should be obvious about the new Vince Vaughn/Mel Gibson cops-gone-bad flick: "If you show up for something called Dragged Across Concrete, you had better be prepared for anything." From the review: Yet this gritty, intense tale of cops gone bad isn't quite as shocking as either of the two previous efforts from the imaginatively brutal writer-director S. Craig Zahler. In 2015's Bone Tomahawk, Zahler staged the single most unsettling torture-murder I've ever seen on screen. Zahler's sophomore effort, Brawl in Cell Block 99, was breathtakingly violent, but was also pulp perfection. His third film, Dragged Across Concrete (which is debuting this week both in theaters and on video-on-demand platforms) doesn't gush with blood, but that doesn't mean it isn't gratuitously unpleasant. In particular, the mistreatment of two female characters is so nauseating that I suspect the female audience for this movie will be fairly close to nil. Even in movies in which bodies pile up like cordwood, there is something infuriating about the abuse of an innocent lady. So beware, but also take notice, because Zahler is the most bewitching maker of B movies working right now. This gripping but difficult movie melds 1970s grindhouse cinema with the harshly funny wisecracks of hardboiled 1940s Raymond Chandler detective noir. Two cynical, deadpan detectives, Brett (Mel Gibson) and Anthony (Vince Vaughn), get suspended for roughing up a Latino suspect in an incident that goes viral after being filmed by a witness. Anthony, who is planning to propose to his girlfriend, is happy to wait it out. But Brett, increasingly bitter about living in a neighborhood where his daughter can't walk home from school safely, is determined to use his time off to rob some drug dealers so he can move to a better place.
4. If You go to see Us, know that Kyle has already done so, and thinks it's trite and less than satisfying. From his review: Step forward, Jordan Peele, the Oscar-winning writer-director of Get Out, the first horror movie since The Exorcist to win a major Academy Award. With his second film, Us, Peele hews more to the horror side than the Oscar side. The new one has a bit of the satiric nature of Get Out, but it isn't nearly as much fun, nor is its social subtext particularly deft. Moreover, those who were hoping that Peele would continue to offer mordant commentary on the state of race relations in America are going to be disappointed. For nearly an hour in the middle of the film, during endless scenes of chasing and screaming and killing of the kind we've all seen in dozens of stalker pictures and zombie epics, I kept looking at my watch and wondering when Peele would finally come to the point. When he did, it was sort of worth the wait, but only sort of. The Six 1. At Gatestone Institute, Soeren Kern unveils a long list of abuses by British officials and cops hostile to Christian street preachers. Would these protectors of multiculturalism be so ready to slap handcuffs on an imam? From the beginning of his piece: The unlawful arrest of a Christian street preacher in London has drawn attention to the continuing use of hate speech laws to silence Christians in multicultural Britain — even as incendiary speech by Muslim extremists is routinely ignored. On February 23, Oluwole Ilesanmi, a 64-year-old Nigerian evangelist known as Preacher Olu, was arrested at Southgate Station in North London after complaints that his message about Jesus was "Islamophobic." A video of the arrest, viewed more than two million times, shows how two police officers ordered the man to stop preaching because "nobody wants to listen to that," confiscated his Bible and then arrested him for "a breach of peace." The video was filmed by Ambrosine Shitrit, co-founder of Eye on Antisemitism, a London-based organization that tracks anti-Semitism on social media. Shortly before Ilesanmi's arrest, Shitrit had seen him interacting with another man, who turned out to be a Muslim. She thought the Muslim was about to assault Ilesanmi when she went over and started filming with her phone. When the police arrived in response to an emergency call, the Muslim man left the scene. The video shows Ilesanmi pleading with police, "Don't take my Bible away. Don't take my Bible away." An officer responded: "You should have thought about that before being racist." A popular blogger known as Archbishop Cranmer tweeted what many people doubtless felt: "Dear @metpoliceuk, Setting aside the appalling ignorance of these two officers, would you handle a copy of the Qur'an like that?"
RELATED: Do read Maddy Kearns' NRO article on the UK's be-woken fuzz. 2. At Law & Liberty, Brendan Patrick Purdy investigates the question of whether defending guns is a fading freedom. From his essay: The debate concerning the Second Amendment and gun control is often framed as a clash between those that consider "the right to keep and bear arms" as an essential part of being an American and those who consider "America's Gun Culture" to be one of many sub-cultures in the United States, albeit a dangerous one that is not representative of the whole. Or to phrase the debate as a query: is the right to keep and bear arms an intrinsic feature of America's free society? There is the text of the Second Amendment itself, but there is no concurrence on how to interpret it between those who believe in a robust right of self-defense and those who favor restrictions on guns and ammunition as well as their accouterments. This latter group typically focuses on what Antonin Scalia in District of Columbia v. Heller called the prefatory clause of the Amendment concerning the militia. But surely the history of the United States from the Pilgrims through the Revolutionary War will give us the historical context of the Second Amendment, and in particular, what is meant by, for example, "militia" or "arms." Likewise, Americans' attitudes and uses of guns from the late 18th century to the present day will tell us how the Second Amendment has been manifested in the lives of Americans. David Harsanyi's First Freedom: A Ride Through American Enduring History with the Gun offers a well-researched and an enjoyable read as the answer to this question: is the right to keep and bear arms part of America's freedom culture just as the rights of the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments are, or is it merely a Revolutionary War relic like the Third Amendment? Harsanyi affirms that the Second Amendment is America's First Freedom—it is the freedom that all of the other individual rights rest on, and remains as important today as it was when it is was ratified.
3. Steve Malanga crushes it at City Journal, castigating the rush of states to legalize marijuana use in the face of mounting scientific evidence of its bad physical and psychological effects. From the get-go of his piece: After Colorado and Washington State voters gave a thumbs-up to recreational marijuana use in 2012, cannabis advocates needed another six years to win legalization battles in eight additional states. But in 2019 alone, at least eight more states seem ready to pass laws permitting recreational pot. Driving the legalization surge are several claims fast becoming conventional wisdom: marijuana is not only not harmful, but it's also therapeutic; legalizing pot will end the unjust imprisonment of casual users, especially in minority communities; lawful pot, further, will help eliminate drug black markets and the violence that accompanies them; once able to regulate and tax pot, states will enjoy a fiscal windfall, as an era of responsible marijuana use dawns. It's an enticing narrative, but most of it is wrong. Even as the legalization push gains momentum, scientific journals report mounting evidence of the drug's harmful psychological effects and social consequences. "There's a tremendous gulf between what everybody thinks they know and what's actually happening," says Kevin Sabet, a former drug-policy advisor in the Obama White House and cofounder, with former congressman Patrick Kennedy, of Smart Approaches to Marijuana. "What's going on with the scientific research is not filtering down to the public." Pockets of resistance to the pot movement are emerging, however. Some minority-community leaders reject the social-justice rationale for legalization, fearful of legal pot's impact on their neighborhoods. Doctors treating the physical and psychological effects of marijuana are increasingly disputing the notion that it is "medication." States seeking a fiscal windfall from marijuana are finding that, if you tax it at high rates, you drive the market back underground. And some legislators are urging decriminalization instead of full-on legalization. Right now, the odds appear stacked against cannabis foes, but an earlier campaign for legalization, which began in the 1970s and looked unstoppable, fizzled out after enough people were educated about the drug's effects. Something similar may eventually happen again—but the cost to the country, in the meantime, could be significant.
4. There are few Vatican observers with more knowledge and sense than Robert Royal, who puts pen to paper for Claremont Review of Books to give his take on five recent tomes about Pope Francis. From his review: From the very beginning, Francis spoke about globalized capitalism as an "economy that kills"—not noticing that it has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty. With his first full encyclical, Laudato Si' (subtitled "On care for our common home"), he made extreme, unrealistic environmentalism a kind of touchstone of his papacy. And he has pushed immigration—essentially open borders—in ways that, combined with his insistance that Islam is a religion of peace, have cost him respect in Europe. And not only in Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Brexit Britain, but even in Italy, where 50% youth unemployment has made utopian schemes for resettling large numbers of mostly poor Middle Eastern and African immigrants deeply unpopular. Francis's positions are unfailingly couched in terms of "mercy"—a slippery word often invoked in this pontificate that has taken on ideological as well as traditional meanings. Perhaps the most egregious example of this kind of politics was the 2016 conference celebrating the 25th anniversary of John Paul II's encyclical Centesimus Annus. Modern Catholic social teaching dates from 1891, when Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum, the first attempt by a pope to respond to the Industrial Revolution and modern societies' changed economic conditions. Leo rejected socialism as incompatible with human nature and good social order, but accepted modern capitalism and industry insofar as they acted responsibly and in harmony with moral principles. Instead of the revolutionary class struggle, he called for cooperation between business owners and workers, even allowing a proper role for labor unions—long thought in Europe to be socialist tools—partly inspired by American models.
5. Channeling Ralph Cramden: At The New Atlantis, Robert Zubrin, conservatism's space guru, proposes offering a purpose-driven plan to open the lunar frontier. From his essay: If we want to explore the Moon, and prepare to go beyond, we don't need a space station in lunar orbit — but we could use a base on the Moon itself. A Moon base would be much more than a stopping point; it could also be a site for producing hydrogen–oxygen rocket propellant from water on the Moon. This is a powerful propellant that has been a mainstay of rockets for decades, used by the Saturn V and the space shuttle. After years of scientific speculation that there may be deposits of frozen water in permanently shadowed craters near the Moon's poles, a study published just this August provided the first definitive proof of water ice in the craters, finding that in some areas it may be present in concentrations of 30 percent by weight in the topmost layer of soil. Mining this water and electrolyzing it into hydrogen and oxygen would allow vehicles to refuel on the Moon. This would provide the means not only to return from the Moon, but also to travel from place to place on the Moon, thereby markedly lowering the ongoing cost and increasing the capability of a sustained lunar exploration program. What we need is a plan for establishing a propellant production base on the lunar surface and sending humans back and forth, using technology we already have or could readily create within the next few years. In particular, the recent spectacular success of SpaceX's reusable Falcon Heavy rocket, first launched in February and offering a much lower per-pound cost than previous launchers, opens up dramatic new possibilities for establishing an ongoing crewed lunar mission on the cheap. NASA has for years been building its own massive rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), which is projected to cost the agency over $2 billion per year for the next five years and is currently scheduled to first fly in 2020. But the Falcon Heavy and the smaller Falcon 9 — both already flying — put the goal of a Moon base within reach, and at a much lower price. By choosing to establish a base on the Moon, we can restore the confidence of the human spaceflight program and enable it to take on the greater challenges awaiting us on Mars and beyond. We can reaffirm our identity as a nation of pioneers and make a powerful statement that the future belongs to the forces of liberty by once again astounding the world with what free people can do. We can do this all — if we proceed with purpose.
6. One more from The New Atlantis. Jon Askonas looks toward Silicon Valley and sees that what it manufactures is gobbled up by authoritarians. From the essay: Big Tech companies have thus married a fundamentally expansionary approach to information-gathering to a woeful naïveté about the likely uses of that technology. Motivated by left-liberal utopian beliefs about human progress, they are building technologies that are easily, naturally put to authoritarian and dystopian ends. While the Mark Zuckerbergs and Sergey Brins of the world claim to be shocked by the "abuse" of their platforms, the softly progressive ambitions of Silicon Valley and the more expansive visions of would-be dictators exist on the same spectrum of invasiveness and manipulation. There's a sense in which the authoritarians have a better idea of what this technology is for. Wasn't it rosy to assume that the main uses of the most comprehensive, pervasive, automated surveillance and behavioral-modification technology in human history would be reducing people's carbon footprints and helping them make better-informed choices in city council races? It ought to have been obvious that the new panopticon would be as liable to cut with the grain as against it, to become in the wrong hands a tool not for ameliorating but exploiting man's natural capacity for error. Of the two sides, cheer for Dr. Jekyll, but bet on Mr. Hyde.
Baseballery Since the first All Star Game was played in 1933, someone would have to be that guy — the one with the most-ever MLB at-bats who was never selected to play in the mid-season contest. Discounting for players whose careers straddled or preceded that 1933 divide (after all Ty Cobb was never an All Star), the That Guy is Tony Phillips, the any-position (besides pitcher and catcher, he played them all) 18-season veteran who began and ended his career (1982 to 1999) in Oakland, and had stints in between with the Tigers, Angels, White Sox, Blue Jays, and Mets. A career .266 hitter, he registered 7,617 official at-bats — and having lead the AL in walks twice (with seven seasons in the Top 10, and ranking 40th all-time!), he heard Ball Four called 1,319 times, giving him a .374 on-base percentage in 9,110 plate appearances (he played in 2,161 games). Beloved by his teammates, he played his last game on August 15, 1999. By the boxscore it seemed like a nice way to end it: Phillips, age 40, led off the game with a single, then stole second and scored on a Jason Giambi double. In the third he slammed a two-run homer, and then followed that with walks in the fourth and sixth innings. But when he tried to break up a possible double play on Randy Velarde's ground ball, Phillips caught a spike sliding into second, breaking his leg. Career over. True, not defined by "all-star," but a proud one still, by any measure. Tony reminds us that you've always Gotta Have Heart. Leave It on Red! I tell my pal David Bahnsen — who is a pretty smart dude when it comes to investing — that this is my strategy, and then admit that when black comes up, as is certain, "Craps you lose!" will be the consequence of my foolishness. So, looking for a wiser way to make sure Mrs. WJ has a few pennies to spend in my fast-approaching dotage and her widowhood, I eagerly await April 9, when David's new book, The Case for Growth: Investing in a Post-Crisis World, is out. Here's his pitch for why this book, now: Both the tech bubble burst of 2000, and the financial crisis of 2008, poked significant holes in the primary investment belief of too many investors today—that one can just blindly withdraw from principal, and that equity returns will keep up. Too many investment advisors have taken the path of least resistance, not aware of the risk in systematically withdrawing from what, at times, will be a declining portfolio. Investors seeking to accumulate money for their future needs, and investors needing to withdraw money now for a present need, both have one thing in common: Dividend Growth investing represents a powerful weapon in the achievement of their objectives. Market volatility is not something any investor can escape, but benefitting from it (for accumulators reinvesting dividends), and being insulated from it (for withdrawers taking only from a growing flow of dividend income), are achievable results for those who understand the time-tested, sustainable, intelligent strategy of investing that is Dividend Growth.
Sounds smart. Also sounds like you should order yourself a copy. And while you're doing that, maybe also order a copy of his highly acclaimed 2018 book, The Crisis of Responsibility. A Dios At Religion Unplugged, Clemente Lisi sees March Madness as a time with a special Catholic aspect. Read his piece. As for Saint Joseph's Day this past week, everyone in the WJ house had the flu (some still), and the last thing the afflicted needed to see or smell was a zeppole. Next year Joey, I promise. Say a prayer of thanks and blessings this weekend for my pal and NR's dear amigo Peter T, whose eyes always wander down to the Jolt's bitter end, but maybe not today — he's getting married. Kudos to you and Mrs. T. May the Angels in the Outfield find some time to visit their church during the ceremony. God's blessings on them . . . and on you and yours, Jack Fowler Who can be emailed at the end of the bench, where he's happily spitting out sunflower-seed shells, at jfowler@nationalreview.com. P.S.: How about this as a caption for the photo above: "Ike One!" Rimshot! | 
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