 Dear Weekend Jolter, Somewhere in the jungles of San Francisco or Montgomery County, Md., or . . . pick any place in Virginia, a platoon of progressive culture warriors must be hacking through the bush wondering how their objectives changed so drastically over the years. They enlisted to fight for gay marriage, abortion rights, and the strict separation of church and state. So what's this business about racist math, wrong pronouns, mismatched swim meets, and the erasure of George Washington's name from buildings? This drift — that is, the swinging shift in priorities that has placed the progressive Left so out of step with the non-politically-obsessed American middle — helps explain the popular rebukes we're seeing in polls and polling places. San Francisco provided a potent example this week as overwhelming majorities in a not-very-Republican city voted to recall three progressive school-board members, a campaign initiated amid complaints the board was pursuing divisive social-justice fights instead of working to reopen schools and deal with pressing financial problems. Ryan Mills gives the backstory here: Instead of focusing its efforts on developing a reopening plan, the board has been preoccupied with woke culture war issues, expending energy on changing the admissions process at the highly-selective Lowell High School to boost the number of black and Hispanic students and reduce the number of white and Asian students; rechristening 44 schools named after prominent Americans, including presidents Abraham Lincoln and George Washington; and a proposal to spend close to $1 million to paint over a historic, 80-year-old mural at a local school that depicts the life of Washington, but also includes outdated stereotypes. The board became the focus of national ridicule last February after a two-hour debate over whether a gay white dad was diverse enough to join an all-female volunteer parent committee. All the while, the district's budget deficit ballooned to about $125 million last year, leading California education officials to threaten a state takeover.
Of course, some local leaders aren't learning any lessons, blaming a cabal of "closet Republicans" (who knew there were so many in San Francisco?) for the defeats. But as NR's editorial states, the verdict from voters is clear that "far-left progressivism has not worked and is not working." For her part, Democratic mayor London Breed cheered the result and called it "a clear message that the school board must focus on the essentials of delivering a well-run school system above all else." Breed seems to recognize the danger of pursuits that please only zealots. She has previously warned about what the collapse in law enforcement is doing to her city; this week, Seattle's mayor had a similar awakening. Other elected Dems are starting to notice that the opinions of overactive blue-checks do not reflect the opinions of a majority, as seen in the wave of decisions to lift mask mandates and other coronavirus restrictions. Perhaps quietly, they are coming to realize that Glenn Youngkin's victory in Virginia was not driven by Charlottesville tiki-torchers, but by the normal people whose bemusement at the causes of the Left is turning to annoyance and ultimately sound rejection. Add in the inflation that the Biden administration insists is unrelated to the nation's historic levels of spending, and the polls start to make sense. And boy, oh boy, those polls. Charles C. W. Cooke flags one outfit, whose surveys tend to favor Democrats, showing President Biden short of 50 percent approval in every state, and underwater in all but four. A separate Morning Consult/Politico poll should be sending Ron Klain in search of scuba gear. Rich Lowry highlights this report from Politico: Democrats' own research shows that some battleground voters think the party is "preachy," "judgmental" and "focused on culture wars," according to documents obtained by POLITICO.
Unclear is whether the response will be to change course — or to simply accuse Republicans of something worse, like pouncing. But the culture-war mission creep is undeniable, as is the insurgency rising up against it. Peggy Noonan recently had some characteristically sage advice, noting that in this time of excess on the left, it is the job of the Republican Party "to be sane," to be "the party of the big center, to stand for normal, regular people in all their human variety — all races, ethnicities, faiths — against the forces of ideology currently assailing them." If you've had a chance to catch a showing lately of the Republican Party, you know this will be harder than it sounds. But the opportunity is there, bigly. In a semi-related bit of news, the cancel-culture wars are no less heated these days. The voices calling for a more thoughtful approach, though, do appear to be getting louder. Nate Hochman reported exclusively on a federal judge who surprised a Georgetown Law audience with a speech defending Ilya Shapiro, the legal scholar who was sidelined from the school's Center for the Constitution over, in essence, a bad tweet. Judge James Ho's remarks are filled with wisdom and common sense, so consider yourself warned. Last, check out Nate's coverage this past week from Ottawa, which we are reliably informed is very, very cold. (Nate, with his itinerant reporting schedule, is truly the Roy Kent of this operation.) Onward . . . NAME. RANK. LINK. EDITORIALS Another election, another resounding message from voters that radicalism is not working: The Trouncing of the San Francisco School Board Even if they're getting the “conspiracy theory” treatment, the allegations in John Durham's latest court filing are serious: Durham's Jaw-Dropping Revelation ARTICLES Michael Brendan Dougherty: Maskless Super Bowl Marks Our Return to Normalcy Michael Brendan Dougherty: Against Meta Charles C. W. Cooke: What in the Hell Is Kamala Harris Doing? Charles C. W. Cooke: Justin Trudeau Has Disgraced His Office Kevin Williamson: Trudeau Follows the Money Kevin Williamson: Why Progressives Can't Quit Their Masks Stefani E. Buhajla: The Human Costs of Covid-Related Medicaid Expansion Alexandra DeSanctis: The Real Science of Fetal Heartbeats Jimmy Quinn: McKinsey Website Contradicts Denials of Chinese-Government Work; Rubio Claims 'Cover-Up' David Harsanyi: Kamala, Blink Twice If You’ve Been Kidnapped by the Ayatollahs John Fund: Thirty House Democrats Now Retiring — the GOP Needs Only Five Seats for Majority Don't miss Andrew McCarthy's three-part series on the January 6 Committee: Mitch McConnell's Good Start; The Irony of the January 6 Committee; Fix the January 6 Committee . . . or the first two installments of Dan McLaughlin's series on gerrymandering: The Selective Gerrymandering Panic; Why Democrats' Gerrymandering 'Fix' Would Fail . . . or the many tributes to P. J. O'Rourke CAPITAL MATTERS Daniel J. Pilla doesn't buy the IRS's claim that they'll really "transition away" from a plan for facial-recognition technology: The IRS Wants Your Picture Andy Puzder explains why supply-chain and demand issues aren't the only things driving inflation — and why inflation in the U.S. is so much higher than elsewhere: Building Back Stagflation LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW. A video-game-based movie ends up being an inane hodgepodge of disconnected action sequences? Weird. From Kyle Smith: Tom Holland vs. Tom Cruise Armond White finds the movie for our time, way back in 1978: Peckinpah's Convoy Honors the Lost Art of Dissent Brian Allen writes about the triumphant return of a cherished painting to the U.K.: Gainsborough's Blue Boy, Back in London FROM THE NEW, MARCH 7, 2022, ISSUE OF NR John Miller: The New Politics of School Choice Madeleine Kearns: Reefer Madness John McCormack: What Reforming the Electoral Count Act Can Do Jay Nordlinger: Daughter of Ukraine FREE SAMPLES, FOLKS — EXCERPTS ARE ON US Faced with an increasingly disruptive trucker-convoy protest, Canada has opted for an illiberal and heavy-handed intervention that we can't help but notice was not employed in 2020. Kevin Williamson explains: In this so-called emergency, Trudeau is not sending in the troops. He is cutting off the money. Trudeau, sounding a little like the old southern segregationists who complained about "outside agitators," insists that the protests have been driven by "social media and illicit funding" rather than by genuine disapproval of his government's policies. And so he is using the Emergency Measures Act to invest himself with the unilateral power to freeze bank accounts and cancel insurance policies, without so much as a court order and with essentially no recourse for those he targets. Canadian banks and financial-services companies will be ordered to disable clients suspected of being involved in the protests. Trudeau says the protests are illegal. That is not quite right. The protests are not illegal per se, though some of the protesters certainly are breaking the law, for instance by blocking public roads and the like. The obvious parallel is the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in Canada, which also included some law-breaking. Trudeau did not invoke Emergency Measures Act powers to suppress those protests, even though they brought together large crowds during a particularly dangerous phase of the Covid-19 epidemic contrary to the advice of Trudeau's government — and the advice out of his own mouth, for that matter. Far from shutting down those protests, Trudeau actually participated in them, making a pious spectacle out of himself. . . . I myself do not particularly sympathize with the aims or the tactics of the protesters in Canada. I don't care much for unruly mobs of any persuasion. But even so, it is impossible not to see the plain fact that these protesters are being targeted not for their practical effect or their tactics but for their beliefs and for the sort of people they are, that an obvious double standard is at play, and that this is deeply illiberal.
Not to be an alarmist, but . . . can pot make you crazy? Madeleine Kearns, for the latest issue of NR, interviews husband-and-wife psychiatrists looking into the link: In 2004, [Dr. Robin MacGregor Murray and Dr. Marta Di Forti] launched the Genetics and Psychotic Disorder study, examining the genetic and environmental causes of psychosis. Since 2019, Di Forti has been running the National Health Service's first clinic for cannabis-induced psychosis. The initial pilot scheme had 20 patients. Demand for the service is only growing, with 30 or more patients participating by Zoom each week. . . . Throughout the '70s and '80s, the idea that cannabis might be contributing to mental-health problems never occurred to Murray and his colleagues. In 1996 the Lancet — Britain's top medical journal — editorialized that cannabis was a safe drug. When psychotic patients' families would ask whether there was any link, since their loved one "smoked marijuana morning, noon, and night," Murray would answer no. By the 1990s, however, the question had been raised so many times that he began to wonder. First, Murray and his researchers found that people who kept smoking cannabis after developing psychosis did much worse than people who stopped. "After establishing that it was bad for you once you were psychotic, then we began looking at whether it actually provoked the psychosis in the first place," Murray says. By 2003, they were convinced that cannabis was a "component cause" of psychosis. In other words, while a person may already have a genetic vulnerability, or other risk factors, heavy cannabis use can also trigger and exacerbate psychosis in those without an obvious predisposition. . . . Most of the patients at the clinic smoke every day and have done so for several years. Yet their psychosis can come on quite suddenly: "Just like cigarettes and lung cancer. You could be smoking for 20 years before you get lung cancer," Murray says. Likewise, you could be smoking cannabis for five or even ten years before you go psychotic.
Catch up on the latest revelations from John Durham's investigation, from NR's editorial: In a court submission last week, Durham alleged that a tech executive, who was supposed to be helping the government combat cyber threats, used his privileged access to Internet data — specifically, domain name system (DNS) traffic between servers — to mine contacts between Russia and facilities connected to Donald Trump. The information, Durham says, was taken out of context and distorted to suggest that Trump might be a clandestine agent of Vladimir Putin's regime. . . . Joffe was a Clinton supporter who was hoping to land a big national-security post if Hillary Clinton were elected president in 2016. Joffe and the Clinton campaign got their lawyer, Michael Sussmann, to communicate this "intelligence" about a corrupt Trump–Russia relationship to government intelligence agencies in the hopes that they would take action against Trump. Sussmann, a former Justice Department cyber-security prosecutor, was then a partner at Perkins Coie, the politically connected law firm that represented the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign. . . . All indications are that Durham's final report will be damning — and, if the pattern holds, ignored by all the same people in the media who promoted Russiagate for years. Even if few people ever face legal jeopardy for this, there ought to be political repercussions as well as serious thought given to preventing similar abuses in the future.
Michael Brendan Dougherty identifies a cultural turning point in the pandemic endgame: The Super Bowl was our unofficial return to normality for the United States. A relatively normal game, with a halftime show geared toward people in their 40s. But the "normal" part was the crowd. It was the general atmosphere. The Chinese Olympics that nobody is watching feature athletes getting served by people in hazmat suits. Meanwhile, SoFi stadium gathered over 70,000 fans for the big game, and the cameras panning the vast crowd showed the spectators to be almost entirely maskless. This was the end of the pandemic in the United States — or at least the primary signal that, as a culture, we are ready for the end. . . . That a football game could "end" a pandemic may seem absurd — what does it have to do with the spread, with the facts of the disease and the latest variants, or with the rate of vaccine uptake? But cultures never make sense as pure calculations about inputs and outputs. Ultimately, we make a collective cultural decision about whether we are in a state of emergency or not. A big, raucous crowd of unmasked fans at a football game in America is normal. Broadcasting that game — and studiously refusing to reference or mention the pandemic — is a giant flashing sign. You probably have moved on or are about to move on. We're moving on, too.
Shout-Outs Soledad Ursúa, at City Journal: San Francisco's Heart of Darkness Tony Badran, at Tablet: Biden Pays Army Salaries to Iranian Ally Hannah Sparks, at the New York Post: Priest who botched thousands of baptisms steps down after 25 years Christian Schneider, at the College Fix: U. Michigan on track to hire 20 new 'anti-racism' faculty (Recall this story from NR earlier this month.) CODA This is the song that would have made last weekend's back-to-the-Nineties halftime show whole. | 
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