 Dear Weekend Jolter, Placing a bet that even Gamblers Anonymous would call safe, Rich Lowry wrote this week that a second Trump administration would be, in a word, "bonkers." The Left would assume a state of perpetual apoplexy, while Trump himself has promised a presidency of "retribution." The guardrails that contained much of the madness to the president's Twitter account the last go-round would be gone; an administration staffed by whoever showed up at Bedminster the night before would apply a philosophy of Truth Social textualism in effectuating his orders. This vibe is what we got a taste of in the pre-action to Alvin Bragg's supposedly looming Trump indictment (the status of which remains unclear). But we can take solace that a second Trump presidency is a mere possibility. Not so for his campaign reboot — it is upon us, and "bonkers" doesn't even begin to cover what America is in for once the field takes shape. "Imagine the perfervid rantings in a padded cell of a mental patient off his lithium and you're mostly there" is how Jeffrey Blehar scene-sets Trump's early take on the Bragg rumblings. That's probably an apt description, too, for the conduct of the 2024 campaign starting with the primary. It will render quaint what was shocking in 2016 — the insinuations about Ted Cruz's father, the comments about his wife, the on-stage stalking of Hillary Clinton, the Access Hollywood tape, "Little Marco," "Lock Her Up" . . . It's all Clark Gable swearing, by comparison. Get ready to hear about how "Lockdown" Ron DeSantis snorted Pfizer doses inside a shuttered kindergarten classroom, next to a cutout of Paul Ryan. Voters got an early glimpse of the warfare the Florida governor's expected entry into the race will trigger, when DeSantis cleverly paired his condemnation of Bragg with the caveat that he doesn't know "what goes into paying hush money to a porn star." Trump, in turn, hinted at theoretical sex allegations from an underage girl or maybe a dude: Ron DeSanctimonious will probably find out about FALSE ACCUSATIONS & FAKE STORIES sometime in the future, as he gets older, wiser, and better known, when he's unfairly and illegally attacked by a woman, even classmates that are "underage" (or possibly a man!). I'm sure he will want to fight these misfits just like I do!
So that's the future. The casual reference to salacious charges was soon followed by a facts-optional screed describing their shared state as more or less third world. As Noah Rothman warns, "If this is how Trump and his acolytes respond to a glancing blow, just imagine how they'll respond when the Florida governor starts throwing real punches." In the near term, as several colleagues have noted, Bragg would appear to be doing Trump a political favor should he proceed — feeding his and his supporters' righteous anger in pursuing a tenuous case that he never would bring against anyone else. Andrew McCarthy counters, however, that the political benefits for Trump could fade if other prosecutors handling other cases then pile on: I believe that when more indictments follow, and the charges become more credible than the ones in Bragg's imminent indictment, the initial surge in Trump's GOP support will ebb. Republicans will sense that Trump's jeopardy is broad, largely self-inflicted, and unpredictable; that he can't win the presidency and that, even if he could, he'd be a lame duck from Day One, presiding over a dysfunctional administration whose main objective would be payback.
In other words, the "bonkers" presidential sequel — and this part's important — can and may yet be avoided. The ugliness of the coming campaign? Sorry, there's no escaping that. NAME. RANK. LINK. EDITORIALS Don't expect the drumbeat for Washington intervention on TikTok to get any softer after this week's hearing: TikTok Digs Deeper Hole Another bill that probably won't achieve what the name of the bill claims: No on the Railway Safety Act Those advocating a softer stance on China aren't very convincing: In Defense of Hawkishness on China Somebody is standing up to the inmates, at last: Stanford Law Draws Line on Disrupting Campus Speech ARTICLES Rich Lowry: Arrest and Counter-Arrest Is No Way to Run a Republic Jim Geraghty: Why We Should Be Skeptical of the Latest Wet-Market Covid Theory Wilfred Reilly: How to Define 'Woke' Noah Rothman: How We Know That 'Woke' Is Losing Michael Brendan Dougherty: Count Trump Out at Your Own Peril Jimmy Quinn: New Report Reveals TikTok Parent's Extensive Links to Chinese Military-Surveillance Complex Charles C. W. Cooke: Pick One: Conservatism or Trump Dan McLaughlin: Politico's Pre-Written Thesis about the Federalist Society Collides with Its Own Reporting John McCormack: Pro-Life Officials Have a Duty to Resolve a Crisis Pro-Life Laws Didn't Create Ryan Mills: Bay Area Gas-Furnace Ban Expected to Gouge Residents, Strain Ailing Electric Grid Brittany Bernstein: Colorado Progressives Use Courts to Take Radical Climate Agenda National Francis X. Suarez: The Vision of Freedom at Stake in Ukraine Jeff Zymeri: Stanford Law Dean Stands by Apology to Judge, Suspends Colleague Who Disrupted Lecture Jeffrey Blehar: Stanford Law School Sends Entire Class to Detention CAPITAL MATTERS Steve H. Hanke and Manuel Hinds give their read on the SVB saga: The Fed's Self-Directed Tragedy Kevin Hassett praises the Fed for staying the course in the fight against inflation: Inflation Is Still the Fed's Scariest Enemy LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW. Armond White, on a cinematic warning from China: Full River Red — China 1, Hollywood 0 Brian Allen kicks off a pair of pieces about the Dallas Museum of Art (catch the sequel this weekend): Art Vandals Foiled in Boston, Art Lovers Rewarded in Dallas EXCERPTS ARE THE NEW BLACK Knee-jerk claims of "xenophobia" won't get TikTok out of this mess. From NR's editorial: TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew's misleading and evasive testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Thursday adds to the substantial case that the app should be subject to a forced sale or a ban. Chew's odds of swaying lawmakers already skeptical of his brief were never that great to begin with, but the hearing became a demonstration of bipartisan resolve to counter the national-security threat posed by TikTok. What Chew wouldn't — or couldn't — say was almost as important as what new information he did bring to light. Lawmakers would not let Chew forget that he was testifying under threat of perjury, as if he needed a reminder, and he obviously dodged many questions. That did not help his case. Under questioning from Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Chew wouldn't say with 100 percent certainty that TikTok could resist orders from the Chinese Communist Party to boost pro-Beijing content during an invasion of Taiwan. He only offered vague platitudes about keeping the platform free from foreign manipulation. He said that his attorneys at TikTok helped to prepare him for the hearing, but he deflected questions about whether individuals at ByteDance assisted. When Representative Debbie Lesko asked if he agrees that the Chinese government has persecuted Uyghurs, he repeatedly dodged, declining to condemn the mass atrocities — which ByteDance has pledged to help cover up in tandem with the Chinese police.
Taking a step back from this week's drama over Alvin Bragg and Donald Trump, Charles C. W. Cooke calls upon conservatives to make a choice, a necessary one: Conservative Americans must choose. Do they want Donald Trump to play a central role in Republican politics, or do they want to win elections and achieve the policy outcomes that supposedly inspired them to get involved in politics in the first instance? My question is literal, not rhetorical. Conservatives must choose. They cannot have both of these things. They must pick only one. As president, Donald Trump delivered some welcome conservative victories. He is not going to do so again. In fact, the opposite is true. If Trump is allowed to stick around, he will remain what he has already become: a massive drag on the fortunes and the efficacy of the political Right. Electorally, Trump is a bust. Ideologically, he is a mess. And as an agent of persuasion . . . well, let's just say that, at this point, the GOP might be better off asking Charles Manson to serve as the chief representative of its brand. A Republican Party that features Trump as its star attraction is a Republican Party that will stay at the margins of federal office and watch impotently as progressives continue to accrete power. The bureaucracy will grow. Taxes will increase. Entitlement spending will spiral. The border will remain porous. The Supreme Court will be flipped back. That, and not the handful of salutary reforms that were achieved between 2017 and 2021, will be Trump's legacy. . . . As a famous man once said, "We have come to a time for choosing." Unlike in 2020, Donald Trump's nomination in 2024 is not a fait accompli, and the question before conservatives is not whether they would prefer a second Trump term to the prospect of Joe Biden. The question now is whether, with the advantage of a great universe of alternative options before them, conservatives would prefer to take concrete steps to advance their political goals or to sacrifice everything to feed the ego of a maniac. Those are our two choices — and they are not going to change.
We've run a number of essays lately unpacking the media tizzy over the word "woke." Noah Rothman may have pinpointed what's behind it: We find ourselves in the middle of an exhaustingly familiar spectacle in which the American Left and its allies in media pretend that a word with an all but universally understood definition is all of a sudden incomprehensible. Today, that word is "woke." A campaign consisting of straight reporting, survey data, and contrived "viral" moments all contribute to the desired impression that those who wield the term don't know what it means, especially if they use it as a pejorative. But even polling purporting to show that more Americans believe the term describes only positive attributes also finds that the public sees it as an epithet more than a compliment. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that what's driving the campaign is that "woke" is now a political liability for those who once proudly embraced it. These periodic crusades against shorthand bubble up from the partisan depths when the Left is losing a political conflict. Rather than change their tactics, they change the language. The Atlantic reporter Molly Ball picked up on this phenomenon a decade ago when she noticed that the Obama administration had ditched the phrase "gun control" in favor of a cavalcade of euphemisms. Anti-gun activists had begun toying with alternatives such as "gun-violence prevention," "firearms regulation," and, of course, "gun safety," which edged out its competitors. Ball observed at the time that the phrase was confusing insofar as it evokes "a firearms-training course" more than any legislative initiative. It still does. But the phrase emerged as the consensus alternative to "gun control" because something had to replace "gun control." That phrase had become toxic.
Following up on last weekend's newsletter: Stanford Law School's dean has taken a welcome stand against unruly student demonstrators, and for free speech. This is good news. Jeff Zymeri has the story: Stanford Law Dean Jenny Martinez released a detailed letter Wednesday criticizing the students who heckled federal judge Kyle Duncan and announcing that DEI administrator Tirien Steinbach, who interrupted his lecture, is now on leave. Martinez declined to submit to calls that she retract her letter of apology to Duncan and emphasized that Stanford's speaker disruption policy was violated by both students and administrators. At an event hosted by Stanford's Federalist Society earlier this month, Duncan, who sits on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, was expecting to give a wide-ranging lecture on recent decisions that Court had handed down. However, audio and video of the event revealed that the judge was immediately heckled upon beginning his talk, with students shouting obscenities at him. When Duncan asked an administrator to intervene, he was subject to Steinbach explaining to him that he was tearing the fabric of the Stanford community. "Is the juice worth the squeeze?," asked Steinbach. Public outcry followed shortly thereafter. Some called for the students who heckled Duncan to be expelled and for Steinbach to be fired. Others, including many Stanford Law students, criticized and sought to shame Martinez for her public apology to Duncan, demanding she retract it. . . . To justify her apology and Stanford's policy, Martinez cited as a point of guidance settled First Amendment law which "allows many governmental restrictions on heckling to preserve the countervailing interest in free speech." Continuing her analysis, Martinez said "a university classroom setting for a guest speaker invited by a student organization is thus a setting where the First Amendment tolerates greater limitations on speech than it would in a traditional public forum…. In such a setting, limiting audience participation to signs, questions during a planned Q&A, and a non-disruptive level of audience reaction is appropriate to the nature of the forum."
Shout-Outs Jonathan Turley, at the New York Post: Why Alvin Bragg's case against Trump is falling apart Ben Weingarten, at RealClearInvestigations: The Problematic Rise of Media Literacy Education Jordan T. Cash, at Law & Liberty: Neil Peart: Lyricist of Democratic Greatness Susan Neiman, at UnHerd: The true Left is not woke CODA As I suspected, the call-out last weekend for songs with moments that "make you do a double take" yielded interesting responses. Kevin in St. Petersburg dusts off a perfect example: "Rock the Casbah." Around the two-and-a-half-minute mark is the Clash's apparent attempt at simulating the sound of a fighter jet (the high end did a number on Kevin's speaker system back in the day). Original versions also include a strange, off-the-beat electronic jangle — a digital-wristwatch alarm, or so the story goes. In a similar vein, Kevin Antonio sends in Todd Rundgren's take on "Tin Soldier," and is vexed by the "clanking noise" at the 39-second mark. What else? William writes in to recommend the entirety of 1968's Switched-On Bach, by Walter (eventually Wendy) Carlos. For those who missed that release, it's Bach — played on a Moog. And a good audio link for this is very hard to find, it turns out. One more: For the sheer surprise of the dynamics change after the piano intro, Brooks Eason puts up Tull's "Locomotive Breath." Well played. Thanks for reading, and for sending. | 
Megyn Kelly -> Pete Hegseth responds to 2017 rape accusation. 🔥 vol. 3, issue 13 | December 6, 2024 Quick Hits All the news you need in...
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