 Dear Weekend Jolter, Jack Crowe here, filling in for Judson Berger, who was last seen hightailing it to Los Alamos to get to the bottom of this whole “our-government-has-aliens-and-UFOs-in-its-possession” thing. It’s a wide field, but for my money, former CIA analyst Martin Gurri has distinguished himself as the most astute diagnostician of what he calls “the crisis of authority” and the resulting populist backlash that’s swept over much of the globe in the last decade. In his masterful work The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, Gurri captures a dynamic that apparently eludes the great and good of our political, tech, and academic elite: As widespread internet access and social-media use has democratized information, allowing the masses to puncture narratives that would have once unified society, or at least provided the illusion of unity, gatekeepers have responded by trying to tighten their grip on information and narrative formation, exacerbating popular distrust of their institutions and fueling a spiral of nihilism. Originally published in 2014, Gurri’s prophetic book predated the election of Donald Trump and Brexit, two world-shaking upheavals that confirmed his central thesis. Now, on an almost weekly basis, news stories pop up that further demonstrate his prescience. The latest example came this week in the form of internal Facebook emails obtained by the House Judiciary Committee, which reveal that, early in the pandemic, the White House pressured Facebook to remove posts arguing that Covid was man-made and that vaccines may have adverse side effects — and Facebook complied. "Can someone quickly remind me why we were removing—rather than demoting/labeling—claims that Covid is man made," Nick Clegg, Facebook's president of global affairs, wrote in a July 2021 email to coworkers obtained by the Wall Street Journal. "We were under pressure from the administration and others to do more," the tech giant's vice president of content policy responded. "We shouldn't have done it." The exchange occurred three months after Facebook decided to end its policy of censoring posts questioning whether Covid-19 was the result of a Chinese virology-lab leak. On another occasion in early 2021, White House adviser Andy Slavitt demanded that Facebook remove a satirical meme suggesting that Covid-vaccine recipients may be entitled to compensation for vaccine injuries. At least one Facebook executive seems to have read Gurri, or at least internalized his critique — but his warning fell on deaf ears: "There may be risk of pushing them further toward hesitancy by suppressing their speech and making them feel marginalized by large institutions," read a draft memo to Facebook executives included in an April 2021 email, obtained by the Journal. While White House officials were pushing Facebook to crack down on mass-produced Covid-origin speculation, their colleagues at NIH were busy shaping the narrative at the elite level. According to internal Slack and email messages obtained by the House Oversight Committee, unnamed “higher ups” in the U.S. government leaned on the world’s top virologists to rush out Proximal Origins, a highly influential March 2020 paper that dismissed the lab-leak theory as implausible. The messages reveal that, even as they published a paper pouring cold water on the lab-leak theory, the virologists were chatting privately about how the theory was still very much plausible, though they agreed they couldn’t entertain that possibility publicly because doing so might anger the Chinese Communist Party. "Given the sh** show that would happen if anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release, my feeling is we should say that given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus, we cannot possibly distinguish between natural evolution and escape so we are content with ascribing it to [a] natural process," Dr. Andrew Rambaut, a British virologist, wrote to his fellow Proximal Origins authors in February 2020. There is mounting circumstantial evidence that Covid emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and while the vaccines undoubtedly saved innumerable lives, many of the initial claims made about their about their ability prevent transmission proved untrue. Weeks before those internal Facebook emails were exchanged, on March 29, 2021, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow told her viewers, “Now we know that the vaccines work well enough that the virus stops with every vaccinated person.” As is so often the case, reality turned out to be more complicated than what the smug assurances of cable-news pundits suggested. It’s become abundantly clear that in this new information age, elites should respond to crises by admitting their fallibility and encouraging open debate. But if Gurri’s predictions hold — and at this juncture, we have no reason to doubt him — our political leaders and their allies in media and tech will only double down, responding to the next major disruption to American life by clamping down harder, having seen how fruitless their efforts were the last time. NAME. RANK. LINK. EDITORIALS A Judge Stands Alone: Protecting the Bidens Misleading Voters: The Hidden Radicalism of Ohio's Abortion Amendment An Inconvenient Truth: Florida’s History Curriculum Is Better Than the Lies about It Not So Fast, Democracy: Joe Biden’s Attempt to Bypass the Senate ARTICLES Andrew C. McCarthy: Hunter Biden’s Sweetheart Plea Deal Blows Up Andrew C. McCarthy: Devon Archer’s Fraud . . . and Hunter Biden’s Connection To It Caroline Downey: Wisconsin Detransitioner Told Surgeon She Was Suicidal. The Surgeon Performed a Mastectomy Anyway Jeff Zymeri: Hunter Biden Pleads Guilty after Judge Puts ‘Unusual’ Deal with DOJ on Hold Jim Geraghty: Try What in a Small Town, Now? Jim Geraghty: The Conspiracy Made Me Write This Newsletter Kathryn Jean Lopez: Jason Aldean Isn’t Helping Jeffrey Blehar: Ron DeSantis’s Reckless Embrace of RFK Jr. Jeffrey Blehar: Illinois Voters Bought the Ticket; They’re about to Take the Ride Ari Blaff: Anheuser Busch Lays Off Nearly 400 Corporate Workers as Bud Light Backlash Continues Ari Blaff: AP Curriculum Touted by Progressives Also Includes Section on Slaves Learning Skills Andrew Follett: Why U.S. Scientists Lied about the Possibility of a Covid Lab Leak Ryan Mills: Educators behind Florida’s African-American History Standards Push Back on Claim It Whitewashes Slavery Charles C. W. Cooke: Cheer Up Already, Republicans Brittany Bernstein: Back-of-the-Pack GOP Candidates Borrow Left’s Attacks on DeSantis Brittany Bernstein: Motel Guest Kicked Out to Make Room for Migrants Says She Never Received Voucher from NYC Mayor’s Office Brittany Bernstein: Trump Accused of Trying to Delete Mar-a-Lago Surveillance Footage in New Indictment Rich Lowry: The Left Will Say Anything about Florida Noah Rothman: DeSantis’s Problem: Alienating Voters He Needs CAPITAL MATTERS Matthew Lau plays the hits, pointing out that the evidence of Milton Friedman’s wisdom continues to pile up. Diana Furchtgott-Roth notices that Beijing is not playing by the same rules as climate-concerned Western countries. LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW. Michael Brendan Dougherty celebrates the two films that are — at least temporarily — distracting Americans from the political news cycle. Rich Lowry uses the occasion of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer to reexamine the legacy of the father of the atom bomb. Historical legacy aside, Armond White was . . . not impressed by Oppenheimer, a film he found perfectly suited for “today’s moral idiots.” FROM THE NEW, August 14, 2023, ISSUE OF NR Jack Butler: Is Your Doctor Racist? Jim Geraghty: Are Trump’s or Biden’s Lies Worse? Amity Shlaes: Calvin Coolidge and Us Dan McLaughlin: William Jennings Bryan’s Subtractive Populism John O’Sullivan: The British Tories’ Sorry State Excerpts, Get Ya Ice Cold Excerpts Here In a cover story for the new issue of NR, Jack Butler dismantles a pernicious claim about the irredeemably racist state of the American medical establishment — a claim based on a misreading of an academic study that nevertheless found its way into Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent in the Harvard/UNC affirmative-action case. Is the American health-care system letting black babies die? Supreme Court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson thinks so. In her dissent in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and UNC, which struck down racial-preference admissions schemes at these schools, Jackson lamented the majority's failure to see how "health gaps" have tracked the financial disparities bequeathed by America's legacy of racial discrimination. She likewise faulted the majority for not seeing affirmative action as a way to address these disparities. "Beyond campus, the diversity that UNC pursues for the betterment of its students and society is not a trendy slogan. It saves lives," she wrote. As an example, she claimed that, "for high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live, and not die." There's just one problem: It's not true. The citation on which she relies refers to an amicus brief filed in the case by the Association of American Medical Colleges, which argues that "for high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician is tantamount to a miracle drug: it more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live." That brief itself cites a study titled "Physician–Patient Racial Concordance and Disparities in Birthing Mortality for Newborns," which uses census data to measure mortality rates for black newborns in Florida between 1992 and 2015. The study's actual finding, far more modest than what the brief made of it, was that the number of black infants who died while being treated by a black physician was less than half the number of black infants who died while being treated by a white physician. But in both cases the number of infants was a very small percentage of the total. The survival rate — what Jackson's opinion refers to — remained above 99 percent for black infants in both groups.
After a brief ode to the acoustics of city life, Rick Brookhiser laments the tyranny of the Airpod as only he could: The other cause of sound mayhem is the perverse effect of a blessing. I first moved to the city in the era of the boom box, when heroes of culture broadcast their music from portable containers the size of suitcases. Their enablers wrote rapturously of how we all became partakers of their culture thereby. Boom boxes were the audible equivalents of subway graffiti, produced by a few, forced on all. But then someone invented earbuds. (Relative) quiet descended. In time, however, restless man hooked the technology up, not to recorded music, but to conversation. With the simple addition of earpieces, looking less and less like the Frankenstein monster's head bolts with every slimming iteration, you can talk, and talk and talk, with your friends and co-workers as you walk. Why sit at a desk? Let the city be your desk. Great — except that everyone you pass becomes your auditor. Make that your part-auditor. You can't tease a stock tip or a rom-com episode out of the half phrases you overhear as you go about your business. But you will hear fragments of everyone else's business. They talk loudly too. This is yet another effect of earbuds used as music-appreciation devices. I once saw a performance piece inspired by the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Major weirdness ensued, but the bit of business I most remember was a prone man with his head pinned against one side of a bass drum while a grinning tormentor beat the other with a mallet. That's what the youth of America have been doing for fun, for years. As a result, when they speak, they speak up.
Ross Douthat argues that Oppenheimer — the very fact that it was made — suggests the American film industry may be turning a corner, or at least showing signs of life after years spent in a Marvel-induced coma. Like me, though, he wishes the film’s final act hadn’t been weighed down with bureaucratic infighting that serves mostly to distract from the apocalyptic stakes explored in the first two acts. It feels deeply ungrateful, from a filmgoing perspective, to say anything especially negative about Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, which (together with Barbie, of course, about which more in a future column) just made The Movies feel culturally important, as something other than a superhero-and-sequel factory, for the first time in a long time. An intensely acted, beautifully shot, never-boring, designed-for-the-biggest-screen dramatization of the life of a scientific genius and the creation of the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer is exactly the kind of work of art that usually doesn't get made under current conditions — it wouldn't work as a Netflix movie, to put it mildly — and definitely doesn't make $80 million in domestic box office on its opening weekend when it does. Yet here we are, with proof that, with the right subject matter and a famous director and an effective marketing campaign, audiences will still come out for the old-fashioned kind of theatrical experience that has felt anachronistic in the Age of Marvel. Add in the fact that both Marvel itself and the entire tentpole/sequel industry is sagging a bit lately, and you have the first real sign that a comeback might be possible for the movies as they used to be, that the central art form of the American age in history might have some life in it yet.
Shout-Outs Olivia Reingold, at The Free Press: Home Is Where the Revolution Is Tatiana Seigel, at Variety: Inside the Battle for CNN: Jeff Zucker, David Zaslav, Chris Licht and 18 Months of Crazy Backstabbing | 
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