Dear Weekend Jolter,
Not three weeks since Super Tuesday locked in a Biden–Trump rematch, the campaigns and their allies have given a bitter taste of what the rest of the year is going to be like.
In that time:
• President Biden delivered one of the most partisan State of the Union addresses in modern times, replete with factual embellishments along with a hangry digression about Snickers bars.
• Chuck Schumer, to the backdrop of activist pressure to get tougher on Israel, called for new elections to replace Benjamin Netanyahu.
• Donald Trump promised a "bloodbath" if he loses in November.
• Democrats and the media portrayed this as a call for political violence, ignoring the context that Trump was talking moments earlier about U.S. auto-manufacturing jobs and foreign imports.
• Trump, after building a reasonable case that those comments were taken out of context, responded to Schumer's by claiming that Jewish Americans who support Democrats "hate Israel" and "their religion." Which was as bad as it sounded.
This much is clear: 2024 is not shaping up to be a campaign to win over reluctant voters in the mushy middle, at least not where the major-party nominees are concerned. Biden World is ramping up progressive messaging; we see it on Israel, on student-debt "cancellation," at times on the border. Trump, meanwhile, is making little effort to woo Nikki Haley supporters while he leans into January 6, retelling that story as one of "unbelievable patriots" wronged by their government. (As Noah Rothman writes, "You would need a private investigator to find the voters who will head to the ballot box in November intent on clearing the January 6 rioters' good names.")
Imagine what the rhetoric and this contest will be like come October. Envision, if you will, the end of The Northman (viewer discretion on that clip), the campaigns battling to mutual destruction at the Gates of Hell, though neither man would be mistaken for a Viking. Yet the vitriolic, hyperbolic nature of the campaign now and to come reflects in precise proportion the desperate circumstance each presumptive nominee finds himself in.
The Biden campaign and its allies insist democracy itself is on the ballot this November. As Rich Lowry explains, this is . . . an overstatement. But the stakes for the two men are as high as can be imagined. Charles C. W. Cooke explained earlier this month how their legacies from this year forward turn on this fall's turnout:
If he loses, Joe Biden will no longer be the guy who beat Donald Trump. He will be the guy who beat Donald Trump, was president for four years, and then, because he could not accept that he was an unpopular, senile failure, allowed Donald Trump to become president again.
As Rich puts it, "A loss to Trump would instantly vaporize what was to be Biden's most important legacy — stopping Trump and supposedly saving American democracy."
Back to Charlie:
And if Donald Trump loses? Well, then he will no longer be the guy who beat Hillary Clinton and prevented her from turning the country to the left, but the guy who beat Hillary Clinton, did some good things, and then handed control of the country over to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for eight years — during which time his achievements were mostly undone.
The stakes may be even higher for the Republican, considering his combination of criminal trials and account-draining civil cases. Andy McCarthy, who has been diligently tracking developments with the latter, including Trump's notification to a New York appellate court that he can't fully post bond to stay enforcement of his $454 million judgment (unless . . . ), observes: "While much of the reporting on the Democrats' lawfare campaign focuses on four criminal indictments against Trump, the civil lawsuits are potentially existential dangers for the tycoon-turned-pol."
"Existential" could just as accurately describe how the presumptive nominees view this campaign. There is no fallback or next chapter for either candidate. Trump is looking at the possibility of asset seizure and/or imprisonment, and the odds of the latter increase if he's not in charge of the Justice Department, soon. If Biden loses, don't expect a Trump DOJ and allied congressional Republicans to spare him further hassle over his family's influence-peddling controversy.
All of which points to a general-election campaign being waged in apocalyptic terms, because pleasant retirement is not a consolation prize this year.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
Covid-era history is being rewritten, to provide cover for those who advocated and enforced obviously harmful policies: The Damaging Legacy of Covid School Closures
Yet more evidence that Hong Kong's government is just an arm of the CCP: A Hong Kong Wake-Up Call
Bernie Sanders's idea of progress: Bernie's 32-Hour Work Week
ARTICLES
Jim Geraghty: 'Just Pray and Go': How One Protestant Pastor and His Family Escaped the Russians
Ryan Mills: Minneapolis Residents Left Hanging as Uber, Lyft Prepare to Abandon City over 'Excessive' Driver-Pay Law
Noah Rothman: Blame the Phones
Arthur Herman: The Real TikTok Scandal
Audrey Fahlberg & Brittany Bernstein: The Anti-Trump Protest Vote Should Have Republicans Worried about November
Dan McLaughlin: Okay, Chuck Schumer. Now Do Mexico
Dan McLaughlin: Now It Can Be Told: The Covid School-Closers Were Wrong, and They Harmed Kids
Kayla Bartsch: Chronic Absenteeism the 'No. 1 Problem' in American K–12 Education Right Now
Andrew McCarthy: Trump Says He Cannot Post Bond, Asks NY Appeals Court to Stay Enforcement of $454M Civil Fraud Judgment
Rich Lowry: Why Is It Necessary to Lie about Donald Trump?
Christian Schneider: If 'Democracy Is on the Ballot,' Kamala Harris Shouldn't Be
Robert P. George: Are Human Embryos Human Beings?
David Zimmermann: Former Harvard Medical Professor Claims He Was Fired for Opposing Covid Lockdowns, Vaccine Mandates
Jeffrey Blehar: Mike Pence Is the Man He Claimed to Be
Brent Skorup: The Beginning of the End for the Censorship-Industrial Complex?
CAPITAL MATTERS
"The bad news was a surprise only to those who took Newsom seriously." Will Swaim explains: California's Deficit: Bring Your Alibis
Joel Kotkin presents a formula for the revitalization of cities: Is There an Urban Future?
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Brian Allen finds something to smile about — and something about smiles — in the Netherlands: With a Twinkle and a Smile, a Hals Exhibition in Amsterdam
Armond White, on Glazer and The Zone of Interest: The Banality of NIMBY
YOUR EXCERPTS, SHOULD YOU CHOOSE TO ACCEPT THEM
The effort to cast the Covid-era school closers as well-meaning administrators and union officials making the best of a bad situation continues apace. NR's editorial shows how miserably inaccurate this retelling of history is:
In a Monday report, the paper of record conceded that "remote learning was a key driver of academic declines during the pandemic." Its reporters seemed self-conscious about the conclusions to which the "research" now points them. They note that there were "no easy decisions at the time," and officials had to "weigh the risks of an emerging virus against academic and mental health." But the decision to close schools to in-person education was still the wrong choice, regardless of the anguish experienced by those who settled on that policy. And it's a choice that became much more obviously wrong the further we got from the initial outbreak in the spring of 2020.
The Times cites studies that conclusively demonstrate that students who experienced prolonged school closures or suffered through hybridized learning "fell more than half a grade behind in math on average." The effects on student performance grow worse in direct correlation with the amount of time students spent outside the classroom. That effect is even more pronounced in poorer school districts, which had access to fewer resources to cope with their new reality and were likely to remain closed longer than their counterparts in wealthier areas of the country.
These revelations come as no surprise to almost anyone who personally struggled with the remote-learning regime to which children were consigned in 2020–21. Within weeks of that experiment, parents recognized the catastrophic circumstances that had been imposed on their families. They told anyone willing to listen — from pollsters to politicians — that this new status quo was unsustainable. By June 2020, for example, a majority of parents surveyed by Gallup wanted to see their children return to full-time, in-person learning. But those concerns were met with a blizzard of emotionally manipulative brushback pitches, in which parents were accused of wanting to sacrifice the lives of America's educators only to restore the convenience that the pandemic had taken from them.
In the summer of 2020, teachers' unions in places like California voted overwhelmingly against returning to the classroom in the fall in direct response to surveys that showed parents favored a return to in-person education. The alternative, a union statement read, was to use teachers "as kindling" to "reignite the economy." The Washington Teachers Union lobbied for members to be allowed to "opt-out of in-person teaching" indefinitely. The Chicago Teachers Union engaged in work stoppage unless the city committed to a variety of demands for smaller class sizes and more flexible hours for school employees. In New York City, teachers planned mass "sick-outs" to ensure that schools stayed closed. The briefest of reprieves from the prison of remote education was summarily stolen from pupils again in the fall of 2020 when teachers' unions forced city officials to shutter the schoolhouse doors again based on arbitrary levels of local viral-transmission rates.
It is nothing short of rewriting history to suggest that school closures were just another pandemic-era conundrum policy-makers had to navigate with imperfect information. As the Democratic governors of seven northeastern states wrote in response to New York City's return to remote learning in the fall of 2020, "in-person learning is safe," "even in communities with high transmission rates." The deleterious effect remote learning was having not just on student performance but also on young people's mental health was observable and, indeed, chronicled at the anecdotal and clinical level. And yet, critics of school closures were routinely rebuffed. They were told that educational facilities couldn't reopen, not just because schools had become death traps for teachers but because the country had not committed sufficient resources to teacher safety. That was the point at which the pandemic became an extortion racket.
Sticking with this theme, Kayla Bartsch follows up on prior reporting about how Covid-era habits have hardened into a chronic-absenteeism problem in schools across the country:
Since the pandemic, K–12 schools across the country have seen a dramatic increase in chronic absenteeism.
While millions of American students missed out on in-person learning during Covid-19, the number of students back in class after the pandemic did not rebound as expected. Instead, according to the latest data, over two-thirds of students in the U.S. attended a school with 20 percent or more of its students chronically absent in 2021–2022. Both the clear identification of this issue and the enactment of a swift response should be top priorities for school districts across the nation.
"Chronically absent" refers to students who miss 10 percent or more of instructional days in a year. Unlike truancy, which refers to a summation of unexcused absences, chronic absenteeism includes both excused and unexcused absences.
The startling increase in chronic absenteeism that began during Covid-19 can be attributed in part to the vast school closures and move to remote learning across the country during the pandemic. Children fell out of the habit of attending school every day — and their parents fell out of the habit of ensuring that they were in school. While going to school was once an unquestioned norm, the pandemic colored it with optionality.
Chronic absence and truancy were, of course, problems before the onset of Covid-19. The pandemic exacerbated an already-existent problem.
"Chronic absenteeism is the No. 1 problem in education right now," Nat Malkus told National Review. Malkus, the senior fellow and deputy director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote, "This is not a new problem, but COVID shutdowns turned it into a crisis." Before the pandemic, in 2019, about 15 percent of students nationwide were chronically absent. By 2022, that number had nearly doubled to 28 percent. However, even after Covid-19 spikes subsided, the number of chronically absent students did not. In 2023, 26 percent of students were still chronically absent.
Noah Rothman hits on something intuitive — yet hardly treated with the urgency it deserves — regarding the happiness deficit in younger generations:
A Gallup survey released on Thursday contains both good news and bad news. First, the good news: If you're over the age of 60, you're probably one of the happiest people on earth. According to the pollster's "World Happiness Report," which evaluated relative self-reported levels of happiness in 140 countries worldwide, the U.S. ranks in the top ten among senior citizens. And yet, the younger generations cannot say the same. Among Americans aged 30 or younger, happiness has proven elusive. Based on the responses from its youngest cohort, the United States ranks just 62nd in global happiness.
What explains this disparity? Younger Americans inclined toward political activism are quick to cite material considerations. With higher interest rates and low inventory, the prospects for younger potential home buyers are bleak. Health care, food, and utilities are pricey, too, making saving for the future a prohibitive prospect. These factors matter. But if you're of a certain age, you also recall that America's youngest working-age citizens have long complained about the same factors contributing to their failure to rise. And yet, self-reported happiness among the youngest generation did not fall off a cliff until recently — recently enough that it coincides with what psychologist Jean Twenge identifies as the main culprit: the rise of digital media and the degree to which it has become inescapable with the advent of the smartphone.
In a 2019 study, Twenge finds that younger people began reporting consistently decreased levels of happiness beginning in 2012, and their satisfaction has declined ever since. That coincides with an increase in young people telling pollsters that they are spending inordinate amounts of their day interacting with screens. "During the same time period that digital media use increased, adolescents began to spend less time interacting with each other in person, including getting together with friends, socializing, and going to parties," Twenge writes. They get less sleep, spend less time forming durable bonds with their friends and communities, attend fewer religious services, and they even use their phones less as, you know, phones. Instead, they are texting, posting on social media, playing games, consuming online media products, or listening to music with earbuds — all solitary occupations. . . .
Spending one's life in psychological isolation and staring into a machine designed to maximize user engagement by bombarding one with negative feedback (and associated calls to action) is an easy way to miss out on life's joys.
Shout-Outs
Adam Kredo, at the Washington Free Beacon: TikTok Supporters Blame Jews for Congressional Ban
Alex Thompson, at Axios: “Obama would be jealous”: How Biden’s rivalry with his ex-boss shapes his presidency
Nancy Loo, at NewsNation: 'Squatter Hunters' help California homeowners fight squatting
CODA
I dropped in a wailing, soul-baring monument of a blues song by SRV a couple weeks back. But returning to the greats, specifically an icon of Chicago blues and a member of the old guard who is still around and pickin' — Buddy Guy makes you feel what he feels. Here are a couple imported straight from 1991. “Damn right.”
Enjoy the weekend.
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