The Week

• Ditto.

• Radio is a powerful medium, more personal somehow than TV, and few broadcasters exploited its power to greater effect than Rush Limbaugh. A former DJ, he kicked around various radio gigs until finding the right outlet for his talent (on loan from God, of course) in political talk radio. He created a new industry, revitalized AM radio, and made friends with millions of people who never met him but were drawn to his voice and irresistible persona. His lashing critiques of the Left, comic riffs, and cheerful bombast spawned many imitators, but never anything like his equal. He had an outsize role in conservative politics for 30 years, and could instantly elevate a cause or argument. He loved Bill Buckley — the feeling was mutual — and was friends with many people at this institution. A humble man in person, who performed countless acts of personal generosity that no one will ever hear about, he fought his lung cancer at the end with the heart of a lion. R.I.P.

• Speaking on the Senate floor at the end of the impeachment trial, Mitch McConnell said that Donald Trump had moral responsibility for the Capitol riot of January 6 but that the Constitution did not allow the conviction of a former official. (He allowed that the constitutional question is a close one.) As he had to foresee, he is taking flak from all directions. Trump’s opponents are by and large saying that McConnell invoked a “technicality” to acquit him, a criticism that trivializes the Constitution. Trump’s supporters reject McConnell’s severity toward the former president. McConnell’s argument about Trump was, though, hard to refute: “The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president. And their having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories, and reckless hyperbole which the defeated president kept shouting into the largest mega­phone on planet Earth.” To condemn Trump, McConnell emphasized, was not to condemn the 74 million Americans who voted for him. Trump was the one in a position of responsibility, and the one who abused it. Most of the Republican senators who voted to acquit him were not willing to offend his remaining supporters by condemning his post-election campaign. But they were also unwilling or unable to defend it. Their silence, while an unfortunate contrast to McConnell’s forthrightness, was its own kind of verdict.

• Trump is right about one thing — Mitch McConnell is dour. The former president hit back at the Senate minority leader in a long, angry, personally insulting statement calling for Republicans to break from McConnell and promising to back Trumpist candidates in GOP primaries. He implausibly blamed McConnell for the special-election defeats in Georgia, when his own outlandish attacks on Georgia Republicans who wouldn’t endorse his conspiracy theories surely had more to do with it. McConnell certainly isn’t charismatic, but he is canny, tough-minded, and willing to play the long game. If he’s made mistakes in internal Republican fights over the years, there’s no question he’s genuinely interested in building up his party rather than tearing it down if he doesn’t get his way. The same can’t be said of his antagonist.

• Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) didn’t dispute anything McConnell said, but complained that his having said it would haunt Republican candidates in the 2022 elections as Demo­crats played the tape. If Democrats consider this tactic useful in 2022, though, it will be because Trump’s misconduct and Republican candidates’ tolerance of it is unpopular — which suggests that the misconduct and the tolerance would be more to blame. Trump and the Democrats have an interest in making the former president the top issue in the midterms. Graham has done both of them a favor by calling Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump “the future of the party” and endorsing her in a North Carolina Senate race she has not even joined. You may agree or disagree with what McConnell has to say on any given day. You can at least trust that he has thought about it before he speaks.

• The handful of Republicans who voted to impeach or convict Donald Trump for inciting the mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6 got swift rebukes from GOP party officials back home. On the Senate side, Bill Cassidy (La.) and Richard Burr (N.C.) were censured by their state parties. Pat Toomey was censured in seven Pennsylvania counties. Ben Sasse faces censure in Nebraska. A move to censure Mitt Romney was mooted in Utah. Meanwhile the South Carolina GOP censured Representative Tom Rice. These reproofs were expressions of wrath that a Republican president had been traduced by fellow party members. The GOP is like a shell, occupied by the hermit crab of Trumpism, an increasingly obstinate and delusional thing. Recovering the party from its current inhabitant will be a task requiring years of work.

• That light you may have seen in the night sky, brighter than Halley’s Comet, steadier than the aurora borealis, is the Lincoln Project blowing up. This was a PR shop run by ex-Republican campaign operatives avowedly disgusted with Donald Trump. They churned out numerous ads and endless tweets, all in the highest dudgeon, hammering the 45th president. For these services they collected multimillions from wealthy Democratic donors, paying their own concerns a large proportion. One of their number, John Weaver, allegedly used his position to proposition younger men. Weaver’s fellow projectors reacted to the accusations against him like the monkeys who heard and saw no evil. The irony of naming themselves after Abraham Lincoln, a man noteworthy for his simple tastes, self-discipline, and lack of rancor, was lost on them — and will be lost on everyone as they fade from view.

• A petition to recall California governor Gavin Newsom has gained the 1.5 million signatures needed to force a vote. The Republican National Committee has put $250,000 into the effort. The momentum behind the effort speaks to the widespread dissatisfaction with Newsom, who has failed to abide by his own strict COVID-19 lockdown measures. And while it seems like a moonshot at first glance, the last gubernatorial recall led to the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2003. We don’t expect California to elect another Republican anytime soon, but the use of statewide petitions can serve as a counter­weight to the state’s patently incompetent one-party govern­ment. For their part, California Democrats, long fond of ballot referenda when they suit their needs, have suddenly deemed such measures illegitimate.

• Newsom’s bad 2021 got worse when the U.S. Supreme Court suspended California’s ban on indoor religious services, in place since mid 2020 — the most extreme ban in the country. The Court has properly deferred to elected state and local officials to make public-health decisions, but it has drawn the line at indefinitely suspending the explicit constitutional guarantees of the Bill of Rights. Even Chief Justice John Roberts, who sided with Andrew Cuomo when the Court ruled against New York’s church-capacity restrictions in November, thought Newsom had gone too far: “The State’s present determination — that the maximum number of adherents who can safely worship in the most cavernous cathedral is zero — appears to reflect not expertise or discretion, but instead insufficient appreciation or consideration of the interests at stake.” The freedom to worship, the core of the free exercise of religion, should not have to play second fiddle to indoor film and television production, which Newsom allowed. Five justices invited further scrutiny of discriminatory treatment of singing in church. The Court’s vigilance is a welcome sign for the first freedom.

• New York governor Andrew Cuomo, already buffeted by revelations that the death toll in New York nursing homes (where Cuomo sent COVID patients in March) was almost half again as great as the state said, took another hit when aide Melissa DeRosa admitted in a conference call with Democratic legislators that Cuomo’s team had withheld accurate numbers because it feared the use President Trump might make of them. “Basically, we froze,” DeRosa said. Cuomo’s fellow Democrats were not pleased. “All of it is B.S.,” declared Ron Kim, a Queens assemblyman whose uncle died in a nursing home. “They could have given us the information back in May and June of last year.” New York suffers the effects of one-party government: laziness, carelessness, secrecy. The worst that can be said of Andrew Cuomo is that he is as bad as Bill de Blasio.

• Laura Ingraham invited Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to her podcast to discuss the COVID-19 pandemic. Best known for his surname and his quixotic quest to supplant Jenny McCarthy as the country’s most prominent anti-vaxxer, Kennedy is the chairman of Children’s Health Defense, a group that submits that vaccines cause children to develop autism, ADHD, and even cancer. He not only buys these theories and seeks to spread them far and wide, he also believes that Big Pharma, the media, and the government are in cahoots to cover them up. In the context of the current health crisis, he has alleged without evidence that the COVID-19 vaccines are dangerous and even that they are responsible for the death of 86-year-old baseball legend Hank Aaron last month. Promoting the interview, Ingraham tweeted out a quote from Kennedy, asserting that Dr. Anthony Fauci “is a very sinister guy who has turned this country over to Big Pharma.” We can think of more-sinister figures.

• Joe Biden says he wants to get schools open, and the scientific evidence is clear that they can operate safely with basic precautions such as masks. But his administration is reluctant to stand up to the teachers’ unions on it, and the latest guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control are a case in point. As two public-health experts explained in the Washing­ton Post, the agency’s suggestions are so stringent they could keep schools closed, or at most in hybrid learning, in 90 percent of the country. The agency relies heavily on measures of community spread, even though these metrics are unreliable (and schools can operate safely when community transmission is high anyway); and it emphasizes keeping kids six feet apart, even though three feet would be sufficient for kids wearing masks and many schools don’t have enough space for a six-foot rule. These are nonbinding suggestions, and states and school districts should ignore them. But in too much of the country, they will provide unions a new excuse to delay re­opening as kids fall further and frther behind.

• In response to President Biden’s executive order mandating, among other things, that “transgender women should compete on female teams” (as a subsequent White House statement explained), tennis legend and lesbian Martina Navratilova, along with law professor and NCAA champion Doriane Coleman and Olympic swimmers Donna de Varona and Nancy Hogshead-Makar, have set up a group to lobby Biden and Congress to preserve “girls’ and women’s sports while accommodating transgender athletes.” Navratilova et al. argue that the president’s policy “does the cause of transgender inclusion no favors,” as it will cause “justifiable resentment.” They are petitioning for a “science-based approach to trans inclusion,” which means banning individuals who “have experienced all or part of male puberty” from participation in female categories, but they suggest separate heats, additional events, and/or handicaps as a compro­mise. This is moderate and conciliatory dissent, which means it’s sure to be rejected as a form of hate.

• When John Kerry — now the Biden administration’s “climate czar” — jetted off to Iceland in 2019 to accept the Arctic Circle Prize, he flew private, as is his wont. “I understand that you came here with a private jet,” Icelandic reporter Jóhann Bjarni Kolbeinsson had the good sense to ask Kerry after he collected the iceberg-shaped award for climate leadership. “Is that an environmental way to travel?” “It’s the only choice for some­body like me who is traveling the world to win this battle,” the very busy and important Kerry huffed. “I’ve been involved with this fight for years. . . . And, I believe, the time it takes me to get somewhere, I can’t sail across the ocean,” Kerry continued defensively. “I have to fly, meet with people, and get things done.” No one is asking Kerry to sail to international climate junkets on a trireme. But perhaps he could at least deign to fly commercial the next time he wants to lecture people about reducing their carbon footprints.

• Jamie Fly is a veteran foreign-policy hand: a Reaganite who has worked in the Senate, the Pentagon, the White House, and elsewhere. He knows a lot about Kremlin disinformation, among other things. In 2019, he was named president of RFE/RL (that combination of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty). He was outstanding in that job. Yet he was fired last summer, in a purge of all such broadcasting heads. Now he has been returned to that job, which is good news. Millions depend on RFE/RL, and it is a jewel in the American crown.

• Dominion and Smartmatic are voting-technology companies. In the 2020 elections, Dominion’s technology was used in 28 states; Smartmatic’s was used in one county (Los Angeles County, Calif.). Immediately after the elections, the companies became targets of conspiracy theories, and their employees were subjected to threats of violence. Charlie Kirk, the young right-wing provocateur, tweeted, “Has anyone checked Hunter Biden’s laptop for any references to Dominion or Smartmatic? I have a good feeling they would find something there.” The companies have now sued various TrumpWorld figures for defamation: These include Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell. Smartmatic has sued Fox News and three of its hosts, including Lou Dobbs. The day after the suit was filed, Fox eased Mr. Dobbs out. We have long warned of a society that is overly litigious. But the defamation laws are there for a reason, principally to make the media exercise a modicum of self-restraint.

• In February, the New York Times fired its star science reporter, Donald McNeil Jr., who had been with the company since the Ford administration. McNeil’s crime? Having used the N-word during a conversation about the appropriateness of someone else’s having used the N-word. Explaining the decision, the Times’ leadership proposed that it would “not tolerate racist language regardless of intent” — a preposterous standard that would, if taken seriously, lead to the termination of the many Times journalists who use the word regularly on social media and in the paper’s pages, and to the chilling of precisely the sort of historical discussions in which the Times wishes to be engaged. Instead of making this point, alas, McNeil decided to grovel. He had, he said, shown “extraordinarily bad judgment,” been “deeply offensive and hurtful,” “hurt my colleagues,” “hurt the Times,” and “let you all down.” None of this, of course, was true, which the Times’ own Bret Stephens pointed out eloquently in a column on the incident — or, at least, which Stephens would have pointed out had his column not been spiked by the publisher, who later seemed to walk back the “regardless of intent” language, but, disgracefully, not to reinstate McNeil. The Times walks farther down the road to illiberalism.

• Washington Free Beacon staff writer Aaron Sibarium, reporting on that incident, asked New York Times Magazine reporter and 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones whether her tweets including the N-word violated the Times’ professed standards. In response, Hannah-Jones shared a screenshot of Sibarium’s inquiry — featuring his personal cellphone number — with her more than 500,000 followers on Twitter (a practice known as “doxxing” and a clear violation of the Times’ social-media guidelines). A spokesperson for the Times came to Hannah-Jones’s defense, saying that the inclusion of the phone number had been “inadvertent” and that it had been deleted as soon as it was brought to her attention. In point of fact, Hannah-Jones deleted the tweet 47 hours afterward — well after one of her own Twitter exchanges revealed that she was aware that she had shared Sibarium’s number. Sadly, none of this — the McNeil firing, the doxxing, and the embarrassing response from the Times — should shock us.

• A Time magazine story tried to tell “the secret history of the shadow campaign that saved the 2020 election,” claiming “a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes” in which “a well-funded cabal of powerful people . . . work[ed] together . . . to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.” Many conservatives are up in arms about the story and its tale of social-media bans and election-law changes being centrally organized by leftists, and Time and writer Molly Ball had to know the effect the story would have. The article was irresponsibly written, overstating the extent to which these actions were coordinated, and downplaying the independent and honorable role of individual Republicans in resisting Donald Trump’s post-election pressure. The story also ignored the complicity of liberal media in promoting hysteria about a Postal Service conspiracy to hand the election to Trump. It leaves unanswered questions about whether these same forces would have supported a Biden-Harris attack on the outcome. In a perilous climate of suspicion, Ball and her editors should have been more careful.

• In February, the AP had a scoop: The Catholic Church in the U.S. had “amassed” millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded coronavirus aid, despite “sitting on billions” last year. That is, across the country, a variety of Catholic institutions such as parishes, schools, and charitable organizations applied for and received government loans for which they were eligible under the Paycheck Protection Program. That program was intended to help keep people employed, and their employers afloat, during an unprecedented economic lockdown. It sensibly included religious institutions, which both employ large numbers of Americans and provide them with essential social services. The report presents the Church as if it were a monolithic corporate entity in which bishops exercise total financial and operational control in their dioceses. In reality, there is no central vault of cash. Bishops cannot simply reallocate assets at their discretion from well-endowed parishes or organizations to struggling ones. Many Catholic institutions have suffered financially or been shuttered during the pandemic. That others remain in the black would seem to be good news rather than the stuff of scandal.

• Gina Carano, an actress on The Mandalorian, has been punished for a controversial political opinion: that we should not punish people for controversial political opinions. Reminding the world why actors need other people to write lines for them, Carano shared a very stupid meme, the argument of which was, roughly: Adolf Hitler had to cultivate hatred of Jews to enable the Holocaust, and Americans fomenting hatred against those with unpopular political opinions are doing the same thing. Of course it is in very bad taste to use Holocaust imagery to make a political point, but it is also, unhappily, very common. Carano’s co-star Pedro Pascal is guilty of the same thing, but his target was the immigration policy of the Donald Trump administration, and so he faces no professional sanction. It is very strange that American progressives have decided that what the country really needs is a good, far-reaching campaign of moral purification and that Corporate America — in this case the Walt Disney Company — should be deputized to carry it out. If you believe that there is a better way to handle political disagreement than to create a vindictive left-wing mutaween to police the morals of Hollywood, then you are closer to Gina Carano’s ill-expressed views than to those of her employer.

• There’s diversity, and then there’s San Francisco diversity. When the city’s school board held a hearing on adding a member to its Parents Advisory Committee, the candidate seemed a perfect fit: gay, married, with a multiracial child, a talented musician, and active in school affairs. Immediately, however, the usual complaint erupted: not diverse enough — which is to say, white. The existing committee has two African Americans, one Asian American, three “Latinx,” a Pacific Islander — and three whites, who were the sticking point, because they make up 30 percent of the group when only 15 percent of the city’s public-school students are white. One board member bemoaned the lack of Arab, Vietnamese, Native American, and “Chinese or Chinese-speaking” members; an audience member asserted that a wider variety of voices “need to be heard first before white queer voices.” Another audience member said the board was “operating under white supremacy.” After two hours of this, the nomination was shelved and the board members were urged to go out and find some candidates with the right identity credentials. Better hire a demographer.

• Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced that the Biden administration will be reengaging with the U.N. Human Rights Council, from which the Trump administration withdrew in 2018. Although the council has sometimes advanced the cause of human rights, its authoritarian members — Russia, China, Venezuela, Cuba, and others — too often get a free pass, and it disproportionately criticizes Israel. These flaws are longstanding. What is new is that China has stepped up its attempts to co-opt the body. The Biden administration believes that being in the room will allow it to push back against authoritarian influence. But the body should be fundamentally reformed before the U.S. lends legitimacy to it once again. “Diplomacy is back,” says the Biden team, but we fear what they really mean is “complacency.”

• Confucius Institutes are, nominally at least, modeled on benign organizations such as Germany’s Goethe-Institut, which operate, with direct or indirect official support, to promote a country’s culture and language. Confucius Institutes are run by Hanban, officially a nonprofit associated with China’s ministry of education but indisputably an arm of the state dedicated to the development of China’s soft power. Where these institutes differ from their European counterparts is that they tend to be located on college campuses, in what can be a lucrative arrangement for their hosts. And, of course, some of the “culture” they are promoting reflects the values of an authoritarian regime rather than those of a democracy. They are not the place to go to for up-to-date information on the concentration camps now being run in Xinjiang. At least in some instances, staff have been subject to ideological vetting, and there have been claims that the presence of an institute on campus can be used to suppress unfavorable discussion of the regime, even on the broader campus. Oh, yes, Hanban also helps support “Confucius Classrooms” in primary and secondary schools. In August last year, the Trump administration required the American head office of the Confucius Institutes to register as a foreign mission. In late December, it proposed a rule requiring educational institutions to disclose the details of their arrangements with Confucius Institutes. The incoming Biden team then appeared to have abandoned these plans, but after criticism it claimed that this was merely part of a general freeze on new rules that had not made it onto the books before Trump left office. According to a State Department spokesman, the institutes remained an object of “concern.” We will have to see what happens next. Since becoming president, Biden has talked a good game on China, but deeds trump words, and one of those deeds needs to be to throw more light on what the Confucius Institutes (and their American partners) are up to.

• The latest revelations about Communist China’s human-rights abominations are possibly the most horrific yet. According to a new BBC report, women are being systematically raped and tortured in the Xinjiang concentration camps. From interviews with brave victims and from analysis of documents and satellite imagery that corroborate their stories, the BBC pieces together how the Han Chinese authorities routinely subject their victims to sexual violence in dark cells throughout the camps. In other instances, these depraved crimes take place in the open, such as one gang rape perpetrated before a captive audience of 100 prisoners. It’s impossible to read the report without agreeing with the conclusion of Tursunay Ziawudun, one of the Uyghur women who shared her story: “They say people are released, but in my opinion everyone who leaves the camps is finished,” she said. “Their goal is to destroy everyone, and everybody knows it.” The destruction of the Uyghurs is clearly Beijing’s ultimate goal. Time for sanctions on everyone who is participating in this genocide, and on the corporations who are, through their operations in the region, enabling it.

• A World Health Organization mission to Wuhan wrapped up its work, and during a three-hour press conference, public-health officials called it “extremely unlikely” that COVID escaped from a lab, lending credence instead to the Chinese government’s disinformation narrative that the disease actually originated outside of the country and first entered China via the packaging of frozen foods. Days later, WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus contradicted the mission, saying that the lab-origin theory couldn’t be ruled out. And in an interview with Science magazine upon his return from China, Peter Ben Embarek, the WHO official who led the Wuhan mission, seemed to reverse himself. He called the lab-outbreak theory not impossible but ruled out the frozen-food theory: In 2019 “that was not a possible route of introduction.” The WHO is trying its hardest to avoid offending Beijing, which, despite contributing a tiny portion of the organization’s budget, exercises outsized influence over it. The result is corruption leavened by inconstancy.

• Raif Badawi is the most prominent political prisoner in Saudi Arabia. He has been imprisoned since 2012 (also lashed). The next most prominent, probably, was Loujain al-Hathloul, who was imprisoned in 2018. She has been tortured, as is de rigueur in Saudi Arabia. Al-Hathloul has now been released, although she is under a travel ban and other restrictions. “She was a powerful advocate for women’s rights,” said President Biden in remarks at the Pentagon, “and releasing her was the right thing to do.” Obviously, the U.S. alliance with Saudi Arabia is very important. But the new administration has signaled that human rights will be a component of our dealings with the kingdom. The U.S., presumably, has leverage. Why not use it in behalf of American values, and human ones? We hope that we will be seeing Raif Badawi soon.

• Twice, Vladimir Kara-Murza, the Russian democracy leader, was poisoned: in May 2015 and Febru­ary 2017. Twice, he survived. It was a very close call each time. Now, Bellingcat, in cooperation with Der Spiegel and The Insider, has investi­gated these episodes. (Bellingcat is an international consortium of in­vesti­gative journal­ists; The Insider is an independent news site, based in Moscow.) The investigators have uncovered just who poisoned Kara-Murza, and how. The would-be assassins were members of the FSB — Russia’s secret police — including from the senior ranks. The Chekists are still at work, after all these years. Said Kara-Murza himself, “It’s one thing to know intellectually that someone has tried to kill you — and it’s quite another to see the names and photographs of the actual people who did this.” One can imagine, barely.

• Midwives at two public hospitals in England run by Britain’s National Health Service have been told to follow a new “gender-inclusive language policy” that would replace the word “breastfeeding” with the nonword “chestfeeding.” Apparently, this is supposed to help transgender-identifying mothers — or rather, “birthing parents,” as the policy dictates — feel more included. According to the policy, the department for maternity services is to be renamed as that for “perinatal services,” while “breastmilk” is to be changed to “human milk,” “breast/chestmilk,” or “milk from the feeding mother or parent.” To complete this Orwellian travesty, the word “woman” is to be replaced with the phrase “woman or person.” And all this despite the fact that less than 1 percent of the U.K. population identifies as transgender (a condition for which there is no objective diagnosis), while around 50 percent of the population are unambiguously female. This is yet another disturbing example of the state-imposed mainstreaming of transgender ideology in the U.K. medical profession.

• “We win today and we’re champs for life,” Tom Brady, 43, told his teammates, delivering a pregame exhortation that a Tampa Bay sportswriter called “the epic of epics.” Underdogs, the Buccaneers took the field in Tampa in Super Bowl LV and pro­ceeded to rack up touch­downs while thwart­ing Patrick Mahomes, 25, the electrifying, improvisational quarter­back of the reigning champion Kansas City Chiefs. Final score: Bucs 31, Chiefs 9. The quarterback matchup was for the ages but, in the end, not much of a contest. Brady completed 21 of 29 passes, three of them for touch­downs. He won the Super Bowl MVP award, his fifth, and a champ­ionship ring, his seventh, extending his record. He had worked behind the scenes to recruit tight end Rob Gronkowski and wide receiver Antonio Brown — both connected for touchdowns in the first half — to the roster of his new team, which he joined this season after 20 dazzling years in New England. How much of the credit for the Patriots’ dynasty does head coach Bill Belichick share with his former quarterback? Football fans love to debate the question. See Super Bowl LV for the answer.

• Eight thousand hours later, Micah Mattix’s excellent news­letter, Prufrock, is taking a break. This daily arts-and-culture briefing has been arriving in subscribers’ inboxes for eight years now, enlightening them with essays on a wide variety of topics. Each email was a focused collection of four to five article links, and it aimed to showcase pieces covering fascinating subjects that received little attention owing to their lack of a political angle. Anything from new poetry revelations to the invention of the Pez dispenser to philosophical questions could find its way into the newsletter. Mattix would end each edition with a link to a captivating picture — rolling cornfields in Iowa, a church in rural France, an amazing celestial event — and a new book recommendation. Mattix was sorry to push pause on the project, but he now has other duties that demand his attention. It was a delightful way to begin one’s morning, reading this newsletter, and we will miss the charm and variety it brought to our day.

• Daniel Hannan is a British writer and politician. He is a great admirer of the United States, and, maybe even better, understander of it. Many of us have observed that Hannan has a rather American mind and heart. National Review Institute, among other U.S. organizations, has honored him. Hannan is still in his forties. Some of us have mused, Might he come here and have an American career, both journalistically and even politically? On February 1, Dan was introduced into the House of Lords. So it seems like Britain has him for good, lucky people. All we can say — borrowing from the language of Peru, where he was born — is, Viva Lord Hannan.

• Larry Flynt’s dishonesty arose not from any attempt to dress up his products per se, as did that of Hugh Hefner the would-be glamour boy. Flynt pushed porn, pure and simple, with few limits: celebrity nudes, rape fantasies, jokes about child-molesting abounded. Flynt’s dishonesty was to assume the mantle of a civil libertarian: He was upholding the principles of John Milton and James Madison. Sure, as long as he made money and got publicity. In 1978 he was shot and left wheelchair-bound; grit must be granted him. In 2011 he appeared in Richard Brookhiser’s documentary Rediscover­ing Alexander Hamilton, as the soul mate of the scandal-mongering journalist James T. Callender. Flynt described the last step in his sexposés: a pre-publication call to the victim. What happens next? Flynt was asked. He grinned: “There is usually silence at the other end, followed by a brisk denial.” It made powerful TV. The lesson: Don’t fall into this man’s hands, he enjoys his work. Dead at 78. R.I.P.

• In a recent issue, we hailed George P. Shultz on the occasion of his hundredth birthday. It is time to do so again. He was born on December 13, 1920, and grew up in New Jersey. He went to Princeton, studying economics. He served as a Marine in World War II (Pacific theater). Afterward, he earned a Ph.D. at MIT, in industrial economics. He stayed to teach at MIT; later, he went to the University of Chicago. A free-marketeer, he referred to Milton Friedman as his “friend and hero.” Under Nixon, Shultz was labor secretary, budget director, and Treasury secretary. Under Reagan, secretary of state. He helped the president navigate the many challenges of the 1980s, including what turned out to be the climax, or dénouement, of the Cold War. Like other Reaganites, Shultz was an unabashed champion of freedom, democracy, and human rights. He has now died at a hundred plus two months or so. He was a statesman admired by other statesmen, and not a few average citizens. R.I.P.

Acquitted, but Not Vindicated

Former president Donald Trump got acquitted in his second impeachment trial, 57–43, but it was hardly a vindication.

His conduct in the post-election period and on January 6 will blight his reputation forevermore. He waged a dishonest and poisonous campaign to overturn the election that culminated in a mob disrupting the counting of electoral votes at the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

The new videos played by the House managers at the trial brought home again the national embarrassment of that day, with top elected officials scurrying for safety as the rabble descended.

The House managers were at their strongest describing Trump’s conspiracy-laden effort to reverse the election result, his long catalogue of inflammatory comments, and his dereliction of duty in failing to urge the rioters to cease and desist as early and forcefully as possible. All of this is damnable, inarguably so.

The weakness in their case stemmed from the defects of the article of impeachment itself, which went both too far and not far enough.

At the core of the article was the contention that Trump incited the crowd to attack the Capitol, that he “willfully made statements that, in context, encouraged — and foreseeably resulted in — lawless action at the Capitol.” This suggested an element of intent that the managers couldn’t prove.

On the other hand, incredibly enough, the article didn’t even mention Trump’s abysmal conduct during the riot, when he continued to criticize Mike Pence as he was being targeted by the mob and went AWOL as allies begged him to tell the rioters to stand down. Trump’s defense team didn’t have good answers — or really any answers — when queried in the Q&A about what Trump was doing in these hours.

If House Democrats hadn’t rushed to impeach Trump in an afternoon, they might have written a more airtight article. Re­gardless, seven Republicans concluded, reasonably enough, that Trump was still guilty. If he hadn’t falsely insisted in the most incendiary terms that he’d really won the election, and if he hadn’t promoted a protest on January 6, there would have been no rabble to run out of control in the first place.

On top of this, his pressure campaign to get Republican officials to throw the election to him in key states was intolerable in its own right.

Most Republicans voting to acquit argued that under the Constitution a former president can’t be tried by the Senate, a colorable claim, although one we don’t find persuasive. Even if they were right about this, there was no excuse for more of them not forcibly condemning the president’s conduct.

This was a quickie impeachment, running about a month from beginning to end. But the underlying events, and Trump’s unforgivably reckless behavior, will long reverberate.