On the menu today: Yup, it’s time for the webathon. They say to put the request for funding right at the top, so here it is. Every time the suits ask me to write one of these fundraising appeals in the Morning Jolt, you, the readers of this newsletter, come through and make me look good. So, like the meme of Bernie Sanders says, “Once again, I am asking for your financial support.” Click on over to the donation page, slip us a couple bucks, and allow me to spotlight some of the excellent work of my National Review colleagues. And then we’ll talk about Nazis.
The People Who Make NR What It Is
Believe it or not, we only hold a few webathons a year. I know, it feels more frequent, but we wouldn’t ask if we didn’t need it. And as much as I don’t like asking you to continue your always generous support, it does give me the chance to brag about my colleagues.
First, our Audrey Fahlberg may have written the most consequential bombshell scoop of the year when she broke the news about Virginia Democratic attorney general candidate Jay Jones and his psychotic fantasies of murdering his Republican colleagues and watching their children die. Take a look at the collection of polling data at RealClearPolitics, and you can see exactly when Fahlberg’s scoop was published. The story of the state attorney general’s race is still being written, but if Jason Miyares wins another term, Audrey’s reporting will have played a huge role in the outcome.
When some school board is making some utterly unjustifiable decision to have boys in girls’ locker rooms — often in northern Virginia! — our Haley Strack is on it.
I can’t succinctly define John Fund’s beat because it seems to encompass the world, from Japan’s new prime minister to California’s “social justice” politics to Washington regulations strangling innovation.
Brittany Bernstein’s “Forgotten Fact Checks” go deep-diving into the memory hole, for all the inconvenient and inaccurate narratives that the mainstream media would prefer to forget.
I’m proud of the fact that on just about all the biggest issues in the news cycle, my colleagues rank among the most insightful and experienced, most influential, must-read voices. When there’s a big legal or criminal controversy, you need to hear from Andy McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor. When there’s something stirring in China, you want to hear from our Thérèse Shaheen, chairman of the State Department’s American Institute in Taiwan (what we call our ambassador who isn’t technically an ambassador). If you want to know why the U.S. government works the way it does — or why it doesn’t work — you want to hear from our Yuval Levin, former special assistant to President George W. Bush for domestic policy. When news breaks on the abortion beat, our Kathryn Jean Lopez, who has spent her adult life standing up for the pro-life cause, even when it was far from popular, is there with a Lifeline.
I like to think I can crack a joke, be witty, or offer a good insight every now and then. But it’s humbling when every day your work appears alongside Charlie Cooke, Jeff Blehar, Noah Rothman, Dan McLaughlin, James Lileks, Rich Lowry, and Ramesh Ponnuru — that’s just a murderer’s row right there. (Heck, between Jimmy Quinn, Dominic Pino and Jack Butler, you could assemble an all-star lineup out of the guys who have just left NR for law school or sweet gigs at other publications lately.) And now think of the collected talents of all my colleagues who will probably be irked I forgot to mention them.
And as for me, in addition to this newsletter and Corner posts and magazine pieces and appearances on The Editors podcast and all that, this year, I’ve reported from such far-flung and intermittently dangerous places like Karkhiv, Ukraine, Idlib, Syria, and all over India. (Admittedly, the main danger in India’s cities was the traffic.) Your generous support helps NR support me in all kinds of vital ways — like covering the costs of my bulletproof vest and Kevlar helmet.
You just don’t find this sort of thing at many other conservative news and analysis sites or magazines. So please, throw a few bucks our way, to help us maintain something special and unique in the American media landscape.
Nazis . . . I Hate These Guys
I don’t know about you, but the world of politics this week has felt like we walked through that doorway in the last season of HBO’s Peacemaker and entered the parallel world full of Nazis.
First, there was Paul Ingrassia, President Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel, who, in his own words, declared that he had a “Nazi streak”:
“Paul belongs in the Hitler Youth with Ubergruppenfuhrer Steve Bannon,” the first participant in the chat wrote, referring to the paramilitary rank in Nazi Germany and the Republican strategist. POLITICO is not naming the participants to protect the identity of those interviewed for this article.
“I do have a Nazi streak in me from time to time, I will admit it,” Ingrassia responded, according to the chain. One of the people in the text group said in an interview that Ingrassia’s comment was not taken as a joke, and three participants pushed back against Ingrassia during the text exchange that day.
Note that this is the same text chain where Ingrassia wrote, “MLK Jr. was the 1960s George Floyd and his ‘holiday’ should be ended and tossed into the seventh circle of hell where it belongs” and “No moulignon holidays. . . . From kwanza [sic] to mlk jr day to black history month to Juneteenth,” then added: “Every single one needs to be eviscerated.”
This world has a lot of people who are racist; but when you’re willing to give up several federal holidays and go to work some extra days, that’s a really committed racist.
Now, when it comes to people working for the U.S. government or really in any position of responsibility, we’re looking for no “Nazi streak,” no Nazi dollop, not even a Nazi molecule. We’re really looking for people who come up with a big fat zero on the Nazi-ometer.
Thankfully, the White House withdrew the nomination, although the entire public can fairly ask how the heck anyone ever thought that was a good idea in the first place. The bad news is that as of this morning, Ingrassia continues to serve as White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security. Why is anybody with a self-described “Nazi streak” working anywhere in this administration or anywhere else in the federal government?
Then there’s Maine Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner. Fresh off explaining that he wrote a lot of incendiary and controversial things when he was young and foolish . . . five years ago . . . at age 37 . . . he found himself compelled to publicly declare, “I am not a secret Nazi.”
Well, when you have an SS symbol tattooed on your chest, it doesn’t seem all that secret.
Tommy Vietor: [In the video] at the very end, you can see a tattoo on your chest. And I’ve been told that some of your political opponents are telling reporters that that tattoo has a Nazi affiliation. And I would like to know, is that accurate? Are you a secret Nazi?
Platner: I am not a secret Nazi. Uh, actually, if you read through my Reddit comments, I think you can pretty much figure out where I stand on Nazism, right? Uh, and antisemitism and racism in general.
Note: On Reddit, Platner said he was a Communist and asked why blacks almost never tip bartenders:
Platner: In 2007, I was a machine gun section leader with uh Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 8th Marines. We were on the 22nd MEU and it was my third deployment. My previous two had been to Fallujah and then Ramani 2006. Uh, and we went ashore [in the city of] Split, Croatia, myself and a few of the other machine gun squad leaders. Uh, and we got very inebriated and we just, we did what Marines on liberty do, and we decided to go get a tattoo. Um, and we went to a tattoo parlor in Split, Croatia, and we chose a terrifying looking skull and crossbones off the wall because we were Marines and, you know, skulls and crossbones are pretty standard military uh military thing. And we got those tattoos and then we all moved on with our lives and I actually joined the army after that.
Platner said in a statement released to Politico that he had no idea that his tattoo was the skull and crossbones of the Nazi Schutzstaffel, or SS. He said he intended to have the tattoo removed.
That tale of accidentally getting an SS tattoo may sound innocent enough, but there are a few complications. First Matthew Kassel of the Jewish Insider reported:
But according to a person who socialized with Platner when he was living in Washington, D.C., more than a decade ago, Platner had specifically acknowledged that the tattoo was a Totenkopf, the “death’s head” symbol adopted by an infamous Nazi SS unit that guarded concentration camps in World War II.
“He said, ‘Oh, this is my Totenkopf,’” the former acquaintance told Jewish Insider recently, speaking on the condition of anonymity to address a sensitive issue. “He said it in a cutesy little way.”
If that’s true, then Platner knew darn well what that skull represented. But let’s assume for a moment that unnamed former acquaintance is an unreliable source.
Here’s a line from (yet another) glowing New Yorker profile of Platner: “A precocious reader, Graham devoured books on military history, especially the American Civil War, and watched Ken Burn’s documentary series about the conflict on television.”
He “devoured books on military history” . . . and didn’t recognize the SS logo?
You can see the tattoo here. The skull tattooed on Platner’s chest doesn’t look like the one we’re used to seeing on a Jolly Roger pirate flag, or the cover of a Guns and Roses album, or Skeletor from He-Man. It doesn’t look like a Day of the Dead skull, or the Crystal Skull, or the Red Skull from Marvel Comics, or the Grateful Dead skull.
It looks like the skull and crossbones from the logo of the SS. You know, the one that would make any rational man ask, “Are we the baddies?”
Platner got the tattoo in 2007. That tattoo is now old enough to vote. Are we to believe that for nearly two decades, military-history enthusiast Platner looked at that tattoo on himself, seeing it in his reflection in the mirror each day, and it never crossed his mind that it looked like the skull symbol of Nazi storm troopers?
Some of those closest to the candidate aren’t buying his excuse. Late last week, Genevieve McDonald resigned as Platner’s campaign manager. In a post on Facebook Tuesday, McDonald wrote, “Graham has an antisemitic tattoo on his chest. He’s not an idiot, he’s a military history buff. Maybe he didn’t know it when he got it, but he got it years ago and should have had it covered up because he knows damn well what it means.”
Last cycle, Democrats talked themselves into believing they had a shot at beating Nebraska GOP Senator Deb Fischer by not formally fielding a candidate and instead supporting an alleged independent candidate, an unknown, blank-slate populist by the name of Dan Osborn. In part because another columnist contended I was overlooking the Osborn momentum, I rather obsessively looked for evidence that Fischer was in genuine trouble in a deep red state that Donald Trump was guaranteed to win handily. I never found any. Fischer won by 6.67 percentage points, more than 62,000 votes. It was never all that close.
But obviously, some Democrats love the idea of nominating a virtual unknown running a campaign on a generic populist theme. And just by showing up, Platner got a glowing early profile in the New York Times, as well as the New Yorker and New York magazine and The Guardian and NBC News and GQ and The Nation and Good Morning America and the American Prospect.
Way to dig into the candidate’s background there, guys! Heck of a job!
Remember, we need the mainstream media, because they’re the only ones who can spot the danger of Nazis in this country.
The problem with hyping an unknown candidate is that they’re unknown, and you never know what skeletons are in their closet, or what skulls are on their chests.
ADDENDUM: I’m pleased with yesterday’s edition of the Morning Jolt about the knocking down of a wall in the East Wing to prepare the site for the construction of a new White House ballroom . . . but man, “Ballroom Blitz” would have been a perfect headline.