On the menu today: We’ll get the spring webathon business out of the way, then take a long look at the many, many, many . . . many ways that the modern Left and Democratic Party stinks.
Democrats Are a Mess
Yes, we’re asking for your support again. We do this a couple of times a year. National Review has always run on a combination of advertising revenue, subscriptions, events like the cruises and the recently held Ideas Summit, and the support from our readers. Unlike some other publications in the political sphere, we don’t have a generous billionaire benefactor. We have you — five bucks here, ten bucks there, some three-figure donations, and every once in a while, a four-figure donation. And I have faith in you. Every time the Powers That Be ask me to write one of these fundraising appeals in the Morning Jolt, the readers of this newsletter come through. You guys make me look good. So, like the meme of that Larry David impersonator, “Once again, I am asking for your financial support.” So click on over to the donation page, slip us a couple bucks, and meet me back here in a moment . . .
. . . Okay, welcome back.
The Left stinks.
I know it can be easy to forget, at a time when Republicans control the White House, the U.S. Senate, and the House of Representatives. The Trump administration screws up, too — around these parts, you may have noticed an article or two — or twelve — about Ukraine or tariffs or the whole national-security team chatting on Signal. When you’re running the government, you get more scrutiny.
But no one’s forgotten what the previous administration, its congressional allies, its media cheerleading squad, and other acolytes of the blue-state model have inflicted upon this country.
- Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, having skipped out to Ghana as her city faced arguably the worst natural disaster in city history and botching the response every step of the way, promised “rapid rebuilding” and “accelerated rebuilding” in the aftermath of the devastating wildfires. In 75 days since the fires, the city has approved an entire four permits for homeowners to rebuild their properties. Four!
- The remaining team around senile, doddering, now nearly invisible Joe Biden are so terrified of his remarks being noticed that in his first public remarks since leaving office — at the conference of the National High School Model United Nations — no press were invited and the lone coverage was a Facebook post.
- The Tesla-trashing Tim Walz continues to insist that he’s the answer to a question that no one asked, and aims to be the first Minnesota governor elected to three four-year terms.
- Sure, everybody’s mad at Chuck Schumer lately, but he’s the young fresh face compared to most Democratic Party leaders in the Senate. As I wrote a week ago, “The current whip is 80-year-old Dick Durbin of Illinois. Conference vice chair [Elizabeth] Warren turns 76 in June. Fellow vice chair Mark Warner is 70. The Senate Democratic Outreach chair is . . . er, 83-year-old Bernie Sanders. The median age of Senate Democrats is 66 years old. It’s not surprising that Senate Democrats are always promising that they’ll never let Social Security benefits get reduced . . . because a whole bunch of them are already collecting it. They generally oppose the burning of fossil fuels because they’re not that far away from becoming it.”
- California Governor Gavin Newsom wants you to believe he’s always perceived a “fairness” issue about athletes who were born male participating in women’s sports. Kind of amazing how in the past eleven years, he never objected to California’s laws that enabled that, huh? It must be because he’s so bashful and camera-shy.
- Speaking of the California governor, we keep getting told that Kamala Harris is contemplating that job as her next step in politics. Even if you put aside the fact that she’s lived in Washington and traveled around the world from January 2021 to January 2025, how much have you heard from Harris, regarding events in California, in the past few months? One brief tour of the Palisades in early February? Since losing the presidential race, she’s only been slightly easier to find than J. D. Salinger. Are Californians supposed to just hand her the governor’s mansion as a consolation prize for losing the 2024 presidential race?
- The only people that Representative Maxine Waters (D., Mars) wants to deport are U.S. citizens — first Elon Musk, then Melania Trump.
- Bill Clinton continues to insist, at great length, that he was the victim of a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” that everyone loved him as president, and that anything that went wrong on his watch is somebody else’s fault.
- It’s all a mess, but don’t worry, Democrats. Democratic National Committee vice chair David Hogg is here to save you.
And that’s just what I’ve written about lately, when I’m not gallivanting to countries that are a ways away from getting their own Fodor’s guides.
Among my colleagues in recent weeks, you’ve seen:
- Jack Butler eviscerating the presidential ambitions of Pete Buttigieg.
- Judson Berger and Jeff Blehar on how Representative Jasmine Crockett represents the national political equivalent of assisted suicide for the Democratic Party.
- Rich Lowry on how AOC’s influence is rising when Democrats need her to shuffle off the stage.
- Phil Klein on how Senate Democrats went all-in supporting green-card holder and recent Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of the pro-Hamas protests at the university as well as its partner school, Barnard College.
- Ramesh Ponnuru pointing out that Denmark’s political party on the left made its peace with immigration enforcement — a form of growth that, so far, still eludes too many Democrats.
- Brittany Bernstein on how Democrats flipped, overnight, on the value of the filibuster, which not too long ago when they were in the majority, they were denouncing as the “Jim Crow filibuster.” (Every Senate Democrat in the chamber right now either voted to get rid of the filibuster or publicly supported that move. Then 38 Senate Democrats turned around and tried to filibuster the most recent budget deal.)
Then there’s David Zimmermann’s reporting on the deeply shady $5 million in payments to the health-care company of Representative Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick of Florida, and James Lynch’s reporting about how the Department of Homeland Security fired four staffers at the Federal Emergency Management Agency for spending $59 million to house illegal immigrants in violation of the law, and Audrey Fahlberg’s reporting on how House Democrats belatedly realized their antics during Trump’s address to Congress backfired and made them look ridiculous.
Wait, that’s just NR’s hard-hitting coverage of Democrats in Washington. In the states:
- Dominic Pino singing the praises of the Colorado state government’s TABOR law, which caps Colorado state revenue growth at the rate of inflation plus the rate of population growth, and how it’s enraging progressives in the state legislature.
- Our old friend Jack Fowler on how Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro is hanging out on TikTok attempting to convince the young folks he’s “groovy and cool.”
- Ryan Mills’s reporting on how anti-gun Democrats in Washington State are ignoring the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution (again).
- Paul J. Gessing, president of the Rio Grande Foundation, warning that if former Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland wins her bid to become governor of New Mexico, she “would likely be even more aggressive than current Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham in doubling down on all the things that have made New Mexico an impoverished, slow-growing outpost in the American Southwest.”
And for a publication called National Review, you’d be surprised at how much coverage of local government we offer. Besides the blithering incompetence of Mayor Bass in Los Angeles and the constant scandals in the New York City mayor’s office:
- John Fund strolls into Jeff’s beat and laid out how under Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, “Chicago’s government appears determined to become the municipal equivalent of a failed state.”
- Tevi Troy lays out how Montgomery County, Md., concluded the lesson of the 2024 election is that people want and need bigger, more invasive, and more expensive government.
- Jack Butler examines Cincinnati’s hard lessons on the consequences of city officials declaring the place a “sanctuary city.”
- Rich Lowry on Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s adamant opposition to agents of the federal government enforcing federal immigration law in her city.
- Kathryn Lopez on the long-awaited closure of the flagship Planned Parenthood in New York City.
And that’s just the voices of the Left in government. Noah Rothman observed that the Democrats’ activist class is demanding the elected officials commit the political equivalent of self-immolation. Vahaken Mouradian dismantled Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s absurd contention that the Washington Post, of all places, had become a tool of Trumpian fascism.
One of my favorite paragraphs that NR has published in a while comes from Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California, in her piece, “Democrats Aren’t Just in Disarray. They’re in Denial”:
In the aftermath of 2024, Democrats need to stop paying so much attention to themselves and pay far more attention to the American people and the issues they really care about. The potentially unsurmountable roadblock for Democrats is accepting not only that liberal values are not “everyone’s values” but that others’ values can be just as legitimate. Through the course of the campaign, liberal elites evolved merely from harshly judging to barely tolerating with bafflement the idea that rural Americans hold dear values different from theirs. The next and only step for Democrats, if they wish to succeed, is to embrace the fact that rural values — which, as it turns out, are pretty reflective of most of the country — are no less important.
Politics will always feature disagreement. What we’ve seen in recent years is an effort at delegitimization: a far-ranging governmental and cultural effort to decree many once-mundane viewpoints — like, “Immigration laws should be enforced,” or, “Shoplifters should be locked up, not toothpaste” — as so unacceptable and abhorrent that they must be purged from any expression in public life and that anyone who defies that must be punished in as many ways as possible. And that instinct to ban and suppress wrongthink* is so intertwined with the Democrats and progressives’ sense of their own identity, I don’t know if they’ll ever manage to extricate it from their worldview.
(The quickest way to demonstrate that you don’t read National Review is to whine, “National Review never criticizes Democrats!” You’d be surprised how easy it is to find that complaint on social media.)
We write and publish this, not quite 24/7 but pretty close to it, morning, noon, and night, weekdays and weekends, even some holidays. And this isn’t even counting the podcasts like The Editors, The McCarthy Report, and The Charles C.W. Cooke Podcast; videos from David Bahnsen and Caroline Downey; oh, and yes, we still publish that print magazine, once a month, usually about 70 pages.
And we do all this while guys like you-know-who attempt to drive us out of business with nonsense lawsuits — which, as you probably know, costs its own pretty penny to fight off.
I haven’t named all my colleagues, and certainly not all our contributors to NR in today’s newsletter. But you’ve noticed it’s a lot, right?
We’re not the only good publication in the world, but nobody else does this, on this scale, at this level of quality, with this many top-notch writers and reporters and thinkers. That takes money. I’m sure a lot of people ask you for donations, and you’re probably often wondering, how do they use that money? At NR, you see the results on the page and the screen, and playing on your speaker, every day.
So please give what you can; it is most appreciated.
*Illinois senator Dick Durbin has apparently never heard of the term “wrongthink.”
ADDENDUM: This morning in the Corner, our Andy McCarthy lays out the how and why of the illegality of U.S. officials with security clearances talking about classified information on Signal, and how the plans to attack the Houthis incontrovertibly were classified information, no matter what Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth says now.