Dear Weekend Jolter,
If digital journos went to boot camp, the drill instructor might adapt a famous call-and-response:
What makes the grass grow?
Clicks, clicks, clicks!
Thankfully, we here at National Review don’t have to chase clicks all day. I’m not saying traffic doesn’t matter to us: It does, and we’re grateful to our advertisers who, appreciating the importance of the NR audience, plant their flags on our pages. But we operate on a hybrid business model, and the most important part of this model is subscriptions.
If we didn’t have subscribers to NRPlus — that’s the all-access pass to NR’s digital stuff — it’s fair to say this publication would look considerably different (many more stories about Harry and Meghan, Kim K., miracle diets, and how one savvy Zoomer was able to make $15,000 in a week by selling glue, for instance). So it’s important to keep growing this readership, and we’re running a subscription drive this week with the goal of expanding the NR family further.
If you don’t have NRPlus, please do consider signing up.
Before getting into the benefits of membership, I want to use this space to briefly explain what happens under the hood here, day in and day out, to give a sense of the scale of operation our revenue supports. Every morning, we flip the metaphorical switch on NationalReview.com and, if I may invite Hamilton comparisons, write like we’re running out of time. Check out the masthead, and you get a sense of the number of writers contributing to our in-depth analysis and original reporting in the form of online articles, Corner posts, news pieces, newsletters, editorials, magazine pieces, podcasts, video specials, and more. This, as submissions editor Jack Butler sifts through the many pieces pitched to us every day from lawmakers, scholars, and other outside writers. The rest of the team then gets to work editing, proofing, and fact-checking, while Jack Crowe & Co. tackle the day’s news for NRWire and our content managers handle everything from home-page production to slideshows to important backend SEO work (“if a story doesn’t show up on Google, was it even written?” — ancient proverb). That’s not even getting into the magazine’s chain of command, or social media, or the finance operation, the marketing team, the developers, the podcast toilers, audience development, graphic design, sales, publishing . . . In short: Putting together a publication, especially a multimedia one such as this, is an enterprise of many.
And none of that matters if you, the reader, don’t see value in what we produce. If you’re reading this, we hope it’s because you do. If you already subscribe, thank you; but please join us if you don’t. The postcard version of the benefits is: access to all paywalled stories (no more device-jumping to try and circumvent “the wall”); access to the magazine online; far fewer ads; commenting privileges; invites to members-only conference calls; and the full text of Jim Geraghty’s Morning Jolt newsletter in your inbox. That is to say, you’ll plug into a publication brimming with informative analysis and reporting you just won’t get in other places, without the clickbait. Plus you get the culture coverage — books, movies, music, art and museums, everything you ever wanted to know about Dune and LOTR — and even the writing with no agenda other than to make you laugh.
Right now, you can enjoy a 60 percent discount, and snatch up a subscription for 40 bucks. Do you, like Joe Biden, prefer the tactile experience? Then bundle that with a print subscription for just $12 more.
Your membership doesn’t just keep the lights on; it keeps us real.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
The GOP should ignore the ridiculous campaign to rule the crime issue out of bounds: Of Course Republicans Should Run against Crime
Bookmark this ruling for the next time Stacey Abrams alleges voter suppression: Stacey Abrams’s Very Bad Day in Court
ARTICLES
Jim Geraghty: The Ball Is in Your Court, U.S. Attorney David Weiss
Andrew McCarthy: Larry Krasner’s Lies
John Yoo: The Intellectual Legacy of Judge Laurence Silberman
Jay Nordlinger: Harvey Mansfield, ‘Our Professor’
Charles C. W. Cooke: A Week in the Life
Nate Hochman: South Texas on the Political Brink
Rich Lowry: Hispanics Weren’t What Progressives Thought
Therese Shaheen: Why the Chinese Communist Party Needs Xi
John McCormack: What to Make of the Herschel Walker Abortion Allegation?
John McCormack: Ben Sasse Explains His Decision to Leave Senate to Serve as University of Florida President
Ryan Mills: NIH Grants EcoHealth Alliance New Funding Despite History of Dangerous Coronavirus Research in China
Dan McLaughlin: The Emotional Meltdown in American Law Schools
Phil Klein: Aaron Judge, Home Run King
Alexandra DeSanctis: What We Throw Away
Luther Ray Abel: How Navy Prosecutors Tried to Scapegoat a Junior Sailor for a Billion-Dollar Fire
CAPITAL MATTERS
Joel Kotkin examines how cities will have to adapt in the new era: Do Cities Have a Future?
No matter how many times Biden claims to be a deficit-closer, it’s still not remotely true. From Jack Salmon: An Administration of Deficit Hawks? Not So Much
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Looks like Blonde is not going platinum. From Armond White: Blonde Gaslights Marilyn Monroe
TIME FOR YOUR EXCERPT BOOSTER
John McCormack snagged an interview with Ben Sasse, who explained his decision to leave the Senate for a university post:
Sasse, who formerly served as president of Midland University in Nebraska, was reelected in 2020 and still has four years left in his current Senate term. Why leave now?
“I honestly think this is the most interesting university in the country right now,” said Sasse. “I think it’s the most important institution in the most dynamic state in the union.”
Sasse said that he had “been courted by a lot of universities about presidential vacancies for a couple of years and [had] never really taken them seriously” until the University of Florida came along. He spoke, among other things, about the university’s “board and faculty that’s just incredibly entrepreneurial”; its plans to build new campuses and programs; its hospital system (the second-largest in the state); and its having “the largest supercomputer on an academic campus on earth.”
What does he say to Nebraskans disappointed by his decision to leave the Senate without serving out the entirety of his second term? “Nebraskans have well understood that I didn’t expect to be in politics as a lifelong calling. I need to get back to building stuff,” Sasse said. “The best picture in the dome of the U.S. Capitol is Washington surrendering power.”
During his first term, Sasse often expressed disillusionment with politics and sometimes his own party, leaving many to wonder why he was even pursuing a second term in 2020. Sasse told me in 2019 one reason he was seeking another term was that he had a “calling” as “a Tocquevillian or a principled pluralist or a constitutionalist” to fight on behalf of that faction within the conservative coalition, which he had come to realize was smaller than he once thought. Asked how he squares that 2019 comment with his early departure from the Senate, Sasse said on Thursday that “Tocquevillian society is about building things. The center of America really isn’t political power. . . . I think the University of Florida is better positioned to build than any university in America right now.”
Ryan Mills, evidently on assignment looking for the definition of insanity, has found something:
EcoHealth Alliance, the U.S. nonprofit that used National Institute of Health funds to conduct dangerous coronavirus research in partnership with China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology prior to the global Covid-19 pandemic, has been approved for yet another five-year federal grant, despite a history of violating the terms of its contracts.
On September 21, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, headed by the soon-to-be-stepping-down Anthony Fauci, approved a new five-year grant for EcoHealth. The nonprofit will receive $653,392 this year, and is in line to receive more than $3.25 million over the next five years. The grant is to analyze “the potential for future bat coronavirus emergence in Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam,” according to a description on the NIH RePORTER website.
This newest grant is one of four concurrent NIH grants that EcoHealth has. Three of the four grants were awarded after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“This is high-risk research that involves going into remote, often inaccessible areas, and sampling bats and bat excreta, and then returning those samples to laboratories in population centers where they attempt to isolate the virus … and then seek to characterize the threat level posed by the virus,” said Richard Ebright, a biosafety expert and professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University. “This is one of the kinds of research that may have been directly responsible for the current pandemic.”
Andy McCarthy sets Philly DA Larry Krasner straight for parroting and embellishing a very misleading talking point:
Larry Krasner, the “progressive prosecutor” of Philadelphia, which seems poised to set yet another homicide record this year, told an incredulous local television host last week that the violent-crime problem in America is being driven by “MAGA states.”
Just to recap, there were 561 murders in Philadelphia last year. It was a record high, but one that probably won’t last long: The City of Brotherly Love passed the 400-murder mark for 2022 last week, with a quarter of the year left to go. The 2021 record outpaced New York City by a wide margin (the Big Apple saw 485 murders — a bad year by recent standards), even though New York City’s population is more than five times that of Philadelphia. Los Angeles, which has more than twice the population of Philadelphia, saw about a third fewer murders — L.A. had 397, a 15-year high but nowhere close to the city that has adopted Krasner’s anti-prosecution policies.
When the local host pointed out to Krasner that nearly a thousand people had been murdered in his city in just the last 20 months, the DA preposterously countered that the real crime problem in America is Donald Trump and his followers. “These states in the United States that have a rate of homicide which is 40 percent higher — are MAGA states,” Krasner claimed. “They are Trump states. I’ll say it again, the rate of homicide in Trump states as compared to Biden states, take all 50 of them, is 40 percent higher.” Not content with that, he followed up with this whopper: “Eight out of ten of the most violent cities are Trump cities. Like we’ve got to get real about this. Facts matter.”
Facts matter? The highest-crime cities in America are cities that have been run by Democrats for years. No honest, rational person denies that this is so. Krasner of all people knows that it is so. He’s just spouting nonsense and hoping to get away with it. . . . It is silly, in any event, for Krasner — whose sole responsibility is Philadelphia — to talk about statewide crime. Pennsylvania has a low rate of overall crime (a category that includes petty crime), but it ranks in just the middle of the pack among states in violent crime. But so what? That statistic is irrelevant to the majority of Pennsylvania counties that see few if any murders. The state number is way higher than it should be largely because of Krasner’s city.
Every once in a while, NRO runs something particularly inspired. Charlie hits the quota here with a mostly accurate portrayal of how we in the media cover controversies. The sequence of events goes down like so:
On Day 1, a no-name opinion columnist at the Los Angeles Times writes a piece arguing that you should probably cancel your plans for the coming weekend and cut off your foot with a hay sickle.
Initially, this essay is overlooked, until, on the morning of Day 4, it is discovered by a Twitter user whose other output makes his account un-retweetable. Within an hour, the column has become the top trending topic online, and thereby the source of most of the conversations among journalists, politicians, and the terminally plugged-in.
By midafternoon, the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh has critiqued the piece in a mini-documentary that is released on, and then pulled down from, YouTube. In response to Walsh’s work, a blue-check propaganda account that obtained its large following from its stint as a Taylor Swift fan-feed claims that the documentary is in violation of the Geneva Convention. This claim receives 92,000 retweets, is endorsed by Laurence Tribe and Ted Lieu, and forms the core of the next six weeks of programming on MSNBC.
Arriving first to the hot-take punch, a Vox writer who has neither read the column nor watched Walsh’s video weighs in to explain with confidence that all opposition to cutting off your feet with a hay sickle is a “social construct” that “emerged” in about 2018. At Salon, Amanda Marcotte backs this theory but complains that, while this is probably true, she can’t help but notice that the discussion about cutting off your feet with a hay sickle is being conducted “mostly by white men.” At the Atlantic, Adam Serwer repudiates the Vox piece by proposing that the most racist people on the 1957 Little Rock School Board were against cutting off your feet with a hay sickle, and inviting his readers to “think hard” about what “that tells us” about the practice’s “contemporary critics — which include Republican Senator Tim Scott.”
Shout-Outs
Karol Markowicz, at the New York Post: Nobody watched Trevor Noah
Mary Katharine Ham, at MKHammer Time: In the Age of Quiet Quitting, I Was Quiet Suspended, And I Can’t Shut Up About It
Jonah Goldberg, at the Dispatch: The Anti-War Right’s Misguided View of Putin
The College Fix: New guidelines: Students with lice should not be sent home because of ‘stigma’
CODA
Sixty percent off NRPlus? I’d call that a “Bargain,” wouldn’t you?