Dear Weekend Jolter,
Back in 2024, the Supreme Court handed governments a modest win on the practice of asset forfeiture (the civil variety) when it decided against requiring an extra hearing as part of the often-contested process. But as Dan McLaughlin wrote at the time, “the Court’s lineup may presage trouble” for such seizures in the future.
Indeed, the Court just decided to take a case in its next term that presents an opportunity for justices to rein in government confiscations.
In the dispute at hand, a conviction was obtained, unlike with so-called civil forfeitures that have drawn outrage over the years — but the punishment and crime appear wildly out of proportion. That mismatch is what the Court is being asked to consider. In 2012, Kenneth Jouppi, an Alaskan bush pilot, was found preparing to transport beer into a dry community (a passenger had the alcohol in her luggage; the pilot said he wasn’t aware of it). On top of filing a misdemeanor charge, the state sought to seize his $95,000 plane. Jouppi sued, claiming a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s excessive fines clause.
“The Excessive Fines Clause was built for cases like this,” his lawyers wrote. They argued that “a decision upholding the forfeiture of an airplane for a six-pack is a self-recommending candidate for review.”
A 2019 Court decision had already applied those protections against state forfeiture schemes but did not specify how to define “excessive.” Here, Jouppi’s attorneys want the Court to consider a defendant’s specific conduct, not just the underlying offense.
Jouppi’s case is one of many involving heavy-handed government takings. As Kamden Mulder reports, “In 2009, a South Carolina man’s RV was seized after police discovered four ounces of marijuana inside.” The Institute for Justice, which represents the Alaska pilot, has long brought attention to and been involved in similar cases, specifically civil forfeitures carried out without charges — ranging from the FBI’s seizure of family savings kept in safe-deposit boxes of a business that was raided in California, to Nevada cops’ seizure of a veteran’s life savings during a traffic stop, to border agents’ seizure of a man’s Ford F-250.
Setting aside the delicious Alaska-ness of the dispute that now has the Supreme Court’s attention, Dan writes that “it could turn out to be one of the big cases of the next term.”
The Court, after all, had already telegraphed that forfeitures were due for closer examination. As Dan noted regarding the 2024 decision, Justice Neil Gorsuch, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote in a concurring opinion at the time that law enforcement agencies have become “increasingly dependent” on the money raised, apparently influencing their actions.
Whether the forfeitures are the civil or criminal variety, governments that have developed a taste for aggressive and excessive confiscations should be worried. And that’s a good thing.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
This was, in fact, a “bad idea”: The Qatar Force One Fiasco
The evidence is on Rubio’s side: Countering Left-Wing Terrorism
Brava: Sophie Cunningham Dishes Common Sense
A problem worth fixing: New Jersey’s Damning Admission on Illegal Voting
ARTICLES
Dan McLaughlin: The Supreme Court Needs Saner Critics
Michael Brendan Dougherty: AI’s Bad Reputation Is of Its Own Making
Jim Geraghty: Mamdani Finally Admits He Can’t Arrest Bibi
Joshua S. Treviño: The End of ‘El Mayo’ Is Only the Beginning
Nina Shea: Don’t Give Up on Jimmy Lai
Rich Lowry: Socialists vs. the Senate
Inez Feltscher Stepman: The Great DEI Defunding
John Gustavsson: Andy Burnham Is Bad News for British Business
John Fund: America’s Twin Water Crises
Charles C. W. Cooke: The Anti-Odyssey Crusade Has Lost the Plot
Noah Rothman: In Trump’s Campaign Against ‘Third Worldism,’ Cuba Is at the Center
Brittany Bernstein: Scientists Behind Paper Dismissing Covid Lab Leak Privately Lost Confidence in Findings — but Maintained Public Stance
Brittany Bernstein: MAGA Media Lap Up Trump’s Election-Interference Exaggerations
Stanley Kurtz: Saving Citizenship in Ohio from Leftist Indoctrination
CAPITAL MATTERS
Todd Zywicki warns about the threat of a new banking fee: Don’t Let Banks Charge Data-Rationing Fees
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Armond White attempts to cut through it: The Fog of Hype
Brian Allen’s got one for the auto junkies this week: A Trove of Cars Fit for the Racetrack, a Beauty Pageant, or a Date with 007
EXCERPTS: THE CLIFFSNOTES FOR THIS WEBSITE
Details about the deception over Covid keep emerging, years later. Brittany Bernstein has the latest:
Just three months after a group of scientists published a paper claiming that the Covid lab-leak theory was not “plausible,” several of the researchers began having doubts, according to newly released documents that raise questions about why those researchers continued to defend their conclusions publicly.
Senator Rand Paul’s office released private Slack messages between the scientists who authored “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” a paper published in Nature Medicine in March 2020 that would go on to be widely cited by the journalists and public health officials who roundly dismissed the idea that Covid-19 had emerged from a lab leak in Wuhan, China. Lawmakers would later discover that Anthony Fauci, then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, prompted researchers to author the paper and was even involved in the editing and approval process for its final draft. When asked publicly in April 2020 whether Covid may have emerged from a lab, Fauci cited the paper to cast doubt on the theory.
But in June 2020, one of the scientists, evolutionary biologist and Scripps Research professor Kristian Andersen, suggested in private messages with his “Proximal Origin” co-authors — Andrew Rambaut, Eddie Holmes, Bob Garry, and Ian Lipkin — that he believed there was a 30 percent chance the virus had come from a lab — a sharp departure from the conclusion presented in the paper, which held that the lab leak was implausible. Holmes, meanwhile, assigned the lab leak a 20 percent probability, though he later downgraded that to 10 percent.
“Our paper was pretty strong in saying ‘there’s no way,’ but I have less confidence in that statement at this stage,” Andersen told his colleagues in messages on June 11, 2020.
Paul’s office notes the “Proximal Origin” paper argued that purposeful manipulation of the virus was implausible, but Andersen began to question that after German scientists built a reverse-genetics system for SARS-CoV-2 in under two weeks.
In response to the German development, Andersen wrote, “Clearly it’s not that hard.”
He also acknowledged that the paper is inaccurate in its claim that bat coronavirus research was widely distributed in labs all over the world, a claim that was used to downplay the significance of the virus emerging in such close proximity to the Wuhan lab. “We describe this in the paper and say that this work is performed ‘all of the world,’ but that isn’t true — it has exclusively been going on at [the Wuhan Institute of Virology],” he wrote.
MBD marvels at how ham-handedly the Big Tech CEOs marketed the AI revolution:
People are campaigning to rule out or impede the building of data centers in their communities forever. . . . Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, worried that public absorption of AI “does feel surprisingly slow.” At a tech conference this February, Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, the chip producer that is minting money off the boom, called the public backlash “extremely hurtful.”
But the AI industry has itself to blame for these attitudes. How can Altman be surprised at public reluctance when he signed a letter in 2023 saying that AI posed a “risk of extinction” to humanity? Huang, just last December, said the technology would touch “every job” and seemed to echo an industry-led narrative of social catastrophe. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in May last year that AI could cause a “dramatic spike in unemployment in the very near future.” And Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather of AI,” was reported to have said that it seems very likely “there will be unemployment,” with tens of millions of jobs displaced.
No industry in the history of the world has marketed itself with such imbecilic self-sabotage: What we’re building is horrible, will ruin your livelihood, and possibly enslave you! It’s also inevitable. Oh, and may we please have a few acres to scale up our operations?
They are doing this at a time when people are more ambivalent than ever about the social transformations that the internet, smartphones, and social media have triggered. There is, in many people, a growing unease with the costs these technologies seem to have imposed on us and a nostalgia for a technological landscape that didn’t immediately strike anyone as dystopian.
It doesn’t have to be this way. AI companies could emphasize the good they are doing, even now.
You can find our Odyssey takes here, here, here, and here. Charles C. W. Cooke zooms out a bit, to touch on the absurdity of the Very Online conniption over the film:
Who would have thought that it could be so sinful to enjoy a cinematic epic? This weekend, Christopher Nolan’s latest blockbuster, The Odyssey, opened to a flurry of ticket sales, to a storm of acclamatory notices, and to the enmity of a bunch of rattled conservative “influencers” who seem to have had Odyssea delenda est tattooed in wine-dark ink across their foreheads. Merely to signal one’s intention to see the film has caused one to be chased around Twitter by a cadre of digital Furies, flouncing, denouncing, and renouncing as they go. Among the charges that they have thrown at would-be audience members is that they are “enemies of Western civilization.” Gosh!
This, suffice it to say, is Weird Behavior — and it is no less so because it comes from people who maintain that their ends are pure. There is nothing whatsoever wrong with criticizing a popular movie, but, in its tone, its substance, and its aims, the present anti-Odyssey crusade no more constitutes “movie criticism” than last summer’s freakout over Sydney Sweeney’s denim commercial constituted “commercial criticism.” Criticism of art — which, naturally, is only possible after the critic has actually experienced that art — involves analysis, judgment, and thought. The suggestion that a person who attends a given film is, ipso facto, an accomplice to the destruction of the United States — or, in my particular case, ought to be “deported”! — reflects none of those things. Instead, it reflects politics — and a stunted, aggressive, illiberal politics at that.
This weekend, I saw it argued in various places that those who claim to have enjoyed Nolan’s movie are, in fact, motivated by the desire to construct a “narrative,” or to change America’s immigration laws, or to reshape the Republican Party. This is a monomaniacal, totalitarian, Stasi-like non sequitur. It is projection, on an IMAX scale. It represents everything that I have always hated about the insistence that “everything is political” — an insistence that, for most of my life, has been the preserve of the idiopathic left but has recently started to derange the right as well. As a free person, living in a free country, I reserve the right to watch things, or listen to things, or eat things without being expected to don armor and go 18 rounds for the privilege. You didn’t like the movie? That’s great. I don’t like a lot of movies — including one of Christopher Nolan’s recent offerings that I am simply not intelligent enough to understand (Tenet). You are so upset that someone would go to the movie that you elect to send them emails telling them that they should be denaturalized? Well, now we have a problem. This is not East Germany.
John Fund raises the alarm on America’s water woes:
America is facing two distinct disasters that have been developing for years. The worst drought in centuries has parched Western states and driven reservoirs dry. Water levels behind two of the nation’s largest dams are in danger of dropping so low that the dams might stop functioning. The federal government should urgently reallocate scarce water more efficiently, limit subsidies that discourage conservation, and better protect property rights.
But there’s an even bigger problem that exacerbates this situation — our aging water infrastructure.
Last week, a three-foot-wide pipe ruptured in the West Hollywood area of Los Angeles. A total of 17 million gallons of water flowed down the Sunset Strip and beyond Santa Monica Boulevard. More than 200 cars were destroyed, and Sunset Boulevard remains closed because of the sinkhole created by the break. The disaster shouldn’t have come as a complete surprise. The burst pipe was 110 years old. The average age of the nation’s pipes is 45. The American Society of Civil Engineers reports that about 20 percent of all the water mains in the country — over 450,000 miles of pipe — have exceeded their useful life.
Water breaks and leaks cause the loss of 6 billion gallons of treated water each day. In a year, that’s enough to supply more than 30 million households. “These losses don’t just waste water — they also waste energy, chemicals, and dollars spent to treat and transport it,” reports the Conservation Foundation. These losses partially explain why the price of water and sewage for households has more than doubled in real terms since the early 1980s. Households in some large cities now spend more than $1,200 a year on water and sewage charges, even though per capita use has decreased.
The nation’s 150,000 local water systems are a marvel that helped transform the country. A third of Americans lacked indoor plumbing in 1950; by 1990, less than 1 percent did. Using filtration, chlorination, and proper sewage treatment, by the 1980s, the vast majority of Americans had safe, clean water. But the government neglected the maintenance of this infrastructure. Some major Eastern cities still use pipes installed in the 1800s. The total cost of replacing these pipes — which is now required by law in the next ten years — is estimated to be between $45 billion and $90 billion. But the federal government is moving slowly and often focuses on hugely expensive filtration upgrades that don’t do much good. Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency is setting water mandates that far exceed what even the most liberally governed cities consider necessary. These mandates drive up the cost of water, stymie housing construction, and burden city budgets.
CODA
Nobody likes being stuck in traffic. But being stuck with Traffic? That doesn’t sound so bad. To the point, here’s some “Rainmaker.”
Thanks for reading.