Dear Weekend Jolter,
You might not have heard of the case of Guo Degang. He’s a popular comedian in China who recently was investigated for the offense of modifying the lyrics to a Chinese revolutionary song in, of all places, Wuhan. Reportedly, he changed the line, “The sun is about to set in the west; all is quiet on Weishan Lake,” by swapping the lake for “the Forbidden City.” You had to be there, I suppose. For this lyrical tweak, “he was reported to [Wuhan’s] culture and tourism bureau,” according to the New York Times, and fines followed.
Now, before you say, “but Jimmy Kimmel” — if only Kimmel could have been so subtle. Yet the Guo episode is one of many reminders lately that the China model is nothing to emulate.
For the record, the FCC’s Kimmel fit was “preposterous,” as we’ve editorialized, and the court system is taking up that fight. And that is a crucial detail, the independent judiciary. Ask Jimmy Lai. Jianli Yang, writing on Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington, cites a more recent administration fight with the media to point up and appreciate our differences in that regard:
Here an apparently unrelated event during Xi’s visit becomes important.
The White House had barred CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from White House grounds. The organizations sued. Other major media organizations stood with them. Then U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, appointed by Trump himself, ordered their access restored. The administration complied.
Consider how strange this must appear from Beijing. A president appoints a judge. The judge later rules against the president. The president is angry. The ruling nevertheless takes effect.
Jianli goes on to argue that, in the emerging AI debate, America must hold onto its values and not adopt, for instance, “China’s methods of surveillance, information control, centralized data collection, and political management” in pursuit of technological goals.
Yet Beijing’s command of economy and society continues to hold a certain allure among Western policymakers and provocateurs alike: whether seen in the New Right’s pursuit of an industrial policy of our own or the far left’s fandom toward (in the words of one noxious host) “Chinese-style Communism” and “Cultural Revolution sh**” or, going farther back, the media’s early praise for China’s Covid response.
Thérèse Shaheen, addressing other misconceptions, explains that the country is not doing nearly as well economically as is often portrayed. She writes,
The Chinese Communist Party has been working overtime to present China as an unstoppable economic and technological power. Artificial intelligence has become particularly useful to this narrative. China’s advances in AI are real. So are its accomplishments in electric vehicles, batteries, robotics, drones, solar panels, and advanced manufacturing. But the Trump administration, along with other Western governments, much of the business world, and many economic and political analysts confuse the technologically sophisticated portions of the Chinese economy with the Chinese economy itself. China remains a mostly poor, mostly uneducated, aging society riven with internal inconsistencies. Only a sliver of its population is involved in the tech sectors that have the world so mesmerized.
Despite Trump’s praise for Xi as a “great leader” and his touting of their “fantastic relationship,” Jim Geraghty also lists the myriad ways China and its entities have tried to (almost literally) blow up that relationship: sending components to Iran that can be used in drones and missile guidance systems, providing satellite images to Iran of a U.S. base in Jordan before a fatal attack over the summer, allegedly conducting a cyber-espionage campaign that compromised federal agencies, and so on.
But most important, the personal liberties we take for granted remain unrealized in China, certainly by comparison. Guy Denton published a startling profile this week on a member of the long-persecuted Uyghur minority. Read it:
When Mihrigul Tursun arrived in the United States, nothing around her made sense.
The food, clothes, and buildings that permeated her new life were unfamiliar and disorienting. Insomnia and anxiety haunted her. When she managed to sleep, she was plagued by nightmares of what she’d escaped. In moments of distress, she would withdraw to the bathroom to scream and weep in privacy, running the shower and playing loud music to conceal the noise from her young children.
Slowly, however, she adjusted. And while the trauma of her past life will never fully disappear, America has come to feel like home. “I am safe here,” she told National Review in a telephone interview. “Nobody can hurt me.”
Tursun, a Uyghur Muslim, fled China to escape the government’s relentless campaign of religious persecution. Her arrival in America came only after years of abuse in China’s vast network of Uyghur internment camps. And her story is emblematic of a broader crisis unfolding in China that the Western world seems reluctant to address. The Chinese Communist Party does not simply wish to exterminate the Uyghurs — it seeks to purge China of all forms of religious faith.
As Guy reports, Tursun was detained in a Xinjiang camp several times, held once “in a roughly 45-square-foot cell with more than 60 other women,” conditions that led to several deaths: “The prisoners were frequently tortured. Tursun was once strapped to a chair and electrocuted. Others, she learned, were forcibly sterilized. Before she left China, Tursun was injected with a mysterious substance. She fears that it may eventually kill her.”
By all means, Hasan Piker, keep ranting about the utility and awesomeness of Chinese-style imprisonment.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
A disaster averted: Miracle on FlyDubai
The toll of tariffs: Republicans Facing the High Political Cost of Tariffs
The oil is starting to get through: Encouraging Signs from the Strait of Hormuz
In the words of a great director, Cut: Against the Hollywood Bailout
ARTICLES
Jeffrey Blehar: Another Flight 93, Averted
Charles C. W. Cooke: Am I Lying to Myself About the Death Penalty?
Andrew T. Walker: What the Modern State Gets Wrong About Execution
Dan McLaughlin: The Moral Wilderness of the Cornell Seven Case
Dan McLaughlin: Tending the Landscapes of Our Imaginations
Abigail Anthony: What the ‘Anti-Woke’ Crowd Gets Wrong
Joseph Loconte: Aslan, Meryl Streep, and the Abolition of Man
Christopher J. Scalia: My ‘Buddy’ System: The Nickname I Vowed Never to Call My Sons
Inez Feltscher Stepman: The Underfunding Myth Is Exposed
Noah Rothman: The Parade of Hormuz Horribles Fizzles Out
Michael Brendan Dougherty: A War Rejected by the People
Noel J. Francisco: Why the Supreme Court Should Shut Down Boulder’s Climate Case
Will Swaim: Will California Democrats Finally Defeat John C. Frémont?
Charles Hilu: How College Football Helped the Senate Get Its Act Together
Daniel Foster: The ‘Indian Question’ Question
Eva Terry: Antisemitism Is Thriving Among Young People Online. The Solution Lies in the Real World
Brittany Bernstein: Najya Hannah-Jones Parents Her Mother in Revealing Interview
Christian Schneider: Generation Zzzzz
Jerry Nadeau: Concussions Aren’t Just a Football Problem
CAPITAL MATTERS
Ben Lieberman sounds the alarm on the cost of Biden regs: The Affordability Crisis Hits Air-Conditioning
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Armond White firebombs the Times’ list of top TV shows: The New York Times Celebrates the Dregs of Television
Brian Allen writes about the unveiling of a “superstar picture”: The Getty Goes Tahitian, Premiering Its Splendid New Reynolds Portrait
THE TIME IS NIGH . . . EXCERPT TIME
Dan Foster breaks down what’s going on with the unfortunately titled “Indian question,” or rather what that debate says about the people engaged in it:
The nationalist populists are months into the tedious and time-consuming work of figuring out exactly which races are welcome in the movement, which must be relegated to associate status, and which must be excluded altogether.
The latest plenary session has to do with Indian Americans. The “Indian Question” — as a not squeamish but nevertheless squirmy video exchange between Chris Rufo and Jonathan Keeperman recently called it — has been percolating for some time but was brought to the floor as a privileged motion after a political candidate in Texas commented negatively on a picture of South Asian students celebrating at a UT football game. In the video, Keeperman explains that it all comes down to an “intuitional preference”: many people, he says, simply prefer to live in a homogeneous society the way some prefer Sauvignon to Chablis, and they owe no one a reason.
There followed even sillier things involving the family of a Texas congressman. Representative Brandon Gill, a freshman who shops the usual mix of mass deportation and deep reductions of legal immigration, had already been skewered for featuring a picture of his children in a post about wanting them to “grow up in a country they recognize”, but not their mother: Danielle D’Souza Gill, daughter of the Indian-born, Portuguese-surnamed Dinesh D’Souza. A week after the UT episode, Gill called the leftist doofus Hasan Piker “the poster child for why we need to end birth tourism.” Piker rejoined, simply: “your wife is indian.” D’Souza weighed in in his daughter’s defense, conceding the worst premises of both litigants: “She’s Christian, born in America and her mom is white.”
This all unfolded in a multiethnic natcon milieu that is very comfortable speaking in slurs as a signal of their brash truth-telling, and at one point roped in Senator Ted Cruz to finger-wag at an Asian-American conservative influencer who had bandied about a few choice anti-Indian ones. Richard Hanania, himself a racist from way back and so well placed to comment, offered this — incredibly — fair summary of the discourse in question: “A Cuban Republican Senator attacking a Chinese populist for her open racism against Indians, in a controversy about a white anti-Indian Congressman married to an Indian woman, whose dad says she is fully American because she’s half white.”
Yep.
The whole “Indian question” was itself a rehash of a parallel, long-running session in this set that had to do with the — well, with the Jewish question.
Abigail Anthony finds a problem with the “anti-woke” origin story, in rereading NR’s original mission statement:
I had the pleasure of attending a retreat last weekend for young conservative professionals. “Varieties of conservatism” was the organizing theme of the seminars, and National Review’s 1955 mission statement was included in the readings. Someone mentioned during the class that Buckley was opposing moral relativism. That’s true, but it misses the more important point.
The justification for establishing a forum like National Review was that a dangerous illiberalism, animated by hostility to truth and reason, had already conquered virtually every major institution. My verb tense matters: Buckley et al. were not worried that such a dubious philosophy might eventually capture a few prestigious establishments that failed to engage in an ideological battle. Rather, NR’s founders astutely detected that the radicals had already seized control everywhere it mattered. The publication’s purpose was not merely to argue against an existing ideology but to disrupt its monopolistic power, hence the mission statement’s phrases such as “liberal orthodoxy” and “liberal world” appearing in 1955. The diagnosis was explicit: “And since ideas rule the world, the ideologues, having won over the intellectual class, simply walked in and started to run things. Run just about everything. There never was an age of conformity quite like this one, or a camaraderie quite like the Liberals’.”
Such an assessment is so germane that it could have been written today; the founding editorial is one among many artifacts confirming Buckley’s prophetic wisdom. But the mission statement also identifies precisely the problems that supposedly “reasonable” liberals, allegedly friendly to the conservative movement, discovered only in 2016 or 2020 during the “Woke Era” — and those “dissidents” positioned themselves as insightful heretics for observing what NR described over 70 years ago.
The broadly “anti-woke” crowd, exempting self-described “conservatives” and “right-wing” individuals, suffers from the delusion that elite institutions were ideologically captured in roughly the past decade. Such liberals think that the New York Times was an exemplar of fair and rigorous journalism until 2016, but then, it was suddenly corrupted by a virulent opposition to MAGA; the ideological tilt was only obvious when an editor resigned in response to outrage over an opinion piece by Senator Tom Cotton. They’ll tell you that NPR was a fantastic source of insightful nonpartisan discourse until 2020, when the radio hosts and writers all suddenly suffered from Rapid Onset Wokeness. They’ll claim the media were neutral and accurate, then unpredictably shifted to call the BLM riots “peaceful.” They’ll say universities were environments for open discourse, deep learning, and character formation until there was some overblown debacle at Yale University over appropriately sensible Halloween costumes. Experts in government, doctors, and medical associations were entirely apolitical prior to Covid, or perhaps just until they endorsed performing “gender-affirming” surgeries on minors, per the devoted readers of The Atlantic. The people who own a New Yorker tote bag and wear lanyards at work think corporations never engaged in left-wing social activism until grocery stores issued statements endorsing Black Lives Matter.
But that is all wrong, and our mission statement proves it. National Review detected the intelligentsia’s hegemony, and further denounced their falsehoods, decades ago.
What’s the matter with “buddy”? Christopher Scalia explains why he studiously avoids this nickname (a nickname the author of this newsletter definitely uses for his own kid):
Not long ago, when I was at the neighborhood playground with my kids, I shamed myself by saying something to my son that I had promised myself I never would.
I called him buddy. My own son!
You may be wondering, what’s so bad about that? Plenty of fathers call their sons buddy. That’s true, and I’m sure most of them are good fathers. Maybe you use that term of endearment with your own son, in which case I say to you what Rodney Dangerfield says when Ted Knight doffs a rainbow fedora in Caddyshack: “It looks good on you though.”
But calling my sons buddy was a transgression against a central principle of my philosophy of fatherhood, something formed long before I ever became a father myself. That principle is this: buddy is lame. It is what a pushover dad, the kind who is too desperate to be on his child’s good side, who’s too weak to deny him anything and says things like “He and his friends are going to get drunk anyway, they might as well get drunk in my basement,” calls his son.
CODA
And now for something completely different, again. I’ve seen some strange shows in my time, mostly in the wilds of the Garden State and sometimes Philadelphia. But Messer Chups, whom I caught on a lark with some friends last month, must rank high on the list.
I’m not even quite sure how to describe them, so I’ll copy/paste a few descriptions from promotional copy: “surf’n’roll” from “outer space,” “horror surf and rockabilly” . . . “crypt-a-billy” (???). The band is said to be from Saint Petersburg, Russia. Their live show is mostly fast-paced, Ventures-inspired surf rock, with a Halloween twist (they play old horror-film footage, some of it MST3K-worthy, in the background). Should you see them? Yeah, see them. It’s a good time. Here’s a taste.