Dear Weekend Jolter,

When they go low, we seize the means of production.

This appears to be Democratic primary voters’ attitude this year toward the excesses of the Trump era. But fighting recklessness with recklessness has its own costs, as the party is learning the hard way in Maine.

“Today, it’s the Democratic Party’s turn to confront how easily it was manipulated by ideologues,” Noah Rothman writes of that Senate campaign meltdown, after a sexual-assault allegation against Graham Platner at last compelled his most prominent supporters, including Bernie Sanders, to pressure him to exit the race ahead of Monday’s drop-out deadline. In a lengthy and blame-casting video posted late Wednesday, in which he again denied the accusation, Platner suspended his campaign.

Other attention-getting and problematic Democratic congressional candidates don’t appear to have nearly the record of normally disqualifying personal sins that Platner has, but the red flags (emphasis on red) are obvious to all but the most ideologically committed. As John Fund writes, Democrats’ “hatred of Donald Trump has driven them to search for and embrace lots of extreme and questionable candidates this year.”

Darializa Avila Chevalier, the party’s candidate for New York’s 13th congressional district, can’t articulate a circumstance in which a murderer should go to prison for murdering. Melat Kiros, the Democrats’ pick for Colorado’s first congressional district, struggles to call out deadly antisemitism. AOC-backed Abdul El-Sayed, running for a Senate seat in Michigan, has campaigned with streamer Hasan Piker, who has said America “deserved 9/11,” favors Hamas over Israel, and has expressed comfort with an array of crimes; Mallory McMorrow dropped out of that race last weekend, leaving a binary choice between El-Sayed and the more moderate Haley Stevens. Noah is not hopeful going into Michigan’s August primary: “Democratic primary voters are not casting safe ballots. They are voting with their hearts, and their hearts are with the socialists.”

The takeaway from the Platner saga — a truth reinforced in countless elections this century — is that voters and operatives are willing to look past awful flaws for the sake of partisan allegiance. “Now they are paying the price,” NR’s editorial observes.

The stakes for other races might not be as high right now as the balance of power in the Senate. But continuing to elevate candidates whose contempt for country and the notion of private enterprise is palpable will lead U.S. politics down an ever-darker path. As with Mamdani and AOC, each newly minted socialist celebrity can become a kingmaker in his or her own right, committed to expanding the movement’s influence in the Democratic mainstream — a sort of chain migration for socialists into the halls of power. It shouldn’t take sexual-assault allegations for the party to reconsider these choices.

NAME. RANK. LINK.

EDITORIALS

The MOU is disintegrating: Iran Gets Back on Trump’s Bad Side

Cultural habits are hard to change. But Europe will have to change one, and adopt AC, sooner or later: Europe’s Deadly Aversion to Air-Conditioning

On Platner: Democrats Run Out of Excuses for Platner

ARTICLES

Itxu Díaz: Art Without Soul Is Not Art

Abigail Anthony: England’s Proposed ‘Conversion Practices’ Ban Is a Mess

Caroline Downey: Is Gen Z Lazy?

Stanley Kurtz: The Smithsonian’s Leadership Must Go

Robert P. George: Obergefell, Eleven Years On

Brett Schaefer: Yet Again, the U.N. Is Treating Hamas Lies as Fact

Daniel Buck: Teaching Students to Love America Again

Jim Geraghty: The Trump Card and the Red Card

Brittany Bernstein: The Media’s Not-So-Happy Fourth of July

Dan McLaughlin: We Are All Still Living in Bill Clinton’s Moral World

Dan McLaughlin: Platner Shows Why the Supreme Court Was Right on Campaign Spending

Michael Brendan Dougherty: The Never-Ending Panic About Liberalism

Bing West: The Pentagon Must Undertake Its Own Transformation

Rich Lowry: Does the WNBA Not Like Caitlin Clark?

CAPITAL MATTERS

Rachel Greszler, with some thoughts on oversight: How to Fight Fraud in Reconciliation 3.0

LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.

Brian Allen is ready to roast some folks: And the Inaugural ‘Supreme Flower of Nitwittery’ Awards Go To . . .

Armond White, with his own version of midterms: 2026 Midyear Reckoning: Midyear Chaos

EXCERPTS, SNIPPETS, CLIPS, AND EXTRACTS

Dan McLaughlin provides historical context for the roster of morally broken candidates:

Thirty years ago, the entire Democratic Party set out to convince the country that the character and morals of our leaders were irrelevant — especially as regards how they treated the opposite sex in matters sexual. Leaders “compartmentalize,” Democrats told us. Only prudes care about whether we are led by people of good character. We should be more like the sophisticated French and not care. . . . This unified philosophical message was carried forward on the now familiar whole-of-society basis by the Democrats — not just their elected officials, messaging apparatus, and formal surrogates, but also their pundit class and their allies in the entertainment world, academia, and the supposedly objective press. They kept up this drumbeat for eight solid years. While it had other beneficiaries — after all, the most influential figure in setting the party’s agenda for four decades was Ted Kennedy — this was all done in the service of one man: Bill Clinton.
It matters not whether any of this was sincere. People fiercely defending the irrelevancy of sexual predation in the workplace had only a few years before, in the 1991 Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill hearings and the 1992 “Year of the Woman” in Senate races, insisted equally loudly that sexual harassment was the most pressing issue of our times. The far more important point than its sincerity (or lack of it) is that it succeeded. The American people bought the argument. Some agreed with it; those who didn’t agree accepted that it had carried the day, and that resisting it was a despised minority position. Of course, the two parties have both opportunistically shifted their tone from one campaign and one controversy to the next in the intervening years. But the abiding lesson they both drew is that Clinton and his defenders had permanently changed the game. They had created a blueprint for not just surviving personal scandal but aggressively dismissing its significance. They had built an audience and a philosophical structure for that argument.
They also unmade the lesson of Watergate. . . .
Ever since, we have lived in the moral world made by the Clinton defense arguments. That world gave us Trump, and it gave cover — until Trump shifted the partisan valence of such arguments — to the likes of Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein. If you’re wondering today why terrible people such as Graham Platner and Ken Paxton think they can run for major public office, this is why: because one of the two parties succeeded in persuading the American people to stop caring about the moral character of public men.

Abigail Anthony digs into the myriad and messy problems with a recently introduced bill to ban so-called conversion therapy in England and Wales:

The new “Conversion Practices Bill” is devilishly vague, but here’s what stands to happen if it is passed in its current form. The law would establish new criminal offenses that carry an unlimited fine and a five-year maximum prison sentence for “conversion practices,” a term broadly defined as “abusive” conduct that aims to change an individual’s sexual orientation or “transgender identity.” (This standard would supposedly be applied bidirectionally, meaning that it would be an offense to try to convert a homosexual person into a heterosexual person, and vice versa.) When assessing conduct, consideration would be given to whether it involved “(a) words or behaviour of a sexual nature; (b) violent or threatening words or behaviour; (c) controlling or coercive words or behaviour; (d) use of economic pressure; (e) use of psychological or emotional pressure.” But that would theoretically cover most conduct, since surely all discussions about an individual’s sexuality or “gender” necessarily involve “words . . . of a sexual nature,” while “psychological or emotional pressure” could be just about anything.
Ultimately, the bill creates the following crime: “A person commits an offence if the person carries out an abusive conversion practice on an individual which causes — (a) serious harm to the individual’s physical or mental health, or (b) serious alarm or distress to the individual which has a substantial adverse effect on their usual day-to-day activities.” Yet many LGBTQ+ activists claim to be victims of a traumatic “hate crime” if someone accidentally “misgenders” them, so we can probably assume that any criticism of a person’s sexuality or “gender” will be legally classified as causing “serious harm.” An additional worrying provision in the bill would criminalize encouraging or assisting a person outside of England and Wales in performing “conversion practices.”
The bill also introduces a new type of protection order that can be issued by the court in response to an application, or even in circumstances where an application has not been filed. This is quite an extreme measure: Other types of protective orders issued in the United Kingdom are designed for alarming behavior such as stalking, harassment, and domestic violence. Under the bill, the court could issue a protective order “even though the respondent has not been given such notice of the proceedings as would otherwise be required by rules of court,” which presumably means it can be issued against an individual who has not been charged with any crime. Furthermore, a person who has been issued a protection order can be arrested for violating it.
Not only is the bill confusing, but its text seemingly contradicts what the government and elected representatives have said about it, leaving us to wonder exactly what conduct would be considered permissible. A carve-out exempts medical professionals engaged in “healthcare,” although the government also describes the bill as resulting in “all forms of ‘talking conversion therapies’” being “banned for under-18s regardless of circumstances.” So, there is somehow a “healthcare” exception, yet certain forms of therapy are seemingly unprotected. Moreover, I suspect that the types of therapy that will be deemed illegal are those that espouse the “watchful waiting” model rather than the “affirmative” approach, given that the United Kingdom’s thought police has long skewed in favor of left-leaning speech.

NR’s editorial, putting in a good word for air-conditioning:

AC, a product of American ingenuity, has been spreading across this country since the middle years of the past century. The boost that it has given, especially in hotter, more humid states, to livability, safety, and productivity has been a triumph. About 90 percent of U.S. households now have some form of AC, a level roughly comparable to Japan’s, although we lag South Korea. It’s a sign of the times that China is now home to more AC equipment than anywhere else and that demand for these marvelous devices is surging in India, too, albeit from a low base.
In Europe, however, AC is harder to find, with a penetration rate of somewhere between 20 and 30 percent, a number that masks higher rates in some of its more southerly countries. This lower take-up owes a great deal to the temperate climate that had prevailed in much of it, and quite a bit to the buildings that survive from that era. Old, grand architecture and AC are not always an easy fit. A certain snobbish/jealous disdain for the comforts of American life has also played its part. And so have electricity prices that are significantly higher than on this side of the Atlantic.
This expensive electricity is, in no small part, a consequence of the devotion of the European ruling class (and, regrettably, of quite a few of their subjects) to the “race” to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, a race as reckless as it is futile. Participating in it has meant that European governments have made it unnecessarily difficult to install AC. Their explanation is that generating additional electricity for extra AC will mean more greenhouse gas emissions. . . .
That the aversion to AC should be so strong on a continent that prides itself (not always accurately) on its sense of history ought to embarrass Europeans more than it does. Humanity’s advance — there are now more than 8 billion of us spread across the globe, flourishing as never before — is a living monument to our ingenuity and to our adaptability. It is reasonable to expect that those same qualities will enable us to cope with a warming planet without abandoning the economic growth that has taken our species so far.

CODA

I made a spur-of-the-moment call this week to catch former Metallica bassist Jason Newsted, who was playing at a local club with his group, the Chophouse Band. The project has played charity and such events for years now but is doing shows all month for what is billed as their first-ever North American tour. If they’re coming to a city near you, do yourself a favor and go.

Chophouse works through a mash-up of anything that could loosely be categorized as Americana, their own material alongside heavy-ish covers of “heroes” — Tom Waits, Levon Helm, Blue Öyster Cult, you name it. Metalheads are accustomed to seeing Jason doing back-up growls for James Hetfield, but the guy can sing, while mostly leaving the solos to two other guitar players flanking him onstage.

The frustrating part is that they aren’t selling albums; they played a wonderful, soulful original before the break, and you can hardly find a recording of this song anywhere. I finally tracked it down, at least unless/until it’s taken down, at the 58-minute mark here.

That said, it was wild to watch an arena-metal god banter with the crowd in an intimate lounge setting while honoring American folk and rock history. To keep some continuity with last week’s Coda, here’s a rough old clip I was able to find of the guys doing Waits’s “Jockey Full of Bourbon,” which they also played this week. Rock on, Jason.

Thanks for reading/listening.