Dear Weekend Jolter,
Lenin may not have ever said that “there are weeks where decades happen,” but we’re passing through another one all the same.
As Israel conducts its devastating campaign against Iran’s nuclear and military sites and leadership, the very survival of the country’s theocratic regime is in question.
Whether “regime change” is an explicit goal of Israel or, as Benjamin Netanyahu described it to Fox News, a potential outcome of its military operation (or both), the scenario is now openly contemplated. Most recently, Israel’s defense minister said in response to Iran’s strike on a hospital that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei should not “continue to exist.” Reza Pahlavi, Iran’s exiled crown prince and son of the toppled shah, this week declared from afar that the Islamic Republic is “in the process of collapsing” and called for a “nationwide uprising to put an end to this nightmare once and for all.” He claimed that “Iran will not descend into civil war or instability,” citing preparations for “the establishment of a national and democratic government.”
Those are ambitious statements. Ayatollah Khamenei, for his part, issued a defiant message on Wednesday, rejecting President Trump’s all-caps demand for “unconditional surrender” and warning that “any U.S. military intervention will undoubtedly be accompanied by irreparable damage.”
Trump, who taunted that the supreme leader is an “easy target” but said he’s safe “for now,” is currently prodding Tehran to negotiate, as he weighs a strike. On that debate, NR’s editorial makes the qualified case for U.S. intervention to take out Iran’s Fordow nuclear facility — but cautions about the many unknowns associated with regime change or regime collapse:
It is true that the regime, weakened by Israeli hammer blows, eventually could fall. This would presumably be a strategic boon for the West in taking off the map an inveterate, dangerous enemy that has destabilized the region for decades. But no one could know with certainty what would come next, and chaos and civil war might ensue.
“We know through our experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq that ‘regime change’ always looks easier before you get started,” Jim Geraghty writes. (As one administration official told Axios, “It’s the Ayatollah you know versus the Ayatollah you don’t know.”)
Of course, the ayatollah we know is . . . really, quite awful (though his health and level of control during the war are a subject of debate). Jim notes, too, the risk of the alternative:
There’s a cost to regime preservation, as well.
Since the first days of the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the men who rule the Islamic Republic of Iran have been a cancer upon the world. The regime is the globe’s foremost sponsor of terrorism, beginning its reign of terror with the hostage crisis and continuing it in the Beirut barracks of American servicemen, the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, the hijacking of TWA flight 847, Khobar Towers, and in the cities of Iraq. They hate Americans and Israelis but don’t care whom they hurt in their global campaign of chaos. The Iranians have bombed a Jewish community center in Argentina, Israeli diplomats driving through the streets of New Delhi, a tourist bus in a coastal town in Bulgaria, a taxi in Bangkok, Thailand. Their “diplomats” have been found supplying explosives to terrorists. It goes well beyond Israel; Iran stands accused of supporting terrorism, bombings, cyberterrorism, planned assassinations, attempted assassinations, successful assassinations, and other mayhem in Albania, Bahrain, Denmark, France, Kenya, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Thailand.
NRO has hosted a vigorous debate all week about the merits and demerits of U.S. involvement in Iran, and the proper conditions for it, not to bring about the collapse of the government but to help Israel take out Fordow. (You can read the takes from Phil, Charlie, Michael, Noah, Mark, Andy, Jim, and others.) Andy McCarthy argues that “there is no reason to believe President Trump contemplates more than a lightning strike that destroys Iran’s potential to besiege our nation and our allies with nuclear weapons,” and he notes: “We who favor regime change in Iran as an American foreign policy goal have never favored achieving it by an American military presence.” Michael Brendan Dougherty is dubious that U.S. intervention and all that follows would play out neatly: “I hope that magic button exists, that Donald Trump presses ‘bombs away’ and we get everything we want and nothing we don’t. . . . But I’m not counting on it.”
The hopes, as expressed by Pahlavi, for a tipping-point wave of anti-regime protests may also be misplaced. For all we know, Israel’s strikes could serve to inspire at least the short-term appearance of national solidarity inside Iran, giving the mullahs the most gossamer thread of popular will with which to hold together their oppressive syndicate. Trump could swoop in to make a deal, or not.
But the question of what comes “After the Ayatollahs,” as Shay Khatiri explored in a 2024 magazine piece that is well worth revisiting in this moment, is one that may have to be answered much sooner than we thought.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
Reality beats ideology: A Victory for Sanity in Medicine at the Supreme Court
The Fordow editorial, once more, is here: U.S. Should Destroy Fordow — but Only If Israel Can’t
On the name games: The Trump Administration Is Right to Re-Redesignate the Army Bases
ARTICLES
Rich Lowry: Donald Trump Is a Republican Moderate
Stanley Kurtz: Inside Harvard’s Indoctrination Factory
James Lynch: FBI Ordered Destruction of Memo on Attempted Pro-Biden CCP Interference in 2020 Election
Jeffrey Blehar: I Love the New York City Mayoral Race
Jack Butler: In Obama They Trusted — Too Much
Benjamin Rothove: Why Are Young Men So Turned Off by Democrats? These Campus Activists Ought to Know
Brittany Bernstein: Major Media Outlets Have Issued Hundreds of Corrections on Gaza Stories. They All Cut in the Same Direction
Moira Gleason: Latino Scholars Urge Congress to Defund ‘Marxist’ National Museum of the American Latino
Moira Gleason: What I Saw at the Parade
John Gerardi: Gavin’s Last Gasp
Dan McLaughlin: A Big Supreme Court Win for Reality over Transgender Ideology
Dan McLaughlin: Bunker Hill: The Battle That Made America Possible
Kayla Bartsch: How I Made It Out of Wartime Israel
Noah Rothman: The Reputational Cost of Letting Ukraine Burn
Noah Rothman: Your Narrative Can Wait
Abigail Anthony: U.K. Grooming Gangs Report Finds Perpetrators Disproportionately Pakistani, Undermining Official Narrative
Jimmy Quinn: Israel Strikes Iranian Institute That Hosted Holocaust-Denial Conference
CAPITAL MATTERS
“Something troubling is happening to the dollar,” writes Desmond Lachman: Trump’s Dollar Problem
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
A couple of Brian Wilson tributes for you. From Armond White: Brian Wilson and the Memory of Patriotism . . . and from Jeff Blehar: A Beautiful Mind: Brian Wilson, R.I.P.
And Brian Allen pens his own touching tribute, to a dear friend and art-world star: Saying Goodbye to Julia Alexander
DON’T THINK TWICE, THIS NEWSLETTER’S ALL RIGHT
In one of the biggest cases this session, the Supreme Court has upheld Tennessee’s ban on “gender-affirming” treatments for minors. Notwithstanding the coverage framing this as a blow to “transgender rights,” the ruling simply recognized reality and helped to protect minors. From NR’s editorial:
Wednesday’s 6–3 decision in United States v. Skrmetti, in an opinion delivered by Chief Justice John Roberts, is a victory for basic reality and a defeat for judicial adventurism.
If all the justices followed the original meaning of the Constitution in this case, it would have been 9–0. But the Court did not even need to get that far. The esoteric theory of sex discrimination advanced against the Tennessee law was that it discriminated by allowing the same hormones to be used for entirely different treatments, such as “to treat a minor’s congenital defect, precocious (or early) puberty, disease, or physical injury.” But as Roberts noted, this theory ignored “a key aspect of any medical treatment: the underlying medical concern the treatment is intended to address.” Because “different drugs can be used to treat the same thing . . . for the term ‘medical treatment’ to make sense . . . it must necessarily encompass both a given drug and the specific indication for which it is being administered.” At that, the theory once backed by Joe Biden’s Justice Department evaporated.
Hard cases make bad law; easy cases make bad dissents. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by the other two liberals, brought the melodrama: “The Court abandons transgender children and their families to political whims. In sadness, I dissent.” Democracy is not a political whim. As Justice Clarence Thomas rejoined to Sotomayor’s effort to muster a medical consensus on her side, “the American people and their representatives are entitled to disagree with those who hold themselves out as experts,” especially on questions of ethics. Even if the current elite American fad for transgender treatments were not built on shifting scientific sands, it would still be the right of the people to decide that irreversible medical treatments on minors are unethical because they are not old enough to give their own informed consent.
Those sands are indeed shifting, as the Court noticed in its references to the 2024 Cass Report. Thomas added to that picture the evidence that the American medical decisionmakers were pressured politically by the Biden administration with an eye firmly on how the “science” would play in this and other court cases. Sotomayor complained that Tennessee’s law is not exactly the same as those in European countries, but this is America. Our Constitution has not surrendered the right of the people to make different decisions any more than their rights to make moral judgments or to reevaluate changing circumstances.
In a historically poorly timed trip, NR’s Kayla Bartsch landed in Israel a day before the strikes on Iran began. Thankfully, she’s made it out, and she tells the story of how, here:
In what can only be described as a cinematic affair — replete with nail-biting suspense, curious characters, lavish sets, and stunning landscapes — we made it out of Amman and into the sweet, sweet arms of Athens. Soon we will be homeward bound, after a harrowing few days in Israel as part of a pre-planned trip that began just one day before Israel’s preemptive strikes on Iran.
To set the stage: It must be remembered that Israel is surrounded by slightly to wildly antagonistic territories. To the north, Lebanon. To the east, Syria and Jordan. To the south, Gaza and Egypt. To the west lies Israel’s friendliest neighbor, the Mediterranean Sea.
With Israeli airspace shut down, the nation’s geographical configuration posed a unique challenge for exit.
Either we would have to:
A) Drive across a border and fly out of another country’s open airspace, or B) find a boat that could take us to Cyprus, the closest friendly port by sea. (The drive from Jerusalem to the coast, along with Tehran’s targeting of Israeli port towns, added further risk to this latter option.)
Unfortunately, Greta did not leave behind her freedom flotilla for us to usurp (rude!). While one boat option did emerge, the craft was a sailboat which would have taken 20+ hours to navigate from Israel’s coast to Cyprus.
The next problem: How were we going to fly out of Amman?
Amid all the other news this month, Dan McLaughlin marks a notable anniversary — 250 years since the Battle of Bunker Hill:
Nothing went right for the British. [William] Howe discovered that his field artillery had brought the wrong size cannonballs (a planning failure that would be echoed 40 years later when the British at New Orleans showed up without scaling ladders). The Royal Navy’s bombardment was unable to reach the American positions with more than harassing fire, although they did succeed in incinerating Charlestown, destroying hundreds of homes and barns. The British infantry, carrying 50 pounds of equipment and fighting in red wool uniforms, broiled in the hot sun. The area chosen for the flanking attack turned out to have waist-high uncut grass full of concealed fencing and other obstacles, while the Americans were positioned behind a rail fence that helped stabilize their fire.
The Americans had their own problems. The redoubt had no positions for firing artillery, of which they had little anyway. Given the limited range of their muskets and almost complete lack of artillery, the Americans didn’t contest Howe’s landing, which took six hours to await high tide and unload 1,500 men from longboats by 2 p.m. — although the time did allow the Americans to build more entrenchments and obstacles. As the battle commenced, the militia were never able to get reserves into place, leading critics of Putnam to snipe afterwards, “There never was more confusion and less command.” Washington, always a skeptic of militia, concluded that better command would have won the battle.
But this was a completely amateur army of unconnected Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island militia, sniffily dismissed by [John] Burgoyne as a “rabble in arms.” What it did succeed in accomplishing was remarkable. Throughout the war, militia would show themselves poorly suited for offensive maneuvers or amphibious landings, but they could be highly effective defending fixed positions. If their leaders were no great military minds, they rallied the men’s morale; the 6-foot-3 Prescott stood ramrod-straight and unflappable even when his uniform was splattered with blood and brains, and ended up being nearly the last man off the field. Prescott and Putnam probably didn’t coin the phrase, “Don’t fire, boys, until you see the whites of their eyes” that day, and may or may not have said it, but it reflected the advice that the American commanders sent up and down the line.
The British soldiers described running into “a continual sheet of lightning” and “an uninterrupted peal of thunder.” The first American volley cut so brutally through the redcoats that it took Howe half an hour to reform his lines to renew the attack. Twice they came, and twice they were repelled. Major John Pitcairn, the British hero of Lexington and Concord, fell with four bullets in him and was carried from the field by his son. Howe’s aide-de-camp was killed, and his entire staff was dead or wounded, but the general himself was unharmed in the thick of the action. A more seasoned force might have taken Breed’s Hill by bayonet charge in spite of the American fire, but with so many officers cut down, the infantry were hard to rally. Only on the third attempt did the British finally take Breed’s Hill, and only because the Americans ran out of ammunition.
Even as they turned to flee, the Americans managed to withdraw without a complete rout. Burgoyne observed, “The retreat was no flight. It was even covered with bravery and military skill.” Howe restrained [Henry] Clinton from continuing the pursuit; [Artemas] Ward restrained [William] Prescott from trying to retake the hill. The battle had lasted three hours. Britain had taken Breed’s Hill and Bunker Hill. . . .
Bunker Hill’s importance went beyond its immediate effects on American morale and its strategic role in the ultimate British evacuation of Boston. The carnage was deeply traumatizing to the British officer corps and infected their tactics with more caution for the remainder of the war. Clinton, whose aggressive ideas were regularly overruled, sat on his hands in New York later in the war while Burgoyne was defeated at Saratoga and Cornwallis defeated at Yorktown.
From July 1775 on, the starring role in the American Revolution would be played by Washington’s Continental Army. But the “Father of our Country” had adopted his army from the militia. The militia could not win America its independence. But at Bunker Hill, it made that fight possible.
CODA
I’ve been listening off and on lately to Benny Goodman’s historic 1938 Carnegie Hall concert (the 1999 reissue, with the full set). What a show.
It’s extracted from original acetates, and the discs keep a pleasant balance of crackling and clear sound. Here’s “Blue Reverie,” but you can pick through the whole concert here. Carnegie’s stage that evening was heavy with greats: Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, Johnny Hodges . . . and many more.
Enjoy, and thanks for reading.