Dear Weekend Jolter,
The Democrats are not acting as if they’ve had a year to reflect on the party’s disastrous flameout.
In the time since then–President Biden dropped out of the 2024 race and handed a barely flickering torch to Kamala Harris, the party reportedly has been working on an “autopsy” that, per the New York Times, avoids the “likeliest cause of death,” while watching helplessly as upstart, far-left candidates grab headlines nationally and victories locally.
The identity crisis goes on. In the just-out September issue of NR, Audrey Fahlberg writes about how the Democratic Party is still wrestling with itself, as the self-styled “normal” ones contend with a “radical leftist flank” that “constantly seizes the microphone and shouts down any suggestion that the Democratic Party . . . should moderate after one of its most bruising presidential defeats in recent memory.”
Fittingly, as Jim Geraghty observed earlier this month, one of the lone voices warning his fellow party members about the path they’re on is, once again, former Minnesota Representative Dean Phillips. Speaking recently to CNN, he addressed a two-pronged problem: The party has too many officials “who have been sitting in seats for too long,” but it also needs “normal candidates” running to succeed them. To this point, he described possible future NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani as a “grave threat.”
One can argue that New York’s primary election does not speak to the direction of the party nationally, but, as Ramesh Ponnuru has noted, many of the party’s presidential candidates have acted “as though the primary voters of New York City were the kind of voters they most needed to win over.” In a recurring theme, that race was another example of a tragically flawed “establishment” figure being derailed by a renegade. Republicans are happy to reinforce the notion that Mamdani is the “face” of the Democrats either way.
Hardly helping to dispel the narrative, over on Dean Phillips’s home turf, democratic socialist Omar Fateh just secured the endorsement of the Minneapolis DFL party in the city’s mayoral race. “For Democrats still wondering how Trump was able to win a second term, this is why. People like [Mayor] Jacob Frey, who appear at least somewhat interested in responsible governance, can never live up to the expectations of the progressives,” Benjamin Rothove writes.
Incumbent Frey might still prevail, as Jeff Blehar notes. Fateh only won an endorsement, not a vote, in a convention marred by disputes over the tabulation system. But even as Trump’s Washington is gripped these days by Epstein fever (more on the ugly outgrowths of that below), it’s not like we’re seeing a roadmap to normalcy out of the DNC.
The Times reports that the party’s after-election autopsy is expected to mostly avoid decisions by the Biden and Harris campaigns and focus on actions by “allied groups.” One particular focus reportedly will be the super PAC Future Forward and its stratospheric ad spending. But that, of course, would reflect a narrow assessment of campaign-season tactics, and not a broader one of the governance and decision-making that fatally damaged the brand.
Jeff serves up hard truths:
Friends, better super PAC messaging wasn’t going to save Democrats in 2024. A Democratic Party that refuses to acknowledge that it lost because of the border, inflation, and its cultural alienation from the great mass of American voters is not a party properly reckoning with its failures.
Biden’s refusal to back out of the race in time to allow for a true primary was no small factor, either — just don’t bring that up with Hunter these days. As Jeff tartly concludes: “An honest autopsy would report the cause of death as suicide.”
The party review may well gloss over Biden and Harris’s deficiencies, Noah Rothman writes. Even assigning blame to them alone would be too tidy; honest scrutiny of how Democrats governed for four years, Noah notes, “would find that Democrats at all levels pumped ungodly sums of capital into an already overheated economy, contributing to the inflationary pressure consumers hated with a blinding passion” while “Biden presided over American humiliations in the Middle East and Europe.”
Audrey writes about how some Democrats are earnestly trying to find a path forward. We’ve seen flashes of awareness about the disconnect between party orthodoxy and ordinary voters, most recently from Rahm Emanuel. And of course, Democrats may be able to rely on negative sentiments toward President Trump to regain lost ground in the next cycle. But if the Mamdani effect inspires more followers, don’t expect them to hold it for very long.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
We’ve had enough lawfare already: Russiagate, Revisited
Ousting Powell would be pointless and destructive: Trump Shouldn’t Fire Powell
On a great loss: Ed Feulner, 1941–2025
ARTICLES
Charles C. W. Cooke: Stephen Colbert Killed The Late Show
Abigail Anthony & James Lynch: L.A. Children’s Closes Trans Youth Center Under Pressure from Trump Admin, Joins Growing List of Closures
James Lynch: FBI Spied on Catholic Priest for Refusing to Divulge Details of Conversations with Parishioner
James Lynch: Billions in Federal Aid Yield About 400 EV Chargers — at $19M Apiece
Noah Rothman: This Is How ‘Authoritarianism’ Ends: With a Whimper
Andrew McCarthy: AG Bondi Fires Back After NJ Federal Judges Refuse to Extend Alina Habba’s Interim U.S. Attorney Appointment
Jim Geraghty: The Ukrainian Government Shoots Itself in the Foot
Mark L. Clifford: Hong Kong Authorities Are Hiding the Truth About Jimmy Lai
Mike Coté: Why the Iranian Regime Is Still Uniquely Dangerous
Brittany Bernstein: The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s Thankless Task
Moira Gleason: The End of the Essay? Humanities Departments Enter the AI Age
Michael Brendan Dougherty: The Other Ukraine
CAPITAL MATTERS
Sean Higgins provides a reality check on Sesame Street alarmism: Sesame Street Will Still Be Open
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Brian Allen tips us off on where to find great, big, serpentine art — outside: An Outdoor Sculpture Triumph in the Berkshires
Armond White, on the Colbert fallout: Jon Stewart’s F-Bomb Chorus
FROM THE NEW, SEPTEMBER 2025 ISSUE OF NR
James Kirchick: Tucker Carlson’s Dark Turn
Arthur Herman: How We Built the Arsenal of Democracy
Elliott Abrams: The Decline of the Iranian Empire
Audrey Fahlberg: Democrats Are Still Lost in the Wilderness
Daniel J. Flynn: Star Trek’s Forgotten Encounter with NR
Dan McLaughlin: Among the Baseball Nerds
EXCERPTS IN EVERY POT
The new issue of NR is out, and you can work your way through it here, including the special section on the defense industry. But to start, James Kirchick has a comprehensive piece on Tucker Carlson’s descent:
Since his firing from Fox News in 2023, Tucker Carlson has been descending deeper and deeper into the fever swamp of conspiracy theories. Guests on the enormously popular, self-produced Tucker Carlson Show have included author Naomi Wolf, who claims that certain clouds are in fact “geoengineered skies,” and Alex Jones, the vaudevillian mountebank whose most monstrous lie — that the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre was a “false flag” operation perpetrated by the government to confiscate guns — cost him $1 billion in civil damages. At a live taping of the show last September, during which Jones asserted that “the globalists are making aliens by mixing humans and other animals and insects and plants. . . . They gestate them and use cow uteruses to grow them,” Carlson lauded Jones for being “vindicated on everything.”
In recent months, Carlson has focused his skeptical eye on a more prosaic conspiracy: the machinations of the State of Israel and what Pat Buchanan infamously called its “amen corner” in the United States. On June 18, four days before President Donald Trump ordered the U.S. military to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites, Carlson aired an interview with Republican Senator Ted Cruz that addressed America’s potential involvement in such an operation. While the clip that earned the most attention featured Carlson expressing pseudo-shock at Cruz for not knowing Iran’s population, the crux of their tête-à-tête concerned Israel and the political influence of its American supporters.
Prefacing his interrogation with the proviso that he was acting “on behalf not simply of myself but of my many Jewish friends,” Carlson repeatedly pressed Cruz on alleged Israeli espionage in the United States (without mentioning any specific instances of it), rejected the theological basis of some Christians’ support for Israel, and demanded to know why AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) has not been forced to “register as a foreign lobby.” When Cruz remarked on Carlson’s “obsession with Israel,” Carlson was indignant, denying that he was thus obsessed seven times over the course of their two-hour-long debate. Indeed, far from being “obsessed,” Carlson insisted that he would prefer not to discuss the subject at all. “I don’t even like talking about Israel,” he complained in the middle of an interview that touched on little else. As to Cruz’s observation that he had a malignant interest in “the Jews,” Carlson angrily replied that he was “just asking questions.”
A survey of Carlson’s programming and rhetoric over the past several years, however, makes abundantly clear that he is indeed very much “obsessed” with Israel and the Jews. Carlson has devoted more time and attention to the Jewish state, which he portrays in a uniformly negative light, than to any other country in the world. He has suggested that Israel and its agents have been behind everything from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to the promotion of “white genocide” to the deceased financier Jeffrey Epstein’s supposed entrapment of the world’s most powerful men via the trafficking of underage girls. To listen to Carlson’s show is to come away with the impression that Adolf Hitler was misunderstood, that Israel is a country systematically murdering Christians, and that American Jews compose a bloodthirsty fifth column bent on conscripting their Gentile countrymen to fight Israel’s wars.
Trump’s attempt to change the subject with retributive action is as unproductive as it is transparent. From NR’s editorial:
The president is engulfed in a Jeffrey Epstein controversy of his top law-enforcement officials’ own making. Knowing the president had a yearslong friendship with Epstein, Attorney General Pam Bondi — egged on by demagogic commentary from MAGA influencers Kash Patel and Dan Bongino before Donald Trump named them to lead the FBI — nonetheless fed the notion of a broad sex-trafficking conspiracy implicating famous Epstein “clients.” Predictably unable to back up this irresponsible suggestion with evidence, Trump officials are now stunned that the president’s base won’t take “never mind” for an answer and that Democrats are reveling in the equally flimsy suggestion of an administration cover-up of the full extent of Trump’s relationship to Epstein.
Stuck in this mire, the administration is trying to change the subject. Trump and his national intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard, are claiming that former President Barack Obama led a “treasonous” conspiracy by promoting the fiction that Trump worked with Russia to steal the 2016 election.
The underlying truth is serious enough: Trump was the victim of one of the most insidious dirty tricks in American political history. The Clinton campaign used the bogus “Steele dossier” to manufacture the Trump-Russia “collusion” narrative. Obama administration officials picked up this story and ran with it.
By July 2016, President Obama knew — because then-CIA Director John Brennan briefed him — that the Clinton campaign had a campaign strategy to divert attention from her email scandal by “vilifying” Trump by tying him to Russia. . . .
But Trump and Gabbard go further, treating the accurate portion of the Democratic narrative as though it too were a fiction. Russia did indeed try, however ineffectively, to interfere in the election. Trump CIA Director John Ratcliffe has attested to it. Just days before Gabbard’s release of emails, the CIA issued a report finding that the 2016 ICA had been on solid footing when it concluded “with high confidence” that Russia had meddled in the hope of undermining Clinton as president. . . .
Special counsel John Durham, who was tapped by the Trump I DOJ to investigate the origins of the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, spent four exhaustive years on the probe. As his 306-page report concludes, the Clinton campaign was principally responsible for fabricating the story, and the FBI was recklessly irresponsible in opening a full investigation and using the dossier in court without rudimentary verification steps. But he drew the correct conclusion that “even horribly bad judgment” and “unseemly or unethical conduct” are not crimes absent violation of a particular criminal statute.
That is still true. It should be front of mind when partisans assess the official conduct of their political rivals. We have had enough, more than enough, lawfare. And before concluding that turnabout is fair play, Trump should consider that lawfare can also backfire — which helps explain why he is back in the White House in the first place.
We’ve published many takes on Colbert’s cancellation, all worth your time. To pick just one, Charlie gives a characteristically concise assessment of what really went wrong for the partisan late-night host:
Since the news was promulgated, entertainment analysts have been busy looking for the murder weapon. Some have suggested Donald Trump. Others have pointed to the political climate, or the state of the TV market, or the economics of producing a spectacle in contemporary New York City. My choice is less complex. The executioner was Stephen Colbert.
As the host of the Late Show, Stephen Colbert was annoying, in a direct and palpable sense. He hectored; he sneered; he gatekept for a narrow, pious worldview; and, above all else, he sacrificed jocosity for ideology — a trade that never, ever pays. Under Colbert’s inadequate leadership, the program came to resemble the sort of bedeviled mutt that one might expect if one were to instruct artificial intelligence to produce a chat show, having trained it solely on old episodes of The View. Not only did the product fail to look like America; its architects neither knew what America looked like nor wanted to know what America looks like. It was insular, smug, and self-serious — and, worst of all, it routinely committed the only mortal sin in show business: It was boring.
Most of this was directly Colbert’s fault. The rest was indirectly Colbert’s fault. Many of the postmortems have noted correctly that Colbert was obsessed with a particular strand of American politics and that, in addition to giving the show a dull, Manichean tone, this obsession led him to offer up a surfeit of left-leaning politicians as his guests. What has received less attention is that his non-political invitees were also habitually dreary. Why? Because, in the environment that the Stephen Colberts of the world have created, they had no choice but to be so. It is, indeed, true that the “death of the movie star system” has made late shows more difficult to stage. But, in the grand scheme of things, that is a red herring. A media universe that was engineered by the likes of Stephen Colbert was always destined to be a media universe in which interesting people sedulously avoided saying anything of consequence, and in which those who tried to say compelling things were swiftly cut off at the pass. Ultimately, the problem was of demand, not of supply. . . .
Go back and watch some of Johnny Carson’s interviews from the 1970s, and you will notice how generous the man was in both style and substance. Into his studio came an eclectic parade of guests and interlocutors, and, irrespective of their foibles, eccentricities, or perspectives, Carson treated them all in the same affable way. Night in and night out, he asked gentle, empathetic, open questions, and then waited calmly for the answers — even if those ended up being unusual or harrowing or bizarre. Stephen Colbert did not do this.
Mark L. Clifford shines some needed light on the case of Jimmy Lai:
Jimmy Lai, the Hong Kong newspaperman and British citizen, has spent more than 1,650 days in prison, mostly in solitary confinement. There is perhaps no greater living icon of freedom in Asia than Jimmy Lai. He was a central figure in peaceful protests against China’s crackdown on Hong Kong, protests joined by millions of the small island’s citizens. His newspaper, Apple Daily, was one of the loudest pro-democracy voices in the city until the authorities shuttered it in June 2021.
Lai is currently serving a six-year sentence for a minor lease violation. This has given local authorities plenty of time to drag out yet another persecution of this great man — this time, under the Beijing-backed National Security Law. The Chinese can’t be too worried about the outcome. According to the Hong Kong government’s own count, nearly nine out of ten people charged with offenses under the city’s national security and sedition laws have been convicted over the past few years. It’s hard to imagine they would let such a big fish get away.
It will come as no surprise to those who are familiar with Xi Jinping’s rule that Lai is enduring inhumane treatment. As I wrote about my friend and former colleague in the Wall Street Journal last week, I am extremely concerned about Lai’s condition. He is a 77-year-old diabetic. He lives in a tiny, windowless concrete cell without access to sunlight or fresh air, where he must endure the intense heat and humidity of his fourth Hong Kong summer behind bars. Temperatures this week are forecast to be in the 90s; humidity will hit 95 percent.
The Hong Kong government angrily accuses critics of “disregarding the facts and slandering and smearing” its administration. Those who ask questions about Lai’s solitary confinement in a windowless cell are guilty of “malicious and despicable intentions” and trying to “undermine the rule of law in Hong Kong.”
The questions we asked about Lai, says the government, “continue to distort the truth, blatantly discredit the judicial system and trials of the HKSAR [Hong Kong Special Administrative Region], and make false and misleading statements by fabricating information.”
This July 16 statement by the government, apparently made in response to my column in the Journal, claims that Lai’s solitary confinement “has all along been made at his own request.” The government cites a September 2024 letter from his local legal team as evidence. Robertsons, the legal firm representing Lai, has not responded to repeated requests for the letter. . . .
Hong Kong authorities claim that prison conditions are “secure, safe, humane, appropriate and healthy.” If they’re so confident of these claims, they should be able to easily prove them.
Honorable Mention
This is a last call, from our friends and partners over at National Review Institute, to apply for the Burke to Buckley fall program:
The Burke to Buckley Fellowship program is back in Dallas this fall for food, friendship, and first principles! Burke to Buckley is intended for mid-career professionals from a wide variety of professions and industries. Over seven sessions, your cohort will gather to discuss key subjects in American conservatism through foundational texts. Upon completion of the program, you will join a network of hundreds of alumni across the country.
Experts from academia and National Review guide the conversation on topics including Burke, the spirit of conservatism, economic and political freedom, and foreign policy. For more information and to apply, click here. Applications close August 1.
CODA
In my high school in my particular township in New Jersey in the ’90s, Ozzy (much like Lemmy) occupied godlike status. Our school band had “Iron Man” in the repertoire. The metalheads revered him. Judge harshly if you must, but Ozzfest was the cultural event of the year, one I attended twice.
So, “absolute legend” about covers things for the purposes of this space. Here are a couple songs to remember him by. And a couple tribute posts from Jeff and Vahaken. R.I.P.
Thanks for reading (and thanks to Audrey for covering while I was away).