Dear Weekend Jolter,
Fair is foul and foul is fair, say some.
“Michael Sussmann is innocent!” Except that he’s not. “The Second Amendment guarantees no individual right!” Except that it does. Race-blind is racist. Spending is not inflationary, and on and on and on it goes.
We’re here to set the record straight, not that you Dear Jolter, are likely to be in need of any such straightening. Nevertheless, it’s nice to be reminded you’re not alone in the land of the sane, right?
Yes, Joe Biden is far too old to be president. No, critical theory is not a substitute for phonics. Yes, Ilya Shapiro’s being reinstated at Georgetown Law was a victory. No, we should not feel much better about the state of our culture so long as mousy men like Georgetown Law dean Bill Treanor remain in positions of power.
Much of this would be a bore to go over, were it not for the talent of our stable of writers for finding unique angles to decry and fisk and explain and even comfort, when necessary. I’ll keep this short and allow you ample time to learn, eye-roll, and fist-pump from, at, and to the goodies below. Enjoy!
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
Corporations are people, my friend: The Supreme Court Should Protect Social-Media Free Speech
Red Flag laws have merit, but only on the state level: Say No to a National ‘Red Flag’ Law
On inflation, President Biden has tried nothing and is all out of ideas: Joe Biden’s Out of Ideas about Inflation
John Durham has demonstrated the worth of his work, even in failure: Durham’s Work Must Go On, despite Sussmann Acquittal
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun and the willingness to act: The Uvalde Outrage
ARTICLES
Kyle Smith: Norm Macdonald Killed before He Died
Charles C. W. Cooke: Stop Lying about the Historical Understanding of Gun Rights
Madeleine Kearns: A Reckoning for MeToo
Ari Schaffer: Georgia Republicans Flip the Script on Stolen Elections
Jack Crowe: UPenn Med School Leaders Turn on Former Dean over ‘Racist’ Affirmative-Action Criticism
Rich Lowry: The Blowhard-in-Chief
Jim Geraghty: Could Los Angeles Elect a (Relatively) Conservative Mayor?
Jeff Eager: Does the GOP Actually Have a Shot in Oregon This Year?
Dan McLaughlin: We Don’t Have to ‘Do Nothing’ on School Shootings
Alexandra DeSanctis: Understanding the Human Cry behind the Pro-Abortion Cause
John McCormack: Do Americans Really Want an Octogenarian in the Oval Office?
CAPITAL MATTERS
Ben Sperry gives yet another example of what’s wrong with the everything-is-everything mindset: Broadband Internet Isn’t a Social-Justice Issue
Do you have too much money in your pocket? Is that the problem? Ryan Ellis thinks not: The Left Is Wrong: We’re Overspending, Not Undertaxing
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Only Armond White could cause you to want to drop everything and run to the theaters for a poet’s biopic: Terence Davies’s Magnificent Benediction
Kyle Smith is grateful for an indefatigable Maverick: Thanks, Tom Cruise
Brian T. Allen writes in praise of Donatello, and a new exhibition in Florence: Donatello, the Renaissance Genius on Whose Shoulders Other Geniuses Stand
THE CHARGE: GREAT COPY, THE PLEA: GUILTY
A jury may have found Michael Sussmann innocent, but the Editors remain sure of Special Counsel John Durham’s purpose:
The usual suspects are taking the acquittal of Democratic lawyer Michael Sussmann as proof that Special Counsel John Durham never had a real case to investigate. Instead, it should put a spotlight on what really needs investigating: the FBI’s role in the Trump–Russia “collusion” farce.
In the case that Durham unwisely brought, the FBI played the part of the victim. And there is no serious question that Sussmann lied to it. He conveyed an allegation that Donald Trump, at the time the Republican presidential candidate, had established a communications back channel with the Kremlin through servers at Russia’s Alfa Bank. While the allegation was based on misleadingly mined Internet data, the lie at issue in the trial was Sussmann’s claim not to be representing a client. At the time, he was in fact representing both the campaign of Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, and the tech executive who had compiled the data, Clinton partisan Rodney Joffe.
We have smoking-gun proof that Sussmann lied: a text message he sent the night before his September 19, 2016, meeting with the FBI. Sussmann — a former Justice Department cybersecurity lawyer — assured his old friend James Baker, then the FBI’s general counsel, that he wanted to bring the “sensitive” information only to “help the Bureau,” and not on behalf of any client.
At the time of the indictment, though, Durham did not have the text. Inexplicably, he did not obtain it until a few weeks before the trial, which was after the five-year statute of limitations had elapsed. The jury was thus told it could not find a false statement based on the text standing alone. Given that the one-on-one meeting between Sussmann and Baker was not recorded, and that Baker has given conflicting accounts of what was said when questioned about it over the years, Durham had a weak case.
Still, the principal impediment to conviction was the FBI itself.
Baker’s claim to have accepted Sussmann’s cover story rang hollow. The FBI knew exactly who Sussmann was. He was well known for representing top Democrats along with his then–law partner, Marc Elias (the main lawyer for the Clinton campaign). Moreover, the DNC had retained Sussmann earlier in 2016 to deal with the FBI in connection with its allegation that Russia had hacked its servers. Under Sussmann’s guidance, the DNC had resisted surrendering its servers to the FBI for forensic examination — instead hiring a private contractor, Crowdstrike. The notion that, just six weeks before Election Day, a top Democratic lawyer had no partisan motivation in bringing the FBI derogatory information about Trump, and that information just happened to support the Democratic smear of Trump as a Putin puppet, was laughable.
And sure enough, in the Sussmann trial’s most notable testimony, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook admitted that Hillary Clinton had personally approved leaking the Trump–Putin back-channel tale, which the campaign knew to be dubious, to the media. Once the media began running with the Alfa Bank story, just days before the election, Hillary Clinton herself (along with her aide Jake Sullivan, now Biden’s national-security adviser) amplified the news in tweets that anticipated an imminent FBI investigation.
Charlie Cooke has had it up to here with those who would have you believe the Second Amendment guarantees the only constitutional right not extended to individuals:
If it will please the court, I will happily fall onto both my knees, throw my arms up into the air, shake my head plaintively, and plead with America’s journalists, in the name of all that is good and right, to stop doing this:
The interpretation that the Second Amendment extends to individuals’ rights to own guns only became mainstream in 2008, when the Supreme Court ruled in a landmark gun case, District of Columbia vs. Heller, that Americans have a constitutional right to own guns in their homes, knocking down the District’s handgun ban.
This claim was made yesterday in the Washington Post, by a staff writer named Amber Phillips, under the tag “Analysis.” It is, of course, a ridiculous, contemptuous, malicious lie, a myth, or, if you prefer to use a phrase that has become popular of late, disinformation. It has never — at any point in the history of the United States — been “mainstream” to interpret the Second Amendment as anything other than a protection of “individuals’ rights to own guns.” The decision in Heller was, indeed, “landmark.” But it was so only because it represented the first time that the Supreme Court had been asked a direct question about the meaning of the amendment that, for more than two centuries up to then, had not needed to be asked.
Three months before Heller was decided, 73 percent of Americans believed that “the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees the rights of Americans to own guns,” with just 20 percent contending that it “only guarantees members of state militias such as National Guard units the right to own guns.” That 73 percent supermajority (we might call it the “mainstream”) included a majority of non-gun-owners — which, well, of course it did, given that the alternative interpretation represents a preposterous conspiracy theory. To be within that 20 percent minority, one must ignore all of the history before the Second Amendment’s passage; all of the contemporary commentary as to its meaning; James Madison’s intention to insert it into the Constitution next to the other individual rights in Article I, Section 9, rather than next to the militia clause in Article I, Section 8, clause 16; the 45 state-level rights to keep and bear arms, many of which predated the Second Amendment; the meaning of “the people” everywhere else in the Bill of Rights; the fact that it would make no sense at all to give an individual a “right” to join a state-run institution from which the federal government could bar him; and all evidence of what the United States was actually like prior to 2008.
Writing in 1989, the progressive law professor Sanford Levinson explained in the Yale Law Journal that the theory that Amber Phillips is now laundering “is derived from a mixture of sheer opposition to the idea of private ownership of guns and the perhaps subconscious fear that altogether plausible, perhaps even ‘winning,’ interpretations of the Second Amendment would present real hurdles to those of us supporting prohibitory regulation.” Or, as Adam Liptak put it in the New York Times in 2007, the theory that Phillips has shared is based on “received wisdom and political preferences rather than a serious consideration of the amendment’s text, history and place in the structure of the Constitution.” Once one undertakes that “serious consideration,” one recognizes immediately that the “collective right” claim is, and always has been, a cynical, dishonest, outcome-driven farce. There is a good reason why even Barack Obama responded to the Heller decision by confirming that he had “always believed that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to bear arms”: The alternative is a joke.
Ari Schaffer, formerly of Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger’s office, takes a well-deserved victory lap over conspiracy theorists of all stripes:
While much of the coverage of the victories by Kemp, Raffensperger, and Attorney General Chris Carr has focused on what they mean for the Republican Party, what they mean for the general election deserves more attention: Georgia’s Democrats will finally have to answer for their own stolen-election claims.
Kemp, Raffensperger, and Carr all stood up to the baseless stolen-election claims pushed by Trump and his supporters. Raffensperger took the brunt of the heat and refused to back down, touring the state and appearing on even the most Trump-friendly media outlets time and time again to answer questions. He launched around 250 investigations related to the 2020 elections, around 130 of which dealt with the November general election specifically, but never found enough evidence to put in doubt the results of the presidential race. In a now-famous phone call, Raffensperger stood up to Trump himself in defense of Georgia’s elections.
Kemp has likewise repeatedly pushed back against allegations that the November 2020 election was stolen, and Carr fought for the integrity of the vote in the courts, working to beat back the false claims of Sidney Powell, Lin Wood, and other Trump-affiliated figures.
Indeed, instead of bowing to pressure and leaning into Trump’s stolen-election claims, or even letting them fester unrefuted, Raffensperger, Kemp, and Carr stood up for Georgia’s elections.
On the other side of the aisle, Georgia’s Democratic ticket will be led in November 2022 by Stacey Abrams, who has become a national name by making stolen-election claims of her own.
In November 2018, Abrams refused to concede to Kemp after he defeated her in the state’s gubernatorial election, though her margin of defeat would end up being four times as large as Trump’s was in 2020. She claimed thousands of votes were suppressed and immediately filed a since-rejected lawsuit against Georgia’s election system. She later launched Fair Fight Action, which raised more than $66 million in the 2019–2020 election cycle in part through repeating her stolen-election claims. In the years since her defeat, she has used some of the very same language to cast doubt on the results of her 2018 gubernatorial bid that Trump used to question the results of his 2020 presidential bid.
The 2020 election and its aftermath notwithstanding, Abrams has still refused to concede that she lost in 2018, parroting the stolen-election claims she and Trump have made for years.
The top vote-getter in the Democratic primary for Georgia secretary of state, Bee Nguyen, recently received Abrams’s endorsement in the runoff. In December 2018, Nguyen shared on Twitter an article that claimed that because of “Georgia’s outdated, hackable voting machines,” and “merciless purging and blocking of minority voters . . . Georgia voters will never know who veritably won the [2018] gubernatorial and seventh congressional district races.”
“Him?” asks John McCormack:
If Biden, at the age of 79, is registering poll numbers like that in 2022, how much more will the issue of his age weigh on the minds of voters should he seek another term in 2024?
Americans will not merely have to be comfortable with the fitness of the man they vote for in 2024 — they will have to confident that he’ll remain fit to serve as president through January 20, 2029, when Biden would be 86 years old. Attacks on Ronald Reagan’s age obviously didn’t hurt him in 1984, but at the end of a second term Biden would be nearly a decade older than Reagan was when he left office at the age of 77.
Voters do not need to play the role of armchair psychiatrist to see that Biden has lost a step. Despite all the attempts in the mainstream media to recast Biden’s troubles speaking as a lifelong battle with a stutter, it is plain to anyone with eyes and ears that the president who now struggles to make it through a speech is not nearly as sharp as the vice president who debated Paul Ryan in 2012.
It’s far from clear that the issue of age will sink Biden if he runs again in 2024, but it is clear that Republican primary voters could do a lot to help protect Biden from age-related attacks if they nominated Donald Trump for a third time. Trump’s worst mental deficiencies are his erratic personality and his conspiratorial mindset, but he’s also very old: If he ran and won in 2024, he’d be 82 by the time his term ended in January 2029.
Both Biden and Trump are giving every public indication that they will indeed run in 2024, and there’s no sign that they are saying something different behind the scenes. As New York magazine’s Gabriel Debenedetti reported last week, Biden “has said in private that he sees himself as the only thing standing between the country and the Trumpian abyss and has instructed his aides to redouble their planning for a rematch.”
Shout-Outs
Noah Rothman, at Commentary: Biden’s Anti-Saudi Campaign Made Little Sense and Cost You Dearly
Erika Bachiochi with Ezra Klein, on a podcast at the New York Times: Sex, Abortion, and Feminism, as Seen From the Right
The Editorial Board, at the Wall Street Journal: The Supreme Court’s Mail-Ballot Mulligan in Pennsylvania
CODA
I know we’re supposed to be angry at Disney — and I am — but if you’re boycotting, I highly recommend breaking your fast for the new Obi-Wan Kenobi series, which has proven me oh-so-very right and Jack Butler oh-so-very wrong. Same as it ever was.