Dear Weekend Jolter,
Once again, it’s difficult to resist pointing out parallels between President Trump and Teddy Roosevelt.
TR had his own Venezuela problem in his day. During a European naval blockade of the nation over unpaid debts, the assertive president amassed U.S. ships in the Caribbean. He worried Germany might try to acquire territory and, as chronicled in Edmund Morris’s biography, aimed to deter the kaiser with a show of force. The Europeans ultimately backed down. Roosevelt helped facilitate a resolution, while emphasizing that he couldn’t let Venezuela hide behind the Monroe Doctrine either (a view that would eventually inform the Roosevelt Corollary).
The circumstances today are quite different, but America finds itself once more deploying military assets to the Caribbean to deal with Venezuela. U.S. intentions are similarly foggy: In the thick of what may be a prelude to military escalation beyond obliterating drug boats, the sitting president has not articulated to the American public or Congress what the plan is. The narrow, though warranted, focus this week on the so-called double-tap strike has also pushed aside more critical questions about the legitimacy of the boat-strike operation itself.
Trump himself now freely uses the w-word and sounds increasingly bellicose. His subordinates and allies, as Dan McLaughlin observes, speak in the terms one uses to justify war, describing targets as “narco-terrorists” and Venezuela as part of a “drug caliphate.”
Dan counsels, however, that “drifting is no way to take Americans to war. As a matter not only of law but of politics and national leadership, the president himself should look the nation in the eye and explain what he’s doing, and why it should be done.” Noah Rothman has raised similar concerns, noting that a case for military action can be made, and “not only through Trump’s subordinates in passing asides on the Sunday shows.” Joshua Treviño and Melissa Ford recently penned for NRO such an explanation of the multiple and overlapping interests the U.S. has with Venezuela.
NR’s editorial gives more context:
[Nicolás] Maduro and his henchmen have systematically stolen the wealth of his country and immiserated its people. But the Maduro regime is not merely a domestic problem for Venezuelans because it has directly and consistently threatened American interests. Maduro’s actions have sent millions of Venezuelans into exile, many of whom have ended up in America, straining the resources of state and local governments. For years, the regime has facilitated and profited from the trafficking of drugs at an industrial scale into the United States. Indeed, in 2020, Maduro was indicted by U.S. federal prosecutors for his association with the Cartel de los Soles — the “cartel of the suns.”
And Maduro has aligned Venezuela with a who’s who of anti-American despots and adversaries: Cuba, Iran, Russia, and China.
And yet cocaine-trafficking alone “is not an act of war against the United States, and it is not terrorism.” Rich Lowry has more on why the blow-up-the-blow mission itself is dubious.
In such a haze, one might think the administration would aim for clarity. Instead, as our editorial notes, the administration is “vague and contradictory” about its anti-Maduro policy and aims.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has described U.S. intervention as a “counterdrug operation” and reportedly told Congress that ousting Maduro was not the goal. The gathering ships and aircraft, and a declaration that the surrounding airspace is “closed,” send another message. Dire warnings about the narco-terrorist threat from Venezuela are particularly difficult to square with Trump’s decision, while all of this is playing out, to pardon a former Honduran president and convicted drug trafficker. As Jim Geraghty writes, “You can’t say you oppose drug traffickers and then issue a pardon like this.” Meanwhile, the administration’s evolving explanations about the second strike on an alleged Venezuelan drug boat have put the team on the defensive in D.C.
As our editorial says, Trump should go to Congress if he is seriously contemplating using military force to drive out Maduro. And Americans should not have to stay logged in to Truth Social to find out whether we’re going to war, and why.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
In the words of one prosecutor, “This is a system that’s been begging to be exploited”: Minnesota’s Massive Welfare Fraud Scandal
The return of choice: Trump Pumps Up the Gas
A closer look at the drug-boat strike: A Fair Accounting of Pete Hegseth’s Role in the Caribbean Boat Strike
The Venezuela editorial, once more, is here: The Venezuela Crisis
ARTICLES
Audrey Fahlberg: Senate Republicans Question Trump’s Drug-Trafficker Pardon: ‘Horrible Optics’
Wilfred Reilly: The Not-So-Nefarious Reason for White Crime Stat Confusion
Kamden Mulder: Women’s March Hosts Webinar to Teach Liberals How to Speak to MAGA Family over the Holidays
Dan McLaughlin: Supreme Court Rightly Keeps the Texas Republican Gerrymander for 2026
Brittany Bernstein: How a Leading Academic Journal Was Captured by Left-Wing Radicals
Andre Archie: Creedalism Needs Culture
Noah Rothman: The Other Way of Looking at Tennessee’s Special Election Results
Noah Rothman: In Defense of Strip Malls
Haley Strack: Top Scientific Journal Retracts Study Predicting Global Economic Collapse from Climate Change
Rich Lowry: Ilhan Omar Is Not the Kind of Immigrant America Needs
Jim Geraghty: Tim Walz’s Office Can’t Take Care of the Basics
Kathryn Jean Lopez: No Human Being Is Garbage
CAPITAL MATTERS
“The trend toward budget shortfalls is unmistakable,” writes Sam Aaron: The Budget Crunch Is Coming. States Must Adjust Their Spending Accordingly
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Brian Allen reports on a sordid Philly fight (is there any other kind?) with a side serving of Canada shade: A Catfight in a Snake Pit in Philly’s Art Museum
Armond White assesses another horror-classic reboot: Dracula Reimagined as Socialist Trauma
WE PROMISE WE WON’T SERVE YOU LEFTOVER EXCERPTS
Here’s more from Audrey Fahlberg on that pardon:
For several months now, White House officials have aggressively defended the Pentagon’s anti-narco-terrorism push in the Caribbean, where U.S. forces have been striking alleged drug boats in what the administration insists is part of a broader effort to take down Venezuelan-linked drug cartels.
And yet amid this anti-narco-terrorism push, and the scrutiny that has come with it, President Trump announced via social media on Friday his decision to issue a “full and complete” pardon of convicted drug trafficker and former two-term Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, a move that some Republican senators believe undercuts the administration’s anti-trafficking agenda.
“I hate it. It’s a horrible message,” says retiring Senator Thom Tillis, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The North Carolina Republican said that the pardon sends a “mixed message” to the American people at a time when U.S. officials are weighing escalating military action in Venezuela for narco-terrorism-related reasons.
“It’s horrible optics,” Tillis added.
“From what I’ve read about the Honduran president’s role in funneling cocaine to the United States, he does not seem like a good candidate for a pardon to me,” said Senator Susan Collins (R., Maine), chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
“It’s hard to reconcile that pardon with the repeated emphasis on drug trafficking as a rationale for our Venezuela interest — period,” says Senator Todd Young (R., Ind.), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
U.S. officials indicted and extradited the former leader to the U.S. on firearm and drug-related charges in 2022. Hernández, who served as president of Honduras from 2014 to 2022, was freed from U.S. custody this week after being sentenced in June 2024 to 45 years in prison on weapons offenses and for conspiring to distribute more than 400 tons of cocaine in what former Attorney General Merrick Garland called “one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world.”
Trump, who signed the pardon on Monday, has argued that Hernández was treated unfairly in court under the Biden administration.
Brittany Bernstein reports on another academic casualty of extreme wokeness:
During the height of the U.S. racial reckoning in June 2020, a radically progressive editorial team was installed at one of the country’s premier journals of political science.
The editorial team, which dubbed itself the “Feminist Collective,” and led the American Political Science Review for a four-year term ending last year, declared the need for political science to “actively dismantle the institutionalized racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, and settler colonialism that continue to characterize and structure it.”
With that goal in mind, the team instituted a two-tiered system of standards, in which they actively screened submissions differently based on the authors’ race and sex. Submissions from women and “scholars of color” were much more likely to advance to the peer-review stage, while papers written by white, male scholars were often subjected to “desk rejection” without being advanced, regardless of quality.
The team further favored submissions that focused on “pressing political problems, including structural inequalities and the exercise of power by oppressed people,” along with “policing and the carceral state, [and] racialized and gendered health and economic inequalities.”
Now, a new report out from the Goldwater Institute finds research published in the APSR during the reign of the Feminist Collective ultimately “devolved into outlandish social activism.” In one example, “Wages for Earthwork,” the study’s author proposes “‘wages’ or reparations to Indigenous peoples for debt owed to them for their devalued climate work. . . . I contend that (re)valuing earthwork must also be central to projects aimed at decolonizing climate justice . . . and wider structural transformation of colonial capitalism.”
In fact, the editorial team’s goals led to the publication of “other ‘scholarship’ indistinguishable from left-wing activism,” the report finds, including articles like “Violence in the American Imaginary: Gender, Race, and the Politics of Superheroes,” which finds that the Marvel character “Punisher’s unrestricted violence valorizes white male grievance.” In yet another article, “Feminist Demands and the Problem of Housework,” the author endorses “the demand to socialize housework.”
And now for something completely different. Noah Rothman defends the great American strip mall:
As online shopping slaughters big-box retailers, strip malls are attracting new tenants who provide experiences and services as well as goods. As NorthJersey.com’s Daniel Munoz reported this summer, “You can now visit local strip malls for fitness and wellness, sports and recreation, specialty grocers, international food stores and dog grooming.”
What he described as retailers’ efforts to “Amazon-proof” their livelihoods have led to a revitalization of these spaces, many of which would please the eye of even the most discriminating fan of Moscow’s grocers and subways. Indeed, the troubled conventional mall — the one you remember from the 1990s — increasingly features strip-mall-like outdoor shopping settings.
But perhaps the problem isn’t what the strip mall looks like but what’s in it. Maybe it’s not the multi-unit structures that line the nation’s arterial roads and divided highways that they hate. Rather, they resent, à la [Tucker] Carlson, the “karate studios and vape shops.”
Ostensibly, the left shares Carlson’s lament only insofar as these conventions are car-centric — encouraging not just the pollution produced by the combustion engine but the disaggregating influence of the automobile on the community and the accompanying prospects for communitarianism. But they also hate the stuff you buy at these places, too. Out with the karate studios, they also say; in with the “yoga studios, fad fitness classes.” Down with the vape stores, they agree; in their place, erect niche cafés, jewelry makers, and outlets that cater to the “furbaby movement.”
Uniting these disparate discontents is their idealized nostalgia. As the father of the modern shopping mall, Victor Gruen, mused, the shopper’s experience was meant to “provide the needed place and opportunity for participation in modern community life that the ancient Greek Agora, the Medieval Market Place and our own Town Squares provided in the past.” His creation took on an organic life of its own — one that disappointed its creator — but it’s unlikely that the small-business owners who forge a life for themselves and their families in these brick-and-mortar establishments agree. . . .
For some, there is no modern iteration of the capitalist enterprise that will satisfy their cultural ennui. You just can’t improve upon the feudal ideal — scratching out a subsistence living, kicking just enough up to your lord to justify your parcel, and never traveling much beyond the confines of the village. Those of us who do not languish in the life of the mind patronize these local businesses and are presumably grateful for the services they provide — the evidence of which is apparent in aggregate shopping patterns.
If strip malls offend your taste, don’t shop there. Assuming enough of your neighbors share your preferences, those ugly edifices will disappear soon enough. But if you cannot convince anyone else of your view, you’d probably have the urge to take matters into your own hands — regulating these features of the commercial landscape out of existence or, in the extreme, resolving to “burn your strip mall down.” But that tendency is revealing. As is so often the case, those who insist that everyone secretly agrees with them appear to be speaking only for themselves.
CODA
Let’s change things up, if for no other reason than this is what we were listening to on the way to/from Thanksgiving: with Amy Winehouse.
Thanks for reading, and have an utterly extraordinary weekend.