Dear Weekend Jolter,
By now, it is abundantly clear that American news outlets — and the social-media giants that determine their reach — not only missed but actively suppressed one of the biggest stories of the 2020 election.
Recall, for a moment, how the New York Post was treated after breaking the news on the trove of data recovered from a laptop left with a Delaware repair shop, showing details of Hunter Biden’s financial dealings in Ukraine and with Chinese energy company CEFC. Andrew McCarthy, in NR’s latest issue, gives the recap of that episode:
Twitter locked the account of the Post — the nation’s oldest continuously published newspaper and its fourth largest by circulation — as well as accounts of Trump advocates who attempted to circulate reports on Hunter’s laptop. Other social-media platforms followed suit. Journalists speculatively questioned the provenance of the laptop data . . .
Former intel officials simultaneously pushed the claim that this might all be the work of Russian disinformation artists. That was enough to kill it. End of story.
Until now. The New York Times has authenticated key files from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop. So has the Washington Post, while noting that this level of confidence extends to thousands of emails but not other chunks of data in its possession purportedly from Hunter’s laptop. (The Washington Post’s verification efforts in 2020 apparently were stymied in part by Trump allies’ refusal to cooperate.) The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, says a federal tax probe into Hunter is “gaining momentum,” and prosecutors are looking at his sources of foreign income. The Times says the tax inquiry has widened to include possible violations of “foreign lobbying and money laundering rules.”
So the story was a story after all. We’re getting lab-leak déjà vu over here. Andy says the president’s son is likely looking at indictment, one way or another, even if his back taxes are paid up now.
The latest reports are careful to note that evidence does not at this stage demonstrate wrongdoing or knowledge by the president concerning various transactions by his son. White House chief of staff Ron Klain has defended Hunter while also stressing that his dealings “don’t involve the president.”
But the focus is turning to President Biden, and it’s not hard to understand why.
This week, we learned that a grand-jury witness reportedly has been asked to ID the individual referred to as the “big guy” in an infamous email discussing equity distributions for those involved in a deal with CEFC China Energy Co. The email seemingly discussed the possibility of a 10 percent cut for said “big guy,” and one former partner has alleged that this referred to Joe Biden. Andy flags another emerging detail here, concerning a college recommendation letter, that raises suspicion about the elder Biden’s level of awareness of his son’s business pursuits.
As for what made this case newsworthy in the first place, the Washington Post’s multi-article treatment of Hunter’s name-trading reprises the cringey details: Nearly $5 million paid by the “Chinese energy conglomerate and its executives” to “entities controlled by” Hunter and his uncle. An agreement to represent a CEFC official later convicted in the U.S. in a bribery scheme. A getting-to-know-you diamond gift. Rich Lowry calls the particulars “jaw dropping”:
The company sought to extend Chinese influence as part of Beijing’s “Belt and Road” initiative. The founder of CEFC, Ye Jianming, roped in Hunter Biden, infamously giving him a 2.8-carat diamond after their first meeting. Everyone knew the score.
Everyone — except Joe Biden? Rich says Republicans should make this a focus of investigation if they take the House in the midterms. So challenged, the Biden White House is sure to keep calling this a private matter. By now, however, there should be no argument that this is a legitimate story, worthy of investigation and media attention, and always was.
Some holdouts remain. The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum asserted this week that the laptop reporting was “irrelevant” from the start. (So “why was it censored?” David Harsanyi counters.) Elsewhere in the media, however, there appears to be some tacit recognition that, in language familiar to husbands who’ve ever forgotten to secure the lid on the blender, mistakes were made. One WaPo editorial explaining the paper’s handling of the story acknowledges that a lesson from 2020 may be that, just as the need to treat salacious campaign-season allegations with caution was underscored in 2016, “there’s also a danger of suppressing accurate and relevant stories.”
Talk about timing: Elon Musk might soon be able to help Twitter, for one, see the light on that count.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
Russia’s atrocities in Bucha only underscore the need to step up assistance, quickly, to Ukraine: The Horror of Bucha
Elon Musk has put his money where his tweets are on free speech: Musk’s Move on Twitter
ARTICLES
Jay Nordlinger: Ukraine and the Meaning of This War
Steven Camarota: The Illegal-Immigrant Population Increased Dramatically in Biden’s First Year
Aron Ravin: The Short-Sighted, Ignoble Lie of DEI
Caroline Downey: Schools Push Radical Ideology under Guise of ‘Social-Emotional Learning,’ Parents Warn
Isaac Schorr: Republicans Threaten to Let Disney’s Mickey Mouse Copyright Lapse over ‘Radical Political Activism’
Alexandra DeSanctis: House Republicans Unveil Post-Roe Messaging Strategy
David Harsanyi: The Most Radical Abortion Law in the Nation
David Harsanyi: The ‘Groomer’ Accusation Is Counterproductive
Nate Hochman: A Conservative Radio Station Bows to the Left-Wing Mob
Ryan Mills: A Mom’s Fight to Save Her Daughter from Trans Orthodoxy at School
John Fund: Let’s Learn from Orbán’s Landslide Instead of Denouncing It
Brittany Bernstein: Chicago Church ‘Fasting from Whiteness’ for Lent
Ben Domenech: Only Well-Armed Ukrainian Resistance against Russia Will Achieve Peace in Ukraine
Zachary Evans: ‘Control Your Soul’s Desire for Freedom’: Shocking Videos Emerge as Brutal Shanghai Covid Lockdown Drags On
Kevin Williamson: Is the Party Over?
Dan McLaughlin: The GOP Remains the Only Party for Conservatives
CAPITAL MATTERS
Paul Gessing has a timely question in this period of oil-and-gas uncertainty: Where’s Deb Haaland?
Andrew Stuttaford examines the case of a potential shareholder for free speech: Elon Musk’s Twitzkrieg?
Got questions on inflation? David L. Bahnsen’s got answers: A Comprehensive Primer on the Fed and Inflation
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Kyle Smith has a two-parter on European deficiencies, using our own David Harsanyi’s latest book as a jumping-off point: Let’s Measure Western Europe against the U.S. & The Toxic Aspects of European Culture
Brian Allen serves up seconds on the Winter Show in New York, and it’s not too late to swing by if you’re in the neighborhood and looking to pick up a piece for the mantel. Brian even provides price tags: A Second Look Rewards, at the Winter Show
A film about a mass shooting in Australia pierces through the usual crime-story conventions. From Armond White: Nitram Is a Mass-Empathy Masterpiece
LOOK WHAT WE SMUGGLED OUT FROM BEHIND THE PAYWALL
David Bahnsen has a deep dive on inflation, its causes, and its cures. He concludes:
The challenges we face in our economy are made worse by current inflation. We are hearing pleas for the Fed to do something and for the government to do something. We would do well to remember that the same calls will come when a recession surfaces (which it inevitably will). Once we accept that monetary and fiscal policy caused this inflation, it will not be a big stretch to argue that monetary and fiscal policies ought to be the cure for contractionary times as well. We have been in this negative feedback loop for decades, and the result has been a continual boom–bust cycle that is the envy of no one. The Fed’s role as smoother of the business cycle is doing more harm than good. The Keynesian notion that excessive government spending can cure our cyclical problems has run its course. We have an economy in need of a detox.
I see two major economic agendas in front of conservatives: (1) ridding ourselves of the excessive fiscal and monetary interventions that have done so much harm to the economy, and (2) solving for the stagnant economic growth that is exacerbating social divides in our country and suppressing opportunities for today’s middle class, not to mention the generation ahead.
Inflation has been an undesirable and unwelcome entry to this conversation over the last year. Its damage is disproportionately felt by lower-income Americans. It punishes savers. It erodes purchasing power whether it happens quickly or slowly, over time.
Let us not allow the present inflation discussion to blind us to the two agenda items above. What we say now will be used against the cause of real reform in a different economic context. We have structural challenges that must be addressed. I fear too many on the right are so focused on finding the 1970s in present conditions that they may miss out on the chance to really move the needle on the 2020s. If the first couple of years of this decade are any indication, our ideas are going to be needed.
Caroline Downey reports on misplaced priorities in the American education system:
During the pandemic, Tracie Spiegel’s son and most of his Howard County, Md., classmates received virtually no mathematics instruction for five months.
What little ineffective virtual instruction he did receive didn’t prevent his grade from plummeting from an A to a C. So when he returned to the classroom as a high-school freshman, he became incredibly frustrated that he and his peers were asked to spend 40 minutes every Monday on so-called social-emotional learning (SEL).
Instead of spending as much time as possible making up the ground they had lost in math and other subjects, they were taught how to avoid committing microaggressions, how to use pronouns, and how to avoid offending gay people, according to Spiegel’s son.
Since conservatives at all levels of government embraced the fight against critical race theory, dissenting parents nationwide know how to recognize and counter racially divisive curricula. But a broader suite of radical ideas, couched in therapeutic language, is quietly being advanced under the banner of SEL, parents whose children have been exposed to such programming told National Review.
In a recent Washington Post article, SEL advocates argued that the conservative outcry is an unwarranted attack on crucial mental-health programming for kids.
A review of SEL materials obtained by the nonprofit Parents Defending Education (PDE) confirms parents’ concerns that mental-health language is being co-opted to advance radical ideas about race, gender, and sexuality. But even if some of the SEL material is innocuous, parents told NR they’d still be concerned because time spent on SEL is time not spent helping kids recover from the learning loss they suffered during two years of school closures.
As Spiegel put it: “Where is the algebra? Where is the biology? Where is the English?” . . . “My daughter’s asking me if she’s a racist and my son’s confused about why he has to take these,” Spiegel said.
The reports out of Bucha reflect nothing less than acts of human depravity, on a vast scale. From the editorial:
The Russian retreat from the Kyiv suburbs left behind mass graves and corpses strewn everywhere for the world to see. The most horrific of these scenes was discovered in the Kyiv oblast suburb of Bucha last week after Ukrainian troops reclaimed the city.
Early reports piece together a sickening mosaic of gratuitous violence inflicted on the city’s residents for weeks.
The Times of London, in a report with the headline “Bodies of mutilated children among horrors the Russians left behind,” interviewed a Ukrainian self-defense-force member who found 18 corpses in the basement of a dacha: “They had been torturing people. Some of them had their ears cut off. Others had teeth pulled out. There were kids like 14, 16 years old, some adults.”
A local coroner, the New York Times reported, had to get a backhoe operator to dig a mass grave in the backyard of a church to accommodate the bodies sent his way.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has said that over 300 people had been tortured and killed in Bucha. (Russian mouthpieces claim the bodies seen on the street were planted there for propaganda purposes, but satellite imagery obtained by the New York Times showed the corpses were there during the Russian occupation.) That town has garnered international media attention, but it’s only one city that Russian forces controlled in the area until the recent pullback. Ukraine’s prosecutor general said the atrocities in another Kyiv-region town, Borodyanka, are even worse. That’s to say nothing of territory still under Russian control in other parts of the country — in Mariupol, Russian troops are reported to have brought in portable crematoria to cover their tracks.
We should want more solid confirmation of all this, given the fog of war and the incentive Ukrainians naturally feel to generate as much international outrage in their behalf as possible. But even if only a fraction of it is true, it’d be horrifying enough, and certainly none of it is out of character for Putin’s Russia.
Make of this what you will, but Brittany Bernstein relays the story of a church finding a peculiar way to observe Lent:
A church in the suburbs of Chicago says it is “fasting from whiteness” during Lent, the 40-day period leading up to Easter.
“For Lent this year, First United is doing a mix of ‘giving something up’ and ‘taking something on,’” the First United Church of Oak Park wrote on its website. “In our worship services throughout Lent, we will not be using any music or liturgy written or composed by white people. Our music will be drawn from the African American spirituals tradition, from South African freedom songs, from Native American traditions, and many, many more.”
Shout-Outs
Brooke Singman & Peter Hasson, at Fox News: Biden wrote college recommendation letter for son of Hunter’s Chinese business partner, emails reveal
Chuck Ross, at the Washington Free Beacon: Dems Tap Hunter Biden Laptop Conspiracy Theorist To Serve on Afghanistan War Commission
Suzy Weiss, at Common Sense: The Teen Girls Aren’t Going to Forget
Jessica Contrera, at the Washington Post: The remarkable brain of a carpet cleaner who speaks 24 languages
CODA
Some of the best covers are those tackled by musicians operating in the wilds of entirely different genres. The tributes that make you say, “Wait a minute, who’s doing that song?” That was the reaction I had the first time I heard Johnny Cash’s “Hurt,” before being floored by it.
I stumbled across one of this type recently, and, while it doesn’t possess that level of emotional resonance, it certainly made me say, “Wait a minute, who?” It’s not every day you hear a Gershwin “cover” outside of the orchestra hall, besides. Prog supergroup Liquid Tension Experiment has the requisite chutzpah to try it; their version of “Rhapsody in Blue” achieves lift-off around the 9:30 mark, if you can wait. Great fun.
Run into any unexpected covers lately? Shoot over a song link for sharing with this list to jberger@nationalreview.com. Thanks for reading, listening, or doing whatever it is you’ve been doing while this email was open.