Dear Weekend Jolter,
Under a smoldering ash heap lies America’s diplomatic dalliance with Iran.
Its fate was clear to many for months, if not years, before Israel endured — and this time, with U.S. help, successfully repelled — the second act of war committed against it in six months. And with Israel retaliating in strikes against Iran early Friday, reportedly hitting a base near a city housing nuclear and missile facilities, the project has ended definitively in ruin.
The coming days will reveal whether Israel has reestablished deterrence or merely returned one of many volleys in a war to come. The limited nature of the counterstrike, and the inherent insinuation that Israel could inflict much worse, may lead to de-escalation. But the past week has, if anything, shown the wisdom of America’s yearslong effort to bring together Israel and surrounding Arab nations in contrast with the folly of courting Iran. As NR’s post-attack editorial argues, the origins of Tehran’s brazen assault on Israel can be traced to actions undertaken during the last administration in which Biden served. Overlooking Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism and attacks via regional proxies, Obama negotiators had pursued a nuclear deal that “funneled tens of billions of dollars in sanctions relief to Iran and allowed the regime to become a greater conventional threat.” While Trump withdrew from the pact,
Biden and his team — many of the same people responsible for Obama’s failed policies — sought to resurrect the deal. Once again, in doing so, they tried to downplay Iran’s bad behavior and funneled tens of billions of dollars in sanctions relief to Iran.
The devil was in the details:
Within weeks of taking office, Biden removed the terrorist designation on Iran’s proxy in Yemen, the Houthis, and in 2023, he allowed the U.N. sanctions against the Iranian missile and drone program to expire. Those were the types of weapons not only that were used [Saturday] night but that Iran has sold to Russia for use against Ukraine. . . .
Thanks to the policies of the Obama and Biden administrations, Iran — which has vowed to destroy Israel as a step toward its ultimate goal of “Death to America” — has thousands more ballistic missiles it could fire at Israel.
Chief Iran deal promoter Ben Rhodes, in a video commenting on last weekend’s attack, emphasized Israel’s recent strike on IRGC personnel in Syria, claiming that Iran could have, in response, escalated even further via Hezbollah rockets from Lebanon. What played out last Saturday, he said, was not the “worst-case outcome.”
Noah Rothman and Jim Geraghty both reject the idea that Iran’s attack was somehow “designed to fail.” Rather, Noah writes, “its aim was to kill as many Israelis as possible.” In hindsight, the idea of America striking a lasting deal with Iran was always fanciful; in recent months, Iran-backed militias’ drone attacks on U.S. outposts in Jordan, Iraq, and Syria, Iran-backed Houthi attacks on Red Sea vessels, and now this have made that conclusion inescapable.
To the contrary, as the Wall Street Journal reported, long-running outreach to Israel’s other Middle Eastern neighbors helped to minimize the damage from what could have been an overwhelming assault by Iran. Per the Journal’s timeline, this included efforts to build an air-defense system dating back decades, which at last gained steam following the Trump-era Abraham Accords between Israel and the UAE/Bahrain. Then, under Biden, “the Pentagon shifted Israel from its European Command to Central Command, which includes the rest of the Middle East, a move that enabled greater military cooperation with Arab governments under U.S. auspices.” The top U.S. commander in the region at the time reportedly convened a meeting of Israeli and Arab military officials “to explore how they could coordinate against Iran’s growing missile and drone capabilities.”
Fast-forward two years, and with Iran vowing to respond to the strike in Syria, the U.S. was able to put a plan into action, coaxing the UAE and even Saudi Arabia to share intel, according to the WSJ, while Jordan allowed the U.S. and others to use its airspace. The result was an incredible success, and demonstrated unmistakably which Middle Eastern governments are willing to partner with the West — and which one never will.
Noah, without getting his hopes up, writes that Biden should push to restore conventional-arms embargoes at the U.N. level, apart from unilateral sanctions imposed when they expired and now being expanded. Doing so would force a confrontation with Iran’s enablers there, communicate that the White House takes the threat from Tehran seriously, and reflect a stark reality: “The JCPOA is dead and gone.” Few mourn the loss.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
The Iran-attack editorial, once more, is here: The Failure of Biden’s Doctrine of ‘Don’t’
Harvard confirms the test-optional phase is coming to an end at elite schools. Good: The Failed Experiment with Ending Standardized Testing
It’s (well past) time: Pass the Security Bill for U.S. Allies
A warning, from an NHS-sponsored report: A Damning Indictment of Gender ‘Affirmation’
ARTICLES
Audrey Fahlberg: Speaker Johnson Stares Down Potential Ouster amid Foreign-Aid Push
Andrew McCarthy: The Legal Doctrine That May Be Trump’s Best Defense in Bragg’s ‘Hush Money’ Case
Alvin S. Felzenberg: Correcting the Record on William F. Buckley Jr. and Civil Rights
Rich Lowry: Kari Lake Is the Worst of the Contemporary GOP
Caroline Downey: California Inmate Says She Was Forced to Share Cell with Man Tied to Her Childhood Abusers
Ryan Mills: Denver’s Neighbors Rebel against Open-Arms Approach to Migrants: ‘We Do Not Want That’
Richard T. Bosshardt: Stuck in Wokeness’s Waiting Room
Jeffrey Blehar: Uri Berliner Burned His Bridges at NPR, Then Set the House Ablaze
Haley Strack: Veteran Editor Resigns from NPR, Says New CEO’s ‘Divisive’ Left-Wing Views Confirm Bombshell Exposé
Zach Kessel: ‘Baffling’: Columbia Students React as President Fails to Describe Campus Protests as Antisemitic
James Lynch: Columbia University Closes Campus as Hundreds of Anti-Israel Student Protesters Occupy Quad
Michael Brendan Dougherty: We Are Stuck in the ’90s Again
Abigail Anthony: Why I Needed Standardized Tests
Christian Schneider: Alvin Bragg Is a Supporting Role in Trump’s Movie
CAPITAL MATTERS
In honor of Tax Day, from Adam Michel: It’s Time to End Automatic Tax Withholding
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Armond White, on a film he worries aims too much to please: The Long Game’s Election Interference
Brian Allen ventures beyond the Big Apple for the start of a series on New York State’s other art offerings. First stop, New Windsor: Storm King Rules for the Best in Outdoor Sculpture and Gorgeous Grounds
Jeffrey Blehar, with a tribute: Dickey Betts, 1943–2024: The Ramblin’ Man at Rest
FROM THE NEW, JUNE 2024 ISSUE OF NR
Peter Skerry: Insane Asylum: The Policy Disaster at the Border
Dan McLaughlin: It’s 1892 All Over Again
Mike Watson: What You Need to Know about Narendra Modi’s India
Fred Bauer: Bronze Age Menace
Jim Geraghty: What Ukraine Needs
Hannah E. Meyers: What Our Elites Get Wrong about Class
THESE EXCERPTS WILL BE CARBON-NEUTRAL BY 2030
The new issue of NR is out. Peter Skerry’s cover story on the disaster at the border sets the tone:
The ongoing crisis at the U.S.–Mexican border has one distinct virtue. It presents Americans with the opportunity to clarify various misconceptions about what is not merely the largest wave of migrants in our history, but also the most disorderly and disruptive. These misconceptions have distorted our rightful understanding of ourselves as the world’s preeminent nation of immigrants. And after more than five decades of evasion and outright policy failures, immigration is now at the core of the profound disaffection so many Americans express toward our elites and mainstream institutions. It therefore behooves us to stop and scrutinize the ill-founded assumptions on which various positions and policies — whether “pro-” or “anti-immigration” — have become not just based but entrenched.
But a funny thing happened on the way to this crisis. The size, relative suddenness, and sustained nature of the mass of humanity arriving at our southern border has rendered dramatically less salient what had long been the dominant frame of the ongoing national debate: the line between legal and illegal immigration. Our decades-long national preoccupation with illegal immigration has — at least for now — been eclipsed by the more pressing concern, among elected officials and citizens alike, of addressing the chaos not only along our southern border but also in our major metropolitan areas. Legality has been superseded by reality.
At least since 1994, when the thunderbolt of California’s Proposition 187 prohibited the provision of most public services to the undocumented (before being gutted by the federal courts), the national debate over immigration had been fixated on the presumptively bright line between legal and illegal immigration. Yet that line had always been rather blurred, and in recent months it has become almost invisible. Under the Biden administration’s disastrous policies, jurisdictions — not just along the border but across the nation — have been overwhelmed with unprecedented numbers of migrants in need of basic services and support. State and local officials struggle to provide food, shelter, and medical care to hundreds of thousands of people, not to mention schooling for the tens of thousands of children accompanying them, all with minimal help from the federal government. We have as a nation come to focus not so much on the legal status of this crush of humanity as on the fiscal, logistical, social, and ethical challenges it poses.
Andy McCarthy lays out how Donald Trump might be able to minimize the damage from the “hush money” trial:
As we’ve discussed time and again, the “hush money” case against Donald Trump was forged by Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s inflation into 34 felonies of what, at most, may have been a misdemeanor falsification of business records. Bragg had to do that because if the conduct charged is a misdemeanor, he has no case because of the statute of limitations.
Trump’s best defense, then, is not necessarily to establish that he is not guilty; rather, it is to establish that, if he is guilty of anything, it is merely of the misdemeanor. If the jury so finds, I believe the case would have to be thrown out. The conduct charged in the indictment occurred in 2017. The misdemeanor falsification of business records offense has a two-year statute of limitations — meaning, it lapsed in 2019, or maybe 2020 if prosecutors got creative enough. Bragg did not indict the case until 2023, years after the limitations period on the misdemeanor had been exhausted.
Bragg dubiously revived the case by enhancing the misdemeanor into a felony, which gave him the advantage of a six-year statute of limitations (the standard New York felony limitations period of five years, plus the one year the state tacked on during the Covid pandemic when the courts could not process cases). Trump, however, could nullify this sleight-of-hand with what’s known as the lesser included offense doctrine.
In the criminal law, every offense has essential elements — often between three and five — which are the facts prosecutors must prove beyond a reasonable doubt to establish guilt. Take bank robbery: The state must prove that the defendant (1) used force or intimidation to (2) take money or other property from (3) a financial institution, and (4) did so intentionally. In armed bank robbery, the prosecutor must prove all four of the elements of bank robbery, plus a fifth: that the defendant used or brandished a firearm.
The crime of bank robbery thus contains all of the elements of the greater crime of armed bank robbery. Hence, bank robbery is a lesser included offense — the two crimes are the same, except for the exacerbating element involving a gun. That’s what makes armed robbery the “greater” offense: It’s more serious and has a more severe potential penalty.
The situation with New York’s crimes of falsifying business records is analogous.
It was a fascinating split-screen this week, as Columbia University’s president appeared reluctant to call campus protests antisemitic, while Jewish students gave a very different assessment — and a campus protest that very day provided contrary evidence. James Lynch reports:
Columbia University closed its doors to the public on Wednesday as hundreds of campus activists protested Israel’s ongoing military campaign against Hamas.
Campus police and NYPD officers prohibited those without a Columbia ID card from entering campus as students erected dozens of tents on the school’s main campus lawn and hurled anti-Israel slogans. The protest was held as Columbia president Minouche Shafik testified before Congress.
“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” protesters could be heard chanting. Two Jewish Columbia students spoke about their experience during the protest and the larger issue of antisemitism on campus.
“They took over the lawn, set up tents so people don’t have access to it, and they continued their antisemitic, hateful chants,” Jewish student Jonathan Lederet told National Review.
“Intifada, intifada” and “death to [the] Zionist state” were among the chants hurled by the protesters, he recalled.
“They all chant ‘shame, shame on you.’ I say ‘I want there to be more aid, Hamas steals the aid.’ I say ‘Let’s chant for peace, let’s talk about co-existence, have a dialogue.’ They chant about martyrdom and violence and killing. So yeah, they all hate me, but I’m not going anywhere,” Lederet added.
Lederet held up an Israeli flag and wore his yarmulke to the march. Footage shared by independent left-wing reporter Talia Jane showed protesters chanting “shame on you” to the pro-Israel students who came to the event.
Another Jewish student from Barnard College, Columbia’s sister college, said she was “disgusted” by the protest and it happens “all the time.” The student, whose first name is Katie, called on Shafik to take further action against antisemitism and live up to Columbia’s values.
“If somebody says calling for the genocide of Jews makes me unsafe, they say ‘f*ck you.’ And then there’s no consequence, people have been told ‘f*ck the Jews,’ they’ve been spit on, someone threw coffee on a Jew today,” she said.
“A lot of Jewish students have either switched rooms, moved off campus, transferred,” Katie added. She was one of the Jewish students who moved off campus because of the antisemitic climate.
MBD, occasional culture critic, has a theory with much to support it:
There is a sense in which our culture has been frozen since the 1990s. The internet and paid cable TV really got to work on resegregating, silo-ing, and deconstructing what had been a common, mass popular culture. It was thrown to flinders as people bought multiple cheap TVs, and then Napster, the iPod, and the iPad tore it up in a BitTorrent. Eighty-three million viewers had once tuned in to see who shot J. R. in 1980; 76.3 million tuned in to watch Jerry Seinfeld and his friends put in the slammer in 1998.
Now, Seinfeld producer and writer of that finale, Larry David, has relitigated that episode in the finale of Curb Your Enthusiasm, which was watched by just 1.1 million people.
David isn’t the only one re-feasting on the 1990s. There’s something about broadcast television that doesn’t work in the absence of a truly popular mass culture in which a huge share of a nation’s people are watching and listening to a lot of the same things at roughly the same time. You can see this in recent episodes of Saturday Night Live. The show is just coming out of one of its critical nadirs and starting to win plaudits again. But in just the last few episodes, it has been surprisingly dependent on cultural references that are a quarter century or more out of date. Last week’s episode with Ryan Gosling featured skits about Beavis and Butthead (1993–1998) and Erin Brockovich (made famous by the 2000 film). Other recent episodes have featured references to Jumanji (popularized by the 1995 film), Moulin Rouge! and its soundtrack (2001), and AirBud (1997). The Shane Gillis episode had a skit based on Forrest Gump (1994). What stands out is the obscurity of more contemporary cultural artifacts that SNL sends up. A sketch making fun of NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts proves the rule: A satire for a large audience needs a culture with common references, and that culture died at the turn of the millennium. This also explains why, for the past two decades, broad comedy has over-relied on politics.
We’ve been wading up to our hips in ’90s remakes and revived sequels, like Point Break (1991/2015), Flatliners (1990/2017), Scream (1996/2022), Robocop (1987/2014), The Lion King (1994/2019) . . . Soon we’ll get the full flood.
Shout-Outs
Helen Lewis, at the Atlantic: Britain Is Leaving the U.S. Gender-Medicine Debate Behind
Uri Berliner, at the Free Press: I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.
Alec Schemmel, at the Washington Free Beacon: Anti-Semitic Incidents on College Campuses Surged 320 Percent Last Year, ADL Finds
CODA
Now that I’ve had a dose of R&R, I’ll get things started again with, of course, an unreasonably but also necessarily long prog song. Returning to the Nordic nations, following a Sigur Rós plug a few weeks back, I commend to you Norway’s Airbag. The first seven minutes of “Homesick” are windup, mind you, but then the Floydian fun begins . . . especially around Minute 12.
Have a great weekend, and thanks for sticking through to the end (or skipping ahead to the end, either way).