Dear Weekend Jolter,
Russia takes no prisoners. Really: With respect to political dissidents and foreigners who inadvertently cross into Putin’s battle chessboard, what the regime does is take hostages.
The enthusiastic pursuit of the practice is one way in which Russia is becoming “re-Sovietized,” as Jay Nordlinger explains in the magazine and for the website. He reports that by one count, Russia has more political dissidents in prison today than it had during the late Soviet period.
No act of resistance is too small, too passive or harmless to escape notice. Beria would be proud. Consider this example:
In Yefremov, Russia, a 13-year-old girl drew an anti-war picture in school. This led to the arrest of her father, Alexei Moskalyov. It was discovered that he had criticized the Ukraine war on social media. His daughter, Masha, was sent to an orphanage. He was at home, under house arrest, awaiting sentence. He fled to Belarus. He was soon picked up, apparently when he turned on his phone. He was sent back to Yefremov. And he has now been sentenced to two years.
As for the regime’s latest high-profile arrest, of American Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, Jay likens it to the hostage-taking of American reporter Nicholas Daniloff in 1986, under the Soviets. “Needless to say, there was a deal. As there probably will be for the new hostage, Evan Gershkovich,” he writes.
To nobody’s surprise, Russia’s subservient judicial system upheld Gershkovich’s detention a few days ago. He’ll be held in Moscow, for now, pending trial. The charge is not material, because the charge is made up.
The Russian government’s motivation in taking foreign hostages is transparent: Vladimir Putin wants the leverage, and he uses it effectively. He last exchanged an American prisoner, basketball star Brittney Griner, for international arms dealer Viktor Bout. The motivation for holding domestic political dissidents involves a broader concession sought, but one arguably more important to the regime’s survival: the opposition’s resolve.
Putin’s appetite grows. The human-rights group Memorial estimates that Russia today is holding 549 “political prisoners,” up from just over 400 in late 2021. Alexei Navalny, opposition leader and the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary, is the most famous. Another, Vladimir Kara-Murza, about whom Jay frequently writes, was sentenced this past week to 25 years in prison, after he criticized the Ukraine war. Exhibiting a spine of adamantium, Kara-Murza made clear at the closing session of his trial that the resolve of regime critics remains far beyond Putin’s grasp:
The day will come when the darkness over our country will dissipate. When black will be called black and white will be called white; when at the official level it will be recognized that two times two is still four; when a war will be called a war, and a usurper a usurper; and when those who kindled and unleashed this war, rather than those who tried to stop it, will be recognized as criminals.
This day will come as inevitably as spring follows even the coldest winter.
In other words, not your typical hostage video. That’s a promising sign amid so many disturbing ones.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
We struggle to see how the latest housing “fix” makes sense: How to Make the Housing Market Worse
If you’ve been following Jimmy Quinn’s coverage, you already knew about this malign presence in Manhattan. Now, it’s out in the open: Arrests Tied to Chinese Police Station Should Prompt a Reckoning
Meanwhile, on the Ontario beat: The Woke Takeover of Ontario Schools
ARTICLES
Stanley Kurtz: The Blue-State Education Nightmare
Rich Lowry: Why Riley Gaines Matters
Jimmy Quinn: Two Charged for Role in Chinese Police Station Operating Out of NYC: ‘Sinister’
Noah Rothman: Democrats’ Atrocious Attack on Personal Responsibility
Noah Rothman: Slinging Pudding and Evading Responsibility
Jeff Zymeri: Portland REI to Close Due to Record Number of Break-Ins, Thefts
Caroline Downey: Female Volleyball Player Testifies to Physical, Mental Trauma since Injury by Trans Athlete
Jeffrey Blehar: Call Crime by Its Name
Jim Geraghty: Three Hard Lessons from the Dominion Defamation Lawsuit against Fox
Madeleine Kearns: No, Republicans Did Not Start the Culture War over Transgenderism
Dan McLaughlin: Chuck Schumer’s Embrace of Mobs Is a Menace to Constitutional Democracy
Ari Blaff: How Ontario’s Personalized Educational Approach Was Sacrificed on the Altar of Equity
Christian Schneider: The Literature Vandals Don’t Know When to Stop
CAPITAL MATTERS
Joel Zinberg & Casey Mulligan refute more Covid nonsense: No, Lockdown States Did Not Do Better
Dominic Pino, with this important reminder: It’s Great to Live in the American Economy
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Armond White hooks us with the headline: Tarantino’s No-Sex Talk
Brian Allen is pleasantly surprised by Amsterdam’s Vermeer exhibition: Early Vermeer Goes from the Bible to the Bordello
STICK AROUND, THERE’S MORE
Noah Rothman wrote here about a confounding Federal Housing Finance Agency move to essentially penalize homebuyers with good credit and/or large down payments. NR’s editorial elaborates:
When government isn’t getting the results it wanted with all of its previous involvement, it tries a little more intervention to “fix” its previous interventions. To help out homebuyers with poor credit scores, the Federal Housing Finance Agency has decided that homebuyers with good credit scores will pay a little more for their mortgages.
“Mortgage industry specialists say homebuyers with credit scores of 680 or higher will pay, for example, about $40 per month more on a home loan of $400,000,” reported the Washington Times. “Homebuyers who make down payments of 15% to 20% will get socked with the largest fees.” The fees — “junk fees” by any measure — will start after May 1 for new homebuyers or people who refinance.
Potential homebuyers do face a problem in high nominal interest rates right now, although there is an argument that (because of the interaction with the tax code) this may be less of a burden than it appears, at least for the median homebuyer. It is, incidentally, worth remembering that one reason that rates have risen is because of Democrats’ irresponsible spending, which contributed to the inflation that the Federal Reserve had to raise rates to quell.
FHFA director Sandra Thompson said the new rules (which would use the redistributed funds to reduce the interest rate paid by less qualified buyers) would “increase pricing support for purchase borrowers limited by income or by wealth.” But income and wealth are and should be limiting factors in lending. It’s not good for borrowers to take on loans that may prove beyond their means to pay back.
Financial institutions check creditworthiness because they want to be paid back; it doesn’t do them much good to lend to people who can’t afford the installments. . . . On the borrowers’ side of things, this policy reduces the incentive to be responsible. Not everyone with a low credit score got it from being irresponsible, but plenty of people with one did. Programs that seek to downplay poor creditworthiness are moral hazard enough, and we have plenty of those already. This new policy has the added twist of penalizing people with high credit scores. So not only will poor decisions carry fewer consequences, but good decisions will carry fewer rewards. That’s one way to get more poor decisions and fewer good ones.
To reprise the weekday Jolt, Jim Geraghty published a widely read column on the Fox News–Dominion settlement, offering “three hard lessons” to take away from it. The first is about the cost of repeating Trump’s lies:
If you choose to believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen, you must also believe that there is a compelling pile of verifiable evidence that, for some inexplicable reason, was never presented by Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in its myriad post-election lawsuits in November and December 2020. Furthermore, you must believe that when facing a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit from Dominion, Fox News never presented any of this evidence as a defense in this defamation lawsuit. Truth, or substantial truth, is an absolute defense in a defamation case.
If you choose to believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen, you must believe Fox News agreed to pay $787.5 million to Dominion in a settlement, rather than present any of that evidence. You must believe that Fox News had a quick and easy way to win this lawsuit and simply refused to use it — even though the news distributor had more than 700 million good reasons to point to this evidence, if it existed.
But Fox News did not present that evidence; in fact, Fox Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch said under oath that he believes the 2020 presidential election was free, fair, and not stolen. Fox News did not present any evidence contending that the 2020 presidential election was not stolen, because the 2020 presidential election was not stolen, and there is no compelling evidence that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Period, full stop, do not pass go, do not collect $200.
Some of you might be thinking, “That’s not much of a hard lesson.” No, the hard lesson is that a CNN poll last month asked 1,045 Republicans or Republican-leaning independents, “Thinking about the results of the 2020 presidential election, do you think that Joe Biden legitimately won enough votes to win the presidency, or not?” The survey found just 37 percent of these Republicans or Republican-leaning independents believe that Biden legitimately won; 63 percent believe “Biden did not legitimately win enough votes to win the presidency.”
Of those who said Biden’s win was illegitimate, 52 percent said they had seen “solid evidence” of that; the other near half said their opinion was only based upon suspicions.
This is going to make covering former president Trump a potentially litigious matter going forward, as Trump is unlikely to ever back down from his conspiracy theories and could repeat his false and defamatory claims about any of the voting-machine companies at any time. Any television network covering Trump will feel a need to push back against those claims, early and often, and on-air.
Jeffrey Blehar serves up real talk about Chicago crime, in contrast with the shamefully mealy-mouthed response from the incoming mayor:
You may have heard, via social media or your personal grapevine (but less likely via national media), about the chaos that spontaneously descended upon Chicago this weekend: An enormous crowd of kids from the South Side, coordinating via social media, flash-mobbed the city’s downtown, the beating heart of the Magnificent Mile, and scenes of frank barbarism followed. The videos — which circulated on TikTok, because people who are amoral enough to participate in such crimes are often also stupid enough to record and publicize them — are traumatizing and will be suppressed by the mainstream press. If you wish to gaze into the maw of insensate mob horror, you can watch as one unarmed woman is swarmed outside her place on Wabash Street and — there is unfortunately no other way to phrase this — brutally gang-stomped into the ground by a throng of cheering teenagers. . . .
If you were expecting [Brandon] Johnson, being a new mayor, to suddenly get serious about the undesirableness of pop-up mobs that spread violence and hooliganry in Chicago’s downtown, well, then, my friends, you don’t appreciate what kind of pre-programmed progressive true believer Chicago has managed to vote into office. Johnson’s response this weekend was, practically speaking, “The kids are all right.”
And yet it’s an improvement on Johnson’s rhetoric from August 2020, when — as the city was being ransacked during the George Floyd riots — he placed the real blame on “corporate looting.” (Fair enough: I still remember when Target came to my place, smashed all my windows, fractured my skull, and emptied my closets.) He has evolved since then: Instead of squirming and refusing to condemn rioters and looters, he’s now willing to say, as a concession, that “in no way do I condone the destructive activity we saw in the Loop and the lakefront this weekend.” That’s mighty generous of you, mayor-elect. Then again, it’s understood that nothing before the “but” really matters, and with a throat-clearing “however,” Johnson instantly supplies us with his real view: “It is not constructive to demonize youth who have otherwise been starved of opportunities in their own communities.”
I have little difficulty “demonizing” — apparently a new dysphemism for what normal folks call “accurately assessing” — people who hurt others for kicks while asking friends to film their best and most pain-inflicting blows so that they may gloat about them later. Johnson continues in his statement: “Our city must work together to create spaces for youth to gather safely and responsibly, under adult guidance and supervision, to ensure that every part of our city remains welcome for both residents and visitors.” I also have little difficulty saying that it’s more important to create a cultural, civic, and legal incentive structure that discourages this behavior instead.
Stanley Kurtz’s report this week on state-level education developments should serve as a standing reminder to the media that the pushback is not the story. The trends prompting the pushback are:
What is the top education story in the country? Measured by press coverage, Ron DeSantis’s pushback against woke education in Florida takes the prize. Yet in truth, DeSantis’s pushback is only the second-most important education story of our day. The deeper mystery is the rise of the movement he’s resisting.
Obfuscating denials that “critical race theory” is taught in K–12 mean that the woke takeover of our schools is still imperfectly recognized and understood. The frightening truth emerges if we do what the media avoid — preoccupied as they are with an education backlash from conservatives — and survey the advancement of education radicalism in the blue states, where its spread is largely unimpeded.
What is driving the relentless expansion of woke education in Democrat-run states? Can an America where our core story is no longer told survive? Important as the red-state pushback against woke education has been, a tour of our blue-state education nightmare will tell us much that we need to know about where America is headed. What happens when anti-woke pushback fails?
Rhode Island happens. The Ocean State has just put in place an outrageously politicized and shamefully deficient set of social studies standards, and it has done so in the most underhanded fashion.
Here is the central trick. If you take a quick, superficial look at the content sections of Rhode Island’s Social Studies Standards, things might seem relatively normal. Many of the usual topics in U.S. history, for example, are present in the standards. The trick is that every topic must be taught in line with the new “anchor standards,” which demand radical leftist advocacy.
So, for example, the anchor standard on “power” tells teachers to “argue how power can be distributed and used to create a more equitable society for communities and individuals based on their intersectional identities.” This anchor standard on “power” is then cross-referenced in the various content units, for example, in the U.S. history unit on “The New Right and the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.” In other words, the standards effectively command Rhode Island’s teachers to present Reagan’s presidency by showing how an identity-based, equity-focused leftist coalition might have reversed his policies.
Almost all of Rhode Island’s anchor standards are about “equity” (equality of result), and the use of “identity, power, and resistance” to achieve it. Not a single episode of history can be taught outside the dictates of the anchor standards, i.e., without leftist advocacy.
Shout-Outs
David Zweig, at the Free Press: The School That Couldn’t Quit Covid
Jordan McGillis, at City Journal: Can Chicago Survive Brandon Johnson?
James Varney, at RealClearInvestigations: Where Did All the Biden Illegal Immigrants Go?
CODA
I can’t say why this song came to mind last weekend whilst I was walking through a Walgreens. Maybe because it sounds a little like Muzak — but in a not entirely bad way. “Odyssey,” by Dixie Dregs, suffers from the goofy prog/fusion impulses that typified the genre in the late ’70s, but all of this is forgiven for the beauty contained between the 1:30 and four-minute marks.
For something more pleasant from start to finish, the album’s title track also suits.
Enjoy, and thanks for reading.