Dear Weekend Jolter,
What goes around comes around. Turnabout is fair play. Payback’s a . . . you get the idea. The concept is so fundamental that many well-worn expressions exist to describe it. And yet it routinely eludes those who temporarily wield political power. This past week was a veritable courtroom of exhibits showing how wanton norm-busting eventually comes back to bite each party, deepening D.C.’s dysfunction in the process.
Exhibit A: President Trump granted preemptive pardons this past week to Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and dozens of others connected to the push to overturn the 2020 election.
Where he got the idea is no mystery. Here’s Noah Rothman:
It’s not like Trump invented preemptive pardons.
Biden’s pardons of his family members, January 6 committee participants, and public officials like Anthony Fauci — all in the absence of any charge and seemingly only to promote the political narrative that the incoming Trump administration was salivating over the opportunity to persecute them — set the stage for today’s disgrace.
Noah goes on to warn that the “political party that forges new weapons for itself to wield in the ongoing culture war will see those instruments turned against it soon enough.” And yet “this unavoidable conclusion seems to elude the political class.”
Exhibit B: Congress just clawed its way out of the longest, possibly most pointless government shutdown in American history. Again, it’s not as if the precedent of shutting down the government to seek concessions related to Obamacare hadn’t already been established. Republicans infamously went through these motions in 2013 — in opposition to Obamacare — and more disruptive deadlocks have followed. “Once rare, government shutdowns have become commonplace,” Noah writes. Shutdowns are now one of the ordinary tools the parties use to, if not extract concessions, look like they are on the cusp of extracting them. Expect more of this. With the new deadline pushed into the new year, Jeff Blehar sees what’s coming: “I look forward to meeting you once again, come January 2026, when the next required show of ‘resistance’ rolls around.”
Exhibit C: The Trump DOJ continues to pursue shaky legal cases against James Comey, Letitia James, and possibly others. Andrew McCarthy catches us up here on Comey’s specifically. As he’s pointed out before, the prosecutions against Trump during his stint as a non-president helped set the stage for today’s vindictive lawfare. Trump now gleefully turns the turrets of government on his perceived enemies. Perhaps he assumes this will make them even; it won’t. Anticipating a presidential self-pardon in the event of a Democratic victory in 2028, Andy writes, “Given Trump’s unabashedly vindictive lawfare practices, I now have to assume that the next Democratic administration will pursue criminal investigations against him — and that Trump’s lawfare practices make Democratic victories in coming elections more likely.”
We should hope that the filibuster does not become Exhibit D. Until the shutdown-ending deal was reached in Congress, Trump had been pressuring Republicans to nuke the filibuster to reopen the government (and to pass his agenda) — as Jim Geraghty put it, “the ultimate short-term gain, long-term loss for Republicans in the Senate.” Yuval Levin writes that the shutdown’s resolution suggests the filibuster might be more durable than thought:
The sheer bottomless idiocy of the idea of ending the filibuster to pass a continuing resolution has meant that people trying to reinforce Trump’s doltish haranguing have needed to look for other arguments against the filibuster than the one he was making. And the one reached for by most (like the vice president) is that the Democrats will surely end the filibuster the next time they have a chance, and that they didn’t do it last time only because of opposition from a couple of senators who aren’t there anymore.
This is not a foolish argument, and it may turn out to be true. Creating the impression that the filibuster might be in danger was also useful to Republicans. . . . But the end-game of this shutdown suggests that (as usual) the filibuster has more friends than we might imagine.
As described above, at least Republicans showed the ability to imagine what the other side might do, albeit from a position of maximum cynicism; the next step is to appreciate that one’s political opponents are, in fact, more likely to commit outrageous acts if one commits them first.
(Finally, once more, I have to impose upon your screen with an appeal for our soon-to-be-ending fall webathon. Thank you, sincerely, to those who have been so generous over the course of this fundraiser, bringing us well above $100,000. We’re still pushing for a bit more, so if you haven’t given and feel so moved, please click here and toss something in the jar.)
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
On the shutdown wind-down: Democrats Caved on the Shutdown
The math behind the 50-year-mortgage proposal is not a pretty picture: Don’t Bet the House on the 50-Year Mortgage
Good news on the recruitment front: The Military’s Recruiting Surge
A word of praise, and caution: Trump Deserves Credit for Focus on Nigerian Christians
ARTICLES
Philip Klein: This Time, It’s the Populists Who Are Underestimating Trump
Charles C. W. Cooke: Trump Dismisses Economic Anxiety at His Own Peril
Dan McLaughlin: Now Can We Stop Pretending That It Was Republicans Who Shut Down the Government?
Audrey Fahlberg: Knives Out for Chuck Schumer — Again
Caroline Downey: The 50-Year Mortgage Would Make Things Worse for Gen Z
Jeffrey Blehar: The Left’s Omnicause Claims Another Victim
Rich Lowry: The Malevolent Brilliance of Candace Owens
Stanley Kurtz: Introducing the Hippocratic Society
Michael Brendan Dougherty: Boomers Didn’t Pass On the American Dream
Kamden Mulder: American Academy of Family Physicians Pushed ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ for Kids at Annual Conference
James Lynch: After Charlie Kirk’s Assassination, the Federalist Society Is Doubling Down on Campus Activism
David May & Ben Cohen: Fifty Years of Gaslighting Israel at the U.N.
Becket Adams: Republicans Have a Young Voter Problem
Haley Strack: Teen Vogue Died a Long Time Ago
Abigail Anthony: UPenn Alumni Sue After Hackers Breach ‘Woke’ University’s Databases
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
“Del Toro’s remake refuses to grow up,” writes Armond White: Frankenstein — Forever Childish
Brian Allen pays tribute to the Marines, and looks at their treatment in paintings and war photography and film: Happy 250th Birthday to the Few, the Proud, the Marines
EXCERPTS ARE FOREVER
Dan McLaughlin calls out the unrelenting gaslighting that was a core feature of this historic shutdown:
For the past 40 days, we have been subjected to a gaslighting campaign from Democrats and their media allies on the pretense that the shutdown was Republicans’ doing. The campaign was largely successful with the voting public — and transparently timed for the run-up to Election Day — but it was always an obvious lie. Democrats were the ones making demands before they would agree to reopen the government; Republicans were demanding nothing and kept voting to reopen the government. Every adult who paid attention knew this.
Last night, the shutdown drama ended. It ended exactly the way you would expect if you understood it as a Democratic shutdown: Republicans made concessions (albeit modest ones), Democrats made no concessions, and, as a result, Republicans got enough Democrats to vote with them to reopen the government.
Leading Democrats told us over and over that the shutdown was an example of Republican cruelty and callousness — that the GOP just wanted to keep poor people from eating, to fire federal employees, and to have airplanes fall out of the sky, all while refusing to show up for a vote, partying, and building a fancy ballroom. If this were an accurate description of reality, then you would expect two things to be true. First, Democrats would be lining up in droves to vote for ending the shutdown. Second, Democratic politicians, activists, and media voices would be ecstatic at the prospect of that finally happening.
Instead, the opposite has been the case — which makes sense only if the opposite was true all along and this was really a Democratic shutdown. The majority of Democrats voted against ending the shutdown. The party’s leaders have denounced that vote, and activists are threatening to primary the people who cast those votes. There is no way to reconcile the furious response with the wholly false claim that it was Republicans, not Democrats, who shut down the government. It was always a lie, and they always knew it was a lie.
Rich Lowry charts the descent into madness of the Candace Owens podcast:
There’s been a lot of conversation about Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes lately, but everyone should spare a thought for Candace Owens.
On her eponymous podcast, Candace, the crackpot influencer has been conducting an “investigation” into what happened to Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University that is another symptom of how far off the rails a segment of the right-wing media ecosystem has gone.
(Owens is too foolish even for Fuentes, who says she defines “low-IQ antisemitism,” although Carlson has her on his podcast for friendly interviews.)
The Owens probe is about as serious and likely to bear fruit as O. J.’s attempt to find the real killer of Nicole Simpson.
According to Owens, who once worked with Kirk at Turning Point USA, what obviously didn’t happen is that Tyler Robinson shot Kirk in the neck with a rifle at relatively close range from the roof of a building with a clear line of sight to Kirk after fulminating about the activist and podcaster being a hater.
No, in episode after episode, day after day, for an hour or more, she claims that things just don’t feel right, invests enormous significance in minutiae, asks for help from listeners in tracking down supposedly crucial information, casts aspersions on TPUSA, attacks anyone who pushes back against her accusations, claims that things are getting weirder and weirder, makes dark insinuations about Jews and Israel, and suggests that she could be killed at any time by the same shadowy forces that took out Kirk.
Give Candace Owens this: It takes considerable talent to take an open-and-shut murder case and turn it into a whodunit and you’ve-got-to-listen-to-every-episode true-crime mystery.
Haley Strack documents the downfall of a publication that lost its way:
This has been Teen Vogue’s general layout since 2016: progressive politics mixed with cultural drivel. With the rise of Donald Trump in 2016, the magazine announced that it would create a politics section, morphing from a tabloid that helps girls navigate the world into “the young person’s guide to conquering (and saving) the world.” The publication became hyper-politicized, apparently to match the times.
No one asked it to.
Fast-forward a couple Trump terms, and Condé Nast announced last Monday that Vogue will absorb Teen Vogue and focus its content on “career development, cultural leadership and other issues that matter most to young people.” According to New York’s NewsGuild, Condé management will lay off “six of our members, most of whom are BIPOC women or trans, including Teen Vogue’s Politics Editor.” The publication now has “no writers or editors explicitly covering politics.”
A chorus of they/thems has raised the alarm on social media. “They just gutted Teen Vogue which had top notch political journalism. The media is continuing to purge any sort of political dissent to Trump and the oligarchs,” trans activist and Harvard clinical instructor Alejandra Caraballo said. Trans activist and journalist Erin Reed was devastated by the “major loss.” Another former writer said, “Teen Vogue was one of the first places I ever got to write the kinds of more radical stories about mental health, polyamory, queerness, trans people and more. I helped shape the identity and politics verticals back in 2017-2018 and seeing it ruined is nothing short of horrific.” A cabal of gender-curious staffers cornered and bullied the company’s head of human resources, Stan Duncan, on Thursday to protest the layoffs. Four of them were fired.
Employees complain that Condé is trying to stifle the magazine’s “insightful” journalism for political reasons. Teen Vogue’s readership (which the magazine defines as “genderless”) craves progressive activist content, they say, and Condé Nast is “attempting to intimidate and silence our members’ advocacy for the courageous cultural and political journalism of Teen Vogue,” union members say.
But a closer look at the publication’s trajectory over the past decade shows how it lost its way by embracing the niche political fashions and befuddling mannerisms of the far left, without regard for its general audience.
Teen Vogue’s reason for existence, recall, was to give fashion-aware girls relatable and affordable lifestyle tips, as Vogue matriarch Anna Wintour said when the magazine was founded in 2003. “We are going to do what we do well, which is fashion, beauty and style,” Amy Astley, the first editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue, said at the time.
CODA
Several months after Abigail reviewed it, I have surrendered to the hype and watched KPop Demon Hunters. Good luck getting this out of your head.
Have a fine weekend.