Dear Weekend Jolter,
The past few weeks have produced salient reminders that, win, lose, or draw in Ukraine, Russia will stay a persistent threat to governments west of Bratislava for the foreseeable future.
Bombshell reporting from 60 Minutes, the Insider, and Der Spiegel on Russia’s potential role in the so-called “anomalous health incidents” known as Havana Syndrome suggests a bigger confrontation may loom between Washington and Moscow. The journalistic investigations, while not conclusive, pointed to evidence indicating a Russian intelligence service may have carried out directed-energy attacks on U.S. targets, causing a mysterious cocktail of symptoms in victims including nausea and ear pain — despite a public intelligence assessment playing down the likelihood of foreign-adversary involvement.
Among other things, the Insider and its partners found travel logs, call metadata, and other evidence that GRU operatives were in the proximity of Havana Syndrome victims in some cases. 60 Minutes reported on a call intercepted in Tbilisi, just before the wife of a U.S. official posted there was hit in her home: “Is it supposed to have blinking green lights?” someone asked in Russian. “Should I leave it on all night?” . . .
The full story about Havana Syndrome is still far from clear, but the latest reporting raises some serious questions about the way that senior officials have handled their responsibility to those serving in the field. It presents the most compelling evidence yet for the possibility that Russia is targeting American officials across the world — a thesis that, if confirmed, will demand a strong U.S. response.
Greg Edgreen, who ran the Pentagon probe into the incidents and relayed as part of the above reporting that there consistently was a “Russia nexus,” suggested that this nexus can’t be ignored for long. Referring to a 2023 incident in which a DoD official was struck at a NATO summit in Lithuania, he reportedly said: “It tells me that there are no barriers on what Moscow will do, on who they will attack, and that if we don’t face this head on, the problem is going to get worse.” (The plot thickened further from the angle of local, D.C.-area intrigue, when it emerged that one potential Russian spy connected to this was also, at one time, an out-in-the-open chef at a celebrated Russian restaurant in the capital. He is now dead, supposedly, perhaps conveniently.)
Against this backdrop, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich just marked one year in a Moscow prison where he’s being held on bogus espionage charges. His detention is reflective of Vladimir Putin’s commitment to collect Americans wherever he can find them, for use as bargaining chips. The Kremlin’s taste for kidnapping informs the current State Department advisory urging Americans not to enter Russia, or to leave immediately if already there. Per the Wall Street Journal, which reported extensively on the secret negotiations behind an “escalating hostage crisis” that’s become so challenging (considering America’s lack of bargaining chips) that the U.S. has to rely on allies to trade their Russians: “America once had only one prisoner it considered wrongfully jailed in Russia, the 54-year-old [Paul] Whelan. But through nearly six years of intense and combative negotiations, Putin has run up the score, stockpiling his prisons with Americans to swap for the very few Russians abroad he cares to bring back.” His appetite is unlikely sated. As Fiona Hill, the former National Security Council official who played a walk-on part in the first Trump impeachment inquiry, warned in the same article: “Putin will take more and more Americans.”
This is to say nothing of Russia’s appalling record of holding Russians as political prisoners, including, most infamously, Alexei Navalny, who died in a Russian penal colony in February, another fallen impediment to Putin’s inexorable consolidation of power.
Ukraine, of course, remains key to checking Russia’s territorial ambitions, which appear to extend beyond Kyiv, still. The war may even have limited Moscow’s ability to detect and stop the recent terror attack on a concert hall, which both the U.S. and Iran had warned Russia about; it has without question affected the government’s ability to identify the true culprits. Putin continues to strain to connect Ukraine to the plot for which ISIS already claimed responsibility, even as he’s acknowledged “radical Islamists” carried it out. Russia has also arrested, among others, several alleged Tajik gunmen who, based on their appearance in court, were beaten severely.
Putin, meanwhile, was just “reelected.” Jay Nordlinger takes to task those who congratulated him, and administers a dose of clarity for any nations laboring under the misapprehension that he can or should be engaged like a normal head of state:
Vladimir Putin is one of the most despicable and dangerous tyrants of modern times. I see no reason of realpolitik to congratulate him on an “election” that was no such thing — just another exercise of dictatorial control. Putin exiles, imprisons, or murders his critics. He erases international boundaries through violence. We have seen all this before. The Free World ought to oppose Putin mightily.
In other news . . . read on.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
About that intelligence-community assessment: A Havana Syndrome Cover-Up?
On PBS’s WFB doc: A Flawed Buckley Documentary
There’s already money for this, lots of money: Congress Shouldn’t Fully Pay to Rebuild Collapsed Baltimore Bridge
This law will lead to a waste of resources and is an enormous step backward for free expression: Scotland Muzzles Speech
ARTICLES
Michael Brendan Dougherty: Why Colleges Are Dying
Jim Geraghty: No Labels Comes Up Empty
Noah Rothman: Democratic Politics Shift Toward the View That Hamas Should Win
Jimmy Quinn: Exclusive: NYC Mayor Eric Adams Skipped Banquet for Taiwan’s President after Lobbying by Chinese Diplomat
Madeleine Kearns: Scotland’s Authoritarian Blasphemy Law Takes Effect
Abigail Anthony: UT Austin Administrators Tried to Punish Professor over Anti-DEI Crusade. He’s Fighting Back
David Zimmermann: Whistleblowing Surgeon Targeted by DOJ, HHS for Exposing Trans Procedures in Texas Children’s Hospital
Andrew McCarthy: Judge Merchan Abruptly Labels Trump Case ‘Federal Insurrection Matter’
Christian Schneider: In Women’s Sports, Only the ‘Right’ Kinds of Fans Are Wanted
Jill Jacobson: Most ‘Squatters’ Don’t Own Squat
Mitch Daniels: How George Will Changed America’s Mind
Jay Nordlinger: A Stalin-Era Story, Roiling Russia
Audrey Fahlberg: Kari Lake’s Out-of-State Travel Adds Up
Dan McLaughlin: Stolen-Election Litmus Tests Could Blacklist Competent Conservatives from Serving Trump
Caroline Downey: UCLA Medical School Abruptly Cancels Lecture Blaming ‘Whiteness’ for Opioid Crisis
CAPITAL MATTERS
Diana Furchtgott-Roth lays out the many ways New York’s congestion tax is a bad idea: New York’s Crazy Congestion Charge
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Armond White, on a letdown: Woody Allen’s Dream Is Our Nightmare
Brian Allen finds something new in Paris, including an installation he’ll not soon forget of life-size sculptures wheeling around: A New Paris Museum Shows the Best in Cutting-Edge Art
IT’S EXCERPT TIME
Jimmy Quinn’s out with a scoop in his continuing coverage on the strange relationship between China’s government and New York City’s:
New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, skipped a banquet honoring Taiwan’s president after a top Chinese diplomat sent him a letter warning that his attendance at the March 2023 function could cost New York its “friendship” with China.
The Chinese lobbying, revealed here for the first time, sheds light on Chinese Communist Party campaigns to influence key state and local officials — in this case, as part of a broader push to isolate Taiwan on the global stage.
In a letter to the mayor hours before the banquet, Chinese consul general Huang Ping said he learned that Adams or other officials in his administration had been invited; he urged that “the City government avoid any kind of official contact with Tsai when she is in New York City.”
Adams and other top officials from City Hall did not attend the event, and it’s not clear why. Over the past week, City Hall did not respond to multiple emails and a text message requesting comment. But Adams and his team have forged a strong working relationship with the Chinese outpost. . . .
National Review — via a request filed under New York State’s Freedom of Information Law — obtained Huang’s letter and other correspondence between City Hall and the Chinese consulate general, which is located in Manhattan. The records disclosed under the law show that, for weeks leading up to Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen’s visit, Huang personally lobbied City Hall officials against interacting with the Taiwanese. They also show that Adams’s team was arranging a dinner slated to take place at Huang’s official residence around the same time.
Scotland’s new “hate crime” law is illiberal and insane. Madeleine Kearns explains:
The recently implemented bill criminalizes “stirring up hatred” — an offense that occurs when a person says, displays, publishes, distributes, gives, sends, shows, or plays something that “a reasonable person would consider to be threatening, abusive, or insulting” toward a protected characteristic. There needn’t be any specific victim of the crime. Third-party reporting sites are now operational where citizens can go snitch on each other for “hateful” speech. One of these sites is a sex shop in Glasgow. Another is a salmon and trout wholesaler in Berwickshire. (I’m not kidding.)
The maximum sentence for this offense is seven years’ imprisonment.
While sexual orientation, religion, and transgender identity all make the list of protected characteristics, sex, notably, does not. Naturally, this has left some wondering how the law is likely to affect the transgender debate, a live political issue in Scotland. Or Edinburgh’s International Festival Fringe, scheduled for the summer, in which comedians might need to rethink their more offensive jokes.
In 1859, John Stuart Mill warned of the “tyranny of the majority,” the persecution of those with minority views. But the Scottish government’s regime is even more egregious, a tyranny of the minority. . . .
An additional irony is that when the law was first introduced, it was done so purportedly to amend a dormant blasphemy law from 1837. It is frankly ridiculous that — in a law repealing blasphemy — the “hate crime” bill has to spell out that it’s permissible to discuss, criticize, ridicule, or insult religion or try to convince someone to abandon their religious beliefs but that, when it comes to transgender ideology, only “discussion” and “criticism” are permitted.
As I wrote when the bill was first introduced, the Hate Crime and Public Order Act simply swaps one blasphemy law for another. The religion it’s now illegal to disrespect is that of social progressivism.
Say Trump is elected in November. The next big question would be: Who would staff his administration? Not just who would be willing to serve, but who would be allowed to serve based on their “stolen election” stance? Dan McLaughlin makes the case against any such litmus tests:
There have been a lot of worrisome signs that not only Trump but the people around him are determined to go Full Trump this time around if they are given power. Trump is unable to let go of his fixation on stolen-election theories and revisionist history of January 6. . . .
Now, as Noah Rothman relays from reports in the Washington Post and CNN, it is claimed that the Republican National Committee has followed its purge of existing staff by asking prospective employees (including those re-applying for their old jobs), “Was the 2020 election stolen?” and by focusing heavily on election-integrity issues. There are good reasons to doubt that the Post or CNN can get the truth of what goes on inside the RNC (although Trumpworld has always had a weakness for leaks to hostile media), and there are good reasons why the RNC should devote some attention to the nuts and bolts of how votes are counted. But if it is true that fealty to the stolen-election theory is going to become a litmus test for hiring people to work for this party, campaign, and possibly the next administration, that would be a catastrophe.
Why? Because it’s not true, and because, even if you think it might be true, it can neither be proven by evidence nor justified in law. And filtering your hiring for people who cling to falsehoods that won’t stand up to factual or legal scrutiny — whether they believe them or not — is a great way to ensure that you’re hiring people who will consistently fail at any job that requires command of the facts and the law. Which is the bulk of executive-branch work, to say nothing of the judiciary. It’s making failure a choice — indeed, a priority.
Of course, most people — even smart, competent, principled people — believe some things that are nutty or conspiratorial. But these particular lies have been at the center of a political storm for years and have been deeply examined, without competent evidence ever produced to show that any of the states Trump lost would have gone the other way but for illegal votes. If you’re continuing to profess belief in that lie in the face of the evidence, it speaks exceptionally poorly of your capacity to distinguish reality from BS. And sure, there are otherwise respectable people in the GOP — people who should know better — who have played footsie with this stuff in the past. But that’s not quite the same as digging in this far after the fact, and it is also a reason why some of those people (even ones who are worth keeping around as legislators) should not be trusted with executive or judicial posts.
My concern is not that conservatives with the integrity to speak the truth about the 2020 election will lose out on career opportunities, although it is surely the case that it’s bad for building a bench as a movement when you shut the door for years on anybody who is capable of telling fact from fiction. It’s that staffing a whole administration — maybe worse, its judicial selections — with fools and liars is a recipe for failure and lost opportunity.
Abigail Anthony spotlights the case of a Texas professor who’s fighting back against DEI mission creep on campus (and his name’s similarity to our esteemed editor’s is a complete coincidence):
University of Texas at Austin finance professor Richard Lowery has annoyed the university’s administration by publicly criticizing its embrace of diversity, equity, and inclusion and suggesting that administrators exploit their positions for their children’s admission.
Lowery’s crusade did not go unnoticed: Several university administrators — and the university president, Jay Hartzell — responded with a “campaign to silence” the professor, which included threatening his job, salary, professional affiliations, and research opportunities, according to a lawsuit Lowery filed against the administrators.
Lowery embraces that his views are unpopular on campus. His bio on his now-private Twitter account reads: “All opinions are mine and almost certainly diametrically opposed to those of my employer.”
Lowery became unpopular on campus by criticizing the UT Austin’s sprawling DEI bureaucracy, which costs $13 million annually in salaries alone. The UT Austin “Faculty Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Strategic Plan” requires that “all members of faculty search committees must participate in diverse hiring training” and invests $3 million over four years to support “recruitment and hiring of faculty contributing to diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
The focus on DEI is exemplified by a UT Austin research program that offers a voluntary four-week study for white four- and five-year-old children and their white caregivers to learn about “anti-Black racism.” Lowery criticized the project in an op-ed for the College Fix, writing, “Imagine if such training were to be focused only on black preschool-aged children, a subset the researchers deemed deficient in patriotism.”
In response to Lowery’s public criticism of the university, Hartzell and several senior administrators pressured his supervisor at the Salem Center — a research center at the business school of UT Austin — to discipline him, according to the lawsuit. (While he likely couldn’t be fired from his tenured position as a professor, Lowery’s role at the Salem Center came with a $20,000-a-year stipend and is renewed annually.)
Shout-Outs
Eliot Brown, at the Wall Street Journal: Evan Gershkovich’s Stolen Year in a Russian Jail
Joan Smith, at UnHerd: Humza Yousaf receives more hate complaints than J.K. Rowling
Lisa Schiffren, at the College Fix: After Education Department botched FAFSA application season, fiasco gets worse
CODA
I picked up John Mayall’s The Turning Point on the cheap from a store in Frederick, Md., last weekend. The record was his stab at “low-volume” blues music, but this song here, “California,” grants effervescent phrases of jazz a dispensation to sneak in, here and there. Enjoy — it’s relaxing.
I’ll be out next weekend, handing the nuclear codes to Jack Crowe till I return. Catch you mid month.