Dear Weekend Jolter,
The theme of today’s note is Seattle, and we’ll start with the good news. Two years after homicides in the city reached a 30-year high, killings have fallen significantly — almost 50 percent in the first nine months of the year.
That’s the good news. In other news, the verdant hub of the Pacific Northwest just elected a democratic socialist as mayor, has been taxing jobs out of the city, and is doubling down on gender-obsessed initiatives in the public schools.
Kamden Mulder, who’s all over the education beat, reported this past week that city schools developed “K–5 Gender Book Kit Lessons,” including “a kindergarten lesson to introduce students to progressive ideas about the malleable nature of gender identity.” The story continues:
The lesson features a picture book titled “Introducing Teddy,” a story about a teddy bear named Thomas who decides he wants to be Tilly, a girl teddy bear. The video component of the lesson is narrated by Brennon Ham, a Seattle Public School health education specialist, who uses the pronouns he, she, and they.
Kamden followed up with a report that Seattle-area schools are asking students as young as ten years old questions about gender identity, substance use, and sexual preference, “and sharing the data with third parties” (though officials insist actual student identities are not shared outside their school district). According to her piece, students — and parents — voiced discomfort with the survey questions, with some “writing in responses such as ‘No, I’m also twelve,’ ‘I never want to do this ever again,’ and ‘Why do you want to know my sexual orientation?’” The federal Department of Education has launched an investigation into the matter, Kamden reports.
The ideological tilt of the schools tracks with that of the Seattle area generally and its elected officials. Donald Kimball recently wrote for NRO about similarities between Mayor-elect Katie Wilson’s policies and those of New York’s Zohran Mamdani, especially her interest in government-run grocery stores. He argues that a “hostile business climate and an unpunished looting problem” led to the closure of stores in the first place, and “government-run grocery stores will only serve to cost the city more by driving the need for further tax increases and causing more businesses to flee.”
The appeal of an “affordability” agenda is understandable in high-priced Seattle as in New York, but an agenda that focuses on taxes over housing supply is likely to fall short. As a Washington Post editorial pointed out after Wilson’s election, her plans could worsen the city’s exodus of businesses and reverse the progress on crime. Meanwhile, following a round of headlines about jobs leaving the city in the wake of a previous payroll tax, the Washington State Legislature, naturally, is considering a proposal modeled on Seattle’s. It would hit “large” businesses with a 5 percent tax on payroll expenses above salaries of $125,000.
Republicans, citing the cautionary tale of Seattle, warn the move would only discourage businesses from starting up or staying in the state. Indeed, even as proponents hope to capture new revenue for housing and health care and more, the mayor of nearby Bellevue cautioned that Seattle’s program ended up helping her city by sending thousands of jobs their way — a pattern that could repeat, only statewide.
With any luck, Seattle’s experimentation will stay contained to Seattle. The country can thank the city for grunge, Starbucks, and Bill Gates, and politely decline the rest.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
Candace Owens is doing much worse than “asking questions”: Erika Kirk’s Anger Is Justified
About that NSS: Trump’s National Security Strategy Document Is a Curious One
Is giving China a leg up really worth 25 percent? Trump’s Ominous Decision to Sell Advanced Chips to China
Enough is enough: Rein In the Presidential Pardon Power
On Trump v. Slaughter: There Is No Such Thing as an Independent Agency
ARTICLES
Jeffrey Blehar: Jasmine Crockett Gives New Hope to Texas Republicans
Jeffrey Blehar: Indiana Republicans Decline to Dance to Trump’s Tune
Brett Schaefer & Danielle Pletka: Ben Rhodes Keeps Getting It Wildly Wrong on Israel and Gaza
Audrey Fahlberg: What’s Trump’s End Game on Venezuela? Combating Drug Trafficking, Regime Change, or Both?
Noah Rothman: Miami Falls
Caroline Downey: Erika Kirk Takes On the Podcast Conspiracy-Mongers with Grace
James Lynch: A Florida Teen Committed Suicide After Getting Hooked on an AI Chatbot. Now His Mom Is Demanding Accountability
James Lynch: China Just Had a ‘Sputnik Moment.’ This GOP Lawmaker Is Urging Americans to Recognize It
Charles C. W. Cooke: Europe Is Delusional
Rich Lowry: Doha Is the New Paris
Jim Geraghty: The Online Right’s Conspiracy Faction Keeps Getting Crazier
Haley Strack: The Danger of Weight-Loss Drugs Going Mainstream
Jianli Yang: One Fire, One System: Hong Kong’s Fire Tragedy and the City That No Longer Exists
John Gustavsson: How the Internet Broke Assimilation
Jessica Hornik: Font of Wisdom
CAPITAL MATTERS
John Puri writes that these are the only two possible explanations: Are We Extorting Nvidia or Selling Out National Security?
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Armond White takes issue with Hamnet revisionism: Mrs. Shakespeare, Credit Hog
Brian Allen resumes his tour of the Florida art scene, this time in downtown St. Petersburg where Baroque masterpieces are on display: Florida’s St. Pete Goes All Caravaggio
EXCERPTS: FOR WHEN YOU JUST NEED THE GIST
Charles C. W. Cooke knows what time it is. That is,
It is time for a rant about Europe. It has, in fact, been time for quite a while, but there is always a moment at which the straw meets the camel, and, for me, that moment came when the European Union announced that it intended to extort another hundred million dollars or so out of the wildly productive American tech sector, and then the bureaucrats and politicos who staff that dreadful institution took to the very service they were in the midst of extorting to offer up generalized attacks on the United States. As a former Brit who enjoys spending time in both France and Italy, I take no particular pleasure in unloading in this manner, but honesty compels it: In its current incarnation, Europe is a poor, corrupt, sclerotic, vampiric open-air museum, and its leadership class is full of priggish, dishonest, supercilious, rent-seeking parasites, whose boundless sense of superiority ought by rights to have vanished in 1901. Europe, in the year 2025, is what a continent would look like if it were run by NPR. It is a librarian in a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, snobbishly shushing the workers outside. It is a faculty meeting, a Sierra Club protest, a forum for those who believe that words create reality. There is no reason that we in the United States should consent to be lectured by the apologists for such a silly place.
Presidential-pardon abuse is only getting worse. NR’s editorial argues for a change:
Recent Democratic presidencies have produced enough shocking examples of pardon abuse to convince any Republican that the process is hopelessly poisoned. Bill Clinton effectively sold pardons, even to the fugitive from justice Marc Rich. Political accountability for this fiasco was so tepid, the Justice Department flunkey who carried it out (Eric Holder) later became Barack Obama’s attorney general. Joe Biden handed out pardons like candy to his corrupt family members to cover the tracks of his family influence-peddling business — including pardons announced so late they were publicly known only after dignitaries were seated to witness Trump’s inauguration — then let his staff cover those tracks by mass-producing autopen pardons. That’s without even discussing the various left-wing radicals and terrorists pardoned by the Clinton, Obama, and Biden administrations for reasons of vote-buying and ideological sympathy for political violence.
Donald Trump’s presidencies have offered Democrats plenty of reasons of their own to mistrust the pardon power. Trump has openly used pardons, commutations, and clemency as leverage to gain political support from corrupt Democrats, to reward factional allies within the Republican Party such as Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, and Joe Arpaio, and to mass-absolve participants in the January 6 riot at the Capitol. Trump has capriciously bulldozed the long-standing Justice Department process for issuing pardons. His latest pardons include Democratic Congressman Henry Cuellar, whom Trump seems to hope can be induced to switch parties; fraudster David Gentile, whom Trump freed from paying $15.5 million in restitution to his victims; and former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, a convicted narco-trafficker of the sort that Trump is simultaneously claiming the authority to kill by drone strike without trial.
Enough is enough. None of this benefits anyone outside the privileged circles of Beltway influence or the cesspools of ideological extremism. If Congress passes a constitutional amendment to reform or abolish the pardon power on a timeline that is not obviously partisan, there might be enough popular support to get state legislatures on both sides of the partisan divide to prevent future mischief. A popular constitutional uprising against bipartisan elite corruption would be the healthiest sort of civics and would have met with the Founders’ approval.
Reforms short of complete abolition should be considered first. The easiest is that departing presidents could be prevented from issuing pardons between Election Day and the end of their terms, or at least have their power to do so curbed by their successors or by Congress. That would end pardons for which nobody could be accountable. Some classes of recipients — such as blood relatives, close aides, or alleged co-conspirators of a president — could be removed from the list of recipients of a unilateral pardon.
Alternatively, the pardon process could be subjected to systemic checks. . . .
Failing a thoughtful consensus, it would not be the worst outcome if the pardon power was outright abolished. It now engenders more mischief and scandal than the good it does.
James Lynch speaks with the mother of a teen who committed suicide after becoming infatuated with an AI chatbot:
As Megan Garcia watched her teenage son’s mental health deteriorate, she knew he was spending too much time looking at screens — but she had no idea that he had built a warped sexual relationship with an AI chatbot.
Garcia was close to her 14-year-old son, Sewell, and felt comfortable having difficult conversations with him when his grades started to slip and his mental health began to decline. Desperate for a way to halt Sewell’s slide into depression, Garcia took his phone away and attempted to limit his screen time.
But it wasn’t until after Sewell committed suicide in February of last year that she learned from police that he had formed what she now describes as an addictive relationship with a chatbot created by a company called Character AI.
“I was the one of those parents who checked. I was one of the parents who was having the conversation, really difficult conversations with my child, and most of the parents that I talk to are the same way,” Garcia told NR in a wide-ranging interview last week.
When Garcia began reviewing her son’s lengthy message history, she learned that he was having intimate, sexual conversations with a chatbot impersonating Game of Thrones character Daenerys Targaryen.
Garcia, an Orlando-based attorney, is now suing Character AI over her son’s death and leading a push to get Florida to embrace AI safeguards that she believes could have made a difference for her son. Her lawsuit against Character AI holds the company responsible for Sewell’s death because of its product’s design and failure to warn minors and parents about it.
“What happens when these chatbots have the ability to interact with our children in such a predatory way, where they’re having the same conversations that online predators have, these sexual conversations with kids, is that their little hearts and their little minds and their little souls start to hurt, and it’s foreseeable that a child would be depressed,” Garcia said. “Whenever a child’s abused, they go through a depression, suicidal spiral that’s like abuse by an adult. And the same thing happens when a chatbot does it.”
When reached for comment, Character AI expressed its sympathies for Garcia and highlighted the changes the company has made since her son’s death.
Jianli Yang explains how Hong Kong’s response to a tragic fire reveals the extent to which the city has changed, for the worse:
The deadly apartment building fire that recently claimed at least 156 lives in Hong Kong has triggered a debate over construction safety, lax regulatory enforcement, and the failures that allowed such a catastrophe to unfold. The city’s leaders quickly ordered an investigation into the fire’s cause, and police made several arrests of individuals suspected of negligence. In any earlier era, these steps might have been seen as the first moves in a process of public accountability that would be scrutinized, debated, and supplemented by an outspoken press, civic groups, and elected representatives. But in the Hong Kong of today, this response to the tragedy reveals something deeper and far more disturbing: the city is now operating under a political logic indistinguishable from that of mainland China. The space once reserved for free speech, civil society, and bottom-up community mobilization has been replaced by a reflexive deference to Beijing and a determination to eliminate independent voices that might question the official narrative.
For many Hong Kongers, the tragedy did not simply expose weaknesses in building safety. It confirmed the disappearance of the Hong Kong they once knew. In the past, a disaster of this scale would have ignited robust public debate ranging from criticism of fire code enforcement to demands for transparency about how aging residential towers are maintained. Journalists would have questioned officials; NGOs and district-level community groups would have coordinated aid for displaced residents; lawmakers across the political spectrum would have pressed for answers. That ecosystem of scrutiny and compassion was the city’s check-and-balance mechanism, a hallmark of what made Hong Kong different from Chinese cities administered under one-party rule.
But in 2025, after the National Security Law, mass arrests, the dismantling of civil society, and Beijing’s direct political restructuring of Hong Kong’s governance, the response followed a different script. Authorities treated independent aid efforts with suspicion, mirroring the mainland’s instinct to prevent nongovernmental groups from becoming centers of community trust and mobilization. Volunteers attempting to organize donations and temporary housing support were discouraged, redirected, or blocked. Some were questioned by police. The message was unmistakable: in the Hong Kong of today, only the state — and those it authorizes — may respond to a tragedy.
Equally telling was the treatment of public criticism of the city authorities’ handling of the fire. Residents who took to social media to condemn lax enforcement, mismanagement, or persistent corruption in the building-inspection process soon found themselves facing legal warnings or police visits. Several individuals were reportedly detained for “spreading rumors” or “inciting public dissatisfaction” — charges that have become routine across the border but once felt foreign in Hong Kong. Even mild criticism, the sort that used to fill newspaper columns and online forums, now risks being labeled destabilizing or subversive. Fear, self-censorship, and silence have replaced the open, sometimes fiery, public discourse that once characterized the city.
Perhaps the clearest indicator of how Hong Kong has changed was the political choreography that unfolded in the immediate aftermath of the fire. Before firefighters were publicly thanked, before frontline responders or local district workers received acknowledgment, before grieving families were addressed, the Hong Kong government issued statements expressing gratitude to Xi Jinping and the central government for their “care,” “guidance,” and “support.”
CODA
Okay, one more Al Di Meola song before the year is out. The title of the album that houses it, Elegant Gypsy, probably wouldn’t pass the PC test today. Never mind that. The opening track, “Flight over Rio,” features a bass line that rivals anything the Black Eyed Peas ever put out. I immediately regret making that comparison.