Dear Weekend Jolter,
Dark days have fallen on the Democratic establishment.
At official headquarters, DNC Chairman Ken Martin is in “survival mode,” the AP reports, avoiding media appearances amid fundraising woes and calls for his ouster. The organization’s troubles keep getting featured in the New York Times (with details Jeff Blehar says point to a party in crisis). Socialists are winning primaries and flexing muscle, amid lingering consternation over the DNC’s misbegotten 2024 “autopsy.”
It is perhaps an added cruelty, then, that the Midwest, the region Martin calls home, is the site of the party’s latest trials and humiliations. In Michigan this week, the radical Abdul El-Sayed narrowly pulled off a victory over establishment choice Haley Stevens in the hard-fought primary race for Senate. From NR’s editorial:
His win is an ill omen for the current direction of the Democratic Party — and a terrible development for Michiganders and Americans alike — but an enormous and deeply symbolic victory for the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
As Jeff wrote ahead of the result (which ended up being closer than expected), the coming general election battle will be competitive, despite President Trump’s unpopularity, “because Detroit cares a lot more about the fate of the auto industry than it does the fate of Gaza.” Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee, is by no means a lock but says he is confident he can break Democrats’ 25-year hold on Senate seats in the state.
“The crazy train has arrived in Michigan, and AOC is the engineer, and Bernie Sanders throws coal in the fire, and my opponents, with all of their endorsements are riding that train. It’s just not who we are here,” the candidate said in an interview with NR’s Kamden Mulder.
Then again, as the editorial cautions, “the problem with a major political party losing its mind is that a goodly number of the candidates it nominates will, if the circumstances are right, make it into office.” Either way, Michigan is now critical for the GOP’s hopes of holding onto the chamber.
While El-Sayed has denied he’s a socialist, Kamden notes he’s been outspoken about far-left beliefs:
He supports abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, expresses anti-Israeli sentiments, and wants to end the Senate filibuster. He also supports Medicare for All, which is one of his most talked-about issues — aside from Israel — with supporters on the campaign trail.
El-Sayed’s rhetoric is out of step with the more moderate stances of his [now-defeated primary] opponent, and many establishment Democrats in the state.
That’s just Michigan. Wisconsin is up next, with a gubernatorial primary next week that, in the words of NR’s editorial, could mark the return of so-called sewer socialism, but worse. Again, the establishment is in danger of being steamrolled:
Marquette’s latest polling for the state’s gubernatorial race, published on July 29, has Democratic Socialist Francesca Hong at 38 percent, 22 points in front of second-place Mandela Barnes, the former lieutenant governor who lost a Senate race against Ron Johnson and just dropped out. Wisconsin’s Democratic leadership prefers the third-place David Crowley (7 percent), the current Milwaukee County executive. Governor Tony Evers endorsed Crowley after his lieutenant governor, Sara Rodriguez, also withdrew from the race because of gross financial mismanagement. The single primary debate saw Hong go unchallenged while Barnes and Crowley did yeoman’s work convincing viewers that neither of them is up to the job.
In short, the field is a mess in Wisconsin’s Democratic race, with voters now “seriously considering a journalism dropout” and holiday-hating weirdo in Francesca Hong, despite the party’s historical success with more boring candidates, as was the case in Michigan for years.
Primary voters are making ever-riskier bets, and by all indications, party leaders cannot do a thing about it.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
A prestigious institution allowed itself to be played: Cambridge Has Itself to Blame for the Jason Arday Debacle
On the mass migrant incursion in Spanish territory: The Roots of the Ceuta Crisis
ARTICLES
Jianli Yang: We Must Not Let China Plead the Fifth on Covid’s Origin
Charles Hilu: Pressed by Trump, Thune Still Has Support Where It Counts
Charles Hilu: Cornyn Says He Now Opposes Scrapping the Filibuster
Noah Rothman: The Reflecting Pool Is Now a Serious Scandal
Charles C. W. Cooke: Truth Social’s Early-Access Scheme Is Indefensible
Chloe Cole: A Child’s Healthy Body Is Not a Problem to Be Solved
Kaitlyn Kiepert: A Conversation with the Dead
Becket Adams: Another Media Freak-Out over Another Non-Scandal at CBS
Joshua S. Treviño: Spain and Europe’s Crisis of Meaning
Abigail Anthony: Cambridge Prof Fighting Plagiarism Allegations Seems to Have Fabricated Major U.S. University Affiliation
Michael Baumgartner: Biden’s $7 Billion Taliban Weapons Tab Is Still Coming Due
Seth Cropsey: The President’s Military Options Are Dangerously Limited
Andrew McCarthy: On the Republican Deal to Save Blanche’s AG Nomination
CAPITAL MATTERS
John Puri, on the tariff farce: Are We Tired Yet of Tariffs by Decree?
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Brian Allen, on a fright at the museum: Race Rage, Climate Craziness, and Sex-Change Silliness at the Smithsonian
Armond White, on a fright of a different sort: Ice Cream Man’s Reign of Future Terror
EXCERPTS: THE GENUINE ARTICLES
We should pause to reflect on how disturbing President Trump’s pursuit of Reflecting Pool–related charges is, against seemingly random people. From Noah Rothman:
The Reflecting Pool has become a serious political scandal.
It’s “difficult to attribute the widespread damage to the Reflecting Pool to vandalism, let alone to establish that fact beyond a reasonable doubt,” read a statement from the office of U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro. In fact, the president’s critics were right all along: the pool wasn’t a victim of sabotage but, rather, a “botched installation.”
Now they tell us! Too late, however, to prevent innocent people from being prosecuted. Last week, Pirro’s office revealed that it was dropping federal criminal charges against four individuals, only the most famous of whom was a former Olympic canoeist, who were charged without sufficient evidence of a federal crime. They were charged for vandalizing the pool because the president wanted to see someone catch a charge. The average American voter takes notice of that. After all, one could be a victim of those circumstances as easily as anyone else.
Perhaps most Americans looked askance at how the Trump administration twisted itself into knots to put James Comey and Letitia James in the dock. If they even took notice of the U.S. attorney who resigned rather than bring politically motivated charges into a courtroom, or of how those cases fell apart after Trump found himself a more pliant attorney, they might have also compartmentalized it all.
Sure, that was egregious, the average voter might concede. But James and Comey were in the game. They took their shots at the president, and he took his. But this isn’t anything like that. The four individuals who caught a charge based on the allegation that there was not just significant vandalism but any vandalism of the Reflecting Pool were civilians. They were not players in our political pageant. In all likelihood, their offense was their being in the wrong place at the wrong time — and just when the president needed a scapegoat to spare himself the humiliation of having to admit that his critics were right.
Chloe Cole, a detransitioner, tells her story and makes the case for the bill that bears her name:
Instead of asking why I felt disconnected from my body, the professionals around me taught me that my feelings were not only valid but that they dictated my identity. Meanwhile, they told my parents I would kill myself if I wasn’t affirmed completely.
While my parents had their hesitations, they allowed me to begin the medical process, having been emotionally blackmailed. By the time I entered high school, I went by a new name and was on puberty blockers and testosterone. The drugs were powerful — my voice and body changed drastically. People I had known for years didn’t even recognize me. I began using boys’ restrooms and locker rooms. Anyone who remembers high school can remember the smells and atmosphere of a boys’ bathroom. Beneath the awkwardness, as I reflect on that time, I now realize just how dangerous it would have been if the boys around me had discovered that I was female.
In June 2020, at the age of 15, I underwent a double mastectomy. For four years, I clung tightly to the belief that transition was the saving grace of my story. But life was not greener on the other side. I learned that young men carry struggles of their own, including profound loneliness and pressure to conceal vulnerability. There often seemed to be no place where a boy or man was allowed to struggle honestly. I experienced that isolation firsthand.
Harder questions began surfacing. What if I wanted to be a mother? Or what if I wanted to be a wife? In my desperate pursuit of finally feeling whole, I had lost pieces of myself that I could never get back. When it struck me that I would never be able to nurse my children and that the medical interference in my life could affect my ability to have biological children at all, the illusion began to collapse. I started reconnecting with reality — not all at once, but piece by piece. . . .
I am so grateful to U.S. Representative Bob Onder (R., Mo.) for spearheading legislation bearing my name. As a physician, he understands that medicine carries an obligation to do no harm. In my case, and in the cases of too many others, that oath was broken.
The Chloe Cole Act provides a federal civil remedy for individuals who were subjected to irreversible gender interventions while they were minors. Rather than regulating gender interventions directly, the bill allows detransitioners and their parents to sue the medical professionals who prescribed puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or performed gender surgeries. Those harmed may seek compensation for the lifelong physical, emotional, and financial harms those irreversible procedures caused. The bill also establishes a lengthy statute of limitations, ensuring that those harmed have a meaningful opportunity to seek justice.
My story cannot be rewritten, but another child’s story still can.
Much as the show Severance presents an array of ethical dilemmas pertaining to the (fictional, we hope) act of splitting yourself into distinct personal and work identities, AI poses (very real) dilemmas that never would have been contemplated a few years ago. Kaitlyn Kiepert reports on “griefbots”:
Robert Neimeyer was just shy of his 12th birthday when he heard his mom’s scream — the scream that ended childhood, he’d later call it.
On a cold January morning, Neimeyer’s mother found his father’s lifeless body. He died from a self-administered dose of whiskey and barbiturates.
Neither Neimeyer nor any of his family members saw it coming. They knew his dad had been struggling to keep his pharmacy afloat and that he had been dealing with health problems. But the pressures weighed more heavily on him than they realized.
As the eldest of three, Neimeyer was expected to step into the shoes his dad left behind. Over the years, he would often dream of his dad. In these dreams, his dad was a figure in the attic of his home. Neimeyer would try to approach, and his dad would vanish. Once, his dad met his eyes and smiled, but that was all. He vanished, as usual, without a word.
Decades later, though, this changed.
Neimeyer spoke with his dad, or at least that’s how it seemed.
“My God, Bobby, there you are,” his dad began. “You have no idea how long I’ve yearned to reach for you, and yet I never knew how.”
It was what Neimeyer, by then the director of the Portland Institute for Loss and Transition, had been longing to hear. He found himself weeping by the end of the conversation.
But his dad’s arms couldn’t hold him in this tender moment. All Neimeyer had to show for the conversation was a screen with four or five pages of messaging. Yet he walked away feeling reconnected, like it was a conversation he could always come back to.
All it took was an AI chatbot — in this case, a “griefbot” — to bridge the gap left by death. . . . Sometimes called “deadbots,” these griefbots fall into the overarching category of “generative ghosts,” AI representations of a deceased family member or friend. Griefbots are specifically utilized to help people grieve, trained with everything from the deceased loved one’s social media accounts to biographical information inputted by the user.
An early prototype of a griefbot was generated in 2013, but the rise of ChatGPT in 2022 took the technology to a new level, further humanizing and personalizing AI conversations. . . . But as AI technologies continue to develop, some psychologists worry that griefbots might provide a simulacrum of the grieving process that could harm, rather than help, the bereaved.
CODA
My wife and I saw The Odyssey last weekend, officially becoming the last people to do so. Aptly, the music that plays during the sirens scene stuck with me. The haunting motif, which returns toward the end of the film, reportedly was played using an ancient instrument called the aulos. As the Times article describes, Ludwig Göransson’s siren song is just a few notes, with a drone. It achieves the desired effect.
Thanks for reading. I’ll be away and turning the Jolt over to John Puri next week; catch you when I get back.