Dear Weekend Jolter,
Expect to see more from NR (and this newsletter) next week as America marks 25 years since 9/11. But consider this a passing observation that 25 years still hasn’t been enough time for some politicians and media outlets to grasp the enormity of the event.
Even through the jaded eyes of those of us who witnessed terminology such as “man-caused disaster,” it was shocking to see the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation issue a memo urging staff not to refer to 9/11 as terrorism absent attribution. The “hijackings led to passenger jet crashes,” the guidance antiseptically clarified. As Kamden Mulder reports, the soon-pilloried network backed off, conceding: “After reviewing our current language guidance, we have decided to adjust it to clarify that direct attribution is not required for describing the historic events of 9/11 as terrorism.”
Suffice it to say that if 9/11 can’t, as a factual matter, be called terrorism, nothing can, and the word should be retired.
Over the next week, I do not expect to see other outlets issuing such egregious editorial guidance. But, unfortunately, I very much expect to see politicians and activists, particularly of the DSA variety, echoing the sort of message that Zohran Mamdani issued year after year, until he ran for mayor. As Dan McLaughlin recounts, concerning both the New York City mayor and Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed:
A resurfaced, since-deleted September 11, 2021, tweet from Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is making the rounds. On that 20th anniversary of the worst terrorist attack in American history, El-Sayed tweeted:
Today, I mourn the 3K lives, 6K injuries, & infrastructural devastation in NYC, perpetrated ignorantly in the name of my faith.
Tomorrow, I’ll mourn ~1M lives, millions of injuries, & infrastructural devastation in 3 countries, perpetrated ignorantly in the name of my country.
That same day, Zohran Mamdani tweeted a strikingly similar message:
Nearly 3,000 New Yorkers died on 9/11; 20 years later, the death hasn’t stopped. We mourn our neighbors who died that day. The hundreds of thousands who died in the wars that followed. The unknown millions injured & displaced. In their memory, we work toward a better world.
Mamdani tweeted virtually verbatim 9/11 anniversary messages in 2022, 2023, and 2024 before shifting his tune during the fall of his mayoral campaign.
As Dan writes, Mamdani and El-Sayed treat 9/11 as “an embarrassing fact that needs to be whatabouted away in order to prosecute their argument against America, the West, and ‘Zionists.’”
Some families, reportedly backed in part by Republican lawmakers, have tried to bar Mamdani from Ground Zero for the anniversary over his stances. It would be better if he showed up and joined their prayers, without qualification.
September 11 is for mourning the victims of September 11, not every awful thing that happened in its wake. The coming week will stir painful memories for many, but there is a service done in the remembering, no matter how much some would prefer to dilute the ritual.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
On going into business with a Venezuelan oil venture: The American Nationalization of Venezuelan Oil
This isn’t a fight for the judicial branch: The Ballroom Dance Doesn’t Belong in Court
“In what possible way does this make America ‘great’?” Trump’s Tacky Coin
ARTICLES
Michael Brendan Dougherty: The Court Tries to Give God a Restraining Order
Christian Schneider: There Is No Problem Government Creates That It Can’t Make Worse
Daniel Foster: The Meta Settlement Settles Nothing
Robert Maranto: In the Age of AI, What Should Schools Teach?
John Fund: If You Thought California’s High-Speed-Rail Idea Was Insane . . .
Noah Rothman: Trump’s Big Bet on Data Centers
Seth Cropsey: The Illusion of One Voice in Wartime
Yuval Levin: Barking Up the Wrong Amendment
Jeffrey Blehar: Everyone Is Edging Away from Ken Paxton
Sloan Rachmuth: How the DSA Is Making Inroads in Battleground North Carolina
Joseph Loconte: The Siren Songs of Our Age
Jim Geraghty: The Inevitable Impeachment Rerun
Christopher J. Scalia: Life, Liberty, and a Laugh Track
David Mamet: Futility
CAPITAL MATTERS
John Puri proposes a new agenda: We Need Electricity Abundance
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Brian Allen justly roasts the Biennale’s anchor exhibition: The Trauma Hothouse in Venice
Warner Bros. falls off a cliff with its “high-concept inanity.” From Armond White: Coyote vs. Culture: An Iconoclastic Cartoon
LET THEM READ EXCERPTS
Daniel Foster revisits the Meta settlement and is struck by the lack of closure:
Meta has agreed to pay up to $17 billion to settle claims that its products harmed America’s youth, an unsatisfying outcome to a worst-of-both-worlds process.
Worst of both worlds because it adopted a regulation-by-settlement approach in which the owner of Facebook and Instagram admitted no wrongdoing and successfully conditioned some of the settlement cash and policy changes it has agreed to make to curb pathological teen use on getting its competitors to adopt them as well, with Meta even going so far as to run ads on its own platforms “inviting” TikTok and YouTube to step up.
And unsatisfying because the settlement leaves largely untouched the core operating model of social media and largely unchanged the incentives of the attention economy. It does nothing to come to terms with the pathologies introduced into all our lives — not just kids and teens, but (allegedly) grown adults as well — by The Algorithm writ large.
The changes Meta has agreed to are almost certainly good ones. It agreed to limit minors to two hours of usage a day across Facebook and Instagram, to block access from midnight to 6 a.m. and mute notifications during school hours, and to beef up tools for parental supervision. These are defaults that can largely be overridden by parents, which is fair enough, as the measures follow and indeed lag what a lot of parents and school districts are already doing. Along with blanket smartphone bans in schools and some favorable trends in screen time for Gen Alpha kids, there is a growing reckoning of the harms and willingness to do something about them.
And parents and boards of ed are the right spots on the subsidiarity stack for these solutions, for creating rules around when, where, and how these platforms get used by vulnerable and half-formed brains. But even taken all together, these adaptations won’t solve what you might call the digital question: what rules govern our online lives — what rights and duties we have as, for lack of a better term, digital citizens, and what we’re owed before we become mere digital subjects.
Noah Rothman explains Trump’s confrontational stance in favor of data centers:
When the paranoid style in American politics gets in the way of the Trump administration’s initiatives (and only then), this White House shows little tolerance for pop conspiracy theorizing.
In recent weeks, the president and his allies have been giving the “Epstein files” treatment to the most salacious claims about data centers. In an interview last week with his formerly estranged fixer, Michael Cohen, Donald Trump touted the national data-center development over which he has presided. Not only did the president assure his interlocutor that the “tremendous amounts of jobs and money” they create are desirable, he also tried to bust some of the more popular myths about data centers promoted by their opponents.
This week, the president trotted out a more confrontational version of that message. “Communities that don’t take a data center, they’re making a mistake,” Trump said. He took that line of criticism further still in a post on Truth Social: “The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor.” The communities that “want to be successful and rich,” by contrast, will “let Data Reign.”
With that, Trump uncorked a cascade of feigned outrage among aspiring populists who channeled what they imagine to be the public’s passions. . . .
On the right and left alike, those presumptuous enough to speak for The People pounded the table. “I guess I’m backwards and poor,” Republican Congressman Tim Burchett told the left-wing activist media outlet MeidasTouch. “I mean, how about we put one in Mar-a-Lago?” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggested. “Let’s put a data center at Mar-a-Lago, and we’ll see how backwards and poor he is in response to that.” Indeed, there’s a data center right across the lagoon from Trump’s golf club, with more on the way.
The people criticizing Trump for his data center advocacy have the polls on their side. But Trump is betting that the hysteria these facilities have inspired will dissipate as quickly as it arose. On that, he has reason to be optimistic.
California outdoes itself. John Fund has the latest:
The decision by the unelected California Energy Commission to make an estimated 70 percent of the tires sold in the state illegal by 2033 is touching off a citizens’ revolt. This week, the CEO of Dunlop, which is headquartered in California, scorched the commission’s power grab by comparing its stupidity to the state’s notorious, budget-busting high-speed-rail project: a perfect metaphor for government incompetence.
Dunlop CEO Darren Thomas says that, by mandating more “efficient” tires, regulators risk repeating the stupidity behind the bullet train by ignoring real-world economics in a misguided effort to curb carbon emissions. “We’re asking California to prove that the regulation produces a better overall outcome for Californians,” he says. “As a state we failed to do that with High-Speed Rail. Another initiative that cost taxpayers billions and promised lower fuel consumption and emissions.”
But the California Energy Commission’s first-of-its-kind tire efficiency standards could have national implications. A long list of Golden State regs — from vehicle emission limits to appliance standards — have become de facto national ones because of the size of the state’s market. These tire restrictions, too, could be coming to other states. New cars generally come with efficient tires, but consumers typically replace those with ones that have higher rolling resistance. Goodyear warns that the increased costs to consumers could run in the hundreds of dollars. Most all-season replacement tires last for roughly 65,000 miles. But the European-standard tires mandated by the new rules average 27,000 miles, meaning that consumers will have to replace them twice as often. It’s no surprise that the only major tire company to back the regs is France’s Michelin, whose tires are consistently in the top price tier and will likely see increased sales under the new standards.
CODA
I saw Tedeschi Trucks Band last weekend — and highly recommend catching them live if you can. The stage-filling ensemble has a dozen members, which seems excessive at first, but each is a world-class musician and gets his/her moment to shine during extended jams. From the Eric Dolphy–style sax vamping to the sheer virtuosity of Derek Trucks himself, they put on a great show. Here’s one from their new album, Future Soul.