Dear Weekend Jolter,
If you’ll indulge something a bit different this week, let’s look at three examples of how double standards are applied in the media and the political landscape today, via the treatment of three distinct and significant news stories.
(And, before turning to that, a quick note: I’d like to make one last appeal as part of our flash webathon, as we fight to counter the ridiculous effort to cancel Rich Lowry over something he didn’t actually say. We’re asking for donations — of any amount — to help fund Rich’s travel so he can go on a speaking tour of his own, to champion the values of open debate and stick it to those who fabricated this smear against him. If you can, please, chip in — and thank you.)
The IVF Debate
Kayla Bartsch provides a public service in busting the myth that Republicans are targeting IVF (when, in fact, many are doing the opposite). But within that piece, she discusses something that speaks to how Democrats’ and Republicans’ legislative intentions are treated very differently in the press. Both Democrats and Republicans offered up dueling bills to, ostensibly, protect IVF, and each side blocked the other’s. How was this reported? You could probably guess:
CBS News: “Senate Republicans block IVF package as Democrats highlight reproductive rights”
CNN: “Senate GOP blocks IVF bill again as Democrats spotlight issue ahead of elections”
The New York Times: “Senate Republicans Block I.V.F. Protection Bill a Second Time, Breaking With Trump”
When you got to the body of these and other stories, most included the detail that Senate Republicans offered an alternative package, but the framing of the reports clearly fit with Democrats’ narrative — that Republicans are blocking their efforts to protect IVF. Kayla includes several other examples of news stories framing this legislative clash exactly how Democrats would want.
There are, of course, differences between the Democrats’ legislation and that offered by Senators Katie Britt (R., Ala.) and Ted Cruz (R., Texas). As Kayla reports, “Britt’s bill would mandate that states not prohibit IVF if they are to receive federal Medicaid funding. The Democrats’ bill, the Right to IVF Act, would mandate a slew of progressive agenda items, under the guise of ‘protecting’ IVF.” The Democrats’ bill is much longer and more expansive than the Republicans’. But those differences certainly don’t justify treating the GOP-backed legislation as an afterthought in coverage.
Election Meddling
Many of us were led to believe that foreign interference in American elections is a serious problem to be confronted head-on. Yet 2024 has seen a wave of foreign interference on various fronts, not all treated equally. Noah Rothman documents the double standard at play, as it pertains to the treatment of the threat from Iran, versus that from Russia, in our elections:
Democrats want you to believe they are obsessively fixated on the scourge of interference in American elections by hostile foreign powers, by which they mean Russia and Russia alone. They seem incapable of acknowledging other malign actors abroad that also seek to influence American electoral outcomes, particularly when those operations are crafted for their benefit.
“President Joe Biden’s campaign did not reach out to law enforcement after individuals associated with the campaign received hacked material from Donald Trump’s campaign in their personal email accounts in part because they had not opened the messages,” Politico revealed on Thursday. The campaign Kamala Harris was bequeathed “did not provide a timeline of events” when asked by reporters to identify, presumably, when they received those hacked materials or the actions they took in response. “Similarly,” the report continued, “a law enforcement official familiar with the hacking incident told POLITICO Thursday that there’s no indication that the individuals associated with Biden’s campaign responded or took actions on the emails.”
That’s weird. Indeed, the Biden-Harris team’s inaction is rendered even stranger by the revelation several weeks ago that those unsolicited materials were pilfered from the Trump camp by agents loyal to the Islamic Republic of Iran.
As Noah writes, the Biden DOJ is pursuing the Iran case, but the Biden-Harris political world is not exhibiting anything near the level of distress that Democrats do over Russian meddling, especially considering that the interference now includes a foiled, Iran-tied assassination plot: “Iran is trying to kill an American president on U.S. soil. Whether or not it is in the Democratic Party’s immediate political interest, Americans are obliged to internalize the gravity of that discovery.”
NR’s editorial about the hacks and the plot notes that anti-Trump meddling gets “considerably less time from press-briefing podiums across the administration,” and Tehran’s theft of campaign information has prompted “virtually no outrage from the crowd that crowed about Russian ‘collusion’ . . . a manifestation of the double standard on foreign interference that benefits Democratic leaders.”
Tragedy in Georgia
The tragic cases of two women in Georgia who died after complications from taking the abortion pill, Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller, have become an unfortunate political football in the presidential campaign and beyond.
In Thurman’s case, doctors waited an astonishing 20 hours to operate, according to ProPublica. The original report said it’s unclear from the records why doctors waited so long to perform what’s called a dilation and curettage (D&C) but suggested a lack of clarity on the state’s strict abortion law played a role. Dan McLaughlin writes that, if the reporting is accurate, the hospital was almost certainly at fault, and “any lawyer who argues that the language of the Georgia heartbeat law outlaws a D&C after the child has already been aborted and is dead ought to be disbarred.”
But two other details from these cases warrant special attention.
First, a piece of history that is glossed over in the coverage is that, as Dan writes, Democratic administrations have over the past decade steadily rolled back Clinton-era requirements for doctor visits for women taking the pill. Miller reportedly did not see a doctor out of concern for “the current legislation on pregnancies and abortions,” and it’s unclear whether Thurman did — and whether an appointment could have prevented either death. The removal of those critical safeguards, however, should be at least as relevant to these cases as the reported confusion over Georgia’s abortion law.
Second, Dan reports on the double standard on display in the publicizing of “private medical information obtained and published in violation of federal law — the same federal law that the Biden administration is using to prosecute a whistleblower in Texas who was far more protective of patient privacy.” That whistleblower, Dr. Eithan Haim, today faces federal charges for alleged HIPAA violations, after he leaked documents showing a Houston-based hospital was conducting transgender procedures on minors, despite pledges to the contrary. He was charged for allegedly releasing “individually identifiable health information” of patients, even though he redacted such details. Dan notes that the information made public in the Georgia cases is, by contrast, “highly particular and personal to Thurman and Miller, and has literally resulted in the vice president of the United States leading chants of Thurman’s name at rallies.”
In one case, the public interest was evidently judged to outweigh concern about the regulations; in the other, the public interest barely factored into the equation. Strange, how this works.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
The New York indictment reflects a real level of commitment to the alleged corruption: The Eric Adams Indictment
She does it again: Kamala Harris Busts Another Norm
Warnings were not heeded: The Costly Mark Robinson Lesson
To repeat: It’s not Israel that is provoking the warfare in the Middle East: Israeli Counterattack on Hezbollah a Long Time Coming
ARTICLES
Charles C. W. Cooke: Kamala Harris’s Fair-Weather Filibuster
Rich Lowry: Is Deportation Fascist?
Rich Lowry: Israel’s Righteous War on Hezbollah
Jay Nordlinger: Wrestling with Race
Jim Geraghty: Unserious Candidates in a Seriously Dangerous World
Noah Rothman: California Can’t Resist Imposing Its Own Idiotic Plastic-Bag Ban
Stanley Kurtz: Walz Education Appointee Calls for the Overthrow of the U.S.
Jeffrey Blehar: The Polls Are Starting to Suggest It’s 2016 All Over Again
Philip Klein: Kamala Harris Makes It Clear: The Only Way to Preserve the Filibuster Is to Elect a Republican Senate
Jack Butler: Kamala Harris Is Not the Catholic Candidate
Kayla Bartsch: Republicans Don’t Want to Ban IVF. The Left Keeps Pretending Otherwise
Brittany Bernstein: The Public Learns about NYC Covid Czar’s Sex-Party Hypocrisy Four Years Too Late
Brittany Bernstein: Kamala Harris Won’t Say Where She Stands on Trans Issues — but Her Record Is Clear
Luther Ray Abel: Will the Real Tim Walz Please Stand Up?
CAPITAL MATTERS
Dominic Pino has the latest on a looming strike that would be the first of its kind in decades: East Coast Dockworkers Could Strike Beginning Next Week
Andy Puzder & E. J. Antoni sound the alarm as America’s fiscal picture gets even worse: Americans Are Paying for Out-of-Control Federal Spending
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Brian Allen picks up, and concludes, his series on Impressionism with a magnificent exhibition at the National Gallery: An Impressionism 150th-Birthday Bash in D.C.: C’est Magnifique
Christian Schneider writes with authority on a cultural constant: You’re Wrong about Saturday Night Live
BE KIND, PLEASE UNWIND (WITH SOME EXCERPTS)
Luther Abel made the trek into the wilds of Minnesota to find out what residents think of Tim Walz — especially the Walz of today as compared with the Walz of years past. These are two different personas, and residents are left wondering which is the authentic one:
Bjorn Olson thought he knew Tim Walz. Not anymore.
As Olson’s congressman, Walz wrote him a letter of recommendation to West Point and paid for his aunt to travel to Texas to visit her son, who had just returned injured from combat in Iraq. Congressman Walz was widely considered to be a warmhearted, folksy moderate who could represent conservative sensibilities while signing off on bipartisan progressive measures that the socially conscious citizens of the state saw as reasonable.
Olson and Walz both taught in the state’s schools, both served in the Army in a reserve capacity, and both represented an agrarian region that prioritizes civility and Christian charity — Olson as a state representative and Walz as a U.S. congressman.
Walz was elected governor in 2018 with the support of many Republicans who saw him the same way Olson once did.
“We thought him to be the same NRA-endorsed fiscal and social conservative,” Olson said.
By 2022, those voters did not feel the same way, with most returning to straight-ballot Republican support following the closed-churches and open-liquor-store lockdowns and riotous unrest of Walz’s first term.
“I don’t know what Walz believes in,” says Olson, contemplating the Walz of 2024.
Walz and his handlers are trying to return to those folksy, rural roots — never mind his leftward lurch in the governor’s mansion.
As the Harris campaign takes pains to advertise, there’s some reason to believe Walz is a country boy at heart. He owns a restored 1979 International Harvester Scout. He owns and can hold a shotgun, and he wears camouflage. The man attends church.
But it’s one thing to own and partake in the trappings of folksiness and another to live it, so I drove over to Minnesota to see whether Walz’s neighbors are buying the branding. . . .
After traveling the state and speaking with all manner of Minnesotans, I am certain of this: Nobody quite knows, or will say, who exactly Tim Walz is.
Sticking with Minnesota — Stanley Kurtz is out with an eye-opening piece on a Walz education appointee poised to bring his radical views to the state school system (an update can also be found here):
Brian Lozenski, an associate professor of urban and multicultural education at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minn., was appointed by Governor Tim Walz’s state education department to help write the statewide “implementation framework” (similar to a curriculum) for Minnesota’s new “ethnic studies” standards. It now emerges that Lozenski has called for the “overthrow” of the United States.
Lozenski is no outlier. On the contrary, he has been the leading voice advocating the addition of a radical version of “ethnic studies” to Minnesota’s social-studies standards (citizenship and government, economics, geography, history, and now ethnic studies). Lozenski is also the key organizer and thought leader for the radical leftist advocacy groups that Governor Walz has effectively put in charge of rewriting Minnesota’s social-studies standards. While Lozenski’s call for the overthrow of the United States is the clearest expression of his radical stance to date, it’s hardly surprising. For years, conservative voices in Minnesota have sounded the alarm over the extremism of Lozenski and his allies. Maybe now, Walz will have to answer for putting Lozenski and his friends in charge of education in the state.
Yet Walz is apparently doing everything possible to avoid accountability. According to an earlier promise by the Minnesota Department of Education’s interim communications director, Anna Arkin, the ethnic-studies implementation framework was supposed to have been released in time for a public comment period from August 9 through August 22. Yet no framework has yet been published.
The most recent public meeting of the committee that is crafting the implementation framework came and went this past Tuesday, September 24. Once again, no framework was produced. (For more, see this important account by Catrin Wigfall.) Increasingly, it appears that, contrary to earlier promises, there will be no public release or public comment period before the October 31 statutory deadline to submit a finalized ethnic-studies implementation framework. There is good reason to believe that the implementation framework is being withheld from the public to prevent it from becoming an issue in the presidential election.
It is impossible to create an honest implementation framework for Governor Walz’s new ethnic-studies standards without making the radicalism of those standards crystal clear. At points, they are flat-out anti-American. This is disguised at the moment by the standards’ unfamiliar leftist jargon. All of this tallies with Lozenski’s call to overthrow the United States. The anti-Americanism of Minnesota’s new ethnic-studies standards is tied to concepts that come directly from his work. Once you piece together the puzzle, it’s evident that an honest ethnic-studies implementation framework can’t help but expose Walz’s education extremism.
Plastic-bag bans are back, this time in California. Noah Rothman recalls the experience of our beloved Garden State:
For the last two years, New Jersey has had the dubious honor of being home to the dumbest new policy fad in America. It has spent that time clinging to a progressive reform so rigid, imperious, and counterproductive that you’d think no state would be pig-headed enough to pursue it. But apparently, California just couldn’t abide this challenge to its primacy as the most witless state in the union.
“California is banning all plastic shopping bags at grocery store checkouts under legislation that [Governor] Gavin Newsom signed on Sunday,” Axios reported. Newsom’s signature “honors the intent of a ban on single-use bags” the state passed into law ten years ago, but that included what one bag-banning lawmaker denounced as a “loophole” that “allowed stores to provide consumers with thicker plastic bags at checkout.”
If New Jersey’s experience is any indication, Californians can look forward to a costly new inconvenience that doesn’t provide the environmental benefits it promises.
The first of many unanticipated consequences associated with the Garden State’s prohibition on the distribution of shopping bags was the sudden disappearance of shopping carts and baskets from grocery stores. “They are just disappearing,” the CEO of Food Circus Super Markets complained. “I may actually have to just do away with them soon, can’t afford to keep replacing them.” Of course, the additional costs borne by grocers are passed on to consumers.
But that isn’t the only pricy imposition on New Jerseyans who prepare and consume food. Alternative shopping-bag sales skyrocketed in the state, as one might expect. “An in-depth cost analysis found a typical store can profit $200,000 per store location from alternative bag sales,” the Institute for Energy Research revealed. “For one major retailer, it amounted to an estimated $42 million in profit across all its bag sales in New Jersey.” It’s not that New Jersey residents were rigorous in their observance of the ban but that they are so often compelled to buy ever more shopping bags as a result of their own failure to keep a ready supply of totes with them at all times.
As Democratic New Jersey state senator Bob Smith observed, “the number of these bags are accumulating with customers.” New Jersey residents are drowning in reusable bags that rarely get reused. And because it requires a greater investment of energy and resources to make an ecofriendly shopping bag, the environmental benefits plastic-bag-banners envisioned are unlikely to be realized.
Indeed, the most you can say in the bag ban’s favor is that it was effective at banning bags.
CODA
One thing I love is stumbling upon a non-American act working in a distinctly American genre with a distinctly American sound. I wandered into a market in Goa once where a local band was growling out Pantera (metal, very metal); and if you ever find yourself in Reykjavík on a Thursday night, go to a bar called Dillon and head upstairs to see this gentleman play the blues. Then you have his fellow countrymen, under the name Kaleo (or KALEO, if you’re looking for an excuse to dust off that caps-lock key), who have achieved international fame playing . . . blues rock. “I Can’t Go On Without You” is a white-hot example. The genre may be a U.S./U.K. love child, but I heard these guys on the radio for years assuming wrongly that they were American.
Yet another example of Iceland’s outsize stamp on the music world. Thanks for reading, and have a good one.