Dear Weekend Jolter,
Way back in 2019, the Democrat-controlled House came close to formally condemning Congresswoman Ilhan Omar for antisemitic remarks, only for the resolution to get watered down to instead condemn bigotry of all kinds. It ended up being such an ecumenical list of different denominations of discrimination that Omar — the original, intended target of rebuke — was able to turn around and tout it as a victory for its call-out against anti-Muslim bigotry.
Democratic leaders might be feeling regret for not taking a firmer stance back then. Festering antisemitism in the ranks leaked into public view once more this week, only this time compelling members of leadership and other colleagues who don’t want to be affiliated with rigid anti-Israel attitudes to unequivocally speak out.
Pramila Jayapal, leader of the House progressives, invited the backlash by calling Israel a “racist state.” House Democratic leaders soon issued a statement asserting the opposite and underscoring the enduring nature of the U.S.–Israel “special relationship.” Dozens of other Democrats released their own statement calling Jayapal’s comments “unacceptable” and opposing “anti-Zionist voices that embolden antisemitism.” Jayapal walked back her remarks, sort of.
By the standards of intra-caucus scraps, the condemnations were positively scalding. Where was that resolve in 2019, when leaders initially blasted Omar but then backed down? What changed? Noah Rothman says: politics. He elaborates:
Many of the Democratic Party’s biggest near-term challenges are attributable to shifting attitudes toward Israel within its coalition.
A Pew Research Center survey conducted in 2021 found that 75 percent of Orthodox Jewish voters now self-identify as Republicans. That’s a dramatic increase from 2013, when just 57 percent of the Orthodox community affiliated itself with the GOP. These voters demonstrated their strength in 2022, when they ousted sitting New York Democrats like Sean Patrick Maloney from office and came close to installing Lee Zeldin in the Albany governor’s mansion. This spring, Democrats struggled to find a recruit who could appeal to the Jews in the suburban New York City district once represented by Nita Lowey, and captured in 2022 by Republican Mike Lawler. A similar phenomenon has contributed to the Democratic Party’s declining prospects in South Florida, and Republican candidates are busily capitalizing on their opponents’ unforced errors.
There is no high-minded principle on display from Democrats here. The attack on Jayapal and, by extension, the sentiments that prevail among the most vocal members of the Democratic base, are informed by the party’s instinct toward self-preservation.
Questions over motivation aside, Democratic leaders have another problem. Given the restless hostility to Israel in the ranks, as NR’s editorial points out, “it’s getting harder and harder” for them to draw the distinction between opposing specific policies of the Netanyahu government and opposing Israel itself.
While Jayapal was making work for her colleagues’ communications staff, members of the “Squad” (led by Omar, natch) were vowing to boycott Israeli president Isaac Herzog’s speech to Congress. Our editorial makes clear why this could not be framed as a mere Bibi-directed protest:
When Democratic leadership decided to invite Herzog to speak last fall, it was viewed as a noncontroversial way to commemorate Israel’s 75th anniversary. In Israel’s parliamentary system, the prime minister steers policy, while the president serves as the ceremonial head of state, with no policy portfolio. To the extent that Herzog has weighed in on policy matters in recent months, it has been to urge Netanyahu to seek compromise and back off his reforms of the nation’s judiciary. In short, there is no reason for members to boycott Herzog unless their objections are to Israel in general, rather than over a specific policy or figure.
Republicans, meanwhile, pounced sought to realign the House on the issue — and brought a resolution to the floor stating that Israel is not racist, denouncing antisemitism, and affirming the U.S.–Israel alliance (it passed overwhelmingly, supported by Jayapal). To be sure, the far Right has its own (well-known) antisemitism problems — tiki-torchers, Nick Fuentes, etc. — which have been justifiably covered by the media and condemned. And, as Herzog alluded to in his address, Israel’s judicial overhaul has drawn widespread protest inside the country — a debate he called “painful and deeply unnerving” — not just from critics abroad.
But the Herzog boycotts and sweeping condemnations tap into a reserve of animus little connected to changes to Israel’s checks and balances. The party that talks a lot about dog whistles is finally perking up to the shrill sound emanating from inside the tent.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
The allegations surrounding the first family are getting more serious by the week: The Jaw-Dropping Hunter Biden–Investigation Revelations
The muddying of the “book ban” debate continues: What Obama’s Letter to Libraries Leaves Out
ARTICLES
Andrew McCarthy & Jack Crowe: Bidens Pressured Burisma Founder into Paying $10 Million Bribe to Get Ukrainian Prosecutor Fired, FBI Source Claims
Dan McLaughlin: Donald Trump’s Stupid, Pointless War on Republican Governors
Becket Adams: The Press Was Complicit in Biden’s ‘Uncle Joe’ Myth
Madeleine Kearns: In Defense of Jonah Hill
Rich Lowry: Mutually Assured Re-Nomination
Rich Lowry: Since When Did the Pentagon Become a Chapter of Planned Parenthood?
Yuval Levin: Distinguishing Two Revolutions
Jay Nordlinger: Friends of the Chinese
Haley Strack: ‘We Have a Problem’: Georgia Legislature’s First Black Republican Woman Explains Why She Switched Parties
Brittany Bernstein: Biden-Appointed D.C. U.S. Attorney Quashed Hunter’s Felony Tax Charges, IRS Whistleblower Testifies
David Bhatti: Pakistan’s Blasphemy Laws Are Targeting, and Killing, Religious Minorities
Christian Schneider: Democrats Embrace Government by Word Puzzle
Charles C. W. Cooke: Harvard’s Mark Tushnet Wants Joe Biden to Become a Dictator
Noah Rothman: Trump Is the New O.J.
(Also: Check out MBD’s AMA-style exchange with NRPLUS members from this week. On matters personal, Ukraine-related, and more. Thanks to everyone who participated in this.)
CAPITAL MATTERS
John Mozena offers a cautionary tale about economic-development subsidies: Ohio’s Long-Running Corporate-Welfare Farce Takes Another Absurd Turn
Dominic Pino punctures the fantasy: Elizabeth Warren’s Inflation Magic
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Armond White does the full Barbenheimer: Barbie Gets Weaponized & Oppenheimer’s Revenge of the Geeks
Brian Allen revisits the topic of the Carnegie Museum of Art, diving into an exhibition featuring a West Coast artist who liked to feature her pets, so we’re already off on the right foot here: Discovering Joan Brown, a San Francisco Star
Jonathan Nicastro isn’t just trolling us, he swears. Hear him out: Taylor Swift Didn’t Charge Enough for the Eras Tour
LIKE TOM CRUISE, THESE EXCERPTS NEVER AGE
Following up on last weekend’s newsletter theme, Andy McCarthy and Jack Crowe lay out the details of some pretty damning allegations concerning Biden family dealings (again):
According to an unidentified informant businessman, the founder of Burisma recounted being pressured by then-Vice President Joe Biden to put Biden’s son Hunter on the Ukrainian energy company’s board, and for $10 million in bribes — $5 million each to Joe and Hunter Biden — in order to use Biden’s political influence to force the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor who was investigating Burisma.
The prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, was fired by the Ukrainian government a few months after Vice President Biden, in late 2015, threatened then-Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko that the Obama administration would withhold $1 billion in congressionally approved U.S. funding unless Kyiv fired Shokin. Biden later bragged about the threat in a 2018 interview at the Council on Foreign Relations.
The bribery information was provided to the FBI in a series of meetings with the informant beginning in 2017. Those meetings were summarized in re-interview of the informant on June 30, 2020, and outlined in a Form 1023, the standard FBI form used to record information from an interview with a confidential human source (CHS). As National Review previously reported, this 1023 report has been the subject of an extensive dispute between the House Oversight Committee, which subpoenaed the document, and the FBI, which fought its release and then made a redacted version of the document available to the committee with significant restrictions.
The 1023 report was released Thursday afternoon with minimal redactions by Senator Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) . . .
Burisma’s founder and CEO is Mykola Zlochevsky. The CHS, a businessman, first dealt with him indirectly in the 2015-16 time frame. The CHS was introduced to Burisma executives by an associate, identified as Oleksandr Ostapenko, who accompanied the CHS to a meeting at Burisma headquarters to discuss the company’s acquisition of an American energy firm that would allow them to IPO in the U.S.
During the meeting, Burisma CFO Vadim Pojarskii listed the company’s board of directors, which included the former president and prime minister of Poland as well as Hunter Biden who, he said, was brought on “to protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems.”
The CHS then asked why Burisma needed his assistance with the acquisition of a U.S. energy company given Hunter Biden’s involvement, prompting Pojarskii to concede that the younger Biden’s limited intelligence meant he was of little value outside of the influence he could exercise over his father. . . . At a subsequent meeting two months later, the CHS expressed concern that Shokin’s investigation of Burisma would damage the company’s prospective IPO in the U.S. Zlochevsky, the Burisma CEO, replied something to the effect of, “don’t worry Hunter will take care of all of those Issues through his dad.” He allegedly went on to say that he had paid $5 million each to Hunter and Joe Biden, an admission the CHS said was not at all unusual in Eastern European circles, where businessman enjoy bragging about their influence.
What is Trump thinking? Dan McLaughlin explores the question that’s more or less our national pinned tweet, in this case concerning Trump’s war on GOP governors who are popular:
Being governor of an early-primary state hasn’t immunized Iowa’s Kim Reynolds or New Hampshire’s Chris Sununu.
Reynolds has been a great political success since taking over for Terry Branstad; she was reelected with 50.3 percent of the vote in 2018 amidst a tough climate for Republicans in the Upper Midwest and won handily with 58 percent in 2022, five points ahead of Trump’s best performance there. But while Reynolds has not made an endorsement for 2024, Trump is hypersensitive to the appearance that Reynolds has been favorable to DeSantis, who seems to be openly considering her as a potential running mate. Trump is undoubtedly also still worried about a state he lost to Ted Cruz in 2016 after having insulted its voters and suggested that they were brain-damaged because of a poll that had shown Ben Carson ahead of Trump.
The result of that insecurity is a fusillade of attacks on Reynolds. Trump told a stone-faced crowd that “I hate to say it, without me, you know, she was not going to win [in 2018], you know that, right?” . . .
Other Republican contenders rallied to Reynolds’s defense. One Iowa state senator who had previously endorsed Trump, Jeff Reichman, switched to supporting DeSantis in response — DeSantis’s 38th endorsement from an Iowa state legislator.
Sununu, like Hogan, has offered his share of criticisms of Trump. Still, Sununu is broadly popular in New Hampshire, having won four consecutive gubernatorial elections, and having earned 52.8 percent in his first reelection bid in 2018, 65.1 percent in 2020, and 57 percent in 2022 — all in a state Trump has lost twice and where independent voters make up a large share of the primary electorate. In a New Hampshire interview, before Sununu ruled out a presidential bid, Trump called Sununu “a little bit cuckoo” and said “he couldn’t be elected now.” At a rally, Trump asked the crowd of Sununu, “Isn’t he a nasty guy?” . . .
Trying to work out what Donald Trump is thinking is a famously futile endeavor, but there are two possible explanations. The first is simply that Trump’s fans enjoy watching him in conflict, and Trump himself thrives on conflict and the attention it brings, to the point where it never really matters who Trump is fighting or whether he wins. The fighting is the point.
The second explanation is Trump’s need to assert his dominance by showing that he will hit back at anyone who slights him in any way (real or perceived) or stands in his path. From this perspective, rhetorical grenades are a form of deterrence, and the fact that they frequently land as duds doesn’t change the message: I will give you a headache and make it your problem if you come at me.
Of course, if you’re a Republican voter who wants to see the party and its agenda succeed rather than be subordinated to whatever serves Trump’s impulses at any given moment, none of this does the least bit of good.
ICYMI, Maddy Kearns penned a defense of actor Jonah Hill last weekend (for those who need catching up, this was about an ex who shared texts purportedly showing his relationship “don’ts”). We rarely get to include any celeb news in this space, so . . . here’s our chance:
Victim feminism has become a veil for all behaviors, including sheer spitefulness. Why, for instance, is [Sarah] Brady sharing these messages now? She is no longer in a relationship with Hill. Brady said that she had to share the messages for her own “mental health,” and that she waited until after Hill’s child was born so as not to stress out his pregnant girlfriend. She wrote, “It may seem as if I am sharing a lot, you all have no idea how much more there is which I am choosing not to share out of consideration for him and his family.”
This thinly veiled “there’s more where this came from” threat recalls the similar antics of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry when they made their infamous accusation that someone in the royal family had expressed “concerns” about the skin color of their future child, while refusing to say who said it or what exactly what was said. In these situations, vague allusions are even more damaging. At least a specific comment can be explained or refuted.
I’m not claiming Jonah Hill is an upstanding gentleman. I really have no idea. But so far, the only evidence brought against him are texts expressing sentiments that aren’t necessarily abnormal.
Ending on some history, Yuval Levin explains how the American and French revolutions were different, a reply of sorts to Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s gauzy tribute on Bastille Day:
The American and French revolutions were “fueled by the same aspirations” in the sense that the fire in the hearth of a warm and stable home is fueled by the same oxygen as a raging inferno that burns down a city. Oxygen is vital, and fire is a tremendous force for good, but to set it loose without some broader grasp of how it can be used to support a flourishing household is to run the risk of catastrophe.
But that is not what Blinken was saying, of course. He was saying the American and French revolutions sought the same ends by the same means.
There were some Americans who thought the same, at least in the early stages of the French Revolution. One of them was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, so his view certainly has to be taken seriously. But it’s worth seeing that for all of his zeal for the French Revolution while it was happening, Thomas Jefferson concluded late in his life, after seeing what became of the Revolution, that it had gone too far, and that if the king and the people had reached an arrangement more like the moderate American regime (or even like the limited monarchy of the British), they could have averted “those enormities which demoralised the nations of the world, and destroyed, and is yet to destroy millions and millions of its inhabitants.”
Those enormities were a function of the unbounded radicalism of the revolution itself, and of the fact that they then led to military dictatorship and the Napoleonic wars. This was not where the American Revolution pointed, because while the American Revolution sought to ground political life in the core and fundamental truth that we are all equal under God, it did not take this truth to require a politics of radical disjuncture.
Shout-Outs
Sheluyang Peng, at Tablet: How False History Is Used to Justify Discrimination Against Asian Americans
Helen Raleigh, at the Federalist: China Is Way Too Risky For American Travelers And Businesses
Bari Weiss, at the Free Press: When Ideology Corrupts Medicine—and How One Reporter Exposed it
CODA
I’ve touted the virtuosity before of Steven Wilson, but talent attracts talent — and his albums introduced me to another remarkable musician with whom he performs: Ninet Tayeb. The Israeli singer (and actress) is huge in her home country. It’s not difficult to understand why. Check out her work on “Routine,” which crescendos toward “Great Gig in the Sky” levels of intensity, and this is only rehearsal footage. Skip ahead to about the six-minute mark if you like.
Have a great weekend, and thanks for reading. I’ll be out next week/weekend; the trusted Jack Crowe will be taking over this note in my absence.