 Dear Weekend Jolter, Welcome Tim Scott, welcome Ron DeSantis, welcome (checks notes) . . . Doug Burgum, maybe. Republicans' 2024 presidential primary field experienced another growth spurt this week, with the South Carolina senator and Florida governor officially declaring in quick succession. (Burgum — who, I'm sure most will need to be apprised, is the governor of North Dakota — has not declared but is said to be seriously considering a run too.) As of Friday, the GOP field stood at roughly seven candidates, including the latest entrants, Donald Trump, Nikki Haley, Larry Elder, Asa Hutchinson, and Vivek Ramaswamy, along with a handful of other lesser-knowns. Mike Pence, meanwhile, is contemplating a bid and recently visited New Hampshire and Iowa; Chris Christie is preparing to announce, allegedly; Axios reports that Virginia's Glenn Youngkin is reconsidering a run after appearing to back away just weeks earlier; and others are making similar noises. Even considering Mike Pompeo's April decision not to enter the race, it is evident that Trump's early announcement did not freeze the field. To the contrary, this presidential cycle looks set to host its share of Lincoln Chafees and Mike Gravels cluttering up the stage. And yet, a number of the non-Trump, non-DeSantis candidates are worthy contenders who should not be dismissed as mere impediments to a clean political death match. NR's editorial said of Tim Scott: He is popular with his colleagues in the Senate. He presents conservatism well, in a manner that is likely to attract converts. He has a friendly, honest, and open affect, which helps him discuss the thorniest issues in America in an unusually constructive way. In a word: He is an optimist. Historically, Republicans have done well when they have run optimists.
As for Ron DeSantis, notwithstanding the technical-difficulty-marred launch, his entry makes the 2024 GOP primary contest feel, at last, formed. Michael Brendan Dougherty was hopeful in predicting "the launch of his campaign will show that, indeed, he's not afraid of a confrontation with Donald Trump." To that point, NR's editorial counsels that DeSantis will have to be more "explicit" in the confrontation. But stepping back, Phil Klein wrote recently that DeSantis's mid-May haul of Iowa endorsements only reinforced how it was "insanely premature to write off DeSantis" so early in the cycle, as some had. (After all, if he weren't a threat to Trump, the former president's super PAC wouldn't be spending millions attacking him.) Likewise, it would be premature to focus too much on the ever-expanding field and its potential for splitting votes to Trump's benefit. The race is only beginning, and fortunes change. Phil wrote how Pence, for one, could see a viable path starting in Iowa, and he downplayed concerns about the crowding field. If early assumptions about presidential chances necessarily proved correct, Hillary Clinton would have faced a pre–Four Seasons Total Landscaping Rudy Giuliani in 2008, and Jeb! would have used his powers of low energy to clear the stage in 2016. As the Tim Scott editorial noted, "It is May 2023, a year and a half before the next presidential election, and, at this point, anything can happen." Even with Trump continuing to soar above the rest of the field in the RCP average. However (and here comes the but), Republicans should learn from Democrats' 2020 example, and prepare to self-consolidate before Super Tuesday once wheat and chaff have been separated — or else a Trump nomination is probably how this whole exercise ends up. The same editorial urged Scott to "have the wisdom to drop out before playing the role of spoiler," should his candidacy not catch fire — the advice, of course, applies to others in the field too. But hey — they can all learn from Pete Buttigieg's mistake and be sure to demand something safer in exchange than a posting at Transportation. NAME. RANK. LINK. EDITORIALS Once more, here are the Ron DeSantis and Tim Scott editorials Sarah Comrie's employer did not show a spine, but it's not too late to do so: Bellevue Hospital's Disgraceful Reaction to the Viral Citi Bike Video A positive step in the gender wars: Florida and Texas Defend Kids against Gender Madness ARTICLES Dan McLaughlin: Applying the Clarence Thomas Family Standard to the Biden Family Ari Blaff: Minnesota County Had No Right to Confiscate Elderly Woman's Home Equity, Supreme Court Rules Will Swaim: The California Reparations Commission Fails State History Brittany Bernstein: No, Florida School Didn't Ban Amanda Gorman's Poetry Brittany Bernstein: Trump PAC Has Now Spent More Attacking DeSantis Than Backing GOP Midterm Candidates Rich Lowry: Democrats Are Making a Crazy Bet John Fund: The Left Gaslights Us on San Francisco's Problems Kathryn Jean Lopez: The Best Commencement Speeches Have Nothing to Do with Politics John Yoo & Robert Delahunty: Biden's 14th Amendment Folly Noah Rothman: The Return of the Losers Rand Paul: Keep Artificial Intelligence out of Government Surveillance Abigail Anthony: Target Sheds $9 Billion in Market Cap amid Backlash over ‘PRIDE’ Collection
CAPITAL MATTERS Joel Kotkin closely examines Newsom's conundrum: The Governor's Gambit Brad Polumbo finds fault with a narrative: The Student Debt 'Crisis' Doesn't Actually Exist LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW. Armond White takes a soil sample of Paul Schrader's latest film and finds it lacking artistic nutrients: The White-Supremacist Fantasy of Master Gardener Brian Allen imbibes and describes the new Picasso exhibition at the Guggenheim: Picasso in the City of Lights FROM THE NEW, JUNE 12, 2023, ISSUE OF NR Noah Rothman: The War on Things That Work Andrew McCarthy: How the Bidens Got Rich John McCormack: Sorry, Trump Lost Madeleine Kearns: The U.S. Is an Outlier in 'Gender-Affirming Care' for Minors Thérèse Shaheen: China's Coming Decline NOW ENJOY YOUR EXCERPTS PREPARED FRESH, À LA MINUTE The new issue of NR is out, and it is jam-packed (see above, and here and here). I'd like to excerpt about a half-dozen articles, but I don't want to stress the servers. We've seen what happens when one does that. So, two then. First, Noah Rothman's cover story, "The War on Things That Work," is an instant classic and chronicles exactly what the title describes. From a passage about our beloved New Jersey: The irrepressible self-righteousness of America's technocratic social engineers may know no limits, but politicians who are responsible to voters just might learn from some of the green movement's failed experiments. Take the State of New Jersey's woeful example. In 2022, the Garden State implemented a policy so profoundly foolish that most residents probably doubted it would ever go into effect: an outright ban on single-use packaging — including food containers, plastic shopping bags, and even paper bags — in big-box and grocery stores. Advocates of this policy routinely present circular logic by insisting that the success of their proscription can be measured in the number of people who comply with it. Yes, banning bags is an effective way to ban bags. But by any other measure, the switch makes little sense. The alleged environmental benefits are indefinable. Scuttling plastic bags forces consumers to purchase and tote around reusable shopping bags, which require more energy and resources to produce (one European estimate found that reusable bags must be reused 7,100 times before they compete with plastic bags' carbon footprint) and are less sanitary (as some might recall from the pandemic). The practical impact of the ban was so pronounced for disabled and low-income residents and the charities that serve them that the state baked into the law loopholes that temporarily allowed certain institutions to avoid complying with it. The only observable effect of the ban has been to make daily life marginally more expensive and noticeably more annoying for New Jersey residents. The same might be said of far-more-widespread (but ever so gradually disappearing) restrictions on plastic straws. Straw restrictions — which, I kid you not, were conceived in response to a 2015 video shot by a Texas A&M scientist of a sea turtle struggling to dislodge a straw from its nostril — quickly made disposable plastic tubes into sought-after pieces of contraband. Hoarding plastic straws became the preoccupation of what the New York Times derisively deemed "die-hards." The reactionaries were admonished for refusing to adopt the plastic straw's ready replacement: the paper straw, which functions for all of ten minutes before dissolving into a wash of particulates that gluts your drink and coats your mouth. These campaigns against contrivances that improve the quality of daily life are not justified by clear environmental or material benefits. They are costly impositions on the time and resources of everyday Americans — downsides that their advocates apparently don't worry about.
Second, John McCormack engages in a thorough dismantling of Trump World fantasies: True the Vote, a Texas-based nonprofit, claims that by purchasing geo-location cellphone-tracking data it uncovered an elaborate scheme to steal the election. The scheme involved at least 2,000 people — the "mules" — who trafficked fraudulent ballots from liberal nonprofits to ballot drop boxes in the five key states that decided the election: Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona. True the Vote says it has obtained 4 million minutes — nearly 70,000 hours — of surveillance video of the drop boxes; the documentary shows a number of people dropping off a handful of ballots. "What you're seeing is a crime: These are fraudulent votes," D'Souza tells viewers as surveillance video shows one person dropping off a handful of ballots. According to True the Vote, its criteria for detecting each of the "2,000 mules" is a cellphone that over the course of the month leading up to the election made at least five visits near a nonprofit and ten visits near different drop boxes. The organization estimates that the 2,000 mules made an average of 38 trips each to drop boxes, depositing an average of five ballots per trip, for a total of 380,000 fraudulent votes spread across the five states. In the documentary, D'Souza then runs the numbers: Without these ballots, Biden would still have won Michigan and Wisconsin, but Trump would have narrowly prevailed in the Electoral College by eking out wins in Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. For a conspiracy so vast, the outcome seems a little underwhelming: Subtracting the alleged voter fraud facilitated by the supposed 2,000 mules would have given Trump a victory of just one-third of one percentage point in Arizona and Georgia, and the conspirators would not have been confident in advance that a small number of votes would deliver the election to Biden. But D'Souza has a solution to bolster the theory: more mules. "No one thinks that our 2,000 mules were the only mules trafficking illegal votes," he tells viewers. Taking D'Souza up on this proposition, True the Vote then lowers the threshold for determining who was a mule, counting cellphones that were detected near a minimum of five drop boxes rather than the original ten. "This revealed a huge upsurge in the number of mules, from 2,000 to 54,000 mules," D'Souza says. Voilà ! Without the 54,000 mules, Trump would have handily won each of the five states. . . . Despite the supposed existence of 54,000 illegal-ballot traffickers who placed fraudulent ballots at multiple drop boxes, D'Souza and True the Vote have publicly named precisely none of them. Trump's political operation, flush with tens of millions of dollars, has identified no mules. Republican attorneys general in Arizona and Georgia, desperate for Trump's support, have been able to expose not a single mule. According to True the Vote's anonymous sources, the mules are criminals working for $10 a ballot. To evade public detection over the past three years, these 54,000 petty criminals must somehow have maintained operational security and secrecy that would put SEAL Team Six to shame. Despite the 70,000 hours of surveillance footage, the documentary does not actually show a single person making more than one trip to a ballot drop box. If there were 54,000 mules — or even just 2,000 — shouldn't the footage have detected hundreds of them? In the year since the documentary was released, some individuals shown dropping off a handful of ballots at a single drop box have been publicly identified by their vehicles' license plates, but there is no evidence that they acted illegally. The Georgia secretary of state's office investigated three cases and dismissed each of them.
In defense of Sarah Comrie, from NR's editorial: When Sarah Comrie prepared to bike home after completing her twelve-hour shift at Bellevue Hospital while six months pregnant, she could hardly have expected that within days she would become an infamous supervillain, and that she'd be placed on leave from her job. But in this era of viral outrage, that's exactly what happened. For those who haven't seen it, last week a video exploded on social media showing Comrie and a young man struggling over a Citi Bike that both had claimed to have rented. (Citi Bike is New York City's public bike-rental service.) In the video, Comrie yells for help, cries, and complains that the young man trying to grab the bike from her hit her unborn child. She is heckled by a group of men surrounding her, who accuse her of fake crying, and joke that "her baby gonna come out retarded." The group intimidates her into switching to another bike. Given that Comrie is white and the young man she was struggling with is black, it didn't take long for the video to spread and get processed through our nation's toxic racial discourse. . . . Instead of standing by its employee — or, at the minimum, awaiting more facts — NYC Health + Hospitals, which operates Bellevue and all other public hospitals in the city, swiftly caved. Calling the video "disturbing," the hospital network announced in a statement that "the provider is currently out on leave and will remain on leave pending a review." This is a disgraceful overreaction. Based purely on the short video, there is no evidence that Comrie did anything wrong. And now, we have actual evidence that points in the other direction. A lawyer for Comrie has shown receipts to several media outlets demonstrating that Comrie took out the bike in question, at the time in question, for one minute — which would be consistent with the elapsed time on the video. (The bike's serial number, visible on freeze-frame in the video, matches the number on the receipts.)
ICYMI, Will Swaim definitively fact-checked the history in the California reparations commission's report. Here's one passage: Though California entered the Union a free state, Southern apologists never surrendered their hope of one day capturing the Golden State. These fantasists foresaw the creation of a vast slave empire, fueled by California gold and run through Pacific Ocean ports, stretching not just coast to coast but globally, too — south through Mexico, Central and South America, all the way to frigid Tierra del Fuego, and westward across the Pacific Ocean to grasp all of Asia. When the Union blocked Southern ports in the summer of 1861, Richmond's malignant California dream became an urgent military necessity. Confederate troops massing ominously in West Texas suddenly crossed that border, invading the New Mexico Territory and establishing a regional capital in Mesilla with an outpost farther west in Tucson. From that fortress town, the rebels began probing the desert path to California. Set against Southern ambition, some 2,000 Californians volunteered for training at Camp Downey, in what's now Oakland. This newly minted First California Volunteer Infantry, along with regular Army units, was shipped to Los Angeles and from there stepped off on a 900-mile march across Southern California's hellish eastern deserts toward the Confederate Army. Water and food were scarce along the route. Just as formidable were the Apache Indians; fierce defenders of their historic lands, they were a constant threat to the Californians. Still, they marched. On April 15, 1862, at Picacho Pass, 50 miles northwest of Tucson, twelve California scouts ran into ten rebel "pickets" — guards at the westernmost tip of the advancing Confederate Army. Their engagement was brief and deadly. Irish-born Californian lieutenant James Barrett led the attack, quickly capturing three Confederates and killing another. But when he had secured one of the prisoners and swung back onto his mount, Barrett was briefly in the range of a sharp-eyed rebel sniper. Shot through the neck, Barrett bled out on the spot. Two other Californians, Privates George Johnson and William Leonard, were shot and died nearby. The retreating Confederate pickets carried news of the advancing California Column back to their outpost in Tucson; from there, the Confederates packed up and fled back to Texas. The Battle of Picacho Pass ended the western advance of the most malignant force in the first American century. It ended the slaveholders' dream of global empire. But that achievement left behind the dreams of three young Californians. Johnson was just 21, Leonard perhaps 26; their bodies were returned to California and buried at the San Francisco Presidio. Barrett's body, reportedly buried in a shallow grave, was never found. In 1928, the Arizona Pioneers Historical Society and the Southern Pacific Railroad erected a monument, near U.S. 10, to recall their sacrifice in the "only battle of the Civil War fought in Arizona Territory." The California Column wasn't unique. From a state population of just 380,000, more than 17,000 Californians joined the Union ranks — "the highest per-capita total for any state in the Union," notes the state's Department of Parks and Recreation. Fewer than 300 Californians left to join the Confederacy. Few Americans today recall the Californians' commitment. There is no mention of it in the state's reparations report. Here as elsewhere, the commission's report often speaks loudest in its silences.
Shout-Outs Steven Nelson, at the New York Post: Second Hunter Biden IRS whistleblower emerges after dismissal despite five years on case Larry Sand, at City Journal: Uneducating America Ben Shapiro: Will Elon Musk Break the Legacy Media Stranglehold? CODA In response to last week's call-out for song titles that grab you, frequent Coda contributor Kevin Antonio writes in with a song title that knows what it wants: "Political Song for Michael Jackson to Sing," by Minutemen. And another regular, Kevin in St. Petersburg, offers Peter Gabriel's "Shock the Monkey." Thank you, gents. I'll close out with a palate cleanser, to follow a couple weeks of hard-rock-themed Codas: Balanescu Quartet's sublime "East." Enjoy. | 
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