 Dear Weekend Jolter, A month ago, the New York Times published an article titled, "How a Few Stories of Regret Fuel the Push to Restrict Gender Transition Care." It gave the intended impression that, but for a few politically exploited individuals, the case for strict regulation of the medical industry in this field would have little to support it. Why, the author even cited, as evidence, the opinion of the medical industry itself. It's more than a "few stories," it turns out. National Review's Caroline Downey has, in just the last two months, interviewed several others (as well as one cited by the Times) as part of our series, "The Detransitioners." Their accounts are harrowing, as Jack Crowe and Caroline detail here, and they follow a pattern: Each of the series' subjects struggled with mental-health problems as adolescents and were nevertheless steered toward medical transition by professionals who either downplayed or completely ignored the long-term mental and physical consequences of surgical and hormonal interventions.
Caroline's work is just one example of the kind of assiduous and impactful coverage we're asking our readers to support, as part of our ongoing webathon. The documented reality of "gender-affirming care" is critical to the ongoing legislative debates over regulation, particularly as it pertains to minors. The stats on detransition are notoriously unreliable, involving people who may not wish to report their experience (the Economist noted reported rates between 1 percent and 30 percent, with the latter a high-end stat for certain military patients). Data from gender-identity clinics in Europe reflect a sharp uptick in patients beginning roughly a decade ago. The minors who sought this treatment are maturing now, and some have a story to tell, not always positive; Caroline's reporting could represent the tip of the iceberg of detransitioners. Their experiences will vary, but what we're learning makes even clearer that activists cannot be allowed to shut down research and debate (as happened with a recently retracted journal article) — and that the state-level legislation generating so much angst is simply meant to shield children from drastic, life-altering medical procedures for which they cannot give true consent. Despite the media narrative about "attacks" on LGBT people, America is in fact an outlier in the field, and common-sense restrictions are already being imposed across Europe. Roughly 20 U.S. states and counting are now moving in the same direction, with full or partial bans on medical gender interventions for minors (with a handful blocked in the courts). Most were approved this year. As Rich Lowry writes, "There is reason to believe that we are winning the trans debate now or, at the very least, that the other side has overreached." The tide is turning, as the American public starts to realize what Western Europe already has — and lawmakers take their cue. But it will take relentless work to ensure this continues to be the case, and to keep the coverage grounded in reality. This is why we ask for your help, for your contributions. Running a magazine and website featuring top-notch writers comes with costs — and we rely on donations, in addition to subscriptions and, yes, ad revenue to keep everything afloat. We appreciate anything you can chip in. Thank you. NAME. RANK. LINK. EDITORIALS It's good to be (the son of) the king: Hunter Biden's Sweetheart Deal More evidence regarding a public-policy disaster: The Pandemic School Closures’ Terrible Toll Sacrifices were made: The Price of Blinken's China Trip ARTICLES Andrew McCarthy: The Intentionally Provocative Hunter Biden Plea Deal Ryan Mills & Jeff Zymeri: How Rampant Crime Turned Westfield Mall into a Symbol of San Francisco's Decline Dan McLaughlin: Justice Alito Has Done Nothing Wrong Rich Lowry: Check Out the Very Latest Pride Flags Rocking the Month of June Ari Blaff: 'Terminal Decline': Ontario Teachers Plead for Help as Schools Descend into Violent Mayhem Jack Fowler: Could I Have Cracked the Biden Brain Code? Jay Nordlinger: The Courage of a Cuban Writer Noah Rothman: Every Lawyer's Nightmare Client Caroline Downey: Sorority Doubles Down on Admission of Male Student, Urges Court to Dismiss ‘Frivolous’ Lawsuit Charles C. W. Cooke: The Titan Sub and the Terror of the Sea CAPITAL MATTERS Marc Joffe looks at what's troubling public agencies: Local Government's Death by DEI Richard M. Reinsch II & David L. Bahnsen, with a back-to-basics appeal: Can We Talk About Economic Growth Again? LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW. Tell us what you really think, Armond: Nobody's Hero Is a Cuck's Tale Brian Allen turns court-watcher, tracking a case of DEI gone wrong: Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum Fires a Longtime Employee for Requesting a Definition of 'Systemic Racism' FROM THE NEW, JULY 10, 2023, ISSUE OF NR Lionel Shriver: The Modern Quest for Immortality Charles C. W. Cooke: Bad Arguments for Nominating Trump Noah Rothman: In Ukraine's Counteroffensive, What Counts as Success? John Bolton: Civilization, Not Isolation IF YOU'VE SCROLLED THIS FAR, YOU MUST BE TIRED NR's editorial takes a closer look at the Hunter Biden plea deal: According to court documents filed Tuesday, Biden will plead guilty to two misdemeanor charges of willful failure to pay income taxes which, after years of dithering, the Biden Justice Department is accepting in lieu of felony tax-evasion charges that would have carried potential five-year terms of incarceration. This will allow him to be sentenced to probation. More mind-boggling given the Democrats' anti-firearms theatrics, Biden is being allowed to enter "pretrial diversion" (essentially a counseling program) in lieu of being prosecuted for possession of a handgun by a user of illegal narcotics. That's a federal felony, carrying a potential ten-year prison sentence, based on a statute that was shepherded through Congress by none other than then-senator Joe Biden during the Clinton administration. . . . The Hunter Biden deal is another instance of the transparently preferential treatment offered by America's justice system to prominent, connected, or expensively represented people. Less famous or well-positioned defendants, who are not offered monetary damages and zero jail time on tax fraud and felony handgun possession, may justly wonder at the curious luck of such a notoriously public drug addict. The temptation to compare the light sentence Hunter Biden has received to the serious legal jeopardy Donald Trump currently faces in his federal indictment is inevitable. It's worth remembering, though, if Trump had followed the advice of his lawyers, and simply returned all his illicit classified material, he wouldn't have faced charges in the first place. Of course, the Hunter Biden story does not end here. His alarming and highly lucrative influence-peddling with foreign interests is a far more serious matter than the tax-evasion and gun-possession matters. Last month, the House Oversight Committee, led by Chairman James Comer, released a report detailing how the president's family members and their associates raked in over $10 million from foreign nationals and their related companies since Biden's days as vice president. Senator Chuck Grassley has said that the FBI is withholding a document where a source is cited as saying that a separate party not only bribed both Bidens, but also audiotaped himself doing so. This could of course be an impeachable offense if the underlying allegation were true.
Lionel Shriver's new NR cover story is about death, and those who would try to evade it: The promise of eternal life has conventionally been the dangled carrot of religion. It is now the holy grail of Silicon Valley. After all, what good is being a Big Tech billionaire if all that money can't buy you out of ending up drooling, doddering, and in due course nonexistent, just like your undocumented gardener? Fascinated by parabiosis, the transfusion of young people's blood into older veins, PayPal's Peter Thiel is heavily invested in health and biotech companies. Amazon's Jeff Bezos is throwing tens of millions at longevity projects. Microsoft's co-founder Bill Gates has donated $100 million of his own money to dementia research. Life-extension ventures are popping up everywhere, with names like Verily, Elevian, Fountain, Halcyon Molecular, Nootrobox, Navitor, Stemcentrx, the Methuselah Foundation, and Human Longevity, Inc. Why, by 2017 Americans' investment in longevity topped $7 trillion, thus constituting the world's third-largest economy. Meanwhile, the Terasem Movement, People Unlimited, and the Church of Perpetual Life have bettered plain old Christianity with more appealing religions that entice their flocks with eternity sans the disagreeable business of dying first. A disclaimer: I'm no medical researcher. I'm a fiction writer. While I do routinely stick my nose into a host of nonfiction subjects that are none of a fantasist's business, I'm still in no position to analyze the prospects of success for cryonics, stem-cell therapy, nanotechnology, telomere extension, transhumanism (which foresees the uploading of consciousness to more-durable synthetic bodies or computers), the eradication of senescent cells, or the life-sustaining effects of living a hundred days underwater. But I'm as qualified as anyone to wonder: Why is the clichéd search for a fountain of youth accelerating, with no apparent sense of embarrassment? Is the ambition to hang about indefinitely healthy or warped? What might be the up- and downsides of living for hundreds if not thousands of years? And what could a greatly protracted or veritably infinite life be like? In my last novel, Should We Stay or Should We Go, I dedicate a long chapter titled "You're Not Getting Older, You're Getting Better" to a future in which my protagonists live to see a cure for ageing. Like all their neighbors, my once-elderly British couple can soon pass for 25. If they keep looking both ways before crossing the street, they will live forever. . . . So I've thought about this stuff. In the book, eternity starts off great. Then it begins to wear. Mind, efforts to push the human envelope fall into discrete camps. Immortalists truly hope to conquer death. Less head-in-the-clouds efforts aim to extend life span beyond today's surprisingly low American life expectancy of 76 years. I'm personally keenest on the ambition solely to increase "health span." What's also known as "morbidity compression" would impede or reverse the physical and cognitive ravages of ageing, which some clinicians characterize as a disease. The goal is not necessarily for us to live longer, but for us to live well longer, thereby saving health-care systems a bundle. For the irony of all these resources being poured into longevity is that, economically and experientially, shedloads of people are living too long — in terrible shape.
Jay Nordlinger has a fascinating interview with Cuban dissident Abraham Jiménez Enoa, conducted in Oslo: He and I are sitting down, not in Spain, but in Norway — at the Oslo Freedom Forum. Jiménez Enoa is a journalist and writer, the author of La isla oculta ("The Hidden Island"). He is an unlikely dissident — an unlikely rebel against the Castro dictatorship. Abraham Jiménez Enoa was born in 1988 to a revolutionary family. His grandfather was a bodyguard to both Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. His father was a colonel in the interior ministry. This was a strongly pro-regime family, a faithful family, if you will. Guevara was the padrino of Abraham's grandparents' wedding. A padrino is a kind of patron, or sponsor. When did Abraham start to have doubts? Doubts about the regime and its legitimacy and its goodwill? When he was a university student, really. His parents were alarmed, as you can imagine. And when Abraham went into dissidence, they were scared — scared because very bad things happen to dissidents in Cuba. (Bad things happen to their families, too.) . . . On one terrible day, state agents seized Jiménez Enoa and stripped him of his clothes. They put handcuffs on him and forced his head between his feet. They filmed him and mocked him. They threatened to imprison him and destroy his family. This went on for hours. Eventually, they let him go. That night, Jiménez Enoa saw himself on television, as the state further attempted to humiliate him, this time before the whole nation. They called him a "CIA agent." Today, in Oslo, Jiménez Enoa can joke a little about that. "Where's my money, from the CIA?" On July 11, 2021, the country erupted in protests, and the government cracked down, viciously. If dissidence was dangerous and painful before, it was even more so thereafter. The likes of Abraham Jiménez Enoa were under tremendous pressure. The government had been holding Jiménez Enoa's passport. But, in November, they gave him the ultimatum: We will return your passport — but only if you leave the country, immediately. Otherwise, you're going to prison. When he got off the plane, he was amazed. "I landed in Barcelona, capitalism, the Western world." He had never been in a subway system. He had never had a bank account. "I had the feeling of being born again. It was as if I had landed on Saturn or in another galaxy." He realized, more than ever, that Cuba was a cruel and abnormal country. It is "an island kidnapped by a political system" that has kept the country in darkness for almost 65 years.
Ari Blaff is out with his latest disturbing installment in a series on the troubled Ontario school system. This one focuses on the teachers (and students) struggling under a lax discipline system that seems to serve no one well: Video footage obtained by National Review confirms that a troubling pattern of violence has been allowed to take root at St. Thomas Aquinas. Many of the recorded incidents took place in front of the very same entrance where [James] Murphy intervened that fateful day. Virtually no Canadian media outlet has written about the disciplinary issues as the district has sought to suppress stories and press coverage, teachers from the district who spoke with NR confirmed. On February 9, two female students came to blows, tussling and grabbing one another's hair. One of them had brought a knife to school and dropped it during the altercation. It took administrators half an hour to locate the weapon, one teacher said. Administrators failed to institute a school lockdown, in apparent violation of protocol. On the last day of the 2021-2022 academic school year, June 24, at least two vicious fights broke out between students, neither of which resulted in a police or administrative investigation. In one video, a fight between two male students devolved into a swarming attack with multiple bystanders joining in, stomping and pummeling a downed student. At one point, the dazed kid is kicked directly in the face. The knot of students surrounding the fight then transforms into a scrum wrangling over a metal baseball bat. A middle-aged bystander, who is not a teacher, fortunately wrestled hold of the weapon screaming for everyone to "Go home!" repeatedly until the crowd dispersed. A short time later, in front of the school's infamous main entrance, two female students got entangled in a violent altercation. Dozens of students cheered and filmed the fight without intervening. No students were suspended or disciplined because of the brawls, according to Murphy. The normalization of violence across Ontario public schools is the direct result of administrators discouraging teachers from proactively intervening to stop altercations, several teachers said. Teachers are now instructed by administrators to close their doors, focus on teaching, and ignore the mayhem that routinely unfolds in hallways and near school entrances. Attempts to enforce Catholic school uniforms are futile. "They start swearing at you. Who the f*** are you? Do you know who you're f***ing talking to?" Murphy says. Ask a student for their name? Don't even bother. "We've lost the hallways," Murphy, who keeps tabs on developments at St. Thomas Aquinas, confessed. . . . A Dufferin-Peel spokesman refused to comment on specific instances of violence but noted that "violent incidents have increased post-pandemic across DPCDSB and many jurisdictions across North America." "Student behaviour is assessed against the requirements dictated by the Education Act and its regulations, which outline which progressive disciplinary consequences are appropriate and required based on the behaviour," he added. "DPCDSB is committed to responding to all acts of violence according to appropriate legislation, policy, and procedure."
Shout-Outs Bill Barr, at the Free Press: The Truth About the Trump Indictment Allysia Finley, at the Wall Street Journal: The Root Causes of San Francisco's Disorder Drew Holden, at the Washington Free Beacon: CNN’s Presidential Fact Checker Hasn’t Fact-Checked Biden in Months CODA In keeping with the webathon theme, and following up on a prior week's appreciation of Mr. Bungle, please savor "Sweet Charity." Thanks again, everyone, for your support, readership, or even vague interest in what we do over here. Have a fine weekend. Oh, what the heck: Have a great one. | 
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