Dear Weekend Jolter,
Why are people so cynical about politics these days?
No need to look too strenuously for answers. They're all around. Take Covid-19. Representative Brad Wenstrup (R., Ohio), chairman of the subcommittee probing the pandemic, observed in a comprehensive report this week that the experience brought out a "distrust in leadership" among the American public. In your freshman-year writing class, you might have learned that this is a device called understatement.
Indeed, the report's section and subsection titles themselves mark the fracture points in the relationship between Americans and government officials, an ugly montage of mendacity about Covid-19 and the response to it. A sampling:
The World Health Organization Failed to Uphold Its Mission and Caved to Chinese Communist Party Pressure
The Six-Foot Social Distancing Requirement Was Not Supported by Science
Masks and Mask Mandates Were Ineffective at Controlling the Spread of COVID-19
Unscientific COVID-19 Lockdowns Caused More Harm Than Good
Public Health Officials Incorrectly Characterized the Lab-Leak Theory as a "Conspiracy Theory"
COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates Hampered U.S. Military Readiness
Long Term School Closures Were Not Supported by Available Science and Evidence
Pandemic-era School Closures Adversely Impacted Academic Performance that Will Continue for Years
In the end, House investigators found that the pandemic probably began following a "laboratory or research related accident." Imagine that. "What's the statute of limitations on helping start a global pandemic?" wonders Jim Geraghty, who was writing about "lab leak" back when doing so was thought dangerously conspiratorial.
The misleading was not always deliberate. At times, it was well intentioned. But it was facilitated by a paucity of humility and tolerance on the part of government officials, qualities that decision-makers such as Francis Collins appear to now realize would have been valuable.
As Wenstrup touched on, distrust is a sentiment at the root of this period in American politics. Pew polling shows faith in government near historic lows. With every scandal and falsehood, every nonchalant concession of failure regarding some government edict or program or position considered inviolable nine minutes ago, distrust rises. Its cousin, cynicism, grows like a culture in a Petri dish, resistant over time to appeals to morality and higher purpose. Barack Obama couldn't run on "hope and change" today (ask Kamala). A modern Reagan would struggle.
President Biden's pardon of his son, Hunter, was another clarifying point. On a personal level, one can understand why the elderly president pardoned his — I'd like to be diplomatic here — very troubled, and only surviving, son. As NR's editorial notes, voters would have come around to accepting an honest explanation of his intentions offered from the start:
The president could have looked the country in the eye a year ago and said he was issuing a pardon because he had already lost his older son to cancer and could not bear the imprisonment of his drug-addicted, habitually self-destructive younger son.
Biden did not do that. The president did not take the reliable Washington route of ducking the difficult question with a slippery answer, either. Instead, he and his staff repeatedly lied and denied that a pardon would be issued, as Jim documents at length. Then, he issued the pardon anyway, while stressing his commitment to the "truth." His staff proceeded to test the public's credulity some more, when NBC reported that the president had discussed the possibility with close aides at least since June and that "it was decided at the time that he would publicly say he would not pardon his son even though doing so remained on the table." White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre denied the report and insisted Biden had arrived at the decision over the weekend. The federal judge on Hunter's tax case could scarcely contain his dismay over the president's framing of the entire episode.
Surely, this man deserves a place in the dictionary upon leaving office: Biden (intransitive verb): to lie or mislead, while claiming to have been motivated by only the highest ideals.
Now, Donald Trump's end-of-first-term pardons to cronies were hardly demonstrations of moral rectitude. The current president's shortcomings don't excuse the incoming president's sins and personality defects, which, ironically, track closely with Biden's. But distrust toward public officials, and repeated reinforcement of the reasons for that distrust, help to account for Trump's rise. As NR's editorial cautions, Biden's pardon will only provide more cover for whatever dubious pardons Trump might issue in Term 2, while minimizing the "blowback from an increasingly cynical public." Rich Lowry writes that it will "serve to convince more people that self-professed defenders of our institutions like him can't be trusted."
Political cynicism didn't begin with Biden or Trump or Covid, of course; it's only become more pronounced. "Feeling good about government is like looking on the bright side of any catastrophe. When you quit looking on the bright side, the catastrophe is still there," P. J. O'Rourke wrote in 1991. Mencken sneered at the "humorless idealists" who "took the platitudes of democracy quite seriously" seven decades earlier. They were early adopters. Dan McLaughlin has made a convincing case that 2012 was the year that truly started to derange the country. (Rush haters would argue it was 2112, but I digress.) I can think of many moments since then that hang like Polaroids on the corkboard of possible culprits: Chris Christie and his family lounging on an empty beach closed to the public during a government shutdown in 2017. As Dan recalled, Harry Reid quipping in 2015, "Romney didn't win, did he?" when confronted on his Senate floor lie that Mitt Romney had paid no taxes for a decade. Gavin Newsom at the French Laundry and Nancy Pelosi at a salon, amid the fog of Covid-era strictures. Hot-tub guy (you know who I'm talking about). Blago. Vivek's entire 2024 candidacy. You could sing these to the tune of a Billy Joel song, probably. And, yes, Trump himself, the very embodiment of cynical politics, arguably its end-stage, a vessel for and visitation of contempt for anybody who would claim to be in the game for anything but himself.
Becoming un-cynical is possible, if unlikely. O'Rourke observed that we habitually treat the president (until he disappoints) as "a divine priest-king." In the case of Joe Biden, Noah Rothman writes, Democrats had elevated him "to the status of saintly paragon of virtue." A first step toward healing would be to accept that politicians and bureaucrats are people — and to insist that their handlers and their egos accept it as well.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
On the pardon: The Scandalous Hunter Biden Pardon
On this week's major SCOTUS case: The Supreme Court Should Rule That Reality Exists
On Trump's Labor pick: Lori Chavez-DeRemer Wants to Ban the Red-State Model
ARTICLES
Andrew McCarthy: Brace Yourself for More Biden Pardons
James Lynch & Audrey Fahlberg: Biden Faces Mounting Criticism from Dem Senators over Pardoning Hunter
James Lynch: Alito Calls Out Solicitor General for Ignoring Research That Exposed Risks of Trans Procedures for Kids
Caroline Downey: Solicitor General, ACLU Rely on Dubious Stats to Defend Child Gender Transition before the Supreme Court
Charles C. W. Cooke: Trump Is Well within His Rights to Fire Christopher Wray
Dominic Pino: Murdering CEOs Is Evil
Jim Geraghty: The Hegseth Nomination Falters
Michael Brendan Dougherty: The Meaning of Infirmity
Jack Butler: Is Fitness Culture Right-Wing Now?
Ryan Mills: Can Trump's 'Drill Baby, Drill' Energy Policy Revitalize This Struggling Louisiana Parish?
Chip Roy: Pass Our Bill to Sanction the ICC
Kayla Bartsch: How the Yale Women's Center Was Colonized by Pro-Hamas Radicalism
David Harsanyi: The Left's Paranoid Style of Politics
Rhyen Staley: Post-Election, the Transgender Movement Continues to Deny Reality
CAPITAL MATTERS
Paul Winfree is bullish on DOGE: DOGE Brings the X Factor and Will Be Successful
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Brian Allen takes on a Chicago foundation that's gone on a mission tangent: Chicago's Terra Foundation Turns into DEI Central
Armond White backhand-compliments Ridley Scott: Ultrahack Scott Gets Allegorical in Gladiator II
Abigail Anthony offers an alternative perspective on Wicked: Just Enjoy Wicked
EXCERPTS, FOR DISCERNING READERS OF IMPECCABLE TASTE
Andrew McCarthy predicts that Biden's Hunter pardon is just the beginning. Hear him out:
I suspect that we're going to see more scandalous Biden pardons. The breathtaking expanse of Hunter's pardon doesn't make sense otherwise.
As I have written in an op-ed for Fox News today, the Hunter pardon goes back to 2014 because the most egregious evidence of Biden family influence-peddling occurred in the 2014–16 window, when Joe Biden was vice president (and, therefore, at his most influential during the scheme, which ran from 2014 through 2019, at least). It was because of this 2014–16 period of maximum criminal exposure that prosecutor David Weiss dragged his feet for years during the investigation: It was a Biden-Harris Justice Department imperative that no cases be charged that would trace criminal activity back to Biden's time as vice president, so no charges were filed as the relevant statutes of limitations (six years for tax felonies, five years for other kinds of crimes) lapsed.
To put a finer point on it (and repeat what I've said before), Hunter Biden was the just ancillary beneficiary of the way Weiss and Attorney General Merrick Garland oversaw the Biden investigation; DOJ's priority was to protect the president.
That raises the following question: Why worry any longer about 2014–16 if the statute of limitations (SOL) has already expired? . . .
It looks to me like the extraordinary pardon, blanketing Hunter in immunity from prosecution for any and all conceivable federal crimes for a period of nearly eleven years, is intended to discourage the Trump Justice Department from investigating. If no crimes can possibly be prosecuted, there is no point in investigating, even on the lawfare pretext that something prosecutable might emerge.
But here's the thing: This strategy only works if Hunter is just the first of the pardons. Otherwise, Hunter's pardon is an enticement, not a discouragement, for the Trump DOJ.
Why is that? Immunity.
Because of the sweeping pardon, Hunter no longer has a viable Fifth Amendment privilege from self-incrimination. He is immune from prosecution for any further Biden crimes related to influence-peddling. Hence, he may not refuse to testify if summoned by a grand jury to answer questions about the potentially criminal activities of others — and if the Trump prosecutors were to conclude that Hunter had lied in grand jury testimony, he could be prosecuted for perjury. (A pardon does not cover future crimes, such as perjury allegedly committed after the pardon.)
Hence, if the Trump DOJ decided to play the lawfare game that Democratic prosecutors — including the Biden-Harris DOJ — played so aggressively against people in Trump World, prosecutors could subpoena Hunter into the grand jury, tell him to bring every financial and personal record he has that might be relevant to their inquiry, and grill him about the activities of himself, Jim Biden, their business partners in the "Biden brand" activities, and President Biden himself. Hunter would have no choice: He'd have to testify; he couldn't take the Fifth.
Consequently, the only way I can see President Biden preventing such an investigation from happening, or at least trying to prevent it, would be to pardon other participants in the influence-peddling — giving them the same sort of expansive pardons that Hunter got.
Speaking of the roots of cynicism: Some of the arguments used before the Supreme Court this week in support of gender-transition procedures or treatments for kids were blatantly misleading and featured cherry-picked stats. Caroline Downey breaks it down:
Making the case against a Tennessee law banning transgender procedures for minors before the Supreme Court on Wednesday, the U.S. solicitor general and an ACLU lawyer cited dubious statistics to support their argument that the benefits associated with hormone therapies and surgeries easily outweigh the attendant risks.
During oral arguments in United States v. Skrmetti, Justice Kavanaugh asked U.S. solicitor general Elizabeth Barchas Prelogar whether detransitioners — a growing group of individuals who eventually come to regret their medical transitions — should be considered in weighing the harms associated with such procedures.
"Yes, yes," Prelogar responded. "We're certainly not denying that some people might regret this care, but all of the available evidence shows that it's a very small number."
In their brief to the court, the ACLU claimed that less than 1 percent of minors who undergo gender transition later come to regret the decision, a far smaller proportion than the 85 percent put forward by the Tennessee attorney general's office.
Justice Sotomayor asked transgender-identifying ACLU attorney Chase Strangio to explain the discrepancy.
Strangio argued that the 85 percent figure is "misleading" because it pertains to older studies of prepubertal children who underwent gender medicalization.
"The evidence shows that once an adolescent reaches the onset of puberty, their likelihood to ultimately identify with their birth sex is very low," Strangio said. "And then as to the question of the 1 percent . . . the rate of regret when people receive this medication, is as low as 1 percent. What's important here, and the solicitor general mentioned this, that is exponentially lower than the rates of treatment permitted by SB-1."
Puberty for girls usually starts between the ages of eight and 13, whereas puberty for boys usually starts sometime between the ages of nine and 14, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
Sotomayor appeared to conflate rate of desistance with rate of regret in her question. The 85 percent figure likely refers to the rate of desistance, or the rate at which gender-confused children desist from their trans identification by adulthood. This is different from the percentage of children who experience regret after receiving gender-reconstructive surgery or hormone therapy. A 2021 study conducted by Canadian scientists reported follow-up data on what was at the time the largest sample of boys who had been referred to clinics for gender dysphoria. At follow-up, once the boys had reached adulthood, 87.8 percent were classified as desisters and 12.2 percent were classified as persisters, or those who maintained their trans identity into adulthood. While they would not be included in Strangio's 1 percent of individuals who regret receiving hormone treatments, the boys' decision to reject their trans identity suggests they likely do regret receiving medical interventions to support a gender identity which they jettisoned by adulthood.
An August Manhattan Institute analysis of an all-payer, all-claims national insurance database similarly suggested that a significant percentage of children with gender dysphoria would eventually grow out of it once they matured. In the 12.5–17.5 age category, 43.7–46.2 percent of those who had a gender-dysphoria diagnosis in 2017 retained a gender-related diagnosis by 2023, the study found. In the combined 7.5–17.5 age-group category, the diagnostic persistence rate was slightly lower, at 42.2–44.5 percent. The takeaways are that, despite what the trans lobby insists, most adolescents diagnosed with gender dysphoria will not have this diagnosis within as few as seven years, during the period of rapid-identity development. Therefore, a diagnosis of gender dysphoria is a wobbly justification for invasive, permanent, and life-altering medical intervention for minors.
Michael Brendan Dougherty mulls the meaning of frailty in old age, as another country moves toward embracing assisted suicide:
The very legality of medically assisted suicide will tend to condition both doctors and patients to demoralize each other with assessments about the "burden" that chronic illness or depression brings to others. In fast-paced cultures that overvalue "productivity" — like those that obtain in most Western countries — the elderly and the sick are already afflicted with a sense that their lives are an unjust burden on loved ones. And it is true that our frailty at the end of life is a kind of humiliation that prepares us for death, and that this frailty imposes costs on our adult children.
In the fight against legal suicide, Christians have to confront the fact that the perceived "senselessness of suffering" at the end of life is the product of a materialist worldview. To champion the dignity of life — even life marked by dependence, suffering, and senility — we have to recover the Christian vision that sees that the humiliations of old age and infirmity are not meaningless.
Of course, some cases are extremely hard. I have witnessed levels of senility that can sap all the sweetness out of the personality of an aged relative and replace it with a childish crabbiness borne of fear and afflicted unknowing. I have seen the aged resist gentle caretakers as if they were being put under torture rather than a sponge bath. I've had my own elderly relatives refer to me by the name of a long dead brother or father. No, I hope that I do not die, having lost the ability to reliably recognize my family members, or respond to them familiarly.
But our need for others' care in old age should no more make us feel guilty than our need for others when we were young children. Instead, this dependence is a strong reminder that our lives are not our own, but sit atop the treasury of love and care in our families, and the decency of our society. Our physical dependence late in life is a reminder of our spiritual need for grace and mercy in the judgment to come. And it is an inducement to virtue in the people around us. The acceptance of these humiliations is part of the road to a good death.
CODA
I hope everyone had a warm, high-calorie, and restful holiday weekend. I spent the time (the small part of it we weren't in traffic, I mean) at my folks' place, which meant quality time with them, as well as with a cabinet-full of Woodstock-era records. Carole King, among others, was on the playlist this year. "You’ve Got a Friend" is a masterpiece with universal appeal.
Thanks for reading.
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