Dear Weekend Jolter,
I'm back from holiday hiatus in that other hemisphere, and catching up on all the news I missed in this one. But it appears one thing is constant: Joe Biden's delusions about serving some sort of epochal term.
Recall, one last time, that he had pledged in 2020 to be a "bridge" to the next generation of leaders. It was a throwaway line (from what his party would later regard as a throwaway president), for he scrapped that self-concept as soon as he entered office and began hearing from historians how he could be transformative in the style of FDR. He partly reverted to his pledge, consenting to serve just one term, only after his disastrous debate with Donald Trump forced him to.
But in the president's final weeks in office, the bridge connecting his term not to Kamala Harris but to Trump again, Biden seems to think he had it right the second time: He is going big before going home. He is making every day count. He is making up for time lost during the election year, despite possessing no mandate for such an eventful coda to his presidency.
Focused inward and believing he could have won had he stayed in the race, Biden has moved to affix the family name to eleventh-hour actions in the way his predecessor, now successor, stamps his five letters on the façade of skyscrapers. The decision this past week to ban new offshore drilling in more than 625 million acres of federal waters is, as Rich Lowry notes, part of an attempt to "burnish his tarnished legacy with last-minute administrative actions" and "impose his policy preference going forward." It is a strictly pen-and-phone exercise, and just might work. Biden claims counter-drilling authority from a 1953 law that could restrict the ability of future presidents — in this case, Trump — to revoke the action. Agencies are pressing ahead with rulemaking and recommendations on other fronts, including a ban on so-called junk fees and a pitch for updated warning labels linking alcoholic beverages to cancer, before the change in administrations.
On a separate track, the Biden administration just exported eleven prisoners from Guantanamo Bay to Oman, completing a transfer years in the making. With just 15 detainees remaining at the camp, the population is at a historically low level, continuing a reduction undertaken by Barack Obama's administration.
Before that, Biden reduced the death sentences for 37 federal inmates to life without parole — his way of getting ahead of Trump’s expected lifting of the moratorium on federal executions, while nearly clearing out federal death row with the stroke of a pen. He kept in place the death sentences for the most high-profile offenders but converted those of others. (David Zimmermann details their depraved crimes here.) The decision came after the president pardoned 39 and commuted sentences for nearly 1,500 in a historic single-day act of clemency. (Jim Geraghty details some of their crimes here.)
All these decisions, of course, followed Biden's issuing the ultimate pardon, a "full and unconditional" decade-long hall pass to his son, Hunter. That decision was the inverse of a legacy-builder, however. According to the Wall Street Journal, Biden's planned presidential library is now in funding jeopardy, with donors and donor advisers reportedly citing his decision to run for a second term and delay in dropping out in having "soured" on their support for the institution, and others citing the Hunter pardon. No amount of offsets in the form of commutations and pardons for others can fix that.
As Jeff Blehar writes, Biden's explanation for the Hunter decision effectively translated to #YOLO (Jeff's version was more crude, but this is a family newsletter). Put another way, YOSO, or You Only Serve Once, is the mindset we can expect is driving the decision-making in the last week before Inauguration Day.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
Trudeau's departure is one giant leap for "peoplekind": At Long Last, Justin Trudeau's Time Is Ending
Even if he's just doing it for the “likes,” Zuckerberg's changes to content moderation are welcome: Mark Zuckerberg Goes Musk
It's time: Pay Up, Mr. Mann
ARTICLES
Jim Geraghty: How Policy Decisions Exacerbated the Devastating Los Angeles Wildfires
Jim Geraghty: The United Kingdom's Long-Delayed Reckoning on 'Grooming Gangs'
Abigail Anthony: How England Failed Sara Sharif
John Yoo & Robert Delahunty: TikTok Is a National Security Threat
Dan McLaughlin: January 6 Is Over
Dan McLaughlin: The Democrats' Campaign against the Supreme Court Pauses with a Whimper
Caroline Downey: Governor DeSantis Overhauls Another Left-Wing Florida College, Appointing Conservative Board Members
Yuval Levin: How the DOGE Could Succeed
Noah Rothman: The Time to Push the Iranian Regime to Collapse Is Now
Brittany Bernstein: Facebook's Defunct 'Fact-Checking' Program Led to Years of Censorship
Jack Butler: How to Make Your New Year's Resolution Stick
James Lynch: Judge Lets Trump Off with No Punishment in Hush Money Case
James Lynch: Congress Officially Certifies Trump's Resounding Electoral Victory
Christian Schneider: Alcohol Warning Labels Are Nanny Statism at Its Worst
Kathryn Jean Lopez: Jimmy Carter Was No Kamala Harris on Life
Ian Tuttle: A Reading List for the New Year
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Armond White's own version of the year in review in film is out: The Better-Than List for 2024
Brian Allen explores another side of Egon Schiele: Schiele's Not Just for Nudes Anymore
ADMIT IT: 'READ MORE EXCERPTS' IS A MORE REALISTIC RESOLUTION THAN DRY JANUARY
The Los Angeles wildfires have produced some of the most horrifying scenes of nature's devastation in modern times. Follow Jim Geraghty's coverage for how the disaster intersects with policy. As he writes, "there is no policy, at the federal, state, or local level that can eliminate the threat of wildfires. But policy choices can mitigate or exacerbate those risks and the consequences of those fires, and unfortunately, the bad decisions of Southern California have piled up, year by year, decade by decade":
As noted earlier this week, in October, the U.S. Forest Service directed its employees in California to stop prescribed burning "for the foreseeable future," citing the need to preserve staff and equipment to fight wildfires if needed. The Angeles National Forest, managed by the U.S. Forest Service, covers more than 650,000 acres, about one-quarter of Los Angeles County. The entire Angeles National Forest was closed for public safety January 8 and will remain closed until at least January 15.
The National Park Service of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area contends that controlled burns are not an effective tool in their particular ecosystem. "Prescribed burning is not effective in limiting the spread of wildfires under the conditions that burn the largest amount of land and cause the most home losses. Native shrublands are being burned too frequently because of human ignited wildfires. Prescribed fire does not fulfill any identified ecological need in chaparral or coastal sage scrub and would increase the probability of a damaging short fire interval following a prescribed burn."
Abigail Anthony's deep dive on the case of murdered little girl Sara Sharif is difficult to get through, but it raises an important question: Why didn't a single person effectively intervene to protect her?
Beside the dead body of a ten-year-old girl with 71 fresh injuries and 25 separate bone fractures was a flimsy piece of torn notebook paper that said, "Love you Sara," written in capital letters and the inconsistent handwriting of a kindergartener. It was a confession from her murderer — her father. "It's me Urfan Sharif who killed my daughter by beating," he wrote, continuing that "I swear to God that my intention was not to kill her, but I lost it."
The police non-emergency phone number received a call from Pakistan at 2:47 a.m. on August 10, 2023, two days after Sara was murdered. Urfan Sharif began the eight-minute-and-34-second call by telling the operator to write down his address. He admitted, "I killed my daughter" and instructed the police to visit "No. 6 Hammond Road," where keys were left under the door mat. "I'm a cruel father," he stated, then pledged: "I promise I'll come back . . . I'll face the death sentence."
On December 17, 2024, Urfan was not handed the death penalty. The judge convicted Urfan — along with Sara's stepmother, Beinash Batool — of murder, and convicted Sara's uncle Faisal Malik for causing or allowing the death of a child. Urfan was sentenced to prison for life with a minimum term of 40 years, Beinash was sentenced to prison for life with a minimum term of 33 years, and Faisal was given a 16-year sentence. Somewhat unusually, the judge took great pains when explaining the ruling, noting that parole is not necessarily granted upon serving the minimum term. "Nothing that I can do will provide recompense for the loss of this young child's life," the judge wrote regretfully, as if he wishes harsher punishment were possible in the post-death-penalty country.
And so three people are imprisoned in relation to the murder of Sara. But far more people are guilty. The story of Sara's life should be grounds to sue England itself for its repeated failures to protect her. Indeed, it seems that if a single person had acted responsibly, then Sara might be alive today. . . .
Evidence for what the murder trial judge called a "campaign of abuse against Sara" dates as early as 2019, when she began residing with Urfan and Beinash. At the time, Beinash had electronically messaged her sister to say that Urfan had beaten Sara, sometimes including photos of the bruises. "This is how bad he is beating her. . ." Beinash wrote alongside images, adding "I feel really sorry for her," and "he beat the crap out of her." (The sister said to follow the Quran and avoid the authorities.) From those messages, the judge inferred that Urfan "regularly inflicted serious violence" on Sara. In response to the beatings, Sara began soiling herself and vomiting — reactions that prompted even more beatings from Urfan. Eventually, Sara was compelled to wear the hijab to hide her wounds and injuries.
People had suspicions over the years. One neighbor of the family told jurors that she often overheard screaming, slamming doors, and swear words from the Sharif residence. (She had considered making a formal report but did not.) Another neighbor similarly said in court heard screaming and swear words, as well as smacking-like sounds. (That neighbor "spoke to people" and was told to ignore it.) And another neighbor heard disturbing screams just a few days before Sara's death. (That person "wondered" about doing something, but then didn't hear "any other noise" and therefore "did not take it any further.")
In 2022, a teacher noticed a bruise near Sara's eye and reported it to the school. In 2023, a teacher noticed bruises on Sara's face, and the school contacted social services. But the investigation lasted six days and concluded in March that there was no need for intervention. Later that month, the school made an internal report that Beinash had called children "motherf***er, sister f***er, b****, and whore" at the playground. The next month, Urfan withdrew Sara from school permanently and claimed to homeschool her.
Sara was not seen outside again. She was only heard screaming from the house.
Brittany Bernstein documents the unfortunate history of Facebook's "fact-checking" program now that Meta is mending its ways:
Meta announced this week that it will switch to a community notes style of fact-checking, abandoning its existing third-party fact checking program, which the social media giant now acknowledges was plagued by political bias.
The original fact-checking system, deployed in 2016 as Trump took office, essentially outsourced the job of verifying the veracity of popular narratives to partner organizations, most of which were legacy media outlets. As Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged in announcing the end of the program this week, Meta (then Facebook) decided to launch the fact-checking initiative in response to pressure from the mainstream media about the spread of "misinformation" online and the resulting harms to democracy. The outlets that applied the pressure ultimately reaped financial rewards as Facebook paid them to do the fact checking.
While Facebook did partner with some conservative outlets — including, for a brief time when the program first launched, National Review — the bulk of the fact-checking was done by ideologically homogenous outlets that instinctively targeted high-profile right-wing users and publications, leading to the suppression of claims that ultimately proved true around topics like Covid, Biden family misdeeds, and climate change.
Around the time the fact-checking program was launched, a former Facebook employee accused the platform of omitting conservative topics from its trending bar, though the platform denied the allegations. The worker said Facebook bumped stories about CPAC, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from the trending section. . . .
But perhaps the greatest test of Facebook's free speech policies came in 2020 with the Covid-19 pandemic, as Facebook and other sites faced pressure from the Biden administration to censor critical information regarding so-called Covid-19 misinformation.
Zuckerberg acknowledged in an August letter to the House Judiciary Committee that "senior Biden administration officials, including the White House, repeatedly pressured" Meta to "censor" content related to the pandemic in 2021.
But even before President Biden took office, Facebook was among several social media sites that banned discussion of the lab-leak theory in spring 2020. It wasn't until May 2021 that Facebook announced it would no longer remove posts that suggested Covid escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China.
Fast-forwarding to the next year: When vaccines against the virus became widely available, Facebook began to censor claims that Covid vaccines didn't prevent infection.
Even The BMJ, a leading medical journal, was not safe from Facebook's censorship; in November 2021, the journal sent a letter to Zuckerburg that said readers reported a variety of problems when trying to share a BMJ article by journalist Paul D. Thacker that alleged there had been "poor practice" at one of the companies involved in the phase III evaluation trials of the Pfizer vaccine.
While some users were unable to share the article, others said their posts were flagged with a warning that read, "Missing context . . . Independent fact-checkers say this information could mislead people." Users who tried to post the article received a warning from Facebook that users who repeatedly share "false information" can have their posts moved lower in the newsfeed.
Dan McLaughlin remarks on the diminishing political force of January 6, now that another anniversary — and election — has passed:
January 6 is over. It's history. It's done as a political issue. Four years after a mob stormed the Capitol, it doesn't matter anymore in our politics.
This is not a normative statement: I'm not saying that it shouldn't matter. Quite the contrary. Trump's course of conduct in rejecting the legitimacy of his defeat in 2020, up to and including his speech on January 6, should have disqualified him from further service in public office, and resulted in casting him into the outer darkness of our political culture. There were two procedurally proper ways to do this: The Senate could have convicted him after his second impeachment and barred him from holding office again, and Republican primary voters could have rejected him and turned the page rather than leaving him as the only alternative to continuing the ruinous governance of the Democrats. I argued for both at the time. But in each case, our system chose to honor the small-d democratic value of Trump's continuing popularity with Republican voters rather than honoring the virtues of good statesmanship and good citizenship.
For Democrats, it was a good run for a while. They made January 6 the centerpiece of their midterm campaign in 2022, lavishing vast ad buys on the topic and spending millions to elevate Republican primary candidates they could tie to it and to 2020 stolen-election theories so they could beat them in the general election. In the midterms, it worked. But two things went wrong for them in 2024. One was that voters turned out to be less concerned with an event in Washington three and a half years earlier than with their own ongoing lives and futures. The Democrats, as the party in power, couldn't get away from the election being a referendum on their disastrous governance. The other is that Democrats overplayed their hand: Once impeachment failed, instead of just making the case about Trump to the voters, they tried to get him thrown off the ballot and buried him under a blizzard of dubious to completely bogus criminal charges.
That effort to have the election decided in the courts left a lot of voters worried that the Democrats were as dangerous to our democratic system as Trump is. Exit polls found that 39 percent of voters described democracy in the United States as "very threatened," and Trump won a majority of voters who said so, 52 percent to 47 percent. Seventy-three percent described democracy as either "very threatened" or "somewhat threatened," and Trump won the combined group, 50 percent to 48 percent. Trump lost by 14 points among the 70 percent of voters who said that they were concerned that the 2024 election would result in violence, but he still got 42 percent of those voters. The Democratic base may have internalized the "democracy is on the ballot" argument, but even among the 34 percent of voters who identified "democracy" as their top voting issue, nearly a fifth voted for Trump. Meanwhile, 48 percent of the voters picked the economy, immigration, or foreign policy as their top issue, and Trump won those voters by a whopping 63-point margin (81 percent to 18 percent).
When Kamala Harris gave a big speech at the Ellipse in D.C. about democracy, it landed without a splash. It had been said too many times, to the exclusion of too many things that Harris and Joe Biden had failed to address.
CODA
Let's kick off 2025 with an on-brand shout-out to another Steven Wilson project. Avid readers whose thumbs get stuck in a swishy motion and end up at the bottom of this note on the regular (there are tens of you) are by now familiar with my interest in him as a solo artist and his band of merry progsters, Porcupine Tree. One of his poppier collaborations is with Israeli musician Aviv Geffen, under the banner Blackfield. They've released a half-dozen studio albums; I'm not intimately familiar with them all, but the music has a pleasing depth not always found within the confines of a four-minute song. Layered, memorable, dare I say catchy.
Listen to "Scars," and see what I mean. Thanks for reading.
Megyn Kelly -> Pete Hegseth responds to 2017 rape accusation. 🔥 vol. 3, issue 13 | December 6, 2024 Quick Hits All the news you need in...
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