Dear Weekend Jolter,
The authoritarian regime in Tehran is as dangerous as it is desperate.
As of this writing, activists say nearly 2,500 protesters have been killed, and thousands more detained, in the Iranian government's overwhelming crackdown — an operation so lethal it may have suppressed demonstrations for now. An accurate picture of the unrest and the response to it is difficult to form given the communication blackout, but the New York Times has described this as one of the deadliest crackdowns in over a decade.
"A killing spree," is how one protester put it, amid accounts this week of government forces opening fire on demonstrators and scenes of body bags on floors. Noah Rothman notes that activists outside Iran estimate the number slain to be closer to 12,000, if not higher, the victims of "an unspeakable massacre."
The ferocity of the response betrays the tenuousness of the regime's position, as economic discontent has converged with longstanding resentment toward the government, at its most vulnerable point in decades in the wake of strikes against its nuclear program and the decimation of key regional allies. Amid the slaughter, there is still hope. "It is possible to imagine that we could be about to experience a bookend, from 1979 to 2026," Rich Lowry wrote, before an “eerie quiet” settled over the country.
Whether and how the Trump administration might intervene is a live question. "HELP IS ON ITS WAY," President Trump posted Tuesday, urging protesters to "TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS." For obvious and recent geopolitical reasons, the ayatollah can't assume he's bluffing. Yet it's unclear whether that was reckless online instigation or the prelude to hard-power backup; Trump pedaled backward a day later, saying he's been assured "that the killing has stopped, that the executions have stopped." The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump was advised a major strike is unlikely to topple the government and could make things worse, and the U.S. would need more regional firepower anyway. This, as the Pentagon reportedly is moving the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group toward the Middle East, and Trump keeps options open — in other words, the only person who really knows what Trump will do is Trump, and even that might assume too much.
Michael Rubin writes for NRO that the U.S. president should learn from his predecessors' mistakes — with China, with Iraq, with Iran — and "help the Iranian people end the Islamic Republic." Jim Geraghty notes as well the legitimate concerns that a U.S. strike could be used to discredit the protesters. Regardless of our level of involvement, Noah Rothman has observed from the start that these protests might, in fact, be different, and even the cynics among us should look with fresh eyes.
If the regime has put down the protests for the time being, embers burn. Andy McCarthy is cautiously optimistic about the opportunity for regime change, though "only the Iranian people" can achieve it. Noah warned on The Editors that if the regime does survive, it may be another generation before the opportunity to uproot it returns. Working against the mullahs, however, are the five decades they've spent making themselves loathed by the people they rule — the biggest determinant for whether 1979's upheaval indeed sees a bookend this year.
As protests in Iran were spreading, I happened to be reading a memoir about its postrevolutionary period, Reading Lolita in Tehran. The book portrays lives filled with small indignities, amounting to large ones. Iranian-born author Azar Nafisi (who left for America in 1997) recalled how pro-government motorcycle thugs used to show up to the scene of bombings during the Iran-Iraq War to extol the regime, blocking mourners and protesters. She recounted all the ways women, many of whom had tasted pre-revolutionary freedoms, were concealed and put under the guardianship of men. One of the most peculiar but memorable passages describes an evening at a closely monitored concert:
We were greeted by a gentleman who insulted the audience for a good fifteen or twenty minutes. . . . [The band members] weren't allowed to sing; they could only play their instruments. Nor could they demonstrate any enthusiasm for what they were doing: to show emotion would be un-Islamic. . . . Every time the audience . . . started to move or clap, two men in suits appeared from either side of the stage and gesticulated for them to stop.
Imagine being controlled in this way for 47 years by bearded Karens.
The regime in Tehran is not just evil and fanatical, an exporter par excellence of global terrorism — it is a tragic, civilizational joke. May they be laughed off the stage, for good.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
On Trump vs. the Fed: Targeting Powell
On this week's big SCOTUS cases: There's No Sex Discrimination Without Sex
This would backfire, badly: The Credit Card Interest Cap Is a Scam
Piracy is not the way: Proceed with Caution on Venezuelan Oil
ARTICLES
Jim Geraghty: Has the U.S. Cracked the Havana Syndrome Mystery?
Gregory Brown: Why Sex Differences Matter in Women's Sports
Rebeccah Heinrichs: After the Venezuela Raid, Trump Should Finally Stand Up to Putin
Jeffrey Blehar: The Trump Administration's Lawfare Will Destroy More Than Just Itself
Dan McLaughlin: Another Self-Destructive Decision by the Trump DOJ
Haley Strack: Thousands Flock to ICE Watch Training as Minnesota Governor Tim Walz Encourages Residents to Track Agents
Noah Rothman: Americans Are Going Where No Man Has Gone Before
Ryan Ellis: How to Alleviate the Middle-Class Crunch on Homeownership
Audrey Fahlberg: Exclusive: White House Sends Mixed Signals to Pro-Life Groups amid Health-Care Negotiations
Christian Schneider: Squatting Isn't a Housing Policy. It's Property Theft
Michael Brendan Dougherty: RFK Jr. Inverts the Food Pyramid, at Last
James Lynch: U.S. Experienced Negative Net Migration in 2025 for the First Time in 50 Years
CAPITAL MATTERS
David Bahnsen, on the dangers of economic populism: The Saddest Part of This Recent Economic Lunacy
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Armond White wishes not to attend this Clooney party: Jay Kelly, a Movie Star's Pity Party About the Cost of Fame
You might have noticed a light interruption in our usual biweekly dose of art coverage; Brian Allen’s been down with the flu but, being of hearty stock, vows to return to full strength with a reinforced immune system shortly. Until then, enjoy part 2 on Princeton: Triumphs and Tin Ears at Princeton's New Art Museum
THESE EXCERPTS ARE THE ONES WE'VE BEEN WAITING FOR
NR's editorial explains why the challenges to state laws limiting girls' sports to girls deserve to fail:
In a properly functioning constitutional republic, the Supreme Court's job is reading legal texts; matters of elementary common sense are left to the people and their representatives. But our era's cultural complaints sometimes require the justices to turn their attention from law to the difference between fiction and reality.
So it was with Tuesday's oral arguments in two cases challenging West Virginia and Idaho laws that limit participation in girls' and women's sports to — brace yourself for this one — girls and women.
In last year's Skrmetti case involving a Tennessee ban on "gender-affirming" hormone therapies, the Court did not need to get into the basic definitional questions about sex and gender because it resolved the case by dismantling a convoluted legal theory about how two different uses for the same hormone were supposedly the same medical treatment. But with transgender athletes, as Justice Scalia would say, this wolf comes as a wolf — not a ewe.
The plaintiffs in West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox would prefer to argue that it is invidious discrimination against transgender people to not let them unilaterally redefine their sex. But the current Court has little appetite for creating a new constitutional "suspect class," so the ACLU lawyer arguing the case has to engage in some definitional legerdemain to argue that banning males from female sports is, at least in some cases, impermissible sex discrimination under the equal protection clause and under Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. That was good enough for the Fourth and Ninth Circuits, to their shame.
The very existence of female-only sports that exclude males is sex discrimination. That's the entire point. Yet, the Court's precedents have long allowed sex discrimination that is based upon real, biological sex differences. In competitive sports, those are glaringly obvious and have real consequences not only for who wins but also for the safety of female athletes. That's why most of these cases involve males trying to play with the females, rather than the other way around. Males who identify as female can still play sports — just not as females. The stubborn reality of biology is why the Court applies a more lenient test ("intermediate" scrutiny) than it does when assessing race discrimination, which is presumed to be irrational and thus can be justified only by the most compelling interests and applied only in the most narrowly tailored settings.
We think Justice Samuel Alito cut to the heart of these cases when he asked Kathleen Hartnett, the ACLU's lawyer, "For equal protection purposes, what does — what does it mean to be a boy or a girl or a man or a woman? . . . How can a court determine whether there's discrimination on the basis of sex without knowing what sex means for equal protection purposes?" That question goes double for Title IX, which bans discrimination "on the basis of sex." Congress must have meant something when it used that word. Yet, Hartnett responded as if this was an unsolvable stumper: "We do not have a definition for the Court."
That ought to be the end of the case.
The most insane story of the week concerns so-called Havana Syndrome. Jim Geraghty has the details:
The first angle of this CNN scoop that deserved to break through the noise of the news cycle is that the U.S. government appears to have gotten its hands on one of the devices that triggers "Havana Syndrome":
The Defense Department has spent more than a year testing a device purchased in an undercover operation that some investigators think could be the cause of a series of mysterious ailments impacting US spies, diplomats and troops that are colloquially known as Havana Syndrome, according to four sources briefed on the matter.
A division of the Department of Homeland Security, Homeland Security Investigations, purchased the device for millions of dollars in the waning days of the Biden administration, using funding provided by the Defense Department, according to two of the sources. Officials paid "eight figures" for the device, these people said, declining to offer a more specific number.
The device is still being studied and there is ongoing debate — and in some quarters of government, skepticism — over its link to the roughly dozens of anomalous health incidents that remain officially unexplained.
The U.S. government bought this device? Man, you can find anything on Ebay. . . .
So, sometime in "the waning days of the Biden administration," the U.S. gets its hands on what we'll call a "Havana Syndrome device" that uses pulsed radio waves to inflict nonlethal injuries upon its targets, and the U.S. Department of Defense starts studying it.
Perhaps the Pentagon scientists even attempted to reverse-engineer it, or figure out how to develop another version of it. Call it a "Caracas Syndrome device." (The Pentagon has been researching and attempting to develop a variety of non-lethal weapons for many, many years.)
There's a reason I'm speculating along these lines. On January 10, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt urged her followers on X to "stop what you are doing and read this," sharing an account from Mike Netter, the vice chair of the effort to recall California Governor Gavin Newsom. Netter transcribed an interview with a figure who was, allegedly, a surviving member of Maduro's security team:
Security Guard: On the day of the operation, we didn't hear anything coming. We were on guard, but suddenly all our radar systems shut down without any explanation. The next thing we saw were drones, a lot of drones, flying over our positions. We didn't know how to react.
Interviewer: So, what happened next? How was the main attack?
Security Guard: After those drones appeared, some helicopters arrived, but there were very few. I think barely eight helicopters. From those helicopters, soldiers came down, but a very small number. Maybe twenty men. But those men were technologically very advanced. They didn't look like anything we've fought against before.
Interviewer: And then the battle began?
Security Guard: Yes, but it was a massacre. We were hundreds, but we had no chance. They were shooting with such precision and speed . . . it seemed like each soldier was firing 300 rounds per minute. We couldn't do anything.
Interviewer: And your own weapons? Didn't they help?
Security Guard: No help at all. Because it wasn't just the weapons. At one point, they launched something — I don't know how to describe it . . . it was like a very intense sound wave. Suddenly I felt like my head was exploding from the inside. We all started bleeding from the nose. Some were vomiting blood. We fell to the ground, unable to move.
Jeff Blehar has a challenge for the MAGA class, amid the lawfare targeting of Jerome Powell:
What defense does MAGA wish to offer for Trump threatening to indict the chairman of the Fed on fake charges because he won't cut interest rates like Trump demands? Trump cannot legally remove Powell from his position except "for cause," and so here he is, directing his Justice Department to manufacture a "cause" he can use to threaten Powell. I can hear the constant refrain of online Trump supporters ringing in my ears: "I voted for this." Did you, really? Did you vote for this?
Let us pause also to note the hilarity (seemingly almost intentional, as if to emphasize the near-Shakespearean insolence of office) of Trump threatening to indict Powell over purportedly mishandling the "renovations of historic buildings." Donald Trump literally just demolished the East Wing without any sort of review, and then illegally slapped his name on the Kennedy Center to end the year. And bragged about how nobody could stop him from doing it! Does the administration see this irony? Maybe Trump does not, but those surrounding him surely do — and I'm halfway convinced that this aspect of things is an "intentional flex," what they enjoy about their current amoral exercise of power more than anything else. We can do whatever we want, use any tool we wish, because we're in charge now. (This power-tripping attitude comes through with crystalline purity in the public rhetoric of Trump's most prominent underlings, such as Stephen Miller.)
It's frightening to see a methodology shaping up in the Trump DOJ's nakedly political indictments. This is now the second time they have moved against a disliked political figure by sifting through random Senate testimony to find something they can hang a flimsy indictment on. It is precisely the brand of injustice we all learned to revile from the Stalinist era: "Show me the man, and I will find you the crime." The fact that all this pressure is so shamelessly out in the open — and greeted with distractable indifference from the media and Trump's increasingly coarsened supporters — feels like a degradation of American politics, and a quietly slow-rolling, endlessly accumulating civic and social tragedy. The cost of the politics of this era will be felt long after Trump is gone. I fear we will never get the poison fully out of our blood.
So I invite all who disagree with me: Defend this! Shift your ground to the cheap and temporary rationalizations of politics instead of the arguments of law and ethics. Tear down yet another piece of what you believe to be the mere scaffolding of our Republic, only to discover that you're removing load-bearing pillars. Defend this, and don't be surprised when suddenly a firm structure no longer bears up under the shocks and stresses.
Honorable Mention
And now, a message from our National Review Institute friends, who are extending (just a little bit!) the deadline for their Burke to Buckley Programs in Miami and New York:
Live in Miami or New York? While you may have missed the January 16 application deadline, we will provide Weekend Jolt readers the opportunity to apply to NRI’s dinner-discussion groups through Sunday! Treat yourself to dinner and discussions with new like-minded friends through the Burke to Buckley Program. Click here for more information.
Equip yourself with a deeper understanding of America’s Founding and of the principles that shaped the modern American conservative movement.
With the beginning of 2026, we are entering America’s 250th anniversary year. What better way to celebrate than to join with other patriots who seek to better understand what makes America so great.
Join NR writers (or academics or policy experts) for a seven-session exploration into some of our nation’s most important documents by becoming a Burke to Buckley Fellow this spring. The programs will take place in Miami and New York.
CODA
I've been listening lately to the new-ish album from Lunatic Soul, a side project of Polish prog rocker Mariusz Duda. Yes, this is pretentious music engineered in a lab to drive my wife crazy when I play it in the car. But the genre-crossing soundscape is a strange brew I've come to enjoy, an experimental blend of ambient and electronic-infused prog rock with an Eastern tinge. It's background music for work hours.
Thanks for reading, and have a pleasant long weekend.
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