Dear Weekend Jolter,
Don't look now, but the principles National Review stands for are carrying the day once more.
Whether it's the virtues of restrained government or educational standards or de-politicized medicine, the arguments we make day in and day out are resonating. So we're hoping you can continue to support our work by contributing to our spring webathon.
Do not mistake this as premature celebration. As Charles C. W. Cooke noted earlier this week, it does seem as if "every battle in American life has to be fought again and again and again." But even among those most reluctant to accept these ideas, a certain concession to reality is taking place.
In Washington, congressional Democrats have implicitly acknowledged in their own budget proposals that they want taxes to stay low — not mimic the European model. The so-called "abundance" agenda, while hardly converting the Democratic Party to supply-side economics, connects deregulatory policy to growth, especially where housing is concerned (what a concept!). None other than Fareed Zakaria recently scorched blue-city governance for "promising more, spending more, delivering less," while singling out New York City for opprobrium. Speaking of which, it took mere weeks before new Mayor Zohran Mamdani acknowledged, via his budget proposal, that he may need to broadly raise property taxes to fund his schemes — the ones Noah Rothman once warned were "about as sound as the business model for the blood-testing start-up Theranos." (Mamdani reportedly is backing away from that, too, after a backlash.)
That's one front. On drug policy, Charlie cautioned last fall that the marijuana legalization frenzy has gone too far. In February, the New York Times editorial board said the same.
In October, Bill Gates shocked the NGO world by declaring that climate change, while still a serious issue, "will not lead to humanity's demise," urging a "strategic pivot" to focus more on preventing disease and poverty. He declared that "improving lives" is a better metric than emissions and temperature change.
Such notions will be familiar to anyone who's read NR the past few decades.
Then there is the issue of so-called transgender medicine. Major medical associations at last have started to revise guidance to steer physicians away from gender-transition surgeries on minors — a change (one of many) that NR has advocated since the gender madness first gripped America's institutions. In the field of athletics, the International Olympic Committee just this week banned men from women's events. Elsewhere in our cultural battles, standardized testing is making a comeback in elite college admissions — as NR has urged — while the march of DEI policies has at least been slowed (though it could pick up once Trump-administration-applied pressure eases).
To adapt Reagan, sanity is never more than one generation away from extinction. We'll continue to fight for its survival, in policy and discourse, on a daily basis — while, naturally, producing a killer magazine and website that are both entertaining and informative.
Have I mentioned we're running a webathon?
Please, if you enjoy what you read here, if you think these ideas and arguments are important for a thriving republic such as ours, consider a donation, of any amount, to keep this institution healthy and humming.
Thank you.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
An appeal to Republican donors and activists: No on Virginia's Gerrymander
There is a way out of the airport nightmare: Congress Can Split Up the Homeland Security Funding
On the late, late-term abortionist's trail of wreckage: Remember Kermit Gosnell's Victims
ARTICLES
Noah Rothman: How Vulnerable Is America to an 'Operation Spiderweb' at Home? Very
Noah Rothman: The Iran War Successes They Don't Want You to Hear About
Dan McLaughlin: Victories Need to Be Visible
Dan McLaughlin: Of Course JD Vance Will Run in 2028
Rebeccah Heinrichs: The 'Iran Deal' Was Never the Solution to the Regime's Nuclear Program
Jim Geraghty: How Iran Is Setting Up the Starvation of the World's Poorest People
Rich Lowry: Joe Kent Is a Loon
Päivi Räsänen: My Criminal Conviction Is a Terrible Blow to Free Speech in Europe
Brittany Bernstein: 'Rogers Park Man' or Illegal Immigrant? Media Mislead on Suspect's Identity in Chicago Student Shooting
James Lynch: The More Americans Use AI, the More They Fear It
Christian Schneider: Baseball Is the Ultimate Modern Game
Jeffrey Blehar: Lefty Influencers Embrace Poverty Tourism on Havana Junket
Kamden Mulder: Chicago Teachers Host Curriculum Fair to Ensure Lessons Don't 'Facilitate Genocide'
Andrew McCarthy: L.A. Jury Finds Social Media Companies Liable for User's Depression
CAPITAL MATTERS
John R. Puri, with an explainer: Don't Blame Insurance for the Strait of Hormuz Crisis
Derek Kreifels writes about a (business) climate change in the states, and some corresponding relocations: Why Corporate America Is Coming Home to the Heartland
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Armond White revisits a Bengali masterpiece: Days and Nights Remembers the Human Condition
Brian Allen heads to South Bend for the new Raclin Murphy Museum of Art: A Heavenly New Art Museum for Notre Dame
EXCERPTS, EXCERPTS (READ ALL ABOUT 'EM)
Dan McLaughlin explores an important part of the Iran war messaging battle that's being overlooked:
A little over three weeks into the war against Iran, we still don't know what victory looks like. That's a problem, because victories need to be clearly visible to the ordinary citizen. That's important not only to Republicans' political popularity but as a matter of the democratic legitimacy of our foreign policy. That concern is heightened when wars are waged entirely on the basis of an executive decision without Congress.
I'm not that concerned that the war is taking weeks rather than days or hours, or that it is hard to tell from open sources exactly what we've accomplished yet. Sure, it's frustrating in an era of instant gratification that we don't yet have a resolution wrapped up neatly in a bow. But what matters, ultimately, is not how things look day to day but where we wind up, how long it takes to get there, and what it costs us along the way. Progress reports can be deceiving, especially in wars that don't involve a clear territorial front that we can see advancing across a map. . . .
But at the same time, this isn't a one-night raid of the sort we conducted in Venezuela, where the public doesn't even know it's happening until it's over. This is war in all but name, and even the name is increasingly hard to deny. Wars have real costs: They get people killed, they cost money, they damage and destroy equipment, they expend munitions, they exact diplomatic costs, they interrupt trade and travel, and on and on. They are deadly serious business. They should be waged to victory — or not started at all.
But what is victory? This is the question that has bothered me since we first started discussing a second strike on Iran months after Operation Midnight Hammer last June. Ending the Iranian regime once and for all and thereby removing a key piece on the board for China and Russia is worth doing, and my conditional support for the war assumes that this is how it's supposed to end. But we didn't quite go that far in Venezuela, and it's not at all clear that we are taking the necessary steps to get there now.
We have yet to get a clear, formal statement from the president about our war aims. That doesn't mean that we don't have any; various senior figures have listed a number of things we intend to accomplish, such as destroying Iran's ballistic missile capabilities, its capacity to threaten the Strait of Hormuz, and any prospect of it restarting a nuclear program (the latter of which was supposed to be resolved by Midnight Hammer).
But those are unsatisfactory goals.
Noah Rothman, meanwhile, explores the battlefield successes that are being overlooked:
It seems now that rendering a pessimistic assessment of U.S. and Israeli progress in this war is the price of admission into sophisticated circles. If you're not hopelessly melancholy, you're not a serious person. At least, you're not availing yourself of the news from the front.
That dour outlook seems wholly divorced from an objective appraisal of the war in its fourth week. . . .
U.S.-Israeli forces neutralized roughly 40 senior Iranian leadership figures in the opening salvos of the war. As the conflict progressed, Iran's armed forces and intelligence leaders, national security figureheads, senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Basij paramilitary commanders, and the brainpower behind Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile programs met the same fate. Israeli forces lure Iranian military targets into kill boxes of their choosing, make direct phone calls to individual Basij commanders to intimidate them into surrendering, and hunt down individual IRGC targets in the wooded hills to which they've fled.
Iran's command-and-control is famously decentralized, but these operations have contributed to Iran's inability to coordinate strategically coherent attacks on U.S., Israeli, or Gulf region targets. Meanwhile, the U.S.-Israeli campaign has enjoyed spectacular tactical successes on the battlefield.
Within the first two weeks of the war, U.S. and Israeli forces unleashed a blistering wave of strikes on Iranian air defenses, radar systems, missile launch and storage facilities, drone capabilities, naval mines, air bases, and the pillars of regime stability. The Iranian air force is gone. Most of Iran's air and missile bases have been rendered inoperable. Its naval installations along the Persian Gulf coast were incapacitated, and about 120 Iranian ships were disabled or sunk. And what remains of Iran's once formidable network of terrorist proxies across the Middle East was decimated, their leadership ranks decapitated, and their local support networks disrupted or entirely cut off.
As the U.S.-Israeli war against the Islamic Republic entered its fourth week, their joint force embarked on what their military brass called "phase two" of the war: taking out Iran's military infrastructure. The U.S. and Israel hit Iran's nuclear facilities, including those that were struck in June 2025, as well as new targets, including undeclared nuclear sites. U.S.-Israeli strikes also began targeting Iran's defense industrial base. Its missile-production facilities, drone manufacturers, explosives-production plants, and sensitive electronics developers came under sustained bombardment. . . .
There is a temptation abroad — in the press, at least — to yadda-yadda away these spectacular tactical successes in combat against a nation that, as recently as 2022, commanded one of the most formidable militaries on earth. Iranian hubris and that of the terrorists in its orbit set into motion a sequence of events that would culminate in its destruction. But it was by no means foreseeable at the outset of this decade that the Iranian threat could suffer such a lopsided series of defeats.
James Lynch reports on the AI image problem:
Artificial intelligence is increasingly becoming a part of daily life for many Americans — and they aren't happy about it.
As AI continues to accelerate at breakneck speed, working its way into an increasing number of economic sectors and transforming everyday interactions, the technology is fast becoming one of the most disliked forces in American life. This backlash, captured by a growing pile of survey data, adds urgency to the AI policy debates happening on the national level and across state governments, where lawmakers, entrenched tech interests, and consumer protection groups battle over the height of regulatory guardrails.
A poll from NBC News released last week found AI has a −20 approval rating, with 26 percent rating it positively compared to 46 percent who were negative. The only institutions that proved less popular in the poll were the Democratic Party at −22 approval and Iran at −53 approval.
Similarly, the latest poll taken by YouGov and The Economist found three times as many Americans have negative expectations for AI's impact on society compared to those with a positive outlook. The poll showed 47 percent expect AI to have mostly or entirely negative effects on society, compared to 16 percent who said AI would have mostly or entirely positive effects.
"Polling continuously proves that people are not buying what Big Tech has been peddling: that AI will lead to some kind of utopia. In fact, a mass movement is growing in opposition to AI without safeguards. The American people don't want AI to replace human beings," said Brendan Steinhauser, a Republican strategist and CEO of the Alliance for Secure AI, a bipartisan organization that favors AI regulation.
Blue Rose Research, a Democratic research firm run by respected liberal pollster David Shor, recently released data which show 67 percent of people distrust the claim that AI will not create widespread job loss. Fifty-six percent of Americans also distrust the claim that AI will create economic productivity to everyone's benefit.
Blue Rose's study found that 57 percent of Americans think AI is advancing too fast and 77 percent are worried about the emergence of AI technology eliminating entire industries. A large portion of Americans, 72 percent, believe AI will change the job market in ways that drive down wages, and 56 percent fear the possibility of themselves or their family members losing their job because of AI.
CODA
I was listening to the classic bop record Blue Train the other night and realized that it's as much a Lee Morgan album as it is a Coltrane one. The teen trumpeter's simply on fire from start to finish. He was 19 when he recorded this. I was still mastering bar chords at 19.
Thanks for reading, and, if you gave, thank you for that too. Have a great weekend.
Commentaires
Enregistrer un commentaire
Thank you to leave a comment on my site