Dear Weekend Jolter,
Before we get started, I’ve got a deal to tell you about. It’s one I’d like to announce in the style of Tobias Fünke, but I don’t want the power of the performance to distract from the value itself. So put simply: For a limited time, for just $3 a month, you can pick up a subscription to NRPLUS. That gives you full access to our online offerings, paywall-free. The offer lasts through Memorial Day weekend, so time is running out.
And now, I’d like to talk about baseball.
* * *
You may be familiar with the stereotype of the overinvested Little League parent — you know, the one white-knuckling it from the stands, shouting tips about proper hitting stance, ready to pounce on a borderline call.
The profile puzzled me. Who could care so much about whether eight-year-olds throw balls or strikes?
Then, this year, for the first time, I got involved in youth sports. Forgive the departure from politics this week for a few words about that experience.
First things first. How did I avoid the gravitational pull of soccer, baseball, football, or track for so long, even as a kid? My secret was a proprietary blend of infinitesimal athletic ability and prior commitments to every school music program, foreclosing any possibility of playing a sport while also dressed like a cockatoo with a clarinet for fans’ enjoyment. And I can’t throw a football.
So, as much to push him into something new as to push ourselves, we signed our kid up for this year’s Little League spring season.
Second thoughts immediately crept in, as the full scope of the commitment became clear: the crowded practice and game schedule, the emails and asks — and nobody told us about the gear. How many trips to Target and Dick’s did we make because I bought the wrong thing? (This dependency was captured in a recent Wall Street Journal story, “The $40 Billion Game of Youth Sports Has Only One Winner: Dick’s Sporting Goods.” Fact check: true.) Idiotically, I showed up to preseason lessons with absolutely no equipment. “Are we supposed to bring a bat?” I asked a fellow dad. He looked at me like I was a foreign tourist on the steps of the Capitol asking where it was: “Well, it’s baseball, so . . .” It was the last conversation I had that day with my peer group.
We’re past that now. The season’s almost over, and I can say confidently: Little League is one of the best things we’ve ever done.
The thrice-weekly engagements are a commitment, but the mandatory outside time away from work and screens is welcome. And unexpectedly, I do care about whether the kid on the mound is throwing balls or strikes — not so much that I’m rushing the ump, but enough that I’ve realized nothing so far has brought us closer to personally experiencing the highs and lows of our child’s view of growing up. The team’s losses are our losses; the wins, shamelessly clutched as our own. After a particularly demoralizing drought, last weekend, the kids scored a big playoff victory. It was the same weekend as the PGA Championship, but this felt more consequential. My wife, less of a sports fan than even I am, is on my case to get in practice time daily during the “postseason.”
Obviously, I’m late to the game, discovering now what millions knew. But as deeply ingrained as youth sports are in America, their prolonged health is not guaranteed. One Aspen Institute study (cited by the WSJ) found that, yes, spending for youth sports is up dramatically; not so, participation, though overall rates rebounded post-Covid. Involvement in baseball, specifically, fell 19 percent among young children from 2019 to 2024. According to the American Institute for Boys and Men, boys’ sports participation has been on a “downward trend,” while girls’ participation is more stable. This matters because, among other reasons, sports are the only extracurricular “boys are more likely to take part in than girls.” Cost is a barrier, no doubt. Infernal devices, too, are only going to continue to compete with the field for children’s attention — and are unlikely to do as good a job teaching dedication, sportsmanship, and teamwork.
I can’t say how long we will stick with the game, but another season is almost certain. We’ve watched the team grow and improve, thanks in no small part to the saintly people with patience kept, I suspect, in strategic reserves just off the dugout: coaches. They hold together platoons that are quite visibly little. As for the adults — as Yogi said, “Little League baseball is a very good thing because it keeps the parents off the streets.”
God bless it.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
Congress should not accept this: Stop Trump’s Slush-Fund Boondoggle
There is no real market for this kind of candidate, actually: The Thomas Massie Lesson
ARTICLES
Rich Lowry: The Real ‘Flight 93’ Election
Elliott Abrams: Terrorists Have Taken Over Iran — Now What?
Stanley Kurtz: The Arizona Two-Step May Save Your University
Matthew X. Wilson: A Fatal Stabbing in Britain Is the Stuff of Dystopian Horror
Andrew McCarthy: AG Blanche Delivers Tax Audit Immunity to Trump, His Former Client
Dan McLaughlin: Trump’s Collusive ‘Anti-Weaponization Fund’ Takes a Page from the Left’s Playbook
Brittany Bernstein: Harris Campaign Didn’t Go Negative Enough on Trump, DNC Autopsy Concludes
Abigail Anthony: The Speech Police Are Worse Than We Thought
Michael Brendan Dougherty: Trump Defeats Xi
Oleksandr Kraiev & Andreas Umland: When the Guns Fall Silent: Ukraine After the War
Robert P. George: Jürgen Habermas: A Serious Man
Caroline Downey: Deranged Luigi Mangione Fans Exploit Mamdani’s Press-Pass Laxity
Jeffrey Blehar: The Axe Finally Falls upon Thomas Massie
Jim Geraghty: The Large-Scale Near-Miss Cyberattack You Never Heard About
Kathryn Jean Lopez: Learning from a Great Man: Bob Woodson, R.I.P.
Jessica Hornik: A Scary Story
CAPITAL MATTERS
Domenico Ferraro, on the vicious cycle societies refuse to learn from, or break: The Specter of State-Controlled Industrial Policy
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Armond White explains the significance and the roots of those wild pro-Pratt ads we keep seeing: The Origins of Spencer Pratt’s Satirical AI Style
Brian Allen is telling New York tales this week, about buildings packed with history and possibly ghosts: Art and History, Downtown, Uptown, and Is That a Ghost at Jumel Terrace?
BEAT THE HEAT WITH EXCERPTS
The political disaster that is the release of the draft DNC “autopsy” was a sight to behold this week. Jeff’s got his take here, on the “half-drafted thesis assembled at the last second for a book the Democratic Party never finished reading.” Brittany reports the details:
A newly released Democratic National Committee report looking back at how the party lost the 2024 election concludes that then–Vice President Kamala Harris lost, in part, because she failed to focus sufficient negative attention on President Trump.
“The national campaign did not effectively drive Trump’s negatives, and the White House did not effectively support Vice President Harris over three and half years to improve her standing before the candidate switch,” reads the autopsy, written by Democratic strategist Paul Rivera, who was asked by the DNC to investigate why the party failed to wing big in 2024.
Rivera goes on to suggest that Democrats failed to remind Americans why they disliked Trump in his first term.
“The idea Trump’s negatives were ‘baked in’ is a major failure of analysis and reality, given how his favorability has cratered less than a year into this term,” he adds.
Rivera’s finding that Harris wasn’t sufficiently negative is curious given that Harris and her surrogates incessantly depicted Trump as a threat to democracy who revealed his true colors on January 6.
Harris attacked Trump repeatedly during the campaign, calling her opponent “increasingly unhinged and unstable” and telling CNN that she believed he was a fascist who wanted “unchecked power.”
Party officials interviewed hundreds of Democrats in all 50 states to create the report. Democrats had asked DNC Chairman Ken Martin for months to publicly release the findings, but Martin chose to do so only after being “presented with CNN’s reporting about much of its contents,” according to the outlet, which first obtained the nearly 200-page report.
The report is littered with notes drafted by DNC editors pointing out that many of Rivera’s claims are unsubstantiated and/or contradict publicly available reporting.
Rich Lowry updates Anton:
We all know the famous “Flight 93” essay from the 2016 election, arguing that the stakes in the contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were existential.
It was definitely better that Trump won in 2016, but Mike Anton’s argument was overwrought. His contention that a Clinton win would cement Democratic electoral dominance forever, such that Republicans needed to charge the cockpit or die, was implausible at the time, and seems more so in retrospect.
If Hillary had won in 2016, in all likelihood she would have been gone in 2020, washed away by the pandemic just like Trump was.
We had a real-world test case of a bad Democratic politician winning the presidency in recent years — the Biden presidency didn’t result in the end of the republic, just an ineffectual single term.
Anton put a lot of weight on immigration policy. It’s hard to imagine how Hillary’s policy could have been worse than Joe Biden’s. He created a de facto open border, and the consequence wasn’t the destruction of America or of the GOP, but a public backlash that helped return Donald Trump to the White House.
This time, though, really might be different.
Democrats are now seriously contemplating measures that wouldn’t have occurred to Hillary Clinton circa 2016.
Endorsing some version of Court-packing, or “Court reform,” as Democrats insist on calling it, is becoming orthodoxy among mainstream Democrats.
A couple of weeks ago, James Carville said that Democrats should pack the Court and add the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico as states in 2028 if they get unified control of Washington.
Now, Carville is just a political pundit, although a prominent one who has been a relative moderate in the Democratic context. But the immediate past Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, who has some chance of winning the 2028 nomination, associated herself with the same ideas the other day. She added abolishing the Electoral College to the list.
Elliott Abrams looks closely at the IRGC’s tightened grip on power in Iran (and Andy adds additional context):
The takeover of the Iranian government by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is increasingly apparent. How should the United States and other countries react when a terrorist group gains control of a government?
First, that the Revolutionary Guard Corps is a terrorist group is now very widely acknowledged. Not only the United States but also the United Kingdom, Australia, the countries of the European Union, Canada, Saudi Arabia, and many others call the IRGC a terrorist group.
Second, it is also understood very widely that the IRGC is the dominant power in Tehran now — not the clergy. The Soufan Center reported that “U.S. intelligence agencies assess that Khamenei’s replacement, his son Mojtaba, is severely injured and that IRGC commanders and powerful civilian leaders are ruling in his name.” Iran International reported that with “the Revolutionary Guard effectively assuming control over key state functions,” the IRGC “has blocked presidential appointments and decisions while erecting a security perimeter around the core of power, effectively sidelining the government from executive control.” The group says senior IRGC officers now exercise “full control over the core decision-making structure.” And according to the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, “Israel’s intelligence agencies have assembled a comprehensive assessment of who truly controls Iran. . . . Real power lies with a hardline group operating through the Supreme National Security Council and the IRGC, which now shapes Iran’s military and political direction.”
There is a precedent for a terrorist takeover: the Hamas takeover of the Palestinian Authority in 2006. In the parliamentary election held on January 25, 2006, Hamas won a clear majority of 74 seats to 45 for Fatah (out of the total of 132 seats) — and won the right to rule. The reaction from the United States was to break off contacts with every ministry in the Palestinian government and with the new (Hamas) prime minister. A USAID notice told its employees that “no contact is allowed with PA officials under the authority of the Prime Minister or any other minister. Contact with all officials in these ministries, including working-level employees, is prohibited.” All U.S. aid that went to the new Palestinian Authority government was immediately stopped. No money could be sent to the PA through U.S. banks, because aid to any part of the PA controlled by its new cabinet was considered to be aid to terrorism.
Not only the United States but also the Middle East Quartet (consisting of the U.S., EU, Russia, and the U.N.) demanded that the new PA government abandon violence and terror, acknowledge Israel’s right to exist, and support all previous agreements between the PA and Israel, including the Oslo Accords.
The period of distancing from the PA ended in June 2007, when — amid Hamas–Fatah gunfights in Gaza — PA President Mahmoud Abbas dissolved the PA government and appointed a new, non-Hamas prime minister.
What is striking about the IRGC takeover of the Iranian regime is that no such reaction has been visible from any quarter. U.S. sanctions on Iran are so heavy that they already exclude the kinds of support or association that existed with the PA before the 2006 elections. But what about the other countries that consider the IRGC a terrorist group — most of which are democracies that have anti-terrorism statutes?
Here’s the piece only Armond White could write, on the 18th- and 19th-century stylistic origins of those wild AI ads for Spencer Pratt:
These clips restore the satirical power that political cartoonists in newspapers and print magazines lost during the digital era. No matter one’s position on the Los Angeles mayoral race, the Pratt spots harness physical movement and mimesis for the liveliest examples of cinema so far this year.
Updating the history of satirical political graphics — William Hogarth’s 18th-century engravings on British moral topics, Honoré Daumier’s caricatures of 19th-century French decadence, and Thomas Nast’s critiques of Tammany Hall corruption during America’s Gilded Age — the Pratt graphics respond to current social circumstances using AI style that’s distinctly of its time.
The spots are shocking because they dare to use Pratt’s recognizable appearance alongside ultra-realistic likenesses of his opponents, primarily presiding Mayor Karen Bass, with her perpetual “what-me-worry?” grin. Humorous antagonism heightens the emotional impact of these imaginary confrontations. They would be cartoonish, but background images of Los Angeles burnt to cinders and crumbling social order trip an alarm. It captures the desperation of the moment. Pratt’s tech team accesses that gleefully morbid fascination of 1970s disaster movies — The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, and the Airport franchise — in which the desire to see Los Angeles/Hollywood “get it” (as ’70s wags quipped) is now a reality.
CODA
Let’s close with “Last Letter Home,” a Dropkick Murphys song based on the family correspondence of Marine Sergeant Andrew Farrar, who died in the Iraq War in 2005. It is tough to get through with dry eyes, I won’t lie.
To those who serve(d), to those who sacrificed, and to their families, thank you — this Memorial Day weekend, and every weekend.
Commentaires
Enregistrer un commentaire
Thank you to leave a comment on my site