Dear Weekend Jolter,
In a year when anti-Trump anger is supposed to propel Democrats to victory across the country, local and congressional primaries are proving to be spectacularly messy affairs on the road to November.
In California this week, the party was able to avert the nightmare scenario of two Republicans competing in the gubernatorial general election, after the ritual purging in April of the disgraced Eric Swalwell. Democrat Xavier Becerra will advance, but it could take (at least) days to know whether current runner-up Republican Steve Hilton moves forward under the state’s “jungle primary” system. In Los Angeles, Republican viral sensation Spencer Pratt also could make it to a showdown against Mayor Karen Bass, an embarrassment for the incumbent even as Pratt faces an uphill climb.
Elsewhere, the primaries are elevating some uniquely damaged, in some cases outright atrocious, candidates.
For instance, in New Jersey, voters just nominated for a House seat a plastic surgeon who once upon a time reportedly volunteered with an al-Qaeda front group and served as a witness for the Blind Sheikh in the terrorism prosecution Andy McCarthy led back in the ’90s. You can read Andy’s detailed takes on Adam Hamawy’s backstory here and here.
“The Democratic Party may regret unleashing the forces that are contributing to the rise of radical Islamist elements, but its leaders lack the spine to reassert their control over the party’s destiny,” Noah Rothman concludes.
The New Jersey seat is expected to remain in Democratic hands. What’s happening in Maine represents a much bigger risk for the party. The state’s primary is Tuesday, and a number of progressives appear willing to stand by the sinfully flawed Graham Platner for a chance at ousting moderate Republican Susan Collins and possibly taking the Senate. Aside from Platner’s Nazi-tattoo problem and inconsistencies in his biographical narrative, he was revealed a week ago to have carried on sexting exchanges with up to six different women while married, and also to have had an account on the problematic app Kik, which no adult male should have. (As Jim Geraghty writes, “If the official campaign statement is ‘up to six,’ it means it is six. No married man is going to overestimate the number of women he’s sexting.”) Amid concerns that more dirt is coming, a report involving troubling accounts from ex-girlfriends dropped Thursday.
Democrats are anxious — but not so much, yet, that they’re ready to give him the Swalwell treatment. A couple characteristic quotes (from before the latest bombshell), courtesy of Axios:
“I’ve heard some of my colleagues’ concerns about what we’ve read in the papers, but at the end of the day, we’ve got to win” — Senator Catherine Cortez Masto (D., Nev.)
“I think it’s important for us to focus on the issues facing working families a little bit more than Graham Platner’s marriage” — Senator Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.)
This logic will be familiar to anyone who watched conservatives swallow their objections to Donald Trump over the years. Noah addresses the downsides of this approach:
In defeat, the ethical compromises so many are talking themselves into today will seem ill-considered in retrospect. But what if Platner still manages to pull off a victory in November? Some Democrats are probably beginning to ask themselves what exactly they will have voted for themselves once the thrill of reveling in Republicans’ defeat fades.
Having spent the last decade condemning the GOP for subordinating their integrity to political pragmatism, Democratic partisans are signing themselves up for the same torment. In their quieter moments, some of them just have to be wondering: Is it really worth it?
Dan McLaughlin writes that the Platner revelations are forcing Democrats to reckon with their own rhetoric about character and morality — though “not due to any shortage of Democrats of bad character.” (Coyly, Governor Janet Mills told a reporter amid the Platner drama that she’s technically still on the ballot even though she has suspended her campaign. But it’s getting late.)
Meanwhile, the mess in Texas — the now-official Senate battle between Ken Paxton and James Talarico — is another story. The latter, after spending years positioning himself somewhere to the left of people who find Bluesky too reactionary, is moving to moderate in anticipation of the general. Caroline Downey recently questioned whether Talarico is aware of what state he’s running in. It turns out he does, which is why his campaign has entered its clean-up phase. Rich Lowry writes here on the campaign’s efforts to downplay past statements, everything from a declaration that “God is nonbinary” to a claim that there are six biological sexes to a Covid-era warning that white people were spreading the racism virus.
Yet Paxton’s stains are of a more personal nature: allegations of adultery amid a divorce battle, as well as corruption charges of which he was acquitted in a Texas impeachment trial.
In the 2026 congressional races, character is a luxury good.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
Good riddance: The Anti-Weaponization Fund Is Dead. Long Live Its Death
Phasing out the use of standardized testing was a terrible idea: Universities Have Seller’s Remorse
In this case, DNI should stand for Do Not Install: Remove Bill Pulte
Not a great look for the U.K.: Britain’s Illiberal Mistake on Speech
ARTICLES
Andrew McCarthy: How the Trump DOJ Extracted a Guilty Plea from John Bolton
Kaitlyn Kiepert: Inside the Austin Church That Shaped James Talarico’s Left-Wing Views on Christian Morality
Jeffrey Blehar: ‘Freedom 250’ Collapses into Another Trump Campaign Rally
Joseph Loconte: The Atheist Roots of Modern Antisemitism
Brittany Bernstein: Gay World Cup Fans Search Desperately for ‘Safe Havens’ in . . . San Francisco
Gregory W. Slayton & Sergei Ivashenko: Will Putin Lose Transnistria, Too?
Dan McLaughlin: We Don’t Need a Deal with Iran
Noah Rothman: Trump Has Lost the Thread on Iran
Morgan Ortagus: America Is Winning and Iran Is Losing — Badly
Joshua S. Treviño: Claudia Sheinbaum Leads Mexico into Confrontation
Kamden Mulder: Activists Claim Restrictions on ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ for Minors Cause Suicide. The Study They Rely on Has a Huge Flaw
Andrew Follett: A Year of Deregulation Ignited an American Nuclear Renaissance
CAPITAL MATTERS
Richard Morrison is not mourning the demise of this SEC rule: The Insane Climate Bureaucracy That Never Was
In case you missed David L. Bahnsen’s speech at National Review Institute’s Regional Seminar in Dallas: Freedom Is Worth the Risk
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Armond White’s headline about the latest Sacha Baron Cohen movie says it all: Ladies First, Comedy Last
Brian Allen gets in the America 250 spirit with a look at John Trumbull’s revolutionary art and more: A Boola Boola Revolution
THE EXCERPTS ARE BACK IN TOWN
Senate Republicans are finally asserting Congress’s power — in this case, to put down what would have been an awful abuse by the Trump administration. From NR’s editorial:
Well, that didn’t take very long. Two weeks after we editorialized against the Trump administration’s $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told a House subcommittee hearing that the administration is not going forward with the fund.
That’s good news. It’s a sign that Senate Republicans in particular have remembered that they run an independent branch of the federal government, with its own responsibility to voters and its own duty to uphold the Constitution and the laws it writes. They should go two steps further: bar Trump from reviving the idea, and ensure that future presidents are no longer empowered to engage in similar mischief.
Republicans on the Hill, especially in the Senate, had concerns from the start about the fund. Its huge and transparently symbolic price tag was obviously not calibrated to any realistic assessment of the government’s actual liability for legal wrongs allegedly committed by the Biden administration. Its December 1, 2028, end date was obviously designed to ensure that it served the politics of this administration and not its successors. There were real worries that it would be used not only as a corrupt slush fund to reward political allies, but specifically to pay off January 6 rioters in ways that would be both morally wrong and politically embarrassing to Republicans.
To the extent that there’s an argument for creating new rights of compensation for government misconduct beyond those already on the books, that’s the job of Congress. The Senate and House were justifiably concerned that the fund would be an end run around their powers, and would be used by Trump and Blanche to redress what they perceive as unfairness and injustice rather than to pay for violations of established legal rights that could be proven in court.
It is also heartening to see that the power of the purse still works. The direct impetus for Blanche’s concession was that he and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin were both testifying hat in hand as Congress considers another bill to fund immigration enforcement. That gave leverage to the legislative branch that it seems at times to forget that it has.
The fund was publicly indefensible, and election years have a way of putting a stop to indefensible things.
Over at Capital Matters, Richard Morrison explains the bureaucratic nightmare that could have been, but won’t be:
On Friday, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Paul Atkins made one of the most important announcements in the history of modern financial regulation. His news was not a new regulation or a billion-dollar fine for some white-collar miscreant. In a refreshing move that will hopefully inspire future policymaking, Atkins announced the elimination of a huge bureaucratic burden: the agency’s climate disclosure rule. Critics of the rule cheered.
The rule would have imposed an annual reporting mandate on every public company in the U.S. related to their energy use and climate-change-related policies. This would have been a departure from the SEC’s traditional “principles-based” approach to disclosure, which allows companies to prioritize the information they think will be most useful to investors. This emphasis on one specific topic — especially coming during the Biden administration’s “whole-of-government” campaign on climate change — suggested that the agency was going beyond its authority and implementing environmental policy rather than trying to protect investors or improve market efficiency.
It’s been a long road for this rule, which started with a “request for information” by the agency in 2021, a proposed rule in 2022, and a slightly less extreme final rule in March 2024. After publication in the Federal Register, the rule was immediately challenged in federal court, both by business groups and small government advocates who argued it went too far, and a few environmental activist groups upset because it didn’t go far enough.
Those challenges were making their way through the system when Donald Trump was elected president for the second time and nominated Republican attorney and former SEC Commissioner Paul Atkins to be the new chairman of the agency. In March of last year, the agency voted to take the first major step in reversing course by voting to no longer defend the rule in court. In September, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals announced that the legal challenge was essentially on hold until the SEC made the next move. That next move has now been made. . . .
The rule would have required public companies to make subjective and disparaging disclosures about their own operations, created a rent-seeking bonanza for self-interested parties (to the detriment of ordinary investors), implemented environmental policy disguised as financial regulation, and would not have come close to passing any reasonable cost-benefit test. The rule would have created a value-destroying vortex of redundant paperwork and board-level meddling of staggering proportions. It also would have constituted an entire new industry unto itself in the form of climate-themed corporate auditing. It’s no wonder the biggest accounting firms all lobbied aggressively for the rule’s adoption.
Kaitlyn Kiepert takes a closer look at Texas Senate candidate James Talarico’s church:
James Talarico believes that Christians are called to embrace progressive social views on everything from abortion to gender.
The Texas Senate candidate’s conception of Christian moral teaching, which he tirelessly promotes as the foundation of his campaign, seems to have been shaped by the church he has attended since childhood, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas.
The minister of St. Andrew’s, the Reverend Jim Rigby, often brings politics into his sermons, frequently criticizing the Trump administration from the pulpit. His April 26 sermon, delivered a day after the assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, is a striking example. “There was an assassination attempt,” he told his congregation, “and I know a lot of people have mixed feelings” — he paused, and laughter rippled across the congregation — “but it’s really, really important if we’re going to be the healing agents of the world, to recognize that violence isn’t going to get rid of the problem that we have.”
St. Andrew’s church leadership passed an official resolution against Christian nationalism on Tuesday, shunning the narrative that America has a Christian founding. The leaders promote the idea that the United States has fundamentally corrupt roots, primarily in the unjust acquisition of Native American lands and enslavement of black Americans.
Advertised as Sunday school classes in St. Andrew’s news bulletin, the church’s summer “adult education” sessions are used to promote these ideas. The May 15–21 bulletin introduces one such class: “Christianity today, especially the American version, has discovered some interesting ways to ignore the message of Jesus,” it reads. The study aims to answer financial, political, ethical, and legal questions about Christopher Columbus and is rooted in sources like “art, Bible, Church documents, guest speakers, U.S. federal law, and the U.S. Supreme Court.”
In a statement to National Review, Talarico rejected the notion that he and his church promote a distinctly political version of Christianity.
“I don’t believe in a progressive or conservative Christianity; I believe in a biblical Christianity. My faith is rooted in scripture and the teachings of Jesus Christ. I’m not a perfect Christian, but I try my best to follow the two commandments Jesus gave us: love God and love neighbor,” Talarico said.
CODA
Roll into summer break with this SRV banger.
Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend.
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