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Hello and happy Saturday. A decade or so ago, in an earlier and more innocent era of social media, Esurance ran a commercial featuring a grandmotherly woman named Beatrice. She bragged to her friends that she was saving a lot of time by “posting photos to her wall” (early Facebook-ese), and then she turned and pointed to her living room wall, covered in photos. She then goes into her insurance spiel, and when one of her friends tries to argue with her, Beatrice gestures at her and says, “I unfriend you.” The frustrated friend stands up and says, “That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.”
That expression, now immortalized as a meme, came to mind a few times this week. If there was a recurring theme to the big stories of the week, it would be norms—and how they are being violated. On Wednesday, the Texas House of Representatives approved a new congressional map, redrawn in hopes of giving the GOP five extra seats in Congress come the midterms. Normally, congressional districts are redrawn only once a decade, after each census. But Texas knocking down that norm paved the way for other states to do so: California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared Thursday that the state would hold a special election this November to redraw its own congressional districts to advantage Democrats. (Don’t miss Charles Hilu’s reported piece on gerrymandering through the years and how this bout might play out.)
David Drucker reported on the California initiative, noting that one poll showed that 57 percent of Californians would support such an initiative. Drucker notes that Newsom is not hiding the fact that it’s a ploy to stop Republicans: “The governor … is framing the campaign as a choice: Help Democrats check the president in next year’s midterm elections—or empower him.”
And speaking of Newsom: In his campaign to promote the special election, the governor has begun mimicking Trump’s social media persona. He’s tweeted in all-caps, shared AI-generated memes of himself, and used emojis to call Trump a snowflake.
Nick Catoggio is a little conflicted. He concedes some of the trolling is funny, and he acknowledges that Newsom’s tactics are working on a number of fronts. But what does it say that trolling is a winning strategy? In Boiling Frogs (🔒) he writes:
Trumpism is a reminder that many people are looking for excuses to be cruel to their enemies and will warm to ideologies that grant them moral license to behave accordingly. It will take much more than Gavin Newsom’s dopey trolling exercise to grant that license to Democrats—he’s trying to raise, not lower, American standards for political civility by mocking their degradation—but you can see from this episode how a more earnest “Trump, but progressive” demagogue might gain traction by inviting liberals to lean harder into their contempt for Republicans.
On Friday, we woke up to the news that the FBI was raiding the home of John Bolton, who served as Trump’s national security adviser from 2018-2019 and has since been a staunch critic of the president. The raid was ostensibly part of a national security investigation into Bolton’s potential mishandling of classified documents, according to several reports.
While the FBI declined to comment, FBI Director Kash Patel tweeted, as the raid was going on, “NO ONE is above the law.” Attorney General Pam Bondi also took to social media, tweeting “America's safety isn't negotiable. Justice will be pursued. Always.”
It is indeed possible that the FBI had legitimate cause to request a warrant, and it presented enough evidence that a federal judge signed off on that warrant. But it’s worth noting that in 2023 Patel published a book called Government Gangsters that included an appendix listing scores of prominent Democrats as well as former Trump administration officials that he considered members of the “Executive Branch Deep State.” Bolton was on that list.
Once again, I turn to Nick. He (and many other commentators) suspect that the probe is about Bolton’s book, The Room Where it Happened, published in June 2020. A memoir of his time as national security adviser, the book is often harshly critical of Trump. Bolton had to get the book vetted for publication to ensure he wasn’t sharing classified information. Long story short, the book was vetted and informally cleared by an expert in such matters, but the White House asked a national security official named Michael Ellis to double check. Ellis, who is not an expert on prepublication review, claimed to have found several examples of classified information. Bolton published the book anyway. Nick writes:
[W]hen you sic federal cops and prosecutors on a known political nemesis, you’re inviting Americans to conclude that law enforcement is doing the White House’s dirty work. No president wants the public to look at him like he’s a mob boss, dispatching goons to menace his enemies when they get in his way.
Except Trump. That’s exactly what he wants.
He governs according to the authoritarian maxim, “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.” And John Bolton is the perfect enemy for him to make an example of.
As always, thank you for reading and have a great weekend.
The fall is coming and, with it, school. As parents, we have all the usual concerns. Did my kid get the best homeroom teacher? Do we have the right pencils? When is pajama day, and can they please give us more notice this year? To this, many parents have added a new worry: Is my child’s class now full of a bunch of unvaccinated kids? There is a lot of discussion in the media and in parent groups about vaccine skepticism, declines in vaccination rates, and the possible risks of having fewer children vaccinated. The Kaiser Family Foundation recently issued a report showing vaccination rates declining among kindergarteners. The resulting confusion may leave parents wondering: How much should I worry about this? Do I need to vet possible playdates for their family’s vaccine views?
A lot of the stuff that happens in America that the right doesn’t like is driven by a thing the right professes to like a great deal: Capitalism. Capitalism, not wokeness or lefty social engineering, is the single most powerful engine of social transformation ever invented. I’ll spare you a few thousand words on Joseph Schumpeter and just make things more concrete. I love print newspapers and magazines. They’re dying—or dead—because of technological innovation in pursuit of profit. The general store was killed by department stores, grocery chains, and other big retailers. It’s largely forgotten now, but the decline of the general store—which was often the primary source of debt financing for farmers and rural Americans—was one of the biggest drivers of populism in America and Europe in the 1930s. One of the promises in the Nazi Party’s 1920 platform was the “communalizing of big department stores.”
Earlier this month, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the cancellation of more than $500 million in HHS contracts through the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) that supported mRNA vaccine development. Trump himself seemed indifferent to the attack on arguably the most widely praised legacy of his first term. “That was now a long time ago, and we’re onto other things,” Trump said when asked this month about Operation Warp Speed—the program that helped speed COVID vaccine development. Researchers and former biosecurity officials argue the administration’s turn against mRNA will only leave the United States less able to respond to future disease and public health threats, even as geopolitical adversaries like China ramp up on investments in the technology.
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