Last night, Matt Taibbi, an independent journalist, wrote a lengthy Twitter thread he called “THE TWITTER FILES.” The thread purported to expose how Twitter made the decision to dramatically suppress discussion of the contents of a hard drive from Hunter Biden’s laptop. But it inadvertently did something else entirely: It exposed the new Twitter owner Elon Musk’s profound misunderstandings about the First Amendment.
If ever there were a time and place for a thoughtful, patriotic conservative to vote third party or perhaps even vote for a reasonable Democrat, it’s the 2022 election in Georgia. Herschel Walker’s past is, if possible, even more checkered than Donald Trump’s. After all, no one ever claimed that Trump threatened one of his ex-wives with a gun.Recent evidence that Walker paid for an abortion is just one more revelation about his thoroughly debauched past.
As I reviewed the heavily redacted affidavit relating to the FBI’s warrant to search Mar-a-Lago earlier this month, after its release today, I was reminded of the phrase from the Apostle Paul in his first letter to the church in Corinth that “we see through a glass, darkly.” Yes, we are able to discern certain things, but the whole truth remains hidden; we must thus approach the matter with extreme caution.
Rarely in the annals of public controversy has so much certainty been expressed in the face of such great ignorance. With very few exceptions, the Republican Party has coalesced around Donald Trump and expressed the fierce conviction that the Department of Justice’s decision to serve a search warrant on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence was a grotesque abuse of power.There’s a notable problem with this conclusion: The American public still hasn’t seen the search warrant.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Federal and state prosecutors may soon need to decide whether to bring charges against a former president and current front-runner for the Republican nomination.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Federal and state prosecutors may soon need to decide whether to bring charges against a former president and current front-runner for the Republican nomination.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
The entire legal and cultural ethos of the pro-life movement can be summed up in two sentences: A just society protects all life. A moral society values all life.Justice is thus necessary but not sufficient for a culture of life. The pro-life movement should greet the reversal of Roe v. Wade with a spirit of gratitude. The people of this country have, for the first time in almost 50 years, an opportunity to enact laws that truly protect the lives of unborn children.
The entire legal and cultural ethos of the pro-life movement can be summed up in two sentences: A just society protects all life. A moral society values all life.Justice is thus necessary but not sufficient for a culture of life. The pro-life movement should greet the reversal of Roe v. Wade with a spirit of gratitude. The people of this country have, for the first time in almost 50 years, an opportunity to enact laws that truly protect the lives of unborn children.
Sign up for David’s newsletter, The Third Rail, here.We do not know if Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked draft majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health represents the current consensus of a majority of the Supreme Court. We certainly don’t know yet if it’s a preview of the Court’s actual ruling. Decisions are not final until opinions are issued, and dramatic history exists of a Supreme Court justice changing his mind on abortion during deliberations.
Sign up for David’s newsletter, The Third Rail, here.Few legal doctrines are contributing more to the culture war than the idea that America’s public-school teachers have no meaningful free-speech rights when they’re at work.
To understand the perils of the present, it is necessary to understand the perils of the past, a distant past that few Americans remember well. In the early days of the Cold War, NATO allies faced a daunting strategic challenge. The Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies possessed an overwhelming advantage in conventional weaponry. They had more men, more tanks, and more planes—and they were massed in proximity to NATO’s borders.
As the Kyle Rittenhouse trial comes to a close, two things are becoming clear at once. First, absolutely no one should be surprised if Rittenhouse is acquitted on the most serious charges against him. And second, regardless of the outcome of the trial, the Trumpist right is wrongly creating a folk hero out of Rittenhouse. For millions he’s become a positive symbol, a young man of action who stepped up when the police (allegedly) stepped aside.