Weekend Beacon 7/20/25

July 19 - 20, 2025

Hunter Biden made news this past week when he said on a podcast that Democrats could have won the White House if only they stuck with his father: "We had the advantage of incumbency, we had the advantage of an incredibly successful administration, and the Democratic Party literally melted down." Literally? Were the Democrats in Hades? Don't answer that.

But speaking of the last election, Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, and Isaac Arnsdorf have a new book out, 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America. Our Andrew Stiles gives us a review.

"Weirdly enough, the most explosive revelations are about Iran's efforts to murder Donald Trump and his associates. The authors briefly note how U.S. intelligence assessed that Iran had 'multiple kill teams' inside the country and was unable to rule out an Iranian role in the assassination attempts in Pennsylvania and Florida. (Don't tell Tucker Carlson.) Several pages later, they devote three sentences to the breaking news that former secretary of state Mike Pompeo 'narrowly escaped' after Iranian operatives 'tried to capture him' at his Paris hotel in 2022. Um, what?"

"The entire election can be summed up by how each of the key players chose to cooperate for the book. Trump agreed to be interviewed. Harris declined, obviously. Biden's aides refused on his behalf, citing a conflict with his upcoming memoir. Then one of the authors reached Biden on his cell phone as he was about to board an Amtrak train, and they spoke for several minutes. His aides went ballistic and blocked the reporter's number on Biden's phone, which was subsequently disconnected."

"Biden and his team were determined to run again because they believed he 'governed well, and they cared that historians agreed, ranking Biden among the most successful modern presidents.' They found a token minority, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, to serve as campaign manager, but gave her essentially no power. Biden got expert advice from Hollywood producers who proposed 'an aggressive media campaign to restore voters' confidence,' but no one had a clue what he should say."

Kamala Harris "is at her most impressive in the 24 hours after Biden delivered the news that he was dropping out and planned to endorse her, working the phones with ruthless proficiency to lock up the nomination and advance her career. Once tasked with actually running a campaign, it became clear she had no business running a McDonald's, let alone the United States government. Her political instincts were almost as bad as her ability to speak unscripted. At one point, before the switchover, Harris earnestly proposed showcasing Biden's accomplishments at the convention with 'an original song by Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda.' It was rejected in part because Miranda was viewed as too closely associated with Barack Obama, whom many in Biden's circle regarded as a 'prick.'"

From internal political strife to widespread civil strife, historian and Weekend Beacon contributor Allen C. Guelzo reviews Jay Winik's 1861: The Lost Peace.

"If there is a hero in this story for Winik, it is [John J.] Crittenden, 'one of history’s unsung figures,' who against every expectation came within an ace of persuading the conference and Congress to amend the Constitution and head off the rush to war. The conference has generally been dismissed by historians as too-little-too-late, and even by Horace Greeley in 1861 as 'The Old Gentlemen’s Convention.' Winik is more cautious in his estimate. Crittenden, the heir of Henry Clay’s Union-saving mantle, was 'humble, patriotic, dignified,' all the while 'carefully monitoring the pulse of the American public in the North as well as the South.' The compromise proposals—chiefly, a federal commitment to protect slavery, but only in the states where it was legal—read to modern eyes as amoral deals with the devil. But as Winik notices, the Southern delegates who accepted those compromises were quietly recognizing congressional authority to limit the spread of slavery to the West, something they had been swearing since 1857 and Dred Scott that they would never do.

"In the end, it all came to naught. 'Both sides,' Winik writes, 'were seduced by their own illusions,' and especially the illusion that the other side would cave first and obviate the need for compromise. Remembering Southern threats of civil war as early as 1850, the Republican stalwart Carl Schurz assured nervous Northerners that the threats of 1861 would end the same way. In 1850, 'the South … went out, took a drink, and then came back.' Now, they would try to leave the Union again, 'and this time would take two drinks but come back again.' The Chicago Tribune snorted at secession as 'a confidence game' which, 'when the real meaning and scope of this secession business is understood,' will be dismissed by 'the capitalists and business men' and end with 'a hearty laugh all around.' Abraham Lincoln, whose election sent South Carolina racing toward secession in the first place, was certain, even after South Carolina’s secession convention declared its ties to the Union dissolved, that 'things have reached their worst point in the South, and they are likely to mend in the future.'

"They could not have been more horribly wrong. 'What was begun,' Winik writes, 'to quell an insurrection would consume more than 600,000 lives' and would turn the South into 'charred and lonely reminders of once thriving cities.' True, it gave us 'the genius of Abraham Lincoln,' and for African Americans it provided 'their own struggle for true freedom.' But there is still the hint of resignation in Winik’s conclusion. Even 'the exhilaration of emancipation' would be tempered by 'its unfulfilled promise.'"

Of course, not all geniuses are like Abraham Lincoln. Adrian Nguyen explains in his review of The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea by Helen Lewis.

"According to Lewis, there are two critical parts of the genius narrative: the hagiography of big-brained individuals and a fixation on IQ, singling out unique human beings with higher intelligence. She points to Giorgio Vasari, who wrote a series of salacious biographies called Lives that centered on the careers of Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and other Renaissance artists. He wrote that the young Leonardo was 'marvellous and divine,' and 'would have made great profit in learning had he not been so capricious and fickle, for he began to learn many things and then gave them up.' With regard to IQ, she traces that back to Lewis Terman and Francis Galton, proponents of eugenics. But this certainly has its limits—she points to Cyril Burt, a geneticist who performed twin studies to understand genetic inheritance, and describes his career as 'a story of status, hierarchy and privilege.' Following his death in 1971, the results of Burt’s studies have been alleged by some to have been falsified.

"Such scientific misconduct led to the publication of Genius by Hans Eysenck, well known for his research on cancer and personality, which projects egotism and strength onto the concept of the genius. ... Downplaying the impact of hereditary IQ is also reductive, as it is a deeply complex science that is unfairly dismissed by progressives as a pipeline to racism and sexism. While Lewis doesn’t resort to this, she falls into the typical trap many progressive journalists have already presumed about the field. One of these is minimizing the usefulness of IQ tests because some of the questions being provided—Is idle a synonym for inactive or a synonym for lazy?—were 'arguable' rather than settled for both. But standardized tests are accurate predictors of employee performance and the likelihood of a major accomplishment before middle age. It is otherwise a scientific tool that can be applied and misapplied.

"While this isn’t a major component of the book, Lewis mentions the Great Men of History approach as an extension of her problem with the genius myth. She acknowledges that Thomas Carlyle wrote the famous essay about Great Men of History as a defense of public figures and their innate ability to accomplish things that change the world. But she falls into the widespread misinterpretation that Carlyle’s essay was ultimately hero worship, to demonstrate how 'Francis Galton’s belief that greatness is innate and inherited' was its major influence. But Galton himself believed that these gifts were highly correlated with insanity."

Even our president has thoughts on the thin line dividing geniuses and madmen.

Happy Sunday.

Vic Matus
Arts & Culture Editor
Washington Free Beacon