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House Republicans are readying their subpoenas.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

The greatest nuclear threat we face is a Russian victory. Take detransitioners seriously. Who’s afraid of a portrait of Muhammad?

Probable Probes

After a few (er, 14) initial stumbles, House Republicans have elected a speaker and handed out committee gavels, and are now poised to deliver on the one promise to voters that they have the unchallenged power to keep: pursuing aggressive investigations of President Joe Biden, his administration, and, yes, even his family.

The flurry of inquiries that Republicans, under the auspices of Congress’s oversight power, plan to launch in the coming days and weeks might well overwhelm the Biden administration, not to mention the public. None of the hearings are likely to command the attention of last year’s Democratic-led January 6 committee, but they have the potential to reveal new information about how the federal government has operated over the past two years and to create political headaches for the president as he prepares to run for reelection. The investigations also carry risks for Republicans, who could lose public support if they appear to be tilting too far at conspiracy theories or pursuing overly partisan—and personal—takedowns of Biden and his son Hunter.

Here’s a guide to the probes that are likely to make headlines in the months ahead.

The Southern Border

Multiple House committees are planning hearings on an issue that Republicans made, along with tackling inflation, a centerpiece of their national campaign. They’ve accused Biden of willfully neglecting the influx of migrants across the southern border, and although the attacks frequently devolve into immigrant-bashing, the moral and legal conundrum over how to handle asylum seekers is becoming a bigger political liability for the president. Big-city Democratic mayors such as Eric Adams of New York are complaining that they lack the funds to accommodate the migrants who wind up on their streets. A big question is whether the hearings will stay focused on policy or whether they’ll turn into an impeachment drive against Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s secretary of homeland security.

Hunter Biden

The personal and business dealings of the president’s surviving son have been a Republican obsession for years, and now the party has the power to hold hearings on what Representative Elise Stefanik of New York has called “the Biden crime family.” Hunter Biden is already under investigation by federal prosecutors in Delaware, and Republicans are intent on demonstrating both that he traded on access to his famous father overseas and that the president was aware of what his son was doing. The younger Biden may be in real legal jeopardy, but the GOP faces a tricky test in making the broader public care about Hunter Biden and keeping its probe focused on his alleged corruption rather than the more sordid personal activities of a troubled son.

The “Weaponization of the Federal Government”

To secure the House speakership, Kevin McCarthy agreed to conservative demands to create a select subcommittee modeled on a 1970s Senate panel that investigated abuses by the intelligence community. This one is focused on what Republicans call “the weaponization of the federal government,” and it’s likely to zero in on complaints from Donald Trump–aligned conservatives that the FBI and other federal law-enforcement agencies have unfairly targeted the former president and his supporters. Democrats see a more malicious motive: to undermine and thwart the many ongoing investigations involving Trump and GOP lawmakers, including the special counsel’s inquiry into Trump’s possession of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.

Biden’s Own Classified Documents

Republicans had barely claimed their new House majority when news broke that classified documents had been found at a think tank in Washington, D.C., where Biden had kept an office, and Biden’s residence in Delaware—handing them a fresh line of inquiry against the president. GOP leaders quickly launched a congressional investigation, but they will be competing with the Justice Department, which appointed Special Counsel Robert Hur to look into the matter.

U.S.-China Relations

Democrats may see the other planned investigations as partisan exercises aimed at tarnishing the president, but not this one. A House vote last week to create a select committee on the “strategic competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party” earned broad bipartisan support, including from all of the top Democratic leaders. The committee is expected to focus on how the U.S. should counter China’s growing economic and military strength, the threat of its possible invasion of Taiwan, and American concerns about its human-rights abuses. Stronger U.S. policy toward China has long been a bipartisan cause in Congress; former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who voted for the bill, is a hawk who angered the Chinese government with her high-profile visit to Taiwan last year. That consensus is likely to add legitimacy to the committee’s work, although some progressives are wary of its potential to generate anti-Asian rhetoric.

Related:

Biden’s classified documents should have no impact on Trump’s legal jeopardy. The impeachment of Joe Biden (from October 2022)

Today’s News

A helicopter with senior Ukrainian officials onboard crashed in a Kyiv suburb, killing more than dozen people, including Ukraine’s minister of internal affairs. The cause of the crash is still unknown. Microsoft is planning to lay off about 10,000 employees as part of a broader effort to cut costs. New research shows that areas of Greenland are hotter than they have been at any point in the past 1,000 years.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf explores whether diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts actually exacerbate intolerance.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Tommaso Ottomano

This Is the Band That’s Supposedly Saving Rock and Roll?

By Spencer Kornhaber

Early December, a tchotchke shop in Brooklyn—an employee advises me about which novelty socks to pair with which comical greeting card for a friend. Then her voice, previously curious and chatty, gains a sudden seriousness. She tells me about a concert she went to the night before. The band was Italian, it was saving rock and roll, and it’d play in the city again, that night. I suddenly understood the difference between a salesperson and an evangelist. The woman gave me an order: You must go see Måneskin.

I didn’t go, but I did know who Måneskin was. I first became aware of the group while attending a watch party for the 2021 Eurovision Song Competition. No one at the party could understand why a bar band in burgundy leather, playing what sounded like a Rage Against the Machine song edited for a Chevy ad, ran away with the top prize. Eurovision is known for Abba-style spectacle, silly and bright. Måneskin is all about scowling, and guitars that sound like carburetors. But clearly, the band had sparked passion somewhere—the kind of passion that, it turns out, converts listeners into proselytizers.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Let’s shake on it. When good pain turns into bad pain

Culture Break

A still from Hawa (Amazon Studios)

Read. “The Bug,” a new poem by Daniella Toosie-Watson.

“What did you expect? For me to let the bug / just be a bug. To leave it alone / when it already planned on dying.”

Watch. Hawa, streaming on Amazon Prime, accurately captures teen grief.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I’ve been reading, and thoroughly enjoying, James Kirchick’s book Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, which came out last year. The title, with its focus on a single American city, actually undersells the book’s scope. More than a case study or chronology of a civil-rights movement, Secret City is a fascinating history of the past century of American politics. It reveals, or reminds, the reader of the supporting and often central role that the scandal of homosexuality—as it was too long understood—played in so many of the nation’s pivotal moments, including the Red Scare of the 1940s and ’50s, the Kennedy assassination, and Watergate. I had no idea, for example, that Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan were all subject at one time or another to rumors that they were gay. Kirchick documents how gay life evolved from subculture to simply culture in Washington over the course of a few decades, and how the nation’s capital was both behind and ahead of the curve in the slow but profound shift in acceptance of gay men and women in public service.

— Russell

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

A mosque in Kandahar houses a relic of the Prophet Muhammad: a cloak preserved, splendid and unpilled, almost 1,400 years after its owner’s death. The mosque’s caretaker claims that the cloak has extraordinary qualities, such as a color that transcends the visual spectrum. The color can be seen, but it has no name. I asked the caretaker whether I could take a look. He said no; unbelievers may not see it. And even if I did, God would delete the memory from my mind immediately afterward, like Tommy Lee Jones in Men in Black. So I went home without seeing it—to the best of my recollection.

These tales of the supernatural have no basis in Islamic scripture (except in the general sense that God’s powers are limitless, so if he wanted to produce a technicolor dreamcoat, he could do so). But as a matter of theology, I greatly prefer this version of the Islamic God—who does as he pleases, and simply performs a neurological reboot on those who displease him—to the one that requires defending by Fayneese Miller, the president of Hamline University, a small Methodist school in Minnesota.

[Daniel Golden: ‘It’s making us more ignorant’]

Last year, Miller severed Hamline’s ties with an art-history professor, Erika López Prater, after she showed her students a 14th-century Persian painting of Muhammad. A Muslim student complained that she found depictions of Muhammad offensive. The administration agreed that López Prater’s act was “Islamophobic,” and that the offense taken “superseded” any claim that this masterwork of Islamic art needed to be seen to be understood. The punishment: banishment. “In lieu [sic] of this incident,” Hamline’s administration told the student newspaper, “it was decided it was best that this faculty member was no longer part of the Hamline community.”

After the story ignited the attention of the national media, Miller defended her decision. And the student, 23-year-old Aram Wedatalla, held a press conference where she wept over her distress at having looked at the painting. The usual defenders of academic freedom, such as the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and PEN America, have raced to López Prater’s side. Most encouraging, though, is the range of allies she has found in Muslim groups. Last week, the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) supported her unequivocally. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which in the past has focused on its irritation at perceived slights against Islam, likewise called on Hamline to reconsider its position.

Who will save Muslims from their saviors? Miller’s administration pronounced the class “Islamophobic,” and said that such atrocities should prompt the community to “listen rather than debate the merits of or extent of that harm.” In this case, “listening” meant listening to Muslims. The positions of some of the most prominent Muslim advocacy organizations in America now complicate that advice. It turns out that Muslims have different views on this matter and many others, and that the fatwa from the president of a Methodist college in St. Paul, Minnesota, has somehow sided with the most intolerant element of the American Muslim spectrum. Miller invited a Muslim speaker to campus who compared the professor’s art-history class to a pro-Nazi or pro-child-molester class, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. Then he suggested that a Muslim might want to kill her, and that these murderous feelings deserved recognition. “You’ve seen what happened in the horrible tragedies of Charlie Hebdo,” Jaylani Hussein warned the faculty and students of Hamline. “Muslims revere our Prophet in a meaningful way, and regardless of whatever you are teaching, you have to respect them.” (Hussein runs a local chapter of CAIR, which distanced itself from his comments—perhaps because “American-Islamic relations” are not improved by reminding people to watch what they say, because some Muslims might want to kill them.)

Perhaps Miller received poor counsel, which led her to assume that all Muslims are reduced to tears when they fail to read the syllabus and cast their eyes upon paintings. But the statement she wrote under pressure last week suggests conviction. She wrote that “faculty have the right to teach and research and … publish under the purview of their peers.” Did she mean “review”? This sentence alone calls into doubt her commitment to academic freedom, because academic freedom is not, in fact, limited by the scrutiny of one’s peers. They can scrutinize all they like. I’m scrutinizing right now. But they can’t stop her from teaching and publishing what she likes. Citing an op-ed published by Inside Higher Ed, Miller went on to say that the right to academic freedom infringed on the right not to be “emotionally, intellectually, or professionally harmed.”

[Graeme Wood: Cowardice at Sundance]

Miller is deferring to the most fragile Muslims. She must think Muslims have skulls like crepe paper, and brains that can be bruised by a light gust of academic inquiry. Such people exist, and her student may be one. But most Muslims—including some who would object strenuously to a depiction of the Prophet—navigate the world without the shelter offered by the Hamline administration. The Muslims I know generally realize that the world is full of insults and challenges, and that education requires willingness to live with them and learn from them. Miller wants to make this resilient Muslim majority, and everyone else, hostage to their most brittle and blubbering brothers and sisters. If any Hamline students really need this kind of protection, I suggest they enroll at a university in Kabul.

Someone once said that Islamophobia is a term invented by fascists and used by cowards to manipulate morons. This line (falsely attributed to my late colleague Christopher Hitchens) has seemed to me truer at some moments than at others. It certainly seemed to apply during the heyday of the Islamic State, when one could be tarred as an Islamophobe merely for mentioning inconvenient truths about Islam, such as the fact that ISIS’s view of the apocalypse is grounded in Islamic tradition and, like the Christian apocalypse, bloody and unpleasant. The promiscuous use of the term served ISIS well, because many of ISIS’s Muslim opponents looked like petulant weenies, and it was of course delightful for actual bigots, who are happy to see accusations against them diluted.

In defending López Prater, CAIR and MPAC use the term Islamophobia, but their letters are neither fascistic nor cowardly nor moronic. They make encouraging distinctions that elude Miller and Wedatalla. Among them: It matters, morally, whether the giver of offense intends to offend, and whether the offended party has good cause to take offense. People take offense for good reasons and for bad ones, and the mere statement I am offended is worthless without a sound articulation of the cause for offense.

These distinctions are intuitive even to small children. But the instinct to treat Muslims like toddlers, incapable of dealing with unwelcome developments, and therefore in need of protection at all times, is powerful in some quarters. The same patronizing attitude is rarely applied to Christians or Jews or atheists. If any of them objected to a painting in an art-history course, they would be told that liberal education might not be for them, at least not until they can toughen up a little. It is a relief to find that nearly everyone outside the Hamline administration, especially Muslims themselves, thinks Muslims should be held to the same standard. Miller, for her part, answers to no higher authorities than God and the Hamline board of trustees, and I hope one of them someday calls her to account.