She ran to Jake Tapper:

And told Nicole Wallace it’s because she’s a woman:

But this really does seem to be a self-own that has legs in this whirlwind news cycle as an indication of what Democrats will do the instant they have power.

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That’s why I think President Trump should short circuit this whole thing before it ever happens.

I’ve warned before about the consequences of the 2026 election amounting to enabling the vengeance-minded wing of the Democratic Party, and that their target list will run much, much longer than just President Trump. Now, the Left has made explicitly clear that they plan to punish young people who had the audacity to try and serve the country in a Republican administration – and the costs for their careers will be great.

Democrat Senator Elissa Slotkin, currently one of the CIA’s Senators tangentially from Michigan, who repeatedly acts as an object lesson in demonstrating what GLP-1 overuse does to the brain, decided to let her traitor-hunting flag fly at an event at the University of Chicago documented by the Chicago Thinker:

[F]or the young conservatives who listened in, one thing Senator Slotkin said in particular stuck out: she legitimately wants her planned political prosecutions of Republicans in power to scare young conservatives from getting involved in politics because, per her words, “Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want, so let me avoid participating in that.” What types of problems did Senator Slotkin have in mind? She didn’t say it in many words (the best threats are implied, of course), but thankfully, her moderator, the editorial director of Vox, said it for her: making young conservatives who choose government service a “pariah politically, socially, maybe even legally.

You can watch the clip here:

The idea of aggressively targeting young staffers in the administration – presumably innocent of any crime, but worthy of harassment for the sin of being Republican and working for Donald Trump – received immediate and wide condemnation, including from her fellow Senate colleagues. But Slotkin doubled down, effectively saying yes, she believes these people are worthy of bankrupting and harassing to the nth degree with her favored lawfare jihad.

This is unprecedented stuff in modern American history. The idea that service in a presidential administration means you have signed up for a life-changing firestorm of threats from the trial lawyers of the Democratic machine is the sort of animosity that wasn’t even reserved for former Confederate officials, many of whom ended up serving in Congress after they literally took up arms against the regime thanks to the Amnesty Act of 1872. It identifies Schedule C political appointees as pawns, fodder for the coming lawfare barrage that will napalm every youngster who had the audacity to be on Jack Smith’s list for purchasing a MAGA hat.

Typical for a CIA Karen’s inability to keep the loud part quiet, Slotkin’s dull-witted vocalization of her oncoming threat is a political gift. It is un-American and unprecedented. It says that once she and her fellow Democrats have the power to do so, they will ruin lives and careers at will, whether anyone is guilty of anything or not, to send the message that civic life within the federal government is not a place your kind are allowed to exist.

It’s incumbent upon President Trump, personally familiar with all the predation of the leftist lawfare regime, to reject and frustrate Slotkin’s favored approach from on high, through a similarly unprecedented step that is nonetheless justified by the bloodthirsty nature of today’s Left.

President Trump should announce, before leaving office, that he has pardoned every single Schedule C political appointee in his administration.

The presidential pardon power is already a broken cheat code solution to our toxic partisanship. But post-Hunter Biden, there’s no reason it can’t be used to prevent unjust prosecution and pursuit simply because of an individual’s politics. Will normal people screech and shout, and run to the courts to overturn such a decision? Of course they will. But the practical effect would be simple: it would show the Elissa Slotkins of the world that they will never be able to use the tactics of legal terrorism against the young people who just signed up to work and serve the country.

Slotkin and her ilk have done enough to render our politics toxic, horrible, and full of vengeance. For too long, Republicans have been fighting them like they’re just fellow civic-minded Americans whose complaints deserve a hearing. It’s time we dealt with them like they deserve. Stop them in their tracks, and protect young Trump staffers from their vile and vengeful agenda.

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I certainly do when I read that, if I’m going to use Anthropic’s A.I. models, I had better be on my best behavior – warning users not to “engage in sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward our models.” You hear that? You’re behaving badly when you yell impotent…

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Consumer prices were up 3.7% in September from a year earlier, the Labor Department said Wednesday, hotter than August’s gain of 3.4%.

That was above the 3.6% rise expected by economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal.

Core prices excluding food and energy rose 2.6%, above forecasts for a 2.5% increase. Month over month, core prices rose by 0.3%,…

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Today, with the midterm elections mere weeks away, that coalition looks decidedly fractured. His approval among black voters has sunk, largely thanks to economic and inflation concerns. Controversy over H-1B visas and a racist tweet by a Trump supporting candidate in Texas became flashpoints for Indian Americans, contributing to a decline in support among Asian voters. And his portion of the Latino vote is taking a hit both for his aggressive enforcement of immigration laws in some communities and a feeling of betrayal by an administration that has prioritized foreign policy conflicts over domestic policy concerns. As the Financial Times frames it:

In 2024, nearly half of Hispanic voters backed Donald Trump. But polls predict that a big majority of them will support the Democratic Party in this year’s midterms.

Many of them blame the Trump administration for a Middle East war that has pushed up diesel and gasoline prices, for cuts to welfare programmes they rely on more than white voters do and for a crackdown on illegal immigrants that has sown fear and anger in Hispanic neighbourhoods…

Both parties have long courted Hispanic communities, who make up about 20 per cent of the US population. But with so many of them backing Trump in 2024, there was talk of a permanent shift in their loyalties towards the Republicans, a once-in-a-generation political realignment…

They were angry at Biden-era inflation and Democratic identity politics, symbolised by the word “Latinx”, which many saw as a label imposed on them. They felt that the undocumented migrants flooding across the border were being granted rights and benefits they had spent decades fighting for. But Hispanic support for the Republicans has proved far more ephemeral than party strategists had hoped.

Last week, the most recent CBS News/YouGov poll found 60% of likely Hispanic voters planned to vote for Congressional Democrats in November. For Republican candidates who had hoped their redistricting success would create a swathe of competitive districts, it turns out much of that hope depended on the 2024 Trump coalition holding together. Instead, it’s breaking apart.

None of this should be surprising. The president has exercised such an outsized role in determining the direction of his party that the extent to which his second term has focused on building – his White House, his legacy, his reshaped world – it has done little to build on the coalition he and his team formed. Instead, the administration’s attitude seems to be: what are you complaining about? If you’re complaining, you’re not part of the team.

The effect is a sour taste in the mouths of many voters who crossed over to back Trump over Kamala Harris, much to the outrage and frustration of their friends and families. The MAGA movement advances a mythology that everyone who voted for Donald Trump in 2024 was coming in for the big win, that they’d joined the fanbase and donned a bright, shiny new jersey. But that’s not what happened. For many voters, including the most critical independents who swung his way, choosing Trump over Kamala was the pragmatic choice. It wasn’t signing up for the red hat club. It was a hope that he could right the ship.

Instead, voters today see a gilded age of ultrarich tech weirdos and Wall Street finance bros controlling Washington’s priorities. Farmers see the highest debt they’ve ever had. Ranchers and consumers see knockoff South American beef flooding our markets. Diesel prices scared the White House enough that they’re reversing their policy to buy Russian gas, even though it’ll cover only two days of supply (if Vladimir even delivers). Mortgage rates popping above 7% means more and more potential homeowners will be forced to sit and wait for their dream. And the president? He’s promising you $5k if you re-elect Republicans – which he’ll deliver somehow, TBD.

By nearly all the major measures, this economy is better than the one Joe Biden presided over – but President Trump’s numbers are worse. It’s obvious why. These new voters expected him to fix things and make them better. Instead, they’re stuck in an economy where the things they need to buy for day-to-day life are more expensive, the people winning big in the marketplace exist at a far-flung distance, and the president seems more interested in landscaping than the voters who crossed over to elect him.

Whatever happened to America First? That’s the fundamental question voters are asking. And the answer Republicans are giving them isn’t enough.

I will lay my cards out clearly: I am strongly for Hasan’s public execution. I am indifferent as to whether the livestream component is right or wrong. I believe people of good will exist on both sides and can make strong arguments for or against. If the live-streaming component were reversed, I wouldn’t be upset, as I think it’s permissible — not obligatory.

But public outcry that reduces public execution to a “spectacle” vastly undervalues the magnitude of Hasan’s offense. It is true that concerns about the macabre, bloodlust, and prurience are real. It is right and good to warn against turning a public execution into an experiment in unbridled machismo. No one should derive joy or entertainment from watching another human die, even if the conditions are just. A public execution is a solemn act of restitution, not a spectacle.

To those making accusations that public executions are a “spectacle,” I would simply warn them against committing “chronological snobbery” that C. S. Lewis warned against — the mistaken idea that the present age is more enlightened than previous times. To that, I would simply say, our society is no more morally enlightened than biblical times, where execution was public (Lev. 24:14; Num. 15:35–36; Deut. 17:5; 21:21; 22:24) and done so that “all Israel shall hear and fear and never again do any such wickedness as this among you” (Deut. 13:11) — in other words, deterrence. To pick and choose Old Testament maxims, like treating the foreigner justly, only to then turn your back on practices that the same Old Testament grounds in the retributive justice principles of natural law (Gen. 9:5-6), is simple partiality. The Bible does not permit being just and compassionate in one situation and then endorsing injustice or vindictiveness elsewhere. If the Bible endorses public execution in some general way, it is not intrinsically immoral. Moral seamlessness underlies the full biblical canon, even as we interpret moral principles carefully. A humble posture would ask why civilizations before us all practiced something that we now consider barbaric and, further, assess whether the therapeutic nature of punishment that now views the condemned as “patients” to be “healed” has not eclipsed what punishment is really for — balancing the scales of justice for the sake of public safety and the common good.

The argument here is not that the Bible demands public execution today in the exact form or that the witness of history is infallible. Claiming so confuses Israel’s law-covenant with the modern nation-state and views history alone as its own moral justification. Just because something has been practiced does not mean it must be practiced today; it should prompt us to ask deeper questions about why such execution methods were used. History does teach, and we are obligated to learn the right lessons. At the same time, anyone who believes we can dispense with the principles of human dignity, public justice, public accountability, and deterrence ignores timeless principles the Bible and modern statecraft continue to rely upon (Rom. 13:1-7).

Even so, concerns about what the event could become do not negate the legitimate public interest in witnessing justice carried out — and in the public reckoning and assuagement that follows. Hasan’s crime was public in nature and requires public satisfaction.

The condemned in focus in this case is no ordinary murderer. He committed both treason and terrorism, making his crime an offense against the body politic on a scale beyond that of an ordinary murder. A soldier sworn to defend the nation who turns against it by murdering those likewise called to its defense has committed an offense of such a horrific kind that I am not troubled by giving its punishment greater symbolic weight in the public mind. If that means a livestream, so be it.

Whether I watch it or not, I believe there are good reasons for the livestream. I would argue on jurisdictional grounds. Because I believe capital punishment should be public, who should view the execution should be determined by the political community’s own interests. In other words, Tennesseans should have the ability to see a Tennessean murderer executed.

More from Axios: Trump Questions Livestreaming an Execution

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Democrats Are Running On Corruption

The latest episode of The District Club is here:

You can also listen to the podcast:

More from:

• The New York Times: Democrats, Midterms, Corruption, and Affordability

• Politico: Democrats Are Making Corruption Messaging a Pocketbook Issue

• The Bulwark: Democrats Plan To Target Trump Underlings

Romance Is Dead — Whose Fault Is It?

Derek Thompson:

I care about the decline of coupling and marriage not because I consider myself a strict evangelist of matrimony—I think people should do what they can to enjoy themselves without hurting others—but rather because I think it bears on two of the most important questions about the future: (1) How many people exist, and (2) how happy are they? The relationship between romance and births is practically linear. Since 1990, Burn-Murdoch has shown, the decline of births traces the decline of relationship formation across many countries. Fewer relationships mean fewer people, and accelerating population declines around the world are, somewhat like climate change, a slowly accumulating phenomenon that will almost certainly shape the future of economics, technology, and the texture of human existence.

Then, there’s the mushy yet momentous question of whether people actually enjoy their existence. Self-reported happiness is declining in the west, and particularly in the U.S. Reviewing several decades of General Social Survey data, the economist Sam Peltzman came to the conclusion that “most of the overall downturn [in life satisfaction] is attributable to decline in marriage post-2000.” Reviewing Peltzman’s work, The Atlantic’s Olga Khazan provided some useful context:

One paper alone might be easy enough to dismiss, but this is a fairly consistent finding dating back decades in social-science research: Married people are happier. Period.

If the decline of coupling is upstream of both falling births and falling happiness, then the most important question is what’s happening at the source. In his new book Generation Uncoupled, Daniel Cox, a public opinion researcher and director of the Survey Center on American Life, considers a range of causes that span technology, culture, media, economics, and politics. In today’s interview, we talk about all of that.

In the end, we talk about men—especially low-income men without a diploma. “No group appears to be struggling more on the dating market than young men without college degrees,” Cox told me. “Compared to their college-educated peers, they are far more likely to be single and far less likely to have gone on a date in the last 12 months.” One reason is that, even after decades of rising female economic power, women in the dating market still value men’s economic potential more than height, politics, religion, or education, and low-income men without college degrees are often less affluent than the women in their neighborhoods and social circles. The decline of marriage cannot be reduced to any one thing, but it cannot be fully explained without considering the decline of what the sociologist William Julius Wilson once called “marriageable men.”

How White Guilt Disarms The West

I interviewed Eli Steele for the Daily Wire:

Obama knew that his power would be in identifying with the black guy, even though that black guy, in my cynicism, was not part of the American line; he was from Kenya. I have a true connection to slavery. My kid is white, but my great-grandfather was born into slavery. So I know that power very well because I have a choice, right? Nikole Hannah-Jones had that choice: white mother, black father, and a middle-class upbringing. So pretty similar to mine. She decided she identified with the black guy, and so white guilt made Nikole Hannah-Jones possible.

Nikole Hannah-Jones played the black side of the coin — the black power side of that coin. And she knew that if she were to go to the black side, she was going to have to follow that black power politic very militantly. Slavery must be everywhere. We got the 1619 Project, which went into almost every school. So if you want to understand the power of white guilt, because what she was doing was giving the white education power structure — the institution — its innocence. You are right, Nikole; we are a profoundly systemic racist nation. We must educate every kid. We must ground the founding of our nation in slavery.

So if that’s the object or the basis, how do we get past that?

I think that the answer really is to first understand the power of white guilt and start addressing it. And now, what makes white guilt very difficult for people, and what makes suicidal empathy so attractive, is that suicidal empathy is a diagnosis. They usually say, “Ah, that guy on the Left, he’s crazy. That’s suicidal empathy.” White guilt doesn’t do that. White guilt states, “What are you going to do? You?” Now I’m not talking about them. I’m talking about you. What are you, as the individual, going to do? Because all these years you said, “As a white man, I cannot say this or do this, or I’ll be a racist. Or, as a black man, I cannot say or do this, or I’ll be your Uncle Tom.” So we kept quiet, and we kept people, as my father says, deferential.

We kept deferring to people like Nikole Hannah-Jones. We didn’t want to get fired. I’m not minimizing the price that people have had to pay. I mean, my own father paid the price. I paid the price in a smaller way, so I know the price, but at the same time, if we’re not really going to pay that price in the short term — because what happened to our country, we’ve seen a decline. So I would say the way out really is to understand where we are, but also to understand that we have white guilt inside our brain. What I mean by that is that we police ourselves.

The other way is people saying, “I’m going to become tribal just like them and become just a white identity. I’m embracing the white identity.” The only way out for us is to become American, for us to really become unapologetic about the American principles, which are the greatest principles, the most universal principles, in the world. And I know people may think it’s kumbaya or something like that, but really, what else is there? The Bible tells you to do the same thing. If we compromise the Bible, we compromise the American principle. Right now we’ve got to stop compromising on that. And that’s the challenge of living in freedom. And that’s the way we have to, in a collective sense as a society, start living by the principle.

✍️ Feature

• Tablet: On The Student Riots in France

🌍 Foreign

• The Wall Street Journal: United Kingdom Welfare Disability Payouts

• Politico Europe: Europe Rebukes Donald Trump Over Russia Diesel Imports and Ukraine Support

• MSN: Europe’s Test Case to Unite the Right

• The American Conservative: Trump Gives Brazil’s Bolsonaro a Boost

• Daily Wire: How Policy, Not Walls, Quieted the Darién Gap. And No One Is Talking About It.

• Daily Wire: The Riots in France Today Could Be at America’s Schools Tomorrow

• Daily Mail: Saudi Prince’s Heavily Guarded Palaces and Bunkers Face Houthi Attacks

• Semafor: Attacks on Riyadh Threaten Saudi Confidence

• The New York Times: Israel’s Election, India’s Protests, and Riyadh Under Attack

• The New Yorker: How a Canadian TV Show May Have Helped Foil the Flydubai Terrorist Attack

• Daily Mail: Erik Prince’s Forces Suffer Battlefield Losses in Congo

🏛️ Domestic

• The New York Times: Elon Musk and the Midterms

• The Washington Examiner: Graham and Andrews Trade Insults in Debate

• The Washington Examiner: Trump and Rubio Consider Firing Kimberly Guilfoyle

• The Wall Street Journal: Amy Klobuchar and the Minnesota Governor’s Race

• The Wall Street Journal: A Credit Score Shift at Fannie and Freddie Is Shaking Up the Mortgage Market

• The Wall Street Journal: What Might Russ Vought’s “Tremendous Surprise” Actually Be?

• Politico: Ilhan Omar’s Home Is Raided as Trump’s Political Fight Escalates

• Punchbowl News: Katie Bailey Becomes Trump’s New Hill Liaison

• Daily Wire: Campaign and Hospital Deny Claim That James Talarico Went to Ohio Mental Hospital

🗳️ 2028

• Daily Wire: Rubio’s Athens Address Is a Vision for Western Civilization

• Axios: Buttigieg Gambles on a Different Path for 2028

📰 Media

• Mediaite: CNN Data Guru Breaks Down Unusual Democratic Strength in Texas Beyond James Talarico: “Truly Historic”

💻 Tech

• The New York Times: The TikTok Tarot Card Lady Called Me a Murderer

• The National Interest: Why Data Centers Should Be Able to Defend Themselves

🧬 Health

• Daily Wire: The Deadly Secret Behind “Compassionate” Health Care

🏈 Sports

• Daily Wire: Sophie Cunningham’s Blunt Response to Liberal Media Attacks

🎭 Culture & Hollywood

• Daily Wire: Our Bar for Great Writing Has Never Been Lower

• The Hollywood Reporter: ‘Other Mommy’ Scores at Box Office: Social Reckoning Bad Opening

• Variety: Russell Brand Rape Trial Starts in London

• Variety: Dan Levy Slams Shane Gillis’ ‘SNL’ Monologue, Says More Men Need to Stand Up

• Variety: ‘Miami Vice ’85’ First Look: Michael B. Jordan and Austin Butler Filming

• Daily Wire: What Usefulness Has to Do With the Crisis of Men’s Friendships

• Daily Wire: Banal Horror: Prime Video’s Shallow Reimagining of a Stephen King Classic

• Daily Wire: Mike Flanagan’s Chilling Portrait of a Decadent America

• Daily Wire: ‘Lanterns’ Shows the Limits of the Superhero Genre

🪶 Quote

“As the world changes, the forms of corruption also gradually become more cunning, more difficult to point out - but they certainly do not become better.”

— Kierkegaard

Three years on, the lesson of that attack is clear: it worked.

October 7 was meant to break the status quo asunder. It targeted the Jews most sympathetic to the plight of Gazans, most liberal in their views, and slaughtered them like the soft targets they were. It was a blood-red flashpoint smeared across the face of Israel and its allies. It aimed at killing as many Jews as possible while undoing years of advancement under Donald Trump’s diplomacy to achieve a new normalcy for relations between the Jewish state and Muslim nations across the Middle East.

Instead of joining the fight against the side that murdered innocents, nations clambered over each other to recognize for the first time a Palestinian state – including Spain, France, Mexico, Portugal, Norway, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and the U.K. As an ally to Israel, the United States truly stands alone.

October 7 was a call for the West to answer, done with a demonic confidence that the West would overwhelmingly fail the test… and fail we did.

My friend Douglas Murray has used this line about that day: “Sometimes in life a flare goes up, and you get to see where everyone is standing.” Yes – and in this instance, it helped those who hate Jews discover new ways to find each other.

It turns out there are far more of them than many people imagined. It turns out that rather than stop with horror to look at the images, still unseen by the vast majority of people, that were broadcast by a demonic group of murderers, many people in the West responded instead by deploying the famed Norm Macdonald tweet as if it were a piece of wise counsel instead of trenchant mockery.

So here we are in 2026, a time when people regularly tell their millions of followers that America deserved 9/11, the Jews deserved October 7, Hitler wasn’t a villain, and then dance right up to the idea that maybe, just maybe, another Holocaust would be a good thing.

This may sound like exaggeration, but it isn’t.

Before October 7, the majority of Americans had favorable views of Israel – now, six in 10 have unfavorable views, and the number with extremely unfavorable views has nearly tripled to 28%. This includes a majority of Republicans 18-49, 70% of Independents, and as high as 84% of Democrats in the same age range.

It is now a solidly bipartisan position in America to dislike Israel. Given the trajectory, and the blame ascribed to Israel over the Iran war, it may soon be a bipartisan position to hate it.

For younger citizens of the West, this deep-seated inhuman hate has learned the power of a smiling face. It comes now clad in athleisure wear, speaks the language of Ivy League colonialists with eloquent charm, and sheds the unsightly vestiges of the cruelest antisemitism for propaganda designed to resemble harmless influencer banter. It is a curated form of the oldest hatred, hidden within a seemingly innocuous message indistinguishable from the socialist instincts that animate the 21st-century Left.

Come for the Medicare-for-All. Stay to learn which billionaires need to bleed.

In retrospect, the revelry of the October 7 attackers was their celebration of the end of the world – a world they destroyed with every life they ended. We live in that world now. And how America responds to that evil – whether we have the courage to do what is necessary even if the Jew haters at home and abroad shriek, even if the whole world hates us for it – is the moral leadership test of our time.

People want to forget. America has to remember.

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Related:

• CDR Salamander: Three Years Since the Oct. 7th Slaughter

• The New York Times: For Twin Brothers Abducted in the Oct. 7 Attacks, Adjusting to Freedom Is a New Challenge

• The Wall Street Journal: The Young Americans Who Moved to Israel After Oct. 7

• Daily Wire: Three Years After October 7, The Truth Is Out

• The Jerusalem Post: How Will We Remember October 7?

• New York Post: Jew-hating radicals are celebrating the horrors of Oct. 7 and organizing parades full of monsters

• Semafor: No Gaza Peace Three Years After Oct. 7

• New York Post: NYC Mayor Mamdani Uses 3rd Anniversary of Oct. 7 Atrocity to Attack Israel for Ongoing Genocide

• New York Post: Oct. 7 Survivors Struggling With Joblessness and PTSD

• The Washington Post: Three Years After Oct. 7, Israeli Strikes in Gaza Grind On and Deaths Climb

• The Free Press: We’re Still Drowning in Myths About Gaza

• The National Interest: Israel’s PTSD Election

• The New Yorker: Will Netanyahu Escape His Reckoning?

• The Free Press: Israelis Who Never Left October 7: Hostages, Survivors, Survivors’ Families

• Daily Wire: The Shrill Half-Wits Of The Podcast Class

🪶 Quote

“Human beings do not live forever, Reuven. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much, if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye?... I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing; but the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing; but the man who lives the span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant. A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life. It is hard work to fill one’s life with meaning — that, I do not think you understand yet. A life filled with meaning is worthy of rest. I want to be worthy of rest when I am no longer here.”

— Chaim Potok

Cornell protesters swarm campus to support Jane Doe, call for university president’s resignation

Faculty at Cornell University are weighing a vote of no confidence in the school’s administration as student protesters take over the campus in response to sexual assault allegations on Tuesday.

The no-confidence resolution has secured support from 40 of the faculty senate’s 75 voting members, according to the resolution’s sponsor, professor Paul Ortiz.

“As you may suspect, we were approached in our capacity as faculty senators by numerous Cornell colleagues demanding action. Many of these faculty – including myself – were approached by students at Cornell who are upset, fearful for their personal safety, and wanting our university to address the perennial problem of sexual assault on the campus,” Ortiz wrote.

Cornell President Michael Kotlikoff also faced questions from the student body during a campus assembly on Monday as protests took over the college.

“We’re not hiding anything at Cornell,” Kotlikoff told students, according to the Cornell Daily Sun student newspaper. “You will hear proposals from us going forward around what we’re going to do to try and improve this culture and address this problem.”

Kotlikoff has so far dismissed student calls for his resignation.

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There was also extensive conversation about the week’s movements on the A.I. front, which was also a topic on my Fox weekend, where I co-hosted the Big Weekend Show on Saturday and joined Sunday Morning Futures. Thanks to everyone who tuned in!

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The A.I. Golden Calf

Andrew Walker in the Daily Wire:

The form of human idolatry changes. The propensity for idolatry does not.

Whether building sky-high towers that reach God, as in the tale of Babel in Genesis 11; making golden calves in Exodus 32; or raising Nebuchadnezzar’s golden image in Daniel 3, humans tend to project God-like power onto human-made artifacts. The great theologian John Calvin likened the human heart to a “perpetual factory of idols.”

Enter the latest chapter of this deeply human tendency: AI. This is the next widget on the conveyor belt of idols. What’s fascinating is that even AI experts admit they aren’t even sure exactly how AI works. If they can’t, I can’t either. From all the available summaries I’ve read, AI works by algorithmic prediction based on the enormous quantities of data it has scraped.

Questions now abound about whether, and to what degree, AI possesses God-like attributes — such as aseity (existence), infallibility (without error), and omniscience (all-knowing) — and God-authored human capacities, such as rationality, moral responsibility, consciousness, sentience, and ensoulment.

Now that conversation is accelerating, as the New York Times reports in a stunning story about Anthropic consulting with religious leaders on the moral status and religious implications of AI agents. The story shows that the secularized tech vanguards of Silicon Valley — who largely assume a materialist account of reality — are courting and pressing religious leaders to consider the outer boundaries of their own assumptions about AI’s moral status as a conscious being. Other stories give eerie indication of where AI accelerationism is going: “If we build a superintelligence, we will first fall in love with it. Then we will worship it. Finally, we will make sacrifices to it.” Thankfully, not all of the AI champions are singing from the same technocratic hymnal. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s lead, is right to point out the errors of placing religious burdens on AI: “I am very uncomfortable about people trying to ascribe religious force or a surrender of human judgment to AI models, and think it is a real safety issue.” Restraint and sobriety in the face of unbounded optimism is a welcome chastening.

As of this writing, I am hard-pressed to find many — or any — serious religious leaders entertaining AI as a morally responsible person or an agent that can channel the divine. Earlier in the year, the Vatican released a sprawling encyclical insisting upon the unique status of humanity, a unique status that no man-made machine can fully replicate. Far ahead of our current craze, I was part of a group of Christian scholars and leaders who, in 2019, released a statement denying “that any part of creation, including any form of technology, should ever be used to usurp or subvert the dominion and stewardship which has been entrusted solely to humanity by God; nor should technology be assigned a level of human identity, worth, dignity, or moral agency.” What seemed like far-off speculation a mere seven years ago now seems the topic du jour.

Our argument was and remains: AI is not conscious. It lacks self-awareness or the ability to conceptualize self-transcendence. AI does not possess moral free choice, that is, the ability to deliberate and make choices all on its own. AI is not “alive” in any sense that bears resemblance to organic beings. AI is not sentient; it cannot feel. AI has neither soul nor body. It has no reflexive rationality that was not first programmed.

Disembodied, it lacks the foundational requirement of what makes us human persons and created in the divine image — the Body-Soul unity. Cognitive simulation without a human body does not constitute personhood. Biblically, human personhood is the unity of body and soul.

The fact that AI must be trained for “alignment” (industry lingo for setting proper moral parameters) means they are not innately morally responsive. Lacking moral agency — needing training to know right from wrong — highlights a salient difference between humans and machines: moral awareness is innate in humans (Rom. 2:14-15).

As philosopher Christopher Tollefsen helpfully summarizes, AI may have the properties of mind for information processing and still lack consciousness. From this, we can conclude what AI does: it mimics cognition. Simulating cognition is different from possessing cognition in itself. It has the “illusion” of consciousness, as Tollefsen states, that allows predictions to follow from inputs. That may be as much as we can say.

Apart from the powers of computation that humans give to AI when they create it, AI would never do. Because it has no property of doing apart from the humans that empower it, it has no property of ontological being, either. There are also real human costs to ascribing human-like powers to AI: We begin to assign worth based on function. Here, as the cognitively disabled, the comatose, or those with dementia are edged out for what qualifies as “humanity,” the logic of anti-humanism will cash out in ascribing human agency to machines at the cost of safeguarding our own dignity.

Read the rest.

Latinos Could Decide The Midterms

Axios:

Republicans built pieces of their 2026 strategy, including newly drawn House districts in Texas and Florida, around the assumption that Trump’s historic Latino gains would endure. A reversal is complicating that bet in key races.

Trump’s breakthrough with Latino men was among the clearest signs of a changing GOP coalition in 2024. Two years later, those gains look far less durable, though Democrats haven’t recovered all the ground they lost in the last decade.

A new NBC News/Telemundo poll found Latino voters preferred Democratic control of Congress 59%–35% — a 24-point advantage, double the margin the same poll found in 2024.

A new CBS News/YouGov poll tells the same story: Hispanic likely voters favor Democratic House candidates 60%–39%.

Latino men have undergone a particularly strong political whiplash. Hillary Clinton won Latino men by 31 points in 2016, according to the Edison National Election Pool exit poll, and Biden won them by 23 points in 2020. But in 2024, Trump won them by 10 points.

• NBC now finds Latino men preferring Democratic congressional control 53%–39%.

• About one in seven Latino voters who say they backed Trump in 2024 now want Democrats to take control of Congress.

• A majority of Latino voters say their congressional vote will be a signal against Trump.

Cornell And The Gen Z Sexual Catastrophe

I interviewed Bethany Miller this weekend for the Daily Wire:

BM: I think this is where the conservatives may have, I guess in a blunt way, shot ourselves in the foot where we’ve given conservative women a dichotomy. You have either the girlboss or you have the trad wife. The girlboss is exactly that. Speaking for myself, I’m in my mid-20s, I’m a working woman, and I am unmarried, and I live in a metropolitan area. I’m exactly what the Left hopes for and often wins. Naturally, I am conservative. And so I am that exact demographic, but I can’t put myself in the tradwife box because I’m not married and so I’m not literally a traditional wife. But I’m not a girlboss either because I do desire those things. But I do think there are women like myself who are responding to the way the media, social media, is covering the Clancy case because women are elevated to just our emotions.

That’s all that they’ve become, which is interesting. As you said, this does set feminism back because there is no equality. All of a sudden, you are equal in every aspect until you have to have autonomy and actually have to take responsibility. And all of a sudden it’s, oh, she just struggled with her postpartum psychosis, whatever it may be, and it’s always believed the woman. So I think that the algorithm right now is trending towards more of that. It is pushing more of this toxic empathetic narrative. But at the same time, you can open TikTok today, and you will see women make videos talking about how their husbands are abusive or that marriage is the most oppressive thing you could do.

And I do think that the aesthetic of tradwife right now is not something that you see on TikTok. Instead, you see “Sex and the City”; you see the liberation of having a job and working in the office and being a character on “Suits.” It is the “I can do anything a man can do,” just like that Annie Oakley song — and I can do anything you can do better. That is the trend right now, and it is not trad wife because it doesn’t fit the aesthetic. And so like you said, motherhood is not an aesthetic thing right now on social media. And if it is, it trends more with this far-right-wing circle than with the broader American public. Social media caters more to women who are told to believe all their emotions.

And that is why we have the digital response we do to the Cornell 7 and to Lindsay Clancy right now. And now you’re seeing clips of women telling their boys, “This is how you’re supposed to treat women, and you’re never supposed to treat women the way that happened in Cornell 7.” And I just think it’s absolutely ridiculous what we’re seeing right now.

BD: You mentioned the word aesthetic. It seems to me that the aesthetic here is incredibly powerful because it’s largely an illusion. It’s one that, when it’s effective, is effective for a reason — it connects with people. But you also have this false choice where, as you said, it’s basically either you’re going to be a girlboss or you’re going to be a tradwife when the truth is that the vast majority of women in America are neither of those things in terms of the way that they live their lives and raise kids and work and all the different choices that they make. Is this a situation where the aesthetic has basically taken over and replaced the argument that basically it’s in an era when we don’t have any patience for anything beyond the short video scroll that never ends, that we don’t actually have the conversations around the choices that we make in life?

Are we instead just driven toward “You like this aesthetic, so you’re just going to get more and more and more of it until you can’t take anymore”?

BM: It is exactly that. It’s almost like we let the digital aesthetic speak for what exactly it is. We let Pinterest and TikTok and Instagram tell women what femininity is without actually being able to say what femininity is and actually have the argument of what is the difference between the two sexes? Men are providers and protectors and they are the stronger vessel. Whereas women are the weaker vessel, and women are nurturers and softer, and they provide an aspect that men do not have, and that’s why they’re meant to complement each other. But if I were to even say that publicly, that’s considered inflammatory and controversial, because that’s where our culture is primed right now. But 100%, it’s almost even trivial to say out loud, but the aesthetic is the forerunner to the argument. And all of a sudden, the further and further the aesthetic is allowed to run, the further back the argument is, and no one’s even able to tell you what femininity is.

I think that’s why you’re either a girlboss or you’re a tradwife, and there’s nothing in between. And you just cannot narrow down women and femininity, and men too, into an aesthetic like that. Motherhood is sacrifice and responsibility. It’s children and bills and sickness and forgiveness. Nothing about that is aesthetic. It never was meant to be. Same with men, and the aspect of what it means to be masculine was never meant to be that. But it’s funny, we talk so much about toxic masculinity. We never talked about toxic femininity. What we’ve only ever talked about was the aesthetic parts of it. But because we’ve not been able to define the argument of what it means to be a woman, which we can’t even answer that, funny enough, but then we can’t even answer what it means to be feminine.

All we’ve seen is the unhealthy version of it, which is what we’re seeing in the headlines. And so it doesn’t surprise me. We’ve let the aesthetic define what it means to be a woman. And then now we’ve got this outrage that we’re seeing with these women, the state of women and how they respond to headlines and how they are allowed to run with completely unrestricted emotion. And then it is all the unhealthy versions of women. And so what we’re seeing on display is that unhealthy femininity and not healthy femininity because no one has stopped and talked about what it means to be a healthy and beautiful and flourishing woman. And it’s been unfortunate to see the conservative outlook on life not be able to communicate that because now we’ve let the Left say we are the pro-women party, we are the pro-woman movement.

And now women have found a “home within the Left,” thinking that they are pro-woman, when it’s the conservative outlook on life that actually provides that flourishing, that femininity. And exactly like I said, 72% of Gen Z does want to marry. Some women are lying to themselves. They do want to marry. And if you ask them, they’ll say, “Yeah, we do want a man to pay for dinner. We do want a man to open the door.” And they’re naming all of these things that are exactly what true textbook masculinity is. So they still want to, which is why it’s kind of contradictory. But yes, 100%.

More from Jordan Schroeder in the Daily Wire: Why the ‘Cornell 7’ Story Didn’t Actually Start Inside a Frat House

✍️ Feature

• New Yorker: The Battle for the Post-Trump Right

🌍 Foreign

• Semafor: Trump Administration Eyes Iran Midterm Play

• WSJ: Security Failures Mount After FlyDubai Pilot Is Killed in Israel

• WSJ: Flavio Bolsonaro Surges Past Lula, Setting Up a Bitter Brazil Election Runoff

• Axios: France’s Debt Crisis Sends Yields Higher and Politics Into Turmoil

• UnHerd: How Britain’s Military Bases Are Imperilled

• The Spectator: It Will Be Hard for Sanchez to Avoid Defeat in Spain’s Election

🏛️ Domestic

• WSJ: The American Economy’s Consumer Profile Is Changing

• New York Times: Supreme Court Could Reshape the Midterms as Trump Pushes Election Agenda

• Politico: Trump’s Judges Are Getting Younger

• Punchbowl News: Jim Jordan Emerges as GOP Leader Candidate

• Punchbowl News: SLF Targets Kansas With Major Spending

• Mediaite: New Leaked Audio: Ken Paxton Privately Griping That He Doesn’t Control His Own Campaign

• Politico: House Democrats Target Six Red Seats in Trump Country

• Politico: Fairshake Crypto PAC Targets House Races

• Daily Wire: The Case Against Taxpayers Funding America’s Wealthiest Alumni

• New York Post: White House Rips ‘Scumbag’ Ex-Special Counsel Jack Smith After He Wears ‘No Kings’ Shirt to Bruce Springsteen Show

• New York Post: Former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, Who Later Admitted to Sexual Abuse, Dead at 84

🗳️ 2028

• Washington Examiner: John Kennedy Eyes 2028 Republican Presidential Run

• Fox News: Democratic Senators Dodge Backing Kamala Harris for Potential 2028 Run: ‘Very Messy’

• Semafor: Vance’s Midterm Speech Previews 2028

📰 Media

• Mediaite: Karoline Leavitt Joining Fox News

💻 Tech

• City Journal: Artificial Intelligence, Safety, Technology, and Innovation in Historical Perspective

• Washington Examiner: Big Tech’s AI Safety Guardrails Push Protection Over Profit

🧬 Health

• Washington Examiner: Russian Researcher Studied Plague, Then Died of Mysterious Illness: What to Know

🏈 Sports

• Daily Wire: Why Ted Lasso Pulls His Punches on Women’s Sports

🎭 Culture & Hollywood

• Variety: Digger Majorly Bombs at the Box Office, Earns Verity Scores

• Variety: David Ellison Unveils Skydance’s New Leadership Team

• Daily Wire: Why the Outrage Over ‘Mom of the Year’ Completely Missed the Point

• Daily Wire: Four Tips for Choosing a Great Children’s Book

🪶 Quote

“When the pioneers and adventurers of our past left their homes in search of new lands, they said good-bye forever to the place of their birth and the companions of their youth. Only a lifetime ago, parents waved farewell to their emigrating children in the virtual certainty that they would never meet again. And now, within one incredible generation, all this has changed.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

We pay too much for healthcare, but we don’t notice anymore. At least, not in the way we notice the cost of gas, coffee, groceries, or even the vaunted burrito.

James Carville famously reduced all of American electoral politics to four words: “It’s the economy, stupid.” In the post-COVID years, our elections have revolved around the price of g…

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They lost so quickly that it’s actually astonishing. To witness a company valued at over $8 Billion become so politically toxic in both parties at such speed is a rarity, unless you’re guilty of an oil spill, poisoning dogs, or strangling babies.

Scratch that last one. Lindsay Clancy probably has a bigger political constituency than Flock at this point.

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The decision by the CEOs of the mass surveillance cameras unit of our economy to no-show for the Senate hearing chaired by Josh Hawley and Dick Durbin – not exactly a common political alliance – was an act of surrender. Maybe the surveillance bros thought that if they didn’t show, the scene would get less attention. Instead Fox News made the rare decision to run a huge chunk of a subcommittee hearing. That’s what you do when people are watching.

“The numbers are crazy. They’re worse than data centers,” one consultant told me. And it seems like they know it.

The big news today is that Flock is actively weighing a selloff, either to Motorola or Axon, as its public profile takes hit after hit – likely with the knowledge that more is coming. The number of states and citiies taking down cameras and ending contracts is only accelerating. And then there’s the legal ramifications — add the five cops charged in Indiana yesterday to the pile for the future class action. “Were you stalked by Flock? Sign up here.”

It isn’t hard to see why. The testimony from those innocents wrongly targeted or identified through the use of Flock, thrown into jail in the middle of the night, is the stuff of nightmares right out of Fargo: “This is a problem, you understand, because for you to be right the state would have to be wrong. Is that what you’re saying? That the state is wrong?”

The handwaving solutions Flock offers – changing a dropdown menu, shortening data retention times – aren’t going to satisfy any of these basic objections. It reads as dismissive, a series of tweaks to a product people just plain do not want.

The big mistake Flock seemed to make was assuming that their utility for law enforcement, and promises to greedy local officials eager for potential income, would win out over an American populace with a decidedly different attitude toward mass surveillance than citizens of other nations. The second mistake they made was recruiting a bunch of advocates who seem to think mass surveillance the second you leave your house is something Americans would accept. And the third was treating their critics as if they were a bunch of loud dumb cranks who don’t know what’s good for them – something Flock CEO Garrett Langley did repeatedly.

What I’ve come to agree with is the notion of a horseshoe mentality, that it’s just a very very small number of people, incredibly small, that tend to be really loud.

I imagine you’ve never been to a city council meeting.

Interviewer: I never have.

And I imagine you never will, because generally, I hope you vote, you should vote, and then you trust that the system works, that the person you voted for as generally aligned views, and like they’re going to go do the hard work, because that’s what you elect them to do.

As a general rule, “trust the government, if you aren’t doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear” hasn’t had much purchase in the American mindset – and in the post-Covid era, it has even less. The left already doesn’t trust cops. And while the right is generally pro-cop, they are extremely uncomfortable with the idea they’re being constantly watched.

The tolerance Americans have for being constantly watched is an odd thing. Your phone, your television, your car – they’re all listening to you pretty much all the time now. But that ubiquity serves to make many Americans more on edge about intrusion into their privacy, not less. Americans don’t actually want to live in a world where privacy is reserved for the few cubic centimeters in your skull.

In the wake of sacrificing so many of our liberties in recent years, that’s a heartening thing to see.

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✍️ Feature

• Daily Wire: The AI Doomsday Cartel and the Radical Utilitarianism of Effective Altruism

🌍 Foreign

• Daily Wire: How Trump Redefined U.S.-Iran Policy at the UN

• National Interest: How the UN Can Save Itself

• National Interest: China’s Slow-Motion Financial Crisis

• Foreign Affairs: How Putin Escalates

• Times of Israel: A Month From Elections, UN Speech Is an Opportunity for Netanyahu, But Trump Isn’t Helping Him

• Punchbowl News: Whatley: Iran War Hurting Farmers

• MSN: Burnham Has No Idea What He’s Doing and It’s Starting to Show

🏛️ Domestic

• Politico: Democrats’ Midterm Money Worries

• Semafor: Tim Scott to Senate Republicans: We’re Still in This

• Washington Examiner: Peltola Campaign Defends Claims of Mistreated Staffers, Burden of Grief

• New York Times: Timothy Mellon and Republicans’ Midterms

• WSJ: Democrats Backed an Independent in Nebraska. Leaked Tapes Make Him a Risky Bet

• Politico: NJ Sherrill Struggles With Lieutenant Governor Investigation

• New York Post: Kyrsten Sinema’s Ex-Bodyguard Trashes Her Arizona Home, Causes $200K in Damage

• New York Post: Medal of Honor Heroes Take Sides as Trump’s Army Secretary Decision Becomes Pentagon Knife Fight

• Punchbowl News: House Republican Gavel Grab

• Daily Wire: The Hidden Reality Behind NY’s Declining Murder Rates

🗳️ 2028

• Daily Wire: Blaming Sexism for Kamala Harris’s Loss Is Too Easy

📰 Media

• Washington Examiner: Peter Navarro Calls for Admin Boycott of Fox News

• Axios: Trump Des Moines Register Lawsuit Dismissed

• Axios: Judge Orders CNN, MSNBC, Politico WH Access

• New York Post: Speculation About Bari Weiss’s CNN Future Is Coming to a Head

💻 Tech

• Semafor: Some Republicans Push to Prioritize Husted Data Center Bill

• Daily Wire: America’s Next China Dependency Could Be Artificial Intelligence

• WSJ: Mark Zuckerberg Lays Out His Vision: Muse AI Agent Fused With Smartglasses

• WSJ: The AI Build-Out Is Becoming the Biggest Economic Bet in U.S. History

🧬 Health

• New York Times: The Organ Donation System Needs Ethics and Trust

🏈 Sports

• Daily Wire: Jennifer Sey: My Stand With Sophie Cunningham for Women and Girls in the Fight for Women’s Sports

🎭 Culture & Hollywood

• Semafor: Paramount Weighs Tapping Musk for Equity Investment

• Variety: You Can See Everything Trailer: Nathan Fielder and Elizabeth Holmes

• Hollywood Reporter: Elizabeth Holmes Prison Release to Halfway House in 2027

• Hollywood Reporter: Transformers: The Movie 40th Rerelease Extended

• Yahoo Entertainment: Row Engulfs Dolly Parton’s Estate

• Daily Wire: Cashing In On A Generation of Peter Pans

• Daily Wire: Taylor Swift Apparently Committed the Ultimate Modern Marriage Sin

🪶 Quote

“And then the Internet happened: and the panopticon society, cameras everywhere and augmented-reality tools gobbling up your peripheral vision and greedily indexing your every spoken word on duty.”

— Charles Stros

Yet since none of these picks are going to get shoved out the door, what is it really about? The real aim of presidential impeachment for the Democrats at this point involves no realistic plan for removal from office, and following an election cycle they claim is all about jobs and affordability, a Quixotic impeachment quest would be a marked break from why voters gave the Speaker’s gavel to Hakeem Jeffries (or a W.A.R. equivalent Speaker To Be Named Later). The abortive Russiagate/Ukraine phone call impeachment wasn’t a great lead-up to the 2020 election for Democrats, and it’s unlikely to be any better headed into 2028. So what’s really going on?

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Washington just tipped its hand this week, and the call came from inside the house – or, well, the Senate. Freshman Republican John Curtis of Utah, who has slid happily into an even squishier-than-Mitt Romney role early on, sent a letter to Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley demanding that Donald Trump Jr. be subpoenaed by the committee in connection with a ProPublica report laying out a financial relationship with a Russian oligarch. Curtis claims he wants to know more about it, writing in part:

[Q]uestions have arisen about the relationships of President Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., with foreign business figures and the acceptance of significant gifts. These include a lavish wedding afterparty, on a private island, provided by Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev, who reportedly traveled to China as part of a delegation accompanying Vladimir Putin shortly before giving the gift.

These concerns are compounded by Donald Trump Jr.’s active promotion of family-backed cryptocurrency ventures, his continued pursuit of international real estate deals involving direct meetings with foreign heads of state, and his reported investments in defense contracting. This pattern extends to his significant financial and advisory ties to prediction-market platforms that depend on favorable federal regulatory decisions being considered by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Presumably to offset the allegation that he’s just targeting the president’s son, Curtis also called for subpoenaing Hunter Biden for his own history of wheeling and dealing (now that’s good television, by committee standards). None of this is likely to happen, but it’s important that Curtis is indicating his willingness to go along with Democrat efforts to target the Trump family so early – he’s not waiting for the votes to be counted in November. And that indicates where things are headed.

What voters should expect to see after this election isn’t movement on affordability, on housing, on jobs. Maybe they’ll get some desperate flailing at health care costs, because those scare Republicans too. What they should expect to see is Democrats building their case for another go-round of their favorite tactic: sustained, over-the-top, and well-funded lawfare, targeted at Trump associates and the Trump family, where the process is the punishment. The job of Hill Democrats will be to shake loose everything they can through witness depositions and wildly broad subpoenas, any way they can and with the help of the still very real deep state.

Everyone’s going to be on the target list – from the crypto bros to the foreign investment funds to the various slimy (but in a pretty normal swampy kind of way) hangers-on. But the biggest targets will be on Trump’s family and anyone who’s become a business partner since his 2024 victory – including the tech industry, which has moved in his direction.

Democrats aren’t going to be about changing the country, not after this midterm. They’ll be all about getting every scalp they can. And if they can’t get the president himself, they’ll settle for ruining the lives and businesses of the people he loves, and who love and work with him. It’s not about the future. It’s about revenge. If you vote Democrat in November, that’s what you’re voting for – whether you know it or not.

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This is a 30,000-foot view of ads that have aired or been reserved from Aug. 1 to Election Day. Let’s break it down.

Ohio: Republicans have $189 million in reservations while Democrats have $118.7 million. The delta: $70.2 million.

Texas: The GOP is in for $105.3 million compared to Democrats’ $40 million. The delta: $65.3 million.

Michigan: Republicans have booked $89.8 million in ads to Democrats’ $56.2 million. The delta: $33.7 million.

Maine: Republicans have spent or reserved $81.1 million in ads to Democrats’ $56.6 million. The delta: $24.5 million.

Iowa: The GOP has booked $73 million in ads compared to Democrats’ $52 million. The delta: $21 million.

Alaska: The GOP booked $36.4 million in ads compared to Democrats’ $21.6 million. The delta: $14.8 million.

North Carolina: The GOP has booked $75.4 million in ads compared to Democrats’ $66.8 million. The delta: $8.6 million.

New Hampshire: Republicans have $32.6 million booked compared to Democrats’ $26.6 million. The delta: $6 million.

Georgia: The Peach State is the only place Democrats have the edge with $65.3 million in ads compared to the GOP’s $47.7 million. The delta: $17.5 million.

The prospects, however, aren’t as bleak for Democrats as they might seem. That’s because some of their candidates are very well-funded and candidates can buy ads at a much cheaper rate than super PACs.

So in North Carolina, Republicans are spending nearly $9 million more but Democrats are actually ahead in gross rating points, a measure of how often an ad is seen. Former Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper is running circles around Republican Michael Whatley in fundraising and that’s negating some of the GOP spending advantage there.

The blockbusters. Ohio is the most expensive Senate race by far, drawing more than $307 million on ads from both parties combined.

The next most expensive race is Michigan with nearly $146 million, followed by Texas with $145.3 million and North Carolina with $142.3 million.

Except… what’s the message?

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Xi Wants To Convince Trump To Abandon Taiwan

WSJ:

In April, the leader of Taiwan’s main opposition party traveled to mainland China for a red-carpet six-day tour, the first such visit in nearly a decade.

Officials treated Cheng Li-wun, chairwoman of the Kuomintang, or KMT, to high-level meetings and a Shanghai river cruise. The chairman of Meituan, one of China’s biggest tech companies, gave Cheng a plushy kangaroo, the corporate mascot. Capping it off, Cheng got an audience with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

His hands were as “soft as clouds,” Cheng said later.

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What Voters Want From The Midterms: Cheaper Gas

And Republicans are getting the blame. WSJ:

Republican lawmakers are running out of time to assuage voters angry about soaring fuel costs, setting off a last-minute scramble on an issue many see as the GOP’s biggest political liability in the midterm elections.

Record-high prices for diesel fuel used by trucks and farm machinery are hitting especially hard in rural and red states, where Republicans are now locked in tougher-than-expected battles to hold on to their seats in places such as Iowa and Nebraska. If voters take out their anger on GOP candidates, the results could be catastrophic for the party, some strategists and lawmakers fear.

“Voters aren’t happy, and we’re in charge,” warned Sen. John Kennedy (R., La.).

Lawmakers have floated ideas including a federal gas-tax holiday or a ban on diesel exports, while acknowledging the Iran war is the critical driver of prices. The fighting, which started in February, has become a vulnerability for President Trump and his party, after he promised no new “forever wars” and pledged to bring down prices.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R., S.D.) said last week that he was open to exploring a diesel-export ban. But later he said it was up to the Trump administration to get shipping flowing again through the Strait of Hormuz. “That’ll take the pressure off,” Thune said.

Over the weekend, GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa urged Trump to impose an export ban, similar to agriculture export bans in the 1970s. “High diesel prices ARE KILLING FARMERS INCOME,” he said on X. Rep. Ashley Hinson (R., Iowa), who is running for the open Senate seat in the state, said Monday she too would support pausing diesel exports, arguing Iowans “shouldn’t have to foot the bill at the pump or the checkout line for the war in Iran.”

The Senate has scheduled only two more weeks in session ahead of the election, and there are no plans to vote on a suspension of the gas tax or another measure designed to lower fuel prices. Even if senators did pass a bill, the measure wouldn’t make it to the president’s desk soon, as the GOP-led House recessed last week.

Some Republicans would rather not talk about it.

“See you later,” Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, the No. 2 Senate Republican, told a reporter who asked what Congress or the administration could do about high diesel prices. Asked on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday if he would support an export ban, Barrasso replied: “Well, the president is considering a number of different things that he can do.”

Others say there is little chance of action.

“I don’t think there’s gonna be a discernible decrease over the next 48 days before the election,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R., N.C.), who is retiring after this term, when asked about the possibility of lowering fuel prices. Asked if there would be consequences for Republicans at the ballot box, Tillis said, “Elections are always pocketbook issues, right?”

More from The Wall Street Journal in Detroit.

Who Is An American?

Anang Mittal in Daily Wire:

American nationalism was civic, voluntary, and universal in aspiration, if not always in practice. Being American means holding dear the principles of individual liberty, equality before the law, constitutional government, and republican self-rule. Civic nationalism is the only framework that can sustain a diverse republic. A nation can restrict immigration and still promote the idea that citizenship and assimilation confer equal membership on a newcomer. The debate over immigration has no connection to singling out non-white students at a football game as “foreigners.”

Civic nationalism asks newcomers to accept responsibility for the country they now share. Much of that responsibility is learned through institutions rather than abstract principles. Football is one of them: people acquire loyalties to a school, a team, or a city by showing up, sharing rituals and passing them on. Immigrants do this when they build institutions of their own. Catholics built parish schools and charities; Jewish congregations organized lay boards and federations; Hindu Americans incorporated temples as nonprofits, established schools and organized acts of charity. Faith remains distinct, but their institutions operate according to American customs of voluntary association and self-government. Assimilation is not erasure. It means translating one’s culture into the civic framework of the country one has joined.

The Anglo-American culture newcomers assimilate into is itself a composite. In “Albion’s Seed,” David Hackett Fischer traces regional traditions that crossed the Atlantic: Puritans to Massachusetts, Quakers to the Delaware Valley, Royalists and indentured servants to Virginia and British border peoples to Appalachia. They shared a language and British legal traditions, but differed over religion, social rank, and the meaning of freedom. Later immigrants, Fischer argues, adopted the customs of the regions where they settled while retaining their own ethnic identities. He encountered the combination among his own Brandeis students, including “backslapping Texas Jews in cowboy boots and ten-gallon hats.” As Fischer puts it, “in a cultural sense most Americans are Albion’s seed, no matter who their own forebears may have been.”

Today’s far-right nativists claim to defend American identity, but they’re importing the European blood-and-soil politics that America has rejected. When they speak of “heritage Americans” defined by ancestry, they’re channeling the Know-Nothings of the 1850s and the immigration restrictionists of the 1920s. An 1854 Know-Nothing document required members to support only native-born officeholders and exclude Roman Catholics. For the nativists, naturalization could not overcome a foreign birthplace, and American birth could not overcome being Catholic.

A May 1, 1939, Life profile of Joe DiMaggio praised the Yankees player’s adaptation to American habits: “He never reeks of garlic and prefers chicken chow mein to spaghetti.” The article assured the American public that the Italian-American player was Americanized, with his preference for chow mein as reassuring evidence. Much of what we recognize as ordinary American life was once seen as a failure of assimilation. Today an Italian surname or a dish of spaghetti hardly needs a defense. Later generations have little reason to remember how fiercely their ancestors’ membership was disputed.

A nation demands extraordinary commitments from total strangers. Citizens pay taxes for people they will never meet, obey laws written by people they did not elect, and defend the rights of people they vehemently disagree with. A passport alone cannot produce that kind of allegiance. It has to be learned in families, schools, churches, neighborhoods, and other institutions that teach people to regard strangers as members of the same political community. Every generation has to shoulder and renew this responsibility.

That kind of civic formation is harder in an age of extraordinary personal autonomy and isolation. You can work from home, order food from an app, watch movies alone, argue about immigration, and develop beliefs about places without meeting the people who live there. Politics becomes entertainment. The fewer occasions we have to encounter fellow citizens directly, the easier it becomes to view them only in political categories: immigrants, activists, socialists, “heritage Americans.” The technology that creates unfettered autonomy also leaves us dependent on intermediaries to explain our country.

Paramount Settles With States, Clearing Way for Deal

The Wall Street Journal:

As part of the agreement, the company behind hits like “The Godfather,” “Top Gun,” “South Park” and “Yellowstone” will avoid having to sell cable channels, the people said. The final terms of the deal couldn’t immediately be learned.

Settling the suit effectively removes the most serious remaining hurdle to the deal closing. The question of whether Paramount would be able to close its transaction has hung over the media and entertainment industry since Chief Executive David Ellison won a fraught bidding war against Netflix to buy Warner Bros. in February.

Paramount’s Warner deal would bring two of the movie business’ oldest studios, two major streaming services in Paramount+ and HBO Max and dozens of television networks under one owner. It would also give Ellison, the son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, a vast entertainment empire that includes franchises such as Harry Potter, DC superheroes and “Game of Thrones,” as well as cable networks like CNN and Cartoon Network.

A dozen Democratic-led states including New York and Colorado sued in July to block the deal on antitrust grounds. The attorneys general, led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, argued that the combination of Paramount and Warner would create too much concentration in the markets for theatrical films and television channels.

The Writers Guild of America sued too, saying that the combination of the legacy media companies would kill jobs and career opportunities for Hollywood screenwriters at a time when the film and television production economy is already under pressure.

The looming deal and the legal fight over it has been a source of controversy in Hollywood. Many creatives, including movie stars, signed an April open letter opposing the deal, saying it would further imperil an already diminished media and entertainment industry. Throughout the weekend, opponents of the deal, including actor Mark Ruffalo, voiced concern about a pending settlement, urging Bonta to hold the line.

There was mounting political and industry pressure to settle. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra, the major movie theater chains and some Hollywood labor unions urged the parties to resolve their issues.

The coalition of states and Paramount spent the weekend in advanced settlement negotiations discussing a range of concessions including an investment in production, selling cable channels and creating a board to ensure that CNN retains editorial independence, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Settling the suit before it heads to trial could help Paramount avoid racking up costly “ticking fees,” which it offered to win the deal and must begin paying if the deal doesn’t close by Oct. 1. The company was set to pay Warner shareholders roughly $650 million a quarter, or $7 million a day, beginning next month, until the transaction closed.

Still, the combined company is set to emerge with nearly $80 billion in debt—a substantial burden already expected to weigh on its investments in the business.

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• Daily Wire: Greta Gerwig’s War on Masculinity, Narnia, and C.S. Lewis’s Intent

• Variety: Presley Gerber Dead: Model and Son of Cindy Crawford Was 26

🪶 Quote

“Sexual intercourse was taboo on the Lord’s Day. The Puritans believed that children were born on the same day of the week as when they had been conceived. Unlucky infants who entered the world on the Sabbath were sometimes denied baptism because of their parents’ presumed sin in copulating on a Sunday. For many years Sudbury’s minister Israel Loring sternly refused to baptize children born on Sunday, until one terrible Sabbath when his own wife gave birth to twins.”

― David Hackett Fischer

Don’t look now, but the Democrats’ Senate nominee has a bigger lead in Texas than in Minnesota.

That’s according to the RealClearPolitics polling averages, showing Democrat James Talarico up 2.6 percentage points over state Attorney General Ken Paxton (R-TX) while in Minnesota, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan (D-MN) leads former sports broadcaster Michele Tafoya by 1.8 points.

Statistically, that’s not a huge difference. But Minnesota has historically been one of the bluest states in the country, and its Senate race wasn’t supposed to be competitive this year. Texas is among the reddest, and it hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since Lloyd Bentsen in 1988.

A Democrat leading, or even being in the hunt, in Texas could be a sign that a blue wave is coming. But what then to make of Minnesota, where the most recent poll shows a tie between Flanagan and Tafoya?

This is what the fight for control of the Senate looks like in general. Democrats are leading in North Carolina, Georgia, Texas, Ohio, and Alaska. Republicans are up by just 1.1 points in Iowa, according to the RealClearPolitics average of polls. There have even been polls showing Republicans trailing in Kansas and Nebraska. The White House seems to be taking these numbers seriously.

At the same time, Democrats have not locked down Senate races in Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, or Minnesota. Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) outperformed her poll numbers to win reelection six years ago. But that doesn’t explain Michigan, which hasn’t elected a Republican senator since the historic red wave of 1994.

New Hampshire hasn’t sent a Republican to the Senate since Kelly Ayotte in 2010, during another red wave. Now Ayotte is the governor, and she is heavily favored for reelection. Former Sen. John Sununu, a Republican, could be on the verge of a comeback. Cook Political Report now considers the race a toss-up.

It doesn’t seem very likely that Democrats will win Senate seats in Texas, Kansas, and Nebraska while losing one in Minnesota or anywhere in New England. It’s possible that Republicans have false hope in some of the bluer states where they are currently competitive. They are not actually leading in any of these places, not even Collins, just holding the Democrats to low single-digit leads on average. The initial post-Labor Day polling shows things getting worse rather than better for the GOP.

In the latest Fox News poll, a major driver of this dynamic is people souring on capitalism en masse.

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Piker and Hasan’s Osama Bin Laden Echo

Isaac Schorr:

A decade and a half after his death, Osama bin Laden can still count on moronic, morally deranged progressives to parrot his propaganda.

After 9/11, al-Qaeda worked tirelessly to co-opt self-hating leftist movements in both the United States and the West more generally, the theory being that even after watching Islamists murder nearly 3,000 of their countrymen, some would still be chomping at the bit to blame America first. It was a hubristic, surprisingly savvy gambit.

Library of Congress alum and Middle East scholar Raymond Ibrahim first noted this insidious public relations strategy in the 2000s. In its outgoing communiques, al-Qaeda accused the United States of “oppressing and exploiting the Islamic world,” citing its friendship with Israel, support for United Nations sanctions on Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime and, later, its reluctant waging of the War on Terror as proof.

“Does the prey not have the right, when bound and dragged to its slaughter, to escape? Does it not have the right, while being slaughtered, to lash out with its paw?” wondered a victimized bin Laden.

But internally, al-Qaeda’s leaders struck a much different chord. Their “documents rarely made mention of all those things — Zionism, Bush’s ‘Crusade,’ malnourished Iraqi children — that formed the core of Al Qaeda’s messages to the West,” observed Ibrahim. “Instead, they were filled with countless Koranic verses, hadiths (traditions attributed to the Prophet Muhammad), and the consensus and verdicts of Islam’s most authoritative voices.”

“Put another way,” he wrote, “the language of ‘reciprocity’ was exchanged for that of intolerant religious fanaticism.”

As proof of this phenomenon, Ibrahim pointed to bin Laden’s response to an open letter from a group of Saudi intellectuals asserting that “The heart of the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims is justice, kindness, and charity.”

“As to the relationship between Muslims and infidels, this is summarized by the Most High’s Word: ‘We renounce you. Enmity and hate shall forever reign between us — till you believe in Allah alone,’” replied bin Laden. “If the hate at any time extinguishes from the heart, this is great apostasy! … Battle, animosity, and hatred — directed from the Muslim to the infidel — is the foundation of our religion.”

Charming, no?

Still, it’s the dead terrorist’s policy-oriented, outward-facing message that his Fabian apologists continue to tout.

More from Axios, which has a sit-down with Piker:

Left-wing streamer Hasan Piker tells Axios he believes America conducts more terrorism in the world than al-Qaeda, the terror network that carried out the 9/11 attacks.

“Pound for pound as far as the number of deaths, yes,” Piker said in an exclusive interview for a new episode of “The Axios Show.” Piker added: “We have caused tremendous terror all around the world.”

The Moral Inversion Behind Lindsey Clancy

The Public:

The lone holdout juror in the Lindsay Clancy trial was accused of domestic violence, has a restraining order filed against him, and is months behind on paying his rent, NBC Boston reported on Friday. This history suggests he may have lied on his juror questionnaire, the local news station noted. After NBC Boston ran its story, a blogger found and exposed the holdout’s full name, photo, and address. “Now that the holdout juror in the Lindsay Clancy case is getting the negative attention he deserves, it’s easy for [Plymouth County, Massachusetts] District Attorney Tim Cruz to agree to a plea deal that gets Lindsay the help she needs,” argued a lawyer in the Boston Herald.

But in effectively revealing the juror’s identity, NBC Boston broke with established journalistic norms and made him a target. “My family cannot leave the house,” the holdout’s brother said. “They are leaving notes at my mother’s house.” Reporters usually only investigate jurors’ backgrounds after they have come forward publicly. For example, when reporters revealed that a juror in the Derek Chauvin trial had participated in a political protest wearing a “Black Lives Matter” T-shirt and baseball cap, they did so after the juror had identified himself and given a TV interview. The Clancy holdout, in contrast, had not given interviews, and his name is still legally sealed by the court.

✍️ Feature

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• Daily Wire: Nancy Mace: A Child Murderer Wants Mercy. The Rest of America Wants Justice.

🗳️ 2028

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🪶 Quote

“How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.”

― Christopher Hitchens

Below is a post I wrote in 2002, about a visit to Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Within the space of a few short years, one of the teenagers in that picture above would be working in the White House, another in Afghanistan, another in Iraq.

The ripples of 9/11 changed the lives of Americans in ways we still don’t fully understand. For some of us, it is still a scar of a wound that will never heal. For others, it's proven far too easy to forget.

“Let’s go chase tornadoes
Just me and you
Don’t often catch em
But man, when you do
Just grab that catch rope
Crawl out on the wing
We won’t come down til we
Own that thing.”

— James McMurtry

My family stopped in Pennsylvania this past week to hike and stop by the highest point in Pennsylvania – we’ve done about a dozen state high points together over the past couple years, and Pennsylvania’s has a beautiful view (as opposed to Virginia; our highest point is in the middle of a forest). We drove to the north, through small towns and past horse buggies, traveling slowly towards Shanksville, the crash site of Flight 93.

Springsteen was playing on the stereo when my sister and I drove past the town’s welcoming sign: “Welcome to Shanksville, a Quiet Little Town.” Underneath that was a High School logo: “Home of the Vikings.”

The flags were everywhere on Main Street – in windows, on porches, rows of miniature flags standing along front yards. There was a small sign, a flowing flag on a white background, pointing the way to the Flight 93 temporary memorial. The wind was at our backs.

There were only a few cars on the back roads, winding slowly between sunlit farmers’ fields, filled with corn and freshly bound hay bales. The tiny white signs guided us along, past farmhouses with peeling paint, broken down trucks on cement blocks, black cows and green pasture. There was a faded piece of plywood propped up against one of the porches: “Never Forget the Heroes.”

As we topped the rise of a hill, a field that bore all the marks of an old strip mine came into view. Some reports claimed that Flight 93 went down in a farmer’s field, but they were wrong. The field is actually owned by a coal company, which still has two massive old coal rigs set yards away from the road, like rusted metal giants, twins sleeping in the long grass.

The temporary memorial was a spread of gravel in the middle of the field and a section of a high chain link fence set into the ground, swaying incongruously in the wind. About a dozen cars were parked there as we arrived – the visitors, young and old alike, walked quietly along the fence, looking at the poems, flags, letters and little trinkets stuffed into the chain links. Some took pictures of a flag stretched across the ground several yards away, marking the impact site of the plane. Others wept, uncontrollably.

In that field, on that quiet sunny afternoon, there was no separation between the reality of death. This wasn’t TV footage. You could squint into the sun. You could smell the air. You could hold the dirt in your hands, and watch the wind carry it away.

In the rest of the country, almost a year has passed since the crash. In that field, it still feels like it was yesterday.

I wonder what it must have been like on Flight 93 – not the actual action, the sequence of events, but the thoughts of the passengers and the terrorists as they approached their confrontation. What did the passengers think as they traded glances on that plane, scared but united, preparing to lay down their lives? Did they think of their loved ones? The regrets of a life cut short? The promises they would never keep?

Sacrifice has often proved to be evil’s undoing. There is something about evil that abhors sacrifice in all its forms — for loved ones, for friends, for strangers. Perhaps George MacDonald had it right when he wrote that Hell has but one principle: “I am my own.”

On September 11th, evil stormed across the earth like a tornado, seeking to kill, ruin and destroy our nation and our people. Tornadoes are vicious, dangerous things, random and merciless. And when the men and women on Flight 93 saw those dark clouds coming their way, they didn’t duck or run, awaiting the inevitable. They grabbed a catch rope and dug in their heels – and they brought that twister down.

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Related reading:

• Patrick Ruffini: The Last Moment of American Unity

• Wall Street Journal: A Nation Remembers: 25 Years After 9/11, U.S. Mourns a Growing Number of Victims

• National Review: The Golden Decade Is Gone

• Daily Wire: September 11 and the Impotence of Secularism

• Daily Wire: ‘Never Forget’ for the Generation Born After 9/11

• Daily Wire: 9/11 Unified America. Just 25 Years Later, We’re Tearing It Apart.

• Daily Wire: The 9/11 Lesson This Survivor Says America Is Already Forgetting

• Daily Wire: 9/11: The Flight Attendants Who Spent Their Final Moments Helping Identify the Hijackers

• Daily Wire: The FDNY Chaplain Who Sacrificed Everything on 9/11

🪶 Quote

“Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You've seen the refugees going nowhere,
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.”

— Adam Zagajewski

Takeaways from the Wall Street Journal:

The president and former reality TV star hatched the idea for the convention and put himself in the starring role. It was impossible to walk around American Airlines Center without seeing Trump’s image—large photos covering the walls, T-shirts, and even the event credentials hanging around attendees’ necks.

Trump delivered a trademark nearly-two-hour speech, boasting about the crowd size—despite visible empty seats throughout the arena—and ticking through his favorite subjects, including false claims of winning the 2020 election. He mused about changing the name of New Mexico to New America, defended the war in Iran and paid tribute to Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist who was assassinated a year ago.

But the most eye-catching part was Trump’s promise to give a $5,000 “dividend” to all American adults if Republicans maintain their majorities in the House and the Senate. He said the money must be spent in the U.S. Such a dividend would likely need to be approved by Congress.

The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for more details about the proposal. Giving every American adult $5,000 would cost more than $1 trillion. Trump suggested the money could come in part from revenue from tariffs.

The term-limited president implored the audience to think of him as on the ballot in November and said he would travel the country on behalf of candidates in tough races. One of those candidates is Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is running for Senate and has drawn complaints from Republicans of a lackluster campaign. Trump made fun of the way Paxton looks, speaks and dresses, but praised him as a fighter.

Republicans are betting that putting Trump at the center of the midterms will help convince the president’s conservative supporters to show up at the polls in November. But Trump’s approval rating is below 40% in most polls, and the all-Trump-all-the-time strategy could drive away independent voters.

Sen. John Fetterman (D., Pa.) delivered the first surprise moment of the convention when he appeared by video, boosting Republican hopes of convincing voters the Democratic Party has gone too far left. “Why am I here talking to you today? Because, well, I’m a common sense Democrat,” he said. “I’m always going to reject the extremes in socialism and that anti-American way of life.” Fetterman touted bipartisan work with fellow Pennsylvania Sen. David McCormick on preserving the state’s steel industry, adding “We’ll work with President Trump.”

Fetterman’s popularity among Democratic voters has plummeted since his election in 2022 as he has become increasingly vocal in his criticism of his own party and has offered staunch support for Israel. A recent Wall Street Journal report found that Fetterman, once viewed as a progressive populist, has shirked many of his responsibilities as a U.S. senator.

His video appearance only further angered Democrats and fueled speculation that he may switch parties, though Fetterman said in a statement that he wouldn’t leave the party if Democrats flip the chamber in November. Pennsylvania State Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, a vice chairperson of the Democratic National Committee, compared Fetterman to Benedict Arnold.

Even though the moment drew much attention in political circles, Fetterman’s video message received a muted reaction from the crowd at the convention.

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Memories On The Eve Of 9/11

Joshua Trevino in National Review:

he 25th anniversary of the massacres of September 11, 2001, brings with it a flood of memory, and regrets. The simple reality, visible at the time and brought into ever-sharper focus across each successive year, is that the enemy in al-Qaeda achieved its major strategic objects in its attack upon the United States of America. Although the day itself saw the virtues of Americans in aggregate brought to the fore — most especially in the raw heroism of the Flight 93 passengers, but also in the selfless sacrifice of the FDNY, NYPD, and unnumbered Americans known and unknown who saw death for themselves and gave in the hope of life for others — it also illuminated with great rapidity the strategic incapacity of American political leadership. It is an incapacity yet to be fully repaired.

Although I am not a New Yorker, I was by circumstance present in New York City the day of the massacres. My then-fiancée, working on Water Street, saw it all up close and lived a harrowing morning: the second aircraft plunging into the World Trade Center tower, a descent in panic down her own skyscraper’s elevators to the ground floor, an emergence onto a street with flaming debris cascading downward, and in an episode we still invoke in wonder today, a 15-minute wait for a payphone so she could call me and ask what to do. My counsel was to get out of lower Manhattan, preferably by train. She caught the last train to Brooklyn, alone in a car with a man who had clearly also escaped the chaos. He said aloud that it was a shocking accident. She replied that it wasn’t an accident: she’d seen it, and it was an attack. The man buried his face in his hands and wept.

When she arrived home, she had flecks of ash in her hair.

There was a lot of ash on the clear blue morning of September 11, 2001. The skies were strewn with the detritus of murder. Even before the towers collapsed, you could see the white and flashing twinkling of papers thousands of feet aloft, fluttering against the azure and the gray of the smoke. Everyone in the path of the northwesterly wind got something from the bloodied sky. We received Nynex billing records on our patio. A business two blocks away received an in-flight safety card from one of the doomed aircraft. When the towers finally did collapse, the plumes of their deaths erupted forth the quotidian stuff of the work and lives extinguished. Walking to the Brooklyn Promenade, we saw a singed manila folder descend from the heavens right in our path.

On the Promenade itself, the black pillars, the ashes of several thousand slaughtered Americans — I wondered in the moment if we had just surpassed Antietam — rose ever upward. The crowd was hushed, shocked, muted but not silent. A young man’s voice rose above the rest, strident and insistent: “The people who did this are still out there. They are still out there!”

They still are.

We were not, however, going to get those people, and this I divined quickly and with disappointment. The motivation and religion, one and the same, of the killers were swiftly proclaimed, and its rootedness in their faith and heritage was easily discerned. Yet within a week the president of the United States instructed Americans to turn away from the obvious conclusions: an act of historical revisionism undertaken in real time for reasons both ideological and prudential. The generations-long project of desacralization of the American public square, and the eradication of American particularity as an intrinsic value, left American elites and governance wholly unequipped when an explicitly religious tradition of warmaking with 14 centuries of its own inheritance slaughtered thousands of our own. We stared down the abyss of jihad and responded as if undertaking Reconstruction.

In the days that followed, our neighborhood and every other in New York City were plastered with photographs of the dead, posted in vain hopes of finding survivors, a last act of love and faith by those condemned to live. The horror and the sorrow suffused everything, and we received our condolences from those outside the city. But we needed none. We were alive. Our families were alive. Elsewhere, in New Jersey and Staten Island and Queens and in fire stations and in schools and in homes where little children asked why daddy never came back from work, or why mommy kept playing the last message from the answering machine over and over and crying, they needed the prayers and the sympathies. They needed a nation that would vindicate them — not just in care, though care they deserved in full, but in blood.

They didn’t get it.

Ellie Bufkin at Daily Wire:

As ignorant kids watching television in a barn loft in Maryland, it felt as though the entire sky might be full of hijacked aircraft.

Even the towers falling didn’t register for me as the singular, heart-stopping moment it appears in retrospectives now. It was almost beside the point.

Because by then, something I had believed in as firmly as I believed in anything was being eviscerated.

The America I had grown up in, safe, free and impenetrable, was disappearing on a clear, beautiful September morning.

And that childlike, almost comical ignorance I possessed that day would never be permitted to return again.

It’s been 25 years of knowing that anything could happen. Any day, any perfect morning could turn into hell on earth.

But over the years I have learned many things because of that morning.

It’s not luck that we haven’t had a repeat of that day. It’s vigilance, advocacy, strategy, policy, alliance, and yes – war, that have kept the door closed. It’s not guaranteed.

I have now spent years reading about the people who attacked us that morning, trying to understand what they believed, why they hated us, how they got access and opportunity, and the threats that remain. Maybe I would have found my way here anyway.

I’ll never know.

I envy something about generations too young to remember September 11. They cannot know what it was like to possess the almost absurd confidence in our own security that so many of us had before 9:03 that morning.

For thousands of families, the horror of that day was unimaginably greater. They lost parents, children, spouses, siblings, and friends.

I didn’t lose anyone I loved on September 11.

What I lost was much smaller.

I lost the certainty that another ordinary Tuesday would always come.

At 8:55 that morning, I was an 18-year-old girl in yesterday’s clothes, hungover, laughing at the idea that I might be watching the news. My biggest concern was making it to my first shift at Best Buy.

Eight minutes later, I watched an airplane disappear into the side of a skyscraper full of people.

Twenty-five years have passed. I know much more about that world now. I know the names of the men who attacked us. I know what they believed. I know what it takes to keep people like them from doing it again. And I know that the safety I once took for granted was never guaranteed at all.

But sometimes, when I think about September 11, I don’t think first about terrorists or wars or falling towers.

I think about that girl in the barn loft.

I think about how completely safe she believed she was.

And I wish, just for a moment, I could give her back the world she thought she lived in.

More from the Wall Street Journal Archives.

Republicans Clash Over Subsidy For Childcare

Semafor:

The White House is shrugging off the internal Republican tension kicked up by its still-unreleased proposal to divert federal childcare aid to stay-at-home parents.

The plan, which would route some money from the government’s $12 billion childcare fund to help married parents who don’t work, reflects the rising power of a GOP wing that’s occasionally willing to abandon party orthodoxy on the size of government in order to appeal to the working-class base that helped elect Trump.

It’s drawing praise from conservative commentators like Terry Schilling of the American Principles Project who argue that it boosts family formation. Its critics on the right, including radio host Erick Erickson, counter that President Donald Trump should focus on cutting government subsidies instead.

While the fierce debate plays out online, the Trump administration has yet to answer key questions about the idea, such as whether it wants Congress to add money to the childcare fund. And for now, some inside and around the White House seem to view the plan’s opponents as irrelevant establishment voices…

This person predicted that polling would show overwhelming support for the plan: “We all agree that big government is bad, but this isn’t a question of whether we spend this money. It’s already been appropriated. It’s a question of whether we use it to incentivize nuclear families or to incentivize single motherhood, which is how it is currently constituted.”

A White House official told Semafor that the plan is not yet finalized and dismissed the early pushback as “playing no role” in the work on it.

It’s also not clear whether any eventual plan would resemble the draft proposal that leaked last week. Though Trump campaigned in 2024 on a promise to make IVF free for women seeking to build families, for example, his administration has so far limited government IVF support to discounted drugs and recommendations for how to lower out-of-pocket costs.

✍️ Feature

Graphs about Religion

Who Do You Talk to When You’re Struggling?

This post has been unlocked through a generous grant from the Lilly Endowment for the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA). The graphs you see here use data that is publicly available for download and analysis through link(s) provided in the text below…

Read more

a month ago · 24 likes · 1 comment · Ryan Burge

🌍 Foreign

• Wall Street Journal: With Close Calls on U.S. Warships, Iran Shows New Appetite for Escalation

• New York Times: 25 Years After 9/11, Al Qaeda Still Has a Home in Afghanistan

• National Interest: Has the U.S. Post-9/11 Counter-Terror Strategy Shifted From Sunni to Shia?

• Politico Europe: U.S. Pressure on NATO Allies Over International Criminal Court

🏛️ Domestic

• Axios: GOP Uses Sept. 11 For Midterms

• Politico: John Fetterman: A Possible Senate Party Switch?

• Politico: Why So Many Incumbents Lost Primaries This Year

• Punchbowl News: Jeffries Gets Infusion of Dark Money

• New York Post: Hunter Biden’s Meme Coin Crushed 4 Out of 5 Buyers While One Mystery Trader Raked In $1M

📰 Media

• Hollywood Reporter: Famed ESPN Hockey Analyst Barry Melrose Dies

🧬 Health

• City Journal: California’s Home Health Agency Medicaid Fraud

💻 Tech

• Wall Street Journal: iPhone Duo: Apple First Impressions

• Semafor: Bipartisan AI Safety Bill Gains Momentum on the Hill

• Daily Wire: The Spectacular PR Collapse of Flock Safety

✝️ Religion

• Daily Wire: Why Charlie Kirk’s Faith and Courage Still Define a Generation

🏈 Sports

• Wall Street Journal: Seahawks-Patriots: Drake Maye Interception

• House of Strauss: The Seven Reasons Nobody Believes in Brock Purdy

🎭 Culture & Hollywood

• Variety: Jimmy Kimmel James Talarico Interview Moved to YouTube Over FCC

• IndieWire: Zach Cregger on Resident Evil, Austin Abrams and Kids

• The Hollywood Reporter: Tech Giants Are The New Villains

🪶 Quote

“September 11 was a day of de-Enlightenment. Politics stood revealed as a veritable Walpurgis Night of the irrational. And such old, old stuff. The conflicts we now face or fear involve opposed geographical arenas, but also opposed centuries or even millennia. It is a landscape of ferocious anachronisms: nuclear jihad in the Indian subcontinent; the medieval agonism of Islam; the Bronze Age blunderings of the Middle East. … The champions of militant Islam are, of course, misogynists, woman-haters; they are also misologists — haters of reason. Their armed doctrine is little more than a chaotic penal code underscored by impotent dreams of genocide. And, like all religions, it is a massive agglutination of stock response, of cliches, of inherited and unexamined formulations.”

— Martin Amis

I’ll also be hosting a panel on everyone’s favorite devil of the moment — data centers — which should be interesting. If you’re at the convention in Dallas, stop by and grab a drink.

States Are Yanking Back Data Center Deals

WSJ:

Over a decade ago, Ohio lawmakers exempted tech companies from sales taxes on computer servers and other equipment needed for data centers, betting that changes worth millions of dollars would lure much-needed investment to the state.

It worked, turning Ohio into one of the leading destinations for data centers. But then the artificial-intelligence boom supersized the tax exemption, pushing it to more than $1.5 billion last year, more than 10 times the original state estimate. Voter outrage after news outlet Signal Ohio reported the scale of the provision prompted Republican Gov. Mike DeWine to pause new applications for the sales-tax exemption in May.

Now, some state lawmakers, including Democratic Rep. Tristan Rader, want to repeal the sales-tax exemption and renegotiate past deals with companies such as Amazon.com, Meta Platforms and Alphabet’s Google that secured exemptions for decades by signing contracts with the state. In several states, the exemptions for tech giants have exceeded $1 billion annually.

“They seem to have more money than God and they’re able to build without the need for these types of incentives,” said Rader, who is proposing new data-center taxes and requirements that developers pay more for power and electrical infrastructure. He represents parts of Cleveland, where locals have pushed back against the facilities, and he hopes the new threats force the companies to the negotiating table.

A similar dynamic is playing out across the country, as legislators or governors in more than 10 states, including Illinois, New Jersey and Washington, have slammed the brakes on the tax breaks. The reversals underscore how state leaders who once welcomed the facilities powering the AI boom as an economic engine suddenly treat them like a political liability.

Mohamed Atta, 25 Years Later

Ayaan Hirsi Ali in Tablet:

After 9/11, intellectuals and policymakers asked “what went wrong?” as though the source of Atta’s animus toward the West was shrouded in some deep mystery. In the Western experience, men had not killed other men over religious questions en masse since the end of the great religious wars of the 17th century. Culture, a term that was once understood to encompass a great many facets of human identity, experience, and belonging—religion included—had also been ruled out. Saying that cultural differences exist and should be respected was a foundation of the multicultural order; the idea that some cultures might lead people to murder each other, for reasons that do not appear in the Western rationalist list of sane causes, struck many Western liberals as too close to racism to bother arguing the point.

Since then, each time the West collided with Islam, much of the Western intellectual class reached for explanations that made sense within its own secular humanist categories: grievance, humiliation, underdevelopment, alienation, foreign policy frustration, or the failure of Western states to properly integrate men like Atta, who were, or must be, inherently no different than immigrants of similar age, class, and educational attainments from Vietnam or Poland, or anyplace else. Since all conflicts are material in origin, it was assumed that they could be settled though material means. And given the obvious superiority of Western values, as measured through the superior material attainments of the West, conflicts over land, jobs, dignity, sovereignty, or redistribution should be negotiated with the generosity appropriate to those who occupy positions of immense privilege and power, thanks to the inequities of European colonialism. If Muslim populations suffered from a democracy deficit, elections would reveal and moderate those demands. In every case, theology and culture were translated into psychology, economics, development policy, or diplomacy.

American leaders then added a second layer of denial. President George W. Bush stood at the Islamic Center of Washington to insist that “the face of terror is not the true faith of Islam.” Following Bush’s lead, after later atrocities in Paris, Brussels, Manchester, and elsewhere, Western leaders repeatedly said that the killers had “nothing to do with Islam.” At the same time, the notion of “Abrahamic faiths” was revived or normalized, as though Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were merely variations within one spiritual family, separated by temperament more than by theology or civilizational ambition.

After centuries of religious war, the West had concluded that privatizing faith was the price of stability and progress. Religion would become hobby, heritage, or private consolation; politics would be conducted in the cooler register of interests. Having made that bargain, Western societies forgot that secularism and pluralism were local settlements, not universal defaults, and so assumed that every rival civilization must ultimately favor the same compartmentalization. When confronted by an adversary for whom the public order was explicitly theological, and for whom the separation of sacred and political authority was itself an offense against God, the West did the only thing its own intellectual settlement allowed: It translated theology into categories it found more manageable.

As a result, for a quarter-century, America and the West have chosen to enmesh themselves with dysfunctional Muslim societies, with the goal of rectifying “what went wrong.” Simultaneously, they opened their doors to mass Muslim migration, taking in millions of refugees from war-torn societies that had notably failed to be transformed by the influx of American money, democracy experts, and boots on the ground. The failure of the Western secular faith in material reality to transform these shattered societies was dismissed as an accident, or as a consequence of how broken and needy these societies actually were. Surely the faith would prove its worth once the refugees arrived in America.

As it turned out, the prediction that a large-scale encounter between the populations of the Western nations and Muslim lands might bring about a meaningful social transformation was correct. What Western optimists failed to imagine was that their own societies would be reshaped in the image of the newcomers they sought to evangelize. By 2026, NYC had become a parade ground for Islamic terror groups, run by a foreign-born Muslim mayor who supported “globalizing the intifada” and whose wife celebrated Hamas’ massacre of Israelis. Nor were such attitudes unusual in a city where Muslim immigrants nearly outnumbered the city’s native Jewish population. A Pew Research poll released in July 2026 showed that 44% of Muslims in America held a favorable view of Hamas.

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The Hottest Pumpkin Spice Season Accessory

My latest in the Daily Wire:

First, a few questions: Are you a single white woman in America in 2026? Is the only correct take on Lindsay Clancy the one you have adopted after scouring TikTok like the world’s greatest true-crime detective? Do you own one or more items of “Hot Girls For Zohran” flair?

Then this message is for you: This pumpkin spice season, don’t miss out on the must-have accessory of the season — your new jihad-adjacent boyfriend. He’s intense, he’s problematic, and his opinions on 9/11 are sure to anger all the relatives you hate the most over the holidays.

Kathy Hochul showed the way when she rocked that hijab in exchange for a group of very important Muslim men having to suffer the rare experience of listening to a woman talk. It’s a natural progression – you go from hashtagging for Gaza to embracing this inventive new idea called socialism to realizing that sure, Luigi murdered a guy, but have you noticed he’s hot?

The speediest path to Karen-izing Islam in the West is personalizing the narrative, and you have the power to do it. And trust me, the internal satisfaction of this accessory boyfriend will be immense. It comes when you post your orchard-infused Uggs-resurgence Instagram story about taking him apple picking for the first time. (For the record, you’ll be doing all the picking). It comes when you tell your mother no, it’s not that you don’t like Leinenkugel’s anymore; it’s just that it’s haram. It comes when your uncle storms out of Thanksgiving muttering about Ann Coulter (who?) and turning the Middle East into a “sheet of glass,” whatever that means. Probably something racist. Come on. It’s twenty-five years after 9/11, and it’s time people just grow up and let it go.

The best part about this move isn’t just that you’re trendsetting; it’s the emotional rush of getting ahead of where everything is going and gaining the moral authority to pass judgment on all of it. Let the weirdo right-wingers eat each other on X arguing about the cost of burritos and welfare for tradwives and the Latin Mass. You’re staking out ground that will infuse the next iteration of America’s human resources departments as part of a new protected class. And what’s the personal cost for you? Some hijab-prompted dermatitis? Big deal, your hair was shedding from the SSRIs anyway.

Some of your best friends will judge you, but that’s how you know this is so right. Someone posted a beautiful quote you saw the other day – it was from a French author; you haven’t read the book, but it’s a good summary: “the summit of human happiness resides in the most absolute submission.” Don’t you have the right to be happy? They’re just jealous they don’t have a man who believes in anything beyond prediction markets and Patagonia.

So this decorative gourd season, don’t just run things back with all the tired old tropes you embraced the past few years. Head up to a rally in Michigan. Be the first in your friend group to get that new must-have accessory. Sure, sometimes he can seem a little bossy. But what’s the worst that can happen?

✍️ Feature

• WSJ — Windows on the World: The Restaurant That Defined the World Trade Center

🌍 Foreign

• Foreign Affairs — How al-Qaeda Ended

• Reuters — Iran Says It Captured US Submarine Drone in Strait of Hormuz

• Semafor — US Ramps Up China Rhetoric Ahead of Upcoming Meeting

• The New York Times — Canada’s Carney, Trump and the US-Canada Trade War

• Politico Europe — French Centrists Struggle to Find Unity Candidate as Extremes Surge in Polls

• National Interest — The AfD’s Electoral Victory Is a Tale of Two Germanies

🏛️ Domestic

• Politico — Trump Isn’t on the Ballot. He Wants Republicans to Pretend He Is.

• Axios — Musk PAC Rolls Out Trans Senate Ads

• Punchbowl News — GOP Midterm Lifelines

• Politico — GOP’s Midterm Hopes Suffer Under Energy Inflation

• Daily Wire — How the GOP Can Reclaim the American Dream for the Next Generation of Voters

• Daily Wire — This Is Why a Terrorist Sympathizer Will Win in Michigan

• Politico — In Michigan, GOP Senate Candidate Makes a Canadian-Sized Gamble on Trade

• Washington Examiner — New Hampshire Senate Race: John Sununu, Chris Pappas

• Daily Wire — Twenty-Five Years Later, My 9/11 West Point Class Still Keeps Freedom Alive

• Daily Wire — Why the Battle for the Middle Class Runs Through Austin and Sacramento

• The American Prospect — Trump Angers Ranchers Over Beef

• New York Post — Why NYC Parents Are Homeschooling Their Kids in 2026

• Daily Wire — Gloria Steinem’s Legacy Was Largely Anti-Woman

• Daily Wire — Lindsay Clancy Jurors Reveal What Really Went Down With Lone Holdout

🗳️ 2028

• Axios — Vance Fundraising Network Rockbridge GOP Gathers

📰 Media

• Daily Wire — The Rise, Fall, and Deportation of the Original Political Troll

💻 Tech

• WSJ — Anthropic Researcher Quits Over Out-of-Control AI Fears

🧬 Health

• Politico — Louisiana Abortion Pills Case Could Alter Mifepristone Nationwide

• Daily Wire — Seven Foods You’re Probably Storing Wrong

🏈 Sports

• New York Post — Ben Shelton Wins Five-Set Thriller Over Carlos Alcaraz at US Open

🎭 Culture & Hollywood

• The New Yorker — Have Conservatives Taken Sexy Back?

• Daily Wire — Nancy Mace: Objectification Is Only Wrong When Men Do It

• The Hollywood Reporter — Portuguese Artists Drop Out of Jerry Seinfeld Festival

• The Hollywood Reporter — Paramount, Warner Bros. Wants States to Stake Bills

• The Hollywood Reporter — Get Smart Reboot Set From John Mulaney

• Variety — Chris Rock on Misty Green, Oscar Buzz and the Will Smith Slap

• Variety — Netflix Orders New Lonesome Dove Series

🪶 Quote

“The ‘80s were about acquiring—acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn’t I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn’t I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime. I don’t know who will lead us through the ‘90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul.”

— Lee Atwater

“On September 11th, 2001, 19 Islamist extremists hijacked four airplanes and flew two of them directly into the World Trade Center at the instruction of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, killing nearly 3,000 Americans.”

That’s an example of a sentence that could get you banned or penalized on TikTok.

Over the last few weeks, I — along with countless other political content creators — have been censored, throttled, and threatened with bans on the Chinese-owned app for simply stating basic facts about Islam, political leaders who practice the faith, and/or terrorism happening in our country and around the world.

I’ve always dealt with some censorship on TikTok. I have to appeal at least 30% of my videos after they’re abruptly taken down upon posting, with no explanation beyond the red banner reading “you’ve violated community guidelines” (translation: something might have offended someone). But something has changed in the last month.

It started with a video about Hasan Piker and the New Left. The entire video consisted of me quoting the Twitch streamer, his friend Abdul El-Sayed, and Francesca Hong. I noted that Piker has said he believes America deserved 9/11, that he wants more immigrants to come into your countries and “f*ck” “your” sisters and daughters, and that he’s expressed a desire to see the white race and white middle class destroyed. I pointed out that Abdul El-Sayed campaigned at a mosque whose imam has openly called for the killing of “infidels,” and that former Wisconsin Senate candidate Francesca Hong has said she hates Thanksgiving.

The video was blocked immediately. Why should I be punished for simply relaying the heinous things our new political Left is screaming into the ether?

My next video, a recap summarizing the week’s insanities, was also flagged within minutes. Likely because I mentioned Islamic foot-washing stations at Dallas airports, and the fact that two conservatives dressed as Muslims exposed how easy it is to register non-citizens to vote in Minneapolis.

Then, of course, my video about Abdul El-Sayed’s sister, an America-hating, Columbia professor, professional POS, was also quickly removed.

Infuriating is an understatement.

I have 243,900 followers on TikTok, where viewership translates directly into revenue. When a video gets removed, and if the Chinese communist overlords put it back up on my page, it’s often days or weeks later, and my viewership is abysmal.

To avoid this, I started whispering or mouthing certain “trigger” words — Muslim, Islam, rape, sexual assault — so as not to set off Big Brother. The result is often a video where I’m mouthing half my sentences while trying to explain current events, which would be funny if it weren’t so ridiculously absurd.

For instance, TikTok did not like my video discussing the U.K. pamphlet fiasco, in which the government was forced to put out a nine-page PDF for foreigners, outlining how to act like a civilized human in their once-civilized country. I can’t help that they had to spell out, in print, dozens of times, that it’s not okay to rape, touch, or advance upon girls under the age of 16. But clearly that has to be said.

Wasn’t this app supposed to be banned? Read the rest.

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An Unexpected Big Jobs Number

The Wall Street Journal:

The U.S. added 162,000 jobs in August, the Labor Department reported Friday, a much-stronger-than-expected result that suggested the labor market shook off its early-summer doldrums.

The unemployment rate stayed steady at 4.1%. That leaves it at a historically low level that indicates the labor market remains generally healthy.

Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal had forecast the report would show the economy gained just 53,000 jobs, and an unemployment rate of 4.1%.

Friday’s jobs report will likely allow the Federal Reserve to focus squarely on inflation.

“With economic activity and the labor market in good shape, they are not a large factor in my determination of the appropriate setting of monetary policy,” Fed governor Christopher Waller said on Thursday.

The Labor Department’s consumer inflation report comes out next Friday. The Fed meets later this month.

The jobs counts for both June and July were also revised higher. The Labor Department now says that the economy added 21,000 jobs in July, rather than losing 23,000 jobs. June’s jobs gain was revised up to 31,000 from 20,000.

Democrats Start Leaking Against Fetterman

The Wall Street Journal:

With his hoodie-and-shorts wardrobe and working-class appeal, Fetterman occupies a unique place in a Democratic Party increasingly populated by leftist insurgents. Fetterman often portrays himself as a “regular Democrat” calling out aspects of his party’s progressive fringe—just the profile that past centrists have leveraged in a divided Senate to cut bipartisan deals and score big wins.

But behind closed doors, the first-term senator shows little interest in doing the job beyond cultivating relationships with conservative media figures and advocating for Israel, according to interviews with more than a dozen former staffers and lawmakers, as well as text messages and other internal records.

With a pivotal election looming in November that could yield a split Senate and give Fetterman outsize influence, his office is staffed with a revolving door of aides who are constantly scrambling to keep up the face of a functional operation, the interviews and text messages show.

Fetterman keeps a light daily schedule, often refusing to meet with constituents and fellow lawmakers, or canceling at the last minute, records and interviews show.

Last September, when an aide told Fetterman that officials with the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, known as CHOP, wanted to meet because they were worried about Medicaid cuts, he was dismissive.

It marks a contrast to his 2022 campaign, when Fetterman spent long hours traveling to small rural communities, embracing people who felt left behind. “He won because he worked his heart out,” said Judy Hines, chair of the Democratic Party in Mercer County, in rural northwest Pennsylvania. Hines said she was worried about what she sees as a transformation in Fetterman in the years since the campaign.

In the background are concerns about Fetterman’s longstanding struggle with depression, which flared up after a near-fatal 2022 stroke that left him with lingering speech issues. Last year, Fetterman’s former chief of staff publicly aired concerns that Fetterman had stopped following his recovery plan, was damaging personal relationships, exhibiting paranoia, and addicted to his smartphone.

At the time, Fetterman dismissed his former staffer as “disgruntled” in a statement and asserted “ my ACTUAL doctors and my family affirmed that I’m very well.”

Fetterman didn’t reply to multiple requests for an interview for this story. The senator walked away from a Wall Street Journal reporter at a public event in Erie, Pa., late last month, declining to answer questions. His office also didn’t reply to multiple emails summarizing the reporting for this story.

Conservatives Want To Build Families Again

Brad Wilcox in the Daily Wire:

Finally, some good news on the family front.

A growing share of the American people, led by Republicans, believe it is very important that a couple is married when they have a child together.

According to new Gallup polling, roughly four in 10 Americans say it is very important that “couples who have a child together” should be married, a 10-percentage point increase over the past six years.

Among Republicans, there has been a 22-point increase, up to 58% who say marriage is very important for couples with a child. Independents have seen a 9-point increase in that direction, and Democrats have experienced a 3-point increase.

It is encouraging to see more Americans valuing marriage in the way it should be. Given the fact that this uptick has been driven by Republicans, we can attribute this trend in large part to the work that Right-leaning think tanks — like the Institute for Family Studies and the American Enterprise Institute — have done in recent years to spotlight the value of marriage, the ways in which conservative media outlets and voices — like the Daily Wire, Isabel Brown, and Ben Shapiro — have underlined the importance of marriage, and the encouragement that Republican leaders like Vice President J.D. Vance have offered us to “fall in love, get married, and start a family.”

Of course, Charlie Kirk’s life and message were especially important in driving this conservative interest in marriage. Kirk was famous for urging his followers to “Get married. Have children. Build a legacy. Pass down your values. Pursue the eternal. Seek true joy.” Just days before he was killed, on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show, Kirk addressed the decline in marriage and fertility rates, arguing that young women were chasing “careerism and consumerism” instead of what he considered more meaningful goals. “Having children is more important than having a good career … my kids matter more than how many social media followers I have,” he said. Kirk was also a big booster of data showing that women and men who embrace marriage and family life are significantly happier than their peers who are single and childless. The attention he devoted to the cause no doubt played a central role in marriage’s rising popularity among Republicans since 2020.

But as encouraging as this turn in public opinion is, the numbers are only back up to 2013 levels, so there is still room to grow. If more growth is to happen, conservatives can lead the way. Through culture, research, public policy, and leading by example, conservatives can speak clearly about the necessity of married, stable families for the next generation.

✍️ Feature

• National Interest: The Untold Pre-History of 9/11

🌍 Foreign

• National Interest: Why U.S.-Russia-Ukraine Talks Should Shift From Territory to Security

• Washington Examiner: Javier Milei Escalates Falkland Islands Feud After Trump Questions U.K. Backing

• Washington Examiner: Machado’s Two-Front Insurgency for Legitimacy

• Politico Europe: Nigel Farage’s Reform UK Hit by Fresh Scandal

• Asia Times: China’s Pressure Campaign Against Japan Is Backfiring Badly

• Foreign Affairs: How Taiwan Can Win the Strait

• USA Today: Trump Wants U.S. Control of Venezuelan Oil Reserves. Here’s What That Means

🏛️ Domestic

• Washington Examiner: Inside Elections Shifts New Hampshire Senate Race to Toss-Up as Sununu Gains Ground

• Politico: Republicans Once Hoped Iran Would End Before the Elections. They’ve Given Up That Dream.

• Politico: What Johnson’s Early Exit Could Leave Behind

• Punchbowl News: Jeffries, Johnson and a Rollercoaster Week

• The New York Times: Diesel Prices Hit a Record as Oil Rises Amid Iran Tensions

• The New York Times: Mortgage Rates Rise Again, Putting More Pressure on Home Buyers

• City Journal: Kathy Hochul’s New York Energy Affordability

• Politico: Trump Names Adam Telle Acting Army Secretary After Driscoll Resignation

🗳️ 2028

• Politico: MAHA Is Unhappy With the 2028 Candidates

📰 Media

• Hollywood Reporter: Norah O’Donnell Returns to CBS Mornings

• Daily Wire: Woke 1 Never Left Because It Is the Left

💻 Tech

• Daily Wire: Bernie Sanders’s AI Pause Grants Big Tech Its Wildest Dreams

• Semafor: Trump Seeks to Turbocharge Manufacturing Workforce

• Semafor: Chinese Tech Firms Deepen Ties in Saudi Arabia

• Axios: The Dangers and Risks of Superintelligence

• Axios: How AI Models Think

🧬 Health

• The Wall Street Journal: Drugmakers Halt Autoimmune Trials After Deaths, Life-Threatening Side Effects

• Axios: Employer Health Insurance Costs Are Set to Jump, Forcing Companies to Cut Benefits

🏈 Sports

• The Athletic: Why the Kawhi Leonard Signing Was the Worst in History

🎭 Culture & Hollywood

• The Wall Street Journal: How to Make Sense of All Those Airport Line-Cutting Options

• The Wall Street Journal: There’s a W in These Woods

• The Hollywood Reporter: Primetime Exclusive: Robert Pattinson and Lance Oppenheim

• The Hollywood Reporter: 2026 Venice Festival Lineup Is Political

• Variety: Oasis Documentary Captures Gallagher Brothers’ Moment of Reconciliation on Camera

🪶 Quote

“My first impulse, when presented with any spanking-new piece of computer hardware, is to imagine how it will look in ten years’ time, gathering dust under a card table in a thrift shop. And it probably will.”

— William Gibson

People 65 and older now outnumber children ages 5 and younger worldwide for the first time in recorded history, according to a new report by the U.S. Census.

A global plunge in fertility — demographers’ term for the number of children being born — and increased longevity are creating a demographic inversion that’s projected to deepen for decades.

It’s a trend that’s shifting the historic balance between working-age people and older adults.

The scale and speed of the shift as the youngest Baby Boomers move toward their mid-60s are striking. They reflect the scope of the challenge in caring for the elderly and maintaining programs such as Social Security in the U.S., an Axios analysis of the Census data found.

• More than 71% of the world’s population lived in countries with fertility rates at or below the roughly 2.1-births-per-woman replacement level in 2023.

• That’s up from 45% in 2013. The Census says the world reached that tipping point much earlier than demographers expected just a decade ago.

• The population of those 65+ is projected to grow from 852 million in 2025 to 2 billion in 2060.

The low-birth era has spread far beyond wealthy countries.

China and India — the world’s two most populous countries — now have fertility rates below the roughly 2.1-births-per-woman replacement level, the Census report says.

Bangladesh, Mexico and Vietnam are among the most populous countries to fall below replacement-level births since 2013.

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How TikTok is Melting Women’s Brains

Daily Wire:

There is no mystery about the most important fact in the Lindsay Clancy case: Lindsay Clancy killed her three children.

She admitted that she did it. Her own defense does not dispute it. There are serious questions for a jury to consider about her mental state and criminal responsibility, but who killed these children is not one of them.

And yet, spend enough time watching videos about this case on TikTok, and you can find yourself in an entirely different reality.

Read more

Mayor Zohran Mamdani has assembled an army of nearly 200 “influencers” — giving the social media stars VIP access to push the lefty administration’s talking points, according to a new bombshell report.

The study by the Columbia Journalism Review this week revealed a web of online personalities are being fed talking points by City Hall in an encrypted Signal group text, potentially running afoul of local record-keeping laws.

Some of the influencers are even pocketing taxpayer funds “for work on particular messaging campaigns,” though not for their coverage, the report said.

The official Mamdani cheerleaders chat spawned from Creators4Zohran, which started during the mayoral campaign, according to the report.

“A group of content creators and influencers, the Creators4Zohran group that supported his election campaign was reconfigured to promote coverage and talking points from the Mayor’s office,” the report reads.

“The group is run by the Director of New Media and Cultural Communications at the NYC Office of the Mayor, Emilia Rowland, and her staff, and members of the group receive daily updates, talking points and clips that they can use in their posts.”

One of the influencers highlighted by Creators4Zohran, Allie O’Brien, recently said Mamdani was the “mayor of uncontrollable joy” in a worshipping social post.

Director of New Media and Cultural Communications at the NYC Office of the Mayor Emilia Rowland in an undated photo.X/EmiliaWinterRo

O’Brien, though, appears to live in Connecticut from online records.

Another out-of-NYC influencer, who goes by the handle bananadotgov on Instagram, is from Columbus, Ohio, and has posted a number of lionizing videos about Mamdani.

“Strange things are happening, because I have literally not felt this way about a politician since Bernie Sanders,” she said, responding to the mayor saying he wouldn’t take a pay raise in July.

More from Semafor:

“William,” a middle-aged man in a blue short-sleeved button-down shirt whose YouTube videos have more than 14 million views, looked straight into the camera at his kitchen table in August and read a script about New York City’s mayor. His video, Mayor Mamdani Panics as Taylor Swift Triggers a $2.3 Billion Celebrity Exodus, quickly racked up more than 474,000 views.

“Omar,” a shaggy, bearded creator who claimed to be based in New York, read a report to viewers in June about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her ex. AOC FREAKS OUT as Riley Roberts CAUGHT Running Her ENTIRE Operation, set to ominous music, got more than 250,000 views. The same music played on a video, Socialist Seattle Mayor CRIES As A Beloved Bookstore Closes, from a channel called Julian News Report. It also registered a quarter of a million views.

To the casual YouTube viewer, these would look like unconnected videos from political news creators outraged by events happening in cities led by Democrats. The reality is more complicated. “William” and “Omar” are actors, Semafor found in a forensic accounting of their channels’ origins. They were reading formulaic, repetitive scripts that appeared to be generated or aided by large-language models.

Over the last several months, a new generation of YouTube growth-hackers have flooded American politics with sensationalized, low-quality content, reaching millions of viewers with nearly identical videos taking aim at progressive politicians including Zohran Mamdani, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker. Notably, while the videos are presented as laypeople giving straight-to-camera ideological news recaps, they feature actors and spokespeople paid small amounts of money to read nearly identical scripts laced with misleading claims and outright falsehoods.

Viewers either didn’t notice or didn’t mind: A single network of interconnected videos that are affiliated with a growth-hacking company whose founder promises to be the “strongest alternative to paid ads” garnered well over 45 million views and 90,000 comments on YouTube as well as millions more impressions across social platforms like TikTok. With that level of viral videos, a small media organization can make tens or even hundreds of thousands a month.

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Trump’s Pro Data Centers, and the GOP is Worried

Politico: Trump’s Seen the Data Center Polling, and He Still Supports Them

For the president, data centers are the “Golden Goose,” as he put it Monday on Truth Social. They’re one of the few investment engines humming in an otherwise sputtering economy and a cornerstone of the administration’s strategic AI arms race with China.

Trump is defending them because they’re also an albatross around Republicans’ necks heading into the November election.

And no small part of that position, as is often the case with Trump, is economics. The bright spot in construction is increasingly data centers, not the factories Trump promised through his push to reshore manufacturing.

“Trump is married to data centers no matter what because it’s the only real job creator,” said one former Trump administration official. That former official, and others quoted in this article, were granted anonymity to speak frankly about the controversial topic.

Telling communities they would end up “backwards and poor” if they rejected data centers is the most blunt he’s been on the issue as Republicans rapidly abandoned ship amid widespread public backlash.

And expect the president to “continue leveraging the data center boom to deliver real benefits for working families and small businesses,” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said in a statement.

Trump called Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s decision to pause approvals for new data centers “a mistake” last month, before later telling reporters, “If a Republican’s against a data center, that’s OK with me.”

Now, as Republicans from Mike Rogers in Michigan to Ken Paxton in Texas race to distance themselves from data centers, he’s actively making the opposing case.

Despite the split, Trump doesn’t believe Republican candidates are crossing a red line in staking out a more skeptical position, the senior White House official added.

More here: Republicans Struggle to Find Data Center Response for the Midterms

Vulnerable House Republicans returned to Washington this week pushing for action before the midterms on reining in data centers, only to find their leadership still undecided on the volatile issue.

Further complicating the debate: President Donald Trump’s Truth Social post Monday saying that the only reason Americans might not want data centers built in their communities is if they “want to end up being backwards and poor.”

The desire for action on data centers, which had already divided the House GOP conference, came up in multiple member discussions early this week — including a conversation that House Speaker Mike Johnson hosted Monday with freshman lawmakers, Republicans told POLITICO.

Multiple lawmakers pushed back on Trump’s Monday comments in the closed-door meeting and in other conversations with Johnson and House GOP leaders, according to three people with direct knowledge of the matter.

“My communities know what they want to live next to and what they want to co-inhabit with,” said Republican Rep. Rob Bresnahan, who is running for reelection in a competitive Pennsylvania district, in response to the Trump data center decree. “And that’s why it’s so important that Congress [acts.]”

The need to act “was a big topic of conversation in the freshman meeting yesterday,” he said of the Johnson meeting. “I know a few of us have similar, different pieces of legislation, but there’s certainly a willingness, from my perspective, that this is something that we can’t run from, and our communities are begging us for help.”

Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.), chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, told POLITICO he’s hoping his legislation meant to curb the impact that data centers have on the electrical grid can bridge the divide between parts of the GOP — including Trump — who have doubled down on data centers, and party vulnerables who want to respond to constituent backlash against the AI infrastructure.

He’s pushing Johnson to schedule a vote on the bill, approved by his committee earlier this year, in the coming month. Guthrie believes the so-called Ratepayer Protection Act and another bill on data center water use align with Trump’s recent data center support while still providing relief for the communities where they’re built. “Our model is the Ratepayer Protection Pledge,” Guthrie said, referring to a White House compact released earlier this year to ensure tech companies pay for the energy costs associated with data centers.

Record-High: Americans Say Government is Corrupt

Gallup:

Americans’ perceptions of government corruption in the U.S. are at their highest level in 20 years, with 89% of U.S. adults saying it is widespread. That figure is up 10 percentage points from last year and well above readings in the 72% to 79% range between 2010 and 2025.

Democrats’ perceptions of government corruption have risen the most sharply since 2024 compared with other party groups. In former President Joe Biden’s final year in office, 57% of Democrats said corruption was widespread in government; that rose to 76% in 2025, the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, and reached 91% this year. The figure among political independents (90%) aligns more closely with Democrats’ than with Republicans’ (83%) and is up 12 points since 2024.

Republicans’ views of corruption have changed far less in the same period. For the past two years, about eight in 10 have said corruption is widespread, broadly in line with 2024, when 87% said the same.

✍️ Feature

• New Yorker: The Art of Leaping Out of Planes to Fight Wildfires

🌍 Foreign

• WSJ: In Daylight Raid Backed by Drones, Israel Seizes Senior Hamas Militant

• Spiked: Inside the Iranian Clampdown

• Washington Examiner: The Gaza Genocide Hoax

• New York Times: The U.S. Navy’s Carriers Struggle with Supply Lines in the Iran War

🏛️ Domestic

• Axios: Golden, Perez and Jeffries: House Democrats Face Punishment

• Daily Wire: Democrats Chant ‘ICE Out’ While They Let Criminals In

• New York Post: Trump Warns Chicago Will ‘Die’ if Pritzker Refuses Federal Help After Bloody Weekend Leaves 41 Shot

• Washington Examiner: Jeffries Leadership Test: Democrats Face Socialism Vote

• Washington Examiner: Talarico Goes From Bad to Worse as GOP Debates Paxton Support

• Washington Examiner: Bessent Scolds Media for Its Iran Reporting and Being ‘the Best Allies’ That the Iranians Have

• Daily Wire: How ‘Soaking the Rich’ Always Drowns the Middle Class

• Daily Wire: Why Net-Zero Policies Risk Human Catastrophe — And Carbon Dioxide Doesn’t

• Daily Wire: I Was Patient Zero of Woke 1 and It Nearly Ended My Life

• Daily Wire: Tyler Robinson Will Stand Trial

• Daily Wire: Nancy Mace: Lindsay Clancy’s Children Are Dead and the Jury Is Deadlocked

🗳️ 2026

• Politico: GOP Midterm Convention Attendance

• Politico: Trump Invites Battleground Republicans to Rose Garden Dinner

• The Hill: GOP Vulnerable to Trade War Costs

📰 Media

• WSJ: Profile of the Clay and Buck Radio Show

• Mediaite: Bill Simmons Claims He Didn’t Know the Rules After Being Investigated for Getting His Daughter’s Boyfriend to Place Bets for Him

💻 Tech

• National Interest: Is China Working Against U.S. Data Centers?

• TechCrunch: Florida and Texas Move to Block Flock Cameras Over Privacy Concerns

🏈 Sports

• USA Today: Tony Romo Statement on OWI Arrest Charges

• Daily Wire: Why the NCAA Can’t Be Trusted to Protect Women’s Sports — And What the Senate Can Do About It

• Page Six: Tiger Woods Loses License for 5 Years in DUI Plea Deal as Judge Issues Stern Warning

🎭 Culture & Hollywood

• Daily Wire: How Mark Ruffalo Swapped the Avengers for Antisemitism

• Daily Wire: Nashville Needs a Honky-Tonk Hero

• Hollywood Reporter: HBO’s Harry Potter Gets a Second Trailer

• Hollywood Reporter: Netflix, GTA and the Future of Streaming

🪶 Quote

“In the age of wooden television in the South where I grew up, leisure involved sitting on screened porches, smoking cigarettes, drinking iced tea, engaging in conversation, and staring into space. It might also involve fishing. Sometimes the Web does remind me of fishing.”

— William Gibson