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.

✍️ Feature

• The New Yorker: A Populist Revival in Iowa

🌍 Foreign

• Semafor: U.S., Chinese Officials Talk Trade, AI Ahead of Xi Visit

• The National Interest: How Donald Trump Can Reinvigorate His UN Strategy

• The National Interest: Goodbye, Nation-State. Hello, AI Swarm

• The Wall Street Journal: Maria Corina Machado’s Risky Return

• The Times: Meloni’s Italy to Ban Burqas and Migrants From Classrooms

• The Free Press: Israel Won the Battles. Did It Lose the War?

• Washington Examiner: Benjamin Netanyahu’s Last Stand: The Magician’s Final Trick

• Foreign Affairs: Shrink the U.N.

🏛️ Domestic

• Politico: Senate Republicans and AI Safety

• Politico: Poll: California Voters Turn on AI

• Punchbowl News: Donald Trump, Senate Look to Leave

• The New York Times: El-Sayed gets Tucker Carlson’s backing in Michigan

• New York Post: Furious Rep. Lauren Boebert Blasts Claim She Had Sex With 3 Staffers, Including 2 Women

• Washington Examiner: JD Vance’s GOP Hamiltonian Turn

📰 Media

• Variety: TV Networks Suspend White House Pool Protest Over Trump-CNN Ban

• Hollywood Reporter: CNN, MS NOW Sue White House Over Revoking Press Credentials

• Mediaite: Trump’s UN Ambassador Battles CNN’s Dana Bash in Heated Skirmish, Tells Her Trump Was Spot-On in Banning Her Network From White House

• Daily Wire: The Endless ‘Genocide’ Lie: How the World Has Smeared Israel Since 1948

🧬 Health

• Daily Wire: The New Yorker’s Dangerous Ambiguity About When Life Begins

✝️ Religion

• Daily Wire: Human Dignity and the West’s Uneasy Conscience

• Daily Wire: Colorado Keeps Waging War on Religious Freedom. Now It’s Attacking Preschools.

🏈 Sports

• USA Today: Week 2 in the NFL Brings Misery for Jayden Daniels, Caleb Williams

🎭 Culture & Hollywood

• Daily Wire: Infidels Producer: ‘We Used So Many Squibs We Ran Out’

• Variety: The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth Trailer: Brad Pitt Returns

• 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

New Yorker: The American Religion of Self-Storage Facilities

🌍 Foreign

• The National Interest: How to Build a U.S.-Ukraine Drone Powerhouse

• Semafor: Hopes Dim for U.S.-China Talks During Leaders’ Summit

• Washington Examiner: Mark Carney Tries to Soothe U.S. Fears as Canada Seeks EU Associate Membership

🏛️ Domestic

• WSJ: The New Rules for Selling Your Home With Mortgage Rates Near 7%

• WSJ: Warsh Takes Hawkish Turn With Rate Rise and Hints of More to Come

• The New York Times: The Midterms Map: Republicans and Democrats Face a New Political Landscape

• Semafor: Democratic Group Launches Campaign to Boost Graham Challenger

• The New York Times: El-Sayed Faces Michigan Senate Scrutiny Over Jewish Petition

• Punchbowl News: Marie Gluesenkamp Perez Forces Leaders’ Hands

• Axios: Kennedy Center Fencing Goes Up Amid Fears of Demolition

• Daily Wire: A Constitution Day Roadmap for the Supreme Court and How to End the Administrative State

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

🗳️ 2028

• Politico: JD Vance Faces Test in White House Meeting With Israel-Backing Radio Host

📰 Media

• Daily Wire: Why the Antisemitism of America’s Elites Blinded Us to the Real Threat

• Daily Wire: Academic Who Exposed Arday: DEI Elites Escaped Scrutiny

💻 Tech

• Straight to the Point: Clarity Act Fails Spectacularly

• Politico: House Passes Bill on Data Center Power Costs

• After Babel: Are Phone-Free Schools Working?

• WSJ: Inside the White House Tussle to Sway Trump on AI

• Politico: China Driving Fears on AI Competition

🧬 Health

• Politico: Health Insurance Premiums About to Spike

• Semafor: FDA Nominee Preps for Hearing Next Week

✝️ Religion

• Daily Wire: A Warning From Britain: I Was Nearly Groomed at 11. Surveillance Won’t Save Girls Like Me

🏈 Sports

• Variety: Under Pressure, Robert Kraft Donating Millions to Gaza Humanitarian Crisis

🎭 Culture & Hollywood

• Variety: Paramount Is Leaving California

• Variety: Pink Explains Macklemore Social Media Post on Palestine and Jewish People

• WSJ: The 40-Minute Phone Call That Left Ed Sheeran’s Tour Hanging by a Thread

• Puck: First Look at Ari Emanuel’s Memoir

• The Hollywood Reporter: South Park Returns, Plot Stays Local, Trump-Free

• The Hollywood Reporter: Elf Movie Immersive Experience Coming to NYC’s Rockefeller Center

• The Hollywood Reporter: Elon Musk Movie May Be Canceled by Universal

• Daily Wire: Madison Beer and Mid Art in a Post-Taylor Swift Age

🪶 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

23 days 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

American education is overdue for disruption. For generations, we have educated children in roughly the same way: grouping them by age, following a standardized schedule, ringing a bell, and sending them to the next class. Whatever the merits of that model, it was built for a different era, and as Americans, we should be asking whether it is still the best way to educate our children today.

It makes sense then that Alpha School, an innovative new education model, has received so much fanfare, including Education Secretary Linda McMahon recently praising it on CNN. Alpha School flatly rejects the “teacher-at-the-front-of-the-room” model. It rejects teachers completely, for that matter, while claiming that its AI can teach students “2x in 2 hours.” For a minimum of $40,000 a year, your child will spend an average of two hours each morning completing core academics through customized, AI-driven tutoring, then spend the rest of the day developing skills like entrepreneurship, leadership, public speaking, and financial literacy.

There is much to laud in this model. It embraces the very principles that the homeschooling movement has understood for decades: the traditional 7-hour school day is a relic, most children can be autodidacts with assistance, and parental ownership of the children’s education is non-negotiable.

Alpha School has released non-independently verified data to back up their claims, and their standardized scores are impressive. But measuring the success of their method on the motivated children of the top 1% is a little like asking Michael Jordan if his shoes helped him dunk a basketball. When the outcome is more or less inevitable, the interventions are cosmetic.

Replacing human teachers with software in the name of disruption is problematic, as is Alpha apparently surveilling children in their own bedrooms in the name of accountability. And I worry that Alpha’s AI-as-teacher approach and American educators’ broader embrace of tech in the classroom rest on an unexamined premise: that mandatory hours of screen time over traditional methods have no downside. Given what we know about how the brain processes reading on paper versus screens, as well as the benefits of writing over typing, both of these processes are crucial to recruit more of the brain to work together through neural integration, which then leads to more lasting memory.

Alpha’s gamified, metric-heavy approach is also concerning. Think Khan Academy, but infused with an Orange Theory Fitness metric-based vibe. The constant assessment, while motivating for some, can easily grind down the wonder inherent to a child’s constitution. And hotwiring a child’s internal dopamine regulation system to achieve results may also have long-term negative effects. Learning is not meant to be easy or even fast. Confusion, frustration, and failure are not bugs in the process. They are part of how competence is built, and technology that circumvents the human element is likely to be a long-term detriment.

And while knowing the etymology, spelling, and meaning of every word helps you ace standardized tests, should that come at the expense of getting to sit with your elementary school classmates, the windows open to the sweet spring breeze, while your teacher reads you Jack London’s “Call of the Wild” or E.B. White’s “Charlotte’s Web?” Can an AI replicate that experience with a screen and headphones?

By uncoupling judgment, depth, and emotion from knowledge through their choice of software over humans, Alpha seems to be arguing that knowledge in and of itself can beget judgment. But human teachers naturally pass on much more than sterile knowledge; they pass on how and when to apply that knowledge to the broader world through empathy and wisdom.

Read the rest.

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Venezuela Oil Exports Jump 30%

Semafor:

Venezuela’s August crude exports jumped almost 30% from the previous month, as the Trump administration prepares to take greater control of the country’s oil industry. Washington recently took a stake in a firm — run by a former Venezuelan government contractor who faces widespread corruption accusations — in an effort to tap the world’s largest oil reserves and tame fuel prices at home.

Though critics say the deal risks entrenching Caracas’ authoritarian rulers and raises uncertainties for other investors in the South American nation, Washington has defended it as necessary to expand US crude reserves and refill the country’s strategic petroleum stocks, which have fallen to record lows as the Middle East conflict draws out.

More from Axios: Trump’s Venezuela Oil Baron

Alejandro Betancourt, 46, runs the oil company that’s entering into an unprecedented partnership with the Pentagon. It gives America access to some of Venezuela’s vast oil fields at a time when U.S. reserves are low.

“No Betancourt, no energy-security deal,” a U.S. official told Axios. “And Maduro might still be in power if it wasn’t for him.”

Betancourt’s life story has an oil-like boom-and-bust aura, replete with billion-dollar deals, international intrigue, a longstanding money-laundering probe and even a Spanish castle raided by authorities.

Inside the room: As Trump demanded Maduro leave Venezuela last year, Betancourt played a crucial role feeling out Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodriguez on whether she would run the government as replacement.

“There was no direct ask from Alejandro to Delcy; it was more getting a sense on where her head was at,” said a second U.S. official briefed on the private talks between the two Venezuelans.

Betancourt was in regular contact with Trump’s unofficial Venezuela fixer, Mauricio Claver-Carone, and discussed how to keep oil flowing and the economy running in post-Maduro Venezuela.

On Jan. 3, when the U.S. military seized Maduro, Claver-Carone was communicating via phone with Betancourt, who was also communicating with Rodriguez.

At first, Rodriguez “thought the U.S. had killed Maduro, that she had been double-crossed, and [she] was very angry and very scared,” a Betancourt ally told Axios. “He had to talk her down, playing the good cop” and finally persuaded Rodriguez to talk with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio about taking charge in Venezuela.

The backstory: Betancourt’s relationship with the U.S. government began in Trump’s first term, when Claver-Carone was the director of Western Hemisphere affairs for the National Security Council and the administration declared Maduro an illegitimate president.

Trump became the first world leader to recognize the head of Venezuela’s national assembly, Juan Guaido, as the nation’s rightful leader in 2019.

Betancourt acted as a go-between, linking Maduro’s opposition with Venezuelan political figures and top-level military officials to build domestic support for a nonviolent, democratic transition to a Guaido government, said an opposition figure and a member of Guaido’s inner circle.

Betancourt also traveled to Moscow to hand-deliver a letter on behalf of Guaido’s government asking Russia to stop backing Maduro.

I discussed this more on Morning Wire:

✍️ Feature

• Pirate Wires: Cameron Schiller is Rebuilding American Manufacturing

🌍 Foreign

• Wall Street Journal: The Ukraine Drones That Are Carrying a Bigger Punch Deeper Into Russia

• Wall Street Journal: Iran, Oil, Houthis, Shipping and Terrorism

• Wall Street Journal: Two Tankers Attacked on Midnight Run Through Hormuz

• The National Interest: Why ‘Mowing the Lawn’ Isn’t a Winning Strategy for the Iran War

• The National Interest: Iran’s Cyber Retaliation Strategy

• The Telegraph: Starmer Steps Down as MP

• Geopolitical Futures: An Attempt to Understand a Strange Visit to Moscow

• Politico Europe: Marine Le Pen’s Risky Promises

• Daily Wire: Canada’s Complicity In Western Decline

• New York Post: Benjamin Netanyahu’s Son Evacuated From the US Over ‘Significant Threat’ After Israeli Leader Warned of Iran Plot

🏛️ Domestic

• Wall Street Journal: Army Secretary Resigns After Months of Friction With Hegseth

• Punchbowl News: Will Mike Johnson Keep the House in DC?

• Washington Examiner: Texas Voters and the RNC Midterm Convention

• Washington Examiner: Mamdanism Falters in New York

• Washington Examiner: House Resolution on Socialism Reflects Something Much Bigger

• Daily Wire: Cooking The Books In Olympia: Deficits, Taxes, And The Phantom Trump Slump

• Daily Wire: We Forgot What Happened On 9/11

• Daily Wire: Why The Next Generation Sees The West As The Enemy

• Daily Wire: Parents Need To Vote On Biological Realities Despite Gender Ideology’s Political Cash

• New York Post: Lindsay Clancy Jury Says They Are Deadlocked, Judge Tells Them to Continue Deliberations

• Daily Wire: Lindsay Clancy Jury Hits Stunning Roadblock After Days Of Deliberations

• Daily Wire: I Served On A Murder Jury. What Happened Behind Closed Doors Terrified Me.

💻 Tech

• Axios: Tim Cook’s Legacy Hinges on Apple’s AI Bet

✝️ Religion

• Daily Wire: Dear Gen Z Christians: It Is Biblical For Women To Work

🏈 Sports

• Axios: NAACP, Black Athletes and NIL Boycott

🎭 Culture & Hollywood

• Variety: Trump Endorses Federal Incentive for Hollywood

• The Hollywood Reporter: Coyote vs. Acme Box Office: Spider-Man, Titanic, Dog Stars

• The Hollywood Reporter: Gal Gadot, Henry Cavill and Superman’s Exit From DC Studios

• Variety: ‘Gargoyles’ Live-Action Show Not Happening at Disney

• The Cut: I Should Be Allowed to Cold-Call My Friends

🪶 Quote

“Hell of a world we live in…”

“That’s right,” I said, “or even worse, it could be perfect.”

— William Gibson

My buddy Paul picked me up at the Billings Logan airport. I was already hungry and planning dinner. I asked if we should stop at a butcher on the way. He told me not to bother. Peter Allen, who owns Mastodon Valley Farms in Wisconsin, was joining us for the weekend and bringing 40 pounds of his own beef. I asked what cuts. Paul said, “Oh, he’s just bringing a bunch of the ground stuff.”

I had not packed foie gras and Bandol to spend my one vacation of the summer eating ground beef. I had plans: I envisioned a whole lamb, slow-roasted over the fire, basted in a truffle sauce. Instead, I spent the night at the grill, making hamburgers.

The burgers put my grand plans to shame. I knew it before they hit the fire. I opened Peter’s cooler and found beef that hadn’t already started browning the way most “American” ground beef has by the time you buy it. Small one-pound packages greeted me, all colored a jewel-like red. The grind was coarser than what you’d find at a normal grocery store, and despite that, the fat content held. Formed into a patty, it didn’t crumble and weep out its fat in comically large flare-ups the way cheap ground beef does. It stayed inside. The bite was absurd. With September around the corner, it’s still the best thing I’ve eaten all year.

Butterworth’s is coming up on its second anniversary. For most of that time, we refused to put a burger on the menu. Some of that is my own particular strain of pretension. But mostly it’s a simple fact: it is very hard to buy quality ground beef in America. Most of it is a scrap-room process. A Chinese- or Brazilian-owned processor takes a little trim from Mexico, a little from Argentina, some lean trim from the U.S., some fatty trim from God knows where, and mixes it all together into something that resembles less a food product than a bathhouse orgy. Out the other end comes your hamburger. Seven dollars a pound. Thank you very much.

Americans didn’t vote for this. It happened the way most horrors do, one small, defensible decision at a time, each one minuscule in its consequence, until you wake up inside a Lovecraftian horror of your own making.

It started in 2002, when Congress passed a law that seems almost quaint now. You had a right to know where your beef came from. Born here, raised here, killed here, it said so on the label. Then, in 2015, under pressure from Canada and Mexico and a World Trade Organization ruling threatening over a billion dollars in retaliatory tariffs, Congress repealed it. Beef and pork lost their labels. Politics was a little boring back then, so hardly anyone noticed. The scrap room became a legal place to hide.

That repeal opened the door for mixed ground beef, and American ranchers started selling their cattle into a system that would cut it with whatever was cheapest that week, from wherever it came. With the economic incentive gone, the American herd began to shrink. A percentage drop here, a percentage drop there, and almost no one noticed. Then, in 2025, it became harder to ignore. The Department of Agriculture shut its livestock ports to Mexico in July, after a flesh-eating parasite called the New World Screwworm started working its way north through cattle smuggled across a border nobody could fully police. In January, the annual Cattle Inventory Report came back with a number that made even the economists tighten their sphincters: 86.2 million head, the smallest herd in this country since 1951. The slow death ranchers had been living with on the ground finally reached American wallets. This is where it left us.

I can name 20 small cuts along the way, but I will spare you. Suffice it to say, for a few decades now, we have slowly and deliberately hamstrung American ranchers in favor of third-world importers. This week, President Trump joined a long line of presidents and bureaucrats by expanding the import break even further.

I understand the logic. He’s trying to bring down the price of ground beef for everyday Americans, and in a year when every politician in the country is trying to work the word “affordability” into their stump speech, that has a kind of political sense to it. But it will not fix the problem. It is a bandage on a wound that needs a tourniquet, and one more step toward the end of American ranching as a way of life. More than that, it runs against the reason so many people voted for him in the first place. From Minnesota to the Texas border, Americans are frustrated that cheaper economies elsewhere are hollowing out our own.

This expansion will not help the American rancher; it will finish him off. He will look at what he’s competing against, do the math, and tell his son to go work in computers instead. We have to think about this long term, or we’ll keep circling the drain until the only thing left in the bowl is the pink slurry that fills a Doritos Locos Taco.

You will now, on occasion, find a burger on the Butterworths’ menu. I call up Peter, and when he can send his beef, raised on his land and cared for by him and his family, I put it on the menu. I do it because it’s delicious, because it speaks to America’s greatness, and because I’m secretly terrified we’re barreling toward a future where I won’t be able to find beef like his anymore.

For more on this, read Will Harris on the need to rebuild America’s herd.

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The Downside of Talking to Terrorists

Elliott Abrams in Tablet:

Biden administration officials never said they wanted to negotiate with Hezbollah and never acknowledged doing so, but that’s the reality. What about Trump, who, as we now know, has agreed to Kushner’s face-to-face talks with the head of Hamas? The president has personally expressed his willingness to do so unconditionally. “I would speak to Hezbollah. Yeah, I speak to everybody,” Trump said in a joint presser with the Lebanese president at the White House in July. “I’ll speak to people that a lot of people think I shouldn’t be speaking to, and things work out.”

It stands to reason then, that U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack was channeling the president’s attitude when he recently suggested that, for negotiations between Israel and Lebanon to go anywhere, Hezbollah and Iran ought to be brought to the table as they are the ones “who can make a decision,” and that this is “what I think the [U.S.] negotiating team is attempting to do.”

It’s unlikely that Trump would shun a Hezbollah meeting, any more than he would a meeting with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The president confirmed to Fox News that “U.S. officials are communicating directly through a backchannel with IRGC officials.” Trump also told FOX that the United States has a “different channel with Hamas”—which turned out to be Kushner.

So Trump is pushing the envelope: Obama/Biden officials never sat down with Hamas’ then leader Yahya Sinwar, nor did they ever acknowledge a “back channel” to the IRGC (even though Obama apparently wrote to Qassem Soleimani, then head of the IRGC’s Quds Force).

It’s worth stopping for a moment to ask why any of this is a problem. Why not talk to terrorists? There is a huge political science literature about that question, and predictably many NGO types and academics love the idea—in many cases because, like Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, they think the terrorists (and terrorist regimes such as those in Cuba or Iran) have “legitimate grievances” and in fact are owed American apologies for our great crimes in the past. The condescending conventional wisdom in Washington, often cited to justify such unconditional engagement with terrorists and their state sponsors, is that “you talk to your enemies, not just your friends.”

Time To Investigate Flock

Josh Hawley:

Today, Congress has not written any rules governing the data captured by national AI camera networks built by Flock Safety and similar companies. It may be governed by older statutes, and should have Fourth Amendment limits, but those are unsettled questions. For now, for practical purposes, the only privacy protections for hundreds of millions of Americans are those found in one company’s internal policies. I don’t know if Flock has broken the law, but I do know that technology is moving faster than Congress is keeping up. So I have opened an investigation in the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, which I chair, into how this data is collected, retained, searched, and sold.

I heard about this issue in my home state of Missouri. The St. Charles County Police Department canceled its Flock contract this month, after an audit found a civilian employee running searches for personal reasons. Sadly, my state is not alone. In Milwaukee, prosecutors charged an officer with searching his girlfriend’s plate 124 times and her former boyfriend’s plate 55 times, typing the word “investigation” in the software’s justification field each time. Worse still, the system’s audit didn’t catch him; a private citizen did, after looking up his plate on a public website.

Adding insult to injury, the systems make mistakes. A Florida woman spent 13 days in jail on eight felony counts, three for vehicular homicide, after investigators searched Flock’s network for a vehicle description and arrested the owner. The prosecutors later dropped the charges because they had the wrong person. Los Angeles dropped its Flock contract after an audit found officers had stopped 161 drivers wrongly flagged as driving stolen cars. Another California police department found that 71 percent of its alerts were wrong.

Then we consider what happens to records generated by these cameras. Flock boasts an $8.3 billion valuation, which brings commercial pressures. Americans deserve to know whether and how their driving data is licensed, sold, and used. There are also concerns about whether data is sent or stored abroad. For example, reporters have described Flock using gig workers in the Philippines to classify data captured by cameras. Powerful AI models also automate parts of the process, supercharging these concerns.

All that said, I want police to have the tools they need. Cameras can help recover stolen cars, find missing children, and catch fleeing criminals. But people are concerned when private companies build unprecedented databases of personal information and want reasonable safeguards for that data. And the Supreme Court has found that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy against a “comprehensive” record of where they’ve been. Americans do not surrender all their privacy rights every time they leave the house.

So I have posed common-sense questions to Flock about how long it keeps data, who controls it, who can search it, what protections are in place, and who, if anyone, is buying what the cameras see.

I hope the company will commit to resolving these questions. But even if it does, Congress should not just take its word at face value; we should write protections into law. These safeguards must apply to every company and endure longer than the tenure of current CEOs. More fundamentally, the rules protecting Americans should be set by law and by the people, not by venture capital funds, AI executives, or big tech companies.

A MAHA Custody Battle

The New Yorker:

On a Thursday evening in April, at a date and time that had been determined by a family-court judge, Michael Lee Horrocks drove to his ex-wife’s house, in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia, to collect their three children for the start of spring break. It was a ten-day holiday, longer than the usual weekends that he had been granted under the terms of his custody agreement. Michael, who is thirty-four, had come to think of himself as “the fun parent.” He drives a Harley-Davidson Road Glide and, online, goes by Kneepatch, a persona that he styles with graphic tees, chunky mixed-metal rings, and an arm of American-traditional tattoos. That weekend, he planned to take the kids to a monster-truck show. Michael had been married to their mother, Leah Stelly, for nine years, until the previous spring. Now he saw her only when they handed off the children. Most of these exchanges happened quickly, in a tense near-silence. But, other times, the pickups became hostile. When Michael and Leah did fight, it was usually about the kids’ medical care.

That day, Michael had received a call from the nurse at his eldest child’s school. Keith, who is eight, appeared to have a bad case of pink eye. The nurse told Michael that she couldn’t get hold of Leah and that Keith needed to see a doctor as soon as possible. Michael lived in a city called Charles Town, more than an hour away, and he wasn’t supposed to pick the kids up until 6 P.M. He imagined that Leah had been treating the pink eye with a natural home remedy, because, as he later told me, “she’s all holistic” and “has, uh . . . what did she call it? A ‘crunchy mom’ outlook.”

At the pickup, Keith looked worse than Michael had expected. “His whole eye was swollen up, almost out of his head,” he said. His middle child, Donnie, who is five, also had watery eyes. His daughter, Star, who is four, seemed fine. By then, Leah had received antibiotics from Keith’s primary-care provider. For Michael, this was another source of concern. The kids saw a physician assistant, rather than a pediatrician. Michael believed that this had to do with the fact that many doctors refuse to see unvaccinated children. Keith, who had been ordered by a judge to start public school in January, had received some of his standard immunizations, including shots for measles, mumps, and rubella. But Donnie and Star were unvaccinated.

Leah had undergone several transformations in her life—shifts that she described to me as “awakenings.” One of them had led her to the belief that vaccines were dangerous, and to a broader world view that aligned with the Make America Healthy Again movement. Her particular MAHA leanings were laced with a kind of freethinking, hippie spirituality. She believed that she had manifested her daughter into existence and that Star’s arrival, via home birth at 2:22 p.m. in 2022, was a sign for 222, an “angel number” in numerology signifying alignment and cosmic timing. She dressed in vintage seventies clothing and wore her hair long, in ringlets. Online, she had posted about Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., “b!g ph@rm@,” and living a “non-tox” life style, and recorded lessons for her eleven thousand followers on divine femininity and receiving messages from the universe. In her videos, she rings herself in fuzzy golden light and talks in a wispy Southern accent. The word “TRUTH” is tattooed high across her neck, like a choker. Below that, on her sternum, is a fine-line rendering of the Seed of Life, a sacred geometric symbol.

Michael did not share Leah’s MAHA sensibility, but he was no liberal scold. He had nonspecific theories about the pandemic, telling me that it “duped a lot of people in a lot of different ways,” and he had refused the covid vaccine. He liked to take the kids to McDonald’s, even though—or possibly because—he knew that it drove Leah crazy. The first time we met, in the parking lot of a West Virginia chain called Tudor’s Biscuit World, he wore a graphic T-shirt that said “Fuck Your Mask” across the back and was chain-smoking Marlboro Black Reds. The kids were tucked in by his side, still sleepy from staying up the night before watching TV. Star meowed at me by way of greeting. They were sweet and polite children. Later on, as we talked, Michael received a pointed TikTok from Leah about exes who try to put you down when, really, they’re just jealous of your aura. Michael watched for a few seconds, then swiped away. “I’m burnt out on Leah,” he said. “I don’t go clicking on her stuff.”

Michael and Leah lived much of their lives online. To varying degrees, they’d both become microinfluencers. As Kneepatch, Michael maintained a Facebook page about biking, with a following of almost fifty thousand. During the week, he worked as an underground-petroleum-tank specialist, doing installations and repairs at gas stations across the mid-Atlantic. The nickname was a nod to this work: the job required him to kneel on the concrete, “opening up manholes and shit,” which wore holes in his jeans. Kneepatch shared real-time updates about his bike trips and his personal life. “Like ‘The Osbournes,’ ” he said, referring to the reality show about Ozzy Osbourne and his family. Kneepatch’s fans knew about his divorce; his new girlfriend, Brianna; the time his bike broke down in Las Vegas; the sunset in Ohio that made him believe in God; and the running sex jokes he made about feet, with pictures of himself giving Brianna a pedicure or smoking a cigarette held between her toes. His followers were also acquainted with Michael’s three children, who featured prominently in the Kneepatch adventurescape, sometimes riding with him on his Harley, outfitted in tiny helmets.

Several months before spring break, Michael had appealed his custody agreement. In addition to more time with the children, he wanted to control their medical care. Specifically, he told me, he wanted his kids to receive the same basic vaccinations that he had received when he was a child. He was especially worried about Donnie, who had spinal muscular atrophy, or S.M.A., a progressive genetic disease that weakened his muscles and left him vulnerable to respiratory infections.

That weekend, at the monster-truck show, Michael gave Keith a pair of sunglasses with mirrored lenses, to cover his swollen eyes. They hung back from the crowd, Star in a cowboy hat, Donnie in a miniature wheelchair. “Everything was fine,” Michael said. “The kids had a great time.”

By Wednesday, though, all three children were sick. They didn’t want to get out of bed or eat, and their skin felt hot to the touch. On Friday, eight days into spring break, Michael was at work when he received a text from his mom, who was babysitting, with a picture of Donnie. He had a rash of flat, red blotches on his face and body. Michael thought it could be chickenpox, but when he sent the picture to Brianna, who had kids of her own, she told him that it wasn’t a normal rash. “I’ve seen every rash a child can get,” she told me. “I have never seen that.” Michael took the boys to urgent care. Both were found to have respiratory issues and fevers of a hundred and one.

The urgent-care nurse was the first person to say the word “measles” to Michael. “I was, like, ‘Holy cow, are you serious?’ ” he said. By 9 p.m., Donnie was being seen by a doctor who described his symptoms as “textbook measles.” The medical staff administered a nasal swab. The results would take several days. They could still come back negative. But Michael had already latched on to the idea that Donnie was sick—and that one person was to blame. He texted Leah, informing her that a doctor was “confident” Donnie had measles. It was only a matter of time before they would have a confirmed diagnosis, he said. Public-health officials were being notified. Keith had a faint rash—possibly a breakthrough case. Star was also showing symptoms. “We are heading home and will be monitoring all three closely,” he wrote. “Given Donnie’s SMA and the ages involved, we are taking this very seriously.”

✍️ Feature

The Free Press

Why Ukraine Hasn’t Broken

Now in its fifth year, the war in Ukraine may not dominate the headlines as it once did. But for Ukrainians living through it, the reality of life at war persists. Over the weekend, Russia launched its deadliest attack of this year, killing at least 38 people in the suburbs of Kyiv. The attack came just days after Ukraine celebrated its 35th anniversary of independence from Russia…

Read more

a month ago · 46 likes · 49 comments · Sebastian Junger

🌍 Foreign

• The National Interest: Who Is Ukraine’s New Defense Minister?

• Semafor: U.S. and Iran Exchange Fire for the First Time in Over a Month

• Semafor: Asian Leaders Gather Amid China’s Efforts to Expand Influence

• Daily Wire: Economic Warfare and the Fight to Dismantle Iran’s Financial Lifelines

🏛️ Domestic

• The Hill: Ken Paxton, John Cornyn Face Off in Texas Senate Race Criticism

• The Wall Street Journal: Ken Paxton Is in Texas Trouble, But He Has History — and Trump

• Politico: MAGA and MAHA vs. Iowa and Big Ag

• Politico: Working-Class Voters Are Up for Grabs in the Midterms

• Politico: House Republicans Return to Washington With the Election in View

• The New York Times: The Least Transparent Midterm: How Dark Money Is Washing Over the 2026 Election

• The Wall Street Journal: Ex-Congressman George Santos Receives Kalshi’s First-Ever Lifetime Ban

• Daily Wire: How Democrats Botched the Rules to Rig the Election Maps

• AP: Grand Canyon Flash Flood Kills at Least Three Near Bright Angel

📰 Media

• Daily Wire: Why Would ‘The View’ Want Karoline Leavitt to Co-Host?

• Mediaite: The Pentagon Secretly Hires Conservative Influencers to Amplify Pete Hegseth’s Agenda

💻 Tech

• The New York Times: The Data Centers vs Anti-AI Populism

• Washington Examiner: Trump: Communities Build Data Centers ‘Backwards and Poor’

• Axios: AI Advocacy Group Targets Data Center Battleground States

✝️ Religion

• Daily Wire: The Catholic Nuns Fighting New York’s Suicide Mandate

• Daily Wire: America Before the Islamic Revolution

🏈 Sports

• The Wall Street Journal: Novak Djokovic Fails at the U.S. Open

🎭 Culture & Hollywood

• Variety: DollyFest: Dolly Parton Announces Nashville and London Events for 2027

• The Hollywood Reporter: Sacha Baron Cohen’s Ali G Movie Boycott Has Theaters Taking Notice

• The Hollywood Reporter: Met Gala: John Galliano Out

• Variety: Box Office: The Dog Stars Bombs, Spider-Man: Brand New Day

• Variety: Anne Hathaway, Tom Cruise Talk Days of Thunder Sequel

• Daily Wire: Why More Money for Wives Can Mean Less Stable Marriage

• U.S. Magazine: Bonnie Blue Announces She Gave Birth to Baby

🪶 Quote

“Homo sapiens is about pattern recognition, he says. Both a gift and a trap.”

— William Gibson

There they were, crammed in the close quarters of the filled-to-capacity Capitol Rotunda to shield our aged political leaders from the cold outside, flanking the once-and-future president as he took the oath of office for a second time. The richest and most powerful people in the world rubbing shoulders awkwardly – there were Elon, Jeff, Tim, Sundar Pichai from Google and (ominously) Shou Zi Chew of TikTok shifting in uncomfortable folding chairs designed to put them on display. The most natural thing that happened was Mark Zuckerberg accidentally reminding the world that he’s straight.

They were there to give homage to the man who had beaten them, and who now they needed to woo back to their side. Big Tech did a terrible job navigating the Trump years, and they knew it. They let their woke control freak employees go wild after 2016, and were forced to debase themselves as having not done enough to stop Hillary’s collapse. Pronouns and politics became mandatory in an industry that had been all about whatever nerd could build the best company in their dorm room. The media pressure was enormous. Out of nowhere, they were deemed the new pontiffs of the Trumpian era: what their platforms decided was okay was an endorsement. They had an obligation to censor, to silence, to shadowban, to debank, and, above all, to fund dying newspapers. They suddenly had to throw a gigantic pile of money at race problems because a random drug addict died in Minnesota. They caved to the forces of censorship in the 2020 election and indoctrination during the Covid years, becoming synonymous with a leftist authoritarianism totally at odds with the rebellious hacker mentality that birthed their industry. They didn’t care about politics – but it cared about them. So they did what they had to do, or so they thought at the time. And they lost.

Now here they were, sitting and grinning, as just off stage their high-paid consultants and their NGO partners and their Aspen and Sun Valley and DAVOS friends were all losing their minds. But what else were they supposed to do? If the rule they followed brought them to this, of what use was the rule?

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It was time to make amends. They would do the work of politicking; they would shake hands and smile and talk about working together. They would survive the return of the president they had tried and failed to ban. Because all this came just as the next stage of technological advancement, long burgeoning and anticipated, was about to skyrocket. And that would reorder not just our economy, but the world.

This moment was more significant for our politics than many grasped at the time. It represented a dramatic shift where, for the first time, Republicans were about to become the party of Big Tech. Where Silicon Valley had been a punching bag for conservatives for years, what with their climate change nattering and San Francisco values, they left California behind for the welcoming arms of pro-business red state leaders. The taxes were low, the regulations more forgiving, and their employees could finally afford a house. They were flush with consumers and data and cash after years of lockdown. And for the GOP’s influential investor class, the A.I. spark made these companies synonymous with skyrocketing market success. The sides had flipped.

Few states were more welcoming to this shift than Texas under Republican Governor Greg Abbott, which became a haven for Big Tech headquarters. The attitude from the state’s Republican leadership wasn’t just advocacy but cheerleading advancement and a Western agreement with moving fast and breaking things. That’s why it should serve as such a stunning warning to these same companies that it’s the same governor who promised to lead the country in A.I. who is warning them now that they’ve gone too far, too fast:

ABBOTT: One thing is the rapidity that these data centers are coming online, that people didn’t see coming. The other is the way that the data centers, they didn’t do their job to get the support of people in local communities. Gaining the support of people in local communities is essential.

Because they did not do that, that’s why I am now coming in as governor saying, listen, if you’re a data center and you want to operate in Texas, you have to first get the approval of those in local communities…

KARL: It was last year that you said that Texas was the epicenter of the A.I. industry. In hindsight, did Texas move too fast?

ABBOTT: It wasn’t Texas that was moving fast, it was these data centers.

KARL: But they needed approval from, you know, from the government.

ABBOTT: Well, so what data centers we’re doing, and this is the problem that we are facing here in Texas, but you mentioned what’s going on nationally. And that is, they pop up in places that nobody ever heard of before, until they started the construction. And so they had not been working in collaboration with the state, they’d not been in collaboration with local governments, and so they basically dug their own grave for the problem that’s been caused for them. And that’s why they got the backlash they deserve.

“They got the backlash they deserve.” The frustration of Texas communities and voters is what’s driving Abbott’s shift, just as it is across the country for politicians who welcomed a tech boom without thinking about the attendant risks. It’s as if these companies thought that the A.I. race was something they could win with just top-down approval from Washington and the governors – not convincing local voters and communities they wouldn’t raise their costs or wreck their environment.

You can hear the lunacy of this hubris expressed by the leader of one tech company, which is clearly the next in the barrel. The backlash to Flock cameras is growing in parallel to the animosity toward data centers, at an astonishing rate considering how quickly the issue has taken hold. It’s easy to understand why when you hear Flock CEO Garrett Langley talk with obvious irritation about the intransigence of local voters who have the audacity to… go to a council meeting.

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.

The political problem Big Tech failed to realize still exists: the views of the electorate still matter. It’s not just about gladhanding with the guys at the top. In the wake of the past decade, the American people’s level of trust in these companies is practically nil. It doesn’t matter to the normal voter if we’re in an A.I. race with China. It doesn’t matter that these companies have promised to back off of politics (Elon and Larry Ellison excepted). It doesn’t matter that they stood in that Capitol Rotunda to be publicly shamed. They have no depth of faith among the American people who use their products because they have to, even through a mist of resentment and laziness. We know we said A.I. is going to take all your jobs, but wasn’t it enough to give to the Inauguration Committee? No, it is not.

For Big Tech, the problem is easier to solve: work and spend. They have to make the case for themselves instead of dismissing the valid concerns of Americans. But somewhere there’s always going to be a state and a community to take their money and make a deal, even with the political costs.

For Republicans, though, the potential problem goes deeper. They are unused to navigating a world where being pro-business isn’t necessarily good for their voters. And they may find out they became the party of Big Tech just as much of the country turned against it.

Billionaires are fun to play with, until they aren’t. And then, you find out they can be a real drag.

Democrat Senator Jon Ossoff’s carefully scripted line attacking cancer survivor Natalie Harp, the president’s assistant, by intentionally implying an inappropriate relationship between the two is just another example. Before that, we had The New York Times writer Jodi Kantor, one of the most aggressive MeToo advocates, excusing and downplaying the behavior of Maine’s Graham Platner. And then we had the absurdity of the Abdul El-Sayed pool party surrounded by fashion-obsessed influencers — Hasan Piker included — when his wife can’t even wear a swimsuit.

From Platner to El-Sayed to now Ossoff, there is a decidedly Middle Eastern tone to these supposedly masculine lefties: Rape doesn’t really exist. Your wife can’t wear a swimsuit to a pool party, but the man of the house can hang with influencers who do. We can now slut shame you for having a high-profile job — how unwomanly.

It’s a particular kind of misogyny, different from the kind that came before. Instead of offering a perspective on American Democratic men that is of the cheap Nina Burleigh variety — the Time magazine reporter who said of Bill Clinton, “I’d be happy to give him [oral sex] just to thank him for keeping abortion legal,” an offer there is no indication Bill took up — this is an attitude right out of Michel Houellebecq’s Submission. Sure, at first that Handmaid’s Tale outfit was a protest — but what if you learned to love it?

Consider it a MeToo aftershock, a corollary to American men who seek to date more foreign-born women. The Left, having embraced the idea that they are the party of the Moral Majority, is now openly advocating for a form of female subjugation that is notably at odds with the Western understanding of what modern manhood and womanhood look like. It’s as if the lesson they took from their precipitous loss of young male voters in America was to Eat Pray Love their way into a burkini.

This goes beyond the excuse-making, slut shaming, and blatant partisan talking points of the past. Those have been with us always, since the days of James Carville’s comment about dragging a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park. The Pod Save Bros (ever the willing supplicants to Islam) are happy to take up the legacy in its perverted form today.

This isn’t just craven politics; it’s a fundamental break with modern America. It is a direct descendant of the pathologizing of normal relationships, especially of men’s roles in relationships. The Right has veered into tradwives and tradmen with a cross on the wall, so here comes the Left’s equal and opposite reaction with crescent and star.

From the Left’s perspective today, if a man forces you to have sex, well, you must understand the needs of his war-weary PTSD. If women are forced to wear the hijab, well, that’s just their culture, which you must respect. If a woman gets far in her political career, well, they must have slept their way to the top. Meet the new Man of the Left, avatar of this old-made-new red-green alliance. And he can’t be sexist, mom and dad — he’s Muslim!

Besides, he’s down with our vision for the country: a spiral minaret atop a Planned Parenthood, a sign in front welcoming all refugees, all of it paid for by the tech billionaire about to meet the guillotine in the town square.

The Left’s broken compass is pointing in this direction, leading the Democrats to a space previously unoccupied because it was anti-Western and anti-American. But when the guardrails are removed in a desperate bid for power, self-importance, or influence, this becomes the destructive path.

What a beautiful future, if only they can seize it. If only you will let them.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had just about enough of these pompous establishment Democrats defending their party severing the last vestiges of its rationality and patriotism to trans itself into Commie ISIS.

We’ve seen all this before. The union of Marxists and Islamists has a long history, a high-low combo of academics with a surplus of graduate degrees and guilt entertained by the youthful passions of the proletariat into supporting the vilest anti-human agenda devised in modern times.

This way to the gulag, comrade – walk faster, you know you deserve it.

The Abdul El-Sayed victory in Michigan, even if it came more narrowly than expected and was rebuffed by rural and black voters, is just the confirmation of what was already clear. Today the organizing energy of the Democratic Party – the party that less than a generation ago stood shoulder to shoulder with fellow Republicans and Independents against the Reds and the terror-supporters alike – is driven by a group of craven, manipulative liars and a bevy of followers whose understanding of history doesn’t start til iPhone 6.

These wannabe red diaper babies want to run back the losing side in the Nixon-Khrushchev kitchen debate and repackage it for morons on TikTok, and they do it well. Pick your reasoning for why they do it. Is it all to ease the horror of their meaningless existence by creating a community of followers who hang on their words of hate for people who are more successful than they are?

Whatever is wrong in your life, you can blame it on a corporation, a billionaire, or a Jew. Sometimes you hit the jackpot with all three at once.

This isn’t crazy. This isn’t radical. It’s the Democratic mainstream now. And after the results of the major primary elections across the country, it’s a genuine wave that will swamp a once truly American party that held Jefferson-Jackson Day dinners every spring until Donald Trump came along and liked them both.

The man who helped usher in that era of post-American politician, David Axelrod, took to the CNN airwaves last night to lecture the country on why it’s so bad that American Jews are spending money defending their interests. Keeping in mind that the overwhelming majority of AIPAC dollars (again, in the case of last night’s primaries) have always gone to Democratic politicians, Axelrod’s smear that this represents “foreign influence” found a fitting rebuttal from Van Jones.

Whether you care about Israel or not, the point for Americans is the weaponization that anti-Semites have achieved within the Democratic and, with less success, attempted to achieve within the Republican coalitions. Michigan proved once again that the AIPAC approach to American politics is a loser. Their highest-backed candidate just lost to an army of Democratic Socialist influencers, for whom FOMO is the most powerful motivation, who anointed a dog-electrocuting 9/11-supporting double-breasted nepo baby as their activist champion. What was October 7th but just some bros on Blue Chew flying Mario Karts into a festival? What’s so wrong with that? The streams did numbers after all.

Michigan’s outcome was actually good for Democratic hopes in the fall, though, because it will likely force Abdul El-Sayed to do something he wouldn’t have done otherwise: moderate his tone. In the past few weeks, ebullient with the aura of inevitability (thanks in part to what now looks like a bunch of juiced internal polls), El-Sayed was taking on an attitude of “I don’t need you any more” toward the party.

This is classic dumb savior complex politician stuff, complete with the Beto “born to be in it” energy. But this outcome will likely temper that heat and push him back towards the Democratic politicians he needs to get him over the finish line — to give him the veneer of normalcy he needs to win Michigan. And they’ll be there for him.

For the rest of us, we should recognize what a danger it is to have a major party just become Commie ISIS, a coalition that joins all the people who want to seize your property, eliminate the nuclear family, re-educate your children, and also sometimes slaughter a goat in their backyard.

As an independent, I’ve voted for Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, and The Rock.

My question going into a voting booth is always what a good friend calls “the beach test”: “Can you imagine this person on the beach with a machine gun fighting back against the Chinese invasion?” It obviously applied to the likes of Jim Webb. But do any of these Democrats pass that test today? Forget it – they’d be turning those guns around.

Al Sharpton used to warn Democrats about the Republican Party hijacking the Bible and the Flag. Today’s Democrats just don’t care. They have other flags to follow.

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The Real Reason Every Restaurant Tastes The Same

Chef Andrew Gruel:

There’s a narrative making the rounds on social media that tries to explain why so many restaurants taste the same. The villain, we’re told, is Sysco. According to the internet, one giant food distributor supplies every restaurant in America with the same frozen food, which is why every mozzarella stick, onion ring, chicken tender, and burger tastes identical. It’s certainly a satisfying story, but unfortunately it’s not that simple.

I don’t have any particular interest in defending Sysco. In fact, I have plenty of criticisms of large food distributors in general, from their unwillingness to support local producers to their lack of general customer service, but blaming Sysco for what has happened to the American restaurant industry is like blaming UPS because every package looks the same. Sysco isn’t creating the demand for generic pre-processed junk; it’s responding to the (government-manipulated) market.

If you really want to understand why restaurant food has become so homogenized, you have to stop looking at the distributor and start looking at the incentives that created the demand in the first place. As economist Thomas Sowell has often argued, people respond to incentives. You don’t change outcomes by pretending human nature is different than it is; you change the incentive structure, and behavior follows.

Over the past 15 years, the economics of running a restaurant have changed dramatically. Labor costs have blown up, food costs have nearly doubled — rent, insurance, utilities, workers’ compensation, credit card fees, compliance costs, and government regulations have all increased. Restaurant margins, which were never especially generous to begin with, have been squeezed thinner and thinner. Sometimes it feels like we are running a non-profit, and I don’t mean a 501(c)(3).

For decades, restaurants could survive by preparing food from scratch every day. They employed prep cooks who chopped onions, breaded chicken, cut fries, made sauces, rolled meatballs, and prepared desserts using the owners’ recipes. That labor was never “cheap,” but it was manageable.

Today, that same labor has become one of the hardest expenses to justify. When labor and food already consume well over half of every dollar that comes through the register (typically 60-70 cents on every dollar), owners begin to question those foundational operations: “Can someone else do this cheaper? Can someone do this absent the excess workers’ compensation costs or the risk of changing labor violations?”

That’s where the food manufacturers find their opening. Restaurant owners decided they could buy labor along with their products, especially if they are mass-produced. The onion rings arrive already breaded, the chicken already par-fried, the fish already dusted in cornmeal, and the mozzarella sticks already assembled (complete with TikTok-ready cheese pull). Sauces are made in massive facilities, packaged, labeled under different brands, and shipped through distributors across the country. Whether the box arrives from Sysco, US Foods, Performance Food Group, Shamrock Foods, or a regional distributor is almost beside the point; in many cases, those products originated from the very same manufacturers, just with different labels.

Distributors didn’t invent this model; the market demanded it because the economics forced them to. This had become a more prevalent industry trend, but COVID nitro-boosted it. During the pandemic, labor became even scarcer (as people were paid not to work), while supply chains became entirely unpredictable. Restaurants outsourced everything they possibly could just to survive. Sauces moved to co-packers — products that once required skilled kitchen labor became commodities. The government loved this because now they had only a few companies to control, as opposed to thousands of smaller ones. This is why I suggest the COVID economy was a corporatists’ dream: It killed the “artisanal” nature of the restaurant industry.

Read the rest.

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In the very early days of the COVID-19 outbreak, panic, confusion, and lack of concrete information sent Americans into the realm of the unknown. In many ways, we have been left with loss, anger, and a deep distrust of public health officials – epitomized by the recent hearings held by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs. Anthony Fauci would finally be held to account for what many felt was a deep betrayal of trust in the name of ego and power. But his refusal to answer questions offers an opportunity to remember that what we need isn’t necessarily a reckoning, but a time to examine exactly what went wrong to prevent this failure from recurring. Matthias Shapiro was at the fore examining data at the COVID Tracking Project, and he talks with The Daily Wire about his experience during that time, what public health officials and the media got wrong, and the debate about COVID’s origins. He can be found on X @politicalmath and his Substack, “Marginally Compelling.”

***

Ben Domenech: Can you walk people through your background and what brought you to pay as much attention, I think in a very detailed way, to the crisis that surrounded COVID beyond, I would say, the layperson?

Matthias Shapiro: Yes, sure. So when COVID started, I was living outside of Seattle, and the first detected COVID case was actually in Seattle. And then the first recorded death was about a mile and a half from my house.

BD: I did not know that about you. That’s kind of crazy. You didn’t happen to know the person, I assume?

MS: No, no, no, no. It was an old folks’ home. But it was shocking because it was maybe four or six weeks after the first detected case, and we thought that nothing had happened.

BD: What timing was this? What was the date or the rough date?

MS: February — late February, early March 2020. I saw the first, second case and then nothing for weeks. And then, oh, suddenly there’s this huge outbreak in this place that’s just down the street. And I thought to myself, “Okay, so we’re not actually tracking this. We don’t actually know what’s going on.” And Seattle had some of the earliest shutdown stuff in the country. I think my kids — one day we just got a notice that school was off for the rest of the year, no more school. And so we had pretty harsh lockdowns. People were not going outdoors. There were many small community efforts to help, but much of it was locked down. I knew doctor friends, and the hospitals were all — they canceled everything — but my doctor friends were talking to me and saying, “There’s nobody here.” It was a very weird firsthand experience of what everybody was going to experience for the next 18 months.

But I’m also way into software and data. And so I heard about this data initiative to get COVID data out to people because the CDC had completely fallen on its face.

BD: Can I ask you about that? There are so many things about the early stages of COVID that are totally lost to either revisionism or a lack of memory. And one of the things that was very apparent, and it’s one of the points where I had already been following you and paying attention to you obviously for years, but one of the things that really stuck out to me is that very early on, you were part of the group of people online who were data focused, with questions like, “Why are we not getting actual information out of the knowledge that we already are clearly collecting, but it’s not getting put out to people?” The project that you started interfacing with, even if it’s ad hoc.

MS: It was called the COVID Tracking Project, and Alexis Madrigal at the Atlantic was the one who started it because he was like, “I’m trying to get information about this. Why isn’t the CDC doing anything?” And I mean, the real answer is the CDC doesn’t do daily data. They do weekly data or monthly data. And usually it’s that stuff is delayed by weeks. But given how fast COVID was spreading, weeks were not going to cut it for people. They wanted better information right now. And so, for this project, we just had a pile of volunteers, and we went literally state by state, checking every single state’s COVID numbers at the health department. And there were actually a couple of weeks where I was in charge of Washington state because the state dashboard went down. So I went county by county and counted all the COVID cases.

It was a really crazy time. But because of that, I was just surrounded by the actual numbers — the actual COVID numbers — all the time. And so I started noticing really annoying things. Most data people notice annoying things, like when the news says, “Oh, there’s a 300% increase.” Well, okay, yeah. So now, instead of 20 cases, there are 60 cases. Well, that’s not the biggest deal in the world.

BD: For at least a decade of doing television and things like that, I’m always paranoid when I hear somebody cite the percentages. When they’re saying the percentages — the percentage increase in this and the percentage increase in that. And it’s like, okay, well, but what’s the number? Because you’re telling me what this looks like, but I don’t know what either end of this actually looks like. And I feel like you were very early to start paying attention to the fact that a lot of this was — I don’t want to say that it was fear mongering, but it was taking the worst possible number — not the actual number — the worst possible percentage, et cetera, so that I can make a headline that will get more people to click it.

MS: There were a lot of headlines and a lot of really shady data practices several times. And it got really embarrassing to watch from a data perspective. Several times, it was reported that there was a 100% COVID positivity rate. And after the first three times, you’re like, well, obviously what happened is they didn’t report the negatives. The only way you get 100% positivity is to forget to report the negatives. But it would just show up in a headline, and you’re like, stop it. Anyway, that was sort of my introduction. And that quickly escalated for me because one of the frustrating things that I had while I was doing this is that I’m in this data group; it’s a private group. We’re all talking, we’re all gathering data.

The group leans to the Left, but that’s not really a big deal because everybody is focused on the data, not the politics. But after a little while, you notice that, okay, everybody does know what the data is talking about, but they’re not talking about it out in public. And that becomes increasingly frustrating because you’re like, people want not just the data, but somebody who’s familiar with it to get a decent interpretation of it. And there were a lot of instances when I felt like it wasn’t happening. So I ended up pulling that data and doing it. Once a month, I would just do an overview of every region in the United States. Because if you group the states by region — if you don’t just go state by state — you’re like, oh, it’s not that Florida is having a bad COVID spike; it’s that the whole region of the South, the East, is having this happen.

The Southeast would get it and then it would move north and then the Northeast would get it. And then it moved predictably, repeatedly. But that was not a very popular narrative because once you start working with regions, you’ve got blue states and red states doing the same thing. That’s not the narrative anyone wants to spin. They want to spin a narrative of red state versus blue state. So that’s sort of how I got into it. It started with just plain old data, data digging and trying to give people raw data, and it sort of moved into this mostly counter-narrative. I tried to give people a clear sense of what was happening in their regions, and they made their own determinations about how to live and how careful they wanted to be.

And that was my positive contribution, but I spent a lot of time just trying to shoot down bad narratives.

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Winning Is The Only Way Out

Rebeccah Heinrichs on the war in Iran:

In “Men at War,” Ernest Hemingway writes, “Once we have war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.” The war with Iran has been a point of conflict for those within and without President Trump’s administration and circle. It has not been without rumors and chatter from the usual corners of the foreign policy ecosystem, long accustomed to the confines of “traditional” diplomacy, statecraft, and war. But is that the best path forward today for the president, the region, and for America? Rebeccah Heinrichs is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute and the director of its Keystone Defense Initiative. She specializes in U.S. national defense policy, with a focus on strategic deterrence, and sits down for an extended interview with The Daily Wire about where America stands and what it stands for in order to win this war.

***

Ben Domenech: Here we are after an inordinate amount of time dealing with the ramifications of an administration that simply does not seem to know what it wants, from my perspective, when it comes to achieving an end to this conflict with Iran. You have been all over this from the beginning. You’ve been saying what we ought to be doing. What should the president be doing right now?

Rebeccah Heinrichs: First of all, I don’t downplay the risks. So I think that individuals who really want the president’s efforts on diplomacy with the Iranians to work will often accuse those of us who think diplomacy is not going to work of not fully appreciating the risks of resuming military operations. But I want to be very clear that there are risks in all of the options before us.

BD: Just in terms of the president’s immediate decision, he has talked about doing all sorts of terrible things that we can’t say on FCC-moderated radio to the Iranians in response to their killing of American personnel and other steps that they’ve taken. What do you think the actual menu is in front of him, and what is the thing that he should pick?

RH: One of the things that is in front of him would be increasing the scope of our targets in a military operation that is much more robust than anything we even saw in Epic Fury. And what I mean by that is increasing the target list to the main infrastructure in Iran that the IRGC relies on to survive. That includes some bridges, that includes key energy infrastructure. It certainly includes the IRGC itself. So yes, it’s leadership, but it’s also just the rank-and-file members of the Revolutionary Guard. So far, even in Epic Fury, when the United States was flying wing-to-wing with the Israelis, so much of the elimination of the IRGC leadership in Iran was left to the Israelis. But the United States has really been focused on particular military weapons targets. But I think the United States should expand the number of things on our target list, especially considering the Iranians continue to intentionally try to kill Americans throughout the Middle East.

BD: The situation right now seems to be a lack of understanding around Iran’s strategic response to our campaign, that they have been doing things that we didn’t expect. They’ve been neutralizing our strength. They’ve been making it impossible to decapitate. They’ve been making it too expensive to achieve our objectives. They have been basically using the material that they have to eat our resources and our munitions. How does that change?

RH: First of all, on the munitions point, the munitions that we’re really running low on that are serious — this is very serious — are the more exquisite longer-range strike systems like Tomahawk and interceptors for our defenses. Tactical interceptors and the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, the THAAD interceptors. What we are not running low on, and we are plentiful on, are the short-range systems that we would primarily use for the rest of this campaign.

I do think some people are focusing on what we’re running low on to convince the president that we can no longer move forward on this. But one of my responses to that is if the United States can’t finish this military campaign on Iran, there is no way we are going to husband these particular resources in the hopes of winning a war with China, for instance. And that’s absurd on its face. That’s absurd.

So we’re in this war now, and we’ve got to finish it. So what the Iranians have been successful in is because so many of these IRGC leaders have been left alive, including the head of the IRGC now, Ahmad Vahidi; they’ve been essentially able to just use drones, these sort of low-flying drones, to just terrorize the strait along their coast. And that is what I think this administration did not fully appreciate going into this war, that they would be able to do that. And then, of course, they laid mines along the middle corridor in the Strait of Hormuz. I think in hindsight, it would’ve been a lot more prudent, if not difficult, if we had already had an international coalition in place to prevent the Iranians from closing the strait. You prevent them from closing the strait; that’s a lot easier than trying to reopen it once they’re terrorizing it through drones.

But here we are. And so I think that the way forward is you really do have to bring the IRGC to heel. And you’re not going to do that by leaving so much of the IRGC intact while trying to claim that folks like Mohammed Ghalibaf dictate terms that Vahidi is just simply not ever going to agree to anyway. And it seems to me that the negotiators letting the IRGC go unpunished, if they’re supposedly operating independently, tells me they’re not. They’re actually operating together.

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The event was, as is typical for the Capitol City, reduced to a pathetic networking session of smiles and handshakes between journos and politicians, lawyers and lobbyists, with the additional Kremlinology of who got to sit where and why. Everyone was on their phones between songs of generic holiness, stuck to the uncomfortable confines of worn brown National Cathedral chairs in the purportedly religious house that has the acoustics of a Wawa and whose respect for holiness is embodied by the head of Darth Vader perched atop its Northwest Tower, as predicted by the Gospel of Luke. For this, John Fetterman wore a suit?

What was remarkable about the Graham funeral is how little resemblance it bore to the man it claimed to honor. Instead it was a tribute isolated to a single relationship confined to the last seven years of Graham’s thirty-four year career in Washington: his political friendship with President Donald Trump. It was a connection built on Graham’s belief that, in the absence of his longtime foreign policy allies John McCain and Joe Lieberman, he had to make the best of things – becoming a quarterback whisperer in an offensive scheme he never thought he’d have to run. The decision reaped benefits, for Graham and for Trump – the former an old hand at driving policy in the Republican conference, the latter a political neophyte who didn’t know who to trust or how to move legislation beyond a Truth Social post.

The tributes from the front of the Cathedral focused on an appeal to the Commander in the Chief in the front row, and left his longtime friends unmentioned. The program wasn’t marked by any of his longtime political allies from his home in South Carolina. Take the world leaders out of the equation in the attending crowd, and it could’ve been a funeral for any Republican Senator. The oddity of it all is that unlike so many others, Graham’s absence is likely to be immediately felt, and felt the most by Trump’s White House, whose relationship with Capitol Hill, already strained with contention and resentment, is only going to get worse.

The following day brought another insult to holiness with the circus of the Anthony Fauci hearing. The fish in the barrel claimed the fif the entire time, and Senators expressed their undying love and affection (on the Democratic side) and their utter contempt for his lying, self-dealing, and pompous assumption of the seat of the Pope of Science. Rand Paul’s blonde gum-chewing staffer went viral. Josh Hawley channeled the fury of millions of Americans. Bernie Moreno said a swear. None of this will be of any consequence.

This is where Republicans find themselves: looking back in anger, without delivering anything of substance. They’re still fighting the last war. Democrats are crazy socialists who haven’t stopped being crazy, in fact they’ve gotten even crazier. But that’s not good enough to win, despite the insistence of too-online right wingers that they can run that play back one more time to buck decades of historical midterm trends. Four in ten voters say they want “revolutionary” change from this election. Do you think they care about people movers at Dulles Airport? Do you think they give a shit if James Talarico rents a truck?

That brings us to the dire mood in the Capital City. House Republicans had already been planning their exit strategy and shopping for their next homes and jobs. Senate Republicans have only just noticed that they are headed in the same direction: off a cliff, at rapid speed. President Trump’s approval rating is -33 in the latest AP poll. The Democratic Senate candidate currently has the lead in North Carolina and Georgia respectively – where Majority Leader John Thune has promised to spend an enormous amount of cash – and is within the margin of error in Ohio and Texas, which were supposed to be red states last we checked. Every bout at the White House’s UFC sideshow ended in a knockout. This may not even be that close.

The realization on the eve of August that the blue tidal wave could hit the Senate, too, has come too late to do much of anything about it except bitch about the damn war. And what comes after? We all know what it looks like for D.C.: committee circuses, impeachment of cabinet figures, and lawfare targeting the president’s family and allies to a degree that it will make the Joe Biden years look sleepy and innocuous. For the left? A dramatically emboldened socialist wing, with the force multiplier of eager and willing new entrants from safe seats, each looking to make a national name for themselves. And for the right? Two years of vindictive bloodletting and horror, blame and revisionism, and a level of factional strife that will have the city turning back to all the old Game of Thrones episodes, lacking as we are in newer references in the post-peak TV era.

The Republican Party was emboldened by Donald Trump’s victory in 2024. But from election night on, they made the mistake of thinking that victory for the right was fundamental. It may turn out to be the exception before the left’s new and dangerous rule.

Buckle up.

Now comes Kim Strassel at The Wall Street Journal to identify why this is happening:

This column reported last week on the bitterness Mr. Vance’s congressional colleagues are feeling over his continual absence. In recent administrations, governing majorities have come to rely on the vice president—who is ex officio Senate president—to act as primary liaison between the White House and Congress. Mr. Vance has blown off this important if unsung duty, preferring to stay in the spotlight. Tempers hit a boil last week when—at a pivotal legislative moment—Mr. Vance canceled a planned Tuesday House meeting in favor of appearing on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” where he bashed Congress.

Republicans have mostly held their tongues on Mr. Vance out of deference. But the vice president has shown a lot of lefty leg lately: undermining Israel, panning free markets, touting a Christian-themed big-government agenda. That’s in addition to what many Republicans view as Mr. Vance’s naive approach to Iran. That elected Republicans were joining conservative commentators in a Vance rethink was worthy of reporting. And most readers would have seen the column for what it was: part of a growing GOP debate over who should lead the party in 2028.

Team Vance saw it as it sees any slight: an all-hands call to delegitimize a critic—to brand her a RINO, “establishment,” a liar, a captive tool, or part of some anti-JD “op.”

The Vance press team contacted my editors to demand corrections. They wanted a mea culpa for what I didn’t write—namely that Mr. Vance had showed up to the House . . . on Wednesday. Never mind that Congress’s anger stemmed from Mr. Vance’s decision to ditch them for Mr. Rogan’s program. They claimed that wasn’t “the reason” for canceling, though they didn’t provide an alternative explanation. What else was Mr. Vance doing in Austin, Texas?

Their final complaint was a hair-splitting gotcha: I wrote that “lawmakers can count on a few fingers the times former Sen. Vance has set foot in the Capitol.” That’s what lawmakers told me. Mr. Vance’s spokesman insisted the vice president had been there more than two dozen times since taking office. The phrase obviously referred to the infrequency with which Mr. Vance huddled with members of Congress to solve problems and wasn’t a literal count of the number of times he was physically present to attend a speech or break a tie.

Mr. Vance’s real bully-boy strength shows up with his online army, where a retinue of “influencers” and “journalists” stand ready with an arsenal of labels, whataboutisms and falsehoods. The tactics aren’t new. They are straight-up Saul Alinsky—pick the target, freeze it, personalize and polarize it—long practiced by the left. I wrote a whole book about that, “The Intimidation Game.” What is new is for the right to use such means in an effort to shut down conservative dissent.

Even as Mr. Vance’s team complained I’d omitted the word “Wednesday,” his deputy chief of staff went online to claim (falsely) that I—part of the “LEFT”—had written that Mr. Vance was “nowhere to be seen” on “Tuesday or Wednesday,” above a picture showing the vice president in Congress on Wednesday. That was the cue to a swarm of Mr. Vance’s social-media minions. They labeled me a spineless leftist, their proof a series of lame rejoinders: Yeah, but the Senate sucks! Yeah, but what about Mitch McConnell? Yeah, but, you probably don’t even like the SAVE America Act! Yeah, but you’re a loser.

A reported piece on this is in the Washington Post today:

A Washington Post analysis of conservative influencers’ posts on X found that criticism of Vance spiked immediately after his appearance on Rogan’s podcast.

Critical posts poured in from prominent commentators including Ben Shapiro, Marc Thiessen and Batya Ungar-Sargon, as well as online right-wing influencers and little-known X users whose anti-Vance posts quickly gained traction. Some of the users who pledged to oppose Vance and support Rubio in 2028 had profiles that strongly suggested they aren’t American voters and are based in other countries.

It was “obvious to anyone with an IQ above 70″ that the barrage of attacks has been “totally inauthentic and probably coordinated to a certain extent,” the close Vance ally said.

The upsurge in online criticism “hasn’t been reflected in any data correlating with Vance’s image among GOP voters, which currently tracks President Trump’s image to a T,” the person said. “If it were organic, authentic or effective,” Vance’s favorability rating with Republican voters would have cratered over the past nine months, since the intense online criticism first peaked, the person said. “And that just hasn’t happened.”

A spokesperson for the vice president said Vance’s only focus is “fighting for the president’s agenda and delivering wins for the American people,” and that he is not concerned with social media.

Vance allies have pushed back publicly against some of the attacks, at times calling attention to common language used among those posting insults.

Jon Schweppe, a Vance supporter and senior adviser at the American Principles Project, who worked for Trump’s Federal Trade Commission until earlier this year, posted a chart on X last week that showed the vice president’s favorability among Republicans had remained steady despite an “anti-Vance op.” His post quickly received dozens of replies from accounts that didn’t follow him — all attacking Vance. Schweppe described the response as curious, since his post had not been shared by any high-follower accounts.

“Primary season — I guess it’s beginning before the midterms this year,” Schweppe said, adding that Vance’s detractors are “trying to create a divide and separate him from the president.”

“There’s going to be folks within the party structure, within the influencer structure, who are going to try to knock him down a few pegs in hope that a challenger can emerge to beat him, and that’s just what we’re seeing,” Schweppe said. “But it’s absolutely organized.”

My question to Team Vance would be: But what if it isn’t?

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The Wiki War Over Nick Shirley

Pirate Wires:

When the Wikipedia entry was created days after the video went live, its opening line was straightforward. Shirley was “an American independent journalist and YouTuber,” known for “investigative reporting on government spending, immigration, and alleged fraud.” There was no verdict on his work and, just as importantly, no ideological label. That would quickly change.

On January 14, the word “unsubstantiated” entered the lead when an editor, High Professor, added that the allegations were “described as unsubstantiated.” Over the subsequent minutes, a miniature edit-war consisting of the removal and addition of the “unsubstantiated” claim ensued. It foreshadowed activity that would unfold on the page over the next six months.

By 5:15 UTC that morning, another editor, CNMall41, had reverted the “unsubstantiated” edit. A third editor, Assorted-Interests, restored it; hours later a fourth editor, PositivelyUncertain, tore it back out, arguing the sourcing was thin — “NBC only mentions it in passing, CNN doesn’t say that at all.” By 2 a.m. UTC on the 15th, High Professor restored it.

The sentence quickly evolved, losing its hedge as a claim made by others: “described as unsubstantiated” became, in an edit by AlsoWukai, “were unsubstantiated.” The perspective of an unnamed few was folded into disembodied truth.

Few Wikipedia edit wars with this kind of cultural charge end quickly, or at all. This case was no different. On January 16, an editor named Studious Cat stripped the claim three times in two hours, arguing it was “demonstrably false” that Shirley’s claims against daycare centers were unsubstantiated; Denniss, Sibshops, and AzureCitizen reverted him each time. Like waves of troops thrown against an unrelenting front, editor after editor fought for the glory: Isaidnoway, Ethiopian Epic, NathanBru, Jokerpower71, Friedbyrd, and Wrolen all removed or softened the line, and each time it came back, replaced — in almost every instance — by the same few hands.

All told, the sentence was cut and restored more than 20 times. But the impact of one account stood out above all.

While Wikipedialand was carrying on this ideological edit war dressed up in procedural debate, reality kept complicating things. In April, FBI and Homeland Security agents executed 22 search warrants against Minnesota daycare and other facilities, including the Quality Learning Center, one of the daycare centers Shirley had visited — which drew social media plaudits for signage misspelling the word “learning.” (The center is now closed.)

This month, Fahima Mahamud, owner of Future Leaders Center, another daycare center featured in Shirley’s December video, pleaded guilty to the charges and tried to board a flight to London the same day she told the state she was closing.

Wikipedians argued fiercely that these charges did not align with Shirley’s claims because they centered on fraud connected to a state-funded food program, rather than daycare center administrators inflating their headcounts.

Mamdani and Ms. Rachel, War Profiteers

New York Post:

Sure, the mayor is genuinely no fan of the Jews; he and his wife have been obsessively demonizing the Jewish state for years while cheering on those meek humanitarians over at Hamas.

But, as Tuesday’s video makes all too clear, the mayor’s own biases are a sideshow, not the main attraction.

At heart, he’s a theater kid starved for attention — and he knows that nothing gets his base more riled up than squawking about death, war and suffering: the video received 2.3 million views the day Mamdani posted it on YouTube.

It’s politics as imagined by a narcissistic, solipsistic, dim millennial whose privileged upbringing featured so little by way of real-world experience that he felt compelled to find purpose elsewhere.

And he found it, like all too many members of his screen-addled generation, in the cheap and meaningless validation that comes with chasing clicks and likes online.

He is hardly alone in this scam.

The mayor’s bestie, the online toddler influencer known as Ms. Rachel, recently took a sharp turn into politics, posting less about the ABCs and more about “Palestine” — and amassing a fortune along the way.

The numbers tell the story.

In 2023, before Hamas’ marauders crossed into Israel to behead babies, rape teenage girls and kidnap hundreds of innocent civilians, Ms. Rachel enjoyed a sizable but solid audience of about 5 million viewers.

Once she started posting and speaking incessantly about Gaza — offering only grudging empathy, at best, to the Israeli children slaughtered in their beds or held hostage in dark tunnels by vile terrorists — her numbers zoomed: As of this year, her channel boasts more than 20 million subscribers.

Because preening about war while showing no real interest in its causes and making no real effort to help bring about a resolution is one heck of a business model.

Mamdani, the drama club’s alpha dog, was paying attention.

He’s realized that if a dimwitted kids’ entertainer with a YouTube channel can turn “caring about Gaza” into a multimillion-dollar empire, and if a petty provocateur like Hasan Piker can use it to brand himself as the Democrat Party’s new kingmaker, then a clever and ambitious cad with no moral scruples can catapult the same sentiment into a stellar political career.

✍️ Feature

• The New Yorker: One Man’s Quest to Fix Every Deadly Guardrail

🌍 Foreign

• The Wall Street Journal: Trump Is Losing Patience Over an Iran War With No Clear End in Sight

• The Wall Street Journal: The Houthis Have Opened a New Front in the U.S.-Iran War

• Daily Wire: Who Is Britain’s New Prime Minister?

• Daily Wire: Why Hasn’t Washington Pressed Qatar To Extradite Terrorists?

• National Interest: How to Get the Other Half of U.S. Economic Statecraft Right

• The Free Press: Douglas Murray on Mamdani and Netanyahu

• The New York Times: The Case for Elbridge Colby’s Defense Strategy

• New York Post: Cops Fume as Mamdani Urges New Yorkers to Protest Netanyahu

🏛️ Domestic

• The New York Times: Trump, Thune, and the Senate Election Bill

• The Wall Street Journal: Trump Unveils New Tariffs Designed to Withstand Legal Scrutiny

• Semafor: Trump Ducks Supreme Court With New Tariffs

• Axios: House and Senate Republicans Push Reconciliation, SAVE Act

• Punchbowl News: House Enters the Danger Zone

• Daily Wire: Meet the Republicans Running for Re-Election on Amnesty

• Politico: Contractor Disputes Mikie Sherrill’s Claims of New Jersey Voter Registration Software Error

• Politico: House Members Stare Down a Grueling Summer on the Campaign Trail

• Politico: Lisa Murkowski and the Todd Blanche Confirmation Fight

• Washington Examiner: Defiant Trump’s WHCA Dinner Redo

• Axios: GOP Senate Race Concerns Around Darline Graham

🗳️ 2028

• Washington Examiner: An Open 2028 Presidential Field Could Include Two Dozen Candidates

📰 Media

• Mediaite: Tucker Carlson Claims Trump Will Obey Ben Shapiro in Iran War Meltdown

• Mediaite: Elon Musk Lashes Out After Far-Right Accusations

• Associated Press: Subpoenas Withdrawn After NYT Dispute

💻 Tech

• The New York Times: Risky Trips and the Social Media Travel Trap

• The Wall Street Journal: China’s AI Chips Race

• City Journal: Prediction Market Ad Regulations Target Polymarket and Kalshi

🧬 Health

• Daily Wire: The Abortion Industry Wants To Harvest Your Live Babies

🏈 Sports

• Daily Wire: Caitlin Clark’s Bodyguard Is Now Fighting for Us

• Daily Wire: The Strange New Rules for Women’s Sports Coverage

• ESPN: LeBron James and Closing the Chapter on Heat/Cavaliers Reunion Talk

🎭 Culture & Hollywood

• Daily Wire: The Metaphysical Yin and Yang of Christopher Nolan and Taylor Swift

• The Hollywood Reporter: Paramount-Warner Bros. Merger Pause Extended

• Variety: ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’ Actress Mary Kate Golding Dead After Stabbing

• Vulture: Behind-the-Scenes Drama at Dutton Ranch

🪶 Quote

“Right it is to be taught even by the enemy.”

― Ovid