Some NATO nations have spent far too long refusing to invest sufficiently in defense, preferring to break the bank on entitlements. The Baltic countries and Poland are exceptions. They saw the threat from Russia much sooner than Germany, for example. But the tide has turned. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, in stark contrast to former Chancellor Angela Merkel, readily admitted that Trump was right about Europe’s failures. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has repeatedly said, and continues to emphasize, that Europe and Canada have increased their defense spending, with investments averaging nearly 4% of GDP. This progress has been made within a year of their initiative to reach Trump’s 5% GDP demand. This commitment has materialized in a range of defense weapons deals. And despite the president’s indefensible warnings about wanting to own Greenland, Denmark stands out as a strong ally, reaching nearly 4% of GDP and signing new weapons procurement agreements.

European NATO nations have also stepped up and strengthened support for Ukraine’s war effort against Russia, easing the U.S.’s burden. Trump agreed yesterday to authorize a license for Ukraine to manufacture Patriot interceptors, giving Ukraine the ability to restore its critical air defense in light of increased Russian attacks on Kyiv — a huge boost for the country. The authorization not only strengthens Ukraine’s war effort but also expands Patriot production for the United States following a period of rapid depletion in the war against Iran. Outside of the U.S. authorization, Ukraine managed to reach nine drone deals total with various European allies as well as Gulf partners as efforts to increase assistance and cooperation continue to develop. Allies further reaffirmed their united support with a pledge to provide at least 70 billion euros in military equipment, aid, and training for Ukraine this year and again next year.

Despite Trump’s claim that Europeans haven’t been loyal to the United States during Operation Epic Fury, they were vital to the U.S. operation. True, the U.K. initially denied U.S. use of the joint base at Diego Garcia, but this was brief. Throughout Epic Fury, the U.S. operated consistently from bases across the U.K., and the Brits helped with intelligence, logistics, and air defense for the Gulf States. As did the French. The U.S. had a tanker bridge, deploying nearly 100 tankers across eight allied nations. European politicians did not advertise the extent of aid because of how unpopular the United States is with their domestic audiences, especially after Trump’s threats to Greenland. Europe’s most conservative politicians — who are most amenable to American conservatives — even condemned Trump’s threats.

Still, Europe benefits from the U.S.-Israeli military operations to significantly weaken the Iranian regime, so leaders quietly authorized support. At the NATO summit, Trump and other NATO leaders have strengthened ties to openly facilitate cooperation on missions, including the safe movement of oil in the Strait of Hormuz. They agreed to facilitate a joint operation of minesweepers to de-mine the Strait in anticipation of Iranian efforts to deploy more mines (as the MOU continues to be tested and is on the brink of collapse). In response to Iranian violations in the Strait, NATO allies have expressed support for the United States’ action against Iran. Rutte defended U.S. strikes against Iran last night with the following statement: “I think it was absolutely necessary because when you have a ceasefire and Iran is basically violating the ceasefire. . . I think it is totally crucial that the U.S. forcefully react.”

This good news does not mean there are no challenges ahead. The president should let Secretary of State Marco Rubio work with the Kingdom of Denmark privately to ensure U.S. security concerns are addressed in Greenland. The Danes have been entirely cooperative and continue to stand out as reliable allies willing to do their part to enforce sanctions and keep the Chinese Communists from embedding in the High North. Ridiculing Denmark and threatening to take its territory only hurts Trump’s success in injecting energy and real, no-kidding defenses in Europe. Still, the summit was a success, and Trump does deserve credit for getting Europeans to take their defense seriously, which goes a long way for the president who wishes to be hailed for making peace.

Platner Fallout Continues

Politico:

Nirav Shah’s first event back on the campaign trail was coming together quickly. Staffers shepherded supporters into a nearly-empty office space, and an intrepid group of volunteers, armed with masking tape and markers, put the finishing touches on familiar campaign signs that suddenly needed an update.

Forming in a makeshift assembly line, they methodically taped over the word “governor” and wrote “Senate” in its place. Erin Evans, 56, of Portland, arrived with her own handmade poster: she had used colored duct tape to mask what once was her “Graham Platner for Senate” yard sign, covering the oysterman’s name with an all-caps “NIRAV.”

The DIY-campaigning is a symptom of the moment in which Maine Democrats now find themselves. Platner, who ended his campaign Wednesday night, had energized voters who were hungry for a fighter to unseat GOP Sen. Susan Collins. But support for Platner’s campaign crumbled after POLITICO reported a woman he used to date accused him of sexual assault — an allegation which he denies.

His old supporters are now trying to find a new political home in the two-and-a-half short weeks during which Maine Democrats must name a replacement for their former Senate hopeful. And voters’ options, for the most part, are a flurry of familiar faces who unsuccessfully mounted campaigns for office already this year and are now scrambling for a second chance.“Campaigns are always like building the plane while you’re flying it, but this is like building it while falling out of a helicopter,” said a staffer working on one of the campaigns who was granted anonymity to candidly discuss the situation.

The homemade signs at Shah’s event were just one example of how fast things are moving in Maine: the WiFi network available at his kickoff event was still labeled “ShahForGovernor.”

Several of the Democrats vying to replace Platner have already run against each other in a nearly-identical field in this year’s June primaries. Whoever emerges will face Collins, a battle-tested five-term incumbent with more than $10 million cash in the bank who won her last race by eight points even as President Donald Trump lost the state by nine. The race’s result will play a pivotal role in Senate control.

Three of the unsuccessful candidates for governor are vying for the open spot on the ballot, including former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, and Shah, who was the former top Pine Tree State public health official. All three won at least 20 percent of the primary vote just one month ago. Two other candidates, Jordan Wood and Paige Loud, fell short in the Democratic primary to succeed retiring Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine) in his battleground seat. And then there’s Maine Beer Company founder Dan Kleban — who initially ran for the Senate but bowed out of the race to back Gov. Janet Mills before she, too, dropped out as Platner asserted a massive polling and fundraising lead.

These hopefuls have already aired their political differences with each other over the course of the last year, but the pseudo-primary for the Senate will come with a far harsher — and nationalized — spotlight in a majorly truncated period of time.

The race to replace Platner on the ballot began in earnest on Thursday, with several candidates actively jumping into the race and their advisers scrambling to figure out how to pay for staff, run ads, and identify who they are even competing against — with scant details from a state party that is also piecing things together on the fly.

Said an adviser on another campaign: “No one planned for this. Even anyone that thought, ‘okay, Graham might be in trouble’ … the idea that anyone actually put a ton of planning into this scenario seems unlikely.”

More:

• Politico Magazine: The Platner Scandal and the Rules Democrats Thought Would Protect Them

• New York Post: Graham Platner Campaign Paid $10 Million to Consultants While Top Aides’ Salaries Went Unlisted

The Blue Cities Hiding Their Homeless Problems

Daily Wire:

The final FIFA World Cup game hosted in Seattle ended in the disappointing loss of the United States to Belgium. But for Seattle, a city so overcome by drug addiction, mental illness, and street-level homelessness, the weeks-long event was a smashing success.

Downtown sparkled as it welcomed visitors from around the world for the six games it hosted at Lumen Field, rebranded Seattle Stadium for the tournament. In addition to exciting games, soccer fans enjoyed a city with noticeably cleaner streets and few visible signs of homelessness, drug addiction, and mental illness that are familiar to residents.

But this is not what long-term success looks like.

Mayor Katie Wilson and her team did not clean up the city. They simply moved the problem elsewhere, like a child shoving his toys under the bed when told to clean his room.

Under Wilson’s direction, the homeless were swept out of downtown and pushed into surrounding neighborhoods and minority communities already struggling with crime and disorder.

Journalist Jonathan Choe regularly reports on the plight of Seattle’s Chinatown-International District, an Asian American community overwhelmed by open-air drug use and stolen-goods markets. Here, many businesses are boarded up, and those that have survived are quickly losing money. Merchants report ongoing theft and crime. Parks meant for children and families are instead filled with drug users and paraphernalia. Residents have pleaded with city officials for help, but there has been little response. Choe calls it “the city’s human dumping ground.”

Seattle is not the first to engage in these deceptive city-cleaning tactics. Hiding the homeless is a common occurrence in cities across the nation when they host large events or important national and international figures. The Associated Press noted such instances in New Orleans ahead of the 2025 Super Bowl, Chicago ahead of the 2024 Democratic National Convention, and Atlanta ahead of the 1996 Olympics. The most notorious might be the cleanup of San Francisco in preparation for Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.

These cities appear more concerned with making a good impression on visiting tourists, dignitaries, and soccer fans than with the experiences of residents who live with these conditions year-round.

✍️ Feature

Pirate Wires: Do Bots Have Feelings?

🌍 Foreign

• Wall Street Journal: Iran Hatched Fresh Plot to Kill Trump, Israel Told U.S.

• Semafor: U.S. and Iran Continue Negotiations Despite Recent Strikes

• Mediaite: Trump Fires Back at Iran’s Request to Continue Peace Talks: ‘Ceasefire Is Over’

• National Interest: What the NATO Ankara Summit Missed

• Wall Street Journal: Ukraine’s Drones Are Now Reaching Siberia—and Imperiling Russian Energy Assets

🏛️ Domestic

• Axios: Treasury Sees Inflation Cooling as Real Yields Rise

• Axios: Trump Housing Bill Clears Senate, SAVE Act Advances

• New York Times: New Air Force One to Receive Expanded Defensive Countermeasures

• Punchbowl News: Thune Launches Senate Nomination Blitz

• Wall Street Journal: Democratic Socialist Candidates Gain Ground in Congressional Races

• City Journal: How the DSA Is Pulling the Democratic Party Left

• Washington Examiner: Radical Socialist Democrats Pretend to Be Blue-Collar Allies

• Daily Wire: Court Accidentally Shows Tyler Robinson’s Confession Note to Trans Lover

• CNN: Hegseth’s Beard Policy Sparks Pushback From Sailors

💻 Tech

• Wall Street Journal: Tech Stock Jitters Just Went Off the Charts

• MSN: Billionaire Exodus? California Still Drew 10 Times More Venture Capital Than Any Other State This Year

• Wall Street Journal: Record Companies Push to Label AI Songs on Streaming Platforms

• Semafor: The Mistrust of AI Labs Bubbles Over

🧬 Health

• Daily Wire: The Medical Myth That Failed Millions of Women

• Daily Wire: The NYT Profiled My Butter. Here’s What It Missed About Big Fertility.

• Daily Wire: Identity Politics Is Burying Science

🏈 Sports

• Wall Street Journal: Erling Haaland’s Rise and Norway’s World Cup Dream

• Wall Street Journal: France Pins Its World Cup Hopes on Mbappé and Dembélé

• Daily Wire: Is Soccer Flopping Its Way Out of America’s Favor?

🎭 Culture & Hollywood

• Variety: Letterboxd Explores Sale as Netflix, Sony and Paramount Hold Talks

• The Hollywood Reporter: Moana Sets Box Office Pace as Evil Dead: Burn Begins With Strong Previews

• The Hollywood Reporter: Anthony Hopkins Returns to Music With New Decca Album, Life Is a Dream

• The Hollywood Reporter: Buddy Trailer: Cristin Milioti and Keegan-Michael Key Star in Sundance Favorite

• Daily Wire: Hollywood’s Latest ‘Sex Comedy’ Has an Unexpected Conservative Message

• Daily Wire: The Hobby Mistake Keeping Men Single

• Daily Wire: We Thought We Beat Cable. We Were Wrong.

• Daily Wire: No, the Age of Reading Isn’t Over

🪶 Quote

“In countries where there is great private wealth, much may be effected by the voluntary contributions of patriotic individuals; but in a community situated like that of the United States, the public purse must supply the deficiency of private resource. In what can it be so useful, as in prompting and improving the efforts of industry?”

— Alexander Hamilton

And here’s The Big Ben Show celebrating the 250th:

Subscribe now

How Long Can Graham Platner Last?

Punchbowl News:

After Politico and CNN both reported that Platner allegedly sexually assaulted Jenny Racicot, the DSCC and Senate Majority PAC said they’d no longer support his campaign. Republicans have already announced that they will spend $42 million in Maine defending Collins. Platner will have no backing from the Senate Democratic political machine.

Party leaders believe Platner will drop out of the race as soon as today, possibly even this morning. That would give Democrats just three weeks to find a new challenger to take on Collins.

Much of the discussion about possible replacements for Platner is currently focused on other failed 2026 candidates.

Former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson, epidemiologist Nirav Shah, Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows and former congressional candidate Jordan Wood are all options, according to multiple sources. Jackson released a statement saying he believes Racicot and urged Platner to get out of the race.

“There is no place in our politics for sexual violence,” Jackson said. “Not in our party, not in any party. Graham Platner must withdraw from this race today.”

Retiring Democratic Rep. Jared Golden would be the top choice of many Democrats. But the four-term lawmaker has made clear he wants to leave Congress at the end of this year. Maine Gov. Janet Mills, whom Platner decisively defeated in the Democratic primary, is extremely unlikely.

Platner allies say that he’ll only drop out of the race if his replacement supports the progressive policy positions that Platner campaigned on. Platner does have some power here, as Democrats understand that Platner needs to leave the race quickly if they have any hope of unseating Collins.

More from the New York Times, Washington Examiner, and Mediaite.

Why Trump Was Right About NATO

Politico Europe:

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte has one message for NATO allies about Donald Trump: The U.S. president was right.

He was right on pressing NATO allies to boost defense spending, he was right in getting them to modernize their militaries, and he was right to launch a war with Iran, Rutte told POLITICO in an interview for “The Conversation with Dasha Burns” podcast at this week’s alliance leaders’ summit in the Turkish capital.

“I just like the man. I think what he is doing for NATO is great news,” Rutte said.

It was a full-throated endorsement of the president’s policies that have at times rankled other alliance members, many of whom question Trump’s commitment to the alliance after his threats to annex Greenland, his questioning of the NATO’s Article 5 common defense pledge, his attacks on fellow leaders, his decision to withdraw some U.S. troops from Germany and the ongoing broader Pentagon review of the American military presence in Europe.

“President Trump [is] basically achieving what, since Eisenhower, American presidents tried to achieve, which is to equalize the defense spending between the U.S. and Europe,” Rutte added.

The NATO boss said this year’s summit would be “transformational” for the alliance, and also pump billions more into critical defense programs.

The numbers, so far, are massive. Over the past two years the 31 non-U.S. NATO members have pledged $250 billion in new programs and defense investments, with a slew of new deals and pledges expected over the next two days.

All that has come against the backdrop of Trump demanding allies spend and do more as Washington shifts to homeland security and to a lesser degree, the Pacific region.

More from Semafor and the WSJ.

Get Ready For The Small Generation

Axios:

By the numbers: The U.S. population ages 45-64 fell by 2.68 million from April 1, 2020, to July 1, 2025, according to new Census Bureau population estimates reviewed by Axios.

• The group declined 3.2% nationally, from 84 million to 81.3 million.

• The Northeast had the steepest percentage drop, falling 7.1%.

• The Midwest fell 6.2%.

• The West fell 2.7%.

• The South was the only region where the 45-64 population grew — barely — adding 18,749 people, or 0.1%.

The decline is happening as the country gets older overall.

• The U.S. median age rose to 39.4 in July 2025, up from 38.6 in April 2020.

• The 65-and-older population grew 16.2% nationally during the same period.

• The under-18 population fell 2.4%…

Gen X is smaller than the baby boom because it was born during the “baby bust” that followed the postwar birth surge.

Birth rates fell sharply in the 1960s and 1970s as contraception became more widely available, women delayed marriage and childbirth and divorce and new family structures became more common.

The U.S. is not alone. Other wealthy countries also are wrestling with aging populations, slower workforce growth and rising pressure on public budgets.

Share

✍️ Feature

• ESPN: Inside Sean Payton’s Plan to Return the Broncos to the Playoffs

🌍 Foreign

• WSJ: A New Model to Fund War: A World Bank for Defense

• Semafor: Türkiye Cracks Down on Dissent Ahead of NATO Meeting

• Brussels Signal: Meloni Out in the Cold as Europe’s Conservatives Woo Trump

• Reuters: Britain’s Farage Quits as Lawmaker, Triggering By-Election

• New York Times: Marine Le Pen Wins Appeal of Election Ban Verdict

• Daily Wire: America Needs To Declare Independence From China

• National Interest: The NDAA Strengthens Government Support for Biotech. It Can Be Even Stronger.

🏛️ Domestic

• Washington Examiner: Michigan Senate Primary Splits Democrats

• Washington Examiner: Mamdanism: The New Face of Socialism

• Daily Wire: Antisemitism Is Not A Fringe Position In The Democratic Party

• Daily Wire: How Over-Credentialed Elites Pretend To Be Working Class

• WSJ Opinion: America Is More Than a Creed

• Washington Examiner: Joe Concha: Democrats’ July Fourth Messaging Problem

📰 Media

• Variety: Prince Harry Loses Privacy Judgment Against Daily Mail

• New York Post: Mamdani Aide Goes Berserk on ABC Executives After ‘The View’ Host Calls Socialist Candidate Antisemitic

• Daily Wire: ‘The View’s’ Sunny Hostin Says American Flags Make Her Feel ‘Unsafe’

💻 Tech

• Politico Europe: Google Says It’s Protecting Privacy. The EU Thinks It’s Guarding Its Monopoly.

• New York Magazine: Artificial Intelligence, Anthropic’s IPO, and the Return of Effective Altruism

🧬 Health

• Daily Wire: The Mental Health Crisis Turned Tragedy That Goes Beyond American Girls

🏈 Sports

• WSJ: How the U.S. Lost to Belgium, Became World Cup Rivals

• Hollywood Reporter: USMNT’s World Cup 2026 Exit Sparks Questions About the Program’s Future

• Variety: World Cup Ratings Lift Fox, Telemundo and Peacock

🎭 Culture & Hollywood

• Variety: ‘The Odyssey’ First Reactions Hail Christopher Nolan’s Epic

• Hollywood Reporter: Inside the New Era of the Dutton Ranch

• Hollywood Reporter: Dolly Parton Musical Sets Winter 2026 Broadway Opening

• Daily Wire: Social Media Influencers Are Turning the World’s Most Beautiful Places Into Shallow Photo Ops

🪶 Quote

“This ball of liberty, I believe… is now so well in motion that it will roll round the globe.”

— Thomas Jefferson

The administration was never going to win the birthright citizenship case before the Supreme Court. Changing something as fundamental as our current practices regarding membership in the national community shouldn’t be changed by executive order.

But the real losers from Tuesday’s decision are the American people.

That’s because the high court didn’t just strike down Trump’s January 2025 executive order on “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” Rather, by a 5-4 vote, it said that Congress did not have the authority to change our current practice of granting U.S. citizenship to almost everyone born here, even children born to tourists, foreign students, visa workers, or illegal aliens. This removes the issue from normal democratic politics.

The only way to reform the rules now is a constitutional amendment. But that requires a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the state legislatures — so at a time when Republicans have a tiny House majority, and Democrats are sending literal communists to Washington, D.C., it’s a safe bet that this ruling will be with us for a while.

So what are the likely policy consequences?

First, the ruling gives added urgency to the administration’s rhetorical push for large-scale deportations. The Biden administration let in at least eight million illegal aliens, thousands of whom have had automatic U.S.-citizen children here, with more born every day. The fact of U.S.-born children gives illegal aliens no automatic right to stay, but it creates “equities” that make it politically more difficult to send people home.

This means the “worst of the worst” talk from the administration has to end, or at least be supplemented by aggressive, high-profile moves to force non-rapist illegals out of the country as well. This means dramatically stepped-up work-related enforcement needs to happen, now. That would involve raids of worksites, for sure, but also paperwork measures, what I call “briefcase enforcement,” involving not just DHS, but also the IRS and the Social Security administration.

Most illegal aliens aren’t dealing drugs or killing people — so why would they decide to self-deport if all the talk is about violent and dangerous illegals? There has indeed been some self-deportation, but the only way to scale it up is to make it impractical to live here illegally by locking illegals out of jobs, driver’s licenses, financial services (bank accounts, remittances, mortgages), etc.

In some of these areas, the administration has moved aggressively — Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has been especially active in his bailiwick. But flushing illegal aliens out of the job market has to be the main objective; it’s something the administration has been loath to do — and that impulse is coming from the top. Maybe this week’s setback at the Supreme Court will focus the White House’s attention on the urgency of worksite enforcement.

The citizenship ruling has implications for legal admissions, as well. One issue that has finally been getting attention is birth tourism. Thousands of foreign women every year come to the United States on tourist visas to give birth, and then return home with their newly minted-on-paper U.S. citizens. Those children are raised entirely abroad, with no instruction in American history or traditions, and certainly no patriotic education — in many cases, quite the opposite, since some of the top sources of birth tourists are communist China, Russia, Nigeria, Turkey, and elsewhere. Peter Schweizer, in his recent book “The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon,” estimates there may be as many as 1.5 million paper U.S. citizens living in China as a consequence of birth tourism. I suspect the number isn’t that high, but there’s no question it’s a large-scale problem.

The State Department and ICE have already been cracking down on birth tourism networks here and abroad, but more is needed. Now that reform of our citizenship rules is off the table, pregnant women are going to have to be barred from traveling to the United States on tourist, student, or work visas.

That means, for starters, the State Department visa form needs to add a question asking whether the applicant is pregnant, which it does not do now. What’s more, the regulations governing visa issuance now handcuff consular officers in this regard. They read:

You must not ask a visa applicant whether they are pregnant unless you have a specific articulable reason to believe they may be pregnant and planning to give birth in the United States. … You must not, as a matter of course, ask all female applicants (or any specific sub-sets of applicants) whether they are pregnant or intend to become pregnant; you also may not require B NIV [tourist or business-travel] applicants to provide evidence that they are not pregnant.

This has to change.

A roundup of reactions to the SCOTUS cases:

• Daily Wire: The Supreme Court Saves Women’s Sports

• Daily Wire: A Country Where Girls Can Be Girls

• Daily Wire: Supreme Court Rightly Upholds Fairness in Women’s Sports

• Daily Wire: The Supreme Court Restores Common Sense to Campaign Finance

• Daily Wire: Slaughter Gets Separation

Subscribe now

Who Lost Faith In The American Dream?

Jenna Stocker in Daily Wire:

Happy 100^th birthday, Route 66! Yes, that scenic byway that runs from Chicago to Santa Monica, California – 2,448 miles of pure America — hit the centennial mark and looks pretty darned good considering it was marked for execution half its lifetime ago.

Instead of a death sentence, this vein that cuts through the heart of America persists, just as America has for 250 years: reinventing itself and rebelling against generations of nostalgia-bathed geriatrics to define its own purpose and future, brick by brick — or paved mile after paved mile.

Sure, there’s plenty of old-timey glory to be had, but this super roadway toward a sunset strip offers so much more: a glimpse into the past with the wheels always treading toward the future. And if you follow it west, it goes right into the horizon of a sun that never sets until you want it. And even then, perhaps it’s somewhere in the cool desert under a canopy of endless stars winking you a goodnight through the neon glow of a roadside motel or trippy little teepee. The Mother Road offers what Americans have always been looking for: adventure, discovery, possibility, and a path of unwritten rules (speed limit be damned). Go west, young man, and grow up with the country.

But this isn’t about Route 66. It’s about the type of country and the type of Americans it represents.

We are empire builders in every sense of the world, and if you’re ashamed of that, then you need to reassess your priorities, man. Because doggone, how could you not always be in love with the team that suffers the foolishness of the world and ends up shaking the whole thing down until it’s safe for the beaten and scared – or threats are at least behind us – and then carries on as if it was NBD? And all the while we’re blasting rockets into space, curing diseases, feeding the world’s hungry, writing great literature, creating great art, and writing the Great American Songbook. We build skyscrapers, railroads, fleets of aircraft, and TV dinners. We invented Hollywood, football, pantyhose, and pinup girls. We make muscle cars. We play golf on the moon.

What good is an empire if you don’t use it? Yet here we are – the U.S. of A. with our hotdog cookouts where men wear low-cut sneakers and grab beers from sweating coolers under the Maple tree, and wives in gingham and soft brown hair corral barefoot children, sticky from ice pops and marshmallows and lemonade made with too much sugar. Here is the Empire of the true believers: the road doesn’t start or end here. Each man knows from where he came and wishes to go. These are parents whose own childhoods were unburdened by the weight of the future and the fears of old men. Couples who fell in love with each other and the American Dream. When it comes to realizing that love — of God, family, and country — it cannot be held back. It’s akin to closing the back cover of a book that blew your mind, and the only thought that bubbles to the surface is, “This must be shared.” And so it is with building the American Empire.

Who has lost faith in the American Dream? When “proud” is a proxy for love, it’s easy to see who is invested in the long-haul, full-speed-ahead, ride-or-die America of the past, present, and future. If one man is making that drive by way of the Main Street of America or any other highway or byway, backroad or country road, in a Corvette alongside Tod Stiles or riding shotgun with Hunter S. Thompson, the Empire is unmistakable. It is belief in the project of America rather than the political projects subject to the whim of office-holding power. To Democrats, there is nothing to be proud of — nothing to love — when the levers of power aren’t being pulled by “your team.”

So it goes, why invest in the American Dream, become part of the Great American Project, the American Empire, if your entire viewpoint and love is dependent on political power? You don’t. You don’t see the point beyond one being wholly consumed by a constant feed of hateful slop, shoveled into every eye, ear, and mouth hole until the consumer is conditioned to crave it. For the leftist, the defiance and the satisfaction both depend on the project of destroying the American Empire rather than on recognizing its awesomeness.

We live in the most culturally and environmentally diverse nation, yet are largely unified under the principle of being, well, American. To paraphrase John Candy (R.I.P.) We like us — and we like being American. This is a land still waiting to be discovered and shared, and welcomed to, where you can stake your own little corner of it somewhere – practically anywhere. We are kind and without prejudice to strangers until the moment you badmouth the very things that make this the best place on Earth — our trust in goodness, and our ability to do good, if imperfectly. We unapologetic Americans don’t care about how others denigrate us to feel morally superior; that’s our superpower. The down-on-America types contribute nothing to this scenic adventure, but they do expose a shallow and unprincipled life by so easily and flippantly turning on a nation and its people who gave the world so much in exchange for the self-important applause of fellow pompous status-seekers.

Inside The Egg Price Fixing Scandal

WSJ:

On Dec. 19, 2022, executives from America’s three biggest egg producers got on a call. The subject: how to keep the price of eggs high.

With Christmas a few days away, the chief executive of Arizona-based Hickman’s Egg Ranch had an idea for how to push an industry benchmark for eggs higher, according to the Justice Department.

If Hickman’s and other big egg companies all bid aggressively for eggs on a wholesale market exchange, they could raise a key pricing measure that influences the prices shoppers pay in grocery stores.

“As a group we need to bid like they vote in Chicago, early and often,” an alleged co-conspirator said, according to a federal court complaint made public this week.

The complaint, filed in Iowa federal court, described a yearslong effort by a handful of major egg producers to manipulate a little-known process that helps determine what Americans pay for eggs. From 2022 to 2025, antitrust enforcers said, executives of Cal-Maine Foods, Hickman’s and Versova spoke by phone and exchanged messages to coordinate bids and trading.

The effort occurred during a period when eggs were scarce, consumers paid more for cartons than ever before, and President Trump raised the issue on the campaign trail. Egg producers have blamed a historic avian flu outbreak that decimated the hen population.

Following the Hickman CEO’s late-2022 message, Cal-Maine, Versova, and Hickman’s collectively submitted dozens of bids to a wholesale egg marketplace known as the Egg Clearinghouse, the Justice Department alleged. Over several days, executives exchanged a flurry of messages and entered more bids. The price benchmarker, Urner Barry, then raised its egg price quotations for “white, large, shell eggs” across all regions.

On Dec. 22, 2022, the Hickman’s CEO sent his fellow executives an Urner Barry report saying that egg prices were hitting records, according to the complaint. He added: “Great job in the northwest today!”

Glenn Hickman, who was CEO of Hickman’s Egg Ranch up until selling the company late last year, declined to comment.

For consumers, egg prices at the time were already surging to record highs. An avian influenza outbreak had killed tens of millions of chickens and turkeys, and wholesale prices of Midwest large eggs hit $5.36 a dozen in late 2022. Egg prices climbed further in 2024 and 2025 while outbreaks continued, prompting panic buying and purchasing limits at supermarkets and egg surcharges at restaurants.

✍️ Feature

Niall Ferguson: Why Britons Regret Brexit

🌍 Foreign

• Daily Wire: Mocking France Over AC Makes America Cooler

• WSJ: Europe’s Heat Wave Is Exposing the Continent’s Air-Conditioning Problem

• WSJ: Putin Faces a Political Crisis as Fuel Shortages Ripple Through Russia

• WSJ: Saudi Arabia Is Rethinking Its Relationship With the U.S. After the Iran War

• National Interest: On China, Donald Trump Is Making Barack Obama’s Mistake

• The Hill: Why the U.S. and Iran Should Return to Negotiations

🏛️ Domestic

• Punchbowl News: The House GOP’s Majority May Be About to Get Even Worse

• Semafor: U.S. Expected Not to Extend USMCA Agreement

• WSJ: Hickenlooper Wins Colorado Democratic Senate Primary, Fighting Off Left-Wing Challenge

• Politico: Colorado Democrats Search for Fighters Against Trump After Primary

• Axios: Colorado Democrats React to Melat Kiros’ Victory

• Mediaite: New Poll: Susan Collins Leads Graham Platner

• Mediaite: CNN Data Guru Dumps Ice Cold Water on Democrats’ Senate Hopes

• WSJ: Trump Made More Than $1 Billion on Crypto Deals as Part of 2025 Windfall

• Politico: Tom Kean Opens Up About Depression, Transparency, and Privacy

• Washington Examiner: Abbott Endorses Data Center Ban in Rural Texas

• Washington Examiner: Virginia Residents Face Electricity Rate Spike Over Data Centers

• New York Post: Trump Staff Shows Off New Air Force One

🗳️ 2028

• Axios: Harris, Mamdani, and the Progressive Fight Over 2028

• Daily Wire: AOC’s Giddy Response When Asked About Running for President

📰 Media

• CNN: Nina Totenberg Apologizes For Alito Report

• Variety: Paula Reid Exiting CNN as Legal Affairs Chief

💻 Tech

• Hollywood Reporter: Sony PlayStation Could End Physical Game Discs by 2028

🏈 Sports

• Semafor: Los Angeles Is Running $1.7 Billion Short for Its Car-Free Olympics

🎭 Culture & Hollywood

• Daily Wire: Seven Tips for Family Road-Tripping That Will Save Your Vacation (And Your Sanity)

• Hollywood Reporter: Taylor Swift’s Wedding Celebration

• Hollywood Reporter: Tom Hardy Makes Up With ‘MobLand’ Producers

• Daily Wire: ‘Young Washington’ Shows How Failure Made America’s Greatest Leader

• Variety: The Best Movies of 2026 So Far

🪶 Quote

“Measures of the most stupendous magnitude – measures which affect the lives of millions, born and unborn – are now before us. We must expect a great expense of blood and treasure to maintain them. Yet, through all the gloom, I can see the rays of light and glory; I can see that the end is worth more than all the means.”

— John Adams, July 1, 1776

As far as I can tell on my initial reading, this is, for the anti-birthright folks, a total loss. Which is one of the reasons I always thought that whole John Eastman-backed ludicrous tactic of an Executive Order was the riskiest of all the approaches, and the one likeliest to be rebuffed by the Court.

(Lots of people disagreed with me at the time, and I hope they feel stupid about it.)

Anyway, here’s how Hugh Hewitt reacted, and I think it’ll be echoed by a lot of folks in Washington, and rejected by a lot of folks outside of it. And here’s what Ilya Shapiro had to say:

“For once I agree with Justice Kavanaugh’s middle-of-the-road approach here, meaning that the Court was wrong on the constitutional question but the executive order conflicts with federal law. Justice Alito actually reinforces that understanding in his dissent when he writes, ‘The Fourteenth Amendment dictates who must be a citizen, but it does not address who may be a citizen by Act of Congress.’ But that statutory route is now foreclosed, leaving the federal government unable to deal with the scourge of birth tourism, which was unknown and inconceivable at the time of the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification. That’s unfortunate to say the least and—given that the constitutional issue was a close one for originalists—the Court would’ve been better off taking Kavanaugh’s off-ramp and leave the issue to the political branches.”

The inevitably aggressive political movement to overturn this is going to become a central facet of the Republican Party for the foreseeable future.

Hold on to your butts, folks.

Subscribe now

Oh And Here’s A Thing I Wrote Back In 2018

I had heard rumors that this Executive Order was being considered, and as per usual Jonathan Swan is on it on Axios’s new HBO show.

“It was always told to me that you needed a constitutional amendment. Guess what? You don’t,” Trump said, declaring he can do it by executive order.

When told that’s very much in dispute, Trump replied: “You can definitely do it with an Act of Congress. But now they’re saying I can do it just with an executive order.”
“We’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States … with all of those benefits,”

Trump continued. “It’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. And it has to end.” (More than 30 countries, most in the Western Hemisphere, provide birthright citizenship.) “It’s in the process. It’ll happen … with an executive order.”

The president expressed surprise that “Axios on HBO” knew about his secret plan: “I didn’t think anybody knew that but me. I thought I was the only one.” …

The legal challenges would force the courts to decide on a constitutional debate over the 14th Amendment, which says:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Few immigration and constitutional scholars believe it is within the president’s power to change birthright citizenship, former U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services chief counsel Lynden Melmed tells Axios.

Senator Lindsey Graham told ABC News he plans to introduce legislation along the same lines as the proposed executive order from President Trump. “Finally, a president willing to take on this absurd policy of birthright citizenship,” he said.

One aside: it seems clear this is not the roll-out those backing this idea intended. The President seems genuinely surprised that Swan knew about this idea being floated at the White House Counsel’s office. That is interesting.

As a legal matter, this question is in dispute thanks to a handful of legal scholars on the right who disagree with the overwhelming majority of legal scholars, politicians, and, most importantly of all, the president’s own judicial appointees on this question. (James Ho was not yet a lifetime appointee federal appeals judge when he wrote this – Trump appointed him.) An even tinier portion believe it can be done via executive action instead of via Constitutional Amendment or act of Congress. But leave the legal debate to the lawyers, and to non-lawyer Michael Anton, and just look at the practical and political questions raised by this assuming it is not simply a midterm rallying theme – akin to a mythical middle class tax cut.

Interestingly enough, ending birthright citizenship is opposed by immigrant hardliners like Mark Krikorian, because he believes it is both impractical and has longterm negative ramifications. On the legal question, Krikorian believes the birthright citizenship issue would have to be decided by the Supreme Court or a Constitutional amendment. But he wouldn’t want to change that regimen, because of the negative outcomes it would create with stateless children representing a semi-permanent underclass.

Consider the practical outcomes of this after half a decade: Ending birthright citizenship would make the United States more like the rest of the world – it would also end an incentive for immigrants to come here, which is of course the actual goal of most of the people advancing this argument. But what it will not do is provide any incentive for people already here illegally to leave. Instead they will stay, and have children anyway.

Rather than the previous agreement – where we owe these children the protections of the Constitution, and they owe their allegiance to our flag – there is no such commitment made. They will be stateless, as illegal in their presence in the United States as their parents, with no nation to call home.

In our current understanding of the 14th Amendment and birthright citizenship, the existence of a permanent underclass of native born non-citizens ends at the first generation. Their children are as American as you, and integration into American life begins in a way that discourages the creation of multigenerational non-citizen ghettos. In the absence of that understanding, say hello to a massive underclass of people and families with a greater incentive to form exactly the kind of hardened ethnic conclaves we see in Europe – and the outcomes and risks that come with such ghettos. I wonder if they will put one in Santa Monica.

Managing a permanent and significant non-citizen population is messy stuff historically and today, and Krikorian and other smart immigration policy wonks know it – that’s why border enforcement, skills based immigration, and eVerify have been their focus, not this. The short term political ramifications would serve as a serious boost to the demography as destiny crowd. The longer term political ramifications here would be obvious and severe: an inevitable and powerful push for a mass and total amnesty for these multi-generation non-citizens that would come the instant that Republicans no longer are in power.

Polls show Republican voters consistently support a citizenship solution for the Dreamers, and that this would effectively create millions more. The pressure to grant mass amnesty would be a thousand times as heavy in an environment where the semi-permanent underclass has no hope of integration for their children, and it would inevitably eventually succeed – creating a cohort of millions of voters with a loyalty to those who backed it.

Subscribe now

Bill Pulte walked into his new role as Director of National Intelligence and immediately asked for names of officials to cut. He was on a mission to do what President Donald Trump had asked of him: “execute the immediate and needed downsizing of the office.”

That mission has set off a firestorm within the intelligence community. The Daily Wire has learned that Pulte is working closely with CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Republican Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, who view DNI’s oversight as a hindrance to individual intelligence agencies.

Their opponents argue that downsizing and cutting ODNI’s oversight only enables the very deep state that Trump so adamantly wants to root out.

Trump’s mandate to Pulte didn’t expressly say to fire people, but instead to send them back to their home agencies. That appears to be largely what Pulte is doing: since he took over, more than 50 ODNI staff have been removed from their jobs, an administration official confirmed to The Daily Wire. Forty-five of those individuals were returned to their home agencies, while six career officials were fired.

A senate source familiar with the matter told The Daily Wire that Pulte is working closely with Cotton and Ratcliffe, as well as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Contrary to media reporting, that senate advisor said, the senators like Pulte and enjoy working with him. Asked about reports that Pulte’s cuts have been contradictory or disorganized, the senate source pushed back, saying: “His cuts have been deliberate.”

The CIA would not comment directly on Ratcliffe’s interactions with Pulte, but spokeswoman Liz Lyons told The Daily Wire that Ratcliffe “continues to support acting DNI Pulte’s mission to advance the President’s priorities.”

ODNI did not respond to multiple requests for comment from The Daily Wire.

News that Pulte would assume the acting DNI role sparked massive backlash from Democrats and some Republicans. Critics pointed to his lack of intelligence experience and said he’d be a hatchet man for the president. Even Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters in early June: “We don’t need a weaponized DNI.”

His treatment of the outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard drew criticism as well. Gabbard was supposed to stay in her role until the end of June, but Pulte, eager to get started (and make use of his limited time as acting DNI), aggressively pushed for Gabbard to leave early, a senior intelligence official shared. The move angered Gabbard’s supporters, particularly because Gabbard had agreed to a particular timeline with President Trump in light of her husband’s cancer diagnosis.

One notable Pulte victim was Will Ruger, the deputy director of national intelligence for mission integration, who was placed on administrative leave. He led the intelligence community’s “collaborative integration efforts and primary intelligence support to policymakers through the President’s Daily Brief and the National Intelligence Council,” CBS News first reported.

Some conservatives worry Pulte’s cuts will result in a weakened ODNI that can’t rein in rogue agencies like the FBI and CIA. Under Gabbard’s direction, DNI had already cut 40% of staff, leaving the agency with less than 1,400 employees, compared to the estimated 38,000 of the FBI and 20,000 of the CIA.

“The mistake is they’re getting rid of people who are loyal to POTUS,” a former intelligence official alleged, “and if they get rid of ODNI there is no one to do actual effective oversight of the Intelligence Community.”

ODNI’s supporters also point to the recent weaponization of the FBI, for example, against Trump and his allies under President Joe Biden, arguing that the bureau still is staffed with agents that were part of this weaponization and that oversight is still needed.

“The DNI manages the National Intelligence Program budget, giving the ODNI real fiscal leverage over FBI Counterintelligence operations,” a second former intelligence official said. “Given that the FBI Counterintelligence Division has been completely rogue since Trump came down the escalator, and because Congress has proven itself incapable of conducting any real oversight of the FBI and CIA, the Trump Administration should be cautious when liquidating a component of the USG with true oversight ability.”

Congress has oversight over the FBI and the CIA, but at the end of the day, the lawmakers are only briefed on what the agencies choose to tell them. In some cases, the senior intelligence official said, Congress will never know “unless shit goes so badly that they can’t hide it.”

The DNI position was created after 9/11. Before, the CIA director effectively ran the entire intelligence community in addition to his own agency.

Cotton outright made the case that things may have been better off then on the Senate floor this week: “Unfortunately,” he said, “I think we can now assess a couple decades on, that it is something of a failed experiment itself.”

The Arkansas lawmaker, who said he wants ODNI to be downsized and streamlined, noted that ODNI does serve some functions that could possibly be “performed elsewhere.” He shared that he spoke with Pulte this week about sending officers back to their home agencies and reducing ODNI to its original size, but he denied reporting that “mass firings” had begun.

Subscribe now

Iran Levels U.S. Base in Bahrain

The Wall Street Journal:

When the Iranian missiles and drones came for the nerve center of America’s naval operations in the Middle East, some of them hit their mark.

The U.S. Navy base in Bahrain was repeatedly targeted between late February and June. Strikes that got through caused extensive damage, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of satellite imagery, social-media footage and interviews with current and former servicemembers—damage that the Pentagon hasn’t publicly acknowledged. Hit hard were the command headquarters and at least a dozen other buildings, along with two satellite communications terminals.

The military said no one was killed at the base, known as Naval Support Activity Bahrain, and that the strikes didn’t significantly impact operations. The U.S. evacuated most personnel but has kept a small staff on the ground.

Over the course of the war, “Centcom rightfully prioritized the protection of people over buildings, and our strategy of protecting people worked. Iran shot more than 8,000 missiles and drones and only two hits resulted in U.S. fatalities,” said Capt. Tim Hawkins, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command, which oversees U.S. forces in the Middle East. Hawkins also said the U.S. military inflicted far more damage to Iran than it received, with the U.S. striking more than 13,500 targets.

The extensive damage done to America’s sole naval base in the Middle East—along with hits to at least 20 U.S. sites across the region, including military installations and diplomatic facilities—has the U.S. re-evaluating its entire footprint in the region, according to U.S. officials familiar with the deliberations.

Damaged sites include warehouses, a water tank, two satellite communications terminals and a communications management facility, and the headquarters building for the U.S. Navy in the Middle East. Airbus

The military is now considering revamping the base in Bahrain, reducing the U.S. presence in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and moving some bases or base functions west, farther from the reach of Iranian missiles and drones, according to the officials familiar with the deliberations.

Structures that were attacked may not be rebuilt. Command and control nodes could be moved underground. And military capabilities could become more spread out across the region, the officials said, though they cautioned that no decisions had been made.

Israel is one of the locations being considered for basing, according to two of the officials. The country hosted dozens of U.S. aircraft, including jet fighters and refueling planes, during the war.

The U.S. government pressed commercial satellite imagery providers in April to restrict access to images showing destruction at American bases as well as the broader conflict zone, making it difficult to see the full scope of the damage. Officials said the move would help protect U.S. forces.

Europe Desperately Needs A/C

The Wall Street Journal:

A record-breaking heat wave has disrupted life across Western Europe, exposing the continent’s vulnerability to scorching temperatures that are expected to be the norm with climate change. Schools have closed because of lack of air conditioning; electrical grids are under strain; and authorities have slowed trains as rails are deformed in the heat. In Paris, where temperatures reached 108 degrees Fahrenheit this week, the city allowed residents desperate to escape the heat to swim in the polluted Canal Saint Martin.

Schools in Western Europe largely lack air conditioning, which wasn’t a problem when temperatures were cooler. But this heat wave and several previous ones came unusually early, before summer vacation.

In France, 3,000 schools have closed completely, and 10,000 have cut back on their hours. In the U.K., more than 1,000 have shut down.

European housing is ill-equipped to protect inhabitants from extreme heat.

Three-quarters of European housing stock is energy inefficient, according to the Europe Environment Agency. In France, 90% of homes are vulnerable to overheating, and half are considered to be “boilers” that are incapable of holding cool air.

European households have been steadily adding air conditioning as heat waves become more frequent and intense—but they still use the technology far less than the U.S.

✍️ Feature

• Tablet Magazine: The Coming Age of Promethean Terrorism

🌍 Foreign

• Reuters: Iran Insists It Has the Right to Control Shipping Through the Strait of Hormuz After Ship Hit Near Oman

• National Security Journal: Iran Just Proved It Can Choke the World’s Oil. Now the Gulf Is Quietly Building Ways to Make Sure It Never Can Again.

• The National Interest: The Iran War Was a Loss for the U.S., but the Ceasefire Deal Is a Win

• The National Interest: Why Russia Is Mobilizing Its Women for War

• Politico: Trump, Rutte Showcase NATO Reset in Washington

🏛️ Domestic

• SCOTUSblog: Supreme Court Allows Trump Administration to End Removal Protections for Syrian and Haitian Nationals

• Politico: Congress Subpoenas Leon Black Over Jeffrey Epstein Investigation

• The Wall Street Journal: Lawmakers Call for Investigation Into Deceptive Advertising by Polymarket

• The New York Times: Trump’s Agenda Faces a Crucial Republican Test

• The Wall Street Journal: Wall Street Realizes It Needs More Than Money to Counter Mamdani

• The Daily Wire: The Everlasting Resilience of American Patriotism

• The Daily Wire: Military Effectiveness Should Be Determined by the War Department, Not Judges

• The Daily Wire: Understanding the Masterminds Behind the Communist Revolution

• The Daily Wire: Political and Cultural Battles Are Wars for the Soul. Choose Wisely.

• The Daily Wire: Big City Socialism in Every Pot

🗳️ 2028

• NBC News: After Losing One Billionaire Tax Battle, Gavin Newsom Prepares to Wage Another

📰 Media

• Variety: MSNBC Now Expands Video Podcasts, Weekend Changes Include Alex Witt Exit

💻 Tech

• Axios: Amazon, Google, and Microsoft Dominate Data Centers

• Semafor: Bessent Engaged on AI Following Warnings About Fed Payment Rails

• The Daily Wire: The Battle Over AI Dominance Starts With the States

• The Daily Wire: The Real Reason Your MacBook Is More Expensive

🧬 Health

• Axios: White House Narrows FDA Finalists

✝️ Religion

• Washington Examiner: Pope Leo and the AI Arms Race

🏈 Sports

• New York Post: The Miserable Mets Are All David Stearns’ Mess Now

🎭 Culture & Hollywood

• The Daily Wire: Hollywood Made Another ‘Modern Woman’ Hero. Here’s How It Went.

• The Hollywood Reporter: ‘Supergirl’ Reviews Disappoint, ‘House of the Dragon’ Review and More

• The Hollywood Reporter: Hollywood’s Minions & Monsters and the Recognition They Deserve

• The Daily Wire: How ‘Toy Story 5’ Stripped Buzz Lightyear of His Masculinity

• Pirate Wires: CHUD-Izen: Incel Ante — A Review

🪶 Quote

“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation.”

— William Gibson

Subscribe now

Share

NYC Goes DSA

Daily Wire’s Chloe Trapanatto’s takeaway: Osama Won

New York just nominated a slate of Islamic socialists so radical, so proudly anti-American, that Osama bin Laden is rolling around in his watery grave like it’s Christmas morning.

Zohran Mamdani, the Ugandan-born Muslim socialist mayor of New York City, endorsed three congressional candidates in their Democrat primaries. All three won. Two of them knocked out sitting incumbents.

The man’s three for three, and he’s just getting started.

After Mamdani’s candidates secured their November spots, the kingmaker took to X to thank Allah. His comrade Ilhan Omar chimed in with “Alhamdulillah.” And Hakeem Jeffries, the biggest loser of the night? He was sent home with his tail between his legs, mumbling that “a handful of primaries aren’t going to reshape who we are as House Democrats.”

Sure, bud.

Establishment Dems are getting booed out of their own backyards. When Jeffries appeared on screen at one of the victory rallies, the crowd jeered, then chanted “You’re next” to his face.

So the NRCC sent him flowers and a condolence card, which is hilarious. I’d have sent a one-way ticket out of relevance.

Here’s the thing, friends. Socialism is winning. It’s swallowing the Democratic Party whole, and riding inside that socialist Trojan horse is radical Islam. It’s not coming. It’s here. We let it happen. And now we either fight to keep it at bay, or we let the scavengers pick America clean until she’s hollowed out.

Before we talk about how this happened, let’s understand who we’re actually dealing with. Because these are not your grandfather’s liberals. These are full-throated, flag-burning, Hamas-sympathizing, capitalism-hating radicals. And New York just handed them the keys.

First up: Darializa Avila Chevalier, who won the NY-13 primary and knocked out five-term incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat. She is a founder of CUAD — Columbia University Apartheid Divest — whose stated goal includes “undermining and eradicating America,” through the use of “violence.”

Cute.

She’s a Dominican-Venezuelan immigrant who converted to Islam but, in her own words, operates through “a black queer feminist lens.” She wants to seize the means of production, abolish the police, abolish the border, and she’s on record saying that deportation is wrong because, “We’re all on stolen land!”

She refuses to say murderers should go to prison. Refuses to support deporting illegal immigrants convicted of rape. Refuses to condemn Hamas or October 7th.

I’d surmise she also refuses to shave her pits and use deodorant.

Next: Aber Kawas, who won the Democratic primary for New York State Senate District 12. A child of illegal immigrants, she wants to abolish ICE completely, campaigned under a Palestinian, not American, banner, and blamed September 11th on America’s “system of capitalism, racism, white supremacy, and Islamophobia.”

She’s also been photographed at protests wearing a Hamas headband. Charming.

Then there’s Claire Valdez (NY-7), who cruised to victory promising to grant citizenship and voting rights to illegal aliens, use your tax dollars for all transgender medical treatments, eliminate private health insurance, and abolish ICE.

Her father, notably, runs a firm that secures the Texas border. Pause for the irony there.

And Brad Lander (NY-10), who ran on forgiving all student loans and expanding the Supreme Court. He’s a progressive plant, backed by Mamdani and Bernie Sanders, which tells you everything you need to know.

Mamdani and his fixers walk into a bar. The bar is now a commune.

How did this happen? Three things: foreign voters, DSA zealots, and a city #2cool2care.

In Mamdani’s own mayoral race, over 62% of foreign-born New York voters chose him compared to 31% of American-born voters. Last night, that pattern continued. The DSA knocked on doors. Their volunteers showed up. And the city’s apathetic native-born population (the “New York or nowhere” crowd) sat on their couch and watched Netflix while socialists rewrote their political future.

Look at the Avila Chevalier numbers. She lost the Bronx portion of her own district by 30 points. She lost majority-black and hispanic neighborhoods. She lost lower-income areas by 10 points. The people she claims to fight for rejected her. So who voted for her? Young voters. High-income voters. College-indoctrinated voters.

Yes, the silver-spoon guilty-white-liberal demographic, voting communist because it makes them feel less bad about their lack of melanin.

Meanwhile, the DSA (the organization putting forward all these madhatters) is roughly 85% white. Progressive elitists speaking for the little people who, in the end, didn’t actually vote for them.

And then there’s the third group. Not the ones who love this agenda. Not the ones who hate it. The ones who don’t care. The “it’s New York, who cares who runs it” crowd.

Less than 10% of New York City residents voted in these primaries. The other 90% were sitting it out. And the indifference of these lacrosse-segway-finance-pipeline party animals just nominated a nutjob who cheers for Hamas and a radical who wipes with the American flag.

Apathy is a vote. You just didn’t know who you were voting for.

And into that vacuum, something very organized, very dangerous, and very un-American walked right in.

It’s called third worldism. And Ronald Reagan, God bless him, saw this coming decades ago. In 1964, he warned that Democrats were dragging their party “down the road under the banners of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.”

He said then what we’re living now: freedom isn’t the natural state of things. It has to be defended. Constantly. Or it gets eaten.

Third worldism is the fusion of Islamist ideology with anti-Western, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist grievance politics. It frames Islam and Muslim societies as the authentic, oppressed “periphery” locked in a civilizational struggle against the West, and places Islamic unity as the better alternative to liberal democracy, individual rights, and Enlightenment values. It rejects secular law and individual liberty in favor of religious authority and grievance-based solidarity.

In plain English: It’s the end of America as we know it.

More:

• Daily Wire: I’ve Seen What Socialism Did To Venezuela And NYC Is Next

• Daily Wire: Socialists Sweep, Will New York City Weep?

• Daily Wire: The Most Terrifying Political Takeover In America Just Accelerated

• Daily Wire: Establishment Dems Melt Down After Team Zohran Sweeps Primaries

• Daily Wire: ‘Dirt Bag Left’: Trump And Fetterman Respond To Socialist Sweep

• Daily Wire: Mamdani’s Socialists Upset Incumbent Dems In House Primary Sweep

Subscribe now

A Conversation With VDH

Ben: Victor, it’s always a pleasure to talk to you and we have plenty to talk about, but I think I have to lead off with this news of this potential closure of the deal with the Iranians that could bring about a pause or an end to this conflict. We still are light on details in terms of the things that have been reported. I tend not to trust them because a lot of them are being spun by the various figures involved. What’s your perception of what’s played out here? And do you believe that this is something that will ultimately be viewed as an achievement or as one that was a mistake?

VDH: I could just preface it. It all depends on the willingness or the degree to which the United States is willing to use force because this regime has no history of abiding by anything over the 47 years of its existence. So if you make an agreement and it’s very different than the Obama agreement from the simple reason that they’re dealing now in a position of weakness. They’ve been hit for 40 days approximately and they’re much weaker and then they’ve been strangulated economically. So that’s all good. But I think the administration, as I follow it, is betting on the idea that there’s various factions and that’s okay, that theocracy, the military, the revolutionary guard, and then the elected officials and they feel they’re dealing with people who want a new Iran. But I’m afraid that could be bad cop, good cop. In other words, they’re cynical. And the only thing that matters is if we negotiate this end of the deal, we have 60 days as sure as the sun rises every morning, there’s going to be a ship that is attacked on our part.

Somebody will attack one of our ships. They’ll send a missile into the Gulf or Israel. And at that point, if we just say that’s a tap tap or pat on the back, it’s not going to work. You’re going to have to be disproportionate. There’s a couple of things that I’m a little worried about and that’s this word proportionate. They’ve said that a couple of times. We responded in a proportionate man. They have to respond in a disproportionate manner or it won’t work. And then the other thing is this will usher in a new Middle East. It’ll only usher in a new Middle East if the Theocracy and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard are ended, eliminated zilch. If they have any role, they’re murders and no so- called moderate government or transitional government or the Venezuela model will work as long as they’re involved. It’s just that simple.

Ben: I’m concerned about a couple of things related to this deal and I’ve made those concerns known. The thing that really I think sticks out to me though is what you’re saying, which is that the Iranians are just not trustworthy. They cannot be taken at their word on these things. And I’m concerned that the domestic politics of the moment are playing into the acceptance of a deal that doesn’t really live up to the standards that the president set when he decided to go into this conflict. When you look at that decision, do you think that from the get- go it should have been more modest in terms of the achievement that the president essentially set out there, that rather than sort of stretch and try to reach for something that would be more of an emphatic win, that it really should have been essentially what Marco Rubio said within the first three weeks of this conflict, that eliminating their ballistic missiles, preventing their ability to protect themselves in the case of a future assault was basically the more modest end.

Is that something that should have been clear from the get- go?

VDH: Well, we achieved all of that in 38 to 40 days and then we stopped and then we negotiated on the principle that they were beaten, humiliated and they would concede, but they had the ability we kept saying that their Navy was destroyed and their Air Force and 90% of their missiles, but they had, I don’t know, six or 7,000 missiles. So if they had 10%, they had 700 wood launchers that they could hit the vulnerable Gulf and that’s what they did. So each time they did something for the next 60 days, we occasionally responded, but not in a fashion that they felt was existential for them. So we just kept playing this tit for tat and they were saying to themselves, “We’re getting closer to the midterm. We’re getting closer to breaking the American spirit because of gas prices and we’re going to keep doing this.”

And at some point Donald Trump, he hit them very hard once and I think he could have done it for two weeks and gone home. I really do. I think he could have just done what Bill Clinton did. Bill Clinton was in a quandary in Serbia in 1999 over Kosovo and he was very meticulous for 60 days. And then people said to him, “It’s not working. You’ve got to hit all the bridges on the Danube. You’ve got to hit all of the power grid of Belgrade. You got to put them in darkness.” And he said, “Well, these are dual use, doesn’t matter.” And that’s what he did. And it ended in 72 days about two weeks later. And so I don’t understand why they didn’t do that. Barack Obama bragged that he wouldn’t do that. In Libya, he bombed in an unauthorized fashion by Congress for seven months, but he did take out the port facilities.

He took out the TV stations, the communication and we haven’t done that. And if you’re not going to do that, it’s going to take a long, long time to play cat and mouse with missile launchers and mosquito boats or whatever they are. It’s not going to work. So I wish we had have done that. And right now if we’re going to negotiate, I think we’ve got to get over the idea that there is a moderate faction that has control of the government. There may be a moderate faction that wants to save its own hide and feels there’s going to be a revolution imminent when everything’s calmed down, they’re broke and they start diverting scarce funds to re-arm or to their error proxies, that would get people very angry. But the idea that that moderate group is going to take power or has power I think is erroneous.

It’s not proven. So it’s very important if they want to negotiate that the first sign that the Iranians break any agreement or start to use force, we have to really pound them and then we should just do it for two weeks and eliminate all of the dual use targets and then see, then either go home or leave a carrier group in the Gulf to keep the straight open. And then we can just say, “Well, it was tragic we lost 13 people. We didn’t use ground troops that the accident rate in the US military every two weeks is 15 people lost.” So in terms of history, it was a successful mission. They won’t have a bomb or a capable military for 10 or 15 years mission accomplished. I would rather see that, but it would take, I think, a week or two of hitting the dual use targets very hard.

Ben: Rewinding to the beginning of this, there is talk in Washington about what the president was being told by his military advisors about what was achievable, particularly when it came to dealing with the inevitable mining of the straight something that the Iranians are very good at and which everyone assumed was a card that they would play. Do you look back on that as being a situation where the president was operating with full understanding of what our military capability was to deal with those problems and do you think that a big part of why this maybe didn’t play out the way that some people would have hoped is because the president has a contentious relationship with the Europeans right now and that one of the handful of things that they still do well is deal with mind sweeping and things of that nature and they clearly did not want to be participants in this conflict.

VDH: Yeah, I think that’s largely true, but I think it was in a larger context. They kept talking about the numerator, that is how many things they destroyed, missiles, boats, launchers, but they didn’t talk about the denominator. That is how many did they have, and they didn’t know that accurately apparently. So when they said 90% of the launchers or the missiles that are gone or 95% of the Navy, they didn’t tell us 90% of what 5,000, 2,000, 3,000. So I think it would have been better to say we have a rough estimate and overestimate that there are 500 of these boats that can mine the harbor or intercept traffic 500 of them and we’re going to get all 500 of them or whatever that is. But they just kept saying, “We got 90% or 80%. We did all this. We took out 4,000 missiles, but we never knew how many there were to begin with.

And that was the problem I think because they held us hostage. It’s kind of ironic. Everybody said, “Well, the Israelis don’t want to be hit. They’re holding us hostage.” The Israelis didn’t really care if they attacked the Israelis, the Israelis were going to hit them twice as hard. It was the Gulf States that had all of this infrastructure and they kept being schizophrenic. They said, “You got to deal with Iran.” So then we dealt with Iran and they said, “You got to stay and take them out. “ And then they would say, “Well, they want to negotiate now. Just stop for a while. It’s getting too rough for us.” They had 600 combat aircraft. They had twice the number of Israel. So you would think that when we put in six or 700 or 800 and Israel put in three, they would have been flying every day with 600 combat and they could have taken a whole section and were told that many of their pilots were retired, European and US military.

So they had good pilots, they had great planes and they didn’t do much at all. But then they came back and said, “One missile will take out our desalinization. One missile will take out a pipeline.” And that was all true.

That leverage that Iran had, that was really the leverage that and the straight and that didn’t take very much military capability at all. So if you got 90% of it, but they were able to interrupt the straight or to terrify the Gulf and so then that was enough. And yes, so two things could be true at once. When Trump said they’re militarily devastated, they’re economically wrecked, that was all true, but even a wrecked country, if they can send three missiles into a desalinization plant and knock out the water supply of Saudi Arabia, that’s something to worry about and that’s what happened.

Ben: The book that you have that’s forthcoming is The Counter Revolution. I haven’t had the chance to read it yet during the course of this conversation, but I did notice that your title regarding the second Trump presidency’s foreign policy invoked the word Colossus and that to me was rather striking. Do you still think that after this experience with the Iranian conflict that this is a foreign policy that has sort of reestablished American strength or is that now a question?

Read more

After more than three months of bombing and blockades, the U.S. and Iran are back to square one, preparing for what promises to be difficult negotiations over limits to Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.

This time, the Iranians will come to the table armed with valuable knowledge: They can survive the worst the Americans can throw at them.

President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gambled that their fierce campaign of airstrikes, launched on Feb. 28 and lasting 40 days, would overthrow Iran’s theocratic regime, or at the very least force it to make major concessions.

None of that happened, despite the killing of much of Iran’s senior leadership, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the decimation of the country’s navy, air force and other military assets.

Instead, the Iranian regime has survived and consolidated, under new and perhaps even more radical commanders. It has also gained a new instrument with worldwide consequences through its control of the Strait of Hormuz, while the war has led to unprecedented American restrictions on the behavior of Israel’s military.

“Iran is leaving this war with a sense of euphoria. They are managing the Strait of Hormuz, nobody was able to force them to back down militarily,” said Meir Javedanfar, an Iran expert at Israel’s Reichman University. He predicted Iran will now see the Persian Gulf’s oil-rich monarchies as its own sphere of influence.

Meanwhile, the war—which consumed a large part of U.S. precision munitions and inflicted damage on key U.S. military facilities in the region—has also exposed the limits of American military power. This, in turn, has undermined Washington’s main argument in its attempts to wring future nuclear concessions from Tehran, which retains a stockpile of highly enriched uranium and has yet to agree to renewed international inspections.

“When it comes to nuclear negotiations, we are back at the prewar stage, but with the U.S. leverage removed,” said Dania Thafer, director of the Gulf International Forum think tank. “Pandora’s box has already been opened, everything has been tested, and Iran feels it doesn’t have much more to lose or to fear. The worst has already happened, from the Iranian perspective, and they have survived it.”

Ever since former President Barack Obama tried to negotiate with Iran more than a decade ago, the credible threat of American military force was indispensable for any progress, said Daniel Shapiro, who served as deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Biden administration and as U.S. ambassador to Israel from 2011 to 2017.

“Now, we are going into the nuclear talks, with Iran having already proven that it could take the United States’ and Israel’s best punch, survive, and land some very effective counterstrikes, imposing global economic chaos and economic and political harm to President Trump and the United States,” said Shapiro, currently a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. “Iranians will view with great skepticism that they will face a significant military threat if these talks are not progressing. And so there is a high likelihood that these talks will be inconclusive.”

While Iran may no longer fear the American stick, the American carrot remains attractive. The Iranian economy was already in a tailspin before the latest round of fighting, with runaway inflation and a water crisis—some of the reasons for the mass protests that the regime met with a deadly crackdown in January. The U.S. and Israeli bombing campaign, which destroyed some of Iran’s most important industrial sites, has only compounded the damage.

“Iran is still in a vulnerable position, given the economic pressure that the country will face, and the incredible cost of undergoing reconstruction after this war,” said Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, chief executive of the Bourse & Bazaar Foundation think tank. “The deal ultimately just takes them to the status quo ante, but in the interim, the country has absorbed huge costs. Iran cannot undergo a full reconstruction after this war without broad sanctions relief. And so the incentive remains there to get a full agreement.”

• Bloomberg: Read the 14-Point Draft Memorandum Between the U.S. and Iran

• Daily Wire: How Does Trump’s Iran Deal Compare to Obama’s?

• Washington Examiner: Trump and Obama Lock Horns Over a New Iran Deal

• New York Post: JD Vance Says Iran Deal Could Be Scrapped if There Is an “Utter Meltdown”

• Semafor: Oil Falls Below $80 as Hormuz Opens

• Axios: Trump’s MAGA Coalition Splits Over Iran

• WSJ: Iran Frozen Assets Become a New Focus

Subscribe now

✍️ Feature

Axios: “Regime Change”: The Night Murdoch Chose Rubio Over Vance

🌍 Foreign

• Politico Europe: Far-Right General Upends Italian Politics

• Politico Europe: Andy Burnham’s “Manchesterism” Wants to Make Britain Great Again

• UnHerd: How Britain Maimed Its Military

• Bloomberg: Starmer Faces Cabinet Showdown Days After Crucial By-Election

• MSN: China Has Failed to Learn the Right Lessons From Soviet Failures

🏛️ Domestic

• Daily Wire: Leftists Hate Americans Who Love America

• Washington Examiner: Did Gavin Newsom Peak Too Soon? California Wildfires Raise Questions

• New York Post: Leaked and Classified Situation Room Talks Demand a Criminal Probe, Says Furious Trump

• Politico: Trump Stumbles on Rick Jackson in Georgia

• New York Times: Independence Day Flight Disruptions Threaten Washington Travel

• Punchbowl News: Clayton Nomination Blowup Roils the Senate

• New York Magazine: New Details: Why Jeffrey Epstein Did Kill Himself

💻 Tech

• WSJ: Elon Musk Is Unleashing SpaceX’s New War Chest to Solve His AI Problem

🧬 Health

• Daily Wire: The Zombie Study: Indulging Mental Illness and Hiding the Truth About Transgender Kids

🏈 Sports

• NYT: A Magical Messi Hat Trick

• Daily Wire: The Darker Side of Sports That Could Be Targeting Your Kids

• Hollywood Reporter: 2026 NHL Stanley Cup Final TV Ratings

• Deadline: Knicks NBA Finals Ratings Hit Record Highs for ABC and ESPN

🎭 Culture & Hollywood

• Variety: Hollywood’s Exodus: Film and TV Production Continue to Leave Los Angeles

• Hollywood Reporter: Armie Hammer on His Career and Scandal in Exclusive Interview

• Telegraph: Jeremy Clarkson Cancer Diagnosis: Clarkson’s Farm Star Speaks Out

• Variety: Tom Holland and Zendaya Confirm Wedding Rumors

🪶 Quote

“But how can we in good conscience justify war before we’ve tested a diplomatic agreement that achieves our objectives; that has been agreed to by Iran; that is supported by the rest of the world; and that preserves our options if the deal falls short? How could we justify that to our troops? How could we justify that to the world or to future generations? In the end, that should be a lesson that we’ve learned from over a decade of war. On the front end, ask tough questions. Subject our own assumptions to evidence and analysis. Resist the conventional wisdom and the drumbeat of war. Worry less about being labeled weak; worry more about getting it right.”

— Barack Obama

Guida: Despite the lack of enthusiasm, you think Republicans are still confident. Why?

Domenech: Much of it comes from a belief that Democratic radicalism, particularly the various examples of what they view as a renewed cultural leftism in opposition to Trump during his first term, will play in their favor. Talarico is a good example of this — thanks to many past comments, some of which he’s distanced himself from, Republicans view him as representing a form of progressive Christianity that’s anathema to Texas voters.

But the real question is if that cultural shift is enough to keep Trump’s 2024 coalition together. He won by making inroads with minorities, particularly Hispanic voters. Republicans need to find a way to convince these voters that they’re the better answer on the economy, crime and border security than Democrats, or else they’ll be stuck with just loyalists at the polls.

Guida: Are there noncandidate Republicans in this cycle, particularly those who operate outside of Trump’s circle of attention, worth keeping an eye on? Someone like Gov. Brian Kemp or Marjorie Taylor Greene in Georgia?

Domenech: I admit that I don’t personally understand the idea of people being truly excited by politicians, but online Republicans tend to be most drawn to candidates running in solidly Democratic states without a real hope of victory.

California has gotten outsize attention this cycle for exactly that reason. Every consultant has an opinion on what their candidates can do to emulate Spencer Pratt without the losing aspect of it. And Steve Hilton has done an impressive job as a consultant turned candidate of adapting his message for California voters. But it’s safe to say nobody’s jumping up and down for any of these folks — though are California Democrats really excited about Xavier Becerra?

As for the general tone of the party, though, it’s notable how many significant members are headed to the exits, particularly from the House. Nancy Mace came in fifth in her attempt to win the South Carolina governorship. Representative Chip Roy of Texas, often a foil for the White House, lost his attorney-general runoff. All four Black Republican members of the House are headed for the exits. It’s a real shift. It’s not just on the G.O.P. side — I am definitely going to miss Jasmine Crockett.

Guida: You mentioned Nancy Mace. There are very few women G.O.P. candidates this year, and very few in the Trump cabinet. Should the party be more worried about the gender gap?

Domenech: With a few exceptions — such as Marsha Blackburn in Tennessee, Julia Letlow in Louisiana and Ashley Hinson in Iowa — the statewide candidates certainly skew more male than Republicans would like.

At the same time, there are ebbs and flows in how much attention the G.O.P. pays to these perennial recruitment issues. Former Speaker Kevin McCarthy was a strong recruiter of women and minority candidates, but he still ended up with an extremely narrow House majority.

Parties that lose midterms tend to learn lessons about this sort of thing. But Republicans still seem to think that, thanks to redistricting and their advantages in fund-raising, they could buck historical trends and hold on, perhaps even in the House. They’re just scared about gas prices. Personally, I’m skeptical.

Guida: In the meantime … the super PAC aligned with President Trump, MAGA Inc., is sitting on a $300 million war chest. The strategic team involved in previous Trump campaigns, including Chris LaCivita and Tony Fabrizio, will have a lot of money to spend. What’s your sense of how and where they will spend it?

Domenech: The president’s political team is supremely confident in their ability to pick and choose candidates after a cycle where his endorsements proved decisive and where they believe that they emerged with a stronger slate of candidates than in recent cycles. They are likely to focus on the Midwest, so if you live in a Rust Belt or Great Plains state, get used to seeing political ads.

One outstanding question, though, is what will happen in Texas. After Paxton cruised to victory in the Senate primary runoff, there’s a general attitude among Washington Republicans that Texas should have to take care of Texas given Paxton’s past difficulties fund-raising. (As I noted on Fox, the attitude is “you break it, you bought it.”) But there’s a great deal of confidence that James Talarico is a weaker candidate than past statewide Democrats, and Paxton should still have enough energy to win in a red state without significant national help.

Guida: Finally, you cover politics, but you just said that you don’t personally get the idea of people being excited by politicians. Why is that?

Domenech: Politics is the art of deal-making and trade-offs. No politician is perfect; they’re all just men and women trying to do a job or make themselves rich. Some of them are better at it than others. Even the most noble politician will let you down eventually. Having lived through the heights of Barack Obama’s rise that was so truly thrilling for so many in my generation, and now witnessing the revisionist nostalgia for some friendly, more civil time in politics — as if the 1990s were just a comfortable blur — it’s healthier to believe in something deeper than an elected official.

Don’t treat politicians like some king, queen or savior. We are a nation of citizens, not subjects. America’s strength in our 250th year certainly isn’t going to be found in the halls of Congress. It’s the people outside this city who make this country great.

I hope you’ll read the whole thing.

Subscribe now

✍️ Feature

Racket News: To an Ivy League Professor Who Doesn’t Understand Why Students Are Fleeing Academia

🌍 Foreign

• Washington Examiner: Trump’s Public Inner Dialogue on Iran War, Negotiations, and Strikes

• Wall Street Journal: Trump’s Iran Deal Still Has to Get Past the Revolutionary Guard

• New York Post: Trump Blasts Tehran After Iran Leaks Its Own Demands in Peace Deal

• J.T. Young: The Strait of Hormuz Was Iran’s Ace in the Hole. Not Anymore.

• The National Interest: Why an Iran Deal Needs Economic Statecraft

• Politico Europe: Far-Right Surge: Merz’s Coalition on the Clock to Deliver

• Wall Street Journal: Switzerland’s Radical Proposal on Immigration: Cap the Population

🏛️ Domestic

• Punchbowl News: Thune: “My hopes often dashed”

• Wall Street Journal: Congress Republicans’ Reconciliation Bill Defense

• Mediaite: ‘Democrats Are Missing the Mark’: DCCC Chair Grilled Over Intraparty Turmoil on CNN

• Wall Street Journal: ‘Dudebro’ Graham Platner and the New Political Influencer Class

• Washington Examiner: The New Man: Graham Platner Can’t Stop Lying

• New York Post: Mamdani Cashed In on Mayoral Perks for Knicks Tickets and Downplayed the Price

• Washington Examiner: Judge Blocks Paxton From Suing ActBlue Over Talarico Campaign Concerns

• Washington Examiner: John Cornyn to Mike Lee on SAVE Act: You Don’t Have the Votes

• Daily Wire: Trump’s Energy Agenda Is Being Undermined By His Own Justice Department

• Politico: Sam Bankman-Fried’s Conviction Upheld by Appeals Court

• Daily Wire: College Can Be Where Life Starts. Now It’s About Ending It.

📰 Media

• Hollywood Reporter: Peter Thiel’s Tribunal Puts Journalists on Trial

• Daily Wire: Law Professors Say They Support Free Speech. Many Are Afraid to Practice It.

💻 Tech

• Wall Street Journal: SpaceX IPO Live Coverage

• Semafor: SpaceX Set for Record Debut

• Axios: SpaceX, Space, Data Centers, and the New Race for Compute

• New York Magazine: Prediction Markets Can Fix Rotten Tomatoes

• Semafor: Trump’s Prediction-Market Regulator to the Supreme Court: Bring It On

🧬 Health

• Daily Wire: Major Hospital Makes a Dramatic U-Turn on Youth Transitions

• Daily Wire: Who Made These People Parenting Experts?

🏈 Sports

• Wall Street Journal: America’s World Cup Golden Generation

• New York Post: USMNT Has a Once-in-a-Generation Chance at the World Cup

• Politico Magazine: FIFA, Trump, and the World Cup

• Axios: Previewing the UFC at the White House

• Newsweek: Ring Girls’ Outfits at Trump’s UFC Fight Draw Flag-Code Questions

🎭 Culture & Hollywood

• Variety: The Death of Robin Hood Review: Hugh Jackman and Jodie Comer Shine in a Gritty Reimagining

• Wall Street Journal: The Odyssey IMAX Tickets Spark a Scalper Frenzy

• New York Times: Kennedy Center Appeal Seeks Trump’s Name

• Showbiz411: Spielberg’s ‘Disclosure Day’ Flops With $6.5 Million Preview Night

🪶 Quote

“Everything in space obeys the laws of physics. If you know these laws, and obey them, space will treat you kindly. And don’t tell me that man doesn’t belong out there. Man belongs wherever he wants to go—and he’ll do plenty well when he gets there.”

— Wernher von Braun

Subscribe now

Trump Ramps Up Iran War

WSJ:

President Trump said the U.S. would resume attacks on Iran later Wednesday after a drone fired by Tehran hit a U.S. Apache helicopter, prompting several waves of American strikes in retaliation.

Any renewed attacks would follow strikes by both the U.S. and Iran on Tuesday following the incident.

“We’re gonna be attacking them, attacking them very hard,” Trump told reporters Wednesday. “We hit them hard yesterday, and we’re going to hit them again hard today,” he said.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the U.S. would “strike hard” at Iran. “Central Command will be busy tonight,” he said, referring to the Pentagon organization that oversees American forces in the Middle East. “We will bomb key facilities in Iran, the strikes will be strong and clear,” he said.

As well as indicating a resumption of military strikes, Trump revealed in a social-media post that since last month the U.S. military had been executing a “secret mission” to facilitate oil tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz. The mission has primarily been carried out by U.S. aircraft, including jet fighters and helicopters, assigned to protect vessels moving through the strait, according to a senior U.S. official.

“I am pleased to announce that this effort has resulted in more than 100 MILLION Barrels of Oil making its way through the Strait, and into the Open Market,” Trump said in a post. “More than 200 Commercial Ships have safely traveled through the Strait.”

The Apache that went down late Monday was defending ships in the waterway from Iranian drones and missiles, the senior U.S. official said. The pilots managed to escape the burning aircraft after it hit the water with seconds to go before it sank.

Around 20% of the world’s oil supplies travel through the strait, which Iran has blocked since the start of the war on Feb. 28, leading to a surge in energy prices. The U.S. has blockaded Iranian ports.

He said that the U.S. now controlled the strait, though Iran continues to exert influence over ships seeking to cross. The movement of ships transiting under the U.S. mission, which was reported by The Wall Street Journal, still pales in comparison to the situation before the war, when more than 100 ships would traverse the channel a day. And traffic has all but ground to a halt when skirmishes have broken out.

More here:

• National Interest: Understanding Iran’s 3,000-mile battlefront

• Axios: Trump Plans Iran Strikes on Kharg Island

• Daily Signal: VDH: Iran “buying time”

• Brussels Signal: Trump Plan to Force Iran Negotiation

Spencer Pratt And The New Populism

Daily Wire:

Pratt’s invocation of corrupt politicians did evoke the same populist spirit that has animated Donald Trump’s MAGA movement. Yet unlike Trump, and unlike the Left-wing populism of Bernie Sanders, Pratt’s campaign introduced a third, “local,” type of populism.

While both Left- and Right-wing populism ask voters to identify an ideological enemy — whether corporations, the media, coastal elites, or the deep state — localized populism asks voters to reckon with the political reality before them. Rather than blame distant actors for national problems, it directs grievances closer to home: toward those responsible for an empty reservoir, uncleared encampments filled with drug-addled vagrants (Pratt called them “zombies”), or a home that has yet to be rebuilt.

Though Pratt has made this brand of politics viral, its appeal extends well beyond the confines of his mayoral race. In 2024, Daniel Lurie won the San Francisco mayor’s race through a campaign focused on residents’ homelessness and public safety concerns. Indeed, even Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City in 2025, winning not on the widespread popularity of his socialist maximalism or obsessive anti-Israelism, but because he spoke relentlessly about New York City’s housing and affordability crisis.

But not all ostensibly nonpartisan politics deserve the localized populist label. Dan Osborn, Nebraska’s independent Senate candidate, has cultivated the aesthetic of a working-class outsider while accepting millions in donations from Chuck Schumer’s Senate Majority PAC and campaigning on positions indistinguishable from the national Democratic platform. Osborn’s independence, unlike Pratt’s, appears more strategic than substantive.

Spencer Pratt failed in his ambitious — if somewhat quixotic — quest to become mayor of Los Angeles, but his primary campaign has nonetheless introduced an appealing form of politics, particularly for non-far-Left candidates interested in competing in big, blue cities. The lesson is that populism need not traffic in radical, fringe conspiracism to gain ground. Voters, at least a sizable chunk of them, it turns out, appreciate a candidate willing to speak narrowly about the city he wants to govern.

✍️ Feature

• New Yorker: Could Switzerland Become The First Country To Cap Their Population?

🌍 Foreign

• New York Times: Ukraine-Russia war compared to World War I

• Politico Europe: Keir Starmer Resignation Talk Swirls

• Semafor: Trump trade deal skepticism North America

• WSJ: Microfinancing loans and entrepreneurs poverty cycle

🏛️ Domestic

• Axios: Trump inflation wages economy impact

• WSJ: ECB raises rates amid inflation resurgence

• Politico: DHS funding bill advances along party lines

• Daily Wire: Swing voters poll has shock for Democrats

• Washington Examiner: Democrats defend Graham Platner

• Daily Wire: Democrat fundraising machine CEO questioned

• Daily Wire: America’s color coded murder debate

• Daily Wire: Education reform in Appalachia

• Daily Wire: Patriots’ Day New York holiday proposal

📰 Media

• Hollywood Reporter: JD Vance to Join The View Amidst FCC clash

• Washington Examiner: Scott Pelley’s entitled CBS controversy

• Mediaite: Knicks radio host Taylor Swift hot mic incident

💻 Tech

• Variety: Nintendo Announces Plans to Remake Zelda

• Semafor: Jeff Bezos raises $12B for AI systems that build things

🧬 Health

• Politico: Hawley pushes Blanche on abortion pill settlement

✝️ Religion

• NBC News: Pope Leo Blesses Sagrada Familia

🏈 Sports

• Wall Street Journal: Instant Classic Knicks Win

• New York Times Athletic: Iconic Knicks shot analysis

• New York Magazine: Knicks Game 4 Spurs Brunson/Anunoby breakdown

• Daily Wire: NFL subscription model controversy

• Roll Call: College sports bill sparks unusual alliances

• Daily Wire: Knicks owner blasts NYC leadership over security

🎭 Culture & Hollywood

• Daily Wire: What Happens When Fantasy Escapes the Gatekeepers

• New York Times: Steven Spielberg “Disclosure Day” review

• Vulture: Reality TV meets Kalshi and Polymarket prediction markets

• Daily Wire: HelloFresh’s “rated X” controversy ad

• New York Post: Jerry Seinfeld clashes with anti-Israel influencer after Knicks win

🪶 Quote

“We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self.”

— William Gibson

Maine

The most-watched race of the night didn’t necessarily have any suspense, but it had plenty of intrigue. In the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate, controversy-laden progressive Graham Platner won his party’s nomination. With 94% of the estimated vote reporting, he has 72% to Gov. Janet Mills’s 20%. Mills suspended her campaign in April, making…

Read more

Subscribe now

Hollywood’s Worst Nightmare is Already Here

Daily Wire:

Last weekend marked a historic turning point at the box office that should give every normal American a reason to cheer. Two lower-budget horror films rooted in YouTube and online culture, “Obsession” and “Backrooms,” dominated the charts and delivered a powerful rebuke to Hollywood’s tired establishment. And just months before, independent movie “Iron Lung” did the same.

“Obsession,” directed by 26-year-old Curry Barker, is a supernatural psychological thriller about a hopeless romantic who makes a Faustian bargain to win his crush’s heart, only for the wish to spiral into a terrifying nightmare. Shot in just 20 days on a shoestring budget under $1 million, the film opened to $17.2 million and then grew an impressive 39% in its second weekend to $23.9 million. As of early June 2026, it has crossed $105 million domestically and $150 million worldwide. Barker previously honed his skills on YouTube via “That’s a Bad Idea,” teaming up on a successful horror short called “The Chair.”

“Backrooms,” helmed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons, adapts his viral internet creepypasta into a mind-bending found-footage horror experience where people fall through reality into endless, unsettling yellow rooms filled with existential dread and lurking horrors. Built from Parsons’ massively popular YouTube series, the film cost around $10 million and opened to a staggering $81 million domestically and $118 million globally, setting records for A24 and making Parsons the youngest director ever to land a number one movie.

“Iron Lung,” written, directed, starred in, and self-financed by popular YouTuber Markiplier (Mark Fischbach), is a claustrophobic sci-fi horror thriller based on the indie video game. It follows a convict piloting a rickety submarine through an ocean of blood on a distant moon in a desperate search for survival. Made for roughly $3 million, the film opened to $17.8 million domestically and has grossed over $51 million worldwide, proving a massive success for a self-distributed indie project.

Together, these YouTube-bred films crushed bigger studio fare and proved that fresh, unfiltered storytelling can capture audiences sick of being preached to. This success came from normal dudes focused on craft, hard work, and actual storytelling over identity politics. All three tested material directly with real viewers and improved based on honest feedback and hard data. They wisely skipped the conformity enforcers and built loyal audiences from the ground up through merit and persistence.

YouTube success forced Hollywood to pay attention. “Obsession” triggered a fierce bidding war and landed with Focus Features and Blumhouse. “Backrooms” earned A24’s full theatrical backing and the support of iconic horror producer James Wan. “Iron Lung” succeeded largely through grassroots fan power and self-distribution, in which Markiplier’s audience sent letters directly to theaters demanding that they play the movie and promising to show up in big numbers.

Sundance and the rest of the festival circuit have long been elitist echo chambers pushing progressive orthodoxies, identity dramas, climate hysteria, and attacks on masculinity and traditional values. The result? Taxpayer-subsidized flops that alienated everyday Americans and accelerated Hollywood’s theatrical decline.

Barker, Parsons, and Markiplier wisely skipped that entire rigged game. YouTube democratizes storytelling through algorithms that reward watch time, talent, and effort, not politics or DEI checklists. Creators can experiment cheaply using phones, free software, and online tutorials while testing ideas in public. Viewers respond instantly, and the analytics are brutally honest. What emerges is a system that rewards material people want to watch, not whatever happens to satisfy an ideological trend or leftist activism. By the time creators arrive at studios, they often already own their IP and bring a loyal audience with them.

✍️ Feature

• Daily Wire: You Should Never Take Up Smoking Unless You Want To Look Really Cool

🌍 Foreign

• War on the Rocks: The Toll Booth at the Throat of World Trade

• National Interest: Iran’s Mafia State Understands Only a Law Backed by Power

• Wall Street Journal: Iran Ratchets Up Pressure on Trump With Kuwait Airport Attack

• Wall Street Journal: Russia’s Elite Is Souring on the War. Putin Doesn’t Seem to Care

• Daily Wire: Henry Nowak’s Murder Is The Tragic Endpoint Of Ideological Insanity

• Daily Wire: British PM Tries To Blame Musk As Outrage Grows Over Henry Nowak’s Murder

• Semafor: Intelligence Alliance Warns of China’s Spy-Recruiting Efforts

• Foundation for Defense of Democracies: Letter to the POTUS

🏛️ Domestic

• Axios: Trump to Nominate Todd Blanche as Attorney General

• Daily Wire: California Is Notoriously Slow For Counting Elections. Here’s Why.

• New York Times: Republicans Fear Trump’s Iran Fight Could Hurt Them In Elections

• Daily Wire: Platner Promises Dem Senators There Will Be No New Accusations

• Daily Wire: When People Have Tattoos That Tell Us Who They Are, Believe Them

• Daily Wire: Josh Hawley: Child Sex Trafficking Ends When We Give Investigators The Tools They Need

• New York Times: John Bolton Reaches Plea Deal

• Daily Wire: The College Degree Scam Nobody Wants To Admit

🗳️ 2028

• Mediaite: CNN Data Guru Says Americans Have One Message For Biden: Go Away

📰 Media

• Daily Wire: Scott Pelley’s Glasses Were A Prop For A Man Play Acting As An Anchor. I Watched It.

• Hollywood Reporter: 60 Minutes Upheaval Fuels Debate Over Bari Weiss And Nick Bilton

• Wall Street Journal: The Meltdown Inside 60 Minutes

💻 Tech

• Wall Street Journal: Phoenix Is A Data Center Mecca—and A Test Case For How To Pay For AI’s Power Needs

• Wall Street Journal: A Guide To Buying SpaceX Shares Via Your Brokerage Account

• Semafor: AI Executives Make Rare Collective Warning On Bioweapons Threat

🧬 Health

• Daily Wire: Gene Editing Can Save Your Life And Countless Babies

• City Journal: Medicare And Medicaid Fraud Is Driving Up Health Care Costs

✝️ Religion

• Graphs About Religion: The Southern Baptist Convention’s Membership Problem

🏈 Sports

• House of Strauss: The Knicks Are Breaking My Understanding of Basketball

• Hollywood Reporter: Inside UFC’s White House Fight Plans, According To Dana White

🎭 Culture & Hollywood

• Daily Wire: How To Celebrate America In A Hyper-Political Partisan Era

• Variety: Quentin Tarantino Slams Hollywood And Netflix Economics

• Deadline: The YouTube Revolution Reshaping Hollywood

🪶 Quote

“Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.”

— Neil Postman

Somewhere today in America, erstwhile CBS anchorman Scott Pelley is chewing the living hell out of the arm of his glasses in a bout of uncontained fury at the way his bosses are fixing 60 Minutes.

Pelley, infamously the most anti-Trump anchor in television history (quite the accomplishment, considering George Stephanopoulos exists), went on a loud, unprofessional rant during a meeting. This memorable moment, sure to be enshrined with a shiny plaque, was reported with glee by reporters at The New York Times, The Guardian, and Puck – who had to work hard to get audio Pelley clearly wanted leaked. Pelley’s spittle-flecked invective against CBS boss Bari Weiss and new 60 Minutes executive producer Nick Bilton included referring to a list of recent firings as “Black Thursday,” as if letting go a list of hacks on a show that survives only based on the fact that it follows the National Football League was a date to be noted in the annals of history.

“She’s murdering 60 Minutes! … She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it and is doing exactly that,” Pelley reportedly said, telling his new boss he “would never be welcomed” at the show. “[Weiss] has no qualifications for her job; you have slender qualifications for this job. The changes that she’s made at the ‘Evening News’ have been catastrophic, so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?”

As a former CBS employee for several years, Pelley was infamous for asking the stupidest questions in production meetings, and now he clearly wants the award for “big loud speech that establishes exactly why you’re not a newsman and hopefully gets you a severance package that can help stand up your new Substack.”

What inquiring minds want to know is: Did Pelley walk in already twirling his glasses, or did he wait til he got rolling?

Here’s the real thing that bothers Scott Pelley: the era of the pompous Democrat television anchor is over. That role is filled by John Oliver and Jimmy Kimmel, and was formerly filled in his own house by Stephen Colbert. People don’t want a newsreader who lectures them simply by virtue of their ability to read a prompter. And they certainly don’t want that type of lecture from people who clearly hate half the country they’re reporting on every night.

I don’t know if what Bari Weiss is doing to CBS is going to work. Television is hard – I’ve been in it just as a commentator and contributor for a decade and a half, and I’m still learning. But CBS is a network institution with a wealth of internal value if it can be brought out of the dusty corners of decrepit leftism into the present day, and not just because of Jane Pauley’s CBS Sunday Morning segments on the history of the Erie Canal. The people that won’t be part of it are the Scott Pelleys of the world – people who don’t report, research, or find the news for themselves, but read it on a camera and feel like that gives them oracular authority over the direction of the world behind the little red light.

Chew on that, Scott.

Subscribe now

Read more

Subscribe now

A Texas-Sized Gamble

My take on the Senate primary in the Daily Wire:

Republican voters made a Texas-sized gamble last night in the Lone Star state, betting that even with the baggage he carries into a general election, Trump loyalist Attorney General Ken Paxton will be able to handle the threat from a strongly backed Democratic effort behind State Rep. James Talarico. We’ve heard the left’s dreams of turning Texas blue for decades, but even with his defects as a candidate and fundraiser, Paxton still enters the final contest as the favored candidate. The larger question is whether that gamble will cost Texans and Republicans in other races around the country.

As successful as he’s been politically — with a knack for surviving challenges, lawsuits, and even an impeachment — Paxton has never been an effective individual fundraiser. The biggest gap between him and incumbent Senator John Cornyn isn’t ideology or even loyalty to the president — it’s their capability to raise money in a state marketplace that demands it.

Cornyn’s campaign doomed his effort to hold on this cycle by squandering that money on television ads, poor staffing choices, and adopting a general Washington insider tone in a cycle of voter frustration — but they had plenty of money to dump into the effort. National Republicans are pissed off about the whole situation, understanding that they may now have to push money into a contest that wouldn’t have needed it if voters had decided differently. If their reluctance to spend big on yet another contest in a critical cycle holds and Paxton’s past is prologue, he’ll have to get a leg up from Texas donors called upon to grin and bear it about a candidate they’ve been reluctant to fund.

The concern among Texas Republican politicos is less about Talarico’s potential for victory, given his lengthy history of far-Left comments about everything under the sun, and more about the newly drawn redistricted map potentially netting fewer GOP victories than hoped for, given Paxton’s electoral appeal. While Cornyn and fellow Senator Ted Cruz have consistently held the line among Hispanic voters (in his Senate race, Cruz won Hispanic voters by 6 points over Colin Allred two years ago), Paxton has lagged. The latest polling has Talarico winning Hispanics in the state by almost 30 points, and such turnout from those voters in November could be a major drag on Republican congressional candidates down-ticket.

The fear in Washington is that Texas will now draw resources necessary to hold seats in Maine, North Carolina, and Ohio — potentially detracting from the strong GOP hopes of taking Senate seats in Michigan and Georgia. If Senate Majority Leader John Thune and National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman Tim Scott decide to keep their focus on those five contests, Texas may be left on its own to get Paxton across the finish line.

The unpredictable element here is how much the national media will play in this contest. In the past, we’ve seen the national glow-ups for candidates like Beto O’Rourke totally backfire, turning a fairly middle-of-the-road El Paso Democrat into a progressive wet dream, the skateboard-riding bass player that made Austin swoon but who ultimately had no path to victory statewide. Will Talarico get the same treatment? He already is, though every interview he does betrays that his version of non-binary six gender abortion-loving Christianity is anathema in the Valley.

Paxton is still the odds-on favorite. To a certain extent, the lengthy catalog of his failings is largely known to voters, while Talarico is still a fresh face who hasn’t confronted the scrutiny of running statewide in an old-school Texas knife fight. For Republicans who care about holding the Senate against a blue wave, they have hope that Paxton’s sins are already baked in, and that Talarico’s approach to running continues to look more like prep for his ideal next job — co-hosting a religion podcast for The New York Times.

Midterms? Who Cares?

Punchbowl News:

President Donald Trump made a startling admission on Wednesday as he met with his Cabinet.

“I don’t care about the midterms,” Trump told reporters when asked about the Iran war and the slow-moving negotiations to end the conflict.

“Look what happened last night. That was a preview of the midterms,” Trump added, pointing to the overwhelming defeat of incumbent GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas by scandal-plagued Attorney General Ken Paxton in the Senate Republican runoff. GOP leaders fear Paxton’s victory puts Texas in play this November, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Yet what Trump doesn’t seem focused on enough is restoring Americans’ faith in the U.S. economy. And that’s a huge political problem for both GOP congressional leaders and vulnerable Republicans as they try to save their endangered majorities. Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune don’t say it publicly. But privately, it alarms the Republican leadership.

Trump’s poll numbers on the economy — by far the top issue this year — have collapsed. Some recent polls had him under 30%, an absolute disaster for Republicans.

A White House Divided on A.I.

Politico:

There are three main camps in the West Wing, per two senior White House officials, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive internal dynamics. The first, which includes former AI czar David Sacks, favors less regulation to help the industry compete against China. It was Sacks who called the president last week and derailed the EO at the last minute due to industry concerns that the order could be too onerous for the relatively nascent industry.

On the go-slow side: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and his undersecretary Emil Michael, a former Silicon Valley executive. They are pushing for greater barriers to Mythos-type models, according to the senior White House officials, over concerns that the technology could be used by rivals such as China.

Hegseth and Michael are among the “AI hawks who are afraid of it, who think that it could be exploited for nefarious purposes, who want to make sure that we do everything we can to make sure it [doesn’t] go to China,” the first senior White House official said.

Then, according to the White House officials, there’s the middle ground camp involving chief of staff Susie Wiles and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who have pushed for a regulatory framework in which AI companies voluntarily provide the U.S. government first glance at its new models.

These disparate camps underscore the degree to which Trump administration policy is being shaped in real time, trying to respond to a rapidly-developing technology.

Despite the chaos of Trump’s last-minute decision, the order doesn’t appear dead – at least not yet. Now administration officials have another chance to make the case that their viewpoint should win the day.

The executive order that Trump almost signed called for a voluntary oversight system for AI companies to consult with the U.S. government on their latest models. It offered a framework for the federal government to preview the products before they are released to the public without the burden of a mandate.

“It wasn’t government telling these companies what they could and couldn’t do, but it requested that the U.S. government get a first look at any new models, just to be sure that they couldn’t be exploited by bad actors,” the first senior White House official said. “It wasn’t mandatory, but we did get an agreement from all of them that they would abide by it.”

✍️ Feature

Straight to the Point

Numbers Do Lie?

The Bulletin Board…

Read more

2 months ago · 9 likes · Steve Ruddock

🌍 Foreign

• Tablet Magazine: Trump Cuts Bait on Iran and Hormuz

• Semafor: U.S.-Iran Trade New Strikes as Hopes of Peace Deal Dim

• Semafor: Central Banks Warn of Long-Term Inflation Impact of Iran War

• Axios: Iran Missile Defense Lessons Ripple to Ukraine and Taiwan

• Wall Street Journal: U.S. Military Conducts New Strikes on Iran

• Wall Street Journal: How Long Can Iran Withstand the Economic Pain of the U.S. Blockade?

• National Interest: China’s Broad Foreign Influence Operations Need a Broad Counterstrategy

• Politico: Cuba Fears U.S. Military Attack

• Axios: Trump’s Cuba Squeeze Fuels Regime Change Talk

• Wall Street Journal: Christopher Laneve Picked as Army Chief

• Foreign Affairs: The Coming Crisis in NATO Deterrence

• Washington Examiner: Trump Isn’t Abandoning NATO — He’s Rebalancing

• Brussels Signal: Conrad Black on Ukraine: Russia Has Failed

• Politico Europe: Tony Blair’s Screed Uncorks Angst Over Labour’s Future

• Telegraph: Blair Only Has Himself To Blame for Cataclysm Hitting Labour

🏛️ Domestic

• Daily Wire: Trump Set To Officially Launch App For Millions Of Trump Accounts

• Daily Wire: Jill Biden’s Latest ‘Stroke’ Claim Runs Into One Big Problem

• New York Times: Jill Biden and the 2024 Debate Fallout

• New York Times: Can Democrats Win Back Young Men Who Soured on Trump?

• New York Times: Ken Paxton and James Talarico Set Up Texas Showdown

• Washington Examiner: Janeese Lewis George Leads Kenyan McDuffie in D.C. Mayor Race

• Wall Street Journal: Justice Department Opens Probe Into Trump Accuser E. Jean Carroll

• New York Times: The Kennedy Dynasty and Jack Schlossberg

🗳️ 2028

• The Hill: Pete Buttigieg Leads Early Democratic Presidential Primary Poll

• Washington Examiner: JD Vance’s Mission Impossible White House Bid

📰 Media

• Hollywood Reporter: Oz Pearlman Deception Exposed

• Wall Street Journal: A Way to Challenge the Groupthink of Scholarly Journals

💻 Tech

• New York Post: AOC’s Dirty Water Trick Feeds the Delusional Data Center Panic

🧬 Health

• Daily Wire: I Thought IVF Was My Only Path To Motherhood. Then Everything Changed.

✝️ Religion

• Daily Wire: An Encyclical For The Ages: AI, Universities, And Builders Of Humanity

• New Yorker: What Pope Leo XIV Said About AI

🏈 Sports

• Daily Wire: Bipartisan Bill Seeks To Restore Order To College Sports

🎭 Culture & Hollywood

• Variety: James Bond Game ‘007 First Light’ Launches

• Variety: ‘Disclosure Day’ First Reactions Praise Spielberg Film

• Hollywood Reporter: ‘Obsession’ Scores Second-Weekend Box Office Spike

• Wall Street Journal: New Jersey’s Film Boom

• Daily Wire: Leftist Hollywood Critics Drool Over Bizarre Anti-Capitalist Movie, But Audiences Aren’t Buying It.

• Daily Wire: Bringing The Everyman Comedy Back To The Big Screen

• Daily Wire: ‘Toy Story 5’ Plot Twist Set To Disappoint Parents

🪶 Quote

“In a society in which the dream of success has been drained of any meaning beyond itself, men have nothing against which to measure their achievements except the achievements of others.”

— Christopher Lasch

Jenna Stocker.

Traveling southwest on the Catalina Highway toward the heart of Tucson, twisting and descending through Coronado National Forest, where the rock-hewn vistas meet the high, bright blue of sky that swallows any fear that God does not exist. It is such a place where one would expect to be surrounded by the radiating waves of heat on a baking blacktop, as a spectator to some aged, weathered vaquero of the lost ages of the Wild West.

You can see it as you fall out of the prehistoric heat-swell of the canyons and mountains, each pitched against the other as if they were remnants of a war between Greek gods, scars and fissures, and the heaving of the earth: Tucson. The oldest city in the Arizona Territory that maintains its ties to the dusty wiles of its past through old, glorified museums, sun-faded rodeos, and capital-A Americana. The gunslinger and wagon-bound settler and the Indian and the law. They converge on a place that can still barely maintain its proper sense of being, balanced with tourist thirst traps. Along that highway through God’s country back to the terra firma of the U-S-of-A and one can pass the Trail Dust Town with its mock gunfights and chintzy steak house (complete with cowbell-ringing waitresses outfitted with hip-slung blue jeans and soft drawls welcoming you, “Darlin’”), and gift shops with sterling silver baubles outlined in turquoise and fool’s gold, and Kachina dolls, and paperweights of smooth glass encasing tarantulas, scorpions, and the various genus of poisonous vermin and arachnid that scuttles about the desert floor. And the tourists ramble into the shops crammed together, peering at the oddities and treasures on equally crammed shelves with wide grins and sweaty necks and bellies full of steakhouse T-bones and smelling of baked beans and Western dressing.

Ask any of the shopkeepers who run the little enclave of strung-together gift stores, hot sauce and salsa shops, jewelers, novelty stands and Western wear haberdasheries — strike up a conversation that starts with a statement, but is really a question: “I bet you’ve seen a lot of changes here,” and let a Roy Murrow or Abe Walker or Sherri Lantis ramble about the Walmart on Speedway Boulevard or the In-N-Out Burger off South Kolb Road, or the damn university kids, and one gets a sense, just by the tired, crow’s feet-lined frowns and deep, distant eyes on wizened faces that there’s something that’s lost. What once was the destination of the kid who dreamed of Roy Rogers and John Wayne’s “Stagecoach” and the Earps, whose soundtrack was the slow, rap-rap-rap tempo of boot heels on raised-plank boardwalks accompanied by the ominous jingle of well-used spurs, had been buried with the myth that brought it fame, notoriety — and crowds.

Speeding south into Tucson where Catalina terminates, joining Tanque Verde — a mainline road banking east to west with a slow curve south over the Pantano Wash, past the Trail Dust Town, past the pop-up cannabis shop, Golf ‘N Stuff, a series of squat, adobe-style apartments — the two-level kind with Spanish tile roofs and centered around a courtyard overrun with thorny catclaw acacia, prickly pear, and Larrea tridentata with its tiny yellow-tinged, waxy flowers giving that decidedly rain smell after a rolling storm.

Then, take a straight shot south on Pantano until you run up to the airfield. The airfield. Stretches of planes, comatose and covered, baking in the unrelenting sun, swirls of heat rising between wings and shadowed bellies of hulking P-3 Orions and E-3C AWACS. All around the gray metal beasts sit silently in formation: here, C-130s, there, A-10 Warthogs, farther down field, one can make out the sleek, streamlined lethality of a grouping of F-16s with each seam and gap meticulously wrapped and sealed as if the very desert would cause the second death of these retired warriors. Where once they hunted and evaded the enemy as rulers of the sky, now the planes were at its mercy in the arid, unceasing desert heat.

This isn’t any airfield. This is Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, where 3,500 retired or stored aircraft sit, month after month, waiting for their fate either to be cannibalized or revived into former air superiority glory.

The story of these planes isn’t contained between Alvernon Way and South Houghton Road. It bleeds out into the desert. It creeps out like ghosts in the night, haunting the dreams of young men — those who used to dream of gunfights and horse trails and warm whisky in dark saloons and the jingle of spurs on hollow boardwalks. Now, they dream of going Mach 5.29, burning jet fuel, puking their insides out on test flights, and pushing the boundaries of the impossible because they refuse the idea of the impossible.

Before the movie Top Gun was made, it was a story in a magazine. The May 1983 issue of California magazine was sitting in a dentist’s office when film producer Don Simpson picked it up, read a few pages, and immediately, in his guts, knew: this was a film that had to be made. This was a story of speed, adventure, danger, excellence, masculinity, death-defying, gravity-breaking, pulse-pounding adventure that had to be told. And he was right. And only a man who refused to be bound by the constraints of the physically possible and psychologically normal could see and recognize the American essence in this story. Never mind that Simpson was notoriously fueled by cocaine and booze — a man who took his filmmaking and partying with equal passion and determination. He tapped into the veins of what made America’s blood pump. After all, he was altogether unfazed by the death of his drug rehab coach in his pool house, naked. The temptation to bring this story to the big screen was too strong. The article’s author, Ehud Yonay, writes in “Top Guns”:

Once over the Mexican border they pick up speed, and Yogi starts jinking. He whips the stick — the steering mechanism between his legs — from side to side and the plane rolls this way and that, letting him and Possum spot anybody making for their tail. From where they sit, however, it’s not their silver rocket that’s rocking but the entire vast blue dome of sea and sky. There are no ups or downs up here, no rights or lefts, just a barely perceptible line separating one blue from another, and that line is spinning and racing like mad in the distance. Yogi was still in junior high school when he realized that flying straight and level might be okay for some people, but if you like yanking and banking — the feeling of riding inside one of those storm-in-a-bottle souvenirs — then there’s just one place for you, and that’s the cockpit of a fighter plane.

Now we have willow-fingered suss-gussets picking through the bones of our Americana like vultures on a highway roadkill, stinking and bubbling in the sun, the last soul that dared venture out under the cover of night to be barreled over by a rust-colored Buick Skylark.

Capital-A Americana has been worn smooth over the decades by a culture that bristles at hard things. What once was the stuff that made legends has turned into cautionary tales. “Go West” was the slogan of the intrepid and the bold; now merely a bumper sticker catch phrase for glamping outlets and secret sauce limited-time burgers at Arby’s.

We’ve had the essence of Americana squeezed out of us by intellectuals and ivory-tower academics and wannabe sophisticates wholesale by industrial-grade juicers, strained through a dozen gauzy layers of cheesecloth by the strangling hands of PC-mindedness, and sent through the clinking and clamoring bureaucracy like miles of twisting, nonsensical pipes, sloshing along until our Americanness has been sterilized and ostracized and thinned out to be wholly unrecognizable.

There is no toughness, no fortitude into the unknown, no unforged paths, no aspirations toward the conquest: it’s been conditioned out of us. Then those same mawing shrieks who scold the veritable past squeeze harder.

Is the Americana ethos extinct?

Read the rest.

Read more

Subscribe now

✍️ Feature

CrashOut by Ioan Grillo

Mexico Hammers Fentanyl While US Overdose Deaths Drop

In the 12 months ending June 2023, the United States recorded its highest ever number of overdose deaths with 111,466 casualties reported and estimates of even more. This might be the peak of the most lethal drug crisis in world history, although we don’t have solid numbers for overdose deaths in China at the time of the Opium Wars. Since the year 2000, more than 1.3 million Americans have died of OD’s, about as many as…

Read more

2 months ago · 20 likes · 12 comments · Ioan Grillo

🌍 Foreign

• The Spectator: Economic Fate Will Be Decided in the Strait of Hormuz

• Wall Street Journal: With Castro Indictment, Trump Bets His Venezuela Playbook Will Work in Cuba

• Wall Street Journal: Israel-Gaza Cease-Fire Talks Stall as Attacks Intensify

• Politico Europe: NATO Allies Downplay U.S. Troop Withdrawals

🏛️ Domestic

• Wall Street Journal: Mortgage Rates Hit a Nine-Month High in Blow to Prime Buying Season

• Axios: Democrats Release 2024 Autopsy

• Politico: Democrats’ 2024 Autopsy Finds Party Lost Touch With Voters

• Politico: Moderates Push Back on GOP Weaponization Fund

• Punchbowl News: Senate Republicans Buck Trump

• Wall Street Journal: Trump on Collision Course With GOP Over Controversial $1.8 Billion Fund

• New York Times: Trump’s Arch Project Wins Approval

• Axios: Feeding Our Future Fraud Ringleader Sentenced

• New York Magazine: John Fetterman’s Israel Politics Are Roiling Democrats

• The New Yorker: A Republican Bloodbath in the Texas Senate Primary Is Giving Democrats Hope

• New York Post: DHS Reveals Stunning Number of Illegal Migrants Deported or Self-Deported

• New York Post: Judge Drops Charges Against Virginia School Administrator in Teacher Shooting Case

• Daily Wire: The County D.A. Handing Out Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free Cards

• Daily Wire: Trump Was Right About Hyperbolic Climate Models

• Daily Wire: The Worst-Case Emissions Scenario That Turned Out To Be A Lot Of Hot Air

📰 Media

• Daily Wire: Murderer Fan Club Ghouls Are The New Courtroom Journalists

• Hollywood Reporter: Jimmy Kimmel Says “Never Watch CBS Again”

• Hollywood Reporter: Spotify Launches AI-Generated Personalized Podcasts

💻 Tech

• New York Times: Jeff Bezos Defends Trump’s Second Term

• MSN: Data Centers Could Actually Be Good for Your Hometown

• Wall Street Journal: SpaceX Prepares Starship V3 Launch

• Axios: White House Postpones AI Executive Order Signing

🧬 Health

• The Cut: Vanessa Trump Diagnosed With Breast Cancer

• MSN: Trump And Mark Cuban End War Of Words To Tag Team America’s Drug Pricing Crisis

✝️ Religion

• Graphs About Religion: Does Religion Make You Happier? Yes, So Does Money.

• Wall Street Journal: Falling Birth Rates Are a Mystery

🏈 Sports

• House of Strauss: Thunder Derangement Syndrome

• The Athletic: Knicks-Cavaliers Game 1 Turns Into James Harden Show

🎭 Culture & Hollywood

• Daily Wire: Eat This, Not That! — Make Brown Bag Lunches Great Again

• Variety: Jeff Probst Reveals ‘Survivor 50’ Finale in Spoiler Mishap

🪶 Quote

“Don’t just build a net worth — build a life.” — John Coleman

It’s worth pausing in this news-filled political season to appreciate just how dominant Donald Trump’s political operation has become. They have over the past month racked up a litany of wins in Indiana, Louisiana, and Georgia, and last night cemented things in Kentucky by having Trump’s favored candidate easily outpace Mitch McConnell’s chosen heir.

The nuking of Thomas Massie, who exited stage left complaining about Jews, was just the icing on the cake. As CNN quoted a Senior White House adviser yesterday: “It’s not a retribution campaign, it’s a send a message campaign. It’s about reminding people of the political power. It’s not about retribution..This is basic political management of a party. You have to keep everybody on the reservation. Occasionally you have to shoot a hostage. The next one is Thomas Massie.”

Read the rest here.

More:

• Punchbowl News: Trump Is Doing Whatever He Wants

• Wall Street Journal: Trump’s Endorsement Machine Steamrolls Dissent

• Politico: Trump Completes His Revenge Tour

Subscribe now

Soros Prosecutors Endanger American Lives

Tom Cotton in Daily Wire:

In March, a criminal illegal alien stabbed Stephanie Minter to death at a bus stop. Last week, her mother gave a strong and courageous testimony on Capitol Hill, speaking about her daughter’s fierce faith in God, vibrant smile, and love for family. Sitting to her left was the man whose pro-criminal policies led to Stephanie’s death: Soros-backed Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano.

Stephanie’s alleged murderer, Abdul Jalloh, was a known, repeat, violent offender. In fact, the Fairfax County Police Department had warned Descano’s office about this man multiple times. Over the years, Jalloh had been charged with numerous crimes, including malicious wounding, aggravated assault, and rape. Yet, Descano’s office had dropped more than half of Jalloh’s criminal charges, ignored warnings from police, and let him loose in the community.

This woke, radical ignorance caused Stephanie’s death earlier this year. Her horrific murder was senseless, tragic, and entirely preventable. Had Fairfax County government officials prioritized the safety of innocent Americans over criminals and illegal aliens, Stephanie may still be alive today.

Sadly, Stephanie is only the latest victim of radical policies enforced by pro-criminal prosecutors. Descano’s deliberate moves to decarcerate and under-prosecute criminals are part of a nationwide, left-wing effort to remake America’s criminal justice system by installing pro-criminal, anti-cop prosecutors bankrolled by billionaire George Soros.

Read more

As I have stated from the beginning: I support a punitive expedition and can live with the goals outlined by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff early on. In my preferred COA, we would have already decoupled…but facts on the ground change.

I’ll repeat again what I have said often when we step into conflicts: war is a dark room. Once …

Read more

At first glance, the advanced semiconductor supply chain not only binds Taiwan and the United States in a vital technological partnership but also is likely to become even more consequential as the AI race accelerates. Taiwanese companies, as the main producers of the most advanced semiconductors, and US companies, as the main designers and purchasers of these chips, depend on each other for this high-tech supply chain to function. This “silicon shield” posits that the United States has a strong interest in Taiwan’s security to safeguard the supply chain—and in deterring China from attacking Taiwan or otherwise disrupting it. The silicon shield has become even more vital to Taiwan as the chip industry has grown to encompass 21 percent of Taiwan’s GDP, driving record economic growth over the past few years.

Whether the silicon shield would hold in a moment of crisis remains to be seen. But the silicon shield concept does have a reassuring effect on Taiwanese people. Surveys in Taiwan show that majorities believe the silicon shield does have a protective strength by binding US and Taiwanese interests together. Unsurprisingly, when the Trump administration announced that it sought to onshore a significant portion of advanced semiconductor manufacturing capacity, Taiwanese trust that the United States would assist in a cross-Strait contingency dropped.

Given the potential for a catastrophic war between great powers if the United States were to intervene in a Chinese attack on Taiwan, with no guarantee of victory but almost certainly widespread destruction, the Trump administration’s reshoring industrial policy is a logical US hedging strategy. As Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick put it, “We cannot rely on Taiwan, which is 9,500 miles away from us and only 80 miles from China.” The problem with this, of course, is that replacing chips made in Taiwan with those made in the United States could make Taiwan a less important US priority and reduce the likelihood of a US military response.

Reshoring weakens the silicon shield, and may be why there is increasing doubt about the United States’ commitment: A new poll by the Democracy Foundation found that majorities in Taiwan doubted the United States would help defend the island. Lutnick’s view, anticipating such skepticism, is that the United States needs the capability to produce a domestic chip supply large enough to assist in a contingency. But to believe this reassurance requires faith in a partnership that the Trump administration is straining.

More:

• WSJ: Tightly Choreographed Visit Masks Big Differences Between U.S. and China

• NYT: Trump’s China Deals Raise New Economic Questions

• The Free Press: The Myth of the Thucydides Trap Is Convenient for China

• Daily Wire: Don’t Be Commie Chinese, If You Please

Read more

Share

Does Taiwan Care To Defend Itself?

The WSJ edit board struggles to admit the obvious: Taiwan isn’t paying anything close to their fair share.

Taiwan in recent days passed extra defense money that had been stalled in the narrowly divided legislature. The roughly $25 billion falls short of the $40 billion proposed by Democratic Progressive Party President Lai Ching-te, as he tries to move the island’s defense spending to 5% of its economy by 2030. But the opposition Kuomintang and a third party control parliament.

The defense package appears to exclude some missile defense and domestic drone priorities crucial to persuading Mr. Xi that an invasion would be a debacle. Depending on how the money is allocated, Taiwan could spend about 3% of its economy on defense this year.

Yes, that’s insufficient, given the increasingly aggressive Chinese Communist Party. A trip to China last month by Taiwan’s opposition leader fueled suspicions that the country’s political class isn’t serious about defending its political and economic freedom.

But President Lai has to socialize the threat without terrifying the public, in a country that held its first presidential election as recently as the Clinton Administration. That is one of the heaviest lifts in global geopolitics, and compromises and incremental progress are a feature of democracy.

Three percent. Three percent! And they gutted their domestic drone program. Great job selling the world on your stubborn defense strategy, guys.

• The Free Press: Trump-Xi Détente: The Taiwan Summit Stakes

• Wall Street Journal: Taiwan Is the Key to AI Dominance

• Wall Street Journal: Trump and Xi Begin Superpowers Summit

• National Interest: The Trump-Xi Summit Behind the Curtain

• New York Post: Taiwan Becomes Flashpoint of Trump-Xi Summit

• Semafor: Xi Warns Trump Over Taiwan

• Semafor: Rubio Urges China to Help U.S. With Iran War

• Politico: Trump’s Disappearing China Hawks

• New York Times: How Chinese Citizens Are Reacting to the Trump Summit

The Post El Chapo Civil War

Wall Street Journal:

A man’s body, hands bound and covered by a blue tarp, lies by the side of the road where it had been dumped minutes earlier. A blood-soaked sign says he was a “Chapito,” a member of one of two criminal factions fighting for control of this city, the cradle of Mexico’s transnational narcotics industry.

Such macabre finds are common in Culiacán—a city of luxury car dealerships, fancy malls, and makeshift fentanyl labs—marking the shifting lines of nearly two years of relentless civil war between the two main clans of the pioneering Sinaloa cartel.

It’s a war that the Chapitos, the heirs of Mexican drug boss Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, appear to be losing, casting doubt on the future of a dynasty that once ruled vast swaths of the criminal underworld on its way to becoming the world’s top producer and smuggler of fentanyl.

The latest blow came last month with the U.S. indictment of Sinaloa Gov. Rubén Rocha and nine other current and former state and local officials, charging them with taking bribes from the Chapitos to protect their criminal enterprise.

On one level, the fall of the Guzmáns marks a signal victory for Washington, which pursued them across four presidential administrations. Since his 2019 conviction in a Brooklyn federal court, El Chapo has been serving a life sentence plus 30 years in a Supermax prison high in the Colorado Rocky Mountains.

On another, it has cost Mexico dearly. The fight among criminal pretenders to Guzmán’s throne has unfolded like a Shakespearean drama, sparked by betrayal, ambition, greed—and rivers of blood. Since 2024, when one of Guzmán’s sons kidnapped the veteran head of a rival faction and handed him over to U.S. authorities, some 3,000 people, gunmen from both sides and innocent bystanders, have been killed in the fighting. Another 3,600 are missing.

The Marriage Crisis Is Worse Than You Think

Daily Wire:

In 1960, nearly 85% of prime-age adults (those between 25 and 54) were married. Today, that figure has collapsed to roughly 54%.

However, the topline marriage data conceals that America’s marriage rate is propped up by immigrants. While 64% of foreign-born adults in America are married, fewer than 52% of native-born American adults are married. That’s a 12-point gap. Without the steady arrival of immigrants who still prioritize marriage, America’s marriage rate would be even lower and, consequently, so would the birth rate.

At first, one may think that immigrants are more likely to be married because many of them arrive through marriage. But two facts disprove this argument. First, there was no gap in the marriage rate between immigrants and natives as early as 1970. And second, when we divide immigrants by how old they were when they first came to the United States, it becomes clear that the younger immigrants are when they arrive in the United States, the more they look like the average American when it comes to marriage. Culture is driving the decline in marriage, and immigrants and their children are unfortunately assimilating into America’s low-marriage culture.

When you look only at immigrants who arrived in the United States before turning 18, and thus well before marriage-based immigration could explain their presence, they still marry at a higher rate than native-born Americans. But when you compare immigrants who arrived before age 10 to those who arrived as teenagers, the pattern is unmistakable: the more years an immigrant spends growing up in America, the less likely they are to ever marry. The marriage gap between native-born Americans and immigrants who arrived as young children has completely vanished this century.

This is what assimilation looks like, except in this case, it is a bad thing. Immigrants aren’t bringing some exotic disease called “low marriage rates” with them. They’re catching it in America.

It raises a question that should haunt every American who still believes families are the building blocks of a free society: What exactly are immigrants assimilating to?

✍️ Feature

• Tablet: What The Iran War Has Revealed About China’s Weakness

🌍 Foreign

• Spectator: Russians No Longer Believe Putin’s War Propaganda

• Politico Europe: Keir Starmer Leadership Crisis — Live Updates

• Politico: Man Convicted of Running Secret Chinese Spy Outpost in NYC

🏛️ Domestic

• Axios: Democrats Eye the South in the 2026 Midterms

• Politico: Poll Shows Democratic Redistricting Push Risks Losing Black Voters

• Politico: Maryland Democrats and Gerrymandering

• Punchbowl News: CBC and Redistricting

• Punchbowl News: The Defense Spending Mess

• Washington Examiner: Pro-Family Conservatism Needs an Economic Vision

• Washington Examiner: Georgia GOP Senate Primary Fight Over Ossoff

• New York Times: Jack Schlossberg’s Chaotic Campaign

• Daily Wire: How Transgender Fixation Flunked Loudoun County Schools

• Daily Wire: Fetterman Torches Democrats as Party of ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’

🗳️ 2028

• Daily Wire: The Brutal Truth About AOC’s Presidential Ambitions

📰 Media

• New York Post: Israel Hits NYT With Defamation Suit

• Mediaite: Joe Rogan Shocked by Polling on Trump Assassination Attempts

• Deadline: CBS Evening News Cameraman Suffers Medical Emergency

💻 Tech

• Hollywood Reporter: YouTube Is TV Now

• Axios: AI Matchmaker Comes for Online Dating

🧬 Health

• Daily Wire: Makary’s Resignation and the Fight Over Mail-Order Abortion Drugs

✝️ Religion

• Axios: Pope Leo XIV’s First Encyclical Will Focus on AI

🎭 Culture & Hollywood

• Variety: Adam McKay Says There’s ‘No Group Worse’ Than White Liberals

• Variety: Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey Armor Draws Travis Scott Backlash

• City Journal: Ben Sasse on America’s Future

🪶 Quote

“The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.”

— Ernest Hemingway