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

a month 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

a month 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

My warning to President Trump in the Daily Wire:

In a very literal sense, Taiwan is moving westward toward China, and there’s nothing that can be done about it. The tectonic plates that have shifted over millions of years, creating the island’s mountain terrain, are also driving it slowly and irrevocably toward the mainland. That notoriously craggy terrain is expected to act as a deterrent to any attack from the People’s Liberation Army from across the Taiwan Strait, a lane of the Pacific which runs as narrow as 100 miles and for the most part shallower than 100 meters. For the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan lies just out of reach. It is the military equivalent of skipping a smooth rock.

Taiwan’s position as a locus of China’s ambitions go beyond the temptation of seizing hold of the island’s burgeoning chip industry. It is the path to becoming a true ocean-ruling power, breaking out of the chain of Western-allied archipelagos that run along the Pacific Ring of Fire. To extend the PLA’s untested forces and grasp Taiwan isn’t just a matter of national pride to further the One China policy. It is a giant step toward the global dominance China’s leader, Xi Jinping, wants to transform into an inevitability — his lifetime’s legacy for the PRC.

For critics who have questioned the interests of the United States in its military support for Taiwan, the explosion of the semiconductor industry came at an unfortunate time. Beyond the obvious American interest in defending against the expansion of China’s brutal communist regime, Taiwan is now dominating the global foundry of chips — including more than 60 percent of the market overall, and 90 percent of the most advanced versions, central to the pursuit of artificial intelligence dominance. Taiwan’s innovations made their independence essential at exactly the same time protectionists and isolationists wanted to press the case the island is utterly dispensible.

How very inconvenient.

The question that confronts Donald Trump now as he wings his way to the long-anticipated meeting with Xi Jinping is how clearly he will make that importance known. There is no security, market, or historical incentive at this point to concede the long-held position of the United States toward Taiwan — bolstered most recently in a December package that included $11 billion in weapons for the island. But there is the question of how dedicated the Taiwanese are to their own defense, after the opposition to Taiwan’s president — who holds the largest portion of legislative seats — nixed a major package that would’ve significantly increased their defense spending, opting for a half measure that cut back on domestic drone production and their air defense systems. The opposition’s leader, Cheng Li-wun, has courted accusations that she’s working to diminish the island’s deterrence capability — a storyline that only grew after she chose to meet with Xi Jinping in person last month.

For the people of Taiwan, there is also the question of time. Opposition to the acceptance of China taking over their republic is largely the view of older members of society, and the youngest people on the island seem increasingly open to the idea. The constant influence of PRC-backed social media campaigns and outreach efforts to exert soft power over the minds of youths absolutely has something to do with this. For a population that is facing a gargantuan decline — their fertility rate fell to the lowest in the world last year at 0.7 — perhaps all China will have to do is wait them out.

The PRC has telegraphed its Taiwan-related intent for this meeting all along. It wants to tempt Donald Trump by appealing to his personal vision as a peacemaker — particularly in the context of the Iran conflict — by asking for an alteration to stated U.S. policy, or just to have the president declare publicly that he opposes Taiwan’s independence. The propaganda victory alone would send a shudder through the island’s political leadership and would be a coup for Xi Jinping, even if it may seem like a low-cost offering from President Trump for potential economic gain.

In this context, the meeting this week takes on a whole new importance when it comes to dictating the future — not just for AI in the West, but for Donald Trump’s legacy as a world leader. He has restored a hardened focus on America’s interests, particularly in the Western Hemisphere. As dedicated as he is to ending Iran’s chances at becoming a nuclear power, some of his advisors might use that effort’s uncertainty as a justification for sacrificing America’s interests in Taiwan.

If there’s one thing we know about this president, it’s that, as much as he listens to those around him, he keeps his own counsel on the right path forward. There is no wisdom in being remembered as the president who gave China what it craves most. And in a brutal sense, so long as the PRC’s energy is directed at this one infuriatingly productive mountainous island the size of West Virginia, it is spending less time on everything else it would like to do to become the global superpower of Xi Jinping’s dreams. Trump is a gambler, wagering the cost of breaking norms and diplomatic rituals on his, and America’s, strength. Today, that is a cost worth paying.

More:

• WSJ: Trump and Xi Prepare for High-Stakes China Meeting

• Semafor: Senators Warn Against Unilateral Changes to Taiwan Policy

• Fox News: Hugh Hewitt: Xi, Free Lai

• WSJ: Inside Taiwan’s Coast Guard Mission to Thwart a Chinese Blockade

• NYT: Trump’s China Arrival and the Airport Diplomacy of Presidents

Subscribe now

What Did Fauci Know And Why Did He Hide It?

An explosive hearing.

A current CIA employee accused Dr. Anthony Fauci of “injecting” himself into the intelligence community’s investigation on the origins of COVID-19 — and said he played an “intentional” role in the agency’s scrapping of a plan in 2021 to announce the virus was leaked from a Chinese lab.

The whistleblower, James Erdman III, made the claim while testifying before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Wednesday morning.

“Public health policy would have been very different had the American public been made aware that a virus from a lab in China was going to serve as the foundation for an emergency use authorization MRNA products being mandated by the former administration,” Erdman testified in his opening remarks. “Dr. Fauci’s role in the cover-up was intentional. Dr. Fauci influenced the analytical process and findings by leveraging his position to insure the IC consulted with the conflicted list of curated subject matter experts, public health officials, and scientists.”

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) later asked him several questions about Fauci’s alleged meddling in the CIA probe into COVID.

“Your conclusion is changing from the scientific consensus of it being from a lab to a neutral position by the CIA was significantly influenced by Anthony Fauci?” Paul asked.

“It was significantly influenced by Anthony Fauci injecting himself into the IC,” Erdman said.

He continued, saying the CIA was “considering calling this a lab leak” on August 12, 2021, following a 90-day study.

“That changed on August 17, 2021,” Erdman said. “And unfortunately because the CIA would not provide us documentation that we asked for, we have no idea why that changed.”

More here in Daily Wire.

Trying To Run D.C.’s Hottest Restaurant While Surrounded By Weed Dispensaries

Bart Hutchins of Butterworth’s writes:

My restaurant in Washington, D.C., Butterworth’s, is in no danger of losing a Michelin star because we have none. But we sweep behind the refrigerators, pressure wash the sidewalk, and prepare food the hard way. Our french fries take three days to make. The sauce for our bone marrow escargot, two. When lamb is on the menu, it is usually a whole lamb, butchered in its entirety down to each cut. We do these things because we cannot help ourselves. Because we aren’t sure who we would be without it.

Next door is one of many cannabis dispensaries in D.C. Down the block, two more. One block further down Pennsylvania Avenue, three more. They have names like “BluntSlut” and “Highway420” in purple neon and QR codes taped crookedly to the glass. At eleven o’clock in the morning, men stand outside watching videos on their phones at full volume while smoke drifts through the front doors whenever a guest opens it. There have been plenty of nights when I am getting crushed by orders for tartare and steak au poivre while a man in pajama pants leans against a lime scooter and screams into the street.

Washington, D.C.’s marijuana laws exist in a state of deliberate confusion, which I know because I spent an unpleasant afternoon trying to understand them. In 2014, D.C. voters legalized personal possession. But Congress, which controls the city’s budget, blocked D.C. from licensing or regulating commercial sales. The result is a market that cannot legally exist and cannot be stopped from existing. For years, the city’s solution was the “gift economy,” where if you bought a sticker, marijuana appeared in your hand. It had the logic of children. Then the city cracked down, raided sixty-odd shops, and arrived at its replacement: declare yourself a medical patient by phone in four minutes, walk into a licensed dispensary, and buy whatever you like. The transaction is legal now. The logic is still childish.

It is so glaringly obvious that weed, as it is currently quasi-regulated in D.C., is not working. But no one seems interested in resolving the underlying issues. Congress lacks the attention span, and the city has only barely managed to replace one absurdity with a slightly less absurd one. One week, the city raided dispensaries only to have those same dispensaries reopen under different names with the same employees beneath the same neon the very next week. “Cloud9” became “ZaMuseum.” Somebody printed new menus, and the whole performance resumed. This week, we have “marijuana lounges” coming, so you can gather with fellow gentlemen and scholars to smoke your weed in person.

I do not especially care if people smoke weed. Civilization has always contained vice. Restaurants are vice. Alcohol certainly is. Butter and cigarettes and beautiful women in black dresses and staying out too late on a Tuesday are, too. Some of the best parts of life are. But D.C.’s haphazard weed culture is not a vice; it’s a cash grab by the dumbest people you’ve ever met, overseen by its laziest.

This malaise seems to be the entire working policy of D.C. Most days feel like the Do Lung Bridge scene in Apocalypse Now. The bridge keeps getting shelled. Music blares in the background. Martin Sheen’s character asks a soldier, “Who’s your commanding officer?” The kid with a machine gun in his hand asks: “Ain’t you?”

If you squint, there are times when Pennsylvania Avenue feels vaguely ceremonial. It feels like “The Capital,” “The White House,” “America,” and its great empire. But more soberly, it mostly looks like empty storefronts and a Reddit homepage come to life — a place where you can hand-cut potatoes while down the street somebody sells pre-rolled joints named after cartoon characters…

Congress says it’s a local matter. The city says Congress tied its hands. We are led by morons who do not care that the day-to-day exhaustion of this lack of leadership is absorbed by idiots like me, who still show up every day, still caring.

✍️ Feature

• Daily Wire: Rick Scott: Victory In Iran, Nothing Less

🌍 Foreign

• National Interest: Why the US and Iran Are Losing Confidence in Pakistan

• Times of Israel: Saudi Arabia’s Strange War: Appease Iran, Rebuff Israel

• The Guardian: Russian Ship Ursa Major Sank While Transporting Nuclear Reactors to North Korea

• New York Post: America, Take A Lesson From UK PM Keir Starmer’s Humiliation

• Daily Wire: Is The CIA Ramping Up Anti-Cartel Operations Inside Mexico?

🏛️ Domestic

• Axios: Inflation Continues to Worsen

• Daily Wire: Democrats Go Full Insane Mode After Virginia Court Enforces Rule of Law

• Politico: GOP Faces Affordability Pickle

• Politico: Democrat Donor Stephen Cloobeck Arrested

• Yahoo News: GOP Rep Humiliates Boy

• New York Magazine: Something Weird Is Going On With Cole Allen’s Prosecution

• Washington Examiner: The New Right Wants To Help Workers. Its Labor Policy Will Hurt Them

• WSJ: A Spending Splurge By Baltimore City Hall Is Stoking Taxpayer Outrage

• Semafor: Mayor Zohran Mamdani Is Wading Into An International M&A Deal

• NYT: Test Scores Are Falling Across American School Districts

• Daily Wire: What Needs To Change To Make America Pro-Life

• Yahoo News: Murdaugh Convictions Overturned

📰 Media

• Hollywood Reporter: Warner Bros. Discovery Upfront Felt Like a Funeral — and David Zaslav Wasn’t There

💻 Tech

• Semafor: What Spencer Pratt’s Rise Can Teach Both Parties About AI-Age Campaigning

🧬 Health

• Daily Wire: Daily Wire Medicaid Investigation Triggers A $1.4 BILLION Spending Freeze, Warning To States

• Washington Examiner: JD Vance Fraud Task Force Pause Medicare Home Healthcare Hospice

🏈 Sports

• Daily Wire: Lane Kiffin Apologizes For Comments On Race And Recruiting

🎭 Culture & Hollywood

• Variety: ‘Survivor 50’ Producers Address Editing Backlash

• Variety: Michael Che Says He Dropped Out Of Kevin Hart Roast

• Variety: Saudi Arabia Courts Hollywood Amid Warner Bros.-Paramount Merger Dreams

🪶 Quote

“Let’s check in on California local politics, where the mayor of a town of ~55,000 people has just admitted to acting as a foreign agent for China, running a pro-CCP propaganda outlet with her ex-fiancé who prosecutors say was seeking to mold his double-agent lover into a political star capable of furthering China’s goals in the U.S. (no word on if “slide in Eric Swalwell’s DMs” was part of the plan). From 2020-2022, Eileen Wang, the mayor of Arcadia, apparently helped run “U.S. News Center,” a deceptively-named outlet on account of its marching orders came directly from… Beijing. In one instance, a PRC boss even praised Wang for getting a high viewcount on a piece of distributed propaganda, to which the lovely mayor replied, “Thank you leader.” Proposal: can we now investigate every other California mayor for foreign ties just to be safe? Particularly ones who flew to Africa while their cities burned.”

— Riley Nork

In a massive blow to Virginia Democrats and the national party’s hopes for the midterms, the Virginia Supreme Court threw out the 10-1 gerrymander passed narrowly by voters last month as unconstitutional, finding its result “null and void.”

The Court’s 4-3 ruling is a vindication for critics like former attorneys general Jason Miyares and Ken Cuccinelli, both of whom were loud critics of the process that put the referendum on the ballot in the first place.

This wasn’t even about the bizarre nature of the Democrat-favoring map itself, with its now notorious lobster-shaped district. The court ruled that the General Assembly failed to meet the Commonwealth’s constitutional requirements, which include an intervening election. The fact that early voting had already led to almost half of Virginia voters casting their ballots meant the session that General Assembly Democrats used to spark the referendum process in an October 31 vote didn’t pass muster.

“While the Commonwealth is free by its lights to do the right thing for the right reason, the Rule of Law requires that it be done the right way,” Justice Arthur Kelsey wrote for the majority.

Everyone involved on the Democratic side now has egg on their face. The 10-1 redistricting referendum dominated the political conversation of Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s first months in office, squandering any goodwill among independents toward the faux-moderate. It set a pile of money on fire to the tune of more than $70 million from Democrats nationwide pouring into ads, promotions, and social media.

Spanberger isn’t the only victim of this hubris, caught as she was in an immediate flip-flop on the issue and forced by state Senate President pro tempore Louise Lucas — the most powerful Democrat in Richmond, who this week had her offices and businesses raided by the FBI — to accept such an extreme map. National Democrats flocked to push for the measure, including noted constitutional scholar Barack Obama.

The Democrats still have major backing heading into the midterms, and history says they should sweep into power in the House of Representatives. But their biggest investment and most extreme move in the redistricting game blew up in their faces, and Virginians can rejoice that the state Supreme Court found their methods to violate the rules and the law.

As for House Democrats, this statement to Axios, offered on condition of anonymity, is a good summary of their mood: “F*****ck!!”

More from me on Fox this weekend. Here’s Ken Cuccinelli, the former AG, who believed all along (and wrote this Daily Wire oped spiking the football):

More here:

• NYT: Jeffries, Democrats Consider Replacing Entire VA Supreme Court

• Daily Wire: How Much Virginians Paid For Democratic Gerrymander

• Punchbowl News: Johnson, Jeffries Clash Over Voting Rights Act

On 250th, Pride in America is a Partisan Divide

Deseret News:

Americans and Utahns who took the surveys, conducted April 15-20 by Morning Consult, were asked if they plan to celebrate the nation’s 250th birthday.

Utahns (64%), more than other Americans (48%), said they were planning on celebrating the anniversary, and Republicans were far more likely than Democrats and independents to say they will celebrate. In Utah, 80% of Republicans plan to celebrate compared to just 31% of Democrats. Nationally, 65% of Republicans have plans to celebrate and 37% of Democrats say the same.

The survey found that both in Utah and nationwide, the youngest age group, 18 to 34, were the least likely to say they would celebrate. Nationally, 44% of that age group plan to celebrate, and in Utah, 58% say they plan to celebrate the 250th.

More at Daily Wire: Woke Parents Protest As School Dares To Celebrate America’s 250th Birthday

A Third of Democrats Believe WHCD Shooting Staged

The reality based community:

A recent survey conducted by YouGov and NewsGuard asked Americans about the three attempts on Trump’s life — the Butler, Pennsylvania shooting, the thwarted attempted at the president’s golf course, in West Palm Beach, and the shooting at the Washington Hilton just weeks earlier. According to the survey, just 38% of respondents believed all three assassination attempts were legitimate. Additionally, 54% of respondents said all three were staged or that they weren’t sure.

Perhaps predictably, the numbers showed extreme variations between party lines. The report continued:

• The contention that the three events may have been staged correlates strongly with party identification. Across all three events, Democrats were far more likely than Republicans to endorse the “staged” framing.

• In total, 21 percent of Democrats responded that they thought all three events were staged, as did 11 percent of Independents and three percent of Republicans.

• Of the 12 percent of Americans who said that all three attempts were staged, 55 percent were Democrats, 38 percent were Independents, and seven percent were Republicans.

• Of the respondents who said that all three incidents were authentic, only 15 percent were Democrats. Thirty-eight percent were Independents and 47 percent were Republicans.

• For the most recent event — at the April 25, 2026, White House Correspondents’ Dinner — 34 percent of Democrats and 13 percent of Republicans said it was staged, a 21-point gap.

✍️ Feature

• New Yorker: How Americans Caught Gold Fever Again

🌍 Foreign

• Semafor: Iran War To Overshadow Trump-Xi Meeting In Beijing

• Asia Times: Trump-Xi US Uncertainty, China Ambition

• National Interest: The New Age Of Supply Chain Warfare

• Spectator: China’s Theft Of American AI Tech Is Becoming More Brazen

• Telegraph: Iran Executes ‘US Spy’

• Daily Wire: One Daughter’s Mother’s Day Nightmare From Xi Jinping

• Semafor: War Squeezes Asian Farmers, Oil Prices

• MSN: UAE Slips Hidden Oil Tankers Through Strait Of Hormuz

• Daily Wire: Great Britain Is A Case Of Institutional Priorities Gone Mad, So Voters Revolted

• CNBC: Starmer Fights For His Political Future In Pivotal Speech

• National Interest: The Trump Administration’s Counterterrorism Strategy Takes Aim At Drug Cartels

🏛️ Domestic

• Decision Desk HQ: House 2026: Democrats Are Still Favored

• Axios: Trump Weighs Suspending Federal Gas Tax

• WSJ: Trump Clears Way For More Beef Imports, Aiming To Bring Down Record-High Prices

• Axios: Thomas Massie Faces Ed Gallrein Challenge Backed By AIPAC, Trump

• Daily Wire: AOC Flunks American History

• Politico: White House Correspondents’ Dinner Shooting Suspect Enters Not Guilty Plea

• Daily Wire: Rubio: ‘We Aren’t A Stupid Country’

• Daily Wire: The Controversial Connection Between Newsom’s ‘Free Diapers’ Plan And His Wife

• New York Magazine: California Governor Race Is a Mess

• Daily Wire: Spencer Pratt Shares Raw Mother’s Day Tribute To Wife

📰 Media

• Verge: Substack’s High Fees Opens Door For Ghost, Beehiiv

💻 Tech

• Spectator: China’s Theft Of American AI Tech Is Becoming More Brazen

🧬 Health

• WSJ: Healthcare Jobs Continue To Power The U.S. Labor Market

• Daily Wire: Let’s Get Physical — MAHA Is Gaining Momentum Nationwide

✝️ Religion

• Graphs About Religion: The Pro-Life Democrat Is A Political Unicorn

🏈 Sports

• House Of Strauss: The Libs Give Up On Adam Silver

• WSJ: Brooks Koepka’s PGA-LIV Crossroads

• Hollywood Reporter: Lachlan Murdoch Deepens NFL Ties

🎭 Culture & Hollywood

• Hollywood Reporter: BravoCon 2027 And Bravo Fan Fest Head To Charleston

• Hollywood Reporter: Pete Davidson’s Charlie Kirk Joke At Kevin Hart Roast

• Variety: Kevin Hart Roast’s Best Jokes — Including The Ones Netflix Cut

• Variety: Ben Affleck And Matt Damon Sued Over ‘The Rip’

• Daily Wire: ‘Bored’ Kids Are Making A Comeback

🪶 Quote

“I have seen much war in my lifetime and I hate it profoundly. But there are worse things than war; and all of them come with defeat. The more you hate war, the more you know that once you are forced into it, for whatever reason it may be, you have to win it. You have to win it and get rid of the people that made it and see that, this time, it never comes to us again.”

— Ernest Hemingway

Share

Subscribe now

Kevin McCarthy: The GOP Can Fight the Blue Wave

The Daily Wire Interview:

Daily Wire: The cycle and the history is obviously against Republicans, especially in the House, which everybody has basically written off. What are the three things that you think Republicans and the House in particular should be doing differently?

McCarthy: First of all, you study history. So the party in off-year elections usually doesn’t do as well. If you look at New Jersey and Virginia, how those gubernatorial races go, it kind of gives you some indication. If Democrats win both, they usually flip. If Republicans win one, we flip. But there are some things internally that upset me that Republicans should be doing differently.

First, the use of discharge petitions. Now, a discharge petition is 218 people sign a discharge petition, your bill automatically comes to the floor. If you’re in the majority, that’s simply saying, “I’m going to turn the floor over to the Democrats.”

They should stop allowing that to happen. They have passed more discharge petitions in three weeks than happened in 30 years. They let a discharge petition authored by a squad member just pass.

Too many retirements; we’ve now set a new record. So that’s another indication. You’re not just running for higher office; you don’t like the job.

They’re fighting with the Republicans in the Senate too much. So what they’re doing in this is they’re setting every indication to the public that they can’t win or they can’t govern.

They should stick together. They should put an agenda together and they should stop recessing. Now, the Senate stayed in when the Democrats shut down the government, but the members of the Republicans in the House left.

Think about this. The voters gave you 24 months to be in the majority, and you just took two months of that and didn’t use it. If I was in the minority and I stopped the majority from being able to govern, that’s a victory. You could be in there passing bills that are 80 / 20 every day of the week. You gave up your majority for two months when you only have 24 months of it. This is the part that upsets me. And then I watched, like the week before, they fought on things that were never going to fly in the Senate, and they took up so much time with that. I want to see things that shift in the voters’ minds that they want to have you be in the majority. So you know what? Focus on the economy, focus on crime, and you can divide the Democrats on this and really show the public who they want to be governing.

Daily Wire: The complaints that you said are all complaints that I’ve heard from members, particularly leaving town. Why does that happen? Who in the architecture of power thinks that’s a good idea?

McCarthy: I don’t know, because I would not have allowed that to happen.

Because if you’re given this power for a short time, the public’s going to judge you on how you use it. If you’re in a sporting event, if you’re in a basketball game in the last seconds, are you going to quit? Are you going to set up and take that shot?

You want to show the public that, even if the Democrats are doing derelict things, that if you’re in charge, you don’t walk away. You put them in their place, and then you go show simple bills out there, and the Democrats vote “no,” you vote “yes,” and show the public the difference. I give the Senate credit. They stayed in session.

Daily Wire: The other one I hear a lot from members is frustration with the Senate, that they feel the Senate has expectations and priorities that aren’t aligned with theirs. I literally had a member last week saying, “The Senate’s going to screw us over on this particular thing again.” And my question is, why don’t Republicans in the House and Senate understand that voters in this midterm are going to vote based on you as a unit?

McCarthy: It’s always the old argument. The Senate is the enemy. The other party is my adversary; they get mad at us. You’re 100% correct. The public is not going to sit back and say, “Oh, it was the Senate. Oh, it was the House.” They could say, “Republicans, you were in charge. What job did you do?”

Recently, I watched as the Democrats shut down the government, and when the Senate passed the bill over to the House, the House Republicans voted no, and then a month later voted for the exact same thing by voice vote. But what they did there was take the shutdown. It’s a difficult job and a hard job to lead, but if you only take advice from the Freedom Caucus, you’re only going to end up in one or two places: in a cul-de-sac or in the minority.

You’ve got to understand the rules of the House are different than the rules of the Senate, but that’s why you’ve got to work together, achieve as many conservative aims as you can, pass that, and come back for what you didn’t get the next day. But fighting with each other lets the Democrats sit back and say, “They’re the problem,” instead of highlighting and putting the Democrats in a weaker position, or having them vote against popular bills.

Democrats’ Redistricting Fight Goes Sideways

Punchbowl News:

Every day of delay has Virginia and national Democrats growing more skittish. Yet Democrats could still win two of the contested four seats even if they lose in court.

If the new map doesn’t go into effect, Democrats still have a good chance at toppling GOP Reps. Rob Wittman and Jen Kiggans. But GOP Reps. John McGuire and Ben Cline will likely be safe.

The GOP South. It’s been a week since SCOTUS ruled in Louisiana v. Callais. And Republican-controlled southern states — under pressure from Trump — have moved extremely fast in response.

GOP lawmakers in Tennessee have already circulated a map designed to draw Rep. Steve Cohen out of his Memphis seat with negligible impact to the state’s other Republicans.

Louisiana Republicans are likely to redraw at least one of the Bayou State’s two Democrats out of the House.

Alabama GOP officials are pressuring the Supreme Court to lift an order that forces the state to keep its congressional map until 2030. This would allow the Republican-run legislature to at least draw Democratic Rep. Shomari Figures out of his seat, stretching from Mobile to the Georgia border. In theory, Republicans could also go for Democratic Rep. Terri Sewell, whose district is anchored in Birmingham.

South Carolina is mulling a new map to eliminate iconic Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn’s deep blue seat. Clyburn is the only elected Democrat remaining in the Palmetto State delegation.

Mississippi’s Republican Gov. Tate Reeves told the Daily Caller he’s considering a push to eliminate Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson’s seat in the western part of the state. Mississippi already had its primary, so this is very likely a 2028 move.

None of these Republican-drawn maps are final yet. The Florida map is subject to multiple lawsuits. Yet even if the map stands, Jeffries and Democratic leaders think they can snatch a few light red seats from the GOP. South Carolina Republicans are far from assured of passing their map.

Nationwide, a number of seats are trending in the Democrats’ direction. If the current political environment continues to worsen for the GOP, Democrats may even pick up or hold onto seats that Republicans redrew.

Faith, Partners, and Marriage Patterns

Graphs About Religion:

There’s this phrase I heard over and over again growing up in a Southern Baptist Church - “don’t be unequally yoked.” It’s a reference to a verse from 2 Corinthians 6:14, “Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?” In my experience it is always used in the context of finding a spouse. The admonition is to find someone to marry who has the same faith background as you. The worry for my evangelical group leaders was that if one of us married a non-believer, our spouse might lead us down a path toward secularism.

But the general admonition is the same in many faith communities: try to marry someone who shares your faith background. That’s certainly a well-established norm in Jewish communities. According to Kiddushin 68b, marriage between a Jew and a non-Jew is prohibited under Jewish law. In Islam, there’s not an outright prohibition on marrying a non-Muslim, but the Quran only permits people to marry other “People of the Book.”

There are theological reasons for this, as was commonly invoked in my evangelical upbringing. Each spouse can edify the other’s faith and grow closer together as they grow closer to God. But there’s also a really important sociological reason for it, too: kids who are raised by two parents who share the same faith background are more likely to be raised in a consistently religious home. This likely increases the chances a faith is passed down from one generation to another. This is a powerful reason religious groups might discourage interfaith marriages.

The ARDA is hosting the most recent wave of the Pew Religious Landscape Study, which was conducted in 2023-2024 and it has a whole host of insightful questions about who folks are marrying and how much they talk about faith in their home. It includes a variable indicating whether respondents’ current religion matches that of their partner’s. If a Catholic married a Protestant, that would not be defined as a match. If a mainline Protestant was married to an evangelical, that’s still a match because they are both Protestants. A Muslim marrying a Jew wouldn’t be a match and so on. You get the picture.

The groups most likely to marry someone of the same faith background are Hindus (86%), evangelicals (83%) and Latter-day Saints (81%). They are followed closely by Black Protestants at 79%. Then there’s a pretty noticeable gap and a whole bunch of traditions are clumped right around 70% including Catholics and the non-religious.

✍️ Feature

Blocked and Reported

Premium: Is Dropout TV Antisemitic Copaganda?

This week on the Primo show, Jesse and Katie discuss Dropout TV, the successor to College Humor, and two controversies manufactured by a small subset of psychotic fans…

Listen now

2 months ago · 82 likes · 310 comments · Katie Herzog

🌍 Foreign

• National Interest: How The U.S. And Europe Can Open The Strait Of Hormuz And Empower Ukraine

• New York Times: How Oil Tankers Navigate The Strait Of Hormuz

• National Security Journal: Iran Wants To Make Sure It Can Close The Strait Of Hormuz Anytime It Wants

• Asia Times: The Cold, Hard Realism Of Saudi Hedging

• Wall Street Journal: Putin’s Strongman Image Is Fading As Ukraine Brings War Home To Russia

• Wall Street Journal: Marco Rubio Meeting Pope Leo, Giorgia Meloni

• New York Times: Britain’s Local Elections Deliver Another Blow To Keir Starmer

🏛️ Domestic

• Wall Street Journal: Jet Fuel Prices Are Spiking And Trump Advisers Are Worried

• Axios: Trump Allies Push Redistricting Plans In Multiple States

• Politico: Xavier Becerra’s Rise is Surprising in California Governor Race

• New York Post: Spencer Pratt Clashes With Karen Bass And Nithya Raman In LA Debate

• Washington Examiner: Grand Jury Indictment In Cole Allen Case

• Semafor: Graham’s Democratic Opponent Hits Him On Ballroom Funding

• Politico: Sherrod Brown Alters Crypto Politics

• Politico: Shapiro Bets Big On Pennsylvania House Race

• Axios: Judge Releases Jeffrey Epstein Purported Suicide Note

• City Journal: Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court

• Daily Wire: Remembering Peter Ferrara

📰 Media

• Deadline: Garrett Haake Named NBC News Chief White House Correspondent

• Daily Wire: The ‘New Left’ On The Right: Siding With America’s Enemies

• Hollywood Reporter: TV News Anchors Face Industry Shakeups

• Mediaite: GOP Senator Launches Tirade Over Obama-Colbert Sit-Down

• Daily Beast: Bari Weiss Meddled In Another Show’s Report

🧬 Health

• Washington Examiner: Rudy Giuliani Reflects On 9/11 Health Coverage In New York

• The Cut: Supplements And The Influencer Economy

• Wall Street Journal: Hantavirus Contact Tracing Expands To Cruise Ship

✝️ Religion

• New York Magazine: JD Vance And The Catholic Right Split From The Pope

• Daily Wire: Biden And His Cronies Engaged In Anti-Christian Actions, What’s Shocking Is The Extent

🏈 Sports

• Closing Line: FanDuel CEO Amy Howe Out, Christian Genetski In

• Daily Wire: Will A Saudi-Funded Golf League Survive Despite Low Ratings And Low Cash?

🎭 Culture & Hollywood

• Variety: Gen Z Cancels Streaming Subs After One Show, Stop Buying Games

• Hollywood Reporter: Matt Shakman To Direct Planet Of The Apes Movie

• Daily Wire: A Big Disney Reset Is Quietly Taking Shape

🪶 Quote

“This book will not tell you how to die. Some cheerleaders of war can always get out a pamphlet telling the best way to go through that small but necessary business at the end. PM may have published it already in a special Sunday issue with pictures. They might even have it bound up as a companion piece to the issue I read in November 1941 entitled ‘How We Can Lick Japan in Sixty Days’. No. This book will not tell you how to die. This book will tell you, though, how all men from the earliest times we know have fought and died. So when you have read it you will know that there are no worse things to be gone through than men have been through before.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“Fly me to the moon,” Frank Sinatra sang in 1964, “Let me play among the stars.” The song was recorded more than 100 times before Sinatra’s version appeared on his album, It Might as Well Be Swing. It was released one year after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. In another five years, Sinatra’s recording would play on a Sony TC-50 portable cassette player on the Apollo 10 mission, which orbited the Moon in May 1969.

It was fitting that the biggest star in American entertainment — the Chairman of the Board, the leader of the Rat Pack, Mr. Las Vegas and Palm Springs — with those electric blue eyes and buttery voice, would lend his singular vocals to the mid-20th century’s consummate moment. Pop culture meets celebrity meets the American Space Cowboy in one bold, frontier-expanding, mind-blowing, breathtaking, victorious, seemingly impossible starburst adventure into the heavens themselves.

What happened to us?

Space, that final frontier, is overshadowed by the perpetual glow of screens and the mind-crushing, unimaginative “creator class” more interested in monetizing people’s brain synapses through cat memes and AI slop bots.

At one time, astronauts ruled the covers of glossy magazines, nightly newscasts, and film reels. The nation hung breathlessly on NASA updates during our Cold War battle with the Soviet Union. It was a unique convergence of nerd-meets-jock as America’s brightest minds built a pathway to space helmed by the country’s daredevil real-life rocket men who practically double-dog dared each other to blow Death himself a kiss behind the throttles of experimental planes as post-WWII test pilots. These men had the Right Stuff, and Americans were cheering them every step of the way because the very existence of the free world and the American way of life was at stake.

At the time, astronauts and just about anyone in NASA’s orbit could be included in the celebrity-hero category. Even astronauts’ wives piqued the American people’s curiosity and subsequent press coverage. They were the first “Real Housewives,” but with a more wholesome, patriotic plotline.

Now, famous-for-being-famous is the truthism of our time. Celebrity is not much more than a slurry of performative indulgence, self-important fame whoring, and personal branding. One needs to look at Jeff Bezos’s foray into civilian space travel to see this in action. It was a real cast of characters in the worst all-female remake of a space adventure imaginable. The Girl Power Space Cadets — launched into a few minutes of weightlessness via the Blue Origin spacecraft — were powered by Bezos, who seems plenty happy to orbit his wife’s celestial spheres and send her, in a nod to Jackie Gleason’s Honeymooners character Ralph Kramden, “To the moon!” in addition to making those same celebs angry about buying his way into Monday evening’s Met Gala. What’s a billionaire to do?

No, these aren’t heroes, and they barely qualify as celebrities, even by today’s standards. The real astronauts, the ones who should be cruising down New York City’s Fifth Avenue in a ticker-tape parade, who should be invited to speak at every college and university commencement address this graduation season, who should be the star of every party and never have to buy a beer at one ever again, are the Artemis II astronauts. Sure, they didn’t actually land on the moon, but they reached farther into the depths of space than any human ever. They witnessed the Earth set behind the moon. They didn’t listen to Dark Side of the Moon; they experienced it. It was the first crewed flight beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972, and everyone just shrugged.

In fact, when the four-man crew (Victor Glover, Christina Koch, Jeremy Hansen, and Reid Wiseman) recently appeared in the Oval Office standing behind President Donald Trump, not a single question was directed at them by the press. The late comedian-prophet Norm Macdonald is nodding with knowing disappointment from the great beyond.

Even when the press asks the Artemis II crew questions, they center on an identity-based narrative rather than the enormity of the accomplishment. To his credit, Victor Glover has redirected this messaging toward an American experience and achievement rather than on his being a black man. We should expect as much from the press and fame ecosystem, where what passes for being a celebrity or an admired entertainer is their “influencer” status.

Read the rest. It should not be lost on us that the Artemis II astronauts got 20 minutes in the Oval Office and no journalist even asked them a question.

Subscribe now

MAHA’s Farming Retreat

Pirate Wires:

What is regenerative agriculture? The name feels concerningly evocative of the corpo-slop buzzwords (sustainability, green bonds, climate change, ESG, etc.) that we left behind in November 2024, but it actually does mean something. It’s basically a way to keep soil healthy. These farmers aim to reduce chemical usage as much as possible and plant “cover crops” that act as “living mulch” — essentially keeping land more fertile over time, and producing much tastier food.

Sovereignty Ranch is a sandbox for these regenerative strategies. The enclave was founded in 2021 by siblings Ryland and Mollie Englehart, who had spent their past lives operating a series of vegan restaurants in Los Angeles and working at environmental NGOs and non-profits. In the midst of COVID, they renounced their Californian ways and moved east to Texas, where they now run a thriving cattle ranch, eat meat, and work to reduce chemical-intensive farming.

Like many MAHA touchstones (raw milk, vaccine skepticism), regenerative farming is kind of crunchy and countercultural — a feature reflected in their merchandise: a “2nd Amendment Hippie” shirt featured a wild-haired hippie girl holding up an AR-15. Another shirt: “Raw Milk: The Real White Privilege.”

Between regenerative organic cheeseburgers and speeches from MAHA evangelists, a group of male activists from Southern California asked me whether I’d ever done psychedelics. When I shamefully confessed that I had not, they provided a lengthy instructional tutorial on microdosing.

As I made my way to a presentation on clean butchery, I discussed King Charles’ support of regenerative agriculture with a well-dressed Englishman, who explained to me that he’d quit his corporate job to meditate in India for a decade before joining a bioherbicide company that sought to unseat the dominant herbicides of Glyphosate and Diquat and replace them with a MAHA-approved alternative.

Other conversations ranged from optimistic preaching about the newest superfood mushroom or supplement powder to angry rants about data center construction, Palantir’s recently inked deal with the USDA to centralize farmer data, and cloud seeding in the Great Salt Lake (featuring hats that read “Make Clouds Real Again”).

Taiwan’s Defense Budget Fight

The National Interest:

To understand this dispute, one must understand the three primary paths Taiwan takes to acquire weaponry.

The first path is Foreign Military Sales (FMS), overwhelmingly from the United States. This is a straightforward government-to-government transaction. Taiwan submits a request, the US government conducts political and military assessments, the State Department manages the diplomatic timing, and the Department of Defense, DSCA, and relevant services handle execution, pricing, delivery, and logistics.

The advantage of FMS is a clear chain of accountability. However, FMS has never been a purely commercial transaction; it is always a segment of the United States’ foreign policy. When Washington is engaged in strategic dialogue with Beijing, the announcement of sensitive sales may be slowed, segmented, or delayed without warning.

The timing of the FMS process is one major reason the defense budget is currently stalled. The portion of the budget with the most consensus consists of the items that have already gone through visible FMS channels, such as HIMARS and Javelin missiles. These are easier for the legislature to accept because the nature of the deals is obvious, the link to US government supervision is evident, and the accountability chain is discernible. The real friction begins as the budget moves toward the higher mark that is expected to include advanced FMS items like PAC-3 MSE and the Integrated Battle Command System. If these had already been formalized through the FMS process, the special budget would have high legitimacy, and the legislature might well have approved the funds by now. However, because these FMS cases have not yet been finalized, a political and procurement vacuum has emerged. Into that vacuum have stepped DCS proposals, domestic manufacturing schemes, and various middlemen.

The second path is Direct Commercial Sales (DCS), through which the Taiwanese government signs a contract directly with a US manufacturer. In a “true” DCS arrangement, the Taiwanese government contracts directly with a US defense manufacturer or exporter, rather than routing the purchase through a local prime contractor. Liability for delivery, warranties, maintenance, and upgrades remains with the US original equipment manufacturer (OEM).

DCS is more flexible and often faster than FMS. If the prime contractor is a reputable US firm, the chain of responsibility is clear, and the pricing is verifiable. This can be a viable solution that satisfies Washington’s demand for higher spending while avoiding FMS delays. The harder question is whether the State Department and the Pentagon are prepared to endorse newer or less proven defense contractors in sensitive DCS arrangements.

But the most critical issue Washington must address is the often-neglected third path: domestic commissioning and indigenous production.

The Cultural End of the Useless Dad?

Michael Knipp in Daily Wire:

Capcom’s recently released title Pragmata has already been dubbed a “dad simulator” by gamers. The game sold over 1 million copies (at $60 a pop) in two days. Pragmata follows Hugh, a man tasked with protecting and guiding a naive young (android) girl through a hostile environment. Beneath the sci-fi combat, players have been drawn to something more resonant: the protective instinct, the mentorship, and the pride of helping someone grow. In short, the best parts of being a dad.

This isn’t an isolated phenomenon. Games such as The Last of Us and God of War have already demonstrated how powerful fatherhood narratives can be. But Joel and Kratos are reluctant, grief-shaped fathers. They remain emotionally distant and walled-off. Hugh, by contrast, takes genuine joy in his pseudo fatherhood. The “sad dad” archetype is giving way to something warmer, and the market response to Pragmata suggests audiences are hungry for it.

Video games have always found success as power fantasies with aspirational characters. Now, a significant part of that aspiration includes fatherhood.

Why now? Traditional markers of male achievement, such as home ownership, seem unobtainable. The economy feels oppressive, and the cultural narratives that once gave men a clear sense of purpose have grown thin. Masculinity is demonized relentlessly, and young men feel it. Fatherhood offers something concrete: a person who truly needs you and values your very existence. It is no surprise that social media is filled with videos of fathers coming home to hugs from excited children, often captioned with the sentiment, “Other men may be wealthy. This man is rich.”

✍️ Feature

The Free Press

Meet the Free Speech Warrior of the Trump Administration

Last Saturday, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner at the Washington Hilton, Sarah Rogers—under secretary of state for public diplomacy—was sitting next to congressional leader Steve Scalise when she heard “shots fired” through the radios of Scalise’s protection detail…

Read more

2 months ago · 68 likes · 98 comments · Madeleine Kearns

🌍 Foreign

• Axios: Trump Warning Over Iran Strait of Hormuz Operation

• Wall Street Journal: Live Coverage of Iran and the Strait of Hormuz Crisis

• Wall Street Journal: Attacks on U.S. Warships in Strait Test Trump’s Desire to End Iran War

• Semafor: Inflation Concerns Spike Globally Amid Iran Standoff Drags

• Politico: Alberta Separatist Group Says It Has Enough Signatures to Trigger Referendum Vote on Leaving Canada

• Politico: Inside the Collapse of the Canada-U.S. Trade Deal

• Politico Europe: Europe Fears Putin Sees Window of Opportunity to Test NATO

• RealClearWorld: Western Europe Needs to Strengthen Its Defense Strategy

• Brussels Signal: To Win Victory in a Democracy, Just Give the People What They Want and Need

🏛️ Domestic

• Decision Desk HQ: 2026 Indiana and Ohio Primaries Preview

• Washington Examiner: Alito Slams Jackson “Insulting” Dissent in Supreme Court Louisiana Redistricting Case

• Washington Examiner: The Mysterious Principles of Barack Obama

• Semafor: ‘I Don’t Completely Fit In’: John Kennedy Keeps Republicans Guessing

• Daily Wire: ‘Kamikaze Dolphins’? The Daily Wire Asks Trump Admin What Everyone Wants to Know

• Daily Wire: JD Vance Vows Crackdown After Daily Wire’s Ohio Medicaid Investigation

• Politico: Trump Ballroom Funding Fight Heads to Senate

• Mediaite: Trump Offers John Fetterman ‘Total and Complete Endorsement’ If He Joins GOP

• Mediaite: JB Pritzker Claims Trump Set Tone for Political Violence After Latest Assassination Attempt

• ABC7: Eric Swalwell Faces Allegations From More Than a Dozen Women

• Axios: Black Voters Targeted by Republicans

• New York Post: Cornell President Accused of Injuring Students After Israel Debate Clash

📰 Media

• Daily Wire: Daily Wire Snags Two Awards for ‘Outstanding’ Podcast and News Reporting

• Hollywood Reporter: New York Magazine Bid From James Murdoch

• Daily Wire: In Tucker Carlson’s World, It’s Not America First — It’s Tucker First

💻 Tech

• Wall Street Journal: Hunting and Fishing Get a Technology Makeover

🧬 Health

• Axios: Abortion Pill Rulings Create Confusion

• Washington Examiner: Trump Resurrects Presidential Fitness Test

✝️ Religion

• Wall Street Journal: Trump Accuses Pope Leo of Endangering Catholics by Opposing Iran War

🎭 Culture & Hollywood

• Daily Wire: The Met Gala’s Dumbest Political Stunts

• Hollywood Reporter: ‘King of the Hill’ Season 15 Sets Premiere Date

• Hollywood Reporter: ‘The Mandalorian & Grogu’ Reactions Pour In

• Variety: Pussycat Dolls Cancel Reunion Tour

• Variety: ‘The Bear’ Surprise Episode Brings Back Jon Bernthal

• Variety: ‘The Boys’ Series Finale to Hit Movie Theaters in 4DX

• Variety: First Trailer for Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ Reveals Cyclops and Pattinson

• Daily Wire: Inside the Diamond Game

🪶 Quote

“Hello, Artemis II! This is Apollo astronaut Jim Lovell. Welcome to my old neighborhood! When Frank Borman, Bill Anders, and I orbited the Moon on Apollo 8, we got humanity’s first up-close look at the Moon and got a view of the home planet that inspired and united people around the world. I’m proud to pass that torch on to you — as you swing around the Moon and lay the groundwork for missions to Mars … for the benefit of all. It’s a historic day, and I know how busy you’ll be. But don’t forget to enjoy the view. So, Reid, Victor, Christina, and Jeremy, and all the great teams supporting you – good luck and Godspeed from all of us here on the good Earth.”

— Jim Lovell

Latest Big Ben Show features Byron York and Elizabeth Pipko. Listen here:

• “For nearly two centuries before the Revolution, this land was settled and forged by men and women who bore in their souls the blood and noble spirit of the British. Here, on a wild and untamed continent, they set loose the ancient English love of liberty and Great Britain’s distinctive sense of glory, destiny, and pride… The American Patriots who pledged their lives to independence in 1776 were the heirs to this majestic inheritance. Their veins ran with Anglo-Saxon courage. Their hearts beat with an English faith in standing firm for what is right, good, and true.” (Watch)

Read more