How Is This Beef Policy America First?

Someone explain it to me

Aug 31, 2026

Over at DW, we had Chef Bart write on How Washington Ruined the American Hamburger:

My buddy Paul picked me up at the Billings Logan airport. I was already hungry and planning dinner. I asked if we should stop at a butcher on the way. He told me not to bother. Peter Allen, who owns Mastodon Valley Farms in Wisconsin, was joining us for the weekend and bringing 40 pounds of his own beef. I asked what cuts. Paul said, “Oh, he’s just bringing a bunch of the ground stuff.”
I had not packed foie gras and Bandol to spend my one vacation of the summer eating ground beef. I had plans: I envisioned a whole lamb, slow-roasted over the fire, basted in a truffle sauce. Instead, I spent the night at the grill, making hamburgers.
The burgers put my grand plans to shame. I knew it before they hit the fire. I opened Peter’s cooler and found beef that hadn’t already started browning the way most “American” ground beef has by the time you buy it. Small one-pound packages greeted me, all colored a jewel-like red. The grind was coarser than what you’d find at a normal grocery store, and despite that, the fat content held. Formed into a patty, it didn’t crumble and weep out its fat in comically large flare-ups the way cheap ground beef does. It stayed inside. The bite was absurd. With September around the corner, it’s still the best thing I’ve eaten all year.
Butterworth’s is coming up on its second anniversary. For most of that time, we refused to put a burger on the menu. Some of that is my own particular strain of pretension. But mostly it’s a simple fact: it is very hard to buy quality ground beef in America. Most of it is a scrap-room process. A Chinese- or Brazilian-owned processor takes a little trim from Mexico, a little from Argentina, some lean trim from the U.S., some fatty trim from God knows where, and mixes it all together into something that resembles less a food product than a bathhouse orgy. Out the other end comes your hamburger. Seven dollars a pound. Thank you very much.
Americans didn’t vote for this. It happened the way most horrors do, one small, defensible decision at a time, each one minuscule in its consequence, until you wake up inside a Lovecraftian horror of your own making.
It started in 2002, when Congress passed a law that seems almost quaint now. You had a right to know where your beef came from. Born here, raised here, killed here, it said so on the label. Then, in 2015, under pressure from Canada and Mexico and a World Trade Organization ruling threatening over a billion dollars in retaliatory tariffs, Congress repealed it. Beef and pork lost their labels. Politics was a little boring back then, so hardly anyone noticed. The scrap room became a legal place to hide.
That repeal opened the door for mixed ground beef, and American ranchers started selling their cattle into a system that would cut it with whatever was cheapest that week, from wherever it came. With the economic incentive gone, the American herd began to shrink. A percentage drop here, a percentage drop there, and almost no one noticed. Then, in 2025, it became harder to ignore. The Department of Agriculture shut its livestock ports to Mexico in July, after a flesh-eating parasite called the New World Screwworm started working its way north through cattle smuggled across a border nobody could fully police. In January, the annual Cattle Inventory Report came back with a number that made even the economists tighten their sphincters: 86.2 million head, the smallest herd in this country since 1951. The slow death ranchers had been living with on the ground finally reached American wallets. This is where it left us.
I can name 20 small cuts along the way, but I will spare you. Suffice it to say, for a few decades now, we have slowly and deliberately hamstrung American ranchers in favor of third-world importers. This week, President Trump joined a long line of presidents and bureaucrats by expanding the import break even further.
I understand the logic. He’s trying to bring down the price of ground beef for everyday Americans, and in a year when every politician in the country is trying to work the word “affordability” into their stump speech, that has a kind of political sense to it. But it will not fix the problem. It is a bandage on a wound that needs a tourniquet, and one more step toward the end of American ranching as a way of life. More than that, it runs against the reason so many people voted for him in the first place. From Minnesota to the Texas border, Americans are frustrated that cheaper economies elsewhere are hollowing out our own.
This expansion will not help the American rancher; it will finish him off. He will look at what he’s competing against, do the math, and tell his son to go work in computers instead. We have to think about this long term, or we’ll keep circling the drain until the only thing left in the bowl is the pink slurry that fills a Doritos Locos Taco.
You will now, on occasion, find a burger on the Butterworths’ menu. I call up Peter, and when he can send his beef, raised on his land and cared for by him and his family, I put it on the menu. I do it because it’s delicious, because it speaks to America’s greatness, and because I’m secretly terrified we’re barreling toward a future where I won’t be able to find beef like his anymore.

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

The Downside of Talking to Terrorists

Elliott Abrams in Tablet:

Biden administration officials never said they wanted to negotiate with Hezbollah and never acknowledged doing so, but that’s the reality. What about Trump, who, as we now know, has agreed to Kushner’s face-to-face talks with the head of Hamas? The president has personally expressed his willingness to do so unconditionally. “I would speak to Hezbollah. Yeah, I speak to everybody,” Trump said in a joint presser with the Lebanese president at the White House in July. “I’ll speak to people that a lot of people think I shouldn’t be speaking to, and things work out.”
It stands to reason then, that U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack was channeling the president’s attitude when he recently suggested that, for negotiations between Israel and Lebanon to go anywhere, Hezbollah and Iran ought to be brought to the table as they are the ones “who can make a decision,” and that this is “what I think the [U.S.] negotiating team is attempting to do.”
It’s unlikely that Trump would shun a Hezbollah meeting, any more than he would a meeting with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The president confirmed to Fox News that “U.S. officials are communicating directly through a backchannel with IRGC officials.” Trump also told FOX that the United States has a “different channel with Hamas”—which turned out to be Kushner.
So Trump is pushing the envelope: Obama/Biden officials never sat down with Hamas’ then leader Yahya Sinwar, nor did they ever acknowledge a “back channel” to the IRGC (even though Obama apparently wrote to Qassem Soleimani, then head of the IRGC’s Quds Force).
It’s worth stopping for a moment to ask why any of this is a problem. Why not talk to terrorists? There is a huge political science literature about that question, and predictably many NGO types and academics love the idea—in many cases because, like Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, they think the terrorists (and terrorist regimes such as those in Cuba or Iran) have “legitimate grievances” and in fact are owed American apologies for our great crimes in the past. The condescending conventional wisdom in Washington, often cited to justify such unconditional engagement with terrorists and their state sponsors, is that “you talk to your enemies, not just your friends.”

Time To Investigate Flock

Josh Hawley:

Today, Congress has not written any rules governing the data captured by national AI camera networks built by Flock Safety and similar companies. It may be governed by older statutes, and should have Fourth Amendment limits, but those are unsettled questions. For now, for practical purposes, the only privacy protections for hundreds of millions of Americans are those found in one company’s internal policies. I don’t know if Flock has broken the law, but I do know that technology is moving faster than Congress is keeping up. So I have opened an investigation in the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, which I chair, into how this data is collected, retained, searched, and sold.
I heard about this issue in my home state of Missouri. The St. Charles County Police Department canceled its Flock contract this month, after an audit found a civilian employee running searches for personal reasons. Sadly, my state is not alone. In Milwaukee, prosecutors charged an officer with searching his girlfriend’s plate 124 times and her former boyfriend’s plate 55 times, typing the word “investigation” in the software’s justification field each time. Worse still, the system’s audit didn’t catch him; a private citizen did, after looking up his plate on a public website.
Adding insult to injury, the systems make mistakes. A Florida woman spent 13 days in jail on eight felony counts, three for vehicular homicide, after investigators searched Flock’s network for a vehicle description and arrested the owner. The prosecutors later dropped the charges because they had the wrong person. Los Angeles dropped its Flock contract after an audit found officers had stopped 161 drivers wrongly flagged as driving stolen cars. Another California police department found that 71 percent of its alerts were wrong.
Then we consider what happens to records generated by these cameras. Flock boasts an $8.3 billion valuation, which brings commercial pressures. Americans deserve to know whether and how their driving data is licensed, sold, and used. There are also concerns about whether data is sent or stored abroad. For example, reporters have described Flock using gig workers in the Philippines to classify data captured by cameras. Powerful AI models also automate parts of the process, supercharging these concerns.
All that said, I want police to have the tools they need. Cameras can help recover stolen cars, find missing children, and catch fleeing criminals. But people are concerned when private companies build unprecedented databases of personal information and want reasonable safeguards for that data. And the Supreme Court has found that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy against a “comprehensive” record of where they’ve been. Americans do not surrender all their privacy rights every time they leave the house.
So I have posed common-sense questions to Flock about how long it keeps data, who controls it, who can search it, what protections are in place, and who, if anyone, is buying what the cameras see.
I hope the company will commit to resolving these questions. But even if it does, Congress should not just take its word at face value; we should write protections into law. These safeguards must apply to every company and endure longer than the tenure of current CEOs. More fundamentally, the rules protecting Americans should be set by law and by the people, not by venture capital funds, AI executives, or big tech companies.

A MAHA Custody Battle

The New Yorker:

On a Thursday evening in April, at a date and time that had been determined by a family-court judge, Michael Lee Horrocks drove to his ex-wife’s house, in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia, to collect their three children for the start of spring break. It was a ten-day holiday, longer than the usual weekends that he had been granted under the terms of his custody agreement. Michael, who is thirty-four, had come to think of himself as “the fun parent.” He drives a Harley-Davidson Road Glide and, online, goes by Kneepatch, a persona that he styles with graphic tees, chunky mixed-metal rings, and an arm of American-traditional tattoos. That weekend, he planned to take the kids to a monster-truck show. Michael had been married to their mother, Leah Stelly, for nine years, until the previous spring. Now he saw her only when they handed off the children. Most of these exchanges happened quickly, in a tense near-silence. But, other times, the pickups became hostile. When Michael and Leah did fight, it was usually about the kids’ medical care.
That day, Michael had received a call from the nurse at his eldest child’s school. Keith, who is eight, appeared to have a bad case of pink eye. The nurse told Michael that she couldn’t get hold of Leah and that Keith needed to see a doctor as soon as possible. Michael lived in a city called Charles Town, more than an hour away, and he wasn’t supposed to pick the kids up until 6 P.M. He imagined that Leah had been treating the pink eye with a natural home remedy, because, as he later told me, “she’s all holistic” and “has, uh . . . what did she call it? A ‘crunchy mom’ outlook.”
At the pickup, Keith looked worse than Michael had expected. “His whole eye was swollen up, almost out of his head,” he said. His middle child, Donnie, who is five, also had watery eyes. His daughter, Star, who is four, seemed fine. By then, Leah had received antibiotics from Keith’s primary-care provider. For Michael, this was another source of concern. The kids saw a physician assistant, rather than a pediatrician. Michael believed that this had to do with the fact that many doctors refuse to see unvaccinated children. Keith, who had been ordered by a judge to start public school in January, had received some of his standard immunizations, including shots for measles, mumps, and rubella. But Donnie and Star were unvaccinated.
Leah had undergone several transformations in her life—shifts that she described to me as “awakenings.” One of them had led her to the belief that vaccines were dangerous, and to a broader world view that aligned with the Make America Healthy Again movement. Her particular MAHA leanings were laced with a kind of freethinking, hippie spirituality. She believed that she had manifested her daughter into existence and that Star’s arrival, via home birth at 2:22 p.m. in 2022, was a sign for 222, an “angel number” in numerology signifying alignment and cosmic timing. She dressed in vintage seventies clothing and wore her hair long, in ringlets. Online, she had posted about Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., “b!g ph@rm@,” and living a “non-tox” life style, and recorded lessons for her eleven thousand followers on divine femininity and receiving messages from the universe. In her videos, she rings herself in fuzzy golden light and talks in a wispy Southern accent. The word “TRUTH” is tattooed high across her neck, like a choker. Below that, on her sternum, is a fine-line rendering of the Seed of Life, a sacred geometric symbol.
Michael did not share Leah’s MAHA sensibility, but he was no liberal scold. He had nonspecific theories about the pandemic, telling me that it “duped a lot of people in a lot of different ways,” and he had refused the covid vaccine. He liked to take the kids to McDonald’s, even though—or possibly because—he knew that it drove Leah crazy. The first time we met, in the parking lot of a West Virginia chain called Tudor’s Biscuit World, he wore a graphic T-shirt that said “Fuck Your Mask” across the back and was chain-smoking Marlboro Black Reds. The kids were tucked in by his side, still sleepy from staying up the night before watching TV. Star meowed at me by way of greeting. They were sweet and polite children. Later on, as we talked, Michael received a pointed TikTok from Leah about exes who try to put you down when, really, they’re just jealous of your aura. Michael watched for a few seconds, then swiped away. “I’m burnt out on Leah,” he said. “I don’t go clicking on her stuff.”
Michael and Leah lived much of their lives online. To varying degrees, they’d both become microinfluencers. As Kneepatch, Michael maintained a Facebook page about biking, with a following of almost fifty thousand. During the week, he worked as an underground-petroleum-tank specialist, doing installations and repairs at gas stations across the mid-Atlantic. The nickname was a nod to this work: the job required him to kneel on the concrete, “opening up manholes and shit,” which wore holes in his jeans. Kneepatch shared real-time updates about his bike trips and his personal life. “Like ‘The Osbournes,’ ” he said, referring to the reality show about Ozzy Osbourne and his family. Kneepatch’s fans knew about his divorce; his new girlfriend, Brianna; the time his bike broke down in Las Vegas; the sunset in Ohio that made him believe in God; and the running sex jokes he made about feet, with pictures of himself giving Brianna a pedicure or smoking a cigarette held between her toes. His followers were also acquainted with Michael’s three children, who featured prominently in the Kneepatch adventurescape, sometimes riding with him on his Harley, outfitted in tiny helmets.
Several months before spring break, Michael had appealed his custody agreement. In addition to more time with the children, he wanted to control their medical care. Specifically, he told me, he wanted his kids to receive the same basic vaccinations that he had received when he was a child. He was especially worried about Donnie, who had spinal muscular atrophy, or S.M.A., a progressive genetic disease that weakened his muscles and left him vulnerable to respiratory infections.
That weekend, at the monster-truck show, Michael gave Keith a pair of sunglasses with mirrored lenses, to cover his swollen eyes. They hung back from the crowd, Star in a cowboy hat, Donnie in a miniature wheelchair. “Everything was fine,” Michael said. “The kids had a great time.”
By Wednesday, though, all three children were sick. They didn’t want to get out of bed or eat, and their skin felt hot to the touch. On Friday, eight days into spring break, Michael was at work when he received a text from his mom, who was babysitting, with a picture of Donnie. He had a rash of flat, red blotches on his face and body. Michael thought it could be chickenpox, but when he sent the picture to Brianna, who had kids of her own, she told him that it wasn’t a normal rash. “I’ve seen every rash a child can get,” she told me. “I have never seen that.” Michael took the boys to urgent care. Both were found to have respiratory issues and fevers of a hundred and one.
The urgent-care nurse was the first person to say the word “measles” to Michael. “I was, like, ‘Holy cow, are you serious?’ ” he said. By 9 p.m., Donnie was being seen by a doctor who described his symptoms as “textbook measles.” The medical staff administered a nasal swab. The results would take several days. They could still come back negative. But Michael had already latched on to the idea that Donnie was sick—and that one person was to blame. He texted Leah, informing her that a doctor was “confident” Donnie had measles. It was only a matter of time before they would have a confirmed diagnosis, he said. Public-health officials were being notified. Keith had a faint rash—possibly a breakthrough case. Star was also showing symptoms. “We are heading home and will be monitoring all three closely,” he wrote. “Given Donnie’s SMA and the ages involved, we are taking this very seriously.”