This week The Daily Wire has taken over Hero Bar to create the BARNC across the street from the arena where Republicans will attempt a massive reset before they head into the fall. Come by and join us — we’ll be filming and hosting panels all day, including a special edition of our new Sunday show, The District Club. If you missed the first episode, check it out here:
I’ll also be hosting a panel on everyone’s favorite devil of the moment — data centers — which should be interesting. If you’re at the convention in Dallas, stop by and grab a drink.
States Are Yanking Back Data Center Deals
Over a decade ago, Ohio lawmakers exempted tech companies from sales taxes on computer servers and other equipment needed for data centers, betting that changes worth millions of dollars would lure much-needed investment to the state.
It worked, turning Ohio into one of the leading destinations for data centers. But then the artificial-intelligence boom supersized the tax exemption, pushing it to more than $1.5 billion last year, more than 10 times the original state estimate. Voter outrage after news outlet Signal Ohio reported the scale of the provision prompted Republican Gov. Mike DeWine to pause new applications for the sales-tax exemption in May.
Now, some state lawmakers, including Democratic Rep. Tristan Rader, want to repeal the sales-tax exemption and renegotiate past deals with companies such as Amazon.com, Meta Platforms and Alphabet’s Google that secured exemptions for decades by signing contracts with the state. In several states, the exemptions for tech giants have exceeded $1 billion annually.
“They seem to have more money than God and they’re able to build without the need for these types of incentives,” said Rader, who is proposing new data-center taxes and requirements that developers pay more for power and electrical infrastructure. He represents parts of Cleveland, where locals have pushed back against the facilities, and he hopes the new threats force the companies to the negotiating table.
A similar dynamic is playing out across the country, as legislators or governors in more than 10 states, including Illinois, New Jersey and Washington, have slammed the brakes on the tax breaks. The reversals underscore how state leaders who once welcomed the facilities powering the AI boom as an economic engine suddenly treat them like a political liability.
Mohamed Atta, 25 Years Later
After 9/11, intellectuals and policymakers asked “what went wrong?” as though the source of Atta’s animus toward the West was shrouded in some deep mystery. In the Western experience, men had not killed other men over religious questions en masse since the end of the great religious wars of the 17th century. Culture, a term that was once understood to encompass a great many facets of human identity, experience, and belonging—religion included—had also been ruled out. Saying that cultural differences exist and should be respected was a foundation of the multicultural order; the idea that some cultures might lead people to murder each other, for reasons that do not appear in the Western rationalist list of sane causes, struck many Western liberals as too close to racism to bother arguing the point.
Since then, each time the West collided with Islam, much of the Western intellectual class reached for explanations that made sense within its own secular humanist categories: grievance, humiliation, underdevelopment, alienation, foreign policy frustration, or the failure of Western states to properly integrate men like Atta, who were, or must be, inherently no different than immigrants of similar age, class, and educational attainments from Vietnam or Poland, or anyplace else. Since all conflicts are material in origin, it was assumed that they could be settled though material means. And given the obvious superiority of Western values, as measured through the superior material attainments of the West, conflicts over land, jobs, dignity, sovereignty, or redistribution should be negotiated with the generosity appropriate to those who occupy positions of immense privilege and power, thanks to the inequities of European colonialism. If Muslim populations suffered from a democracy deficit, elections would reveal and moderate those demands. In every case, theology and culture were translated into psychology, economics, development policy, or diplomacy.
American leaders then added a second layer of denial. President George W. Bush stood at the Islamic Center of Washington to insist that “the face of terror is not the true faith of Islam.” Following Bush’s lead, after later atrocities in Paris, Brussels, Manchester, and elsewhere, Western leaders repeatedly said that the killers had “nothing to do with Islam.” At the same time, the notion of “Abrahamic faiths” was revived or normalized, as though Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were merely variations within one spiritual family, separated by temperament more than by theology or civilizational ambition.
After centuries of religious war, the West had concluded that privatizing faith was the price of stability and progress. Religion would become hobby, heritage, or private consolation; politics would be conducted in the cooler register of interests. Having made that bargain, Western societies forgot that secularism and pluralism were local settlements, not universal defaults, and so assumed that every rival civilization must ultimately favor the same compartmentalization. When confronted by an adversary for whom the public order was explicitly theological, and for whom the separation of sacred and political authority was itself an offense against God, the West did the only thing its own intellectual settlement allowed: It translated theology into categories it found more manageable.
As a result, for a quarter-century, America and the West have chosen to enmesh themselves with dysfunctional Muslim societies, with the goal of rectifying “what went wrong.” Simultaneously, they opened their doors to mass Muslim migration, taking in millions of refugees from war-torn societies that had notably failed to be transformed by the influx of American money, democracy experts, and boots on the ground. The failure of the Western secular faith in material reality to transform these shattered societies was dismissed as an accident, or as a consequence of how broken and needy these societies actually were. Surely the faith would prove its worth once the refugees arrived in America.
As it turned out, the prediction that a large-scale encounter between the populations of the Western nations and Muslim lands might bring about a meaningful social transformation was correct. What Western optimists failed to imagine was that their own societies would be reshaped in the image of the newcomers they sought to evangelize. By 2026, NYC had become a parade ground for Islamic terror groups, run by a foreign-born Muslim mayor who supported “globalizing the intifada” and whose wife celebrated Hamas’ massacre of Israelis. Nor were such attitudes unusual in a city where Muslim immigrants nearly outnumbered the city’s native Jewish population. A Pew Research poll released in July 2026 showed that 44% of Muslims in America held a favorable view of Hamas.
The Hottest Pumpkin Spice Season Accessory
My latest in the Daily Wire:
First, a few questions: Are you a single white woman in America in 2026? Is the only correct take on Lindsay Clancy the one you have adopted after scouring TikTok like the world’s greatest true-crime detective? Do you own one or more items of “Hot Girls For Zohran” flair?
Then this message is for you: This pumpkin spice season, don’t miss out on the must-have accessory of the season — your new jihad-adjacent boyfriend. He’s intense, he’s problematic, and his opinions on 9/11 are sure to anger all the relatives you hate the most over the holidays.
Kathy Hochul showed the way when she rocked that hijab in exchange for a group of very important Muslim men having to suffer the rare experience of listening to a woman talk. It’s a natural progression – you go from hashtagging for Gaza to embracing this inventive new idea called socialism to realizing that sure, Luigi murdered a guy, but have you noticed he’s hot?
The speediest path to Karen-izing Islam in the West is personalizing the narrative, and you have the power to do it. And trust me, the internal satisfaction of this accessory boyfriend will be immense. It comes when you post your orchard-infused Uggs-resurgence Instagram story about taking him apple picking for the first time. (For the record, you’ll be doing all the picking). It comes when you tell your mother no, it’s not that you don’t like Leinenkugel’s anymore; it’s just that it’s haram. It comes when your uncle storms out of Thanksgiving muttering about Ann Coulter (who?) and turning the Middle East into a “sheet of glass,” whatever that means. Probably something racist. Come on. It’s twenty-five years after 9/11, and it’s time people just grow up and let it go.
The best part about this move isn’t just that you’re trendsetting; it’s the emotional rush of getting ahead of where everything is going and gaining the moral authority to pass judgment on all of it. Let the weirdo right-wingers eat each other on X arguing about the cost of burritos and welfare for tradwives and the Latin Mass. You’re staking out ground that will infuse the next iteration of America’s human resources departments as part of a new protected class. And what’s the personal cost for you? Some hijab-prompted dermatitis? Big deal, your hair was shedding from the SSRIs anyway.
Some of your best friends will judge you, but that’s how you know this is so right. Someone posted a beautiful quote you saw the other day – it was from a French author; you haven’t read the book, but it’s a good summary: “the summit of human happiness resides in the most absolute submission.” Don’t you have the right to be happy? They’re just jealous they don’t have a man who believes in anything beyond prediction markets and Patagonia.
So this decorative gourd season, don’t just run things back with all the tired old tropes you embraced the past few years. Head up to a rally in Michigan. Be the first in your friend group to get that new must-have accessory. Sure, sometimes he can seem a little bossy. But what’s the worst that can happen?
✍️ Feature
🌍 Foreign
Reuters — Iran Says It Captured US Submarine Drone in Strait of Hormuz
Semafor — US Ramps Up China Rhetoric Ahead of Upcoming Meeting
The New York Times — Canada’s Carney, Trump and the US-Canada Trade War
Politico Europe — French Centrists Struggle to Find Unity Candidate as Extremes Surge in Polls
National Interest — The AfD’s Electoral Victory Is a Tale of Two Germanies
🏛️ Domestic
Politico — Trump Isn’t on the Ballot. He Wants Republicans to Pretend He Is.
Politico — GOP’s Midterm Hopes Suffer Under Energy Inflation
Daily Wire — How the GOP Can Reclaim the American Dream for the Next Generation of Voters
Daily Wire — This Is Why a Terrorist Sympathizer Will Win in Michigan
Politico — In Michigan, GOP Senate Candidate Makes a Canadian-Sized Gamble on Trade
Washington Examiner — New Hampshire Senate Race: John Sununu, Chris Pappas
Daily Wire — Twenty-Five Years Later, My 9/11 West Point Class Still Keeps Freedom Alive
Daily Wire — Why the Battle for the Middle Class Runs Through Austin and Sacramento
New York Post — Why NYC Parents Are Homeschooling Their Kids in 2026
Daily Wire — Lindsay Clancy Jurors Reveal What Really Went Down With Lone Holdout
🗳️ 2028
📰 Media
💻 Tech
🧬 Health
🏈 Sports
🎭 Culture & Hollywood
Daily Wire — Nancy Mace: Objectification Is Only Wrong When Men Do It
The Hollywood Reporter — Portuguese Artists Drop Out of Jerry Seinfeld Festival
The Hollywood Reporter — Paramount, Warner Bros. Wants States to Stake Bills
The Hollywood Reporter — Get Smart Reboot Set From John Mulaney
Variety — Chris Rock on Misty Green, Oscar Buzz and the Will Smith Slap
🪶 Quote
“The ‘80s were about acquiring—acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn’t I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn’t I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime. I don’t know who will lead us through the ‘90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul.”
— Lee Atwater