Crossword: J Accuse Crossword: J Accuse Brendan Emmett Quigley

Meet Javier Milei, the world’s only electable libertarian Meet Javier Milei, the world’s only electable libertarian Dan Hannan Meet Javier Milei, Argentina’s libertarian candidate. He calls himself an anarcho-capitalist, names his English mastiffs after Murray Rothbard and Milton Friedman, and wants to close down most of the Argentine government. Oh, and he is currently the favorite to be the next president, having just won Argentina’s important primaries.
How can such a thing happen? It is a firm rule of politics that libertarians don’t exceed low single-digit poll results. In the United States, for example, the Libertarian Party never managed more than 0.5% in any presidential election in its first 40 years.
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In 2016, it achieved what I guess counts as a breakthrough. Facing the repulsive alternatives of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and doubtless buoyed by the important and highly sought endorsement of this column, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson secured a record 3.3%. That, until now, has been as good as it gets.
Yet, somehow, a shock-haired, wild-eyed economics professor who proposes to scrap the central bank, legalize drugs, and privatize state schools is polling in the mid-30s, comfortably ahead of his rivals, the left-wing Peronists and the center-right coalition.
How has Milei managed it? In the superficial analysis of most international media, he is a far-right populist who (as every newspaper from the Economist and Le Monde to the New York Times and the Washington Post has claimed) “admires” Trump and Brazil’s recently ousted strongman, Jair Bolsonaro.
It is hard to stress how wrong this analysis is. It stems from a tendency, widespread on the Left, to lump all your opponents together. “X disagrees with me, and Y disagrees with me, so X and Y are the same.”
In fact, Milei is a down-the-line classical liberal. Unlike Bolsonaro, he has no time for culture wars, being relaxed about same-sex marriages and transgender people — “so long as no one sends me the bill for their operation.” He supports immigration, except for criminals. Unlike Trump, he wants to dismantle tariffs unilaterally, a move that would solve many of Argentina’s economic problems but a counterintuitive and therefore unpopular one.
The claim that he is some kind of Pampas Trump rests on a remark he made during a 2021 interview, in which he said he had “an almost natural alignment” with the American and Brazilian leaders because they had “taken on the Left from day one.” Like them, he said, he had a “very clear agenda, which runs against anything that smacks of socialism or communism.”
But Milei’s worldview could hardly be more different from those of the other two. On the night he won the primary, he defined his philosophy as follows: “Liberalism is the unrestricted respect for one’s neighbor’s life plan, based on the nonaggression principle and the defense of the right to life, liberty, and property.” Hmmm. I’m not exactly getting Adolf Eichmann vibes.
The only issue on which Milei is arguably more conservative than libertarian (I say “arguably” because plenty of libertarians share it) is abortion. He takes the view that the “life” bit of “life, liberty, and property” starts at conception.
So, to repeat, how does a politician who would be a fringe candidate anywhere else get to head the polls?
For an answer, look at the state of the Argentine economy. Inflation is currently running at 116%, which is far from historically unusual. The average annual rate since 1980 has been 206%, making for a total price rise of over 900 billion percent. Interest rates, as I write, are 118%.
Argentina last had a properly pro-market government in 1916. Since 1946, it has been dominated by Peronism, a corporatist, nationalist, interventionist, and protectionist ideology that is generally considered left-wing, although it appeals to a certain kind of integralist NatCon.
There were occasional military interludes and even, after 2015, a feeble attempt at reform under Mauricio Macri. But Macri could not overcome the Peronist deep state, and in the 2019 elections, the burnt fool’s bandaged finger went wobbling back to the fire.
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Might that have been the last time? Argentine voters seem finally to have reached the view that their problems are too deep-rooted to be susceptible to gradual reforms. They need to tear the weeds out by the roots, scrapping the peso, disbanding state bureaucracies, taking on vested interests, and opening to the world.
The rest of us could, of course, attempt some market reforms before we follow the once-wealthy Argentines into penury. But the moral of the story is that we, too, will probably leave it until too late.
Biden White House follows familiar playbook on embarrassing presidential relatives Biden White House follows familiar playbook on embarrassing presidential relatives Haisten Willis
What would the Founding Fathers think of Hunter Biden?
Of course it's impossible to know, but based on historical evidence at least a few would find him recognizable, or even familiar. While technology has changed dramatically over the last 250 years, human nature and family dynamics have not.
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And despite the headlines and congressional hearings, the historical record shows that even the most misbehaved presidential children may not have much impact on election outcomes.
Troubled first family members are as old as the presidency itself, dating back all the way to the first president of the United States and continuing today, only with better documentation.
That's not to say that problem children are the norm. More than one executive offspring has risen to become president themselves, while others caused headache after headache, some even ruining their fathers' post-presidential lives.
The first example carries a bit of an asterisk. George Washington did not have any biological children but helped raise the offspring of his wife Martha, who had four children by her first husband before he died and left her a 26-year-old widow.
George Washington grew particularly frustrated with one of his step-grandchildren, George Washington Parke Custis, which we know of today thanks to Washington's letters. Custis attended three different colleges as a young man, including the precursors to the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University, and graduated from none of them.
After Custis returned home for good after only one semester at a Maryland college, George Washington sent him back to his mother with a searing note that could describe a modern teenager who plays too many video games.
"He appears to me to be moped and stupid," the first president wrote. "[He] says nothing, and is always in some hole or corner excluded from the company."
Custis repaid Washington somewhat in later years by turning his home (now part of Arlington National Cemetery) into a shrine to his famous grandfather, and even wrote books and plays about George Washington's life.
The fourth president was not so lucky.
James Madison is hailed as the "Father of the Constitution," but he was also the stepfather of a man who brought the entire Madison family crashing down.
That man, John Payne Todd, is arguably one of the closest predecessors to Hunter Biden. Like the younger Biden, Todd's life was marked by early tragedy and personal struggle. Todd's father died when he was just 1 year old, and his mother married the much older Madison a year later.
As an adult, Todd never developed a career but did develop a love for alcohol, guns, and gambling. He was twice sent to debtors' prison, and Madison later mortgaged and then lost his Montpelier, Virginia, plantation in order to cover his stepson's debts.
Todd's mother spent the end of her life in genteel poverty following Madison's death and the sale of Montpelier, and Todd only outlived her by two years before succumbing to typhoid fever at age 59.
It wasn't all bad for the Founding Fathers. The sixth president, John Quincy Adams, was the eldest son of the second president, John Adams, becoming the first man to follow his father into the executive office.
"On balance, presidential children have been more good than bad," presidential historian Craig Shirley told the Washington Examiner. Shirley points to examples like the four sons of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who all served in World War II, or the sons of George H.W. Bush who became the 43rd governor of Florida and the 43rd president.
Yet even some of the most celebrated presidents didn't escape family drama.
"Honest Abe" Lincoln attracted a measure of controversy when he and his wife kept their oldest son, Robert Todd Lincoln, out of the Civil War until its final stages, and then in a mostly noncombat role when he finally enlisted. But the younger Lincoln succeeded in life and was rumored for the presidency in later years, though he declined to run.
One of the more colorful presidential children was Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the irrepressible daughter of Teddy Roosevelt. Her father became president when she was just 17, and Longworth soon became a fashion icon and a tabloid sensation, the subject of public fascination and even popular music.
"The whole phenomenon of media attention to the first family really dates to the Teddy Roosevelt administration,” David Greenberg, a Rutgers University history, journalism, and media studies professor, told the Washington Examiner. “He was the first president since Lincoln with young kids in the White House, and the first ever to do so amid a mass media environment.”
Longworth smoked cigarettes in public, kept a pet snake in the White House, and annoyed her father with unsolicited political advice. She married a speaker of the House but had her only child via an affair with a U.S. senator.
"I can either run the country, or I can attend to Alice," Roosevelt once said. "I cannot possibly do both."
More recent presidents might have thought the same thing about their relatives.
Richard Nixon's brother Donald borrowed $205,000 from business magnate Howard Hughes in 1957, while Richard was vice president, in order to shore up a failing drive-in restaurant. The business went bust anyway, and questions about the nature of the loan haunted Nixon for the rest of his political career.
Jimmy Carter was a devout Baptist who taught Sunday school into his 90s, but his relatives proved that the apple can indeed fall far from the tree.
Carter's younger brother, Billy Carter, ran the family's peanut business and promoted "Billy Beer" in the 1970s.
"I had this beer brewed up just for me," read a note from Billy printed on each can. "I think it's the best I ever tasted. And I've tasted a lot."
His outlandish reputation took a dark turn when it was reported that he received up to $2 million from the government of Libya, an incident with strong parallels to the doings of Hunter Biden.
Meanwhile, Jimmy Carter's sons Jack and Chip both used illicit drugs, the latter developing a serious drug problem that led to an estrangement from his father. Chip and his father reconciled before Carter became president, and Chip later shared a “big fat Austin torpedo” (marijuana) with country star Willie Nelson on the roof of the White House.
Ronald Reagan also found himself saddled with children who seemed diametrically opposed to his ideals. In 1986, Reagan ordered an investigation into pornography that became known as the Meese Report. Eight years later, his daughter Patti Davis posed for Playboy. His son Ron Reagan has become an outspoken liberal advocate and atheist.
Finally, there is Bill Clinton's half-brother Roger, an actor whose string of minor roles in movies and television began and ended with the Clinton presidency.
The Secret Service gave Roger Clinton the code name "headache," and for good reason. In 1999, Roger took $50,000 and a Rolex from the Gambino crime family on the condition that he convince Bill to pardon the jailed mobster Rosario Gambino.
Gambino did not receive a pardon, but Roger Clinton did shortly before his brother exited the White House, nullifying a 1985 federal cocaine possession and drug trafficking conviction.
Presidential children in the 21st century have been mostly clean, though Democrats might cry foul over the business dealings of Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Conservatives counter that Hunter Biden is not just another wayward son. They point to growing evidence that Joe Biden knew about, countenanced, and potentially profited from his son's adventures in Ukraine and China.
"This is different,” Shirley said. “It’s not isolated. It’s part of a pattern. It’s indicative of criminality in the Biden family. He’s the most obvious representative, and while his father doesn’t snort cocaine from the rear ends of hookers as far as we know, he has taken illegitimate money from foreign governments and foreign entities.”
The question going forward will be how much weight voters give the Hunter Biden saga, especially as the 2024 presidential contest sharpens into view. History doesn't show much correlation between nefarious relatives and election results.
University of Virginia Center for Politics Director Larry Sabato points to the Billy Carter precedent as a relevant example.
“Hunter Biden will have the same effect on the 2024 election results as Billy Carter had on the 1980 results: Next to none,” Sabato posted on X, formerly known as Twitter.
"Refresher: President Carter’s colorful brother Billy took a ‘loan’ of $200,000 to $2 million from Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi — months of bad headlines plus Congressional investigation,” he continued. “Partisans love this stuff but it’s not why or how people vote for president.”
That warning hasn't stopped Republicans from digging deeper into Hunter-related investigations, with impeachment rumors beginning to grow louder as the GOP seeks more information and documents from a reluctant Biden administration. The Department of Justice has appointed a special counsel over the matter.
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The White House counters that Hunter Biden's story is a matter of private concern, not public.
"He's focused on the American family, but they want to focus on his family," press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told a reporter on July 25. "They can do whatever it is that they wish to do, but we're going to stay focused. We're going to stay steadfast."
Why are we revisiting American Gladiators now? Why are we revisiting American Gladiators now? Oliver Bateman In 1989, a reality game show exploded onto our fuzzy CRT television screens: American Gladiators. Today, we have two documentaries that excavate the relics of this cartoonish spectacle, thrusting its tale of muscular men and women in singlets rolling around in big metal balls and hitting each other with pugil sticks back into the limelight. In yet another long moment of national crisis and economic flux, it's fitting that we're revisiting an era when many of us began to awake from the American dream into a much cheaper and tawdrier reality.
The American Gladiators Documentary, a three-hour film produced under ESPN's 30 for 30 and directed by Ben Berman, focuses our attention on series creator Johnny Ferraro, an Elvis impersonator-turned-TV producer from Erie, Pennsylvania, and his allegedly duped partner “Apache” Dann Carr. Carr, who remains something of a mystery until the latter stages of the film, has had an outsize impact on the world of sports entertainment. The retired union worker and arm wrestling champion already had a major role in Showtime’s 2017 documentary Tough Guys, which describes how he, Bill Viola, and Frank Caliguri pioneered MMA in Pittsburgh in 1970s, and old footage in The American Gladiators Documentary shows how closely the hit TV show resembled the games Carr staged for union workers in Erie in the early 1980s.
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In a stark contrast of perspective, Netflix's Muscles & Mayhem: An Unauthorized Story of American Gladiators, directed by Jared Hess and Tony Vainuku, uses its five 40-minute episodes to dive deep into the bruised lives of the gladiators themselves. It's the story of musclebound men and women who bore the physical brunt of the show, earning less than many professional wrestlers while being denied a share of the show’s merchandising and ticket sales.
Together, these documentaries spotlight the potential and pitfalls of a sport-cum-entertainment spectacle that might have rivaled the UFC had the series made a similar transition from a silly “look-at-this-stuff” freak show into an organized sport. Instead, it became emblematic of a reality television business model that capitalized on ephemeral fame and disposable talent, a harbinger of today’s culture of fleeting authenticity and throwaway creativity.
So, why are we revisiting American Gladiators now? In a digital age flush with overnight celebrities and their transient viral moments, the saga of the gladiators feels uncomfortably relevant. It’s not just another relic from television's yesteryears but a chilling parable. It amplifies the hollowness of evanescent stardom, spotlighting the pitfalls of an industry ready to exploit ambition and sacrifice authenticity — whether gladiator or influencer or reality star, each can be flushed down the toilet tomorrow with nothing to show for it. Through their tales, we're confronted with the painful reality of how easily dreams can be snuffed out, trampled under the weight of commercial interests. We’re left hearing just the echoes of what might have been if these gladiatorial games had remained true to Dann Carr’s original vision of serving as a fun summer challenge for steel workers in Erie: an opportunity for the common man to be in the show rather than forced to sit back in front of his TV and see it.
In The American Gladiators Documentary, Berman's narrative centers on Ferraro and Carr's relationship, with Carr mysteriously absent till the climax. This absence becomes a narrative challenge as Berman creatively overcomes barriers to access through imaginative reenactments of Carr’s own unpublished autobiography, which an Erie newspaperman assures us is a work of actual genius. (It still hasn’t been released.) When Carr eventually graces the screen, the revelations of his own life unfold. This includes the claim from the huge protege that he had been training to become the first “American Gladiator” before the show’s launch that “Apache” Dann hadn’t given him a dime — this despite the man’s contention that he played his own role in the development of the games.
Where the ESPN documentary spirals into the complexities of authorship and the elusive truth behind the spectacle, Netflix's take is more direct. Muscles & Mayhem celebrates the gladiators, illuminating their stories with both flash and shadow. It brings back fan favorites like Nitro, Tower, and Laser, shedding light on their struggles with performance-enhancing drugs and the heavy toll of their fame — though people wanting an even darker and more honest look at all of that should read Nitro’s 2009 autobiography, Gladiator: A True Story of ‘Roids, Rage, and Redemption.
Their tales of injuries, romantic escapades, unjust payments, and celebrity without compensation paint a vivid picture of the sacrifice behind the spectacle. These firsthand accounts are tinged with both regret and pride, offering raw insight into the personal costs of public fame. However, these poignant stories are sharply contrasted with the dismissive and often evasive statements from the show's executives. They seem to skate around the deeper issues, leaning into corporate rhetoric. The resulting dichotomy between the gladiators' nostalgic reminiscing and the executives' hollow denials creates a palpable tension that makes the documentary a riveting watch.
In essence, Muscles & Mayhem is a curtain call for these beat-up old gladiators, the swansong of warriors of a bygone era. Their stories come across not just as memories but as reminders of an industry's exploitation. Modern influencers, armed with social media tools and brand collaborations, lead a precarious existence but retain some power to carve out their legacies via product placements, subscription services, and revenue sharing. Meanwhile, these gladiators, the Saturday morning cartoon heroes of an older age, lacked all such avenues. When the roar of the crowd faded and the arenas emptied, they found themselves navigating the silence, haunted by the weight of obscurity, the pains of their injuries, and the shadows of their past.
Dann Carr emerges as a beacon of resilience amid this narrative. In a world where many of his contemporaries struggle to squeeze the last drops of their fleeting fame, Carr is an image of serene acceptance. Settling in the sunny climes of Florida, far from the frenzied world of Hollywood gladiatorial combat, he exudes stoic contentment. Had his efforts been properly recognized, this man could have been the linchpin in the sports renaissance of the '90s. Instead, he's chosen a path of introspection, symbolized by his dedication to curating indigenous art in his residence — a far cry from his lowest moment, when he contemplated murdering former friend Johnny Ferraro because of the perceived inequity of their financial arrangement.
On the surface, these documentaries will strike casual viewers as entertaining time capsules. To some, they will represent a nostalgic sojourn, meandering through the heady days of the American Gladiators era. Yet, it's crucial to remember that this isn't merely about reveling in the past. Together, these stories tell a cautionary tale, an unsettling homage to fleeting fame, the unsparing nature of showbiz, and dreams derailed by the precarious economics of cheap television — after all, the contestants and gladiators, like UFC fighters, pro wrestlers, and reality show participants today, can’t avail themselves of union protections or benefits. Set against the tumultuous background of an era when finance capital was bringing recalcitrant labor to heel, these narratives expose the stark realities of missed opportunities and erstwhile glory that inevitably leads into the void.
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Oliver Bateman is a journalist, historian, and co-host of the What’s Left? podcast. Visit his website: www.oliverbateman.com.
This land is whose land? This land is whose land? Avi Woolf In honor of July 4 this year, the makers of the popular frozen comfort food Half Baked lived up to the name on the carton. “This 4th of July, it’s high time we recognize that the US exists on stolen Indigenous land and commit to returning it. Learn more and take action now,” Ben & Jerry’s posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, which added a “readers’ context” note, a form of communal user fact-checking, below the post that said: “Despite Ben and Jerry’s supposed commitment to returning land they feel was stolen, they have yet to reach out to the tribe whose land their HQ is on, and arrange a return of the land to them.”
Land acknowledgments, the public pronouncement that you are on stolen land and are very sorry but not sorry enough to vacate the property, are all the rage these days. From corporations to universities to government agencies — the Smithsonian even provides a link to a helpful map for finding whose stolen land you occupy — a new mantra has emerged to sandwich the perfunctory mentioning of pronouns and the usage of pride flags and Black Lives Matter slogans on social media.
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Acknowledgments do appear at first glance to be a result of the recognition or at least political awareness of the injustices that Europe and European nations did to various peoples and groups in the imperial era, an awareness that has germinated and grown ever stronger since the radical tumult of the 1960s. But it is an odd sort of virtue-signaling to acknowledge one’s own complicity in an atrocity while in the same breath promising to continue participating in it.
Concentrated, at least for now, among the Anglo countries of Canada, the United States, and Australia, their emergence among non-indigenous peoples is closely tied to events that led to “awokenings” of varying kinds: America’s "Great Awokening," the resurfacing of Canada’s debate over forced family separation among the indigenous beginning in the 19th century, and Australia’s abandonment of the legal standard of terra nullius, the idea that the land colonized by the crown was (legally) uninhabited.
So what’s the harm with this latest woke performance?
Let’s set aside how many Americans and non-Americans don’t care for having their country’s sins shoved in their face at every opportunity, regardless of context or timing or any attempt at balance. One problem is that land acknowledgments are yet another brick in the DEI wall, a new item in an ever-lengthening loyalty oath for those in good standing. There’s a bitter irony in the side that once damned oaths of anti-communism in the same spaces now enforcing something no less doctrinaire, partisan, and polarizing on pain of firing and social damnation. The Puritans who settled the New World and started the process of driving the Native Americans out would be proud.
But the Puritans at least tried to practice what they preach when it came to personal conduct. The new morality of land acknowledgments is all preaching, an exercise in moral exhibitionism by mostly affluent professionals seeking superiority — especially over the folks who just want ice cream and fireworks on the Fourth of July.
So much for the direct political effects of land acknowledgments. But there are deeper historical problems with their underlying assumptions.
For starters, “indigeneity” as understood in popular parlance (few read the academic debates on the subject) is a deeply flawed concept. Alongside the “noble savage” and other romantic ideas about non-European peoples, many think that whoever was where they were when Europeans arrived were always there, from time immemorial, almost as though they were grown from the soil in a new spin on the biblical creation story.
This is rarely the case. The history of humanity, both civilized and nomadic, is one of conquest and movement, dispossession and replacement, acculturation and assimilation. The happy accident of any given people having won the game of territorial musical chairs just as European explorers or traders or settlers showing up and being considered native since eternity generally does not mesh with what we know from the historical and archaeological evidence.
Few places exemplify this fallacy more than one of the most famously contested places in the world, the Holy Land. Archaeology and history attest to the settlement, conquest, and cultural changes that took place over millennia. The same is true for many places around the world, not just outside Europe but even in it. Simply asking what a Central or Eastern European city’s name is can give you a window into how the snapshot of currency bias conceals more than it reveals and always has.
Is it the city of Bratislava (Slovak) or Pressburg (German)? The city of Vilna (Russian), Vilnius (Lithuanian), or Wilno (Polish)? So many of these places changed hands through conquest, annexation, and “ownership,” through cultural impact or population presence, that it’s hard to speak of any purely “original” owner whose claims trump everyone else’s.
To be fair, some advocates of land acknowledgment seem to realize this problem. The Yale University land acknowledgment guide mentions every native tribe known to have occupied or controlled a particular area — those that are still around, anyway. But even then, it’s very much a case of survivor bias, with the most recent or last remaining conqueror claiming to have been the owner since time immemorial rather than communing with all the pre-modern peoples who inhabited the place or passed through it, most of whom are long gone.
Which brings us to the core problem of the whole business: the insistence that Natives and relatively indigenous peoples, even those who conquered and killed and displaced others themselves, are the only stewards of the land worth acknowledging, while all the settlers and immigrants who came after, especially but not only from Europe, are forever invalid and unworthy of mention except to be damned repeatedly.
In and of itself, like the deeper popular awareness of the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow in our day, the insistence that Westerners take heed of the sins of their own civilization in their treatment of those who were there before — the broken treaties, the murders, the land theft and social engineering — can be well intentioned. But like every other brick in the DEI wall, the fundamental error of the woke project in general and land acknowledgments in particular is insisting that the story of America or Canada or the West in general is nothing but misdeeds and abuse of others and that the West did nothing worth appreciating as regularly as the sins we “acknowledge.”
But this simply isn’t true. The peoples who came from other lands were often great stewards of the land themselves, not just by establishing cities and laws but also in treating and preserving the land itself — as farmers, ranchers, scouts, park builders. Even their relations with the Natives were not always ones of abuse. Like many a conquering nation before them, Americans thought it a compliment to name children after great Native leaders (William “Tecumseh” Sherman, anyone?) and preserve many of the old names and places rather than snuff it all out.
One prominent example comes from the German Americans, whose contributions are often overlooked. In addition to bringing beer culture and classical music to a Puritan America, they often brought a liberal set of politics to the land of the free, including a penchant for abolitionism and even a serious respect for African American music, as can be seen in the pioneering work of music critic Henry Krehbiel, the dean of New York musical curation in the Gilded Age.
Germans also made a vital contribution to fortifying the American Great Plains as one of the world’s breadbaskets when German Mennonite colonists from Russia, fleeing a forced draft, brought a hardy strain of wheat known as “turkey red” to the U.S., helping the country better grow food even during harsh weather. This breadbasket, cultivated by both native-born and immigrant Americans, would help to save millions and perhaps tens of millions of Europeans after the catastrophes of World War I and the Russian Revolution.
A healthier form of “land acknowledgment” would acknowledge both the place of Natives in stewarding the land and the work of the settlers and immigrants who developed it, such as the Germans and others. A civilization that does nothing but loathe and cease to believe in itself is not long for this world. A civilization that has a healthy balance between crass triumphalism and self-criticism will do just fine.
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Fortunately, America already has a national holiday, established amid its greatest national crisis, when people can set aside their differences and deeply appreciate everything about the country and everything to be thankful for. It’s a day much like the July 4 Ben & Jerry’s so rudely interrupted in the name of raining on everyone’s parade.
It’s called Thanksgiving.
Avi Woolf is an editor and translator. He has been published in Arc Digital, National Review, the Bulwark, and Commentary.
Nikki Haley won, but will it matter? Nikki Haley won, but will it matter? Hugo Gurdon
Political encounters such as Wednesday’s Republican cage match in Wisconsin are not really debates. They are glittering TV brawls to which candidates bring rehearsed speeches and sound bites. But these, like war plans that don’t survive beyond the first shot of battle, should give way to nimble adaptation once the enemy starts springing surprises.
Prime-time debates show who can stay effectively on message without being bogged down in the glutinous mire of their prepared remarks. That is their value. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) failed this test.
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Far from stopping the rot that has halved his support since January, DeSantis gabbled, looked uncomfortable, and blatantly hung scripted remarks on questions instead of answering them. He was uncompelling and outclassed by several rivals. When candidates were asked if they’d support former President Donald Trump if he was nominated, DeSantis checked what others were doing before raising his hand about halfway. He has forgotten that you can only lead from the front. On this performance, he can be expected to fall farther behind Trump and perhaps be overtaken by others.
Businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, the flavor of the month, was fluent, perhaps more than any of the other eight Republican debaters. And he went toe-to-toe capably against former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, the biggest bruiser in the race. But his tumbling rhetoric (which sometimes became a torrent) became a vulnerability when combined with his dubious policy positions, such as abandoning Ukraine and Israel. Having seemed fresh at first, he dwindled into being glib and shallow.
This was exposed best by the winner of the night, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who turned on Ramaswamy, denounced him for plans that would make America “weak,” and dismissed him witheringly in one exchange by saying, “You have no foreign policy experience, and it shows.” This sparked loud cheers. Throughout the evening and on most subjects, Haley was forceful, serious, and more self-assertive and aggressive than she has customarily been.
This might, and should, dispel the mist of insipidity that has hung about her throughout the campaign. She needs to sustain her new persona, not just confident but dynamic, for only this will advance her from her lowly position in polls. Sen. Tim Scott, the other South Carolinian in the race, seemed likable but not much more, probably because his compelling American dream life story cannot be unpacked compellingly in clipped sound bites when seven rivals are clamoring for airtime.
Former Vice President Mike Pence plodded out lines from his stump speech, as is his wont. He is the humble bragger of his generation, laying it on so thickly that he might as well be using a shovel. Before one of his boasts, he parenthetically said, “in all humility.” The audio reveals an aptly derisive chuckle of response from one of the participants — it is not clear who.
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The other two debaters were largely unobjectionable but also largely pointless. Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (lugubrious and dull) and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum (apparently running for small-town mayor) could do everyone a favor by dropping out of the race.
They probably won’t. But if the debate helps sort the sheep from the goats — and I don’t mean greatest of all time — it will have been worthwhile.
Our nuclear weapon paradoxes Our nuclear weapon paradoxes Mackubin Owens Thanks to the international box-office success of Oppenheimer, the use and morality of nuclear weapons have become a popular discussion again. While we have lived in the nuclear era for the better part of a century, nuclear escalation and deterrence policy remains at the forefront of any military confrontation, including with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That campaign has played out against the backdrop of modern nuclear weapons technology and the fear that Russia might escalate to nuclear levels in order to break the stalemate in its favor. Yet the technological advancements in nuclear weapons, and indeed, non-nuclear weapons, since the time of Robert Oppenheimer might make it less likely either side will resort to a grand nuclear clash.
On Aug. 6, 1945, an American aircraft dropped an atomic bomb over Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, a second bomb was detonated over Nagasaki. The two bombs killed between 129,000 and 226,000 people, most of whom were civilians. The debate over the morality of these bombings began immediately and has only intensified over the decades as the destructive power of nuclear arms increased with the development of a thermonuclear weapon.
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Supporters of President Harry Truman’s decision to use the bomb cite the likely human costs of the alternatives: a blockade of Japan intended to starve the Japanese into submission, hardly a humanitarian course of action, or an invasion, which would have killed many more Americans but also Japanese as well. And any discussion of the morality of nuclear deterrence since the end of World War II has to take account of the fact that, although the Atomic Age did not lead to the end of war, fear of the destructive power of nuclear weapons placed an upper limit on conflict. One has only to compare the human cost of war since 1945 to the years between 1914 and 1945.
Nuclear weapons very likely prevented war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Indeed, during the Cold War, nuclear weapons policy and strategy suffused every aspect of national security, including non-nuclear strategy. The great destructive power of nuclear weapons served as a deterrent. For instance, the U.S. rejected military options during both the Korean and Vietnam wars out of concern that escalation might lead to a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union or China.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine and NATO’s proxy war have raised the specter of a possible nuclear confrontation between the U.S. and Russia. Certainly, Putin has rattled the nuclear saber. He previously warned against Western interference with his assault on Ukraine and put Russian nuclear forces on alert. With his invasion of Ukraine having bogged down recently, he ratcheted up his threats to employ nuclear weapons. U.S. officials have taken that threat seriously, voicing concerns that Russia might employ tactical or low-yield nuclear weapons in response to setbacks in Ukraine.
It is customary to classify nuclear weapons as “strategic,” capable of striking assets in the enemy’s homeland; “theater,” capable of striking strategically important targets within a theater of operations; and “tactical,” intended to attack enemy units or weapons in relatively close proximity to one’s own forces. Strategic weapons have generally featured a higher “yield” of explosive power.
In the early years of the Cold War, the main means of delivering a strategic weapon was a gravity bomb dropped by an aircraft. Next came ballistic missiles, both land- and sea-based. These were of intercontinental range, meaning that the U.S. could attack targets in the Soviet Union and vice versa. The U.S. ultimately deployed a nuclear “triad” consisting of strategic bombers, such as the B-52 and B-2, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, and submarine-launched intercontinental ballistic missiles. The Soviet arsenal followed a similar pattern. At the theater and tactical level, delivery systems included aircraft, cannon artillery, and intermediate-range ballistic missiles. Today, cruise missiles and hypersonic missiles have been added to the mix.
U.S. nuclear weapons policy during the Cold War was based on the logic of an “escalation ladder.” The main theater of war in the confrontation between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was Europe. U.S. and NATO policymakers believed that they could not match Soviet and Warsaw Treaty Organization conventional forces in Europe, but according to the logic of escalation, NATO could deter war by threatening to use tactical nuclear weapons, such as low-yield weapons delivered by aircraft, tube artillery, and short-range missiles, if it were in danger of losing a conventional conflict. If WTO responded in kind, NATO could escalate to theater-level nuclear weapons and, if necessary, to the strategic level.
In the early years of the Cold War, U.S. policymakers believed that the U.S. possessed “escalation dominance”: that in any scenario, conventional or nuclear, the U.S. could threaten to escalate to a level of conflict at which we possessed the advantage. That belief evaporated in the 1970s as the Soviets began to deploy theater nuclear weapons and, most critically, to develop powerful counterforce strategic nuclear capabilities, such as the SS-18, that erased U.S. escalation dominance. A U.S. threat to escalate to a nuclear exchange as it was losing a conventional war in Europe now rang hollow.
Beginning in the late 1970s and into the Reagan administration, the U.S. responded in three ways: at the strategic nuclear level, deploying a whole array of new, accurate land-based and sea-based systems such as the Minuteman III, the MX, and the Trident Missile and the first components of a system of strategic defense; at the theater nuclear level, deploying the Pershing II intermediate ballistic missile in Europe; and perhaps most importantly, at the conventional level, developing true war fighting and war winning operational doctrines for the U.S. Army and Air Force, AirLand Battle/Operations, and for the naval services, the “Maritime Strategy,” was designed to bring naval aviation to bear against NATO’s northern flank and in the Pacific.
With the end of the Cold War, the central importance of nuclear weapons to U.S. security policy declined precipitously. Of course, there were concerns about rogue actors such as North Korea and Iran. Indeed, one of the justifications for launching the Iraq War was to prevent Saddam Hussein from acquiring a nuclear capability.
As a result, thinking about nuclear strategy and force structure atrophied. This can be seen by examining the evolution of the periodic Nuclear Posture Review process, begun during the Clinton administration in order to provide a comprehensive account of U.S. nuclear policy, including the role of nuclear weapons, nuclear force structure, and nuclear force options. For instance, the 2010 Obama NPR said that although Russia remained a nuclear peer, “Russia and the United States are no longer adversaries, and prospects for military confrontation have declined dramatically.” The Trump NPR attempted to reinvigorate U.S. nuclear weapons policy and strategy, especially in light of the reemergence of great power confrontation and Russia’s nuclear modernization.
NPRs were normally issued by the Department of Defense as stand-alone documents every five to 10 years, but in 2022, the Biden administration folded the NPR into the National Defense Strategy, stressing that the fundamental role of U.S. nuclear weapons is to deter nuclear attack on the U.S., its allies, and its partners. It further claimed that the U.S. would only consider the use of nuclear weapons in extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the U.S. or its allies and partners. What does all of this mean in light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine?
According to the Arms Control Association, currently deployed U.S. and Russian warheads for strategic weapons are about equal in number: 1,458 warheads on 527 intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched missiles, and bombers for Russia and 1,389 warheads on 665 intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched missiles, and bombers for the U.S. Both sides have more warheads in storage. No other country possesses anything near these numbers.
A major development in the evolution of nuclear strategy has been the vast improvements in the accuracy of nuclear delivery systems. For instance, satellite-linked guidance systems make it possible to deliver a warhead much closer to a target than in the past. This means that even strategic nuclear weapons now feature reduced yields because of the cubic relationship between accuracy and effect: Doubling the accuracy of a weapon is equivalent to increasing the yield eightfold. And herein lies the first paradox.
Arguably, nuclear states have avoided crossing the nuclear threshold because of the immense destructive power of thermonuclear weapons. But improved accuracy means that a more accurately delivered weapon requires a much smaller yield, compared to a less accurately delivered warhead, to achieve the same effect on the target, producing the necessary overpressures to destroy even hardened targets while reducing collateral damage. Ironically, this theoretically removes an obstacle to the use of nuclear weapons, which has led some observers to express concern that increased accuracy means that nuclear weapons have become more “usable.”
Given this reality, would Russia consider using tactical nuclear weapons within Ukraine to break the current stalemate, risking escalation? On the one hand, the Russians have apparently developed very low-yield nuclear warheads that can be delivered by air or short-range ballistic missiles. Of most concern is the Iskander-M (NATO designation SS-26 Stone), which has already been employed extensively to deliver non-nuclear explosives.
On the other hand, we face a second paradox. Both the U.S. and Russia have developed non-nuclear warheads that produce blast effects and overpressures similar to those of a small nuclear weapon, such as thermobaric weapons. The Russians no doubt also have munitions such as the U.S. Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb, which was used against an Islamic State tunnel complex in Afghanistan in 2017. The latter contains some 18,000 pounds of an ammonium nitrate/powdered aluminum gelled slurry detonated by a high explosive booster.
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Russia also possesses a non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse warhead capable of knocking out communications and modern electronics in a broad area. Such a specialized Iskander radio frequency warhead delivered by an Iskander-M would affect electronics and communications within a radius of some 10 kilometers from the detonation point.
So the two paradoxes of today’s nuclear weapons are that (1) technology, primarily improvements in accuracy, has made it possible to reduce the explosive power of nuclear weapons, arguably making nuclear weapons more usable, and (2) other technological advances have caused the effects of nuclear and non-nuclear weapons to converge. While the first paradox would seem to make a nuclear confrontation more likely, the second paradox makes it less likely that either Russia or the U.S. will cross the nuclear Rubicon in Ukraine.
Mackubin Owens is a senior fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute and a national security fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas, Austin.
Schrodinger’s GOP primary Schrodinger’s GOP primary Jay Cost The first-in-the-nation primary contests in Iowa and New Hampshire may not be until January, but judging by the national polls, the Republican race appears to be over already. At the beginning of the year, former President Donald Trump seemed to be struggling, with Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) closing in. But after being indicted by New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg, the former president jumped out to a huge lead and has remained there for months. As of this writing, Trump boasts a 40-point lead over DeSantis in the RealClearPolitics average.
Are Republican primary voters ready to Make America Great Again? Maybe so, but maybe not.
REPUBLICAN DEBATE: DESANTIS PLAYS PREVENT DEFENSE BEFORE TAKING THE LEAD
It’s important to bear in mind that, with the exception of political professionals, pundits, and the terminally online, most people are not thinking all that much about the primary. The news that they are hearing is mostly favorable, from their perspective, to Trump. Republican voters believe that these indictments are a put-up job, an effort by Democratic prosecutors to criminalize politics, and they have accordingly rallied to his banner. But they’ve simultaneously told pollsters time and again that they remain open to other candidates.
And the political universe looks different in the early states in the nominating process, especially Iowa and New Hampshire. Trump certainly has the edge there, but it does not seem like an impending coronation.
This should not come as a huge surprise. The early states are where candidates have poured the most time and resources into campaigning, voters there are more engaged, and thus Trump does not look as formidable. These voters are hearing more from the other candidates, rather than the national story of Trump’s indictments, and so actually doing what national voters claim to be doing: keeping an open mind and considering their options.
RealClearPolitics has Trump at 43% in Iowa and 44% in New Hampshire. Moreover, his numbers in both states have remained flat for months, even as his national numbers have enjoyed a boost with his various indictments. This is good but not great, given Trump’s status in the party. Granted, he maintains a large lead, but that is because non-Trump voters are scattered across half a dozen candidates. Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) looks strong in Iowa, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie does in New Hampshire, and DeSantis is in the mix in both places.
The importance of these two states cannot be understated. In the last 50 years, the only nominees in either party who won the nomination without carrying at least one of them are Bill Clinton in 1992 and Joe Biden in 2020. Just as Trump’s indictments altered the information stream that voters received in 2023, so will the back-to-back results in Iowa and New Hampshire possibly reframe the electoral landscape in early 2024. Time and again, candidates have seen their national polling numbers collapse when they lose in the early states.
Yet there are more than a few reasons to think Iowa and New Hampshire are problematic for Trump. The first and most obvious is the Trump campaign, or lack thereof. The former president is not really running anything like his rivals are. Judging strictly by the national polls, this might make sense. He looks like an incumbent president in those polls, far above the fray. Why should he deign to compete? But in Iowa and New Hampshire, he looks more like a strong front-runner, somebody with an edge but who still must close the deal. Far from trying to do that, Trump has gone out of the way to be antagonistic, picking fights in Iowa with the popular governor, Kim Reynolds, and prominent evangelicals such as Bob Vander Plaats. To be sure, it is highly unlikely that these tiffs are going to cost Trump many votes. The significance is the mindset the former president has: The nomination is his by right, and everybody else needs to fall in line. He’s not trying to solidify his existing support, let alone expand it.
Additionally, there is a lot of money out there that will be spent against Trump, not so much in negative ads but rather in campaigns for other candidates. Those resources are going to be overwhelmingly dedicated to Iowa and New Hampshire in the next five months. This is something that incumbent candidates almost never have to deal with. Their opponents rarely amount to more than token resistance. And just how much money will Trump have available to spend? He has raised an impressive amount this year, but a lot of it has gone to his legal bills. Is he going to have the ability to go on an advertising blitz to counter late-breaking momentum from one of his opponents?
Iowa poses additional challenges for Trump. It’s a caucus state, where the vote is conducted by the Iowa GOP under a byzantine set of rules, which privilege the most engaged voters. Unsurprisingly, turnout for the Iowa caucuses is always lower than turnout in primaries. That works to the advantage of candidates with strong, grassroots organizations and those with ties to the Christian evangelical community, which has historically dominated the proceedings in the Hawkeye State. Trump has little organization this year, and his relationship with Iowa evangelicals has always been fraught, as his recent fight with Vander Plaats indicates. In fact, the pre-caucuses polls in 2016 had Trump ahead by about 5 points, but he lost by 4 points.
What’s especially interesting about both states is their propensity to break extremely late in the cycle. Voters in Iowa and New Hampshire are pretty comfortable kicking the tires on candidates all through the summer and fall before settling on a candidate in the winter. The last three winners of the Iowa caucuses, for instance — Ted Cruz in 2016, Rick Santorum in 2012, and Mike Huckabee in 2008 — were barely registering in the polls around Labor Day. They shot up late, and rapidly. Democratic caucusgoers have likewise been prone to late breaks, with Barack Obama in 2008 and John Kerry in 2004. Candidates who felt the wind at their back in late August have often been hit with a cold wind in their face in January.
Trump’s biggest advantage in both states is that the field remains fragmented. If we assume that the former president’s floor is 35%, that will probably be enough to win so long as there are three or more serious alternatives to the ex-president. That was an advantage he enjoyed in 2016. His rivals spending time punching one another rather than going after him or dropping out. If the day of the caucuses arrives and DeSantis, Scott, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, former Vice President Mike Pence, and Gov. Doug Burgum (R-ND) are all still in the race, drawing support, it’s an easy bet that Trump’s 35% will be more than enough. Even more so in New Hampshire, where Christie is drawing an additional 10% of the vote.
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What needs to happen is for the non-Trump candidates to make sure that Iowa and New Hampshire voters get a close look at them but have the self-awareness and humility to acknowledge when they’ve been found lacking. “Zombie” candidacies, with no realistic path of winning but still drawing a non-negligible share of the vote, will be a boon to the Trump campaign, just as they were in 2016.
To reframe the opening question: Is this a real race where other candidates have a shot, or is this all sound and noise, signifying nothing before Trump’s eventual coronation? Who knows yet? This is, at least for now, Schrodinger’s primary. Just as Schrodinger’s cat is both alive and dead until the box is opened, this primary is real and imaginary until Iowa and New Hampshire speak. If Trump loses one or both or wins narrowly, it will be a race. If he wins both handily, it won’t be. There are reasons to think that Trump could lose early, but we won’t know for sure until the leaves have fallen from the trees and the winter frost has rolled in.
Jay Cost is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a visiting scholar at Grove City College.
Yoon’s triumph at Camp David Yoon’s triumph at Camp David Rebeccah Heinrichs The outcome of this month’s Camp David summit is anything but ordinary. The national leaders of the Republic of Korea and Japan met with President Joe Biden to discuss mutual commitments to fair economic practices, sovereignty, territorial integrity, and maintaining a free and open Indo-Pacific, along with rather specific and pragmatic steps to mature hard power within a tripartite regional security architecture. While such statements might seem routine, what the summit represents is the start of a political-military regional alliance architecture for Asia. And though much depends on the next presidential election, Washington's ability to seize this momentum could go a long way in deterring military aggression from the biggest threat to peace in the region and the world: Xi Jinping.
South Korea and Japan, both important democratic allies of the United States, have had to overcome vexing hurdles to get to the success of Camp David.
CHINA BOASTS RECORD-HIGH MILITARY RECRUITMENT WHILE US FACES A DEFICIT
Before a bilateral meeting in Tokyo in March, their regular meetings had taken a decadeslong break. Despite being modern and free societies, with democratic systems of government, robust and dynamic economies, and close alliances with the U.S., historical memories are long and national and family loyalties are powerful.
The brief and oversimplified history is that Imperial Japan colonized the Korean Peninsula between 1910 and 1945, and the emperor’s regime ruled with an iron fist and forced many Korean men into labor camps and women into prostitution (the tragically titled “Comfort Women”) before and during its aggression in World War II.
On and off, as Japan transformed into the indispensable ally of America it is today, Tokyo has tried to make amends with Seoul. But the moves have largely been viewed by the families of those abused by Imperial Japan as insultingly inadequate. Adding to the prickly political dynamics, under the leadership of the late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the former pacifist nation dramatically began to rearm. Japan came to terms with the threat the Chinese Communist Party-led People's Republic of China posed to Japan, the region, and the international order led by the U.S.
The charismatic, politically shrewd, and strikingly skilled politician navigated President Donald Trump better than perhaps any world leader except for NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg. Abe was tragically assassinated in July of 2022, his loss devastating loved ones and admirers who saw his leadership as key to the progress Japan was making.
Abe guided Japan toward a robust rearmament and a more prudent posture toward its own defense and deterrence with close ties to the U.S. And South Korea was not politically ready for that. China remains South Korea's biggest economic partner, and Seoul has been painfully reluctant to speak starkly about the threat the PRC poses.
This stands in contrast to South Korea's condemnations of the aggressive behavior by its northern authoritarian neighbor, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. To this point, at least publicly, security cooperation between the two Asian democracies has been defined by the shared interest in keeping Kim Jong Un under control and from firing off nuclear-capable missiles near and over their countries. And in this regard, their shared security interests were focused on collaborative efforts on the Korean Peninsula, always with the coalescing support of the U.S.
And, notably, the statement from Camp David noted the goal of the denuclearization of North Korea, not the “Korean Peninsula,” which is North Korea's preferred characterization and one the Biden administration has been willing to adopt in the recent past. The U.S.’s security guarantees to those Asian allies, not least of which the nuclear umbrella, has been the foundation of the U.S.-led order since World War II. But the U.S.’s power has declined relative to its apex following the Cold War.
And American politics are deeply unsettling to allies in the most dangerous neighborhoods, especially to those who prefer the U.S. to remain the preeminent power if the choice is Uncle Sam or Xi. But despite the insistence of Biden cheerleaders in the media and his administration, America does not always feel “back.” For example, although the U.S. is critical for the international effort to support Ukraine’s defense against Russian aggression, it has not been lost on nations such as Japan and South Korea that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nuclear threats have prevented Washington from helping Ukraine “too much” for fear of escalation.
No doubt the efficacy of this approach has also not been lost on Xi. Wisely, allies want greater nuclear assurances. That became especially clear when South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol insisted Biden provide more robust nuclear guarantees.
But the creeping doubt in U.S. commitments isn’t tied to any one specific foreign policy matter. The entire Biden foreign policy agenda remains conflicted, with goals from climate policy to liberal domestic ideology taking precedence. Administration instincts remain more inclined toward risk aversion when courage is needed and appeasement when a matter calls for punishment. And then there is the matter of the president’s own political, legal, and health troubles. The Republican Party doesn’t offer much by way of reassurance, with no conservative internationalist candidate coming near the ethically and legally beleaguered showman, Trump.
Tough times call for breakthroughs in leadership. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has carried on the legacy of Abe. What was needed was an equally committed and courageous leader from South Korea. Yoon is that man. Yoon is a conservative former prosecutor and something of a political outsider and has deftly and persistently steered South Korea toward a more muscular approach against authoritarian countries and cooperation with the U.S. and its longtime democratic neighborhood rival. His determination to move South Korea to sounder footing to deter China and deepen meaningful military ties with Japan is truly remarkable, though his successors must build on this very new progress.
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And although China’s meteoric economic rise looked poised to surpass the U.S. and set the conditions for Xi to reorient the international “rules” to favor the CCP model and away from liberty and national determination, it has hit an economic plateau. But a flagging authoritarian nation could be quite dangerous, especially since Xi has tied his own fate to imperialist aims such as conquering Taiwan and pushing the U.S. out of the Pacific.
The new tripartite military plans, missile defense cooperation, and technology sharing between South Korea, Japan, and the U.S. will be enormously beneficial to convincing Xi that any aggression in the region could be met with responses that would make him regret his move. But the U.S. seems to be in the wilderness. While it works its way out, other capitals will be required to do exceptionally difficult and remarkable things, and the Camp David outcomes are Yoon’s triumph.
Rebeccah Heinrichs is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and an adjunct professor at the Institute of World Politics.
Here’s what Trump’s economic agenda will look like if he’s back in the White House Here’s what Trump’s economic agenda will look like if he’s back in the White House Tiana Lowe Doescher If former President Donald Trump claws his way back to the White House, he'll face unfinished business from his signature domestic achievement as president.
Expiring provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act will confront either a restored Trump, a reelected President Joe Biden, or another 2024 presidential winner. Taxes are set to go up on broad swaths of the economy in 2025 if something isn't done since Trump and a then-Republican Congress enacted the law through Senate budget rules requiring only a bare majority to pass the chamber rather than the usual 60-vote filibuster hurdle, which limits the duration of some tax cuts.
UP FOR DEBATE: TRUMP, DESANTIS, AND 2024 GOP HOPEFULS' STANCE ON AI
Revisiting the TCJA would be just one component of Trump's economic agenda in a second term, which isn't a fanciful notion, even though he faces 91 criminal counts across four separate criminal cases. Trump is the undisputed Republican presidential primary front-runner. And though Biden benefits from the favorable political headwinds of his incumbency, the real roadblock threatening the president's reelection is not his son Hunter Biden or even his record-setting status as the first octogenarian to occupy the Oval. Rather, Biden's biggest liability is the economy and, more specifically, the 16% increase in overall prices since he took office.
Trump would have to reckon with the expiration of most of the TCJA's individual income tax provisions in the second half of 2025. While Trump would surely move to extend his signature legislative achievement, which would cost $3.3 trillion through 2033, he will reckon with an economy fundamentally transformed since the law's enactment in December 2017.
The COVID-19 spending boondoggle by both Congress and the Federal Reserve resulted in about 2 million boomers cashing in on artificially inflated asset bubbles, and retiring early, expediting the crisis of our aging society's shrinking workforce. This problem compounds the impending insolvency of Social Security by 2033, as the ratio of workers to Social Security recipients decreased from its already record low point of 3-1 to 2-1. Trump has distinguished himself as the loudest Republican refusing to reform Social Security, which, if nothing is done, means a 23% across-the-board benefit cut within a decade. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget found this translates to a $17,400 benefit cut for a typical newly retired dual-income couple.
Federal Reserve Clashes
A second, nonconsecutive Trump term would likely mean renewed clashes with the Federal Reserve. Trump previously showed no more respect for the precedent of an independent Central Bank than he did for the judgment and discretion of voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and elsewhere when he engaged false claims about the logistics of the 2020 election in a futile effort to reverse his loss to Biden.
In 2018 and 2019, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell showed admirable resolve in ignoring taunts and insults from Trump, the president who had appointed him, over interest-rate policy. Trump repeatedly attacked Powell for raising rates from near zero despite the persistence of the longest bull market run in history.
Trump has since shifted his tone, now jabbing Powell for his dovish approach to the start of the worst inflation crisis in 40 years. During an interview with Fox Business's Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council in his administration, Trump noted that Powell was "always late, whether it was good or bad."
While Trump has shown zero interest in reforming the Fed's dual mandate, which has the central bank balance the two goals of maximizing employment and stabilizing inflation at no more than 2% on an annual basis, he has strayed from his heterodox monetary inclinations. That includes recently expressing worry about the dollar's diminishing share of global currency reserve and the yuan's threat to the greenback's dominance, a tenant of long-running China criticisms.
If in position as president again to replace Powell as Fed chairman or fill other positions, Trump would likely consider Kudlow or economist Judy Shelton. Both are widely respected and mainstream conservative-leaning economists. Though Trump's 2019 nomination of Shelton to the Fed Board stalled in the Senate for more than a year and Biden withdrew it after taking office.
Green Be Gone
Trump likely would aim to overturn much of his predecessor's industrial policy. That includes gutting the Biden administration's green energy tax breaks and subsidies as a part of a commitment to unleashing domestic energy production. Trump also could dramatically expand his tariff regime. That would mean proposing universal, baseline tariffs on the vast majority of foreign imports. This consumption tax revenue would then fund domestic tax cuts, including making permanent corporate tax cuts in the TCJA while streamlining and simplifying other parts of the federal tax code.
Trump has made clear he wants to cut some nonentitlement spending, promising to upend the Impoundment Control Act, a Nixon-era restriction on presidents' ability to delay or cancel congressionally appropriated funding significantly.
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"Reasserting the president’s historic Impoundment authority will also restore critical negotiating leverage with Congress to keep spending under control," Trump said in June. He further pledged to withhold funds "to obliterate the deep state, drain the swamp, and starve the warmongers … and the globalists out of government."
Ultimately, Trump will continue to combine his gut instinct for protectionism to put "America First" with his priority of economic growth over conventionally conservative spending cuts. While piecemeal defunding of the federal bureaucracy will slow our projected growth of spending, Trump's real bet is similar to that which he made for returning to office on Jan. 20, 2025: that we can grow our way out of projected spending increases through pro-business and protectionist policy.
Contours of potential Federal Trade Commission case against Amazon become clearer Contours of potential Federal Trade Commission case against Amazon become clearer Jessica Melugin A reported “last rites” meeting for Amazon with the three members of the Federal Trade Commission last week signals that a case against the online retail giant may be imminent.
The FTC has been investigating the $1.4 trillion online retailer, movie studio owner, primary care medical provider, Whole Foods grocery store holder, and cloud services company for years, but details for the forthcoming case have not been made public.
UP FOR DEBATE: TRUMP, DESANTIS, AND 2024 GOP HOPEFULS' STANCE ON AI
Moreover, FTC Chairwoman Lina Khan is a longtime Amazon antagonist. She wrote an influential paper as a Yale Law School student, “Amazon's Antitrust Paradox,” which argued that the current American antitrust law framework has focused too much on keeping consumer prices down at the expense of alleged monopolistic practices. Amazon is, forgive the wordplay, a prime example of the problem, in Khan's view.
One issue for regulators would be "price parity." That is, up until 2019, Amazon prevented third-party sellers in its online marketplace from offering lower prices in other selling venues. That year the company changed its policy to ban sellers from “setting a price on a product or service that is significantly higher than recent prices offered on or off Amazon.” If sellers violate this policy or charge inflated shipping costs, they may be subject to a truncated “buy box” being displayed alongside their product, which displays purchase options. This adds one extra step in purchasing the product and is significant because 82% of sales happen in the box.
In explaining the terms of the price parity arrangement, Amazon states that it “strives to provide (its) customers with the largest selection at the lowest price.” Critics of the policy, like the attorneys general of the District of Columbia and California, charge that price parity results in customers paying artificially higher prices.
Perhaps also at issue is the platform’s "self-preferencing" practices. Critics charge that Amazon unfairly advantages itself when it competes with third-party sellers in offering similar items. Specifically, the accusation is that Amazon favors the search results with offers from its in-house brand, Amazon Basics, over those of third-party sellers. This practice would have been banned by the American Innovation and Online Choice Act, which failed to pass in Congress last session.
Defenders of the practice argue that the Amazon Basics line offers more choices for consumers and often a lower price, free and expedited shipping.
Most recently, the FTC’s Consumer Protection Bureau filed charges against Amazon for using “manipulative, coercive, or deceptive user-interface designs known as ‘dark patterns’ to trick consumers into enrolling in automatically renewing Prime subscriptions.” The company’s sheer size and market power, with wildly successful services like Prime, may factor into the upcoming case.
The current FTC has put Big Tech in its crosshairs with cases against Meta, Google, and Microsoft. Efforts are ongoing against Meta’s 2012 $1 billion purchase of photo-based social media app Instagram, while one challenging Meta’s acquisition of fitness virtual reality startup, Within, was lost in court. A case challenging Google’s contracts with device manufacturers to be the default search option on products is set to start trial next month. The agency’s effort to block Microsoft’s purchase of video game maker Activision Blizzard, maker of the popular game Call of Duty, also failed in court this summer. All the attempts reflect the current FTC commissioners’ skepticism of large companies and their impact on competitors, workers, and competition dynamics.
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One question for the FTC with the forthcoming Amazon case is if Khan will recuse herself. Because the FTC acts as both prosecutor and judge in its in-house administrative courts, Khan’s past publicly expressed opinions about the company’s practices could violate Amazon’s right to due process. Khan rose to prominence in the antitrust field by authoring that law school paper asserting Amazon was harming competition. She then went on to craft a report about the market dangers of large tech companies while working as a committee counsel in the House of Representatives. Amazon has filed a petition asking her to recuse herself from any future cases against the company.
If the FTC case is successful, remedies range from barring certain business practices at issue, like price parity or self-preferencing, to structural remedies, like breaking up the company. That would be the biggest antitrust measure ever taken against Big Tech.
Bestselling author tells girls they have lost ‘human rights’ Bestselling author tells girls they have lost ‘human rights’ Madeline Fry Schultz Just as most people can remember exactly when, if ever, they had “the talk” with their parents, most millennial women can probably tell you about the first time they cracked open a slim little book called The Care and Keeping of You. Published in 1998 by American Girl, this trim, 104-page manual has taught millions of preteens — yes, it has sold more than 2 million copies — about personal hygiene and what to expect from puberty.
Its author, Valorie Lee Schaefer, finalized her book while she was on bed rest with her first daughter. Twenty-five years later, she took to Elle magazine to look back on the legacy of her wildly successful book.
UP FOR DEBATE: WHERE TRUMP, DESANTIS, AND REST OF REPUBLICAN 2024 FIELD STAND ON KEY ISSUES
“We wanted to encourage and empower girls to step up and start to take ownership of their own health, hygiene, and well-being,” she wrote. “We wanted to plant the seed of an idea: Your parents and other grown-ups are there to help you, but it’s your body — a message that’s still timely today, even if it hits in a slightly different way.”
It’s not hard to guess where this is going. Girls in 2023 have inherited a world worse than that of their peers born in 1998, Schaefer wrote. Why? Because of the reversal of Roe v. Wade, of course.
“If my daughter were born today in 2023, she’d arrive into a political landscape where women and girls have less fundamental human rights in many parts of the U.S. than they did in 1998, less say over what happens to their own bodies,” she wrote.
Schaefer described Roe as “affirming a person’s right to reproductive self-determination,” as if women, in choosing whom to sleep with and when, are not the governors of their own reproductive fates. (Of course, there are tragic exceptions to this rule, ones that many state abortion restrictions acknowledge.)
Schaefer wrote that for young girls, the messages of The Care and Keeping of You “still ring true, even if their state laws tell them otherwise: You are strong. You are capable. You are worthy. The future belongs to you.”
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Hopefully, young readers don’t stumble upon the op-ed that tells them they have no future without the “human right” to end their pregnancies. With her pro-abortion rights lecture, Schaefer seems to forget the thing that made The Care and Keeping of You so popular: Without wading into politics or controversial discussions of gender and sexuality, the book simply encouraged young girls by teaching them the facts about their development.
But that was a different time. Now, American Girl’s A Smart Girl’s Guide: Body Image, which came out in 2022, instructs children about gender ideology. As Schaefer seems to imply, a book as simple and influential as The Care and Keeping of You may never be made again. What she doesn’t realize, however, is that we have only the ideologues to blame.
Auctioning off border security Auctioning off border security Conn Carroll Sometimes it seems that President Joe Biden’s immigration policies are driven more by spite than any rational thinking — spite toward former President Donald Trump, that is.
For decades building a border wall between Mexico and the United States was a bipartisan priority. No one built more miles of the existing border wall than President Bill Clinton.
THE BIDEN BORDER CRISIS RAGES ON
But sometime around 2016, right about when Trump made finishing the border wall one of his signature policies, all of a sudden, adding one more single inch to the already 649-mile barrier between Mexico and the U.S. became one of the most racist things a politician could possibly do.
So when Trump left office with over 1,000 “square structural tubes” for the wall purchased but not yet installed, instead of completing construction with the materials already purchased, Biden put them in storage at a cost of $130,000 a day and almost $47 million since Biden became president.
Seems like it would have been cheaper just to finish building with what the government already had.
Nope.
Now, instead of resuming construction, the Biden administration is auctioning off the remaining uninstalled pieces of the wall. It has already sold 81 lots for just pennies on the dollar and has over 1,000 left to go.
What if, instead of selling the construction materials for a loss, the government sold them to border states willing to pay to finish the wall? Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) would be more than happy to take the “square structural tubes” off the federal government’s hands and turn them into a working border wall.
Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Tom Cotton (R-AR), Roger Wicker (R-MS), and Joni Ernst (R-IA) have introduced the Finish It Act, which would do exactly that. The legislation would not force Biden to build a wall he does not want to build, but it would allow border states to purchase already paid-for wall material from the federal government to complete construction of the border wall on their own.
“Instead of securing the border, President Biden is auctioning off taxpayer-funded border wall materials for pennies on the dollar,” Ernst said. “He cannot avoid Congress’s accountability and must use these parts for their intended purpose. Build the wall and finish it!”
With illegal border crossings rising again last month, Biden should at least consider letting states finish building the wall for him. Unfortunately, that too seems to make too much sense.
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Helen Mirren plays Golda Meir in a new biopic about the Israeli prime minister Helen Mirren plays Golda Meir in a new biopic about the Israeli prime minister Sean Durns A decade before the rise of U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Israel had its own “Iron Lady,” Golda Meir, a 75-year-old grandmother more famous for her chicken soup recipes than wielding weaponry yet who led the country through its biggest military challenge 50 years ago when Egyptian and Syrian forces invaded during the Yom Kippur holiday. And her life is now told on screen in Guy Nattiv’s new film Golda.
Helen Mirren stars as Meir, and Liev Schreiber portrays Henry Kissinger, the U.S. secretary of state often, but not always, at odds with the Israeli prime minister. This is by a wide margin the best portrayal of the Israeli premier put to film, easily surpassing Ingrid Bergman’s 1982 movie A Woman Called Golda, among others. The film is dark and somber. The cinematography is beautiful and bleak. The overall gritty feel is aided by sparse dialogue and a fitting score. And the mood is tense. This is a story of survival told from the perspective of a survivor who, while the Holocaust loomed, famously said, “There is only one thing I hope to see before I die, and that is that my people should not need expressions of sympathy anymore.”
THE ATOM SPLITS, THE GENDERS UNITE, AND THE BLOCK BUSTS
Mirren gives a superb performance. There are portions of the film in which old news clips are interspersed with Mirren’s Meir, and it can be hard to tell the difference. Mirren looks like Meir, her face etched with wary lines. She sounds like Meir. And she even walks like Meir, plodding but assured, holding a handbag. Schreiber gives a similarly strong performance as a taciturn Kissinger. He nails Kissinger’s famously gravelly voice and portrays the controversial secretary of state in an unadorned fashion.
Unsurprisingly, some of the film’s best moments come from tête-à-tête scenes between the two. In one of the movie’s memorable scenes, Meir and Kissinger engage in a battle of wills over the Israeli prime minister’s kitchen table, with Meir forcing the exhausted diplomat to eat borscht. The scene is one of many that hints at a core theme: Meir’s charm coexists with a steely determination.
Meir came from a working-class background and was part of Israel’s founding generation. On the eve of Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, she engaged in risky diplomatic missions, trying, unsuccessfully, to persuade Transjordan to refrain from attacking the fledgling Jewish state. She spent decades in the often fractious Israeli Labor Party, gaining a reputation as a canny political operator.
When Prime Minister Levi Eshkol suddenly died from a heart attack in 1969, Meir seemed to be a natural successor. She came to power amid a time of great change, both for the young nation and the Middle East. Israel had won a resounding victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, defeating numerous Arab opponents and seizing eastern Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria, or the West Bank, from Jordan and swaths of territory from Egypt and Syria.
But on Oct. 6, 1973, Israel was attacked on the Day of Atonement and caught flatfooted before regaining the offensive. The Jewish state would endure horrendous losses, in men and material, until it managed to beat Egypt and Syria back. Israel won the 1973 war, but it hardly felt victorious. How, it was rightly asked, could Israel have been surprised by massive invading armies bent on its destruction?
Recriminations would follow. The 1973 war, it could be said, marked the beginning of the end for the Labor Left that had ruled the country since its founding. Meir would soon retire. And her two immediate successors, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, would rule only briefly before a conservative victory in 1977. Meir would die a year later — but not before she would watch Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin make peace with Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat, her old foe.
Golda’s story hinges on 1973. While concerned about Israel falling to Soviet client states such as Syria and Egypt, Kissinger is equally keen to prevent greater involvement from the Soviet Union in the region. And perhaps most importantly, he wants to move Sadat into the U.S. orbit. By contrast, Meir is solely focused on saving the country that she helped create and build. She has seen how little the outside world cares about Jewry, and she’s not interested in making compromises with possibly lethal results.
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In one of the film’s more memorable scenes, Meir coolly chastises Kissinger, reminding him that she was acutely aware of “the Russians,” having witnessed their pogroms as a little girl in her native Ukraine. But things are different now. The Jewish people have Israel and are no longer unarmed against those who seek their destruction. “I’m no longer that little girl hiding in the cellar,” she tells him.
Meir’s strength — some might say her stubbornness — is well captured in the movie, but so too is her vulnerability. The audience views her treatments for cancer, hidden at the time from Israelis, her incessant smoking, and the loneliness of command. Lives are being lost, and she knows she will have to account for all of them. Like Israel, Mirren’s Meir is both strong and vulnerable.
Sean Durns is a senior research analyst for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.
What we lose when we lose the regional football conference What we lose when we lose the regional football conference Ben Jacobs College football is a regional sport. Or at least, it was.
For over a century, the sport was defined by regional rivalries and athletic conferences whose composition seemed almost set in stone. It was defined by tradition as fans geared up annually for games that were so significant that they had their own names. Kansas didn’t just play Missouri; they held a Border War. Oregon’s rivalry against Oregon State was so intense that it was Civil War. And the matchup between Oklahoma and Oklahoma State was just Bedlam. Soon, none of these rivalries, all of which date back a century, will exist.
CONGRESS WEIGHS WHETHER TO REFEREE 'PAY FOR PLAY' IN COLLEGE SPORTS
The realignment of college sports around a handful of megaconferences, consumed by a need to maximize television payouts to air college football games, is not new. It’s a process that has been going on for decades but has accelerated in recent weeks with the near-total disintegration of the Pac-12, the conference traditionally based on the West Coast of the United States. It seems possible that the Atlantic Coast Conference, the conference traditionally based along the Atlantic Coast (although it now includes schools as far afield as Louisville and Notre Dame), could follow in its wake. The most likely scenario is that college football may soon become a homogenized national sport.
Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with homogenized national sports. The NFL has become a vital part of American culture, and its teams often become avatars for a set of values rather than a geographic area. There are countless Cowboys fans who have never been to Dallas and countless Packers fans who have never been to Green Bay (let alone the Raiders fans who have never been to Las Vegas or Oakland or Los Angeles).
But that is not what college football was meant to be. It is, or at least it was once, built around regional rivalries and local bragging rights. Passions were fueled by the fact that archrivals were clustered in such close geographical proximity to each other. College football rivalries divided workplaces and families and provided an almost sociological insight into states and regions. The class divide between Mississippi and Mississippi State runs deep in the Magnolia State, and the Holy War between Brigham Young and the University of Utah literally reflects the religious tensions in the Beehive State. A big loss was something to be brooded over for a year, a big win provided a year of gloating. While those two particular rivalries will continue under the current alignment, there is no guarantee they will continue into the future.
This is not unusual in sports or even life. After all, one of the most fundamental aspects of modern life is the general homogenization of everything. Increasingly, there are only a few big brands and only a few options. Regional chains get bought out by national conglomerates, and the cultural quirks that defined every locale in America get slowly eroded away by this consolidation. In all 50 states, people shop at Walmart, eat at McDonald's, drink coffee at Starbucks, and search for information on Google. Sports has not been immune to this trend. In recent years, European soccer has transformed from a series of nationally based leagues to one flooded with oligarch money and focused on a handful of teams that dominate the sport not just in their own countries but across the continent. Teams like Bayern Munich in Germany and Paris Saint-Germain in France easily win domestic competitions every year. Instead, the real goal is the rich television rights fueled treasure of the Champions League. The strategy is not to beat traditional rivals but to best other far-flung superteams to cash out and use the proceeds to buy even more elite players.
There are both gains and losses from this. After all, prices tend to be cheaper at a Walmart than at a Main Street shop, just as the quality of football in a game between Texas and Alabama is likely much higher than that in a game between Texas and Baylor. But there are other more intangible things that are lost.
It’s not likely college football will go fully big box megastore, not yet. It is still nominally an amateur pursuit organized around nonprofit universities that insist they exist to provide educational opportunities. But the rise of the megaconference hints at a world in which this will inevitably become the case.
Instead of Oregon State, Oregon will soon be in the same conference as Maryland, and instead of Oklahoma State, Oklahoma will soon be grouped together with Florida. These are not exactly natural rivalries, and they represent an array of other obstacles more logistical than just the spirit of competition and regional spirit. After all, while football teams fly private, their fans will now have to deal with cross-country flights and multiple layovers to see their favorite teams. (Let alone the obstacles faced by college athletes in other “nonrevenue” sports. In order to maximize money from television deals, water polo players and gymnasts will now have to figure out how to study for a test or write a paper while traveling commercial from Norman, Oklahoma, to Gainesville, Florida.)
But the product being sold is not about what it means for the fans going to the games or even the die-hards watching at home. Instead, it’s a television program for casual fans, ones who are less caught up in the history and tradition and simply more likely to flip the channel when there are two big names playing. It is homogenized content for an increasingly homogenized country. And as for the things being lost? They are harder to quantify for the same reason they were worth valuing.
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Ben Jacobs is a political reporter in Washington, D.C.
Tourists are in the right place Tourists are in the right place Rob Long On a particularly hot and muggy day last week, I was trying to get out of the Union Square subway station, but the top of the stairs was blocked by a family of tourists who had chosen that exact spot to gather and consult a map. Irritated subway passengers, sticky with subway sweat and city grime, snaked past them until one New Yorker (not me, I promise) exploded. “New York!” he shouted, with admirable economy.
Not “Hey! Geddoudda way! This is New York!” Or “New York is a busy town, people, don’t block the subway entrance!” Just a simple, loud declaration of place. And, of course, it turned out that “New York!” was all that was needed. The human corks looked up from their map, got the message, and moved to the side.
POLITICAL INCORRECTNESS IS KILLING COMEDY
August, in other words, divides the world into two basic categories: There are tourists, and there are people who complain about tourists.
The truth is, it’s possible to be both. Barely a week after I shouted at those poor tourists (yeah, it was me, but I think you knew that) I was blocking traffic myself. Navigating my way through a city in Spain, head down and staring at Google Maps, I was unaware that my walk had slowed to a near-dead stop and that people around me were becoming exasperated. It was one of those narrow Spanish sidewalks, barely wide enough for one, with cars and motorcycles zipping by at a deadly speed, so a singular slow-walking tourist can cause a major traffic jam.
People in Spain are more polite than people in New York — or should I say, they’re more polite than I am — so no one barked “Barcelona!” at me. But there were some audible huffs and puffs, and I quickly got the message and stood aside. I found my way and was back on the right path before I fully grasped the powerful symmetry of the moment. I had yelled at tourists in my home city and had been yelled at, in turn, by someone else in his home city.
People don’t give tourists a break, I thought to myself as I walked through Barcelona at a now sprightly pace. That’s what happens when someone treats you exactly the way you’ve treated others — you get philosophical. Aside from the economic benefits of tourism — and New York City and Barcelona must surely rake in some serious coin from all of those visitors — tourists milling around a city have emotional and spiritual benefits as well.
Tourists are funny! You get to see whole families marching around together, and that’s a reliably hilarious sight. There’s always a short-tempered child being dragged along to see the most boring stuff. Someone is hungry and cranky. There’s a cheerful parent pointing out irrelevant sights while the teenager silently notes the cool shops and hangouts to return to on his own when the family naps at the hotel. And there’s always someone saying, “My feet hurt.”
And they all look alike! Tall Dutch families strolling through Washington Square Park like giraffes. English families with pale faces and identically sunburned legs. Korean families with little backpacks with BALENCIAGA emblazoned across them. Middle-aged Americans in shorts and sneakers wearing straw hats purchased 10 minutes ago from a street vendor waiting for the Hop-On-Hop-Off bus. (That last one was me, but I think you knew that.)
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It’s glorious. If you look past the grouchy-lost-hungry-bored, what you see paints an optimistic picture of how things are going in the world in 2023. Families still travel together, still look up in amazement at the Empire State Building or La Sagrada Familia. Parents all over the world still feel obligated to pack their children up and take them somewhere weird and foreign, where the language sounds like gibberish and the food is problematic.
Families — the essential building block of world civilization, the only reliable engine of progress and prosperity — are still sticking together, bravely going on mini adventures, risking pickpockets and hotel taxes and irritable locals. A family of tourists in your hometown clogging up the sidewalks and slowing everything down is nothing to grouch about. It’s a sign that everything is going to be OK.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and he is the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
The heartbreaking rationale for not paying ransom to free US hostages The heartbreaking rationale for not paying ransom to free US hostages Jamie McIntyre To a person, Republicans welcomed the news this month that five Americans had been released from a notorious Iranian prison and transferred to a hotel in Tehran as the first step in a U.S. negotiation aimed at eventually bringing them home.
But when officials in the Biden administration confirmed that the hostage deal included not only the release of five Iranians from U.S. prisons but also the transfer of $6 billion in Korean won frozen under U.S. sanctions in two South Korean banks, Republicans were in lockstep in their condemnation.
DEBATE: WITH FRONT-RUNNER TRUMP OUT, WILL GOP VOTERS TUNE IN?
“Biden has authorized the largest ransom payment in American history to the Mullahs in Tehran,” former Vice President and presidential candidate Mike Pence posted on X, formerly known as Twitter.
“Unfreezing $6 billion dollars in Iranian assets dangerously further incentivizes hostage-taking and provides a windfall for regime aggression,” posted Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID), ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “The Biden Admin must punish those who use Americans as political pawns and work to end this practice.”
“For decades, standing U.S. policy was to refuse ransom payments, a legacy continued by President Trump, who secured the release of two American hostages from Iran without offering a cent of financial relief," Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a press release.
When the outlines of the yet-to-be-completed deal leaked, the White House and State Department immediately went into spin mode.
“Iran will not be receiving any sanctions relief,” said Secretary of State Antony Blinken. “Iran’s own funds would be used and transferred to restricted accounts such that the monies can only be used for humanitarian purposes.”
“This is not a ransom,” White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said on CNN. “The account from which money could be accessed by the Iranians is an account set up in the previous administration.”
The funds in question were from money due Tehran for Iranian oil imported by South Korea in 2018 and 2019, but placed in escrow subject to U.S. approval, under an exemption to U.S. sanctions.
“No U.S. taxpayer dollars involved here,” Kirby said. “What we're talking about is the possibility of making that one account that has been in existence for several years more accessible to the Iranians … and there is an oversight mechanism that's already built into that process, so it's not ransom.”
“There is no chance this money is ultimately going to be used for humanitarian purposes,” former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo scoffed in an essay posted on the American Center for Law and Justice website. “Team Biden knows this because money is fungible. That means that even if every cent released to the regime is in fact used for humanitarian purposes — an improbable outcome in itself — the regime will still be free to allocate more resources to fund terror and mayhem on America’s partners and allies.”
The undeniable reality of hostage deals is that, whether they involve the payment of cash ransom or are a straight prisoner-for-prisoner swap, they inevitably beget more hostage-taking.
Three months after the Biden administration traded notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout, known as the “Merchant of Death,” for WNBA star Brittney Griner, Russia took Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich hostage.
Families, and even the hostages themselves, know that paying ransom is a counterproductive strategy, but they fear the alternative is indefinite confinement, usually in brutally harsh conditions.
Among the five hostages now under house arrest in Tehran is Siamak Namazi, an Iranian American who’s been held the longest, almost eight years, and whose father was also imprisoned when he traveled to see his son.
“He spent first two years being detained in the toughest part of Evin Prison by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, subjected to very, very terrible conditions of detention,” Jared Genser, a lawyer for the family, told CNN International. “Siamak himself has been left behind three times, once by President Obama in the 2016 nuclear deal and two more times by President Trump.”
Frustrated, Namazi gave a prison phone interview to CNN, risking retaliation from his tormentors.
“I spent months caged in a solitary cell that was the size of a closet, sleeping on the floor, being fed like a dog from under the door,” he said. “Honestly, the other hostages and I desperately need President Biden to finally hear us out, to finally hear our cry for help and bring us home. And I suppose desperate times call for desperate measures. So, this is a desperate measure.”
Left behind in the deal that freed Griner after 10 months was Paul Whelan, a former Marine, sentenced to 16 years in prison for spying after a Russian agent allegedly framed him by passing him an incriminating flash drive that was supposed to contain innocuous wedding photos.
Russia wants another high-value prisoner for him.
Jason Rezaian, a journalist jailed by Iran for 544 days between 2014 and 2016 and now a columnist for the Washington Post, said he understands the debate over the “merits and the wisdom of doing these kinds of deals,” but he told CNN, “The reality is that if you don't do a deal, you're leaving Americans behind.”
“The question is, then, what do you do? Do you let an innocent American citizen who's a father, a brother just die in a foreign prison? Do you do nothing to bring them home?” said Neda Sharghi, whose brother Emad is one of the five Americans Iran is using as a bargaining chip.
“What do we answer to this?" Sharghi continued. "How can we let an innocent American man perish in a foreign prison? Especially one who has been taken because he's an American.”
“It is never wrong to bring an American home,” said Tara Tahbaz, whose father, Morad, like Emad, has been wrongfully detained since his arrest in 2018.
“They need to come home first, and then we need to figure out how we deter this in the future,” Tahbaz said in an interview along with Sharghi on CNN. “I mean, they have a blue passport, and they should be afforded the protection of their country.”
In an opinion piece in the New York Times titled “How Much Is an American Hostage Worth?” conservative journalist Bret Stephens says there’s a better way to deter ransom demands than making repeated concessions to terrorists or terrorist states.
“Every time Iran takes another hostage, the administration imposes another sanction. Every time Iran or its proxies attack a single U.S. military installation, the United States retaliates against multiple Iranian targets. Every time Iran supplies offensive weapons to Russia or other outlaw states, the United States supplies long-range fire and other advanced munitions to Ukraine,” Stephens argues. “He pulls a knife, you pull a gun.”
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“Of course we welcome home Americans who are wrongfully detained anywhere in the world, but we should be clear-eyed about what's going to happen here. This is going to encourage Iran and other enemies to take more American hostages because they see that it pays,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) said in an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity. “They may release the current hostages, but they can easily reverse their promises and just take another set of hostages.”
“That $6 billion is not going to go to support widows and orphans in Iran," Cotton added. "It's going to go to support attacks on our troops, to fund terrorism to support attacks on Israel, to arm Russia. That's what that money is going to go for, so this is a shameful and craven act of appeasement.”
Donald Trump to hit state Republican party events in California and South Dakota Donald Trump to hit state Republican party events in California and South Dakota David Mark
South Dakota’s two senators, both Republicans, are backing Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) for the 2024 GOP nomination. Despite those endorsements by Senate Minority Whip John Thune and Sen. Mike Rounds, or perhaps because of it, former President Donald Trump will visit South Dakota, home to Mount Rushmore, on Friday, Sept. 8, for a “Monumental Leaders Rally.”
Gov. Kristi Noem (R-SD) will be attending the gathering at the event center “The Monument” at 444 Mt. Rushmore Rd N. Rapid City, South Dakota, 57701. Noem is a staunch Trump supporter and is oft mentioned as his running mate if, as expected, he secures the 2024 Republican nomination.
REPUBLICANS FACE UPHILL BATTLE IN EFFORT TO UNSEAT PENNSYLVANIA SEN. BOB CASEY
South Dakota is a deep red state that hasn’t backed a Democratic White House nominee since it supported President Lyndon Johnson in 1964. And the Mount Rushmore State has elected Republicans for governor every four years from 1978 on. So, President Joe Biden’s 2024 chances in South Dakota are minimal, to put it mildly.
Trump will continue on the state Republican Party circuit with a Friday, Sept. 29, lunch appearance in Southern California. Trump will speak at the California Republican Party’s fall convention, near Disneyland, at 700 W. Convention Way, Anaheim, California, 92802. But Trump won’t have the California Republican Party spotlight to himself. A prominent Trump GOP primary rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), is set to speak in Anaheim on that Friday evening at a dinner banquet. South Carolina Sen. Scott will speak before that, on Friday afternoon. And biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy is set to address the California GOP faithful at a lunch banquet on Saturday, Sept. 30
Trump’s advisers recently successfully convinced California Republicans to change the rules of the state’s GOP primary in a manner expected to help him in the state’s March 5 primary. Under the new rules, if a Republican presidential candidate receives more than 50% of the statewide vote, he or she will receive all of the state’s 169 delegates. If no candidate reaches the benchmark, delegates will be awarded proportionally based on the statewide vote.
That’s an important change for the Trump campaign since the former president has by far the most support and name recognition over rivals like former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, along with Trump’s vice president from 2017-21, Mike Pence, plus Gov. Doug Burgum (R-ND), former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, and ex-Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson.
Scott returns to Iowa with some reason for optimism
Scott is going big on Iowa, which holds the 2024 first Republican voting event with its Jan. 15 caucuses. The South Carolina senator has spent considerable time in the Hawkeye State during his presidential run. He’ll be back in force at the end of August.
On Wednesday, Aug. 30, Scott will join Rep. Randy Feenstra (R-IA) for a town hall, in LeMars, Iowa. On Thursday, Aug. 31, Scott will host a town hall in Oskaloosa, Iowa. The senator will host another town hall that day, in Ottumwa, Iowa.
Scott recently was among several GOP candidates appearing at the Iowa State Fair, participating in Gov. Kim Reynolds’s (R-IA) “Fair-Side Chat” candidate interview program.
Still, the Iowa campaigning seems to be having a limited effect for Scott, like his GOP opponents. In the first Des Moines Register-NBC News-Mediacom Iowa poll, caucusgoers overwhelmingly said that Trump is their first choice, with 42%.
Scott, though, can claim some bragging rights in the poll. He took third place, behind Trump and DeSantis, with 9% of respondents saying he is their first choice for president.
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Scott’s total “Iowa footprint” adds up to 53% of likely Republican caucusgoers, a measure that includes how they would prioritize their votes beyond their first-choice pick. That included 15% who said Scott was their second choice and 29% of Republican caucusgoers who said they are actively considering him.
And Scott is the only candidate other than Trump and DeSantis whose “footprint” includes more than 50% of likely GOP caucusgoers, leaving him room to grow if Trump somehow falters in Iowa over the next four-plus months.
Congress weighs whether to referee ‘pay for play’ in college sports Congress weighs whether to referee ‘pay for play’ in college sports David Sivak Congress is weighing whether to regulate a so-called race to the bottom in college sports as states pass ever-looser laws on student-athlete pay.
The decision to allow students to ink endorsement deals and other paid sponsorships, a movement led by California, marked a watershed moment in college sports.
UP FOR DEBATE: WHERE TRUMP, DESANTIS, AND REST OF REPUBLICAN 2024 FIELD STAND ON KEY ISSUES
Starting in 2021, athletes were allowed to tap into the multibillion-dollar industry that is college athletics by monetizing their name, image, and likeness, known as NIL, for promotions and other paid media.
Athletes pulled in millions as states from Florida to Ohio followed California's lead.
But the state laws, passed in contravention of NCAA rules, had sports officials sounding the alarm bells. In a bid to outmaneuver one another, states were beginning to enact lax NIL rules to attract recruits to their universities.
The changes were creating an "unlevel playing field" in college sports, the NCAA warned. Worse yet, they posed an existential threat to the principle of “amateurism” that differentiates college from professional sports.
The NCAA dropped its prohibition days after the Supreme Court questioned its legality under antitrust law, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh excoriating the group for "suppressing the pay of student-athletes who collectively generate billions of dollars in revenues for colleges every year."
But the NCAA, constrained by the new state laws and fearful of further antitrust suits, failed to replace its policy with a set of guidelines on NIL. Instead, it has looked to Congress to replace a "patchwork" solution with a federal one.
Lawmakers have been slow to respond to the changing NIL landscape. A handful of bills have been introduced and reintroduced with little to no action in the House or Senate.
Sports leaders hope to break the logjam with an aggressive lobbying campaign on Capitol Hill. Figures from Alabama football coach Nick Saban to SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey renewed their calls for action this summer, mindful that this year is their best shot to get a law passed before Washington is consumed by the 2024 election cycle.
The NCAA even brought on the politically connected Charlie Baker, the former governor of Massachusetts, as its new president in March, widely viewed as a strategic hire to get a college sports bill passed.
Congress responded to the push with a bevy of legislation, some in draft form and others introduced formally.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), the former head coach of Auburn, and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), a one-time college football player, spent more than a year consulting with stakeholders, including conference officials, coaches, and student-athlete groups, before they introduced theirs in July.
“What happened is we put something together, and then we invited all them to come in, put their two cents worth, and then we changed it around,” Tuberville told the Washington Examiner.
The bill has unique provisions, such as the limits it would place on a student-athlete's ability to transfer schools, but it has substantial overlap with other legislation put forward in recent weeks.
“Joe and I didn’t want to get into reinventing the wheel here,” Tuberville added. “What we wanted to do was get four or five basic things to where the NCAA could work with it. And we think it hits most of those pretty good.”
Among its provisions is a ban on "recruiting inducements," in effect gifts used to influence a student's decision to attend a certain university.
Boosters have for decades lured student-athletes to colleges with financial perks and favors, but the advent of NIL deals has supersized those inducements.
In one possible case, a collective apparently offered more than $13 million to recruit a star athlete in Florida before the deal fell apart.
The NCAA already bans the practice but has struggled to enforce its NIL policies as state laws render the organization toothless to pursue violations.
The Tuberville-Manchin bill, like others, would preempt state law and impose a set of guardrails to regulate the market.
Agents would be required to register with a regulatory body, and all NIL deals would be reported to a central database for public disclosure.
The legislation, though it broadly allows NIL deals, would impose some restrictions, including on agreements related to drugs or alcohol.
The bill is viewed as friendly to athletics associations — it would shield schools and conferences from legal liability for enforcing the NIL rules, for example — but does not go as far as some.
A draft bill offered by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), the top Republican on the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, the panel of jurisdiction for NIL legislation in the Senate, includes language stating that student-athletes are not university employees.
The provision is aimed at killing efforts to share college sports revenue with the players who generate that money, a practice called "pay for play."
The NCAA opposes revenue sharing, arguing it would starve athletic departments that subsidize less lucrative sports with the money brought in by men's basketball and football. The change also raises Title IX concerns for women's sports.
The NCAA, however, is embroiled in a lawsuit over whether it is denying players their right to compensation under federal labor law. Separately, a bill considered in the California legislature would have imposed revenue sharing while skirting the question of employee status.
Not all of the proposals introduced in Congress are favorable to the athletics associations. A bill reintroduced by Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) and Rep. Lori Trahan (D-MA) in July would, among other things, empower athletes to take civil action against the NCAA and colleges that violate their NIL rights.
“Giving college athletes the ability to make money off their name, image, and likeness was long overdue, and the past two years have transformed college sports for the better," Murphy said in a statement. "The NCAA spent decades arguing against athletes’ right to their own NIL, so it should come as no surprise that colleges and athletic associations are now focused on how to take back control, hoping Congress will do it for them."
Getting a bill through both chambers that reconciles these and other differences is daunting, especially in the face of a busy legislative calendar that will be consumed by government funding fights.
Should Congress fail to get legislation done, the NCAA is already contemplating a Plan B in the form of new guidelines that would incorporate elements of the proposed bills. Those include transparency and disclosure requirements and the creation of a standardized contract for NIL agreements.
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"The board believes the Association must use the tools at our disposal to improve outcomes for student-athletes when it comes to NIL activity, but there are some things we believe only Congress can address," Jere Morehead, chairman of the Division I board of directors and president at the University of Georgia, said earlier this month.
"We have seen good progress on Capitol Hill recently," he added, "and while that process advances, we are moving ahead to do what we can to increase transparency and establish standards so student-athletes can pursue these NIL opportunities."
Late Sen. James Buckley was an early critic of emerging campaign finance regime Late Sen. James Buckley was an early critic of emerging campaign finance regime David Mark The modern system to raise money for presidential and congressional campaigns is about to turn 50. An early skeptic, the late Sen. James L. Buckley was the namesake for litigation challenging it, with critics today still citing his arguments.
Buckley died Aug. 18 in Washington, D.C., at 100, having been the oldest living member of Congress to that point. A senator from New York from 1971-77, he represented the Conservative Party but allied himself with Republicans, very much the minority faction amid decades of Democratic congressional dominance.
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By the time Buckley reached Capitol Hill, his last name was already associated with modern conservatism, as the older brother of National Review founder, Firing Line television host, and syndicated columnist William F. Buckley. But James L. Buckley, a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School who in between served in the Pacific during World War II, carved out his own independent political identity.
He was the lead challenger to the 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act. Amendments to the law enacted in 1974, in response to Nixon-era fundraising shenanigans exposed by Watergate investigations, expanded public financing for presidential races. The updated law also set limits on contributions by people, political parties, and political action committees. All are overseen and regulated by the Federal Election Commission, which was created in 1974.
Buckley had a big problem with this. He grew concerned over the new restrictions, which effectively limit total spending by any one campaign. Spending and contribution limits would “squeeze out the ability of challengers to come in and confront the political establishment,” Buckley said as his lawsuit, Buckley v. Valeo, wound through the federal courts.
The Supreme Court in 1976 issued a split decision. Justices upheld public financing of presidential elections but struck down limits on independent expenditures, candidate self-financing, and overall spending. However, it did allow individual spending contributions to stay in place. Indexed for inflation, those are now $3,300 each for primary and general elections.
Federal Triple Crown
Buckley is one of a small group to hold positions in the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of the federal government. It’s a public service feat roughly equivalent to MLB's "Triple Crown," when a hitter leads a league in batting average, home runs, and runs batted in.
During President Ronald Reagan’s administration, Buckley was an undersecretary of state and then president of Radio Free Europe. Reagan in 1985 nominated, and the Senate confirmed, Buckley as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Buckley held another distinction as one of a handful of third-party Senate victors, the first independent elected to the Senate since Robert M. La Follette Jr. of Wisconsin won as a member of the Progressive Party in 1934.
In the 1970 New York Senate race, Buckley ran on the Conservative Party line, and his opponents included Sen. Charles Goodell, previously a conservative congressman from western New York. Goodell had been appointed to serve out the final 2 1/2 years of the term won in 1964 by Democratic Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, the former attorney general and brother of slain President John F. Kennedy. Robert F. Kennedy, seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, himself was assassinated on the campaign trail in June 1968.
Since moving across the Capitol, Goodell had become an outspoken Vietnam War critic and generally moved leftward, providing an opening for Buckley at a time of domestic tumult. The Democratic nominee in the three-way race was Rep. Richard Ottinger, who was also from a prominent family: His late uncle, Republican state Attorney General Albert Ottinger, narrowly lost the 1928 New York governor’s race to future President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
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Buckley won the Senate seat, with 38.75% of the vote to 36.77% for Ottinger and 24.29% for Goodell, whose son, Roger Goodell, has been NFL commissioner since 2006.
But Buckley’s political fortunes didn’t hold. In blue New York, Buckley in 1976 lost to Democratic rival Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an academic and former official in the administrations of Republican Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Buckley in 1980 lost a Senate comeback bid in his original home state of Connecticut. But even in a strongly Republican year, with Reagan romping to the presidency, Buckley lost 56%-43% to Democratic Rep. Chris Dodd, who went on to spend 30 years in the Senate.
From Teddy Roosevelt whiskey to Minnesota bourbon From Teddy Roosevelt whiskey to Minnesota bourbon Eric Felten Teddy Roosevelt was not one to be entirely trusted on the subject of alcohol. In the 1912 presidential contest, T.R.’s opponents spread the word he was a lush. In particular, a small newspaper in Michigan declared he was a notorious drunk. Outraged, the old Bull Moose swore that after the election, he would sue the local rag for libel.
On that, he was as good as his word. In 1913, Roosevelt and a small army of politicos, journalists, and random witnesses boarded a train for Marquette, Michigan, where there was to be a libel trial. If you’ve ever seen Anatomy of a Murder, you’ve seen the Marquette County Courthouse. The movie was largely filmed in that stately structure.
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Roosevelt took the stand and delivered testimony that left little wiggle room: “I have never been drunk or in the slightest degree under the influence of liquor.” Roosevelt proclaimed, “I have never drunk a cocktail or a highball in my life. With the exceptions hereafter noted, I never drank whiskey or brandy, except under the advice of a physician. I don’t care for the taste of either. I never have drunk beer, nor do I drink red wine. The only wines I have drunk have been white wines, Madeira, champagne or very occasionally, a glass of sherry.” Mint juleps were right out.
Roosevelt prevailed, but no one took it particularly seriously, least of whom the judge, who awarded the former president 6 cents in damages.
Perhaps he knew that when it came to abstemiousness, Teddy was fibbing. Consider the White House whiskey tasting of 1907. It was the age of the Pure Food and Drug Act, and whiskey was one of the first targets of reformers out to eliminate phony liquor — rectified whiskey was basically moonshine doctored with chemicals and flavoring, concocted to imitate honest likker.
Dr. Harvey Wiley, chief of the Bureau of Chemistry at the Department of Agriculture, was an advocate for honest labeling. “Tell the truth on the label,” was his motto, “and let the consumer judge for himself.” When it came to flavored and blended whiskey-like spirits, Wiley wanted to see labels that read “imitation whiskey.” The rectifiers were naturally opposed.
Wiley didn’t waste time skirmishing with the rectifiers. He went straight to the top, giving Teddy Roosevelt a visit at the White House late on a November evening in 1907. Wiley brought with him samples of proper straight whiskey as well as neutral spirits together with various chemicals that could be combined to imitate the real thing. It was all very scientific, with beakers and test tubes. After two hours of sampling Wiley’s wares, Roosevelt declared he couldn’t tell the difference between straight whiskey and the rectified sort.
Never mind that T.R. couldn’t tell the difference between compound booze and the good stuff. My point is that Roosevelt was able to drink whiskey for two hours without falling out of his chair. A remarkable feat for one who claimed under oath that he found whiskey to be so nasty that he never had a drop.
Bourbon was eventually defined. It has to be made from a grain mash of at least 51% corn. To be called “straight bourbon,” the whiskey has to be aged in charred new oak barrels for at least two years. There are technical requirements about the proof at which the spirit can come off the still and be bottled. And of course, it has to be made in Kentucky. …Not! Bourbon can be made anywhere in the United States. That includes such northerly climes as Minnesota, which, over the last decade, has flourished in making bourbon.
I recently blind-tasted several Minnesota bourbons and found them to be surprisingly good. GEO Benz & Sons is a perfect cocktail whiskey, substantial without being harsh. Tattersall makes both a “high rye” bourbon and a “wheated” version. Both were first-rate, and the expression with the high proportion of wheat in the mash may have been my favorite. It faced stiff competition from a whiskey from the Far North Spirits distillery called Bodalen. It’s brilliant farm-to-bar-table stuff, with a farmer-distiller who grows the grain he uses to distill. I wouldn’t be surprised if, before long, Minnesota bourbon becomes hard to get. Get some before the cognoscenti drink the barrels empty.
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Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
Maybe the NBA isn’t a great employer after all Maybe the NBA isn’t a great employer after all Zachary Faria Even some of the biggest businesses in the world sometimes forget to make sure that only current, nondisgruntled employees are running their social media accounts.
A former employee for the NBA who had access to the league’s Facebook account gave a final sign-off after not having “worked here in weeks.” Among his grievances were that the NBA doesn’t provide health insurance until you are employed for 90 days and worked this particular social media employee on 14-hour shifts without breaks.
A former NBA employee posted this on the league’s official Facebook page this morning.

It was deleted after roughly 20 minutes. pic.twitter.com/RkLX2ZafOk
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All for the measly salary of $50,000 (after taxes). Some people really have it rough out there in the Biden economy, it seems.
Apparently, this same employee also used the NBA’s Facebook account to advertise his new business, meaning that he is less a hero of the $50,000-after-taxes working class and more an attempted entrepreneur trying to leech off his former employer and some social media buzz. You just can’t trust disgruntled employees to give you an honest assessment of their workplace anymore.
So the ex-NBA employee who posted from their official Facebook?

He also advertised his new business. Put up his full name. His rates. From the NBA account.https://t.co/PdwHEd1JLc pic.twitter.com/Zh018vixx5
— Jack Appleby (@jappleby) August 22, 2023 Of course, it isn’t hard to believe that the NBA “overextends” its social media team “greatly to the detriment of their health and social lives.” It’s a league with a heavy focus on social media, a fervent social media fanbase, and a track record of allying with a country that runs concentration camps. If those children in the sweatshops can work around the clock to help Nike sell NBA players’ signature sneakers, surely a social media page admin can put in a 14-hour day clipping highlights for NBA fans to scroll past and argue in the comments of.
It could always be worse. The social media team could be physically abused like the children at NBA camps in China were. If the league never had to answer for that, it probably won’t have to answer for helping our angry entrepreneur take home $50,000 for 14-hour days either.
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Could Maui fires make your insurance more expensive? Could Maui fires make your insurance more expensive? Jeremy Lott As the death toll from the early August wildfires that left much of the Maui town of Lahaina in cinders continued to mount, so too did the estimates for “covered losses” from the fires.
Covered losses are what insurance companies will be on the hook for once all the claims have rolled in. That total bill, estimated to be in the billions of dollars, could lead insurance companies to hike premiums for property owners and drivers far beyond Hawaii, experts have warned.
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Recent fires and other natural disasters in other states could add to premium woes as well.
“We probably won’t know the numbers [from Maui] for a good six months,” Marty Stauffer, owner of the Washington state-based insurance brokerage Stauffer Insurance, told the Washington Examiner. And this could lead to rate hikes down the road.
“Any of those increases, they’ll be hitting in 2024, 2025,” he predicted.
At least 115 people were declared dead in the fires, and over 1,000 were still missing or unaccounted for at press time. Lahaina was an expensive and highly insured area. Stauffer rightly called it the island’s “tourist central.”
Estimates for total insurance liability and claims have climbed as more news of the extent of the devastation has rolled in. Moody’s initially pegged covered losses at about $1 billion. Now, it predicts the total will be more in the $3 billion-$4.5 billion range.
The latest Moody’s estimate could end up being too low. The Hawaii State Bar Association has opened a natural disaster legal hotline to offer free legal advice on how to deal with insurance companies, and the State of Hawaii Insurance Division is throwing its weight around as well. A SHID memo has asked insurance companies to lengthen the claims window by 60 days, for instance.
Lahaina was full of high-value properties, and Hawaiian building costs are, metaphorically, through the roof. A February analysis by the website TheStreet had construction costs in Hawaii as the highest in the nation, with the “total building costs for land, construction & other [at] $551,145” per home. The second highest was California at $494,859 per home, over $56,000 cheaper.
Stauffer said real estate will not be close to the whole bill, from the perspective of insurance firms. Lahaina also had many expensive cars that burned, life insurance claims were mounting, and many businesses insured their income against losses from natural disasters.
Still, one expert said that the total national picture for insurance policyholders might not be so dire as the current headlines would lead us to believe.
When the Washington Examiner asked Jerry Theodorou, director of the R Street Institute’s Finance, Insurance, and Trade Policy Program, if Maui’s fires would lead to higher insurance premiums, his answer was conditional.
“It depends on the magnitude of losses in Q3 and Q4,” he said. “Through the first half of 2023, insured U.S. natural catastrophe losses were under $10 billion, which is below the average in recent years. The quarter with the most losses is historically Q3, and we are still in the middle of Q3.”
Theodorou admitted, “The Hawaii fire and Tropical Storm Harold in Texas are major loss events,” but insisted, “whether there will be rising rates on homeowner insurance policy renewals depends on how the remainder of the year shapes up.”
He spelled out two scenarios: “If the total natural catastrophe loss for the year exceeds the long-term average, there will likely be rate increases, with the Hawaii fire a contributor, but if we have a light September (and end of August) and Q4, it is not a foregone conclusion that there will be rising rates broadly.”
Then there are the wildfires currently blazing in many states and making life difficult for insurance brokers.
When the Washington Examiner interviewed Stauffer in a coffee shop on Aug. 23, he was not allowed to write new policies for PEMCO Insurance, for instance. PEMCO policies were available in some parts of Washington but not his Whatcom County, in the state's northwest corner, straddling Canada. That's due to current or recent blazes in the area. And Nationwide was not allowing any new policies at all in the state, he said, until temperatures cooled down.
National disasters aside, Stauffer said that he had actually seen a few encouraging signs for his clients recently, “But what we’re currently in is called a hard market.”
He said many insurance companies are “trying to protect themselves from loss” after having “taken too many years of losses in a row.”
Insurance companies can try to pass some of those losses onto their customers in the form of higher premiums, and many of them are doing that. But they run into problems.
One barrier is state insurance commissioners, who tell insurance companies, “You’re only allowed to make x amount” per year. That can make it harder to offset loss years, Stauffer said.
Still, some states can squeeze insurance companies so hard that their residents suffer from a dearth of insurance providers.
“A lot of companies have gotten out of the state of California for the time being,” Stauffer said.
With that in mind, many states’ insurance commissioners are allowing increases in premiums, sometimes in increments of 25% per year.
In fact, Stauffer was ecstatic when he recently saw that one insurance company was “only asking for a 6% increase” from the Washington state insurance commissioner for next year.
He would like to see prices come down. But in some ways, he thinks that rising insurance premiums are simply catching up to the effects of inflation and other changes in the market.
Take car insurance. “Auto body rates went up and glass rates have gone up,” he said. And these increases in labor and materials are going to be reflected in the size of claims.
Bumpers are a real issue too. With old metal bumpers, small collisions were often dealt with easily, by buffing it out, at a cost that was too low to bother with a claim. That is no longer the case with the plastic bumpers with sensors, and more, on current cars.
“What would have been a walkaway is now, at minimum, a $5,000 to $10,000 claim,” he said.
The price of reinsurance, or insurance for insurance companies, has also been pushing up premiums.
“Reinsurance now costs insanely more than it used to cost,” Stauffer said.
Those costs could either go up or down, depending on how claims for the rest of the year shake out.
“Reinsurance costs are established shortly in advance of Dec. 31, which is when reinsurance treaties renew,” R Street’s Theodorou said. “It is too early to know what will be the result of the Dec. 31/Jan. 1 reinsurance renewal negotiation. If the catastrophe load proves light for 2023, reinsurance rates may go down. But if reinsurers are hit by large, higher than average losses, reinsurance cost may rise, with the rise passed on to primary insurers.”
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If the past is prologue, those insurance companies will then turn around and try to pass an increase onto insurance policyholders, and competition between providers will only do so much to offset the increase.
Looking back over the insurance market of the past few years, Stauffer lamented, “The options to shop around have become more limited and more difficult to obtain.”
Why I’m obsessed with ventriloquism, and think you should be too Why I’m obsessed with ventriloquism, and think you should be too Michael Taube I still remember the first time I ever saw a ventriloquist in action. The legendary Edgar Bergen and his dummy sidekicks, Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd, appeared on an episode of The Muppet Show in October 1977. While the 7-year-old me didn’t know who he was then, I was immediately transfixed. McCarthy and Snerd, like Jim Henson’s Muppets, obviously weren’t real but seemed almost alive on the screen. How was Bergen doing this? How was he able to make them talk without moving his lips?
As I later came to find out, Bergen moved his lips far more than most ventriloquists (and often joked about it in his act). What he had mastered was an impeccable sense of comedic timing. The interplay between Bergen and McCarthy, Snerd, Effie Klinker, and several other of his dummies was lively, humorous, and mesmerizing. He made it feel like he was having a real conversation with these “woodenheads.” They, in turn, had unique personality traits that seemed as real as their flesh-and-blood counterparts.
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This started my obsession with all things ventriloquism.
The public’s interest in ventriloquism has piqued in recent years due to, of all things, America’s Got Talent. Terry Fator’s stunning win on the NBC show’s second season in 2007 kicked things off. It led to the once-struggling performer receiving a five-year, $100 million contract at the Mirage in Las Vegas. Two equally talented ventriloquists have followed in Fator’s footsteps as AGT winners, Britain’s Paul Zerdin and 12-year-old Darci Lynne Farmer.
There have been other memorable ventriloquists on the AGT franchise. Kevin Johnson, who was on AGT’s first season, parlayed his signature “Godzilla Theater” skit into an appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman. Spain’s Celia Munoz, a trained opera singer who took up ventriloquism less than five years ago, got to the finals of AGT’s Season 17 without puppets and by throwing her voice. Munoz performed with her two inspirations, Fator and Farmer, in the season finale. Jamie Leahey, the 13-year-old who finished second on Season 15 of Britain’s Got Talent with his dummy, a wisecracking chicken named Chuck, is a natural entertainer and throwback to the song-and-dance routines of vaudeville.
These are exciting developments. Yet there’s so much more to the history and art form of ventriloquism that needs to be remembered — or it will soon be forgotten.
Ventriloquism’s origins date back to ancient Greece. There were belly speakers (or belly prophets) who would “counterfeit spirit possession by talking in a diffused voice while engaging in a certain amount of lip control,” according to ventriloquist/historian Valentine Vox’s 1981 I Can See Your Lips Moving: The History and Art of Ventriloquism. This mode of divination was known as gastromancy. One of its most well-known purveyors was the Athenian priest Eurycles, who Plato called “wonderful.” He had an Egyptian counterpart, Sacchura, often described as the “wizard of the dead.”
There’s also the unusual example of Elizabeth Barton, the “Holy Maid of Kent.” She was a "ventriloqua," with a voice disseminating from her belly like the ancient Greeks. Alas, Barton’s place in history was her failed attempt to use ventriloquism to oppose the marriage of King Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn. She was found guilty of high treason and hanged on April 20, 1534. During her confession, “she admitted that her prophetic utterances had all been fraudulent, contrived by men of learning for their own gain.” The fairer sex could evidently take advantage of a gullible public, too!
Ventriloquism has been mostly associated with humor, witty banter, and entertainment over the past few centuries. The art form gradually shifted from speaking from the belly to throwing (or venting) one’s voice through dolls, makeshift hand puppets, or just about anything the performers could think of. It brought a unique dimension that traditional Punch and Judy performances and early puppeteers, as great as both were, simply couldn’t replicate.
Early ventriloquists were viewed as magical and supernatural, with an uncanny ability to develop an atmosphere that both suspended belief and created disbelief from many in the audience. They played a memorable role in society, too.
William Hogarth’s "An Election Entertainment," one of four paintings in his Humours of an Election series (1754-55), depicted Irish politician Sir John Parnell using his hand and napkin as a talking puppet to amuse other guests (with little apparent success). Austrian nobleman Baron de Mengen surprised onlookers in 1757 by throwing his voice into a little puppet or doll with a lower jaw that moved like a nutcracker. The Baron was “credited with introducing this marriage between puppetry and ventriloquism which did not become vogue until many years later.” Britain’s James Bick was a ventriloquist “who could imitate various instruments with amazing clarity” to amazed audiences in the 1720s and 1730s, most notably a trumpet. There’s also a French grocer, Monsieur St. Gille, whose “astonishing talent” and ability to remain “absolutely mute” impressed mathematician Abbe Jean-Baptiste de la Chapelle during a private performance. So much so that Chapelle made St. Gille the main focus of his 1772 study, Le Ventriloque, ou l’Engastrimythe.
By the 19th century, ventriloquism shifted from carnivals and traveling funfairs to the proper stage. But it was vaudeville where modern ventriloquism we would recognize takes its shape, often with the dummy as the jokester and the ventriloquist as “straight man.” There’s a straight line from this era to our own: “The Great” Harry Lester and his popular sidekick Frank Byron Jr., for instance. He served as a mentor to Bergen’s memorable interplay with Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd — who, in turn, inspired Paul Winchell and his popular dummies Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff. There was Senor Wences, a throwback to Parnell, with his hand puppet Johnny, Cecilia Chicken, and Pedro, a head in a box who answered questions with a familiar “s’awright.” And we can’t forget Shari Lewis (Lamb Chop, Charlie Horse), Keith Harris (Orville the Duck), Arthur Worsley (Charlie Brown), Willie Tyler (Lester), and Jeff Dunham (Peanut, Walter).
Bergen, Winchell, Lester, Tyler, Lewis, and the rest spent years honing their craft and ability to entertain an audience from start to finish. Their puppets and dummies developed their own personalities, and many in the audience would look forward to the witty banter in their respective acts. In a few cases, they even helped inspire some well-known entertainers to start out as ventriloquists. This includes Don Knotts, Ted Knight, and Johnny Carson. Imagine if these gentlemen had continued on their original paths — and how different their careers might have been!
Today, for those of us weirdos nursing an obsession with the history and craft of ventriloquism, there’s even a museum dedicated to it, the Vent Haven Museum in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, founded by businessman and amateur ventriloquist William Shakespeare Berger. He was friends with Lester, and some visitors included Bergen, Winchell, and Jimmy Nelson. Berger collected more than 500 dummies in his lifetime. It’s grown to over 1,000, along with posters, photographs, and other paraphernalia. “No other person has been such a friend to ventriloquism” and “given more of his lifetime to preserving the rich heritage of this ancient art form,” curator Lisa M. Sweasy wrote about Berger in Vent Haven Museum: Its Past, Present, and Future. It was a childhood obsession that turned into a lifelong passion.
Sounds like the perfect place to visit, if you, too, think this art form is something worth laughing and obsessing over.
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Michael Taube, a columnist for four publications (Troy Media, Loonie Politics, National Post, and Epoch Times), was a speechwriter for former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
How to write a biography without biographical information How to write a biography without biographical information Micah Mattix On the first page of Sarah Ruden’s biography of Vergil, she states the problem that any biographer of the ancient poet and author of the Aeneid faces: We know almost nothing about him. “The man is like Shakespeare,” she writes. “He disappeared into his writing.”
So, why write a biography of him, and how might one go about it if one did? The answer to the first question might be money. That was certainly Stephen Greenblatt’s motivation in writing a highly publicized biography of Shakespeare nearly 20 years ago. Greenblatt got a six-figure advance for Will in the World, which sold 150,000 copies on the first day of publication and was on the New York Times’s bestseller list for nine weeks. But only Shakespeare is Shakespeare, of course, and no other author, living or dead, comes close to generating the amount of interest he does.
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Ruden in her preface stated that she decided to write a biography of Vergil largely out of curiosity. She is the author of an acclaimed translation of the Aeneid, and she became increasingly intrigued, she writes, as she worked on the translation by how a “mere life” could “produce such beauty”: “After much hesitation, I set off on a quest to know Vergil the man better through what probably follows from such things as his physical, social, and literary contexts and his own literary innovations.”
Thus, we have the answer to the second question. How to go about writing a biography of someone who left behind no memoir, no collection of letters, and whose entire biographical record consists of a few pages in Suetonius Tranquillus's On Illustrious Men? Use historical contexts to speculate as to what he might have thought or could have done. Call it the Might-Have-Could-Have approach to biography.
The risk of such an approach is obvious. The subject of the biography becomes a mere object of our own projections. What we get is not Vergil himself, but the proto-fascist Vergil or the anti-imperialist Vergil, the proto-Christian Vergil or the gay Vergil. I am reminded of Daniel Mendelsohn’s article in the New Yorker a few years ago in which he presented Vergil as something of a tragic, bleeding-heart liberal, whose sympathies are on the side of the victims whom "‘empire’ leaves in its wake” but who was pressed into the service of empire nonetheless.
Ruden is aware of this risk. “We need to make our own peace with our own histories,” she writes, “and leave Vergil out of them.” She proposes to avoid it by sticking closely to what Vergil wrote and extrapolating only those biographical tidbits that seem plausible. H. L. Mencken may have been right when he wrote that criticism “is no more than prejudice made plausible.” But a biography that is no more than prejudice made plausible is no biography at all.
Problematically, Ruden proposes to compare Vergil to his modern “descendants” — that is, to modern writers — to gain insight into his life. She argues that because writers are categorically different from other people, it makes sense that Vergil might have more in common with other writers, even those who lived 2,000 years after he died, than he did with the people of his own time. After all, wasn’t Vergil, like so many modern writers, an eccentric who lived an unconventional life marked by an unwavering commitment to art? “Many things about Vergil’s life made more sense to me,” she writes, “once I dared to grasp that this shy young man from nowhere, who struggled from line to line as he composed and revised, sensed in some part of his mind that if he tried hard enough he could cause the world to welcome millions of copies of his work.” She goes on to compare him to Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, among others.
Alas, rather than getting us closer to the “real Vergil,” Ruden’s biography simply gives another Vergil — Vergil the brooding, sensitive modern writer who sacrifices everything for his art. This leads to problems.
One thing we know about Vergil from Suetonius is that he was frequently ill and rarely “appeared in public in Rome.” We're told this was because his fame made it difficult for him to move about freely in the capital. Ruden claims (and I think she is right) that he also avoided going to Rome because he was shy and committed to his work. But she suggests that he may have even faked illness to avoid social contact and was something of a misanthrope. “I am convinced,” she writes, “that his characters tend to fall short in differentiation and believable thoughts and feelings because he did not like other people much or find their minds reliably interesting compared with his own.” Her further evidence of this misanthropy is that he wrote a lot about nature.
She wants to see Vergil as a modern artist who eschews authority and “civic and professional duty,” but she is at pains to explain how he could be one while also writing an epic poem whose primary purpose was to celebrate the Roman empire. This leads her to make muddled statements like this:
The poet’s quasi-propagandistic work remains worth reading now that all its ideological and cultural assertions but the most universal have been discredited, at least in liberal democratic nations. Modern ethics reject unquestioning religious, filial, and patriotic 'duty,' and most especially the divinely decreed 'fate' of one race to conquer and rule others. But the Aeneid is still running on its literary steam. This divorce of content and form forces Ruden to identify Vergil’s literary accomplishment with something like verbal decoration. Ruden means it as a compliment when she writes that “Vergil was the only poet” who could “relieve and decorate” the “necessary heavy-handedness” of a “full-length epic poem about the ruling dynasty’s purported ancient foundations.” But this diminishes, rather than heightens, Vergil’s accomplishment. Immediately after this, she admits that Vergil and Augustus likely did not disagree on the work’s “major themes.” So why divorce those themes from style and prosody in the first place?
Even more problematically, Ruden suggests that several of the poems of the Appendix Vergiliana, a supposed collection of Vergil’s juvenilia that many scholars dispute, were indeed written by Vergil because it is implausible that he would not leave a record of his development. Why? Because Vergil was more of a modern poet than an ancient one. “If Vergil was, as he appears to have been,” Ruden writes, “a modern type of conspicuously isolated author with an independent, obsessive drive to perfect certain literary forms, rather than the typical ancient author who wrote for public occasions and communal edification, then a large archive makes sense.” Talk about begging the question.
Ruden even wonders whether Vergil became so obsessed with perfecting the Aeneid that Augustus became paranoid and killed him. Vergil died of heatstroke in Athens, which doesn’t make much sense according to Ruden. “If the Romans knew anything, it was how to deal with hot climates," she continues. "Did Augustus, alive to the difficulties of either controlling or sidelining the popular, well-liked author who had written the great national poem but then fled the nation, turn his mind to the advantages of Vergil’s bad health worsening to a lethal degree? ... Was treatment of Vergil’s condition withheld? Or was sunstroke a cover story for something else? Was there something in Vergil’s refreshments?”
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She quickly adds that this is all “speculative reconstruction.” A better phrase for it is “pure speculation.” The only thing she insists on is that the ancient account of his death doesn’t make sense.
Fine. But why not leave it at that? Because word counts must be met, I suppose, for book contracts to be kept.
Micah Mattix is a professor of English at Regent University.
The tame souls behind books arguing against cars The tame souls behind books arguing against cars Jack Baruth There are eight kittens running around my little rural property as you read this. Three of them are utterly feral, as is their mother, and I see them mostly as ephemeral moments of motion between trees or through the grass. The other five were brought into my barn by their mother shortly after birth. You can handle them, and sometimes they will consent to sit on your lap — but any attempt to shut them up in the barn, even during bad weather, is intolerable to them. They are wild by design and by dint of having just a little freedom, which is all it takes to build the desire for more of it. If you want true house cats that will not even consider walking through an open door to the outside, you have to break them more or less at birth and never let them see an alternative to your (admittedly loving) incarceration until they are too old to change.
Daniel Knowles is just such a house cat. The author of Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse And What To Do About It failed to get his driver’s license as a teenager, noting that he found driving “simultaneously stressful and boring.” A decade later, while working for the Economist, he was finally forced by circumstance to get his license, but the damage was already done. Knowles had already fallen into the mindset that finds the densest of megacities to be, in his own words, “the richest, most innovative places on Earth. They are the places with the highest quality of life … the happiest people. … People are desperate to live in them.” He dismisses the hundreds of thousands of people who flee New York every year by noting how quickly others replace them, without considering how the same might be said of everything from Scientology to the Wagner Group.
THE SELECTED WRITING OF ONE OF AMERICA’S BEST BLACK SPORTSWRITERS
Knowles lives in a gentrified Chicago neighborhood: “Most of the houses are beautiful, solid brick buildings, with grand porches, high ceilings, and huge windows.” He can walk anywhere he wants and is almost indecently satisfied with his life. To his credit, he’d like everyone else to live the same way. But there’s an enemy out there that prevents it, and it has four wheels.
Carmageddon reads, at times, like a self-conscious parody of Reddit-level slacktivist dogma. Everything wrong in the world is either the fault of the automobile, racism, or a Wonder Twins pairing of the two. “The decline of Detroit,” he intones, “has many causes. Dysfunctional government is one, racism another, corruption a third. But all of them are linked to the automobile.” He leans heavily on the apocryphal tale about Robert Moses building bridges to keep black families away from the beach and then ascribes the demonstrated preference of most human beings for private transportation to a sinister and all-too-familiar motivation: “In your car, you do not have to share space with somebody of another color.”
The principled and classically liberal opposition of Daniel Patrick Moynihan to congestion pricing in New York City during the ’70s is shaded thus: “Moynihan, a senator who, a decade before, had argued that it was family breakdown causing problems in African American society, rather than the ghettos created by the combination of racism and automobiles.” At one point in Carmageddon, Knowles appears dangerously close to making a cogent point about COVID-19: “Outdoor air pollution kills half as many people each year as coronavirus did … yet we shut down our economies to prevent COVID-19 from spreading.” Ah, but his eventual resolution is not that COVID-19 was handled in a hysterical fashion, but rather that we should shut down the rest of our economy to stop the evil cars. Perhaps his most delightfully fanciful conclusion is that people left cities during the ’70s and ’80s because of, you guessed it, pollution from the leaded gasoline used in urban cars. As someone who was born in New York City, I would suggest that the rapidity with which cars were stolen there during the ’70s was perhaps a larger factor in people wanting to leave than whatever came out of the tailpipes of those stolen cars, but perhaps that is naive.
Knowles finds the most solid ground in his anti-automotive crusade when he discusses the remarkable and rather shocking effects of minimum-parking regulations on the urban landscape. In this, he relies on a better and more thoughtful book, Donald Shoup’s famous The High Cost Of Free Parking. Shoup has spent a lifetime detailing the inanities of parking-obsessed civil planning, but his oft-updated book runs north of 800 pages and is often tiresomely academic. Henry Grabar’s much shorter and livelier Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains The World, released about a month before Carmageddon, contains pretty much all the useful and true information you could get from Shoup’s tome and Knowles’s polemic.
Grabar, as well, lives a charmed life in Chicago, but he has no affection for the anti-car agitation of fortunate walkable-city gentrifiers: “I come to bury that rhetoric, not to praise it.” And he is willing to consider both sides of a question: “Are real estate values high [in New York City and other dense cities] because they are dense, vibrant environments? Or are they dense, vibrant environments because real estate values are too high to sustain surface parking lots?”
Grabar, relying on his own research in addition to that of Shoup, makes a solid case that there is simply too much parking, sold to motorists at a fraction of its actual cost. His most interesting point is that street parking tends to be cheaper and more convenient than garage parking, leading to nontrivial extra traffic on streets, more unpleasant interactions, more agitation, and largely empty parking garages. And, below a certain price level, people will simply store their cars on the street. He tells a story of a woman who has lost considerable weight since finding the best possible street spot to park her car long-term because she is unwilling to move the car from that spot to go to a restaurant or even a grocery store.
The reader ends Paved Paradise largely convinced that there should be a more data-driven and thoughtful approach to the provision and allocation of parking pretty much everywhere from Chicago to Dallas. This is much better than the feeling one has upon finishing Carmageddon, which is not dissimilar to how a pedestrian in a walkable community might feel after escaping the clutches of a particularly manic and aggressive street preacher. Yet both books share a common, and critical, flaw: They treat the desire for private transportation in one’s automobile as an inexplicable and irrational evil, a modern equivalent to the Mayan obsession with human sacrifice.
Call it house-cat blindness, perhaps. Knowles and Grabar can see the evils of the car, which are admittedly myriad and diverse, but they have no genuine feeling for why people might willingly subject themselves to those evils. Knowles thinks it is an expression of structural racism, while Grabar regards it as a sort of childish irrationality based on laziness and unwillingness to walk anywhere.
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Yet the average person understands the appeal of the car instantly. It does not just “represent” choice and freedom, as these books grudgingly admit. The automobile is choice and freedom. Some freedoms are minor: the ability to stay 20 minutes longer somewhere without falling afoul of ticketed and timed mass transit or to load up an extra bag of mulch in one’s pickup truck just in case. Others are fundamental: the right to travel without the permission and knowledge of a transit authority or public utility.
The privately owned automobile is an environmental, financial, and physical menace. Yet it also offers something that has been impossible for 99.9% of human history: the ability to cover a thousand miles in a day without the approval of a third party. This freedom, once tasted and enjoyed, is impossible to forget, the same way that my partially wild kittens will never willingly accept a house where every door is shut. “In no way am I unusual,” Knowles pleads, detailing his unwillingness to drive himself. “There are millions of stories like mine.” Of course there are! The meek, like the poor, will be with us always.
Jack Baruth was born in Brooklyn, New York, and lives in Ohio. He is a pro-am race car driver and a former columnist for Road and Track and Hagerty magazines who writes the Avoidable Contact Forever newsletter.
The Silicon Valley faceoff over free speech The Silicon Valley faceoff over free speech Dominic Green It looks like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg won’t be having their martial arts duel in a Roman colosseum after all. This is disappointing, not just because the people have a right to see their masters throttling each other as they roll in the dirt. It would have been the most significant American duel since 1859, when the retired California Justice David S. Terry shot and killed Sen. David C. Broderick.
Musk vs. Zuckerberg would not be a matter of life and death, but, as Terry vs. Broderick crystallized around slavery and personal insult, the rivalry of the tech titans is about more than the egos of two midlife billionaires. It symbolizes the digital transition of recent decades, an alteration over which Musk of X (formerly known as Twitter) and Tesla and Zuckerberg of Meta (ex-Facebook) and Instagram reign like Roman emperors. It also symbolizes the political combat between competing visions of the internet and democracy.
NIKKI HALEY CLAIMED DEBATE SPOTLIGHT AMONG CROWD OF 'SCREAMING MEN'
Dueling was an aristocratic European ritual. Though the upper echelons of early American society aspired to Old World dignity, or at least vanity (see: Burr, Aaron), Americans developed their honor codes for personal combat. In the comedy of wrestling, the ideals of the old Athens hit the mat in the new Rome. The scripts and characters of WWE and co. have displaced baseball in the world’s image of American sport and leached into politics. Donald Trump, who guested as a WWE ringmaster, plays “the heel,” the villain we love to hate. Joe Biden, campaigning in a 2020 tag team with Kamala Harris, suggested that he and Trump should settle their differences “behind the gym.”
The Musk-Zuckerberg rivalry is a gossip column come to life — the proceeds of their fight were to go to charity. The proceedings and our fascination with them reflect the power of the quasi-aristocracy in Silicon Valley. The internet, like the railroads, the oil and automobile booms, and Hollywood before it, has raised a new upper class to power in America.
The internet has also changed our “information regime.” As previously, this change is altering the nature of politics. The Reformation, which created the nation-state as we know it, had the printing press. The 18th century, which gave us democracy as we know it, had the coffeehouse broadsheet. The 19th and 20th centuries mass-produced voters and daily papers. The 21st century has Wi-Fi, broadband, and a paradoxical relationship to information and the regime, which, by controlling it, can shape social perceptions and political information.
Digital information resembles a mighty river, but a handful of private companies control how the flow of knowledge is dammed, distributed, stored, priced, and cleaned for public consumption. Between them, X and Meta have absorbed much of what used to be called political debate. No one watches Senate debates because there is little debating in the Senate. Hardly anyone watches committee deliberations on C-SPAN, but millions watch the highlights on social media.
Since Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, all electoral politics has been digital first. It is bad that tech monopolies distort the digital market. It is worse that they have collaborated with the Democratic Party and its media publicists. Worst of all, as Musk let us know by opening the “Twitter Files,” social media worked with federal agencies to manipulate and suppress information about the origins of COVID-19, the business activities of Hunter Biden, and the opinions of obscure users who dared to mock Democratic candidates. In the name of stopping “disinformation,” social media companies systematically misinformed the voters.
Silicon Valley loves a “disrupter” and boasts of moving fast and breaking stuff. It has disrupted and broken politics as we knew it, and all the tech giants’ persons are struggling to piece it together again. The Musk-Zuckerberg rivalry reflects the bifurcating of America’s information regime and suggests how this split outcome will affect its political regime.
Musk, like most immigrants, actually believes in free speech. His X is the First Amendment on a phone. The racist and reprehensible may range unfiltered, but so can the irreverent and the original. Like Musk’s electric vehicles and rocket shots, this high-risk venture seems to come from an earlier age when America’s best dueled with the elements themselves.
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Musk is a digital Prometheus. Zuckerberg collects busts of Augustus, who managed Rome’s metamorphosis from republic to empire. Musk aspires to unleash the American id, electrify our cars, and live on another planet. The opaque procedures of Zuckerberg’s Meta empire are the surveilling superego of technocratic management.
Out in the desert, Jeff Bezos’s megaservers hum efficiently as they back up the data of the federal agencies. In the chambers of the republic, the elected officials hum and haw inefficiently about tech monopolies and disinformation and its discontents but never regulate anything. The faceoff between Silicon Valley’s founding libertarian principles (now in the red corner) and (in the blue corner) the quasi-governmental referee it has become will determine whether free democratic discourse is possible in the America of the future. It might also show whether the public can handle their freedom. For that to happen, all media, social or antisocial, must hold the ring for a free public sphere.
Review: Tom Lake by Ann Patchett Review: Tom Lake by Ann Patchett Malcolm Forbes Ann Patchett knows how to hook readers and reel them in. Her finest novels, such as her 2001 breakout Bel Canto, as well as 2016’s Commonwealth and 2019’s The Dutch House, get underway with an arresting and inviting opening scene, each carefully crafted, beautifully staged, and comprising a surprise event, shocking act, curious circumstance, or beguiling state of affairs that piques our interest enough to make us stick around and keep turning those pages.
For her latest novel, Tom Lake, Patchett has opted for a quieter but no less engaging opener, one that is not so much jaw-dropping as eyebrow-raising. At their high school in New Hampshire, Laura and her friend Veronica are helping with auditions for the community theater production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. After watching one adult after another flounder and fail on the stage, Laura realizes that she is being taught a valuable life lesson: “What I was seeing was nothing less than how to present myself in the world.” Bored and annoyed by the lack of talent on show, undaunted by her theatrical inexperience, and convinced that she has learned enough from the amateur actors’ mistakes, she puts herself forward for the role of Emily. A star is born, and at the same time Laura is reborn as Lara.
ALL THE GENERATIONAL STEREOTYPES ARE WRONG, EXCEPT THAT BIG ONE
But not all of that first chapter, or indeed the whole novel, plays out in the past. Tom Lake is made up of two narratives. One unfolds in spring 2020 and centers on 57-year-old Lara and her family on their cherry farm in northern Michigan. The other is Lara’s account of her foray into acting and the intense but short-lived romance she had over the summer of 1988 with a talented, charismatic actor. Patchett artfully synthesizes both narrative strands into a cohesive and immersive tale of a life lived with golden opportunities, occasional setbacks, and no regrets.
The pandemic has brought Lara and her husband Joe’s three grown-up daughters back to home and hearth. Nell, 22, an aspiring actress, is “fragile and pure.” Maisie, 24, a trainee veterinarian, is “logical and strong.” Emily, 26, a former wild child, is a farmer who will one day take over the family business. With lockdown preventing the farm’s regular workers from helping with the harvest, the girls lend a hand picking fruit in the orchard. To break the monotony and lighten their loads, their mother gives in to their demands and tells them in installments about the time she dated Peter Duke — back then an unknown actor but destined for big things; later a successful crowd-pleasing actor whose family-friendly films captivated the girls as teenagers; and finally, an accomplished “Very Serious Actor” who conquered Hollywood and won plaudits and an Oscar.
Lara’s impatient daughters are keen for her to cut to the chase and get to the part of the story involving “Duke,” but first she has some gaps to fill. She picks up where she left off, revealing that she received a standing ovation at the end of that audition at her high school, and from that day on believed she had found her vocation. At college, she plays Emily again and is spotted by a director who whisks her to Los Angeles to take a screen test. She makes a movie that takes years to see the light of day, but while waiting for it to appear, she is offered the chance to reprise the part of Emily in two separate productions of Our Town: first on Broadway, then in Michigan at a summer stock company called Tom Lake.
So begins a fleeting yet memorable episode of Lara’s life. She meets Duke and learns that he is to play her fictional father, Editor Webb. Duke takes Lara under his wing and very soon into his bed. When not under the covers or in rehearsals, they spend long lazy hours swimming in the lake, drinking tequila, and playing tennis with Duke’s more level-headed brother Sebastian and Lara’s understudy Pallace. On a day off, the play’s director invites Lara to visit his family’s cherry farm, and in doing so unwittingly sows the seeds of her future life. An act of betrayal ends an affair, a cruel twist of fate puts paid to a performance, and a major wake-up call brings the curtain down on an acting career.
Like the work of Anne Tyler, much of Patchett’s writing explores family relationships — tight bonds, frayed and knotted ties — with little in the way of full-scale tragedy or catastrophic upheavals. Patchett is reluctant to kill her darlings, and good cheer and Panglossian optimism always preponderate over doom, gloom, nastiness, and cynicism.
Tom Lake offers more of the same. “Actors are all about luck,” Duke says, and he and Lara are blessed with an abundance of it. Her entry into, and progress through, the acting world consists of a string of lucky breaks, most of them too good to be true. She is never exploited and doesn’t have to “go upstairs to get the part.” Nell may complain about tedium, but she and her family are safely cocooned from COVID-19 and experience a lockdown unafflicted by sickness, poverty, anxiety, and grief.
In the present, Lara’s girls listen as their mother travels back down memory lane. But Lara’s recollections don’t dominate their days. Maisie tends to sick animals, Nell vents her frustration at being “trapped with my family on the farm while the world goes up in flames,” and Emily wounds her parents with the bombshell that she does not plan on having children with her fiance Benny because of the dire state of the planet.
But then again and again, Lara returns to her story. The deeper into it she gets, the more her daughters come to view her erstwhile lover and their childhood hero in a markedly different light. Nell says their mother is “putting together the whole picture” for them: “Telling us everything you previously kept from us.” But there is one crucial part of the picture that Lara chooses not to show the girls, and it concerns the time, long after Tom Lake, that Duke reappeared briefly on the scene and made his presence felt.
The stakes aren’t as high here as in past offerings, but Patchett’s novel still makes for intelligent, poignant, and absorbing fiction. It channels great literature (Chekhov, King Lear, and of course, Wilder). It showcases storytelling expertise. It paints a vivid portrait of a young actress. And it imparts and illuminates a simple but relatable truth about triumphing, faltering, then being content with what you’ve got.
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Malcolm Forbes has written for the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. He lives in Edinburgh.
Doug Burgum hopes the debate will vanquish his anonymity among the base Doug Burgum hopes the debate will vanquish his anonymity among the base Salena Zito NORTH DAKOTA — Doug Burgum wasn’t even a household name in 2016 when he ran for governor of North Dakota, but there he was on that debate stage alongside other prominent Republican presidential candidates this week. In an interview conducted before the debate, Burgum talked to the Washington Examiner magazine about the race and his long-shot bid. The following has been edited for space and clarity.
Washington Examiner: There are two ways to ask a candidate, “Why are you running for president?” The first is the straight, aspirational, literal question. The second is delivered with an assumed “when you know you aren’t going to win and may help Donald Trump just by crowding the field.” Why is Doug Burgum running for president?
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Doug Burgum: The simple answer there is that president of the United States, most important role in the world, one way to think about it, is the CEO of America. When you do that job right, we have an opportunity to improve the life of every American. That’s the simple answer, is that we can do that. We can improve every American life.
With that, we can bring out the best of America. That is the inspirational aspect of that because there are so many things that are going right in this country. There’s a bunch of things that need to be fixed at the federal level where Biden is going 180 degrees [the] wrong direction on the economy, energy, and national security. We can talk about all those, but the “why” is to improve everything — improve every American life and bring out the best of America.
The second one ... there’s a part of me that rejects the premise. Because it’s just so interesting to me, having spent my life in the private sector … which is always such a crowded field. Anytime, like in North Dakota, if we were posting to fill one of the positions for our 11 universities, if we had only 12 people apply and eight of them were qualified or they really didn’t want to be president — they wanted to sell a book or they wanted to be a Cabinet member or they wanted to be a vice president — and you only had two or three candidates, I know we’d probably say, “Man, we should repost this position and see if we can get a bigger, better pool.”
I always believed that when you’re making hiring decisions, which is part of what the electoral process is: The American people are deciding who they want to hire to lead the country. When they’re doing that, competition’s great. It’s great for the Republican Party. It’s great for everything.
This idea that somehow a plurality is going to win implies that no one is going to consolidate a block of voters to compete because I think everybody understands that there’s a leader right now. I wouldn’t look at the national polls — I’d look at state polls because the state polls is where all of us are campaigning.
Right now, there’s only two candidates in recent polls gaining significant share there. One of those campaigns is ours. We’ve only been out at eight weeks. ... It’s like the football season hasn’t even started the preseason, much less been played. Super Bowl’s not until February, and about every interview I’m on, somebody is like, “You should drop out,” or … [they] write editorials: “We have too many candidates.”
It’s like telling your Pittsburgh Steelers or something they shouldn’t start the season because they don’t have a chance in the Super Bowl. I think people like to see the season actually played. We like our chances.
Washington Examiner: There is an endless obsession with Trump in the press and in our culture — understandable since it’s not often you have a former president indicted not once but four times. However, there’s a lot of issues we’re not talking about. Are we spending way too much of our time still reliving 2020?
Doug Burgum: Two people love it when we’re talking about 2020. The first of that would be ... Biden would love that because he doesn’t have to campaign on his horrific record on national defense or national security. He doesn’t have to compete. He doesn’t have to campaign on the border. He doesn’t have to campaign when we’ve got the highest interest rates in 22 years.
The nation got downgraded from a debt rating standpoint. That gets buried. They rolled out a bunch of regulations here ... on the same day as an indictment. It was essentially an attack on not only American industry, American U.S. energy industry, it was an attack on all liquid fuels.
That’s an attack on every farmer because farmers provide a lot of liquid fuels through ethanol. It’s an attack on that. It was an attack on pickup trucks, basically, because they proposed new standards that would be worse than what California passed in terms of saying that you can’t have, basically, internal combustion pickup trucks after 2032.
They slip that in. That’s on page 18 because talking about the stuff that you mentioned, that’s the first move that wasn’t — because it’s one way for Biden to get reelected, is to not have to talk about his record. That’s why, in our campaign, when people ask about other candidates, we just remind them, “We’re running against President Biden. We’re going to talk about economy, energy, national security at every stop.”
Then the other group that loves it when we’re talking about 2020, of course, is China because they forget that we’re not focusing on what our greatest threat to our country is. We’re having these internal squabbles where we forget that we’re actually in a proxy war with Russia that needs our attention. Those are just the tip of the iceberg of some very complex things going on, not to mention North Korea and Iran, as well.
Leadership in the private sector and the public sector requires leaders that can focus on the things that are the most important things. It turns out that economy, energy, and national security are the most important things for the country, but they’re also the things that, if done right, would improve every American life. That’s why we’re just so laser-focused on trying to shift the dialogue around these things because that’s what an election should be about.
Washington Examiner: Let’s discuss energy.
Doug Burgum: Happy to do that. I would say the first thing that we would do on day one, from a policy standpoint when we’re in the White House, 180 degrees different from Biden, is we would say, “We’re going to sell energy to our friends and allies. Stop buying it from our adversaries.” That would be the biggest change to address both economics and for the cost of the price of the pump for Americans.
The price that people are paying to heat their homes, the price they pay for electricity ... during this period of incredible inflation, it’s one of the things that does that. Maybe they want jobs. You’ve got low-priced energy and high quality, clean U.S. energy like they produce in Pennsylvania — that brings manufacturing jobs back to our shores. One of the things we’ve got to do is we got to fix some of our supply chain dependencies. It’s super, super critical.
I would just say, again, everybody’s talking about Ukraine. Putin wouldn’t have even invaded Ukraine if they didn’t have all of Western Europe totally dependent on Russian energy. Being invasive, he knows what’s going to happen. He’s got smart people working for him. Supply disruptions, price spikes up through the roof in the first three to six months of that war, he just made more bank than he’s ever made. He already is worth $70 billion or something.
Belatedly, then we decide, “We’re going to sanction Russian oil,” and that drives the price down 20% after the markets have gone up higher than that. That brings them back down, so then now he’s selling his oil and gas at 20% off the world market to China. A lot of it’s going to China.
The farmers in Iowa and North Dakota, they’d like to get diesel in their tractors at 20% off, but no, we’re subsidizing the Chinese economy with our sanctions on Russia. Of course, Russia and China had 40 high-level meetings at the highest levels in the last 10 years.
Then a lot of other stuff that the Biden administration’s doing with the Middle East, where they’re driving the Saudis and everybody else closer to the Chinese. … Then, back home, at the time of that invasion, when Russia invaded Ukraine, there was 400,000 barrels of oil a day of equivalent, a lot of it dirty heating oil, just being offloaded into New England to heat homes in New England. That was happening there.
At the same time that was happening, and Biden had been going around in the midterms, trying to get ... what? State Department went to Venezuela. Seven and a half million people left Venezuela, fled the country where there’s no human rights and no EPA.
The State Department was saying, “Venezuela, could you produce more oil and gas if the price is too high at the pump here” in the United States? Biden himself going to the Middle East, trying to get them to produce more — we know how that went.
Then, to get the price down at the pump, he drains the petroleum reserve from 800 million to 400 million barrels, which is ... again, I don’t want to say it should have been against the law because there should be some definition of what strategic is. Because I don’t think, when we loaded that thing up, strategic meant, I’m sure, for the defense of the nation, not, “Let’s get the price down at the pump to help fight the inflation you created ahead of the midterms.”
You cannot separate economy from energy, from national security.
Washington Examiner: The border: Do you have any sense as to why this administration is ignoring it?
Doug Burgum: I don’t have an answer to your question about why the Biden administration’s doing it. I do know that the job of the president of the United States includes national security, and that includes border security.
One of the reasons I’m running is because, when elected, I will do the job that’s actually described the president is supposed to do, which includes border security. I’m heading down to the border ... again. We have 240 North Dakota National Guard troops down there.
When you’re on the border and you see what’s actually happening, it’s not what’s really being reported. It’s being underreported because there’s entire sections of the border when I’ve been down there that are unguarded, and ... there’s not even any technology in terms of knowing whether people are walking across or not. I take the Biden number for apprehensions and double or triple it based on my experience from down there.
Every state becomes a border state with the process that they’re using, but the thing that’s most disturbing, and why it has to be closed, is because the fentanyl — 110,000 deaths in this country of overdoses, 70% of those because of fentanyl-based products occurred in 2022. The year before under Biden was 107,000. We’re averaging, for two years in a row, 300 people a day dying of a fentanyl overdose and fentanyl-related, 70% of those cases.
We’re taking as casualties, and all the precursors we know are being made in China and then coming through the border. Again, when those people are dying, this is not the Democrat versus independent versus Republican issue. Closing the border apparently is a Republican issue because Biden refuses to actually do his job that he’s required to do by the Constitution to lead our national security.
When we’re out campaigning and somebody says, “We lost our granddaughter to an overdose,” or, “We found our son dead in his bed, and we didn’t even know he was using, but he bought a $30 Percocet pill that turned out to have fentanyl in it,” that just cuts across all the income groups, it cuts across all geographies, and it cuts across all political affiliations.
When I’m down there [at the southern border], talking to people in customs and Border Patrol, and I’m like, “Where is everybody?” They go, “Look, everybody that can take early retirement did because we signed up to be in law enforcement. We didn’t sign up to do paperwork.”
A lot of the folks that should be out on the border are back processing the tens of thousands of people that are coming across every week. They didn’t get into that job to be pushing paper. I’m not talking computers — I’m talking paper. They’re totally demoralized. They feel completely unsupported by the White House.
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Then, how’s recruiting going? When I asked them how’s recruiting going, “Who would sign up today?” It’d be like the same cities that wanted to defund their police. Ask them how their recruiting is going in terms of new recruits.
If you disrespect the people that are enforcing the law and keeping our nation safe, people are going to say, “I don’t need to go into it. This job is hard enough, it’s dangerous enough, and then [to] be disrespected by the people who I’m actually every day putting my life on the line to try to protect?” We have to get back to honoring those people in uniform and those people in law enforcement in this country, because if we don’t, we’re just going to continue to see a complete degradation of respect for the rule of law in this country.
Freedom’s just another word for lonely and drunk Freedom’s just another word for lonely and drunk Timothy P. Carney Chelsea Handler in a recent social media video popped open her morning bottle of champagne while sitting in a hyperbaric chamber to celebrate being child-free and tries to argue that “women who are single with no children are happiest.”
Anywhere you look these days, including social media and major op-ed pages, you hear celebrations of the attachment-free life of the unmarried and childless. And while Handler's data on happiness were a bit off, her morning champagne appears to be pretty on-trend.
MORTGAGE RATES AT TWO-DECADE HIGH COULD RISE FURTHER AND STAY THERE FOR MONTHS
Binge drinking and some drug use reached record levels among Americans aged 35 to 50, a new study found. This is part of “a long-term upward trajectory,” the authors reported. Back in 2012, 23% of Americans between 35 and 50 years old reported having five drinks in a row at some point in the prior two weeks. In 2022, the number was up to 29%. This is connected, no doubt, to the rise in “deaths of despair” that Anne Case and Angus Deaton identified last decade.
What could be behind this bender boom? A prime suspect has to be our baby bust and the retreat from marriage.
“A record-high share of 40-year-olds in the U.S. have never been married,” Pew Research reported in June. This, too, is part of a long-term upward trend, from 6% of 40-year-olds having never been married up to 25% in 2023. Meanwhile, the birth rate has fallen to record lows, and the number of births has fallen almost every year since 2008. More and more adults are childless every year, and a growing share expect never to have children.
The retreat from marriage is most prevalent among the working class, which is also where binge drinking is highest.
The one group where binge drinking is actually on the decline: men under age 30 who have children, according to a 2019 study by researchers at Columbia University’s public-health school.
Influencers and newspaper columnists will tell you that life without a husband, wife, or children is a life of autonomy. That’s probably true. But the evidence, in these early decades of this increasingly connection-free world, is that a life of autonomy maximization is not a happy or healthy life.
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Yevgeny Prigozhin, 1961-2023 Yevgeny Prigozhin, 1961-2023 Neil Hauer Even the world’s best caterers don’t live forever, and Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of Russia’s PMC Wagner mercenary outfit, was no exception.
Two months to the day after marching his troops hundreds of miles toward Moscow to “sort things out” with Russia’s military leadership, Prigozhin’s luck finally ran out. Late on Wednesday local time, reports emerged that a jet belonging to the erstwhile Wagner head had crashed somewhere in the Tver region, northwest of Moscow, with Prigozhin himself on board. Dramatic footage soon emerged of the plane falling from the sky after being struck by an anti-aircraft missile, exploding in a fireball on the ground. Various sources soon confirmed it: Prigozhin, 62, was dead.
TOP THREE TAKEAWAYS FROM THE REPUBLICAN DEBATE IN MILWAUKEE
Few figures in recent Russian history have risen to such dizzying heights — or fallen as fast. Much like Russian President Vladimir Putin, Prigozhin got his start in St. Petersburg in the 1990s, first selling hot dogs at the market before moving into the restaurant and grocery store business. Following Putin’s ascension as president, Prigozhin became a favored client of the new leader, his firm winning numerous catering contracts totaling hundreds of millions of dollars.
Yet his appetite went far beyond the dining hall. With Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine’s Donbas region in 2014, Prigozhin tabled a new business idea: a mercenary outfit. The group, PMC (short for “private military company”) Wagner, would get its start in Moscow’s irregular intervention in eastern Ukraine that year, hiring veteran Russian soldiers for sums much higher than the army’s meager pay to participate in officially nonexistent military operations for the Kremlin. Wagner then played a key role in Russia’s intervention in Syria from late 2015 onward, serving on the ground as a light infantry force to spearhead Russian efforts to aid Syrian leader Bashar al Assad’s forces in recapturing territory from the Islamic State group and other rebels.
As Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he found need of Prigozhin and his mercenaries once more. Alongside, but crucially, separate from the Russian army, Wagner fought in several key areas of the Donbas front, being given responsibility for the capture of Popasna in spring 2022, opening the way for further Russian advances. Prigozhin, who had denied all links with Wagner to date, also publicly took ownership of the group.
Wagner and its new recruits were placed in charge of the conquest of the Donbas city of Bakhmut and gifted with tanks, artillery, and all manner of military hardware. While they would eventually succeed, the ensuing period saw Prigozhin’s open rivalry with the Russian military leadership — in particular, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and chief of staff Valery Gerasimov — grow to the point of open insults and profanity-laced tirades. With Wagner’s access to men and materiel dropping, Prigozhin stunned the world by turning his tanks around on June 23 and marching them in the direction of Moscow, vowing to remove the “traitorous” military leadership there. His troops took over the city of Rostov-on-Don and made it within two hours’ drive of the capital, downing half a dozen Russian helicopters on the way, before just as suddenly accepting a deal brokered by Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko, including Lukashenko’s offer of exile.
What would become of Prigozhin since then had been unclear. Moscow may have dispensed with the need for his troops in Ukraine, but Wagner was still crucial to numerous Russian foreign policy operations, notably in Africa. At any rate, Putin clearly had had enough. His termination on Wednesday of not only Prigozhin but also Dmitry Utkin, Wagner’s head of military operations (on board the same jet), has likely ended Wagner’s operations for good. With its two key leaders eliminated, it seems implausible that any other figure might have the influence to keep the group together in the face of the Russian military’s efforts to disband it.
Yevgeny Prigozhin was seemingly a man out of another century of Russian politics. A loyal satrap-turned-insurrectionist, his march on Moscow had more in common with the 18th-century rebellion of Pugachev against Catherine the Great or Gen. Kornilov’s march on the then-capital St. Petersburg in 1917 than anything in the Putin era. But while Russia’s leader emerged the victor now, future historians may well point to Prigozhin as the man who heralded the beginning of the end for Vladimir Putin’s reign.
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Neil Hauer is a Canadian journalist writing on Russia and the Caucasus.
Trump wins, DeSantis struggles, Haley shines, and everybody hates (or loves) Vivek Trump wins, DeSantis struggles, Haley shines, and everybody hates (or loves) Vivek Byron York TRUMP WINS, DESANTIS STRUGGLES, HALEY SHINES, AND EVERYBODY HATES (OR LOVES) VIVEK. Milwaukee — Going in, former President Donald Trump's view of the first Republican debate was that it would turn into a bunch of people fighting over second place, while Trump remained untouched and far ahead of the pack. The idea in the Trump camp was that if the former president skipped the debate, his absence would inevitably lead the other candidates to attack each other, bringing themselves down while Trump, and his big lead, remained unscathed.
That's pretty much what happened at the Fiserv Forum Wednesday night. There were large segments of the debate in which the candidates sparred and sometimes fought and sometimes insulted each other, while Trump remained an unspoken and untouched presence. And when Fox News moderators Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum turned the subject to Trump, whom Baier called "the elephant not in the room," the debate turned even more contentious, but much of the conversation involved how much the candidates were inclined to defend Trump even after his four indictments.
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), the leading candidate onstage, was clearly the most uncomfortable with the subject. He had a terrible moment when Baier asked the field, "If former President Trump is convicted in a court of law, would you still support him as your party's choice? Please raise your hand if you would." Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy's hand shot up. DeSantis hesitated, then glanced to his left to see Ramaswamy and then former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley and then Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) and then Gov. Doug Burgum (R-ND) all raise their hands. Only then did DeSantis tentatively raise his hand. To DeSantis's right, former Vice President Mike Pence waited even longer to raise his hand, and the two clearly anti-Trump candidates, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, did not raise their hands. True or not, it looked like DeSantis was waiting to see what everyone else did before taking a position.
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Yes, DeSantis had some good moments. He rebelled at another raise-your-hand question about climate change and took control of the subject. But overall, two things happened that the DeSantis campaign did not anticipate. First, even though he leads the rest of the field in national polls, DeSantis was not the main target of attacks from the rest of the candidates, as he had predicted. And second, the climate change moment aside, DeSantis failed to seize control of the debate. A breakdown of how long each candidate spoke showed that Pence, Ramaswamy, and Christie all spoke longer than DeSantis, with Pence being particularly aggressive in keeping the microphone.
The short version is that the debate was DeSantis's opportunity to break out from the field, and he did not take it.
One who did take the opportunity was Haley. Far down in the polls, fifth place in the field with the support of just 3.2% of Republican voters in national surveys, Haley made good use of a resume that ranges from a governorship to U.N. ambassador. Her most remembered moment was a dust-up with Ramaswamy, who, after Haley denounced Russian President Vladimir Putin and supported arming Ukraine, said, "I wish you well in your future career on the boards of Lockheed and Raytheon." Haley, who is not on the board of either company, went off on Ramaswamy, listing what she said were his wrongheaded foreign policy positions. She then kept at him as he repeatedly tried, and failed, to get a word in edgewise. Then she ended with, "You have no foreign policy experience, and it shows. It shows!" Ramaswamy was left sputtering and trying to explain.

Haley was also good on abortion — she and Pence had a debate that summarized differences among pro-life Republicans about how to proceed politically. And perhaps her best moment came when she praised Trump's accomplishments — after all, he was the president who made her U.N. ambassador — but argued that it is "time for a new generational conservative leader." Does the country really want a general election choice between 82-year-old President Joe Biden and 78-year-old Trump? "We have to look at the fact that three-quarters of Americans don't want a rematch between Trump and Biden," Haley said. "And we have to face the fact that Trump is the most disliked politician in America. We can't win a general election that way."
Haley's encounter with Ramaswamy was just one of Ramaswamy's fights Wednesday night. Ramaswamy, who with his other strengths is a veritable talking machine, came to Milwaukee with a big show, holding a "Revolution" party the night before the debate. Onstage, Ramaswamy began by lifting a line from former President Barack Obama, saying that uninitiated voters might be wondering, "Who the heck is this skinny guy with a funny last name?" After that, Ramaswamy showed that he can be both an interesting, provocative candidate and a complete jerk. The peak moment was when the candidates were asked about climate change and Ramaswamy said, "I'm the only person on the stage who isn't bought and paid for, so I can say this: The climate change agenda is a hoax."
Accusing all your fellow candidates of corruption and claiming unique purity for yourself is not a way to start a serious discussion of an issue. (Especially since on the specific issue at hand, climate, most of the other candidates basically agreed with Ramaswamy.) Ramaswamy continued the insult routine with Haley and then with everyone else — he treated Pence as if the former representative, governor, and vice president just didn't understand government. In remarks after the debate, Ramaswamy said his manner simply showed he is not a professional politician and that he stands out in a field of liars and squishes. The others onstage, he said, will "say anything, even when it's outright false," leaving Ramaswamy feeling like "I was onstage with Joe Biden and Liz Cheney."
Christie ran out of patience with Ramaswamy early on. "Hold on, hold on," he said. "I've had enough already tonight of a guy who sounds like ChatGPT. He stands up here, and the last person in one of these debates who stood in the middle of the stage and said, 'What's a skinny guy with an odd last name doing up here?' was Barack Obama. And I'm afraid we're dealing with the same type of amateur tendencies tonight."
By the end of the debate, there was little doubt that all the candidates loathed Ramaswamy. The bigger question, though, was what did the voters think? In an earlier newsletter, I noted that huge majorities, over 60%, of voters did not know enough about Ramaswamy to say whether they had a favorable or unfavorable opinion of him. Now, after a two-hour debate, many of them know a lot more. And the early indications, from TV focus groups, man-on-the-street interviews, and internet surveys, are that some voters, perhaps many voters, liked what they heard from Ramaswamy.
Will the debate change the race? Yes, it marked the beginning of a new stage in the campaign, but will the new stage be new and different? The answer is, probably not. It could be that the debate, for all the talking and insulting, did not make any fundamental difference at all in the race.
Certainly the Trump camp feels that way. After the debate, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), one of the former president's surrogates, was a happy man. He was particularly happy with Ramaswamy, the most pro-Trump candidate in a pro-Trump field. "It almost seemed like at every point in the debate, a different candidate tried to tangle with Ramaswamy, and it was like they were putting a wet fork in an electric socket because he seemed to be giving as good as he got," Gaetz said.
"Vivek won the debate," Gaetz continued. "Ron DeSantis lost the debate, and probably President Trump does the best coming out of it because you saw nothing in this debate that is going to reshape the fundamental contours of this race — nothing at all."
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