Supreme Court may soon undercut Biden’s regulatory regime Supreme Court may soon undercut Biden’s regulatory regime Kaelan Deese The future of the administrative state hangs in the balance. Supreme Court justices will soon decide in a pair of cases whether to reverse a decades-old precedent known as the Chevron deference that would curb federal agencies' power to regulate everything from Wall Street to the stove in your kitchen. This Washington Examiner series will look at how a departure from this precedent could rip up the regulation nation. Part 1 will focus on the underlying court case.
The Supreme Court will soon issue a ruling that could reshape the balance of power between federal agencies and the judiciary, give small litigants due process leverage, and disrupt President Joe Biden's progressive regulatory agenda.
The nearly 40-year-old precedent known as the Chevron doctrine tells courts to defer to federal agencies’ reasonable interpretations of ambiguous statutes, which many business and industry groups say has led to stifling regulations. Conversely, the federal government contends the precedent respects courts' authority to interpret law while also respecting Congress's ability to delegate power to agencies in the executive branch, according to Justice Department legal briefs.
Major industry groups encouraging the high court to diminish or toss out Chevron include oil giants such as Chevron and Exxon Mobil. Agriculture giants such as the North American Meat Institute have also urged the Supreme Court to move away from broad agency deference, as have trade groups representing e-cigarette companies.
Conservative interest groups that are sympathetic to the industry groups describe Chevron as a legal framework that typically gives more favor to "experts" within executive agencies, such as in cases where industry groups challenge climate change rules or other environmental regulations.
Carrie Severino, president of the conservative JCN, formerly the Judicial Crisis Network, told the Washington Examiner that Chevron essentially "gives the regulators a thumb on the scale in any court case."
"That's a huge disadvantage for any person challenging the federal government," Severino said.
The cases before the high court, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce, were brought by two fishing companies challenging a National Marine Fisheries Service mandate that forces their fishing companies to pay and house at-sea herring monitors. But the core dispute provides a stage for the Supreme Court's Republican-appointed majority to reassess Chevron. The fishing companies argue that Congress never authorized the NMFS to require commercial fishermen to pay for at-sea monitors, highlighting a central aspect of the Chevron debate: the extent of agency authority.
After the 6-3 Republican-appointed Supreme Court heard oral arguments in January over the case, the majority of justices gave no indication they would bolster or reaffirm Chevron. Annie Talley, former deputy assistant to then-President Donald Trump, said the only uncertainty is how far the justices will pare back the 1984 doctrine.
"The question is, what guidance do they give to the lower courts going forward? Is it that you can't use Chevron at all? Is it you can use some type of deference that's not Chevron?" Talley said of how the justices may rule.
The primary complaint by industry groups and businesses is that Chevron makes it too easy for each new administration, whether it is Republican or Democratic, to change its interpretation of federal law and introduce "systematic bias into the adjudication of cases."
"[Chevron] makes the government a towering behemoth and it makes it hard for anybody to fight it. So one of the things that makes this case so unique and so powerful is that the people on the other side of the case are real-life fishermen, whose lives are in a real way made worse by the government acting this way," Talley said.
These challenges to Chevron also come as the high court has seemingly moved away from the 1984 doctrine, not having relied on it since 2016 to make any of its key decisions. Lower courts have inconsistently applied the doctrine in cases concerning regulation. If the justices are poised to limit or overturn the precedent, it could result in forcing lawmakers in Congress to write clear and concise laws rather than vague or undefined measures.
Cary Burke, a partner at Seyfarth Shaw, told the Washington Examiner the high court's decision may come down to two choices. The justices could "either 1) change the way in which it analyzes whether a statute is ambiguous or 2) limit Chevron’s applicability to instances in which Congress has given an agency authority to act with the force of law."
The Supreme Court’s evolving approach to administrative law, along with hints it could soon retire Chevron, has brought increased attention to two key doctrines: the nondelegation doctrine and the major questions doctrine. The major questions doctrine arises when the court rejects Chevron by arguing Congress wouldn't have delegated a question of high significance to an agency. But under both nondelegation and the major questions doctrine, the high court has in the past utilized those standards to minimize agency power and relocate lawmaking power to the legislative branch.
A significant decision that foreshadowed the Supreme Court's growing reliance on the major questions doctrine came in the 2022 West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency case, which limited the extent to which the EPA can regulate carbon dioxide emissions related to climate change.
Burke said under the nondelegation doctrine and major questions doctrine, the Supreme Court "has already hemmed in Chevron's influence."
"Regardless of the outcome in Loper, I expect that courts will continue to try and use these mechanisms to sidestep the Chevron analysis where possible," Burke added.
During the Supreme Court's oral arguments on Jan. 17 in the fishermen's cases, several justices appointed by Republican presidents expressed skepticism about Chevron. Justice Neil Gorsuch, a vocal critic, pointed to confusion among lower courts and the disruptive nature of Chevron deference on "different classes of people."
“The cases I saw routinely on the courts of appeals — and I think this is what niggles at so many of the lower court judges — are the immigrant, the veteran seeking his benefits, the Social Security Disability applicant, who have no power to influence agencies, who will never capture them, and whose interests are not the sorts of things on which people vote, generally speaking," Gorsuch told U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, who was arguing on behalf of the Biden administration to keep Chevron intact.
Prelogar's main argument relied on the idea that agencies are filled with experts in their field and that it makes far less sense for a judge to be interpreting ambiguous statutes when there are designated experts in agencies such as the EPA or the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission who might be better suited to interpret statutes.
But Justice Brett Kavanaugh underscored the instability Chevron brings, such as allowing new administrations to reinterpret laws differently, thereby shifting regulatory landscapes dramatically. He framed the issue as a constitutional one, arguing that the judiciary must ensure the executive does not overstep its bounds and act "as a king."
While some Republican-appointed justices appeared open to overturning Chevron entirely, others, including Chief Justice John Roberts, hinted at the court’s gradual distancing from the doctrine. Roberts queried whether Chevron had already been effectively sidelined by the court’s recent reliance on the major questions doctrine, which demands explicit congressional authorization for significant regulatory actions.
On the other side, the court’s Democratic-appointed justices defended Chevron, stressing the importance of agency expertise in navigating complex, ambiguous statutes. Justice Elena Kagan highlighted the challenges Congress faces in foreseeing future problems, such as those posed by artificial intelligence, where detailed statutory guidance might be lacking.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson raised concerns about the judiciary’s role if Chevron were overturned, cautioning against courts becoming "uber legislators." She pointed out the burden on agencies to seek judicial approval for new rules, a sentiment echoed by Prelogar, who warned of the "unwarranted shock to the legal system" that overturning Chevron could cause.
The concerns by Jackson and other members of the Democratic-appointed bloc, which includes Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Kagan, aligned more closely with the government's position. The solicitor general also stoked concerns that "litigants" would "come out of the woodwork" in response to a weakening of Chevron. Kagan and Sotomayor agreed that it would be difficult for judges to make the "best" interpretation of the law when the justices already "routinely disagree" about a law's meaning.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The high court's decision, expected by the end of June, could go several ways. It might limit Chevron’s application without fully overturning it, or it could replace Chevron with a new standard altogether. Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s position remains pivotal, as her questions during arguments indicated a nuanced view between the majority and the minority, making her a possible wild card in the final decision.
As legal scholars and practitioners await the ruling, the implications are profound. Overruling Chevron could significantly curtail the power of federal agencies, shifting more interpretive authority to the judiciary and possibly altering the landscape of administrative law.
What’s next in the lawfare campaign against Trump What’s next in the lawfare campaign against Trump Byron York
The first thing to say about the Democratic lawfare campaign against former President Donald Trump is that it has been a smashing success. With help from a senior Biden Justice Department official and a Biden-donor judge, Manhattan Democratic District Attorney Alvin Bragg set out to convict the former president on 34 felony counts and ended up convicting the former president on 34 felony counts. By any measure, that is a triumph for a prosecutor — and his party.
Now, though, comes the task of converting a win in court into a win in the presidential election, which has always been the underlying goal of the lawfare campaign. Even with all of President Joe Biden's liabilities, including his age, inflation, and the border disaster, some Democrats believed that if they could just call Trump a "convicted felon," enough would-be Trump voters might abandon the Republican candidate to allow Biden to win a second term.
Maybe that will happen. Right now, though, it's too early to know precisely what effect Trump's conviction will have on the race. But it is not too early to see that the confusion, emotionality, and endless arguments surrounding the verdict raise the possibility that the political impact of Trump's conviction will be muddled. If that is the case, the muddle might also affect the public's view of the other Trump prosecutions that will go on between now and Election Day. The short version is that, despite the success in Manhattan, it is not at all clear that lawfare will be an electoral winner for Democrats.
A novelty case It is hard to think of another high-profile trial in which there was so much argument and disagreement about what the defendant was charged with. It began with the indictment, in late March 2023, when Bragg announced he was charging Trump with the misdemeanor crime of falsifying business records but was also employing a legal twist to upgrade the crime to a felony. He then charged Trump with the same felony 34 times. 
News accounts at the time noted that it was a "novel" prosecution, meaning no one had ever seen a case quite like the one Bragg conjured up against Trump. The case was a "novel application of the law," a "risky and novel case" that "rests on a novel legal theory," analysts said, to use examples from the New York Times. Sometimes the case was called "untested" and sometimes "unique," but the larger point was that Bragg, who ran for office on a promise to pursue Trump, had stretched the law to indict his target. Later we learned, also from the New York Times, that Bragg, whose predecessor had not been able to find a suitable crime to charge Trump with committing, "pushed his prosecutors to scour the penal code for a workable theory" — that is, for a charge that could be brought against Trump. It was a classic show-me-the-man-and-I'll-show-you-the-crime moment.
Unless you just wanted to see Trump brought down for any reason at all, and there were plenty of commentators who did, delving into the details of Bragg's case could make your head hurt. Trump was charged with causing the business records of his company to be falsified (a misdemeanor) with the intent of covering up another crime (another misdemeanor) that he might or might not have committed but intended to commit and in any event depended on one or more of three other unlawful acts that the prosecutors said, but did not have to prove, that Trump intended to commit. Experienced legal minds struggled to comprehend Bragg's case.
But not Judge Juan Merchan, who in 2020, in clear violation of New York's Code of Judicial Conduct, made small donations to the Biden campaign and two anti-Trump groups. When it came time to instruct the jury, Merchan gave the charges the most pro-prosecution reading imaginable. It only took a couple of days for the jurors, all drawn from one of the deepest blue areas of the country, to convict Trump on all 34 counts.
Given the confusion, it would be enormously helpful to know what the jury was thinking. But all Merchan required of them was to check one box per count on a verdict sheet, indicating that Trump had caused the records falsifications. They said nothing about the other crime that made it a felony or the other unlawful act that made the other crime a crime. So when the trial was over, we still didn't know the whole of what Trump was convicted for, which meant the verdict didn't do anything to clear up the puzzlement over the charges.
"Is it normal to have this much disagreement just on what the charges are?" a reader of National Review's Dan McLaughlin asked. "Nothing about this prosecution was normal," McLaughlin answered. "Nobody would want to see justice work like this in ordinary practice — which it doesn't."
The point now is that going forward, one side in the 2024 campaign will be calling Trump a "convicted felon," while the other side will literally not understand what Trump was convicted of doing. It is fair to say we face months of fruitless argument over the most basic facts of the case, even as its verdict hangs over the campaign. It is possible an appeals court will clarify things, but that will not happen until next year, long after the next president is elected.
The novelty continues The bafflement over the first Trump prosecution now moves on to the next Trump prosecutions. Trump is charged in three additional cases. Two were brought by Jack Smith, the Biden Justice Department's choice to prosecute Biden's opponent. One of those is the classified documents case in Florida, and the other is the case focusing on the 2020 election and Jan. 6 in Washington, D.C. The third case was brought by Fani Willis, the elected Democratic district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia.
The Georgia case, plagued by Willis's ethics problems, is going nowhere. In early June, a state appeals court stopped all proceedings for months while litigation over Willis continues. The classified documents case is creeping along, mired in pretrial fighting and the difficulties of handling zillions of secret documents. Neither has a ghost of a chance of coming to trial this year. That leaves the 2020/Jan. 6 case, which is the one that true Trump bashers always hoped would be tried first. 
That didn't happen because the Jan. 6 case has problems, too. And guess what the biggest problem is? "The charges are novel applications of criminal laws to unprecedented circumstances," the New York Times declared. There's that word again. Like Bragg before him, Smith scoured the laws to find something to charge Trump with. Now, his "novel application" of the law has led to pretrial wrangling resulting in not one but two Supreme Court cases that have yet to be decided. Decisions are likely coming by late June, but the controversy will almost certainly delay Trump's trial on the 2020/Jan. 6 charges until after the election.
The Supreme Court case that has received the most publicity is Trump's claim that he is immune from criminal prosecution for acts he undertook as president of the United States. It, too, is a novel claim — novel charges beget novel defenses. The anti-Trump side has dismissed Trump's defense as a delaying tactic, but it raises a critical issue, especially in an age in which lawfare is increasingly used as a political weapon. At oral arguments in April, the justices realized the case was bigger than Trump.
"This case has huge implications for the presidency, for the future of the presidency, for the future of the country," Justice Brett Kavanaugh said. Justice Samuel Alito added, "Whatever we decide is going to apply to all future presidents." Justice Neil Gorsuch said, "We are writing a rule for the ages."
Smith, of course, wanted the decision in a hurry. He did not get his way. In the end, it is expected the justices will not give Trump the blanket immunity he seeks but will decide that a president does enjoy some immunity for acts he takes while in office. We will see what effect, if any, the ruling has on the Trump 2020/Jan. 6 prosecution.
The other Supreme Court case, the one that has received less publicity, involves two of the four counts against Trump, the charge that he obstructed an official proceeding, referring to Congress's Jan. 6, 2021, certification of Biden's victory in the Electoral College. (The two separate charges are that Trump 1) obstructed the proceeding and 2) conspired to obstruct the proceeding.)
That part of the indictment is particularly notable because the same charge has been used against hundreds of accused Jan. 6 rioters. In many cases, when rioters did not engage in violence and would otherwise face misdemeanor charges, such as unauthorized presence in a restricted area and illegal parading in the Capitol, the charge of obstructing an official proceeding has been the only felony prosecutors could find to charge them with. About 350 accused rioters have been charged with the offense. And so has Trump.
The problem is that the charge seems entirely inappropriate to the Capitol riot. The law is known as 18 U.S. Code 1512(c)(2). It was passed in 2002 as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which was designed to crack down on white-collar crime in the aftermath of the Enron scandal. That case involved a lot of documents, and it exposed an odd feature in the law at that time: It was illegal for a corporate officer to tell an underling to destroy documents but not illegal for the officer to do it himself. Congress sought to remedy that situation by passing Section 1512(c)(2), which said: "Whoever corruptly alters, destroys, mutilates or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object's integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding; or otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both."
It was obvious that the law was intended to plug the Enron loophole concerning the destruction of evidence. But Biden Justice Department prosecutors investigating Jan. 6, scouring the penal code, focused on the part of the law that said "otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding." Aha! they said. That's what the Jan. 6 rioters did, wasn't it? The prosecutors had a workable theory.
Soon hundreds of accused rioters faced the felony charge of obstructing an official proceeding. Many of them challenged the charge on the obvious argument that the law did not apply to Jan. 6. They all lost — except one, a man named Joseph Fischer. When Fischer's challenge went before Trump-appointed Judge Carl Nichols, Nichols agreed that 1512(c)(2) did not apply to the circumstances of Jan. 6 and dropped the charge. The Justice Department immediately appealed. It could see calamity coming if the charge it had used against so many Jan. 6 defendants was thrown out. 
The Justice Department won its appeal, but the appeals court judges disagreed among themselves as to the reason why 1512(c)(2) was an appropriate charge. That's the problem with novel applications of the law. They can be far-fetched, convoluted, and difficult to understand, and even distinguished lawyers can disagree over their meaning. In this case, the Supreme Court took notice and agreed to hear the case of Fischer v. United States. The sentences of hundreds of Jan. 6 defendants hang in the balance, as well as the charges against Trump.
At oral arguments, the justices seemed skeptical that the Enron scandal law could be appropriately applied to the Capitol riot. That could bode ill for the Justice Department. In any event, like the Trump immunity case, it is likely the court will release its decision in late June. No one will find it surprising that Smith is said to be working on a new and novel interpretation of the law to use against Trump even if the Supreme Court rules against Smith in the matter.
The way forward So what now? The next things scheduled to happen are the court's late June decisions in the immunity and Jan. 6 obstruction cases. If Trump wins the immunity case, that part of the lawfare campaign against him would be over. But that seems highly unlikely, so Smith's Jan. 6 case against Trump might well go ahead. If Fischer wins the obstruction case, that would be a win for Trump as well, but Smith will probably have something up his sleeve to keep those charges alive, too.
In Manhattan, Merchan has set sentencing for July 11. It will be a bizarre day in which a Biden donor has the sole authority to put Biden's opponent in jail. There are quite a few commentators advocating Merchan do just that. But others say that since Trump was convicted of a pair of misdemeanors and since Trump is a first-time offender, the former president should not be sentenced to prison. 
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
As for the other two indictments of Trump, the Florida documents case and the Georgia case, the future is extremely unclear. If Trump is elected president, the federal documents case would probably go away. The Willis case might be dead before Inauguration Day anyway.
That's a quick rundown. But take a step back and you will see this is an entirely surreal situation. It's an election year, and the nominee of one party is facing four criminal prosecutions driven by elected officials of the opposition party, in the case of Manhattan and Fulton County, and by an official appointed by his opponent's attorney general, in the case of the Smith prosecutions. All the while, Democrats extravagantly deny that there is anything, anything at all, partisan about what is going on. So no, it is not possible to predict what will happen in the next six months. But it can't be good.
Byron York is chief political correspondent for the Washington Examiner.
Hogan’s a hero: The Senate candidate gives long-suffering Maryland Republicans a chance Hogan’s a hero: The Senate candidate gives long-suffering Maryland Republicans a chance Tevi Troy
Maryland Republicans did something unusual recently. In nominating former Republican Gov. Larry Hogan for the Senate, they selected a candidate for federal office with a chance to win. Maryland, a liberal state with a large population of government employees, has not voted for a Republican for president since 1988. And Maryland has not had a GOP senator since the liberal Republican Charles Mathias retired in 1987.
For long-suffering Maryland Republicans like me, having Hogan as a candidate is like having your hard-luck sports team contend for a championship. In my two decades in Maryland, I’ve seen the great wheel of time turn. My children have gone through school. I have buried my parents. I’ve even seen the 17-year cycles of the cicadas twice. Yet in these 20-plus years in Maryland, I have never before had an opportunity to vote for a candidate for federal office who has had any chance to win in Maryland. Until now.
Living where I do as a Republican is an exercise in frustration. Montgomery County, where I live, is even more liberal than the state as a whole. Joe Biden won the county 78.6% to 19% in 2020. Montgomery County has never had a Republican council president in its history. Republicans have not had a majority on the council since Lyndon Johnson was president in the 1960s. The odds that I will in my lifetime get to vote for a Republican candidate for Congress with a chance to win are somewhere around winning the Powerball after being struck by lightning.

Usually, I have to find alternatives to winning as a way of getting political satisfaction. I flash my ID when I go to vote, only to have the election officials put up their hands like Dracula avoiding a cross. I proudly ask for a Republican ballot, which sometimes requires the election officials to scramble about to find one. And I check the returns after voting to see what percentage of the tiny number of Republicans my wife and I constituted at our local precinct.

This sorry record is why I’m so excited about the prospect of Gov. Larry Hogan becoming Sen. Larry Hogan. Hogan is not just a Republican but is a Ronald Reagan Republican. He served as an alternate delegate for the "Gipper" in 1976 and considers Reagan his political hero. He even voted for the late Reagan as a write-in candidate on his 2020 presidential ballot. Hogan is also a Trump critic, which should help him in a state where Biden is likely to win by 20 to 30 points in November.  
Hogan’s opponent is Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks, a 53-year-old black graduate of Duke University and the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. She has lower name identification than Hogan, but she will be a formidable opponent. In the primary, she defeated billionaire Rep. David Trone (D-MD), who spent an astounding $62 million of his own money. Alsobrooks spent almost $6 million of the $7.8 million she raised for the primaries in fending off Trone and will need to replenish her coffers. Hogan should be able to compete with her on this front. As one Hogan operative told me, Hogan “could not have outspent Trone. He can outraise her.”
One big issue is going to be abortion. This is the Democrats’ go-to topic these days, and it’s a potent one in deep-blue Maryland. But Hogan will not be an easy target. He has pledged to be in favor of abortion rights as a senator, which should blunt the issue somewhat. 
Although Hogan will have to play defense on abortion, Alsobrooks has vulnerabilities as well, including on Israel. Even though Maryland has the fourth-highest percentage of Jews in the country — it's almost 4% Jewish, with a total of 200,000 Jews in the state — Maryland’s other Democratic senator is Chris Van Hollen, an unrelenting critic of Israel. The Baltimore Jewish Times recently wrote, “We face the uncomfortable reality that Chris Van Hollen is not our friend.” Hogan, in contrast, is like most Republicans as a staunch Israel supporter, and he has promised to be a “pro-Israel champion” in the Senate. As for Alsobrooks, while she did distance herself somewhat from Van Hollen’s criticisms, she called for a suspension of arms to Israel if it entered Rafah. If she wins, it would likely mean that heavily Jewish Maryland has two Israel critics in the Senate instead of a pro-Israel counterbalance in the form of Hogan.
Another issue is crime. Hogan clearly thinks Alsobrooks is vulnerable here, touting both his support from the Prince George's County Fraternal Order of Police and his "Refund the Police" initiative as governor. He also just released a 10-point crime plan that says that “we can no longer allow politics to get in the way of public safety.” He emphasizes his ability “to bring people in both parties together to get this done, support our law enforcement, and make our communities safer.”
Beyond the specific policies, the framing of the race is crucial. If the race is a referendum on Hogan’s gubernatorial tenure, then Hogan stands a good chance. On the other hand, if it’s about Republican or Democratic control of the Senate, then Alsobrooks has the edge. As a Maryland political donor with ties to both camps told me, the “balance of the Senate is a big issue — absent that he’d have a better shot.” Even here, though, Hogan has an opening. Alsobrooks’s likely fealty to the Senate Democratic leadership allows Hogan to stress his anti-Trump independence and his willingness to work across the aisle to get things done, something voters consistently profess to want in candidates. Hogan recognizes this and stressed in his first released ad of the general election campaign that “it’s time we stop the partisan BS and get stuff done.”
Hogan also doubled down on this by calling on the public to “respect” the Trump verdict, suggesting that he’s more concerned with picking up Democrats than with maximizing turnout among pro-Trump Republicans. 
Hogan’s biggest advantage is his standing in Maryland. He had a remarkable 77% favorability rating toward the end of his tenure as governor. One GOP operative who is an expert in Senate races, and who previously tried to get Hogan to run, said that “Hogan was the most popular politician I’ve ever seen polled.” He added that Hogan has a rare reverse gender gap: Women like him more than men. Hogan proved as governor that he could handle a crisis, leading Maryland through COVID-19 and the 2015 Freddie Gray riots in Baltimore. He earned points through his dignified handling of his bout with non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2015, which left him bald but also gave him a relatable, anti-charisma charm. He’s also a ferocious campaigner, and as the GOP operative told me, “Good candidates win tough races.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
It will indeed be tough, though. Democratic pollster Mark Mellman said Maryland’s history shows that Hogan is facing an uphill battle. According to Mellman, “[Sen. Ben] Cardin won his last election by 35 points, Van Hollen by 32, Biden by 33, and Democrats won the statewide vote for U.S. House by 30 points. Those are very consistent and very large margins in federal elections.” On the other hand, Alsobrooks has never run statewide, which means that her inexperience could be a factor against the battle-tested Hogan. 
Hogan may have another advantage as well, one that is harder to gauge. Republican Marylanders like me, who never get to support a Senate candidate with a chance, may show up in higher-than-usual numbers for the rare opportunity to vote for a possible winner. 
Washington Examiner contributing writer Tevi Troy is a former senior White House aide. He is the author of five books on the presidency, including the forthcoming The Power and the Money: The Epic Clashes Between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry. 
George W. Bush photos appear in Senate campaign ad — of a Democrat George W. Bush photos appear in Senate campaign ad — of a Democrat David Mark Former President George W. Bush makes two appearances, via old photos, in a 2024 Michigan Senate race campaign ad. Not for likely GOP nominee Mike Rogers, a House member and strong supporter during Bush’s 2001-09 presidency, but for the probable Democratic Senate nominee, Rep. Elissa Slotkin. 
The television ad is an extension of a bipartisan-leaning strategy Slotkin has employed since her initial win, in 2018, of a House district that takes in the state capital of Lansing and stretches to the northwestern Detroit exurbs. Slotkin has styled herself as a centrist who reaches out to Republicans.
She’s now running for Senate, to replace retiring Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), who first won the seat in 2000. Both parties view the Michigan Senate race as critical. Democrats need a victory to have any chance of holding their majority, currently at a narrow 51-49. Republicans see Michigan as a ripe pickup opportunity in an already-favorable Senate map.
The Senate race overlaps with the presidential campaign, with Michigan earning its billing as a perennial swing state. President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump need it to win the White House in November.
The Slotkin campaign's featuring of Bush in photos shows the touch-and-go nature of statewide races in Michigan and the at least limited rehabilitation of the 43rd president’s public image. Bush, after all, left office deeply unpopular amid the Great Recession and bailouts of banks and car companies that seemed to contradict the free market principles he had long espoused, along with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other foreign and domestic crises. 
Slotkin, a former Defense Department and CIA official, was deployed to Iraq for three tours over five years. During that period, Slotkin had national security assignments in the Bush White House and the administration of his Democratic successor, former President Barack Obama. Her campaign ad features side-by-side photos in the Oval Office with Bush and Obama. 
And while Bush was a target of Democratic anger, even hatred, in some quarters, during his eight years in office, he's not exactly viewed as a beloved GOP elder statesman. Many Republicans see him as out of step with the Republican Party's current incarnation, in the nationalist-populist mold of Trump, who is seeking a comeback against Biden after losing the 2020 race.
In Trump's winning 2016 campaign, Bush was, in fact, a recurring target of the businessman's insult-comic routines on social media and campaign rallies. Most of the jabs came during the Republican primary season, when Trump's rivals included former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, younger brother of the former president and son of an even more stolid symbol of the old GOP establishment, the late President George H.W. Bush.
Trump in 2016 frequently disparaged the whole Bush family.
"Frankly, I think the son, being loyal to the father, I think he really wanted to go into Iraq, even if it wasn’t the right thing to do,” Trump said in a February 2016 CNN town hall.
"They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction, but there were none. And they knew there were none," Trump added at the time in a statement that could have been uttered in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, when Obama emerged on top, having been an Iraq War critic from the start in contrast to his chief rival, then-Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York.
From Bushie to MAGA Mike During Bush's presidency, Rogers, the former Republican congressman and GOP Senate nominee-in-waiting, would have been a natural to tout his ties to Bush. A House member from 2001-15, Rogers was elected to Congress at the same time that Bush won the presidency. Both got to Washington by the electoral skin of their teeth. Bush in 2000 famously won Florida by 537 votes out of nearly 6 million cast, handing him the presidency after more than a month-plus of court battles. Rogers in 2000, at the time a state senator, won the year's closest House race. He prevailed over his Democratic opponent by 111 votes out of nearly 298,000 cast.
Rogers, a square-jawed former FBI agent who earlier served in the Army, was, two decades ago, out of central casting as a War on Terror-era Republican lawmaker. He supported the 2002 Iraq invasion resolution in Congress and was a strong proponent of a robust and activist foreign policy, which he capped by chairing the House Intelligence Committee during his last four years in office.
These days, though, Rogers is more like MAGA Mike. He’s recast himself as a robust critic of federal law enforcement, routinely denigrating his old agency, the FBI, as a deep state tool that targets Trump. 
“I don’t recognize this justice system,” Rogers said in his September 2003 Senate announcement video. “Look, I’m for holding everyone accountable if they’ve broken the law, no matter who they are. But what we are seeing right now is a politically motivated DOJ waging war against the leading Republican presidential candidate on behalf of President Biden. This is a dangerous precedent, and it needs to be stopped.”
Trump has endorsed Rogers. In a March Truth Social post, Trump called Rogers "highly respected" and noted his military service. "Mike will work closely with me to enact our America First Policies," Trump wrote. "He will tirelessly fight to Secure the Border, Stop Inflation, Grow the Economy, Strengthen our Military / Veteran Support, and Protect and Defend our always under siege Second Amendment."
Rogers had previously seemingly retired from politics. After leaving Congress, he hosted a nationally syndicated radio show for a time and the series Declassified on CNN, where he was a national security commentator. Rogers and his wife moved to Florida, and he became a defense lobbyist. He now says his home is again in Michigan.
Reputation rehabilitation Bush, since leaving the White House in January 2009, has remained largely silent. His presidency had ended on a bitter note amid the worst recession since the Great Depression and a series of wars.
As the economy soured and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dragged on, Bush hit a record low in the spring of 2008, when nearly two-thirds of voters said they saw him in an unfavorable light. That marked a dramatic fall from his 90% approval rating after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Bush bottomed out, per the Gallup poll, at 25% in early November 2008, just as the nation was electing Obama as president, on promises largely to reverse Bush's actions at home and abroad. That was just a point above President Richard Nixon's record-low approval rating on the eve of his August 1974 resignation over the Watergate scandal. By the time of Obama's inauguration, Bush's approval rating had ticked up to 33% in the Gallup poll.
Since then, Bush has become known for his painting more than public pronouncements on political and policy issues. After reading an essay by Winston Churchill in 2012, amid that year’s presidential election season, Bush made the unexpected choice of starting a postpresidential career as a painter. 
Churchill wrote that "painting is a companion with whom one may hope to walk a great part of life’s journey," noted author Jared Cohen in his 2024 book Life After Power: Seven Presidents and Their Search for Purpose Beyond the White House.
Bush, in an interview with Cohen, said he's content out of office.
"When it’s over, it’s over. I don’t miss it," Bush told the author.
As for his legacy as president, Bush added, "Historians are still writing books about the other George [Washington]. ... By the time they get around to me, I’ll be long gone." 
Not that Bush has been completely absent from the political scene. The former president helped talk former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan into running for Senate this year, a tough task even for a popular former state chief executive in one of the nation's bluest states.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
"Probably the most convincing guy was George Bush, who called me and said that he thought that I had an important voice that was needed for the party," Hogan said in a March interview after announcing his Senate bid. Bush "thought that there was a missing voice for our party to get back on track to the more Reaganesque bigger-tent party. And he said, you know, even though you probably don't want to be a senator, we need you."
In the Michigan Senate race, Slotkin isn't making any such claims about Bush supporting her Democratic Senate bid. But she may not have to, with photos, if her campaign strategy goes as planned, telling a story of bipartisanship in an age of fierce party-on-party fighting.
Mike Rowe’s irresistible patriotism Mike Rowe’s irresistible patriotism Madeline Fry Schultz Mike Rowe has made a living from telling stories. And not just in Dirty Jobs, the TV show that made him famous. He has a podcast, The Way I Heard It, a book with the same title, and a TV show called The Story Behind the Story, all dedicated to telling interesting historical tales with a twist. 
Inspired by Paul Harvey’s 1970s radio program The Rest of the Story, Rowe makes you wait till the end of the story to find out, for example, the name of that guy who had to eat bull testicles in order to woo a young farm girl. (Spoiler alert, we’re talking about former Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who didn’t end up marrying former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor after all.)
Ahead of Independence Day, Rowe is now releasing a film that includes nine such stories and finds Rowe exploring Washington, D.C., to honor our nation’s monuments and its founding. 
Rowe explains in an introduction to Something to Stand For that it isn’t meant to be for Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals. But with tributes to former President Ronald Reagan, Francis Scott Key, and members of the U.S. military, the film isn’t likely to be a hit among the progressive Left. Does that mean it’s conservative?
“Well, if you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” Rowe told the Washington Examiner. “The line I would draw today that’s separating the country first and foremost is not between liberals and conservatives or Democrats and Republicans. It’s between Americans and anti-Americans. ... I didn’t write the movie for people who are anti-American, but I guess I did write it because of them.”
Exclusively employing actors and crew from Oklahoma, Something to Stand For is “not in any way, shape, or form a Hollywood project,” Rowe said. It’s the kind of film you might expect to watch on a U.S. Capitol tour or at the National Archives. 
Something to Stand For tells the stories of nine Americans, some more famous than others, who demonstrated bravery, wit, and resilience. In the movie, Rowe refers to the Founding Fathers, for example, as the “one percenters of 1776,” wealthy men who could have enjoyed a cushy life instead of starting a revolution. 
“Unlike most revolutions, ours didn’t start with an angry mob armed with pitchforks and guillotines and nothing to lose,” he says. “That was France. Our revolution started because 56 very wealthy men with everything to lose put everything on the line for a country that didn’t even exist yet.”
Rowe told the Washington Examiner his favorite part of filming was a chance encounter with a 91-year-old Korean War veteran at the World War II Memorial, a moment that appears early on in the movie. Rowe was struck by the “tears of gratitude” streaming down the man’s face as he looked at the memorial to the more than 400,000 Americans who died in the war. 
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“You meet a guy in real life and have an unscripted moment that articulates everything I hope the film espouses,” he said. “Well that’s pretty cool.”
On screen and off, it’s clear Rowe is passionate about his country. Whether that makes his work conservative or liberal doesn’t matter as much as the question: Can celebrating our nation’s heroes, historical and modern, help others feel the same way?
The post-Cold War demise of American foreign policy The post-Cold War demise of American foreign policy Anne R. Pierce With authoritarianism, fanaticism, aggression, and conflict growing alarmingly worldwide, it is clear that America’s post-Cold War foreign policy has been subpar. The response to emerging or reemerging threats to the free world’s security and way of life has been slow, inadequate, makeshift, and inconstant.
The United States and its allies have neglected proven principles and practices and let down their guard while enemies of freedom have seized the day. Complacent rather than vigilant, reactive rather than proactive, presidents and policymakers have, at critical junctures, such as the prologue to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, squandered America’s inherent moral-democratic leadership and military-strategic advantage.
Today’s troubled world bears the marks of deteriorating American foreign policy and waning American influence. The now-formidable China, Russia, and Iran “axis” relentlessly cultivates anti-American dictatorships and forces, feverishly spreads disinformation and propaganda, brazenly pursues “gray zone” subversion of democracies, and shamelessly revives imperialism. Russia wages a genocidal war in the heart of Europe while China advances in the South China Sea. The Taliban in Afghanistan are resurgent, and Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel preceded waves of attacks by Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The nuclear, missile, cyber, bio, and space weapons programs of hostile powers are advancing quickly while America’s relative deterrent capability has declined. Meanwhile, the number of countries beset by dictatorship and violent repression of religious, ethnic, and political minorities has steadily increased.
Making matters worse, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are poor “candidates” for these fraught and dangerous times. They stand in contrast to Cold War Presidents Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan, who met their own fraught and dangerous times with moral clarity, strategic vision, and military strength and resolve.
Forgetting critical lessons learned Reeling from the horrors and devastation of fascism and total war, Cold War leaders resolved to stop expansionist aggression in its tracks and counter extremist ideologies with ideas of political liberty and human worth, to “never again” allow atrocities and hostilities to spiral out of control. Thus, inspiring presidential speeches for freedom and pro-democracy initiatives such as the Marshall Plan and the Voice of America existed alongside meticulous defense strategies, especially “containment” of the Soviet Union, and robust military alliances, especially NATO. American power, American ideals, and U.S. investment were considered “indispensable” to a traumatized, war-scarred world longing for peace and freedom but faced with communist repression and Soviet aggression.
The connection between internal dictatorship and external hostility was a recurring Cold War theme. Truman asserted in an address to Congress that “the creation of conditions in which we and other nations will [have] a way of life free from coercion” required helping free peoples “maintain their free institutions and their national integrity.” Totalitarian regimes, he warned, “undermine the foundations of international peace and hence the security of the United States.” Similarly, Reagan, in an address on promising arms reduction talks with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, stipulated that “an improvement of the human condition within the Soviet Union” was “indispensable for an improvement in bilateral relations.” For “a government that will break faith with its own people cannot be trusted to keep faith with foreign powers.”
During the Cold War, the U.S. dealt with dangers not dissimilar to those we face today. While threats such as cyberattacks and the weaponization of space are new, the determination of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea and their antidemocratic cohorts to subvert and replace the U.S.-oriented world order rings an old bell. So, too, does the severe repression within these regimes and the camps and prisons in which innocents languish. Faced with the Soviet Union’s expansive communism, brutal subjugation of Eastern Europe, and attempts to destabilize and dominate governments in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, Reagan warned against “blindly hoping for the best while the enemies of freedom grow stronger day by day.” “We know only too well,” he counseled, “that war comes not when the forces of freedom are strong but when they are weak. It is then that tyrants are tempted.”
Unfortunately, American foreign policy today devalues Reagan’s “peace through strength” strategy. For the sake of peace, Reagan rebuilt the military and insistently pursued missile defense systems (widely derided as “Star Wars”). Then-President Barack Obama and then-Vice President Joe Biden backed out of commitments to install by then workable missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic despite mounting Russian aggression. Indeed, Biden often responds too little, too late to escalating provocations, hostilities, and atrocities. Prevarication when dealing with mounting threats was evident in Biden’s unwise “waiving” of sanctions on Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline and “pausing” of military aid to Ukraine in advance of Russia’s full-scale invasion. It has been evident in the dithering and incrementalism with which the Biden administration has provided weaponry to war-torn Ukraine, a problem compounded by the recent costly delay in passing a foreign aid package in the House of Representatives.
U.S. military brass testify that China’s overall military might is on a trajectory to surpass the U.S. and warn about the lethal potential of China, Russia, and Iran combined. Military spending cuts and failure to stay ahead diminish credible deterrence. Especially problematic: U.S. adversaries maintain the energy and resoluteness that a war-weary, world-weary U.S. lacks. State and nonstate “bad actors” are fierce and emboldened, while the U.S., in general, and President Biden in particular, appears to be floundering.
Foreign policy degraded by politics The Biden administration’s weak and ineffectual Iran policy exemplifies the fraying of the post-World War II American foreign policy framework. Resisting the “snapback” of sanctions on Iran’s nuclear program, the administration allowed billions in sanctions waivers and estimated billions more in unsanctioned oil sales. Iran’s nuclear advances and massive April 14 attack on Israel, and the Houthis’ continuous attacks on international shipping, show Iran is undeterred. Moreover, Team Biden is awfully quiet about Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism and brutal crackdown on women, religious minorities, and dissidents, as well as about U.S. hostages of Hamas.
Then, there are the repeated attacks by Iran-aligned militias on U.S. forces, bases, and ships and Biden’s tepid response. Recall the deadly position in which he put troops with his rash and ill-conceived withdrawal from Afghanistan and the way he abandoned the Afghan people to the Taliban and left U.S. allies behind to be hunted down despite pleas by military personnel. Recently, Biden put U.S. troops in charge of building a humanitarian aid pier in Gaza, possibly placing them in harm’s way. Hamas has already launched rockets at the pier.
A bigger picture is at play here. Setting a standard for Cold War foreign policy, the 1948 Republican platform and Truman at the 1948 Democratic convention emphasized “stopping partisan politics at the water’s edge.” In contrast, the Democratic Party’s current-day leftism and catering to the voter base can politicize foreign policy. Thus, the Biden administration has treated domestic oil and gas companies too stringently while treating the oil and gas companies of Iran and Venezuela (and leftist dictatorships in South America in general) too indulgently. Concern for the youth vote exacerbates Biden’s Israel policy contradictions, as when he suddenly threatened to block the transfer to Israel of U.S. weapons. Meanwhile, Trump mockingly threatens to abandon NATO allies that don’t spend enough on defense. Privately pressuring allies is acceptable, but undermining or humiliating allies is a bridge too far and hurts America’s credibility and appeal.
Border policy so “liberal” that it allows foreign nationals, including thousands of Chinese military-age men and hundreds on terrorism watch lists, to stream across the U.S. border and fentanyl to flood streets is another bridge too far ... taken for the sake of domestic politics. No foreign policy analyst wants to focus on the border, but news that U.S. special ops forces have been surveilled and worse by migrants here illegally shows this is now a national security problem.
Similarly politicized, today’s State Department advocates American-progressive tenets internally and abroad (not the best way to win hearts and minds in developing countries), and the military must undergo progressivist “training” (not the best way to attract recruits). The U.S. Military Academy recently removed the words “Duty, Honor, Country” from its mission statement. U.S. elites would do well to make the military more attractive to patriots willing to put their lives on the line for their country. Military recruitment has dropped precipitously in times so perilous that the U.S. and U.S. allies should prepare for war while doing everything possible to deter and preempt it. The Democratic Party should reconsider its unabated post-Cold War slide to the left. Young Americans must learn about the horrific abuses and economic decay inherent in communism.
So, too, the New Right should reconsider selfish, misguided isolationism and stop associating military service with “endless war.” And the Republican Party should unequivocally reject and debunk Tucker Carlson’s version of libertarianism, which includes apologetics for Russia and absurdly/implicitly associates murderous Vladimir Putin with Christian values. Perhaps it’s an old-fashioned concept, discarded along with the hard lessons of World War II, but democratic politicians should have higher stakes in mind than their own or their party’s political power.
Rediscovering America’s voice Truman often spoke of the “truth” about communism and warned that those who fall for the collectivist ideology have “deceit and mockery, poverty and tyranny” as their reward. But just as American foreign policy today devalues the imperative of peace through strength, it also devalues the power of truth when it is raised against propaganda. While the U.S. should know and say what it stands for and why, Trumanesque and Reaganesque addresses delineating threats to democracies and making the case for freedom are conspicuously absent. America’s “voice” is only a whisper on the world stage.
Reagan said America’s greatest allies in the Cold War were Soviet subjects and spoke frequently of universal, God-given human rights. In contrast, Biden rarely reaches out to or speaks up for people trapped in severely oppressive regimes (such as Uyghurs in China). Although Trump’s first-term policies were, in certain regards, tougher on adversaries than Biden’s, he, too, had little to say for the oppressed and even went so far as to speak flatteringly of dictators occasionally.
Moreover, Trump’s campaign rhetoric indicates that a second term could involve unprincipled, unwise “deals” with dictators, even Putin.
How far we are from Kennedy’s and Reagan’s impassioned pleas for people behind the Iron Curtain as they stood at the Berlin Wall. Kennedy: “All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner!'" Reagan: “Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
Today, America is in a propaganda war in which it is hardly participating. American leaders should respond to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s purported enthusiasm for concepts such as multilateralism, peaceful coexistence, and noninterference with truth-telling. The truth is that when Chinese elites say Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and Tibet are “internal affairs,” they mean China must be free to crush them. The truth is that China is an imperialist power that plans to subjugate Taiwan. Washington should compellingly counter China, Russia, and Iran’s insidious falsehoods about democracies and expose their attempts to destabilize democracies. For, around the world, they are exploiting moral, military, and strategic deficits in the U.S. posture and pushing the idea of a new world order hard. Even in Latin America, the three countries have significantly increased their military presence, backing of dictatorships, and dissemination of propaganda and disinformation.
The U.S. must re-find hard and soft power backbone and resourcefulness. The U.S. and NATO should immediately forge a decisive strategy for Ukraine to win, not just to hang on. Voice of America-type programs, essential in the Cold War, should be revived and updated for the digital age. Crafting alternative global initiatives to China’s Belt and Road, Global Security, and Global Development initiatives should be an American foreign policy priority. More effort should go into strengthening commercial ties, liberalizing trade agreements, and demonstrating humanitarianism. Tougher sanctions should be imposed on atrocities and illicit weapons programs. China, Russia, and Iran’s feverish espionage and disinformation, blackmail and bribes, cyberattacks and “cognitive warfare,” and hostage-taking and transnational repression should meet staunch resistance. Critical supply chains must be diversified away from China, and U.S. capital and technology must never be allowed to assist China’s military buildup and rights abuses.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Of course, none of this is a substitute for superior military-industrial capability, strong alliances, and demonstrated resolve, so that adversaries’ calculations include fear of overwhelming retaliation. Biden administration hopes that diplomatic engagement will meaningfully change the course of extremist regimes and groups is unwarranted.
On the other hand, engagement with peoples China, Russia, and Iran seek to control could help thwart totalitarian/imperial ambitions. Reagan saw U.S. commitment to universal rights and the corollary “ability to inspire” as America’s “key strategic advantage.” Truman warned the advantage would be squandered if “in many parts of the world ... the story is going untold.”
Anne R. Pierce is an author of books and articles on American presidents, American foreign policy, and American society. Follow her @AnneRPierce.
The dark side of the moon The dark side of the moon Dominic Green What does “the dark side of the moon” mean to you? If you are of a certain age and uncertain taste, it evokes a 1973 album by Pink Floyd. If your memory is as pin-sharp as President Joe Biden’s is, you will also recall that in 1968, Americans were the first humans to see it, on the Apollo 8 mission. If you are Vladimir Putin, you will recall that it was the Soviet Union that pioneered our knowledge of it. You may also appreciate that one of your biggest fans in the West is Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, who really has gone over to the dark side.
The dark side isn’t actually dark. It is unknown. Its darkness is that of our own ignorance. A Soviet probe took the first photos of it in 1959. The Soviets published a two-volume Atlas of the Far Side of the Moon in 1960 and 1965, and we still use the Soviets’ nomenclature for its many craters. Despite the antagonisms of the Cold War, the Soviets named many of them after Westerners, including Joseph Priestley, H.G. Wells, Marie Curie, and Edward Jenner. Perhaps they thought they were winning.
Jenner invented modern vaccination. These days, his surname is more likely to evoke Bruce Jenner (once an Olympian, now a man with a “neovagina” called Caitlyn, still a Republican) and his daughters Kendall and Kylie (reality TV performers, influencers, half-sister satellites of the Kardashians). The Soviets would have called that “capitalist decadence.” They would have been right. But as they picked the wrong military and industrial policies, they aren’t here.
And we aren’t there. The dark side of the moon is now Chinese territory. In 1969, the Apollo 11 crew planted the Stars and Stripes on the side we can see, notifying the world that President Richard Nixon was the elected ruler of the universe and inspiring the four sides of Pink Floyd’s spaced-out Ummagumma album. On June 5, the unmanned Chinese vehicle Chang’e 6 landed in the moon’s South Pole-Aitken Basin. It collected 4.4 lbs. of rocks and planted a Chinese flag.
The Soviets named the Aitken Basin for the American astronomer Robert Grant Aitken (1864-1951). Aitken invented the study of double stars. These come in three types. “Visual binaries” are paired in mutual orbit by gravity, like Kim Kardashian’s backside. “Optical doubles” are, like the Jenner-Kardashian clan’s business ventures, unrelated but appear to align when viewed from sufficient distance and earthly perspective. “Non-visual binaries” are pairings that, like Bruce Jenner’s testes, cannot be seen but whose prior existence can be inferred by science.
These are the kind of stars that Americans really care about. The language of double stars is also an exploitable resource for metaphors about the Cold War and the current American-Chinese rivalry, but all that is far too serious. When Newt Gingrich ran for the Republican nomination in 2012, he was mocked for suggesting that the U.S. should build a base on the moon before someone else did. Ex-President Donald Trump was ridiculed for establishing the U.S. Space Force in 2019.
The presumption, expressed by then-candidate Biden in 2019, is that China is “not competition for us.” That is the darkness of ignorance. It is dawning on us that the Chinese have been serious for years, and not just about the moon. Elbridge Colby, ex-deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development, warned last week that China is “operating at the forefront of human development”: artificial intelligence, green tech, drone and hypersonic weaponry, and of course vaccine research. Soon, a presidential scriptwriter will hit upon the metaphorical potential of saying that we are on the side of the light while they are on the dark side. As Pink Floyd put it, “Us and Them.”
The exploitable resources on the dark side include the gas helium-3. A 2022 paper from the University of Alberta notes that helium-3 is rare down here, plentiful up there, and handy for running a nuclear fusion plant. Mix 2.2 lbs. of helium-3 with 1.5 lbs. of deuterium, and you can produce “19 years of megawatt energy — enough power to run the United States for a whole year.” Deuterium is not available at Home Depot, either, but it composes 1 in every 6,500 atoms of seawater, so it soon should be. It will be sold under its old name, “Heavy Water,” which sounds like a Pink Floyd album.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The Department of Energy is working on deuterium-tritium fusion. Tritium is the radioactive hydrogen isotope that supplies the phosphorescence on the dial of your wristwatch. Tritium is not available in Home Depot, because it also boosts the power of nuclear detonations. It is produced naturally when cosmic rays strike nitrogen molecules in the upper atmosphere, but we can capture it from a nuclear explosion. You can already guess which method the DOE will pick. You can already imagine the protests, the regulatory tangle, and the court cases that will delay Pete Buttigieg or some other genius from implementing fission energy in the U.S. while the Chinese import helium-3 and corner the global energy market.
Also on June 5, Boeing launched its Starliner “space taxi.” It set off five years behind schedule and with three “unidentifiable” helium leaks. Be serious.
Built different: The transgender wars come to high school girls sports Built different: The transgender wars come to high school girls sports Breccan F. Thies and Gabrielle M. Etzel
As a 15-year-old student-athlete in Seattle, Washington, Brooke has been forced to run track against biological boys who identify as transgender girls.
The high school freshman has beaten the biological boys before, she told the Washington Examiner, but she has repeatedly seen the other girls on her team lose to them. She said they are both stronger and faster than the biological girls.
“Our team is being set back because of a guy that says he's a girl. That is totally wrong and unfair,” said Brooke, whose identity is being protected as a minor. “I thought I was completely and utterly alone, trying to stand up for something that is clearly wrong.”
High school and college athletics have been contending with the question of allowing biological males to compete against females for several years. The controversy has led at least 26 states to enact various restrictions on the practice, noting the clear advantage of biologically male athletes.
President Joe Biden’s Department of Education already finalized rules governing enforcement of the sexual harassment and discrimination portions of Title IX in April, changing the definition of sex to include claimed gender identities. Critics contended this effectively banned sex-specific private spaces such as restrooms, allowing school-age and adult males to use the same facilities as women and girls.
After the presidential election in November, the Biden administration is widely expected to take gender ideology further in separate Title IX rules governing sports, tying federal education dollars to allowing students who were born biologically male but no longer identify as such to compete against girls in female sports.
Critics of these practices say it isn’t even just that biological boys are stronger and faster than girls —they also don’t have the same physical challenges that are inherent to female reproductive anatomy.
“He doesn’t have different [menstrual cycle] hormones. If we feel super tired one day, if our muscles are cramping, he doesn’t have that," Brooke said of her transgender competitor. "He doesn’t have to carry extra weight on his chest. He’s just built different, and exactly then, it takes away opportunities from us.”
Brooke’s father, Russell, shared similar thoughts with the Washington Examiner, highlighting the blunt biological realities that separate women and men.
“You're a boy. You are not a girl. You do not have a period,” Russell said. “You're not running with a tampon, and you didn't lose sleep because you had cramps that night. You didn't have to worry about bleeding through your shorts.”
The difficulty as a parent is enormous, Russell said.
“You just feel so helpless, that you can't do anything,” he said. “And you've got this situation where your daughter and all her friends are being taken advantage of and humiliated.”
This is just one of many families that have struggled with the battle over transgender athletes in high school girls sports in the past decade.
Although transgender athletes have not gained notoriety until relatively recently, the International Olympic Committee, for example, has allowed competition since about 2004. At that time, the IOC required transition surgeries and sufficiently low testosterone levels for biological males to compete in female sports, but the organization has since weakened the requirements multiple times to emphasize “inclusion.”
This came up sporadically in the 2010s, likely highlighted by the 2015 announcement that Bruce Jenner, the 1976 Olympic decathlon champion, had undergone transition and adopted the name Caitlyn. Citing personal experience as an elite athlete, however, Jenner has repeatedly spoken against biological males competing in women’s sports. 
In 2016, the IOC for the first time got rid of its surgery requirement for eligibility, and the Obama administration issued a directive altering Title IX to allow transgender schoolchildren to use any restroom they chose. Observers noted at the time that the Obama bathroom directive would tee up the question for sports.
States and athletic associations alike have created their own regulations on transgender participation on teams that do not align with their biological sex, some being permissive and others restricting the practice for safety. But the patchwork meant that in some parts of the country, women and girls would start losing podium positions to biological males who decided to compete against them after transitioning.
Christy Mitchell spoke with the Washington Examiner about a seven-year experience that began in 2017 with her daughter Chelsea competing against biological males in track competitions.
“This started for her when she was just 14 years old, you know, stepping up to the line with a boy, male athlete beside her, knowing that the race was unfair,” Christy said. “It's a hard way to have to grow up in those really pivotal years to have to be caught up in this lie.”
Chelsea ran 24 races in high school against biological male competitors, losing titles at state competitions four times, due in large part to a policy from the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference, which governs school athletics in the state, allowing biological males into female competition based on their gender identity.
The Mitchells filed complaints with the Trump administration’s Department of Education, arguing that Connecticut state policy violated protections under Title IX.
In 2020, just before the Trump administration finalized its own Title IX rulemaking, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights found that the transgender policy the Mitchells were challenging was a violation. Although the department threatened to withhold federal education funding unless the situation was rectified, the finding was not legally binding.
Chelsea, now 21, said in retrospect that sports played such a vital role in her adolescence and personal development despite the drawn-out legal challenge and the emotionally painful losses to biological male competitors.
“I think high school is just such a crucial time in our lives, and I think it was definitely really imperative to my self-growth and my self-confidence back then. Track was a huge confidence booster for me,” Chelsea said. “Repeatedly losing the state championships, repeatedly losing out on these opportunities, it was such an important moment for me, and I definitely think I grew from this overall experience.”
While it had been happening for years, concerns not just about fairness but the safety of female athletes, both in regard to sports injury and being forced to undress in front of biological males in the same locker rooms, reached a fevered pitch when Lia Thomas, a biological male who identifies as female, won the NCAA Division I swimming national championship in 2022, taking the top spot from the women Thomas competed against. 
Following the incident, collegiate swimmer Riley Gaines became a poster child for the #SaveWomensSports movement and an advocate for female athletes of all ages.
The same problems highlighted by Gaines and other collegiate athletes were occurring all along at the high school level while receiving much less attention. This is in part because the high school competition is less elite and more localized. But it’s also because school districts, administrators, and coaches silenced the young athletes who have sought to express growing concerns.
Many of the athletes speaking with the Washington Examiner noted the adults in their high schools would privately acknowledge how unfair it was. Some even admitted an increased risk of serious injury in more physical sports but told students and parents not to talk about it.
As the Washington Examiner reported in May, the United Nations special rapporteur on violence against women and girls has been seeking input about transgender violence against women in sports, citing examples of how the practice constitutes “incursions into their privacy, including voyeurism, sexual harassment, and physical and sexual attacks, by effectively removing single-sex spaces.”
Payton McNabb, a former high school volleyball player from North Carolina, told the Washington Examiner that she “never in a million years” thought she would have to compete against transgender athletes who were born as biological males in the politically conservative area where she grew up.
McNabb was knocked unconscious following a blow to the head from a volleyball spike by a biological male player on the opposing team during the first week of her senior year in August 2022. Nearly two years later, she still suffers from impaired vision, partial paralysis on her right side, and anxiety and depression following the incident. 
“If it didn't happen to me, I probably have a lot of opinions on what I should have done and what I would have done in that situation, but you really don't know what to do until you're actually in it,” McNabb said.
More girls at the high school level may be put into the situation as the debate over biological males in female sports intensifies later this year.
The Department of Education is set to finalize its rules governing Title IX sports provisions in the fall, and while it is not clear what they will include, the proposed changes follow suit with the other Title IX changes that require schools to prioritize gender identity over biological sex.
Education Secretary Miguel Cardona has successfully evaded questions on what will be included, but Republican lawmakers have said they can see the writing on the wall given the stance of the Biden administration making it a priority in a day-one executive order to implement the “reasoning” of Bostock v. Clayton County, which redefined sex to include claimed gender identity as it related to employment discrimination, across the entire federal government.
The most recent changes to Title IX are the response to that executive order, but if the sports portion is finalized toward the end of the year, it may very well be within the time frame a new Congress in 2025 could repeal it under the Congressional Review Act.
As politicians and bureaucrats duke it out, the players and competitors will have to grapple with difficult choices and complex emotions when confronted with the real-life experience of playing against males.
McNabb said she, her teammates, and others in her community felt intense guilt following the incident because “we all knew it was unfair.”
“You tell yourself we should have just not played, we should just walk off the court, and none of this would have happened,” McNabb said.
Some students, on the other hand, have done just that.
In mid-April, a group of girls in West Virginia “stepped in” and “stepped out” of shot put and discus competitions at the Harrison County Middle School Championships to protest the inclusion of a biological male being allowed to compete against them, by virtue of a federal appeals court order. The transgender athlete won the shot put event and placed second in discus, and the five girls who protested got banned from future competition, which is being challenged in court.
Brooke dealt with the unfair competition by organizing her team to run in a pack as a collective of girls to show solidarity. She continues to encourage her teammates to call out the unfairness in the competitions, staying strong despite pushback from school administrators.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Even though it feels isolating, Brooke said no girl should feel alone in this fight.
“I know that it can be super scary going up, but when something's wrong, I feel like we have to say it and we have to know that this is wrong and this is unfair,” Brooke said. “I just want people to know that they're not alone in this. There are girls out there that are fighting against this and [know] that this is wrong.”
Gabrielle M. Etzel is the healthcare policy reporter for the Washington Examiner. Breccan F. Thies is an investigative reporter for the Washington Examiner.
Why voters don’t care about much else other than inflation Why voters don’t care about much else other than inflation Tiana Lowe Doescher The unprecedented criminal trial of a former and possibly future president may have ended in the press with a bang. But in the polls, Donald Trump's criminal conviction of 34 counts related to hush money payments has landed with a thud.
Despite a media-constructed narrative that President Joe Biden was on the cusp of a comeback, the general election needle barely moved throughout the Republican's trial in Manhattan. In the first general election poll conducted entirely after a jury found Trump guilty of falsifying business records, Morning Consult found that the Democrat lost ground. Whereas Biden led Trump by 1 point in Morning Consult's pre-verdict poll, Trump now leads Biden by 1 point.
The reason? Even though voters report the Manhattan case against Trump as one of the largest news stories of the year, no significant portion of the electorate seems to care about this Trump trial or any of Trump's trials. Most of the electorate doesn't seem to care about anything other than the economy, and even when it comes to the economy, voters mean they care about the worst inflationary crisis in 40 years more than anything else.
More than 3 in 5 voters polled by Pew said inflation is a "very big problem," more than any other problem plaguing the country, with nearly half of all Democrats and 4 in 5 Republicans agreeing. Meanwhile, the majority of both halves of the electorate rate their financial situations "poor" or "only fair," and half of all voters polled by Financial Times-Michigan Ross School of Business blamed Biden's economic policies specifically for the state of the economy.
Biden's deflections that unemployment remains low and the stock market is strong aren't working, if only because they don't reflect the reality of what is harming voters on a day-to-day basis. A CookPoliticalReport swing-state voters survey found that a 54% majority reported that cost of living is the best way to measure an economy's strength, compared to just 13% who cited low unemployment and 6% who said the stock market.
In our aging society with a labor shortage that is fueling inflation, it is price instability that robs voters of the real values of their paychecks. They can tell every single time they compare the price of a gallon of gas or loaf of bread from the beginning of Biden's presidency to now. (According to the consumer price index, their prices have increased by 48% and 29%, respectively.)
Nobody is angrier at this price instability than the generation most removed from the last time we saw inflation incinerate the value of paychecks. A Harvard Institute of Politics poll found that most voters aged 18 to 29 consider inflation our top pressing matter, with two-thirds of young black voters saying inflation is more important than healthcare, jobs, democracy, climate change, and the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
Price instability, of course, is the x-factor that explains why Trump is polling better against Biden now than he ever has polled in a general election in either 2020 or 2016. Unlike in 2016, when the possibility of the Trump presidency was an unknown quantity, or in 2020, when a Biden presidency was still untested, we've now lived roughly three years in Trump's America and three years in Biden's. While the sheer scope of the invasion at the southern border and overseas conflagrations may be objectively worse metrics on Biden's presidential scorecard, the soaring cost of, say, car insurance is a more salient issue for ordinary workers than the war in Ukraine or the Rio Grande homeless shelters overran with migrants.
As the Washington Examiner has illustrated countless times, inflation under Biden has resulted in a 5% decrease in the average weekly paycheck and a 19% increase in overall prices to date.
In no issue does Trump hold a larger lead over Biden than the economy: Fox News has him up 13 points over Biden for economic performance, Quinnipiac up 12, and Marquette up a whopping 21 points.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Both Trump and Biden oversaw low unemployment rates, likely a structural consequence of both the birth rate and legal immigration rates falling far too low, and solid stock markets, though Biden's performance has been almost entirely fueled by the Magnificent Seven overcompensating for the rest of the S&P 493 falling mostly flat. But inflation averaged below the Federal Reserve's maximum 2% target throughout Trump's presidency, while under Biden, it has averaged nearly three times that amount.
For all the bombast of payouts to porn stars and wars overseas, this election is coming down to which president made the public poorer. With a difference this stark, even the personal foibles of Trump are being overlooked.
The best music festival in America is in …Spain? The best music festival in America is in …Spain? Armin Rosen Great live performances reveal things in music that hide within the recorded version: You aren’t washing dishes at a concert. In those reality-stopping moments when the art being created in front of you is compelling enough, you’ll forget you even possess a smartphone. Now that it’s music festival season, as a resident of Brooklyn, the center of the allegedly most culturally gravitational megalopolis in the Western world, I might be expected to have local access to top-notch offerings from the corporate concerns that bring artists together in the summers. Yet where I live, the putative center of the world, the pickings are slim. New York City music fans had the option of spending $359 to attend this past weekend’s Governors Ball Music Festival, where a thin bill of retreads, mediocrities, and TikTok ephemera awaited them. 
The top of the bill was decent enough if you were willing to pay exorbitant prices to see short and flat-sounding sets from The Killers and SZA, but the city’s biggest show of the year is nevertheless over by midnight and beer is a $12 luxury. Armies of police and paramedics await the consequences of the next tainted cocaine batch, and the authorities have a justified fear of what might happen when addled young revelers wander into the middle of Queens late at night. Multiday music festivals have become so fundamentally unmanageable in New York that Rolling Loud, the taste-setting hip-hop spectacle, hasn’t mounted an event in the city since 2022, joining The Meadows, Panorama, All Points West, Across the Narrows, NorthSide, and the CMJ Music Marathon in the metropolitan area’s annals of failure.
That’s why I hopped across the Atlantic to Spain, where people have figured out something the culture executives in the supposedly hippest parts of America have forgotten, which is how to compete on quality alone. Primavera Sound, held at the Parc Del Forum in Barcelona each June, has become the best music festival on Earth by delivering the best product it possibly can. At sunset on opening night on May 30, Brooklyn noise rock pioneers Blonde Redhead played to over 5,000 fans in a seafront amphitheater, a bigger crowd than the band would get in its home country under any circumstances. On Saturday, lightning forked over Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna as if the Washington punk prophetess had summoned it herself. 
In safetyist America, the show would’ve been called at the first distant rumbling, but here it was only the fans of the emo touchstones American Football who were sheltering in place, deep in some memory of their 14-year-old selves and happily soaked. The music went on till 6 a.m. every day. All weekend, sturdy young men wandered the festival with kegs strapped to their backs, offering $6 pints of Estrella. More than one woman noted to me that the portable bathrooms, cleaner and more plentiful than their American counterparts, never ran out of toilet paper.
What’s going on here? Perhaps NATO is to blame — maybe American festivals are an extortionate, cacophonous, and quasi-militarized slog, while Europe’s are brilliantly curated and humanely run, because the United States shoulders so much of the continent’s defense burden. I am only half-joking: The music-industrial complex that allows an event like Primavera to take place operates out of the U.S. and is sustained through American capital and consumer spending. It is the European obsession with our own cultural products that makes the party possible: Two of the three headliners in Barcelona were American, and a field full of Brits and Spaniards sang along to Lana Del Rey and SZA on Friday and Saturday night.
At Primavera, an American music fan could take stock of his or her country’s current manias and accomplishments. Our culture continues to dominate the developed world, even if we’ve ruined many of our own native vectors for consuming it properly, in light of the slow death of our movie theaters, record stores, and music festivals. At Primavera, our victory could sometimes look like a kind of global contagion. Ethel Cain is a transgender artist raised by homeschooling Florida evangelicals who sings giant slowed-down country-drone weepers about the girlhood that biology, society, and her own theocratic family robbed her of. The music is almost showily intense, and in Barcelona, many of the fans in the front had tears streaming down their cheeks. Cain’s new and as-yet-unreleased numbers showed that her art has finally sunk into swampy atonality. As personal fashion statements went, an extremely neat Blair Witch tattoo competed with a black pro-Palestinian shirt in Arabic-style English font, a garment that had an odd resemblance to the Islamic State flag.
American art is thoroughly identitarian now, and Cain represents its more strident pole, the end of the spectrum that demands a menu of specific emotional and political responses regardless of the product’s artistic value. If those responses aren’t yours, you will find little reason to care. On the other end of that spectrum is the New York rapper Billy Woods, who commands attention by proudly proclaiming how uninterested he is in what you think. “I don’t wanna see Nas with an orchestra at Carnegie Hall,” he raps. “No man of the people — I  wouldn’t be caught dead with none of y’all.”
With respect to Taylor Swift, Woods is the real last great American dynasty. The run of brilliance that began with 2019’s Hiding Places, or maybe even 2012’s History Will Absolve Me, is unmatched by any other comparably ambitious American musician of the era. In Barcelona, he performed at night under a neobrutalist monumental solar array, the Parc Del Forum’s unreal architectural centerpiece. He came onstage in a plain black shirt and jeans as a cool breeze whipped off the nearby Mediterranean. “Can I get the lights down as low as legally possible?” Woods asked the booth. With the artist himself obscured, the set became a brain-splitting catalog of nightmare in verse: Woods rapped about watching anthropologists “watching negros sell dope;” he’s “chasing dragons on aluminum sheets” and then “watching my body survive myself.” In one song, he raises the possibility that Boko Haram might have a point in asserting that Western education is evil. Rather than horror, my reaction was: Do they, actually? “Everything I learned in community college was a lie…couldn’t read a book if I tried,” growled the trickster baritone of a rapper who drops more references to high culture, to Henri Matisse and William Burroughs and Cormac McCarthy, than any of his peers. 
I had always thought of Woods as a nervy doom poet with an uncanny gift for transcribing the most disquieting regions of his subconscious into verse. In Barcelona, I realized how deliberate his music really is. Like Cain, he has an unusual family history that makes it into his work — Woods’s father was a black radical who moved his family to Zimbabwe and served in Robert Mugabe’s government in the '80s. In his most famous song, “Spongebob,” which he played in Barcelona, Woods appears to rap from al Qaeda’s perspective as American bombs fall on Tora Bora. Later in the set, he’s ignoring a Playboi Carti performance somewhere in Europe, “smoking alone, thinking of home.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Maps, Woods’s highly lauded album from last year, takes up one of our great national themes, that of heading to Europe to understand what’s going on within our own society and within ourselves better. His music is propelled by a careful interplay of militancy and ambivalence — experience and memory amplify and complicate his more extreme ideas, a typically American unity in self-division that’s often achieved in the space of a single verse. In constantly shifting both toward and away from himself, Woods shows the best of what’s possible within our culture’s sharp identitarian turn. 
At a festival as impossibly good as Primavera, you could get discouraged at seeing what we can’t have stateside. But you can still head back across the Atlantic confident in the knowledge that American genius isn’t dead yet.
Armin Rosen is a New York-based reporter at large for Tablet.
A life-affirming choice for women: The important role of maternity homes after Roe’s reversal A life-affirming choice for women: The important role of maternity homes after Roe’s reversal Kimberly Ross
The June 2022 Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization has only increased the intensity surrounding the abortion debate. The ruling did not create a life-affirming culture overnight. But this was not the goal. Righting a legal and moral wrong was necessary. The abortion question is now in the hands of state legislatures and voters. Still, we view it through a large, nationwide lens. The discourse is broad and evenly divided along party lines. The real work takes place beyond the reach of fierce, angry discussion. It is the kind of work that matters far more than viral clips, protests, or interviews with enraged politicians. 
At the heart of it, the pro-life movement has always been a grassroots operation. Perhaps this has been forgotten in some ways over the years. The major focus has always been on Roe v. Wade or Casey v. Planned Parenthood and whether they would survive a Supreme Court challenge. There is nothing wrong with that priority. Legal battles are a main component of the cause. But the work to minister to women and reach them in local communities across the nation existed under Roe. The same work continues now, with an uncertain future ahead for both the country and individual states. 
Pregnancy is overwhelming. This is true no matter the circumstances surrounding conception. Even in stable environments, pregnancy can and does cause anxiety. Carrying, delivering, and raising a new life is the ultimate of responsibilities. In the event of an unexpected and unwanted pregnancy, worries compound to an enormous degree. Far too often, a woman's partner is less than enthusiastic about having a child or, worse, will pressure her to get an abortion. Those who are pro-life are desperate to save the lives of the unborn. This is a beautiful goal. But saving the life of the woman, allowing her to realize she is capable, and providing tangible resources and hope for the present and the future are equally important. 
When standing outside the stories of turmoil, it is easy to wonder why and how any woman could consider abortion. These reactions often come from those without lives marked by abuse, drug addiction, or unsupportive partners, parents, or families. It does little good to wonder why abortion continues to be in demand. It will always be presented as an alternative to scared women. This is the reality. A better use of time is spent meeting women where they are and journeying with them to a better life for them and their precious babies. It is in this vein that maternity homes soldier on. They are generally outside the spotlight. In some ways, this is good. The work is key and demands focus. But in other ways, the spotlight needs to be on them. They are transforming and saving lives, one by one. The lives saved now are also an investment in the next generation. Maternity homes do more to shift our nation slowly to a life-affirming culture than the most intense online disagreement could ever hope to achieve. 
Maternity homes are different from crisis pregnancy centers and similar clinics. Those clinics are essential and stand in direct contrast to Planned Parenthood. Pro-life clinic services include things such as ultrasounds (usually in limited scope), education regarding reproduction and sexual health, counseling, parenting classes for both mothers and fathers, life skill classes, adoption referrals, and clothing and other supplies for mother and baby. These clinics exist to provide compassionate care and direction to overwhelmed women. While abortion clinics offer targeted killing of the unborn, pro-life pregnancy centers do the opposite. As of 2020, there were approximately 3,000 pro-life pregnancy centers. Maternity homes are fewer in number. 
There are around 400 registered maternity homes in the United States, according to the Maternity Housing Coalition. Two of these homes are Road 2 Hope Maternity Home in Beaverton, Oregon, and St. Raymond's Society in Columbia, Missouri, and Jefferson City, Missouri. For Leona Bicknese, president and CEO of Road 2 Hope, and Steve Smith, co-founder of St. Raymond's, the mission is focused as much on the mothers as the babies. And each home offers the kind of holistic, practical approach so needed in the pro-life movement. I had the great privilege of connecting with them and learning about their work. 
Road 2 Hope is located in a troubled corner of the country. According to Bicknese, "We are countercultural. We exist in a strongly pro-abortion, anti-Christian environment. We are in Oregon just south of Washington state. Both states have pledged millions of dollars to pay for abortions, including abortions from out of state. In Oregon, there is no restriction on abortion even up to the moment of birth." This is as difficult a mission field as it gets. It is also an area that desperately needs the kind of compassion and care Road 2 Hope offers. In Missouri, where St. Raymond's is located, Smith said state policy has helped make it a more welcoming place: "In Missouri, any donation over $100 to pregnancy resource center or maternity home gets 70% state tax credit. If a benefactor itemizes at federal level, they also may deduct the other 30% from their federal income. The administration of this policy is simple with no added bureaucracy required from the state. It is the one instance I’ve seen the state, business community, nonprofits work together so that everyone wins. This policy is one of the main reasons St. Raymond’s has been able to add a preschool to serve the community and meet operational costs. The whole community benefits from this policy because the state doesn’t have to provide resources to care for homeless persons, and when women leave St. Raymond’s, they become taxpaying citizens. Everyone benefits when we invest in moms."
The differences between blue and red states can be vast. These disparities affect the conditions in which maternity homes operate. But regardless of the larger political climate, there are countless women in every state, blue and red, who need help and hope to choose life instead of abortion. 
At Road 2 Hope, the mission is "to provide housing, help, and hope to pregnant women and their children. We envision every pregnant woman safe, secure, and supported, prepared for the birth of her baby, and equipped for the future. We exist as an alternative to abortion. Our advocacy for the unborn begins with advocacy for their mothers and a commitment to walk alongside them before delivery, during delivery, and after delivery of their babies." St. Raymond's has similar goals: "As a maternity home, we help mothers who chose life for their children and need support for a season of life. Women come with a variety of backgrounds and circumstances,” the home's mission statement said. “We aren't here to judge any of the past experiences or choices but rather to help women get free from their past so that they can have a joyful future." For the women interested in either home, there must be a serious commitment made. At Road 2 Hope and St. Raymond's, the passion to assist women during a crucial season in life is strong. These homes aren't here to criticize a woman's decisions or convert her to a certain faith. But the applicants must bring with them their own sense of dedication to the program. It is vital to their own success and their family's flourishment. 
Maternity homes are not places where a woman will hear a lecture, receive pamphlets, and be sent on her way. Instead, women are given shelter, food, and clothing. They are educated in the form of life skills and cooking classes. Financial education is a big part of creating a good future, as Bicknese shared: "We set our clients up for future success and independence, starting with comprehensive financial education. In addition, all of the women set goals and establish individual plans for the future with support, encouragement, and guidance from staff. Part of this is removing obstacles, which often required clearing up debt and legal issues." Education is another major milestone. At St. Raymond's, the goals vary: "education including a GED if needed, professional certifications (one resident just obtained her medical coding certificate, landed job at a medical facility, and her employer is now paying for her nursing degree), higher education (one resident is graduating with nursing degree this May), child care/preschool, driver’s license (one current resident just got her driver’s license [and] bought her first car)." The same goals exist at Road 2 Hope: "Completion of high school education comes first. After that, women have the opportunity for vocational education or college. Some women choose to participate in our in-house internships. Through these, women learn to create a resume, apply for and interview for a job. Then, the internship can provide on-the-job training to build employment skills and strengthen their resumes." 
At both homes, a resident's commitment is what can and will carry her through the program to success. But beyond personal motivation, the biggest hurdles for providing care have to do with forces outside an immediate situation. As Bicknese said, "The greatest hurdles are capacity and culture." For Road 2 Hope and St. Raymond's, the needs are numerous. For each woman, there is a long list of physical, emotional, and often mental health concerns to address. The ability to provide assistance and resources is directly affected by the funding. An ongoing need in pro-life ministry will always be financial. Even when the desire to help or the ability to change exists, there must be monetary resources in order to meet those needs. Without question, pro-lifers should invest in their local pregnancy care clinics and maternity homes by giving as they can. Giving money and time to help women move beyond despair is where real change starts. 
For both Bicknese and Smith, the political climate, fraught with continued tension over abortion, affects neither their missions nor their mindsets. It is quite refreshing and humbling to hear of pro-life passion that is unencumbered by political pressure. They are not in it for political gain, prestige, or recognition from spotlight-craving politicians. Quite the opposite, in fact. "As I look into the faces of the moms, babies, and children, I am not thinking about politics," Bicknese said. "I’m thinking about how we can love these moms well. I’m thinking about how we can serve them so they can experience true hope, how we can pray for them, and how we can help them overcome lies with truth. I’m busy thinking a lot about how to build and grow our organization. This includes considering what needs to happen on the board level and how staff can be better equipped to serve our precious clients, as well as what message do I need to share with donors. When speaking to churches, training staff of our home or others, I think in terms of worldview versus politics. Political views are a byproduct of worldviews."
Smith feels the same: "St. Raymond’s life-affirming mission transcends the political debate. Our goal is to help mothers and, in doing so, help their children — that is uncontroversial and something everyone can get behind." If anything, the pure focus of these front-line heroes is a reminder that all of us who have a passion for mothers and babies should set politics aside as much as possible. 
I asked both Bicknese and Smith about their reaction to the Dobbs decision and any noticeable changes as a result. "A few people asked to be removed from our mailing list right after the Dobbs decision. This wasn’t that big of a change," Bicknese said. "The biggest change was regarding the impact that the Dobbs decision had on me. That day and the days immediately following, I was very emotional. I would cry at the drop of a hat."
"Just the fact that it was publicly and officially acknowledged what a bad idea the Roe v. Wade decision was. I didn’t expect to see this in my lifetime. I hoped and prayed for it, and it happened," she continued. "I knew that this wasn’t the end of the battle but a new starting point. I knew the response to the decision in the Pacific Northwest would be to rally the troops and put more money into abortion. My response was we need to get out there and talk to churches more. We need to be out there telling the people in the pews that they can make a difference, that they can and should speak up and stand firm."
For Smith, the overall mission hasn't changed at all: "Women needed help before Dobbs and still need help now. They always will."  
Without a doubt, both Bicknese and Smith have one goal in mind as they look toward the future: to help more women, babies, and even fathers and do it all with excellence. It's not about appealing to a certain ideological demographic or even getting involved in the political aspects of abortion. The goal is saving lives, helping families, and walking alongside women as they establish strong foundations on which to build successful futures. Period. 
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Maternity homes are an overlooked or even unknown but crucial part of the pro-life movement. These homes are nonjudgmental, nonpartisan, and truly life-changing. If anything, we need more of this and less of the fleeting activism that relies on temporary slogans or shaming. Working in the trenches, encouraging women toward life goals and achievements, and showing them they can do it is where the real cultural transformation begins. One by one. 
Pro-life people eager to help have a long list of opportunities in front of them. Financially supporting maternity homes and other pro-life clinics tops that list. It is imperative that these bastions of healing and hope not only continue to operate but also thrive. We need more of them. And we need them now more than ever. 
Kimberly Ross (@SouthernKeeks) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog and a columnist at Arc Digital.
The human history of the institution of the book The human history of the institution of the book Charlotte Allen
Everyone knows that Johannes Gutenberg, he of the Gutenberg Bible, invented the movable-type printing press, suddenly making the mass production of books possible and, therefore, books themselves affordable for nearly all. But hardly anyone thinks about all the technological developments and all the stages of human inventiveness that made possible those 180-odd copies of the Good Book that Gutenberg churned out from his Mainz workshop in 1455, setting a revolution in motion.
And that human element of the story of books is the subject of The Book-Makers by Adam Smyth, a professor of English literature at Oxford's Balliol College and also the owner of 39 Step Press, an unabashedly eccentric print shop in Oxford specializing in minuscule runs of single poems by Shakespeare and others. The "History of the Book" part of Smyth's subtitle is misleading. He has no interest in the first 1,400-odd years of the codex book form per se, pages bound together inside covers, that started to displace rolled scrolls as a reading medium during the early years of the Roman Empire. Smyth's focus is strictly on the printed book that Gutenberg invented and nearly as strictly on the handset type that Gutenberg pioneered. He devotes only a page or two to the mechanized "hot metal" and "hot lead" typesetting methods (such as the Linotype machine) that largely supplanted labor-intensive handsetting of individual letters during the late 19th century and were, in turn, supplanted by computerized typesetting during the second half of the 20th century.
Smyth also focuses special attention on English figures, with two exceptions. One is Benjamin Franklin, who made his fortune in Philadelphia, starting at age 23, as editor and publisher of the Pennsylvania Gazette newspaper, a leading voice of opposition to British colonial rule, and the vastly successful Poor Richard's Almanack. The other is Nicolas-Louis Robert (1761-1828), a Frenchman who patented a cylindrical machine that turned out paper in continuous rolls, replacing the hitherto laborious practice of manufacturing paper one sheet at a time on a mesh screen dipped into a vat of pulp. Robert's machine, with numerous subsequent refinements, became the basis of every sort of paper manufacture to this day, from wallpaper to toilet paper. Robert himself profited little from his invention, however. He quarreled with his business partner, got embroiled in lawsuits, and sold his patent but never got paid for it. He ended his life as a country schoolmaster, almost forgotten. 
As a printer himself, Smyth is fascinated by the sheer physicality of book production. Paper alone, based on vegetable fibers such as rags or wood pulp and thus vastly cheaper than the animal skins that formed the pages of medieval books, was a momentous invention, probably first developed in China during the first century A.D. Paper-making technology spread westward to the Islamic world by the eighth century and then to Europe by the 11th, via Islamic Spain. As Smyth points out, there is no Whig history of upward progress for paper manufacture. "The paper used by Gutenberg in the first printed Bible, with its brilliantly clear bunch-of-grapes watermark, is of a time-defeating quality unsurpassed by modern industrial processes," he writes.
Then there was the printing press, which Gutenberg invented by adapting the screw press used to crush grapes for wine-making to pressing sheets of paper over beds of ink-covered type. Typography, the design and manufacture of typefaces, quickly became a skilled art. The precision craft of cutting type "punches," steel prototypes of letters that were driven into softer brass or copper matrices into which the molten alloy of the type itself was poured, was a "closely guarded secret" handed down from master to apprentice, Smyth writes.
But Smyth's real interest is in the people of the printing world. And here, he has selected a motley crew of them over the centuries, chosen as much for their peculiar personalities and tastes as for their contributions to book-publishing history. For example, he skips over William Caxton, the very first English printer (he put Chaucer's Canterbury Tales into print for the first time), to focus on Caxton's protege Wynkyn de Worde (d. 1534/5), whose publishing appetite was more lowbrow: jest books, self-improvement tracts, ballads, and saints' lives, often illustrated with crude and bizarre woodcuts. John Baskerville (1707-1775), the Birmingham businessman who devised the elegant Baskerville-type font, was also a militant secularist. He specified in his will that he be buried under a cone in his backyard in defiance of the religious "superstition" that required a churchyard interment. But the cone disappeared after his death, and Baskerville's coffin bounced around Birmingham for years, to be occasionally opened by admirers. Finally, during the 1890s, he was buried in sacred ground after all.
Some of Smyth's subjects have only a tangential relationship with bookmaking. Benjamin Franklin, for example, made most of his money with the Gazette, Poor Richard, and an endless round of pamphlets, sermons, and government jobs. But the tireless Franklin, with his countless side-schemes and inventions (swimming fins, bifocal glasses, and a chair that could be converted into a stepladder), was undoubtedly the most colorful figure in publishing history. His stock in trade wasn't simply his virtues of industriousness and thrift but making sure everyone knew about his industriousness and thrift, which enabled him to push aside lazier co-workers as he hoisted himself upward. As he wrote in one of the Almanacks, "The sleeping fox catches no poultry."
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Others among Smyth's subjects include Mary and Anna Collett, two pious 17th-century sisters who cut up Bibles and repasted the pages onto folios to create "Biblical Harmonies" that, for example, refashioned the four Gospels into one continuous life of Christ. During the 18th and 19th centuries, a similar fad prevailed for "Grangerising," named after its clergyman-pioneer, James Granger (1723-1776). This involved cutting open the bindings of books to insert illustrations of their historical or fictional subjects. Nancy Cunard (1896-1965), the wild-living shipping heiress, took a break from her usual hobbies of drinking, leftism, writing avant-garde poetry, and having affairs with famous writers (Ernest Hemingway, Aldous Huxley, and James Joyce) to run the Hours Press in France briefly. There, she set the type herself, printed works by Ezra Pound and Norman Douglas, and "discovered" Samuel Beckett, then 24, by publishing his poem Whoroscope in 1930.
Smyth's lively account trails off only in our own century, when the best he can come up with in our digitized time is an obscure collection of publishers of "zines" (do-it-yourself mini magazines). This may be a metaphor for the fate of the printed book itself, with its ever-declining readership. But Smyth believes nonetheless that "books will endure" — and so might we hope as well.
Charlotte Allen is a Washington writer. Her articles have appeared in Quillette, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times.
Bill Walton created the game of basketball that Luka Doncic dominates Bill Walton created the game of basketball that Luka Doncic dominates Oliver Bateman NBA Hall of Fame center Bill Walton, who died of colon cancer last month, was the best player in the world at his peak. As described in David Halberstam’s book The Breaks of the Game, a merely somewhat healthy Walton led the Portland Trail Blazers to an NBA championship in 1977, defeating fellow former all-everything UCLA center Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's Los Angeles Lakers and then a loaded Philadelphia 76ers squad along the way. Walton's dominance in college and his brief but brilliant professional peak showcased a revolutionary style of play that was ahead of its time. Blazers coach Jack Ramsay, reflecting on how Walton had helped neutralize future Hall of Famers Julius Erving and Doug Collins, heaped superlatives upon his singular star: “I've never coached a better player. I've never coached a better competitor. And I've never coached a better person than Bill Walton.” 
Walton was a unique center, particularly during his short prime in the late 1970s, when the league still lacked a three-point line and centers played very close to the basket. In a period when centers were considered to be scorers first and everything else second, Walton scrambled the formula. Unlike prior behemoths who banged in the low post and scored easy buckets, he functioned as a passing hub for the team offense, a role that centers were not traditionally known for, as well as a mobile stopper and top-tier shot blocker on defense. This led to one of the most underdog triumphs of all time for the Trail Blazers, who consisted primarily of scrappy role players outside of Walton and leading scorer Maurice Lucas.
Remembering Walton’s influence is not just a historical or obituarial matter. Because while Walton was singular in his time, his style is not singular anymore. The game of basketball — played these days with such grace by the likes of Mavericks forward Luka Doncic, who dominated the Western Conference finals this year en route to the NBA Finals, and Nuggets center Nikola Jokic, the reigning MVP who was once compared by Walton to Martin Luther King Jr. — is still played in Walton’s free-flowing, share-the-ball, all-players-can-play-all-positions hippie style. This is the way all the modern greats — Doncic and Jokic over the past half-decade, LeBron James for most of the previous two — play the game. 
It’s a style that the 6-foot-11-inch Walton, due to three dozen orthopedic surgeries, only really came close to perfecting early in his career, at UCLA, where he was a two-time college champ on a team so talented he was backed up by a center (Swen Nater) who would go on to a solid career as an NBA starter, and then that one MVP season in Portland, where he gave the world a preview of Jokic three decades in advance. Before he hung up his high-tops for good, he put his team-first chops to work orchestrating the Boston Celtics’ bench offense during their 1985-86 title run, for which he won the league’s Sixth Man of the Year award. 
Walton’s impact on basketball extends far beyond his own playing career. Born in La Mesa, California, in 1952, Walton grew up with a deep love for the game. He played at UCLA under legendary coach John Wooden during that program’s peak, leading the Bruins to two national championships and an 88-game winning streak. His college career was marked by performances that were otherworldly in terms of their offensive efficiency, including the 1973 national championship game against Memphis State when he scored 44 points on 21-of-22 shooting.
And despite his injury-plagued professional career, Walton’s influence is evident everywhere in the best of the modern NBA. The evolution of the center position is a testament to his lasting impact on the game. Centers today are dominant not just in the paint but are also orchestrators of the offense and nimble, mobile strategists on defense. Nikola Jokic, whose Nuggets claimed last year’s NBA championship, exemplifies this evolution. Born in Serbia, Jokic entered the NBA in 2015 and quickly established himself as one of the most versatile big men in the league. His ability to score, rebound, and, most impressively, pass has drawn comparisons to Walton’s style of play. Walton saw Jokic as more than a basketball player, and his praise for Jokic highlights how the Serbian center embodies the unselfish, imaginative, and visionary style of play that Walton had attempted to implement.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Luka Doncic's dominance in the Western Conference finals this year en route to the NBA championship is also a testament to the enduring influence of Walton's “play the game, not the positions” style, a reflection of Walton’s basketball philosophy, which has long predominated in the EuroLeague where many of them cut their teeth. Hailing from Slovenia, Doncic was a game-orchestrating prodigy from a young age, outplaying grown men in Europe as a callow teenager before joining the NBA. The gigantic 6-foot-7 guard’s ability to control the game, create opportunities for his teammates, and perform under pressure has made him one of the league’s brightest stars. If Jokic is a center who plays like a point guard, Doncic is a point guard who plays like a center. 
The NBA season chronicled in The Breaks of the Game may have been a fleeting and largely forgotten blip in the league’s pre-Michael Jordan history, but the success of multipurpose players like Doncic and Jokic proves that Walton's vision is now a reality. The modern game they have created, with its emphasis on playmaking, positional versatility, and unselfishness, is an evolved form of the beautiful basketball that Walton briefly demonstrated to the world. The big man walked on broken, unsteady feet so that today’s stars could run. 
Oliver Bateman is a journalist, historian, and co-host of the What’s Left? podcast. Visit his website: www.oliverbateman.com.
Ukraine’s path to victory hinges, not on weapons, but on people Ukraine’s path to victory hinges, not on weapons, but on people Jamie McIntyre One of the hottest social media apps in Ukraine these days is called Weather in Kyiv. It alerts users where in the city it’s “raining” at any particular moment.
But it’s not a weather app.
It’s more like a “whether” app, warning young men whether roving teams of military recruiters are on the prowl for newly eligible draftees under Ukraine’s new mobilization law.
Telegram channels also track the Ukrainian authorities combing the streets for draft dodgers, warning of the presence of “crocodiles” and “eggplants,” code for military and police officers,” according to the Daily Mail.
With Ukraine’s stretched and battle-weary army now in desperate need of fresh troops, the Ukrainian parliament reluctantly passed a law lowering the draft age from 27 to 25 in April.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky also signed two other measures into law last month, one allowing prisoners to enlist, and the other increasing fines for draft dodgers fivefold.
It has sparked a bit of a panic among Ukraine’s smallest generational cohort, just over 450,000 men born after Ukraine went through a post-independence depression in the late 1990s.
Thousands of those newly eligible men have tried to leave the country. In contrast, others have paid for forged papers certifying they are unfit for service or are resorting to disguises such as dressing as women to be picked up at random checkpoints.
An estimated 100,000 Ukrainian men have failed to update their status with authorities as required under the law, while some 20,000 accused draft dodgers have been caught.
Part of the problem is that most younger Ukrainians who do want to serve are already in the military and the ones who don’t have been spooked by the horrors of trench warfare, and they fear they will be tortured and butchered if captured by the Russians.
“I am very concerned for my own life. My friends who have already served on the front lines have been disabled for life by this fighting,” a 33-year-old engineer told the Daily Mail’s Sabrina Miller, who noted she saw very few young men on the streets of Kyiv.
It’s a far cry from the early days of the war in 2022 when Ukrainian men of all ages and descriptions, including artists, professors, athletes, and accountants, flooded recruiting offices to enlist in the fight for freedom.
Ukraine, universally lauded for its united and dogged determination, is becoming a nation divided.
“Some are at war, and some are not at war,” Zelensky told the New York Times last month. “On the one hand, you understand, that’s why we are fighting — to liberate people, for cities to live, for people not to be at war. But above all, we must understand that we are all still at war until it ends.”
But Zelensky’s problem is not just one of will to fight, but also the immutable challenge of demographics with having to draw from a population one-fourth the size of Russia. At the same time, Russian President Vladimir Putin ignores the devasting toll the war has taken on his forces, while willingly sacrificing hundreds, sometimes thousands of troops a day in World War I “meatgrinder” assaults for meager gains.
The British Defense Ministry estimates over 500,000 Russian troops have been killed or wounded since the start of the war, with losses averaging a staggering 1,200 a day in May.
“The Russian military has been decimated,” President Joe Biden said in an interview with Time magazine. “It’s been freaking decimated.”
Meanwhile, Ukraine has held its ground with a million-man army with which many of the initial volunteers are still fighting on the front lines after more than two years of grueling combat. Ukraine closely guards its casualty numbers, but it’s believed roughly 10% of its force, some 100,000 troops, have died in combat.
Zelensky was under enormous pressure to rotate those soldiers away from the front, and to do that, he had no choice but to lower the draft age, a highly unpopular move that could severely deplete the next generation of Ukrainians.
“He's in a bind,” said New York Times Kyiv bureau chief Andrew Kramer, who was one of the journalists who interviewed Zelensky on May 20.
“He's ruling a country that, on the one hand, there's massive support for continuing the war, there's incredible anger at Russia, still seething anger at Russia over this war and no desire to negotiate,” Kramer said on the Times podcast The Daily. "On the other hand, you have fewer and fewer people willing to fight.
“This is probably the moment of most uncertainty for Zelensky and for Ukraine since the beginning of the war,” Kramer said. “There's no popular decision for Zelensky. Drafting more soldiers is unpopular. If he doesn't draft soldiers and settles in a ceasefire negotiation, that will also be unpopular. Zelensky is squeezed between two fires.”
What struck Kramer about the interview was Zelensky’s answer to the question about his plans for after the war.
“After the war, after the victory, these are different things. After the war, it could be different. I think my plans depend on that,” Zelensky said, seeming to acknowledge the war might not end on Ukraine’s preferred terms, the expulsion of all Russian forces.
“I would like to believe that there will be a victory for Ukraine,” Zelensky said. "Not an easy one, very difficult. It will be very difficult."
Just a few days later, Biden, in a Time interview, seemed to acknowledge the same possibility — that the war could end without two of Zelensky’s main goals, total liberation of all occupied territory and full NATO membership.
“Peace looks like making sure Russia never, never, never, never occupies Ukraine,” Biden said. “That's what peace looks like. And it doesn't mean they are part of NATO. It means we have a relationship with them like we do with other countries, where we supply weapons so they can defend themselves in the future.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“What [Zelensky] left unsaid was what his life would look like if Ukraine lost the war,” Kramer noted. “One scenario is that he could die at the end of this. He's been the target of 10 assassination attempts, according to his government.
“Another possible outcome would be that Ukraine could lose a large chunk of its territory in a settlement agreement so it's understandable why he didn't go into the details,” Kramer said. “But it was still remarkable that he acknowledged, just for a moment, this vulnerability, this idea that there could be an outcome for Ukraine other than victory.”
An epidemic of loneliness in the age of boundaries An epidemic of loneliness in the age of boundaries Timothy P. Carney Social media features a different viral villain every day. If we’re lucky, he or she tells us something about ourselves.
In just such a case, a man named Marcus Shepard got more than 12 million views on his post bragging of a breakup with a friend with whom he hadn’t had “meaningful offline contact in almost a month.”
“Therefore,” Shepard wrote in a text that he forwarded to the entire world via X, “I’d ask that you seek your care work from somebody else….”
Dumping a friend for four weeks of being out of touch and then posting the text exchange online is extraordinary, thus earning Shepard his virality. But in many ways, Shepard was perfectly embodying the clinical and alienated spirit of our age.
“Care work” is the phrase for what used to be called “friendship” or “advice.” That’s fitting in a world that tries to sanitize and sterilize human life — that tries to replace relationships, which can be so controlling, with transactionships in which consent is asked and received at every single step without presumption.
In such a world, “personal boundaries” are not merely how we protect our privacy or reject inappropriate behavior. Boundaries now surround every inch of ourselves and dictate all aspects of our social lives.
Texting too much crosses a boundary. Texting too little crosses a boundary. Befriending the wrong people crosses a boundary. And because consent becomes the sole determinant of morality, and autonomy the highest good, we end up living fully bounded lives.
We strictly and pointlessly try to enforce our property rights — I won’t give up my airplane seat; don’t let your dog step on my front lawn; it’s sad she got shot, but she pulled into a stranger’s driveway.
Yes, boundaries are necessary. Yes, in some times and in some places, boundaries are too few, too low, or too little regarded.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“In the mountain homes of Jackson,” J.D. Vance wrote of his ancestral home in the holler, “privacy was more theory than practice. Family, friends, and neighbors would barge into your home without much warning. Mothers would tell their daughters how to raise their children,” and so on.
That can be almost oppressive. Today, no doubt, we err in the opposite direction. Excessive boundaries are why young people don’t get married, and it’s why we don’t have babies. An era of boundaries has caused an epidemic of loneliness.
Don’t hate the player: Review of The Winner by Teddy Wayne Don’t hate the player: Review of The Winner by Teddy Wayne Malcolm Forbes
F. Scott Fitzgerald told us that the very rich are different from you and me. The main character of Teddy Wayne’s sixth novel, who gains admittance to a rarefied realm of the super-wealthy near Cape Cod, is acutely aware of how far he stands apart from those sitting pretty. But instead of keeping his distance, Conor O’Toole plans to integrate himself into this gilded world. An opportunity comes his way early on when he is asked if he would like to come to a party — providing he doesn’t mind mingling with a group of Wasps. “As long as the Wasps don’t sting,” Conor replies. What follows is a gripping high-stakes tale of dangerous liaisons, grand deception, and ruthless ambition.
The Winner begins with an outline of protagonist and place. Conor is 25, shares a cramped apartment with his diabetic mother in Yonkers, and has just graduated from an undistinguished law school. He has come to Cutters Neck, a gated community on a two-mile strip of land protruding from the southern shores of Massachusetts, to put his tennis talent to good use. He has secured a good deal with lawyer John Price: rent-free accommodation in a waterfront cabin over the summer in exchange for giving tennis lessons six days a week to his employer-landlord. Price has allowed Conor to turn a profit by teaching other, paying residents. The income will come in handy: Conor can repay hefty school loans and provide lifesaving medication for his mother. His free time will also be beneficial: He can study for the bar exam and send off job applications.
It isn’t long before Conor is coaching Catherine Havemeyer, a beautiful but arrogant and acerbic divorcee and shipping heiress almost twice his age. He quickly realizes this is a woman used to getting her own way. During lessons, she expects a hands-on approach and proves it by audaciously flirting. After lessons, she insists that Conor come back to her house to drink cocktails and pick up his check. She starts to pay him double his normal rate. Eventually, and inevitably, she propositions him with payment for a service he has to carry out not on the court but in one of her 10 bedrooms. 
“Conor had had no shortage of attractive girls coming on to him,” Wayne informs us. “But none of them was the owner of a $26 million mansion overlooking the ocean that supplemented a Fifth Avenue ‘turret.’” After much deliberating, Conor surrenders to his desires and an illicit, erotic affair develops. It’s a win-win arrangement for both parties: Catherine gets to call the shots and remain in control; Conor enjoys a series of earth-shattering, mind-blowing sexual encounters, the best he has ever experienced, and uses the payment for them to buy insulin for his mother. As Catherine’s off-court escort, Conor fully understands the transactional nature of the romance. But he is more than happy to keep playing her game by her rules. As he puts it: “It was as demeaning as it was titillating.” 
The situation changes when Conor meets a woman nearer his own age. Emily is an aspiring writer who has come up to Cutters Neck from Brooklyn. She has a trust fund that keeps her financially afloat, but she is no spoilt and entitled brat. A past breakdown has rendered her fragile, but she is no pushover. Conor finds her wittier, worldlier, and smarter than he is, and soon he is immersed in a deeper, more meaningful relationship with her — while still clandestinely pursuing his passionate fling with Catherine.
And so Conor tries to tread carefully, “to negotiate between the two women with vigilance and skullduggery.” He is plagued by guilt and self-doubt and evaluates the type of man he has become: “The kind who’d started with a minor impropriety, a brief lapse in judgment, then a bigger one and a bigger one, the ligament stretching like taffy, until one day it snapped like a wishbone.” Then, when Catherine learns he is seeing someone else, she threatens to destroy his future prospects. Suddenly this winner has everything to lose. Can he still come out on top?
There is far more to this novel, including shock disclosures and desperate measures involving subterfuge and violence. However, to reveal more would be to spoil all. Suffice it to say, Wayne’s narrative changes gear in the last third of the book as an increasingly frantic Conor makes the transition from hero to antihero. What started out as a sharp comedy of manners about the carefree lives of the careless rich becomes a fast-paced psychological drama with hidden depths and dark undercurrents. 
The literary thriller is new territory for Wayne. He has revealed that during lockdown he consumed novels that twisted and turned while opening his eyes to different aspects of the world. The Winner was his attempt at a thought-provoking entertainment, a book that was at once incisive and propulsive. For the most part, he pulls it off expertly, keeping his reader hooked throughout all of Conor’s exploits, from his sure-footed moves to his calamitous missteps.  
But some of those exploits strain credulity. Why would Conor invite a group of townies he barely knows into Cutters Neck and give them the gate code to boot? The implausibility of the deed kills the tension stone dead. Other actions, certain sexual shenanigans with Catherine, so obviously signpost trouble ahead that it comes as no surprise when their consequences hit Conor hard. Fortunately, Wayne is more successful elsewhere at hoodwinking us and creating an atmosphere of queasy dread.
If this is a new genre for the Whiting Award-winning author, then it is business as usual when it comes to the book’s setup. Wayne’s previous fiction has taken the form of a male protagonist making his way, or coming undone, in a circumscribed milieu. An 11-year-old heart-throb and preteen pop poppet grapples with the fame game in The Love Song of Jonny Valentine (2013). An awkward and deluded sad-sack freshman at Harvard University tries to shrug off his anonymity and win over the classmate he is obsessed with in Loner (2016). And a self-confessed “curmudgeonly crank” who suffers one hard knock after another searches for relevance and connection in the modern world in The Great Man Theory (2022). 
Conor is perhaps closest to the hero of Wayne’s 2010 debut novel Kapitoil, a Qatari computer programmer who travels to New York City in 1999 to help prevent a millennial meltdown. Both characters are savvy strangers in a strange land, fish out of water that don’t flounder. Just as Karim Issar offers a foreigner’s unique perspective on American culture and Western capitalism, so too is Conor a keen-eyed outsider looking in on the charmed lives of the elite.
Once again, Wayne compels with his examination of power imbalances and class divides. Conor rubs shoulders with privileged youngsters who have “safety nets of money and nepotism” and older types for whom “money was a kind of vaccine,” a means of inoculation from COVID and other indignities. Catherine always keeps Conor in check with her authority and social standing, “her oceans of money compared with his dirty puddles.”
Equally effective is Wayne’s depiction of Conor’s two markedly different relationships, one powered by love, the other fueled by lust. “If being with Emily gave him unwavering safety and closeness,” Wayne writes, “being with Catherine was like skydiving with a parachute that threatened not to open each time, until it did at the very last moment.” For Conor, this sense of jeopardy is replaced by a whole new level of intensity in the book’s fraught last act. For the reader, following a man playing with fire while trying not to get burnt makes for an exhilarating reading experience.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Malcolm Forbes has written for the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. He lives in Edinburgh.
The deedholders of the site of the creation of America The deedholders of the site of the creation of America Diane Scharper
In 2022, John Kaag and his family bought an old farmhouse near the Concord River in Massachusetts. Attracted by the history of the area, Kaag, a philosophy professor, was also drawn by its proximity to the homes and haunts of those Kaag calls his “intellectual heroes,” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and William James.
Once Kaag moved into the ancient house, he learned about another American family not as significant as these icons but whose members were still larger than life in their own way: the Bloods. The family’s story and its role in American history is the subject of Kaag’s latest book, American Bloods: The Untamed Dynasty That Shaped a Nation.
The story begins as Kaag finds the manuscript of Roger Deane Harris’s The Story of the Bloods in a hidden room of his house. The papers contain the names of more than 5,000 members of the Blood family, many of whom lived near Kaag’s home, which sits on the remnants of Blood Farm. 
Harris had compiled information about his Blood ancestors and self-published it in 1960 as a family genealogy. His manuscript, which begins with England in the 17th century and ends with America in the very early 20th century, provides an overview of the Bloods and portrays significant moments in their lives as well as facts and dates. He ended the book asking family members to ask questions and contribute more information, but he died before he could add to his book.
The unintentional cliffhanger inspired Kaag to write American Bloods, which focuses on just eight members of a noteworthy but mostly forgotten family who participated in pivotal moments in the chronicles of America. Kaag tells their stories in detail and even includes one Blood’s unusually large thumb “that had been used to identify him, twice the size of a normal digit,” which some call “a murderer’s thumb.”
The Bloods had a “frontier ethos,” Kaag writes. “Their genealogy tracked what Henry David Thoreau called ‘wildness,’ a family trait that is an ‘animating force in American history.’” The American Bloods, Kaag explains, descend from Thomas Blood, who stole the British crown jewels because his land in Ireland was unjustly taken from him. His descendants would refuse to pay taxes in America because they felt taxation was unjust — they owned the land, not the governors. (Their feelings changed during the Revolutionary War when they depended on the militia.)
Thomas’s nephews, Robert, John, and James, came to America from England in the 1600s to escape religious persecution. They shared in the founding of the colonies. Their relative, Thaddeus, aided the Revolutionary War effort. Other Bloods served in the Civil War. One even knew John Brown. Later Aretas, who started out as a machinist, became rich by manufacturing locomotives. Then there was Perez, who was an amateur astronomer; Benjamin, who was a mystic and friend of William James; and Victoria, a feminist and spiritual healer who married into the family. 
Kaag’s descriptions of the land “with its swamp mud” help to bring it alive and seem almost like another character in the book. This fairly significant family inhabits very significant land in American history. In 1640, Gov. Winthrop granted 500 acres of arable land to James Blood, who planted an orchard as well as corn, rye, turnips, and cabbages. Eventually the plot expanded to 3,000 acres, known as Blood Farm. James’s descendants would build homes and raise their children here in the shadow of the Old Manse. The transcendentalist lecturer and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote his celebrated essay “Nature” in 1836 while sitting in an upstairs room of the Old Manse. 
For all of the title family’s untold brushes with important parts of history, however, the storyline of American Bloods is sometimes hard to follow. Kaag inserts too many incidents from his personal life that, although interesting, can be a distraction from the main story. Kaag begins and ends, for example, as he sees a creature that may be a wolf or a dog or a coyote (Kaag isn’t sure) in an area near a mysterious cave and marsh where there haven’t been wolves for more than a hundred years. It feels as though Kaag wants to add a supernatural significance to the Blood history, but it’s not clear why or what this has to do with the subject.
Still, it is an interesting keyhole on an area that has played much more than its share of a role in the country’s national life. Belonging to the Penacook tribe, the land in question was once called Musketaquid, or grassy plain. It was a place of “concord” before the white settlers brought smallpox, which decimated the native people who thought the settlers were “harbingers of death.” This Georgian-style gray clapboard house forms the nucleus of both Harris’s and Kaag’s books. 
Emerson’s disciple, Henry David Thoreau, rented a room in the Old Manse and planted a garden in its yard as a gift to Nathaniel Hawthorne and his bride, Sarah Peabody. Hawthorne also lived in the house and used it as a setting for some of his stories. 
Thoreau had a close relationship with Perez Blood, who spent his retirement years studying the planets. Like Thoreau, Perez never married and preferred to read and contemplate his relationship with nature. Emerson often visited 86-year-old Thaddeus Blood, one of the last living minutemen, to ask him for his memories about the Battle of Old North Bridge, hoping to add historical perspective and to flesh out ideas for his poem “Concord Hymn.”
It is a quote from this poem, about “the shot heard round the world,” the shot that started the American Revolution and began the Battle of Lexington and Concord, that really drives home how significant this place and the people who have dwelled on it have been. As Kaag writes it, the moment comes alive along with Thaddeus Blood, one of the first to hear the shot heard round the world and one of the last to remember it. 
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Diane Scharper is a regular contributor to the Washington Examiner. She teaches the Memoir Seminar for the Johns Hopkins Osher Program.
The Caitlin Rules The Caitlin Rules Zachary Faria Caitlin Clark is bringing much-needed eyeballs to the WNBA after its long history of being an afterthought in the sports landscape. And WNBA players cannot stand it.
Clark has been the target of sustained media criticism from WNBA players even before she was drafted as jealousy over her high profile took root around the league. This attitude came to a head in Clark’s Indiana Fever’s second win, in which Chicago Sky bench player Chennedy Carter body-checked Clark while the ball was out of play.
Carter’s clearly flagrant foul (somehow not called flagrant during the game) was preceded by some obscene language she directed toward Clark and followed by mocking social media posts about how Clark does nothing but shoot threes. Safe to say Carter is among those who are unhappy with Clark’s fame.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
You heard of the “Jordan Rules,” the strategy the Detroit Pistons took against Michael Jordan that included players clubbing Jordan whenever he attacked the basket. The goal was to defeat Jordan on the court. Now, it appears we have the Caitlin Rules in the WNBA, which entails players (and pundits) belittling her. The message from the Pistons to Jordan was that he won’t get easy buckets. Carter’s message to Clark was that she doesn’t belong. The goal is to tear down her image, even though that image is building up the WNBA’s profile.
From both players and pundits, Clark has been the target of ridicule for her skin color, sexual orientation, and the fact that people actually started watching women’s basketball because of her. Those critics can’t stand that they were there first as fans and players, and they must gatekeep the game by trying to ruin Clark. As with the Jordan Rules, the sooner these Caitlin Rules expire, the better the sport will be, even over the objections of haters such as Carter.
Yael Dayan, 1939-2024 Yael Dayan, 1939-2024 Daniel Ross Goodman
Only a select few children of major political figures, such as John Quincy Adams or Indira Gandhi, ever reach the same plateaus that were scaled by their fathers. Others, such as Jenna Bush and Meghan McCain, occasionally distinguish themselves in other fields. And still others yet are worthy of coverage for all the wrong reasons. (Exhibit A in this category is Hunter Biden, whose federal gun law trial is now underway.) Yael Dayan, who died on May 18 in Tel Aviv at 85, was decidedly not in this latter group. Her literary and political accomplishments allowed her to stand on her own as a significant figure in modern Israeli life, irrespective of the fact that her father, the military hero Moshe Dayan, was one of the most famous figures in all of Israeli history. Though, like any child of a noteworthy figure, the famous parent was never entirely out of the picture.
Yael Dayan was born in the small agricultural commune of Nahalal on Feb. 12, 1939. Although she was born into Israeli political royalty, she did not immediately follow her illustrious forefathers into politics. Her father, Moshe Dayan, was Israel’s defense minister during the 1967 Six-Day War and chief of staff of the country’s armed forces during the 1956 Sinai War. Her grandfather, Shmuel Dayan, was one of the founding members of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. And her uncle, Ezer Weizman, the seventh president of Israel, was the nephew of Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel. 
Though Yael Dayan’s initial interests were more literary than political, her first books were colored by the uniquely elite surroundings in which she was raised. Her first novel, New Face in the Mirror, published to great acclaim in 1959 when she was only 20 years old, centered on a young woman’s experience growing up in a military family. Her second book, Envy the Frightened, published one year later, tackled similar themes. 
Her most important book, however, is the one in which she dealt with her father directly — My Father, His Daughter (1985). Moshe Dayan was one of the few figures of the early years of Israel whose fame extended beyond the Mediterranean. For a few years following the Six-Day War, his eye-patched visage was so iconic that when it was seen on a poster in a Mad Men character’s bedroom, it didn’t seem out of place. But, like many great men who accomplished legendary feats on the battlefield and in the public sphere, their private lives were not always exemplary. Yael Dayan addressed these aspects of her father’s persona with surprising candor, allowing his admirers (as well as his detractors) to gain a more rounded, clear-sighted picture of her complex father.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
After Moshe Dayan’s death, Yael Dayan decided to go into politics. Joining Israel’s Labor Party (and later as a member of the One Israel Party), she served three terms in the Knesset between 1993 and 2003. During her time in national government, she spearheaded landmark legislation that definitively outlawed sexual harassment in Israel — an accomplishment she said was the career achievement of hers that made her most proud. A supporter of the peace process during the early 1990s, Yael Dayan was liberal socially as well. She was an outspoken advocate of gay and lesbian rights and a critic of the rabbinate’s monopoly on Israeli marriage, divorce, and personal status laws. Following her Knesset terms, Yael Dayan remained active in politics at the local level, serving on the Tel Aviv City Council for 10 years (a period that included a stint as the city’s deputy mayor).   
These are fraught times for Israel. Since Oct. 7, 2023, the 76-year-old state has been grappling with its greatest existential challenge since the 1973 Yom Kippur War. At the same time, it has also had to face external political pressures that have been nearly unprecedented in modern political history. Even its staunchest ally, the United States, has wavered in its support. For many in Israel, the struggle against Hamas today is no different than America’s fight against Nazism 80 years ago — a confrontation with pure evil in which the good must prevail at any and all costs. But not everyone, of course, sees it this way, as evidenced by the campus protests that engulfed American universities in May. As casualties on both sides of the war continue to mount, and as the morality of the war continues to be called into question, Israel, and the global political community at large, could now more than ever use a strong, sagacious moral voice as that which was possessed by Yael Dayan.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Divinity School. His latest book, Soloveitchik’s Children: Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America, was published last summer by the University of Alabama Press.
Review of Viggo Mortensen’s The Dead Don’t Hurt Review of Viggo Mortensen’s The Dead Don’t Hurt J. Oliver Conroy Felt to be old-fashioned, racist, and unbankable, Westerns fell out of favor in Hollywood for many years. Fortunately for those who’ve carried the torch and kept their My Darling Clementine Blu-rays clutched tight, the tide of taste seems to be turning. The biggest cause, or bellwether, is probably the popular TV melodrama Yellowstone — dubbed “Succession for red states,” though it has far greater viewership. Its creator, Taylor Sheridan, also wrote or directed the “neo-Western” films Sicario (2015), Hell or High Water (2016), and Wind River (2017). To top everything, Yellowstone’s lead, Kevin Costner, left to direct a four-part Western passion project, Horizon: An American Saga, whose first film “chapter” debuts later this month. (Skeptics predict the project will be a flop of Heaven’s Gate proportions; we’ll see.)
But the larger story of the return of the Western also has an odd tributary that runs, for whatever reason, through Denmark. Funny that the Danes, inhabitants of a watery Scandinavian country, should have such an affinity. After starring in 2014’s absurdist Patagonian Western Jauja, Viggo Mortensen, most famous for portraying Aragorn in the Lord of the Rings films, has now written, directed, produced, and co-starred in his own contribution to the Western genre, The Dead Don’t Hurt, about a Danish immigrant in frontier America whose decision to enlist in the Civil War has grave implications for his French Canadian wife, played by Vicky Krieps. Mortensen, born in New York, is Danish American, and the Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen has starred in 2014’s The Salvation, about a Danish immigrant to 1800s America who takes revenge on outlaws who kill his family, and last year’s The Promised Land, a quasi-Western transported to the Danish moorlands. 
Perhaps there’s something in the water. In any event, The Dead Don’t Hurt — Mortensen’s second directorial effort after 2020’s Falling — is not a blood-soaked epic or stirring historical saga but something quieter and more meditative, with the film’s clunky title perhaps giving a sense of its earnestness. This somber, feminist-inflected movie seems most inspired by the small-canvas, big-emotion revisionism of Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992), Costner’s Open Range (2003), and the “slow cinema” of Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff (2010) and First Cow (2019), even if it can’t entirely escape Western tropes and cliches. 
The Dead Don’t Hurt is an essentially simple tale about two intertwined people, with the story told in an occasionally confusing, nonlinear narrative. Mortensen plays Holger Olsen, who left Denmark after fighting in the brutal Schleswig wars to settle in a small town in the gold rush-era West. He has a dilapidated ranch and serves as the local sheriff. While doing business in San Francisco, he meets a pretty and strong-headed flower seller, Vivienne Le Coudy. 
Vivienne finds Holger much more interesting than the wealthy but self-absorbed local patrician she’s been seeing. (A scene of a date with the patrician, in which he prattles on while never asking Vivienne any questions about herself, could partly explain why he’s dating an impoverished flowergirl, and also presumably speaks to a date experience that women throughout history have had.) Like Holger, Vivienne is reticent about her past, but we learn from flashbacks that her French fur-trapper father died battling the British in Canada. 
A romance kindles between Holger and Vivienne and she comes to join him at his ranch. Vivienne’s horror when she sees his bachelor digs for the first time is particularly funny and poignant. The two build a life together. They fix up the ranch, and Vivienne gets a job as a barmaid at the local saloon. The saloon is dominated by Weston Jeffries (Solly McLeod), a binge-drinking, seemingly bipolar villain (he dresses, of course, in all black) who gets away with his acts of bullying and violence because his powerful land-baron father, Alfred Jeffries (Garret Dillahunt, of Deadwood), is in league with the town’s corrupt mayor and banker, Rudolph Schiller (Danny Huston). 
Just as Holger and Vivienne have achieved something close to happiness, the Civil War intrudes. An officer comes to town to recruit volunteers for the Union Army. Most of the townspeople jeer at the idea of risking their lives for the conflict. But Holger, despite Vivienne’s urgent entreaties, is drawn to serve. He leaves for the war — and at this point vanishes from the picture, shifting the perspective entirely to Vivienne’s. 
She struggles, and mostly succeeds, at running their farmstead alone, but comes under the sinister Weston’s discomfiting gaze. One night, he attacks her. To say more is to give too much away, but The Dead Don’t Hurt is, in essence, an exploration of the consequences of that attack — and of Holger’s choice to risk the immediate well-being of his wife for a larger moral duty. In fact, Mortensen’s decision to absent himself from a significant stretch of the runtime is one of the film’s more commendable formal choices: The Dead Don’t Hurt is less interested in the Civil War than in what happened to all the women left behind — and by extension in the experiences of many women in many times and places. It helps that Krieps, who as a mostly-unknown Luxembourgish actress gave a tour-de-force turn in 2017’s Phantom Thread, imbues Vivienne with great inner life. Mortensen also gives a tender and understated performance. 
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Mortensen’s second undertaking as a director is accomplished if flawed. The movie is slow, perhaps meaningfully so, and has an earnestness that can border on the ponderous. It also suffers from some stilted dialogue — film and TV writers today sometimes seem under the impression that people in older days spoke woodenly, without contractions — and I’m not certain that the multiple timelines are necessary. But it also benefits from thoughtful writing, acting, on-location cinematography, and editing. There are some lush, perfectly framed shots of cabins nestled in valleys of which John Ford himself would surely approve.
If the Western is back, then it returns in a more varied and less procedural form, with all the bad and good that comes with that experimentation. 
J. Oliver Conroy’s writing has been published in the Guardian, New York magazine, the Spectator, the New Criterion, and other publications.
Disney canceled Splash Mountain, then made it boring Disney canceled Splash Mountain, then made it boring Jeremiah Poff Between its unnerving cartoon animatronics, quirky theme song, and the very steep and wet drops that earned the attraction its name, Splash Mountain was one of the Disney theme park rides that had a unique character and attraction that could not be missed.
I shamefully admit that despite making a handful of trips to Disney theme parks throughout my life, I can only remember riding the famous log flume one time.
But last year, Disney closed down Splash Mountain at both Disneyland in California and Disney World in Florida with the intent of remodeling it into a ride centering on characters from Disney's 2009 film The Princess and the Frog.
The remodel was announced in June 2020, a date that was no accident. Splash Mountain had long been the last public vestige of Disney's 1946 film Song of the South, which has been almost entirely memory-holed by the company due to its depictions of black Southern living after the Civil War. But even this wildly popular log flume ride, which only featured the film's animated animal characters, could not survive the summer of George Floyd.
The remodeled Splash Mountain, now named "Tiana’s Bayou Adventure" is set to open this summer. In anticipation of the planned opening, Disney released a video showcasing the ride's new thematics and still very wet finale.
But rather than take advantage of the chosen intellectual property's outstanding musical and thematic elements, Tiana's Bayou Adventure chose the blandest aspects of the story to replace the famed "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" tune that accompanied the animatronics of Br'er Rabbit, Br'er Fox, and Br'er Bear in the watery tunnels between wet drops on Splash Mountain.
One of the things that made Splash Mountain such a memorable ride was the eerie behavior of the animatronic woodland creatures that preceded the abrupt drop into a wet pool — and finally concluding in the triumphant "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah." Nowhere in the ride was there any racial element or undertone.
Even still, The Princess and the Frog had plenty of material that could have replaced that in an exciting and fun manner. For example, in the film, the nefarious Voodoo practitioner Dr. Facilier offered some of the darkest and most memorable scenes that showcased some of the less savory aspects of historic New Orleans. He does not appear anywhere in the ride, nor does his memorable song "Friends on the Other Side."
The remodel that no one asked for has turned into the remodel that no one likes.
But while the specifics of the Splash Mountain remodel may wrangle fans due to its blandness compared to what came before, the hostile reception the remodel is receiving speaks to a company that has lost its creative touch while desperately catering to the prevailing whims of political correctness.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The Walt Disney Company is producing more films, shows, merchandise, and theme park attractions than it ever has. But interest in the company's products is declining because the quality of those products is declining. Last month, Disney CEO Bob Iger even acknowledged that the company is making a lot of bad movies and needs to focus on quality.
Ending the practice of remodeling beloved rides in mediocre fashion would be a good start.
Who would Don Draper be voting for in 2024? Who would Don Draper be voting for in 2024? Rob Long A few nights ago, after (perhaps possibly a few too many) cocktails, I got into an argument with a friend. 
Well, OK, not an argument argument. It was one of those conversations that begins on a light and silly note and then gradually darkens into an actual disagreement in which both parties are a little surprised at how much they care about winning.
And it was, of course, about politics. I mean, you knew that, right? What else do we talk about these days? We’re entering the period in the American political cycle when everything — and I mean everything: Gaza, baseball, cake vs. pie, summer weather, the ideal inseam length for men’s shorts, artificial intelligence, the definition of a sandwich, Pope Francis, you name it — becomes the spark that lights the short fuse of the How can you vote for that clown? fireworks that are always close by, ready to ignite and blow off a few fingers.
It started this way: My friend suggested that the character of Phoebe from the TV series Friends would probably be voting for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in November. In his analysis, she was kind of nutty and probably a little mentally unstable — and let’s be honest here, that’s sort of Kennedy's base, right? — and she would have meandered through the thickets of QAnon conspiracies, could have appeared on the Capitol steps on Jan. 6, and would finally land up squarely in the Kennedy camp.
So far, so good. I added to this scenario, suggesting that while milling through the angry and energized crowd on Jan. 6, she might have made the acquaintance of Cliff Clavin, the mailman from Cheers, a show I wrote for and produced for part of its run, and the two of them may have even felt a romantic spark.
It went on from there. Alex P. Keaton, the brash conservative son from Family Ties played by Michael J. Fox, would probably be one of those deeply uncomfortable Republicans right now. He’d be like one of those smart young Republican former congressmen, like former Wisconsin Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher, who quit politics because it’s gotten too weird and nasty and chaotic. 
Each one of the characters on The Golden Girls would almost certainly have been part of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R-FL) spectacular gubernatorial landslide in 2022, but it’s safe to say that in November, it’ll be Rose and Blanche wearing the MAGA hats and Dorothy firmly for President Joe Biden. Sophia, the canny and sharp-witted eldest Golden Girl, will tell everyone she’s voting for Biden just to keep peace with her daughter but will mark the spot for former President Donald Trump in the privacy of the voting booth — that is, if she doesn’t choose to vote by mail.
Again, we’re laughing and having fun and enjoying the conversation. 
Rajesh "Raj" Ramayan Koothrappali, the socially awkward South Asian graduate student in the long-running smash hit The Big Bang Theory, would be a Trumper. Also: You’d expect Niles from Frasier to be a Biden voter, but after a few years living in the disarray and lawlessness of the Pacific Northwest, who knows? Some of the Cosby children may have tired of identity politics by now and gone full radical, reading books by the great Thomas Sowell perhaps and listening to Glenn Loury’s excellent podcast, so maybe that would be a spirited family dinner table.
Where we disagreed — and we were both a little surprised by how passionately we suddenly felt — was when it came to Don Draper, the complicated and secret-filled main character of the drama Mad Men. My theory is that by now, he’d be living in Florida, in The Villages, with a boat festooned with Trump flags. My friend insisted that after spending time at an ashram in 1970s California (where we left him in the final episode of that terrific series), he’d stay true to those principles and be one of those groovy and progressive old men — a classic Bernie Bro. I told him that was stupid. Don Draper was in advertising, I said. He didn’t have any principles.
“I’m in advertising, Rob,” my friend replied. “Are you saying I don’t have any principles?”
And that’s when the conversation got a little ugly. And it didn’t cool off until we both agreed that by now, one of the children in Everybody Loves Raymond would probably be trans.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
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.
Shane Gillis’s existentially juvenile working-class sitcom, Tires Shane Gillis’s existentially juvenile working-class sitcom, Tires Joe Joyce Somewhere, amid its fart jokes, Netflix’s new comedy series Tires explores the daily struggle for contentment, or whatever passes for it in the meantime. 
Tires, the brainchild of comedian Shane Gillis, co-written and co-produced alongside frequent collaborators Steve Gerben and John McKeever, follows the troubles of a failing branch of Valley Forge Automotive, located in a purgatorial stretch of concrete in West Chester, Pennsylvania. The store is managed by Will (Gerben; as in older sitcoms like Seinfeld, most characters in Tires share a name with the actor who portrays them), a failson granted the position by his father who owns the chain. Will mistakes it for an opportunity, while it’s apparent to his cousin and mechanic Shane (Gillis) that this is the only store unprofitable enough to safely sequester them away. Shane understands the mediocrity because he’s responsible for it, spending most of his time on the clock making sure Will, fellow mechanic Cal (Chris O’Connor), and white trash receptionist Kilah (Kilah Fox) don’t do any work either. 
For all the recent talk of trades, this is the sort of drudgery that sends you fleeing to student loans. Will remains in denial about his situation, thinking his next harebrained marketing gimmick will lift the store and him with it. Shane is aware of the indignity, to which he responds with an existential juvenility. One must imagine Sisyphus, or perhaps Shanegillis, happy. Cal and Kilah seem to be living their best possible lives splashing around in the above-ground pool of despair, with highlights not much higher than a smoke break. Yet still the team clocks in every morning. And when the branch faces closure, they find the modicum of ambition left within to mount a defense.
Gillis, one of stand-up’s biggest breakout acts of the past five years, is perhaps best known for getting fired off SNL immediately after getting hired on its writing staff, after some lifeless professional internet sleuth found an old podcast clip of him making off-color jokes. (As a fan of said podcast, I would argue the inciting joke was taken out of context, though given the full body of his vulgarity, it was like Al Capone going down for tax evasion.) Gillis has since shook the dust off and become one of the most popular touring comedians in the country, proving that the best answer to cancellation is simply ignoring it. 
Gillis is pigeonholed by his admirers and detractors as a conservative comedian, a partly fair assessment at best. It may be true of his style. He speaks fondly of his Trump-supporting family, which to most tastemakers places him slightly to the right of Pinochet. But what’s true to most tastemakers and what’s actually true are so different as to be almost impossible to use the same language to compare. What’s actually useful to say about Gillis is that he plays into your biases, his frat boy gone-to-seed persona letting him sneak in some nuance that both the easily pleased and the easily offended rarely catch. 
Gillis is also probably the best vocal impersonator of Trump alive — which isn’t nothing, since everyone on Earth has tried out that voice over the past eight years. If he shares anything substantive with Trump, it's a lack of patience toward social politesse. The characters in Tires follow Gillis’s uncouth example, the underlying message being that decorum is a luxury of the idle, not those on the margins. 
To distill Tires into a sentence, it's the dream of Parks and Recreation fulfilled. Parks and Recreation started from a similar premise, following thankless but vital small-town government work in flyover country. But it soon grew embarrassed of its minor ambitions and decided that it actually wanted to be thanked a lot. All the government employees hit the eject button and land safely in Washington, D.C., to govern the unwashed masses from a safe distance. It remains the perfect time capsule of Obama-era media, where caring for your constituents was synonymous with correcting them. Something golden and orange loomed off the horizon; on first glance one might mistake it for a sunrise.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
In a pep talk Shane delivers to six models before a bikini car wash (Gillis occasionally indulges as well as engages with his frat boy persona), he recognizes that any person at a tire shop at 2 p.m. isn't living their best life. But the funny part about your life being over is that it continues regardless. Meanwhile the sun is out, the beer is cold, and the models are beautiful when squinting through a combination of the two. The characters of Parks and Recreation fled for cooler cities, but there’s nowhere for the staff of Valley Forge Automotive to go. They’re stuck in an unglamorous job, but then someone has to change those brake pads. Society can only run thanks to the efforts of those embarrassed to attend their high school reunion.

What Tires says, through some funny, exasperated, dumb, and mostly expertly-executed jokes, is something that might be the anthem of a whole class of Americans, something John Mellencamp once sang in the song “Pink Houses”:
He's got greasy hair, greasy smile

He says, "Lord, this must be my destination"

'Cause they told me when I was younger

Said, "Boy, you're gonna be president"

But just like everything else those old crazy dreams

Just kinda came and went. Joe Joyce is a writer and contributor. Follow him on X at @bf_crane.
Are airport subsidies a handout to the rich? Are airport subsidies a handout to the rich? Jeremy Lott Climate activists recently sowed chaos at an airport in Munich, Germany. On May 18, members of the green group Last Generation crashed the gates and glued themselves to a runway in protest of government subsidies for flights.
Everything at the Munich airport ground to a halt, leading to flight delays and cancellations on the busy Whitsun holiday weekend. A few of the protesters, anticipating the ire of travelers, carried signs that translate to “Problem is the government, not our holiday,” according to Euronews.
Eight protesters were eventually arrested. The incident led to calls for increased airport security and heightened criminal penalties by German government officials. Current law doesn’t let German prosecutors throw the book at such agitators. A proposed law could see them in jail for up to two years.
No glue on American runways Better post-9/11 airport security and stiffer legal penalties may explain the lack of sticky protests at American airports. However, significant, seemingly ever-increasing subsidies should make American air travel ripe for peaceful protests or public policy criticism at the very least.
Yet criticism is pretty thin on the runway here from center-left policy voices. With the exception of criticism of private air travel (“Tax Private Jets Into Oblivion,” one Jacobin headline advised), concerns over subsidies in America largely come from more free-market mouths.
Marc Scribner, transportation policy analyst for the Reason Foundation, laid out the extent of the subsidies. The Airport Improvement Program is the “main federal grant program” to funnel money to airports, he said, though other subsidies have been giving that program a run for its money.
By statute, the AIP provided $3.4 billion a year in grants. That was recently boosted to $4 billion a year by the bipartisan Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization enacted by Congress and President Joe Biden. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act created two such subsidies that are funded through the federal government’s fiscal 2026: $2.89 billion a year for the Airport Infrastructure Grant program and $1 billion a year for the Airport Terminals program.
Scribner sees the subsidy trend moving in a more dependent direction, at least for the next several years.
“Before IIJA, large airports had been willing to give up all of their AIP apportionments in exchange for eliminating the cap on Passenger Facility Charges, which are federally authorized local airport user fees,” Scribner told the Washington Examiner. “But the large increase in subsidies under IIJA has put airport financing reform on the back burner, and little was changed in the latest FAA reauthorization through FY28 because the new IIJA grant programs run through part of that authorization.”
Because of this fire hose of federal spending, he predicted, “Moving toward self-sufficiency won’t happen until at least FY29.”
Rich people wings? Do airport subsidies amount to subsidies to the wealthy? Scribner says the case is complicated but that there’s something to the charge.
“Larger hub airports are more commercialized and self-financed, while smaller airports are more dependent on grants,” he said. “What this means is that subsidy programs tend to focus on general aviation airports mainly used by wealthy private aviation users.”
He added that airports in Alaska are “somewhat of an exception, with more nonwealthy bush pilots.”
Scribner also weighed into the lack of subsidy criticism in the center-left transportation policy space.
“If anything, they want the aviation system more oriented to rich people because many want to convert airline customers to train riders,” he said. “The unions also like federal grants, regardless of where they are spent.”
In a noted article for RealClearPolicy in 2013, Joseph Lawler made the full-throated case that, “Airports Are Rich People Things.” He noted President Barack Obama (and now his understudy, President Joe Biden) was gung-ho for spending more federal money on airport improvements. The piece argued that was not a good use of taxpayer dollars.
“One key consideration is that, unlike bridges or tunnels, airports are used mostly by wealthy people,” he wrote. “Although 80% of Americans have flown at some point in their lives, regular or even semi-regular air travel is restricted to a fairly small group. … Slightly less than 40% of the population flies each year. Only about a third has a passport. Just 30% of Americans fly in a given month.”
He added the surprising fact that “non-rich Americans are unlikely to pass through an airport even when they’re going a long distance.”
In Lawler’s view, subsidies to airports were subsidies to people who could afford to pay for their own improvements.
It is still true that a majority of people do not fly on an annual basis, but barely. The Ipsos-Airlines for America poll found that 49% of people flew at least once last year and that 86% had flown in their lifetimes. (Before airlines were deregulated in 1978, 25% of Americans had flown in the past year, and 63% had flown ever.)
So, which is it? Are airports rich people things, or are they increasingly middle-class things? Chris Lehmann, author of the book Rich People Things, was asked to weigh in on the matter. He thinks that airports are rich people things, though with growing middle-class participation.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Airports are “transitional,” Lehmann told the Washington Examiner. “They have become display spaces for bad public art, which is a pretty solid tell. But airport adjacent hotels are warrens of downwardly mobile middle-class existence, by and large.”
He added that airplane seating “remains the one sphere of American life where class privilege is forthrightly acknowledged,” with earlier boarding for those with higher status, along with more space and unpriced drinks that keep on flowing.
My island, left behind on D-Day My island, left behind on D-Day Hugo Gurdon It is the anniversary of D-Day. President Joe Biden, in Normandy, France, for ceremonial commemorations today, talked of the bravery and sacrifices of that titanic invasion, of the values that were at stake, and of the alliances that triumphed. It was an effective speech.
There may seem no connection between this and a Delaware court appearance by Hallie Biden, widow of the president’s elder son Beau and former girlfriend of his younger son Hunter, which is taking place on the same day. But one fact in the Hunter Biden case recalls memories for me inextricably tied to D-Day. It is that Hallie Biden tossed a gun belonging to Hunter into a dumpster.
It reminds me of looking down a granite cliff as a boy a generation after D-Day at big German guns rusting on the rocks below where they had been tipped into the sea by Jersey islanders celebrating Germany’s defeat and their own liberation.
Jersey, where I was born and went to school, is in a small archipelago close to France in the Bay of Cherbourg. It lies on the western side of the Cherbourg Peninsula, on the other side of which are Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword beaches, where the Allies landed before battling their way to Berlin.
The landings cut off supply lines to the islands, and for nine months, while the Allies fought across France, Jersey was left isolated in German hands. Freeing the islands had no strategic value and would have cost many lives, so the Allies just waited until the Germans surrendered and took them with hardly a shot.
D-Day used to prompt mixed reactions on the islands. It was recognized as a necessary step toward German defeat, but it brought nine months of increasing hardship as food and other vital supplies ran ever lower. Every boy at my school knew that our aged gym master had suffered as a result; lacking proper equipment, surgeons had to stitch him up in makeshift fashion after an emergency operation to remove his appendix. He was gut hurt ever after.
The Germans had turned the islands into fortresses with big guns bristling from reinforced concrete bunkers on every effective promontory on the shore. We schoolboys used to explore the bunkers and would occasionally find treasures such as old military webbing or empty ammunition clips.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Even a generation after the war, army surplus stores in the little town of St. Helier still had a reasonable stock of wartime bric-a-brac and abandoned military paraphernalia. Wehrmacht helmets were prized as treasures and hard to find, but there were a fair number of gray German uniform tunics that boys would buy and wear ironically with jeans after — it being the hippie early 1970s — embroidering them with mushrooms and other psychedelic emblems of that epoch.
That was only 25 years after the war had ended, and now we are 80 years past the massive Normandy operations that were perhaps the most decisive step toward defeating the Nazis. Rolling the Germans back across France shaped the lives of the veterans who gathered at Omaha Beach to hear the president. The aftermath of German occupation shaped my own boyhood, too.
We have moved from The Longest Day to Saving Private Ryan We have moved from The Longest Day to Saving Private Ryan Dan Hannan There's a moment in Saving Private Ryan, the 1998 Steven Spielberg gore-fest, when the sergeant, played by Tom Sizemore, tells his captain: "Someday, we might look back on this and decide that saving Private Ryan was one decent thing we were able to pull out of this whole godawful s***ty mess."
The one decent thing? What about, you know, defeating Hitler? What about liberating millions from brutal foreign occupation? What about stopping the Holocaust?
There was a time when the fact of fighting the Nazis was seen as intrinsically decent. It did not need some sugary human interest coating to make it palatable. Before Spielberg's, the last D-Day movie had been the 1962 epic The Longest Day, made when it was taken for granted that some things were worth risking your life for.
"There's no time for any sob stuff about England, home and beauty," says the heroic special forces commander, Lord Lovat, played by Peter Lawford. "Remember, our people have had a rough time for 4 1/2 years. They've earned the final victory. Let's give it to them."
Cinematic reconstructions eventually squeeze out firsthand memories. This will surely be the last time that veterans gather in Normandy in any numbers.
"Let me assure you, what you read in those silly books that have been written about D-Day is absolute crap," said George Chandler, now 99, who served on a British torpedo boat escorting U.S. troops to Omaha and Utah beaches. If you have lived through anything you later saw dramatized on screen, you will know how Chandler feels.
D-Day is now mainly about political symbolism, and the politicians know it. No fewer than 25 world leaders are in Normandy as I write, bringing 12,000 security personnel with them.
All sides cram the invasion into their own pet narrative. For Europhiles, it is all about how the EU came together to stop wars. British paratroopers landing on the beaches for the anniversary were pointedly subjected to French customs checks. Marine Le Pen complained that French President Emmanuel Macron was electioneering. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has attended past ceremonies, was ostentatiously uninvited.
My own take on that day was beautifully articulated by Ronald Reagan 40 years ago. "Gentlemen," he told the assembled veterans, in words that still make me choke up, "I look at you, and I think of the words of Stephen Spender's poem. You are men who in your 'lives fought for life ... and left the vivid air signed with your honor.'"
The Gipper went on to make a gentle reference to his own time: "You all knew that some things are worth dying for. One's country is worth dying for, and democracy is worth dying for, because it's the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man. All of you loved liberty."
How many contemporary American politicians would unequivocally commit themselves to the defense of the free world as Reagan did on that day when he quoted the Book of Joshua: "I will not fail thee nor forsake thee."
It is not just that the Cold War is over. It's not just that many American voters have turned inward, nor that Iraq and Afghanistan have created an anti-war mood, nor even that former President Donald Trump cannot find it in him to be critical of Putin or, indeed, of despots in general.
No, the wider problem is that we have moved from The Longest Day to Saving Private Ryan. Although we are more political than previous generations, more prone to work ourselves up into a rage about the slightest slip-up by an elected representative or the use of an inappropriate word by a celebrity, we doubt whether any cause is worth crossing half the world to fight for.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Young people feel strongly about lots of things. But, looking at those face-masked campus protesters demanding that the rest of us send them gluten-free meals and respect their banana allergies, do we really suppose they would make the sacrifice that young adults of their age did when they plunged into Normandy's rough waters under a hail of enemy fire?
On June 6, 1944, the English-speaking democracies, along with detachments of their allies and auxiliaries, imposed their values on the world, values developed overwhelmingly in the language in which you are reading these words. Civilian government, habeas corpus, free elections, jury trials, uncensored newspapers, and equality before the law. These things became so widely accepted that even dictators had to pretend to acknowledge them. Would British, Canadian, and American youngsters fight as hard for them today? I don't like to put the question.