Mission to serve: Veterans and entrepreneurs join forces to help toxic burn pit victims Mission to serve: Veterans and entrepreneurs join forces to help toxic burn pit victims Salena Zito
When two veteran organizations get together to do something helpful, it is bound to be purposeful and successful. That is exactly what is happening between the founders of Black Rifle Coffee and HunterSeven, who have joined forces to support and fund life-saving research for veterans who were exposed to toxic chemicals during their military service.
While they both approach their post-military posts very differently, their mission together makes sense.
Founded in 2014 by former U.S. Army Green Beret Evan Hafer and former U.S. Army Ranger Mat Best, Black Rifle Coffee Company was built upon a mission to serve coffee and culture to people who hold the love of country dear. Known for their unapologetic, in-your-face advertising, cheeky Instagram posts, and, most importantly, premier coffee, they have made their mark by all three driven by a mission that supports veterans, active-duty military, and first responders.
HunterSeven is less in your face.
The foundation, co-founded by Chelsey Simoni, a public health nurse and former member of the Rhode Island Army National Guard, researches military exposures and the impact they have on the health of the veterans who have been exposed to deadly chemicals.
“The foundation is named for the call sign of Sgt. Maj. Rob Bowman, who died after being exposed to toxic burn pits in Iraq,” she explained.
Both organizations have joined together to expose the long-term effects these burn pits located on U.S. military bases during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars had on soldiers, with Black Rifle Coffee using its cultural impact to raise money for the foundation.
Simoni explained burn pits are “these crater-type holes that are used to place waste,” and the result is they release known carcinogens into the air.
“I was seeing, over and over again, this pattern of otherwise very healthy veterans returning from deployment developing leukemia, cancer, and these chronic lung conditions, and I knew something wasn’t right,” said Simoni, who said that was research she was doing as part of her undergraduate work.
That research led her to review the health impact of burn pits in Iraq.
The results were startling. “Two weeks of research with over a hundred Iraq War veterans participating confirmed my theory there was a profound increase in these respiratory systems after they returned from deployment,” Simoni explained.
That led her to a new mission: getting veterans across the country tested so they could be treated before the problems progressed beyond help. Her challenge was that it was expensive, the Department of Veterans Affairs was slow-moving, and she needed money and a megaphone to help the nonprofit group complete its mission to provide post-9/11 veterans with information on the long- and short-term consequences of these exposures.
That is when Black Rifle Coffee stepped up and in.
As Best explains, it was an easy fit. “We began several years ago when we provided a grant that would cover a new round of medical research exploring the effects of toxic exposure in Afghanistan. It was a cause we wanted to champion,” he said.
Chris Mondzelewski, the CEO of Black Rifle Coffee, said the partnership made sense “because we have always been and remain committed to the support of our veterans.”
Mondzelewski said the partnership between the two organizations began in earnest last November ahead of Veterans Day when Black Rifle Coffee, along with the UFC, joined to raise money for HunterSeven. “Our Veterans Day event with the UFC and HunterSeven Foundation raised over $250,000 in one weekend for veterans battling cancer, and that is just the beginning,” Mondzelewski said.
Simoni's voice wavered as she explained that the money raised opened the door for hundreds of veterans to be tested for these cancers and respiratory illnesses that would have gone undetected for years.
In a statement at the time of the event, Simoni said that when she looks back on her time in the military, she remembers not just those lost from combat but also those who were lost from cancer once they came home. Simoni said the numbers were staggering of her fellow warriors who were diagnosed with cancer during and after 9/11.
“It is over a half a million,” she said, growing quiet. “One in 7 or more than a half a million of fellow service members.”
“We have the research and capability to save as many veterans through testing. Now, we have the partnership to raise the money to do so,” she said.
HunterSeven uses the funds to test military veterans through early identification and screening, something veterans cannot access or afford through the normal channels because they have not presented yet.
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After the UFC event, CEO Dana White said taking care of the men and women who serve this country is something that has always been important to him and is a matter he and the entire UFC family care deeply about.
“I have been talking about this a lot lately, aligning myself and the UFC with companies that have the same core values. Veterans have put their lives on the line and sacrificed so much to protect our way of life, and I’m proud of the work that we do with partners like Black Rifle Coffee Company to help our vets get the medical care and services they need to live healthier lives,” he said.
Navigating troubled waters onboard the USCGC William Tate Navigating troubled waters onboard the USCGC William Tate Graeme Jennings and Joana Suleiman The Washington Examiner steps onboard the USCGC William Tate, one of the crucial vessels that helped clear the channel for cargo ship Dali to move for the first time in 55 days.
A couple of months have passed since the cargo ship Dali struck Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, which collapsed, killing six construction workers on March 26. On May 20, tugboats were finally able to escort the 106,000-ton vessel back to the Seagirt Marine Terminal in the Port of Baltimore.
The ship’s removal will now allow “all pre-collapse deep-draft commercial vessels to enter and exit the Port of Baltimore,” according to a news release from the Unified Command, a joint task force composed of multiple government agencies responding to the disaster.
The collision not only choked the supply chain pathway to the busy port but also the livelihoods of thousands of longshoremen. Dockworkers were left idle for weeks, suffering a wage loss of about $2 million a day. Manufacturers and shippers were left scrambling to figure out where they could load or unload cargo. The 30,000 vehicles that drove over the bridge every day had to find alternate routes, and the cost to the Baltimore economy could be as much as $15 million a day, according to Rep. David Trone (D-MD).
“We have refloated and moved the Dali — achieving in weeks what many thought would take months,” Gov. Wes Moore (D-MD) said on May 20 on X. “But our work isn’t done. We must continue to clear the full 700-foot federal channel, support the workers, businesses, and families affected by the collapse, and rebuild the Key Bridge.”
Enter ATON, or aids to navigation, installed and maintained by the U.S. Coast Guard. The Washington Examiner's Graeme Jennings was onboard the USCGC William Tate from April 30 to May 3, observing the keeper-class coastal buoy tender maintain pathways and shipping channels open around the Dali collapse site and up the East Coast. It’s “a life-saving service,” Carmen Caver, Coast Guard Petty Officer 3rd Class and public affairs specialist, told the Washington Examiner.
“Though our ATON units are often out of the spotlight, it is an incredibly important aspect of the Coast Guard. We have the equipment and assets to manage the operations, and though we don’t often directly correlate it, ATON saves lives,” she said. “Aids to navigation [which includes buoys, day beacons, lights, ranges, and lighthouses] are crucial everywhere in the world. We have very busy channels up here in the Northeast, especially — I mean, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and D.C. are all in the same area!”
To maintain safety zones at sea, “the Coast Guard does everything from putting buoys out to ensuring everyone follows the rules and regulations for the best possible outcome. This is often replicated in places across the United States, not just for this particular response. We inspect and monitor ATON and even the ships themselves, and we pride ourselves in being as transparent as possible,” Caver added.
“Even with something seemingly small like this buoy lift operation, members of the community reach out and rely on us to get them back to where the buoys need to be. The Key Bridge Response is important, but maintaining the shipping channels in our area is just as important to our communities.”
Soaring rents a top concern for younger voters Soaring rents a top concern for younger voters Stacey Dec Pollsters and political analysts have of late twisted themselves into contortions trying to figure out what top priorities are for young voters, a key constituency in the neck-and-neck race between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. The explanation is likely much simpler: The rent is too darn high.
Housing costs, and a languishing U.S. economy more broadly, turn out to be a much bigger concern for voters ages 18-29 than those often cited in news reports, such as climate change and Israel's defensive war against Hamas in Gaza, even as this group strongly favors Biden over Trump, per a recent poll by the Institute of Politics at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.
The survey found Biden ahead of Trump 45% to 37% among all voters 18-29. Biden is up even higher, 56% to 37%, among likely voters.
Yet their top issue set is telling.
"We identified 16 prominent areas of concern and asked survey respondents in a series of randomized match-ups which one of two paired issues was more important to them," a report explaining the Harvard Youth Poll numbers said. "We found that economic concerns were viewed as more prominent. Inflation, healthcare, housing, and jobs won most match-ups regardless of what they were paired against."
How much younger voters participate in the presidential election, now less than six months away, is an open question. After all, seniors typically vote at a much higher rate. But if new voters do cast ballots at a considerable clip, their near single-minded focus on economic concerns has the potential to help decide the outcomes in swing states where housing costs are notably on the rise — Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
These by-the-numbers concerns correlate to the recent Federal Reserve decision to keep interest rates high, which leads to rising costs of housing and other goods. As the Fed maintains its interest rate target at 5.25% to 5.50%, keeping mortgage rates high, many hopeful homebuyers may be delaying purchasing homes in hopes of securing a lower rate at a later date or are priced out due to high listing costs.
“More members of the public are worried about housing affordability than has been the case in the past, and the biggest impact falls on renters because owners already have a mortgage rate locked in and their housing costs are mostly fixed,” Alex Horowitz, the project director for the Housing Policy Initiative at the Pew Charitable Trusts, said. “But renters are very susceptible to changes in housing costs.”
Among those in Generation Z who live on their own, 84% are renters, according to RentCafe. 
In April 2024, the average cost of rent nationwide in the United States was $1,997, according to the Zillow Observed Rent Index. In April 2020, rent was only $1,529, leading to a 30.61% increase by April 2024. In April 2016, rents were $1,314, marking just a 16.36% increase in the four-year period ahead of the 2020 election.
“Housing is, when you look at people's budget, often the single largest expenditure in household budgets,” Dan Hopkins, professor at the Ronald O. Perelman Center for Political Science and Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, said. “And so it's no surprise that people are paying a lot of attention to that issue.”
That's an obvious issue for Trump to drive home to voters as he argues people were better off during his 2017-21 term than the nearly 3 1/2 years of Biden's presidency that followed.
“Joe Biden has got to be hoping for six months of low inflation and strong economic growth, and I think, in the reverse, that the Trump campaign is going to do better as it can more clearly point to the Biden economy as a negative,” Hopkins said.
Here's how rising housing costs may play out in that trio of swing states where both candidates have already made multiple visits.
Arizona Phoenix saw its population grow 4% from 2020 to 2023 compared to a 1% increase nationwide in the same period, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
“Arizona has seen steeper rent increases than the rest of the U.S.,” Horowitz, who noted that the U.S. is short 4 million to 7 million homes, said. “Some of what’s going on is that they have seen residents move in in part because there aren’t enough homes in California, and so there’s been outmigration from California.”
However, this has caused Arizona to have some of the same problems that led to the outmigration from California: not enough housing to meet the demand from its influx of residents.
“That means that landlords are in a strong position to raise rents, and tenants have few options when their landlord proposes a rent,” Horowitz said.
In Arizona, 22% of voters said economic issues were their top concern, while another 4% said inflation and the cost of living were the top concern, according to a New York Times-Siena College poll conducted from April 28 to May 9, 2024.
“The share of renters who are considered cost-burdened, spending 30% or more of income on rent, has hit an all-time high,” Horowitz said. “So 50% of renters are spending 30% or more of income on rent, and that’s historically abnormal.”
Pennsylvania Recent polling shows that Pennsylvania should be very close, again. Trump won the Keystone State in 2016 — the first Republican nominee to do so since 1988. Then Biden nabbed it back in 2020.
“Pennsylvania is a state that is sometimes the tipping point state and often a very, very competitive state, partly because our demographics look like those of the nation as a whole,” Hopkins, the UPenn professor, said. If there's an issue that much of the country faces, "given that our demographics look a lot like a lot of the country, we're probably facing that issue, too.”
The average increase in rent in Pennsylvania was actually less than the national average from April 2020 to 2024, at 21.36%. Still, 22% of voters said economic issues were their top concern, while 7% said inflation and the cost of living were the top concern, per the New York Times-Siena College poll.
“For Biden to win Pennsylvania, I think the economy has to both be in reasonable shape and be perceived as being in reasonable shape,” Hopkins said. “And I think that one of the strategic challenges for the Biden campaign is going to be to talk about the economy in a way that both acknowledges some voters’ frustrations but also doesn't feed into and perpetuate a negative image of the economy, which could ultimately cost Biden.”
Michigan Michigan has traditionally been more affordable to buy than to rent. However, Detroit saw the biggest increase in rent prices nationwide in March 2024, up 1% month over month, according to Apartments.com. 
“Michigan overall has still more affordability than the other states. It's kind of in the middle of the pack,” Tony Doblas-Madrid, an associate professor of economics at Michigan State University, said. “The percent increase in rents in Michigan has been high” as rising interest rates have pushed first-time buyers to continue renting.
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Detroit saw an increase in rents month over month of 1.7% in April 2024, and its year-over-year increase remains the second highest nationwide, at 9.98%.
Throughout the state, 20% of voters said economic issues were their top concern, and 7% said inflation and the cost of living were the top concern, according to the New York Times-Siena College poll.
Memorial Day flags, and the upside-down Left Memorial Day flags, and the upside-down Left Hugo Gurdon On Memorial Day, the flag most people think about is the American flag, Old Glory, symbol of our nation. Whether it is a huge banner waving high in the soft breeze of early summer or one of the thousands of tiny replicas fluttering by gravestones at Arlington National Cemetery, it reminds us solemnly and respectfully of men and women who died serving in the military. 
Sadly and distastefully, the Democratic Party, which increasingly represents the forces of domestic anti-Americanism, wants us instead to look suspiciously at a picture of the national flag hanging upside down three years ago outside the home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.
Malevolent “progressives” allege, against all historical and circumstantial evidence, that the upside-down flag shows Alito supports former President Donald Trump and the Capitol rioters of Jan. 6, 2021. They argue from this that he should recuse himself from imminent decisions involving Trump’s right to immunity from prosecution.
Alito is one of six justices often identified as “conservative” but who should properly be thought of as originalist and textualist. This means he is one who interprets law according to what its words say rather than according to what he would prefer that they said. He wrote the 2022 Dobbs decision which, long past time, demolished the invented constitutional right to abortion.
Alito is thus the Left’s enemy No. 1. Or maybe he is No. 2, with Justice Clarence Thomas No. 1 because he committed the additional offense of being black. Enemies three, four, five, and six are the rest of the court’s 6-3 “conservative” majority.
They have been under sustained attack ever since Trump’s successful nomination of three of them created a majority that refuses to let the Supreme Court be used as an extraconstitutional legislature for items on the Left’s agenda that ordinary Americans don’t want, and the law doesn’t allow.
The Supreme Court has become what it was always supposed to be — a check and balance against overmighty executives and legislators trying to govern beyond the limits set by America’s founding document.
That is anathema to the Left, whose every agenda item works against America’s traditional values, most notably freedom. So, the Left is engaged in an all-out assault on the legitimacy of the court. It has resorted to the most picayune smears of a sort that would embarrass anyone capable of embarrassment.
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The point of the upside-down flag controversy, and of another flap over a flag dating back to the nation’s founding, is to undermine and delegitimize the judiciary and prevent it from fulfilling its proper constitutional role. If the Left can smear Supreme Court members, barrack them into recusing themselves from key cases, and erode public confidence in its decisions, Democrats calculate that they will be able to pass “reforms,” such as packing the bench with lefties. This would amount in practice to rewriting the Constitution for partisan and ideological purposes.
This Memorial Day weekend, all Americans should remember those who served the country, and also remember what those citizens fought for. They wore the uniform to protect a Constitution that checks power-hungry militants such as those now clamoring for the defenestration of conservative justices.
Mike Johnson keeps calm: Questions remain about governing a small and unruly GOP caucus Mike Johnson keeps calm: Questions remain about governing a small and unruly GOP caucus W. James Antle III “Like Saturn,” wrote the Genevan journalist Jacques Mallet du Pan, “the Revolution devours its own children.” For a few fateful weeks, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) looked like he was the next entree on the menu.
The House Republican majority was hanging by a thread. Johnson’s grasp on the speaker’s gavel looked just as tenuous. Republican lawmakers were clamoring for the 52–year-old’s ouster. “This is not personal against Mike Johnson,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) told reporters in March. “He’s a very good man. And I have respect for him as a person. But he is not doing the job.”
Although there was little indication that this was the majority sentiment within the House Republican Conference, it didn’t need to be. It took just eight Republicans to bring down the last speaker, paving the way for Johnson’s improbable ascent. But then, just as improbably, Johnson survived.
When the Washington Examiner met with Johnson in his office in mid-May, he was already looking to put the failed motion to vacate in the rearview mirror. “The first six months of my speakership, we had very difficult things to do, very complicated things, sometimes controversial things. But we had to get them done,” Johnson said. “We did. And now we turn the page, and in the next six months is a much easier agenda for us.”
“As is always the case in an election year, especially in a presidential election year, you move more into more legislation that does not have a good chance to become law, you know is referred to as messaging bills,” he continued. “There will be a lot of that. There will be issues that help show the contrast between our side and the other side. Those are things that unify our side and often divide the other.”
Johnson was quick to enumerate several examples of what he prefers to call “vision casting” rather than messaging. “There will be lots of votes on securing the border,” he said. “There will be lots of votes on confronting China. We’ll be dealing with this antisemitism scourge that has overtaken the land and pushing the White House to be more resolute with regard to foreign affairs.”
The speaker even allowed himself to look past November, contemplating a federal government under Republican control and headed by former — and, in his projection, future — President Donald Trump.
“We, of course, would like to tackle all the challenges from rising crime to rising cost of living to energy policy and all the rest,” Johnson said. “But we won’t have an opportunity until January, and I’m absolutely convinced that we will at that point. So, the remainder of the six months here will be preparing to govern. [For] when we do have unified government, and we have Trump in the White House, a Republican-led Senate, and a larger majority of the House.”
Johnson nevertheless realizes it will take more than “vision casting” to convince the electorate Republicans deserve this opportunity.
“But we have big challenges facing the country,” he told the Washington Examiner. “And you can make an argument we have the greatest collection of challenges of the modern era, maybe since World War II. Or maybe since the Civil War. Maybe they’re right. But we have to try breaking into the middle of that and showing the American people that we can be trusted to solve those problems.”
Some contentious battles do still lie ahead. The 2025 federal budget will test the bipartisan alliance that tabled the motion to vacate against Johnson, derided by critics as “the uniparty.” Democrats will want more spending and to find ways to hamstring a possible Trump administration in case the election doesn’t go their way. The more hawkish Republicans will want additional money for Ukraine and their other priorities.
Johnson is a soft-spoken, bespectacled man. The teetotaling Southern Baptist seems unfazed by the chaos around him, more than enough to drive anyone to drink. But occasionally, it is clear that he feels the weight of the moment. Johnson pointed to an op-ed by one of his predecessors, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. “He said Johnson has the most challenging speakership since the Civil War 160 years ago,” the current speaker said. Johnson said Gingrich told him in a telephone call he was “doing an excellent job, but the job is nearly impossible.”
“He made the point that he had 16 years to prepare to be speaker, to build the team, the agenda, the plan, and all that,” Johnson said. “He said I had about 15 minutes.”
Gingrich fought his way from the back benches, where he was a frequent thorn in the side of House leadership, to become minority whip. Even in that position, he led the conservative resistance to then-President George H.W. Bush’s promise-breaking tax increase in 1990. Gingrich leapfrogged the long-suffering House Minority Leader Bob Michel, who had labored in the minority since the 1950s, to become the first Republican speaker in 40 years.
John Boehner was part of the initial leadership team after the 1994 “Republican Revolution,” becoming conference chairman. He was soon booted in favor of JC Watts, a charismatic black Republican congressman from Oklahoma. Boehner had to climb all the way back up the ranks to become minority leader and then speaker.
Paul Ryan was a policy wonk much beloved by conservative magazines and think tanks. As chairman of the House Budget Committee, his “roadmaps,” later rebranded the Path to Prosperity, were thought to be the future of Republican entitlement reform. He won his dream job at the helm of the House Ways and Means Committee before he was pressed into a run for speaker.
Kevin McCarthy presided over unlikely House Republican gains in the 2020 elections that set the party up for a majority in the first midterm elections under President Joe Biden. While the anticipated “red wave” never fully materialized, McCarthy was a prodigious fundraiser who helped Republicans make gains in California that put them over the top. He fought through 15 ballots to become speaker.
For every one of them, it ended badly. Gingrich was eased out of the office after the 1998 midterm elections went poorly amid an unpopular impeachment drive. Boehner and Ryan both clashed with the Freedom Caucus, ultimately opting to leave Washington entirely. McCarthy was toppled as speaker after only eight months, in the first motion to vacate since 1910 and, at this writing, the only successful one.
Only Dennis Hastert managed to survive eight years as speaker and go out entirely on his own terms, though even under his watch, conservative discontent with high federal spending simmered. He later went to prison for reasons unrelated to his speakership. It was the “Hastert rule,” a requirement that only legislation with majority support from the GOP conference would be brought to the floor, that looked like it might be Johnson’s undoing. “If you start to rely on the minority to get the majority of your votes, then all of a sudden, you’re not running the shop anymore,” Hastert said in 2013.
The revolt against McCarthy was sparked by legislation that attracted substantial Republican opposition and more Democratic than Republican votes but still had the backing of most of the GOP conference. Johnson passed two bills — one to fund the government, the other to aid Ukraine in addition to Israel and Taiwan — that violated the “majority of the majority” standard. In both cases, an identical 101 Republicans voted for the measures, and 112 voted against.
The Ukraine aid was especially explosive. Greene and the “America First” faction of the House GOP had pledged not one more dime of funding for Kyiv in its war with Russia. The Republican Party is in the midst of an ideological and demographic transition, but Ukraine was a matter in which many lawmakers wanted to resist the populist tide. Johnson was seen as a leader who could thread the needle, a bridge between Ronald Reagan and Trump, but by passing the aid, Republican critics thought he had picked a side.
Johnson had voted against Ukraine aid previously. He explained that he wanted to press the White House on unanswered questions about transparency and the endgame for the war. By the time of this spring’s aid vote, he said some of those questions had been answered to his satisfaction, and Ukraine was running out of ammunition.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Greene spearheaded the motion to vacate resolution. But Republicans were weary after the protracted fight to replace McCarthy. None of the likeliest replacement options had been able to win a majority previously, and most were not unambiguously more conservative than Johnson.
House Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole (R-OK) told the Washington Examiner Johnson was “navigating a tricky situation well.” He believed even before the vacate vote that most Republicans did not want to go through the experience of replacing the speaker again based on the whims of a minority of the conference.
“They lived through that three-week period. They saw how damaging it was,” Cole said.
Trump also threw Johnson a lifeline. “Well, look, we have a majority of one, OK?” he told reporters. “It’s not like he can go and do whatever he wants to do. I think he’s a very good person. You know, he stood very strongly with me on NATO. ... I think he’s trying very hard.”
“I think he has strong support amongst most of the rank and file. Trump helps,” Republican strategist John Feehery, a former Hastert aide, said of Johnson. “That being said, you don’t want a majority of the majority to vote against you too often. It looks bad.”
Many of the conditions that allowed Johnson to become speaker in the first place, when the fourth-term congressman calmly waited out three other more prominent candidates, helped him keep it. He maintained his composure throughout the ordeal. But this time, House Democrats weren’t willing to abet the chaos, either. The House voted 359 to 43 to table the motion to vacate.
To Johnson’s critics, the vote signaled the Democrats held sway over the House.
“Vacating Kevin McCarthy was a huge mistake. Every Democrat voted to vacate him because he fought them tooth and nail,” Massie wrote on social media afterward. “Keeping Mike Johnson is an even bigger mistake. An overwhelming majority of [D]emocrats voted to keep him because he’s given them everything they want.”
The Blaze’s Christopher Bedford wrote that “after the foreign aid bill, [Johnson] is now effectively the head of a center-left coalition — one that’s promised to protect him from being ousted by his own colleagues.”
But the outcome also raised questions about the House conservatives’ strategy of trying to govern not just as the majority of the majority but as a minority faction extracting concessions from the majority by derailing legislation and threatening to turn the speaker’s chamber into a “revolving door.”
“Some of our members do want to use a government shutdown to force things,” Cole said. “I am not in that camp. I don’t think that ever works.”
Johnson, in his typically understated way, unloads a bit more.
“Some of my colleagues were adamant that we should just shut down the government, right?” he said. “That was the alternative. We had a binary choice. I inherited a budget deal from my predecessor that had a certain number, and there were sidecars or side deals. ... When it came to the proverbial four corners negotiation, they said that was binding on me, too. I fought [Biden] on that for five months, and I lost the battle.”
“So, at the end of the day, we came down to the deadline, and we either shut the government down or we fight for the most conservative policy provisions and wins that we could get and move forward,” he continued. “I chose that latter course because this is a very pragmatic calculation.”
Johnson argued that a shutdown “never works in favor of the party that brings it about.” Biden, whose Washington tenure dates back to the shutdowns that former President Bill Clinton exploited to return from the political dead and secure a second term in 1996, would likely view this scenario as an escape hatch for himself, too. 
“The president holds all the cards for how painful a shutdown can be,” Johnson said. “With Joe Biden being underwater as he is, being under 38% approval, he would have made it extremely painful immediately for the American people.” The Louisiana Republican floated unpaid TSA agents leading to canceled flights, stopped payments to military personnel or Border Patrol agents, and “then the blame for the open border is somehow shifted to House Republicans.”
“Some of my colleagues who gave me the most grief for not shutting the government down privately acknowledged to me that that scenario I just painted was true, but it simply wasn’t their personal problem,” he told the Washington Examiner. “Shutting down the government was a surefire way for us to lose the House majority and therefore not be in a position to save the republic.”
“Then, what you have to consider is that at some point, we would have to relent and reopen the government, but I have to get a vote to do that,” Johnson said. “Now, I had a subset of Republicans who conceded to me, ‘I will never vote with you to reopen the government because there is nothing pure enough for me that will justify my vote.’ So I know going in if I shut the government down, I’m gonna have to get probably a large number of Democrats to agree to reopen. Now, what price do you think we would have to pay to get Democrats to come alone to reopen the government and take the pain off of us?”  
In some cases, it comes down to strategic disagreements about what is possible with a razor-thin House majority and Democrats in control of both the Senate and the White House. But Johnson indicates that this isn’t the only problem.
“One of the problems that we have in the modern Congress, as I call it, is that there is a perverse incentive for people to get attention, and there’s an increasing ability to do so,” Johnson said. “Because of the advent of social media. You know, not that long ago, most of the rank and file did not have their own communications shops. You were lucky if you got a mention in your local paper. Those days are long since gone. With social media, everyone can have their own media operation and can go online every minute of every day to say the things that they’re disgruntled about.”
“If you want 100% of what you demand every single day, and you can’t get it, you have an automatic platform to go and complain about it,” he said. “It creates a perverse incentive for people to cause problems ... regardless of what it does for the team or the cause or the agenda.”
Johnson said most people run for Congress “for the right reasons,” because they feel called to government service and want to solve the country’s problems. “There is a small subset of people, however, who come to Congress to be famous,” he added. “They see this as a means to that end in order to build a personal brand and monetize it.”
Whether these fights exhausted the reservoir of goodwill that made Johnson speaker remains to be seen. Cole said Johnson was “the only one” who could have gotten the necessary votes at the time. The Oklahoman said he and the straitlaced speaker were different, noting his own penchant for bourbon and cigars while quipping Johnson “probably doesn’t know which end of the cigar to light,” but reiterating his strong support.
“I personally like the speaker. He is a true conservative in an impossible position,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), no relation, told the Washington Examiner. “I don’t agree with anyone 100% of the time.”
“We have a broad spectrum of opinion in our party,” the senator said. “Anyone in that position would find it difficult to govern.”
The Wisconsin Republican praised the speaker’s efforts to work and communicate with Senate Republicans. “We need to have far more collaboration,” he said, adding that GOP senators should be mindful of the small House majority. “We need to understand the challenges they face.” He additionally said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) bore more blame for Republicans’ suboptimal choices on the border and Ukraine than did the House speaker, contending McConnell undercut Johnson.
It is now likely up to the voters to decide whether Republicans get to keep wielding the gavel.
“The approval rating of Congress overall is abysmally low because people see dysfunction,” the speaker said. “They see the partisan bickering, and they see division.” Johnson added there were things more philosophical than leadership fights that ought to be a priority.
“I think the solution to that is to be able to articulate, with the right tone, not just what we’re against, but what we’re for,” he said. “We have to present a vision. You know, there’s a passage of Scripture that says, ‘Where there is no vision, the people perish.’” 
Johnson outlines what he calls “the seven core principles of American conservatism.” The list is a familiar one. “It’s individual freedom, limited government, the rule of law, peace through strength, fiscal responsibility, free markets, and human dignity,” he said. “There’s subcategories under each of those. But I think those are sort of the fixed points on the horizon, so to speak.” He said that would be helpful in a time when people “feel as though we’re adrift at sea, and the rudders are broken and the seas are high and choppy.”
“You have to know where the moorings are,” Johnson said. “And so, I often think about what Reagan reminded us in his farewell address. He said, ‘They call me the Great Communicator, but I really wasn’t.’ He said, I paraphrase him, I was communicating the same great things that have guided our nation since the founding.”
“The challenge we have right now, really at its essence, it’s not policy skirmishes,” he said. “We’re in an actual competition between two competing visions for America. Those of us who revere those founding principles and want to preserve them and another group, a rising number of people who have disdain for America’s founding principles.”
Johnson said any future speaker will likely confront the same challenges he has.
“I don’t foresee anytime soon here where you have a 30- or 35-seat majority,” Johnson said. “Because of gerrymandering and redistricting, the number of actual swing seats in the country has dwindled to a small number. It is anticipated for the days ahead that whomever is in the majority, it will be a small majority.”
“I optimistically think that we could grow our majority maybe to 10 to 15 seats this next cycle in a good scenario,” he said. “But that may be about as large as it will be.”
“I think that Donald Trump will have significant coattails in most of the states,” Johnson predicted. “Currently, as you know, he is leading in five of the key swing states. If that trajectory continues, and I hope it will, we will have a great election.”
“Our fate really comes down to the presidential election,” Cole said of the House majority.
If Republicans win the trifecta, Johnson can pitch himself as a Republican leader with a much better relationship with Trump than either Ryan or McConnell. He has visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago and attended his New York hush money trial. Johnson stresses what Reagan and Trump have in common, including the “Make America Great Again” catchphrase.
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“I told President Trump recently, ‘Sir, your next term, which I’m convinced you will have, you could be the most consequential president in the modern era because we have so many things to fix,” Johnson said.
For now, the House is a fixer-upper, too.
W. James Antle III is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
How Ireland fell out of love with Conor McGregor How Ireland fell out of love with Conor McGregor John Mac Glionn Conor McGregor hasn't competed professionally since July 2021 after suffering a leg break against Dustin Poirier. Very soon, though, the 35-year-old will return to the octagon. Or so we're told.
While his opponent, Michael Chandler, is busy training in the gym, McGregor can be found engaged in less-than-athletic pursuits — such as, say, drunkenly riding an ostrich. With a mere six weeks until fight night, one would expect a disciplined UFC training regimen — a regimen notably devoid of booze-fueled escapades. But alas, McGregor seems more inclined to revel in the spotlight, leveraging his fame to peddle whiskey and tout his various investments.
But here's where things get really interesting: There's no signed contract for this supposed June bout, a detail conveniently omitted from many reports. Beyond the spectacle lies a deeper narrative, one that resonates particularly strongly in McGregor's homeland of Ireland. Once hailed as a national hero, McGregor now embodies a different image — that of the drunken caricature, a stereotype that does little to uplift the Irish spirit. As an Irishman myself, I can't help but lament the tarnishing of McGregor's once-shining legacy. His recent exploits, marred by boozy antics and nasty altercations, have soured public opinion, transforming adoration into disdain.
Conor McGregor's character is marked by hubris. At a recent family bash, the ex-UFC champ recently was pictured posing in front of a quartet of Range Rovers. McGregor exudes an aura of unabashed arrogance, his very essence suffused with it. Swagger is not merely an accessory to his being; rather, it is intrinsic, a reflection of his core identity.
This defining trait helps explain the Dublin-born bruiser’s irresistible allure in the United States. American culture has a knack for elevating stars with an unwavering sense of self-assurance, shameless self-promotion, and larger-than-life personae. Whether in entertainment, sports, or politics, flaunters are more beloved in the States. Kim Kardashian is a superstar in the U.S. Back home, she would be laughed out of the room.
In Ireland, a starkly different ethos reigns. Here, humility and modesty are prized virtues, while excessive pride earns a quick slap on the wrist. Rooted in Ireland's history of communal bonds, acts of arrogance are seen as undermining the collective good, damaging the very fabric that holds society together. Ireland's storytelling tradition, sprinkled with humor, acts as a firewall, showcasing the idiocy of pride and emphasizing the value of modesty.
In this light, the scrutiny faced by another Irish icon, Bono of U2 fame, makes perfect sense. Despite his massive success, Bono's perceived sense of superiority and holier-than-thou attitude have rubbed his countrymen (and women) the wrong way, eclipsing his philanthropic deeds. This has been the case for many years.
Similarly, McGregor's brash persona and ballooning ego have dampened the glow of his achievements in mixed martial arts. His meteoric rise to fame has been fueled by a relentless pursuit of attention, often at the expense of sportsmanship and dignity. From hurling insults at opponents to assaulting members of the public, McGregor's antics have transcended mere showmanship, veering dangerously close to outright thuggery. Moreover, his public persona is riddled with contradictions. Despite presenting himself as a champion of Irish pride and heritage and often draping himself in the country’s flag, his actions demonstrate a shallow understanding of his own culture. McGregor's caricatured displays of Irishness serve only to perpetuate harmful stereotypes and commodify a rich and complex heritage for personal gain. The fighter's journey serves as a stark reminder of the fleeting nature of stardom and riches. While his swagger might keep Americans hooked, back home in Ireland, it's met with a knowing smirk — a testament to a culture that, to this very day, values humility above all. 
In the pages of Irish mythology and folklore, hubris takes center stage, embodied in the tragic exploits of legends like Cu Chulainn and Fionn mac Cumhaill. Their tales, rife with fatal refusals to heed warnings and reckless quests for wisdom, serve as wake-up calls against the dangers of unchecked ego and hastiness. Literary giants such as J.M. Synge and W.B. Yeats also tango with hubris and humility in their works, offering deep insights into the human psyche. Through the struggles of their characters with pride and folly, they shed light on the perils of excessive self-regard and the redemptive power of humility.
If he's got a minute in between squaring off with rappers and using ostriches as Ubers, McGregor might want to crack open the works of these literary giants.
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John Mac Ghlionn is an essayist and regularly contributes to Newsweek and the New York Post. Follow him on X, @ghlionn
In some states, breaking the law is still illegal In some states, breaking the law is still illegal Conn Carroll If you think it might be demoralizing to be a police officer in a city where the district attorney doesn’t prosecute criminals and the mayor cuts your department’s budget to give welfare to illegal immigrants, you’re right … and the sheriff of Laramie County, Wyoming, is looking to capitalize.
Elected on a campaign promise to “address disproportionate incarceration of people of color” in 2016, Denver District Attorney Beth McCann has since established herself as one of the softest-on-crime district attorneys in the country. 
Violent crime was already rising when McCann took office, but it has only gotten worse since she made equity, not security, the top priority of her office. According to FBI data, no city larger than 500,000 people has seen a faster rise in violent crime over the last decade than Denver. 
Adding insult to injury, as President Joe Biden has flooded the nation with illegal immigrants through his catch-and-release border policies, Denver has been forced to make $41 million in cuts to provide the housing, food, healthcare, and education these immigrants need. Those $41 million in cuts include an $8.4 million cut to the police department.
Enter Laramie County Sheriff Brian Kozak, who spent $2,500 on a billboard in downtown Denver reading “Work in Wyoming where breaking the law is still illegal and cops are funded.”
“One of the things is you get to do your job here. So, you get to enforce the laws here,” Kozak told Fox 31 in Denver. “We try to look where officers are not happy with the political environment, and we try to promote our culture here in Wyoming where it’s more of a conservative area. Like I said, the community supports law enforcement.”
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Denver Mayor Mike Johnson can’t deny that Biden’s migrant crisis has forced him to cut police funding, but he strongly objected to Kozak’s billboard. “To say that Denver is ‘defunding the police’ is a willful mischaracterization of the budget reductions,” his office told Fox 31.
For his part, Kozak says the billboard is working. Despite lower pay, Kozak says they have already received 40 new applications from Denver law enforcement in response to the ad.
Political party crashers Political party crashers Ben Jacobs
Political parties in the United States were once real organizations. They were the vehicle that funneled people into political engagement and served as the forum to iron out policy disagreements and set governing priorities. Those days are as obsolete as the torchlight parades that the early Republican Party held throughout the country to rally support for Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Instead, the parties now exist mostly as mere legal vehicles that allow politicians to move money around and obtain ballot access. In their new book, The Hollow Parties, Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld try to diagnose how this happened and figure out what can be done to make political parties, if not great again, simply meaningful again.
The book serves as both a history of American political parties and an argument that their deterioration has done untold damage to the U.S., particularly that of the Republican Party. It mourns that both parties have become hollow, which is defined as “distinctive combination of activity and incapacity manifesting themselves across multiple dimensions.” Instead of being “real political actors with particular claims and commitments,” they simply function as “mere abstract markers of identity.”
Although both Schlozman and Rosenfeld are self-professed “left liberals” (as tenured professors of political science at prestigious universities, this is close to a statistical certainty), they offer an interesting and nuanced perspective on how the GOP has become the party of Donald Trump in recent years. For them, the path to Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party began in the 1970s with the rise of the New Right, which systematically usurped the functions of the Republican National Committee and left the national party a mere vessel for activists. The authors look back to the late 1960s as a model for the Republican Party, when former RNC Chairman Ray Bliss used the techniques he mastered organizing the stolid conservative burghers of his native Ohio to help elect Richard Nixon and whittle away at Democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress. This contrasts with the decentralized politics of the Right at present, where outside organizations increasingly take over the functions of the party and well-funded outside groups like Turning Point USA and Club for Growth increasingly take on the roles once reserved for party leaders.
The trend is by no means limited to Republicans. Democrats have drifted into a similar crisis with the rise in influence of “the groups,” the array of single-issue advocacy organizations that have emphasized the priorities of the white college-educated liberals who have become a vital part of the Democratic base. The result, Schlozman and Rosenfeld argue, is that “the politics of work and wages has continued to get short shrift relative to the cultural and political-reform initiatives that capture donors’ imaginations.”
The question of course is why anyone should care. After all, whether voter registration is handled by Turning Point USA or the RNC seems to be a trivia item for the small minority of political obsessives and Washington insiders who know operatives by name and read Politico Playbook over their morning coffee. But there is a real difference between an America with strong political parties and one without them. In part, it is that party organizations have some level of democratic accountability. The current system almost entirely severs the connection the ordinary party member (and primary voter) has with the national party. After all, someone did elect Lara Trump, unlike Charlie Kirk. Even in the heyday of political bosses, there was at least a veneer of democratic legitimacy. Boss Tweed or Mayor Daley had to make sure that aspiring city workers got jobs, loyal voters got Thanksgiving turkeys, and potholes were fixed. As corrupt as an old-fashioned machine was, it depended on more than the largesse of donors. A local precinct chair has a hard but not impossible time influencing the national party but has no say with an outside group at all. 
Schlozman and Rosenfeld show no nostalgia for the machine era of politics, but they do see sprigs of promise on the horizon. In particular, they laud the Nevada Democratic Party, which, under the leadership of the late Harry Reid, became a formidable political machine that combined full-time professional operatives with the organizing powers of the Culinary Workers Union in Las Vegas. Yet even here, there is a note of caution over the two years between 2021-2023 when far-left acolytes of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) briefly took over the Nevada Democratic Party and the Reid Machine had to set up an operation in exile. After all, any level of democratic accountability inherently leads to a certain amount of messiness. 
But that messiness also builds a community. Political parties serve important roles at local and state levels, and revitalizing those functions leads to better, more rational politics. They empower the activists who are concerned about recruiting state legislative candidates and putting on soup suppers rather than those who sit in front of cable news incessantly and use small-dollar donations as an emotional outlet rather than a rational investment. Thriving political parties diminish the role of big donors motivated by ideological whim or self-interest and the operative class that profits off of them. Rejuvenating the parties would give more influence to average people in both parties who want to achieve concrete political goals in their city and their state. Not even the authors of The Hollow Parties would make the case that robust political parties would magically cure all of the ailments plaguing American democracy in the 2020s. But in a moment when the misconception that there are two overly powerful political parties is too broadly held, their book does provide a convincing and detailed counterargument that stronger parties would lead to a stronger political system.
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Ben Jacobs is a political reporter in Washington, D.C.
Nebraska Electoral College vote a key brick in Biden’s needed blue wall Nebraska Electoral College vote a key brick in Biden’s needed blue wall David Mark OMAHA, Nebraska — The road to President Joe Biden’s reelection bid runs through ... deep-red Nebraska?
It may sound strange, considering the Midwestern state last backed a Democratic presidential candidate in 1964. And former President Donald Trump in 2020, losing the White House to Biden, still romped to victory in the Cornhusker State 59% to 39%.
Yet a confluence of Electoral College math oddities and Nebraska’s status as a rare state where the winner doesn’t necessarily take all in presidential elections means Biden has to win in a greater Omaha congressional district to avoid a first-ever Electoral College tie at 269-269.
That’s a plausible scenario if Biden does well but not spectacularly in winning key swing states. Specifically, if he wins Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, the vaunted “blue wall” trio that went Democratic six straight times from 1992 to 2012, but loses other swing states like Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina, he and Trump would end up tied at 269 electoral votes apiece. The race would be decided by the House of Representatives in a contingent election.
This is a shift in Electoral College math from even four years ago. Back then, winning the three “blue wall” states would have been enough to give Biden a second term.
What changed? Reapportionment among states over how many congressional districts each gets. And that affects where votes lie in the Electoral College.
After the 2020 census, due to population growth, Texas gained two House seats. Gaining one House seat were Colorado, Florida, Montana, Oregon, and North Carolina. Other states grew slowly over the decade leading up to the 2020 national population count or, in some cases, outright lost population. So, losing one House seat each were California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.
The House seat and, by extension, Electoral College gains largely went to states that backed Trump over Biden, and losses were heavier in blue areas. Without a single 2024 general election vote cast yet, Biden’s 306-232 win over Trump is reduced by three, to 303-235.
Nebraska’s proportional electors The dicier Electoral College math for Biden now is forcing his campaign to look at Nebraska as a possible tiebreaker since Nebraska is one of two states, along with Maine, to allocate its electors proportionally. Nebraska doles out two of its five electoral votes based on the statewide winner — sure to be Trump again. But who the other three go to depends on which presidential candidate wins those congressional districts.
Two Nebraska House seats are safely Republican. But the Omaha-based 2nd Congressional District is very much in play. In fact, Biden in 2020 won the district 52.2% to 46.8% — and that single electoral vote. This had happened once before, in 2008, when Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama (with Biden as his running mate) won the 2nd Congressional District.
The single Nebraska seat that’s winnable for Team Biden is on its political radar. Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, the husband of Vice President Kamala Harris, visited Omaha on March 19. Emhoff talked up Biden’s record and said things were “terrible” during Trump’s administration.
“We have to win,” he told attendees at an Omaha campaign rally. “We have no choice if you care about this country, you care about freedom, and you care about democracy.”
But some Republicans and MAGAworld figures have also taken notice of the possible make-or-break status of Nebraska’s electoral votes for the presidential campaign. Gov. Jim Pillen (R-NE) recently called on state legislators to take steps that would implement a winner-take-all system. Republicans, in control of Nebraska’s unicameral legislature, rejected that proposal during the spring legislative session.
Pillen has said he could call state lawmakers back into a special legislative session if there are enough votes to change the electoral system.
“I look forward to partnering with legislative leaders to [move] it forward in a special session, when there is sufficient support in the Legislature to pass it,” Pillen posted on X on April 10. “I will sign [winner-take-all] into law the moment the Legislature gets it to my desk.”
It’s also a matter MAGA activist Charlie Kirk has emphasized on his podcast, even traveling to Nebraska to hold an April 9 rally aimed at pressuring GOP lawmakers.
“Nebraska could pick a president,” Kirk said at the rally. “You better believe that that message is being heard in the Capitol.”
Though Democrats do have a political insurance policy of their own, halfway across the country in Maine. The Pine Tree State in presidential elections is safely Democratic statewide. Yet one of its two House districts tends to go the other way. Trump won the sprawling northern Maine 2nd Congressional District in 2016 and 2020.
In Maine’s capital of Augusta, Democrats have full control of state government, holding the governorship and both chambers of the legislature. If Nebraska changes its Electoral College rules to winner-take-all to help Trump, Maine will try to do the same to counteract that impact, Maine’s state House majority leader said in an April 26 statement.
“Voters in Maine and voters in Maine’s 2nd congressional district value their independence, but they also value fairness and playing by the rules,” Democratic state Rep. Maureen Terry said. “If Nebraska’s Republican governor and Republican-controlled Legislature were to change their electoral system this late in the cycle to unfairly award Donald Trump an additional electoral vote, I think the Maine Legislature would be compelled to act in order to restore fairness to our country’s electoral system. It is my hope and the hope of my colleagues in Maine that the Nebraska Republican Party decides not to make this desperate and ill-fated attempt to sway the 2024 election.”
Competitive House race, too The growing focus on Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District in presidential politics inevitably raises its stake in the fight for House control. Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) first won the seat in 2016 by beating a Democratic incumbent. Bacon is among 18 House Republicans in districts that would have been won by Biden four years ago, compared to only five Democrats in the inverse situation, holding seats where Trump would have prevailed.
Bacon faces a rematch against Democratic state Sen. Tony Vargas. Bacon won 50.8% to 48.6%. But the political playing field figures to be different in a presidential year, particularly with the Biden campaign likely to pay a lot of attention to the 2nd Congressional District.
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Bacon has carved out a center-right profile in the House. He was a strong proponent of the military aid package for Ukraine that eventually became law but faced strong resistance from MAGA-style lawmakers such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). First elected in 2016 after a military career in the Air Force, Bacon previously pushed for a pathway to citizenship for young immigrants brought to the country illegally by their parents. In December 2020, he was one of just seven House Republicans to vote with Democrats to continue the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which protects young immigrants.
That approach makes sense politically in the 2nd Congressional District, which has a significant Latino population. It’s a political recipe for more attention being paid by Team Biden to Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District. Which will, in turn, likely ratchet up efforts by Trump’s campaign to ensure Omaha-area voters return to the Republican fold for the first time since 2016.
Three’s a crowd: One way history shows RFK Jr.’s popularity spells doom for Biden Three’s a crowd: One way history shows RFK Jr.’s popularity spells doom for Biden Max Thornberry President Joe Biden looks nervous about what effect Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is having on his chances for reelection. When he threw down the gauntlet to offer terms of debate to former President Donald Trump, he made it clear he wanted to keep the insurgent independent as far away from the debate stage as possible. 
For his part, Trump was happy to oblige, agreeing to Biden’s demand that their battle of wits be a “head-to-head comparison of the two candidates with a chance of winning the election.” 
It’s difficult to tell whom Kennedy is hurting more on his trek around the country in search of ballot access in all 50 states. He’s only secured ballot access in Utah, though his campaign has claimed he’s qualified for several others. 
Kennedy’s polling is sporadic. It’s difficult to gauge how he is doing in important contests where he isn’t guaranteed ballot access. With history as a helpful but imperfect guide, it’s clear popular insurgents have hurt the incumbent party more than the challenger.
It doesn’t take massive victories for rogue candidates to have outsize effects on presidential contests. In three contests in particular, it’s clear that when a third-party candidate received as little as 3% of the vote, he managed to make the contest a referendum on the incumbent and his party to a greater degree than any reelection contest already is. 
William H. Taft  Kennedy didn’t make it as far into the primary contest as Theodore Roosevelt. In 1912, Roosevelt challenged his one-time protege William H. Taft for the Republican Party’s nomination. In 2024, Kennedy barely made it out of the opening days as a Democratic challenger to Biden before switching parties. 
Taft had the awkward task of rejecting a primary contest being launched by his predecessor. Roosevelt was waging a campaign to pull the Republican Party to the left and had all of the grandeur of his time in office to provide his fight with Taft extra heft. 
Kennedy doesn’t have the same governing experience Roosevelt offered, but he’s already mounted an unsuccessful bid to challenge Biden from within the party before leaving it to start his own. His nascent We the People Party was built up to make it easier to gain ballot access in California, Delaware, Hawaii, Mississippi, and North Carolina. 
Roosevelt was a far more effective challenger than Kennedy is shaping up to be. Following the defeat at the convention, his Bull Moose Party carried out a brutal attack on Taft, driving him off the campaign trail and onto the golf links. The rest of the 1912 contest was between Roosevelt and Wilson, with Taft only winning eight Electoral College votes to Roosevelt's 88 and Wilson’s 435. 
Hubert Humphrey Democrats were going to struggle to hold on to the White House in 1968 even before George Wallace mounted his American Independent Party bid with a plea to “stand up for America.” 
Discontent with the prolonged conflict in Vietnam, the political assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and a chaotic Democratic National Convention in Chicago paved the way for Richard Nixon to make his comeback from political loser to world leader. 
Political violence on the scale of 1968 is missing in 2024, but Biden is struggling to reassure the country he is the man to handle conflicts around the globe. After showing robust support for Ukraine and Israel in their wars of encroachment against Russia and Hamas, respectively, the Biden administration is struggling to tell voters the conflicts have an end in sight or that it can shepherd the world toward resolutions. 
Trump is shaking off his own reputation as a political loser and could make Republicans forget all about the series of losses the party has had since he upset Hillary Clinton in 2016. 
Like Trump today, Nixon walked through most of the 1968 contest with a comfortable lead over Humphrey. 
However, Nixon’s comfortable lead shrunk on Election Day. The reliably Democratic South wasn’t ready to line up behind him, and six states couldn’t stomach giving the Kennedy-Johnson-Humphrey line of succession another four years. 
Wallace always intended to play spoiler, taking just enough votes to deny either major candidate enough support to win outright and throw the election to the House. Instead of splitting the electorate, Wallace split the South with Nixon. He won 46 Electoral College votes, holding the three states his segregationist forerunner Strom Thurmond won in 1948, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, while picking up Georgia and Arkansas. 
Nixon’s landslide victory was still four years away. In 1968, Wallace siphoned off enough votes from Humphrey in the South to make the popular vote a close contest with just 43% of voters nationwide backing the Republican. But that chaos in the country and at the ballot box left Nixon with 301 Electoral College votes to Humphrey’s 191 and temporarily repaired his reputation. 
George H.W. Bush Unlike Ross Perot, a successful businessman who mounted the most successful third-party challenge in modern history, Kennedy isn’t independently wealthy, but he has recruited a vice presidential candidate who has enough money to bankroll their attempt to play spoiler. 
Biden has faced many of the same challenges and controversies Bush had to contend with during his sluggish reelection campaign in 1992. Like Bush, Biden has an economy that is doing better than voters seem to recognize, is facing repeated questions about his health and vigor as a candidate, and has even had a problem with checking his watch at a less-than-opportune time. 
With independent funding taken care of, Kennedy’s next step is to mimic Perot’s success in finding his way onto the debate stage with Trump and Biden. No third-party candidate before or since Perot has been allowed to go toe-to-toe with the major party representatives, and with the Commission on Presidential Debates getting pushed to the sidelines, it looks as if Kennedy won’t be in a position to make history. 
Perot, like Roosevelt and Wallace before him, had a much larger impact on the candidate in the party he most closely aligned with. Despite Trump’s initially warm reception of Kennedy, vaccine skepticism, and the penchant for conspiracy theorizing Trump and Kennedy share, it’s clear the former Democrat looks more like Biden on paper than the former president. 
In 1992, a low-energy Bush fell victim to an energized third-party candidate who insisted his followers help put him on the ballot in all 50 states and a talented major party challenger who overcame myriad personal foibles to bump the steady hand out of office. 
In the end, Perot had less success in the Electoral College than Wallace two decades earlier, but he won an incredible 19% of the vote, the most since Roosevelt in 1912. Bush wound up wounded, limping across the finish line and handing Clinton an apparent mandate with a 370-168 Electoral College rout. 
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Bad news for Biden While Biden, Taft, Humphrey, and Bush all would have preferred to remind voters why they should return them or their party to power, they were each forced to deal with the uneasy fact that all was so unwell under their regimes that new challengers enjoyed a groundswell of support. 
As much as Biden wants to make his last campaign a referendum on how Trump performed four years ago, Kennedy’s continued presence will serve as a reminder to voters that all is not well in the United States. It might even be as bad as Biden says it is. 
When White House communicators clash: Karine Jean-Pierre and John Kirby are the latest in a tradition of tensions When White House communicators clash: Karine Jean-Pierre and John Kirby are the latest in a tradition of tensions Tevi Troy
A great deal has been written this year about the tensions between White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and White House national security communications adviser John Kirby. Their uneasy relationship reflects a host of internal and external expressions of doubt about Jean-Pierre’s lackluster performance, internal disagreements about whether to support Israel, and legitimate confusion about the odd division of responsibilities between the two. Typical of internal White House conflicts, the personal tensions also reveal larger dynamics buffeting the troubled Biden team.
Jean-Pierre took over from the generally well-regarded Jen Psaki in May of 2022. Kirby was spokesman at the National Security Council before getting an expanded role as deputy White House press secretary in February of this year. Between the two, Kirby is the far more experienced communicator, having served twice as Pentagon spokesman and also as spokesman for the State Department. In the diversity, equity, and inclusion-focused Biden administration, however, Kirby suffers from the affliction of being a cis white male. Following the brutal Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, Kirby has shared the podium with Jean-Pierre on national security matters, something that Jean-Pierre, who reportedly is “pretty aggressive about marking her territory,” apparently resents. According to one source, “Sometimes, he talks to her and she acts as if he is not talking.”
Using Kirby for briefings related to national security makes sense. “When Karine has to, you know, talk about the things that usually John Kirby talks about, it's not as strong as when she talks about things that are more in her wheelhouse — political messaging, for instance,” Fox News White House reporter Jacqui Heinrich said. 
Heinrich was being diplomatic. Even before Oct. 7, it was noticeable that Jean-Pierre did not internalize her briefing books. This became inarguable when compared to the smooth and skillful Kirby. According to a source who spoke to the New York Post about the situation, “Karine doesn’t have an understanding of the issues and she reads the book [binder] word-for-word.” That source also noted that “she doesn’t have a grasp of the issues and doesn’t spend the time to learn.” What makes things worse is that she apparently is unaware of her limitations. Despite all of the negative reports about her, “she thinks she’s doing an amazing job.”
The situation became more complicated in April, when the New York Post reported about a plot hatched by senior adviser Anita Dunn to encourage Jean-Pierre to decamp to a soft landing at the abortion-rights group EMILYs List. The plot, which had the support of White House chief of staff Jeff Zients, failed when Jean-Pierre refused to depart and said she was not interested in the job. Dunn, who has been described as the “de facto White House communications chief,” has a long history of taking on tough assignments for Democratic presidents. In the Obama administration, Dunn was in charge of the administration’s war on Rupert Murdoch and Fox News, telling the New York Times's Brian Stelter about the network that “we’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent.” That campaign was so aggressive that even a generally sympathetic reporter like Stelter called it “unusual.” Dunn also ran President Joe Biden’s debate preparations in the 2020 presidential campaign.
Despite Dunn’s pedigree and the respect she has in Democratic circles, she has thus far failed to resolve the Jean-Pierre situation. One of the reasons for this is that the White House is reportedly unwilling to take aggressive action against Jean-Pierre, who is black, female, and gay. As a source told the New York Post, “There’s a huge diversity issue, and they’re afraid of what folks are going to say.”
Of course, it’s not fair to lay Biden’s many difficulties at the feet of his press secretary. Political problems for an administration usually start at the top and stem from a host of things. As Dana Perino, a former press secretary for George W. Bush, said of the Biden team’s challenges in 2022, “It’s not a communications problem. They have a policy problem.” Still, having a suboptimal communicator who is feuding with her colleagues does not help. 
White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates, of course, denies that there is a problem at all. But there is ample reason to doubt his take. Fox News reporter Peter Doocy has reported that a “high-ranking person” has said the tensions between Jean-Pierre and Kirby are “absolutely true.”
What’s also true is that we have seen communicators clash in the White House in the past. Press secretary is a high-profile job, and presidents can’t succeed if they don’t have representatives who are successful in that role. In addition, the White House can be a snake pit, and rivalries can upend many a career, not to mention a presidency. Furthermore, the overlapping roles and responsibilities between the White House press secretary and communications director can often lead to conflict.
Looking back at history reveals that full-time communicators in the White House are a relatively new development. The White House did not have a full-time press secretary until Stephen Early in the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, and the role of White House communications director did not come into being until Herb Klein originated the job at the start of the Nixon administration.
After Nixon resigned, Gerald Ford took over, but there were significant tensions between the Nixon holdovers and the new Ford team. C-SPAN's Brian Lamb, then a key member of the Ford transition, recommended that Ford replace Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler, who had major credibility problems after defending Nixon during the scandal. His suggested replacement was Detroit News Washington bureau chief Jerald terHorst. 
Two problems quickly emerged. The first was that, according to Ford biographer Richard Norton Smith, terHorst was “ill-prepared” for the challenging job of press secretary. The second was that terHorst falsely, but unknowingly, told the press there was no pardon in the works for Nixon when in fact there was — terHorst resigned in the wake of the pardon, ostensibly because he objected to the decision. In reality, his lack of preparation and the loss of credibility from the unintended falsehood, for which he apologized, meant that his position was unsustainable. He was philosophical about the amount of conflict he witnessed during his brief tenure, observing that “to expect no frictions, uneasiness, or distrust in such a situation is to defy the psychological dynamics of the human personality.”
Replacing terHorst was Ron Nessen, also a journalist, who had previously been an NBC News correspondent. Nessen also encountered a lot of conflict as press secretary, recalling, “I tried to stay out of the never-ending staff feuds. But that was not possible.” Still, he managed to remain in his position until the end of the Ford administration and even represented the administration as a guest host of Saturday Night Live on April 17, 1976.
A different dynamic was at play in the Carter administration. Jody Powell served as press secretary, and Gerald Rafshoon served as the communications director. Both were in the so-called Georgia Mafia of aides who came with Jimmy Carter to Washington, and the two men had been friends since 1970. Powell was unbothered by Rafshoon taking the communications director position. Powell saw the need for a long-term communications planner, even if it seemingly took away some responsibilities from Powell. As press secretary, Powell’s time was occupied with the daily crush of dealing with the White House press corps.
The challenge that Powell and Rafshoon encountered was Carter himself. The president was thin-skinned and could be nasty to reporters. At the end of the 1976 campaign, Boston Globe campaign correspondent Curtis Wilkie offered Carter a cheeky congratulations on his narrow victory. Carter snapped at him, “If it weren’t for people like you, this election would have been over at 9 o’clock last night.” 
As president, Carter disliked the White House press corps, calling it in his diary “completely irresponsible and unnecessarily abusive.” When Rafshoon wanted Carter to attend the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 1978, Carter refused, saying, “Why should I spend all this time to prepare jokes to entertain your and Jody’s friends?” Powell handled the rejection with aplomb, appearing at the dinner instead of his boss and joking that Carter “wanted me to express his regrets. Unfortunately, time does not permit me to say all the things that are regrettable about the White House correspondents.” Still, Carter’s attitude made things harder for both Powell and Rafshoon — and did not really help Carter, either. He was soundly defeated for reelection by Ronald Reagan.
The Reagan administration had a very talented and successful communications apparatus. At the same time, there was tension between the press office and David Gergen, the communications director. Gergen had a reputation as a leaker and even earned the nickname “Professor Leaky” for his suspected frequent interactions with the press. The Reagan administration itself was a leaky administration, starting at the top with chief of staff James Baker, who was a terrific chief of staff but also a notorious leaker. The leaking was so rampant that even the president himself complained about it, telling aides in 1983 that “I've had it up to my keister with these leaks.” In a great irony, the New York Times reported that the keister “comment was given out by David R. Gergen, the White House director of communications.”
As for Gergen, dislike of him went beyond just grumbles about his leaking. Larry Speakes, who served as acting press secretary for much of the Reagan administration, was one of many who tried to undermine him. Speakes was “acting” press secretary for so long because press secretary Jim Brady was shot in the 1981 assassination attempt against Reagan and retained the title even as he was no longer capable of serving in the role. According to Speakes, Gergen wanted to take over for Brady and Speakes did not want him to. As a result, the two men and their teams engaged in what Speakes called “guerilla warfare” against one another.
From the Gergen side, he would undercut Speakes to Baker, telling the chief that “Speakes didn't get this quite right.” Gergen would also send an underling to stand in the back during Speakes’s briefings to report back on what Speakes was saying. Speakes confronted the underling and told him, “If you want to come to the briefings, you’re perfectly welcome. Why don’t you just stand up front with the rest of the staff?” Following that exchange, the active monitoring stopped.
Speakes also retaliated against Gergen with nicknames, jokes, and pranks. Gergen was quite tall, standing 6 feet, 4 inches, and Speakes dubbed him “the Tall Man,” which he later shortened to just “Tall.” Speakes also made jokes about Gergen’s height, along the lines of “Gergen had been kidnapped as a child and raised by giraffes.” Before Gergen would go brief the press, Speakes would have his aide Mark Weinberg set the White House podium to its lowest height and tighten the setting so it couldn’t be easily adjusted upward. The result, according to Speakes, was that “Gergen would go in and tower over it like Ichabod Crane. He never was able to figure out why the podium struck him well below the waist.”
Eventually, Gergen’s leaking became so problematic that Baker told him he had to go elsewhere. He ended up at U.S. News and World Report, and press aide Marlin Fitzwater noted archly in his memoir that it was a “perfect perch” for him. Speakes won the interaction in the short term, but Gergen would go on to fame and fortune as a pundit. He would also have another contentious White House stint, later in the Clinton White House.
When Gergen joined the Clinton team, the inexperienced administration was in turmoil. There had not been a Democratic administration in 12 years, and the Clinton administration was loathe to take veterans of the failed Carter administration. As a result, the newbies floundered amid failed Cabinet nominations, unnecessary scandals, and poorly handled controversies. According to Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers, “There was a piece in I believe the New York Times that basically said this would be a failed presidency — you know, 10 days into Bill Clinton’s first term.” By the spring of his first year, Clinton was ready for a change, and with the encouragement of chief of staff Mack McLarty, he brought in White House veteran Gergen to be the adult in the room.
Gergen was indeed a mature veteran and a skilled operative, but he also remained a notorious leaker. (Old habits die hard.) He also made an enemy in George Stephanopoulos, who remained in the administration but lost his role of briefing the press as Gergen replaced him in the daily exchanges. Stephanopoulos also disliked Gergen’s leaking and estimated that Gergen was the source for about a quarter of the stories about the administration’s foreign policy troubles. Gergen’s leaking also alienated Clinton national security adviser Tony Lake. With these enemies in powerful places, and with his patron McLarty exiting the chief of staff role, Gergen left the White House for the State Department in June of 1994, 13 months after his arrival.
As for Myers, she faced her own challenge when Leon Panetta took over as chief of staff shortly after Gergen’s departure. Panetta was concerned about Myers’s performance as press secretary since, according to the Washington Post, “on numerous occasions, Myers was sent out to brief reporters with information that turned out to be erroneous or incomplete and then drew sharp criticism for her performance.” In a situation similar to the current Jean-Pierre contretemps, Panetta wanted to let her go but was unable to succeed because of the optics of getting rid of a female press secretary. Myers even used the controversy to earn herself a promotion from deputy assistant to assistant to the president, snagging a prized West Wing corner office in the process. She would eventually leave the administration, apparently on her own terms, at the end of 1994.
One press secretary who was successfully pushed out by an incoming chief of staff was Scott McClellan under George W. Bush. When Josh Bolten took over for Andy Card in 2006, he made a number of changes in the White House, most prominently bringing in Tony Snow to replace McClellan as Bush’s spokesman. NPR’s Don Gonyea reported that McClellan had seemed “a bit weary, a bit embattled,” largely because of altercations with the press about the leak of the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame and the failed Supreme Court nomination of White House counsel Harriet Miers. Bolten wanted a change at the podium and got it. As he later told C-SPAN's Lamb about McClellan, “I fired him. And he hasn’t made any bones about that. I haven’t made any bones about that.”
Unfortunately for Bolten and the Bush administration, the story did not end there. McClellan wrote a tale-telling memoir that was critical of the Bush administration, accusing Bush of not knowing all the facts before ordering the 2003 Iraq invasion. McClellan’s book prompted a strong response from his former colleagues, including Dan Bartlett, who called the accusations “misguided” and said McClellan “would not ... have [had] access to the types of meetings and deliberations that the president participated in.”
Two other embattled White House communicators who left and later wrote books about their experiences were Sean Spicer and Anthony Scaramucci under former President Donald Trump. Spicer was press secretary from Day One of Trump’s administration and started off on the wrong foot with the press over his assertions about the size of the crowds at the Trump inauguration. His tenure was a difficult one, punctuated by a brutal impersonation of him by Melissa McCarthy on Saturday Night Live. In addition to the press secretary job, Spicer also held the role of communications director, which was responsible for stopping leaks — an uphill battle in the constantly leaking Trump White House. In one meeting, Spicer demanded to see White House aides’ phones to see who was leaking. Unsurprisingly, that tidbit leaked to the press as well.
To improve the administration’s press and try to stop the leaking, Trump brought in Scaramucci, “the Mooch,” as communications director in July of 2017. The brash Scaramucci impressed Trump with his TV appearances defending the administration and pledged to take charge of the communications apparatus. Spicer, unhappy at losing the communications director role and at the prospect of having to report to Scaramucci, resigned. Scaramucci then left 11 days later, after an expletive-laden rant to a New Yorker reporter that Scaramucci had failed to make clear was off the record.
The tumultuous early period was only a preview of the communications shop problems inside the Trump administration. Trump would cycle through six communications directors and four press secretaries during his single term. None of them, unsurprisingly, were able to get the leaks under control.
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When it comes to White House communications aides, they best serve the president if they manage the news rather than make it. As veteran Washington reporter Mark Leibovich has observed, “There’s a bit of a ‘If-No-One-Remembers-the-Referee’s-Name-He’s-Probably-Doing-his-Job’ factor in assessing a press secretary.” In all of the controversies outlined above, the infighting among the communicators made headlines while making the administration’s job harder.
What all this means for the Biden administration is that intracommunication conflict usually stems from fundamental administration challenges. Some of those challenges in previous administrations have included an inadequate press secretary, internal disagreement about key issues, or disagreement within the White House about the roles and responsibilities of key officials. The Kirby-Jean-Pierre squabbles in the Biden administration seem to suggest all three are at play.
Washington Examiner contributing writer Tevi Troy, a senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center and former senior White House aide, 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. 
Triple 7 film goes inside special operations veterans’ skydiving feat ‘to forever honor those who gave everything’ Triple 7 film goes inside special operations veterans’ skydiving feat ‘to forever honor those who gave everything’ Heather Hamilton Retired Navy SEAL Mike Sarraille woke up on Jan. 9, 2023, in Antarctica, ready to embark on the first of seven skydiving jumps that were deemed skydiving’s most elusive feat, the “Triple 7” — seven skydives on seven continents in seven days.
For Sarraille and his team of nine former United States and Canadian special operations service members, achieving such a feat would be their way of honoring their fallen brothers.
“When we say the words, especially with Memorial Day, ‘Never forget and to forever honor those who gave everything,’ never forget the example that these men and women set. And ‘forever honor,’ forever honor means living our lives to the fullest,” Sarraille said.
The team completed the seven jumps in six days, six hours, and six minutes, setting four world records in the process.
The jumps took the team from Antarctica to Chile, Miami, Spain, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Australia. Each of the jumps paid tribute to Michael Monsoor, David McDowell, Robert Ramirez, Marc Lee, Dave Hall, Lou Langlais, and Matthew Abbate.
Monsoor, a SEAL, jumped on a grenade 3 feet from Sarraille, saving his life and others around them.
“Something like that just, you can’t erase it from your memory. It’s seared in your mind. He’s never far from me,” Sarraille said.
The skydiving venture ended with an additional celebratory jump in Tampa, Florida, in honor of the 13 service members lost at Kabul Airport during the withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021.
“The world records mean nothing to us,” Sarraille said. “Life is about faith, relationships, character, and integrity. What these men and women found is the one thing for which you’re willing to give everything. … It was for America.”
The skydiving venture was documented in the new film Triple 7: They Said It Couldn’t Be Done.
The film was directed and produced by Dan Myrick, known for The Blair Witch Project.
“It was an opportunity for me to get into this very elite world, this very closed, kind of mysterious world, and sort of demystify a little bit about what these guys are about because Hollywood has the tendency to stereotype them and portray them either as broken soldiers or ‘Rambo’ types,” Myrick said. “I realized that they are these really super cool guys. They’re creative and empathetic, very smart, intelligent — emotionally intelligent — guys.”
“We don’t forget these individuals that gave up everything for us to do what we do,” Myrick added.
As the team completed the final jump, they briefly considered their accomplishments.
“We did something that people said, ‘It couldn’t be done.’ We proved them wrong, but guys like Mikey [Monsoor] and all the ones we’ve lost are never far from my mind. They gave their today and every one of their tomorrows,” Sarraille said. “This is also for the military families. They pay a cost, especially when a loved one doesn’t come home. Military families are the unsung heroes.”
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The film has raised $2 million of its $7 million goal for Folds of Honor, which provides scholarships to the spouses and children of America’s fallen service members or disabled veterans. 
The “Triple 7” team consisted of the following special operations service members: Sarraille, Andy Stumpf, Fred Williams, Mike Barker, Glenn Cowan, Nick Kush, Logan Stark, Jariko Denman, and Jim Wigginton.
Bipartisan FAA reauthorization bill takes flight Bipartisan FAA reauthorization bill takes flight Jeremy Lott
On the day that Federal Aviation Administration funding was set to expire, Congress and the White House reauthorized it — and then some.
“It's a massive porkfest,” Gary Leff, author of the influential View from the Wing website, described the bill to the Washington Examiner. As one example, Leff noted that Congress “more than doubled Essential Air Service subsidies — a program that was supposed to be temporary and end in 1988. They liberalized restrictions on how much airports close to other airports can receive, too.”
Marc Scribner, transportation policy analyst for the Reason Foundation, said the FAA reauthorization “largely perpetuates the status quo, which isn’t particularly surprising given the COVID-19 chaos” that the industry is still recovering from.
If that is so, then the status quo has gotten more expensive. The 2018 FAA reauthorization gave the green light to almost $97 billion in spending over a five-year period, or $19.4 billion a year, according to a breakdown by the Eno Center for Transportation. The new reauthorization is for $105 billion over four years, at $26.2 billion a year, with almost $20 billion earmarked for airport infrastructure projects.
FAA reauthorizations don’t happen very often. Before the 2018 bill, the previous reauthorization was in 2012. These larger bills affect more than simply funding levels for air transportation and the excise taxes on tickets and cargo that get those funds in the door.
Because of the contentious nature of some of the proposed changes, short-term resolutions are often necessary. Short-term bills extended the previous regime from last September to this May 16, when President Joe Biden signed the long-term reauthorization into law.
Refunds, remote control, and more recording This year’s bill saw two significant shifts in policy that may affect travelers and one that could boost safety.
One of the most significant changes is a new policy forcing the airlines to refund delayed or canceled flights, rather than rebooking.
“Ultimately, on the specific issue of automatic airline refunds, the airline lobby lost. And I can assure you that doesn't happen very often,” said William J. McGee, senior fellow for aviation and travel at the American Economic Liberties Project. He called it a bipartisan effort, praising Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) along with Massachusetts’s two Democratic senators and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) for “introducing the revised language to fix the awful section on refunds.”
Critics charge that this new requirement could lead to some passengers being stranded when a flight is significantly delayed or canceled. McGee chalks that up largely to industry propaganda.
“The airline industry put a ton of money and energy into lobbying for the ability to keep other people's money under a system that puts the burden on consumers to actively seek refunds,” he told the Washington Examiner. “The automatic feature ... will help ensure passengers get to keep the millions of dollars that are rightfully theirs.”
Another big policy shift is in air traffic control. Previously, by law this had to happen from large overlook towers at airports. No more.
“The best policy reform was on remote and digital air traffic control towers, which can improve safety and reduce costs,” Scribner told the Washington Examiner. “Like with many air traffic management technologies and practices, the FAA badly lags its overseas counterparts. While it failed to address the biggest long-term problems facing the agency and civil aviation, this FAA reauthorization may at least finally push the FAA into the 21st century on control tower technology.”
The bill lengthens the time that cockpit voice recorders must go before they begin overwriting from a few hours to 25 hours. Leff said this is significant because “in several recent incidents, voice recorders were written over before investigators could access them.”
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters union representing the pilots of cargo airline Atlas Air had objected to the proposal in a comment to the FAA.
“We are strongly against the imposition of arbitrary and unnecessary new surveillance measures that would serve more as an invasion on worker privacy than it would serve to lower aviation safety risks in any meaningful way,” the Teamsters wrote in December.
Reagan National woes One of the biggest missed opportunities in the bill was right in Congress’s own backyard at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, Leff said.
The Perimeter rule, which is imposed by Congress on Reagan, limits the length of most flights to and from the airport to 1,250 miles. Congress can carve out exemptions to these limits with so-called beyond-perimeter slots for flights. It did this in 2012 by opening up eight new slots to or from Reagan per day. This bill allowed 10 additional longer to and from flights per day, but it was stingy about what airlines could fly those routes.
Leff said the language of the bill “was written as a giveaway to big airlines. The language in the bill forbids DOT from even awarding any to new entrants at the airport and appears to even preclude the two smallest carriers from accessing any.” The only smaller airline even in the running is Alaska Airlines.
“Interestingly the bill makes it easier for private jets like Elon Musk's to avoid public tracking,” he added.
Ted Cruz takes the lead The White House’s initial statement on the bill’s signing closed with, “Thank you to Representatives Graves and Larsen, Senators Cantwell and Cruz, and many others for their leadership.”
In one sense, that was expected boilerplate. Reps. Sam Graves (R-MO) and Rick Larsen (D-WA) are chairman and ranking member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) are their counterparts in the Democratic-controlled Senate.
In another sense, many observers were surprised to see Cruz, who famously pushed for a government shutdown to protest Obamacare, taking a leading role in striking a bipartisan deal.
Watchers of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee were less surprised. Since Cruz became ranking member there, he has worked to forge relationships across the political aisle. Last year, when Biden’s nominee for FAA head, Denver International Airport CEO Phil Washington, bowed out, this was largely Cruz’s doing.
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Cruz taking the lead in the bipartisan FAA authorization could also signal greater ambition on his part. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has announced he will no longer be the leader of the Senate Republicans in the next Congress, creating a leadership vacuum.
Cruz’s robust push for the legislation’s passage does not mean he got everything he wanted, however. Leff quipped that the best thing about the FAA reauthorization “is that Cruz's provision to provide private screening and escorts to Members of Congress, Cabinet secretaries, and federal judges was removed from the bill.”
Jeremy Lott is a contributor for the Washington Examiner magazine.
Big rotten apple: The anti-Israel protests are just the latest sign of New York City’s decline Big rotten apple: The anti-Israel protests are just the latest sign of New York City’s decline Karol Markowicz
After the circus at Columbia University wound down with the end of the school year, it is impossible to ignore that New York City has become a spectacle.
New York, with the largest population of Jews outside of Israel, is now a haven for Israel-haters and antisemites. On Oct. 8, Times Square saw some of the largest anti-Israel protests in the country. So many videos of hostage posters being torn down happened in New York. Then, Columbia University led the way on “encampments,” which may have been designed to show “solidarity” with Palestinians in Gaza but largely succeeded in exposing the anti-Jewish rot across the city. 
Part of the reason for this is New York City is a city in trouble. A city in decline can move downward slowly, as New York is, but the trajectory ends in the same place. 
It’s not that the politics of the place has changed, exactly. New York City was always left-leaning, but it wasn’t weird about it. It wasn’t San Francisco or Portland. This was a city that had elected Rudy Giuliani as mayor twice and followed up his reign with three terms of staid, steady Michael Bloomberg. It was a fun city, certainly, but a driven one, too. If you can make it there, and all of that, counted on the city being a hub for a seriousness of purpose and of ideas. There was no time to get sidetracked by crazy ideas and loony policies. There were big things to be done.
Leftist politics moved the liberalism of New York to its natural conclusion. If a Bloomberg-era Democrat believed bail was too high in some cases, now it would be zero. If police were too active in fighting crime, now they would lean inactive. 
The trouble with the city can be traced back to 2013, when the people of New York City elected the most hard-left candidate in the mayoral race. 
The conversation around the mayoral election of New York City always attracts big names. That year, Hillary Clinton, former congressman Harold Ford, and former congressman Anthony Weiner were tossed around as possibilities to get into the race. When none of them did, the most prominent Democrat of the bunch, then-City Councilman Bill de Blasio, was left standing.
De Blasio ran on a “tale of two cities,” on the idea that New York was actually two distinct cities, a rich one and a poor one. He would highlight the stark inequality, and the idea was that if he were elected, he would fix it. He did not. What did happen with his poor policies was New York’s long-running age of peace and security was upended. All those strivers who got to New York to make it were suddenly the problem when they did. Fairness did reign. Everyone was worse off.
De Blasio’s soft-on-crime policies collided with a spike in antisemitism in the city. In 2013, the year de Blasio was elected, the Anti-Defamation League’s yearly audit of antisemitic incidents in New York found 203 incidents across New York state. By the time he left office in 2021, that number was 416, with instances of assaults going from 22 to 51. 
The latter number might also be lower than the real count. By 2021, people realized it was mostly pointless to report antisemitic incidents. Perpetrators were rarely arrested. Armin Rosen reported for Tablet in August 2022, “Of the hundreds of hate crimes committed against Jews in the city since 2018, many of them documented on camera, only a single perpetrator has served even one day in prison.” Calling the police because you’ve been hit in the head by someone screaming antisemitic epithets on the street seemed pointless. 
Beyond that, the mayor seemed to imagine there was a shadowy cabal of white supremacists committing these attacks. As late as 2019, he called antisemitism “a right-wing movement,” adding, “I want to be very, very clear, the violent threat, the threat that is ideological, is very much from the Right.” He was very clear and very wrong. As Rosen reported in July 2019, the “overwhelming majority of the alleged perpetrators in New York are either black or Hispanic.”
You can’t fix a societal problem if you can’t admit it’s happening, and antisemitism was allowed to fester in New York City while de Blasio sought out the real MAGA-hat-wearing culprits. Those alarmed by the post-Oct. 7 incidents of New Yorkers pulling down hostage posters or chanting for globalizing the intifada on the city’s most elite college campus had not been paying attention. It had all been percolating for a long time. 
The coupling of open antisemitism and no consequences for bad behavior was evident on Columbia University’s campus for the weeks of the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment.” The protest at Columbia began on April 17, when students first “occupied” the center of the campus. The date is relevant because it’s the day Columbia University President Nemat Shafik appeared before a congressional hearing to answer the charge that she had allowed Columbia to become a campus rife with antisemitism. The message from the students seemed to be: We’re in charge, and you haven’t seen anything yet. 
Shafik proved them right. She didn’t fall into the trap that ex-Harvard University President Claudine Gay and ex-University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill had tripped into in December when they were unable to say that calling for the genocide of Jews would be a problem on their campuses. She didn’t dance around what would be acceptable Jew hatred. She unequivocally condemned antisemitism and said she would not stand for it on her campus. “I promise you, from the messages I’m hearing from students, they are getting the message that violations will have consequences,” she said.
If the students got that message, it certainly wasn’t noticeable in their actions. Protest leader Khymani James had said in January that “Zionists don’t deserve to live” and that people should feel lucky he’s “not just going out and murdering Zionists.” He said all this during a disciplinary hearing he himself livestreamed. He was that proud of what he said and secure in his position at Columbia. He was only penalized after people found his recording in connection with the April protests. Shafik could claim the university wouldn’t stand for open antisemitism, but James was evidence it did just that.
On May 8, Columbia University Jewish students released a letter in which they noted, “We recoiled when people screamed 'resist by any means necessary,' telling us we are 'all inbred' and that we 'have no culture.'”
Protesters at the encampment screamed, “Go back to Poland,” at Jewish students and chanted to globalize the intifada. When Jewish students held an actually peaceful protest, Isabella Giusti, a student, held a sign in front of them that read, “Al Qasam’s [sic] next targets.” Al Qassam is the military wing of Hamas. No one seemed to fear any consequences.
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The encampment ended on May 1 only after hundreds of students barricaded themselves into Hamilton Hall while continuing to make demands for Columbia University to divest from Israel in addition to what they called “basic humanitarian aid.” Shafik had contorted herself for two weeks to try to placate this mob. She moved the remainder of the year’s classes online, ostensibly to protect Jewish students, and she eventually canceled Columbia’s graduation. She negotiated with them at every turn. It just could never be enough.
New York had originally turned itself around by recognizing that there must be consequences for bad behavior. Once the consequences are removed, people are led to understand that anything goes. Columbia’s protesters got that same message loud and clear. The circus might be over for now, but it always comes back to the towns where it is welcome.
Karol Markowicz is a regular columnist at the New York Post and Fox News and co-author of the bestselling book Stolen Youth. She is host of the Karol Markowicz Show, a podcast on iHeartRadio. She was born in the Soviet Union and grew up in Brooklyn. She now lives in South Florida with her husband and three children. 
Whose sea is it anyway? China’s expansive maritime claims could be the spark that ignites a war Whose sea is it anyway? China’s expansive maritime claims could be the spark that ignites a war Jamie McIntyre
The conventional wisdom in Washington these days is that if the United States were to ever go to war with China, it would likely be over Taiwan.
But there’s another scenario that is at least just as likely.
The Philippines and China are locked in a long-running dispute over a shallow water reef in the South China Sea known as the Second Thomas Shoal, which is only visible during low tide.
“The Second Thomas Shoal off the coast of the Philippines could be the next flashpoint to launch World War III,” Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL), a former Green Beret, said in April. “Our enemies and our adversaries no longer respect and fear us, and that has happened and deteriorated precipitously in the last three years.”
The Second Thomas Shoal is just one of more than 100 submerged features — shoals and reefs — which do not qualify as islands under international law, but to which China asserts “historic rights,” as the basis for laying claim to 90% of the strategic South China Sea, including the fishing rights and its significant undersea oil and gas deposits.
It’s a claim, the U.S. insists, that “has no legal basis.” 
“The PRC [People’s Republic of China] asserts claims to internal waters, a territorial sea, an exclusive economic zone, and a continental shelf that are based on treating each claimed South China Sea island group ‘as a whole,’” the State Department said in a 2022 report. “This is not permitted by international law.”
The Philippines is one of several Asia-Pacific nations — including Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Vietnam — that claims the waters nearest to its coast, which it calls the West Philippine Sea, as its territory, rejecting China’s declaration of sovereignty over almost all of the South China Sea. 
Of seven nations, the Philippines has been the most aggressive in challenging Beijing’s expansive claims for more than two decades.
In 1999, the Philippines beached an obsolete World War II-era landing ship, the BRP Sierra Madre, on Second Thomas Shoal, and manned it with sailors from the Philippine navy as a tangible way to exert its sovereignty over the 11-mile-long partially submerged reef. 
Then in 2016, the Philippines took its case to the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague, which ruled that China had no legitimate claim to the shoal under a provision of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, to which both countries are a party. 
But now, after 25 years of being subjected to the elements, the BRP Sierra Madre is an unseaworthy, rusting hulk, and China is doing everything short of opening fire on the ramshackle ship to try to keep the Philippines from resupplying the small crew holding down the fort on the Second Thomas Shoal, which they call the Ayungin Shoal, in defiance of Beijing.
“PRC ships employed dangerous maneuvers and water cannons against Philippine vessels carrying provisions to Filipino service members stationed at the BRP Sierra Madre, causing multiple collisions, damaging at least one Philippine vessel, injuring Filipino service members, and jeopardizing the safety of the Filipino crew,” the State Department said in a statement in March. “We condemn the PRC’s repeated obstruction of Philippine vessels’ exercise of high seas freedom of navigation and its disruption of supply lines to this longstanding outpost.”
The U.S. has a policy of not taking sides in the territorial disputes, while asserting the absolute right to sail and fly over what it insists is international airspace and waters. 
But in a speech last June, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin made clear that the U.S. was backing Manila over Beijing. 
“Let me again underscore the importance of the 2016 ruling by the arbitral tribunal. It is legally binding, and it is final,” Austin said at the annual Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore.
The battle for the submerged spit of sand and rock is growing more contentious and more dangerous, with China using its numerically superior navy along with civilian fishing vessels to blockade the shoal.
If China were to move against Taiwan, the president and Congress would have tough decisions to make about how far the U.S. would go to defend the self-governing island.
Would the U.S. be limited to weapons and ammunition, as is the case in Ukraine? Or would the U.S. military intervene with troops, ships, and planes in an all-out war?
But in the case of the Philippines, there is no question that, under the terms of a 1951 mutual defense treaty, the U.S. is obligated to come to Manila’s defense.
During a visit to Washington last month by Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., President Joe Biden “reinforced the ironclad U.S. alliance commitment” to its treaty obligations, according to a White House statement.
At the Pentagon the next day, Austin echoed the promise.
“Our commitment to the defense of the Philippines is ironclad,” Austin said, standing next to Marcos. “An armed attack on Philippine Armed Forces' public vessels or aircraft in the Pacific, including the South China Sea, would invoke U.S. defense commitments under our mutual defense treaty.”
The words are intended to deter China from miscalculating, but Beijing continues to ramp up confrontations with Philippine resupply vessels, swarming the ships and dousing them with high-pressure water cannons.
“The kind of behavior that we've seen where Filipino crews are put in danger where, you know, sailors have been injured and [there has been] property damage, that's irresponsible behavior and it disregards international law,” Austin said at a gathering of Pacific allies in Hawaii this month.
Asked by a reporter if the death of a Filipino sailor would trigger the mutual defense pact, Philippines Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro replied that it would be “counterproductive to delve into hypotheticals.”
“We are very conscious of the fact that we need to assert our rights but in a manner that safeguards the safety of each and every member of the Philippine Armed Forces,” Teodoro said, adding that “other countries” sometimes overstate the threat of U.S. intervention as a “bogeyman” to complain about legitimate defensive measures.
“It is an agreement and it will be a political decision at the end of the day of principally the Philippine government when to invoke it,” he said.
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“If as our allies, the Philippines, were to be attacked, then that would change a bit of the scope of what's happening there at Second Thomas Shoal,” retiring Adm. John Aquilino, the outgoing Indo-Pacific commander, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March.
“I believe there's a peaceful way out of this. There's a place for China in this world,” Aquilino testified. “They're just going to have to understand that the nations of the globe require a set of international standards and behaviors that are acceptable and what they're executing now is not.”
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
Pier to nowhere Pier to nowhere Dominic Green The Biden administration built a floating pier off Gaza at the cost of $320 million. Hamas mortared it on April 25, before it opened, just to let the Americans know who’s boss. A senior Hamas official told the Associated Press that any foreign soldiers would be treated as “an occupying force and aggression.” The Biden administration has not given the Gazans a lifeline; it has given Hamas more leverage. If the U.S. disappoints Hamas and Hamas lobs more mortars at the pier, American servicemen and women will be in the firing line.
Given the volume of food now coming into Gaza overland from Israel, the pier is no longer needed. The first shipment of goods via the pier was hijacked as soon as the trucks left the secure landing zone. Like the money that the Biden administration started sending to Gaza in 2021, the food will be distributed by Hamas. As with the money, so with the food: U.S. aid is bolstering Hamas's rule, and the administration knows it. The difference is, in 2021, the administration sent the money in the assumption, then widely shared, that Hamas could be bought off.
Nothing now suggests that Hamas will volunteer to be defeated. Hamas believes it is winning — and if you view the war in Gaza from a bunker in Rafah or a hotel suite in Qatar, you can see why. By massacring Jews in quantities unprecedented since 1945, Hamas has stolen the mantle of “resistance” from Hezbollah. It has discredited the Palestinian Authority and Fatah, damaged society, split the U.S. and Israel, and still retains the support of major American allies like Turkey and Qatar.
The Biden administration has backed Israel by supplying weapons and diplomatic cover. It has undermined Israel by withholding weapons and withdrawing diplomatic cover. It has prolonged the war by restraining Israel. It has pressured Israel to end the war as soon as possible. The ostensible reason is to preserve the political horizon, with its ever-receding mirage of the “two-state solution.”
Everyone in the Middle East knows that the “two-state solution” is a diplomatic bridge to nowhere. The Palestinians have repeatedly blown it up, so the Israelis no longer want to cross it. There is no “road map,” only potholes. Regardless, the Democrats, the State Department, and the Europeans remain committed to the “peace process.” The process is an end to itself. Our diplomats are bureaucratic proceduralists, proceeding to sinecures in the universities and think tanks. The primacy of liberal proceduralism is at stake here. Hence, the Biden administration’s terms for linking a Palestinian state to a peace deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia are more stringent than those of the Saudis themselves. Mohammed bin Salman & Co. know that the Palestinian cause is a bridge to nowhere good. But an Israeli-Gulf alliance would be a wall against Iran.
The peace process cannot continue without a semblance of coherence among the Palestinians. Hence a further set of policy contradictions and mixed messages. Hamas must be removed from power because it is evil, but Hamas must be left in power. Hamas is the enemy of civilization, but Hamas is with our friends in Qatar. Israel must create a situation where Hamas cannot exercise a veto over a revived peace process, but Israel must not go into Rafah.
It is clear, though no one says it aloud in Washington, that if there is such a thing as the Palestinian national movement (rather than the regional norm of clans and militias), then only Hamas is brutal enough to hold it together. It is also clear that, as Salman Rushdie observed on May 20, a Palestinian state would be “Taliban-like.” Strange, Rushdie mused, that the “progressive movements of the Western Left” are backing the creation of a “satellite state of Iran” under the “fascist terrorist group” Hamas.
This was unfair to the Taliban. For years, the Taliban tolerated the presence of two Jews in Afghanistan. That’s two more than Hamas will accept. Yet the Biden administration accepts Hamas, to sustain the two-state fiction and build an even bigger bridge to nowhere: turning Iran from a mortal enemy to a regional proxy.
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The U.S. wasted decades of cash and credibility on the Palestinians. The Iranians supplied the means for the Palestinians to detonate its foundations, even as the Obama and Biden administrations tried to bribe the Iranians. Now the American-led regional structure is tumbling into the sand. The exposure of tunnels between Rafah and Egypt suggests corruption at the highest levels of the Egyptian military, which is American-funded and American-trained. Now we can see why the Egyptians warned Israel against going into Rafah. And we can guess why the Biden administration gave the same warnings.
From the start, the Israelis have said that they face a long campaign in Gaza. The bridge and tunnel disaster cannot be resolved within the administration’s electoral time frame. Biden and the Democrats have personally insulted Mohammed bin Salman and Benjamin Netanyahu, too, so neither will offer a diplomatic exit ramp before November. An October surprise can come from anywhere, but expect it where the Biden administration has invited Hamas to strike the U.S. directly: the Gaza pier — and perhaps sooner than October. The bridge to nowhere leads to the road to perdition.
Monty Python’s fourth season: The terrible end of the greatest sketch show of all time Monty Python’s fourth season: The terrible end of the greatest sketch show of all time Alexander Larman When Monty Python is remembered these days, it’s generally for its two seminal films, Holy Grail and Life of Brian, or Spamalot, the musical inspired by the former. When aficionados of the British act’s inimitable brand of surreal sketch comedy are reminded about the television series that launched the troupe into fame, however, they usually light up and start rhapsodizing about their favorite sketches, whether it’s the obvious (dead parrots, silly walks, and cross-dressing lumberjacks) or the slyer, more literate ones subverting well-worn tropes. I especially adore the first series’s “Working Class Playwright,” in which Eric Idle’s cheery aspirant coal miner upsets his parents by refusing to take on the family business of playwriting. The sketch climaxes with his outraged Northern writer father announcing, “There’s nowt wrong wi’ gala luncheons, lad! I’ve had more gala luncheons than you’ve had hot dinners!” 
Yet amid the fondness with which Python is regarded by its millions of fans — admittedly, many of these admirers now being men of a certain age — there exists a curious lacuna, and that is the fourth series of the television show, broadcast 50 years ago this year. Sandwiched between John Cleese’s (temporary) departure from the group in 1973 and the release of Holy Grail in April 1975, it represented a bold shift away from the sketch-based comedy of the earlier seasons into something more uncompromisingly surreal, consisting of six self-contained half-hour episodes that are all loosely themed around a central storyline. Had it worked, it might now be regarded as the point when British mainstream comedy embraced the ideas of Beckett and Ionesco. Unfortunately, it did not. Today, the fourth season is regarded, even by many fully paid-up Python admirers, as an anomalous misstep. 
In his diary of Sept. 10, 1973, Michael Palin wrote, “I spent nearly an hour on the phone with J Cleese. We talked over everything — but I feel John wants to get completely out of all Python involvement. What a long way we’ve come since John’s phone calls four and a half years ago when he was trying to set up Python.” Cleese saw himself as the guiding creative spirit behind Python, with some justification, but felt that, by the third season, the show was becoming stale and repetitive. He was also weary of his writing partner Graham Chapman’s alcoholism, which stymied both creative and practical progress on the show. With his own idea for a show, which would later become Fawlty Towers, Cleese bowed out of the group’s television work, although he continued to work with them on their films and occasional live specials. 
He may have departed at the right moment. In his absence, the group embraced a more democratic style of working and decided that what they wanted to do was to film six new shows, which were, in Palin’s words, “unified, organic half hours, and not just bric-a-brac, loosely slung together.” To this end, it would simply be called Monty Python, dropping the “Flying Circus” from its title. The BBC responded to this with lukewarm enthusiasm and, despite most of the group wanting to wait until early 1975 to film the new series, insisted that it be broadcast in the autumn of 1974. It did not help that Palin and his writing partner Terry Jones were largely responsible for most of the new material, as Idle had insisted on taking a lengthy summer break in France, and Chapman’s drinking was steadily heading out of control. On July 15, 1974, Palin recounted that “Graham [looked] ravaged and with a hangover you could almost touch ... he was fragile for most of the morning and only a large amount of gin revived him at lunchtime.”
The writing sessions proved to be fraught and fruitless despite the previously unaccustomed novelty of guest contributors, which included Neil Innes from the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and Chapman’s friend Douglas Adams. The latter would go on to fame and fortune with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in 1978 but was now content to offer a few jokes and fleeting appearances in sketches. Palin wrote of his “deep feeling of frustration” on Aug. 1 after a script meeting that was nothing more than a “pointless waste of time” and expressed his anger. “I began to feel what was the point? Here was a series that only Graham was keen to do, and yet only Terry and I were writing.” He concluded, bitterly, “We didn’t need to do it for the money — why the hell were we doing it?” 
Worse was to come. After location filming concluded, Idle, who Palin acknowledged “can so often be the life and soul,” was silent and miserable, leading to “the unprecedently dolorous mood.” Idle, whose holiday meant that he barely contributed to the scripts, also suggested that he was unhappy with the decision to create self-contained narratives. Palin observed that “he didn’t like writing stories, he liked writing revue.” Idle may have been right. The first episode of the fourth series, a particularly tortuous and largely unfunny account of the ballooning pioneers, the Montgolfier brothers, not only missed Cleese but failed to grab even the studio audience, which tittered politely rather than heartily. Palin was later told by the producer that the viewing figures of 5.8 million were “the best on BBC2, apart from Call My Bluff!,” which the actor observed “doesn’t strike me as all that wonderful.” 
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The season does improve. The “Michael Ellis” second episode, in which Idle, attempting to buy an ant in a department store, is caught up in increasingly strange situations, has the courage of its convictions, and the “Mr. Neutron” storyline in the fourth episode, featuring Chapman as a supervillain hiding out in suburbia, feels uncannily prescient, anticipating the likes of The Incredibles and The Boys by decades. Yet, compared to Python’s finest hours before and since, it feels strained and half-baked. Idle commented to the group after the broadcast, “Does anyone feel like me that the TV series has been a failure?” and Adams remarked to Palin that he believed the scripts had lost a great deal in performance. Despite initial interest from the BBC, there was to be no fifth season. 
The Python hardcore have tried to rehabilitate the largely unloved fourth series, and in its structurally daring fashion, it at least breaks new ground. Certainly, the least successful of the group’s films, Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, owes a great deal to the jolting, near-elliptical aspects of the season, although, ironically, that picture returned to the sketch format of the earlier incarnations of the TV show. Yet, although Python’s final televisual bow is big and, to an extent, clever, it sorely fails at being funny. However, better things would soon await, and even a lengthy lawsuit with ABC over the network’s right to edit the series as it saw fit could not dampen the cinematic brilliance that would follow. View this season less as comedy and more as a creative, Mr. Creosote-esque purge, and it suddenly makes far more sense — although not, alas, any more enjoyable to watch.
Alexander Larman is the author of, most recently, Power and Glory and is an editor at the Spectator World.
Relationships are trauma Relationships are trauma Timothy P. Carney “Parentification” is a new pop-psychology term supposed to convey the trauma parents impose on their older children who are given family responsibilities.
“Parentified” children supposedly carry all sorts of pathologies into adulthood, such as becoming “people-pleasers” and perfectionists.
For decades, psychiatrists have noted that in dysfunctional families — say, an absent father and an alcoholic or withdrawn mother — the oldest child bears some scars from the lack of a real parent and the need to prematurely take on serious duties.
But these days, when professionals chase social contagions introduced by minor TikTok influencers and spread via algorithm, it’s now considered abusive to ask your 10-year-old to change a diaper, your 12-year-old to babysit, or your 14-year-old to fetch mom a cup of coffee.
Of course this discourse gets gendered, and “Eldest Daughter Syndrome” becomes new evidence of the patriarchy’s harm. (See the New York Times piece “Why Your Big Sister Resents You.”)
Some in the media have started to express some skepticism of this notion that looking after other people is bad for personal development. “Do ‘Parentified Children’ Really Have It So Bad?” asked a headline in New York magazine’s “The Cut” website.
Simply asking this question seemed to trigger journalists on X.
“What is going on???” asked one incredulous liberal writer.
She was reacting simultaneously to a headline in the Atlantic asking, “Why Do So Many Parents Think Kids Need Their Own Bedroom?” Her followers were just as angry and shocked.
“Trying to normalize increasingly dystopian living conditions, as they do,” was one typical reply.
“It’s more TradWife nonsense,” another reader commented, mocking the notion that “You can survive on one income if you just bought a smaller house for more kids.”
That each child needs his or her own bedroom is weirdly embedded in America’s thinking.
For instance, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that raising a child costs $250,000 or more, that estimate included “the average cost of an additional bedroom.” A family with two children was assumed to need one more bedroom than a family with one child.
The assumptions here — that older children shouldn’t have to care for younger children and that sharing a bedroom is harmful — have a theme: We shouldn’t require people to take care of or learn to live with others. Any unchosen obligation is oppression.
These are the emerging dogmas of a new secular religion that elevates individual autonomy to the highest level. Is it any wonder people are getting married less and having fewer children if they’ve been led to believe that it’s traumatic if someone expects you to care for another?
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In such a sad, lonely world, the parentified child has it pretty well, actually.
As New York writer Rachel Connolly aptly put it, “if a person reaches adulthood and their biggest issue is that they’re a supportive friend, with a tendency to push themselves to always go above and beyond, I would say, in the grand scheme of things, that this person is doing pretty well.”
Alice Stewart, 1966-2024 Alice Stewart, 1966-2024 Daniel Ross Goodman Washington was shaken this week by the sudden and tragic death of the political commentator and veteran media adviser Alice Stewart. Stewart, only 58, had appeared on CNN’s The Situation Room as recently as last Friday. Her body was found the following day in the Belle View neighborhood in northern Virginia. Authorities do not yet know the cause of her death, but they have ruled out foul play.
Stewart was born on March 11, 1966, in Atlanta. An avid football fan and an especially devoted supporter of her Georgia Bulldogs, after graduating from the University of Georgia and working as a local TV reporter in Savannah, Stewart moved to Arkansas, where she worked as a reporter, anchor, and, later, a producer for Little Rock’s NBC affiliate, KARK-4. In the early 2000s, Stewart, while never completely leaving TV behind, began to transition from media to politics. She joined Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s staff as communications director. When Huckabee left office to run for president in 2007, Stewart was one of his presidential campaign’s first hires. Stewart’s shrewd strategizing and media savvy helped Huckabee win the Iowa caucuses and finish second in the delegate count to the eventual Republican nominee, John McCain. “The news of her death has been deeply sobering to me personally and to my family,” Huckabee stated this week. 
Stewart’s success in the Huckabee campaign allowed her to secure media positions with subsequent Republican presidential campaigns. She served as communications director for Rick Santorum’s and Michele Bachmann’s campaigns while also working as a communications strategist for then-Florida Gov. Rick Scott. In 2016, Stewart helped Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) become a legitimate contender for the Republican presidential nomination. Under Stewart’s media and communications guidance, Cruz won the Iowa caucuses and 10 other states, finishing as the delegate-count runner-up to eventual nominee Donald Trump. 
After the Cruz campaign, Stewart returned to television while branching out to other mediums. In 2016, she began working as a political analyst for CNN, appearing regularly on shows like The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer. Although she acknowledged that she had been hired to be one of the network’s conservative voices, Stewart declared that she was “an independent thinker,” not a doctrinaire parrot: “I’m not a Kool-Aid drinker; I’m not a never-Trumper, and I didn’t check my common sense and decency at the door when I voted for [Trump].” Stewart was also a contributor to NPR and the SiriusXM radio show POTUS. In 2020, she launched the Hot Mics From Left to Right podcast with the political commentator and CNN analyst Maria Cardona. Although it faced stiff competition in a media market that now appears to have more podcasts than people, Hot Mics had been gaining traction, recently climbing into the top 100 of Apple’s most downloaded political podcasts. 
A sought-after speaker at conferences such as the Learn Right Summit and the Leadership Institute, where she presided over media training for aspiring conservative politicians, Stewart was also a serious runner, most recently completing a Washington, D.C., marathon and the 2023 New York City marathon. She enjoyed botany and gardening, taking pride in cultivating crocuses and other seasonal plants, adored her Shih Tzu, Sammie, and admired Winston Churchill.  
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Above and beyond her first-rate political communications acumen, in the all-too-often toxic contemporary political environment, Stewart stood out for her decency, sincerity, honesty, and kindness. A proud Christian and, in Santorum’s words, a “faithful witness to her Savior Jesus,” Stewart’s integrity and geniality made her one of the more well-liked political media professionals on either side of the aisle, which is one of the reasons why her death has affected the Washington political class so deeply. In a tribute to his departed colleague, Wolf Blitzer called her “a very special person.” On CNN Newsroom, Blitzer noted, “We always invited her to come on my show because we knew we would be a little bit smarter at the end of that conversation. She helped our viewers better appreciate what was going on, and that’s why we will miss her so much.” 
Another of her CNN colleagues, Dana Bash, described her as “somebody who told it straight,” without histrionics or ad hominem attacks. Still, though, for Bash, as for so many others who were fortunate to cross paths with her, it was her personal qualities that distinguished her. Stewart “brought kindness and support,” Bash said, not only intelligence and expertise. Another media observer remembered how, during political campaigns, she would bring extra food to events for exhausted reporters who could often be too hassled and harried along the campaign trail to grab proper meals. Washington, indeed, has lost one of its truly good ones.
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.
Copper and robbers Copper and robbers Zachary Faria Teenagers banned from malls without chaperones. Streets flooded with cameras to watch everyone while criminals go unprosecuted. People forced to take their tacos to go so employees don’t get assaulted. California is a bastion of wacky crime stories.
Each time one of these stories rolls by, it is hard to imagine it being topped. And then it is. So we go to Oakland, where, due to crime, Taco Bell has closed all but one dine-in location. That seems like a hard story to top, but Oakland found a way. The city has replaced the traffic lights for at least one intersection with stop signs, hanging overhead as if they were traffic lights, because why?
Because criminals are stealing copper wires from the lights and homeless people are leeching electricity from the electric boxes for their own use. Apparently, city officials had even tried to put cement blocks on top of the boxes to prevent them from being tampered with, but people just dragged them off and continued their criminality.
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You can take the Raiders out of Oakland, but you can’t take raiders out of Oakland, at least when you are handing control of the city to pro-criminal “leaders” who would rather see restaurants closed and gas stations avoided than put a criminal in a jail cell. Oakland may well be the softest of California’s big cities when it comes to crime, which explains why even the local chapter of the NAACP is pushing back on the pro-criminal policies that use race as a justification for their existence.
In the meantime, we can all look forward to what wacky crime story California’s cities can offer that can top Oakland’s stop signs hanging from light poles. The ball is in your court now, Los Angeles. Or, at least, it is until it gets stolen like the copper wires at a traffic light.
People are right to blame Biden for their economic woes People are right to blame Biden for their economic woes Tiana Lowe Doescher President Joe Biden retired his "Bidenomics" brand as his popularity plummets, but the White House continues its breathless attempts to reshape voters' abysmal perceptions of the economy.
In a few sentences in a memo to the press, White House senior deputy press secretary Andrew Bates said that the president is fighting inflation by "standing up to corporate price gouging," that inflation is still persisting because these major corporations "overcharge the American people," and that inflation is actually not still persisting and instead is "falling."
And the White House's second favorite scapegoat? Former President Donald Trump, of course, whom Biden again blamed when he oddly repeated the lie twice that he inherited a 9% inflation rate upon taking office in January 2021, when the inflation rate was actually well below the Federal Reserve's maximum target of 2%.
But despite the blame game, voters still hold Biden responsible. While the 56% of Americans polled by the Guardian who believe our economy is undergoing a recession are wrong, the 58% who blame Biden's mismanagement for our worsening economy are correct. Even if one accounts for the aberration of the 2020 pandemic, by nearly every objective metric one can conjure, the personal financial situations of average people have worsened or stagnated under Biden, especially when compared to the prosperity generated by his predecessor.
Earlier this month, Greg Ip at the Wall Street Journal went viral for demonstrating that whereas real household net worth rose by close to 20% in nominal terms during the first three years of Biden's and Trump's presidencies, the picture changes once adjusted for inflation. Real net worth rose 15% by the end of Trump's third year in office, while it grew not at all under Biden. We all know inflation is the universal tax that incinerates gains in growth, but worse for Biden's flailing reelection odds is how regressive the effect is on a per capita basis.
Rather than considering aggregate household net worths, let us compare individual paychecks. Over four years of Trump's presidency, real average weekly earnings, a useful measure because it encompasses time worked and the rate of pay, increased by 8.9%. In under 3 1/2 years of Biden's presidency, real average weekly earnings have fallen by 4.7%.
These numbers are more damning than the real household net worth comparison, but they are also more meaningful. Whereas household net worth reflects our still-robust equity markets that bolster the investment portfolios and retirement accounts of the roughly three-fifths of the country with money to spare in the stock market, it doesn't reflect the share of the country that still lives paycheck to paycheck. And while the stock market has outpaced Biden's debasement of the currency, average wages clearly haven't.
Inflation is also regressive in terms of the goods most affected. For example, per the consumer price index for all goods and services, overall prices have risen by 19% since Biden took office. But food prices have risen 21% and energy prices another 38%. The price of rent of primary residence, what renters report paying to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has also risen 21%. Considering that housing, shelter, and energy comprise a much larger share of the budgets of lower-income earners than the wealthy, the effective inflation rate experienced is likely higher as you move down the income gradation.
The latest analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office confirms as much, comparing the price of the same bundle of goods across the CPI from 2020 through 2023. While the bundles are the same over time, the CBO varies them at the start to reflect the average spending habits of five different income quintiles. Energy and food comprise a larger share for the lower-earning quintiles than those earning more. Whereas the bundle for the highest quintile of earners rose by 4.4%, the bundle for the lowest-earning rose by 4.7%. The middle quintile's bundle rose by 4.5%, resulting in an average annual $3,000 loss of purchasing power.
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The federal government's COVID-era spending spree is no longer softening the blow of such high prices, either. Biden inherited a 20% personal savings rate as a percentage of disposable income when he took office, but that figure has dwindled to 3.6% as savings and paychecks prove less capable of covering rising prices. Compare that to the personal savings rate as a percentage of disposable income that nearly doubled from the time Trump took office to 9.1%. (The government's decision to line our coffers with numerous needless stimulus checks obviously shot this figure to the double digits that Biden inherited, but Trump ought not to be rewarded for his fiscal irresponsibility in 2020 when his pre-pandemic economy was good on its own.)
Maybe the average household with savings to spare in the stock market isn't poorer as a result of Biden's presidency, but nearly four years in, it isn't any wealthier. For the least privileged earners reliant on paychecks and fixed incomes, Bidenomics has indeed made them poorer. That's why they're rightly hammering him in the polls.
Corey DeAngelis earns his victory lap for school choice Corey DeAngelis earns his victory lap for school choice Grant Addison
In his new book The Parent Revolution: Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools, self-described “school choice evangelist” Corey DeAngelis makes an optimistic case that our floundering education system is not beyond repair. Invoking the slogan “let’s fund students, not systems,” DeAngelis’s cause advocates allowing families to take state-funded education dollars to the education providers of their choice, whether a public school, a private school, a charter school, or even a home school. The idea is to allow all parents and students to do what wealthy ones already do: choose the educational pathway that best suits them, rather than being relegated to attending a school based on poverty or ZIP code. His is a compelling case that parents and advocates for educational freedom have already begun to win the day. 
DeAngelis’s amply sourced book functions well as a recent history documenting the upheaval in education over the last several years that happened as a result of COVID and school lockdowns. The parent revolution, as DeAngelis calls it, began in earnest in late 2020 and 2021: schools were shuttered, and parents were forced to bear witness to the flimsiness of “remote learning,” the growing isolation and learning loss of their children, and the unrepentant hypocrisy of teachers unions and government bureaucrats. Even as the medical science around the coronavirus brought into clearer relief that children and younger adults were less likely to contract deadly cases of the virus, teachers unions and their ilk fought tooth and nail to keep schools closed while negotiating veritable hostage payments from the government for more money. Parents became fed up with online learning and appalled at the firsthand look they were given into what was being taught to their children. From school board meetings to the voting booth, parents and their advocates began to take matters into their own hands. 
“The fight over school closures opened parents’ eyes to the fact that government schools were not really accountable to them. When the schools broke trust with parents, the parents didn’t just forgive and forget,” DeAngelis writes. In practice, this manifested as a great many parents all across the nation more actively supporting candidates and policies facilitating educational choice options such as school choice, education savings accounts, and vouchers. While the first third of the book recounts the pushback to COVID closures, along with a laundry list of malfeasance and self-dealing from teachers union mandarins such as Randi Weingarten, the middle of the book gives several case studies of parent reform movements in various states, including Iowa, Arizona, Arkansas, Virginia, and Florida.
As DeAngelis writes in his conclusion, “Not long ago, the idea that we should fund students, not systems, was considered radical and fringe. The way government schools handled COVID made Americans rethink their commitment to a one-size-fits-all system of government schooling. Now nearly a dozen states offer universal education choice, and several more states appear ready to follow them.” There is a clear trajectory: parents wanted their schools reopened, then became more tuned in to the education happening once they did reopen. From ideological and activist educators teaching critical race theory, the adoption of sweeping transgender bathroom policies, age-inappropriate books, and hostile school administrators, many parents did not like what they found. Once they were stymied and ignored by the upholders of the status quo, they were then driven to look for solutions outside the traditional system. 
In chapter four, the book’s strongest chapter, DeAngelis describes the idea behind the “red state strategy” he and other education choice advocates worked to implement alongside the newly awakened parent constituencies in order to facilitate new choice programs. Rather than appealing to a bipartisan approach in blue or purple states, this was an intentional push to make policy inroads in heavily GOP states, to elevate school choice and parental freedom to something of a litmus test issue for Republican candidates and policymakers. First, the goal was to show frustrated families that school choice was the solution to their problem; then, they would help parents “turn up the heat on state legislators, especially Republicans.” This led to, in DeAngelis’s counting, the single most effective year in terms of policy changes in states in 2021, which was matched and even exceeded in 2023. 
The book is a bit self-congratulatory, but there is good reason for that. As my former colleague Max Eden of the American Enterprise Institute wrote for the Washington Examiner last year, the school choice movement made “more progress in the first half of 2023 than it made in the preceding 23 years.” The parent choice campaign that began in 2020, crested in 2021, and continued through the next year’s midterm elections has shown tangible and consistent successes in numerous states, red and purple, and even some blue states such as New York. Four states passed universal school choice in 2023, led by Gov. Ron DeSantis’s Florida. Pro-school choice candidates have won consistently in statehouses across the country, as GOP candidates who buck their constituents on education freedom have lost roundly. 
Each of the major success stories has several elements in common, beginning with strong GOP leadership from the top. In Iowa, Gov. Kim Reynolds made passing an education savings account bill an explicit priority for her party. When her first push failed in 2021 after several Republican legislators defected, she went after them in the primaries, backing nine pro-school choice candidates, including several challengers to incumbent legislators who had voted against the legislation. She made her case to parents and voters across the state, hosting forums and rallies to hear from parents and share their stories of frustration. Eight of her nine endorsed candidates won their primaries, and the GOP majorities in the Statehouse increased the following year. Reynolds and Iowa passed a sweeping education choice bill, allowing all families to take their children’s state-funded education dollars to the education providers of their choosing, in 2023. 
Strong gubernatorial leadership was key in several other states as well, including Arizona’s Doug Ducey, Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin, Florida’s Ron DeSantis, and Arkansas’s Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Each of these Republicans elevated the issue of school choice and educational freedom to a partywide fault line, forcing recalcitrant members of their party to get in line. This approach has shown success, not only for the policies being championed but for Republicans' electoral prospects as well. In both Florida and Virginia’s gubernatorial elections, education proved the pivotal role in Republicans winning those offices, due in no small part to typically non-GOP constituencies casting their ballots for the candidates who supported school choice. 
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The book’s best strength, its thorough documentation, is also its greatest weakness, as often a case is made more than once. But consistency and clarity will cover a multitude of sins. DeAngelis, as anyone who follows him on X will know, is quite fond of pointing out when school choice opponents attended or sent their children to private schools. This habit carries over to the book, which is something one could find quite petty the first few times it happens. However, quantity has a quality all its own. By the dozenth or so time, the consistent pattern of “choice for me but not for thee” hypocrisy on the part of those who oppose others escaping failing public schools is too damning to deny. 
DeAngelis’s book is a worthwhile record of what was a monumental period in schooling policy. The repercussions of the COVID lockdowns and school closures are and will continue to be felt for an entire generation of students, with the demonstrable, devastating learning loss being only the tip of the iceberg. The response of parents to that upheaval is tremendously important, and DeAngelis makes the case that their frustrations have been put to good use. Speaking of the 2022 election results, DeAngelis states, it is now becoming politically profitable to support education freedom. “School choice became a political winner because parents became a new special interest group,” he writes. “Voters just have to keep paying attention and hold [lawmakers] to account for their position.”
Grant Addison is a deputy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine.
Out of the mouth of babes Out of the mouth of babes Kara Kennedy The problem with pregnancy movies is that they never feel quite right. Waters break like fire hoses, and within seconds, a 6-month-old-looking baby is presented neatly and cleanly on the mother’s chest. If you’re childless, it’s unrelatable and boring. If you’re a mother, it’s unrelatable and irritating because it’s nothing like what actually happens. If you’re a man, you probably didn’t pick the movie. 
That’s why, to do anything funny or poignant about pregnancy, you really have to surrender the dramatics. In Babes, Pamela Adlon’s (Californication, Louie) directorial debut about a pair of best friends discovering motherhood, both women slip into labor unknowingly, with more of a “light p***y drizzle” than a gush, and both women volunteer to check the size of the other’s dilation for reasons such as analyzing if there’s any time to grab a quick bite (caviar and oysters), as friends do. 
In Babes, it’s not the pregnancies that seem hard but navigating the friendship between the two leads, Dawn (Michelle Buteau) and Eden (Ilana Glazer), during them. The lifelong BFFs have taken different steps toward motherhood: Dawn is married with a toddler and has an almost overbearing maternal instinct, while Eden is a single free spirit type who gets knocked up after an unprotected one-night stand with a man who shortly after proceeds to choke to death on an almond alone on Thanksgiving, a seemingly important subplot that garnered no emotion from me at all. Yoga teacher Eden’s dependency on mother-of-two Dawn quickly results in resentment. Eden wants to swan through single motherhood equipped with nothing but Dawn by her side, to the point that she asks to move into her basement. Dawn wants to mother her two children, save her marriage, and maybe even get a promotion at the dental office she works at. 
Clearly aiming to be the Bridesmaids of birthing comedies, Babes in many of its scenes takes a genuinely funny moment or one-liner and exhausts it. Both women are naturally charismatic and funny presences on screen (both are stand-up comedians). But some of the extended gags, such as the ones about the size of an amnio needle or the monstrous breast pump contraption, left me feeling like I do when an awkward acquaintance tries a bad joke and then sits waiting for a laugh. In the end, you give it to them out of sheer embarrassment before trying your best to erase it from memory. As well as the jokes, the political correctness or attempts to mock it (I couldn’t tell which one) are shoehorned in. “I’m gonna be a mamacita. Wait, no, that’s appropriation.” “Do you wanna know the sex?” “No, I don’t want to put a binary on them right now.” 
Unfortunately for Babes, as with labor, all of the exciting stuff happens in the last few minutes. We get to watch Eden’s character progress from a freeloading and juvenile archetypal millennial woman into a thoughtful and grateful mother and friend. As we see her baby placed in her arms, we hear, for the first time, a real, emotive monologue. After delivering the baby, she laments how absurd it is that women’s bodies are even capable of that, never mind that it happens every minute of every day. “Why aren’t we talking about this all the time?” she asks. It was a genuinely moving scene that saw me and the only other woman in the child-friendly, mommy-targeted midday screening Alamo Drafthouse had organized for the film burst into tears.  
Though Babes is marketed as a fun-loving, intentionally crude, and no-nonsense view of pregnancy, the heart of the film feels almost accidentally conservative, something that’s been true of others of its genre, such as Knocked Up and Juno, not to mention the most recent Bond, which sees the ultimate manly man finally find fulfillment of his true purpose on Earth only when he has a child. We watch two hip mothers navigating through life in Queens and the Upper West Side, one choosing the more traditional notion of motherhood and the other kind of falling into it but both ultimately becoming better for doing so. It may be littered with jokes about poop and breast milk and rely too heavily on the “I can’t believe she just said that!” shtick. But what you leave the cinema with is something no joke can cheapen: the feeling that motherhood, of all different kinds, is magical.
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Kara Kennedy is a freelance writer living in Washington, D.C.
What is hypochondria? What is hypochondria? Alan Levinovitz
Caroline Crampton’s cultural history of hypochondria begins with her own hunt for a tumor. She stares at her reflection in a bathroom mirror at work, fingers kneading her neck, searching for suspicious lumps. Tumors, she knows from experience, have “a certain texture … a hard kernel moored deep inside with a slippery casing that can move over muscle and under skin.”
Is Crampton a hypochondriac? Even using the word means taking a position in an ongoing debate. “I once used the word ‘hypochondria’ during a consultation with a doctor,” she recalls, “only to have him chuckle and pull a brand new medical dictionary off the shelf to show me that the term had now been deemed ‘obsolete’….”
Now the condition has been split in two, and hypochondria abandoned for “somatic symptom disorder” — which involves the experience of physical symptoms — and “illness anxiety disorder,” which is defined by excessive health-related behaviors and unreasonable concern about becoming ill. But Crampton has long identified with the label and still does, despite the doctor and his dictionary. She sees herself as sharing in a special kind of despair with an enormous community, among whom are many cultural luminaries: Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, John Keats, Molière, Darwin. Hypochondriacs all. 
“I like the word hypochondria,” insists Crampton. “I cannot abandon it. It feels rooted in a history and a tradition that connect sufferers. … It offers companionship while in the grip of a fear that can be completely isolating. At times, it can even offer relief: if this is ‘just hypochondria,’ my health is safe from other threats, for now. A name is a powerful spell.” Crampton does an excellent job as a historian, telling surprising and dramatic stories about the figures listed — Molière’s death is a spectacular story of hypochondria vindicated — and many more with whom she feels a strong kinship. 
Crampton does not defend a specific definition of hypochondria. Instead she moves from one definition to the next, exploring their strengths and weaknesses. In one of many striking passages that effectively blend philosophy of medicine and personal anecdote, Crampton describes her experience when COVID-19 took over the public consciousness. As cases started to rise, she and other hypochondriacs found it oddly calming. They adopted “extreme coping mechanisms,” like “unnecessarily cleaning the packaging of all our food with disinfectant.” But what made it different was everyone else was doing it too.
“Suddenly, we were normal,” writes Crampton. Everyone was a hypochondriac, and therefore no one was a hypochondriac, even the hypochondriacs. She quotes a psychiatrist, speaking 18 months into the pandemic: “Health anxiety in a situation like the one we’re living through is normal, appropriate, and expected.” What counts as excessive or irrational fear, observes Crampton, is subjective, and depends on one’s context and personal experience. Are her throat-kneading rituals irrational magical thinking, or are they the reasonable behavior of someone who was once diagnosed with cancer as a teenager, cancer which, once treated, recurred against the odds?
But Crampton isn’t making an argument for relativism about hypochondria. Clearly the word picks out an important type of human experience, an existential pain at the intersection of medicine and mortality. Crampton has experienced it regularly, the panic that demands endless anxious attention.
“When I experience an episode of severe anxiety about my health, I become an unreliable narrator of my own body,” she explains. “The fear makes me partial; I only pay attention to what fits my belief that I am sick.”
The book gives very serious consideration to the idea that hypochondria is, at least in part, a problem with the direction and intensity of one’s attention. Although anyone can be a hypochondriac, those who have experienced serious illness are far more likely to suffer from it. Their own unlikely brush with mortality shifts their attention to the precarious and uncertain nature of human health, a truth the rest of us can blithely keep repressed.
Misdirected attention can turn into delusion, as it did for King Charles VI, who, at 24, suffered a breakdown while on a military campaign and began babbling nonsense and attacking fellow soldiers. His courtiers managed to return him to Paris, where “his ravings coalesced around a specific fear. He could not bear to be touched, he said, because he was made of glass and could shatter on contact.”
Not all hypochondriacs suffer from glass body delusion, of course, but Crampton uses it as a metaphor that captures the experience of hypochondria: a sense of yourself as perilously delicate, excruciatingly fearful of the damage your body might suffer. In the face of this crisis, you’ll do anything to feel safe. Charles VI develops his own hypochondriacal rituals, reinforcing his clothes with iron rods and moving very cautiously. Nowadays we might Google our symptoms for hours, only to discover that we’ve been made more anxious — not unlike victims of so-called medical student syndrome, where students of medicine fear they have been struck ill by the sicknesses they are studying.
Although Crampton acknowledges that some researchers doubt the reality of medical student syndrome, one of the book’s central themes is that beliefs, like names, are powerful spells. In early 2021, there was an enormous spike in “functional tic-like behaviors.” The behavior was dubbed “TikTok tics,” and linked to the TikTok Tourette subculture of people describing health conditions. The spike was mostly girls, which was strange because Tourette’s is far more common in boys. Strange, but not so strange, since girls were more likely to watch “tic influencers on TikTok,” and a substantial majority of patients reported watching them.
The upshot of this story is not that we should go back to the days of stigma and silence about our suffering, be it physical, mental, or existential. To the contrary: Crampton believes our collective attitude toward those who suffer has improved dramatically. The tics are a sign of our progress, the anti-glass delusion, a better response to the shock of a pandemic and lockdowns. “Rather than wishing to be invisible, these sufferers are taking up space and insisting on recognition in a way that I find admirable. Why should they keep calm and carry on? Look at us, they seem to say. We are not OK, and neither are you.”
Some readers may be frustrated by the absence of clear definitions or concrete plans for improvement. Crampton’s various experiments with treatment are mixed. The most effective was “eye movement desensitization and reprocessing,” or EMDR, which involves recalling traumatic memories while tracking a shifting LED light back and forth with your eyes. “At the start,” Crampton writes, “it felt too close to a ritual to be scientific.” Nevertheless, she reassured herself that a substantial body of experts and a handful of studies seemed to show it worked.
But is there an incompatibility between ritual and science? In her discussion of cognitive behavioral therapy, Crampton compares the techniques of Stoic philosophers, who visualize their worst fears, to the contemporary practice of “negative visualization.” The book’s attention to names forces the reader to ask: So what is negative visualization? A “technique”? A “ritual”? A “spiritual exercise,” as Crampton refers to the methods of the philosophers? Or a “therapeutic technique,” which has the advantage of being covered by insurance?
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There’s no answer in the book, but that, in itself, is part of the answer. Hypochondria resists definitions, Crampton warns. It is a sickness of endless questions: Am I ill? How can I know? How can I protect myself? Am I being reasonable? Can I trust myself? “Some treatment programs for hypochondria begin by asking the sufferer if they are willing to be mortal,” writes Crampton. “What a question.”
It’s yet another that Crampton leaves unanswered, to the reader’s benefit. If hypochondria is a demand for certainty when none can be had, then A Body Made of Glass might be, to mix philosophy with science, a spiritual exercise that protects against illness anxiety. If you worry about your health, or worry about worrying about your health, it’s worth a read — just remember that books are not yet covered by insurance as therapeutic interventions.
Alan Levinovitz is a professor at James Madison University, who specializes in the intersection of philosophy, religion, and science. His most recent book is Natural: How Faith in Nature’s Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science.
We argue about campus free speech because we forget what the university is for We argue about campus free speech because we forget what the university is for David Polansky The combination of highly visible protests combined with the varying university responses has lately reignited the debate over free speech on campus. Longstanding opponents of free speech have suddenly declared its importance, and have noticed how recent ideas about how to erode cultural and jurisprudential free speech norms might actually be used for ill — that is, might actually be used against people they like. 
As Steve McGuire of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni noted on X, publications from the New York Times to Vox that have spent years sounding reluctant to say anything positive about America’s unusually broad legal protections for speech now seem to regret it, as universities crack down on student encampments protesting for Gaza. “It has not gone unnoticed … that many of those who are now demanding the right to protest have previously sought to curtail the speech of those whom they declared hateful,” the New York Times editorial board allowed in May. “Free-speech radicals need to reject the premise that a certain set of words should be set aside as ‘hate’ and prosecuted as crimes,” the New Yorker’s Jay Caspian Kang wrote two days later, contrary to the sleazy attacks on free speech colleagues such as Andrew Marantz have made a career of publishing in that magazine. Vox, like the much-memed character from the sketch in I Think You Should Leave insisting that “we’re all trying to find the guy who did this,” published Eric Levitz arguing that “progressives would be better equipped to resist the present crackdown on pro-Palestinian advocacy had social justice activists not previously popularized an expansive conception of harmful speech.” In short, just when it had become instrumentally valuable again to the short-term strategic political needs of young leftists, multiple major outlets among the legacy media decided to take the brave step of endorsing a core human right they had spent years attacking.
It has, however, become such a commonplace of American intellectual and political discourse for our deepest disagreements to crop up on campus and be resolved through debates over university policy that something important has been forgotten. In all of the fighting over Israel and the pro-Palestinian protests on campus, and the right to block walkways with a tent on campus, and free speech on campus, something is lost. Namely, what a college is, and why it has almost nothing to do with any of this.
There’s a concept in science fiction known as the “generation ship,” a massive interstellar starship so called because the voyage to distant galaxies is so lengthy that entire generations can live and die before it reaches its destination. Some writers have taken this novel concept further, such that the inhabitants come to forget their original purpose, believing their ship is the world itself. This more or less sums up the present situation of higher education in America: it is a particular vessel for transmitting knowledge and learning across generations, but we have come to mistake it for society at large. Granted, the dynamic of an organization losing the memory of its original purpose is hardly unique to that institution. But it is clear enough across every available media platform that we are simply more concerned with the goings-on of universities than, say, the DMV.
And yet, as our recurring debates over free speech on campus demonstrate, our interest is not commensurate with understanding the university properly. The liberal democratic justification of free speech has both positive and negative valences. The positive case was perhaps best articulated by John Stuart Mill: that democratic citizens benefit from being exposed to the widest available range of ideas. The negative case draws on the long experience of the Wars of Religion and is summarized by Judith Shklar’s “liberalism of fear”: limits on speech (and other rights) ultimately pose a danger that we ourselves will become the subjects of coercion.
But neither of these are germane to the circumstances of higher education. Nonetheless, as the university became economically yoked to the wider society in the postwar era, higher education increasingly came to reflect the larger society that sustained it. And with the proliferation of mass education, student population and tuition swelled, along with the expectations of the kind of experiences a university was to provide. If classes, then why not psychological counseling? And if counseling, then why not state-of-the-art gyms? And if gyms, then why not perfectly demographically representative student bodies, and video game labs, and work-study programs? And if all these, then why not the exhilarating experience of political protests?
Thus, we have constructed a university that maps in all particulars onto the larger democratic society of which it forms a part. But as with Borges’s story about the map that is the exact same size as the kingdom it depicts, such an institution has lost its raison d’etre. There are, by now, entire fields and departments that produce virtually no meaningful or lasting scholarship, being primarily organized around various political agendas. This in turn creates its own reality, so we end up arguing over second-order free speech principles, such as whether it’s legitimate for such-and-such speaker or department to take bizarre and fringe positions rather than how doing so furthers knowledge and understanding in the first place.
By the same token, the current protests have produced highly unedifying debates such as “were the fake border police who took over a public space also instituting particular controls against Jews?” Who cares! It’s not that this is an uninteresting question, but it is an example of what the philosopher Bernard Williams called “one thought too many.” The more salient question is: Why are people in an elite place of learning cosplaying as refugees and/or border guards? Forget the debates about whether slogans like “globalizing the intifada” cross lines; why are they yelling slogans at all? Forget for a moment the grotesque content of a sign pointing at Jewish classmates reading “al-Qasam’s next targets.” Why are they waving signs? Plato’s Symposium this isn’t — and not just because of the replacement of wine and pederasty with Adderall and consent forms. 
Defenders of the campus protesters have, seemingly accurately, attributed some of the worst behavior to outside agitators. But this is precisely the point: that the activities of the students (and increasingly faculty) attracted such people in the first place. It is rarely the case, after all, that outside agitators attempt to infiltrate classes on linear algebra or the metaphysical poets.
Jonathan Haidt has argued for ensuring that students are exposed to a wider range of political perspectives than the contemporary university allows. The founders of UATX have taken this ethos one step further in supposedly organizing their curriculum around “forbidden” teachings, which has more than a whiff of Hogwarts about it. But the problem here isn’t simply that students read, say, too much Fanon and not enough Burke, much less that they’re forced to rely on samizdat to learn. 
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It is not possible to have a productive discussion about the scope and limits of speech within a university setting without some consideration of substance with respect to the purpose of a university — much the way you could not have a meaningful argument about the rules of basketball without some understanding of what distinguishes it from other sports. Proceduralism alone is simply not enough. And restoring conditions of order and civility would require not a return to viewpoint neutrality but the revival of a more robust account of liberal education altogether.
The latest excitement over the Israel-Gaza war will pass (not least because summer vacation is at hand), but the fundamental tension remains, as elite institutions of higher learning continue to serve as stages for larger political dramas. But when the next upheaval comes around, we would do well to remember that whether teachers and students have the right to say ridiculous or offensive things is perhaps the least important question to ask. The salient questions are whether universities are meaningfully generating or preserving human knowledge and whether their students are capable of receiving it. Of the many thousands of institutions of higher learning in America today, how many could give plausible affirmative answers to these questions? And what could possibly be the argument for retaining those that cannot? This, and not free speech dilemmas, is the real indicator of the crisis in higher education.
David Polansky is a Toronto-based writer and a research fellow with the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy. Find him at strangefrequencies.co.
The commencement address we need  The commencement address we need  Rob Long Greetings, graduates!
It’s a gorgeous day out here on the Quad, and I’d like to thank the deans and the president of the university for inviting me to speak to you today.
Or, I would thank them had they invited me. To be honest, I’ve never been invited to give a commencement speech, another sign of the decline of America’s once-great institutions of higher learning. But on the theory that it’s always good to be prepared, I’ve given the task a lot of thought.
Like all of us, I’ve read a bunch of these things. I studied the remarks Jerry Seinfeld recently delivered to the graduating class at Duke University. They were thoughtful and amusing, of course, but also apparently incendiary enough that some students walked out in protest. Harrison Butker, the kicker for the Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs, spoke at the commencement ceremony at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas. Maybe you’ve read about that? He made some controversial points about men, women, the Roman Catholic Church, in vitro fertilization, and a lot of other things. The people who heard the speech are reported to have enjoyed it. Some of the people who read about it later weren’t so thrilled.
But that’s to be expected. It’s a difficult needle to thread. On the one hand, you want to say something important and memorable. On the other hand, it’s usually a hot day, and people are sitting outside in black plastic robes that absorb the sun’s heat. The graduates are sweaty and sticky. Their parents are exhausted and broke from four years of endless expenses and the constant fear of seeing their offspring on CNN, shouting nonsense on the university quad or claiming to be part of a “Queers for ...” something or other group.
In other words, they can’t all be George Marshall’s speech to the Harvard graduating class of 1947. In that unforgettable speech, the then-secretary of state described the crisis of a shattered and chaotic postwar Europe and how necessary it was for America to take a leading role in putting the pieces of the continent back together. To the class of 1947, it was supposed to be just another commencement speech. To the rest of the world, though, it became known as the Marshall Plan. And to the American taxpayer, it slowly became understood as an endless, bottomless, never-ending tab they were responsible for.
My plan is to steer my remarks somewhere in the middle of those two extremes. I will neither opine on current and cultural matters nor will I propose a global scheme that will result in a $34 trillion national debt. Instead, I will remind graduates of three basic and undeniable truths.
One: There’s no better feeling than having money in the bank. It’s a universal mental health guarantee and the quickest way to take charge of your life. Cash money in a boring old savings account will cure your anxieties, give you a great night’s sleep, and make you sexier.
Two: The trick to succeeding at your first job is to make sure that you get in a little earlier and stay a little later than everyone else. And to keep your mouth mostly shut when you’re there. Being available when you’re needed sends the message to your bosses that you can be relied upon. Being silent will unnerve your colleagues and midlevel supervisors. It’s not a bad thing for those people to worry that you’re up to something. 
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And three: When you come to the top of the stairs in the subway or airport, move to the side. This is the simplest way to make the world a better place instantly. When you find yourself tempted to lecture someone (probably someone older) about pronouns or sustainability or the evils of capitalism, ask yourself this: Did I move quickly to the side when I got out of the subway? The answer is probably no, so keep it shut until the answer is yes. And even when the answer is yes, it’s still a terrific idea to keep it zipped. 
My commencement address, I realize, will be on the shorter side. The various provosts and deans might feel a little shortchanged when the whole thing is wrapped up in 15 minutes, but I am convinced that the sweltering graduates and the exhausted parents will be grateful the whole thing is over, which is the entire point of the ceremony.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and he is the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
The fall is all there is for Rishi Sunak The fall is all there is for Rishi Sunak Dan Hannan It was a thoroughly British affair: damp, badly staged, and half-arsed. The prime minister, Rishi Sunak, took advantage of what looked like a break in the rain to emerge from No. 10 and announce that there would be a general election on July 4.
As he spoke, the downpour began again in earnest, soaking his suit. Then some Labour activists started blasting out the theme song from Tony Blair’s victorious 1997 campaign, “Things Can Only Get Better” by D:Ream.
“Who do you trust?” the bedraggled PM asked, looking earnest as the drops formed on his immaculate hair. “Thi-i-ings can only get beddah!” boomed the loudspeakers.
Ever since British people started watching The West Wing 25 years ago, we have had a sense that American politicians are not just slicker than our own but somehow more elevated. Wednesday’s weather, as in some literary pathetic fallacy, summarized our national mood. After 14 years, people blame every blemish in their lives on the Conservatives. But there is no enthusiasm for the alternative.
We won’t be torn on the fourth of July. But we’ll be worn on the fourth of July, pessimistic, irritable and resigned. We will almost certainly give Sir Keir Starmer, Labour’s dullsville leader, a large majority. But, on some level, we already know we will immediately start regretting it. Ah, well. Things can only get wetter.
It is hard not to feel sorry for Rishi Sunak. He is a clever, charming man, in politics for all the right reasons. But he took over just as the public was giving up on his party.
When Boris Johnson was ousted in 2022, the Conservatives were 7 points behind in the polls, not a bad position for a governing party two years into a parliament. Now that deficit has grown to 20. It turns out that voters really don’t like having new prime ministers handed down to them by parliamentary cliques. Sadly, by the time Sunak took over, it had happened twice in three months, all without a general election. People want to take it out on someone, and now they have their chance.
At the same time, voters have repressed the memory of the lockdowns that they themselves demanded throughout 2020 and 2021. Instead of seeing the subsequent tax rises and price rises as the consequence of paying people to stay home, they imagine they are somehow the product of Tory incompetence. They don’t expect things to be any better under Starmer, but they still want a scapegoat, a sin-eater. Ironically, Sunak was more anti-lockdown than 90% of the country, but, in a neat symbol of the entire election, no one cares.
And so, with an irony that will blow the collective mind of the New York Times, just as the European Union turns to parties of the authoritarian Right, Brexit Britain will be almost alone in electing a party of the traditional Left. As European countries pursue various schemes to send illegal immigrants to safe third countries in Africa, Britain’s incoming Labour government will scrap the first such scheme. Funny how things work out.
Why pick this moment? After all, the election could legally have come as late as January 2025, and there were all sorts of reasons for waiting. The post-lockdown spasm of inflation has finally subsided, leaving room for tax cuts before the end of the year. Tories tend to do better in winter (possibly because, according to behavioral psychologists, being cold, or having a cold, makes people more worried about crime and immigration and so more right-wing). In any case, you never know — something might turn up.
I think the explanation lies in The West Wing, specifically the episode where an adviser reminds the apparently doomed President Bartlett of a line from the 1968 movie The Lion in Winter (though the movie is not named). As the princes wait to be murdered in a closet, Richard, played by Anthony Hopkins, stands up straight. “My, you chivalric fool,” his cynical brother says, “as if the way one fell down mattered.”
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“When the fall is all there is,” Richard replies, “it matters.”
From the moment he became prime minister, Sunak has been in the shadow of events: the feuding in his party, the lockdown hangover, the spike in energy prices. By going early, he has at last seized the initiative. He has evidently made up his mind that if he is going down, he will go down on his own terms, a patriot trying to the last to serve his country. When the fall is all there is, it matters.