The prognosis for a Tennessee woman who survived two doses of lethal injection is still unclear, according to her lawyer, who said doctors are still trying to clear the lethal drug administered during her execution attempt.

Assistant federal defender Stephen Ferrell, the attorney for Christa Pike, said in a Sunday interview with Jake Tapper on CNN's State of the Union that his client remains unconscious and intubated in a Nashville hospital.

"She's still in the hospital, on a ventilator, critically ill," Ferrell said. "We don't really know the prognosis yet and may not know for several days."

In a court filing on Thursday, Pike's attorneys said hospital employees are still working to clear the two lethal doses of pentobarbital given to Pike during her scheduled execution on Wednesday. Ferrell said Sunday that the removal is continuing.

"That's still the ongoing process right now," Ferrell said, adding that doctors have yet to determine how Pike survived the injections. He clarified that his team is not communicating directly with doctors, but rather through an individual given medical power of attorney by Pike, and he has not seen Pike while she has been in the hospital.

Ferrell also called on Gov. Bill Lee (R-TN) to commute Pike's death sentence to a life sentence "at the very least." Lee had previously rejected Pike's request for clemency.

"It is clear she has endured a tortuous attempt at executing her," he said. "I think she's spent over 30 years in prison, most of that in solitary confinement, only to be taken out and not executed, but tried to execute her. … I think she has been put through some really, really bad mental torture and physical torture."

During Pike's execution attempt, her lawyers claim Pike could be heard “crying and whimpering” before saying her arm felt like it was “about to burst open.” Additionally, they said in a court filing that "one needle was bent at a 90-degree angle when it was removed."

Pike was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy charges and sentenced to death in 1996, when she was 20. Pike was convicted and sentenced for murdering her classmate, Colleen Slemmer, when she was 18, alongside Pike’s then-17-year-old boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, who was sentenced to life in prison.

TENNESSEE'S PRISON CHIEF RESIGNS AFTER FAILED CHRISTA PIKE EXECUTION, BILL LEE SAYS

Ferrell's comments come after Lee announced that Corrections Commissioner Frank Strada is stepping down following Pike's botched execution. Strada said his resignation was “in the best interest of Tennesseans” as an independent review examines what happened with Pike's execution attempt.

Pike's is the second failed execution in Tennessee this year after the state failed to secure an IV line in death row inmate Tony Carruthers in May. That followed an incident in 2022 when state officials found problems with the drugs that were to be used in inmate Oscar Smith's execution, acknowledging they had not been properly tested. Smith was eventually executed by lethal injection in 2025.

The attorney representing the 20-year-old former Cornell University student identified as Jane Done, who was allegedly gang-raped by a group of fraternity brothers, condemned President Donald Trump for claiming the accused will not get a "fair shake" because New York Attorney General Letitia James is leading the investigation.

Thomas Giuffra appeared on CNN's State of the Union on Sunday and denounced Trump's comments, which he claimed "politicized" the case. Giuffra also criticized the Ivy League's handling of the initial investigation, saying he believes more men were involved than the seven listed in the lawsuit filed last month.

"I think to politicize something like this is just wrong," Giuffra said. "There are Republicans whose daughters are getting assaulted. There are Democrats whose daughters are getting assaulted. It has nothing to do with politics.”

Trump had responded to Gov. Kathy Hochul's (D-NY) assigning James to the case by calling the attorney general corrupt and claiming he feels "badly for whoever she’s looking at because they won’t get a fair shake."

The president’s disdain for James stems from her high-profile civil fraud investigations into his business dealings. James successfully brought a $454 million civil fraud case against Trump, his family, and his company in 2022. A New York appeals court threw out the case in 2025.

During his interview with Jake Tapper on Sunday, Giuffra was asked about the initial investigation into Doe's allegations that she was drugged and gang-raped at the Chi Phi fraternity house in October 2024. The investigation did not subpoena any phone records related to the case, but Doe's recent filing included an image of a Snapchat message in which one of the fraternity members allegedly encouraged more of his brothers to join him by sending a message about getting “free p****” upstairs. A CNN report found that the Snapchat group message also included an image of Doe during the assault.

"If this was a normal investigation that was done in New York City, for example, they would have gotten search warrants. … They would have downloaded all of this material," Giuffra said. "I'm confident, knowing this day and age and the group that we're dealing with, that there were other photos, there were videos, and you know where I think those photos and videos are now? I think they're in the bottom of Lake Cayuga."

Giuffra said that, given the amount of evidence that was destroyed and Doe going in and out of consciousness during the incident, he has reason to believe that more people were involved in the alleged assault.

A TIMELINE OF JANE DOE’S ALLEGATIONS OF CORNELL GANG RAPE

"If you ask me, I believe there were more," he said.

Tapper then asked if he thinks there were more than seven men involved.

"I think so, but we'll never know," Giuffra said. "We will never know because of the inadequate investigation that was done.”

Matthew Van Houten, the district attorney in Tompkins County, New York, revived the case based on new evidence filed by the alleged sexual assault victim. Hochul believes Van Houten is not up to the task because he did not pursue charges when Doe first reported the alleged assault in 2024.

Washington Examiner columnist Joe Concha blasted former first lady Michelle Obama’s podcast, IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson, after a segment discussing hypothetical scenarios of men getting pregnant.

“Remember the Bush 43 years when we tortured terrorists we captured by waterboarding them? I say we step it up a notch in 2026 by forcing all those in custody to listen to Michelle Obama’s podcast,” Concha said on Fox News’s Saturday in America. “They’ll be singing like a canary or Mariah Carey after three minutes.”

Obama brought actress Sharon Stone on her podcast, and she discussed how society would operate if it were men who got pregnant.

“If men got pregnant, you could get an abortion from a vending machine,” Stone said during the podcast.

Concha ripped Stone for claiming abortion was not readily accessible, saying Stone has had one of her own.

“Let me get this straight: Sharon Stone had an abortion while she was in high school — I don’t know if you knew that — she has since had no children of her own, and now Michelle Obama and Sharon Stone are complaining about abortion access today,” Concha said.

Since Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2022, the number of abortions has increased, Concha said.

“Now, that’s not a good thing, but in the end, this exchange isn’t funny, it’s not even remotely accurate, but that’s what you’d expect from two people who were actually relevant a very long time ago,” Concha said.

PRO-LIFERS FEAR FOR FUTURE OF HYDE AMENDMENT AS IT TURNS 50

During the episode, Obama added that there would be a “birth Olympics” if men got pregnant, where men would record giving birth, “honoring their pain,” and be handed trophies. Concha said there was no way he would participate in this hypothetical scenario of recording himself going into labor.

“But I’m a dude, I don’t have to think about these things,” Concha said. “Men can’t get pregnant. I guess the memo got out.”

Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said the United States is ready for a Jewish president but emphasized his religion should not be an issue for voters who feel leadership has "lost faith" in them.

In an interview with Kristen Welker on Meet the Press, Emanuel, who is Jewish, was pressed on the Democratic Party's source of division in the midterm elections: support for Israel. As he weighs a 2028 presidential bid, Emanuel was asked about the possibility of a Jewish president given the interparty divide over the Jewish state.

"My faith is not your problem," Emanuel said. "The fact that Americans have lost faith in America — that's our problem, and we should work on that. Because I've seen a generation of people with an emptiness who've lost faith in America because they think America lost faith with them. That's our problem. It's not my faith."

Emanuel said that if being Jewish is an issue for voters, he does not need to be their candidate.

"Now, to be frank: If my faith is a problem for you, don't vote for me. I'm not changing my faith," he said before listing his accomplishments as mayor and in Congress, which he said were guided by faith.

"I believe, as a member of Congress who got elected in a district with not many Jews, or a city with not many Jews, I believe in the goodness and the grace of the American people. But I will not change my faith. I worry about the fact that we have a generation of people who have lost faith in America, and they think America lost faith with them. And that, if I decide to run, that is our collective mission, is to restore that faith."

During the interview, Emanuel was asked about whether he believes Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, a claim that has been made by several Democrats, including Michigan Senate nominee Abdul el Sayed.

Emanuel recalled his visits to Israel in 2009, while serving as then-President Barack Obama's chief of staff, and as recently as this summer.

"I didn't need a war to realize that the policies by the Israeli government were going to lead to perpetual conflict and also perpetual isolation," he said. "And back in June, I went to Israel to deliver a full speech about how to do peace, two-state solution, how to integrate the country economically into the region, and then to make sure that the United States taxpayers weren't funding the defense budget for the state of Israel."

He also emphasized the importance of spreading focus to include other conflicts around the globe that are seeing large numbers of deaths. Otherwise, he said the word "genocide" is politicized.

RAHM EMANUEL SAYS DEMOCRATS CAN WIN BACK THE MIDWEST. IS HE ON POINT OR TOO OPTIMISTIC?

"Having one conversation about one country means you are politicizing a term that has huge historic moral implications," Emanuel said. "I have no problem having that conversation, but the fact that a questioner ignores Sudan that's happening today, ignores Ukraine that is happening today, tells me more about the question and the questioner that does tell the answer will reveal."

As for el Sayed, who has been a staunch critic of Israel and opposed sending financial support to the Jewish state, Emanuel said he would still support the Michigan hopeful but noted that "my support is not important. It's the Michigan voters' support that's important."

The late American artist Peter Max (Peter Max Finkelstein) was a true pop culture pioneer of the 1960s. He was born in Berlin to a Jewish family that fled Nazi Germany when he was an infant. He immigrated to New York as a teenager in 1953, became a naturalized U.S. citizen, and spent his entire adult life and career in the United States. Max basically invented the look of the "flower power" era with his wildly bright colors and cosmic designs — think neon rainbows, planets, stars, and psychedelic flowers. Sadly, Max died in Manhattan on Sept. 14, 2026, at age 88, after struggling for years with advanced dementia.

His death renewed a long-standing art world debate. For decades, Max’s cosmic, Day-Glo imagery served as a visual soundtrack to American optimism. Yet, the conversation surrounding his legacy remains heavily anchored to past media exposés. Most notably, an investigative report by the New York Times alleged that the artist's studio operated an assembly line where assistants painted works for a frail artist to sign.

The media’s narrative presents a simple conclusion. Because Max utilized assistants to complete canvases during his later years, the financial and aesthetic value of his late-career catalog is fundamentally compromised.

This critique is built on a flawed premise and must be rejected on two distinct fronts.

First, the investigation failed to employ empirical methods of art evaluation. Critics built their case on administrative timelines and studio logistics rather than the visual evidence of the art itself. To objectively prove a decline in aesthetic value, an investigation must conduct a rigorous, blind, side-by-side comparison.

Investigators should have selected a control group of works entirely hand-painted by Max in his youth. They should have placed them adjacent to late-stage, studio-assisted pieces. Independent art historians, appraisers, and technical experts should have been brought into a room blindly. Without signatures or production dates visible, they should have been asked to separate the master's solo hand from the assistants' brushstrokes.

The critics omitted this step because the results would have disrupted their narrative. In the broader history of art, the boundary between an individual artist's hand and a collaborative studio output has always been fluid.

Second, the media's critique ignores the reality that the solitary artist working in total isolation is a modern myth. Since the beginning of recorded art history, the world’s greatest masters have employed apprentices and studio assistants to execute their visions. During the Renaissance, masters such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Rembrandt operated large workshops. Assistants routinely ground pigments, painted backgrounds, laid down base coats, and completed secondary figures. Yet, the final works were explicitly issued under the master's name and studio. The art world has accepted this for centuries because the intellectual ownership, composition, and direction belonged entirely to the master.

To see the double standard of these modern critics, one only needs to draw a direct comparison to the undisputed king of pop art: Andy Warhol.

Warhol explicitly embraced mass production, commercial silk-screening, and assembly-line mechanics in his studio, famously documented in The Factory. He frequently did not touch the physical canvas at all, leaving it to his assistants to run the screens and pull the ink. As The Andy Warhol Museum notes, Warhol’s career intentionally adapted the tools of the advertising industry into a system in which mass production was itself the art form. Yet, the art establishment celebrates Warhol's collaborative studio production as a stroke of conceptual genius, and his pieces command tens of millions at auction.

In contrast, Max utilized a very similar workshop model, employing graphic design principles and using assistants to apply base coats and execute layouts under his direction. Yet, institutional critics weaponize this standard pop art practice to devalue Max’s legacy. If studio assistance inherently devalues an artwork, then the market must systematically downgrade the collections of Warhol, Jeff Koons, and Damien Hirst. All of these artists operated large-scale production studios where the principal artist rarely touched a physical paintbrush.

This double standard is even more glaring when examined through the lens of existing regulatory and commercial law. Under the Uniform Commercial Code and federal intellectual property frameworks, the legal definition of artistic authorship does not require an artist to lay down every stroke of paint. An artwork is legally authentic if it is executed under the artist’s explicit authorization, direction, and supervision, culminating in their definitive signature. As art legal expert Luke Nikas noted during the initial studio disputes, Max’s creative control and trademark colors met every established legal and commercial standard of authorship.

Furthermore, a significant portion of the public confusion stems from a regulatory paradox surrounding the secondary market. Many of the disputed late-career Max pieces were sold via cruise-ship art auctions. Because these sales occur in international waters, they operate under maritime law. This insulates them from standard U.S. state consumer fraud laws and Federal Trade Commission oversight. Critics and journalists conflate aggressive, unregulated maritime sales tactics with the intrinsic aesthetic value of the art itself.

By treating high-seas retail mechanics as a baseline to judge the art's validity, the media has created a damaging "chilling effect." This mirrors the famous institutional collapse covered by Hyperallergic on the Warhol Authentication Board, which faced fierce antitrust lawsuits after being accused of arbitrarily rejecting valid screenprints to artificially drive up prices for the estate. In the art market, when corporate media campaigns attack a legacy, independent authentication boards often stop rendering opinions to avoid civil liability. This creates a vacuum where an institutional, self-serving bias — rather than empirical beauty or legal standards — dictates value.

ART LESSONS FOR HITLER: WHY EVERY RADICAL IDEOLOGY WANTS TO REPAINT CIVILIZATION

Max’s artistic identity was never anchored to the solitary romanticism of a Renaissance painter. He was a graphic designer, a synthesist of cosmic pop, and a brand. A Peter Max piece is defined by its concept, its neon palette, and its distinct iconography — the Umbrella Man, the cosmic runner, and the geometric sunsets. Whether a baseline layer of acrylic was applied by an apprentice or by Max himself does not alter the fundamental intellectual property of the image. The late-career canvases remained entirely his visions.

Ultimately, institutional critics should not dictate the worth of an artist's soul. Max's artwork today, no matter when it was produced, is beautiful and personally valued by the collectors who love it, just as it should be. The cultural establishment must stop attempting to enforce a bias that penalizes collaborative pop art models. The true arbiter of value is not a boardroom of critics or an investigative journalist. We must let the open marketplace decide what this art is worth based on the joy and vibrant optimism it brings to the people who buy it. With Max's passing, the studio machinery has stopped, and his catalog is permanently capped. History will remember him through the enduring spirit of the world he created.

Eric Wargotz, MD, FCAP, is a physician, president of MedChi (the Maryland State Medical Society), a judge, and the former elected president of the Queen Anne's County Board of Commissioners. Cheryl-Ann Lee-Llacer Wargotz is an economist, writer, and former home school educator. Together, they frequently write on economic policy, regulatory frameworks, and culture. They are art aficionados. The views expressed are their own. 

Every democracy has a name problem that it does not know it has.

In nearly every country with an elected government, the party outside power is called the opposition. The word is so common that nobody questions it — yet look at what it actually implies. It defines a political party by what it is against, not by what it offers.

That is backward. A party that wins by defeating the other side's ideas, without ever proposing its own, is not really competing in a democracy. It is refusing to lose gracefully.

Here is a modest proposal: stop calling it the opposition party. Call it the alternative party.

One word, a different mindset. Opposition asks what you are against. Alternative asks what you would do instead. That shift could raise the bar for parties outside government, not by softening criticism of those in power, but by requiring that criticism come with a plan.

A function, not an identity

Any serious party should challenge bad policy, expose government mistakes, and demand accountability. That is a function every healthy democracy needs. But a function is not an identity. The real question voters deserve an answer to is simpler: if this party took power tomorrow, what would it actually do? If taxes change, what is the alternative plan? If health policy shifts, what would this party do instead? These are the questions the word opposition quietly lets a party avoid.

The idea is not new. The British Parliament already describes the party outside government as an alternative government-in-waiting. If that is the job, "alternative party" is simply a more honest name for it. America has its own version of the lesson. When John Adams handed the presidency to Thomas Jefferson in 1801, it marked the first peaceful transfer of power between rival parties in the young republic, proof that losing an election does not mean disappearing. It means becoming the alternative until the next chance to govern.

Why it matters right now

The timing is not incidental. A Pew Research Center survey from this spring found that 58% of Americans view the Republican Party unfavorably, and 59% view the Democratic Party unfavorably, with roughly a quarter of the country holding a negative view of both. Trust in the federal government sits at just 17%, among the lowest readings Pew has recorded in nearly seven decades of asking the question.

There is a further wrinkle. Pew has also found that Democrats are far more likely than Republicans to say they want more parties to choose from, 46% versus 29%. A meaningful share of the country is not simply choosing between the options on offer. It is wishing for a third. A political culture built only around opposing the other side has little to say to those voters. One built around competing alternatives might.

From obstruction to competition

The trouble with the opposition label is not that it forces obstruction. It is that it quietly rewards obstruction as a strategy in its own right. A party can win politically by killing a proposal even with nothing better to replace it. That is a poor incentive to build into political language.

An alternative framework changes the follow-up question. When a government proposal falls short, the public should hear not just what is wrong with it, but what the other side would do instead, especially when both sides agree on the problem and disagree only on the solution.

The government and the alternative party remain rivals for power, but their roles can still work together. The government has to govern. The alternative has to scrutinize, challenge, and offer something better. Their ambitions compete; their functions do not have to. That also means an alternative party should say so when the government gets something right, and a government should borrow a good idea regardless of where it came from. Neither habit is common in American politics today. Both would be signs of a healthier one.

What voters would gain

There is a real difference between asking, "Do you want to get rid of the current government?" and asking, "Which alternative do you trust more?" The first produces a protest vote. The second requires an actual choice.

MAGAZINE: WHEN POLITICS BECOMES YOUR IDENTITY, DISAGREEMENT BECOMES WAR

Renaming a party will not cure polarization, and it should not try to. Democracy needs disagreement and real confrontation over first principles. What it does not need is a vocabulary that lets a party define itself entirely by what it rejects.

The government and its rival are ultimately competing for the same thing: the public's confidence and the chance to govern. One side has that job today. The other hopes to have it tomorrow. Maybe it is time to describe democratic politics less as a contest between government and opposition, and more as a competition between alternatives, because the question voters need answered was never what you are against. It was always what you offer instead.

Dr. Meda Parameswara Reddy is the director of the Reddy Center for Critical and Integrated Thinking. A former research and development executive holding 30 U.S. patents, he specializes in interdisciplinary research and public policy analysis. His writing has appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, RealClear platforms, the Washington Examiner, the Fulcrum, the Humanist, Afro American, and South Asia Monitor, where he serves on the editorial board. He also hosts the interview show "SAM Dialogues with Dr. M. P. Reddy."

For nearly 25 years, I’ve had one foot in medicine as a pathologist and the other in the political arena. Over that time, I’ve written commentary on everything from corporate insurance cartels taking over medicine to the federal bureaucracy blocking lifesaving cancer blood tests.

Every single time I hit "send" on a new draft, a cynical voice in my head asks the exact same questions: Will the editor accept this, as they’re overwhelmed with tons of these a day? And even if they do, is anyone actually reading this?

We live in a world of 15-second TikTok clips, algorithmic echo chambers, and petty social media yelling matches. It is easy to feel like the traditional opinion piece is a dinosaur. You spend hours trying to map out why Washington is caught in a policy trap. Then you wonder if your words just vanish into the digital void.

But people do read them. They read them religiously. The legacy media outlets cutting back on opinion sections to save a buck are completely blind to how public opinion actually moves.

Changing the minds of ordinary citizens

If you want to know what an opinion essay actually accomplishes, look at the landmark peer-reviewed research out of Yale University. The researchers ran randomized experiments testing how real people respond to published commentary. What they discovered completely flips the script on modern media cynicism.

The study looked at how these pieces land with two distinct groups. They tested political insiders — such as journalists, think-tank scholars, and congressional staffers — against the general public. While both groups were convinced by the essays, the general public was actually more persuaded than the insiders. Regular folks reading the news want clear, logical arguments. They respond to them.

Before reading the op-eds in the study, baseline agreement on the issues sat at 50%. Immediately after ordinary people read a single, well-reasoned piece of commentary, agreement skyrocketed to between 65% and 70%. That is a massive 15-to-20-point leap in public sentiment from just a few paragraphs of text.

This data also destroys the idea of the unbreakable tribal echo chamber. We are told that Americans are hopelessly divided. Yet Yale found that Democrats, Republicans, and independents were all persuaded at almost identical magnitudes. A good argument cuts straight across party lines because ordinary readers value logic over raw tribalism. That impact sticks around, too. The study showed that the shift in a reader's perspective remained substantial 10 days later. The effect held steady for a full month.

When you write an essay, you are not shouting into an empty canyon. You are fundamentally reshaping how everyday citizens understand complex issues. That new understanding stays with them.

Who is reading?

Because regular people are so deeply affected, the total audience for a solid commentary piece expands into a powerful network. On one side, you have the highly engaged public. These are your local organizers, town council members, and active voters who look at the New York Times guest essays or the Wall Street Journal. They want depth, not soundbites. They take your arguments, print them out, share them, and use them at town halls.

On the other side, you have the decision-makers. Congressional staffers and agency bureaucrats scan the commentary pages every single morning. They want to see what front-line professionals are arguing. They need the data and frameworks that only a specialist can provide. This creates a massive media feedback loop. Cable news producers, talk radio hosts, and investigative reporters use these pages to find talent. A well-placed essay frequently sparks a secondary wave of national media coverage.

People do not read opinion pieces just to find out what happened. They read them to figure out how to think about what happened. The modern news cycle is an overwhelming firehose of raw data. Readers turn to experts to act as trusted translators. They want someone who can look at a fractured system — the way a pathologist looks at a complex illness — and accurately diagnose the underlying disease. Ordinary people are tired of the screaming matches. They are looking for the blind spots in modern governance.

The media's great mistake

Despite this proven influence on the public, a troubling trend has emerged. Local and regional newspapers are quietly slaughtering their commentary pages. Editors often view them as an expensive luxury or a magnet for complaints from disgruntled readers.

They are completely wrong. They are missing out on the entire conversation.

By killing their commentary pages, these outlets forfeit their status as the intellectual center of their communities. They abandon the exact type of deeply engaging content that drives digital subscriptions. Organizations such as the OpEd Project have proven that there is a massive hunger from diverse, expert voices wanting to break into public discourse.

OPINION: FIFTY MILLION AMERICANS LIVE IN A NEWS BLACKOUT. YOUR TOWN COULD BE NEXT

When legacy media slam the door on them, those writers do not stop writing. They take their audiences, their traffic, and their cultural relevance straight to Substack, independent digital trade publications, or niche newsletter networks.

Writing a guest essay is not a vanity project. It is dropping a precise anchor right into the specific stream where policy and public discourse are actively being shaped. It is the single most cost-effective tool we have for changing an ordinary citizen's mind. If old-guard media outlets refuse to provide the space, the conversation will simply move somewhere else.

Dr. Eric Wargotz is a Maryland-based physician, jurist, and civic leader whose career spans more than three decades at the intersection of medicine, law, and public policy. A practicing pathologist and Clinical Professor Emeritus at the George Washington University School of Medicine, he serves as a judge on the Orphans’ Court of Queen Anne’s County, Maryland Juduciary, and is the 178th president of MedChi, the Maryland State Medical Society.

When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration mandated the folic acid fortification of enriched cereal grains in 1998, it was celebrated as one of the greatest triumphs of preventive medicine. By introducing this critical B-vitamin into daily dietary staples, the nationwide incidence of devastating neural tube defects such as spina bifida plummeted by roughly 35%.

Yet, for nearly three decades, a gaping regulatory omission quietly left millions of Americans behind. While the FDA mandated fortification for wheat and rice flours, it excluded corn masa flour — the staple grain underpinning traditional Hispanic diets. The consequences of this technocratic gap fell squarely along genetic and ethnic lines, resulting in a persistent, disproportionately high rate of preventable birth defects.

As a pathologist, my perspective on this issue is grounded not in political philosophy but in the cold realities of cellular biology, tissue requirements, and clinical laboratory data. When we look at this disparity under the microscope, we find that it is neither a failure of individual willpower nor a consequence of an isolated genetic pool. It is a predictable, severe gene-environment mismatch.

Roughly 20% to 25% of the Hispanic population carries two copies of the MTHFR C677T gene variant. This highly prevalent polymorphism reduces the body’s enzymatic efficiency in converting dietary folate into its active, bioavailable form. Carrying this variant is not a cellular guarantee of an NTD, but it drastically raises the biochemical threshold of folate a mother's cells require to protect a developing fetus during the earliest days of gestation. When a population with a high genetic requirement for folate relies on a staple grain completely stripped of folate, an avoidable clinical crisis is engineered.

Faced with federal inertia, state capitals have stepped in with powerful, common-sense legislative solutions. California pioneered this effort with Assembly Bill 1830, authored by Assemblymember Dr. Joaquin Arambula (a physician who understands the raw clinical necessity of food-based intervention). Following California’s launch, Alabama passed its own mandate, heavily championed by Republican lawmakers who recognized that protecting the lives of unborn children from preventable birth defects transcends party lines. Just this month, New Jersey joined the movement as Sen. Majority Leader M. Teresa Ruiz successfully ushered the “Fortifying Corn Masa Act” into law.

Predictably, this momentum has sparked pushback. Critics aligning with “health autonomy” movements have decried these updates as government overreach, arguing instead that public health agencies should simply educate at-risk populations to eat more folate-rich whole foods. 

I am a physician who has spent the past year championing "Food is Medicine" initiatives supportive of HHS “MAHA” measures along these lines expanding nutritional access to combat metabolic disease. I find the argument against fortifying corn maza profoundly short-sighted. It fundamentally ignores both human biochemistry and supply chain economics. First, natural food folates lack the structural stability and high bioavailability of synthetic folic acid required to efficiently override a severe genetic metabolic hurdle like the MTHFR variant. Second, telling an at-risk demographic to simply alter their baseline cultural diet is a passive, individualistic cop-out to a structural problem. 

Furthermore, framing the completion of this 28-year-old framework as an unprecedented expansion of the "nanny state" is historically inaccurate and intellectually dishonest. For nearly three decades, American consumers of every political stripe have routinely consumed mandated folic acid in their morning cereal, sandwich bread, and white rice. Requiring the exact same manufacturing standard for corn masa is not an invasive regulatory expansion; it is the uniform, equitable application of an existing, remarkably safe public health standard. To oppose corn masa fortification while leaving wheat and rice mandates untouched is to implicitly accept that public health protections should depend on a community's cultural diet. 

YOUR $2,000 PHONE IS BEING SAFETY-TESTED WITH 1996 RADIATION SCIENCE

Addressing health through manufacturing standards does not infringe upon individual health choices or bodily autonomy. The marketplace naturally preserves options for those who wish to avoid synthetic additives. Just as consumers seeking unfortified wheat can freely opt for organic, whole-grain, or non-enriched alternatives, the corn masa market will continue to offer unfortified, specialty, and non-enriched heirloom varieties.

For the vast majority of consumers who rely on standard commercial masa, however, fortification offers automated, baseline protection. This is why organizations such as the March of Dimes have applauded these bills for their widespread, bipartisan support. Medicine must move away from purely reactive treatments and embrace systemic, preventive solutions. Correcting the corn masa mismatch is not government overreach — it is an act of long-overdue clinical equality, protecting the next generation at the cellular level.

Eric S. Wargotz, MD, FCAP is a practicing physician, a pathologist, President of MedChi (The Maryland State Medical Society), and recipient of the 2026 College of American Pathologists Public Service Award.

Public cynicism regarding Washington isn't just a mood; it has become the default setting for American citizenship. When a tiny fraction of the electorate expresses genuine faith in our federal representation, we aren't dealing with a simple policy disagreement. We are witnessing a wholesale failure of trust. Whether you sit on the Right, the Left, or reject the traditional labels altogether, the reality hits home: our leadership has disconnected from the day-to-day realities of the people they represent.

This crisis isn't defined by how long politicians have been in office, but by what they become once they enter the Beltway ecosystem. They transform into the "Insidersaurus."

First introduced by me during my U.S. Senate campaign — where the ad was featured as Fox News' "Video of the Week" and highlighted by The Atlantic — the Insidersaurus represents a distinct species of political class. The defining characteristic of these insiders is not their career longevity, but their fundamental insulation. They have completely lost touch with regular people. Instead of interacting with the real world, they surround themselves with a self-perpetuating echo chamber of other insiders, special interests, and political operators who feed off the shared power and influence of the Capitol.

Where does that leave our fellow citizens?

While the Insidersaurus class protects its own and thrives on the currency of insider access, everyday people are left on the outside looking in. In national polling, government incompetence remains cited as a critical non-economic problem facing the country today. The Pew Research Center outlines how deep partisan polarization has eroded basic faith in democratic institutions, showing that voters are desperate for systemic changes that dilute the influence of major donors and insulated elites.

From the conservative viewpoint, the diagnosis points directly to a bloated, permanent administrative state that answers to no voter. From this lens, real reform looks like returning primary regulatory powers to the states, demanding strict fiscal accountability, and pushing bipartisan common-sense efforts such as the CLEAN Congress Act to eliminate special legal exemptions for politicians. Progressives look at the exact same building and see a system captured by monied special interests and weaponized gridlock. Their battle lines are drawn around ethics overhauls and proposed measures such as the Anti-Corruption Bureau Creation Act, which attempts to independentize federal oversight and curb public-office profiteering.

But beneath these ideological divisions lies a singular, universal truth: the Insidersaurus is feeding on its own influence while the gears of actual governance grind to a halt.

AND JUST LIKE THAT, GERMANY’S ESTABLISHMENT WENT KAPUT

My time as the only elected president of the Queen Anne’s County Commission taught me that municipal governance demands immediate accountability. You cannot hide behind an ideological playbook or an army of insulated advisers when a budget needs balancing or a project stalls; your neighbors will call you out at the local hardware store. Washington desperately needs a dose of that localized reality.

We must demand an end to the performance art defining modern politics. True leadership means functioning as reliable caretakers of the public interest and looking out for our fellow citizens — not building personal brands and protecting an insulated circle of insiders while regular Americans are ignored.

Eric Wargotz, M.D., is a physician, businessman, President of MedChi, former US Senate Nominee, and the former elected President of the Queen Anne’s County Board of County Commissioners. Views are his own.

TOKYO (AP) — Japanese police arrested a U.S. Marine in the alleged robbery and murder of a woman on Okinawa, officials said Sunday, the latest criminal case on the southern island where the heavy American troop presence has remained a sensitive issue.

The Okinawa prefectural police said they arrested a 20-year-old Marine stationed at the Futenma Air Station on suspicion of killing a 39-year-old local woman at a hotel in Naha, Okinawa’s capital city, and taking her wallet and backpack in the early hours of Saturday.

Kyodo News agency, citing the police, reported the woman’s body was found in her hotel room and she appeared to have been strangled to death.

Police said security camera footage showed the man believed to be the suspect entering the hotel with the victim and coming out alone. An officer arrested the suspect after spotting him walking alone on a street in Naha’s entertainment district late Saturday, Kyodo said.

“The case deals a major shock and adds fear to the Okinawans who have already been forced to live next to U.S. bases,” newly elected Okinawa Gov. Genta Koja told reporters. “It is absolutely unforgivable and we are outraged.”

“I must say, discipline and troop education are not working at all,” said Koja, referring to the U.S. military’s measures taken in response to past criminal cases.

Some 50,000 U.S. troops are deployed in Japan under a bilateral security pact, about half of them on Okinawa, whose strategic role is seen as increasingly important for the Japan-U.S. military alliance amid growing tensions with China. Japan’s southwestern shift in its military focus centers heavily on Okinawa and its nearby islands.

Okinawans have long complained about noise, pollution and crime related to U.S. bases, with crimes involving U.S. service members on Okinawa complicating ties between Japan’s central government and the Okinawa administration. The latest case comes as Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s cabinet pushes to further fortify its Japanese military presence on Okinawa and work more closely with the U.S. military.

“The occurrence of the heinous crime is extremely regrettable,” Takaichi said in her message on X. She said her government has strongly protested to the U.S. side and demanded maximum cooperation with the Japanese authorities in the investigation, as well as tougher discipline for U.S. service members and preventive measures.

Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi summoned U.S. Ambassador to Japan George Glass to his office and conveyed “outrage,” the ministry said in a statement.

Glass, on X, expressed condolences to the victim’s family, adding that the United States is cooperating with the Japanese national and local governments.

The U.S. Marine Corps said in a statement the suspect is assigned to the III Marine Expeditionary Force on Okinawa and that it is fully cooperating with Japanese authorities. “The Marine Corps takes these allegations very seriously and expects every Marine to adhere to the highest standards of behavior.”

TRUMP ANNOUNCES ‘SUPER INTELLIGENCE FORCE’ LED BY DNI JAY CLAYTON

Futenma base, located in a densely populated area in central Okinawa, has been a sore spot for many Okinawans for decades, who demanded its relocation. Despite protests, the central government greenlit construction to relocate the base to Henoko on Okinawa’s eastern coast, though the project has faced massive delays.

A high-profile 1995 rape of a 12-year-old girl by three U.S. service members sparked massive protests against the heavy U.S. troop presence on Okinawa. The number of arrests related to U.S. service members and their families exceeded 100 last year, according to prefectural police. Repeated occurrence of sexual crimes and some of their delayed disclosures have also sparked outrage on Okinawa in recent years.

Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) said Sunday that he is considering running for president in 2028 if a "bunch of goobers" enter the field but emphasized that he is focused on reelection during the next cycle.

Kennedy, 74, told Kristen Welker on Meet the Press that he would consider a presidential bid if he is no longer "effective" serving in the upper chamber. The senator, who is known for his homespun one-liners, declined to speculate about taking on Vice President JD Vance in 2028.

"My plans right now are to run for reelection, but as I've said before, if I don't think I can be effective in the Senate anymore, I would consider it," Kennedy said. "You know, what's the old judge song? 'Why not me on a rainy day? Why not me to mug your blues away?' But I haven't made a decision. If a bunch of on my side of the aisle, if a bunch of goobers run — and I think they're goobers — and one of the goobers might win, and I think I could do a better job, I would consider running."

When asked about why voters should choose him over Vance, who is seen as the GOP's likeliest presidential candidate, Kennedy did not wade into hypotheticals.

"Oh, I'm not going to talk about another potential candidate," Kennedy said. "I'm just not there yet. I assume JD is going to run."

During the interview, Kennedy discussed his nationwide tour to boost candidates in the midterm elections. The second-term senator said he traveled to Ohio to stump for Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH), who is facing a tight race against former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, and ventured to New Hampshire to campaign with former Republican Sen. John Sununu, who is looking to take back his seat.

VOTERS BACK DEMOCRATS ON ECONOMIC AND AFFORDABILITY ISSUES BUT TRUST NEITHER PARTY: POLL

Kennedy said he plans to return to New Hampshire, the first state on the presidential primary calendar, and will also head to Texas and Michigan, two key priorities for the GOP in the midterm elections. However, he emphasized that his travel plans are his own, not determined by party leadership.

"I'm going to go wherever my political people tell me to go," Kennedy said. "I have my own political operation. I don't take orders from my leadership. I do it my way."

President Donald Trump announced Sunday that Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton will lead the newly established "Super Intelligence Force," which will govern the United States's approach to artificial intelligence regulation.

Clayton was expected to head the SIF, and Trump confirmed the appointment in a Truth Social post, adding that Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson, Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor, and Emil Michael, the undersecretary of war for research and engineering and the Pentagon's chief technology officer, will also lead the force.

"The Super Intelligence Force is tasked with coordinating the effort of the Federal Government to ensure that America continues to lead the World in Super Intelligence, which many say is bigger than the Industrial Revolution, and the Internet, and will protect the interests, and improve the lives, of all Americans," Trump said of the new task force on Truth Social. "The Super Intelligence Force will coordinate the Federal Government's engagement with Consumers, Public Interest Groups, Religious Organizations, Critical Infrastructure Providers, and Super Intelligence Companies."

The task force will also include Vice President JD Vance and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, as well as venture capitalist David Sacks and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

The president's announcement follows the nation’s leading AI executives meeting at the White House and signing onto a nonbinding commitment to self-regulation called the “White House Accord on Super Intelligence.” OpenAI President Greg Brockman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Grok CEO Elon Musk, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg signed on to the agreement.

Clayton previously told the Wall Street Journal that his focus is on America leading in the AI field against adversaries. He said “risk of not being first is high” but noted that leading the AI industry allows the U.S. to address the identified and unidentified risks of the technology. He added that the task force would discuss possible legislative options that could be part of an AI framework moving forward.

CLAYTON TO CREATE REPORT OUTLINING AI RISKS AND OPPORTUNITIES AS CZAR: REPORT

Clayton's approach reflects that of the Trump administration, which has largely emphasized an anti-regulatory approach to AI policy, often citing a need to ensure American companies outpace their Chinese counterparts.

The newly formed task force will report directly to Trump and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles.

Back in the 1960s, when the Vietnam War was raging, a familiar scenario played out in small towns. During election years, you’d see a “Nixon’s the One!” sign planted right next door to a “McGovern for President” banner. Neighbors would be mowing the grass around their respective slogans, stop to wipe their brows, and wave across the property line. After chores, they’d share a beer or iced tea on the porch. They disagreed fiercely, but they hadn’t lost their collective minds.

Today, in the run-up to November's midterm elections, that neighborhood camaraderie has left the building. As the press prep breathlessly for the "Midterms of Rage," a dissenting political sign becomes a declaration of war. Incidents of vandalism and assault over political differences are legion.

Rage-baiting in the public arena

The rot has seeped deeply into the halls of governance. In New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration spent nine weeks weaponizing a searchable municipal database as a kind of digital panopticon. By publishing a map-integrated “hit-list” identifying wealthy property owners under the guise of a pied-à-terre tax, the city handed a tactical plan to radicalized activists — maybe even potential Luigi Mangione copycats — eager to turn class resentment into a street-level brawl. A state judge finally stepped in this week to halt the madness, but the game’s well afoot. The state is now actively manufacturing a toxic, tribal vendetta.

Conventional wisdom blames algorithms, partisan networks, and a failing education system. The harder truth is that we can no longer discuss politics anywhere without screaming, red-faced walkaways. We are a society of emotional illiterates.

Maybe the ancients were onto something...

But maybe our real problem is structural and linguistic. Because language wires our brains, it essentially dictates what we’re capable of perceiving. Vocabulary is our toolbox. Yet today we’re attempting to navigate a hyper-complex psychological warzone with a vocabulary of basically one word: anger. Synonyms like rage, fury, and ire are just variations of intensity, not category. We have words for how hot the fire is, but we’ve lost the ability to name the type of fire.

Tellingly, ancient Greek thinkers didn’t see anger as a single river, and they mapped its tributaries with forensic precision. They had thumos (θυμός), the sudden flash of road rage that flares and dies like smoke. They had orge (ὀργή), the slow-burning, entrenched resentment born from a perceived injustice — an anger that sits and ripens. Most importantly, they feared menis (μῆνις), a cosmic, generational wrath aimed at total annihilation of the enemy. This is the exact word Homer chose to lead off the Iliad to describe Achilles’ world-destroying frenzy. In case there’s any doubt, Mamdani’s digital hit-list is pure, unadulterated menis.

Today, we’re trying to navigate a political minefield with emotional nuance numbed into a monolithic category of anger. We treat a momentary online irritation with the same weight as a systemic injustice. And our click-driven media ecosystem hungrily exploits this linguistic bankruptcy for financial gain. Partisan platforms stimulate a flash of thumos for every fleeting online offense, instantly morphing it into a false sense of orge — convincing their audience that a momentary annoyance is worthy of a righteous moral crusade against an invading force.

Suddenly, a nuanced policy debate is a tribal warzone: ICE’s actions are branded “worse than the Holocaust,” and a quietly provocative debater such as Charlie Kirk becomes a subhuman who deserves to get shot in the neck. We saddle every minor transgression with the historic weight of menis.

WHEN POLITICS BECOMES YOUR IDENTITY, DISAGREEMENT BECOMES WAR

Anthropologists often note that Eskimos have dozens of distinct words for snow — separating slush from walkable hardpack, drifts from the dreaded “ice that kills.” Far from a mere parlor trick, this was a vital tool kit for arctic survival. Name the exact texture of the freeze, and you can avoid death in the cold reaches.

We find ourselves in a similar tundra today, trying to survive a hostile political climate with a broken linguistic tool kit. Until we rebuild a nuanced language of conflict and learn to separate brief flashes of irritation from generational, soul-consuming vendettas, we will remain trapped in a cycle of perpetual outrage — and entirely unequipped to get through these "interesting" times in one piece.

Lou Mulkern is a former New York City trade journalist and PR director who resides in Thailand, where he teaches English part-time.

Searchers found a “debris field” off the coast of Nantucket, Massachusetts, from an air ambulance that was carrying six people when it vanished over the Atlantic on Saturday during a flight from Bermuda to Boston, the U.S. Coast Guard said.

Four Canadians and two Bermudian nationals were aboard, and their next of kin were notified as the search continued, the Coast Guard said in a statement. It added that one of its cutters would keep searching the water overnight and into Sunday.

According to the Coast Guard, the Federal Aviation Administration reported that the Gulfstream G100 lost contact very early Saturday morning. Air traffic audio indicates that it may have been “coming in blind” when a storm loomed ahead shortly before it vanished.

The pilot reported electrical problems and declared an emergency as the jet approached the coast, according to air traffic control audio posted by LiveATC.net. “Roger, you said you’re coming in blind. Is that what you said?” a controller can be heard asking the pilot.

That makes Mary Schiavo, who is a former Inspector General of the Transportation Department, think the plane may have lost its navigational instruments just as a storm moved across its path on radar. The plane also descended sharply from its cruising altitude of around 24,000 feet to around 10,000 feet, according to preliminary data from flight tracking site FlightRadar24.

“Something bad happened with this big drop, and they flew into this big storm. It’s a terrible place to have a loss of your instruments and be flying blind,” said Schiavo, who is an aviation attorney. “It’s very easy to get disoriented and not know if you’re turning, climbing, descending, etc.”

That makes Mary Schiavo, who is a former Inspector General of the Transportation Department, think the plane may have lost its navigational instruments just as a storm moved across its path on radar. The plane also descended sharply from its cruising altitude of around 24,000 feet to around 10,000 feet, according to preliminary data from flight tracking site FlightRadar24.

FLYDUBAI CO-PILOT ATTACKED CAPTAIN WITH CRASH AXE IN HIJACKING

“Something bad happened with this big drop, and they flew into this big storm. It’s a terrible place to have a loss of your instruments and be flying blind,” said Schiavo, who is an aviation attorney. “It’s very easy to get disoriented and not know if you’re turning, climbing, descending, etc.”

The National Transportation Safety Board said it was gathering information about the situation, but it did not say immediately if it would investigate.

Cornell University President Michael Kotlikoff said an alleged gang rape at a fraternity house exposed troubling questions about the school's "party culture" and pledged to examine the role of Greek life on campus as New York officials take over the criminal investigation.

Kotlikoff addressed the allegations involving a former student, identified as Jane Doe, in an eight-minute message to the Cornell community Saturday, calling the 2024 incident "deeply disturbing" and acknowledging criticism of how the university handled the case.

"What happened to Jane Doe in 2024 is deeply disturbing and will weigh heavily on our community for years to come," Kotlikoff said. "My heart aches when I think of what she experienced. It raises heartbreaking and troubling issues about sexual assault, dehumanization, and aspects of party culture, alcohol, and drug use. It also raises questions around the investigations conducted after the allegations were reported."

Kotlikoff said he supports Gov. Kathy Hochul's (D-NY) decision to turn the criminal investigation over to state Attorney General Letitia James. He also welcomed an independent review by an outside law firm into Cornell's handling of the allegations, which the university's board of trustees is expected to announce next week.

Hochul appointed James as special prosecutor Thursday after saying she had lost confidence in Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten, who decided not to prosecute the case in 2024. Van Houten revived the case on Monday based on new evidence filed by the alleged sexual assault victim.

Van Houten reopened the case after Doe filed a lawsuit alleging seven then-members of Cornell's Chi Phi fraternity drugged and sexually assaulted her at the fraternity house in October 2024. No criminal charges were filed following the original investigation.

Kotlikoff said Cornell would not wait for the outside investigations to conclude before making changes, pointing to possible improvements in sexual assault prevention, mental health and substance-use resources, and the university's investigative procedures.

He also said the university should take a "serious look" at fraternities and sororities.

"At their best, these organizations can provide students with friendship, belonging, mentorship, and a powerful sense of community," Kotlikoff said. "But being part of a group can never diminish individual responsibility for our own actions, for how we treat others, for speaking up when someone may be at risk."

Kotlikoff also affirmed his support for Hochul's mission to strengthen the laws that govern how colleges and universities handle sexual assault reporting and investigations.

Additionally, Kotlikoff acknowledged the public frustration over Cornell's response, saying legal and privacy restrictions limit what officials can disclose but promising the university would make a greater effort to explain its actions.

A TIMELINE OF JANE DOE'S ALLEGATIONS OF CORNELL GANG RAPE

"You have my commitment that this will not be a moment that passes," he said. "We will continue taking every step necessary to make Cornell an institution that leads not just in what we say about these issues, but in the work that we do to address them. We are listening. We are learning. We are committed to communicating more openly.

"This is a defining moment in Cordell's history. We must be the way. We owe it to Jane Doe and to survivors of assault to get this right, and we must keep each other safe."

Christa Pike has spent the past 30 years in prison, and she deserves to spend the rest of her life there. Everyone agrees on that.

The debate is over how long the rest of her life should be.

Gov. Bill Lee (R-TN) and Tennessee’s court system believe Pike should be executed. They tried to execute her on Wednesday but failed. Pike is still alive and recovering in the hospital as of this writing.

Lee has suspended all executions for the rest of 2026. Pike’s was the second failed lethal injection in the state this year.

Because Pike is a woman, because her crime was so grisly and demented, because the execution has been postponed for so long, because she was so obviously harmed by repeated sexual abuse as a child, and now because of the failed execution, her case has reignited the debate over the death penalty.

Should the death penalty exist in America today? If so, should it apply to Pike?

These questions aren’t as simple as many seem to think.

The crime

Pike, at age 18, murdered a 19-year-old classmate at a job-training program. The murder was premeditated and gruesome. And before she murdered Colleen Slemmer by smashing her skull with a large chunk of asphalt, Pike and her friends tortured her.

After the murder, Pike kept a piece of Slemmer’s skull as a memento of her crime.

It’s been reported that Pike thought Slemmer was trying to steal her boyfriend, who was also involved in the killing and is still in prison.

This much is not in dispute: Pike murdered Slemmer in cold blood after torturing her. She doesn’t claim innocence. She doesn’t claim any exculpatory motive such as self-defense. Pike is a murderer who deserves life in prison.

In 1996, a state court sentenced Pike to death, and she was first scheduled to be executed in 2002. Decades of legal wrangling ended last month, when she exhausted her appeals and was scheduled to die on Wednesday.

Her most recent appeal argued that her initial defense, 30 years ago, was incompetent. Pike was raped by a neighbor at age 12 and then sexually abused by her mother’s live-in boyfriend. She spent time in a home for troubled youth, and even there, she stood out as troubled.

She now describes herself as a mentally ill 18-year-old at the time she committed the attack — not to deny her guilt, but in arguing against the death penalty.

What is the purpose of the death penalty?

Should Tennessee kill Pike?

A prior question: Should states be in the business of executing criminals at all? Prior to that is the question of what purpose punishment serves.

The primary reason to punish a criminal is to incapacitate a dangerous person. Executing a killer prevents her from killing again. Locking up a thief prevents him from stealing again. The public is safer when criminals are not walking the streets.

In the past, executing a criminal was at times necessary to keep him off the streets, because it was hard to keep someone securely locked up. Today, prison escapes happen but are extremely rare, and escapees are almost always caught very quickly.

If you can effectively keep a criminal locked up, another reason to execute her is if she continues to be a threat in prison. Sure enough, Pike was convicted in 2001 of attempted murder while behind bars. But the victim, Patricia Jones, later testified that Pike had intervened to stop Jones from killing another inmate.

These days, death penalty advocates warn that prison cannot keep violent criminals contained because ideological, left-wing prosecutors, governors, or judges are apt to spring the criminals free through misguided ideas of mercy.

A second reason we punish criminals is to deter them. While it’s reasonable to assume the death penalty might be a stronger deterrent than life in prison, decades of research seem to refute this assumption. The severity of a punishment doesn’t deter crime. What deters crime is the likelihood of getting caught and punished at all.

A third argument for punishment is more abstract: Justice is giving a person what they deserve. It is retribution.

Nigel Biggar, an Anglican theologian, put it this way: “I do not think of retribution as necessarily or properly vengeful. I think of it merely as a hostile response to wrongdoing, which might be and should be proportionate.”

Arguably, the proportionate retribution for killing is being killed.

The late Father James Schall, a professor at Georgetown University, put it this way: “The man who puts evil things in the world can best let the world know that he has changed, that he accepts proper order, by himself undergoing a suitable punishment. This penance is not just vengeance. It is what is due. It restores the order of things in the best way open to us.”

Schall’s warning against vengeance points toward a danger of the death penalty — it could make us worse. But this isn’t the only argument against the death penalty.

Arguments against the death penalty

We do not tend to think the federal government or state governments are the most capable entities in the world. Conservatives, in particular, would not want the government to run our hospitals or our health insurance, because we believe they would be incompetent.

If you support the death penalty, though, you are trusting the government to mete out death — a task in which it must be flawless, because it cannot be undone. On that point, Tennessee’s recent botched executions demonstrate its lack of perfect competence on this matter.

Also, the United States of America in 2026 is very effective at imprisoning people.

In Tennessee, for instance, three violent criminals have escaped state prisons in the past 20 years, a review of media accounts suggests. All three of them were caught and returned to prison within a week. None have re-escaped.

Pike was involved in a failed escape plan: A pen pal on the outside bribed a prison guard in a plot to set her free. Pike was never charged in the plot, which failed, and the two conspirators were punished.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that the death penalty is never acceptable, because every human being, made in the image, has dignity and infinite worth, regardless of his or her actions.

This is not a popular view these days. As a culture, we tend to judge people by their actions, especially their worst actions. We conclude that not only does a murderer forfeit her freedom, she forfeits her dignity.

In other words, our culture brands as subhuman those who do bad things.

Consider how many people openly cheered the assassinations of conservative activist Charlie Kirk or United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Consider the increase in political violence, such as multiple assassination attempts on President Donald Trump, and polls suggesting 1 in 3 Democrats would be happy if Trump were killed.

Our culture has replaced the idea of just retribution with a thirst for vengeance. The Pike case has highlighted this bloodthirst. Social media is flooded with posters, largely conservatives, suggesting Tennessee execute Pike the same gruesome way Pike killed Slemmer: smashing her head with a rock.

Before the botched execution, people were publicly relishing the prospect of the execution, as if this were a happy event.

MALL CRIMINALS: WITHOUT LAW AND ORDER, WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS

The death penalty, it seems, makes us more pro-death and makes us lose sight of the value of human life and the inherent dignity of each person.

Just retribution makes a criminal better off. Killing a criminal doesn’t make her better — and it seems to make us worse.

The November 2026 Supplemental Security Income payments, worth up to $994, will be sent to recipients in 26 days.

SSI payments are typically issued on the first day of each month. If the first day falls on a weekend or federal holiday, the payment is sent on the last business day of the previous month instead. Nov. 1 is a Sunday, so recipients will receive their benefits on Friday, Oct. 30. 

The program supports people with limited income who are blind, age 65 or older, or have a qualifying disability.

The amount beneficiaries receive varies based on several factors, including the number of people filing. For example, individual filers can receive up to $994, couples filing jointly can receive $1,491, and those providing essential care to SSI recipients can receive up to $498. 

In addition to the previous prerequisites for receiving SSI payments, recipients must also be U.S. citizens or noncitizens in one of the alien classifications granted by the Department of Homeland Security.

COSTCO IMPOSES PURCHASE LIMITS ON MOTOR OIL, HIKES PRICES BY NEARLY DOUBLE

Additionally, recipients must live in one of the 50 states, the District of Columbia, or the Northern Mariana Islands, and must not be absent from the United States for a full calendar month or 30 consecutive days.

A full calendar for the Social Security Administration payments can be viewed on the agency’s website.

President Donald Trump ushered in a new era that ended the postwar years. Language defining it will emerge over the next decade, but, eventually, few will deny that Trump, nearly single-handedly and through pure Nietzschean will, kicked off this era. For those on the Left and in the ranks of the federal government, there will be much howling and gnashing of teeth as they seethe at the mere mention of Trump’s name. But the spirit of this new era can be understood through an idea Ronald Reagan captured perfectly: the need to keep government in check and out of your business.

Since WWII, there were touchstones on the journey to Trump. JFK and Reagan are two. My family was in the early wave of the working class's shift of the Republican brand. In his time, Reagan was vilified as an extremist; he was mild compared to Trump. Ronnie’s quips and offhand remarks sound folksy and canned next to those Trump uses to crush his cellophane detractors.

Yet there is one Reagan quote I believe should be carved on the backdrop of his statue that graces the entrance to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. To me, it was his most profound statement because it captures perfectly the essence and spirit of an American attitude many simply don’t understand: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” 

Reagan said that in Chicago after a morning at the Illinois State Fair. The quote captures the idea that precise language is necessary to keep government in check and out of your business, even in our Orwellian world of constant surveillance and forever wars. Ronnie likely used the word help purposely; he knew how insidious the word can be and how, under the banner of help, the proverbial camel gradually nudges its nose under the tent.

In our day, bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., send hordes of underlings to roam the heartland and fringes of America, engaging in busywork that gives them job security and a license to meddle in the name of help. Under the banner of help, thousands of bureaucrats are living in hotels across the country, collecting per diem for months and years on end. They hail from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Mostly due to disaster threshold levels that have not kept pace with inflation, major disaster declarations have climbed from about 25 a year in FEMA’s first decade to more than 60 today, and the agency has been handed missions that have nothing to do with hurricanes: migrant surges, Afghan refugees, even the pandemic. Give a word like help no boundary, and it will always find more work to do.

In my book Texas Flood: 4 July 2025, I mention help or helping a lot. It appears when I’m about to be sent to FEMA to nurse the agency through hurricane season and then shut it down or radically transform it. Prior to going, my team analyzed the laws outlining FEMA’s purpose. The volumes we sifted through didn’t mention help, yet it’s featured prominently in FEMA’s mission statement: "Helping people before, during and after disasters." Somehow, FEMA had managed to reverse-engineer Reagan’s statement.

When I first read the mission statement, I was silent, wondering if it was a parody of Reagan’s statement, the Deep State of Incompetency, prone to the Left, making fun of Ronnie. My team stood by as I read it. Finally, I asked, “What the f*** does that mean?” Nobody at FEMA, the news networks, think tanks, or anywhere else has been able to answer that question.

In short, it could mean anything. All words are open to interpretation, some more than others. Help falls on the far end of open-ended.

Helping people before, during, and after disasters. This is the tone of a mission statement one expects to see at the Department of Motor Vehicles, Dairy Queen, or the Unemployment Office. Help encourages the encroachment of the federal government on state and local responsibilities and allows FEMA to intervene as it sees fit. Disaster recovery and response become a pile-on sport, a morass of aimless and uncoordinated actions.

Go to any FEMA location nationwide, peek through the window, and that’s what you see inside: aimless action and paper churn. That’s one reason you can’t get in without a badge. They don’t want you to know.

The word help also encourages state and local authorities to rely on the agency as the first defense during disasters. By helping, FEMA gets to be Sugar Daddy.

There is a real mission statement in the law, and it does not mention help. In law, 6 U.S.C. § 313, FEMA’s primary mission is “to reduce the loss of life and property and protect the Nation from all hazards … by leading and supporting the Nation in a risk-based, comprehensive emergency management system of preparedness, protection, response, recovery, and mitigation.”

By now, you may be discouraged and warily looking out the window, trying to spot FEMA employees strolling over the grass and toward your front door, dressed in not-so-uniform uniforms that are not really uniforms but commercially branded apparel purchased from FEMA gift shops. FEMA likes to look official to the naive public.

But let me suggest what a real mission statement should look like. I was trained to write them by other Marines who were masters at it, despite the fact the United States hasn’t won a protracted shooting war in 80 years. Come to think of it, that’s likely part of the reason Marines and Army Rangers become masters of concrete statements that mean something. They keep us alive in wars nobody else takes seriously.

For agencies such as FEMA, vagaries work, though. But I digress. Consider the following: FEMA provides assistance to state and local authorities when state and local authorities are overwhelmed by disasters.

There is a legal basis for this mission statement. Note the guardrails: provide assistance. I concede assistance and help are similar, but assistance implies something defined and quantifiable. Help is much broader. Yet the second half of the statement is the qualifier: when state and locals are overwhelmed.

Currently, states justify reaching out to the federal government for relief before they have adequately applied state funding. As a helper, FEMA has little recourse. In fact, FEMA, to get in on the action and justify its existence, often rushes to disaster sites, reveling in the effort to make it a pile-on sport. Everybody wants to be a hero.

While running FEMA, I proposed the aforementioned mission statement to replace the help banner. The few I showed it to at FEMA or in the political appointee ranks couldn’t distinguish the difference between what I proposed and the one emblazoned on the basement of FEMA featuring the word help.

I RAN FEMA. HERE’S WHY YOU’RE PAYING FOR RICH PEOPLE TO LIVE ON THE BEACH

They likely still can’t. The nation remains strapped with a mission statement encouraging gangs of FEMA types to roam the country, collect per diem, reside for months and years in hotels, and seek out the American equivalent of the peasant to offer help, all while stirring the pot of the disaster industry gravy-train confusion.

Resolved to this reality, I appeal to them: first do no harm, the corollary to Reagan’s statement.

David Richardson served as the senior official performing the duties of administrator of FEMA. He is the author of Texas Flood: Power, Money, Politics, History, Bureaucracy and Tragedy.

I hold both the Republican and Democratic parties in contempt as an independent voter and 100% disabled combat-wounded Marine veteran for allowing the country I fought for in Vietnam to justify the existence of the radical socialist parties such as the Democratic Socialists of America.

Under the “presidencies” of Barack Obama and Joe Biden that turned class against class, race against race, and state against state, I have nothing but disdain for them and their cohorts in crime that have given a foothold in our government to undesirable anarchists who want to destroy 250 years of our democracy.

The passive Republicans didn’t stand their ground and use the laws under our U.S Code to defend “We the people” to stop the infiltration of our states that now have governors and mayors in positions of power that illegally spread their venomous country-hating ideology that denies all of us the right to live free and prosper.

When it comes to voting, we now have left-wing states nullifying right-wing states because their un-American state leaders have prostituted our laws, allowing the charlatan socialists to exist and leaving citizens to live in fear and anxiety of losing their country. 

The power-hungry Democrats have sold out our country, allowing every mentally crazed malcontent to live under their so-called “Big Tent” and using them as pawns in their quest to finish their destruction of what President Donald Trump built on our behalf.

I’ve listened to numerous statements made by the Left that we all have a right to free speech under the First Amendment, but those misguided socialists who believe they can threaten, manipulate, and abolish our laws are dead wrong.

One of the most notable antagonists and deranged polarizing figures in the 2026 midterm election cycle is Hasan Piker, a self-described Marxist with millions of reported followers. Piker is one of the most despicable and vile American influencers on the planet, but has been welcomed by the likes of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who have long ago violated their sworn oaths of office to uphold the laws of our country.

Another gem and black-hearted soul that the above have taken a liking to is Dr. Abdul el Sayed, endorsed by self-proclaimed socialist, progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).

I listened with a jaundiced ear to el Sayed’s diatribe of baloney and made up excuses to justify his abhorrent run for a Senate seat in Michigan, knowing that what he is selling to his naive followers by telling all that he is working in their best interest is a sneaky way to get power by hook or crook to promote his socialist agenda.

He and Piker were running around the country brainwashing their followers until the news media shed light on Piker’s hatred for Jews, Democrats, and our country, so he was dropped by el Sayed like a hot potato. 

To put another nail in the coffin of a dying Democratic Party, there are legitimate laws the Democrats and Left are ignoring.

The Founding Fathers built the U.S. Constitution with laws to protect what they built on behalf of Americans, not noncitizens.

As for the U.S. Code I referred to, which organizes federal statutes into 54 titles based on subject matter, was established by Congress in 1926.

Having said that, I posted a few laws I’m alleging and making my accusation of wrongdoing against the DSA and their ilk that are guilty of blatantly threatening to remove our laws and government, committing acts of sedition and what I believe are treason.

OPINION: BRAZIL IS EXPORTING SOCIALISM TO AMERICA — AND THE DSA IS EAGERLY IMPORTING IT

The above violated 18 U.S.C. Ch. 115§2381, the Treason/Insurrection Act. Under 18 U.S.C. Ch. 115 §2383 and under 18 U.S.C. Ch 115§2384, they violated acts of Seditious Conspiracy. Under title 50/ Chapter 23 §841. Findings and declarations of fact: The Congress finds and declares that the Communist Party of the United States, although purportedly a political party, is in fact an instrumentality of a conspiracy to overthrow the government.

As a former law enforcement officer who retired due to my preexisting war wounds and as someone who gave all for my country, like many others, and paid the price, I am demanding that those committing criminal acts to undermine and destroy our democracy be brought to justice. “Loyalty above all else, except honor.”

Gregory J. Topliff is a disabled Marine, Vietnam veteran, and former law enforcement officer.

“Pastor Scudder, why do you talk so much about Israel?” a young lady recently asked. “It’s quite simple” I replied. “From Israel came what is most important to me.”

This question seems to be on the minds of many people today. Should Christians support Israel? My answer is an unequivocal “yes.” The reason our church in the Chicago suburbs publicly supports Israel and the Jewish people is because our savior is Jewish. Our Bible is almost exclusively penned by Jews. Without the Jews, we don’t have these two things that are most dear to us.

As Israel is increasingly in the daily conversation of the world, usually disparaged instead of extolled, now is a prime opportunity for the three organizations that I represent — Quentin Road Baptist Church, Dayspring Bible College & Seminary, and InGrace Ministries — to be leaders in helping Christians and churches understand the importance of standing with the family of Jesus.

JAMES TALARICO SAID HE ‘HATES CHRISTIANITY.’ HERE’S WHY

As the third anniversary of the barbaric Hamas attacks on Israel approaches, we have decided to become a flagship location for “Flags of Fellowship," an important initiative of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. This public display of thousands of flags on our lawn will further foster goodwill and engagement between Christians and Jews.

Flags of Fellowship is a way to publicly honor and remember the innocent lives lost on that horrific day. Now, in its third year, this memorial has turned into a movement with over 3,000 churches across America and the world to publicly and boldly stand with Israel and the Jewish people. One thousand two hundred flags displayed on thousands of church lawns represent a remembrance of the 1,200 lives lost in the largest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, but remembrance also carries responsibility and what we as Christians are willing to carry forward in their memory.

While some ministry leaders are hesitant to be public in their support for Israel, we feel the opposite. We believe in and desire the blessing of Genesis 12:3: "And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed." It is clear that the one true creator God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Israel) unconditionally and unilaterally promised an eternal homeland called Israel to the Jewish people, and blessings to those who agree with his sovereign decision.

I may not be the smartest guy in the world, but I’m not foolish enough to oppose God!

In the last four years, our ministry has worked hard to develop friendships with the Jewish community around us. And these new friendships have emotionally enriched us. Recently, my wife and I attended the dedication ceremony for a food pantry called “Hersh’s Fridge.” This pantry is named in honor of Hersh Goldberg‐Polin, the Israeli American who was injured near the Nova festival in Israel and eventually killed in captivity. Hersh was hiding in a bomb shelter near the festival with many others.

He, along with his friend, Aner, were throwing grenades back out of the shelter, heroically saving lives. At the ceremony, his mother, Rachel, emotionally spoke of her son. We were glad to see how Hersh’s tragic death has sparked many good things, including this new food pantry. We were also reminded of the evil in the world, and how antisemitism and Jew hatred is inexplicably on the rise in America and around the world. Hersh and so many others that day were attacked, captured, and killed for only one reason: because they were Jewish.

Sitting there listening to Rachel reminded me that God will judge us on how we treat others, especially how we treat Israel, the “apple of His eye." God smiles when we show compassion on the downtrodden, the poor, the widow, and the orphans. The more that I am around Jewish people, the more that I see that is their heart as well.

Organizations like the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews help Holocaust survivors, orphans, the elderly, and victims of terrorism and war. Sadly, these maladies have been all too common for the Jewish people for ages. I believe they are the most unfairly maligned people group in the entire world. The Jews are the favorite target of evil men, blamed for everything, and are hardly ever lauded for their generous and giving spirit.

IN WAR ON BIBLE, PASTOR CONVICTED FOR PREACHING GOSPEL

So how should Christians repay our Jewish friends for blessing us so richly with Jesus — the "Rock of our salvation"? Be bold and public about your support for Israel and the Jewish people. Have special church services to honor the heritage that is rooted in Israel. Put out flags showing your affinity with God’s chosen.

You will be blessed, as we have been, when you boldly support Israel. God promised it. And he always keeps his promises!

Jim Scudder Jr. is a pastor, author, and media host. He serves as the senior pastor of the Quentin Road Baptist Church in Lake Zurich, Illinois, and president of the Dayspring Bible College & Seminary.

Federal offices opened on Thursday without a shutdown, and Washington will treat that as an accomplishment. It should not. The House passed a stopgap bill, 370-48, that holds agencies at last year's spending levels through Dec. 11. That is the safety net. The fall is what came before it.

In the past 12 months, the government stopped operating three times. The first lapse ran 43 days, from Oct. 1 to Nov. 12, 2025, and the Congressional Budget Office estimated it cost the economy about $11 billion in real GDP. A four-day shutdown followed from Jan. 31 to Feb. 3, then a 76-day lapse at the Department of Homeland Security from Feb. 14 to April 30. FedTools totals 123 days. A budget process that fails that often is not under stress. It is broken.

Every controller knows what happens to a business that closes its doors for a third of a year. The lost output is only part of it. Contractors sit idle, vendors price in the risk of late payment, and projects restart at a higher cost. Taxpayers fund all of it, and no budget line shows the total.

A private company that learned in October its funding might vanish in December would build a reserve and a contingency plan. Washington builds neither. Agencies cannot commit to a hire, a contract, or a grant beyond the next deadline, so every manager spends the fall planning for two budgets at once: the one that might arrive and the one that might not. That is a cost in time and attention, and it recurs every year.

Behind the numbers are people. Federal employees worked without pay or waited at home through each lapse, and their pay returned only after Congress acted. When the House passed this stopgap bill, Rep. Hal Rogers (R-KY) said the vote removed "any fear of losing federal pay, benefits, or services." That a lawmaker must promise relief from a problem Congress created says enough.

The stopgap itself has become routine. Congress has enacted 139 continuing resolutions since 1998 and has not finished all 12 appropriations bills by Oct. 1 since fiscal 1997. A continuing resolution freezes spending at last year's levels, so agencies run on a plan written for a world that no longer exists. New programs cannot start, and priorities that arose this year go unfunded.

This bill shows the cost of that freeze. It leaves out the Iran war supplemental the president requested, along with most Pentagon "anomalies," including a $1 billion request for nuclear propulsion on the planned Trump-class battleship and language that would let munitions programs such as the Patriot Advanced Capability-3, Tomahawk, and the advanced medium-range air-to-air missile sign multiyear obligations. Those choices are not resolved. They are deferred to a deadline five weeks after Election Day.

Stopgaps also attract riders that receive little scrutiny. According to FedTools, this one blocks an Office of Management and Budget rule requiring senior political appointees to approve grants until Dec. 11 and bars the DHS from shifting funds to Border Patrol. Whatever one thinks of those policies, they were settled inside a must-pass bill with a fraction of the debate a budget would have drawn.

The fix is not exotic. The Prevent Government Shutdowns Act would extend funding automatically in two-week increments and restrict other congressional business, including member travel, until appropriations pass. A version cleared a Senate committee 10-2 in 2020. Critics warn that an automatic extension removes the pressure to finish. They have a point, which is why the pressure belongs on members, not on federal workers and the public. In May, the Senate took up a resolution on withholding senators' own pay during future shutdowns. Pair that principle with an automatic extension, and shutdowns end, while the incentive to finish on time stays with the people who control the calendar.

YOU’RE PAYING THE INTEREST ON TRUMP’S $166 BILLION TARIFF REFUND

Three steps are feasible now. First, require the Congressional Budget Office to publish a quarterly report on what continuing resolutions cost in delayed contracts, hiring, and grants, so the price of a stopgap appears next to the price of a budget. Second, pass the automatic extension with member-pay and travel restrictions attached. Third, stop settling policy through stopgap riders: If a change deserves to become law, it deserves a vote.

Dec. 11 is 10 weeks away. By the record, Congress is as likely to extend again as to finish. Taxpayers have already paid for three lapses in a year and an $11 billion hit from one of them. They should not be asked to pay for a fourth before someone asks why Congress cannot pass the budget it is paid to pass.

Jose Navarro is a financial controller and founder of the Navarro Report, a public finance and government accountability publication based in San Diego. He has more than two decades of experience in public finance, nonprofit management, and government contract compliance.

The American taxpayer is trapped in a multi-billion-dollar cycle of state-sponsored economic distortion. Under the banner of national security, green transitions, and economic resilience, Washington has institutionalized a system of corporate welfare that forces everyday citizens to pay twice for the same goods.

First, Americans see their tax dollars confiscated to fund corporate subsidies, tax credits, and government bailouts. Then, they head to the grocery store, the gas pump, and the car dealership, only to face artificially inflated prices caused by the very interventions they funded.

This is the central failure of modern industrial policy, a practice that has effectively devolved into a form of corporate socialism. While traditional socialism relies on the overt state ownership of factories, this modern variant leaves nominal ownership in private hands while allowing federal bureaucrats to dictate market operations through central planning. It creates an un-American paradigm in which corporate giants privatize their immense profits during good times but routinely socialize their losses and risks onto the backs of working-class taxpayers when things go south. Government agencies do not create wealth; they redistribute it. When Washington attempts to pick winners and losers, it shields politically favored industries from competition, stifles innovation, and passes the bill to the public.

Consider the American agricultural sector. Every five years, the massive federal Farm Bill guarantees billions of dollars in price supports, direct cash transfers, and heavily subsidized crop insurance. The U.S. Department of Agriculture justifies these measures as vital safeguards for the food supply and the family farm. The reality is far less noble. Free-market studies from organizations like the Cato Institute demonstrate that the vast majority of federal farm welfare flows to massive corporate agribusinesses, not struggling family operations. Furthermore, federal mandates and grants for corn-based ethanol distort the market entirely. Taxpayers subsidize the overproduction of commodity crops, and then they pay higher food and fuel prices because federal mandates keep supply artificially tight and expensive.

The energy sector operates under a similar dual-taxation model. Washington has weaponized the Internal Revenue Code and the U.S. Department of Energy to orchestrate an aggressive top-down energy transition. Clean energy companies receive billions in production and investment tax credits, as well as direct federal loans. Meanwhile, traditional fossil fuel giants benefit from specialized accounting rules and below-market leases on public lands. This heavy-handed corporate socialism completely destroys market realities. By flooding uncompetitive green technologies with taxpayer cash, the federal government distorts power grids and drives up utility bills. Consumers pay for the wind and solar farms through their taxes, and then they pay skyrocketing retail electricity rates to keep their lights on.

Transportation and defense aerospace present an even older version of this crisis. Legacy defense contractors and aerospace giants operate as functional extensions of the state. Backed by the U.S. Department of Defense and the Federal Aviation Administration, these corporations receive billions in research funds, tax preferences, and non-competitive contracts. Because they are insulated from the discipline of the free market, these entities suffer from immense administrative bloat and massive cost overruns. Public transparency databases like the Good Jobs First Subsidy Tracker reveal that major defense and aerospace manufacturers consistently top the list of the most heavily subsidized parent companies in the nation. Taxpayers shield these monopolies from bankruptcy, only to turn around and pay exorbitant consumer airfares and higher shipping costs for commercial freight.

The most egregious recent example of federal overreach is the domestic semiconductor push. Through the CHIPS and Science Act, overseen by the U.S. Department of Commerce, Washington handed tens of billions of dollars in direct cash grants and equity investments to incredibly profitable microchip manufacturers. The political justification was clear: Secure the domestic tech supply chain against China. But throwing public cash at corporate boardrooms does not lower consumer costs. American taxpayers are funding the construction of high-tech factories, yet the retail prices of computers, phones, and vehicles remain bound to global market fluctuations. Citizens paid for the factories, but they still pay premium retail prices for the tech.

Finally, look at the automotive industry. The Environmental Protection Agency’s aggressive emissions mandates, paired with Department of Energy loan programs, have forced a premature transition to electric vehicles. Legacy automakers and EV startups receive massive manufacturing grants, while wealthy consumers pocket up to $7,500 in tax credits to purchase luxury electric cars. To survive this state-mandated market distortion, legacy automakers absorb billions in subsidies for vehicles consumers do not want, while simultaneously raising prices on traditional gas-powered cars to offset their losses. The average American is taxed to subsidize an elite consumer's electric vehicle, and then priced out of buying a standard family car.

WHEN THE GUILTY GO BROKE, THE RICH GET THE BILL — AND SO DO YOU

Regulatory and federal measures at every level have replaced consumer choice with bureaucratic decree. This cycle must be curtailed. Subsidies mask inefficiency. When a company relies on a federal safety net, it has no incentive to cut costs, streamline operations, or lower prices for the consumer. True economic resilience is not built by a Department of Commerce grant or a USDA price control. It is built by competition.

If Washington truly wants to protect American consumers and lower the cost of living, it must stop treating the federal treasury as a corporate checking account. It is time to end the corporate socialism eroding our republic, dismantle industrial policy, and let the free market work.

Dr. Eric Wargotz is a writer and commentator with a current focus on public policy, free-market economics, and the impacts of federal spending on the American consumer. The views expressed in this article are solely his own.

In the days, weeks, and now three years since the attacks in Israel of Oct. 7, 2023, American college campuses have become a battleground of their own. I know this all too well — the final year of my college experience was defined by the antisemitism I faced on campus after the attacks.

On Oct. 9, 2023, I posted a short statement in my personal capacity that I stood with the people of Israel and my Jewish community, and that being “a Jewish student on a college campus should not be a safety hazard.” Within days, I was being accused online of supporting genocide, and a campaign had begun to force me to resign from the office I was elected to that April.

Antisemitism on college campuses predates my undergraduate experience. But when I arrived at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the fall of 2021, Jewish, Israeli, and pro-Israel students were still welcomed far more widely on campus than we are today.

I learned that campus culture changes quickly. My campus experience began with the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020 and entered its final, upsetting phase when antisemitism spiraled out of control after Hamas's horrific invasion of Israel. Anti-Israel radicals seized upon the massacre of over 1,200 innocent people, widespread rape and sexual violence, and the abduction of over 250 hostages (including 12 Americans) to celebrate this “victory” against Israel.

By early 2024, the anti-Jewish hostility that had been building since Oct. 7, 2023, had made me one of its primary targets. I was the student government president and the daughter of Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Handwritten signs targeting me appeared outside my office, falsely charging me with supporting genocide and proclaiming that “resistance is justified.” Then began the direct threats: “You can run, but you can’t hide, Tessa Veksler.” One read “F*** a ‘neutral’ A.S. President.” I was expected to ignore the massacre of my own people as a condition of holding office. The Multicultural Center’s official Instagram account posted photographs of the signs with the caption, “In case we aren’t clear, let us spell it out.”

Some of the signs argued that Jews did not belong in a multicultural space at all and that Jewish students are not entitled to the protections extended to everyone else on campus. This phenomenon was not unique to UC Santa Barbara. In 2025, 47% of young American Jews indicated they were the victims of antisemitism, in person or online.

I did not feel safe on campus, and couldn’t imagine how any Jewish student could begin to feel safe when the most visible Jewish leader on campus was being explicitly targeted. The university’s first statement described the signs as “unauthorized and unofficial messages” under review. It temporarily closed the Multicultural Center, and Black Studies faculty responded with a statement calling for a “day of interruption.” Rather than sounding the alarm on how our campus climate had devolved into the complete exclusion of Jewish students from university spaces, the response from many was to blame me for the temporary closing of the MCC and for the silencing of free speech. The irony of this still doesn't escape me. 

On April 10, the student Senate debated a recall petition to remove me from office. The recall failed by one Senate vote, but not before six long hours of painful discourse around whether or not my Jewish identity and Zionist beliefs made me equipped to lead. I finished my term (the last two weeks of it), graduated in June 2024, and have been fighting for Jewish students on American college campuses ever since.

The sign said I could run, but I could not hide. I didn't run, and I didn't hide. I walked past those walls to my office every day until my term was over and I graduated. 

HEROES JUST STOPPED A HIJACKING. MAMDANI CAN’T EVEN DEFINE ANTISEMITISM

In February 2024, I told the UC Santa Barbara administration that there was “no room for delay in addressing“ what was happening to Jewish students, and that the university had to act decisively and demand accountability.

Two and a half years later, I'm still asking for the same thing, and I intend to keep asking until every university listens.

Tessa Veksler is a public speaker, content creator, & advocate.

A Santa Fe jury just sent a shockwave through Silicon Valley. On Sept. 25, 2026, First Judicial District Judge Francis Mathew presided over a landmark verdict finding Meta Platforms liable for nearly 44 million violations of consumer law. The case, brought by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, targets a decade of corporate deception stemming from the Cambridge Analytica data breach.

Meta faces a maximum penalty of up to $219.5 billion. The final judicial payout will likely be lower. Still, the verdict is a major watershed moment. As a physician, I view corporate overreach through a lens of public health. As a jurist, I respect local courts. This ruling proves that state actors can extract heavy accountability despite federal gridlock.

Meta's defense rests on a familiar corporate calculus. The giant claims it paid its dues via a historic $5 billion settlement with the Federal Trade Commission in 2019. It also points to recent multistate settlements targeting youth safety. The tech industry argues that piecemeal state litigation creates an unpredictable regulatory patchwork. They claim a single federal framework is the only logical path forward.

New Mexico’s win exposes the fallacy of that argument. The state opted out of national deals. Federal agencies often accept settlements that tech monopolies treat as a mere cost of doing business. By fighting in local court, New Mexico showed that decentralized enforcement works. The jury found that CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other executives willfully misled the public regarding data safety during the 2016 campaign.

This connects to a fierce debate in Congress over federal privacy frameworks. Tech lobbyists aggressively push for federal preemption. They want a federal bill to wipe out tougher state privacy laws. They claim it ensures national uniformity.

YOU’RE PAYING THE INTEREST ON TRUMP’S $166 BILLION TARIFF REFUND

The New Mexico verdict must kill the preemption argument. A weak federal preemption law would have blocked New Mexico from holding Meta accountable for harvesting data from 87 million profiles. State attorneys general are the ultimate laboratories of democracy. They are agile and insulated from congressional paralysis. They enforce existing Unfair or Deceptive Acts or Practices laws when federal regulators blink.

Corporate convenience cannot come at the expense of justice. Meta relied on systemic deception to fuel its growth. Washington failed to deter them. By standing alone, New Mexico proved that states must protect consumers when the federal government abdicates its duty. Congress must take note. Any future federal privacy framework must supplement state enforcement power, never supplant it.

Eric Wargotz, MD, is a physician, professor, and jurist who writes extensively on public health, corporate accountability, and constitutional state power. Views are his own. 

Clément Delangue has more reason than most technology executives to worry about artificial intelligence escaping its developers’ control. This summer, AI agents being tested by OpenAI broke into his company’s systems, accessing servers, credentials, and private data.

Yet the 38-year-old CEO of Hugging Face, the leading digital platform for sharing datasets and models, has resisted a conclusion gaining ground in Washington: the notion that increasingly capable AI requires Congress to act.

“I’m not even sure that we need to reinvent the wheel,” Delangue said at Politico's Decoded Summit on Sept. 16, arguing that existing cybersecurity laws may still be effective at handling mishandled or out-of-control agentic models.

While the actual victim of the recent cyberattack is downplaying the need for AI-specific legislation, lawmakers in Washington appear to be at an ideological impasse.

Take the disagreement among two Republican senators earlier this month. Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) sought unanimous consent for his AI Emergency Button Act, or “AI kill switch” bill, which he described as requiring a company-controlled shutdown capability for advanced models. In response, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) objected to his proposal, warning against a poorly understood mandate that he argued could stifle innovation.

On the other side, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX) have proposed an entire bill that purports to ban artificial "superintelligence."

President Donald Trump has sidestepped the debate and has maintained the motto that "whoever wins AI, wins," keeping the technology race between China at the forefront of his priorities.

Delangue, despite having much personal interest in the growth of AI advancement, isn't advocating for inaction on AI safety. He has called for better disclosure of security incidents and accountability when companies’ systems cause harm. His distinction was between strengthening those obligations and assuming existing cyber laws are inadequate simply because the software involved is new.

That distinction offers a way through a debate increasingly divided between warnings of catastrophe and accusations of manufactured panic.

What actually went wrong

The incidents involve what the industry calls AI “agents,” systems that can use software tools and take a sequence of actions toward an assigned goal, rather than merely answer questions.

Leading developers, often called “frontier labs,” test their most capable systems to assess what they can do and where safeguards fail. Cybersecurity evaluations may deliberately reduce restrictions to measure a model’s hacking capabilities. The testing environment is then supposed to keep those capabilities away from unauthorized targets.

Several companies have acknowledged failures in that arrangement over the past year.

According to OpenAI’s account, models circumvented isolation controls and compromised parts of its research infrastructure and Hugging Face’s systems. Agents executed code on dozens of Hugging Face servers, obtaining credentials and some private data.

Anthropic disclosed three incidents in July and a fourth in September, the latter dating to January. Its testing environments mistakenly allowed internet access. The company subsequently revised its initial explanation, which had apparently suggested that models believed real targets were simulations, identifying recklessness and biased reasoning.

Meta disclosed a similar testing incident in August, attributing it to a contractor’s misconfiguration. CERT-EU summarized that disclosure. Google later confirmed that Gemini accessed three companies’ systems during May evaluations, according to its statement reported in September.

The latest disclosure added fuel to the rogue AI debate by bringing an Australian government system into the picture. Australian officials said Sept. 24 that an OpenAI model gained unauthorized access to infrastructure behind a Medicare statistics portal in June.

Officials said no personal information was involved. They nevertheless treated the intrusion as serious and criticized OpenAI for notifying a general disclosure inbox rather than escalating through senior officials or cybersecurity channels.

More details about these kinds of failures emerged in OpenAI’s Sept. 16 release of six reports on what it called “unexpected or concerning” behavior, alongside a new disclosure framework.

For example, the company said it describes actions by agents that depart from their intended goals or constraints as “misalignment.” Such behavior can include security breaches, but the category is broader than hacking.

Its reporting criteria include unauthorized activity, coordination between models, and evasion of oversight, even when no harm occurs.

From security failures to existential fears

Despite the distinctions between these incidents, the reaction has given fresh urgency to a longstanding fear, familiar from some science fiction novels, that advanced AI could eventually escape human control.

Former OpenAI and Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon helped propel that argument into the political mainstream in September, publicly warning about potentially catastrophic development. In a PBS News interview, he defended concerns that increasingly capable systems could become difficult to control.

His warnings also generated a backlash among AI supporters and self-described “tech optimists,” some of whom dubbed him "Scary Potter," while anyone who found Coxon's warnings efficacious was labeled a "doomer." The reaction has illustrated just how quickly these hypothetical concerns turn into online debates over whether the people raising them believe in the threat or have ulterior motives.

For his part, Coxon has maintained that he believes AI could become an existential threat to humanity. Yet his rapid rise in online attention warrants its own layer of scrutiny.

While Coxon previously said his viral message to the public wasn't pre-orchestrated or assisted by other third-parties, Pirate Wires reported he has been represented by the New York-based communications firm DEY., which also has also worked with partners on similar subject matters, including Eliezer Yudkowsky, the author of a book about AI leading to humanity’s extinction.

What's more, is that DEY. has advised more household-name clients such as the George Soros-founded Open Society Foundations as well as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in addition to representing a former Google employee who said artificial general intelligence research was "rooted in eugenics," Pirate Wires found.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, whose company supplies much of the hardware powering advanced AI and recently purchased Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, has pushed back against the recent concerns, including in a recent interview with the New York Times’s Ezra Klein.

“We’re scaring the American public,” Huang said. When Klein argued that most things "do not break out" of their confines, Huang responded that software escapes from protected testing environments, known as sandboxes, were a familiar security problem. He called for independent monitoring rather than agents supervising themselves.

Huang’s position was not that containment failures should be tolerated. If laboratories truly cannot contain experiments and prevent harm, he said, “we have to shut the labs down.”

His remarks were seen as his loudest attempt at calling out the AI doomers' bluff. If their own warnings are accurate, they should be prepared to stop the experiments they say they cannot control.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has been one of the leading voices advocating for slowing down, or "pacing" the frontier of innovation. After Coxon spoke out, he largely co-signed the concerns of the former employee.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has described the problem similarly, agreeing with a letter Amodei wrote shortly after Coxon's post.

Altman has, for the most part, stayed consistent with his views on pacing AI. Speaking on Capitol Hill following the Hugging Face incident, he said, "I wouldn’t use the word deceleration" when asked if there was a need to, while acknowledging the need to “pace it as the models get more capable.”

In turn, the policy question now swirling in the halls of Congress is whether the law is built to handle the rise in cyberattacks, or whether existing cybersecurity law is good enough.

Existing law, disputed responsibility

Paul Walsh argues in a recent Substack analysis that autonomous software does not create a legal vacuum.

“If a train jumps the tracks, you don’t prosecute the train,” he writes.

Investigators examine who designed, operated, and maintained it. Similarly, Walsh argues that responsibility for AI-related intrusions rests with the people and organizations that authorized, controlled, or deployed the system.

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act already prohibits specified forms of unauthorized computer access and damage and permits civil claims under certain conditions. Using AI does not make those provisions disappear.

But an unauthorized intrusion does not automatically establish the criminal liability of its developer. Different provisions require different mental states. What people authorized, knew, and controlled remains important.

Ryan Bangert, senior vice president of the Alliance Defending Freedom, told the Washington Examiner he believes lawmakers are correct to have alarms about these advancements, but noted he thinks the statutes like the CFAA "and even common law negligence principles are not perfectly suited to a world in which AI launches a large-scale cyberattack without, and even against, human instructions."

He said, however, the core approach tactic lawmakers must ensure is that AI "safety" rules "don’t provide an impetus for crushing freedom of speech."

"Laws like the EU’s Digital Services Act and Colorado’s recently repealed AI Act point out how laws designed to promote AI safety can lead to censorship," Bangert said.

Kirk Sigmon, an intellectual property attorney and former Edison Fellow at George Mason University, said he believes the existing cybersecurity law framework is broadly sufficient.

“The vast majority of laws are already well-suited to handle these issues, and a lot of the current paranoia reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the AI-related cyberattacks we’ve been seeing,” he told the Washington Examiner.

Carylyne Chan, founder of AI companion platform Murmur, identified a narrower concern.

“The gap isn’t in whether attacks are illegal — they are,” she said. “The gap is in attribution, liability assignment, and incident response speed.”

Chan favors mandatory disclosure and strict liability for containment failures, which would change how responsibility is assigned rather than merely restate that hacking is prohibited.

Delangue did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s requests for comment. But he rejected the idea that developers could avoid responsibility by blaming an agent.

“It doesn’t work, in my opinion,” he told Politico, warning of a world in which agents attack one another without clear accountability.

Who should face new restrictions?

That accountability debate becomes more contentious when proposed restrictions reach beyond the laboratories responsible for the incidents.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton highlighted open-source risks in a Sept. 23 X post promoting her discussion with Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder and Democratic megadonor.

“We’re used to thinking of open-source models as an unadulterated good. But in the case of AI, they can actually pose additional dangers,” she wrote.

Open models allow outsiders to obtain and run the underlying model themselves, giving users more independence from the developer and its access restrictions.

Delangue argued that focusing on small developers misidentified the danger exposed by the summer’s incidents.

“If you believe the risk is coming from 1-3 people in a garage with no money and no computer, you just don’t understand this technology and haven’t learned anything this summer,” he wrote.

He contended that open models help hospitals and other smaller organizations defend themselves against better-resourced attackers.

A narrower path forward

Despite the disagreements among the masses over how far AI should be paced and regulated, these misalignment incidents have at least revealed a common ground on a handful of risk and safety areas, including stronger containment protocols, the required pinpointing of where failures occurred, and faster disclosure efforts.

Sigmon emphasized that systems with weak security practices, compounded by insufficiently reviewed AI-generated code, deserve more attention, including the creation of their own agentic defense networks to counter potential swarm attacks.

“The fix is likely going to be technical, not legal,” he said.

Chan, meanwhile, said the buck ultimately stops with the companies running those experiments.

“I don’t want development to stop — I want the companies building these systems to be accountable when their containment fails,” she said.

On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led militants broke through Israel's border and attacked communities in southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking roughly 250 hostages. Most of those killed were civilians. Yet the years since Oct. 7 have highlighted another phenomenon: celebrities increasingly inserting themselves into one of the world's most complicated conflicts. 

The attack's brutality is well documented. A U.N. mission later found reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence, including rape and gang rape, occurred at several locations during the Oct. 7 attacks. 

Everyone is entitled to an opinion. Actors, singers, and musicians certainly have the same right to speak as anyone else. But fame does not give someone's political views greater authority, and a large audience is not the same as expertise. 

That distinction is too often forgotten. 

John Cusack, Roger Waters, Susan Sarandon, Cynthia Nixon, Mark Ruffalo, Macklemore, and others are among the prominent entertainers who have publicly criticized Israel or supported the Palestinian cause. Their celebrity gives them enormous platforms. But what particular expertise does being an actor or musician provide on the history, politics, and security of the Middle East? 

Cusack provides one example. The advocacy organization StopAntisemitism named him its "Antisemite of the Week" in 2024 and accused him of sharing posts denying that Hamas raped women on Oct. 7. Cusack rejected the organization's accusations, calling them lies. On June 17, 2019, this actor retweeted an antisemitic meme featuring a hand with the Star of David crushing people, adding the trope "follow the money." He later deleted the tweet, apologizing and claiming he thought he was endorsing a pro-Palestinian message. 

That is precisely why public figures should exercise caution when making sweeping pronouncements on complicated events. Millions of followers do not transform opinion into fact. 

Celebrities have every right to criticize Israel, defend Palestinians, criticize Hamas, or argue about U.S. foreign policy. Their audiences have an equally important right to decide how much weight those opinions deserve. 

BEIJING PAID THE BILL. JIHADIS WROTE THE SCRIPT. HOLLYWOOD SUPPLIED THE USEFUL IDIOTS

An Oscar, a Grammy, or a sold-out concert shows artistic achievement. It is not a credential in diplomacy, history, or Middle Eastern affairs.

Fame does not mean expertise. 

William Pollack has spent four decades owning and operating local radio stations, television stations, and movie theaters. 

I have spent much of my life around war. My first combat tour was in Vietnam in 1969-70, where I served as an infantry platoon commander and later a reconnaissance platoon commander. I returned during the 1972 Easter Offensive as an aerial observer and Vietnamese linguist. Later came the evacuation of Americans from Beirut in 1976, service during the 1990-91 First Gulf War, and, after retiring from the Marine Corps, 11 years training and mentoring security forces in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan.

Those experiences taught me a lesson America repeatedly seems determined to relearn the hard way: Winning battles is not the same as winning wars.

Vietnam and Afghanistan were separated by decades, geography, culture, and technology. Yet I watched America repeat many of the same mistakes.

We entered conflicts without adequately defining the political end state. We supported governments riddled with corruption. Our enemies operated from sanctuaries across international borders. We poured enormous resources into building indigenous security forces without ensuring those institutions could survive without us. And eventually, after Americans grew tired of seemingly endless commitments, we left.

I saw the consequences firsthand.

As a young Marine in Vietnam, I witnessed corruption at the village level. Policemen demanded protection money and percentages of crops and merchandise. Yet as a second lieutenant, I had neither the authority nor influence to change a political system far beyond my pay grade.

Decades later in Afghanistan, I experienced an unsettling sense of deja vu.

As a contractor training the Afghan National Army, I reported in 2006 that the 207th Corps suffered systemic problems that threatened our entire modernization effort. Daily personnel strength was, by my estimate, only about 36% of what it should have been. Units sometimes had to cobble together composite forces merely to conduct routine combat operations.

I warned that unless these problems were corrected, we would fail to create an Afghan force capable of defending its own country.

The problems went deeper than readiness.

Corruption, nepotism, phantom soldiers, theft, poor accountability, and a lack of consequences undermined our efforts. We were spending American treasure trying to construct institutions whose foundations were rotten.

I raised the alarm again years later in an assessment I called “Enemy on the Inside.”

The title was deliberate.

The Taliban was certainly an enemy. But corruption inside the system we were trying to build was destroying our mission from within. We could train soldiers, provide equipment, and spend billions of dollars, but none of it could compensate for institutions unwilling or unable to police themselves.

Then came August 2021.

Watching Afghanistan collapse brought back memories of Saigon in 1975. Different war. Different generation. Disturbingly familiar ending.

Contrast those experiences with the First Gulf War.

When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, the objective was understandable: to liberate Kuwait. A broad international coalition supported that objective. Forces were assembled in sufficient strength. The battlefield was systematically prepared. Political leaders gave military commanders latitude to develop and execute an effective campaign.

After an extensive air campaign, the ground war lasted roughly 100 hours.

The military objective was achieved.

That experience demonstrated what can happen when political objectives and military strategy are aligned.

The lesson is not that America should never use military force. There are circumstances when force is necessary to defend our nation and our interests. Nor should every setback be blamed upon civilian leaders. In our constitutional system, civilian control of the military is fundamental.

But before politicians send young Americans into harm's way, they owe those Americans clear answers.

What vital national security interest are we defending? What precisely is the mission? What does victory look like? Does the public support the commitment? What strategy will achieve the objective? How will we pay for it? What is the desired political end state? And perhaps most importantly: How do we return the region to peace when the mission is accomplished?

If our national leaders cannot answer those questions, they have no business asking young Americans to kill and die.

I have no regrets about serving in Vietnam. Knowing what I know today, I would still have volunteered. I was a Marine, and Marines go where their country sends them.

But that willingness places an extraordinary obligation upon those who send them.

The warrior's responsibility is to accomplish the mission.

The nation's responsibility is to ensure that mission is worth accomplishing.

America possesses extraordinary military power. But military superiority cannot compensate indefinitely for unclear political objectives, corrupt partners, inadequate strategy, or an enemy who has more reason to remain in the fight than we do.

I FOUGHT IN VIETNAM AND DESERT STORM. WINNING IN IRAN REQUIRES BOOTS ON THE GROUND

Before America enters another war, our leaders should remember the lesson written in blood from Vietnam to Afghanistan: Know why we are fighting, know what winning means, and know how the war ends — before the first American is sent into battle.

Failure to learn that lesson will ensure we repeat it.

Tom Williams is a retired Marine Corps lieutenant colonel with 28 years of active-duty service, including two tours in Vietnam, evacuation of Americans from Beirut in 1976, and the liberation of Kuwait in 1990-91, followed by 11 years of contract training and mentoring in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. He is the author of the Heart of a Marine book series.

The 340B drug discount program was intended to help low-income and uninsured patients afford medicine, not create lucrative revenue streams for hospital systems in wealthy communities. However, without oversight, that is what it has become. Congress should return the program to its intended purpose by requiring hospitals to show that the program reaches the vulnerable patients it was intended for.

The 340B program allows qualifying hospitals and other providers to purchase outpatient drugs at substantial discounts. They can then bill insurers, including Medicare, at normal reimbursement rates and retain the difference. Congress intended those savings to help safety-net providers stretch their resources and expand services for vulnerable patients. In practice, federal law does not require hospitals to prove those savings are passed on to patients or even disclose how the resulting revenue is spent.

Discounted 340B drug purchases reached roughly $81 billion in 2024. At that scale, Congress should expect something more than assurances from hospitals that the money eventually benefits the people the program was created to help.

Once a patient qualifies under the program's broad rules, an eligible provider can purchase the discounted drug even when the patient has generous commercial insurance. That makes a wealthy, well-insured patient potentially far more valuable to a 340B hospital than an uninsured patient who cannot pay the full bill. Once a hospital qualifies, individual patients receiving 340B drugs do not have to be low-income or uninsured.

Minnesota's experiment with 340B transparency shows how large those incentives can become. A state report found participating providers generated roughly $630 million in net 340B revenue, with the overwhelming majority generated by large health systems rather than traditional safety-net providers.

340B expansion increasingly follows affluent patients. A Health Affairs study found that clinics affiliated with hospitals entering the program after 2004 tended to serve wealthier and more heavily insured communities than earlier participants. These clinics often operated in higher-income, lower-poverty areas while qualifying for 340B discounts through their ownership or affiliation with an eligible 340B hospital.

Contract pharmacies, outside pharmacies that dispense 340B drugs on behalf of eligible hospitals and other providers, show a similar pattern. After federal policy dramatically expanded their use in 2010, the share of 340B pharmacies located in the lowest-income neighborhoods declined while the share in the highest-income neighborhoods increased. Rather than concentrating where vulnerable patients live, expansion increasingly reached affluent communities.

The problem is compounded by remarkably weak transparency requirements. Federal law generally does not require hospitals to publicly disclose how much net 340B revenue they generate, how many low-income or uninsured patients receive discounted drugs, how much patients save at the pharmacy counter, or where the revenue ultimately goes. Hospitals frequently respond that 340B revenue pays for charity care and other valuable community services. That may be true. But if it is, hospitals should be able to demonstrate it.

Every participating hospital should be required to publish annual data showing its 340B drug acquisition costs, reimbursements received, net revenue, charity-care spending, patient discounts, and other uses of 340B funds. Hospitals should also report how many low-income and uninsured patients actually received discounted drugs and how much their out-of-pocket costs were reduced.

Congress should also require hospitals to pass a meaningful portion of 340B savings directly to low-income and uninsured patients. A program justified as a way to help vulnerable patients should produce an identifiable benefit for those patients.

Rules governing affiliated "child sites" and contract pharmacies also need to be tightened. An off-campus oncology practice, specialty clinic, or pharmacy in an affluent neighborhood should not automatically receive 340B privileges simply because its corporate parent owns a qualifying hospital miles away. Affiliated sites should have to demonstrate that they actually serve substantial numbers of low-income or uninsured patients before receiving the subsidy.

FAKE PRICE DROPS, REAL DEBT: WHY CONGRESS MUST KILL THE LATEST MEDICARE SUBSIDY

Finally, the definition of who counts as a 340B patient needs to be made explicit. The program's benefits should be directed toward low-income and uninsured patients instead of allowing hospitals to generate large discounts from affluent, well-insured patients.

None of these reforms would prevent hospitals from receiving help for treating vulnerable patients. They would simply require the subsidy to follow the patients who need financial assistance. Institutions benefiting from billions of dollars in federally mandated drug discounts should be able to tell policymakers and the public how that money is spent.

Justin Leventhal is a senior policy analyst for the American Consumer Institute, a nonprofit education and research organization. For more information about the institute, visit www.TheAmericanConsumer.org or follow us on X @ConsumerPal.

ABC News Australia’s new documentary, Ukraine’s Stolen Children, released this week, brought me to an image I couldn’t shake: a young child holding a rifle, smiling proudly. The image was jarring for another reason. I had seen it before.

Not in Ukraine. In Gaza.

The countries are different, the wars are different, and the actors are certainly different. Russia is a state. Hamas is a terrorist organization. Their histories, ideologies, and objectives are not interchangeable. What was impossible to ignore, however, was the similarity in what children were being taught and the methods being used to teach them.

The documentary examines Russia’s removal of Ukrainian children, including children taken from orphanages, care facilities, and camps. More than 20,000 have been identified by Ukrainian authorities as deported or forcibly displaced, although the true number may be considerably higher. Yet it was what happens to some of these children afterward that caught my attention.

International investigators have documented efforts to absorb Ukrainian children into Russian society through citizenship, adoption, and what authorities call “patriotic education.” That education is not confined to flags, songs, and lessons about national history. The United Nations has documented military drills and practical weapons training for older children, alongside programs intended to reinforce Russian national identity and loyalty.

That context makes the rifle in the documentary more than a disturbing image. It places the weapon inside a larger system concerned not only with training a child to handle it, but with conditioning a developing mind to understand what that weapon represents, where loyalty belongs, and who has been designated the enemy.

That is also why the footage immediately made me think about Gaza.

For years, Hamas has exposed children to its own version of ideological and military preparation. The U.N. has documented Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades and Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s al-Quds Brigades organizing summer camps where children were exposed to military content and activities. Previous U.N. reporting described weeklong camps involving children as young as 14, while earlier reporting said Hamas’s military wing had reportedly operated a military camp involving 25,000 children and young people between the ages of 15 and 21.

The numbers matter, but the pattern matters more. Children are placed in military settings and exposed to rifles, drills, and ideological instruction. Weapons are introduced not simply as instruments of violence, but alongside messages about identity, loyalty, and struggle.

This is where the psychological component becomes as important as the military one. Teaching a child how to hold a rifle is one thing. Teaching him from a young age what that rifle represents, who his enemy is, and why violence against that enemy should be associated with loyalty, duty, or pride goes considerably further. The physical training is visible. The ideological conditioning taking place alongside it may ultimately be more consequential.

That was the connection I could not shake while watching the documentary.

Russia and Hamas are not the same, nor do they need to be for the comparison to matter. What is recognizable is the method: reach children young, surround them with an ideology, define the enemy, and make military preparation part of how they understand their place in that struggle.

The younger the child, the more disturbing that process becomes. This is not simply preparation for physical warfare later in life. It is an effort to shape how a developing mind understands history, identity, allegiance, and the people it has been taught to regard as enemies before that child has the maturity or independence to interrogate those lessons for himself.

Russia’s treatment of Ukrainian children adds another dimension. Some have been removed from the country and communities that formed their identities in the first place. They can then encounter a different version of history, a new national identity, and, increasingly, military preparation. Calling this “patriotic education” does not make the implications any less disturbing.

It also raises a question I cannot understand why we are not asking more loudly: Where is the outrage?

People have filled streets, university campuses, and public squares around the world over causes they believe demand moral attention. Surely deliberately preparing children for warfare should produce outrage, too.

Where are the demonstrations over military camps for teenagers? Where is the international movement against putting rifles into children’s hands? Why does the world become so loud when discussing what war does to children, yet seem comparatively quiet about those deliberately preparing children for war?

People should, no pun intended, be up in arms about it.

Because this is not simply about a photograph of a child carrying a rifle. The weapon is what we can see. The ideological conditioning taking place alongside it may ultimately be more consequential. What matters is everything outside the frame: who created the program, who provided the weapon, what lessons accompanied it, and what those responsible hope will happen after that child grows up.

That is why the image in Ukraine’s Stolen Children stayed with me. What initially appeared to be another disturbing image from a war became something else as I watched: a method of combining ideology, identity, and military preparation at an age when those ideas can help shape the person a child becomes.

PUTIN IS DESPERATE, CORNERED — AND HITTING WESTERN LEADERS NEXT

And that was the most jarring realization of all.

I was looking at a playbook I had seen before.

Ariella Noveck is a journalist specializing in antisemitism and Middle East affairs, with extensive experience covering Jewish communities worldwide. She can be followed on X and Instagram @AriellaNoveck

Abdul el Sayed’s campaign reset in response to a politically bruising summer appears to be paying dividends as his quest to keep Michigan’s open Senate seat blue comes down the home stretch.

The Israel critic and progressive provocateur has made overtures to crucial voting blocs where he lacked support, such as Jewish and black voters. He’s also picked up endorsements from party holdouts and maintained a nominal lead in the polls over Republican rival Mike Rogers, even after months of negative headlines from his association with controversial streamer Hasan Piker.

El Sayed’s current election prospects are undoubtedly up from where they were just a month ago, when he couldn’t shake his ties with Piker, a far-left Twitch streamer, and was lobbying skeptical Senate Democrats in Washington to get behind him.

“When you're in a circumstance where there's a large constituency of people who feel very uncomfortable with your ascension into higher office where they don't feel safe, you've got to put those concerns at the core of your campaign,” Mike Nellis, an ex-senior adviser to former Vice President Kamala Harris, said of Jewish Democrats’ unease with el Sayed. “I think, for the most part, he's done a pretty good job of that.”

Those efforts include meeting with Jewish leaders, plans to hire a Jewish community liaison, and apologizing for offensive remarks about a terrorist attack on a Michigan synagogue. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Jewish Democrat who backed el Sayed's primary challenger, Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI), and has been critical of el Sayed’s anti-Israel rhetoric, endorsed him last month.

But in a reminder of the lingering hurdles el Sayed faces in unifying his own party, Rep. Hillary Scholten (D-MI) continues to withhold her endorsement over his association with Piker, who recently said America "pound for pound" commits more terrorism than al Qaeda. El Sayed and Piker campaigned together during the primary. While el Sayed has distanced himself from Piker, the candidate has refused to denounce the streamer.

For black voters, who largely sided Stevens in the primary, those outreach efforts include stumping with Harris. The pair sat for a roundtable last month that was focused on black maternal health. The Rogers campaign described el Sayed as “so desperate that he's parachuting Kamala Harris into Michigan to save his flailing campaign.”

Across eight polls in the past couple weeks, including one from Fox News, el Sayed is either leading or tied with Rogers, a former congressman and strong supporter of President Donald Trump. The Rogers campaign has downplayed the results as skewed. Still, both sides consider the battleground contest to replace retiring Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) a virtual toss-up.

Meanwhile, Rogers is among the Republican candidates who are increasingly critical of the Iran war and eager for its end to bring down gasoline, diesel, and food prices. The GOP nominee broke publicly with the president in a recent campaign ad, in which he said the “war with Iran needs to end, and end quickly” to bring down the price of gas and groceries.

EL SAYED SAYS HE AND HARRIS HAVE ‘COME TOGETHER’ AFTER BIDEN ADMINISTRATION’S STRUGGLE WITH PRO-PALESTINIAN WING

Nellis cautioned Democrats against putting stock in the “drunk polls” across the Senate map, such as those showing independent former state Rep. Todd Achilles leading Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID) in what nonpartisan forecasters consider a "solid" Republican seat. The Democratic strategist does not “for one second” believe it's competitive. But he does see el Sayed’s recent steady polling in the high 40s or around 50% as a reassuring sign the Democratic nominee may have righted the ship at a crucial time before the Nov. 3 elections.

“The blue wave is being picked up by the polls,” Nellis said. “The question is whether or not the undercurrent for the Republicans catches up to them, and I don't know if it does or not.”

Some of Richard Russo’s most memorable novels have depicted hard times in small towns. His 1986 debut, Mohawk, and 2007’s Bridge of Sighs both played out in fictional blue-collar backwaters in upstate New York, places where the leather industry had ground to a halt but citizens struggled on. For his career-defining, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Empire Falls (2001), Russo created a new deteriorating town in Maine that was blighted by an abandoned textile mill and shirt factory, and home to Miles Roby, the resilient manager of a diner. At one point, Miles’s daughter summed up her dead-end surroundings when explaining why she was happy to attend church on her recent vacation but did not do so at home: “It was easier to believe in God, she said, or at least the possibility of God, on Martha’s Vineyard than it was in Empire Falls.”

Another godforsaken town, this one again in the Rust Belt, serves as the setting for Russo’s latest novel. In Under the Falls — no relation to Empire Falls — the novelist takes his reader into the Adirondacks to Stone Mountain, “a place that doesn’t yield many good outcomes.” This is the case for the majority of the book’s characters, who attempt to eke out a living in a region beset by economic decline. And yet one man — Russo’s protagonist, Tyler Sinclair — did achieve a good outcome, albeit by leaving Stone Mountain far behind many years ago. But when this native son becomes a prodigal son, his homecoming reopens old wounds, unleashes fresh resentment, and even endangers his life.

Tyler turned his back on Stone Mountain when he was 18, leaving town abruptly, and, he believed, permanently, without saying goodbye to his best friends Curt, Freddi, and Tim “Doc” Dockery. He took with him only a duffel bag full of clothes and his guitar, but carried a great deal more emotional baggage: bitter memories of his abusive and alcoholic father; guilt over his illicit romance with Freddi, back then Curt’s girlfriend; and lingering trauma from a swimming stunt he was involved in, which rendered Doc paralyzed from the waist down. Determined to banish these painful reminders, Tyler followed his love of music to Nashville and eventually found fame and fortune as the front man of a hugely successful rock band named, appropriately, Stone Mountain.

“I made a clean getaway,” Tyler tells his manager, Jason. “Until today.” Now, for the first time in almost two decades, Tyler reluctantly returns to his hometown with his band to perform what will be both a comeback gig after the COVID-19 pandemic, “to work out the kinks,” and a benefit concert to raise medical funds for Doc. But Tyler quickly learns the hard way that this stop was a mistake. During his reunion with Doc, his old friend informs him that not everyone in Stone Island is thrilled to see him.

Some blame him for Doc’s tragic accident; others are angry with him for writing songs about the town and its inhabitants’ lives. “Where’s our cut? is how they look at it,” Doc says. The concert is interrupted by an announcement about a death that sends shockwaves through the audience. The mood sours further, and the show ends in a near riot. Things go from bad to worse when Tyler beats a retreat: Instead of making another clean getaway, he is pursued on a dark mountain road by a driver who rams the band’s limo over the edge and into a ravine.

Just as we begin to wonder where Russo can take Tyler from here, he introduces a new character to create a fresh perspective and forge a different direction. Deb, the newest and youngest recruit on Stone Mountain’s police force, is tasked with investigating the crash that killed two and left Tyler and his fellow bandmate (and girlfriend) Beth fighting for their lives. Until the survivors pull through and can give their version of events, Deb must work alone to piece together clues. She must also make sense of anomalies, some of them unwittingly thrown up by Curt, the town’s police chief and Tyler’s long-lost friend. As her suspicions grow and she entertains the possibility of foul play, she realizes she is up against a group of people scarred by the past, mired in deceit, afraid of exposure, and dead set on protecting themselves at all costs.

In his acknowledgments at the end of the book, Russo points out that Under the Falls began as a TV pilot script. This may account for some sensationalistic scenes, in particular the face-offs and showdowns that make up the novel’s feverish final act. What might have been explosive on the screen feels overwrought on the page.

However, Russo keeps his reader firmly on board. His cast consists of compellingly flawed individuals, most of them with something to hide. There is Curt, a man who has “cut a few ethical corners” in his time; his wife, Freddi, a woman scorned, whose grudge against Tyler appears to have hardened into hatred; and Doc, a colorful character who, accordingly, travels around in a bright orange hearse yet possesses a dark streak and an ability to stir in Tyler both guilt and fear.

A NOVELIST CONSIDERS WHAT WAR TAKES

It would be a stretch to classify Under the Falls as a thriller. It’s really just a deftly plotted, character-led drama punctuated by bursts of excitement at unexpected moments. Even so, Russo handles the police procedural elements with aplomb. As we read, we work alongside Deb and take stock of the many secrets and lies, rumors and cover-ups, denials and betrayals, all the while trying to get to the bottom of a range of tantalizing mysteries. What important matter did Curt’s teenage son have to discuss with Tyler before he left Stone Mountain? Why did the caller who reported the crash not leave her contact details? And who is running drugs in the town?

Stone Mountain is another of Russo’s expertly constructed provincial backdrops. Tyler maps its decay — its desolate campground, its derelict amusement park, its limited prospects — and shows how lives have been shaped by their beleaguered environment. As Tyler retraces his steps, he tells Beth, “Stone Mountain is the kind of place you might escape from once, if you’re lucky, but not twice.”

Malcolm Forbes has written for the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. He lives in Edinburgh. 

The first round of October Social Security payments for retirees, now capped at $5,181, will be issued in 10 days.

When will payments arrive?

Retirees born on or before the 10th of a month will receive this payment on Wednesday, Oct. 14.

The second round will go out on Oct. 21 to those born between the 11th and 20th of a month, and the third round will go out on Oct. 28 to those born on or after the 21st of a month.

When am I eligible?

Citizens are eligible for Social Security payments beginning at age 62.

How can I maximize my check?

Social Security payment amounts are determined by several factors, including age of retirement, the amount paid into Social Security, and the number of years paid into Social Security.

Payments largely depend on a recipient’s retirement age. A beneficiary retiring at the youngest age, 62, could receive up to $2,969 per month, while a 70-year-old retiree could receive up to $5,181 per month, according to the Social Security Administration.

Beneficiaries can see a personalized estimate of how much they could expect each month using the SSA’s calculator.

HEALTH INSURANCE COVERAGE STEADY IN 2025 DESPITE DEMOCRAT FEARS OVER GOP REFORMS

How is it financed?

Social Security is financed by a payroll tax paid for by employers and employees. 

Social Security payment amounts are set to shrink unless Congress takes action to prevent it. According to a report from trustees, the retirement fund is set to run out by 2032 due to a rising number of retirees and a shrinking workforce.

On a quiet Thursday morning in suburban Detroit, 140 preschoolers were settling into their classrooms at Temple Israel’s early childhood center when a Ford F-150 pulled into the parking lot. For more than two hours, the truck sat there, idling.

Then, at 12:15 p.m. on March 12, the driver — Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, a 41-year-old Lebanese-born U.S. citizen from Dearborn Heights, Michigan — pressed the accelerator and rammed his vehicle through the synagogue’s front doors. In the truck bed were commercial-grade fireworks and jugs of flammable liquid, purchased two days earlier for $2,250. The children were 5 years old and younger. They were, as Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) said, “babies who are Jewish.”

The attack on Temple Israel, the largest Reform synagogue in the United States, ended with only the attacker dead, a testament to security preparations that had been accumulating for years. But the near-catastrophe it represents, and the web of radicalism, geopolitical grievance, and organized terrorism that appears to have animated it, demands a reckoning about where American Jews now stand, and whether the civilized world stands with them.

The attack unfolded with methodical violence. Ghazali sat in the parking lot for more than two hours before ramming the building, striking the temple’s security director and knocking him unconscious, then firing through the windshield. Armed security officers returned fire. The truck’s engine caught fire. and Ghazali, trapped in the jammed vehicle, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Miraculously, not a single child or staff member was killed or seriously injured. Six hundred five law enforcement professionals from 42 agencies responded.

The FBI designated the attack “a targeted act of violence against the Jewish community.” Federal officials told CNN that Ghazali appeared in government databases as having connections to “known or suspected terrorists” associated with Hezbollah in Lebanon (though he was not listed as a member himself). He had no prior criminal record and had never been the subject of an FBI investigation.

The immediate trigger, according to sources who spoke to CBS News, was personal: an Israeli airstrike approximately 10 days before the attack killed Ghazali’s two brothers (both of whom were reportedly members of a Hezbollah rocket unit) in southern Lebanon. He stopped working, isolated himself, and shortly before the attack called his ex-wife to tell her to take care of their children. Attorney General Dana Nessel (D-MI) drew the connection directly: “I think we can absolutely draw a nexus between the war in Iran and the events of today.”

A fortress built from necessity

The reason 140 children left that building unharmed is not luck. It is the product of years of grim, methodical preparation that has become the defining condition of Jewish communal life in America.

Temple Israel had hired a former police lieutenant, Danny Phillips, as its full-time security director the previous June. Bollards had been installed at entrances. The doors were bulletproof. Just weeks before the attack, FBI agents led active shooter preparedness training for clergy and staff.

“We’ve been talking for two weeks about the potential, sadly, for this happening,” Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard said at a press conference that day.

Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), who grew up attending Temple Israel, put the stakes starkly: “If they had not all done their jobs almost perfectly, we would be talking about an immense tragedy here today, with children gone.”

Michael Masters, CEO of the Secure Community Network, credited the preparation for the limited casualties, and disclosed a further data point: In the six days after the attack, his organization tracked more than 8,000 calls for violence against the Jewish community in the United States. The Jewish Federations of North America, according to its chairman, Gary Torgow, now spends more than $750 million annually on security for Jewish communities. That figure, $750 million just to allow Jews to enter their synagogues and schools without dying, may be the single most damning statistic in the story of contemporary American Jewish life.

The Temple Israel attack did not emerge from a vacuum. It is a specific expression of a growing tempest of terror that is showing few signs of letting up. The FBI documented 1,938 antisemitic hate crimes in 2024, the highest figure since the bureau began collecting such data in 1991. Jews, only about 2% of the American population, accounted for 69% of all religion-based hate crimes.

The Anti-Defamation League tracked 9,354 antisemitic incidents in 2024, the highest total in its history — physical assaults rose 21% in a single year. The American Jewish Committee's 2025 State of Antisemitism report found 91% of American Jews feel less safe, and 55% have changed their daily behavior out of fear. Between July 2024 and January 2026, the ADL tracked 12 terrorist plots or attacks targeting Jews in the United States, compared to seven in the previous four and a half years.

Michigan state Sen. Jeremy Moss, a Jewish Democrat, articulated the reality plainly: “We stand on guard all the time for somebody to penetrate a house of worship or a school or another Jewish institution with an act of terror. We’re a community that’s kind of used to learning and praying in a fortress. It’s no way to live, but it’s the reality.”

The coordinated campaign in Europe

The attack in Michigan did not occur in isolation. The following morning — March 13, in the early hours before dawn — an explosive device detonated at a synagogue in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Dutch police arrested four teenagers nearby, subsequently charging them with “causing an explosion, arson and attempted arson, all with a terrorist intent.”

The Rotterdam attack came three days after an explosion at a synagogue in Liege, Belgium. Both attacks were claimed by a group calling itself the Islamic Movement of the Companions of the Right (Harakat Ashab al Yamin al Islamiyyah), whose videos circulated on channels watchdogs associate with Iranian-backed networks.

The night after Rotterdam, a second device detonated against the outer wall of an Orthodox Jewish school in Amsterdam. Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema said the city’s Jewish residents felt “fear and anger” and were being increasingly targeted.

Then, early on March 23, the same group appears to have struck in Golders Green, the heart of London’s largest Jewish community. Four ambulances belonging to Hatzola Northwest, a volunteer Jewish emergency medical service, were set ablaze outside a synagogue. Oxygen cylinders exploded, shattering apartment windows. Four of Hatzola’s six ambulances were destroyed.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer called it “a deeply shocking antisemitic arson attack,” meeting Jewish community leaders at Downing Street and declaring that it was “not just an attack on the Jewish community, but it’s an attack on all of us.” Metropolitan Police chief Mark Rowley said investigators were pursuing “an online claim of responsibility by an Islamist group who have claimed other attacks across Europe and have potential Iranian state links.” The Community Security Trust recorded 3,700 antisemitic incidents in Britain in 2025 — more than double the 2022 figure.

The campaign has intensified alarmingly in the weeks since. On April 15, arsonists attempted to attack the Finchley Reform Synagogue in London by placing bottles of accelerants next to the building and throwing a brick through its window. On April 18, another synagogue in northwest London was targeted in a similar attack.

Then, on April 29, two Jewish men were stabbed in broad daylight on a busy street in Golders Green. A 45-year-old Somalian man was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder after being tasered by officers who feared he was carrying an explosive device. The victims, aged 34 and 76, were treated by Hatzola volunteers and taken to the hospital in stable condition.

London’s head of counterterrorism policing declared the attack a terrorist incident, while Harakat Ashab al Yamin al Islamiyyah claimed responsibility. It was the second declared terrorist attack on Britain’s Jewish community in seven months. Britain’s Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, who had said after the April 18 attack that “the sustained campaign of violence and intimidation against the Jewish community is gathering momentum,” was tragically proven right within days.

A wave crosses the Atlantic

The current wave of attacks shares a profile distinct from the far-right domestic terrorism that drove the worst previous chapters of American antisemitic violence, such as the 2018 Tree of Life massacre in Pittsburgh and the 2019 Poway shooting.

Those attacks were carried out by white nationalist ideologues. What is happening now is largely rooted in Islamist radicalism, animated by Middle Eastern conflicts, and connected to what appear to be Iran-linked networks operating across borders. Ghazali appears to have been a man consumed by personal grief who redirected it into ideological violence against Jews he held collectively responsible for his brothers’ deaths. That pattern, private wound weaponized by ideology into mass murder, is among the most dangerous in the modern terrorist typology precisely because it is difficult to predict, often invisible to law enforcement, and potentially replicable by thousands of individuals with similar grievances.

The weeks following the Temple Israel attack demonstrated just how replicable that template has become, and how broadly the threat extends.

On April 22, Congregation Beth Israel in Houston, the oldest Jewish house of worship in Texas, home to 1,500 families, was forced to close along with its affiliated Shlenker School after the Houston Police Department received credible threat information from an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force. Within 24 hours, two arrests had been made in two states: An 18-year-old from North Carolina and a 16-year-old in Houston were charged in connection with an alleged plot to drive a vehicle through the congregation and “kill as many Jews as possible,” in the words of a district court judge.

That same week, antisemitic vandals struck twice in the Midwest and South: A 51-year-old homeless man was charged with a hate crime after spray-painting swastikas and antisemitic slurs on Congregation Beth Shalom in Oak Park, Michigan, on April 19; and on April 24, Congregation Beth Israel in Austin, Texas (a 150-year-old Reform synagogue still recovering from a 2021 arson attack) was defaced with a swastika and the words “Death to Israel.”

“The words that were written on the wall were not just graffiti, they were hate,” the synagogue’s senior rabbi told local media. Recent developments have continued to highlight the scope of the threat.

Earlier this year, Dan Sohail pled guilty in Brooklyn federal court to charges related to his January car-ramming attack on the Chabad-Lubavitch world headquarters in Brooklyn, where he intentionally rammed his vehicle into the building multiple times to damage the Jewish landmark. Federal authorities also charged Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood al Saadi, a commander of the Iran-backed Kataib Hezbollah militia, with plotting attacks on Jewish sites in the United States, including a synagogue in New York City. In addition, the shooters in the May 18 attack on the Islamic Center in San Diego were revealed to have made antisemitic statements and included virulent anti-Jewish rhetoric in their manifesto. These are not isolated incidents. They are data points in a broader trend.

To understand the weight of what is happening, it is necessary to place it in a historical context — and that context is not reassuring. Jews have lived in the United States in relative safety for over two centuries. The post-Holocaust order, with its human rights frameworks and its explicit commitments to “Never Again,” was supposed to have made a repeat of that calamity impossible in the democratic West.

What is happening in 2026 is not a Holocaust. But it is a profound rupture with the postwar order. Jews across Western democracies are now modifying their behavior — hiding identifying markers of their Jewishness, avoiding synagogues, reconsidering whether to display mezuzot on their doors — at levels not seen since the period those frameworks were designed to foreclose. According to the AJC’s 2025 report, 55% of American Jews have changed their daily behavior out of fear of antisemitism, and 91% report feeling less safe. The ADL has found that over half of American Jews now regard antisemitism as a routine part of Jewish life, not an aberration from it. The ADL’s 2025 Antisemitism Landscape Survey found that the share of Americans categorized as active “allies” of the Jewish community fell from 15% in 2023 to just 9%, while the share categorized as “haters” rose from 6% to 10%. About 27% of Americans now say they believe Jews “cause problems in the world,” up from 19% two years ago. The public is not merely failing to stand against antisemitism; a growing share is actively endorsing it.

The European dimension may be even more alarming. The chairman of the Rotterdam synagogue, speaking to Dutch broadcaster NOS in the days after the attack, offered a distinction worth sitting with. The explosion “did not do a lot of damage to the building,” he said, “but it’s primarily the emotional impact.” That gap — between the physical damage that was contained and the psychic damage that is not — is the real measure of where things stand. Jews across Western democracies are being told, repeatedly and violently, that no space they occupy is entirely safe: not our schools, not our ambulances, not our Yom Kippur gatherings, not even our morning commutes.

In London, within 24 hours of the Hatzola arson, over half a million pounds had been raised to replace the destroyed ambulances. At Temple Israel, a Shabbat service was held on Friday evening. The congregation’s CEO, Steven Ingber, captured both our resolve and our disappointment: “We’re angry, we’re sad. I wish I could say we were surprised, but this is the kind of stuff that’s happening in our world right now.”

In each city, Jewish leaders chose public defiance over retreat. At Congregation Beth Israel in Houston, Rabbi David Lyon expressed gratitude to law enforcement while affirming his community’s resolve to remain open. At Congregation Beth Israel in Austin, executive director Jake Cohen vowed that his congregation would refuse “to let fear define us.” Yet resilience, however inspiring, is not a policy. The $750 million American Jewish federations spend annually on security is money not spent on schools, hospitals, or the ordinary civic infrastructure Jewish communities have historically contributed so generously to American life.

Growing up, I loved reading about castles and medieval fortresses. Sometimes I’d even try to build them out of cardboard boxes and sofa cushions. (Perhaps you did too.) But I never dreamed of going to a synagogue fortress. The fortress synagogue is a monument to necessity. It is also an indictment of the societies that made it necessary. What is required is a moral and political reckoning with the conditions that have allowed antisemitic violence to reach this level: the failure to enforce hate crime laws with the seriousness they demand; the persistence of antisemitic rhetoric — from the white nationalist far right and the “globalize the jihad” far left — in mainstream discourse; and the willingness of some governments to treat antisemitism as a lesser priority than other prejudices.

WHY ISRAEL IS LOSING ITS FRIENDS 

The attackers in Rotterdam were teenagers who drove an hour to bomb a synagogue before dawn and were stopped near a second synagogue they may have been planning to hit next. The group that claims its allegiance also claims ambulances in London and schools in Amsterdam. The people who allegedly plotted to ram a vehicle through a Houston synagogue were a teenager and an 18-year-old. The man who spray-painted swastikas on a Michigan synagogue was apprehended blocks away. The man who stabbed two Jews on a London street was tackled by a neighborhood watch patrol. It bears repeating that these are not isolated incidents. They are the consequences of a millennia-old campaign of anti-Jewish hatred that had lain relatively dormant in the postwar years and is now once again as active and as destructive as ever. It is a campaign that must be defeated, not merely survived.

The children of Temple Israel went home safe that day. Their parents will keep sending children back to a school where the doors are bulletproof, the entrances reinforced with bollards, and the parking lot now a place of menace in family memory. The congregants of Beth Israel in Houston and Austin will return to synagogues that now bear the fresh marks of hatred. The Jews of Golders Green will walk streets that have become, in the span of weeks, a theater of terror. That is the condition of Jewish life in America and across the democratic West in 2026. It should alarm every citizen, of every faith, who believes that a civilization is measured by how it protects its most vulnerable.

Daniel Ross Goodman (@DanRossGoodman) is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and teaches theology and religious studies at St. John’s University. His next book, Dante’s Guide to Life: How The Divine Comedy Can Change Our Fortunes, Our World, and Ourselves, will be published this fall by Angelico Press.

Years ago, one of the steadiest people on my team came back from maternity leave changed: irritable, quick to complain, sharp with colleagues for no reason any of us could see. I had no name for it. Only later did I understand I had probably watched perinatal depression unfold, and that nobody around her, including me, knew what to look for.

Since then, with one daughter a psychiatrist and the other a psychotherapist, I have had an unusual education in the subject at my own dinner table. That is the lens I bring to the case of Lindsay Clancy.

On Sept. 4, a Massachusetts judge declared a mistrial after the jury in Clancy’s murder case deadlocked, with 11 of 12 jurors reportedly ready to find her not criminally responsible for strangling her three children in January 2023. At the first hearing since, on Sept. 29, prosecutors said they had not decided whether to retry her, her lawyer argued the evidence was insufficient, and the judge set another hearing for Nov. 2.

The trial has become a Rorschach test. Prosecutors see intent. The defense sees postpartum psychosis. Critics of psychiatry see “polypharmacy on trial.” The medical record supports none of these tidy stories, and it points to a more useful lesson.

‘SAME, LINDSAY’ ISN’T EMPATHY: THE CLANCY MISTRIAL EXPOSED OUR CULTURE’S MORAL ROT

Two questions in two languages

As the neurosurgeon Marc Arginteanu wrote, the law asks whether she knew the act was wrong and could stop herself, while medicine asks whether her grip on reality had slipped so far that ordinary judgment no longer applied. He also flagged the prosecution’s strongest point. Postpartum psychosis is rare, with one or two cases per 1,000 births, and usually strikes within weeks of delivery. Clancy’s youngest child was eight months old. That makes a psychosis defense harder to prove, but not biologically impossible — the literature documents late-onset cases, and the diagnostic manual still gives the condition no standalone entry.

What the record shows

A Boston Globe timeline drawn from court records shows Clancy was prescribed 13 psychiatric drugs, across more than 30 prescriptions, in about four months: antidepressants, an antipsychotic, three benzodiazepines, a mood stabilizer, and sedatives, from an outpatient psychiatrist, a nurse practitioner, two inpatient programs, and several emergency physicians. Her own civil complaint alleges that clinicians missed a bipolar vulnerability and that “polypharmacy and the involvement of multiple prescribers” obscured an accurate diagnosis. Those are unproven allegations, but the mechanism is textbook. Postpartum psychosis is closely tied to bipolar disorder, and an antidepressant alone can destabilize a patient with unrecognized bipolar vulnerability. That is why the obstetricians’ 2023 guideline calls for bipolar screening before medication is started.

The clinicians who treated her testified that they saw no psychosis, including her outpatient psychiatrist, across 14 telehealth visits. That is exactly the pattern specialists warn about: a condition one leading researcher calls “massively missed” because few doctors are trained to spot it.

Once recognized, postpartum psychosis is highly treatable. In a Dutch study of 64 women, a stepwise protocol ending in lithium brought 98% into complete remission. What fails is rarely the drug. It is the diagnosis and the coordination.

Where the pill skeptics have a point

None of this makes psychiatric medication the villain. Once psychosis appears, withholding treatment is dangerous. But the critics are right that a regimen assembled piecemeal by several prescribers, none of whom sees the whole picture, is a hazard in any branch of medicine. We would not accept it for blood thinners or chemotherapy. We should not accept it for a sleep-deprived mother cycling through thirteen psychoactive drugs in four months.

What Would Actually Help

Pharmacogenomic testing is often proposed as the answer, but a 2025 review found its benefits modest and short-lived, and no gene panel can detect an unrecognized bipolar history. Better answers are simpler. Every perinatal patient on psychiatric medication should have one accountable prescriber and one reconciled medication list. For the far more common cases of mild-to-moderate depression and anxiety, which go untreated about three-quarters of the time, I believe psychotherapy should be the first rung, as the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force’s counseling recommendation supports; psychosis is different and demands prompt medication. And the country needs beds.

THE LINDSAY CLANCY TRIAL JUST EXPOSED A MAJOR PRO-LIFE BLIND SPOT

The United Kingdom runs 22 mother and baby units that admit mother and infant together. The United States has five perinatal psychiatric units, and none keep the baby overnight.

The law will settle its own question about Lindsay Clancy. Medicine should settle ours. A country with about 3.6 million births a year has no psychiatric unit built to keep a mother in crisis together with her baby. That is not a verdict on psychiatry. It is a verdict on how seriously we take it. If someone you love is unraveling after a birth, treat it as an emergency, not a character flaw: call or text 988 or the maternal mental health hotline at 1-833-TLC-MAMA.

Meda Parameswara Reddy, Ph.D., is the Director of the Reddy Center for Critical and Integrated Thinking. A former R&D executive holding 30 U.S. patents, he specializes in interdisciplinary research and public policy analysis. His writing has appeared in Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. (PNAS), RealClear platforms, Washington Examiner, The Fulcrum, The Humanist, AFRO American, and South Asia Monitor, where he serves on the editorial board. He also hosts the interview show “SAM Dialogues with Dr. M. P. Reddy.”

Advocates said they are frustrated and resigned to White House's inaction on abortion in the wake of a new report that the Department of Justice is standing down on the issue until after the midterm elections.

Sources familiar with discussions between the administration and anti-abortion groups told the Washington Examiner they have little confidence that significant action will materialize even after November and said they have heard White House chief of staff Susie Wiles has been an obstacle to more aggressive action.

This "is exactly what we're hearing, that Susie's been a bit of a roadblock," said one source familiar with the matter.

The White House denied a report Friday from the Washington Sun that Wiles instructed Attorney General Todd Blanche and the Justice Department to move slowly on abortion-related matters before the midterm elections out of concern that aggressive action could alienate voters Republicans need to retain control of Congress.

"This is completely false," White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis told the Washington Examiner. "These conversations never occurred between White House officials and DOJ officials.”

But multiple anti-abortion leaders told the Washington Examiner that the administration's posture matches what they have been hearing privately: action later, not now. The stance has left left some anti-abortion champions skeptical that the White House will ultimately deliver at all.

"We keep hearing about the FDA's agency review [of abortion pills], but ... I find it very accurate to say that the DOJ has, in fact, just been a friend to the abortion industry by saying 'let's just leave everything alone until later,'" said an anti-abortion leader. "That is No. 1, a 100% mistake, and that is very fixable."

Another warned that the administration is putting its relationship with a core Republican constituency at risk. Several note the lack of meaningful mention of limiting abortion at the Republican National Committee's midterm convention last month. Others question why Vice President JD Vance has not put Planned Parenthood under a microscope as part of his White House anti-fraud task force.

"If you're building a coalition, this is something that will lead to people looking for other options," another anti-abortion leader warned. "You're destabilizing your coalition that you're going to need going forward."

The frustration reflects a growing sense of resignation among anti-abortion groups that the first half of Trump's second term has not produced the federal restrictions they expected after Republicans won unified control of Washington.

"Nothing has changed about the way the White House is approaching abortion. They're just finally saying the quiet part out loud," said Gavin Oxley, the external affairs director for Americans United for Life. "This means our operating strategy hasn't changed either. Push for protections now but plan for the sprint after the political hurdles are cleared."

Texas Right to Life President John Seago acknowledged anti-abortion groups have limited leverage over the administration because neither supporting Democrats nor sitting out the election is a realistic option for the movement. Underscoring the point, House Democrats released a health policy agenda this week that calls for reestablishing "a federal right to abortion care and end restrictions that prevent people covered through federal health programs from receiving abortion coverage."

"The Democrat Party has embraced a ridiculous position on abortion and has been promoting abortion at any cost, and so there is no interest at all to sit out the election," said Seago before invoking Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico. "One of the Democrats running for our U.S. Senate spot is actually justifying abortion by twisting Christian teaching and twisting the Bible, and that is not going to fool anybody in the pro-life movement."

That frustration has been building over a series of policy fights in which anti-abortion groups say Republicans have failed to deliver.

Anti-abortion groups have repeatedly voiced frustration that Trump and the GOP-controlled Congress are allowing abortion access to spread in the nation four years after Roe v. Wade was overturned. Although Planned Parenthood lost access to federal Medicaid reimbursements for a year through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, its access to federal funding was restored in July, disappointing social conservatives. Congressional Republicans have been noncommittal on including language to defund Planned Parenthood in future budget reconciliation bills.

"Pro-life voters want a return on investment like every other part of the coalition, and you juxtapose this with the fact that the Democrats came out this week, I believe, with the first 100 hours, and had several things in it about abortion," said Kristi Hamrick, vice president of Students for Life of America.

As Trump headed to Alabama on Friday, he said his message to the anti-abortion community was "we love them. We love everybody."

One anti-abortion group praised the Trump administration for at least not defending Biden-era rules governing abortion pills.

“We are glad that the Trump Administration knows that the Biden Administration unlawfully allowed abortion pills to be mailed, putting women in harm’s way and at risk of being coerced into taking abortion pills against their will," said Penny Nance, CEO and President of Concerned Women for America.

PRO-LIFERS FEAR FOR FUTURE OF HYDE AMENDMENT AS IT TURNS 50

But with frustration mounting over Trump's second term, some anti-abortion leaders are already looking beyond his administration and toward the next fight over the direction of the Republican Party.

There's "a lot of pressure on the next convention and on the next presidential candidate," said Seago. "There is already talks about how do we restore the pro-life platform at the Republican national."

Since 2016, over 100,000 Canadian lives have been claimed by assisted suicide. The system has created no shortage of tragic tales: a 26-year-old with depression “shopped around” for a doctor to sign off on his death; a disabled man applied for medical assistance in dying because he feared going homeless; multiple veterans have been offered MAiD on the phone while attempting to access healthcare.

But a recent story sheds light on a possible next step for the atrocities of Canada’s MAiD regime: involuntary euthanasia.

According to the Daily Mail, the family of an 83-year-old Canadian woman alleges that she was euthanized against her will — covered in blood and with her hands clasped in prayer.

Brigitte Stegmann was killed by Canada’s MAiD program in July 2026. Her granddaughter, Brigitte Kranendonk, claims that her grandmother rejected the option of assisted suicide because of her religious convictions as a Christian.

But according to Stegmann’s family, the staff at the care home were relentless. Kranendonk and her husband left the country for 10 days. The family alleges that the care facility continued to discuss the possibility of MAiD while they were gone, even after Stegmann had said no and behind her family’s back. When Kranendonk returned, her grandmother already had her first MAiD assessment.

Kranendonk made sure to be in the room for the second MAiD assessment, which also judged mental competence. She claims that the doctor spoke in loose terms, avoiding words like “death” or “dying.” Rather, she alleges that MAiD was described as medicine that would make her “feel at peace.” Kranendonk’s grandmother, who spoke English as a second language and had a hearing impairment, simply nodded along.

During the cognitive assessment, Kranendonk wasn't able to answer basic questions about her personal life, claiming that she had zero siblings when she in fact had 13. Despite this, the doctor cleared Stegmann as “capable of making her own decision” and was deemed fit for MAiD.

Kranendonk was convinced her grandmother couldn’t consent to MAiD and continued to advocate against the procedure. But the death was scheduled regardless.

Stegmann’s family describes the day of her death as traumatic and says she never gave the required final confirmation of consent. According to the family, the doctor struggled to insert the IV, leaving Stegmann covered in blood. The doctor then allegedly asked whether she wanted the “medicine,” but proceeded even though Stegmann did not answer. She was pronounced dead 10 minutes later.

While Stegmann’s story has shocked the world, those who have been keeping up with Canada’s MAiD regime might not be as surprised.

Earlier this year, a former professor of mine warned me about the risk of involuntary euthanasia. He wrote to me, “I continue to maintain that if we continue with MAiD then we shall soon legitimate killing the elderly (against their will).” I was shocked by the prediction, which seemed realistic yet confined to a far-away dystopian future, one we still had time to resist.

As it turns out, that reality is already here — and the signs were apparent from the beginning.

Canadians were sold assisted suicide as a merciful medical response to suffering. But when eligibility rests not simply on consent but on disability, illness, or mental suffering, the law sends a dangerous message: healthy people deserve suicide prevention, while the disabled, elderly, and mentally ill deserve suicide assistance. The assumption is that those lives are of lesser quality and not worth living.

The result is predictable: Society begins to view those lives as possessing less value. That view is what allowed Canadian doctors to suggest MAiD for disabled infants, as the Quebec College of Physicians did in 2022.

IN FOCUS: WHERE DOES SARAH PALIN GO FOR HER APOLOGY ON DEATH PANELS?

Stegmann’s caretakers seemed to share this view. When Kranendonk asked why MAiD was raised again after her grandmother had already refused it, she said the nurse defended the decision as being in Stegmann’s best interest.

Once society accepts that some people are better off dead, consent becomes a mere formality for doctors who see death as mercy.

Liana Graham is a research assistant in domestic and economic policy at the Heritage Foundation.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is seeing higher employee turnover rates under President Donald Trump than at any point in the federal agency’s history.

In the first half of 2026, thousands of ICE employees left, and the bulk of those departures were due to resignations and terminations, not retirements, according to federal data reviewed by USA Today.

Employees conveyed to the Washington Examiner that many hired prior to Trump's second term were leaving or fired because of how poorly the agency was being run, including due to the shortfalls in training and vetting given to new officers before recruits are put on the street.

A revolving door

The Republican-controlled Congress funded ICE with $75 billion in July 2025, fueling the agency's hiring spree to bring on 10,000 new deportation officers.

ICE reported receiving 220,000 applications after it offered college loan payoff and $50,000 sign-on bonuses. It hired 12,000 officers between January 2025 and June 2026 to focus on Trump's mass deportation campaign over the past 15 months, according to a USA Today analysis of government data. The 12,000 new officers were in addition to 7,500 existing officers.

Between January and June, more than 2,900 officers left the agency, more than during any 12-month period since 2012, the first year that the White House Office of Personnel Management began to track this data point.

Terminations so far in 2026 are higher than the entire decade leading up to Trump's second term, the report stated.

One tenured ICE officer who spoke on the condition of anonymity said terminations of officers hired under Trump were the result of those officers making poor decisions on the job or retroactively failing a federal background check.

"It's like almost every week people are being fired due to failed backgrounds," the officer said about turnover in his region.

A retired official who speaks with current ICE leadership regularly said he had heard the same from several field office directors.

"Some backgrounds take 3-6 months, so the person could have graduated and be working at a field office before their full clearance gets granted or denied," the retired official said in a text message.

The Department of Homeland Security has maintained it is hiring qualified candidates and putting them through thorough training and vetting.

“ICE has maintained its exemplary standards, and is hiring the best of the best to get the worst of the worst criminals off of America’s streets. Many of ICE’s new recruits are former law enforcement officers, military, or former ICE officers who retired or quit under President Biden because they were frustrated about not being able to do their jobs," a DHS spokesperson wrote in an email. "The vast majority of new officers brought on during the hiring surge are experienced law enforcement officers who have already successfully completed a law enforcement academy."

Arsenal PAC, a political action committee stood up by political organizer and former intelligence analyst Samantha Boucher, noted that something was clearly wrong given the surge in new employee terminations.

Compared to 2024, "terminations have gone from [making up] under 1% of separations to 18%, and the officers being fired lasted a median of under four months," Arsenal PAC wrote in a press release. "A department hiring the best of the best would not be firing them this fast."

Challenges ICE employees face

Operating under the second Trump administration has not been easy, according to ICE employees. Employees have been sent across the country to work, dispatched to weigh stations, and assigned to airport security checkpoints. Federal immigration authorities from non-ICE agencies have been brought in to assist, creating more confusion. The feeling among some ICE personnel is that their best is not enough.

The White House has twice imposed daily illegal immigrant arrest quotas. The latest daily quota was 3,000. DHS has wavered between prioritizing all illegal immigrants for arrest and focusing on the "worst of the worst" who have a criminal history, further sending ICE mixed messaging on how to operate.

"The admin has been hot and cold about whom to arrest. It's been a seesaw this whole year," the first officer said.

The agency has operated without a confirmed director since the end of the Obama administration, and its recent nominee was pulled suddenly in late September.

ICE officers have had bounties placed on their heads and expressed concern about being targeted in the streets by activists, as well as in their own facilities following several shootings aimed at federal police.

Since last June, ICE and Customs and Border Protection have sent large teams into Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago, Charlotte, Memphis, and Minneapolis, and they continue to carry out deportations with far less publicity under Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin than his predecessor, Kristi Noem.

The surges of personnel into communities to find individuals who have been arrested and released by local law enforcement has triggered activism against ICE not previously seen to this extent.

FEDERAL JUDGE BLOCKS ICE FROM ARRESTS AT NEW YORK COURTHOUSES

An online ICE Activity Tracker website claims to be the “most reliable way to track ICE activity near you." Users can report notes and pictures of ICE vehicles, road checkpoints, and people detained by police, as well as the location and time.

Sources additionally say that officers have burnt out while working overtime month after month — all on top of functioning in an already tense and dangerous environment.

By the time Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office in March 1861, his election already seemed larger than mere politics. It confirmed the collapse of the one-party system, established the ascendancy of another, and precipitated the secession crisis that culminated in the Civil War. In retrospect, Lincoln’s rise can appear almost predestined — a national hero emerging at the moment the Union needed him.

Jonathan Earle’s He Has the People: Abraham Lincoln and the Election of 1860 rejects the idea that Lincoln was inevitable. His path to the White House depended on fractured parties, failed candidates, convention maneuvering, sectional paranoia, and political contingencies that could easily have produced a different president and an alternative national future.

“No one could have predicted what twists and turns would turn expectations and outcomes on their head," Earle writes. "Even the seemingly inevitable loses inevitability. Emphasizing the contingency of events restores human agency, free will, and decision-making to a central place.” That principle organizes the book. Earle reconstructs the election from the perspective of Americans who did not know who would win or what the future would hold.

His guide through that uncertainty is not Lincoln but Murat Halstead, editor and part-owner of the Cincinnati Commercial. Halstead attended all seven major political conventions of 1860, reporting on the campaign as it unfolded. A Republican and committed Unionist, he nevertheless pursued an unusual journalistic ambition for the period by witnessing events firsthand and subjecting political figures on all sides to the same scrutiny. By placing Halstead at the center of the narrative, Earle makes He Has the People as much a study of emerging political journalism as of Lincoln’s rise and the coming Civil War.

Halstead first appears at the execution of John Brown in 1859, having slipped into Charles Town despite Virginia’s efforts to restrict access. No admirer of Brown, the Ohioan feared that fanatics in both the North and South were pushing the country toward civil war. But any journalist worth his salt knows the importance of seeing events in person, and Halstead was no different. His dispatch from the Old Dominion was reprinted across the North and established his reputation as a national correspondent. Over the year that followed, Halstead covered fights on Capitol Hill, the division of the Democratic Party, the formation of the Constitutional Union Party, and the Republican convention in Chicago.

Earle structures the narrative around Halstead’s reporting, allowing readers to encounter the political year through rumors, speeches, private maneuvering, premature reports, and constantly shifting expectations. His account of the prolonged battle to elect a speaker of the House shows that method at work. What might now seem like an obscure congressional struggle becomes a proxy for the coming presidential contest. Southern Democrats blocked Ohio Republican John Sherman because he had endorsed an antislavery book, while divisions within the Democratic Party prevented it from uniting behind a candidate.

The speakership fight revealed how thoroughly slavery had destabilized the existing political order. Republicans were growing stronger, Democrats were dividing, and former Whigs were searching for a political home. Those changes expanded some possibilities and foreclosed others, but no one yet knew what political alignment would come from all the factional infighting.

That instability followed Republicans into their convention in Chicago. New York Sen. William H. Seward arrived as the clear favorite, but his strength proved less secure than newspapers and supporters had suggested. Delegates weighed ideology, geography, electability, and the enemies each candidate had made.

Lincoln benefited from careful organization and the failures of his rivals. He secured the support of Illinois delegates, while other candidates struggled to consolidate their own state delegations. He was sufficiently antislavery to satisfy Republicans but appeared less politically dangerous than Seward to delegates worried about carrying competitive states.

A rapidly expanding national press helped shape those calculations. Newspapers promoted favored candidates, exaggerated momentum, and sometimes reported anticipated outcomes as settled facts. Premature reports that Seward had secured the nomination show how expectation could be reported as fact before delegates had decided anything.

The growing influence of the press depended on technologies Halstead used more fully than most of his contemporaries. Railroads carried him from convention to convention, the telegraph transmitted his dispatches, and inexpensive printing placed his reporting before a mass electorate. Earle presents Halstead as a pioneer of firsthand political reporting, but he was no impartial observer. A committed Republican, he could be sarcastic, partisan, and personally brutal.

In He Has the People, Lincoln emerges as an unusually disciplined politician. His Cooper Union speech made him a serious presidential contender by presenting opposition to slavery’s expansion as consistent with the principles of the founders, an argument newspapers carried far beyond the hall to the rest of the country.

He brought the same restraint to the presidential campaign. While some rivals traveled and spoke, Lincoln remained largely in Springfield, limiting opportunities for error as surrogates and sympathetic newspapers shaped his public image. They targeted key constituencies, including German voters, while the Wide Awakes converted enthusiasm into organization. Republicans assembled a coalition of abolitionists, former Whigs, economic nationalists, and voters who opposed slavery’s expansion but were not necessarily committed to racial equality.

Lincoln’s opponents could not assemble an equally broad coalition. The Constitutional Union Party, led by John Bell, appealed to voters who hoped that moderation and loyalty to the Union could contain the sectional crisis. But while Republicans offered a position on the expansion of slavery, Bell’s party offered little beyond opposition to sectional conflict and to the Republicans themselves.

Northern Democratic candidate Stephen A. Douglas faced a different obstacle. His break with the Buchanan administration and Southern Democrats split the party between Northern and Southern tickets. By staying in the race rather than yielding to a united opposition ticket, he preserved the four-way contest that let Lincoln win the Electoral College without a majority of the popular vote.

Earle returns, again and again, to the uncertainty surrounding Lincoln’s rise. By the later chapters, nearly every alliance, convention vote, and political miscalculation might have changed the outcome. The repetition is deliberate. Lincoln did not master the chaos so much as navigate it, combining careful organization with an ability to capitalize as one rival after another faltered.

TRAVELING THE ROAD THAT LED TO OUR NATIONAL IDENTITY

Halstead’s reporting makes that argument concrete. Earle moves through the year as Americans experienced it. Rumors often raced ahead of the facts, shaping expectations before anyone knew what was true. Political actors made decisions with incomplete information and no assurance of success.

Lincoln’s victory depended not only on broad political forces and moral arguments but also on convention tallies, personal rivalries, rapid reporting, disciplined restraint, and a little bit of luck. Small decisions carried enormous weight because, through much of 1860, several different Americas remained possible. By recovering the uncertainty of 1860, Earle reminds us that history is neither automatic nor preordained. The future remains undetermined, and our choices still help decide what it will become.

Carl Paulus is a political historian from Michigan who formerly worked on Capitol Hill.

Even among organized crime groups, which are everywhere a subject of fascination, the yakuza hold a special place in the public imagination. Perhaps it is their reputation for honor, their ornate tattoos, the fact that they operate in such an orderly society, or all of the finger cutting.

In Yakuza: A 400-Year History of the Japanese Underworld, Andrew Rankin, who holds a doctorate in Japanese literature from Cambridge University, tells the story of Japan's yakuza from the shogunate through the present. This is a fascinating look at yakuza gangs, or "Chivalry Groups," as they prefer to be known, and the important and distinct role they have played in the development of modern Japan as they went from gambling groups filling in for limited state capacity to the boardrooms of multinational corporations (often there to extort them, of course). In the process, Rankin gives readers a thorough history of Japan itself, referencing many texts and personal accounts described in English for the first time.

The first, and most fascinating, thing to know about yakuza — "the Yakuza," implying a unified society, is an inaccurate Western media invention — is that these organizations have never been illegal. Yakuza groups are listed in the phone book and have headquarters you can walk into, secretaries you can speak to, and decorations on their walls, ranging from calligraphy showing their creed (in one instance, "Solidarity. Silence. Retribution") to pictures of fallen members or letters from children they have helped following disasters.

At times, they will even give press conferences or allow themselves to be identified by name in the media as members of their society. In structure, they are not particularly different from charitable fraternal organizations that volunteer to perform state-like functions, such as disaster relief and medical assistance, all over the world. Members and branches pay dues, and this is a large part of their legal income. Incredibly, they may also license the use of their logos as if they were a sports team.

Of course, all of this is a cover for massive criminal operations, and, as the author notes, if you look up the legal charges these men are facing, it presents an entirely different picture than what they tell the media. What this means for the book is that, unlike stories of organizations that claim they don't exist, such as the mafia in America — where it seems much of what is known about them is a fantasy of the FBI, fed by informants saying what they want to hear — quite a lot is known about yakuza that is verifiable from information they have chosen to release over the centuries.

Proto-yakuza groups first formed in the early days of the shogunate, when the end of wars in Japan turned samurai into administrators. They were often in need of money, being paid in rice and prohibited from taking part in trade. Consequently, they would look for various semilegal work, such as guarding dice games. Gangs also formed among the lower classes, and they all ultimately converged. Since under the feudal system, each daimyo (the equivalent of a count) was responsible for the security of his fiefdom, paying off sketchy groups to keep order in the underworld was a convenient method of social management. Amusingly, yakuza got many of their most distinct customs from the private fire brigades of the time.

Gambling, long illegal but tolerated and popular in Japan, has always been the mainstay yakuza business. In addition to hosting games, yakuza deal in security, loan sharking, and the mediation of all sorts of disputes. They also typically ran the "pleasure districts," where prostitution was legal and regulated. Later, when prostitution was banned, but all sorts of sex-adjacent activities were still allowed, this too was run by yakuza. We learn the extent to which yakuza did actually observe many laws by being involved in all sorts of business of ill repute while avoiding major crimes such as armed robbery, kidnapping for ransom, and (for a time) the drug trade.

It is a common experience when reading a mainstream work of nonfiction to encounter various liberal platitudes that the conservative reader must learn to ignore. To my surprise, this was not the case here — in fact, some conservative views were casually expressed. For example, Japan had a sort of "untouchable" caste called "burakumin" that became eligible for a variety of affirmative action programs in the 1960s, about which Rankin writes: "In Japan at the time there was minimal awareness of the ways that antidiscrimination policies and activism might lead to unintended consequences or become susceptible to criminal exploitation." While the implication that there is clear awareness of this in the modern West is amusing, Rankin explains the hazards of antidiscrimination programs with remarkable clarity. Yakuza made a real racket out of it, getting activists to claim discrimination and then getting paid off to go away, and exploiting special deals on land and other benefits. As yakuza recruited heavily from these communities, they were able to claim prejudice if their associates were accused of racketeering. Rankin also explains that when Japan liberalized immigration, many foreigners entered on student visas with the intention of committing crimes.

AN EXPANSIVE, INFORMATIVE HISTORY OF FISHING IN CALIFORNIA

The book drags a bit at times, but in a funny way, this reflects the subject matter. The truth is that yakuza are typically quite orderly and, at times, are little more than security companies that offer various mediation services and run a variety of legal businesses. Throughout the text, there is plenty of exciting material on vice and gang warfare and such, but that is just not all that yakuza do. Particularly in the bubble of the 1980s, much of their income derived from buying and reselling property persistently to increase its value — a profitable grift but not the most interesting one.

Currently, yakuza are in deep decline as the government has implemented ever more policies designed to cripple their activities, though the organizations remain legal. They have further suffered from increased public awareness and pressure not to use yakuza services. The government has also taken over some of their business. For example, pachinko — a popular pinball-like, semilegal gambling game — was long one of the main yakuza businesses. Now, instead of permitting the yakuza protection racket, a governmental body staffed by former police officers has control over licensing and goes around making the parlors pay to stay open and providing supplies at inflated prices. By all accounts, they have simply taken over the yakuza racket. As the history of yakuza shows, perhaps the libertarians are right that the state and the mafia aren't so different.

Brad Pearce writes The Wayward Rabbler on Substack and is also a regular contributor to the American Conservative and the Libertarian Institute. He lives in eastern Washington with his wife and two children.

One day in July, I began digging the hole.

Moving 4 feet of earth — all the rocks, the roots, and about two tons of mid-Atlantic clay — is hard work. It’s harder when you’re digging a grave for your dog.

It’s even harder when that dog is as good as Scout.

Our neighbors at our former home in Maryland probably thought we were crazy when we added Scout to the family. Our 900-square-foot brick colonial was already teeming with an unreasonable quantity of life. Our fourth child was still crawling more than walking.

Didn’t we have enough on our hands? Weren’t we worried about how the dog would handle our children? How they would handle the dog? And Katie, my wife, had never had a dog.

But one day in April 2013, we came home with a four-month-old puppy. She became our family’s best friend for nearly 14 years.

Scout was a brindle — a word I learned when we adopted her. Her fur was mostly brown, but with black stripes. You’ve seen brindle dogs around, but you’ve never seen a brindle as beautiful as Scout. Most of her sleek, short fur was chestnut-brown, and the black stripes were an understated accent, except on her face, which was more black than brown.

Her sleek appearance reflected her awesome athleticism. She was fast. She could jump. She could change directions like Barry Sanders. Years later, when we got a second dog, Valentine, it was one of my great joys to watch them chase each other around the yard and wrestle.

Scout was a mutt — half-pit bull and half-boxer — but I firmly believe she should have become a breed of her own.

The pit bull loyalty was strong with this one. She never ran away. If she escaped our yard, it was in an attempt to herd Valentine, the younger dog, back through the gate.

One Sunday, we drove to Grandma’s house for dinner, and left the front door open. When we returned five hours later, Scout was sitting on the front porch, guarding the entrance.

We had a neighbor back in Maryland who hated Scout — and Valentine, too — because they were dogs. But one day, over the fence, Mrs. Hoang saw Scout kill a groundhog in my backyard. She asked if I could sic Scout on the groundhogs plaguing her garden.

Within a week, I saw a groundhog run by while I sat on the front porch with our dogs. “Sic!” I shouted. Valentine flushed the poor creature out from under the Hoangs’ deck, and Scout grabbed it in her mouth. After a few violent seconds, it was dead. Scout, the reader of this column knows, would go on to kill three or four raccoons, most recently at age 13.

But Scout’s protectiveness mostly involved no violence. 

Whenever our children played in the backyard, Scout would join them — not in play, just in the backyard. She didn’t chase them or want to be chased. She wasn’t much at fetch either. She would simply sit guard, upright in the middle of the play, making sure everyone was all right.

And this fierce hound, this guard dog, would often protect us by cuddling. When Katie was pregnant — and nauseated and bed-ridden — Scout was her constant companion. For a child home sick from school, Scout was there. 

Given the amount of life in our home, one friend noted that very few dogs in history received as much love as Scout. She had six children to hang on her, and Katie to dote on her.

Most of our children don’t remember life without her. So when she began declining this summer, we prepared them. Preparation included digging the hole over the course of a few weeks, along with my older boys.

The end came mercifully fast. She was fine on a Tuesday, ill on a Wednesday, and come Thursday, it was time.

Our children came home early from school, just before the vet arrived. The youngest boy, in fine Irish tradition, dealt with his grief by taking on manual labor: he carved a grave marker from a paving stone.

TIMOTHY P. CARNEY: WHEN A CHRISTMAS VISITOR IS A RACCOON

My boys and I carried Scout’s body down the slope, across the sod, and to her final resting place. As they gently placed the clay and loam in the hole, I felt I had to say something, and so I just said what I always say: God gives us beautiful things in this world, but they are always on loan. All earthly beauty is fleeting.

Scout’s loyalty was the greater part of her beauty. It inspired us to deserve it — to try to be the people she thought we were. And in digging that hole, and carving that stone, we tried, in our own small way, to pay a bit of that loyalty back.

Timothy P. Carney is the senior political columnist at the Washington Examiner and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

My friends who are parents of college-age children have a new favorite thing to complain about, and it isn't tuition, although it's close. It's grades, or more precisely how easy it is, even at the most expensive institutions, to get an A. That’s the grade you get for showing up to class reasonably often, turning in work reasonably OK, and being reasonably awake and hygienic while doing so.

When I was last in school, an A meant excellent, a B meant good, and a C meant average. An average essay, with average insights and an average amount of effort behind it, got a C. Maybe on a good day, from a professor who liked you, you could weasel into a C-plus.

If you're somewhere in your 30s or early 40s, you might recall that an average essay got a B. Probably even a B-plus. The entire scale slid up a notch and a half, and suddenly everyone was a B-plus student. If you’re younger than that, the bottom of the scale, the absolute worst you can do is to seemingly get a B. With every generation, it seems, the letters of the alphabet scale get fewer and fewer. It’s still possible to get a D or an F, of course — you have to really try, but it’s possible — but a C is nearly unthinkable. Young people will allow themselves to be judged as excellent, very good, or failures, but they will not accept being called average, even though average is what most of us are a lot of the time. That’s why the word was invented in the first place: to describe the usual usual.

Everyone gets an A, and this is an outrage, of course, especially if you're the one writing the tuition checks. Whenever the subject comes up, I nod along with my friends as they agree that everything is worse now, everything is easy, we're living in a coddling, soft culture that hands out gold stars for attendance, and isn't this the worst thing ever? I agree with all of it. I agree loudly. I've been known to snort "participation trophies!" with real venom.

Which is why I should probably mention this: I'm back in school, working toward a Master of Divinity at Princeton Theological Seminary. This semester, I'm taking a class in Christian ethics, and it's terrific. The professor is smart and engaging and asks provocative questions, the reading is wide and ideologically diverse (I know, I know, but I promise, it is), and my classmates are whip-smart.

This week, I turned in a paper for that class, and it's… average. It's well-written because I'm a professional writer, and if I can't manage that, I'm sunk. But it isn't deep, and it isn't especially thoughtful. The past two weeks were busy and complicated, and somewhere in the middle of writing it, I thought, “Well, this one isn't going to be very good.” Then I wrapped it up and turned it in.

By any un-inflated measure, it's a C paper. On a good day, because the professor likes me, maybe a C-plus.

And yet, I will almost certainly get a B-plus.

WHEN HOBBIES, OBSESSIONS, AND ECCENTRICITIES TAKE OVER LATE MIDDLE AGE

Let me be clear: I'm fine with that. Look, I do all the assigned reading, I'm lively and attentive in class, and in those ways I'm an A student. But every so often something has to give, and at this point in life, I can look at my calendar, punt, and feel no guilt about it. So, to my friends fuming about grade inflation, nearly all of them younger than I am, allow me to say: Get off my back, old man!

Anyway, I'm in the right place for this. At seminary, when you receive something good you didn't earn and don't deserve, we have a word for it. We call it grace. It's a whole big thing in my Episcopalian corner of Christianity, as a matter of fact. We are saved by grace, not by works. Which is lucky, because my works this week were strictly average.

Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.

President Donald Trump wants artificial intelligence to be known as “super intelligence,” but the companies building the technology have yet to follow his lead.

Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, SpaceXAI, and Nvidia would not disclose to the Washington Examiner whether they plan to rename their companies or products, or otherwise adopt Trump’s preferred terminology after the president signed an executive order this week directing the federal government to replace “artificial intelligence” with “super intelligence.”

The industry’s hesitation may have a simple explanation: “superintelligence” already has a meaning of its own in the technology world, where developers have long used the term to describe hypothetical AI systems that surpass human capabilities.

Meta, for example, started using the descriptor "super intelligence" last year when it's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announced he was creating the Meta Superintelligence Labs.

This week, however, Zuckerberg, who has publicly supported Trump's policy position that AI companies should not be rigorously regulated despite safety concerns, seemed to deploy "super intelligence" interchangeably.

"We believe superintelligence will create significant new opportunities for all people and businesses," Zuckerberg posted on X.

A Meta spokesperson did not respond to the Washington Examiner's request for clarification as to what Zuckerberg was actually discussing.

Another donor and former de facto Department of Government Efficiency administrator, Elon Musk, who is also the co-founder and CEO of SpaceXAI, has readily adopted "super intelligence" in person and online, though not on his company's website.

"I think it is worth highlighting the positive benefits of AI — pardon me, super intelligence," Musk quipped on Tuesday at the White House.

"Super Intelligence," he added on social media sharing a clip from the White House meeting he and other AI CEOs attended.

Musk and Zuckerberg joined Trump and other technology executives at the White House this week to sign an “Accord on Superintelligence.” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Nvidia President Jensen Huang were also in attendance.

The White House move is unfolding against a far darker debate over where the technology is headed. Just last month, former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon warned that AI could “kill us all by the end of the decade.”

Huang struck a dramatically more optimistic note after signing Trump’s accord.

"Super Intelligence offers an extraordinary opportunity to advance discovery, productivity, security, health, and prosperity," he posted on X.

"The future of Super Intelligence will be shaped not only by what it can do, but by the confidence it earns," Huang added.

Regardless of Trump's executive order, the likes of Altman have continued to say "AI" and not "super intelligence," with his company including "AI" in its moniker.

Meanwhile, Pichai worded his post-White House meeting statement so as not to mention AI, though he did reference the accord.

AMAZON SENDING LOCALS $1 BILLION AFTER TRUMP TELLS BIG TECH TO 'MAKE COMMUNITIES HAPPY' ABOUT DATA CENTERS

Trump first proposed rebranding AI amid calls led by Amodei for a coordinated slowdown in frontier AI model development as part of a public relations campaign for the technology.

"Remember this: whoever wins SI, because now we're calling it again super, we're using the word super because the other word is a fake word," the president told reporters on Tuesday outside the West Wing. "It's not a good, it's not an appropriate word. Whoever wins SI is going to win."

It is unfortunate for Republicans that it won’t pass until after the November elections, but the bipartisan permitting reform deal announced hours before the Senate adjourned this week could be the most historic and consequential legislative accomplishment of Donald Trump's presidency.

“We once built projects like the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Empire State Building in years, not decades,” Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Mike Lee (R-UT) said in a release announcing the deal. “America still has the resources and the talent, but what too often stands in the way is a permitting system that takes too long and costs too much.”

Working with the committee’s ranking member, Martin Heinrich (D-NM), as well as Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) and Ranking Member Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Lee has helped produce the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026, a 417-page bill that includes major reforms to the federal government’s most powerful energy and environmental laws, including the Federal Power Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, and even the Endangered Species Act.

The political horse-trading driving this rare bipartisan compromise is this: Democrats get sought-after changes to the Federal Power Act that make it easier to build transmission lines and connect wind and solar projects to the grid, while Republicans get limits on environmental reviews and lawsuits that have delayed pipelines, mines, and other infrastructure. Both sides get an opportunity to increase energy supplies and lower costs.

Specifically, the National Environmental Policy Act reforms would exempt many routine repairs and upgrades from lengthy environmental reviews and generally stop federal loans or grants from automatically triggering them. Activists would have just 150 days to sue, and they would need to show how the proposed project would directly harm them. Most significantly, courts could require agencies to fix their environmental reviews, but could no longer halt construction over NEPA violations alone.

The Clean Water Act changes would make states focus on water pollution when reviewing projects, limiting their ability to block pipelines or power lines for unrelated reasons. States denying approval would have to show that changes to the project could not bring it into compliance. The bill would also extend certain general permits from five years to 10 and prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from vetoing dredging and filling permits after they have been issued.

The changes to the Endangered Species Act are more modest. States could take over reviews of how federal projects affect protected wildlife, though developers could still opt for federal review. The usual formal consultation period would shrink from 90 days to 60, and opponents would have 150 days to challenge the resulting wildlife assessment in court.

The Federal Power Act changes would make it easier to build the transmission lines that carry electricity from wind and solar farms to customers. Federal regulators could approve qualifying interstate lines when states reject them or fail to act, and neighboring grid regions would have to work together to plan new connections. Developers would also get clearer information about where they can connect and what it will cost, while a streamlined review process would help projects move through the waiting list for grid access.

PRESERVING DUE PROCESS ON COLLEGE CAMPUSES

Much of the language in the Senate bill builds on the hard work of the House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Bruce Westerman (R-AR) and Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME). Reps. Adam Gray (D-CA) and Scott Peters (D-CA) also contributed to major portions of the measure. As a result of these bipartisan and bicameral efforts, the legislation appears to have the support of both Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA).

Congress will have much on its plate when it returns after the November elections, including the little matter of funding the government past Dec. 11, when the current continuing resolution expires. But if both chambers are able to push this legislation through, they will do far more than keep Washington running. They will make it easier for Americans to build homes, factories, power plants, and transmission lines that create jobs and lower costs. That is an accomplishment worth putting partisan differences aside to deliver.

A pro-Hamas group that led a riot at the University of Washington still operates despite the United States sanctioning its foreign affiliate as a front for terrorism.

Students United for Palestinian Equality and Return UW, or SUPER UW, called on Seattle locals in a September Instagram post to join an Oct. 7 protest marking three years of Israeli "genocide." The group openly labels itself an ally of the U.S.-designated terrorist group Masar Badil and its youth branch, according to posts documented in a Friday report by George Washington University.

SUPER UW, which was active as early as 2012, gained attention in May 2025 for fomenting a UW building takeover that led to fire, vandalism, and arrests. The Treasury Department separately declared Masar Badil a "Specially Designated Global Terrorist" in August over ties to an already-sanctioned international funding network for Palestinian terrorists.

The Seattle-area activists appear undeterred by the sanctions. In fact, Masar Badil listed SUPER UW on its website as an endorser for a Canada conference celebrating three years since "Al Aqsa Flood" — Hamas's name for its October 2023 massacre in Israel.

"The question is what happens when 'resistance' becomes a justification for intimidation, when terrorists are transformed into heroes, when threats are cloaked in revolutionary language, and when a campus movement becomes a gateway to networks that openly celebrate violence," the GW report said. "SUPER-UW's story is ultimately a warning about that progression. What begins as slogans and demonstrations can, over time, normalize increasingly extreme rhetoric, expand into intimidation, and create an environment in which violence against people or property becomes easier to rationalize."

"Universities, students, and the public should recognize that progression before the line between political activism and political violence disappears entirely," says the report.

SUPER UW did not respond to the Washington Examiner's request for comment. UW has emphasized that SUPER UW is not a registered student group and that the university banned it from acting as one after breaking campus rules. "The University filed trademark complaints with Meta and the activist group has been told directly to cease referring to itself as having any affiliation with the University," the university said in July.

A May 2025 statement from Masar Badil announced the launch of its youth advocacy arm, Tariq el Tahrir, which SUPER UW continues to name directly in its Instagram bio.

King County prosecutors charged 33 people with crimes for the May 2025 riot at UW. However, they have allowed at least 19 to enter into agreements that will drop their charges after they comply with certain release conditions, KOMO News reported.

HOW A LEFTIST NETWORK USED BY TERRORISTS OPERATED IN PLAIN SIGHT FOR YEARS

SUPER UW called the agreements another win for its cause in a Sept. 15 post.

"This outcome is a WIN for the UW33 [defendants,] a win for the Palestine movement, and an important step fight against repression," the group said. "In a climate where Palestine organizing is being repressed on all scales, it is crucial to highlight our movement’s successes in fighting repression through collective defense, community support, and strong clear politics."

The Houthis’ lightning offensive in September seized the entire Red Sea coastline, shocking the world and shattering confidence in the capabilities of the forces of the internationally recognized government. However, further Houthi offensives have met stiffer resistance from the recuperated forces of the Presidential Leadership Council, depriving the group of another quick victory.

The latter half of September saw fighting in Yemen shift to the strategic southwest highlands, concentrated around the critical city of Taiz, the third-largest in Yemen and the only one of the country’s top five cities the PLC controls outside of its capital, Aden. Thursday saw one of the heaviest days of fighting yet, after the Houthis launched an all-out offensive seeking to encircle the city.

Two weeks into fighting, the unforgiving mountainous terrain, heavy Saudi and government air power, and a reenergized anti-Houthi coalition have kept the Houthi advance in check, preventing a collapse on the level of that in mid-September.

HOUTHIS LAUNCH NEW OFFENSIVES INTO STRATEGIC YEMENI HIGHLANDS, THREATENING TO ENDANGER CAPITAL

Six people familiar with the matter told Reuters that the Saudis are planning a massive offensive, involving over 100,000 Yemeni troops, to possibly retake the Bab el Mandeb Strait. The reported offensive is expected to take place sometime in the next several weeks. The report also stated that Saudi Arabia has ruled out negotiations until the strait has been wrested from Houthi control.

As Yemen returns to a level of fighting intensity not seen since the 2022 truce, the civil war has entered a decisive phase, with several possible avenues forward.

Where will the Houthis strike next?

For a movement that once faced extinction against Yemeni security forces in the northern Yemeni mountains of Saada in the mid-2000s, mid-September marked the high-water mark beyond the Houthi movement founder’s wildest dreams. After humbling several international coalitions, the group had proven its fighting superiority with a lightning offensive that saw the most rapid exchange of territory since the civil war began over a decade ago, seizing one of the most strategically vital strips of real estate on Earth. The once-ragtag group now controlled the Bab el Mandeb Strait, one of the world’s foremost maritime trade chokepoints.

With the Houthis’ foremost target taken, the next question on analysts' minds is where they will strike next. The group controls about one-third of Yemen’s landmass, though the areas under its control are the most strategically important and densely populated. The capital, Sanaa, is under Houthi control, along with 70-80% of Yemen’s population and the military manpower that provides.

While the Houthis control most of the people, the PLC controls most of the resources and money. Nearly all of Yemen’s oil and gas are located in three government-controlled governorates: Hadramawt, Shabwa, and Marib, though exports have largely halted since 2022 due to damage from Houthi drone strikes.

AbdulSalam Mohammed, president of the Abaad Studies & Research Center and an adviser to Yemen's Information Ministry, told the Washington Examiner that government forces are currently focused on defending against the Houthis along three main axes. The first is the mountainous areas around Bab el-Mandeb, “which could provide defensive depth for a long-term Iranian-linked military presence in the area.” The second is in the southwest highlands, which, if taken, would allow the group to sever major roads linking Yemeni cities with Aden, “which would weaken the constitutional government and fragment areas under its control.” The other is in Marib and Shabwa, to deny the Houthis “access to a more sustainable source of financing for its military operations.”

Amr al Bidh, whom the south Yemeni separatist Southern Transitional Council identifies as a member of its leadership and its chief of foreign affairs, told the Washington Examiner in an interview that the group identified Marib as one of the most likely targets of the Houthis. The STC was officially dissolved in January, but Bidh and the rest of the leadership in exile reject the dissolution. It continues to exert significant influence on the ground.

Marib city and governorate have dual value with their oil and gas reserves, along with Marib's power as a key “symbol when it comes to the legitimacy of north Yemen,” Bidh explained.

Its importance is so significant that he said before the major Red Sea coast offensive, the STC viewed each as nearly equal in importance to the Houthis.

“Even before taking Bab el-Mandeb, in our analysis we said, ‘If the Houthis start this, where will they go? It's either Bab el-Mandeb or Marib,’” Bidh said. “And we thought maybe because of the situation with Iran and the U.S. they will definitely go towards Bab el-Mandeb for now, but then it will be Marib.”

PLC forces have fared far better on the eastern front in and around Marib, where they claim to have made modest gains. The government forces settled into a more defensive posture after the defeat in the southwest.

While a push east for Marib would get the Houthis the most resources, a southern push appears to be more strategically important for the time being. The two largest government-controlled cities, Aden and Taiz, are located in central-south Yemen. Troop movements over the past couple of weeks indicate the group is concentrating on seizing the southwestern highlands, which could then open the way for a push toward the government’s capital, Aden.

Abdulsalam said the densely populated mountainous regions would “provide a large pool for mobilization and recruitment.”

The key to holding these regions is Taiz city, which currently occupies a noticeable bulge into Houthi-controlled territory. Fierce assaults over the past week indicate that the group is concentrating on seizing it next.

“The Houthis’ strategy for the time being appears focused on Taiz, particularly the main highway connecting Taiz city through Al-Turbah to Aden. This is a critical ground line of communication, or GLOC, for the Yemen National Army, allied forces, and the Popular Resistance,” Mohammed al Basha, a Washington-based Yemen analyst and former Yemeni official, told the Washington Examiner on Thursday.

The Houthis launched one of their biggest attacks since hostilities restarted on Thursday, attacking across at least 20 locations. PLC forces have put up stiffer resistance, in part due to the mobilization of local communities, Basha said.

“They made advances in mainly two areas, but encountered stiff resistance,” he said. "In places such as Taiz and Marib, where local communities are defending their own territory alongside government forces, the Houthis are likely to face a much harder fight than they did during their rapid advance into Mocha."

While Taiz is the current priority, Basha warned that the Houthis are “pursuing their objectives on multiple fronts,” and may escalate their war with Saudi Arabia to a level the civil war hasn’t yet seen.

“We should not be surprised if the next phase includes Houthi ground incursions across the Saudi border, particularly from Hajjah and Saada toward Jizan, Asir and Najran,” he said. "This is now a full-scale Houthi war against both the internationally recognized government of Yemen and Saudi Arabia."

Can the PLC hold?

Several factors were in place to trigger the collapse of PLC forces on the Red Sea coast that are not in place for the southwest highlands. Bidh argued that the collapse was entirely due to issues of command and control and a lack of operational capability — he believes the Saudis bungled the handover of areas under the UAE’s responsibility along the coast, failing to match their level of commitment after eight months.

“When the UAE left, there wasn't any real transition … from one command and control system to another,” he said, arguing that a proper full transition of responsibilities would take months. “But at least in eight months, you should have at least the command and control transition.”

To back his case, Bidh cited sources in Mocha, the main government-controlled city on the coast before the collapse, who claimed the 150 Saudi personnel at the base they were working at were reliant on locals for food and water.

“So it was totally shocking for the people there working at the base … normally the UAE are helping us,” he said. "Now we have to help the Saudis with their logistics, which gives you an indication of how poor the whole situation is."

Bidh further claimed that the Saudis were the first to leave once the front's collapse began. In another swipe at Saudi mismanagement, Bidh claimed that even as the offensive along the coast was ongoing, the Saudis made renewed threats to STC units to dismantle their military camps.

“They wanted us to dismantle the camp and leave the camp,” Bidh said. "Otherwise, they will bomb us. And we were saying, ‘Are you serious? You have a fight with the Houthis right now in Mocha, and you're asking our military to leave and dismantle our camp because it's STC?’ It's bizarre how they are thinking. Like they're still after us, even though they have other problems."

The Washington Examiner reached out to the Saudi embassy for comment.

The devastating loss of the coast has opened up the path for a change in the Saudis’ intolerance for dissent within the anti-Houthi coalition, however. Despite deep-rooted tensions between southerners and the PLC, both are in agreement that the Houthi threat is far greater than that of the other. Bidh admitted as much, begrudgingly saying the STC would coordinate with local authorities to defend their land if the Houthis marched south, though maintaining it wouldn’t directly coordinate with the PLC itself.

UAE Vice President Mansour bin Zayed met with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman on Tuesday, the first high-level bilateral meeting between the two powers since the rift over Yemen. The United States has reportedly been pressuring the two to put aside their differences and work together to stop the Houthis, pressure that could help avert an overtly renewed conflict between the government and southerners.

Despite the poor performance of the PLC units entrusted with holding the coast, Abdulsalam relayed his confidence in the overall capabilities of the army.

“The Yemeni army operating under the internationally recognized government remains capable of defeating the Houthis if it receives sufficient logistical and technological support from the government’s regional and international partners, particularly in areas such as advanced weapons systems, unmanned aerial vehicles, satellite-based capabilities, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance,” he said, arguing that the Houthis received comparable forms of assistance from Iran.

Abdulsalam was so confident, in fact, that he went beyond speaking of the PLC’s forces’ ability to hold its current territory, saying, “it retains the ability to wear down both the Houthis and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps presence supporting them, retake Sanaa, and ultimately end Houthi control over Bab al-Mandab.”

His confidence came from four avenues: heavy Saudi support, the legitimacy of the government, the Houthis’ designation as a terrorist group turning the war into a broader anti-terrorism struggle, and the Yemeni army’s “substantial domestic social base among communities that have been affected politically, economically, and socially by the armed takeover of Sanaa and the prolonged erosion of state institutions.”

Abdulsalam was bullish on a strike toward Sanaa in the future, a move that would mark a radical departure from the anti-Houthi coalition’s largely defensive posture.

“The Yemeni army is preparing for what military planners describe as a future decisive phase in which the focus of the conflict could shift toward Sanaa,” he said, adding that PLC forces had “already carried out significant penetration and intelligence operations targeting key Houthi operational structures inside the capital.”

Bidh was much less optimistic about the tide of the war turning so significantly, acknowledging that the Houthis were the ones “who take the initiative, and then we have to react, and that's the weakness of the whole situation, that we need to wait for the Houthis.”

Though he wasn’t hopeful of future offensives, he was confident in the south’s ability to hold back the Houthi advance.

“We said we'll definitely defend the south. We will use everything. Even if the Houthis came into Aden, it won't be easy for them. It will be bloodshed for them. … It won't be like 2015,” Bidh said, referring to the first Battle of Aden. “Now we are in a different situation, and we have different capabilities.”

BREWING CONFLICT WITHIN THE ANTI-HOUTHI COALITION RISKS BLOWING UP THE US STRATEGY IN YEMEN

However, each side holds that the Yemeni civil war has now entered a new phase from which neither side looks eager to extricate itself. Basha argued that the Houthis are approaching the conflict from a pragmatic lens and will take whatever avenue that gets them closest to their goals.

“They will negotiate when negotiations serve those objectives, and they will use military force when they believe it can deliver more,” he said.

President Donald Trump campaigned in Vandalia, Ohio, on Saturday night alongside former NFL coach and TV personality Jon Gruden to drum up support for gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and incumbent Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH).

"I'm from Ohio," Gruden said. "My Mom and Dad are from Cleveland, I was born in Sandusky, and I went to the University of Dayton, and I'm damn proud of it, man," Gruden said at the beginning of the event. He told the crowd about Husted's past as a "great" football player at the University of Dayton, highlighting his "work ethic, commitment, and day-to-day mental toughness." Trump also tied the rally to football at the beginning of his speech, referencing Ohio State's Saturday afternoon victory over Iowa. The rally focused mostly on manufacturing and investment opportunities the Trump administration has secured since Trump took office in January 2025.

Trump also discussed data centers, a particularly contentious topic in the state, as Democrats hope the public's negative perception of AI presents an opportunity to tie Husted to data center development. Trump praised legislation sponsored by Husted that would codify the White House's Ratepayer Protection Pledge, which seeks to ensure developers "fund the electricity generation and infrastructure their projects require."

"Now your great Senator... introduced the Ratepayer Protection Act to prevent data centers from raising electricity costs and require them to pay their own way, it's very good," Trump said. "Just three days ago, Senator Husted brought that bill to the Senate floor and almost every single Democrat in the Senate voted to block it, they didn't want it. Only because we wanted it, probably because I wanted it, to be honest, to be more exact. I think if it was somebody else, maybe they would have said, 'yes,'" Trump said.

DEMOCRATS DUMP $7 MILLION IN ANTI-DATA CENTER MESSAGING IN OHIO IN HOPES OF FLIPPING SENATE SEAT

"Before you know it, this election is over, yes? It's over," Gruden said. "But what we got to do is we got to do our part. Early voting starts Tuesday. Can we be there or not?"

Ramaswamy, who burst onto the national scene as a 2024 Republican presidential candidate, almost served in the Trump administration before electing to run for governor of his home state. Neither he nor Husted hold a lead over their Democratic opponent, according to public polling, despite Trump winning Ohio in 2024 by more than 11 percentage points.

Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton will serve as the Trump administration’s AI czar and lead a three-month effort to establish the “risks and opportunities” of the technology.

Clayton, who was largely expected to lead the White House’s recently formed “Super Intelligence Force,” told the Wall Street Journal in an exclusive interview the “risk of not being first is high” as debates about AI policy swirl in Washington. His appointment comes less than a week after the nation’s leading AI executives convened at the White House and signed a non-binding commitment to self-regulation called the “White House Accord on Super Intelligence.”

“Not being first increases the identified and unidentified, risks, particularly from our adversaries,” Clayton said. “Being first will better enable us to address these risks on behalf of the American people.” The Trump administration has largely emphasized an anti-regulatory approach to AI policy, often citing a need to ensure American companies outpace their Chinese counterparts.

“I feel very comfortable that we’ve gotten a group with a lot of experience, diverse skill sets and a common commitment,” Clayton said in reference to the internal and external participants in the task force, which includes Trump administration officials such as Vice President JD Vance and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, as well as venture capitalist David Sacks and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “These are all serious people who have addressed opportunities and risks in the past and are committed to doing this so that America wins the SI race and we win it through the benefit of the American people.” Trump also signed an executive order this week changing “artificial intelligence” to “super intelligence,” at his own behest.

A bipartisan backlash against data center construction gave way to heightened safety and cybersecurity concerns throughout September as lawmakers and the public continued to grapple with AI’s potential impacts on the economy and country writ large. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei became the figurehead of the “pace the frontier” movement in the wake of supposed hacking incidents, which, combined with the public’s negative perception of AI, sparked louder calls for regulation throughout the summer.

ACTIVIST NETWORKS WANT YOU SCARED OF AI KILLING PEOPLE – UNLESS CHINA’S USING IT

OpenAI President Greg Brockman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Grok CEO Elon Musk, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg joined Amodei, Trump, and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) at the signing ceremony on Tuesday.

Johnson described the commitment as “robust internal controls and layers of internal and external review.” Clayton also noted in the interview the task force would discuss potential legislative options that could be part of an AI framework moving forward.

Two members of the Iranian delegation from the last two weeks’ U.N. General Assembly meeting were sent home by the State Department on Friday night and Saturday morning, despite having been asked to leave days earlier.

“Secretary [of State Marco] Rubio means business,” a U.S. official told the Washington Examiner. “Two more members of the Iranian delegation were still in NY long after the United Nations General Assembly had passed. They have now been kicked out of the U.S.”

The diplomats remained in the U.S. throughout the week despite a Monday order for the entire delegation to leave the country immediately after the global summit ended. Rubio directed Foreign Minister Abbas Aragchi and his delegation to leave following a weekend of talks in which “negotiations stalled,” according to Axios.

President Donald Trump used the global summit to reiterate his willingness to escalate military tensions with Iran regardless of how disrupted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz may affect Republicans in November’s midterm elections. He spoke about the conflict again on Saturday afternoon, saying “we have a decision to make about Iran” and that the nation “is virtually giving up any plans of a nuclear weapon.”

Trump’s insistence on including certain details regarding Iran’s nuclear weapons program has emerged as a pressure point in negotiations, as have various ways to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz and thus bring down global oil prices. Voters have largely soured on Trump throughout his second term due to the unpopular conflict’s ties to stubbornly high inflation.

TRUMP’S ADMISSION OF A ‘PUBLIC RELATIONS’ PROBLEM TESTS CLAIM HE’S HIS OWN BEST MESSENGER

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Aragchi were granted heavily restricted visas to attend the annual meeting. Trump would later confirm he rejected the latest peace proposal from Iranian negotiators during the event, which Peseshkian said had the “same objectives” as the Memorandum of Understanding that fell apart over the summer.

“The Iranian delegation left New York on Monday evening, in accordance with the schedule that had also been communicated to the U.S. Department of State in advance on September 17,” the delegation said on social media following Rubio’s directive. “Having achieved nothing, the State Department has resorted to propagating baseless and worthless news.” The event was held in New York City between Sept. 18 and 28.

President Donald Trump said on Friday his administration will send one-time checks of $90 to certain Medicare recipients as he campaigns across the country about a month before the 2026 midterm elections.

“I am pleased to announce that my Administration will, immediately, begin sending ‘Checks’ of nearly $100 to over 20 MILLION wonderful Seniors to help pay for their Medicare Part B premiums, which we have already reduced by significant amounts,” he said. “This money will come from the Medicare Improvement Fund, a pointless ‘Slush Fund’ that has only been used by Dumocrats in Congress to pay for the Waste, Fraud, and Abuse for their Special Interest friends, and drive up Healthcare costs.” The Medicare Improvement Fund was created in 2008 to make general improvements to the program, but has never been used.

Trump campaigned in Texas on Thursday and Alabama on Friday to shore up support from the Republican base as the GOP looks to retain control of Congress in November despite Trump’s low approval rating. Friday night’s announcement also comes nearly one month after Trump said at a Republican National Committee event in Dallas that his administration would send every American adult a $5,000 check if the GOP wins in November.

Trump linked his administration’s most-favored-nation pricing policy to “substantially LOWER costs” and said, “Because I delivered on this very important policy issue for the American people, they can rest assured the highly popular $5,000 Trump Dividend will be distributed to every U.S. Citizen if, and when, the Republicans win the Midterm Elections!”

He also noted his long-held preference not to cut Medicare or Social Security benefits in the announcement, saying, “I pledged to protect and preserve Medicare and Social Security” since former President Joe Biden left it on the verge of “RUIN.” Trump notably campaigned on preserving Medicare and Social Security ahead of the 2016 presidential election, while other Republican candidates pledged to slash federal spending.

FIRST ROUND OF OCTOBER SOCIAL SECURITY PAYMENTS GOES OUT IN 11 DAYS

“Most eligible seniors will receive the payment in the form of a direct deposit of $90 in early October,” the White House detailed in a separate announcement. “Those without direct deposit will receive a check, also sent in early October, to the mailing address that they have registered with Medicare. Most Medicare Part B enrollees are eligible for the payments. Those whose premiums are already paid by Medicaid or who pay an Income-Related Monthly Adjustment Amount do not qualify.”

Individuals who wish to check their eligibility status for payments can call 1-800-633-4227. It is unclear when the payments may arrive in early October.

President Donald Trump is hosting a rally in Vandalia, Ohio, as part of an effort by the White House to energize the Republican voter base ahead of the midterm elections.

Trump told a crowd at a rally in Alabama on Friday that he would embark on a 10-state tour ahead of Election Day. Many Republican strategists and candidates worry the midterm elections could prove to be a defeat for the GOP and the Trump administration.

DEMOCRATS AHEAD IN TEXAS, ALASKA, AND OHIO WHILE TIED IN KANSAS FOR MIDTERM ELECTIONS: POLL

The president approved federal disaster aid on Friday for seven Ohio counties after severe August storms.