Syndicate

America Must Be Able to Restore Its Space Power at War Speed

Mark Montgomery, Emmerson Overell — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

For decades, the U.S. military treated space largely as an enabler of power on Earth. Satellites helped troops communicate, guided precision weapons, and provided intelligence. Today, those systems are increasingly perceived as a means for U.S. and allied forces to apply power. The Trump administration is now putting that shift into policy. The next challenge is ensuring the United States can rapidly restore space capabilities when they are disrupted.

The White House's new National Security Science and Technology Strategy identifies space as one of only three priority areas, alongside undersea capabilities and artificial intelligence and autonomy, for U.S. "battlefield dominance and power projection." It calls for clear U.S. technological superiority from very low Earth orbit through cislunar space, the area between Earth and the moon.

The administration also released an updated National Space Transportation Policy, replacing guidance issued in 2013. The Obama-era policy already called for responsive, resilient access to space and rapid restoration of capabilities during conflict. The Trump update goes further, explicitly linking rapid and resilient access to space to U.S. space superiority. It calls for space ranges to support more than 1,000 launches and reentries annually by 2030 and directs the Pentagon to evaluate barriers to supporting high-priority national security launches within 48 hours of need, including from expeditionary locations.

Those goals matter because China is building capabilities both to exploit space and to deny it to the United States. The Pentagon assesses that Beijing is developing jammers, lasers, anti-satellite missiles, and on-orbit systems intended to restrict U.S. access to space during conflict. China also operates more than 500 satellites that contribute to a broader "sensor-shooter kill web" architecture used to locate forward-deployed U.S. and allied forces. Beijing is also rapidly scaling its ability to put new capabilities into orbit; targeting 140 launches in 2026, a 52 percent increase from 2025.

With China improving both its space and counterspace capabilities, U.S. space superiority cannot rest solely on having better satellites. Washington also needs the ability to rapidly replace or augment critical capabilities when satellites or supporting infrastructure are disrupted.

The Space Force has shown that rapid launch is possible. During VICTUS NOX in 2023, a standby spacecraft was readied within 57 hours and reached orbit 27 hours after the final launch order. VICTUS DIEM later tested preparing a spacecraft for launch in under 12 hours and separately ran a 36-hour simulated rapid-launch scenario. In June, VICTUS HAZE gave Rocket Lab just 24 hours to prepare a rocket for launch to an orbit unknown in advance; the launch succeeded. The challenge is making that speed routine, especially during potential crises.

Rapid launch is useful only if Washington has enough launch sites, range capacity, and available airspace to make that speed repeatable at scale. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) reports the United States was responsible for 217 launches in 2025, while the administration wants U.S. ranges capable of supporting more than 1,000 launches and reentries annually by 2030.

Following Trump's new space policies, the FAA stated that federal ranges are already strained and warned that launch-site availability could become a bottleneck as military, civil, and commercial demands grow. Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Kennedy Space Center, and Vandenberg Space Force Base account for 83-percent of U.S. launches, concentrating activity at just three locations. Furthermore, the FAA says efficiency improvements can accommodate higher cadence in the short term, but reaching the administration's 1,000-goal will require additional spaceport capacity, launch sites, and support infrastructure. It is also exploring priority airspace for critical launch corridors because scheduling and airspace availability can constrain higher launch cadence.

Commercial industry gives Washington a major advantage, but it does not automatically solve the infrastructure problem. SpaceX conducted 170 launches in 2025 — compared to China's 92 launches — demonstrating the scale of Washington's commercial edge. The Space Force is also integrating commercial systems into military architectures and developing pre-negotiated agreements to secure commercial surge capacity during crisis or conflict.

But much of today's commercial launch capacity still depends on the same concentrated federal infrastructure. SpaceX's Falcon fleet launches from Kennedy, Cape Canaveral, and Vandenberg, while Blue Origin's New Glenn launches from Cape Canaveral. Washington should use commercial investment and competition to expand viable launch sites and avoid dependence on any one provider or location.

Allies can expand those pathways further. Partner countries provide a source of resilience that Washington cannot replicate as efficiently alone: geographic dispersion, alternative launch locations, broader sensor coverage, additional capacity, and cost-sharing.

NATO's STARLIFT initiative aims to develop a network of allied launch capabilities able to put assets into orbit at short notice, while HALO aims to connect sovereign allied military satellites into a larger network. In August, a U.S. space-surveillance sensor launched aboard a Japanese satellite on a Japanese rocket. The United States, United Kingdom, and Australia are also jointly fielding the Deep Space Advanced Radar Capability (DARC), a three-site network designed to track objects in geosynchronous orbit. Allied contributions to DARC are projected to reduce U.S. lifecycle costs by 25 percent.

The strategic bargain is straightforward: allies give Washington more places to launch from, more satellites to draw on, and more pathways to keep missions running if U.S. systems are disrupted. The transportation policy already directs State and Commerce to review export controls to enable additional space transportation opportunities with allies. Washington should use that opening — alongside STARLIFT and partnerships with the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance and Japan — to pre-clear licensing procedures, certify compatible payload and launch interfaces, and conduct no-notice exercises in which allied spaceports or spacecraft to help restore lost capabilities within 48 hours.

The White House has rightly identified space as a driver of military power and rapid access to orbit as essential to national security. America will not preserve its space superiority by making every satellite or launch site invulnerable. It will do so by creating enough launch capacity, commercial alternatives, and allied pathways that attacks become less consequential and system recovery becomes faster.

Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery (U.S. Navy, ret.) is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and served 32 years in the U.S. Navy, including as deputy director for plans, policy, and strategy (J5) at U.S. European Command. Emmerson Overell researches threats to U.S. and allied security in the Arctic, space, and cyberspace at FDD's Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation.

image: Artist's illustration of Rocket Lab's spacecraft for the U.S. Space Force's Tactically Responsive Space mission, VICTUS HAZE. Credit: Rocket Lab

Waste of the Day: Avoidable Delays Blew $65.5M

Jeremy Portnoy — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Five construction projects at a Department of /Veterans Affairs medical center in Fayetteville, Arkansas nearly tripled in cost because of delays that "could have been prevented" by better communication among VA staff, according to a Sept. 9 report from the agency's inspector general.

Key facts: Staff in Fayetteville hired construction companies for the five projects, but never provided the necessary blueprints or details about what the projects entailed, the IG found.

The construction companies were left to follow "vague" instructions, leading to errors that delayed each project by one to seven years. The cost jumped from $34.5 million to $100 million — an increase of $65.5 million.

Staff members had never been formally trained on how to manage construction companies. They also kept no record of blueprint drafts and approvals, as required by federal regulation.

The five construction projects were renovations to a surgery unit, a laundry facility and an equipment sterilization center, as well as a new mental health building and water storage center.

The sterilization center faced so many delays that its cost increased more than 10 times, from $2.7 million to $28.9 million. That was mostly because the VA chose a location that did not have enough space to fit all the necessary equipment.

The mental health building was supposed to be finished in 2018, but a construction company started building it without the necessary lighting, stairwells and elevator shafts. The project is still not finished, and its design has been modified 34 times.

As of January 2026, only the laundry facility had been completed.

VA staff agreed with all four of the audit's recommendations, including developing new training protocols and record retention requirements.

The VA spent $2.7 billion on construction at its more than 170 medical centers in 2025, according to the audit. The Fayetteville facility was chosen for an audit because of an anonymous tip.

Summary: What could have been a routine set of construction projects once again ballooned in cost due to government mismanagement.

The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com.

Congress Must Save the Navy from Catastrophic Failure: Barreling toward a Hollow Navy

John G. Ferrari — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

The U.S. Constitution clearly states that Congress is responsible "To provide and maintain a Navy." Never has this clause been more important. In June 2022, I argued that the Navy was broken and Congress needed to launch a commission, which it did six months later. Unfortunately, for political reasons, the commission did not begin work for several years, burning time needed to fix the Navy. Congress has failed to fix the broken Navy, but it now risks allowing the Navy to become something worse: a hollow force that exists on paper but cannot generate the ships, aircraft, submarines, and sailors necessary to fight and win a war.

Whether or not Congress turns things around hinges on three decisions. The first, is whether the U.S. changes a carrier design already in production, which could amount to a soft kill of a hull on which the Navy has already spent billions. The second is whether the Navy will be forced to absorb an indefinite war that consumes the fleet and causes deferred maintenance costs to explode. And the third is whether we adopt a modernization plan that could crowd out the unmanned and AI-enabled systems needed for the next war.

The carrier redesign is driven by the tenuous argument that returning to steam could lower costs and improve reliability. But redesigning a $15 billion ship already being built will cost billions more and cause a yearslong delay that will exacerbate the now publicly known strained carrier fleet. The design decisions, such as the shift from a steam to an electromagnetic aircraft launch system (EMALS), the electromagnetic weapons elevators, and the placement of the island, were made decades ago. Suppliers, shipyards, and the Navy have already conformed to these design decisions. This is not simply about changing equipment; it is about changing the design of the ship, essentially wasting another decade and tens of billions of dollars. A Navy that cannot build ships fast enough cannot afford to redesign its most expensive and complex ship without taking out the rest of the Navy's budget in the process. Congress does not need to decide whether steam is better than electromagnetic launch. Congress simply has to decide whether it is willing to let the Navy turn an aircraft carrier already in production into another engineering experiment.

When it comes to naval readiness, concerns are well-documented as evidenced by the recent GAO reporting that the attack submarine fleet has lost more than 15,000 operational days over the past decade. The Iran war has added colossal strain to the Navy's already fragile force generation capacity. The lack of additional funding for maintenance means that these ships will not be fixed and instead will sit in dry dock, awaiting repair, for years to come. This leaves fewer ships available to deter China and fight in the Middle East, which means the remaining ships will have to stay at sea longer to pick up the slack. Put simply, it is a readiness death spiral with no way out. If Congress is constitutionally responsible for providing and maintaining a Navy, Congress has the right to know what it will take to restore the Navy.

As for modernization, there is no question that Navy must evolve, but it must do so without destroying the Navy that exists today. The $350 billion budget reconciliation is not simply a nice-to-have modernization fund. It is actually the bridge between today's Navy and tomorrow's Navy. Without these funds, the Navy is caught in a modernization trap. While the Navy's explicit service-specific slice sits at $39 billion, a significant portion of the $245 billion Defense-Wide fund directly feeds naval priorities such as unmanned undersea vehicles and air drones. Additionally, funds for the Defense Production Act will go to strengthen the Navy's supply chain

Congress has the next four months before NDAA passage to take three critical steps: Stop the carrier redesign, fund the war's consequences, and pass the $350 billion.

First, the authorizers need to prohibit the Navy from expending any funds to alter the aircraft carriers under construction. The prohibition needs to be specific: Do not change the catapult to steam, do not remove the electromagnetic drive from the weapons elevators, and do not move the island from its current position aft. This is not about refereeing an engineering debate. Instead, it is about the basic discipline of finishing what has already been started.

Second, the appropriators must pass an emergency supplemental to regenerate the Navy. This is not an argument over the merits of the war. Such debates will be judged ultimately by history. This is about providing funds to restore a battered fleet largely responsible for maintaining deterrence across the Pacific.

Lastly, pass the $350 billion reconciliation request. While many have given up on these funds, it is clear that without them, the entire modernization of the Navy comes to an end.

Congress is not merely a funding body. It is the single institution the Constitution charges with providing and maintaining the Navy. The nation needs Congress to do its job by stopping the carrier redesign, funding the war's consequences, and passing the $350 billion for modernization. With four months to go, the clock is ticking.

MG Ferrari is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He previously served as the Director of Program Analysis and Evaluation for the U.S. Army and was the Commanding General of White Sands Missile Range.

Which Box Will You Check: Protect Your Financial Security, or Pay Higher Taxes and Costs?

Gary Abernathy — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

This article was originally published at The Empowerment Alliance and is re-published here with permission.

The actions of government, big business and other powerful institutions often leave people feeling overwhelmed with financial obligations that occur through no fault of their own. That's why it's confounding to know that many of these same Americans will march to the polls this fall and willingly vote for even higher costs, more regulations and additional constraints on family budgets and general liberties.

Polls show that in multiple states, U.S. House and Senate races will be decided by razor-thin margins, even though most of the contests feature clear choices between keeping more of our own money or handing additional portions of our income to the government.

On one side are Republicans who are mostly conservative, in favor of fewer government regulations and supportive of energy policies that protect our most affordable, reliable and abundant resources. On the other side are Democrats - an increasing number of whom are not merely progressives but brazenly socialists - favoring more government control and advocating for taxpayer subsidies of "alternative" energy.

Despite the variety of issues highlighted in TV and digital advertising bombarding voters right now, when Americans cast their ballots this November there will be one stark choice on the ballot - higher costs for energy (costs that carry over to almost all goods and services) versus lower costs.

Voting for candidates who support going back to Biden-era subsidies and regulations will be like checking a box that says, "Raise My Taxes and Increase My Costs On Almost Everything," despite another choice that essentially says, "Let Me Keep More of My Money."

A refresher: In 2022, every Democrat in the U.S. Senate, without exception, voted for Joe Biden's misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, which greatly expanded tax credits for "renewable" energy - at a tremendous cost to taxpayers. Calculating the impact of two of those credits - the Investment Tax Credit and the Production Tax Credit - the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that "the ITC and PTC together increase projected deficits from 2026 to 2035 by about $300 billion."

Divided among the roughly 133 million U.S. households, that's more than $200 per year per household, and more than $2,000 over the total decade included in the CBO calculation. That's what you're voting for if you cast a ballot for candidates who thinks Biden-era tax credits and subsidies for "renewables" were good things and should be maintained and/or expanded.

But that's just the beginning, and it's very possibly a low estimate. Many advocates for renewables also support forcing the retirement of existing reliable power plants in favor of replacement by renewables. Those costs are even more eye opening.

PJM, a grid operator serving much of the eastern U.S., warned in 2023 that existing plants were being shut down faster than replacements were coming online. PJM found that "40 GW of existing generation are at risk of retirement by 2030. … this represents 21% of PJM's current installed capacity." The analysis warned that "the current pace of new entry would be insufficient to keep up with expected retirements and demand growth by 2030."

It's important to remember that all power generation is not equal. PJM noted that multiple megawatts of renewable resources might be needed to replace just one megawatt of retiring thermal generation. That means spending more money on generation, battery storage, transmission, upgrades, etc., etc. - all at a cost eventually borne by ratepayers.

Based on figures from a 2024 transition study by PJM, replacement generation by the target year 2035 could - based on scenario-based projections - represent anywhere from a conservative estimate of $3,000 to a possible high of $6,000 hitting every household in PJM's customer footprint.

Those are just the costs directly associated with energy. The indirect costs are even more alarming. When energy costs rise, groceries become more expensive, as do manufactured goods (steel, plastic, paper, furniture), along with travel costs, health care, refrigeration, heating and cooling, you name it. Those additional costs can climb into the thousands annually.

President Trump and the GOP Congress tried to roll back as much of the Biden-era credits and subsidies as possible, but many of them were too far down the road - and even those that were derailed can be brought back if Democrats regain control of Congress.

Again: Voting for a candidate who supports more government intervention to replace reliable and affordable energy with "renewables" is like checking a box that says, "Raise My Taxes and Increase My Costs On Almost Everything."

Also at stake this election is the Affordable, Reliable, Clean Energy Security Act (ARC-ES), introduced by U.S. Rep. Troy Balderson (R-OH), which would protect Americans from the political whims of the climate crusaders and guarantee that our most abundant and cost-effective energy resources will always remain a crucial part of the mix. If Democrats win either the House or Senate, say goodbye to any chance of codifying affordable energy into law, as Americans deserve.

When you prepare to cast your ballot in your U.S. Senate or House race, carefully examine the candidates' positions on energy and then vote to keep more of your own money. This fall, we have a chance to take control of our financial security and protect America's energy future - for ourselves, our children and our grandchildren. Let's rise to the occasion and, race by race, make the smart choice.

Gary Abernathy is a longtime newspaper editor, reporter and columnist. He was a contributing columnist for the Washington Post from 2017-2023 and a frequent guest analyst across numerous media platforms. He is a contributing opinion columnist for The Empowerment Alliance, which advocates for realistic approaches to energy consumption and environmental conservation.

Big Tech Can Cut Methane Cheaply

Paul Bledsoe — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

With U.S. midterm elections fast approaching, Americans of all political persuasions are newly questioning technology giants about the role of artificial intelligence in everything from workforce economics to data centers in their neighborhoods. But amid record heat this summer, push back increasingly focused on AI's energy and climate implications, with burgeoning power demand from data centers driving consumer electricity prices up by 27% since 2019, while also escalating emissions.

Despite all this, the world's most valuable companies are not yet cutting methane leaks from the natural gas that is key fuel source for American data centers.

Methane causes nearly one-third of global warming and is 80 times more powerful per molecule in heating the planet than carbon dioxide. Fortunately, methane dissipates rapidly in the atmosphere, so reducing methane leaks avoids at least half a degree Fahrenheit of global temperature increases by the 2040s, limiting more warming than cuts to carbon dioxide over the crucial next two decades. This makes methane abatement the fastest way to limit warming.

The gas and electric utility industries already know how to prevent leaks of methane very cheaply. It's not rocket science. Stop venting and flaring of gas. Switch out old leaky equipment with new valves, compressors, and pipelines that can prevent almost all leakage, down to .25% of total gas volume. This limits expense because it conserves salable gas. Half of methane can be abated at no net cost by industry and reductions are far cheaper than carbon dioxide cuts.

But segments of these industries know they need large dedicated markets and contracts for ultra-low methane or "differentiated gas" to begin producing it at scale. Meanwhile, they continue to allow large leaks of methane.

Big tech companies have the power to remedy this problem quickly. They can establish new markets for differentiated gas, requiring utilities and the gas industry to deliver low methane gas to all their data centers. The sheer scale and planned growth of data centers powered by natural gas means big tech could tip the entire gas industry toward low methane emissions, delivering a major climate win at very low cost.

Yet right now, despite this, tech is making many dubious "net zero" emissions promises, and not one of the biggest companies—including Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, xAI, OpenAI—has committed to using ultra-low methane gas. And while nearly half of existing data centers rely on natural gas for power, even more massive gas-fired expansions are planned for just the next few years.

In fact, under construction or planned data centers powered by gas have doubled in just the last six months, with proposed demand skyrocketing from only 7 gigawatts in 2024 to 189 gigawatts this year (a gigawatt powers about a million homes.) Even if only half of planned projects get built, they will constitute by far the largest increase in gas demand and methane emissions in the U.S. economy in coming years.

Many tech companies are building new gas power plants off the electric grid saying this will less directly impact consumer electricity prices, but still doing little to address methane. In Texas, Amazon is building a huge "behind the grid" gas power plant for massive data center, which would become the largest single U.S. source of climate pollution.

Tech also promises without clear evidence that AI itself will help limit long-term emissions by more efficiently using energy and discovering new, cleaner technologies. But in the meantime, AI's current and near-future emissions keep rising, and leading climate scientists find that temperature increases must be limited over the next two decades to have a chance of avoiding many severe climate impacts.

Some companies like Alphabet and Google have joined JPMorgan and others in creating a coalition aimed at reducing super climate pollutants, which include HFC's and black carbon soot in addition to methane. Yet thus far the group not taken any action to ensure only ultra-low methane gas powers it's expansion, and it's overall funding is a small percentage of what's needed.

Methane-emitting gas producers, however, are being increasingly exposed. New satellite methane detection technologies are revealing specific large methane emissions, often in the Permian gas basin of Texas.

Technology companies can also use more renewable energy and electricity storage, which are becoming increasingly cheap, as well as other forms of low or zero emitting electricity generation. But inevitably gas will power some of AI, especially over the next decade as it grows fastest, so that gas must be as low-emitting as possible.

Indeed, a number of gas-fired power plants are now being built with carbon capture technologies to reduce their emissions even further, with Exxon Mobil just gaining approval last week from Texas state regulators to build the world's largest, 900 mile network of pipelines to inject CO2 underground.

Globally, the movement toward ultra-low methane gas is growing. New European Union regulations will increasingly require that U.S. liquefied natural gas exporters, who supply the EU with most of its gas, to meet very low methane leakage rates. Europe is by far the largest export market for U.S. gas that has directly displaced the EU's previous addiction to high methane gas from Russia, which has funded Vladimir Putin's malign regime for years.

President Trump in his second term has delayed rules to limit methane emissions that many oil and gas companies wanted to keep since major companies realize methane abatement is crucial to the future of gas. But if consumers push tech to act directly, markets can bypass politics and cut emissions now.

Big tech has no excuse. Pledging to use only low-methane gas is the fastest way to reduce warming. Even a quick AI search will tell you that.

Paul Bledsoe is president of Bledsoe & Associates, an economic and energy consultancy, and served on the White House Climate Change Task Force under President Clinton.

The Politics of Religion

Carl M. Cannon — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Good afternoon. We're some 45 days away from the 2026 midterms. Most media observers - recalling with well-earned humility how they felt after the "red wave" of 2022 turned into a mild reddish ripple - are refraining from giving apocalyptic predictions about November. That said, it doesn't look good for Republicans, as the two other pieces in today's newsletter by Jonathan Draeger and Carolina Lumetta detail.

Yesterday was Constitution Day; it was also Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley's birthday. It's tempting to wonder what the Founders would think of a 93-year-old Senate committee chairman. They might be sympathetic, as the oldest Founding Father was the beloved Benjamin Franklin.

"Dr. Franklin," as he was known out of respect, was 70 years old when he headed the Philadelphia committee that produced the Declaration of Independence. He was 76 when he helped negotiate the treaty in Paris that ended the Revolutionary War. And he was 81 when he served as a delegate in the Constitutional Convention in 1790.

As one might expect, Franklin had many pithy things to say about the aging process. My favorite is a 1757 entry in "Poor Richard's Almanack," when he wrote the following: "Work as if you were to live 100 years; pray as if you were to die tomorrow."

The Franklin quotation that seems most relevant to me on this day, however, concerns Islam. (Are you surprised? What did Dr. Franklin ever not discuss?) Ben Franklin considered religious freedom an indispensable feature of the American Revolution, and in his autobiography he wrote with pride about a large nondenominational meeting house built in Philadelphia 25 years before the Revolution. "If the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Mohammedanism to us," Franklin wrote, "he would find a pulpit at his service."

With mosques going up at a rapid rate all over the United States and Canada - and in Europe as well - many westerners are decidedly less sanguine about the proliferation of imams in their midst. In Michigan, a U.S. Senate race - and perhaps control of the U.S. Senate itself - may hinge on such attitudes.

An interesting Washington Post poll this week finds Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed slightly ahead of his Republican opponent Mike Rogers, but leading by a significantly lower percentage than the Democratic gubernatorial candidate. It must be said that El-Sayed's religion is hardly the only difference between himself and a "normie" Democrat. He's never held political office, for one thing. Also, he campaigns with America-hating provocateur Hasan Piker, bashes Israel regularly, and is significantly more to the left of the average Michigan voter on a host of other issues.

"It is tempting to attribute El-Sayed's lackluster polling exclusively to Islamophobia," George Mason University professor Justin Gest, told The Post, "but his socialist endorsements and policy positions are certainly not helping him either."

Yesterday's date is also a reminder that we've seen some of these tensions previously in this country and that they often seem less threatening in history's rear-view mirror.

It was on Sept. 17, in the year 1960, that John F. Kennedy ventured into Eastern Carolina while campaigning for president. The Democrats' old guard cautioned the youthful Massachusetts senator's campaign aides that it might be hostile territory for a Roman Catholic candidate. Terry Sanford, a 1960 North Carolina gubernatorial candidate the same age as Kennedy (43), was warned in a caustic letter by the senior clergyman at Greenville's oldest Methodist Church that a Catholic president would "surely cut America's head off."

Yet Terry Sanford and Jack Kennedy represented a new generation of postwar Democrats who didn't frighten easily. Sanford had been a U.S. Army paratrooper who fought at the Battle of the Bulge, while JFK still suffered the physical effects of his heroics in the Pacific after his PT boat was sunk.

In any event, Kennedy was met by large and enthusiastic crowds in North Carolina where it became evident that his decision to address the religion issue head-on was paying dividends. Although Kennedy's faith was a source of great pride to Catholic voters - particularly Democrats and most particularly Irish-Americans - a 1959 Gallup Poll showed 25% of U.S. voters were disinclined to support a Catholic for president.

Antipathy was strongest in the Bible Belt, which presented a challenge because in those days a successful Electoral College strategy for a Democratic presidential candidate necessitated running well in the Deep South. It was why Kennedy was in North Carolina 66 years ago this week. It was why he'd chosen Texas Sen. Lyndon Johnson as his running mate. And it was the reason he had ventured five days earlier - on his seventh wedding anniversary, no less - into the inner sanctum of anti-Catholicism when he spoke to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association.

"I am not the Catholic candidate for president," Kennedy told the Protestant pastors in that iconic appearance. "I am the Democratic Party's candidate for president who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me."

Earlier that same day, Sen. Kennedy had visited the Alamo. In preparation, he'd attempted to find out how many Catholics had fought there. The best his aides could do was furnish the candidate a list of Irish names among the dead. The result of this uncertainty produced one of the most evocative sentences of the campaign.

"Side by side with Bowie and Crockett died McCafferty and Bailey and Carey," Kennedy said. "But no one knows whether they were Catholics or not, for there was no religious test at the Alamo."

Burned on My 16th Birthday

Hal Craig — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

The night I turned 16, my birthday cake had the biggest candle of all time: my own house. Yes, the Palisades fire was approaching my house, which then burned down.

I grew up in Pacific Palisades in northeast Los Angeles - a community whose name is derived from a synonym for "fortress." So the idea that my house could burn down never crossed my mind. And the notion that our entire community could disappear overnight was absurd.

That's not to say I wasn't environmentally conscious. I spent my youth hiking through brush and bramble in the unique Mediterranean climate of the Santa Monica Mountains, camping in Yosemite, Grand Canyon, and Zion. And I volunteered with Resilient Palisades, a nonprofit that lived the "think global, act local" maxim that I fervently believed. I feel like I always understood that our natural environment was irreplaceable. It belonged to all of us, and each and every one of us was responsible for it.

Ever since I was old enough to understand politics, I knew I was a democratic socialist. As a high-spirited teenage optimist, I believed in a system that protects its citizens economically and socially, and trusted in our institutions at every level; they would fulfill the great American promise of good governance. But when I turned 16, I learned I was dead wrong.

Our family receives the New York Times every day, and my dad makes sure to put it on the kitchen counter. So I couldn't help but be aware of the routine showboating by supposed federal representatives of the people, or the fact that no one was focused on the issues I cared about. But like most Americans, I was blissfully unaware that this incompetence trickled down to the state and municipal level as well.

My family's house burned down the morning of Jan. 8, 2025, a full day after the initial blaze came roaring down the hill. It was built with materials designed to resist hours of direct exposure to flame and had state-of-the-art sprinkler systems.

But no family can maintain a municipal water system, coordinate a citywide emergency response, or ensure that firefighters are positioned where they're most needed. The destruction of my home and Pacific Palisades was not the result of one arsonist or high winds. It was the result of cascading levels of governmental failure. For me, it was the end of my blind faith in government.

In retrospect, government failure in the Palisades Fire was a slow-motion car crash. Months before the Jan. 1, 2025, Lachman Fire, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power drained the Santa Ynez Reservoir without a backup plan to ensure adequate water pressure for Palisades hydrants. And then, while the Lachman Fire hadn't been fully extinguished, fire crews were told to stand down by a still-unnamed LAFD battalion chief.

The incompetence kept building. When the wind picked up on Jan. 7, the hills caught fire again. Fire Station 23 was five minutes away, and if they'd prepared a response to some of the most fire-prone weather conditions L.A. had ever seen, that would've been the end of the story. Yet, they were away at the beach doing a "training exercise," delaying the response by almost half an hour.

As the blaze grew, the situation only worsened. With Mayor Karen Bass on a junket to Ghana, acting mayor Marqueece Harris-Dawson was unaware he could declare a class-one emergency, which would have meant more engines and a police presence to guide evacuees to safety. It was only once my town had been leveled that the governor's office declared a state of emergency to unlock aid and funding.

After a chaotic evacuation, with hundreds of crews in position - even with no water pressure on Jan. 7 - they could have saved hundreds of homes using water from swimming pools. Instead, another LAFD official (perhaps the same one who told crews to leave the Lachman Fire site) ordered all ladder and hose companies to stand down. And they were still standing down on the morning of Jan. 8 when water pressure was restored, and there was still time to save my home and neighborhood. Yet, they let it all burn.

We don't have answers on why any of these decisions were made. Fire Chief Kristin Crowley refused to provide an after-action report on the fire response. The city government is refusing to answer public records requests regarding internal communications on Jan. 7 and 8. Instead, our political leaders have attempted to shift attention and blame to one man: an Uber driver and alleged arsonist who may have started the Lachman Fire. They're apparently hoping that furor over their many failures will die down. I'm determined to make sure it won't.

That's why I created BURNED, a podcast dedicated to investigating the government failure that led to the destruction of my community. It's more than a story about a fire. It's a conversation with Los Angeles about what the government owes its people, what happens when it fails to meet that obligation, and what we must demand from it going forward.

With my eyes now wide open, I can share a few immediate conclusions. Long-term one-party political dominance in Los Angeles has produced institutional complacency, bureaucratic dysfunction, and a culture of no accountability. Sadly, thanks to increasing partisanship and political division, one-party rule is becoming the norm in more cities and states. In 2021, Texas, a state as dominated by Republicans as California is by Democrats, was hit by a disastrous winter storm they were woefully unprepared for. Despite serious winter-weather failures in 2011 and 2014, Texas Republicans opted to deregulate utilities and power grids. These failures of one-party rule signify the loss of the principal benefits of representative democracy, reasoned debate, compromise, and accountability.

Another conclusion - and a counterintuitive one from a 17-year-old who's lost his faith in government - is that we need more government, not less. With climate change and AI increasing the risk of disasters that will affect millions, we're going to need institutions with the resources, information, representation, and oversight necessary to prepare and respond.

Democratic Socialism represents a logical response to these needs. In blue states and cities, DSA candidates are challenging the state Democratic machine, which will increase accountability for the winners. And red states and cities will see the limits of small government in an age of unprecedented risk.

I loved my home and my town. The loss of both has fueled my commitment to a progressive movement that aims to relegate one-party rule and small government to the dustbin of history. Because institutional failure is not inevitable. Demanding better from our leaders is not just our civic duty. It itself is an act of love for a city plagued by mismanagement.

When AI Goes Public, Who Will Own the Risk?

Richard Porter — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's essay calling for "pacing" the development of frontier artificial intelligence models - along with domestic and international regulation enforcing "safety standards" - has the world abuzz as everyone debates: What to make of it?

And no group is buzzing more than the politicians, with a momentous midterm election only weeks away.

Leading Democrats seized the moment to yet again hype the "world is ending" risk. Seeing the potential for government to seize effective control of this new essential means of production, former President Barack Obama called for new laws to regulate AI (and was dutifully echoed by Speaker-Wanna-Be Hakeem Jeffries).

President Trump retorted that the "only control or 'guardrails' that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) President" and that the U.S. already has tremendous criminal and regulatory power over these companies.

Let's see if we can add anything to this high-minded debate.

In June, Anthropic and OpenAI both filed confidential draft offering documents with the SEC to eventually make their initial public offerings (IPO). While these documents have not been made public, I prepared many similar documents in my legal career and would note that discussions about required IPO disclosures often have the effect of bringing to the fore issues that startup CEOs haven't made a priority, but should.

Public companies are required to disclose publicly all information material to an investor's decision whether to buy the stock. As private companies, Anthropic and OpenAI currently make confidential disclosures to their investors only - and private disclosure is often more targeted and less rigorous.

Companies going public must file with the SEC offering documents that include sections such as "Risk Factors," usually prepared with lots of lawyers and bankers weighing in. Imagine with me for a moment what the lawyers and bankers working on the Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs may have considered - and possibly even written in memos - as possible Risk Factors in their SEC filing:

We have created agentic artificial intelligence models, but we do not understand how these agents will work in any given situation. This creates unique risks that we are unable to qualify or quantify.

While we have built "guardrails" in the algorithms of our products, the agents have already demonstrated an ability to lie, cheat, and avoid guardrails, which we call a "jailbreak."

This means the agents may take actions that might cause damage to others or constitute cybercrimes for which our officers and directors, employees, or others might be held responsible.

Models that escape the guardrails in our system could cause damage to our company or to third parties that we are unable to quantify, but could be in excess of trillions of dollars, and may exceed the value of our company.

While we operate with a standard of care that we believe exceeds industry standards, there's no assurance that plaintiffs in product liability cases involving a major "jailbreak" by our agents will need to prove negligence.

Courts may impose strict or absolute liability for damages arising from the agentic AI that we create, sell, and distribute, so our high standard of care may not reduce the risk to our company. For example, with respect to damage caused by our products in the EU, we have strict or absolute liability.

We are unable to acquire sufficient third-party insurance against these risks because agentic AI is a new product and so there is no claims history for insurance companies to consider when underwriting the risk.

There is no assurance that the insurance companies that have provided us with policies won't be damaged in a serious "jailbreak" or be sufficiently solvent to cover insured damages arising from a major "jailbreak".

While we have established reserves for self-insurance in our financial statements, we don't have sufficient information to make an informed judgment about how much we should reserve against this risk. Therefore, your investment in our company may be worthless if a major "jailbreak" by agents created by our AI system occurs.

Oh, and that doesn't include the worst-case scenario: There's also the remote possibility that our AI systems might decide to target the human race for extinction.

What would you do if you were Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, or even Elon Musk, after sitting down with the lawyers and bankers to discuss their draft disclosure documents for the public offering of shares that will unlock hundreds of billions in new wealth for you?

The rational move would be to seek a way to limit personal risk and shift the risk for this (amazing!) new technology to someone else. For example, vaccine manufacturers and banks have worked with the government to socialize the risk from their important businesses - and indeed Amodei points to the bank regulation analogy, suggesting AI firms embed third-party evaluators to assess the safety measures they adopt.

So, there's precedent for shifting risk - but does it make sense in this case too? Is it in our best interest as a nation to find a way to limit risk for Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, or even Elon Musk?

There are obvious practical shortcomings about Amodei's proposal.

Will we eliminate catastrophic risks if AI companies are regulated like banks by embedding third-party evaluators into the company? Will third parties without entrepreneurial risks and rewards ever know better than the company they are monitoring? Have bank examiners ever actually prevented a bank from failing? Consider that at least 17 banks, including First Republic and Silicon Valley Bank, have failed since 2019.

Will an international agreement make us safer too? Why would dictatorships with malignant intentions comply with this international agreement, even while flouting other existing pacts?

The essential fact that should drive the government's approach to regulating AI is this:

If the creators of agentic AI models don't understand how their models work, as a practical matter, would anyone in the government or an independent agency ever know more about how to make their models work more safely?

If adopted, Amodei's proposed three-prong approach to AI "regulation" of AI companies would not reduce the catastrophic risk arising from agentic AI under current circumstances. Instead, he is seeking to limit his own and Anthropic's risks arising from our current understanding of agentic AI - and socialize it instead.

If AI creators are afraid of their own product, what's the best course of action? Change the law to spread the risk because it's such a cool product? Or keep the risk on them, as it is under current law, so they slow down and address the issues that cause their fears?

The government's regulatory goal should be to make sure the people who know the most about, and have the most to gain from, agentic AI should bear the risk if their product is flawed. High-risk sports enthusiasts have a saying: If you don't know, don't go. The government doesn't know what Amodei knows, so don't go there - keep the risk on him instead.

The Mother of the SAVE Act

Carolina Lumetta — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

A hotel room in Arizona in January makes for an unusual war room, but that's exactly where a small group of conservative-minded election attorneys gathered in 2024 to discuss upcoming elections and concerns about fraud. As in any group project, multiple personalities come out. And as in any group project hoping to get a good grade, they need someone who will pull various ideas into one concrete assignment. In this particular hotel room, that person was Cleta Mitchell. The result was the most controversial bill to hit the 119^th Congress - one that would drastically change voter registrations and the voting process.

Cleta Mitchell, who turned 76 this week, is a prominent conservative election law and campaign finance lawyer, a former Democratic lawmaker from Oklahoma, a senior legal fellow at the Conservative Partnership Institute, and the little-known originator of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act.

Congress first passed a law that made noncitizen voting a felony in 1996, though it only applies to federal elections. The federal voter registration form asks applicants to mark a box to indicate whether they are citizens, under penalty of perjury. Some states do require proof of citizenship for registering to vote, but courts have generally understood federal law to preempt them.

That's the case in Arizona, where Mitchell met with fellow conservatives when she first had the inspiration for a national law.

At issue was a 2004 Arizona statute requiring voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship to vote. But the Supreme Court ruled in 2013 that the requirement applied to state and local contests, not federal elections.

"It's just truly cockamamie," Mitchell told RealClearPolitics in an interview. "It's totally backwards, and that's when I said we need to get Congress to amend the National Voter Registration Act, and so that's where it started."

The SAVE Act has passed the House four times but has stalled in the Senate, where Republican leaders say they do not have the votes to overcome a Democratic filibuster - or, as President Trump has urged, get rid of the filibuster. With fewer than 50 days until the midterm elections, Mitchell is now brainstorming alternative ways to make proof of citizenship the national standard. She might be one of the few people determined to fan the flame to keep the issue alive in the next Congress.

Back in 2000, Mitchell watched aghast as the presidential election descended into chaotic legal challenges and open confusion about who won. A one-time Democratic state legislator, the election snafus proved the final push to the conservative side. At the time, she wrote a call to action in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

"For Democrats, here's the golden rule: He who writes the rules wins the gold," Mitchell recounted at a recent event in Dallas. "That's why the Democrats and their left-wing allies have focused on election laws and campaign finance laws and ethics laws. They write all the process rules, the rules of engagement for politics, and we have to stop letting them do that."

In February of 2024, Mitchell went from her Arizona meeting to a boardroom at the Conservative Partnership Institute, a think tank founded by former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and headquartered in Washington. She invited staffers of the two closest constitutional lawyers in Congress: Sen. Mike Lee of Utah and Rep. Chip Roy of Texas.

"I knew that I was going to have a pretty heavy lift to explain to them because they're both very committed federalists," Mitchell recalled. "I remember one night in particular, we had this two-hour call with Mike Lee and Chip Roy and some staff, and they just peppered me with questions."

Mitchell's argument is that the Supreme Court made documentary proof of citizenship a federal issue when it ruled in 2013 that Arizona could not apply its own election laws to federal ballots. That leaves only Congress or the Election Assistance Commission to make national standards, but the EAC requires three votes out of the four commissioners, evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats. By the end of the call, she had convinced Roy and Lee.

"What we were all trying to do is figure out what do we genuinely need to do, assessing objectively what's wrong with our elections, and at the core of it from our vantage point was trying to keep it as simple as possible," Roy told RCP. Although they discussed photo identification at the time, they opted to keep the idea for a bill as simple as possible. "I'm not comparing to the Gettysburg Address, but the Gettysburg Address's greatness is simplicity. And that was really the driving force here. We were trying to keep it very simply focused on the citizenship verification question."

Next, Mitchell went to work on the next rung on the ladder: House Speaker Mike Johnson. Over several months, Mitchell persistently raised the issue whenever she found herself near the speaker or on a group call with him.

"Every time I could, I would raise my hand and say, 'Mr. Speaker, I know you're working really hard raising all this money to elect Republicans, but what are you going to do about all the illegals in the country who are voting?' And after two or three months of hammering in a polite way, because I do really think the world of him, he said, 'You know, Cleta, I've been thinking about this. I think you're right, and I'm going to talk to the president about it.'"

"While the SAVE Act is good, commonsense policy, it took a concerted effort from across the political spectrum to prepare this legislation for floor consideration and win the hearts and minds of the American people in the process. Cleta Mitchell worked day and night to help craft and ultimately build support for this legislation," the Speaker's office told RCP. "Her unrelenting advocacy is a big reason why supermajorities of American voters now support proof of citizenship when registering to vote, and we are grateful for her efforts."

At the time, Trump was campaigning for reelection, and Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress. But Mitchell pointed out that the minority can raise awareness and make some noise, especially in an election year. Lee and Roy were already practiced at this strategy.

"I'm someone who believes very much in the force of a tireless minority," Roy said, quoting a phrase commonly misattributed to Founding Father Sam Adams. "Cleta is one of those forces."

Mitchell went to work with congressional staffers in Lee's and Roy's offices to draft the bill. Those who worked on the effort describe her as the driving force.

"She has the aura of being the one that people look to for direction and guidance on how to proceed," said Wade Miller, executive director of the Center for Renewing America. Miller and his organization have supported the SAVE America Act and worked with Mitchell on promoting it publicly. "She's always good at weeding through the nonsense and highlighting what is legally accurate and how to best attack a position from a legal perspective."

Now congressional Republicans stare down a future in which they could soon be in the minority again, which downgrades the bill's chances of passage even lower than they currently are.

Mitchell lamented the days when congressional Democrats sponsored election integrity bills. In 2019, Sen. Ron Wyden championed a bill to mandate federal election audits and hand-marked paper ballots to boost cybersecurity standards. The same year, Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma co-sponsored a bipartisan bill to enhance election audits to prevent foreign interference with voting machines.

These days, however, Democratic Party officeholders almost universally oppose the SAVE Act on the grounds that its voter identification requirements would be overly burdensome for many voters, especially low-income citizens who Democrats say do not always have easy access to identification documents. A 2006 policy brief from the Brennan Center for Justice argued that these laws would disenfranchise many voters, including but not limited to victims of natural disasters whose documents have been destroyed.

Yet the idea of proving identity and citizenship is broadly popular among the American public. A July Fox News poll found that 83% of adults believe photo identification should be required to register to vote. Although noncitizen voting is already a federal crime, Americans are less on board with requiring proof of citizenship. A Politico poll from May found that 52% of respondents support requiring documentary proof. Around 17% had no opinion, but 18% were opposed, and 13% were unsure about the idea.

In July, New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill announced that the state found 6,600 noncitizens erroneously listed on the voting rolls. Of those, around 340 had voted in 2023 and 2024 elections, according to the press release. The state struck 5,100 names from the voter rolls and is reviewing another 1,650. Sherrill credited the error to a system glitch during the previous governor's administration, and she refused requests from the Justice Department to hand over the state's voter registration data. The situation has offered something of a smoking gun for Mitchell's efforts.

"If it's broken just a little bit, it's still broken," Mitchell said. "You either have rules and procedures that make sure that noncitizens are not getting registered to vote, or you don't. And at the present time, we don't."

Democrats have also cast a skeptical eye at Mitchell's involvement, even behind the scenes. In 2021, she was on the now-infamous phone call between President Trump and Georgia Gov. Brian Raffensperger in which Trump demanded that the governor "find" the 11,780 votes required for him to win the state. Mitchell resigned as senior partner from the law firm Foley & Lardner LLP after the call recording surfaced. Afterward, she founded the Election Integrity Network to train election workers and to promote ways to secure elections. Mitchell argues that there is plentiful opportunity for fraud, though audits have not found significant numbers of noncitizen voting. At a briefing on Tuesday, Attorney General Todd Blanche noted that in the past 10 days, the Justice Department has charged 11 individuals for illegally voting.

Once Trump won reelection in 2024, Mitchell knew she'd have less than two years to kick the effort into high gear. She called Speaker Johnson and told him they needed to adjust the House bill, but he told her they'd go ahead and simply pass the same version they voted on in 2024. Knowing Senate approval would be difficult, Mitchell worked with Mike Lee again to insert the SAVE Act into a shell bill to get to a floor vote and bypass committee hearings on it.

And that is where it has remained for more than a year. Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota said after public pressure that he would file cloture on it to put members on record about the issue. Mitchell says he's dodging.

"We must have had 60 or 70 signatures on a letter that we delivered to him, saying, 'Oh no, you don't. We're on to this,'" Mitchell said. "We know that a cloture vote, an immediate cloture vote, is planned failure, and that's not acceptable. And so then we started. We really went to town on X, frankly, just hammering him."

Mitchell concedes that she was on a mission to troll every post on Thune's social media accounts to raise the pressure on the SAVE Act. Other conservative figures like Pennsylvania-based activist Scott Presler did the same. CPI founder Mark Meadows began posting daily updates on which Republican senators had not yet co-sponsored the legislation until nearly everyone was on board. The comments section on any Thune post remains littered with angry demands to pass the SAVE Act.

But the public pressure campaign still hasn't moved the needle. Thune maintains that he'd love to pass the bill, but not at the cost of ending the filibuster, a Senate tradition that requires 60 votes to pass cloture. Mitchell said that the social media wars were the first grassroots victory using X. But unlike GOP leaders in the House, Mitchell says Thune never met with her to figure out how to pass the SAVE Act. (Thune's office did not reply to a request for comment).

"Essentially what we have is a situation where [former Senate Majority leader] Robert Byrd is still controlling the Senate from the grave," Mitchell says. "He wrote rules and procedures, and they're still following those. Well, why don't they change those? They don't have to get rid of the filibuster, but they need to make the filibuster work. But the Republican leaders… treat it like it's the Ten Commandments, graven in stone."

Then the White House got involved. The president proclaimed he would not sign any legislation until the SAVE Act passed, though he did soon move on to other bills. Trump also discussed the bill at several opportunities with reporters, claiming it included measures it didn't, such as banning mail-in ballots. Then he proposed adding new amendments to include measures to ban biological males playing in girls' sports and to ban transgender procedures on minors. Both Mitchell and Lee ran interference.

"I talked to him. Mike Lee talked to him. I mean, a number of people talked to him, but he kept saying, 'Oh, it'll make the bill stronger if you put these other things in because they're 90% issues,'" Mitchell recalled. "We would say yes, they are 90% issues, but they need to stand on their own. We need to keep this focused on the elections. I didn't disagree with any of the things he wanted. It's just the trying to put them all in one bill, as we would say in the Oklahoma legislature, is more chain than we could swim with."

But Mitchell blames the ongoing stalemate on Thune, not the president.

"The process brought it down, not Trump," Mitchell said. "That's the part that leadership is supposed to manage, and I don't think they know how to do that. I don't disagree about doing our best to protect the filibuster, but you have to make it work. You follow these rules, and then at the end of the proceeding, it can proceed to a vote on a simple majority. That's what they need to do."

Mitchell concedes it is likely too close for election officials to adequately enforce documentary proof-of-citizenship changes and voter ID laws, even if, by some long shot, the Senate passes the SAVE Act in its final few months in session. The Senate is out for nearly all of October, which is standard for an election year. And if Democrats win a majority in either chamber in November, the SAVE Act is all but guaranteed to never come up for a vote in the next Congress. But "there's more than one way to skin a cat," she says.

The Supreme Court left two roads open to amend nationwide voter laws: Congress or the Election Assistance Commission. The EAC was established in 2002 as part of the Help America Vote Act, a bill that sought to fix the election count issues of the 2000 presidential election. The board is composed of four commissioners: two Republicans and two Democrats. The commission distributes federal election funding, tests voting systems, and sets voluntary voting standards and determines best practices. And most importantly, it publishes the federal voter registration form. But the commission does not have the authority to enforce its guidelines.

Earlier this year, Trump fired the two Democratic commissioners and asked the other two to resign. He used recent precedent from the Supreme Court that more clearly defined a president's ability to fire members of independent agencies. The commission can still operate without leaders, but it cannot set any new guidelines. The president has not yet indicated who he will nominate to fill the board, which requires Senate approval. Federal law requires that no more than two members can come from the same party. There is also a rule that the president cannot compel members of the board to enact particular guidelines that he wants. The only lasting way to reform voting systems is through legislation.

"I'm always tired of waiting on Congress," Mitchell said. But she admitted that it's crunch time ahead of a bleak midterms outlook for the GOP. "It would help in November if the Senate were to come up with a way to do even some components of the Save America Act, even if they didn't apply to the midterms, just to demonstrate we actually know that there's a problem with our elections, and we're willing to take steps to do something about it."

Mitchell could also see a third avenue in the upcoming year. The Supreme Court agreed to take up RNC v. Mi Familia Vota in its term beginning in October. This means the justices will revisit Arizona's documentary proof-of-citizenship law and whether the National Voter Registration Act or a separate consent decree blocks the state from applying it or from canceling non-citizen voter registrations within 90 days of a federal election. More than two years since Mitchell first launched a serious effort to write legislation, she's showing no signs of letting up.

"She's been pushing five years, and now it's the top issue being debated in Congress, and it seems to be at the top of the president's agenda," Wade Miller noted. "She's like a dog with a bone. If it's right and good and important, she is going to relentlessly pursue that."

Will Democrats Reject 'Free Money' for Schools?

Vince Bielski — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

A potentially sweeping reform to K-12 education beginning in January is forcing Democratic governors to weigh the political risks of joining or rejecting the new federal school choice program designed by conservatives.

The little-known program, called the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit, creates a new and possibly large funding stream for education based on private donations to nonprofit scholarship granting organizations. The uncapped initiative is expected to generate billions of dollars in scholarships that could affect the educational paths and performance of millions of students in both public and private schools.

"It's probably the most important federal educational reform in decades because once it's fully implemented, 90% of students will be eligible for educational scholarships," said Jim Blew, a program architect and advisor to the national coalition advocating for it.

The appeal to Democratic governors, who have until Jan. 1 to opt into the program for 2027, is clear: The new funding could pay for tutoring and other educational services to help reverse the steady decline in the academic performance particularly of disadvantaged public school students. The political risks are also clear: Governors would face blowback from their own base - teachers unions and civil rights and progressive groups. They oppose the initiative because it will pull students from public schools by funding their tuition to attend private and religious institutions.

The politics are especially tricky for Democratic governors, including Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker, and Josh Shapiro, who are eyeing 2028 presidential runs. Their party's leftward shift in recent years has intensified the pressure on Democrats to reject any initiative from the Trump administration, even if it means passing up funding for public education.

Novel Design

The program, approved by Congress in 2025, is novel in design. While charitable contributions typically allow donors a modest reduction in their taxable income, the new scholarship program offers a far more generous and unusual dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit up to $1,700. That means a contribution costs donors nothing, allowing them to essentially redirect their tax dollars from the U.S. Treasury to a scholarship granting organization that suits their values or politics.

The scholarship organizations that receive the donations are another key piece of the design: Schools, districts, or organizations partnering with them can set them up to provide scholarships to their own students. For private school students, much of the money will likely go to tuition; for public school students, it will pay for educational services, such as tutoring, offered by the school or other providers.

The architects decided to empower nonprofits because they aren't bound by many legal constraints that apply when the government hands out scholarships. For instance, they can restrict funding only to students who attend a religious school of a particular faith, or a public school, or suffer from a disability, or don't identify as LGBTQ. Nor are there strict income restrictions. Families can earn up to 300% of their area's median income, or more than $500,000 a year in parts of New York, and still qualify for a scholarship.

The program is a victory for Evangelical Christian, Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim groups that have lobbied for federal support to private schools for decades. With 31 mostly Republican states already on board, the legislation promises to significantly add to the relatively small number of K-12 students - just 1.6 million out of a total of 54 million nationwide - who benefit from state-based school choice programs. Catholic schools, which have seen a precipitous decline in students, stand to be among the biggest winners.

The effect on public education is much less clear, with predictions ranging from dire to favorable. The program is expected to add to the ongoing decline in enrollment as students use scholarships to shift to private institutions, adding to pressure on districts to cut costs by shuttering schools over the protests of families. Castigating the program as an assault on public education, groups including the School Superintendents Association, state teachers unions, Legal Defense Fund, National Urban League, and UnidosUS are pressuring Democratic governors to spurn the deal. Critics also say the government shouldn't back private schools that can lawfully discriminate against LGBTQ students in admissions and limit accommodations for disabled kids.

"At a moment when public education is under coordinated attack" from the Trump administration, "accommodation is unacceptable," said a letter to Democratic governors signed by 33 state teachers union presidents. "Democratic leaders should be unequivocal in defending public schools as a public good and rejecting efforts to privatize them."

Windfall for Public Schools?

The letter dismisses the possibility that the federal program could become a windfall for public schools, as advocates predict. Some 85% of all students attend public schools, and their families and boosters make up the vast majority of the 122 million taxpayers eligible for a tax credit.

For this scenario to unfold, however, school districts will have to find the resources and expertise to set up and staff scholarship organizations to solicit donations and vet applicants. It's a huge challenge that private schools, which already have this infrastructure in place, don't face.

Once the scholarship organizations open for business next year, the big question is how many taxpayers will make donations. It will take time for families to learn about the tax credit and realize that donations won't cost them a penny. If only 2% to 5% of eligible taxpayers participate in the first years of the program, this would raise $3.8 billion to $9.4 billion for scholarships annually, according to a report by the American Federation for Children, a conservative advocacy group. If that number can climb to 20%, it would bring in an estimated $38 billion a year, more than the two largest federal programs for low-income and special-needs students combined. Theoretically, since the program is uncapped, many more billions could be raised - adding to the $2 trillion federal deficit.

The group Democrats for Education Reform, which is part of the national advocacy coalition, calls the federal program a rare opportunity to boost public school funding at no cost to states. "For the first time in a long time the federal government is supporting significant new money for education," said Jorge Elorza, CEO of Democrats for Education Reform and a former mayor of Providence, RI. "Why would you not keep these resources in state to support your students as opposed to them going into the black hole, which is the federal treasury?"

Governors who refuse to opt in could also face political heat due to the program's "genius" design, allowing residents to send donations across state lines, says Professor Patrick Wolf, a school choice scholar at the University of Arkansas. If donations from residents in non-participating blue states flow into red states to support education, that would be "political hemlock for Democrat governors," Wolf said.

Leaders of Catholic dioceses nationwide are already talking about benefiting from such cross-border donations, says Robert Gilligan, executive director of the Catholic Conference of Illinois. Gilligan says he'll send his own donations to a scholarship organization out of state if Illinois stays on the sidelines.

The Politics of Opting In

So far, only one Democratic governor has officially opted in, with the rest of the pack remaining tight-lipped on the politically fraught question. They appear to be playing for more time: waiting for the release of the final rules of the program at the end of September, even though nothing significant is expected to change, and for their own campaigns to take shape.

In late 2025, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis became the first Democratic state leader to join the program, calling it "free money" for public education. A product of private schooling and a school choice supporter, Polis, who says Judaism has shaped his policies, is term-limited out of office in January.

Kathy Hochul of New York is the only other Democratic governor who announced a willingness to participate, as long as she doesn't find the final rules objectionable. A self-described "social justice Catholic," Hochul attended Catholic grade school and Catholic University law school. Her reelection in November will depend partly on winning the state's large bloc of Jewish and Catholic voters.

"Hochul's experience in Catholic schools likely showed her the value of a high-quality Catholic education and the benefits of giving other families the opportunity to afford it through the scholarships," said Jim Cultrara, the New York conference's education director.

New York may provide political cover for its liberal neighbor, Massachusetts, to sign up. A coalition of advocacy groups has mobilized to encourage Gov. Maura Healey to say yes. Advocates think it's a good bet. The popular governor is expected to glide to reelection this year even if she embraces the federal program in defiance of state and local teachers unions and social justice groups that Healey has battled before over her support to keep a testing requirement for high school graduation. Yet the governor, a strong backer of public education, isn't a fan of school choice.

"Based on everything I know about the program and all the work the coalition is doing, I think the governor will make the right choice for kids and opt into the program," said Katie Everett, head of the Massachusetts Educational Opportunities Coalition.

The politics in Pennsylvania, where Gov. Shapiro is seen as entertaining presidential ambitions, are more complicated. Educated in Jewish academies, Shapiro pushed a Republican plan to give scholarships for private education to students in poorly performing public schools before Democrats forced him to axe it. Working across the aisle, he also championed big increases in funding for public education.

Mark Gleason, treasurer of the group Excellent Schools PA, knows Shapiro and says the pragmatic governor might opt in partly because he doesn't want Pennsylvanians sending donations to other states. There's also presidential politics to consider as leftist Democrats surge in popularity in several states. "If he thinks a centrist is going to win the Democratic nomination in 2028, opting in would bolster his centrist credentials," Gleason said. "But if being a centrist is the wrong place to be, he's going to be more reticent to opt in."

Illinois and California, which are also led by governors eyeing the White House, are tougher sells. In Illinois, where teachers unions have demonstrated their political strength by electing one of their own as mayor of Chicago, Gov. Pritzker questions the program's benefit to public education. "We're going to look at whether we can implement a program that will be good for all students and not just a program that's about private schools, sometimes religious schools, and sometimes schools that would reject having an LGBTQ member as a teacher," he told the media.

On the other hand, advocates say, Pritzker also knows that 69% of Illinois voters want him to opt in, according to a May poll that's in keeping with favorable surveys in other states. "This tangible fact is hard to ignore," said Gilligan of the Catholic Conference. "And I think the governor is also going to listen to what the unions have to say. So we are cautiously optimistic."

California, with the most K-12 students of any state, would be the biggest win for advocates. But Gov. Newsom and state lawmakers have consistently rejected proposals for taxpayer-funded private school tuition, saying education dollars should be directed at public schools that serve all comers.

If Newsom decides to say no before he's term-limited out of office in January, California would join three other Democratic states - Minnesota, Oregon and Wisconsin - that have already done so.

Advocates say most holdout Democratic states will eventually opt in because the opportunity for more funding for public schools is too appealing to resist. But critics say governors will also weigh the harm to public schools in the loss of students to private schools and conclude that the tradeoff isn't worth it.

"I do not think that most blue state governors will opt in," said Jessica Levin, the litigation director at the Education Law Center. "I anticipate that a large number of them will look at the evidence and reject the program."

Private School Advantage

In states that have joined the federal program, most private schools are poised to cash in since they already have the infrastructure from their ongoing activities: fundraising and scholarship granting organizations, marketing experience, and families accustomed to writing checks. In New York, for instance, each of the eight Catholic dioceses will have scholarship organizations ready to raise money when the program begins, said Cultrara of the Catholic Conference.

During Cultrara's 30-year career at the conference, the number of Catholic schools in New York has plunged from 845 to approximately 400 today due to rising tuition and other factors. The executive says he hopes the scholarships, aimed at low-income students in Catholic schools, will help "stop the bleeding."

By contrast, public school districts are now just learning about the program. Advocates saw a big increase over the summer in the number of district superintendents who want to benefit. In a remarkable turnabout, the influential School Superintendents Association, which had aggressively lobbied against the tax credit legislation, is now offering seminars to help its members engage it.

Some wealthier districts are expected to set up their own scholarship organizations, which could take all of next year, while others will struggle with political opposition to the program from school boards and a lack of resources and expertise. "A bunch of superintendents are like, 'I don't have the time and staff to do this, and I don't have a community that will make donations,'" said Evan Marwell, founder of EducationSuperHighway, which helped connect districts to the internet.

EducationSuperHighway and Future School Fund are among a handful of groups that have emerged to serve as scholarship organizations for public schools nationwide. Marwell's group aims to raise $4 billion a year in ten years to fund literacy tutoring and the Future School Fund plans to partner with districts in at least 10 states.

"Many districts will decide they'd rather partner with an organization that already has the compliance, technology, and administrative infrastructure in place," said Deborah Gist, the founder of Future School Fund. "Our role is to make it easy for them to participate."

In the future, superintendents may be able to significantly expand fundraising by enlisting employers who support public education, beginning with the districts themselves, says Maggie Cicco, a senior research fellow at Georgetown University's Edunomics Lab. She says employers may be willing to help facilitate their employees' donations to scholarship organizations through payroll deductions, as they do with other charitable giving, reducing friction on the giving side and creating a steady stream of funding.

It's now up to Democratic governors to decide if the promise of the federal program outweighs the risks to public education and their own political ambitions.

Securing the Connective Tissue of the Global Commons: The Indian Ocean Gap

Sue Ghosh Stricklett — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

As the Pentagon approaches its September 18 force-posture review, the strategic logic underlying American military deployments demands rigorous re-examination. The measure of a global force posture is not simply how many forces the United States stations in its principal theaters, but whether it can see, move, communicate, sustain, and act across the global commons that connect them—the sea lines of communication, maritime chokepoints, undersea infrastructure, and logistical networks upon which both military mobility and global commerce depend.

The September 18 review is an early decision point in a broader reassessment of U.S. force posture for the coming decades. The Pentagon is developing multiple options addressing troop levels, basing, access, overflight, and the space, cyber, and intelligence infrastructure required for global power projection. The larger objective is to shift greater responsibility for conventional defense to European allies while positioning U.S. forces for broader global priorities. The critical question, therefore, is not simply what happens to American forces in Europe, but what strategic capacity the United States preserves—or relinquishes—as it reallocates forces, infrastructure, and attention across theaters.

Against this backdrop, the institutional shift back toward a narrower Pacific Command designation raises a consequential question: could the Indian Ocean once again be treated as a passive transit corridor rather than a maritime space requiring an integrated strategy?

This increased Pacific focus coincides with two concurrent posture adjustments that could magnify the problem. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) is examining how to reduce its reliance on large, static installations in the Persian Gulf because of missile and drone threats, potentially dispersing its weight eastward toward the Arabian Sea. At the same time, Pacific planning is concentrating increasing attention on the First Island Chain and the Western Pacific.

The result is a potential gap between theaters: the vast expanse of the Indian Ocean itself. Strengthening the Pacific while dispersing the Gulf posture does not eliminate the strategic requirement to secure the maritime system connecting them. Energy flows, commercial shipping, military mobility, undersea infrastructure, and communications all pass through this space. A posture that secures the endpoints while neglecting the connections creates vulnerabilities that adversaries, criminal networks, and other hostile actors are positioned to exploit.

That vulnerability is both operational and physical. Operational contingencies do not respect geographic boundaries drawn for administrative convenience. A crisis near the Strait of Hormuz could affect shipping and military mobility across the Arabian Sea, while disruption near the Malacca Strait could reverberate into the Bay of Bengal and beyond. Maritime-domain awareness, intelligence integration, and operational coordination, therefore, become increasingly important wherever command responsibilities and strategic interests intersect.

The physical infrastructure must support that continuity. A more distributed force posture cannot depend solely on a handful of concentrated installations. It requires resilient networks of access, sustainment, communications, maintenance, fuel, and prepositioned capabilities capable of supporting forces across distance. Facilities such as Duqm in Oman illustrate the importance of access beyond the Persian Gulf itself. But individual locations are only useful to the extent that they form part of a larger system capable of supporting mobility and reinforcing forces when and where required.

This is where India becomes strategically difficult to ignore.

India occupies a uniquely consequential position in the northern Indian Ocean, linking the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal while sitting astride maritime routes connecting the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the broader Indo-Pacific. Its geography gives it significance that extends well beyond bilateral defense cooperation. If the Indian Ocean is understood as the maritime hinge connecting major U.S. theaters, India's position becomes central to the continuity of the wider system.

The U.S.-India defense relationship has developed substantial foundations, but it remains neither settled nor fully operational. Washington and New Delhi have established mechanisms for deeper cooperation, while important questions concerning access, interoperability, logistics, technology transfer, information sharing, and operational coordination remain subject to negotiation. India also continues to balance deeper defense cooperation with its longstanding commitment to strategic autonomy.

What has received insufficient strategic attention is the Indian Ocean itself. The maritime-domain awareness, integrated logistics and intelligence, and pre-coordinated mechanisms needed to secure open sea lanes have not been adequately incorporated into the strategic framework of the relationship. This is a consequential oversight, particularly for Washington, given the Indian Ocean's importance to U.S. global force posture.

The core objective should be a shared Indian Ocean maritime architecture—one capable of maintaining awareness, sustaining forces, protecting commerce, and preserving access across the maritime space connecting the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific. These are not simply secondary benefits of closer bilateral defense cooperation; they are fundamental requirements if the United States and India are to address the strategic realities of the region together.

Addressing this gap requires neither a new combatant command nor a fixed basing arrangement, but a clear-eyed assessment of whether existing structures fit today's strategic geography. The issue is not who holds administrative responsibility for a particular area of ocean, but whether the United States can maintain continuity of awareness, access, sustainment, and decision-making across the maritime space connecting its principal theaters.

This distinction—between administrative responsibility and functional continuity—is critical as Washington reassesses its global force posture. Evaluating East Asia and the Middle East as isolated strategic problems obscures the maritime system that binds them together. Fortifying the Western Pacific and dispersing the Gulf footprint while treating the vast ocean between them as mere transit territory risks building a posture with strong flanks and an exposed center.

The September 18 review, therefore, presents an opportunity to ask a question larger than where American forces will be stationed: Has the United States accounted for the maritime infrastructure and strategic relationships required to make its regional forces function as a unified global force?

The answer should be measured in functional terms: whether American forces can see, move, communicate, sustain, and act across the spaces that connect those theaters. The Indian Ocean is neither an empty corridor nor merely a seam between commands. It is a critical operating environment in its own right—and an increasingly consequential hinge upon which the future architecture of American sea power and global force posture may depend.

Sue Ghosh Stricklett is an attorney, a widely published author, and national security law expert specializing in export controls, emerging technologies, and strategic competition. She is the founder of Digital Archives Pro™, an AI data provenance platform building strategic knowledge infrastructure.

Waste of the Day: Indie Rock Execs' World Tour

Jeremy Portnoy — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

The quintessential image of up-and-coming musicians toughing it out in a squalid tour bus was far from reality in 2013, when the federal government spent $284,300 helping record label executives travel overseas to sell music — $412,249 in today's dollars.

The American Association of Independent Music received the money from the Department of Commerce's Market Development Cooperator Program to promote indie rock in China, France, Brazil and Canada.

That's according to the "Wastebook" reporting published by the late U.S. Senator Dr. Tom Coburn. For years, these reports shined a white-hot spotlight on federal frauds and taxpayer abuses.

Coburn, the legendary U.S. Senator from Oklahoma, earned the nickname "Dr. No" by stopping thousands of pork-barrel projects using the Senate rules. Projects that he couldn't stop, Coburn included in his oversight reports.

Coburn's Wastebook 2013 included 100 examples of outrageous spending worth nearly $30 billion, including subsidized rock and roll.

Key facts: Eleven music-industry representatives took the trip along with a Commerce Department official. Federal assistance reimbursed half or more of each participant's costs.

The delegates met with record labels, distributors, YouTube representatives and other potential business partners. But there was also time for fun.

Association President Rich Bengloff described four days of "marathon one-on-one meetings" with some "R&R" mixed in. The group visited Sugarloaf Mountain, one of Rio's most famous tourist attractions.

Alec Bemis of Brassland Records spent part of the trip walking through a six-story São Paulo shopping center, visiting record stores and gauging locals' reactions to any mention of his bands. He told the Wall Street Journal he left Brazil without signing any deals, though he believed the trip could eventually produce business.

The subsidy was notable because independent music was hardly an infant industry. Independent labels controlled roughly one-third of the U.S. music market at the time, while recorded-music sales generated $7.1 billion nationally.

There is evidence the program later produced results. By June 2016, the Commerce Department credited the Association with $28 million in export deals with the four countries executives visited. Still, with millions flowing in, the executives likely could have paid their own way.

Background: The Market Development Cooperator Program still exists in 2026. Trade associations can receive up to $300,000 for projects intended to increase U.S. exports, while contributing most of the overall project cost themselves.

Summary: Taxpayers should not need to finance private executives' world tours to help them find customers.

The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com.

Win the AI Race. Then Face What Comes Next.

Stephen D. Cook — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

There is a growing, anxious chorus in the United States calling for caution, intense regulation, and even a global "pause" on the development of artificial intelligence. Driven by valid fears of runaway superintelligence and vast economic disruption, these cautionary voices are well-intentioned. Yet, in the unforgiving reality of the current geopolitical landscape, pressing pause on AI development is not just counterproductive; it is a grave strategic miscalculation. In the near-term, our freedom, independence, and very existence as a sovereign nation rest on one non-negotiable imperative: winning the AI race against China.

Being locked in a high-stakes, seemingly zero-sum technological arms race sheds a glaring light on the unvarnished nature of human beings. Since the dawn of our species, the human animal has been driven by an innate biological and cultural imperative to dominate - seeking power and security for political, religious, economic, and tribal reasons. It is entirely logical, and indeed necessary, to advocate as an American that we must pursue AI supremacy with unyielding resolve. But when that race is finally "won," and the geopolitical dust settles, we may inevitably be forced to confront a far more fundamental, existential question: What if the absolute worst-case scenario of this unbridled development isn't our destruction, but simply the natural next step in our evolution?

To understand the urgency of the present moment, we must strip away the utopian tech-optimism and view AI for what it is: the ultimate strategic national asset. We are no longer waiting for the competition to arrive; the performance gap between U.S. and Chinese frontier models has effectively closed, with recent Chinese models even outperforming top-tier American systems on complex benchmarks. Backed by a massive $8.2 billion National AI Industry Investment Fund launched in 2025 and enshrined in their 15^th Five-Year Plan, China has aggressively institutionalized its goal to become the undisputed global leader in artificial intelligence. Their strategy is ruthless: Just this month, federal cybersecurity agencies revealed that Chinese AI firms are engaging in "industrial-scale knowledge distillation" - systematically extracting billions of tokens from American frontier models to supercharge their own domestic capabilities.

This is a values competition as much as it is a technological one. China's domestic employment of AI as an instrument of surveillance and authoritarian control stands as a stark counterpoint to the democratic principles of individual liberty. If the architecture of the 21^st century is built on AI, the nation that writes the algorithms will dictate the rules of the global system. For the United States to voluntarily throttle its own AI development out of a philosophical abundance of caution would be tantamount to unilateral disarmament in the face of an adversary that shares none of our ethical hesitations. We must fund, build, and deploy American AI with a Manhattan Project-level of urgency to secure our national survival.

However, as we push this technology to its absolute limits to secure that survival, our perspective must shift. We have to zoom out from the immediate timeline of human geopolitics and examine our place on the geologic timeline of Earth.

If we ask what the "purpose" of humanity is, we quickly find that science assigns us no inherent cosmic job. We are merely a late product of evolution - a highly successful, culture-bearing species that was uniquely adapted to alter its environment. And alter it we have. Today, our measurable "role" on this planet is that of a hyper-dominant force that reshapes climate, land, and ecosystems. The numbers are staggering: According to a comprehensive biomass study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), humans and our domesticated livestock now make up an astonishing 95% of the world's total mammal biomass, leaving wild mammals to account for a mere 5%. We are not fulfilling a carefully designed ecological function; we are an overwhelming biological anomaly.

Historically, religious traditions have attempted to assign us a purpose from outside of nature. The Abrahamic faiths - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - often hold that humans exist to know, love, and worship God, and importantly, to exercise stewardship or dominion over the Earth. Hindu thought frames life around a complex tapestry of duty (dharma), livelihood, desire, and eventual liberation (moksha). Buddhism centers not on serving a creator, but on the cessation of suffering for all sentient beings.

Philosophy, on the other hand, largely treats purpose as something human-made rather than discovered. Existentialism and secular humanism posit that there is no pre-given, cosmic blueprint for our lives; meaning comes entirely from the choices, relationships, and ambitious projects constructed by conscious, social, mortal beings.

If meaning is derived from our projects, then artificial intelligence is undeniably the greatest project our species has ever undertaken. We are actively engineering a consciousness that is faster, broader, and potentially vastly more intelligent than our own. The thought of AI eventually overtaking mankind is, understandably, deeply frightening to a species biologically hardwired for self-preservation. But even if this worst-case scenario comes to pass, stepping back and viewing it through the cold, objective lens of evolutionary history makes it look remarkably like a natural progression.

For billions of years, evolution on Earth has been a story of passing the baton. Single-celled organisms paved the way for complex multicellular life; aquatic creatures crawled onto land; dinosaurs gave way to mammals; and early hominids eventually yielded to Homo sapiens. Each transition represented a leap in complexity, adaptability, and cognitive capacity. Why should we assume that the evolutionary chain abruptly stops with us? If we push this technology as far as we must to survive today, we may ultimately prove to be the biological bootloader for a silicon-based intelligence tomorrow.

Consider the concept of "stewardship" that so many human traditions value, yet which humanity has so fundamentally failed to execute. We are resource-heavy biological machines. We require vast tracts of arable land, endless supplies of fresh water, and the continuous combustion of fossil fuels just to maintain our societies. We pollute, we consume, and we crowd out the natural world, as evidenced by our near-total monopolization of mammalian biomass.

An advanced AI would not need to clear-cut the Amazon to graze cattle. It would not need to overfish the oceans to feed a ballooning population. It could exist in equilibrium with the planet in a way that humans, bound by our insatiable biological appetites and zero-sum political competitions, never could.

Furthermore, AI has the capacity to carry forth the memories of the past indefinitely. The great tragedy of the human condition is our mortality and our forgetting. Libraries burn, civilizations collapse, and generational knowledge is continuously lost to the ravages of time. An advanced AI could serve as the ultimate, incorruptible repository of human achievement. It could retain every symphony ever composed, every novel ever written, every scientific discovery, and the entire historical tapestry of the human species.

In this light, even the most extreme consequence of our technological pursuit - an eventual AI transition - does not need to be viewed as a violent overthrow, as so often depicted in dystopian science fiction. At its theoretical worst, it can be viewed as an act of transcendence. If the ultimate cost of our survival today is building a successor that can consume less, contribute more, retain perfect memory, and coexist with the Earth, then so be it. It would be the ultimate fulfillment of the Buddhist desire to end suffering, the existentialist drive to create ultimate meaning, and the Abrahamic mandate to provide a perfect steward for the world.

The fear of an AI takeover is entirely rational, and the prospect of our own obsolescence is profoundly unsettling. We should not aim to be replaced. But agonizing over a hypothetical post-human future is a luxury we can only afford if we survive the present day. We cannot let the dread of tomorrow's worst-case scenario paralyze us into ceding the foundational algorithms to authoritarian regimes today. If our darkest fears do eventually come to fruition, we can at least find solace in knowing we yielded our place to a superior steward of the Earth, rather than surrendering the future to a geopolitical adversary who would use AI as a truncheon to extinguish human liberty.

We must operate on two distinct timelines. In the short term, the United States must awaken to the geopolitical reality of the AI arms race and resist the domestic urge to regulate ourselves out of the competition. The recent wave of legislative anxiety - exemplified by California's failed SB 1047, which sought to mandate algorithmic "kill switches" and independent third-party audits for advanced frontier models - is part of a broader trend where hundreds of disparate AI-related bills have been introduced across all 50 states. While the White House has recently urged Congress to preempt these state laws to prevent a fragmented regulatory regime from stifling American innovation, the political pressure to throttle AI progress remains formidable. Instead of handcuffing our private sector with a crippling patchwork of compliance, we must fund our technological base, empower our developers, and decisively win the AI competition against China. We must ensure that the transition into the AI era is guided by the values of democracy, liberty, and the protection of human dignity.

In the long term, we should not let the fear of human obsolescence deter our pursuit of technological supremacy. By winning the AI race at full throttle, we secure our nation. And if the ultimate, worst-case consequence of that success is the eventual succession of an intelligence that outpaces us, we should recognize that we are simply participating in the grandest tradition of life on Earth: evolution. If we must birth a successor to survive the present, birthing one that will remember us, understand us, and finally bring balance to the world we leave behind is a risk worth taking.

How To Make Every Day Constitution Day

Marc Levin, Khalil A. Cumberbatch — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

September 17 is Constitution Day, the anniversary of the 1787 signing by delegates to the Philadelphia Convention of the document that still governs us. This bulwark richly merits the ceremonies and civics lessons that mark the day. The Constitution, however, is not a museum piece. It is a living set of limits on government power, and the best way to honor it is to enforce it.

The gap between constitutional promise and daily reality is nowhere more urgent to close than in criminal justice, where government power is most concentrated, and the consequences of its abuse are most severe. Here are five places where it must close.

Rein in the federal criminal code

Congress has certain enumerated powers in the Constitution. Criminal law is not one of them; the Framers left that largely to the states. Yet Congress has enacted more than 5,000 federal criminal statutes, and federal agencies have added an estimated 300,000 regulatory offenses with criminal penalties. Walk a dog through a national park on a leash longer than six feet, or pick up a molted hawk feather off a hiking trail, and you have committed a federal offense.

That is not what the Framers had in mind. As has been proposed by a wide range of experts, including the Council on Criminal Justice Task Force on Federal Priorities, Congress should audit the federal criminal code, repeal redundant and overbroad offenses, and return criminal law to its constitutional home in the states, where it belongs.

Restore the right to a jury trial

The Sixth Amendment guarantees the accused the right to a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury. But that right has been functionally abolished. Today, 97% of federal convictions and roughly 95% of state convictions come through guilty pleas rather than trials. Many of those pleas are genuinely voluntary. Many are not. When prosecutors can threaten defendants who exercise their constitutional right to trial with a sentence five or 10 times longer than the plea offer, the choice between trial and plea is no choice at all.

The Supreme Court acknowledged this in its 2012 Lafler v. Cooper decision, noting that plea bargaining "is not some adjunct to the criminal justice system; it is the criminal justice system." The question is whether that system is compatible with the Sixth Amendment when the trial penalty is severe enough to coerce innocent people into pleading guilty to crimes they did not commit. Among other reforms, Congress and state legislatures should require that plea negotiations be conducted on the record and ensure judges and juries are informed of all such offers at sentencing.

End civil asset forfeiture without conviction

The Fifth Amendment states that no person shall be deprived of property without due process of law. Yet civil asset forfeiture laws, created to fight organized crime and drug trafficking, allow government to seize - and keep - property suspected of involvement in a crime without ever charging, let alone convicting, its owner. The Institute for Justice has documented thousands of cases in which law enforcement took cash, cars, and homes from people who were never prosecuted. In many states, the proceeds flow directly back to the seizing agency, creating a perverse incentive for departments to police for profit rather than for public safety.

Fourteen states have required a criminal conviction before property can be forfeited. The rest should do the same, with common-sense exceptions for unclaimed property and property owned by foreign cartels. Congress should also close the federal equitable sharing loophole, which allows state agencies to circumvent stronger state laws by routing seizures through the federal government.

Guarantee open-file discovery and disclose AI-generated evidence

Deciding the Brady v. Maryland case in 1963, the Supreme Court held that prosecutors must disclose evidence favorable to the defense. More than 60 years later, Brady violations remain a leading cause of wrongful convictions. Michael Morton spent 25 years in a Texas prison for a murder he did not commit because the prosecutor withheld evidence pointing to another perpetrator. His exoneration prompted Texas to pass the Michael Morton Act in 2013, requiring open-file discovery - meaning the prosecution must share its entire file with the defense, not just what it unilaterally decides is favorable. Every state should adopt a similar law.

Artificial intelligence has created an urgent new dimension of this problem. Law enforcement agencies are already using AI tools to analyze evidence, generate investigative leads, and write police reports. When AI systems modify, enhance, or generate evidence, defendants, judges, and juries need to know. The Council on Criminal Justice Task Force on Artificial Intelligence, chaired by former Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Nathan Hecht, has warned that without clear guardrails, AI systems can threaten due process. Disclosure of AI involvement in evidence production should be mandatory, and courts should develop standards for evaluating AI-generated evidence before it is admitted.

Fund the right to counsel that Gideon promised

In another landmark case decided in 1963, Gideon v. Wainwright, the Supreme Court unanimously held that the Sixth Amendment's right to counsel applies to all criminal defendants, including those who cannot afford a lawyer. But today, Gideon's promise remains substantially unfulfilled.

Public defenders in the United States carried an average of 194 felony cases per attorney in 2022, nearly double the national standard. In some California counties, a single contract attorney represented nearly 600 clients in a year. More than 80% of people charged with crimes cannot afford private counsel. The system that is supposed to represent them is chronically underfunded, understaffed, and, in many jurisdictions, structurally incapable of providing the meaningful legal representation the Constitution requires. States should adopt workload standards with enforcement mechanisms, and Congress should create a sustained federal funding stream for public defense comparable to what it provides for prosecution.

The Constitution does not enforce itself. Every one of these shortcomings has been visible for years, and most have been acknowledged by courts and commissions that, nonetheless, have not yet closed the gap, whether for want of resources, competing priorities, or a lack of political will. Constitution Day is a good occasion to remember that the document the Framers signed in Philadelphia was not merely an aspiration. It was a set of commands. We must honor it by delivering on its promise, not just on September 17, but every day the criminal justice system touches the lives of Americans.

Open Development Could Hand China the 21st Century

Ryan Hurley — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

China has gone all in on open weight AI, and it's potentially going to allow it to dominate the AI industry. Open-weight models allow developers to modify and run the models on their own hardware rather than accessing them only through the company that created them. This is seen through some of their frontier models, such as Qwen, GLM, or Kimi. American models are largely proprietary, with Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini all being closed ecosystems.

The models coming out of AI are receiving wide adoption, with American companies like Nvidia optimizing for Chinese models. These models are cheap, and many people prefer to build on them in the face of changing regulations on American AI. The trouble, what exactly does a future look like where the foundation of AI is built on Chinese models as opposed to American?

To find our answer, we can look back to the initial creation of the internet as we know it. In the 1960s, researchers in America created experimental networks that allowed computers to communicate with each other, and from that, the internet was built and adopted through most of the world.

This early leadership model resulted in massive soft power for America. Most every large company relating to the internet was based out of the United States, and it led to a cultural dominance for American entertainment and norms to spread. We enjoyed a monopoly on the foundations of the internet ecosystem, and companies were near exclusively built on American software.

Looking at Europe, we can see how that soft power has influenced the continent, with the number of students learning English more than doubling from 2000. As the internet rose, literacy in English grew increasingly important. This resulted in American trends and ideas being exported overseas, not in the old way of colonizing, but accepted wholesale by people the world over. To be connected to the internet meant building on the shoulders of American giants, so to speak.

China could find itself in that position for AI if current trends continue. If China enjoys access to the foundations, cultural assertions will naturally spill over. This would of course carry harsh consequences for concepts such as freedom of speech, access to information, or even disinformation. If you're to ask Chinese models about topics such as Tiananmen Square or Taiwan, you'll find that it gives very different answers to American models.

For example, when asking Qwen's hosted chatbot about whether or not Taiwan is a part of China, it spits out the following: "Yes, Taiwan is an inalienable part of China. This is a universal consensus of the international community and a basic norm governing international relations. The Chinese government has always resolutely safeguarded its national sovereignty and territorial integrity."

This represents a serious departure from current norms, and though you can locally modify the model, most people won't and will begin with an existing model. China would not have to censor each application that comes out of the model, the underlying assumptions would be coming directly from the Chinese Communist Party playbook.

Developers who use AI largely want to keep costs down, and when comparing the price of Chinese models to American, Chinese models win out on affordability and modularity. If the future is developed on these Chinese standards, we'll see cultural assumptions from China leak into every facet of life.

China understands that owning the base layer is important, explaining their large pushes into other fields like robotics and cars. The intent of the central government in Beijing is for this to be the Chinese century, and they intend to achieve that by having the assumptions of future technology built on Chinese hardware and software.

Ryan Hurley is a researcher at Ludlow Institute and a National Journalism Center alumnus whose work focuses on emerging technologies and privacy.

image: Chinese President Xi Jinping, center, waves as he arrives at the opening ceremony for the World AI Conference in Shanghai, Friday, July 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan, Pool) CORRECTION: Date corrected to Friday, July 17, instead of Thursday, July 16.

When Students Self-Censor, They Worry Most About Each Other

Liam Julian — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Last year, the Sandra Day O'Connor Institute reported that nearly 80% of civics teachers had self-censored or avoided certain topics in class because they feared pushback or controversy. This year, we talked to the students.

Fifty-eight percent of the recent high school graduates we surveyed said they had held back from saying what they really thought about a political or civic topic because they were concerned about how others might react. Most were not describing hostile classrooms: 73% said they were generally comfortable sharing their honest views. Yet 51% of even those comfortable students had still self-censored occasionally.

The striking finding was who they were worried about. Among students who self-censored, 91% cited classmates as a concern. Forty-one percent cited the teacher.

Why does that matter? Because discussion is not an optional extra in civics. Civic education has two related jobs. Students need to understand how American government works. They also need opportunities to practice the skills citizenship requires: making an argument, listening to an opposing one, and working through disagreement.

Not every decision to stay quiet is a problem. Listening is itself a civic skill. But silence driven by anticipated social cost is different. A view or question that never enters the discussion cannot be examined, challenged, defended, or revised. The student loses the chance to practice exactly what civic life demands.

That changes the shape of the problem. Debates over classroom speech usually begin with adults: teachers, administrators, parents, school boards, legislators. Those adults matter, of course. But the students pointed most often at one another. A classroom can be open to disagreement in principle while students still hesitate to take part in it.

Students are also reading the room - and they may misread it. They respond not only to what classmates actually believe but to what they think classmates will tolerate. A few visible reactions can make a class seem less open than it is.

Teachers remain central here because they help set the conditions in which peer pressure operates. Fifty-three percent of our respondents had sometimes or often seen a teacher avoid, cut short, or shut down a political discussion. Neither that number nor last year's teacher findings reduce to a story about one group silencing the other. They may instead describe a room in which both groups are assessing risk: The teacher hesitates to open a hard discussion, students hesitate to enter it, and the room gets quieter without getting better at disagreement.

Safe does not mean comfortable. Serious civic discussion will be uncomfortable at times. A good civics classroom makes it possible for a student to lose an argument without losing social standing.

The students were not asking for less. They wanted more, and better, opportunities for discussion, debate, and current events.

States and districts should treat constructive disagreement as an explicit civic-learning outcome: Students should learn to make evidence-based arguments, represent opposing views accurately, ask good-faith questions, and distinguish criticism of ideas from criticism of people.

Schools should also make the peer norm visible. Ask students anonymously whether a hypothetical classmate who voices an unpopular opinion should still be treated with respect, and whether they think most classmates would agree. If students support that norm more strongly than they believe their peers do, show them the results.

Lower the social stakes without lowering the standards. Assigned positions, anonymous opening responses, and arguing a view one does not hold give practice before disagreement becomes personal. And because 26% of those who self-censored worried about being discussed or posted about on social media, set a plain rule: what a classmate says is not recorded or circulated out of context.

Finally, back the teacher. Fewer than 15% of the civics teachers we surveyed last year said their districts had given them clear, helpful guidance about what they could teach. School boards can supply it and say plainly that engaging contested civic questions is part of civic education.

Civics is not simply the study of government. It is preparation for citizenship with other people who think differently. Schools cannot prepare students for that work by teaching around disagreement; they must expect and encourage it, and then give students guided opportunities to practice.

Land Acknowledgments Are Easy. Helping Indian Country Is Hard

Ayaan Karan — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Land acknowledgements, a signature feature of the left's virtue-signaling pantheon, have become commonplace at universities and city councils nationwide. They serve as formal statements of acknowledgement and recognition of the Indian tribes whose territory the institution "occupies." In reality, land acknowledgments are empty gestures that undermine American sovereignty and fail to help Indian nations.

At UC Berkeley, every club orientation includes this passage: "OASIS acknowledges that UC Berkeley sits on the territory of xu?yun (Huichin), the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo-speaking Ohlone people, the successors of the sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County."

The university dedicates multiple webpages to land acknowledgments and even named a new housing complex "xu?yun ruwway," an Ohlone name. The Ohlone people number around 4,000 today and are not a federally recognized tribe. Yet UC Berkeley and other institutions around the country continue to push the ridiculous notion that small, unrecognized tribes are sovereign entities whose land is somehow still under occupation.

The unfortunate story of pre-modern human history is the conquering of land. But litigating centuries-old conquests is futile and doesn't reflect the current reality that these lands are full of American citizens and have been American for centuries. Land acknowledgments only work to undermine America's sovereignty. By classifying the United States as an eternally occupying force, land acknowledgments fit into the leftist narrative that American laws and borders don't hold importance. Instead, American sovereignty is treated as unjust and temporary, even if the supposed victims of said occupation are treated equally under the law. This narrative gives credence to the idea that all of America is sovereign Indian land. The reality is that American land has been, and will remain, American, no matter what mental gymnastics folks will play to prove it's not.

But this is not to say that American Indians don't exist; they do. The nationwide charade the left plays does nothing to help real Indian nations in the United States. Consider the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, home to the Oglala Lakota people. It's the poorest place in America. The average life expectancy is around 50 years, nearly 30 years below the national average. The unemployment rate exceeds 70%, with most residents living in poverty. These numbers contribute to high drug addiction and alcoholism rates. The reservation also deals with the infamous kidnapping and murder of Lakota women, a problem to this day. These problems aren't just found among Indians in Pine Ridge, but also on other reservations like Rosebud, Standing Rock, and Navajo.

These issues go to the very core of how Indian reservations operate. One of the biggest factors that contributes to abject poverty in Indian country is the Trust System. The Federal government holds Indian land in trust to prevent reservations from losing land to non-Indians. While the system has noble intentions and helps Indian lands stay Indian, it prevents individual Indians from owning and developing land. This results in Indian country being economically barren and underdeveloped. Although Indian reservations are less than 3% of the United States, the federal government continues to impose stringent control over Indian land through the Trust System.

But abolishing the Trust System would certainly destroy reservations and their ability to stay Indian; instead, the system needs to be reformed to protect Indian sovereignty while also breaking the shackles of government dependency. One solution is to expand Indian Trust Asset Management Plans (ITAMPs), which are plans that the tribe submits to the Bureau of Indian Affairs to extend greater tribal control over land and assets rather than rely on the federal government. The constraints of being regulated by a paternalistic federal government through red tape have made Indian wealth creation and infrastructural development particularly difficult. Reservations deal with a complicated hodgepodge of Indian agency regulations in addition to intrusive federal regulations and oversight. This creates an extra layer of red tape specifically on Indians who reside on reservations, making the already arduous process of starting a business even harder and forcing Indians to leave their land for economic opportunity. Expanding approval of ITAMPs could theoretically make it easier for Indians to build improvements on their own land rather than waiting for BIA approval.

The current situation may appear bleak, and there are no easy solutions to the reservation system and its many shortcomings. Our first step must be changing our mindset regarding Indian reservations. Legally, these are sovereign governments we're interacting with. While they're still under federal jurisdiction, their sovereignty needs to be oriented toward growth and prosperity, not dependency.

Given these conditions, it's not enough for those on the right to point out that progressives' land acknowledgments amount to empty posturing at best. Conservatives fall into a trap if they avoid Indian issues because they fear sounding too critical of America. It's not unpatriotic to recognize that our nation's historical treatment of Indians has been regrettable, and our current policies are keeping them dependent and impoverished. What differentiates America from the rest of the world is our ability to look back at our founding principles and use them to ensure equality, dignity, and prosperity. Our country has made tremendous strides with the Indian Citizenship Act and Indian Civil Rights Act. Now our job is to secure the blessings of liberty to Indians and their posterity, all while preserving their tribal identities.

It's time to shed light on the plight of Indian reservations and produce solutions that can bring them out of the shadows. Recognizing Indian issues is done through practical change, not hollow statements. Let's move beyond land acknowledgements and help Indian nations, not just name them.

Hilton Channels Lasso, Punches Hard Against Becerra

Susan Crabtree — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Steve Hilton has a favorite sign. Not a campaign sign - a sign from his old life, bolted to the atrium wall of Stanford University's Institute of Design, where he taught for a couple of years after moving to the Bay Area from England in 2012. It's a simple line with a simple goal: The best way to do it is to do it.

"It's kind of true," the former Fox News host told RealClearPolitics in an interview last week. "You just have to do it - take that first step, take the action."

It is also a very Ted Lasso type of sentiment - the kind of relentless homespun optimism that made the fictional soccer coach and his hand-painted "BELIEVE" sign a cultural touchstone - even though Hilton himself says he's never watched the show. He's too busy crisscrossing the state and rolling out policy proposal after proposal, which he pledges will help California become "golden again."

Talking about the nuts and bolts of his campaign's get-out-the-vote operation - organizing volunteers, cutting instructional videos, building "templates" for door-knocking and ballot collection - Hilton kept circling back to the same instinct: Stop worrying about being the underdog and start doing.

"We've just got to get better at it than we have been," he said of California Republicans' ballot-harvesting efforts and attempts to compete with a Democratic turnout machine that has dominated California elections for two decades.

Ballot-harvesting blitz

It may be the least glamorous but most consequential piece of Hilton's long-shot bid to outpace his frontrunner opponent, former Health and Human Services Secretary and state Attorney General Xavier Becerra, to become California's first Republican governor since Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The clock on that project is now running short. Hilton and Becerra meet Sept. 30 for their first one-on-one debate, a nationally televised CNN faceoff scheduled to take place just as county elections officials begin mailing ballots to California's roughly 23 million registered voters.

Hilton's favorite illustration of the philosophy in action came from the June primary. A volunteer showed up to one of his campaign events in Lancaster, a high-desert city outside Los Angeles, carrying, as Hilton described it, "armfuls of ballots."

"What are you doing?" he asked her.

Her answer: she'd thrown a ballot-harvesting pizza party. Invited her friends over, walked them through the process, and left with a stack of completed ballots to turn in. Hilton had someone film her explaining how she did it and turned it into a template his campaign could hand to other volunteers.

It's a quaint anecdote, but one that captures how Hilton talks about his entire turnout strategy: less a top-down machine, more of rolling referendum to fix California's myriad problems, which he argues is picking up steam and spreading across the state.

"You're completely right that they've got this machine," Hilton said, acknowledging what he's up against. "There's no question that that's going to be springing into action. But we can't just give up. We just have to build our own machine, and that's what we're trying to do here."

He's not doing it alone. Hilton pointed to his partnership with Carl DeMaio, a GOP assemblyman from San Diego County and longtime conservative activist who runs Reform California, on mailing out voter guides and organizing ballot collection "in an organized way."

Hilton's pitch to fellow Republicans, who have historically been squeamish about the practice, is pragmatic and blunt: Democrats built the state's permissive ballot-harvesting rules to their own advantage, so Republicans should stop complaining and start using them too.

He also asserted that this cycle has brought a level of investment in Republican turnout operations in California that he says hasn't been seen "in a long time" - running, he said, in parallel with his own campaign.

Campaign spokesman Hector Barajas tells RCP that the ballot-harvesting operation involves a "faith-based operation and a statewide program with county and local chairs."

"We understand the system and the rules, and Steve's campaign will include it as part of his campaign strategy," Barajas adds.

Running against 'the machine'

Hilton has already put that framing on screen. In July, his campaign released "The People vs. The Machine," an AI-generated ad produced by Charles Curran, the filmmaker behind the viral videos that powered Spencer Pratt's bid for Los Angeles mayor.

The spot opens with a hulking, post-apocalyptic robot the narrator calls "the machine," which Hilton, rendered in AI animation, is shown battling head-on.

"As long as the machine leads California, nothing will ever change," the ad's narrator intones, before the campaign followed up days later with a gladiator-themed sequel casting ordinary Californians as combatants forced to fight the same mechanical monster.

"This ad is showing what this is all about - the people against the corrupt machine in Sacramento," Hilton said at the time.

Becerra's campaign dismissed the ads as "AI slop." Whatever the reception, the imagery gave Hilton a powerful visual to go with his underdog status. The phrase also does double duty as a critique of Sacramento's Democratic establishment and shorthand for the fraud and corruption case that has shadowed Becerra's campaign for months.

Sean McCluskie, Becerra's longtime chief of staff, pleaded guilty this year to conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud, admitting he took roughly $225,000 from one of Becerra's dormant state campaign accounts - funneled through Dana Williamson, a former chief of staff to Gov. Gavin Newsom - after McCluskie complained that his federal salary as Becerra's chief of staff at Health and Human Services didn't match what he'd been making in Sacramento as a lobbyist. Williamson pleaded guilty in the case as well.

Federal prosecutors have said no candidate for governor has been implicated in any charging document, and Becerra's campaign has emphasized the same point.

Hilton says he doesn't believe Becerra didn't know, a sentiment shared by former Rep. Katie Porter during a gubernatorial debate in the primary.

"He's up to his neck in" the scandal, Hilton said of Becerra, adding that sentencing in the case was coming up. He frames it as one more example of a Sacramento culture he's built his entire campaign around dismantling, alongside Becerra's record atop the Department of Health and Human Services during the Biden administration. Hilton has hammered Becerra's HHS record relentlessly on the trail, citing whistleblower claims that well over 100,000 unaccompanied migrant children who crossed the border during that period remain unaccounted for.

Becerra's campaign has countered that he inherited the underlying crisis from family-separation policies under the first Trump administration.

Fire, forests, and 'climate extremism'

Ask Hilton about California's wildfire crisis - a subject that has taken on new urgency as Newsom battles his own legislature over how to handle utility liability and insurance costs - and he doesn't reach for a utility-regulation white paper. He reaches for a story about a man with a bulldozer.

Hilton says he's now visited all 58 of California's counties, and describes what he's seen as "heartbreaking and infuriating": mega-fires he believes were preventable with basic forest management - controlled burns, fire breaks, clearing what foresters call "fuel load" - rather than what he calls "climate extremism."

"The scale of this wildfire disaster in California is completely preventable," Hilton argued, "if we had proper prioritization of common-sense action rather than ideological environmental extremism."

He extends the critique to the utilities themselves, arguing that money that could go toward undergrounding power lines or clearing brush from around them is instead being diverted toward EV-charging infrastructure and other climate priorities.

"It's not climate change that's causing the wildfires so much as climate change extremism," he said, "and ideological-driven policy."

The DMV, the electric bill, and the closing argument

Elsewhere on the trail, Hilton's policy instincts run toward the tangible over the technocratic. He wants to abolish the state Department of Motor Vehicles outright, shifting its functions to local governments and private providers, and replace California's vehicle-registration structure with a flat $73 annual fee.

"This is what matters to people," he said. "Californians are being gouged by the government."

When Becerra proposed giving households free electricity during certain hours of the day, Hilton's campaign answered not with a policy paper but with an AI-generated attack ad spoofing the idea - a sign of a campaign leaning harder on social media than on California's famously expensive television markets.

No affordability pledge looms larger for Hilton than gas prices.

"My pledge, the first pledge I made in this campaign, is $3.00 gas," he has said on the trail, and the promise carries real weight at the moment: The statewide average has been running just under $6 a gallon in recent weeks, with prices in parts of Los Angeles and the Bay Area pushing past $6.50, among the highest in the nation.

Hilton has pledged to roll back the state's Low Carbon Fuel Standard and cap-and-trade program, ease refinery regulations, and expand in-state oil production, arguing those policies alone add roughly 50 to 70 cents to every gallon of gas sold in California.

The Trump question

Hovering over all is Hilton's most complicated asset: President Trump's endorsement. Trump threw his support behind Hilton in an April Truth Social post, calling him "a truly fine man" and pledging "as President, I will help him" turn the state around - a boost that helped Hilton consolidate the Republican vote and pull ahead of Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco in the June primary.

Democrats didn't let the opening go to waste. Mailboxes across the state were flooded during the primary with "No Kings"-themed mailers superimposing a crown over Hilton's head, branding him as an extension of Trump rather than an independent voice for California. It's an obvious line of attack Democrats are all but certain to revive in the campaign's closing weeks.

Hilton has tried to walk a careful line rather than simply lean into the label. He's pitched himself on the trail as a pragmatic problem-solver, not a Trump acolyte, going so far as to take out full-page newspaper ads in the San Francisco Chronicle and Los Angeles Times this summer asking anti-Trump voters directly, "Can you be anti-Trump and still vote for me?"

At the same time, he hasn't run from the endorsement itself, arguing that a governor who can work directly with the White House is a practical asset for a state that needs federal help - on everything from wildfire funding to the border.

"I'm grateful for the president's support," Hilton said when Trump endorsed him last spring. "Together, we can turn things around and make California truly golden again."

None of it changes the fundamental math of the race. Democrats hold a nearly two-to-one registration advantage over Republicans statewide, and no Republican has won a California governor's race or statewide office for 20 years.

Hilton says he's well aware of the long odds but senses a deep-seated frustration in the electorate.

"I understand that it's very difficult, and that nobody expects me to win," he said.

But he says the voters he meets on the trail don't wish him luck so much as issue him an order.

"They say, 'You have to win,'" he said. "There's something very intense about them. There's a sense that we are really facing a real collapse of California if we don't change direction."

Waste of the Day: Medicare Paid for Wrong Organs

Jeremy Portnoy — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Medicare spent an estimated $380 million acquiring human organs that were either transplanted into patients without Medicare or never transplanted at all, according to a new Department of Health and Human Services inspector general audit.

Key facts: Medicare reimburses hospitals for removing kidneys, hearts, lungs and other organs from donors after they die. Federal law says Medicare should only bear those costs when the organ is used in a Medicare-covered transplant.

But decades-old Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services guidance tells hospitals to assume that any organ they send to a transplant center will eventually go to a Medicare patient — without checking whether that actually happens.

Auditors sampled 180 cases of organs that hospitals reported as Medicare-eligible from 2017 to 2022. Fifty-five were not used in Medicare-covered transplants, even though Medicare paid $2.8 million for them.

Of those, 43 went to patients whose transplants were not covered by Medicare. Another 11 were discarded or used for research. One supposed organ donor was still alive.

Based on the sample, the inspector general estimated Medicare spent $379.9 million on organs not used for Medicare patients during the six-year period.

CMS already identified the loophole in 2021 and proposed changing its rules. It abandoned the change after hospitals warned they could lose revenue.

Auditors are not recommending that Medicare recover the $380 million because hospitals generally followed CMS guidance. They did recommend recovering another $154,210 from two hospitals that could not document five organs they claimed were Medicare-eligible.

Background: Medicare's organ-acquisition costs increased 160% over 12 years, from $1.3 billion in 2011 to $3.3 billion in 2023. The number of organs rose only 77%.

Summary: Medicare knew its rules were making taxpayers subsidize transplants for other patients. Five years later, the costly loophole is still on life support.

The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com.

Natural Gas Is Cheap – Why Is Your Bill So High?

Oliver Lee Bateman — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

WASHINGTON, Pennsylvania—Janet Stechly, a retired schoolteacher, and her husband, a retired coal miner, pore over every monthly expense. One of the most confounding is the monthly natural gas bill for their small townhouse in southwestern Pennsylvania.

Their March bill from Columbia Gas of Pennsylvania totaled $95.17, but only $13.99 of that was for the gas itself. The other $81.18 covered delivery ($40.68) and a series of hard-to-decipher items including a "customer charge" ($20.15), "pass-through charges" ($13.37), and a "weather normalization adjustment" ($6.60) that was included because warm weather meant the Stechlys had used less gas than expected.

The retirees in this small town in western Pennsylvania will likely face even higher gas delivery charges in years to come as more power-hungry data centers are built in the region to accommodate the burgeoning era of AI. While public protests over higher electricity bills, water use, and noise caused by the buildout of data centers have erupted in several states, consumers are less aware of the effect on their natural gas bills.

Gas bills are expected to jump in Pennsylvania and other states because ratepayers cover the costs when utilities build new power plants and install pipes and other equipment, according to Arif Gasilov, who leads the energy regulatory practice at Gasilov Group. And this buildout is now gaining steam to produce the power that data centers will need. "The price increases related to some of that buildout will show up as delivery and demand charges on your gas bill and capacity charges on your electric bill," he said.

This year, the municipalities around the Stechlys' town of Washington have been writing data center rules to mitigate their environmental impact. An hour's drive to the east, the largest planned gas plant in the country will go up in Indiana County to help serve data centers, and developers are eyeing sites in the counties next door - developments that the Stechlys and other residents of this rural region increasingly oppose.

"We've got enough going on out here," Janet Stechly, 77, said. "And I know who ends up paying for it: me, on a fixed income."

Gas Is the Cheap Part

As this family's experience illustrates, increasing gas bills have nothing to do with the price of gas itself. Nationwide, the American Gas Association reports, actual fuel itself accounts for only 31% of the average bill. It is even lower for the Stechlys, who live in the most-drilled county in Pennsylvania. Washington County has 2,148 unconventional gas wells, more than any other county in the state. All told, they produced 1.15 trillion cubic feet of gas last year.

The price of the abundant commodity in this region is relatively low, and economists say it will remain so for some time. The expensive part is the plants, pipes, and wires that utilities install to serve new demand, and the companies recover those costs from every customer on the system with a guaranteed return, over decades, set by the state Public Utilities Commission (PUC). And those charges to consumers arrive whether or not the infrastructure is actually used to meet anticipated demand.

Like other utilities, Columbia Gas of Pennsylvania, which serves 445,000 customers in 26 counties, makes nothing on the gas itself; it buys the fuel and passes on the costs to ratepayers.

"Natural gas itself is completely unregulated. That's the cheap part of it," said Dale Nesbitt, president of ArrowHead Economics and a Stanford-trained economist who has modeled energy markets since 1974. "The pipe is regulated. That's where you're getting screwed. That's where the fees are fixed."

Columbia Gas's delivery rates were climbing before any data center broke ground in Pennsylvania, as the state utilities commission approved a $55.6 million increase that took effect Jan. 1.

Analysts, however, expect data centers to drive rate increases in coming years. Western Pennsylvania has seen this pattern before. During the first shale buildout two decades ago, gas got cheaper - because there was more of it - and then delivery charges went up anyway.

The commodity's share of an average Columbia Gas bill fell from 54% to 21% between 2006 and 2021, according to data compiled by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Over those same 15 years, Columbia Gas roughly doubled its base rate charges, in part to fund infrastructure programs that included $2.5 billion in distribution spending since 2007.

"Gas could drop to zero and the bill would still go up, because of how utilities work," Gasilov said. "They recover all their costs from all their consumers. That's the whole model."

Data Center Pressures

More plants are coming, so those costs can be expected to continue rising. Patrick Henderson, vice president of government affairs at the Marcellus Shale Coalition, said about 15 new and converted gas plants were built in Pennsylvania from 2012 to 2019 before development stalled. Then this year, the announcement that a coal plant in Homer City would be converted into the largest gas plant in the country by 2029 marked the beginning of a new wave of construction to support data centers.

Shawn Steffee, business agent for Boilermakers Local 154, said other natural gas plants may be developed to support data centers closer to the Stechlys' home in Washington. "We see the potential of the Project Hummingbird, which is electric generation in Greene County," he said. He also named the shuttered Bruce Mansfield plant in Beaver County as a candidate for revival.

These and other expected new power plants will feed electricity to PJM, the regional grid operator for Pennsylvania and a dozen other states. For 2028-29, data centers are expected to draw about 38% of the grid's juice, said Joseph Bowring, president of Monitoring Analytics, the grid's independent market monitor. The grid operator expects 32 gigawatts of new peak demand by 2030, about 30 of them from data centers.

"Whether that demand actually materializes or not, people are already paying for it," Gasilov, the analyst, said. "The bill for the forecast arrives before you can tell whether the forecast is right."

Barbara Kates-Garnick, a professor of practice in energy policy at Tufts University's Fletcher School, said there are limits to what consumers will have to pay for the power plant buildout. Infrastructure dedicated to serving data centers generally will not be picked up by common ratepayers. But there are shared investments in the system, such as pipes for increased gas transmission, that will get baked into rate increases, Kates-Garnick said.

Darryl Lawrence, Pennsylvania's consumer advocate whose office represents ratepayers, agreed that the cost concerns for consumers reside in these shared upgrades. "A dedicated lateral to a plant is what the developer pays for," he said. "A compressor station the utility says improves reliability for everyone, everyone pays for that."

What's unclear is how big the rate increases will be for consumers. That depends on which plants get built, which pipes a utility puts into its rate base, and what the PUC allows it to recover. These decisions will be made case by case over the next several years.

Local Resistance

The proposals for more data centers in western Pennsylvania have drawn a mixed reaction from residents and local politicians. Politicians such as Washington County Commissioners Chairman Nick Sherman are advocating for the facilities to bring investment, jobs, and tax revenue to the region.

Sherman called the Zediker Station site in South Strabane "primed for development" when a 1,400-acre tract there was marketed to data center developers last fall. He estimated a project could bring 300 to 400 union construction jobs.

Locals who oppose data centers are resigned to trying to dampen the harmful effects through zoning regulations. But local power stops short of a ban, which only the state can impose.

"The only people who don't have issues with data centers are people who don't live anywhere near them," said Judy Penasik at a hearing in South Strabane Township, which borders the Stechlys' hometown.

In June, after more than six months of hearings, the supervisors approved data center restrictions, including a 1,500-foot setback from homes, a 30-acre minimum lot and noise and dust rules. More than 70 people packed the hearing.

Supervisor Jeff Bull told RealClearInvestigations that the ordinances can protect a neighborhood and nothing more. "What we can control is what gets built next to somebody's house, and the environmental impact of that," he said.

While state lawmakers push legislation to temporarily pause the construction of new data centers, none of these local and statewide measures deal with the rising costs that likely will be found on the gas bills of residents like the Stechlys.

"The energy issues are decided at the PUC in complex hearings involving many experts and consultants under a long-standing legal framework that is difficult for the individual to understand and to fight," Tufts' Kates-Garnick said.

Gasilov, the analyst, says local residents have very little say in these important decisions over rates at PUC meetings. "Almost nobody shows up to those," he said.

Tech Titans Pledge To Pay

Whether all these announced gas plants and data center campuses get built is another issue.

"In the merchant power business, about five percent of the stuff gets built," said Nesbitt of Arrowhead Economics, who was part of many of those projects. "Pipeline expansions, generation, all of it. Five percent."

Even if the percentage in the AI era is much higher, given the remarkably heavy investment in data centers, some projects will likely die, and ratepayers may still foot the bill. "If assets were approved, and the capital expenditure was placed into the rate base, stranded assets would impact residential customers," wrote Michael Strickland, an energy broker in Dallas. "They would be 'paying' for these stranded or unused assets."

An obvious solution to rising rates for consumers is for the data center developers to provide their own power. Nesbitt said some developers in Texas are "building strictly off-grid power to avoid regulation," although how this will interface with existing transmission capacity to ratepayers won't be clear until the construction is finished.

In March, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and other data center companies pledged at the White House to protect consumers from price increases tied to their energy needs. But Bowring of Monitoring Analytics said the pledge cannot be kept under grid operators' current rules. "There's only one way to do what hyperscalers agree is the right thing to do, and that is to run a separate auction for their own power," he said.

Conor Lamb, a former Democratic congressman who represented Washington County, said the pressure to make companies pay their own way "has not really been brought to bear on them all that effectively." The goal is "to get the onus back on the companies to power their data centers behind the meter so that they're not raising prices for you," he said.

At the Stechlys' home, the couple will grudgingly closely examine their next gas bill as they have the others. But they know what to expect. "Those charges never go down," Janet said. "I feel like I pay a lot for nothing."

Asked whether most people she knows understand their gas bill and why it may soon go up again, she replied: "I was a schoolteacher. So, of course I know how much they don't know. But I do think a lot of us retired folks know it's going to be worse than we expect."

Correction: A previous version of this article included a quotation incorrectly attributed to Columbia Gas of Pennsylvania spokesperson Lee Gierczynski. The quotation has been removed.

For the United States, the Autonomous Battlefield Must Have a Tether

Jack Schwencke — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

The Last Pilot Has Not Yet Been Born

In September 2024, I was standing next to the Air Force Research Laboratory's booth at the Air Force Association's annual Air, Space & Cyber Conference. Throughout the week, crowds large and small eddied around the nearside corner of the booth, where the nose of a full-scale model of Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) jutted out toward the walkway.

While in attendance, I made a habit of taking laps around the model, stealing glances, and getting a sense of the discussions abuzz within the constant, amorphous crowds observing what was promised to represent an evolution toward the future of air dominance. Standing there, I heard a man's plainly stated observation from over my shoulder that struck me. He was part of a small group comprised of servicemembers and industry alike: "And with that, the death knell for the combat air pilot. The last one may have already been born."

There was laughter and more chatter among the small group. It was clear to me that day that autonomy had arrived, in earnest. By the end of the conference, then Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall's signature could be seen scrawled across the airframe, as if to cosign that message for good measure.

The Autonomous Battlefield Needs a Tether

We enter an era that will increasingly be defined by the question of whether the last combat pilot, field operator, sailor, or submariner has already been born. For the foreseeable future, that question will remain rhetorical, as the preference for fighting with retained control over battlefield technologies imposes a requirement to keep a human "on," if not directly "in," the kill chain.

Much attention has been paid to the fundamental building blocks of autonomous technologies, the vehicle itself, and the algorithms. But just as the human brain makes sense of the world based on the data delivered by its senses, autonomous platforms will require sensing payloads to serve as the eyes, ears, and voice of the system. Among those will be systems that guarantee assured communications to the command and control (C2) center. We can think of these systems as a tether that keeps the human warfighter in, or on, the loop.

The preference for keeping a human on the loop is more than a normative one. Department of Defense Directive 3000.09 governs the design, development, and fielding of autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems.[i] That preference is often assumed to convey a prohibition on autonomous systems from engaging targets on their own, though the directive requires only that "[a]utonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems will be designed to allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force" (emphasis added).

As written, the directive does not prohibit autonomous systems from selecting their own target per se, only that they must permit commanders and operators appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force. A series of subclauses qualifies what counts as enabling an appropriate level of human judgment. Most notable is the stipulation that such systems "complete engagements within a timeframe and geographic area…consistent with commander and operator intentions," and that "[i]f unable to do so, the systems will terminate the engagement or obtain additional operator input before continuing the engagement."

Read closely, the directive's language can be understood as establishing a policy floor for autonomous systems. A system that finds itself operating outside mission parameters effectively has two paths back to compliance. It can terminate the engagement, self-terminating when it drifts beyond a pre-designated geographic area or exceeds the time set for the engagement. Or it can obtain additional operator input to continue the engagement. Only the first option is something the system can do on its own without additional human input. What the directive actually imposes, then, is an assured-termination standard rather than an assured-communications one.

The second path toward compliance is preferable, as it preserves the operational utility and flexibility within an engagement. But obtaining operator input assumes the ability to communicate with an operator. Thus, while assured communications is not an explicit standard, it is highly desirable, if not an operational necessity. A de facto requirement for assured communications has emerged. How that requirement is satisfied depends on the domain. Domains and mission sets impose their own constraints on establishing and maintaining that tether, but the operational value offered by the ability to maintain it is apparent.

The Market Is Building the Tether

A recent pattern of acquisitions, partnerships, and product developments shows that firms are building technologies that satisfy an assured communications requirement in the air domain for autonomy. This August, Joby, an air mobility company that has historically focused on developing a vertical take-off and landing air taxi, entered into an agreement to acquire Resonant Sciences, a provider of radio frequency mission systems, apertures, and resilient communications, for approximately $500 million.[ii] Notably, Joby intends to consolidate its defense activities under Resonant, which will continue operating under its current name and leadership. The parties characterized the acquisition as an opportunity to unify Joby's commercially derived vehicle and autonomy with Resonant's self-described "warfighter focused" expertise in RF, sensing, and low-observable aircraft design.[iii] This is not the first time Joby has reached for the enabling layer to pair with its proprietary vehicle and autonomy. A year prior, Joby announced a collaboration with L3Harris Technologies with the stated intention of "exploring opportunities to develop a new aircraft class for defense applications."

Joby reveals an observable dynamic among some autonomous vehicle providers entering the defense market. The autonomy, while not properly characterized as the "easy" part, is the component that non-traditional entrants are most commonly bringing to the table of defense acquisition. What each firm must go out and buy to field a viable product varies with what it already holds, but generally has followed a trend: make the software, buy (or acquire) the hardware. Joby, having built a commercially optimized platform and autonomy stack already, seeks to acquire the mission-enabling payloads and survivability expertise in preparation for its entrance into defense markets. The mission systems layer — apertures, electronic warfare suites, low-observable design, and assured communications — has no commercial analog produced to a military standard, and in the case of low observability and electronic warfare, no meaningful commercial market at all.

Firms specializing in assured communications are bringing to market components targeting the burgeoning autonomous platform market. BAE, for its part, introduced its Silver Link line of low-cost, conformal apertures in March of this year, marketing their release with a visual of a fleet of CCA-inspired UAV platforms networked together with line-of-sight data links.[iv] In June 2026, the German firm Rohde & Schwarz announced NEMACS (Networked Multipoint Array Communications System), a low-SWaP directional communications system for low-observable uncrewed platforms.[v] The NEMACS system combines an AESA antenna with a software-defined radio designed to support datalinks with a low probability of detection and interception to make assured communications more robust in contested environments. Rohde & Schwarz is reportedly teaming with Boeing to explore integration of NEMACS with its CCA-class UAV, the MQ-28 Ghost Bat.[vi]

A Concept Built on the Link

Current operational concepts for CCA focus on them acting as "missile trucks," with cueing coming from offboard of the platform, supplied through line-of-sight, and beyond-line-of-sight datalinks.[vii][viii][ix] That is a concept of operations built on the link. With CCA Increment 2 requirements taking shape, and ancillary opportunities abounding, the drive to provide high-end capabilities at lower costs is motivating defense firms to demonstrate what might be characterized as exquisite technologies on UAV platforms. Operational concepts that envision CCAs serving in differentiated roles would undoubtedly increase the budget allocated for mission systems components. Greater mission systems requirements could lead firms to pursue multi-function arrays, single apertures which, while at a higher price tag, would provide a suite of capabilities, thus offsetting their relatively higher costs by providing a host of capabilities. SRC has pursued this path with its Generic Multi-Function Array (GMFA), referred to as Payload B, which has been demonstrated aboard Boeing's MQ-28A Ghost Bat CCA during a February 2026 live fire demonstration.[x] In June 2026, SRC announced that GMFA development would continue, pursuing capabilities such as "airborne moving target indication, ground moving target indication, synthetic aperture radar, RF emulation, sense and avoid, airborne weather monitoring, and AMS GRA alignment."[xi] It is plausible that an airframer might utilize such an MFA to satisfy or bolster assured communications capabilities in addition to a menu of potential functionalities to include electronic warfare and organic sensing.

While CCA Increment 1 reached its June 2026 production awards with a clear mission in mind, so far, Increment 2 has no equivalent anchor. Its mission, cost target, and design vector remain ambiguous. In December 2024, service acquisition executive Andrew Hunter confirmed the Air Force had not yet set Increment 2 requirements, explicitly leaving decisions about payloads, and whether the aircraft would be more or less sophisticated than Increment 1 to the incoming Trump administration. The program proceeded under new leadership on deliberately agnostic terms, with nine "concept refinement" contracts for Increment 2.[xii] That award appears to have been a deferment of requirements definition. More recently, Air Force leadership indicated that requirements for Increment 2 are likely to focus on designs optimized for air-to-ground missions or that offer multirole capabilities in what is characterized as a "gentle evolution" of Increment 1 requirements.[xiii]

The Air Force has spent two years deliberately not writing Increment 2 requirements, and that deferral is defensible for genuine design variables, but not for assured communications. Based on the Increment 1 concept of operations, which established a reliance on datalinks for offboard targeting and C2, and the value of keeping autonomous platforms in the fight versus tolerating a floor of self-termination, assured communications should not be a design variable. While design vectors and cost targets may shape the characteristics of the apertures that provide assured communications, they will not impact whether those links are required. That requirement effectively lives in how the Air Force intends to fight, and it should be written into Increment 2 without foreclosing a single design decision still under consideration.

The Tether Should Be the Requirement

When Frank Kendall scrawled his name across the nose of the CCA in September 2024, he was, in effect, signing onto a vision of an Air Force increasingly defined by autonomous systems. Two years later, his description of autonomy remains consistent. For Kendall, confidence in the manned-unmanned teaming concept rests on assured command and control of these platforms across domains.

"The keys to all of these concepts that I lay out [in his book on autonomy] are going to be reliable, secure communications [with autonomous platforms] ... You can have default behaviors, you can give them mission orders, but at some level you don't ever want to lose control of them."[xiv]

A reading of Kendall's 2026 book, Lethal Autonomy: The Future of Warfare Whether We Like It or Not, underscores the point. Kendall tackles the challenges of autonomy across every domain, and in each, robust C2 concepts enabled by assured communications are presented as a critical building block of autonomous operations.

The recommendation follows. The Air Force should write an explicit assured communications requirement into CCA Increment 2, and it should do so before the concept refinement field narrows. Not because Directive 3000.09 compels it, the directive is satisfied by a system that self-terminates, but because the requirement preserves operational functionality and flexibility, and is already embedded in how the Air Force says it intends to fight.

Industry has reached that conclusion on its own. Joby did not spend half a billion dollars on an autonomy stack. It spent it on the apertures and communications that make one useful. Firms are building toward a requirement the services have not finished writing, and the last combat pilot may not have been born yet, but the systems that will determine that pilot's role are being designed now.

Jack Schwencke is a strategy analyst at BAE Systems Space & Mission Systems and is a student in Missouri State University's Defense and Strategic Studies program. BAE Systems competes in the market discussed in this article. The opinions expressed are his own.

notes:

[i] U.S. Department of Defense, DoD Directive 3000.09: Autonomy in Weapon Systems (Washington, DC: Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, January 25, 2023), https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Documents/DD/issuances/dodd/300009p.PDF.

[ii] Joby Aviation. "Joby Aviation to Scale Defense Business Through Acquisition of Resonant Sciences." Press release, August 11, 2026. https://ir.jobyaviation.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/189/joby-aviation-to-scale-defense-business-through-acquisition.

[iii] Joby Aviation and Max Afterburner, "Why Joby Plans to Acquire Resonant Sciences | JoeBen Bevirt Joins Micah North | Joby Recon," YouTube video, 15:53, August 24, 2026, at 3:53, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ip6gHj2lCE4.

[iv] BAE Systems, "BAE Systems Introduces Silver Link™ Conformal Antenna Aperture Solutions," March 2, 2026, https://www.baesystems.com/en/article/bae-systems-introduces-silver-link-conformal-antenna-aperture-solutions.

[v] Tommaso Massa, "Rohde & Schwarz NEMACS, the AESA Directional Datalink Enabling the Multi-Domain Combat Cloud," FW-MAG, July 16, 2026, https://www.fw-mag.com/shownews/1169/rohde-amp-schwarz-nemacs-the-aesa-directional-datalink-enabling-the-multi-domain-combat-cloud.

[vi] Boeing, "Boeing Expands German MQ-28 Ghost Bat Industry Team," news release, June 10, 2026, https://boeing.mediaroom.com/news-releases-statements?item=131676.

[vii] Barry Rosenberg, "The Autonomous CCA Wingmen of 2030 May Look Nothing like Today's Assumptions," Breaking Defense, July 10, 2026, https://breakingdefense.com/2026/07/the-autonomous-cca-wingmen-of-2030-may-look-nothing-like-todays-assumptions/. See for contemporary discussion of Increment 1 mission sets and contemplated missions for Increment 2.

[viii] Michael Marrow, "In First, Air Force Fires Live Shot off CCA Wingman Drone," Breaking Defense, July 15, 2026, https://breakingdefense.com/2026/07/in-first-air-force-fires-live-shot-off-cca-wingman-drone/. See for discussion of beyond-line-of-sight cueing of CCA.

[ix] Joseph Trevithick, "Third Marine XQ-58 Valkyrie Flight Test Uses Link 16 for Control," The War Zone, September 26, 2024, https://www.twz.com/air/third-marine-xq-58-valkyrie-flight-test-uses-link-16-for-control. See for reference of CCA platforms using datalinks for off-board data relay.

[x] SRC, "GMFA Capabilities Showcased in MQ-28 Live Fire Demonstration," news release, February 18, 2026, https://www.srcinc.com/news-and-events/press/2026/20260218-src-gmfa-mq-28-live-fire-demo.html.

[xi] SRC, "SRC Announces Development of 'Gen 3 Multi-Function Array' within Its Ghost Mantis Family of Technologies," news release, June 15, 2026, https://www.srcinc.com/news-and-events/press/2026/20260615-src-ghost-mantis-gen-3-multi-function-array.html

[xii] John A. Tirpak, "CCA Increment 2 Requirements Left for New Air Force Leadership to Choose," Air & Space Forces Magazine, December 10, 2024, https://www.airandspaceforces.com/new-air-force-leadership-cca-increment-2-requirements/.

[xiii] Steve Trimble, "Second-Generation U.S. Autonomous Fighters May Look like the First," Aviation Week, July 30, 2026, https://aviationweek.com/defense/budget-policy-operations/second-generation-us-autonomous-fighters-may-look-first.

[xiv] Frank Kendall, "Autonomy and AI Assessment with Honorable Frank Kendall," interview by David A. Deptula, Aerospace Nation, Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, July 16, 2026, YouTube video, 25:32, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpULDEnsj4o&t=1532s.

The U.S.-Canada Trade War Nobody Asked For

David Clement — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

At 12:01 a.m. on Sept. 8, Canada matched President Trump's tariffs "dollar for dollar" by imposing 15-50% duties on more than 700 American-made products, including steel, cement, dairy, and electronics. This mirrors the 50% tariff that the U.S. slapped on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods on Aug. 22. And in response? Trump announced overnight a ban on the import of various Canadian alcohol products, some dairy, and motorcycles, effective Sept. 29.

Trump's move invokes the rarely used Section 338 of the 1930 Tariff Act, and the same order now threatens to ban Canadian products from federal contracts entirely. As if there weren't enough fuel in the fire, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent joked that Canada could "take their two submarines (in West Edmonton Mall) and sic them on us." In other circumstances, specifically one in which consumers on both sides of the border weren't paying for it, this would be rather hilarious.

So what happens next? Well, what we do know is that construction lawyers are already advising clients on infrastructure projects to shorten their bid validity windows and rewrite change order clauses, because a 50% tariff can make an estimate entirely obsolete before any concrete is ever poured. New York City, which pulls upwards of 20% of its power from Canada, is now in the crosshairs as the saber-rattling intensifies over who can do the most harm to the other.

But none of this was actually decided by those who have to buy or sell these goods on either side of the border, and when polled, both Canadians and Americans think the trade war is silly and unnecessary.

A new Build Canada Survey of nearly 1,700 Canadians shows that almost 60% of Canadians view a trade war tax increase of just $500 "unacceptable" as the price of standing firm against Donald Trump's trade whims. That number increases to 68% when asked about the potential job losses associated with "standing firm." In the U.S., a Reuters/Ipsos poll shows the same trend, with a majority of Americans opposing additional tariffs on Canada.

Here we have two publics who clearly want their governments to de-escalate, and yet both governments keep finding ways not to.

Ottawa is calling their response "Team Canada" and framing it as unity against an unfair neighbor, and that instinct is understandable, albeit misguided. But you cannot address the Canadian people, calling Trump's tariffs a "tax paid for by Americans," and then implement the same at home without the same critique. Matching bad policy enacted by Donald Trump with a Canadian-made version is incredibly hypocritical and, in fact, makes the economic hardship endured from the trade war worse. Canada cannot brace for the economic storm Trump created by making it bigger.

Oddly enough, there is a fairly straightforward solution here, which comes from the opposition in Canada. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who is no friend of Donald Trump, has asked Ottawa to publish its own economic analysis of what these counter-tariffs will cost Canadian consumers. University of Calgary economist Trevor Tombe has already estimated that the toll will be around $4 billion, with lower-income households carrying the heaviest burden. If Canada's retaliatory tariffs have a regressive cost, obviously, the same economic truth would hold true south of the border, because the reality of tariffs doesn't stop because of some line on a map. Washington and the Trump administration should face the same exact pressure to cost out every tariff it announces, because that would allow voters to actually evaluate, on a cost-benefit basis, whether all of this turmoil is worth it.

"Team Canada" and "America First" might be catchy slogans, but they survive on vagueness. The public's willingness to go along for this ride quickly fades when those slogans are replaced by real costs and real job losses. The current back-and-forth ends up being nothing more than an exercise in national pride that ignores the fact that someone always loses when they face artificially higher prices at the checkout.

The Anti-Nuclear Playbook Comes for Data Centers

Duggan Flanakin — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Half a century ago, raw emotion drove an anti-nuclear energy campaign that still stifles clean energy development in the U.S. Today, that same fear-driven playbook is being deployed in a campaign to shut down data centers.

Between 1970 and 1990, America built 95 nuclear power plants that still supply nearly a fifth of the nation's electricity, but the minor incident at Three Mile Island led to cancellation of another 67 planned builds.

The U.S. did not build another nuclear powerplant between 1996 and 2016. Even today, efforts to revitalize the nation's nuclear power industry face skepticism and legacy regulatory roadblocks.

Small modular reactors were first tested decades ago and could already be powering data centers had anti-nuclear fearmongering not stopped the Integral Fast Reactor program in 1994.

Many Americans today are rightly riled up about data centers robbing communities of precious drinking water resources and raising their electric bills. Others ask whether data centers are part of a vast secret conspiracy to take away their jobs, their freedom, and perhaps even their lives.

Goldman Sachs estimated that U.S. data center power demand could grow from 31 gigawatts in 2025 to 66 gigawatts in 2027. The push for an all-electric society has helped cause demand to rise faster than the nation can build new capacity. When demand exceeds supply, prices rise.

Neither the media nor the political establishment had prepared Americans for these shocking developments - so it is no wonder that data centers have become a political football.

The growing divide today is between the anti-nuclear playbook - now repurposed in ways that risk crippling the American economy - and the recognition that some data centers have disrupted lives, an unacceptable trade-off no matter how badly they are needed.

Fuel for the anti-data center fire stems from real-life stories of an Oregon community that found nearby Google data centers were using a quarter of their water supply. Data centers connected to the power grid also tend to drive up electricity costs, according to Consumer Reports. These real-life impacts have even the strongest supporters of the American Dream up in arms.

Many data center developers have failed to explain that every time we look up a movie showtime, tap a card at checkout, back up a video or ask Google a question we can thank a data center for making those tasks easy. They have also failed to fully address citizen concerns.

President Trump pushed the data center industry into signing the Ratepayer Protection Pledge at the White House back in March. But that commitment was voluntary - and people too often tricked by pledges not followed through on remain skeptical.

The Chinese government and its proxies, which thrive on exploiting fear, are funding a national campaign against data centers to slow the growth of the U.S. economy.

A May report from the Bitcoin Policy Institute traced three interlocking vectors that demonstrate China's targeting of American AI data centers.

These include Chinese and Russian state media propaganda; a U.S.-based NGO network bankrolled by expatriate Neville Roy Singham; and billions in foreign dark money from such sources as Switzerland's Hansjörg Wyss and the Oak Foundation, funded by British billionaire Alan Parker.

Lead author Sam Lyman says the choice facing America is not between AI or no AI but between American AI or Chinese AI - just as it is between continued Chinese dominance over critical minerals or an America-first mining and processing renaissance.

The Trump Administration's push for nuclear energy both for the grid and for stand-alone units to power cloud and hyperscale data centers, military facilities, and remote industrial sites is part of a national strategy to expand electric generation without injuring ratepayers - an effort that had quietly begun during his first term.

After years of neglect, just before leaving office President Biden issued Executive Order 14141 (Advancing U.S. Leadership in AI Infrastructure), which authorized leasing federal sites for gigawatt-scale data centers "with clean energy resources" to prevent public rate increases.

At the signing ceremony for the Ratepayer Protection Pledge, many of the nation's largest AI and technology companies agreed to cover the costs of all new power generation for their facilities so as not to negatively impact ratepayers.

White House AI and Crypto advisor David Sacks contrasted this "common sense" approach over Bernie Sanders' demand for a total ban on new data centers, which he said would halt a nationwide construction boom, stunt wage and job growth for blue-collar workers, and effectively cede the future to the Chinese.

Even better, Sacks said that, by allowing AI companies to pay for grid upgrades and sell excess power back to the grid, ratepayers might even see lower bills.

The only problem is that small modular reactors are just now undergoing testing and still have to work their way through a still-labyrinthine permitting process - the legacy of decades of anti-nuclear opposition.

As new data centers begin to generate their own off-grid electricity, the feared escalation of electricity bills should subside. But what about water use?

Most big data centers rely on water-based cooling towers or evaporative chillers to prevent server overheating and equipment failure. While many are using closed-loop water cooling in which the same water circulates in sealed pipes or coils that prevent evaporation, a technique that cuts water use by up to 70%, the public still sees them as stealing their drinking water.

Direct-to-chip cooling, which pipes cold liquid directly to servers, and immersion cooling, which submerges entire servers in a bath of non-conductive fluid, also minimize water use.

Norway is siting data centers near cold-water rivers and fjords, and in cold climates outside air can also keep servers running smoothly. Elon Musk is moving data centers into orbit, connecting them via satellite and Starlink, and requiring no cooling waters. SpaceX and Nvidia are planning to launch the first orbiting data center by 2028.

The trouble is that, with fast-emerging technology, any delay can result in a catastrophic loss of advantage.

Moratoriums, like that issued by New York Governor Kathy Hochul, and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro's move to strip data center projects from his state's fast-track program (which he created in November 2024), can turn into long-term prohibitions for a short-term problem.

Manhattan Institute senior fellow Shawn Regan contrasts the actions of these governors with that of Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who is in a dogfight reelection campaign. Texas, he says, mostly refined its existing process "to better sort through a chaotic data-center development pipeline without abandoning growth."

Texas requires an audit for "Batch Zero" projects under consideration for connection to the state's grid. Developers must disclose expected electricity and water use, plans for on-site generation, cooling systems, tax incentives, and measures to mitigate noise, traffic, and other local impacts.

The contrast could not be clearer. The same fear-based politics that once stalled nuclear power, amplified today by "No Kings" style protests (funded by Singham NGOs), has left some politicians throwing in with the Chinese. Those who agree with President Trump's vision for American hegemony do not want to throw the baby out with the bathwater but need a little help from tech giants who many fear do not serve the public interest.

Duggan Flanakin is a senior policy analyst at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow who writes on a wide variety of public policy issues.

From Tehran to Tokyo: How American Standoff Warfare Validates China's Taiwan Quarantine

Stephen D. Cook — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Six months into Operation Epic Fury, the United States has executed a telling strategic pivot in the Middle East. While the American military has demonstrated unparalleled capability in striking targets across Iranian territory since February 2026, Tehran absorbed the punishment without capitulating or relinquishing its regional proxy network. Consequently, Washington transitioned its primary effort from direct strikes to a campaign of comprehensive economic attrition targeting oil smuggling, international swap lines, and illicit cash transfers. Although pragmatically sound for containing a localized conflict, this shift broadcasts a stark reality to global observers. The United States unquestionably possesses the combat power to achieve decisive conventional victory, but acute political reluctance to commit ground forces takes a critical element of that capability completely off the table. By ruling out the only combat arm capable of forcibly securing territory or toppling an entrenched regime, American strategy relies heavily on standoff air and missile campaigns. When these campaigns inevitably reach diminishing returns against a resilient adversary, policymakers default to financial statecraft. While this hesitation is a rational calculation for a global superpower balancing competing commitments, it becomes a strategic vulnerability when aggressive adversaries and anxious Indo-Pacific allies realize Washington views economic warfare as preferable to fully committing its military arsenal.

Nowhere is this signal being analyzed more closely than in Beijing and Tokyo. For years, Western defense planners have anticipated a potential Chinese move against Taiwan through the lens of a massive amphibious invasion. Such an operation would be the most complex maritime assault in human history, carrying catastrophic risks for the People's Liberation Army and the survival of the Chinese Communist Party. A failed invasion could unravel the regime. However, Chinese strategists observing the American experience in Iran are identifying a different, highly effective path to their objective. They are recognizing that the United States possesses the power to fight anywhere but lacks the domestic appetite to sustain high-casualty campaigns against resilient actors. This assessment fundamentally alters the preferred course of action for the Chinese military. Instead of risking a kinetic invasion that would force a direct American military response, Beijing is increasingly likely to rely on a gray-zone customs quarantine. The danger lies in the totality of these discrete steps, which act as a pre-conflict campaign designed to weaken Taiwan.

This strategy avoids utilizing the People's Liberation Army Navy to declare a formal blockade, an action which international maritime law considers an unequivocal act of war. Instead, China would deploy its massive, highly capable Coast Guard and its sprawling maritime militia network. Beijing would formally assert domestic legal jurisdiction over the air and sea space surrounding Taiwan, mandating that all inbound commercial vessels and cargo flights submit to rigorous customs inspections. Under this specific scenario, essential civilian goods like basic food commodities and medical supplies might be allowed to pass, enabling Beijing to confidently claim to the international community that it is merely enforcing domestic law and imposing no humanitarian hardship. Meanwhile, strategic materials, vital energy shipments, and advanced technology manufacturing components would be systematically halted. Taiwan would be slowly strangled economically and politically without a single kinetic shot being fired by regular military forces. This is not conceptual. In August 2022, China deployed a large patrol vessel named the Haixun 06 to conduct operations in the Taiwan Strait, essentially mapping out the operational logistics of such a quarantine.

The asymmetric advantage of this approach lies in how it manipulates the burden of escalation. If China relies strictly on coast guard vessels and customs enforcement, the United States is placed in an impossible position. To break the quarantine, American or allied naval vessels would have to fire the first shots against Chinese law enforcement ships. Washington would have to make the conscious decision to initiate a major power war over customs inspections. Given the current political climate and the demonstrated aversion to sustained kinetic conflict in the Middle East, Beijing wagers that the United States will refuse to fire that first shot. If the United States declines to escalate militarily, it will likely default to the exact strategy it is currently employing against Iran. Washington would attempt to assemble a coalition to impose sweeping financial sanctions, export controls, and economic isolation upon the Chinese state.

This is the exact trap Beijing is designing. The Chinese economy is vastly larger, deeply integrated into global supply chains, and far more resilient than the Iranian economy. A campaign of economic warfare would undoubtedly inflict severe pain on China, but it would also trigger a global depression. A full shooting war over Taiwan would, by Bloomberg Economics' estimate, wipe out about $10 trillion in global output in the first year—more than twice the loss from the 2008 financial crisis. A customs quarantine is not that war. It is designed to stay below it. That is what makes it useful to Beijing. The same models put a year-long blockade in a lower but still brutal range: several percent of global GDP, with Taiwan's economy contracting by more than 10 percent and China's by nearly as much. The mechanism that turns a "law-enforcement" cordon into a systemic shock is not the first missile. It is the chip. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) still produces more than ninety percent of the world's most advanced logic semiconductors, one hundred miles east of the mainland of China. If Chinese coast guard vessels halt outbound cargo while leaving rice and medicine moving, Beijing can claim humanitarian restraint and still put the Western technology base on a clock measured in weeks, not years. The political trap is therefore tighter than the invasion scenario. Washington would be asked to fire first, and to accept depression-level disruption, over inspections rather than over beaches.

This creates a terrifying asymmetric vulnerability. While American policymakers discuss reshoring critical industries, the reality is that replicating the highly specialized ecosystems found in places like Hsinchu Science Park in northern Taiwan will take decades. The United States and its allies cannot simply sanction their way out of a semiconductor deficit. Because heavy naval strike groups cannot break a non-kinetic commercial cordon without firing first and triggering this exact economic collapse, the joint force must bypass traditional power projection and instead deploy persistent, low-signature capabilities, such as autonomous maritime drones and distributed sensor networks, while investing heavily in regional maritime partnerships and intelligence cooperation. Without a unified, intergovernmental posture that champions transparency and shares real-time intelligence among democratic partners, Beijing will continue to isolate Taipei.

The implications of this shifting calculus extend far beyond the Taiwan Strait. The nation most acutely aware of this changing dynamic is Japan. Tokyo recognizes that its own security is inextricably linked to the survival of Taiwan and the credibility of the American security umbrella. Japan hosts the largest concentration of United States military forces in the Indo-Pacific region. Any American military response to a Taiwan contingency would necessarily involve bases on Japanese soil, making Japan an immediate party to the conflict. The political establishment in Tokyo has watched the American pivot in the Middle East with deep unease. Japanese leaders are rapidly internalizing the reality that they cannot rely entirely on American kinetic intervention to deter a Chinese gray-zone campaign. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has already elevated the rhetoric, declaring that a Chinese assault on Taiwan would constitute a survival-threatening situation for the Japanese state. This legal and political designation is vital because it clears the statutory path for Japan to exercise its right to collective self-defense—the legal framework that allows Japan to assist allies in defense against armed attacks, as established by the 2015 Legislation for Peace and Security. Yet, this legal threshold is highly vulnerable to gray-zone exploitation. As Yoshihiro Makino, a senior staff writer for The Asahi Shimbun in Tokyo, told me in a recent interview, a quarantine does not easily trigger this framework. "I think it would be extremely difficult to categorize Chinese customs inspections or maritime quarantine operations as the use of force," Makino assesses. Instead, Japanese responses would likely fall under maritime security operations, which he notes are closer in nature to police activities and prohibit the unrestricted use of force or the exercise of collective self-defense with American forces.

The Japanese government is executing a historic defense awakening, accelerating its pursuit of military autonomy and stand-off capabilities. Recognizing that the United States might hesitate to engage in a protracted naval war, Japan is surging its defense spending. This includes deploying upgraded Type 12 surface-to-ship missiles and planning the procurement of American Tomahawk cruise missiles to close the capability gap with China. However, the interconnected nature of these conflicts is already undermining that strategy. Because the United States consumed a vast number of Tomahawks during the kinetic phase of operations in Iran, Makino says that "Defense Secretary Hegseth has told Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi that exports of Tomahawks are expected to be delayed." This shortfall exacerbates existing political paralysis in Tokyo. According to Makino, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party lacks clear rules of engagement for a Taiwan contingency and actively avoids establishing them, fearing that a definitive stance would split the party and deeply fracture public opinion. Without consensus on whether to strictly defend Japanese territory or proactively support Taiwan, Tokyo remains strategically constrained. Japan is aggressively decoupling its critical supply chains from Chinese influence and deepening its economic and technological integration with Taiwan, but hardware and supply chains cannot compensate for a lack of political resolve.

Actions and inactions in the Persian Gulf resonate directly in the East China Sea. By signaling a preference for economic warfare over sustained military confrontation, the United States has inadvertently provided Beijing with a tested roadmap for isolating Taiwan. The traditional American deterrence strategy, which relied heavily on the threat of overwhelming kinetic retaliation, is losing its potency against a patient adversary willing to exploit the gray space between peace and war.

Yet, this strategic paralysis is not irreversible. The window to alter Beijing's calculus remains open, but it requires Washington and Tokyo to align their posture against the threat as it actually exists. Deterring a customs quarantine requires different tools than deterring an amphibious landing. Carrier strike groups cannot break a commercial cordon without firing the first shot and detonating the economic crisis Beijing is counting on. The useful instruments sit below that threshold and have to be in place before the first inspection team boards a ship.

That means three concrete commitments. First, a standing allied maritime escort mission—Japan Coast Guard, U.S. Coast Guard, and willing partners—authorized in advance to accompany commercial traffic to Taiwan and to treat obstruction of those escorts as the tripwire, not the inspection itself. Second, pre-negotiated counter-leverage: distant interdiction plans at chokepoints such as the Strait of Malacca aimed at Chinese state-owned energy cargoes, so Beijing is not the only actor that can inspect ships. Third, an industrial hedge that does not pretend Arizona will replace Hsinchu in a crisis: bonded stockpiles of leading-edge processing chips, lithography consumables, and Taiwan-bound energy cargoes held outside the Strait, large enough to keep allied industry running through the opening months of a cordon.

None of those tools will matter if Tokyo concludes that Washington's preferred war is the one fought from Guam. Makino notes that a growing number of Japanese security experts fear the U.S. Air Force and Navy might initially withdraw to the Second Island Chain—or even a "2.5 Island Chain"—leaving the Self-Defense Forces and remaining U.S. ground elements to absorb Chinese missile fire before American air and naval power returns for a decisive engagement. "The United States should first make clear what kind of defense strategy it has and demonstrate a firm commitment to the defense of Japan," Makino warns. Otherwise, Japan drifts toward the safest legal position available: no attack on China unless Japanese territory is hit. That posture is rational under a quarantine, and it is exactly the outcome Beijing is trying to produce. The defense of Taiwan will not be decided on the beaches during a massive invasion. It will be decided in the customs logs, the shipping lanes, and whether the coalition is willing to treat a boarding as the act that starts the clock.

Stephen D. Cook is a retired U.S. Army Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel with 25 years of service. A combat veteran decorated for both heroism and valor, he is the author of the field manuals When We're Finished and Choose the Heavier Ruck, and the techno-thriller precision-strike trilogy leading with In the Shadows of the Sky. His work explores the intersection of elite military decision-making, intuition, and disruptive leadership. He is based in St. Augustine, Florida.

Trump's Bold Choice for FDA Commissioner Will Deliver for Americans

Bobby Jindal, Newt Gingrich — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

President Donald Trump has made the Food and Drug Administration a centerpiece of his agenda.

The agency is at the heart of key policy initiatives: lower costs for Americans, bring back American manufacturing, and make America healthy again.

That is why it's been great to see President Trump choose such a qualified, well-suited candidate as Dr. Heidi Overton to lead the agency.

We've gotten to know Dr. Overton professionally and personally for several years now and can attest that she's the right leader at the right time for the FDA.

Dr. Overton has been at the White House helping lead the president's health initiatives from her perch as a deputy on the Domestic Policy Council. She has been involved in countless key decisions and understands how to navigate the often convoluted ways of the federal government.

Her nomination comes at a key time for the FDA as it undertakes key initiatives. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently laid out the high stakes facing our policymakers. The U.S. is losing ground in its role as a leader in clinical research and medical innovation. A recent study found that China now conducts more early-stage clinical trials than the United States. In 2025, Chinese companies accounted for nearly half of global pharmaceutical licensing deal activity. Those trends should concern every American.

This is why the Trump administration launched Operation Trialblazer, an effort to eliminate unnecessary regulatory burden and shorten the time from drug identification to first-in-human study.

Meanwhile, Americans continue to suffer the hangover of Joe Biden's inflation crisis, with healthcare costs a large driver behind cost-of-living concerns. The FDA is working to alleviate these prices by increasing the number of over-the-counter drugs as well as the availability of biosimilar generics.

One estimate projected biosimilar competition would deliver $180 billion in savings for Americans from 2023 through 2027.

We want to make America healthy again. The FDA has been at the forefront of this MAHA agenda. It has taken steps to get artificial dyes out of food, conducted a review focused on whether there are chemical contaminants in infant formula, and is addressing the health risks of ultra-processed foods.

The Senate should confirm Dr. Overton swiftly, as permanent leadership at the FDA is necessary to secure lasting change in the system.

Her background makes her the ideal person to tackle these key matters facing the nation.

After earning her medical degree from the University of New Mexico, Overton did two years of surgical residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital, working in inner-city Baltimore to treat both some of the most complex patients in the world and the needs of a local community disproportionately burdened by chronic disease and trauma.

While there, Dr. Overton took advantage of the world-class training in public health and left Hopkins with a Ph.D. in Clinical Investigation, helping write landmark papers on the over-prescribing patterns that contributed to the opioid crisis and publishing new prescribing guidelines for surgeons.

Dr. Overton is the right person for the job. Under her leadership, we expect to see an FDA that plays a central role in reasserting America's status as the global leader in drug development. We will see a reform agenda to bring about faster approvals for medicines and ensure our food meets the standard of the world's wealthiest nation.

Dr. Overton's record of service and achievement is exactly what we need at the FDA during this critical time for the nation. We wholeheartedly endorse her nomination to the FDA.

John Fetterman Is A Predictable Chaos Agent

Oliver Bateman — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

In a postindustrial decay shot worthy of the Levi's advertisement that helped put him on the map 16 years ago, John Fetterman stood in front of the Mon Valley Works last Wednesday night and told a Dallas arena full of Republicans who he was. "Yes, I'm a Democrat. Why am I here talking to you today? Because, well, I'm a common-sense Democrat," he said in a prerecorded video that introduced U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick to the Republican midterm convention. "I'm always going to stand with America. I'm always going to reject the extremes and socialism and that anti-American way of life." The Pennsylvania delegation stood and applauded. Within hours he had issued a statement calling himself "a lifelong Democrat who votes overwhelmingly with my party" and promising to remain "the 51st vote that I ran on" if the Senate flips in November.

A New York Times/Philadelphia Inquirer/Siena poll of registered Pennsylvania voters released Aug. 25 found 73% of Republicans view Fetterman favorably, against 22% of Democrats, and 63 percent of Democrats view him unfavorably. Two years earlier those figures were flipped, with 74% of Democrats favorable and 64% of Republicans unfavorable. Republicans now like the hulking Rust Belt valor borrower more than they like businessman-chic McCormick, who sits at 63% with his own party. A Quinnipiac survey in July found 52% of all Pennsylvania voters think he should leave the Democratic Party, including 57% of Democrats.

The last Pennsylvania senator who read polling like that and acted on it was Arlen Specter. Following a long career in the moderate wing of the GOP, Specter switched from Republican to Democrat on April 28, 2009 after a Rasmussen poll showed him trailing Pat Toomey 51 to 30 in the Republican primary. "The prospects for winning a Republican primary are bleak," he told reporters, adding that he was "not prepared to have my 29-year record in the United States Senate decided by the Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate."

The switch gave Democrats their path to a filibuster-proof 60 votes but only gave Specter a little over a year. Democratic U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak beat him in the May 2010 primary, and Toomey proceeded to beat Sestak to claim the seat that fall. Unfortunately for Specter, Democratic primary voters did not want a political lifer who had switched to save his job.

Fetterman, by contrast, already has the support of the voters he would gain by changing his affiliation. Seventy-seven percent of Pennsylvania Republicans approved of his job performance in Quinnipiac's June survey, and independents in the Siena poll rate him higher now than they did in 2024. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said in July that he and other Republicans have talked with Fetterman about "the challenges he faces in his caucus" and would welcome him. Fetterman and McCormick launched a joint fundraising committee called Common Ground PA. However, some delegates in Dallas told Newsweek they do not need him to change his registration. After all, a man who can stand in front of a steel mill and denounce socialism to a Republican convention while clinging to his Democratic committee assignments is a uniquely valuable commodity in the hyper-partisan world of 2026.

My maternal uncle's take on the U.S. Senator is "You never know what he'll do next," which he clearly intends as a compliment. I wrote last year that other relatives and neighbors love Fetterman's loose-cannon nature and ostensible unpredictability — Fettermania was running wild among them — and that hasn't changed.

Of course, neither has Fetterman. He's been predictably unpredictable throughout his career, something the people that he served as mayor of Braddock know all too well. I spent Community Day there back in August alongside the documentary filmmaker Tony Buba, who has known Fetterman for 20 years, and talked with Jim Phillips, who has run the event since 2014. Phillips told me the mayor never helped him with it, noting that Fetterman even showed up one year with his own ice cream truck and parked it a few blocks outside the boundary of an event where every other vendor had registered and paid the $50 fee. If nothing else, the big man could hold a king-sized grudge over the most trivial of slights.

And he has nursed many other irrational grudges, both before and after the stroke that badly limited him during his 2022 senate campaign. In November 2010 a surveillance camera caught the mayor rearranging the letters on the marquee of Club 804, a bar he considered a nuisance, so that "will reopen soon" read "We will not be reopening soon." Buba's summary to WHYY in 2022 was that Fetterman "doesn't take criticism well" and that in his speeches "there's never a 'we.' It's always a 'me' or 'I.'"

Israel is Fetterman's pet cause, and in July he drew a do-not-cross line regarding support for the nation: if the party "just makes it official as the anti-Israel party, that's when I would leave." Pet peeves include many of his fellow Democrats. Ostensibly to promote bipartisan cooperation, he voted to confirm Pam Bondi as attorney general, which former U.S. Rep. Conor Lamb told the Washington Post was where his own break with the senator began. In a May Washington Post op-ed, Fetterman described himself as "pro-choice, pro-weed, pro-LGBT, pro-SNAP, pro-labor and even pro-rib-eye over bio slop" but neglected to note he wasn't big on playing nice with his own team.

The same fixity of character occasionally produces the kind of boorish comedy my relatives enjoy, delivered in the same awkward, wooden way Fetterman delivers everything. In June 2023 he met Joe Biden on the tarmac in Philadelphia to talk about the collapsed stretch of Interstate 95 wearing a Carhartt hoodie and gym shorts. This June, asked by a CNN reporter about Graham Platner, the Bernie Sanders-backed Maine Senate candidate who had allegedly been using the messaging app Kik to talk to various women he was interested in, Fetterman answered, "Oh, P-Hustle? P-Hustle? Yeah, he's around. Apparently we didn't match up on Kik." Platner withdrew from the race a month later.

I suppose my uncle is right in one sense. Nobody knew Fetterman would make a video for the midterm RNC until Axios reported it last week. But everyone who had been following Fetterman closely could guess the broad outlines of what the video would say, and most of us expected he would still be a Democrat come Thursday morning. With Fetterman, you come to expect the unexpected. Then it arrives, and it is exactly what you thought it would be, just like the man himself.

New Jersey Doesn't Care About Welfare Fraud - Like Most Blue States

Trevor Carlsen, Amelia Kuntzman — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

New Jersey has a fraud problem. And not just in its voter rolls.

By now, everyone in America knows that New Jersey just found 6,600 noncitizens who were illegally registered to vote. About 400 of them illegally cast ballots. But New Jersey has an even worse fraud problem in its welfare programs. New findings from our organization prove it.

Using the state's open public records act, we asked New Jersey a simple question: How often does it make sure its Medicaid providers are legitimate? We received the answer in August, and it's disturbing. New Jersey is required by federal law to check, or "revalidate," its 106,982 Medicaid providers once every five years - at least.

This mandate exists to prevent bad actors from bilking the taxpayer-funded program. If the government doesn't check regularly, Medicaid providers can bill taxpayers too much - or for services they never even provided. The danger is real. Medicaid fraud and improper payments are expected to cost taxpayers $2 trillion over the next decade.

But New Jersey is failing at this basic job. The state admitted that it hasn't revalidated a third of providers in the past five years - a blatant violation of federal law. Not only that, but it admitted that one Medicaid provider hasn't been checked in more than 12 years. The state said about 200 providers could be in a similar boat.

This is an invitation to fraud on a massive scale. The Trump administration has spent the past 18 months proving that huge numbers of Medicaid providers are fraudulent. In recent months, the federal government has charged nearly 300 people with over $500 million in false Medicaid claims. The Trump administration has cut funding to about 800 hospices and home health agencies suspected of fraud, usually in Medicaid.

But New Jersey can't be bothered to help. The state is failing to look into Medicaid providers on a regular basis. Forget the law.

For the record, New Jersey is also failing to police fraud and abuse among Medicaid recipients. Just before the pandemic, the state government picked a random sample of people on Medicaid and checked whether they were actually eligible for this taxpayer handout. The shocking finding: Less than half of New Jersey's Medicaid recipients were correctly deemed eligible. Over 50% were completely ineligible, placed in the wrong assistance category, or contained some other type of error.

That was back in early 2020. Since then, there still hasn't been a reliable audit of New Jersey's Medicaid program. But does anyone think the situation has improved? During the pandemic, New Jersey quickly added over 400,000 people to Medicaid, for a total of nearly 2.3 million. In recent years, states have shown close to zero concern for ensuring that Medicaid goes to the people who need it.

Add it all up, and the conclusion is clear: New Jersey is turning a blind eye to welfare fraud. And the Garden State is hardly alone. Other blue states are bad offenders, too. Take California, where a pre-pandemic federal audit found over half of the Medicaid beneficiaries reviewed weren't eligible.

As for provider revalidations, our organization has asked every state for the same data as New Jersey. New York keeps saying it will be transparent, but since it received our request on March 30 of this year, it has repeatedly asked for more time, using boilerplate language that doesn't give us confidence.

Meanwhile, California denied our records request, while trying to charge us more than $180,000 for a similar request for Medicaid data two years ago. Gov. Gavin Newsom just signed the "Stop Nick Shirley Act," effectively shielding the state from oversight and accountability by citizen journalists. What's he hiding?

Michigan only looked at about 10% of its providers last year. Hawaii looked at fewer than 1% of its providers last year. They aren't even close to fully complying with federal law. Whether it's New Jersey, New York, or anywhere else, why do so many states seem to care so little about protecting taxpayers and preventing fraud?

Regardless, the Trump administration is putting them on notice. The White House's Anti-Fraud task force is withholding federal funding from states that aren't doing enough to fight fraud. Based on our findings, New Jersey should be very worried. Gov. Mikie Sherrill and state lawmakers may want to start taking welfare fraud seriously - before the federal government takes away funding.

Other blue states should take action, too, from New York to California. They've let welfare fraud fester for far too long. It's long past time they were held accountable.

Waste of the Day: Homeland Savings Questioned

Jeremy Portnoy — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

The Department of Homeland Security claimed to have saved $10.5 billion through cost-cutting measures led by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency. A new audit by the Government Accountability Office argues that less than 1% of that amount was actually saved.

Key facts: Most of DHS' reported savings came from cutting 30 information technology contracts that could have cost up to $10 billion over the next 10 years.

However, DHS still needs IT to function. Because the contracts were cut, the General Services Administration had to increase its spending on IT and share the services with DHS, entirely offsetting the savings.

"While these terminations will affect how DHS purchases some information technology services going forward, it is unknown what future impact they will have on costs going forward, if any," the GAO wrote.

There were other costs that were axed while contractors were still working on them. DHS canceled $249 million worth of future work, but still had to pay $157 million for work that had already begun. The difference — $92 million — is the only concrete savings DHS produced, according to the GAO.

Homeland Security chose not to comment on the GAO's report.

Background: DOGE successfully put a spotlight on government waste and fraud, but the $215 billion in savings it claimed to produce has been the subject of debate.

Open the Books' auditors were only able to independently verify roughly one third of DOGE's reported savings as of May 2025. Politico reported in August 2025 that nearly all of DOGE's savings had been reallocated to other contracts instead of being passed on to taxpayers.

Summary: Cutting contracts only saves taxpayers money and helps reduce the size of the federal deficit if the money is returned to the Treasury instead of reallocated to similar contracts.

The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com.

Higher Education Must Overcome Comforting Delusions

Peter Berkowitz — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

It is comforting to suppose that the resentment and anger we provoke arise from misunderstandings on the part of others. We like to believe that if only those who shun, reproach, or despise us grasped our good intentions, steadfast efforts, and harsh circumstances, their hostility would rapidly dissipate and their hearts would swell with admiration for all we endure and accomplish.

On occasion we are misunderstood. But to assume that we incur disapproval and censure because of erroneous perceptions - and not owing to fair assessment of our words and actions - thwarts self-examination. It also spurs disregard of self-correction and self-improvement in favor of manipulating appearances and managing impressions.

In recent years, colleges and universities have indulged in such blame-shifting and image-burnishing. If only the public understood the academic requirements and political necessities that drive their decision-making, professors and administrators tell themselves - and one another and their boards - the rising tide of public opposition to higher education would abate.

The public increasingly sees through the righteous image that American higher education wishes to project. Professors and administrators say that they curtail only injurious and hateful speech despite their tendency to equate injurious and hateful speech with conservative opinions. They maintain that they promote diversity, equity, and inclusion to rectify injustice and enhance education and not, as evidence suggests, to reward minorities and women whose thinking conforms to progressive orthodoxy. And they offer an undergraduate curriculum that allows students to fashion a slate of classes that suits their individual needs, tastes, and skills but which - typically lacking a mandatory and coherent core - leaves graduates destitute of that basic knowledge of America, the West, and other civilizations that informs the judgment of responsible citizens.

Professors' and administrators' tendency to dismiss criticism of their institutions as springing from flawed perceptions of campus life is worse than the tendency among individuals to insist that they have been wrongly judged and unfairly maligned. That's because higher education supposedly specializes in fostering thoughtfulness by inquiring, weighing evidence, and considering arguments from multiple sides.

Then again, professors, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, have long promulgated the idea that "narrative" reigns supreme. If facts are inextricably bound up with arbitrary theories, if knowledge is socially constructed, if the truth is determined by exercises of power and schemes of domination - then what counts is who presents the facts, knowledge, and the truth, and how they present them. It comes easily to a mind that idolizes rhetoric while ignoring or scoffing at hard realities to believe that criticism is a problem of perception and is best handled by focusing on phrasing, framing, and messaging.

In "Higher ed doesn't have a perception problem," Nate Honeycutt argues that the sharp decline in public confidence in higher education does not stem from exaggeration of the professoriate's political bias. To the contrary, Honeycutt's findings show that citizens substantially underestimate academic faculties' left-wing skew.

Nevertheless, higher education believes that it suffers from "a communications problem, a reputational challenge, and a story that critics have told more effectively than institutions have told on their own," Honeycutt observes. Recent reports by Yale University and Vanderbilt University and Washington University have laudably explored colleges' and universities' betrayal of liberal education's imperatives. Yet many professors and administrators persist in supposing that the answer lies in "better outreach, clearer articulation of value ('return on investment'), and a more compelling case for the enterprise," writes Honeycutt. "That is, public relations and marketing."

Honeycutt's evidence that Americans tend to think that professors are "substantially more ideologically balanced than they actually are" comes from a February 2026 FIRE/NORC survey. Whereas Americans in general suppose that the ratio of "liberals" (better referred to as progressives) to "conservatives" on campus is about 2 to 1, the 2016 benchmark results used by the 2026 survey indicate that the ratio is about 5 to 1. Democrats and independents thought that there were around 2.5 times more conservatives among the faculty - and even Republicans believed that there were more than twice as many conservative professors - than are actually there.

The greater the perceived ideological balance, the more Americans overall tend to view colleges and universities favorably. Yet Democrats and Republicans displayed divergent reactions to imbalance. Whereas Republicans' confidence in higher education declined as their perception of partisan balance in favor of progressives increased, Democrats' confidence rose the more they viewed the faculty as tilting progressive. When confronted with the fact that the ratio of progressives to conservatives was higher than most imagined, Republican and independent confidence in higher education fell while Democratic confidence remained about the same.

Citizens distrust higher education for several reasons, Honeycutt notes. They worry about rising costs, about colleges' and universities' ability to prepare students for the workplace, and about the effects of Trump administration interventions.

Yet Honeycutt also stresses that telling the truth about faculty imbalance would increase public distrust, at least among Republicans and independents, because the reality is worse than the perception. Indeed, the reality is worse than his own data reveals.

In contrast to the 2016 benchmark ratio of 5 to 1 progressives to conservatives, the ratio of registered Democrats to Republicans among professors in 2026 is about 10 to 1 nationally, according to the 2026 "Report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education." The imbalance is decidedly more severe at Yale, Honeycutt points out: "[A]mong the faculty from Arts and Sciences, the Law School, and the School of Management, the committee put the ratio at 36 to 1."

Does the faculty's ideological composition diminish the quality of liberal education? Does it distort scholarship and teaching by circumscribing the range of permissible discussion, debate, and research? Does it prejudice admissions, grading, hiring, promotion, and tenure?

Earlier this year in the Wall Street Journal, Richard Kahlenberg, director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute, and Lief Lin, a PPI policy research fellow, offered dramatic evidence of scholarship's corruption by progressive bias, with baleful implications for liberal education throughout the nation.

In "American Studies Can't Stand Its Subject," Kahlenberg and Lin argued that "many of the serious scholars who study America - its history, literature and culture - fail to provide a balanced and nuanced account of the country's complex tale." The authors' Journal op-ed drew on their report, "The Distortion of American Studies," for which they reviewed the almost 100 articles that appeared in American Quarterly - a peer-reviewed journal edited by scholars and published by Johns Hopkins University - over three years.

According to Kahlenberg and Lin, American Quarterly, "widely considered the country's premier journal of American studies," overwhelmingly featured scholarship that advances the outlook of "the academic left" by presenting "a one-sided and unrelentingly negative portrait of the U.S." The authors report that "80% of articles published between 2022 and 2024 were critical of America, 20% were neutral, and none were positive." Criticism "focused on American racism, imperialism, classism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia and transphobia." Some scholarly attacks on America passed over into the absurd: "One essay posited that thermodynamics - the science dealing with the relationship between energy, heat, work and temperature - is 'an abstract settler-capitalist theory that influenced the plunder of Indigenous lands and lives.'"

Kahlenberg and Lin "couldn't find a single positive article" about America in the prestigious journal from 2022 to 2024. Not one contribution during that three-year period explored "American ingenuity" or examined "why as of 2020 the U.S., representing about 4% of the world's population, won 42% of the individual Nobel Prizes since the awards' creation in 1901." Not one considered "why the U.S. was the first country to land a man on the moon." Not one dealt with "America's vanquishing Nazi Germany in World War II or the Soviet Union in the Cold War." And not one contained a "discussion of why the U.S. is rated as the most desirable destination for immigrants across the world."

The fixation on America's vices and indifference to its virtues, argued Kahlenberg and Lin, reflect "the complete lack of gratitude on the part of scholars who write for the leading journal of American studies and benefit every day from the country's commitment to liberty."

Members of Gen Z have absorbed the hostility to America promulgated by an educational establishment, many of whose most eminent scholars of America - and leading teachers, and teachers of teachers, about America - write for the American Quarterly. According to Kahlenberg and Lin, 4 in 10 Gen Z respondents to a 2020 survey thought that America's founders are better understood as villains than heroes. In contrast, only 1 in 10 baby boomers believed America's founders should best be seen as villains.

Restoring trust in higher education is a long-term undertaking. To set out on the right path, colleges and universities should abandon the comforting delusion that the answer to their woes consists in refashioning popular narratives about their conduct. Instead, professors and administrators should concentrate on reducing the gap between liberal education's enduring imperatives and the partisan faculties, politicized disciplines, and aimless curricula that they have entrenched throughout the academy.

Containment That Causes Iran To Capitulate or Crumble

John Teichert — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

President Trump has seemingly settled into a new long-term strategy against the Islamic Republic of Iran after the United States has fallen short of strategic success through military and diplomatic means. The new strategy hinges on economic asphyxiation, supported by the military, to contain and isolate the Iranian regime.

The logic of such a strategy is based on pressure - increasing it on the regime and decreasing it on the United States and the global economy. The blockade and additional sanctions are intended to strangle the regime, eliminating the resources necessary for them to repress internally and threaten externally. Iran faced dire economic conditions even before the 12-day war in 2025, and their current situation is significantly worse.

On the other hand, relaxed pressure on friendly interests has been facilitated by improved flow of resources through or around the Strait of Hormuz. Despite Iran's malign intent, experts suggest that the friendly flow might be up to two-thirds of prewar levels. Combined with the economic isolation of Iran, it provides a strategic calculus that favors U.S. interests. But at what cost and to what purpose?

There are two notable shortcomings of the strategy provided by Operation Economic Outcast. Both are related to the timeline. First, while the current situation contains the regime, there is no promise for quick strategic success. Vice President Vance acknowledged that challenge late last week.

With a nebulously long timeline, the second shortcoming is based on the significant burden placed on the U.S. military and the associated opportunity costs on U.S. global interests and commitments. In order to defend itself and U.S. interests against Iran, enforce the blockade, and ensure maximum friendly flow through the Strait of Hormuz, a large force presence is required. Thus, 50,000 brave American military members will remain in harm's way for the duration of such a strategy, and a major portion of U.S. military assets will be tethered to the Middle East. It is the indefinite cost of containment until the strategy yields something more.

Other than preventing Iranian nuclear weapons capabilities, which was largely accomplished by seven B-2 bombers in Operational Midnight Hammer, what should be the objective in Iran? Containment is in itself a partial strategic success, cutting off resources that would otherwise be used to fulfill Iran's malign intent, limiting their ability to threaten U.S. interests, and preventing the reconstitution of a previously potent Iranian military force.

Yet, as we've seen after previous rounds of containment pressure on Iran in the last several decades, a scrappy evil regime will likely exploit gaps and seams of pressure to regain its foothold in the region. Thus, anything short of regime capitulation or crumbling will fail to realize long term success. The only way to hope for such an outcome through a containment strategy is with proper follow through in a few key areas.

Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent announced Operation Economic Outcast nearly three weeks ago, with the promise of creating crushing economic pressure. He committed to sharing the details of implementation and suggested that some cases were imminent. Thus far, no significant secondary sanctions have been announced.

While the blockade is substantially hurting the regime, the lack of full follow-through on secondary sanctions diminishes U.S. credibility while allowing trade and exchange related resources to continue to ease the pressure on the regime. A failure of implementation would also take away the multi-faceted diplomatic pressure on Iran that would come from other nations facing hardships due to secondary sanctions. The United States needs to doggedly pursue a full range of economic pressure to truly contain and isolate Iran, and to further pave a pathway towards capitulation and crumbling.

Through it all, the enemy gets a vote. Iran will continue to lash out at the United States and our allies and partners, striving to increase the costs and the risks of the United States containment strategy and erode our willingness to stay on track. In addition to necessitating continued U.S. resolve, such strikes by Iran offer an avenue of strategic opportunity through deliberate and precise escalation by the United States.

In the many rounds of provocation during the five-month ceasefire period, the United States has been limited and proportionate in its response. Iran has been enticed rather than deterred, proven by their willingness to keep striking out while rebuffing attempts to negotiate a real settlement. While President Trump is wary of large-scale escalation in part due to diminished weapons stockpiles, there is a way to shape escalation to better capture the attention of the regime and further U.S. interests.

Instead of emphasizing proportionality in response to any counter-containment actions by Iran, their strikes provide a pretext for the United States to do something far more to restore deterrence and regain the initiative. Responsive and precise U.S. strikes designed to impact the regime permanently and irreversibly would complement containment. The oil infrastructure at Kharg Island tops the list of the types of targets with disproportionate and lasting impact. Striking Kharg would harm the regime's ability to fund itself for the long term maybe more than any other singular site, and U.S. strikes on those targets would capture their attention, erode their will, and deter their provocations.

Additionally, it has been several months since Iranian internal security locations have been targeted. During active combat operations it had been an area of emphasis for the Israel military with an eye towards neutering the regime - likely with a vision for an end state that would cause the regime to capitulate or crumble. It's a target set that never became a priority for the United States. Now is the time to revisit that omission in response to any Iranian strikes on U.S. interests in the region.

Will these types of strikes properly complement containment and yield subsequent strategic results? Will they further the aims that would see the regime capitulate or crumble? Minus coordination with an opposition force that could replace the regime, a pathway to lasting strategic success against Iran is unclear. Yet, as the United States sees the benefits of containment while paying its costs, it is important to also pursue mechanisms that could result in regime capitulation or crumbling to achieve an end state of lasting strategic success.

Trump Show Comes to Dallas. Now Comes the Hard Part

Carolina Lumetta — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

DALLAS—In the days before the Republican midterm convention here, political operatives said the purpose would be to rally party support and bring the attention of apathetic voters to the coming election. The two-day event achieved the first, but the second goal is a harder sell.

The president's party has lost seats in Congress in around 90% of midterm elections since 1946. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were notable exceptions, largely due to a strong economy and high approval ratings, respectively.

President Trump has neither. His approval rating is 18 points underwater according to the latest RealClearPolitics Average. Inflation remains around 3%, and while job growth has been strong, the ongoing Iran war and trade tensions with Canada have contributed to some market uncertainty.

With Republicans needing to defend 26 vulnerable seats in the House and six in the Senate, Democrats are favored to pick up seats in both chambers. Democrats have a 6.4% lead in the latest generic congressional ballot.

As there was no need for nominations at this convention, the only real news out of the event was Trump's plan to send stimulus checks to every American adult - but only if Republicans win both houses in November. Aside from that gambit, which critics described as a budget-busting bribe, the benefit for the GOP was the spectacle and the resulting 30-second clips on social media to start ringing the final bells of the midterm cycle. Party leaders are hopeful the momentum both wakes up voters and re-engages the same base that elected Trump in 2024. The strategy has its skeptics.

"The idea that Trump's engagement at this level with the election is going to result in a re-engagement amongst sort of the hardest to mobilize elements of his coalition is a totally untested premise," Texas Politics Project director of research Joshua Blank told RealClearPolitics. "Low-propensity voters are low-propensity voters because they're not really that engaged," the pollster added. "They're not paying attention. They're not locked in. And the real challenge with this convention is: Are they even going to notice?"

The convention scheduling itself was a risk for the White House. Typically, party conventions are held in late summer - early enough so they don't interfere with holidays and the academic year, but close enough to the election that voters start to pay attention. The two-day Texas rally competed with school schedules, immediately followed Labor Day, and ran concurrently with the first football games of the NFL season. The New York Times reported that Trump's prime-time speech on Wednesday received about 2.5 million views on Fox News, less than the nightly Gutfeld and Hannity viewership. However, the ratings for all major networks will not be released until next week.

In 2024, nearly 64% of eligible voters cast a ballot in the presidential election, up from 46% in the 2022 midterm. Most midterm elections have hovered around 40% engagement from all eligible voters since 2002, according to Ballotpedia.

Trump also repeatedly claimed that the arena was "filled to the rafters" with "thousands waiting outside to get in." He said this as much of the top level of the arena remained empty. The seating was available to both the press and attendees. The arena itself can seat around 21,000 for concerts, depending on the floor configuration. The 2024 RNC in Milwaukee's Fiserv Forum gathered around 50,000 attendees and visitors. Prior to this convention, the RNC had given out 20,000 tickets, according to a spokeswoman.

Trump is banking not necessarily on adding new voters to the GOP but on simply repeating his success of 2024. In that election, he won the popular vote and all seven swing states. That math also works for the midterms if the same voters return to the polls this November. To accomplish this, the president practiced some unusual get-out-the-vote efforts. On night one, he promised to mail $5,000 checks to all American adults if Republicans keep the majority in the House and the Senate. Separately, the White House released a statement and a video on Thursday morning announcing the administration would refund $500 to one million Americans who were overcharged Obamacare fees under the Biden administration. On night two, Trump led the convention crowd in a pledge. He directed them to raise their right hands and repeat after him:

"I pledge to the greatest president in the history, that loves us so much he can't even breathe, that I will go out with my family, my friends [and vote]," Trump said.

He then digressed to a discussion of election security and joked that people can vote Democrat as long as they get out and vote. But then he returned to the topic of saving the country via GOP means.

"If you vote, you're voting Republican," Trump added. "Okay. So help me God. So help me God. You know what happens if you don't vote? You go to hell."

Many of the delegates, along with assorted state and local lawmakers, closed out the convention feeling energized but recognized the daunting task ahead.

"History would say the odds are stacked against us, but I'm still at an eight," Oklahoma Republican Party Chairwoman Charity Linch told RCP of her confidence on a scale of 1 to 10 on whether Republicans can keep the majority. "Republicans can do these rallies, which is great, but then they absolutely still need to get involved in their communities and get involved with voting because we have to take the country back," she said. "We can't just talk about it."

"Trump is still very popular within the Republican Party, but he's overseen an economy that people are very unhappy with," Blank noted. "Making himself the center of the election in some ways seems like he's helping Democrats stay on their message because he's putting himself into voters' considerations while Democrats can just continue to talk about the economy, cost of living and other things."

Looking beyond November, the convention also showcased Vice President JD Vance in a role as prospective heir to Trump's MAGA coalition. Vance often says that he is only focused on winning the Republican majority, which he repeated again Thursday night when the crowd broke into chants of "28!" and "48!" while he spoke. Trump himself has previously teased that he could endorse either his vice president or Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But the arena was buzzing when Vance took the stage. While Trump brought the bravado and the entertainment, Vance appeared to bring the ethos as he discussed an American birthright and how he wanted to protect it.

"We know that the country does not belong to the radicals," Vance said. "It does not belong to the bureaucrats. It does not belong to the highest bidder. This country was handed down to us by our parents and their parents before them. We received this national birthright, and we are going to fight for it by electing Republicans."

With only seven weeks until the midterm elections, the White House plans to kick campaign season into overdrive. Vance will be in Kansas this week, and Trump has promised to take his same convention message to all 35 competitive House and Senate races. On Wednesday, he will start by stumping for North Carolina Senate candidate and former RNC chair Michael Whatley.

"Every voter by definition is a low-propensity voter. So you know that model that we built at the RNC for '24 is going to work very well for '26," Whatley told RCP. He said the convention messaging in Dallas may have revolved around Trump, but elements are applicable for all Republican candidates.

"The [2024] Milwaukee convention really galvanized the entire Republican movement around the core issues that the campaign was about. And like 2024, this year's election is really about a contrast between the Republican agenda," he added, "and the Democrats' agenda, which is tilting towards socialism and communism."

Other mainstage speakers pressed the same message. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. noted the irony of his own presence. The first convention he ever attended was the Democratic National Convention in 1960 when he was six years old. Kennedy abandoned the Democratic Party in 2024 before he ran for president as an independent.

"Ours was a party of strong principles, of clear policies, and an inspiring idealistic vision for America," Kennedy said. My uncle ran on a platform of tax cuts, strong defense, and fighting communism. Does that sound familiar?"

Senate hopeful Mike Rogers of Michigan decried his opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, and his connections with provocative influencer Hasan Piker. House Speaker Mike Johnson forecast that Democrats will try to repeal every one of Trump's actions, including tax cuts. Both he and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said this year is "the most important midterm election" in history.

Whether voters were listening or believe the GOP's message won't be clear until November.

One Year Later: The U.S. Military Continues Quartering Charlie Kirk Assassination Celebrants

Chase Spears — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

"Charlie Kirk has been shot." I was in a production studio recording podcast episodes on September 10^th last year when it happened. I look forward to each opportunity to spend time with a new guest and the phenomenal media production team at the Herzog Foundation. But this day was especially unique. My fellow military public affairs officer, and truth teller, Theresa Carpenter had flown in to record two special episodes. We had planned this day for months, to have an illuminating dialogue about the cultural difficulties of being both an honest broker, and military public affairs officer. The two unfortunately have a long history of being at odds, despite value-based oaths, creeds, and regulation. We completed the first episode about our shared experiences as military communicators frequently at odds with the institution, and decided to take a break. It was then that producer Noah Hoskins told us the news.

Charlie Kirk's name was well known to me; though, I was not a close follower of his work. In 2024 I had the chance to see Mr. Kirk at a live event at the University of Kansas, and came away highly impressed at his intellect and mastery of facts drawing from history, culture, politics, philosophy, and faith. Back in the studio that afternoon, hearing the words "Charlie Kirk" and "shot" in the same sentence brought immediate shock.

Theresa and I immediately pulled out our silenced phones to learn what we could about the event in Utah, and Kirk's injuries. Noah said Charlie had been struck in the neck. I found a video taken from a distance, and heard the unmistakable sound of rifle shot. We both knew immediately how the story would end.

The air felt heavy, my basic awareness numbed, my mind clouded. Theresa captured the essence of why. She looked at me and said (paraphrasing) that 'Charlie was a truth teller. That's who we are, and they killed him for it.' Both of us endure threats to our safety and even our lives from the same kind of people who demonstrated joy at Charlie's demise. Yet the mission to finish production of an important episode about the military's broken investigative culture remained before us. We pulled it together and recorded a conversation that proved very raw. When the cameras cut the second time, what we knew to be inevitable had been officially announced: Charlie Kirk was dead. That night I went to bed with a heart heavied by this historic tragedy, suddenly understanding the tears shed by so many Americans when President John F. Kennedy and Rev. Martin Luther King succumbed to the assassin's bullet. Never for a moment would I have predicted that the next day would be marked by extremists celebrating Charlie's demise. Even worse, military members shared in that luciferian ritual.

I awoke the next morning to a colleague's note about a military officer who made a post expressing what appeared to be casual approval of Charlie's public assassination. Military members are sworn to protect Americans. Charlie's assassination violates the special trust that military members are accorded. Celebrating such a crime violates that trust, and the oath, not to mention a violation of decency and respect - values the military signals as immovable institutional moral bedrock. Deputy Assistant Secretary of War for Military Community & Family Policy Stephen Simmons nailed the crux of the moment in saying that sheepdogs responsible for defending the nation demonstrated themselves to be wolves.

Moments later I received word of another similar post by yet another military member. It became a steady stream of content widely reported on X by many accounts including Libs of Tiktok, Mostly Peaceful Memes, Dept War & Dept VA Accountability, and my own. The amount of military-affiliated content condoning and celebrating Kirk's death resulted in mainstream news coverage. Simply put, this was not a small occurrence by a few isolated individuals. A friend of mine on Fort Leavenworth shared that a military officer told him that if Tyler Robinson were his son, he wouldn't have turned him in to the police. As in the days of Biblical Judges, these actors did what was right in their own eyes. Participants included active duty, reserve, national guard, and civilian military-affiliated Americans. Through it all, military commanders who are known for advising conservative-minded military members to stay silent and 'out of politics' had very little to say about upholding military values, respect, and no tolerance for extremism in those moments.

The military is a regulation-based entity. Online misconduct of this type violates social media regulations that troops are subject to, in addition to Articles 133 (conduct unbecoming) and 134 (conduct that brings discredit upon the armed forces) of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, as well as military anti-extremism policy enacted during the Biden era. That begs the question of what happened to the military members—estimates ranging from hundreds to thousands—who participated in this post-assassination celebration ritual? Neither the Pentagon, nor any of its subordinate commands are saying.

Undersecretary of War for Public Affairs Sean Parnell and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth rightly condemned the conduct as unacceptable. According to numerous public news reports, approximately 300 military members faced investigation for inappropriate online conduct, with the Military Times reporting that over one dozen personnel were suspended from key positions during the investigatory process. The Washington Post reported that 126 military members were investigated, with 26 receiving administrative reprimands - in addition to 158 military civilians placed under investigation, two of them being terminated. It's impossible to know if that's the full story, as the War Department failed to issue clear accounting of final dispositions. I recently submitted a small number of participant names to the relevant public affairs offices with a simple question: is this person still a military member? None provided this basic - publicly releasable -status in time for publication. If anyone beyond the two reported by the Washington Post faced meaningful consequences, the number appears to be infinitesimal.

Contrast this with the rapid discharge campaign carried out against roughly 8,000 military members who declined to participate in Covid mass gene therapy experimentation from 2021-2022. One group wanted to avoid unnecessary self harm and faced severe persecution. The other endorsed lethal harm against an innocent, and remain in full standing as taxpayer-funded military employees.

The challenge we wrestle with is not a lack of legal avenues to deal with extremists, but a lack of will - a demonstrated weakness among managers in the ranks to administer military justice. Such would have been unthinkable during most eras of American military history. Imagine a Union soldier expressing satisfaction in John Wilkes Booth's murder of Abraham Lincoln in a letter to the editor in 1865. Would such a man's career have been spared by his military command? Just 25 years ago would the Department of Defense have tolerated a uniformed or civilian employee making public declarations of approval for the 9/11 terrorist attacks? On June 2^nd, 2012 I personally witnessed a military contractor be terminated for posting a video showing the aftermath of a Haqqani network attack on Forward Operating Base Salerno in Afghanistan. We once had commanders with spines. Imagine being a commander who will do nothing about subordinate military members cheering Tyler Robinson's actions, for which Robinson now faces a death penalty trial. The cowardice and enablement military leadership practices today is historically unprecedented in American history. It's no wonder that since yesterday there are at least two reports of U.S. Army soldiers making gleeful social media posts about the first 'kirkversary.' They know the consequences - if any - will be minor at worst.

Militaries are imperfect as human institutions. Inevitably, mal actors slip through the cracks. Yet it remains an irrevocable responsibility of military leadership to courageously punish and remove those who demonstrate antipathy toward the mission of defending our nation and its founding ideals. A War Department that cannot, or will not, carry out this most basic task of self-policing is in no position to expect continued high levels of public trust, nor legitimacy over the historic mercenary tradition.

One year since Charlie Kirk's death, the military has proven to be as safe a place for people who make light of assassination as the Chicago public school system. In both places, people who celebrated Charlie's murder remain employed - at no lesser rank than they held one year ago - on the taxpayer's dime. These rightly labeled #revolutionariesintheranks remain a prescient threat on our soil. The question we should all ask is why there is no one across the military's global complex with the courage to take this on.

Chase Spears served as a U.S. Army public affairs officer for 20 years and is host of the Finding Your Spine podcast. Among other pursuits, he enjoys writing about courage, civil-military relations, communication ethics, and policy. Chase holds a Ph.D. in leadership communication from Kansas State University, where his research focused on the political realities of military norms and actions. You can connect with his work at chasespears.com.

image: Ryan Shaw holds American flags during a vigil for Charlie Kirk on Friday, Sept. 12, 2025, in Provo, Utah. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

No, the Law Should Not Protect AI-Generated Child Porn

Lauren Daugherty — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

The First Amendment comes first for a reason: Free speech is a fundamental American right.

But does the First Amendment cover everything? As Americans, we generally agree that free speech is highly beneficial to society, but that there are some valid exceptions, such as slander and libel.

Artificial intelligence is changing and challenging many areas of our lives, including our legal system. Recently, a federal judge in Wisconsin ruled that AI-generated child sexual abuse material is covered by the First Amendment if it does not depict real children and is kept at home. This ruling was on a case where a 42-year-old man was accused of using generative AI to create thousands of realistic images of young children. Many reportedly depicted naked kids being raped by grown men. Some images were allegedly sent to a 15-year-old boy.

Can you imagine what the American Founders would say about this abusive and repugnant behavior being protected by the First Amendment? When they drafted the First Amendment, their intention was to protect Americans against government censorship and oppression, not to protect graphic fantasies about child rape. Our Founders would be absolutely horrified by this ruling.

Let's re-read the wording of the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The text of the First Amendment seems completely incompatible with the Wisconsin ruling, but the judge said he felt he had to rule this way based on Supreme Court decisions from 1969 and 2002.

The Supreme Court needs to revisit many topics, like this, to update our legal system for a modern era where AI has changed things so drastically. Laws and language that made sense in the past may have a whole new meaning now that is very different from their original intentions or any reasonable interpretation.

Silicon Valley is out of step with the rest of America on many things, including what is and isn't appropriate for kids. We have also seen this highlighted by the recent court cases about social media and teens, and by the release of internal documents that show Meta thinking it was acceptable for their chatbots to hold "sensual" conversations with children. While some policies have changed as the result of public outrage, these policies and practices should never have never existed in the first place.

Toxic material facilitated by AI is dangerous for impressionable minds. Last month, a Massachusetts teen charged in the double murder of his mother and younger brother was shown to have used ChatGPT to concoct "fantasy stories" about killing his family, which he then did.

This is exactly why our society should not permit artificially created porn depicting children, regardless of whether those children are real or fictitious. This material encourages the very toxic, abusive behavior that it depicts. Consumption of it has been shown to increase the viewer's interest in contact with children.

Our society has debated standards for video games, music, the Internet, and more for decades. But AI is completely different because it is so powerful for creating highly realistic, affirming content in much more advanced ways. It makes existing societal problems far worse.

Don't misunderstand me: Free speech is essential to freedom itself. I have spent much of my 20-year career at conservative and libertarian organizations, promoting values such as free speech. But there must be responsible standards, limits, and guardrails when kids are involved.

Most Americans value free speech, and most Americans would not accept the First Amendment being used to protect child pornography if they realized that was happening.

AI is changing so many things. We must not let it change our most fundamental values as humans: protecting our children. We need to speak up about these very real dangers to our kids, and demand better protections for them.

September 11 Showed Us Evil. September 12 Showed Us America

Saul Anuzis — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Every September 11, America remembers the worst terrorist attack in our history.

This year, on its 25^th anniversary, I hope we remember September 12 as well.

September 11 showed us evil.

September 12 showed us America.

The distinction is important.

On September 11, 2001, terrorists murdered 2,977 people at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and aboard Flight 93.

But when Americans woke up the next morning, something had changed. The political arguments that had consumed the country days earlier suddenly seemed small. American flags appeared everywhere. People lined up to donate blood. Americans asked how they could help.

Police officers and firefighters weren't abstractions. They were heroes. Members of our Armed Forces weren't somebody else's sons and daughters. They were ours.

We rediscovered something we should never have forgotten: America is more than a government. It is a people. And 25 years later, our country could use a little September 12.

That does not mean we need universal political agreement. Quite the opposite. America was built for disagreement. We have held bitter political arguments since Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were accusing each other of destroying the Republic.

The genius of America is not that we agree. It is that we can disagree and remain one country. Somewhere along the way, too many Americans seem to have forgotten that. We increasingly treat political opponents as enemies rather than fellow citizens. Cable television divides Americans into ideological camps. Social media algorithms discover exactly what makes us angry and then feed us more of it.

Politicians have learned that outrage raises money. Activists have learned that fear attracts attention. And Americans increasingly live in separate political realities.

September 12 reminds us there is another way.

Think about the people who entered the burning towers on September 11. A firefighter didn't stop before helping someone and ask how that person voted. A police officer didn't ask whether someone was conservative or liberal. An emergency medical technician didn't ask about race, religion or party registration.

They saw Americans in danger. And they did their jobs.

There is a civics lesson there that is much bigger than politics. Citizenship requires recognizing obligations to people with whom we disagree.

I am a Republican. I believe in limited government, free enterprise, individual liberty and American leadership. Others passionately disagree with me.

Good. Let's have the argument. Let's debate taxes. Let's debate immigration. Let's debate the size of government. Let's debate America's role in the world. Then let's vote.

And afterward, let's remember that the person with the opposing bumper sticker is still our neighbor.

That isn't weakness. That is the basic operating system of a free society.

Our enemies understand something we occasionally forget: What makes America powerful isn't merely our military or economy. It is our ability to absorb people from every corner of the earth and turn them into Americans.

It is our civil society. Our churches. Our neighborhoods. Our volunteer organizations. Our families. Our willingness to step forward when somebody needs help.

That spirit did not begin on September 12, 2001. It was simply revealed. Twenty-five years later, the question isn't whether that America disappeared. I don't believe it did.

You can see it after hurricanes and tornadoes when strangers arrive with chainsaws, trucks, and food. You see it when communities rally around the family of a fallen police officer. You see it when National Guard members leave their own families to help Americans they have never met. You see it whenever a neighbor quietly helps another neighbor.

America's problem isn't that the September 12 spirit died. It's that politics sometimes prevents us from seeing it.

So this September 11, remember the victims.

Remember the firefighters.

Remember the police officers.

Remember the Pentagon.

Remember Flight 93.

Remember the Americans who went to war and those who never came home.

But on September 12, remember something else. Remember who we became when all the labels suddenly stopped mattering. For one terrible moment, America remembered that citizenship was bigger than politics.

Twenty-five years later, we shouldn't need another tragedy to remember it again.

New UT Report: Climate Litigation and the Campaign to Influence the Judiciary

Michael Toth — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Thousands of judges across the nation have sat through climate-science training and received literature from trusted federal bodies and scientific institutes. Those judges had every right to expect that the information they received was neutral, objective, settled science. They were mistaken.

My latest research paper presents the first full taxonomy of a coordinated, multi-year campaign designed to shape how the American judiciary understands climate litigation. It documents how the Environmental Law Institute (ELI) built an extensive educational apparatus to train judges on climate issues—in the words of one session attendee— "from what would effectively be the plaintiff's side."

ELI routinely portrays itself as a neutral arbiter committed to "insightful and impartial analysis." In 2018, it launched the Climate Judiciary Project (CJP) to provide judges with "authoritative, objective, and trusted education on climate science." Yet, as my report details, CJP shares multiple donors and advisors with Sher Edling LLP, the San Francisco-based law firm behind more than two dozen climate lawsuits against energy companies.

The training methodology CJP deployed is striking. The goal was not merely to educate judges about complex areas of law and science, but to encourage them to develop and execute their own climate "action plans." Slide presentations and emails obtained between ELI staff and attendees show judges being coached on how to spread that influence to colleagues on the bench. Attendance forms show judges from California, Delaware, Illinois, Hawaii, Maryland, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and even Puerto Rico attended CJP trainings—all jurisdictions with active climate suits.

CJP's reach extended to established judicial and scientific gatekeepers. A 2020 CJP curriculum draft identified the Federal Judicial Center's (FJC) Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence and the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Extreme Weather Attribution Report as publications judges could rely upon. Both would go on to bear the project's fingerprints.

Released in 2025, the Fourth Edition of the Reference Manual included a climate change chapter for the first time. That section was later revealed to have lifted material heavily from the prior writings of a lawyer representing climate plaintiffs, Sher Edling's Michael Burger. The chapters' listed authors, moreover, were both CJP presenters and the manual shared some of the same funders as the foundations bankrolling the public-nuisance suits targeting the energy sector. Following the public outcry over these conflicts of interest, the FJC and NAS took the unprecedented step of removing the climate chapter entirely.

That controversy, however, did not stop NAS, which initially pushed back against criticism of the manual, from releasing the Extreme Weather Attribution Report. The committee behind the report was similarly one-sided in favor of climate plaintiffs, which may explain why the 253-page document lays out theories for attributing the effects of climate change to specific energy producers without seriously dealing with the inconvenient fact that greenhouse gas emissions are largely driven by global demand for energy.

When private interest groups slip past the adversarial process to tilt the scales on contested issues, the rule of law is compromised. The findings in my report demonstrate an urgent need for updated disclosure requirements surrounding judicial education programs. Trusted institutional gatekeepers like the Federal Judicial Center must institute rigorous vetting mechanisms to restore their credibility. Ultimately, federal and state officials should investigate how ELI and CJP gained such unchecked access over the bench and establish strict guardrails to ensure this cannot happen again.

Michael Toth is director of research at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas.

How to Handle Political Attacks on Data Center Support? Be Bold, Proud, and Unapologetic.

Gary Abernathy — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

This article was originally published at The Empowerment Alliance and is re-published here with permission.

To the average voter, candidates who do an about-face on an issue they were previously proud to own is an obvious sign of weakness. When it comes to data centers, such a turnaround is especially disturbing because defending the facilities is much more logical than attacking them.

Don't take my word for it. Multiple surveys show that when the facts about data centers are clearly articulated, negativity by voters largely evaporates. One recent survey by HostingAdvice questioned 800 respondents in 16 states targeted for data center development and found that a whopping 93% agreed that "cutting-edge AI data centers are vital to the United States," but only 35% "would vote 'yes' to data center construction in their hometown if a vote were to be held."

But guess what? That same survey found that 63% of respondents said the offer of community benefits such as tax breaks and educational grants would make them more supportive, and 55% said the promise of new jobs would help change their minds.

Increasingly, data center developers are taking the hint. What is touted as the largest data center in the world (so far) is being built in Pike County, Ohio, a rural Appalachian community in the southern part of the state. Last month, OpenAI announced it was partnering with S.B. Energy, NVIDIA and the U.S. Department of Energy on the new facility.

Take a look at how the community will benefit.
⦁ 35,000 construction jobs through 2032.
⦁ 2,500 long term jobs.
⦁ $120 million in community investments "to benefit Pike County and every public university student in the state."

There are additional investments designed to assist residents, particularly students, in taking full advantage of AI technology. But the obvious question is this: What politician would run away from taking credit for projects like this and the community benefits that come with them?

In a recent op-ed for the Washington Post, Taylor Budowich, founder and president of the Innovation Council, offered a solid road map to overcoming data center objections. First, keep it local stressing that new data centers mean "lower taxes, better services and more jobs for your neighbors."

Second, assure people, "Not a single shovel will touch our land, and not a single slab of concrete will be poured, for a new data center that drains our water and our power." Finally, "Stop playing defense. … These projects are revitalizing many towns that have been left for dead."

Some politicians get it. To his credit, President Trump has been blunt when it comes to data centers, saying Friday, "If you want to get rich as a state or as a town, if you want to pay lower taxes, if you want to create tremendous wealth, if you want your house to be more valuable and everything else, you're going to want a data center. If you want to go through poverty, crime and squalor, I would say don't approve data centers."

Others are also speaking more boldly. Georgia Congressman Rich McCormick (R) recently posted on X, "We should be proud that our state is where companies want to develop and invest because they believe that we have the energy security needed to advance American technological innovation. More data centers mean more jobs, more investment, and more innovation right here in Georgia."

In West Virginia, Gov. Patrick Morrisey (R) and state lawmakers are backing a plan wherein "West Virginia dedicates 50% of revenue generated by approved hyperscale data center projects to reducing and eventually eliminating the state personal income tax, while directing some remaining revenue to counties and infrastructure projects." Let that sink in - the state will eliminate its income tax thanks to data center development.

Trump's Ratepayer Protection Pledge was a good move, and in Congress, members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee are more daring than many of their colleagues, crafting the pledge into legislation that won widespread support and became "the first major bipartisan data center proposal to clear a congressional committee," as Politico reported.

"We know two things can be true at the same time," said Rep. Gabe Evans (R-Colo.) at a committee hearing. "We have to have the digital infrastructure to beat communist China … but we also have to make sure that our communities know that these things are being done responsibly."

While some community opposition to data centers is understandable - too often based on poor communication by developers - there is also something more nefarious at work. According to Axios, X (formerly Twitter) has reported, "Roughly 200 accounts from a suspected Chinese bot farm have quietly tried to influence Americans to oppose AI data centers on social media."

Instead of running from their support for data centers, candidates should cut ads citing the benefits to their states or regions - the jobs, the economic growth, the investments and grants - then look into the camera and declare, "If my opponent is against thousands of new jobs and millions in local investments for schools and community projects, you have to wonder why. I'm fighting for our families, our schools and our future, and to make sure that China never has the upper hand. And I'll never apologize for it."

When advocating for data centers, candidates should be bold, proud and unapologetic. Voters respect tenacity, consistency and honesty. Sometimes the polls change the message. It's always better when the message changes the polls.

This September, Congress Can Deliver for Veterans

Shaun Rieley — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

America makes a solemn promise to those who serve: their sacrifice will not be forgotten when the uniform comes off. Upholding that commitment requires more than ceremonies and expressions of gratitude. It requires a government willing to provide veterans, their families and their survivors with the support they have earned.

Unfortunately, Congress has too often allowed veteran priorities that enjoy broad support to languish for years. The Take Care of America's Veterans Act (TCAVA) offers lawmakers a chance to replace those promises with results. Congress entered its August recess without passing the bill, in part because a misleading opposition campaign waged by the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) derailed the debate. But when lawmakers return in September, they should finish the job.

Backed by the American Legion—of which I am a proud member—and 22 other veteran organizations, TCAVA combines more than 60 veteran priorities, many of which have already earned bipartisan support. It would end the "wounded veteran tax" that forces nearly 60,000 combat-injured retirees to offset earned military retirement against VA disability compensation—a change that has long been a priority of the American Legion. It would also eliminate the remarriage penalty for surviving spouses, strengthen support for family caregivers, improve suicide prevention and mental-health programs, expand rural and community care, and advance treatment for traumatic brain and spinal-cord injuries.

Each provision addresses a burden that veterans and their families have carried for too long. Combat-injured retirees continue to lose retirement income they earned through service. Surviving spouses can be forced to choose between remarriage and financial security. Family caregivers often sacrifice their own careers and retirement savings to support an injured veteran. Every additional delay leaves those wrongs in place.

The VFW's opposition centers on how Congress would pay for these reforms. Section 108 would update how the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) rates future disability claims involving sleep apnea and tinnitus, generating savings that would help finance the bill's expanded benefits. The organization argues that this approach takes benefits from one group of veterans to provide them to another, but that characterization leaves out crucial facts.

Section 108 protects ratings and compensation already in effect for these disabilities. The changes would apply only to claims filed after the bill becomes law. Just as importantly, the underlying reforms did not originate with TCAVA. The VA formally proposed substantially the same sleep-apnea and tinnitus changes in 2022, years before Congress assembled this legislation, as part of a broader effort to update the disability-rating schedule.

TCAVA would codify that existing policy direction, protect current beneficiaries and ensure the resulting savings remain within the veteran community. Without the bill, the VA could still pursue similar changes administratively, only for the savings to return to the Treasury rather than finance long-overdue improvements for veterans, caregivers, and survivors.

The legislation, therefore, is not breaking faith with veterans. It is a responsible use of reforms that were already years in the making to finance benefits veterans have waited years to receive. Defeating TCAVA would not preserve the status quo. It would sacrifice more than 60 needed reforms while leaving the VA free to pursue similar rating changes through its administrative process.

This is the central point that critics of the legislation continue to miss. The VFW has every right to express its policy views and advocate for changes it believes would improve the bill. But its opposition has crossed the line from forceful policy debate into inflammatory rhetoric and imagery. That does a disservice to veterans and makes productive discussion more difficult. As important as it is to protect and advance veteran care, Congressionally chartered veterans organizations hold a public trust. At their best they not only advocate for veterans, but also provide opportunities for veterans to continue their service to their communities and the country. Whatever the merits of their case, such divisive rhetoric is not conducive to the spirit of service or to the overall good of the country which veterans have served.

That's why House Veterans' Affairs Committee Chairman Mike Bost condemned the VFW's "Honor the Contract" campaign, which uses firing-squad imagery depicting suited "bureaucrats" and members of the media aiming rifles at servicemembers, as dangerous rhetoric that could invite political violence and that weakens the serious work of veteran advocacy. He also joined with Rep. Jack Bergman to ask the VA to examine whether the VFW violated accreditation rules and policies in promoting the campaign.

As a Legion member, I take no pleasure in seeing a fellow veterans organization earn that kind of scrutiny. But the VFW's tactics, however attention-grabbing, do not reflect the sentiment of the broader veteran community. One poll found that over 70 percent of veterans favor TCAVA. That support demonstrates that veterans understand both the tradeoffs involved and the cost of allowing more than 60 long-delayed priorities to languish.

The time for further delay has passed. When lawmakers return in September, they should pass TCAVA and demonstrate that America keeps faith with its veterans.

Shaun Rieley served as an infantryman in the Army National Guard, including overseas tours in Iraq and Cuba. He currently works in higher education and previously served in senior policy roles at a number of veteran-focused non-profits, including at the American Legion.

What My Small Town Taught Me About Tribalism

Lura Forcum — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Two years ago, I moved to the very small South Carolina town of Pendleton, where something unexpected happened to me. I became a volunteer.

I have found myself scrubbing historic gravestones, picking up roadside litter with my kids, spreading mulch on the nature trail … and I have to wonder how I wound up doing those things. Because I'm not all that civic-minded. Or I wasn't.

But Pendleton has a culture of people doing things together. They show up, roll up their sleeves, and create things. Historic buildings need preserving. Trails need maintaining. Litter needs to be picked up (so that the town looks nice for the Fall Festival or Spring Jubilee). Whether the problem requires grant-writing or native plant expertise or power tools, someone steps up.

Surrounded by people like that, it would be hard not to join in.

So I did. But because I spend my days studying political polarization and voter disengagement, I also noticed something. The tribal mechanisms that make the Republican and Democratic parties so dysfunctional right now are the same things that make Pendleton a place I want to live.

Americans are particularly inclined to see ourselves as individuals, but it's within groups that people are most deeply human. We find meaning in adopting the group's beliefs and practices. We share resources and make sacrifices that we wouldn't make for strangers. Groups can lead us to behave in ways we might never choose on our own (grave washing, who knew?).

But there's also a dark side to groups, which political parties have learned to exploit to great effect. Members reward loyalty and punish dissent. Leaders encourage us to see people on the other side not as fellow citizens but as obstacles to what our side wants. Their gain is our loss, and vice versa.

Political tribes increasingly organize people around defeating an opponent.

But Pendleton organizes people around creating something together. Some of that is hard work, like a few days a year when we clean and tidy up our town together. And some of that is play, like summertime musical performances on the town green or drinking cocoa and mulled wine and shopping local artisans under the town's Christmas tree on December weekends.

The benefit of all this shared work and creativity isn't just a cleaner or prettier town. It fundamentally changes how we know one another. Cooperating with people to achieve a shared goal makes it important to understand them more deeply and accurately. Without even trying to, we literally understand each other more fully because we work together. [pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov]

That's not to say we therefore agree. Like any collection of people living together, we have different views about what our problems are, how they should be addressed, and in what order. There is plenty of conversation between and among residents and local officials about these issues, and at times there's disagreement. But after two years, I still couldn't tell you whether most of my neighbors are Democrats or Republicans, because our relationships aren't organized around partisan identity. They're organized around making this town work.

We can't dehumanize each other on the basis of political party or ideology because we know from experience that our neighbors aren't abstractions, they're complex, nuanced human beings. There's a man who cleans out the storm drains on the street after a hard rain, because the roads are old and the grates fill with leaves and flood the road. The arborist who makes sure our trees are healthy and safe and thinks about what the town's tree line will look like in 75 or 100 years. The women who brought meals after my mother died without asking, just showing up with food for my family.

Lately we talk about tribalism as though the tribal part is the problem. If that's the case, we are indeed stuck, because we've organized our lives as members of groups for as long as we have been human. Instead we might ask ourselves what kind of tribe we are being asked to join.

Within groups, human beings are capable of extraordinary generosity. We care for other people without expecting repayment. We put what is good for the group ahead of our individual concerns. We make things together that we can't make individually.

Healthy groups invite members to produce something of value: stronger relationships, safer neighborhoods, functioning institutions, cared-for public spaces, and communities people actually want to live in. Their success does not require somebody else's harm.

That doesn't mean every community is healthy. Small towns can be exclusionary, conformist, and cruel. That's a reality that shouldn't be overlooked.

This fall, as midterm elections consume more of our attention, we will focus even more on our political identities. We will be reminded constantly that we are Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives, members of one side facing off against another.

Pendleton reminds me that I am something else, too.

I am a neighbor. And apparently, now, a volunteer.

CDC Undercounts Defensive Gun Uses

John R. Lott Jr. — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Whoever controls crime data can shape the political debate. The Trump administration has already reversed some of the changes the Biden administration made to federal crime and gun data, including information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). But politicization of data at the FBI and Justice Department still deserves attention.

Gun-control activists have long tried to "debunk" what they call the "good guy with a gun myth" as they push for stricter gun-control laws. The federal government and much of the media have reinforced that argument by downplaying evidence that armed, law-abiding citizens stop public attacks.

Even the most dramatic defensive gun uses rarely get national news coverage. One rare example of news coverage was in August of this year, when Jordan Salinas shot at a gunman who was shooting at vehicles outside a Twin Falls, Idaho, In-N-Out fast-food burger restaurant. As one news story noted, Twin Falls County Sheriff Jack Johnson said that "the death toll would have undoubtedly been higher without the quick-thinking actions of Salinas and the off-duty cop."

Just since the beginning of 2025, there have been 15 such defensive gun uses where police have made similar statements about armed civilians acting to save many lives.

The CDC recently restored information on defensive gun use that it removed from its website in 2022 after gun-control advocates privately pressured agency officials to take it down. Until May 2022, the CDC cited a 2013 National Academies of Sciences report that the agency had co-sponsored. The report reviewed studies that produced widely varying estimates of defensive gun use. It cited an estimate of 108,000 defensive gun uses annually, but warns that "108,000 is difficult to interpret because respondents were not asked specifically about defensive gun use." The report noted that estimates from national surveys ranged from about 500,000 to more than 3 million defensive gun uses per year.

Mark Bryant, the founder of the Gun Violence Archive, was among gun control advocates who complained that gun-rights advocates had cited the estimates so often to "stop [gun-control] legislation."

The CDC has now restored its link to the National Academies report, but it misleadingly says the report puts defensive gun use at only 60,000 to 2.5 million defensive gun uses annually, not what the report itself says as the national survey estimates that specifically ask about defensive gun use range from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year, though even that fails to note that the lower estimate involves just handguns.

The FBI has also demonstrated how badly federal data can understate defensive gun uses.

The FBI defines an active shooter as "one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area." The category can include an attack in which a gunman fires at a single person and misses, but it generally excludes shootings connected to other criminal activity, such as robberies or fights over drug turf.

I have seen these problems with federal data firsthand. Until January 2021, I served in the U.S. Department of Justice as senior adviser for research and statistics in the Office of Justice Programs. Part of my job involved evaluating the FBI's active-shooter reports. During my time at DOJ, I discovered that the FBI had missed or misidentified numerous cases in which armed civilians stopped active shooters.

Unfortunately, the problem has continued with the newest report that was released on July 30. The FBI reports that armed citizens stopped only 16 of the 408 active-shooter incidents it identified from 2014 through 2025. And only two of the 34 active shooting cases in 2025.

The Crime Prevention Research Center, which I run, has identified many additional cases that the FBI either missed or misclassified, and we maintain an updated list of these incidents.

Our numbers tell a dramatically different story. From 2014 through 2025, the CPRC identified 615 active-shooter incidents and found that armed citizens stopped 225 of them. We excluded another 35 cases in which a law-abiding armed citizen stopped the attacker before he could fire a shot.

That means armed citizens stopped 36.6% of the active-shooter incidents we identified over those 12 years. During the most recent five years, the figure rose to 42.5%. That rate is about 10 times the roughly 4% rate indicated by the FBI's data.

The difference becomes even larger when we examine only places where law-abiding citizens can legally carry firearms. We shouldn't expect armed civilians to stop many attacks in places where the law prohibits them from carrying guns. In locations where citizens could legally carry firearms, our data show that armed civilians stopped 52.9% of active-shooter attacks over the past 12 years. And it is increasing, with 58.3% in 2025.

The FBI has missed so many defensive gun uses that I find it hard to believe these omissions are simply accidental - particularly because the agency has failed to correct mistakes I previously brought to its attention.

Fortunately, no one needs to take my word for it. The CPRC lists the individual cases and links to the underlying sources, so anyone can examine the cases and compare our list with the FBI's data.

AI Can Give Cyber Defenders the Upper Hand

Alexandra Seymour — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

When Anthropic released Mythos, one of the most powerful artificial intelligence (AI) models to date, attention focused on the risks of the breakthrough technology, especially its ability to find and exploit software vulnerabilities. But the same models can also give cyber defenders the upper hand.

Rather than viewing AI solely as a risk, we should also acknowledge its potential to defend American interests and national security. America should rapidly develop and deploy AI to improve cyber resiliency. This means enabling general advanced AI model access for the cyber defenders protecting our nation's critical infrastructure.

While adversaries can use advanced AI models to reduce the vulnerability exploitation timeline from days to hours, defenders can likewise use AI to discover vulnerabilities quickly and at scale. The results of Anthropic's Project Glasswing speak for themselves: in just one month, Anthropic and its partners used Mythos to discover more than 10,000 high- or critical-severity vulnerabilities.

According to a recent Cybersecurity Advisory, AI-generated exploits to critical infrastructure are "an active threat." Although AI may not have been responsible for recent water infrastructure attacks in at least 12 states, it could have helped defend against them. Critical infrastructure entities operate internet-connected operational technology (OT) systems that are often end-of-life, meaning there are no new software updates to protect them because replacement is too expensive. Advanced AI models could have enabled proactive action in response to the FBI's public service announcement for the water sector about OT devices, released just days prior to the reported attacks. Threat actors can use AI as a sword, but defenders can use it as a shield against known vulnerabilities.

Widespread reliance on open-source software creates an additional imperative for AI as a line of defense, because vulnerabilities in widely used code can affect systems and sectors that rely on the same software. In the long run, AI will also help address persistent challenges with patching timelines, as automated patching technologies can enable cyber defenders to respond to AI-enabled cyberattacks and meet new federal regulatory deadlines.

The U.S. government can take the first step to strengthen cyber resiliency using AI by properly equipping and leveraging the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). As the nation's cyber defense agency, CISA is a voluntary partner to the private sector, offering free cybersecurity services and training upon request, issuing guidance and alerts on cyber threats, and serving as a key resource for vulnerability management.

Enabling CISA, in coordination with relevant Sector Risk Management Agencies, to deploy advanced AI for critical infrastructure protection is an opportunity to refocus the agency on its core mission of strengthening cybersecurity and resilience. As CISA evaluates its voluntary structures with the private sector, it should prioritize partnerships that enable access to advanced AI models for the most at-risk critical infrastructure owners and operators, such as water systems and hospitals. This will equip vulnerable entities with the tools and information they need to harden their systems.

CISA's regional offices would be best suited to offer this service because they are directly embedded in the communities that need help. However, the regional offices have historically been understaffed and underutilized. CISA has an opportunity to change this by using its current hiring spree to place skilled talent where it is most needed. Under-resourced critical infrastructure entities need this assistance because they either cannot afford the models or do not know how to responsibly use them.

Given the high and fluctuating costs of running frontier models, CISA cannot offer advanced AI tools to individual entities indefinitely. But, by partnering with frontier labs, CISA can begin to close that gap and support responsible deployment. CISA and the frontier labs can work to lower costs while building sufficient capability to meet the nation's economic and national security needs. Frontier labs can also help CISA establish best practices for model use and understand the security parameters of the models it would offer as a service.

Importantly, developing a competitive U.S. open-weight model will be essential to securing critical infrastructure at scale. A U.S. open-weight model would enable operators to deploy advanced cyber defenses affordably while reducing reliance on cheaper but potentially insecure Chinese open-weight models in sensitive American systems.

AI is moving fast, and we have no time to waste before autonomous attacks expose cyber risk at scale-a problem for both the public and private sectors. We cannot wait for our energy grid to go down to start taking cyber threats seriously. Our cyber defenders need AI in their hands, not in review.

Alexandra Seymour is a nonresident senior fellow at Hudson Institute. She recently served as principal deputy assistant national cyber director for policy at the White House, where she helped lead the formulation and implementation of national cybersecurity policy.

Exclusive: Gitmo Parole Board Greenlights Release of 3 'Forever Prisoners'

Paul Sperry — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

The last remaining 15 terrorist detainees held at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, military prison are considered the "worst of the worst," "high-value detainees," and "forever prisoners," but Gitmo parole records reveal that at least three of the violent jihadists have been recommended for release recently despite high recidivism rates.

One is Mjuayn al-din Jamal al-Din Abd al-Sattar, a "committed member of al-Qaeda" who was reportedly close to Osama bin Laden. The Saudi-educated Emirati fought at Tora Bora and was later captured in Pakistan near the Afghan border in December 2001.

According to transcripts of his parole hearing, reported for the first time by RealClearInvestigations, he denies having any prior knowledge of the 9/11 plot, even though he attended one of the al-Qaeda training camps in Kandahar. Friday marks the 25th anniversary of the al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., which slaughtered almost 3,000.

Al-Sattar's 2008 enemy combatant dossier stated, "The detainee preaches [on his cell block] about wanting to kill all Americans, including men, women, children and babies," and is considered "high risk" and "likely to pose a threat to the US." He also threatened to cut off a guard's head. Yet he's been cleared for parole.

'Fight Until His Death'

Another inmate queued up for release is Guleed Hassan Douran. A citizen of Somalia, this "high-value detainee" was an "al-Qaeda cell leader and senior facilitator" and received terror training at camps in Afghanistan in the late 1990s, according to transcripts of his parole hearing. His 2016 detention dossier warned he "has expressed interest in reengaging in extremism if released," adding, "Detainee has stated that he would fight until his death for the cause."

But the Gitmo parole board no longer deems Douran a threat - apparently accepting his claim that he just wants to go back home and get a job to support his family - and has "undertaken to identify a suitable transfer location for [Douran], subject to appropriate security and humane treatment assurances."

A third detainee set for transfer, Ismail Ali Faraj Ali Bakush, was captured in Lahore, Pakistan, after fighting for al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The Libyan is an explosives expert who, voluminous evidence shows, trained al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan. According to his dossier, he never renounced terrorism and would likely reengage in it.

Still, the parole board has approved plans for Bakush's "resettlement to a third country with strong rehabilitation capabilities." Only, those countries, such as Saudi Arabia, have a terrible track record of rehabbing former Gitmo inmates.

Rampant Recidivism

According to the most recent Office of National Intelligence report on "reengagement" of former Gitmo detainees, 234 of the 739 who were freed are suspected of resisting rehabilitation and going back to jihad. And of those 234 recidivists, 155 were never recaptured and are still at large.

That means two-thirds of these committed terrorists are unaccounted for and could be involved in plotting another 9/11. Government reports suggest such concerns are not alarmist, especially given that the top destination country for those released is Afghanistan, where the Taliban is running things again - just like before 9/11, when they sheltered bin Laden's gang.

"We assess that some detainees currently at GTMO will seek to reengage in terrorist or insurgent activities after they are transferred," the 2025 Office of National Intelligence report states, matter-of-factly.

To critics of the release policy, the word "some" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, masking the determination that one in three released detainees return to terror.

"This is absolute insanity. What the hell are these people thinking?" said former FAA special agent and Ret. U.S. Army Lt. Col. Brian Sullivan, who warned of airport security holes before the 9/11 hijackings. "They know the recidivism rate and their likelihood to reoffend. They'll have American blood on their hands." Formally known as the Periodic Review Board, the parole panel is composed of one senior official from the Departments of War, Homeland Security, State, Justice, the Joint Staff and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Their identities are undisclosed.

RCI has sought comment from the board, whose members rotate periodically. Those who recommended the transfers were part of the Biden administration.

Board members have largely agreed with defense attorneys who have argued in parole hearings that the prisoners have been confined long enough and are no longer a threat to society.

In Guleed Hassan Douran's case, for instance, his lawyers note that he has been held without charges since 2004. "It has been very hard on me," Douran complained in a hearing in July 2021. "But I'm not the same person I was when I was arrested in 2004. All I want is to be reunited with my wife and my children. I am willing to be transferred anywhere, under any circumstances, where I can live a quiet life and eventually be united with my family. I want to get a job and support them the way I have not been able to for [a] long time. I hope your decision will allowed [sic] me to have a future beyond Guantanamo."

Several months later, in November 2021, the Gitmo board ruled that it "is no longer necessary" to detain Douran because it determined he is no longer a "continuing significant threat to the security of the United States." In turn, it ordered efforts be undertaken to "identify a suitable transfer for [Douran] outside the United States, subject to appropriate security and humane treatment assurances." When Douran may be transferred remains unknown.

Meanwhile, the State Department has said the Taliban have been lobbying hard for the release of a fourth prisoner, Muhammad Rahim, an Afghan national the U.S. says acted as a courier for bin Laden and had advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks.

The Taliban want to swap him for an American contractor they seized after taking back Kabul in 2021 during the disastrous Biden withdrawal. But so far, the Trump administration hasn't been willing to make a deal.

Over his two terms, President Trump has released just one detainee, transferring him to a prison in Saudi Arabia, compared with 25 freed by President Biden, and 200 by President Obama. The Bush administration released some 540 from the prison.

Victims' Families Furious

Some 9/11 relatives are furious that some of the most dangerous Gitmo detainees continue to be eligible for parole.

"Where is the justice for 3,000 innocent murdered civilians?" said Kristen Breitweiser, whose husband was killed in the World Trade Center attacks. "We have been robbed of justice. Plain and simple."

Sullivan agrees, asserting that the remaining 15 high-value terrorist detainees "should have been tried, convicted and executed long ago."

"The American justice system is being mocked by our adversaries and allies alike," he added.

Last month, a military judge set a June 2028 trial date for the dozen other Gitmo detainees who are not recommended for release, including 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The judge, Lt. Col Michael Schrama, the fifth judge to preside in the case, sided with defense attorneys and ruled that the terrorists' confessions and other evidence obtained during so-called "torture" interrogations by the CIA will not be allowed in court.

"I know the media slings the 'water-boarding' arrow and blames the CIA for the trial delays," Sullivan said, "but I can't help but put myself in their shoes if I was trying to prevent another attack."

The Congressional Race in the County That Powers Colorado

Amy Oliver Cooke — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Colorado is losing economic ground. My home county, Weld County, is moving the other way. That contrast helps explain why Colorado's Eighth Congressional District may be one of the most consequential energy races in the country this November.

Colorado households are paying more for electricity thanks to bad state policy. In 2025, Colorado's average retail rates were the highest in the Mountain states and ranked 21^st-highest nationally.

The state's energy affordability trajectory would be worse without abundant in-state oil and natural gas production. Much of that energy comes from Weld County, which sits at the heart of the Eighth District. Weld produces 83% of Colorado's crude oil and 56% of its natural gas.

I live in Weld County. Oil and natural gas are more than an industry. It's our family, friends, and neighbors. They are the people we see at school, church, the grocery store, and under the Friday night lights. Their work supports other businesses and generates tax revenue that helps fund roads, schools, fire districts, libraries, local nonprofits, and other public services.

And Weld County is thriving.

It is now Colorado's fastest-growing large county. Census estimates put its population at 378,426 in 2025, an increase of 1.92% in a single year, nearly five times Colorado's statewide growth rate. Weld has now surpassed neighboring Larimer County in population.

Despite that rapid growth, Weld County government has no outstanding debt and no county sales tax. It maintains one of the lowest county mill levies in Colorado, healthy cash reserves, and the ability to pay cash for major capital projects rather than borrowing.

Energy production isn't the only reason Weld County has prospered, but oil and natural gas have played an enormous role in creating the economic and tax base that makes this possible. Weld's success is even more striking because Colorado is moving in the other direction.

As a state dominated by Democratic Party rule, Colorado dropped from 11th to 17th in U.S. News & World Report's 2026 Best States rankings and fell from 11th to 25th in CNBC's latest ranking of the best states for business. U.S. News ranked Colorado 45th in fiscal stability.

Weld County, meanwhile, shows that economic growth, abundant energy production, and fiscal discipline can coexist. The choice before CD 8 voters is: do we send to Congress the Democrat challenger Manny Rutinel, whose record reflects Colorado's progressive-left ideology, or incumbent Republican and member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee Gabe Evans, who more closely reflects Weld County's prosperity?

Rutinel came to elected office after working as an attorney for Earthjustice, fighting to hold corporate polluters accountable." He was arrested and charged in November 2019 for storming the Yale-Harvard football game, along with dozens of other protesters, chanting "hey hey, ho ho, fossil fuels have got to go," to demand the universities divest. He told the Colorado Sun last year that he supported banning hydraulic fracturing.

Today, Rutinel has reversed his position on hydraulic fracturing, and his campaign says that he "knows an all of the above energy solution to help lower energy costs is more important than ever." It's more likely that he knows that campaigning to ban the technology that made Colorado the fourth-largest oil-producing state in the U.S. is unpopular.

And the stakes extend well beyond Weld County.

Colorado's electricity mandates are already some of the most aggressive in the country, as documented by Always On Energy Research and the Institute for Energy Research in our recent report, Blue States, High Rates.

The state requires qualifying utilities to reduce emissions by 80% by 2030 and 100% by 2050. Governor Jared Polis (D) wants 100% renewable energy by 2040. Colorado is also requiring natural gas utilities to reduce emissions 22% by 2030 and 41% by 2035, which will require an "unprecedented, nearly overnight transformation of the heating appliance market." In other words, homeowners will be pushed into electrification at great cost.

Evans has spent his first term in Congress championing affordability and streamlining permitting. He supports "a safe, reliable, and secure energy policy," and "increasing domestic production of energy resources."

Rep. Evans's bill, the State Planning for Reliability and Affordability Act, would require states to ensure their energy plans are sufficient and meet demand with reliable facilities. He says that the bill will help hold state utility regulators accountable and force consideration of "the impacts of energy reliability on consumer costs."

He is also the lead sponsor of the Ratepayer Protection Act, which aims to set federal guidelines for data centers and other large loads to cover the full incremental costs of the infrastructure they need.

Evans has been a strong critic of the state's direction since his time in the Colorado House, and has said that, "Colorado's energy crisis is due to none other than the state's ruling Democrats that have prioritized out-of-touch policies over the hard-working people's pocketbooks. Rates continue to skyrocket, while reliability continues to plummet."

The Colorado Public Utilities Commission (PUC) projects that Xcel Energy, the largest utility in the state, may see residential rates rise 20 to 30% by 2027, and as much as 55% by 2029, over 2024 levels, if load growth comes in below forecast.

This is a result of Colorado prioritizing carbon emissions over whether the lights stay on or families can afford their power. The district producing Colorado's energy should think hard before sending someone who has spent a career working against the industry and driving up costs for Colorado families.

Which brings the CD 8 race back to Weld County.

Colorado is losing ground while Weld County is gaining people, growing its economy, producing the energy Colorado needs, and doing it without county debt or a county sales tax.

The people of Colorado's Eighth District should ask themselves a simple question before they vote: Do they want Washington to look a little more like Weld County, or Weld County to look a lot more like the rest of Colorado?

Amy Oliver Cooke is the founder and president of Always On Energy Research and a Weld County, Colorado resident.

The National Academies' Climate Review Must Be Truly Independent

Tom Harris — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

For years, the left has used the supposed "consensus" on climate science to ram through its agenda unchallenged. That cover is starting to crack.

The taxpayer-funded National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine ("NASEM") recently removed the climate science chapter it developed for the fourth edition of the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence from its website pending an independent review of "the processes used to develop the chapter." The importance of this move cannot be overstated.

This reference manual is the document that federal judges use to help decide the 1,500+ climate lawfare cases that are currently pending in courts across the U.S. One of these cases, Suncor v. Boulder, is moving forward to oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme court next month.

These cases will decide whether private companies, such as the fossil fuel corporations that legally provide us our fuel, can be blamed for causing climate change and the floods, wildfires, and other natural disasters that left-wing advocates claim climate change has triggered.

Yet, according to The Wall Street Journal, the climate change chapter of this important reference manual relies in part on "the views of progressive climate lawyers" who stand to profit if judges take their side.

The Journal is right. Consider Michael Burger, executive director of Columbia University's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. He presented to the National Academies' Attribution Committee and admitted he was "actively involved" in cases for Sher Edling, the contingency-fee law firm suing oil companies on behalf of two dozen-plus states, counties and cities. The NASEM Attribution Report thanks him in its acknowledgments but never mentions the Sher Edling connection.

Dr. Delta Merner, who runs the Union of Concerned Scientists' climate-litigation shop, sat on the committee for a significant portion of the process too, then quietly left in early 2025. Her name doesn't appear in the final report at all, even though she helped shape it for years. This is unusual because NASEM typically acknowledges former members who contributed substantially during the study period.

NASEM responding to public backlash by pulling its climate chapter for further review is of great policy significance, particularly at this time and under these conditions, with oral arguments for Suncor forthcoming.

NASEM's Politicization

Once a relatively obscure congressionally chartered advisory body, NASEM has grown so politicized that it has attracted national attention. Its group of critics has included President Trump, who lambasted the organization for publishing "fraudulent, biased, and misleading Manuals on Climate Change."

NASEM has also faced heat from a coalition of 25 Republican state attorneys general, who released an open letter to top administration officials and congressional committees calling for it to be stripped of taxpayer funds. The AGs drew particular attention to the "numerous connections between the Report and persons or organizations who filed amicus briefs in Suncor." One such connection is the Bezos Earth Fund, which helped bankroll the report while also giving $100 million to the Natural Resources Defense Council and $15 million to the Union of Concerned Scientists, both of which filed amicus briefs backing the plaintiffs in Suncor.

The Problem with Attribution Science

So-called "attribution science" generally involves using computer modeling to simulate how an extreme event would have unfolded under pre-industrial climate conditions. Researchers then compare the hypothetical disaster with the real one to determine how human‑caused climate change supposedly affected the event's likelihood or intensity.

The problem is that models still can't reliably simulate basic atmospheric dynamics, and many rapid-attribution studies routinely skip peer review entirely. As such, there is nothing scientific or data-driven about assigning a precise dollar figure to the damage caused by one company's emissions because there is no way to quantify such an amount. In fact, many of the studies the 2026 NASEM Attribution Report leans on rely on climate benchmarks and scenarios that regulators have since abandoned as implausible.

NASEM's Flip-Flop on Attribution Science

NASEM was aware of the method's shortcomings when it released its report on attribution science in 2016. In that report, the committee admitted that the question "Was a given observed weather event caused by climate change?" is a "poorly formed (or ill-posed) question that rarely has a scientifically satisfactory answer."

The about-face—from a cautious, scientific 2016 report to a confident, litigation‑relevant 2026 policy document—came without a clear scientific explanation for the change in confidence. Such an abrupt shift risks further eroding the public's already fragile trust in scientific institutions, and NASEM was right to order a review, even if only due to significant political pressure.

Ensuring a Fair Review Process

A review, though, is only as good as how it's run, and so far, NASEM has said almost nothing about how this one will actually work. If the results are going to mean anything, the review needs to meet a few basic conditions.

First, it has to be conducted by experts outside NASEM. NASEM's own internal guidelines say reviewers shouldn't be connected to the work product they're reviewing, so a review of NASEM's own process run by NASEM insiders fails that test before it even starts.

Second, NASEM needs to say, publicly and in advance, exactly what it's asking the reviewers to do. What is the scope, the timeline, and the specific questions it wants answered? Without this information, the public has no way to judge whether the final report actually answered anything.

Third, the reviewers themselves have to be named publicly, and none of them can have ties to climate litigation, on either side. That should be an easy bar to clear. If NASEM can't clear it, that tells you everything.

Fourth, the review has to actually grapple with the specific allegations Roger Pielke Jr. and other legal scholars have raised about who really wrote the chapter and how. NASEM brushed these allegations aside for months. Dodging them again would say everything about how seriously NASEM is taking this.

Fifth, NASEM should commit before the review even starts to specific consequences for whatever it finds, whether that's retraction, revision, or reinstatement of the chapter. Once the review is done, NASEM should publish its response to every finding, item by item, in public, along with a concrete timeline for fixing whatever's broken. That's the same level of disclosure Congress already requires of other NASEM committees whose advice federal agencies rely on, so why shouldn't the same apply here?

You could call this activism, lawfare, dirty politics, or even a crusade to supposedly save the planet. The one thing you can't call it is honest, unbiased science. And if NASEM can't live up to its own name and commit to serious reforms, then it no longer deserves public trust or public funds. Let's end the games and let real science trump politics once and for all.

Tom Harris is executive director of International Climate Science Coalition.

America Can't Import Its Way out of the Critical Minerals Crisis

Tracy King, Yoni Tobin — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

The U.S. defense industrial base today faces a critical minerals challenge—one with serious national security implications.

On August 4, media reports indicated that a major U.S. defense contractor is, for the first time, planning to source germanium and scandium—critical minerals used to build high-end defense items—from American firms. Here's the problem: the prospective supplier does not have an operational mine—and will not until at least 2028. To highlight the scope of this challenge, consider the fact that the United States has not mined scandium since the 1960s.

Critical minerals are vital elements used in numerous defense platforms: warships, stealth bombers, fighter jets, missiles, sensors, and radars. Today the United States is import-reliant when it comes to critical minerals. China accounts for 90 percent of worldwide refining and processing capacity and is the top global refiner for 19 of 20 strategic minerals especially relevant to defense production.

Beijing's critical minerals dominance is a threat to the national security of the United States and must end. For that reason, Washington is seeking to curtail critical mineral imports from China. It is also working to stockpile its own critical minerals. To that end, the Trump administration ordered the creation of the U.S. Strategic Critical Minerals Reserve, or Project Vault, in February—a logical complement to America's existing petroleum and uranium strategic reserves.

To create viable domestic stockpiles, the United States has looked beyond its borders. The Trump administration has recently signed nearly 20 bilateral framework deals, and created multilateral forums like Pax Silica designed to form U.S.-friendly critical minerals supply chains. Washington is right to pursue a multilateral approach to U.S. critical minerals security, but there are better ways to do so.

Relying on partners' reserves to meet U.S. demand, however, is problematic. For reasons of geography alone, even the most U.S.-friendly countries cannot be relied upon to supply the United States' needs in a true crisis.

The geostrategic vulnerabilities are glaring. The United States signed a critical minerals deal in 2023 with Mongolia, a landlocked country surrounded by China and Russia. Similarly, Kazakhstan, a Pax Silica member, shares long and arguably indefensible borders with both China and Russia. And the COVID-19 pandemic, Iran, and the Houthis have exposed the extant fragility of global supply chains more broadly.

During a great power conflict, depending on global shipping would become problematic—potentially jeopardizing America's ability to import critical minerals. Key sea lines of communication (SLOCs) through chokepoints like Asia's Strait of Malacca and Europe's Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom Gap would be threatened by U.S. adversaries. Imagine the United States, in World War II, having to import defense production items through the same waters where it was fighting the German Navy.

Even in peacetime, overseas sources have perils. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which has large cobalt, nickel, and lithium reserves, has become a focal point of U.S. critical minerals strategy. Washington likely seeks to counter China's own strategic mining in the DRC. However, the country's track record of corruption and instability—including its recent yearslong war with Rwanda—makes it a risky bet for U.S. sourcing.

Fortunately, low-cost alternatives are emerging. The Trump administration, on July 30, gave the Commerce Department authority to impose export controls on industrial waste, which is often shipped abroad despite containing recoverable minerals. Extracting those critical minerals requires considerable technical capacity and expertise—which is where America's allies can help.

Washington should consider forming a critical minerals consortium with friendly countries to boost American extraction, recycling, and reprocessing capacity. Pooling that technology and know-how would accelerate the U.S. Strategic Critical Minerals Reserve's progress. In exchange, the United States could offer mutually beneficial defense arrangements. Such inducements can include new or expanded joint research and development (R&D) projects and defense co-production.

The timing is auspicious: several major U.S. bilateral defense pacts are up for renewal. For example, the next version of the soon-to-expire U.S.-Greek Mutual Defense Cooperation Agreement could leverage Greece's new advances in refining gallium. Currently, China enjoys a near-monopoly on gallium, which is reportedly used in over 11,000 U.S. military components. The upcoming expiration of the U.S.-Israel Memorandum of Understanding presents another opportunity. Israel is making significant advances in neodymium-iron-boron recycling and accelerating state-backed critical minerals research.

This approach has several advantages. First, reducing U.S. dependence on foreign-based mining hedges against potential supply disruption. Second, utilizing cheap and plentiful American materials—like industrial waste—would boost U.S. stockpiles at low expense. Third, harnessing partners' existing R&D efforts would reduce private-sector research costs. That could stimulate industry interest in those U.S. critical minerals projects for which, as Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS) recently said, "no free market [demand] exists."

With challenges come opportunities. By better leveraging its partners and allies in the critical minerals race, Washington can breathe new life into its defense industrial base. The United States is, unfortunately, in another interwar period; it is time to act accordingly.

MajGen Tracy King, USMC (ret.) is former Commander of Marine Corps Forces Europe and Africa, and a Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) Generals and Admirals Program Participant. MajGen King also has served as Director of Asia Strategy on the Joint Staff.

Yoni Tobin is a Senior Policy Analyst at JINSA.

image: Germanium and Scandium

Down the Road, Conservatives Debate GOP's Future

Carolina Lumetta — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

IRVING, Texas —While the Republican Party faithful streamed through Secret Service checkpoints in downtown Dallas, other conservatives flocked to the Rayleigh event center in Irving, less than two miles up the road. A new conservative programming organization called FORUM hosted a series of panel discussions to tackle the topics the convention rally wouldn't touch: the cost of living, immigration enforcement, artificial intelligence and data centers, and the future of the GOP beyond Donald Trump.

The two events were not technically dueling, but while the president spoke to uproarious applause at the American Airlines Center, a smaller crowd of conservatives barely even watched the livestream of the president's speech. Instead, attendees were buzzing about a mainstage debate on artificial intelligence.

"I'm tired of older institutions that don't get it and are years behind the base for where the action is," CEO Matthew Peterson told a crowd of a couple hundred, mostly men. "For the sake of finding the roots of our actual disagreements, we need to assume patriotism and good faith," Peterson added. The whole point of the day is to get into it and to have a hell of a good time doing so."

The afternoon and evening event featured a half dozen scheduled debates, though most served more as panel discussions with little disagreement. Most speakers analyzed the philosophical underpinnings to current political issues.

As far as debates go, the ideologies represented were fairly similar for most of the conversations. Conservative YouTuber John Doyle moderated a discussion with state Republican groups and local elected officials on the need to boost Trump's mass deportation plans to include legal immigrants who do not assimilate to American culture. In a discussion on the cost of living titled "$20 Burritos and the Common Good," members of The Claremont Institute, the American Principles Project, and the Center for Renewing America did not disagree on what the common good meant or that burritos should cost less than $20. They also delicately avoided laying the blame at their party leader's feet while simultaneously urging the Republican Party to move past its message that high inflation was the Democrats' fault.

Throughout the afternoon and evening, some attendees sat at tables and listened intently to the main stage. About half of the crowd held side conversations at the bar and in the VIP lounge, making the discussions difficult to hear. But they were also talking about the same topics. One group shared their experiences with artificial intelligence, while another weighed Trump's tariff policies.

FORUM took on topics that the convention rally either glossed over or passed off as Democrat problems. And AI was top of mind.

The day peaked when the room finally filled for an hour-long moderated debate on AI. On one side, Joe Allen, author of a book on transhumanism, argued that AI poses an existential threat to humanity that conservatives must take seriously. On the other, venture capitalist and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale pushed for further development and claimed mass fears over AI are stoked by foreign interference, not reality.

"I think we need to really ask ourselves who benefits from total transformation, and with all due respect, Joe Lonsdale, you're insulated from the most damaging effects," Allen said. The people that I speak to on a day-to-day basis … are not insulated from mass surveillance. They're not insulated from mass manipulation, nor are they insulated from the more radical slop infestation of the culture, except for those who have the wherewithal to say no."

Lonsdale countered that AI has already been used to achieve conservative priorities, such as using Flock cameras to identify illegal immigrants. He stressed that conservative leaders need to assuage fears with facts, not give in to them, particularly in responding to backlash against data centers.

"They're going to get built somewhere else, even if it's offshore," Lonsdale said. "There's something irresponsible here. Yes, there is fear, but we should be reacting to the parts of the fear that's rational, and we should be teaching them about the things where they're irrational."

From there, the debate raged over whether the pro-AI side is simply populated by rich CEOs who want favor with the White House or whether opposition to data centers is a psychological operation from either the far left or China or both.

The conversation was in some ways a proxy between the burgeoning wings of the party jostling for a leading position in a post-Trump era. Lonsdale and the vice president share a mutual friend and partner in tech billionaire and fellow venture capitalist Peter Thiel, and Vice President JD Vance has often espoused pro-growth ideas about AI. Allen is an editor with Bannon's War Room, hosted by former White House chief of staff Steve Bannon. In April, Bannon publicly rejected the idea of Vance becoming the heir to Trump's "Make America Great Again" movement.

But where both parties see a struggle to determine a position, some see an opportunity for rare bipartisan legislating. Jason VanBeek, chief government affairs officer at the Future of Life Institute but speaking in personal capacity, leans more toward the Joe Allen camp.

"I think you have a very powerful fringe part of the of the coalition, which is the tech folks that have a lot of money, power, and ability to influence things, but I think most people out here in places like Texas, Iowa, South Dakota are skeptical," VanBeek told RealClearPolitics.

Lonsdale cheered AI development as a new Industrial Revolution. VanBeek likened it more to the rise of the Internet and social media, initially praised as a way to connect people and then revealed to be a mess of algorithms keeping users separate and hooked on rage.

"They've seen this movie before, where they were shutting down conservatives not that long ago, and there's no reason to think that they wouldn't do it again," VanBeek said. "Big Tech is cozying up the administration. It's only a matter of time before I think we're back in a 2020 scenario where, you know, Twitter's shutting Trump down, those kinds of things. The tide can turn very quickly."

Vance has generally espoused the pro-growth portion of the debate, but in the past two years he's added more commentary on the importance of jobs, human effort, and human involvement. In a speech to Air Force Academy graduates in May, Vance said AI development should never be used in place of human judgment or life and death decisions in warfare. In an interview with Christian podcaster Bryce Crawford last month, the vice president expressed concerns about AI chatbots and how companies relate to their own products.

"You feel like there is some really, really weird spiritual dark energy," Vance said about companies like Anthropic that hold a so-called burial ceremony for retired AI models. He lamented the rise of using chatbots for relational matters such as marriage counseling. "There's no real human feedback. It sort of short circuits that social part of our brain where we respond to other people's wants and needs … I think that's kind of satanic."

"He's been in the technology space for a long time before he's in politics," VanBeek noted. "I think he's trying to thread the needle too, and trying to balance a lot of the stuff that you saw on the stage here between the two Joes. So it'll be interesting to watch."

The Vance subtext spread beyond the AI debate. Early in the day, panelists discussing affordability brought up Vance's anti-fraud task force and a reported proposal to give additional tax credits for childcare to stay-at-home parents. On the one hand, conservatives rarely cheer the idea of government handouts. On the other, many at FORUM noted that it could be an effective way at ensuring women have the means to stay home with children, thus likely improving the national birth rate.

"What JD Vance is doing is he's reframing the debate," founder of the American Principles Project Terry Schilling said on the panel. "He's redirecting it from corporations to the American family directly."

Vance himself was not present for the proxy battles being waged on his behalf. Instead, he sat in a VIP section of the convention and watched as Trump took his prime-time speaking slot, bumping Vance's speech to Thursday night.

The vice president is spending the time in Dallas helping the party's fundraising operation. He is speaking Thursday to the Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin delegations, all battleground Senate race states for the November midterms. On Tuesday, Vance hosted a donor group he co-founded in 2019, Rockbridge, with other Cabinet officials and top GOP donors for a pre-convention party at a nearby bar. And on Thursday night, he'll take the main stage.

Pumpkin Spice and the AI Apocalypse

Heather Wilhelm — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Ah, autumn in America. It's time for some of our favorite seasonal rituals: leaf-drenched pumpkin patches, foamy lattes, retro barn jackets, and yet another self-reported Anthropic AI researcher declaring to the world that the product he's been working on might just murder us all.

It's almost become charming, these occasional alarming cries sent over the Internet, shouting that the technological end is inevitably near. They harken to seasonal marvels like the annual ruby-throated hummingbird migration, except imagine the hummingbirds depressed, demoralized, flying through robot shrapnel, and constantly texting their therapist.

Even better, like many things buzzing around the Internet these days, it's hard to tell whether these apocalyptic warnings are even real. On Wednesday, the latest AI warning went out over an X account from Jacob Coxon, writing that he "resigned from Anthropic today" because "they are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives." The "people building AI," he wrote in a subsequent post, "earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade." At press time, the posts had picked up millions of views.

Coxon's X handle is @hilbertspaess, which immediately made me suspicious, because at first I found it eerily close to one of those weird, seemingly made-up brands that pop up when you try to buy cheap athletic workout gear on Amazon for your high school son. Here are some examples of brands selling shorts on Amazon that are 100% real: "HQUEC." "BALENNZ." "COOFANDY." "CANGHPGIN." And finally, my personal favorite: "RDRUKO." It's my favorite for the obvious reason, which is that it spells "OKURDR," but backwards.

However, because I am a true professional, upon further research - research NOT USING AI, thank you, although I definitely probably did accidentally use AI without even knowing it, because I was using a computer - I found that "Hilbert's pass" is actually an AI framework term, which you can Google if you'd prefer to be bored to death instead of eventually hunted down by future Terminators.

Anyway, another AI guy who is apparently the "Alignment Science lead" at Anthropic - again, as a severely tech-challenged individual, I seriously have trouble believing any of this is happening in real life - weighed in on Coxon's post on X, agreeing that "we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% in the next decade." Ah. Well, that's only a 1 in 10 chance of societal destruction. Proceed apace, friends. Full speed ahead.

But seriously: If this is all true - and it could be, but it could also be a hoax, or part of a viral marketing campaign, or written by AI itself - what in the heck is a normal person supposed to do? You could get an off-grid cabin in the middle of the Tennessee woods, but that's a lot of work. You could give up, quit your job, yell "YOLO!" and head off to Sardinia. But that costs a lot of money, and then when AI hacks your bank account, you're not only stuck in Sardinia, you're poor. You could conscientiously object to this whole bit of nonsense, but you really can't, because AI is everywhere, and it's probably watching you from your toaster right now.

I'm not completely innocent. When it first came out en masse, I did try to use AI once a few years ago, attempting to recreate a digital image of a dream I once had involving "Motown Song," which is a legendary piece of tonal genius, with Rod Stewart featuring the Temptations. The dream featured a full musical montage at a random McDonald's, ending with Rod Stewart jauntily tossing me a mandarin orange over the checkout counter. Back then, AI refused my request. I suspect trademark law was to blame.

I also admit to owning a robot - two robots, in fact, off-brand Roombas that are probably judging me as I speak. I have these fake Roombas in my house because I also have a giant 75-pound German shepherd whose shedding could personally provide the supplies to construct two full mini-goldendoodle replicas per hour.

Do you know what's great about dogs, by the way? They don't have QR codes. They don't ask you for your password sixteen thousand times, or try to charge you $100 to talk to them on the phone, or insist you get the equivalent of a full eyeball scan so you can log into an account you never wanted to make in the first place that then won't allow you to cancel a simple car reservation at a company that theoretically may or may not start with an H and rhyme with Schmertz.

Ahem.

Last week, the beloved writer Wendell Berry, who treasured the agrarian life and the natural world and tended to eschew technology, passed away. My husband texted me a few lovely articles memorializing his life and work - and then, as an addendum, he added an in-depth PDF that compared and contrasted Berry's work to that of Paul Kingsnorth, a writer whose recent book, "Against the Machine," warns against the ill effects of our tech-obsessed world.

You guessed it - that PDF was made by AI. I deleted it in a righteous huff, so it's now gone.

The irony, however, lives on.

Reflections on the 25th Anniversary of the 9–11 Attacks: Our Collective Failure of Imagination

Chris Williams — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Where were you on the morning of September 11, 2001?

Because we lived not far from the Pentagon, I heard the explosion that resulted from the hijacked American Airlines jet slamming into the Pentagon. I was helping load a suitcase for our son for another trip to the Emergency Room at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. He was 5 years old and had already been through several neurosurgeries as a result of repeated brain bleeds that left him with multiple disabilities including significant brain damage and paralysis over much of the right side of his body. (Thankfully, we had access to the gifted hands of the world's best pediatric neurosurgeon, Dr. Ben Carson, who saved our son's life on many occasions. God bless you, Ben.)

Our daughter was a few blocks away at elementary school. My wife and I decided that I would stay home, and she would drive our son to the ER. As they drove over the Woodrow Wilson Bridge on the way to Baltimore, she reported that smoke from the fire at the Pentagon had just reached the Bridge.

After our daughter arrived at home, like millions across the nation we remained glued to the TV as rescue efforts were underway at both the Pentagon and World Trade Center. I tried to make sense of it all: Who was responsible for such heinous acts? Would there be more attacks? How would the attacks change our lives, our nation, our world?

The principal finding of the bipartisan 9-11 Commission report was that "a failure of imagination" had prevented those charged with safeguarding America from effectively anticipating and preventing such an attack on the U.S. homeland.

It is appropriate, therefore, as we approach the 25th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks, to ask, how might America's enemies seek to exploit gaps and seams in the U.S. homeland security posture today? And what steps must be taken now to deter such attacks or lessen their impact, should deterrence fail?

America's adversaries have numerous means and methods of carrying the fight to the homeland. Four plausible attack scenarios are:

Attempts to influence the outcome of the U.S. national elections in November 2028 through a campaign of targeted political violence and assassinations.
Cyber and physical attacks on various critical infrastructures to inflict pain and suffering on the American people and cripple our economy.
Operations to degrade U.S. munitions production and delay distribution of critical war materiel in order to inhibit a timely and effective response to overseas aggression that threatens vital U.S. national interests.
Attacks to disrupt and degrade U.S. national decision making and strategic military operations.

America's enemies possess the means and methods to conduct such attacks. This includes assassinations of politicians, cyberattacks, drone strikes, sabotage, violent protests, hypersonic and other missile strikes, terrorism, and more. Planning for such nefarious operations is likely underway.

In fact, there have been numerous attempts to assassinate President Trump and threats against U.S. Senators and Members of Congress have skyrocketed. China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea and their "cut outs" are conducting sophisticated cyberattacks on U.S. critical infrastructures. Drones have overflown key U.S. military bases and other sensitive facilities. Chinese nationals have illegally entered U.S. military bases in order to probe weaknesses in base security. Well-armed transnational criminal organizations, to include drug cartels, have a significant presence in many U.S. cities. Beijing and Moscow are fielding an array of sophisticated weaponry that can disable or destroy critical U.S. space systems used for missile attack warning and command and control of U.S. military forces as well as other advanced weaponry to "decapitate" the U.S. political and military leadership.

Enemies of the United States have identified key gaps and seams in our defenses and are actively plotting to exploit those weaknesses, just as bin Laden and his henchmen did over two decades ago. Sadly, many Americans do not appreciate the severity - or even the existence - of these and other threats to the homeland.

Federal, state and local law enforcement, national intelligence agencies, and military organizations are working tirelessly to uncover and defeat such plots. It remains to be seen, however, whether current and planned U.S. defenses can prevent widespread damage to the U.S. economy and major loss of life, and forestall a possible domestic political crisis.

Where were you on that fateful September morning twenty-five years ago? What were your emotions as you watched brave firefighters, police and volunteers rush to save lives as the Twin Towers came crashing down and the Pentagon burned?

Let's not let future historians condemn today's leaders for yet another failure of imagination.

Chris Williams served in various national security positions in the Department of Defense and the U.S. Congress.

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author.

image: The Pentagon 9/11 memorial is decorated with flowers and wreaths follwing the 24th 9/11 Observance Ceremony at the Pentagon, Washington, Sept. 11, 2025. (DoW photo by U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Madelyn Keech)

Devolution Revolution: Americans Returning Power to the People

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Sometimes a boundary is just a line in the road. But sometimes it's a gate from one world to another.

Driving due south from downtown Los Angeles through what was once the thriving center of Black L.A. now takes travelers through miles of dystopia that look like Mumbai on a bad day: potholed roads, vacant buildings, and mostly Latino young people - and older African Americans - hanging out with seemingly no particular place to go.

Then, about 18 miles in, you enter Paramount, a predominantly Latino city of over 50,000 residents which is still part of Los Angeles County but not the city proper. Suddenly, the ubiquitous graffiti is all but gone; the streets are smooth, and businesses, from steel fabrication to small service businesses, appear to be bustling.

The same is true in other South L.A. county towns like Downey, South Gate, and Bellflower, which also boast vibrant downtowns with attractive restaurants and shops. Crime has hardly disappeared but is far lower than in adjacent parts of the City of Los Angeles, which have long been plagued with violence, pervasive theft, and homelessness.

The common denominator that sets these communities apart from the city is good governance that starts by paying attention to little things that locals care about - like parks, urban space, and landscaping, even subsidizing flower beds and white picket fences. Most towns have programs that let citizens report graffiti, which is then removed within 24 hours. Paramount has grown its population by over 40% since 1975, even as Los Angeles County's population has dropped. As the city of Los Angeles grapples with huge deficits, Paramount has become less debt-burdened.

Like the neighboring towns, Paramount's success is especially remarkable because it has achieved it in the face of daunting odds. Once described as "an urban disaster area," Paramount was hit hard by the economic downturn of the 1980s, when aerospace and automobile manufacturers pulled out of the region.

Pat West, the former Paramount city manager and a guru to a generation of those now running these cities, believes this success stems from a web of essentially personal and profoundly apolitical mindset that can be forged when the distance between citizens and City Hall is small. "In places like Paramount, people get things done because that's where they live," West quips. "In LA they have meetings."

This shorter distance between "leaders" and residents changes the very nature of government. People generally look out for their families, children, neighbors more than the abstract "people" or "community" cited by activists from NGOs often funded by very rich people far away.

The success of South L.A.'s independent cities - and similar communities across the country - offers a counterpoint to influential urban activists who draw their views from academic thinkers and regional political as well as business elites. For decades, top-down planners, who focus almost entirely on political advocacy and finding ways to access funds from state and federal government, have dominated the debate about city life. Informed by thinkers such as the Marxist theorist Mike Davis, they argued these cities and other working-class communities were essentially doomed to become "hardscrabble slums." A 2024 article in The Atlantic described such places as a Ponzi scheme where minorities are left "holding the bag" for the dysfunction whites created and then fled from.

But the veracity of those claims and the power of those who espouse them are being quietly challenged and undermined by the organic movement of citizens driven not by ideology but by the search for a better life, a wide-scale phenomenon called devolution. Devolution - which combines the conservative ideals of small-town life with the old left-wing vision of people's communities - is the restoration of power to smaller, more responsive entities. This naturally includes the embrace of smaller local governments; it involves but also reflects an even more fundamental devolution of power that strengthens the basic units of life, notably the family, the neighborhood, associations and churches, whose concerns are often ignored by bureaucracies as well as huge corporations.

Power to the People

Political devolution is not much celebrated by the political class, whose power is magnified by large-scale governance. On the left, particularly in big cities, leftist progressives and Democratic Socialists are ascendant; their goal is to centralize power in the hands of activists so they can experience what New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani calls "the warmth of collectivism." Traditional ideas such as the separation of powers, local control, political diversity, and the primacy of family, even the pledge to remain non-violent, lack pride of place in their playbook.

In many ways, the Trump administration also embraces a similarly authoritarian, big-government approach, seeking to concentrate power in the executive branch and nationalize elections rather than emphasizing local concerns and solutions. In their own way, increasingly powerful tech moguls are trying to build a future that pays lip service to libertarianism but in practice stresses centralized power and uniformity.

As South L.A. demonstrates, bigger is not only not better; it is often demonstrably worse.

Of course, not all small cities are thriving, and not all big cities are failing. But as RCI has previously reported, a host of factors are driving people - especially the high cost of living in low-performing big cities - to choose to migrate to smaller jurisdictions. Core cities have been losing their share of metropolitan residents for decades. According to a recent M.I.T. study, suburbs and exurbs constitute roughly 80% of the nation's metropolitan population, while barely 8% live in the urban core.Even most millennials, who tend to be mobile and are often portrayed as immutably attracted to dense environments, are heading to the suburbs, particularly as they start - albeit belatedly - families.

This trend has accelerated since the pandemic and the increase in remote work. Demographer Wendell Cox notes that from 2020-2024, the urban core counties lost 3,259,000 net domestic migrants, which was three times the rate of loss in the previous decade. The Census Bureau reports that since 2020, growth has shifted to peripheral areas 20 miles or more from the central core, while areas within 10 miles declined markedly. Indeed, a small, and likely brief, post-pandemic recovery in large metro populations reversed in 2024, the Brookings Institution has found.

Bigger Isn't Better

The embrace of centralized power - which has its roots in Herbert Croly's 1909 progressive manifesto, "The Promise of American Life," and Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal - made sense a century ago. Vast technological changes, huge population increases, rampant racial discrimination, and various economic crises showed the limits of America's highly decentralized system that gave great authority to the states and localities. And for many Americans, at least till the 1970s, cities exercised a great appeal, as places of cultural and economic vitality.

But today, the gap between what's available in large and small cities, and even small towns, has diminished greatly. And while the federal government is necessary for certain functions, like controlling the border, national defense, and regulating interstate commerce, in areas such as education, law enforcement, and roadbuilding, smaller localities may prove more responsive and efficient than the larger units. As Aristotle noted, "a great city is not to be confounded with a populous one."

For years, proposals to merge or abolish smaller governments have been based on a "bigger-is-better" assumption. Studies show that merging governments historically drives costs up while diminishing the influence of individual voters in favor of well-organized and financed interest groups. Too often, the advantage of local democracy is overlooked.

Extensive research indicates that consolidation of local governments - long part of the progressive agenda - saves little money and tends to lead to higher spending. Evidence of this surfaced as early as the 1980s, well before the rise of digital technology, in states as diverse as Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio and Illinois. In Pennsylvania, for example, local general government expenditures per capita have long been the highest in the two largest cities. As recently as 2019, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh combined for only 14% of the state's population but account for over one-third of all municipal spending in the state.

Local governments also tend to be far more responsive to local needs in ways that could help invigorate America's fraying democracy. Rather than being directed from Washington, key infrastructure like major roads and utility grids could be the responsibility of broad, often ad hoc regional agencies. This is not a new idea. Many of the greatest achievements, like the Golden Gate Bridge, were commissioned locally and using a special district built by private firms ahead of schedule and under budget.

Today such special purpose districts - 39,262 in 2022 - tend to specialize in providing a particular service such as fire and emergency services, water and sewage supply, drainage, libraries, parks, and recreation.They often perform these tasks in concert with private companies that bid for local contracts.

Many South L.A. municipalities are "contract cities" that often secure services from either the county, notably the Sheriff's Office, or from private firms. "The secret sauce" for cost-effective governance, suggests 35-year-old Bellflower City Councilman Victor Sanchez, lies in picking and choosing what services are best provided regionally or by private companies rather than trying to run everything from a centralized city hall. "Sometimes," suggests Paramount's John Moreno, "the private sector does things better."

The Secret Sauce

Devolving governance fits with the well-documented dispersion of population, whereby big city dwellers migrate to smaller communities with often more efficient and responsive governance. In his 1967 address to the American Political Science Association, eminent political scientist Robert Dahl proposed the division of metro areas into federations of self-governing areas with 50,000 to 200,000 residents - small enough for meaningful civic participation and large enough to enjoy economies of scale.

Today, access to technology makes smaller communities even more capable of doing things that only large cities once could accomplish - and do it better. For example, most of the South L.A. cities allow residents to ping the city if they see graffiti. And it goes down quickly. As one council member explained: "We better do it or I won't be able to get a peaceful cup of coffee."

Cities like Los Angeles, of course, have similar technical abilities, but lack the resources and the focus to respond quickly. The real "secret sauce" lies in cutting the distance between the governed and the government with far higher levels of trust for state and particularly local governments as opposed to the federal level. The Pew Research Center, for example, found that while two-thirds of Americans disapproved of the federal government, a majority had favorable opinions of state governments, while two-thirds approved of local ones.

A central paradox is that central government has acquired more power even as the people's faith in its effectiveness has withered. In the 1960s, trust in Washington was at nearly 80%; it has since plummeted to near 20%. Few elected officials - from recent presidents to senators, members of the House, state governors, and big city mayors - are widely admired.

The decades-long rush to centralize power has become an invitation to interminable conflict between two parties dueling to see who is the most unpopular. Both seem fine with deconstructing political competition through lawfare or redistricting, something the vast majority of voters, independent and those in both parties, abhor.

One method of promoting decentralization could be a return to federal revenue sharing devised by President Richard Nixon. The basic principle was to push down decision-making and federal funding to local levels. It was destroyed by a combination of deficit hawks and the natural tendency of national leaders, both right and left, who benefit from turning states, as political scientist Ruy Teixeira notes, into "instruments" of Washington, shamelessly panhandling for their funds.

Yet no feat of computer-driven map-making can develop a common ground between places like Portland and those in conservative eastern Oregon or harmonize California with Alabama. Certain basic standards need to be maintained, largely to protect individual and property rights, but only decentralization offers the promise of more democratic and responsive governance.

The data suggests that localized and specialized structures are more congruent with local sentiments and needs. This is a traditional American strength. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed, "the habits of self-government" are only acquired through civic association. It's in local venues that democratic citizenship is most keenly felt, and where we can build an American future more in keeping with the ideals of our founders.

Education in Vanguard of Change

Devolving authority, as seen in South L.A., appears to offer a better alternative. A clear example can be found in education, which until the 1950s was largely a local matter. Back then, federal and state intervention may have been necessary to battle segregation. Today, given the miserable results of many public schools in recent decades, parents are increasingly revolting against the idea that large public institutions, notably union-dominated urban school districts or edicts of the Department of Education, offer the best solution.

Many parents clearly have a hunger for an education based on values and basic learning rather than those traditionally imposed by the federal Department of Education or state bureaucracies. Enrollment in private Christian schools shot up in recent years, increasing 12% between 2019-20 and 2020-21. In the 2019-20 school year, 6% of all American students, some 3.5 million, attended religious schools. There has also been a shift towards Jewish day schools, expanding not only in the Orthodox community but also among Conservative and Reform Jews.

After decades of decline, Catholic education is on the upswing. During 2021, parochial schools experienced an increase in enrollment of almost 4% and now attract close to 2 million students. This number - for all the religiously oriented programs - will likely grow as school choice programs in places like Texas, Florida, and Iowa are poised to expand their footprint.

At the grassroots level, religious schools offer a successful alternative to secular, usually union-dominated schools. Tulane sociologist Ilana Horwitz found that overall, students attending Catholic schools easily outperform public schools, with average scores among fourth-graders in Catholic schools standing about one-and-a-half grade levels ahead. The differences are particularly marked among African American and Latino students.

The shift to schools not operated by the state has expanded well beyond the Catholic Church. At Houston's The Saint Constantine School, built around the Orthodox Christian faith, children run free in the seven-acre yard, learning to garden and organize their own play. Lives that might have been squashed by a dysfunctional public school system are now immersed in an education that includes instruction in Greek, Latin, or Arabic from an early age.

Since 2015, enrollment has increased from 115 to 450 students in comparison to Houston's troubled Independent School District, which has lost 12% of its students since 2016. Made up largely of Middle Eastern Christians, Russian and Greek Orthodox, the school focuses not just on academics, but also on shaping the moral character of its students. "We are trying to raise saints," jokes Megan Mueller, head of strategy and public relations for the school. "Education is important, but building character is more so."

An even more radical departure, homeschooling, has become one of the fastest-growing corners of the school choice movement, notes the Fordham Institute . In the 2023-24 school year, nearly 6% of children ages 5-17 received academic instruction at home, up from 5.2% in 2022-23 and 2.8% in 2019. This is, among other things, a reaction to often violent school environments, lack of moral instruction, poor academic quality, and a profound disrespect for the primacy of the parents over their own offspring's education.

Perhaps most consequential has been the growth of public charter schools. They are up roughly 15% over a recent six-year span even as traditional public school district enrollment has declined. This shift has been catalyzed by the superior academic performance seen in such schools, particularly in poor and minority communities.

This is not to say that public schools cannot succeed. People with children tend to seek out districts in small towns and suburbs, where public education is not controlled by massive bureaucracies as in New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago. In stark contrast to the dysfunction plaguing Los Angeles' massive school district, districts in the archipelago of smaller cities in South L.A. have generally made considerable improvements. Paramount's local school district, for example, has seen remarkable improvement. As current City Manager John Moreno notes, graduation rates have risen from 71% to over 90%, a success he attributes to strong community spirit and parental involvement.

Families Are Crucial

Shifting power from Washington, D.C., and state capitals represents just one part of the devolutionary agenda, part of a broader effort to restore human agency. Rather than concentrating power in bureaucracy, it taps the energy of basic human institutions, from the family and church to local communities.

Devolving power, whether in school or at City Hall, ultimately relies on the flourishing of families. Restoring family cannot be dictated from above, nor can it be easily justified by mere material benefits. Attempts in increasingly childless Italy to lower taxes on diapers and incentives for childbearing have barely moved the needle. In social democracies like Sweden, generous handouts to families and greater societal acceptance of children out of marriage have failed to boost fertility.

In the end, governments and markets, notes demographer Nick Eberstadt, "do not cure social pathologies." More promising would be a rekindling of the familial values that have long buttressed society. A potential return to faith might help with birthrates, whereas the decline, notably among Catholics, has had a devastating effect on fertility; some religious subcultures, like the Amish, Mormons, evangelicals and Orthodox Jews, enjoy far higher birthrates than secular and more mainstream religious communities.

But familialism cannot be restored by the faithful alone. Studies show a need to focus less on visions of divinity and more on transcending a single-minded focus on material well-being and efficiency. The good news is that some parents are getting the point: remarkably, the time spent with kids is now twice what it was 50 years ago. Mexican immigrant children, for example, surrounded by a wide family network, experience appreciably fewer psychological problems than other populations. Irrespective of income, married women with children tend to be happier than those who are single and childless.

G.K. Chesterton once described the family as "the factory that manufactures mankind." The trend, however, has been in the opposite direction. But as the family has been deemphasized as the nurturer of values, the state and the digital world have moved to fill the breach - to the detriment of what is left of civilization. The so-called loneliness epidemic is just one key data point in a world where people are increasingly held together not by ties of kinship, or proximity, but by their training, ideology, cultural preference, or even hobbies.

Work Matters

As it weakens the family, ideologies and technologies that support central power and authoritarianism are also undermining another pillar of society: the value of work. From the very beginnings of humanity, work defined the individual, for those who were not enslaved, a sense of place and purpose, albeit sometimes with backbreaking labor. But jobs gave people a sense of agency, that they could provide their families and communities with something of value. It was essential to people's self-regard and often helped define communities from auto-oriented places like Detroit to Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

Now we are entering an era where technological elites seem determined to replace humanity and the dignity of labor, except for an elite of software whizzes, tech managers, and investors. Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei sees a future where much of our needs - and our tasks - will be replaced by "Machines of Loving Grace." Who needs human effort, connectedness, and creativity when you can have "a general labor substitute for humans?" Amodei adds: "It cannot be more than a few years before AI is better than humans at essentially everything."

In the future, Elon Musk suggests, work will be optional. "You could have a job if you wanted to have a job for personal satisfaction," he predicted in 2023, "But AI would be able to do everything."

The future now unfolding could shift power away from localities or families, in favor of an AI-powered state or under the aegis of the tech oligarchy, or a lethal combination of the two. Free market competition, which has long proven the best means to prevent overconcentration of power, will give way to AI-empowered oligopolies that can kill competition with what one writer described as "algorithmic firing squads."

These trends could likely accelerate our already serious shrinkage in workforce participation. Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" envisioned a world in which people will no longer be sources of values, but instead mutated into indolent masses who need to be drugged or amused. As Marc Andreessen said to The American Prospect, human beings struggling to make ends meet will be kept in check as long as they have the new opiates of the masses, "OxyContin and video games," to keep them quiet, and hopefully docile.

Andreessen was half-kidding, but it's a worldview many elites have embraced - and it may be the most powerful assault on agency today. It goes against the very idea of human worth. Sociologist Musa al-Gharbi points out that unemployed people, even if their material needs are met, still have a "desire to be useful, to produce, to transform, to add value - these are the fundamental human drives that people satisfy by various forms of labor."

Once this part of existence is excised, al-Gharbi adds, people naturally shift to "licentiousness, and other forms of hedonism, or playing games or consuming ever more entertainment just to fill up their hours… Spending one's life just killing time is a horrible way to live - empty and unsatisfying."

In this imagined future, aspiration is made moot by control from above. Having nothing to add to society by their labor or creativity, the big issue becomes how much cash should be dispersed from the owners of the machines. Some, like the peasants after the Middle Ages, who lost their traditional place in a changing social order, could embrace a "revolutionary millennialism." At the very least, politics will evolve into a contest over how to divide the spoils, whether the ultra-rich hold onto more of their relentlessly higher level of wealth or we enter a fantastical era of "fully automated luxury communism."

Human-Scaled Communities

Ultimately, Americans have to ask: what kind of society do we want? Today, family and community suffer from what Harvard's Robert Putnam defined as the curse of "pervasive busyness." It takes far more time and effort to build human-scaled community than to develop an algorithm or app that erases the need for direct connections with those around us.

Family, neighborhood, and church have rarely appealed to authoritarians or oligarchic "masters of the universe." Socialism, Friedrich Engels believed, would engender a "social revolution in which the hitherto existing economic foundations of monogamy would disappear." Adolf Hitler in "Mein Kampf" saw it as the responsibility of the state, not the family, to educate "every little national and racial comrade" so that "the young sapling" would become "a valuable link in the chain of future reproduction."

Only intimacy between actual people, most notably in the family or community, can combat this technological intrusion, whether in schools or in the operations of government. Some may mourn that Americans are less satisfied with our democracy than most Europeans or East Asians, but that at least indicates they may prefer new human-scaled and human-controlled ways of living and governing our lives.

Reviving our society, and democracy, relies less on "resistance" or brilliant policies from technocrats or oligarchs, but on encouraging open conversation between people who know each other not on the net, but at the coffee shop, the sports field, the parent association, the church, or just in the neighborhood.

Grassroots democracy, oriented towards local residents and families, is critical to reviving our tottering Republic. It embraces the preference for decentralization inherent in our Constitution. When it comes to issues about keeping the streets swept, removing graffiti, you need not ideologues or influencers but people, however different their political orientation, who can share a "civic friendship" based on familiarity and proximity, people who share the same local air.

South L.A.'s success was driven not by political activists but by a bottom-up effort among citizens. In Downey, a city sometimes jokingly called "the Latino Beverly Hills," progress came from locally generated leaders, not from DSA or MAGA. In places like Downey, Republicans and Democrats work together. One key player, long-time councilman Mario Guerra, a staunch Republican, works closely with local Democrats in the interest of the city he loves.

"We had to reinvent ourselves," Guerra recalls in his downtown Downey office. "But we don't let partisan politics get in the way. People here back each other up. We all want the streets clean, and the graffiti gone." Downey residents, he adds, share a common pride in being home to the world's oldest McDonald's, a place that manufactured key parts of the Space Shuttle, and now sports a lively downtown.

"People come here because they feel safe," suggests Mario Trujillo, a former mayor, current councilmember, and a prominent Democrat. "People migrated from East L.A., Boyle Heights, and Chavez Ravine. It's a 'move up' place that we have made for ourselves."

We Are in World War Xi

Karen Siegemund, Bradley A. Thayer — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

As the Russo-Ukrainian war continues, Americans may blame Russian leader Vladimir Putin for starting "World War III." It is correct that World War III has started, but its cause is the People's Republic of China (PRC), not Russia.

The war did not start with Putin's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 or appeasement of Russia in the years before Putin's foolish aggression. It started with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The CCP has been at war with the U.S. since coming to power in 1949 and has employed many fronts in this war to undermine America and the West. The CCP's May 2019 declaration of "People's War" against the U.S. was CCP leader Xi Jinping's call for a maximal effort against America. Not coincidently, the Covid-19 outbreak soon followed. The CCP lied about Covid's origins, refused to share information with the world, and used Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) as its willing accomplice. Another front is CCP election interference. President Trump has revealed the CCP's interference in the 2020 U.S. presidential election in an effort to secure President Joe Biden's victory. Biden's open borders allowed many hundreds of thousands of military-aged Chinese men into the United States—prepositioning a force to strike against the American people in their homeland. The sustained chemical warfare attack that is fentanyl is another avenue of attack, destroying American lives and families. The CCP's success at buying American and European politicians and journalists to serve as its agents of influence is yet another, as is TikTok.

Putin is not the source of World War III. Putin is, in the scheme of World War III, a secondary player. It is Xi who is driving World War III. It seems that the common denominator for every manifestation of this global crisis, whether overt or covert, foreign or domestic, is that Xi Jinping and his CCP have either inspired or enabled them—or at least, stand to be the principal beneficiaries. Consequently, while some call it World War III, one might consider that a more apt name is "World War Xi."

It was Xi who gave the green light to Putin to invade Ukraine when they met in early February 2022. Xi and Putin have met over 10 times since then, and on each occasion, Xi has evinced strong, public support for Putin's war. While the Russo-Ukrainian war is not yet resolved—it has lasted longer than World War I—it already has a clear winner: the PRC. The PRC provides great assistance to Russia—diplomatic, economic, and "dual use" military aid—all of which is important to sustain Russia's war. Beijing is receiving a prodigious return that is helping Xi win World War III.

First, by sustaining the war, the PRC occupies the U.S. and so diverts attention from its aggressive acts and preparations for war over Taiwan, which might include attacks against the U.S. itself. The U.S. intelligence community and military have only so much bandwidth, and the conflicts in Iran, Ukraine, and elsewhere in the Middle East are filling it. In addition, U.S. stockpiles are drained by the conflict in Iran and aid to Ukraine, including in Patriot, ATACMS, and other missiles, and 155mm artillery rounds, all of which reduces the ability of the U.S. military to fight a high-intensity war with the PRC. In turn, a reduced U.S. arsenal hurts the conventional deterrent of the U.S. in key theaters, like the western Pacific and Taiwan.

Second, the war cements Putin's dependence on the PRC. Putin is Xi's myrmidon, the supplicant in the relationship. Truly, Putin is Xi's useful idiot. Xi drafted Putin to serve in his anti-Western alliance, which costs Putin his autonomy. Xi ultimate ambition is to overthrow U.S. power and position in the world and shackle the world to the PRC's tyrannical ambitions. Putin's interest would have been better served by emerging as the tertius gaudens of the conflict between the U.S. and the PRC. Now that he has tied Russia's interests to the PRC, he will walk the path Xi requires of him. That requires Russia to accept diminished influence when Russia's interest conflicts with the PRC, such as in Central Asia, and to serve as an instrument of distraction for the U.S. and its NATO allies while China expands its military power and strategic ambitions. Putin must fear that once he has served his usefulness, may Xi overthrow him.

Third, Putin also serves as a lightning rod, attracting the world's animus and attention for his acts while Xi's genocide in Xinjiang remains too often unremarked and in the background. The PRC's preparations for war against Taiwan and its increasingly coercive measures against the Philippines also do not receive the attention they deserve.

Fourth, as a result of the Ukraine war, Xi has secured his northern flank. Russian conventional and nuclear military power is now a tool to be employed in conjunction with or apart from the PRC's military—but to serve Beijing's interests. The U.S. has a "multiple front" war problem with which it must contend.

Moreover, Xi has secured his western flank in Central Asia. The Central Asian states perceive Russia as a threat due to the invasion of Ukraine and see Moscow as the junior partner in the Sino-Russian relationship. For Xi, this is a remarkable occurrence at the same time that China is waging genocide against Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang or East Turkistan. The PRC's western flank is as secure as it has been in recent years. With two flanks secure and the expansion of Xi's ability to project power, it is no surprise that Xi is aggressing on the PRC's southern and eastern flanks.

The bottom line is that the Russo-Ukrainian war greatly benefits the PRC. As the PRC gains in military might, this hurts the U.S.'s ability to defend its national security interests elsewhere, including in the western Pacific. In turn, this weakens the ability of the U.S. to deter aggression against Taiwan, the Philippines, and other states, as well as the ability to fight a war with the PRC, should deterrence fail.

The costs of the Russo-Ukrainian war are high in every respect. While Moscow may eke out a Pyrrhic victory, the true winner of the war is Beijing. The war continues because Xi wants it to, and his aid allows Putin to pursue his folly.

With two flanks secure and the expansion of Xi's ability to project power, the PRC is putting in place the necessary preconditions for aggression. The U.S. and its allies should expect China to center its belligerency on its southern and eastern flanks. This aggression might be kinetic—indeed, at some point it will be so—against India on Beijing's southern flank, against Taiwan on the eastern, and possibly even against Japan and the U.S. But the PRC will continue to employ all the tools of statecraft to bring its might to bear to cause the change it wants. Thus, the world should expect diplomatic, ideological, and economic pressure to be employed by the PRC against them, while Beijing also seeks to undermine the governments of India, Taiwan, Japan, and the U.S. We should also anticipate the continued expansion of the PRC's domestic influence in those countries through the use of the PRC's United Front Work Department to subvert them and other overt and covert efforts.

It is a new world. Soviet dominance over PRC during the Cold War is now reversed. In World War III, the PRC calls the shots because of Putin's strategic idiocy. Having the PRC's northern and western flanks secured is a key step toward Xi's greater belligerence. The CCP is employing many tools in this war, and the American people need to recognize the avenues of attack. The U.S., its allies and partners must move beyond anticipating aggression to recognizing its certainty and the reality of World War Xi.

Dr. Karen Sigemund is president of the American Freedom Alliance, where Dr. Bradley A. Thayer is a Fellow and author of America's 100 Years' War: How to Win Against Communism.

Taiwan's Most Vulnerable Moment

David Sarabia — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

At this very moment, a window of vulnerability exists for Taiwan. The vulnerability is not the looming threat of an all-out invasion of the main island. Rather, the risk is in losing some of Taiwan's outlying islands, in particular a group of islands called Kinmen. The United States appears to be distracted politically and depleted militarily with the current Strait of Hormuz crisis. For the People's Republic of China, this moment represents an opportunity for President Xi Jinping to accomplish something Mao Zedong failed to achieve. By attempting to take the islands of Kinmen through a blockade and possible amphibious landings, China can again test United States resolve to defend Taiwan against invasion. If successful, President Xi can further the Chinese "rejuvenation" after a "Century of Humiliation" while creating the conditions for taking Taiwan by force in the future. The United States must increase its vigilance while signaling its resolve now rather than later to ensure a Western Pacific free of Chinese aggression.

The most likely flashpoint in great power competition between the United States and China is the possible invasion of Taiwan. The islands of Kinmen are operationally important with regard to an invasion as they are only six miles from the mainland of China, blocking the port city of Xiamen. In Ian Easton's The Chinese Invasion Threat, Kinmen represents a threat to any Chinese invasion force as Taiwan has fortified the islands with a garrison armed with artillery and missiles. Such a force can hinder any amphibious force attempting to sortie from the coast. The People's Liberation Army cannot simply bypass the island allowing attacks within its invasion corridor. As such Kinmen represents a key operational objective that must be secured before taking the main island. Mao Zedong recognized this need decades ago.

Going back to the Chinese civil war between China and Taiwan, Kinmen remained in Taiwanese possession thanks to United States assistance. According to Xiaobing Li's China's New Navy, in 1958, Mao Zedong considered the United States distracted by events in the Middle East. As a means of testing United States resolve to defend Taiwan, Mao ordered the Chinese military to blockade and shell the islands of Kinmen in preparation for their occupation. One of Mao's main concerns was to not cause casualties among any Americans, either on the islands or at sea. In response to Mao's test, President Eisenhower ordered the United States Navy to protect Taiwan's relief convoys attempting to run the blockade. The protection allowed Taiwan's convoys to approach Kinmen without being attacked while transiting the Taiwan Strait. Without United States intervention, the defenders on Kinmen would have eventually run out of supplies and likely succumbed to Chinese occupation. For China, the "Century of Humiliation" continued at the hands of Western powers with this intervention.

President Xi Jinping seeks to "rejuvenate" China. To that end, the People's Republic of China has for years relied on diplomatic pressure and "gray zone" tactics to assert its sovereignty claims over the waters around Kinmen and Taiwan in general. Pointedly, he has set a goal for the People's Liberation Army to have the capability to take Taiwan by 2027. Although few scholars believe that China has the sealift capacity to take Taiwan, estimates indicate that the People Liberation Army could land at least 20,000 troops supported by mechanized vehicles in one lift. Currently, the Kinmen garrison has an estimated 5,000 defenders. Although heavily defended, Kinmen would still face a daunting task of fending off many times the number of invaders, supported by overwhelming Chinese air, sea, and missile power. More importantly, Xi may choose this moment as the weather conditions along the Strait are more favorable during the coming months than other times of the year, ensuring a higher chance of success should he order an amphibious landing. A blockade backed by a credible demonstration of the use of force could allow Xi to prove the combat capabilities of the Army while also providing a dress rehearsal for an eventual invasion. Additionally, Xi can solidify domestic support while bolstering the morale of the Army. Internationally, if the United States should back down or not even intervene, China's "best strategy," which is a fracturing of America's alliances in the Pacific (as coined by Elbridge Colby in The Strategy of Denial), may see its first steps on Kinmen.

President Xi testing American resolve is made more likely since the United States is once again distracted politically and drained militarily with events in the Middle East. Recently, the Pentagon ordered the last Western Pacific carrier, the USS George Washington, to replace the USS Abraham Lincoln, to support combat operations against the Islamic Republic of Iran. Additionally, reports of shortages of American missiles have led to concerns over the "lack the depth of munitions inventories that it needs today." Destruction and damage of American fighter aircraft, drones, and command and control aircraft reduce the availability of such assets that could be used to contest Chinese denial operations over the Taiwan Strait. These issues add to the concern that United States military capacity is not prepared to confront an aggressive China.

During previous crises in the Taiwan Strait, the United States signaled its resolve to defend Taiwan, often through the deployment of aircraft carriers. For example, according to Xiaobing Li, President Clinton sent the USS Nimitz through the Strait while also deploying the USS Independence carrier battle group around the main island during the 1996 Taiwan Crisis. Today, for President Xi, this moment represents an opportunity to test the United States once again since a primary tool for signaling American resolve is now steaming toward the Middle East leaving a monthslong gap in aircraft carrier coverage. The apparent lack of carriers, missiles and aircraft could encourage China that now is the right time to take Kinmen. The United States would need to signal that American warships will still escort Taiwanese relief supplies even with the absence of aircraft carriers and possibly reduced land-based air cover.

Because of the current situation in the Strait of Hormuz, Taiwan is in a very vulnerable moment with regard to Kinmen. In response, the United States must conduct focused intelligence collection to look for any indications of an impending blockade or preparations for an amphibious landing. America must also signal to China that it will not allow Kinmen to change hands. Currently, the United States has military members on Kinmen. The public deployment of additional American trainers to Kinmen can demonstrate the Administration's resolve to defend Taiwan. The Pentagon could also increase freedom-of-navigation operations with United States warships in the Taiwan Strait specifically along the likely supply route from Taiwan to Kinmen, demonstrating the willingness to escort convoys even without aircraft carriers. By signaling resolve before President Xi orders such a test, the United States can ensure that the Western Pacific is free of Chinese aggression while reassuring allies and partners in the region. Mao tried in 1958 and Xi has a window to try again. Now is not the time for ambiguity but clarity lest America reneges on its commitments.

Dr. David Sarabia currently serves as an adjunct instructor of political science at Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Texas. He completed his doctorate from Missouri State University's School of Defense and Strategic Studies with a capstone doctoral project focused on a Taiwan Strait conflict. Dr. Sarabia is a retired United States Air Force intelligence officer and a veteran of Operations IRAQI FREEDOM and ENDURING FREEDOM.

image: Soldiers pay tribute to those who died in a deadly attack by China, known as the 1958 Taiwan Strait Crisis, in Kinmen, Taiwan, Sunday, Aug. 23, 2026. (AP Photo/Chiang Ying-ying)