I’ve been recounting the lessons I learned from (unsuccessfully) running for Congress. The first lesson was that politics is a time warp. With a few exceptions, it is dominated by people who started running for office, or started their preparation for running for office, decades ago—and this explains why our political system can be so slow to react to quickly changing events.

I came across a figure that confirms part of this: a calculation that in this year’s primaries (as of late June), the number of congressional incumbents who were running for office and won their primaries dropped dramatically: from 98.2% to, er, 97.1%. That article notes that an unusually large number of incumbents decided not to run for re-election this year. (This is mostly on the Republican side—people who aren’t sufficiently aligned with Trump, or people who realize he’s going to drag them down to defeat in the general election.) But the point still stands. In my case, I didn’t know if my main opponent’s one term in Congress sixteen years ago would confer most of the advantages of incumbency, and yep, it did.

The second big lesson I learned is that this applies to the voters, too—and especially a party’s core voters, the ones who tend to decide the primaries and determine what alternatives you see on your ballot in November. The composition of these voters also tends to reflect the reasons people got involved in politics decades ago, whether they’re local organizers and activists or just the politically engaged rank-and-file—rather than their response to recent events.

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The Laws of Ideologial Inertia

This was driven home to me pretty early on when I met a very nice local Democratic Party organizer in Nelson County (between Charlottesville and Lynchburg) who is a Navy veteran, who has worked on veterans’ issues for years, and who will grill you on those issues at every available opportunity. There’s nothing wrong with that, as far as it goes; every issue needs its single-minded advocates or it will be forgotten in favor of something else. But this set a pattern, and the problem is that the priorities created by these prior political commitments can be a little too unyielding to the requirements of current events.

Here’s an example of what I mean.

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I spent most of 2025 working on a catalogue of abuses of executive power under the Trump administration, which got me revved up to try to do something about it. I’m making plans for how to return to that, so first let me mention, as part of a roundup of news items, one particularly egregious example.

Pete Hegseth is using the Pentagon budget, your tax dollars, to build his own personal troll army.

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Everything Else Is Public Relations

The news just broke recently that a coterie of online military “influencers” has quietly been put on the Pentagon’s civilian payroll, which seems like a way to pay them to put an administration-friendly spin on military news.

The Pentagon has secretly installed several conservative military veterans with large online followings in government roles, declining to disclose their assignments as they amplify Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s viewpoints and attack those who scrutinize the Trump administration, according to people familiar with the matter and corroborating material….

Those involved include Rob Maness, a retired Air Force colonel, and Kurt Schlichter, a retired Army colonel, people familiar with the matter said. Pentagon records reviewed by The Washington Post show that both have active official government email addresses as of this past week and are assigned to the office of Anthony Tata, the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness. The email addresses include a “.civ” suffix, meaning they are labeled as civilian employees, rather than as military personnel or contractors….

In an article published last month by the conservative Daily Caller, Maness argues that Hegseth’s team needs to root out “disloyal” career employees in the department.

You may not recognize most of these names, but I remember Kurt Schlichter, who is pretty much a straight-up fascist who fantasizes about using “the law to ensure blue [state] submission” and “imprison dissenters.”

These writers have not just been providing an administration-friendly spin. They’re giving their readers or listeners a Pete Hegseth-friendly spin, including echoing his beefs with other people in the administration.

Pounds’s secret work for the Pentagon calls into question the motivations of several of her posts, such as when she took a jab at then-Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, a Hegseth nemesis. It also raises serious questions about Secretary Pete Hegseth’s cozy relationship with outspoken conservative social media influencers, and whether it breaches serious ethical norms.

Hegseth has gone to great lengths to limit and muzzle many members of the traditional Pentagon press corps. But secretly employing a shadowy, rabidly online personality for the apparent purpose of going after your enemies is a remarkable illustration of the kind of steps Hegseth appears willing to take to fight internecine political wars.

This follows Hegseth’s attempt to rein in the Pentagon press corps by requiring them to sign a pledge not to “report on information—classified or otherwise—that had not been approved by Hegseth for release”—in other words, a pledge not to engage in journalism. In the words of a famous saying (falsely attributed to George Orwell), “Journalism is printing something that someone does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.”

Hegseth then replaced independent reporters with a group of conservative flunkies. More recently, he fired the editors of Stars and Stripes in an effort to end the military newspaper’s editorial independence.

Oh, and he’s merely following in the footsteps of his boss. Donald Trump is out waving around FCC threats against the press again, complaining about reporting on polls that show him sinking in popularity and an NBC anchor fact-checking him. It’s another good case for reining in the FCC or maybe just ending it.

The upshot is that this administration is attempting to control every source of the flow of information to the public, particularly about military affairs.

I wonder why they might want to do that?

The War of the Monkey’s Paw

Oh, here’s why.

Pete Hegseth regularly receives formal objections from senior commanders and proceeds anyway, the Pentagon’s top spokesman has said, as he tried to discredit a Washington Post report that four generals and admirals had advised against prolonging the war in Iran….

Dan Lamothe, the Post reporter who broke the story, wrote on X that “independent journalism is not a crime” and that such reporting was necessary when officials withhold details about a war funded by taxpayers….

Still, Donald Trump on Monday morning in effect said the war was won.

“Iran is officially a Failed Nation. IT IS DEAD!” the president wrote on Truth Social. “They have no Navy, they have no Air Force, they have no currency, they are not paying their soldiers or police, Inflation is at 300%, and their leadership is in total disarray and incapable of properly representing the country.” He accused Iran’s government of killing more than 100,000 protesters and said its leaders “must be tried for war crimes against humanity.”

Neither Trump nor Parnell explained how that squares with what four of the Pentagon’s own commanders had put in writing: that they can’t sustain the war effort as ordered.

The generals were right to issue these warnings. The problem with assuming you can win a war just by dropping the most bombs is what happens if you’ve dropped all your bombs, and you haven’t won the war, so you have to drop more of them until you start to run out. That’s where we are now.

The massive expenditure of US munitions in the Middle East is increasingly worrying Asian allies and frustrating Pentagon officials overseeing the Indo-Pacific, who fear that the prolonged war with Iran could undermine US readiness for a conflict with China as it continues to step up military pressure across the region….

South Korea and other US partners in Asia, including Japan and Taiwan, rely on Washington as the dominant supplier of major conventional weapons and are reckoning with years-long backlogs….

In December, Beijing staged its largest-ever military drill around Taiwan, encircling the democratically governed island with ships and aircraft. Nearly $30 billion in US arms approved for sale to Taiwan have yet to be delivered, including $882 million worth of Patriot missiles, according to Taiwan Security Monitor.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon has been loath to admit the extent of the damage Iran has managed to do to our bases in the Middle East, which apparently were not prepared for this.

The more we learn about the attacks on the US Naval Support Activity (NSA) in Manama, Bahrain, during the opening days of Operation Epic Fury, the clearer it becomes why the news of its near destruction was not initially reported or acknowledged.

Extensive damage to one of our most significant forward bases in the Middle East is likely to have profound tactical and strategic repercussions that are only now coming into focus….

The idea that the US could not prevent and defend against a predictable attack on a Fleet Headquarters—and our sailors stationed there—is quite startling. It likely is just as alarming to our allies.

The depth of NSA Bahrain’s impact became clear as the stories of scarcities of parts, food, mail and supplies to the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln hit the news. Before long, pieces of the puzzle began falling into place as to the connection between ship supplies and the lack of a familiar resupply source.

We’ve had the Pig War and the War of Jenkins’ Ear, so let’s call this one the “War of the Monkey’s Paw.” We Iran hawks finally got what we said we wanted, but the monkey’s paw twitched, and we got it in the stupidest and most incompetent way.

But why bother getting the ammunition and supplies to actually bomb and defeat the enemy, when you can just fantasize about it with AI slop?

The video, posted to the president’s Truth Social account, appears to show oil storage tanks and refineries erupting in flames from the perspective of someone filming from inside a helicopter above the carnage, with an accompanying message describing the scene as “Kharg Island being blown to smithereens” and signed as “President DJT.”

But a US official said no such attack had taken place, with Kharg Island not being among the locations targeted overnight in what has been the first exchange of fire between American and Iranian forces in weeks.

Fantasizing seems to be President Trump’s main coping method. You can see that in how he’s trying to claim victory in the absurdly self-defeating new trade war he just started—for no reason and with no warning or provocation—against Canada.

This is going to hurt American companies, badly, but Trump will claim victory because he renamed a lake.

President Donald Trump ordered Lake Ontario to be renamed Lake America, the latest broadside in his escalating feud with Canada….

While Trump can change the lake’s name for US government purposes, states and private companies—including those responsible for consumer maps—can decide whether to follow suit.

Placing symbolism over reality is an eternal temptation, particularly in politics and especially in this administration.

Surviving in a Pit of Vipers

In describing the Trump administration’s machination against the press, it might seem like the pro-Trump “MAGA” media world would be thriving. But it’s not. That’s partly because it’s a pit of vipers, as you can see in the news about conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos (about whom I have reluctantly commented once or twice) being deported to the UK—after he lustily cheered on Trump’s deportations of everyone else.

See Will Sommer on why the MAGA media, rather than rallying to Milo’s defense, is cheering on his deportation, and conservative bottom-feeder Laura Loomer is claiming credit for it. Sommer argues “it’s because Yiannopoulos was clear-eyed about the circus that much of right-wing media has become.” Milo knew it was all a con and gleefully exposed the hypocrisy of other conservative provocateurs—one who was having an affair, one who Yiannopoulos claims is secretly gay, one who was skating out on child support.

They’re happy to see him go, and I’ll admit to a bit of schadenfreude myself—leavened by the realization that this is how authoritarian movements always work. It’s always a pit of vipers, with vicious jockeying for power between the opposing factions.

Moreover, this is just one part of a much bigger story: the wide-scale destruction of the right-leaning media and its intellectual infrastructure, such as it was, including some of the places I used to write for.

See, for example, an overview of declining audiences for some top conservative figures.

Experts point to a number of reasons for the changes, including the difficulty in stoking political outrage while Republicans control Washington, along with a quieter midterm season. All content creators are also subject to the whims of algorithms, like on X, which can change without explanation and impact their reach. A fresh generation of influencers, such as Clavicular and the YouTube creator Asmongold, have also siphoned away viewers by speaking about politics alongside other topics like gaming and relationships.

Mr. Fuentes, for instance, saw notable gains in 2025 and early 2026 but is now trending down. “It seems that everyone in the space is experiencing a drop-off in views from 2025,” Mr. Fuentes wrote in an email. “Seems as though 2025 was the anomaly either due to organic interest or potentially artificial boosting,” he added….

Views for mainstream news websites are also down, the group found. But many right-wing websites have seen larger declines, including The Blaze and The Federalist.

Note that line about artificial boosting. There has been some quiet speculation (and a little reporting) about how the demise of the Orbán regime in Hungary may have choked off funds used to prop up sympathetic nationalist conservatives back in the US.

This highlights something I’ve been warning about for a while, which is that Trumpism is bad for the right-of-center media in general, because Donald Trump doesn’t need intellectuals, all he needs is sycophants. Many of the conservatives who boosted MAGA have found that it is fickle. Having lifted them up, it can just as quickly push them back down. Only the lowest of the low have prospered relative to their previous, well-deserved obscurity. (I remember when Loomer was dismissed as a pathetic tryhard, and now she has the ear of the president.)

That has left a lot of us, unfortunately, in a kind of Uncanny Valley where we’re not firmly on “the left” ideologically, so we don’t fit into their institutions, but we’re not MAGA, so we have no prospects on the right. I can think of only three writers in this category who have really been lifted up to a higher level professionally in the last ten years: Jonathan Last at The Bulwark, Tom Nichols at The Atlantic, and David French at the New York Times. For the rest of us, it’s a constant struggle.

That’s something I’m finding after my campaign as I go to restart my writing work—that even some of the opportunities I was working on last year have since reduced in scope. And this is happening just as we really need people who will be both alert to the authoritarian assault from the right and clear-eyed about the “democratic socialists” and their own ecosystem of crazy provocateurs.

So one quick request before the last item in this update. I’m doing a short burst of fundraising to get this newsletter back on track and give me time to retool and launch some new projects. I’m working on a master plan for how to revive and ampify a voice for sanity in insane time. So please offer your support.

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The Sea of Slopulism

Speaking of seeing the insanity on all sides, I recommend a good piece from Catherine Rampell on a disturbing surge in bipartisan support for price controls.

A recent CBS News/YouGov poll found that nearly two-thirds of Americans would like the government to pass price controls, defined as “laws that limit the amount that companies can raise prices, or charge for products and services.” Even a majority of Republicans (54 percent) favor the idea….

Indeed, both Republicans like President Donald Trump and Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) have championed government-established limits on prices as a magic bullet for making Americans’ lives better.

There is zero historical or economic analysis to support their contention that this would make things better. But who needs evidence when you have public opinion?

In fact, I have heard directly from political strategists who believe that radical or heterodox things like price controls should be incorporated into candidates’ economic pitches precisely because they poll well.

The problem is, they’re not quite as popular once people actually experience them.

I really hope I don’t have to remind you why this is such an awful idea.

She goes on to survey a sea of “slopulism” and concludes:

Right now I fear we’re in a sort of economic policymaking race to the bottom. The experts have been ejected by both parties, often replaced with political operatives masquerading as scholars. Their job seems to be to reverse-engineer fake scholarship “proving” the wisdom of whatever policy already polls well. Nobody wants to be the one who tells voters a favorite quick-fix policy won’t work or has tradeoffs.

And brother, I can now tell you all about that from first-hand experience, which I will do in the next installment of my series about what I learned running for office.

For now, suffice to say that we don’t have a political problem or even a moral problem in this country, so much as we have an epistemological problem.

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I’ve been promising to share some of the things I learned by running for office. I’ve distilled it into six lessons, and I’ll share them in six installments over the next month or so.

But first, here’s a tantalizing little news story I came across.

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100% Human

Someone did a study recently to see how much of the internet is now written by artificial intelligence chatbots. The result, about 10%, seemed alarmingly high to me until I read the piece and realized it’s even more alarming than that. The 10% figure includes web pages created before the release of ChatGPT. In a sample of sites created after ChatGPT, about a third showed signs of being written by AI.

But there’s a big caveat. How do they take a sample of half a million web pages and sort through them to see what was created by AI? By using AI, of course! This study used a service called Pangram, which sends a thief to catch a thief, so to speak. It uses AI to search for telltale signs of AI in the grammar and diction of written text. How does it do this? Nobody knows. “Much like the chatbots people use to generate text with AI, the detection software is a black box.”

That said, one of the places where Pangram is showing up now is on the back end of Substack. Before I send out one of these newsletters, I can ask Pangram to scan for signs of AI, and I am unreasonably pleased when it always comes back “100% human.”

Is this verdict accurate and definitive? Definitely not. But it’s still nice to know the robots don’t think I’m one of them.

The point of all of this is that we may not know for sure if a third of all new websites are being created with AI, but you’ve probably noticed that a lot of unoriginal dreck and “AI slop” is being pushed out there. (I find it particularly bad on Facebook, which seems to be a deliberate choice by Mark Zuckerberg.)

By contrast, my promise to my readers is that this newsletter will always be fully human-written. Everything here is a thought from a human brain, free of AI sycophancy and hallucination. I’m giving it to you straight, based on knowledge I’ve checked out and verified based on a lifetime of experience.

It looks like that’s going to start being a luxury on the Internet.

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It’s So Bad Even the Introverts Are Here

Starting last December, I made the jump from being a writer and commenter to being an actual participant in politics by running for the Democratic nomination for Congress in my Central Virginia district.

I did not succeed, losing to a candidate with much better name recognition.

This is not that unusual. A lot of people who try to go from pundit to candidate don’t succeed. Part of the reason more people don’t try is economic. If you write about politics for a living, the first thing you have to do when you run for office is to stop writing about politics for a living. Part of it is geographical. Most people in this business live near the big media centers of New York and Washington, where there are already well-entrenched incumbents. The only reason I thought I could attempt it is because I’m well outside the Beltway, in a district that had no clear front-runner (at first).

And yet, the pundit-to-candidate transition seems like a natural one, because we have a lot of the skills needed for the job: a deep knowledge of politics and of the issues—often much deeper than you’ll find from the average politician—and skills at writing and speaking. And I can tell you the temptation is enormous. It’s not so much about personal ambition as it is the frustration of spending decades on the sidelines watching the idiots in office make glaringly obvious mistakes and thinking: I could do so much better.

Yet few pundits make it. George Conway, a lawyer who used to work for Trump and then became a NeverTrump commentator and a mainstay at The Bulwark, got about the same percentage of the vote in his New York City primary as I did in mine. Kat Abughazaleh, who reached a huge online audience and raised far more money, got a bigger share of the vote but still barely topped 25%.

Part of the reason is that politics does in fact call for a different set of skills—a lot more networking and glad-handing among the rich and influential, and a lot more fundraising. I joked on the campaign trail that my inspiration was a sign I saw at a No Kings rally that said, “It’s so bad even the introverts are here.” To be a good writer, you have to look forward to spending hours at a time in a dark room alone just trying to understand an issue clearly. The sort of people we see on LinkedIn who have a monomaniacal focus on “networking” seem like a different species to us. But those are some of the skills you have to learn for politics.

Running for office also takes a lot of practice and preparation. I often felt like I was a theoretical physicist who was suddenly asked to build a nuclear reactor: You know all the theory, you know generally how things work, but you quickly find out everything you don’t know about the nuts and bolts of the process.

Politics Is a Time Warp

Above all that, politics takes time—not just time on the campaign trail, but time invested years beforehand. Winning usually takes a long and deep history of political connections in your district or community, and even if you haven’t entirely neglected that, you’re going to be up against people who have a really big head start.

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I’ve been trying to catch up on some of the things that happened while I was campaigning, and I decided to jot down a short commentary on the handful of primary victories for candidates from the Democratic Socialists of America. My thoughts expanded a bit, and it turned into a longish commentary, so please bear with me.

But first, a few comments on some other recent news items.

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The Most Powerful Woman in the World

We’re getting a big lesson these days in what it’s like to live in a “personalist” regime, where the entire government is synonymous with one man and his personality and his particular quirks and preferences. This results in a kind of Imperial Court gathered around the one man where court favorites and flatterers gain outsized and undeserved influence.

Consider, for example, the case of Congressman Max Miller, who has been in the news recently because of credible accusations that he abused his ex-wife and daughter (who also happen to be the daughter and granddaughter of US Senator Bernie Moreno, leading to a little family drama within Congress).

How did a creep like this rise to the position of being in the US Congress? A profile of Miller describes him as a spoiled rich kid from a wealthy and well-connected family in Ohio. But what really launched his career was that he got a job as an aide to Donald Trump. And here was the specific skill he brought to that job.

Trump…acquired Miller in a package deal in 2016 when he poached Marco Rubio’s deputy finance director Eli Miller, who had recommended his cousin [Max] for a job driving the Florida senator around Chicago the previous year. But Trump quickly came to see Miller almost as a surrogate son, in large part due to his innate talent for knowing just what nostalgic show tune at what precise moment—“Memory” from Cats, for example—would succeed at talking Trump off the ledge of an incipient meltdown. In those days, senior White House staffers would summon Trump’s “Music Man” when the president became grouchy, “so [Miller] could check on the order of the songs.”

Impunity catapulted the Music Man to public office. When a handful of GOP congressmen voted to impeach Trump over January 6th, Miller was the first primary challenger he recruited to launch his 2022 vengeance tour, to challenge one of those impeachment voters, former Ohio State wide receiver Anthony Gonzalez, who represented a northeast Ohio district just east of where Miller had grown up.

I am not making this up, nor is the writer of this profile. Miller’s “Music Man” role has been reported at several other places. And it’s—well, it’s a weird way to run a serious job like being the president of the United States, isn’t it? It’s a very alarming way to do it.

That brings us to the latest court favorite, Natalie Harp. Who is Harp? If you follow politics very closely, you have probably heard of her before. She is a youngish woman—by the standard of politics, which is an old man’s game, 35 is considered young—who wormed her way into Trump’s inner circle by heaping ridiculously over-the-top adulation on him, which is just the sort of thing he likes and desperately needs. Just as Miller become known as the “Music Man,” Harp became known as the “human printer.”

The New York Times describes her as “the utmost gatekeeper to President Trump, a one-woman conduit of information operating entirely outside the usual chain of command.”

As long as Ms. Harp is around, he enjoys an unvetted flow of information, some of it poisonous and counterproductive, at least as far as a number of his other advisers are concerned. She supplies him with content she fishes out of the social media gutter (like the video he posted depicting the Obamas as apes) and provides him with a view from the world outside official Washington, of which he has always been mistrustful. Her moniker is “the human printer,” because she tails the president with a portable printer so she can hand him information in hard copy.

This has also made her into a highly influential gatekeeper of presidential influence.

She is the president’s constant companion on Marine One, at Mar-a-Lago, and at summits across the world, those familiar with her position told me. They added that the president has described her to them as “my Natalie.” She’s also been nicknamed the “human printer” because she totes around a portable printer so she can, at any point, dash out a paper copy (Trump’s preferred form in which to read things) of a poll or a news story. She has learned his cadence—and unorthodox capitalizations—well enough to draft social-media posts for him to approve. She trawls social media for material that the president can use in his feeds, including posts that have led to trouble, such as one depicting the Obamas as apes. Some aides have quietly grumbled to those I spoke with that Harp is too inexperienced to have such unfettered access to the president.

Each item she prints, whether a positive poll of dubious origin or an attack on a political foe, reinforces Trump’s worldview. In Regime Change, a new book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Trump is depicted explaining to people that Harp is the only aide who loves him as much as his family does. Haberman now says that Harp is Trump’s “human binkie.” Tales of Harp’s commitment to Trump are legion: She rode in the trunk of an SUV to accompany him to court. She sprinted across a golf course in Scotland so he wouldn’t be out of her sight. She left notes for the president that documented her intense devotion. And so on.

In effect, she is a professional flatterer.

You will notice that these reports contain leaks about Harp from other people in the administration. The current wave of press attention comes after a Democratic senator made an offhand reference to her and the Trump administration responded with exaggerated outrage that functioned to elevate questions about Harp rather than to suppress them—an excellent example of the Streisand Effect.

But don’t be fooled by that immediate trigger. Note that several wildly sycophantic letters from Harp to Trump—letters that go beyond sycophancy and read like the ranting of a demented stalker—were leaked to the press by people in Trump’s staff.

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In news links here and in commentary from my campaign, I have already lightly covered the ongoing debacle of Donald Trump’s war again Iran. As I said early on, what makes me even angrier about this story is that I am a longtime Iran “hawk,” as my regular readers know well. I have been advocating for a leader who would finally do something bold and effective against the Iranian regime.

And then Donald Trump loudly claimed to do that, and—well, the monkey’s paw did its work.

I don’t normally do a hard-sell on subscriptions, but I’m rebuilding this newsletter after my brief adventure in electoral politics. Signing up will keep you informed about the often hidden stories behind big and important events—as you will see if you keep reading below—and it will also help provide a base for my advocacy of a rational alternative.

If you’re not already subscribed, please mash that button and sign up.

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At my campaign site, I posted a thorough overview of how Trump’s war against Iran has failed. I’ll just give the bullet points.

I listed each of America’s stated or possible military objectives in the conflict.

• Change the regime, or:

• Install a friendly dictator.

• End Iran’s support for terrorist proxies.

• Destroy Iran’s missile and drone programs.

• End Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

• Keep the Strait of Hormuz open.

On each of these goals, we failed to achieve succss and on most of them, we are significantly worse off than we were before the war.

That was in June, and nothing has changed since then. All we’ve done since the first weeks of the war, really, is to go through a by-now familiar cycle in which Donald Trump issues dire threats against Iran, sometime follows them with a few airstrikes, then backs down and claims the Iranians have agreed to a new round of negotiations in which they will give in to our demands (see the image at the top of this newsletter, which is one of many such announcments). Nothing ever comes from these supposed negotiations, and the cycle begins again. Often, the whole thing begins and ends during a single weekend so it can be wrapped up before the markets open on Monday.

This is all just floundering. It is not an attempt to win the war or change its direction but an attempt to pretend the conflict is still ongoing so Trump doesn’t have to admit that it’s over and we lost.

The latest updates are that Iran is currently negotiating with Oman, the country on the other side of the Strait of Hormuz, to effectively set up a toll system that institutionalizes Iranian control. The Trump administration seems poised to accept this, which would be a de facto surrender, as Trump now says, “We are low-keying it” in the conflict with Iran.

I could go over many of the details of the administration’s bad decisions in this war, and I’ve tried to keep you abreast of them in my news link round-ups. But the root of the problem is the same as in every one of this administration’s prominent failures, the same one that led to the debacle of the reflecting pool.

Trump went with his gut, and nobody around him had the nerve to contradict him.

I suggest reading a long and in-depth report in the New York Times on the decision-making that led to the war. The upshot is that Trump was repeatedly warned that the plan was unrealistic, and he was repeatedly briefed on its risks. But he decided to do it anyway, and everyone in the administration acted in the way they were chosen and groomed to react.

Everyone deferred to the president’s instincts. They had seen him make bold decisions, take on unfathomable risks and somehow come out on top. No one would impede him now.

Keep that in mind because this report was built on leaks from insiders, who were clearly trying to disavow responsibility for the results, which had already turned out badly. That’s especially true for J.D. Vance. But the fact is that not a single one of them stuck his neck out to try to stop Trump from making this mistake. Consider this passage about Marco Rubio.

Mr. Rubio indicated to colleagues that he was much more ambivalent. He did not believe the Iranians would agree to a negotiated deal, but his preference was to continue a campaign of maximum pressure rather than start a full-scale war. Mr. Rubio, however, did not try to talk Mr. Trump out of the operation, and after the war began he delivered the administration’s justification with full conviction.

Who cares what he may have thought in private? What matters is what he actually did in public.

Remember this, because a lot of these people are going to try to rewrite that reality in the future.

The Venezuela Model

The more interesting aspect of Trump’s war in Iran is not its failure. Beneath that, there is the problem that a success, as he defined it, would arguable have been worse. The reason is that what Trump is trying to do in his foreign policy is fundamentally different from what the US has usually tried to do. I think it’s somewhat different from what we have ever tried to do, and it’s certainly different from what we have tried to do for at least a century.

With the exception of perhaps a few decades at the end of the 19th Century, American foreign policy has not been overtly imperialist. Certainly, from World War I through the Cold War, and beyond, we have justified our actions as a way of defending, supporting, and spreading “liberal democracy.” Leftists liked to complain about our policy of supporting “friendly dictators” as an alternative to Soviet-backed tyrants, but in the 1980s we put the skids under a bunch of them. We withdrew support from Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines and Augusto Pinochet in Chile and encouraged democratic reforms from El Salvador to South Korea—and with excellent results. The pro-democracy idealism of the George W. Bush era was not his invention. It was the product, in many ways, of these previous successes.

The general idea is that America’s best interests and future security are best served by promoting liberal democracy and free trade—while ensuring that we serve as the military and diplomatic leader of the democracies and the economic center of the network of trade. This approach was not always well-implemented, but the idea is essentially correct.

Donald Trump has taken a fundamentally different approach. His policy is openly imperialistic, with himself as the emperor.

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Now that I’m back to providing regular commentary here, I’m eager to catch up on a couple of big news stories that popped up in the past few months.

The first of these is something I wasn’t exactly prevented from commenting on in this newsletter, but—well, discretion is the better part of valor. Given the possibility I could end up in a general election in a fairly conservative district, there were some issues I didn’t necessarily want to emphasize. So on one really important long-term story, I had to settle for a link in a news round-up, but without jumping up and down as much as I would have liked about it.

Now it’s time for the jumping up and down.

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I’ve written many times before about one of the big and largely unrecognized stories of the past three decades: the accelerating decline of formal religious belief in America. This is actually an older story. The modern conservative movement was founded by William F. Buckley decrying the collapse of religious belief among intellectuals in the Ivy League. But in the last few decades, this is something that has spread to the general public and become a truly popular, grassroots phenomenon.

I drew attention to this trend a few years back after we got the news from a Pew poll in 2021 in which those who identify their religious beliefs as “nothing in particular” were 30% of the US population. That’s larger than evangelical Christians, larger than Catholics, and larger than any other category or denomination. “Nothing in particular” does not mean that these are all atheists. Committed unbelievers are a larger percentage of the population than they used to be, but we’ve gone from being a tiny minority to a small minority. But while many of the “nothing in particulars” are open to a vaguely “spiritual” dimension of life, they do not have any definite theological commitments and the do not attend any church.

The next big piece of information was about the rate of change, the rate of “religious switching”: the number of religious people who lose their faith, versus the number of unbelievers who find God. These rates are pretty lopsided. The believers are falling away in much higher numbers, and by some projections Christians may no longer be a majority in this country in a few decades.

In the last few months, we’ve gotten another piece of information that is even more surprising: The fading of religious belief is coming to the heartland, too. Even the Bible Belt is giving up on the Bible.

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I’m returning to covering news links, but in a format a little more expansive than the link roundups I’ve been sending out for the past eight months, now that I’m free to add a little more commentary. But for now, it’s only a little more, because I’ve got a lot of stuff to catch up on.

Here’s a first pass at clearing out some of the 85 open tabs on my browser and sending along the most interesting news items to my readers.

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Bay of Pigs, Iran

We have a little new information about what went wrong with Donald Trump’s Iran war, in this case about the failure of Israel’s somewhat far-fetched plan to topple the Iranian regime.

There are a lot of things that can go wrong with a plan like this, but a shakeup within Israel’s Mossad points to one thing in particular.

Current Mossad Director Roman Gofman has removed the two officials most closely associated with the agency’s plan to topple the Iranian regime. One had run the Mossad’s intelligence directorate since December; the other headed the Iran division. This follows the ouster of the deputy director last month, who was similarly linked to the operation.

Their plan centered on Iran’s minority populations, built on the theory that armed pressure at the periphery would revive the mass protest movement at the center and finish the job. Removing the architects of this strategy amounts to acknowledging the obvious: the plan failed.

It appeared to start successfully. Israel conducted strikes on Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps positions along Iran’s border with Iraq, timed to open a corridor for Kurdish fighters to cross into Iranian Kurdistan and push toward northwestern cities. Thousands of young Kurds were expected to join them. They were slated to advance eastward while armed militias from other minority groups struck Iranian territory from all directions, pushing toward Tehran. The US had armed these proxy forces, but the plan unraveled when Fox News reported the attack was imminent. Turkish President Erdogan phoned Trump and, in a furious call, talked him out of US backing for the operation.

This sounds like a replay of the Bay of Pigs, where a plan to overthrow the Cuban regime—also a risky, longshot attempt—failed when the US withdrew crucial support at the last minute because the president wasn’t politically prepared to back the scheme all the way.

I found out about this story by way of Claire Berlinski, who explains why the Turks were so adamant: It “validat[ed] the suspicions of everyone in the region—but especially Turks and Iranians—that Israel seeks to dismember their countries and touch off civil wars in every country with a Kurdish minority, making Syria look like a little warmup.”

I wouldn’t mind if there’s a Kurdish state someday, but I also understand that if you’re going to open that can of worms, you’re going to lose support from many countries in the region, and you have to know ahead of time whether you’re willing to take that heat.

Donald Trump is obviously not the kind of guy to game this stuff out carefully, know where he stands ahead of time, and follow a consistent course of action—and the Israelis were foolish to act as if he is.

What Did the President Think, and Did He Ever Think It?

Speaking of not planning things out ahead of time, Donald Trump is now complaining that he was never warned about something I am certain his advisors warned him about dozens of times:

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In what we are told is the streaming era, this epic is bringing audiences back to cinemas. In what we are told is a time of declining literacy and the “death of the humanities,” translations of The Odyssey, including mine, are flying off the shelves. Some of those who buy the book or show up in cinemas to watch Tom Holland may go on to study ancient Greek. Perhaps the film will persuade a few college administrators not to cut their literature, language, and history departments. Nolan, who studied English at University College London—where students still study The Odyssey as a first year “foundational text”—is doing his best to get the general public reading again, and I am grateful.

This is the gracious ending of Emily Wilson’s review of star director Christopher Nolan’s new film version of Homer’s Odyssey. (The rest was not so gracious, especially considering that Nolan has made Wilson a rich woman. More on that review in a moment.)

One of the compensations of this year is that amid some less edifying debates, everyone has been taking a little time this summer to debate the proper interpretation of a three-thousand-year-old Ancient Greek poem. I regret I haven’t had the time to participate before now, particularly because this new adaptation has a lot of relevance today.

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For those who know their Ancient Greek history, I can describe the film in one sentence: Nolan set out to film The Odyssey and ended up filming the Melian Dialogue. For those who don’t know what that means, read on for an explanation.

But first, let’s deal with the earliest wave of controversy, a freakout among reactionary conservatives—there does not seem to be any other kind these days—over the film’s multiracial casting. Helen of Troy is played by the Mexican-born Kenyan-American actress Lupita Nyong’o. Athena is portrayed by Zendaya, whose father is a black American of Nigerian descent. Eurylochus, right-hand man to Odysseus, is portrayed by Himesh Patel, a British actor of Indian descent by way of Africa. Transgender actor Elliot Paige (formerly Ellen Paige) plays Achilles—no, scratch that. That was the rumor spreading around before the film launched, but Paige actually plays a young Greek warrior named Sinon (a character plucked from The Aeneid but never mentioned by Homer).

Even worse, they cast some pallid Northern European guy as the Greek hero Odysseus.

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Readers of this newsletter have probably seen the news that I did not win the Democratic primary for Congress in the Fifth District.

Voters went with the known, comfortable, established guy. I coaxed a couple of thousand people, in a fairly low-turnout primary, to vote for a more constitutionally focused agenda, but I was afraid from the beginning that local Democrats really, really just wanted to go with their guy. You can see this in a lot of other Virginia races (such as in the First District, just to my east) where voters went with the established choice.

I suppose that’s natural. One of the things that struck me about running for office is that if you want to run for Congress, the best time to start is fifteen years ago: enough time to build up name-recognition, contacts in your political party, influential local leaders who owe you favors, and a fundraising network. (The guy who won in my district is from a prominent local family, so he had all of that from the get-go.)

In normal circumstances, this lends a certain stability and even conservatism to our political system, but it also means that the system is very slow to react to new events. So if someone gets into high office and starts tearing apart the whole American political system, people are reluctant to change their ideas about what their top political priorities are and what sort of person they need to represent them.

People liked my message, mind you. They agreed with it. As I was speaking to Democratic Party groups, I saw a lot of people nodding along. But they did not find it compelling enough to choose me over the familiar guy. Or perhaps they assumed he would do all of the same things, which—well, I hope so.

So what next? Fortunately, running for office is not the only way I have of influencing the future of our country.

I ran for Congress and stayed in the race because I was not fully confident that the guy who eventually won the nomination would stand up for the constitutional reforms we need. But I am 100% confident he will do so if it is clearly popular and polls well. That’s the case across the country. It would be nice if we had political leaders with clear principles, foresight, courage, and the ability to think in constitutional terms. To the extent we can’t rely on that, we have to do our best to marshal the pressure of public opinion.

In short, it’s back to pamphleteering for me. I’ve been writing recently about the influence of ideological pamphlets on the American Revolution, and that’s the model I’ll be following.

In immediate practical terms, that means rebuilding my business as a writer. You will see my free-lance articles appearing again soon at some of the old places and a few new ones. Most of all, I’ll be reinvigorating this newsletter.

The hardest thing about running for office is having to do it while still working for a living. (This is why most congressional candidates have either already made a fortune or inherited one.) It’s harder still when the work you used to do for a living included a lot of writing about politics, and now you can’t do that without running afoul of campaign finance laws. I took a hit for doing that, losing a small but significant portion of my subscribers who fell off the list presumably because I was no longer providing a steady stream of political commentary, at least not here.

If you’re one of the people who lapsed as a paying subscriber, now is the time to come back on.

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Here’s what I have coming up:

• I’ve been thinking that whether I win or lose, I have a hell of an article to write on what I’ve learned about politics by actually engaging in it rather than observing it from the outside. It will be eye-opening—and offered at first exclusively for paying subscribers.

• I’ll be going over some stories I’ve missed during my campaign, or ones where I’ve linked to interesting news reports but haven’t had the opportunity to draw out their full meaning.

• This will include the rise of “democratic socialism” in the Democratic Party. It’s not that I was avoiding the issue. “Democratic socialism” just isn’t much of an issue, one way or another, in the Fifth District. But I’ll try to put the national phenomenon into some kind of perspective.

• In the next day or so, I’ll put up my review of the recent film version of The Odyssey. For those who know their Ancient Greek history, I can say that Christopher Nolan set out to film The Odyssey and ended up filming the Melian Dialogue. If you have no idea what that means, stay tuned, I’ll explain it all.

• I’ll offer a defense of data centers against the latest reborn NIMBY crusade—something I got a look at up close on the campaign trail. But I’ll also go into more detail about my warnings that artificial intelligence, which is the main impetus behind the giant investment bubble in data centers, is overhyped.

• And as promised above, I’ll have a lot more to say on the issue that animated my campaign: the reforms we need to restore the American system for the next 250 years—as well as new commentary on the history, philosophy, and political theory of democracy.

Stay tuned.

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Running for Congress very much took me outside of my comfort zone, which is sitting in front of a laptop writing, and the one positive thing about losing the primary is that I will have a lot more time to spend in a quiet room alone with my words. They have missed me, and I have missed them. And readers of this newsletter will be the beneficiaries.

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Here is the latest weekly round-up of links, with a collection of interesting articles on just a few topics: the progress (or lack thereof) of the Iran War, the hollowing out of a politicized Department of Justice, and the company to watch to gauge whether the AI bubble is bursting.

A reminder about this News Link Round-Up format: The main headlines are there to provide context and perhaps a little commentary, the headlines with the links are the original headlines from the articles, and the quotations beneath are extracts from the articles.

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So How Goes the War?

“He Was warned”: Insiders Say Trump Knew Consequences of Disastrous Scheme

New York Times reporter and author Jonathan Swan says his sources inside the White House claim President Donald Trump was well aware of the consequences of attacking Iran but marched forth with missile strikes regardless.

“All of this was not just predictable, but it was predicted actually,” said Swan, co-author of Regime Change. “He was warned about the munitions supply. He was warned about the potential for the Strait of Hormuz to be shut down. What happened was Donald Trump believed at a very core gut level that none of these things would happen because the war would be over quickly, because he believed that the US and Israeli militaries would crush Iran so quickly that none of these things would come to bear. But of course, that was a miscalculation that we’re now seeing play out five months later.”

Trump Keeps Making Threats. The World Has Stopped Flinching.

When President Donald Trump strode into the Rose Garden in April 2025 brandishing a poster board of tariff hikes, the world leaped as if a fire alarm had gone off. Markets shed trillions of dollars, envoys rushed to Washington, more than 75 governments scrambled to negotiate, some scrapping carefully prepped countermeasures in a rush to cut deals.

Sixteen months later, the flabbergasting threats keep piling up—to weaponize trade, annex Canada, seize Greenland, abandon NATO, annihilate Iran—but the alarm bells have gone quiet. World leaders are slower to rattle as they’ve seen the president increasingly fenced in by courts, rebuffed by Congress and strung along by Tehran—his ultimatums evaporating and poll numbers sinking….

“I’ve been a little surprised at how much his bluster has worked until now,” Shapiro said of the bravado that rattled the world at the start of Trump’s second term. It was effective, he said, because it drew on the “awesome power and deep, long-stored-up diplomatic capital of the United States”—reserves, he said, that Trump has “finally started to blow through.”

Officials “are starting to notice that he’s kind of a bully, and is quite easy to scare,” Shapiro said….

“Between threats, then bombing, then backing off, what he’s radiating to the Iranians is that he’s desperate,” said Ronald E. Neumann, a career Foreign Service officer and U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Bahrain and Algeria under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. “As experienced bargainers, that means you don’t have to lower the price.” Neumann also put it less diplomatically: “The way Trump bargains,” he said, “I wouldn’t give him money to go to the carpet bazaar.”

US Military Asks Troops for “Creative and Unconventional” Ideas to Punish Iran

The request from a senior officer at the US military command carrying out President Donald Trump’s war with Iran came in an email: We need ideas.

“We are looking for new creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran,” an officer in US Central Command’s intelligence branch wrote in a message sent Wednesday to a broad group of military analysts, according to a source familiar with the message. A second source also said that a senior US military officer sent the message last week soliciting new ideas for how to deal with Iran.

The crowdsourcing-style query, which military officials said was unusual over email, is one sign of the limited—and potentially unpalatable—options available to Trump to force Iran into a deal on his terms. Hoping to find an alternative, the official at CENTCOM kicked off the brainstorming session via email to see if anyone had a better idea. The second source said CENTCOM is looking at everything, acknowledging it needs to reevaluate the strategy….

The email preceded Trump’s threat to launch new strikes against Iran, only to call them off over the weekend after regional officials—namely Saudi Arabia’s crown prince—intervened by calling the president and urging him to de-escalate.

MBS Raises Concerns over Trump’s Plans for Massive Iran Strikes

Iran has threatened to retaliate by launching attacks against energy and infrastructure facilities in Israel and the Gulf countries.

“The Saudis expressed concern and asked for clarity about the plan of action,” one U.S. official told Axios. A second source with knowledge of the call said MBS urged Trump to de-escalate and refrain from launching the strikes….

Other regional powers, including Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Pakistan, are also pressing the US and Iran to de-escalate.

The Shallow State

How Trump’s Claims of Vandalism at the Renovated Reflecting Pool Crumbled

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The parts of Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution that we’ve covered so far are mostly introductory, setting the context for the pamphlets that debated and developed the ideas at the root of this country. The next chapter, “Power and Liberty: A Theory of Politics” brings us straight into the substance of that theory.

By first a side note: I have not yet reviewed Christopher Nolan’s version of The Odyssey, and I feel bad about that. The whole culture is engaged in knock-down, drag-out debates about the proper interpretation of an Ancient Greek poem, and I will not be left out of it. I’m able to peel away just enough time from the last days of my campaign to see the film during the middle of the day tomorrow, so readers should expect some commentary on it this week.

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The title of Bailyn’s Chapter 3 talks about a “theory of politics,” and this is more than just a political philosophy. American political theory rises out of a philosophical view about individual rights and the proper role of government—but it combines that with a view of how a government should be structured to defend these rights and what the social forces are that tend both to threaten and to preserve liberty.

The underlying political philosophy has two main elements, which are also named in the chapter title: power and liberty.

“Liberty” refers to “the natural, absolute, personal rights of individuals…which everyone summarized, with minor variation in phrasing, as ‘personal security,’ ‘personal liberty,’ and ‘private property.’”

Note how individual and “personal” this conception of liberty was. The Founders—and the Enlightenment culture they were a part of—was highly individualist, even if they didn’t quite have the word for it yet.

This conception of liberty is also broad and open-ended. Existing, traditional guarantees of rights were not regarded as exhaustive. As Bailyn puts it, they “marked out the minimum not the maximum boundaries of right.” This is contrary to certain modern theories of interpretation in which a right is only enforceable if it has already been explicitly enumerated and protected.

Opposed to liberty was power.

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Here is the latest weekly round-up of links, with a collection of interesting articles on: the ongoing debacle of the Iran War, the consequences of losing expertise and freedom of speech, the ongoing anti-immigrant pogrom, endemic public corruption, the circus of the imperial court, and a reasonable overview on data centers.

A reminder about this News Link Round-Up format: The main headlines are there to provide context and perhaps a little commentary, the headlines with the links are the original headlines from the articles, and the quotations beneath are extracts from the articles.

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We’re Really Gonna Miss the Freedom of Navigation Now That It’s Gone

The Houthis’ Commandeering of a Red Sea Strait Is a Huge Deal

The Strait of Hormuz remains at a virtual standstill because of President Donald Trump’s foolish war, and now, in what represents a new global energy price nightmare, Houthi militants in Yemen have begun to block a separate corridor that is critical for global oil shipping….

Those Houthi militants, who are allied with and supported by Iran, announced Monday that they would were enacting a blockade in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait against Saudi Arabia. The Houthis said their blockade is retaliation for airstrikes against a Yemeni airport intended to prevent an Iranian aircraft from landing. (Yemen’s Saudi-backed government claimed credit for the attack.) On Thursday, the Houthis said they had attacked two Saudi oil tankers and successfully warned 10 more to turn back. (Saudi Arabia’s official news agency confirmed at least one tanker was hit.)

The Houthis’ blockade is a huge deal. Before the Iran war, about a fifth of the world’s oil passed through the Strait of Hormuz. Now it’s effectively closed. Saudi Arabia, which had transported the bulk of its oil through the Strait of Hormuz, started moving oil west through a pipeline. From there, Saudi Arabia was sending its oil out through the Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandab Strait, which connects the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Thus, the Houthis’ blockade of the Bab al-Mandab Strait means they have foiled Saudi Arabia’s back-up plan. And it’s not just oil that’s at stake in the waterway. The Associated Press noted that “around 12% of the world’s trade, including a fourth of global container traffic, passes through [the strait], moving between Europe and Asia via Egypt’s Suez Canal.”

A Couple of Reasons Trump Keeps Making Bad Decisions

The Shallow, Centralized American State

The Trump administration’s attempt to exercise direct political control over all federal grant-making reveals some trends that go beyond that particular initiative. They include:

• A rejection of any independent source of technical or professional expertise;

• The vesting of decision-making authority entirely in political appointees regardless of their knowledge of the policy issue in question;

• The elimination of any countervailing constraint or check on centralized decision-making among inner-circle appointees….

In theory—unitary executive theory if you want to be cute about it—there is a logic for this kind of streamlining and centralization. A populist would want government policy and government outputs to be the direct outcome of what elected officials and their political subordinates want to do. Centralizing authority and eliminating veto points on executive action enables governments to pivot more quickly towards the policy preferences of elected and appointed officials.

The problems are self-evident, however. Even if one assumes the best of intentions, disregarding professional expertise in the service of a shallow state is a recipe for making catastrophic error after catastrophic error.

After Trump’s Order, West Point Curbed Faculty Speech. One Professor Said No.

The longest-serving law professor at West Point rose to declare the school’s new rules unconstitutional. Within moments, a uniformed colonel stood to challenge him.

Tim Bakken, speaking to dozens of colleagues at a faculty meeting, argued that none of them should be forced to seek approval before publishing papers or giving speeches, as a policy unveiled that day would require. “This violates the First Amendment,” he said, predicting an end to West Point’s professed tolerance for opposing views.

Col. E. John Gregory, according to Bakken and three other people in attendance that day, didn’t want to hear it. “Stop talking,” Gregory, a deputy department head, said in a raised voice, “and sit down.”

Bakken, a 68-year-old who had never served in the military, did not sit down. He reminded the colonel that he had sworn an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution when he accepted his teaching job. “It’s like how military officers must not follow illegal orders—” he began to say.

“We’re a military institution,” Gregory interrupted, according to Bakken and the other attendees. “We follow orders.”

His confrontation with the colonel that day in March 2025 brought the clash to the US Military Academy at West Point, the emerald-green-and-granite campus on the Hudson River that trains the leaders of tomorrow’s Army. Since World War II, West Point had fostered academic openness, advancing the view that dissenting opinions are crucial in forming sound military judgments. But Trump and his top lieutenants, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, argue that West Point must prize patriotic obedience to authority above all else….

He had long argued that a military culture of unquestioning obedience, coupled with an aversion to criticism and a sense of superiority, had caused the US to lose every war it fought since 1945. “Inside America, the last seventy-five years of military intervention have unleashed a flood of incompetence, hubris, and denial,” he wrote in a 2020 book, “The Cost of Loyalty.” “I have been living at the headwaters.”

Things That Will Go in a Museum Someday (And We Will Read These Descriptions and Nod Gravely and Be Too Polite to Ask the People Next to Us, “So What Did You Do to Stop This?”)

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In the previous installment of my notes on Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, I covered his description of the arguments that drove the revolution as a “conceptualization of American life,” in which Americans found (as I put it) “the political ideas to match 150 years of prior experience.”

It struck me that this is a direct answer to the claim you hear from nationalist conservatives these days—a claim that has been implicit in American conservatism from the beginning—that “America is not an idea.”

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In this view, America is not defined by a philosophical or political creed that is open to all but is instead defined by customs, traditions, and ultimately by some imagined original ethnic and racial composition.

In my criticism of this viewpoint, I offered the following argument.

In an 1818 letter, Adams argued that “the real American Revolution” was a “radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affection of the people,” and he specifically contrasted this to our traditions and customs.

The colonies had grown up under constitutions of government so different, there was so great a variety of religions, they were composed of so many different nations, their customs, manners, and habits had so little resemblance, and their intercourse had been so rare and their knowledge of each other so imperfect, that to unite them in the same principles in theory and the same system of action was certainly a very difficult enterprise.

Thus, he recommends the project of “searching and collecting all the records, pamphlets, newspapers, and even handbills, which in any way contributed to change the temper and views of the people and compose them into an independent nation.” He describes America’s national identity as being forged through a shared ideology.

The project recommended by Adams is, of course, exactly what Bailyn undertook, and it establishes the extent and nature of the philosophical influence on America in far more detail.

That is particularly the case in this book’s second chapter, “Sources and Traditions.” The title is pretty self-explanatory. Bailyn looks at the quotations and references in revolutionary-era pamphlets, as well as the ideas and even specific words and phrases that they drew from previous thinkers. These are very much not what today’s conservatives would have you believe.

Bailyn divides these influences into five categories.

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Here is the latest weekly round-up of links, with a collection of interesting articles on: the ongoing war over the Strait of Hormuz, the tragedy of Lindsey Graham, the Graham Platner debacle, more ICE killings of random Hispanic men, the Trump swamp, the non-revival of manufacturing, some interesting perspectives on declining fertility, and Zelensky continuing to turn the tide against Russia.

A reminder about this News Link Round-Up format: The main headlines are there to provide context and perhaps a little commentary, the headlines with the links are the original headlines from the articles, and the quotations beneath are extracts from the articles.

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It’s a Good Thing We Stopped All Those “Forever Wars”

Strait of Hormuz Ship Traffic Falls to Lowest Point in a Month After Strikes

Just 14 ships passed through the waterway on Sunday in both directions, the fewest in a month, according to figures from Kpler, a maritime data firm.

Mr. Trump said in a social media post on Monday that he would reinstate the U.S. Navy’s blockade of Iranian ports, which would prevent “Iran’s ships or customers from entering or leaving” the strait.

He added that the United States would provide security for other ships in the waterway but would charge a fee at the “rate of 20% on all cargo shipped” for “any and all costs necessary.”

Before the start of the war in late February, an average of more than 130 vessels transited the strait daily. In mid-June, when the United States and Iran signed a preliminary agreement to reopen the strait, traffic spiked. In the sevendays starting June 20, nearly 400 ships moved through the strait, the most in a one-week period since the war began.

But hopes for a recovery in shipping quickly faded.

Requiem for a Lightweight

Lindsey Knew Better. He Chose Worse.

Let there be no confusion about what Lindsey Graham was. There was no complexity to the man, nor much in the way to plumb and analyze about his journey to the bottom of the Trump sewer.

Lindsey Graham lived his life as a pilot fish, a parasitic sucker fish hovering about larger predators. He was a sidekick and the hollowest of hollow men. Here is what I once shared with Rolling Stone:

People try to analyze Lindsey through the prism of the manifest inconsistencies that exist between things that he used to believe and what he’s doing now. The way to understand him is to look at what’s consistent. And essentially what he is in American politics is what, in the aquatic world, would be a pilot fish: a smaller fish that hovers about a larger predator, like a shark, living off of its detritus. That’s Lindsey. And when he swam around the McCain shark, broadly viewed as a virtuous and good shark, Lindsey took on the patina of virtue. But wherever the apex shark is, you find the Lindsey fish hovering about, and Trump’s the newest shark in the sea. Lindsey has a real draw to power—but he’s found it unattainable on his own merits.

Lindsey Graham’s Choices (from Garry Kasparov)

Lindsey Graham knew right from wrong. He just chose not to act on that knowledge….

[S]ome Republicans agreed with Trump’s sentiments. They simply couldn’t stomach Trump’s style. Their objections were cosmetic.

Graham was different. He was once a moderate with bipartisan instincts on issues like immigration and money in politics, and a man with strong convictions about democracy and world affairs. He had real, substantive differences with Trump. That makes his descent all the more galling.

If American support for Kyiv and other frontline allies was Graham’s animating principle, then he did tremendous damage to his own cause, leading isolationist, pro-Russian forces to the apex of their influence in Washington.

The Spectacular Implosion of Left-Wing Trumpism

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Here is the latest weekly round-up of links, with a collection of interesting articles on the Fourth of July, the air conditioning wars in Europe, and the boom and bust of artificial intelligence.

A reminder about this News Link Round-Up format: The main headlines are there to provide context and perhaps a little commentary, the headlines with the links are the original headlines from the articles, and the quotations beneath are extracts from the articles.

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A Nation of Immigrants

1776 America Had a Higher Immigrant Share Than Today

Americans will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence this month. One of the Declaration’s grievances with King George should resonate with Americans today:

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither.

…All the major founders explicitly stated the desire for America to be an asylum for the masses of people of all religions and nations from around the world seeking freedom. It’s not just that they favored immigration. They established the freest immigration system in the world. My purpose in this post is to show that the Founders were not naïve. They had witnessed high rates of immigration firsthand and chose to expand that successful policy….

The United States had an average annual legal immigration rate—as a share of the population—of about 0.9 percent from 1700 to 1770, including slaves, and about 0.5 percent excluding slaves. In FY 2026, the rate will likely be less than 0.3 percent, including people already in the United States who adjusted to legal permanent residence. Even in FY 2025, the legal immigration rate was less than 0.4 percent….

We also have complete records on the birthplace of members of Congress, and these records track the same pattern as my estimates of the immigrant share in 1776. Immigrants were 14 percent (8) of the 56 Declaration of Independence signers at the Second Continental Congress. The Constitutional Convention, which is not included below, had a similar percentage, 14.5 percent (8 of 55). The Constitution intentionally allowed immigrants to run for office, partly to encourage immigration to the United States, and the very first Congress under the new Constitution had the highest share of immigrants, 10 percent of members, in US history aside from the Continental Congress. Congress’s immigrant share is less than 4 percent today….

The Founders did not stumble into a diverse, immigrant-heavy society by accident—they lived through it, debated it, and ultimately enshrined it in a Constitution that barred religious tests for office and left the door open to immigrants of every nation and faith. The immigration rate they experienced, the share of the population that was foreign-born, and the ethnic and religious composition of the founding generation all point to the same conclusion: America was never a homogeneous nation that only later became diverse through immigration.

It was diverse and immigrant-heavy from the start.

What to an Immigrant Is This Fourth of July?

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To celebrate America’s 250th anniversary, I’m going through Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution chapter by chapter to draw out lessons for today.

I’ve already talked about why I think this is important. This book was part of a mini-Renaissance for the ideas of the Founders, which influenced our politics substantively for the better—for a while. Going back to this source is a good place to start if we need to rebuild our political system and our political culture.

The introduction of Bailyn’s book, like my introduction to this series, talks about the origins of the project. Chapter 1, “The Literature of the Revolution,” is almost a second introduction, in the sense that it doesn’t really talk about the content of the pamphlets that shaped the American Revolution, but instead talks about the literary qualities of these pamphlets and about pamphleteering as a medium.

The pamphlet…was spacious enough to allow for the full development of an argument—to investigate premises, explore logic, and consider conclusions…. It was in this form, consequently, that “the best thought of the day expressed itself”; it was in this form that “the solid framework of constitutional thought” was developed; it was in this form that “the basic elements of American political thought of the Revolutionary period appeared first.” [These are all quotes attributed in a footnote to other scholars.]

And yet pamphlets of this length were seldom ponderous; whatever the gravity of their themes or the spaciousness of their contents, they were always essentially polemical, and aimed at immediate and rapidly shifting targets: at suddenly developing problems, unanticipated arguments, and swiftly rising, controversial figures. The best of the writing that appeared in this form, consequently, had a rare combination of spontaneity and solidity, of dash and detail, of casualness and care.

When I read this passage, I felt a shock of recognition. This is what I do. Articles long enough to deal with big ideas and fully develop an argument—but connected to fast-moving events and short enough to be easily readable by the public. Basically, the Revolutionary-era pamphlet was a Substack post.

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Bailyn observes that the American pamphlet writers were literarily less polished and professional than the British counterparts from whom they clearly took inspiration, simply because the average American writers was an amateur, someone who took up writing to promote the cause of the day but had not pursued it as a profession. (Bailyn adds ruefully: “The poetry—or, more accurately, the versification—is almost uniformly painful to read.”)

But they were also different in another respect that seems really relevant now.

The American writers were profoundly reasonable people. Their pamphlets convey scorn, anger, and indignation; but rarely blind hate, rarely panic fear. They sought to convince their opponents, not, like the English pamphleteers of the eighteenth century, to annihilate them…. The communication of understanding, therefore, lay at the heart of the revolutionary movement, and its great expressions, embodied in the best pamphlets, are consequently expository and explanatory: didactic, systematic, and direct, rather than imaginative and metaphoric…. The pamphlets aim to persuade.

But something else emerges, specifically from the medium of the pamphlet. The American writers were seeking to persuade, but also to understand real issues and problems that were confronting them. And more: They were seeking to understand the unique conditions of American life that had already been established, but of which the American had not become self-conscious.

Bailyn begins this chapter with a quotation from a letter by John Adams: “What do we mean by the Revolution? The war? That was no part of the Revolution. It was only an effect and consequence of it. The Revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen years before a drop of blood was drawn at Lexington.” (This is from a slightly different source than another famous version of the same idea.) But Bailyn goes on to make a wider point. In the fifteen years Adams talks about, the American were developing the political ideas to match 150 years of prior experience.

The great social shocks that in the French and Russian Revolutions sent the foundations of thousands of individual lives crashing into ruins had taken place in America in the course of the previous century, slowly, silently, almost imperceptibly, not as a sudden avalanche but as myriads of individual changes and adjustments which had gradually transformed the order of society. By 1763 the great landmarks of European life—the church and the idea of orthodoxy, the state and the idea of authority: much of the array of institutions and ideas that buttressed the society of the ancient régime—had faded in their exposure to the open, wilderness environment of America. But until the disturbances of the 1760s these changes had not been seized upon as grounds for a reconsideration of society and politics.

In short, Americans had built a society no longer based on concepts of religious and political authority. But they were not yet conscious of what they had built, they did not yet have a developed anti-authoritarian social and political theory, and this is what Bailyn suggests they accomplished in the pamphlets of the Revolutionary Era. He concludes by describing this as “the conceptualization of American life.”

Those who are familiar with my theory of history may remember that I place a lot of emphasis on this kind of process of “conceptualization,” in which people find the explicit philosophical terms that sum up the cultural conditions they have already implicitly created. So you know how my ears perked up at this.

Particularly on America’s 250th anniversary, what strikes me as the most important thing we have to learn from the Founders is this method of thinking—the epistemological example they set: the ability to observe, to understand, to persuade, to apply and develop big ideas that illuminate the crises of their time.

This is what seems most revolutionary about the Founders, particularly compared to today, and it is the first thing we need to learn from the people who made the American Revolution.

When we look at the next chapter, we will continue what the Founders discovered when they employed this thinking method.

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Here is the latest weekly round-up of links, with updates on three important Supreme Court rulings, freedom of speech, the “dirtbag” left, God leaving the Bible Belt, technological non-unemployment, and the usual good news.

A reminder about this News Link Round-Up format: The main headlines are there to provide context and perhaps a little commentary, the headlines with the links are the original headlines from the articles, and the quotations beneath are extracts from the articles.

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“Originalism” Survives by the Skin of Its Teeth

Supreme Court Upholds Principle that Almost All Born on US Soil Are American

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote the majority opinion for the ideologically mixed group of justices that included the court’s three liberals, as well as conservative Amy Coney Barrett.

Conservative Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh dissented from the 5-4 majority in ruling the executive order violated the 14th Amendment, but he joined the 6-3 majority in finding the order violated federal law….

The opinion came over the objections of conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil M. Gorsuch and Samuel A. Alito Jr.

Alito wrote a dissent, while Thomas wrote an opinion that Gorsuch joined.

About 250,000 children would have been born without citizenship in the US each year under Trump’s order, or roughly 5 million by 2045, according to a friend-of-the-court brief filed by dozens of professors. Some would probably have been left stateless because their parents would be unwilling or unable to obtain citizenship for their children in their homelands.

The professors argued that Trump’s order would create a permanent underclass.

Or Maybe Not So Much

Ethnic Cleansing in Ohio

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Here is the latest weekly round-up of links, with updates on the wars in Ukraine, in the Persian Gulf, and against algae, the upsurge of “democratic socialism”—and its limits, the conservative threat to free speech, the resurgence of racism here and in the UK, and the grifter’s paradise of MAGA. You will also notice a pattern of putting some good news—often a form of scientific and technological progress—at the end, because we should never lose sight of the fact that this is the real story of human life.

A reminder about this News Link Round-Up format: The main headlines are there to provide context and perhaps a little commentary, the headlines with the links are the original headlines from the articles, and the quotations beneath are extracts from the articles.

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So How Are the Wars Going?

Turning Crimea from an Asset into a Russian Liability

The best piece of concrete evidence for the isolation of Crimea is that the peninsula is running out of fuel. Yesterday, the Russian governor was forced to take the dramatic step of forbidding fuel sales to civilians. According to a BBC story: “Governor Sergey Aksyonov said individuals and businesses would be turned away from petrol stations, and fuel would only be sold to government agencies ensuring Crimea’s ‘functioning and security.’”

It is hard to overstate how serious the fuel situation must be on Crimea for such a draconian restriction to be imposed on civilians. Putin has always maintained the fiction that Crimea is some happy and functioning part of the Russian state. No more.

Back in July 2024, I wrote that Ukraine isolating Crimea would be a three step process, and at that point only the first step has been accomplished (which was the cutting off of Crimea from the sea). The next two steps would be far more difficult, but if they could be accomplished, the whole process might culminate in an attempt to take down the Kerch Bridge….

I was thinking about this piece a few hours ago, when I saw this Ukrainian boast that they had just disabled the remaining Russian air defense systems protecting the Kerch Bridge.

We Are on a Twin-Track Road to an AI Battlefield

I was very much struck by two very recent claims about how AI systems are on the cusp of changing warfare, both of which came from senior people in the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense. One claim was made by the Ukrainian Minister of Defense, Mykhailo Fedorov. He stated that Ukraine now has an anti-air system that is fully automated after launch and can make all of the decisions from that point until it (hopefully) destroys its target (in this case, a Russian Shahed/Geran attack UAV). He even released a video in this tweet which purported to show the system in action.

The other claim was made by Danylo Tsvok, the head of the Ukrainian MOD’s AI center. He predicted AI systems would soon be unified into a single network overseeing the battlefield, leading to a “war of operating systems” with Russia in the next three to five years—something referred to as a “new paradigm” of war.

“The system that possesses more data and better understands that data, proposes solutions—that system will gain the advantage over the other.”…

If the micro and macro can be merged, think of combining what Fedorov and Tsvok are saying, the result would be a fully automated battlefield. This would dramatically alter the whole idea of warfare.

Ship Attacked in Strait of Hormuz as Iran Threatens UN-Backed Route

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Here is the latest weekly round-up of links, with updates on the connections between Trump’s reflecting pool debacle, his surrender in Iran, and his flirtations with military dictatorship at home—summed up in Timothy Snyder’s trenchant observation about “Utopias of Violence.” Also included: the secret life of Tulsi Gabbard, the looting of the National Opera, the folly of left-wing Trumpism, and buried in there, some good news—a big bipartisan legislative push for the YIMBYs.

A reminder about this News Link Round-Up format: The main headlines are there to provide context and perhaps a little commentary, the headlines with the links are the original headlines from the articles, and the quotations beneath are extracts from the articles.

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Bulldozing the Statue of Liberty

DOJ Declares Trump Has Right to Bulldoze Statue of Liberty

In order to demonstrate Trump’s supposedly far-reaching power to destroy and alter national monuments at whim, the DOJ lawyers claimed that if the president wanted to bulldoze the Statue of Liberty in New York, there would be no one with the standing to challenge him.

“If the government decides very quickly to bulldoze the Statue of Liberty, the people whose ancestors—that was the first thing they saw coming to this country, but the government moved too fast—nothing can be done?” Judge Patricia Millett asked, according to Politico’s Kyle Cheney.

“I think that’s right, yes,” the government responded.

The Statue of Liberty, like the White House, is managed by the National Park Service. Demolishing it would require legislative approval and rigorous public and regulatory review under the National Historic Preservation Act.

It’s Not Easy Bein’ Green

Of all Donald Trump’s little DC hobby projects that have caused scandal this year, the snit over his renovation of the National Mall’s reflecting pool has been the one I’ve cared about the least. But you’d need a heart of stone not to laugh at the snags they’re hitting this week: After months of castigating the “filthy, dirty” pool as a symbol of failed Democratic leadership (“Sleepy Joe doesn’t know what ‘CLEAN’ or proper maintenance is!”), and just days after the White House declared the mission of cleaning it up accomplished, the reflecting pool is once again resolutely algae-green….

[T]he boondoggle is such a striking metaphor for the failures of Trump’s second term that it’s worth taking at least a minute to soak in.

Here is how the president has approached basically all problems since retaking office last year:

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