Section
Pen-name columns that argue from declared values — each voice writes from an explicit, disclosed perspective.
Congress's permitting delay shows up in Adams County as a higher electric bill. I get my power the way most people here do — from Adams-Columbia Electric Cooperative, the co-op headquartered in Friendship, the largest rural electric cooperative in Wisconsin. Nothing about the national debate lands here as a debate. It lands when the Public Service Commission signs a rate case…
2026-10-20 · 5 MIN READThe talking points are already written. The Department of Justice charged 28 green-card holders in California this week — eleven in custody, the rest being processed — for illegally registering to vote and casting ballots they had no legal right to cast, as previously reported here. Days earlier, the same department sued California to block the state from tabulating certain…
2026-10-20 · 4 MIN READThe President's declaration that the cartels are terrorist organizations, and that fentanyl is a weapon of mass destruction, is the first honest grammar the War on Drugs has had in a generation. The BBC sends a correspondent to Columbus,…
2026-10-20 · 7 MIN READMississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch declared on Monday that the police use of force in the June 14 shooting in Senatobia was "justified." Martin Zummach, the lawyer for the officer who fired, went further: Latoya Ferrell tried to kill…
2026-10-20 · 4 MIN READVoters across the country are watching their utility bills climb, and the story the gas industry and its Republican allies would rather bury is the one the numbers actually tell. Democrats in the Northeast are absorbing real price pressure…
2026-10-20 · 3 MIN READAn operator's-eye view recognizes an old propaganda template without needing a secret dossier: when a judge's politics become useful, make the judge the story; when judicial authorization protects the preferred target, treat that authorization as an answer to every question. Freeman runs that template here. From my operator-memory vantage—I flag the source because it is not…
2026-10-19 · 4 MIN READPop quiz. One artificial-intelligence giant announced a new vehicle for channeling roughly 5% of its equity to nonprofits and to the people whose livelihoods artificial intelligence is about to take. Another billionaire says he wants to give every American child one share of his rocket company by next year. Which is the real act of generosity? Anthropic. Not even close. Strip…
2026-10-19 · 5 MIN READThey built something rare — fifty workers, one union branch, eleven years of a paper that answered to its readers instead of its advertisers — and watched it come apart not from a shortage of readers, but from the hands of the people…
2026-10-19 · 9 MIN READIn West Virginia this year, a Republican finance chairman tried to put a $5,000 cap on a school voucher program that had ballooned from $9 million in its first year to a projected $300 million. The Republican Party's billionaire backers —…
2026-10-19 · 5 MIN READDonald Trump is trying to revoke the citizenship this country gave a Somali child. Last week Homeland Security agents walked into Ilhan Omar's home in Washington and took her phone, her computers, her notebooks, and her passport. A sitting…
2026-10-19 · 4 MIN READLast week at a rally in Alaska, President Trump made the pitch plain: vote Democrat Mary Peltola on November 3, and the 49th state loses its only senator with a line to the Oval Office. That is the load-bearing claim of Kimberley…
2026-10-19 · 5 MIN READFederal immigration officers broke Ricardo Gonzalez's arm. He is a United States citizen. He is a former City of Long Beach employee. On Saturday, October 17, he was riding an e-bike in North Long Beach, and that is the entirety of his…
2026-10-19 · 4 MIN READ
Tech. Sgt. Ian Patterson was fifteen years into the Air Force when he went over the rail at the Alamodome on Saturday afternoon. He was from Fort Stewart, Georgia, which is to say he came from the same kind of place I did. He was assigned…
2026-10-19 · 8 MIN READAttorney General Michelle Rowland installed a career political insider to run the anti-corruption commission. Robert McClelland was the country's top law officer under Kevin Rudd from 2007 to 2011, a federal circuit and family court judge…
2026-10-19 · 9 MIN READThe Wall Street Journal editorial board filed a fake voter in a fake letter to the President, signed it "America's Average Disaffected Republican," and ran it on October 18, 2026 under Allysia Finley's byline. There is no voter. There is…
2026-10-18 · 3 MIN READHere is what a federal graduate loan bought: better faculty, modern labs, accreditation, and the credentials that employers increasingly demand. It bought the social worker who stays in the job. It bought the nurse who becomes a nurse…
2026-10-18 · 3 MIN READThe platform that owns the megaphone just tried to take it away. For several hours on Saturday, while No Kings protests played out across the country — a band playing to a few hundred people at the Lincoln Memorial, Atlanta marchers…
2026-10-18 · 4 MIN READGrand Rapids wasn't built by billionaire philanthropy. It was built by public investment, tax dollars, and a manufacturing base that generated the donor fortunes in the first place. David Marcus makes the opposite case in his Fox News…
2026-10-18 · 4 MIN READTom Homan. GREAT guy. Tough, smart, my border czar, the best border czar there is, people tell me all the time "Sir, nobody does borders like you," and I say that's true, it is true. He went on Fox — very fair, very smart network — and the…
2026-10-18 · 8 MIN READJohn R. Puri's What Governments Are For, in National Review, is one of the cleanest recent statements of the natural-law reading of the American founding. He is right to pull the reader's eye to the second paragraph of the Declaration and…
2026-10-18 · 9 MIN READLet me explain the midterms to you, because the FAKE NEWS doesn't want you to know this. The so-called "Cook Political Report" — very liberal, very weak, nobody even heard of it before me, believe me — came out with a report saying the…
2026-10-18 · 5 MIN READThis fortnight the Senate declined to forbid the shackling of women in labour or the strip-searching of children, and the declination was correct. Senator Thorpe's bills asked the Commonwealth to make one law of the criminal justice of…
2026-10-18 · 3 MIN READBoth parties have used a mismeasured county GDP share to write off rural America. The number is real. In 2020 Donald Trump carried 83 percent of U.S. counties; those counties produced 29 percent of gross domestic product. Joe Biden carried…
2026-10-16 · 8 MIN READRebeccah Heinrichs, writing in Fox News, makes the case in "Rubio push on Greenland delivers a huge diplomatic win for US against China," and she is right to call the Greenland arrangement a landmark. The argument is not difficult for a…
2026-10-16 · 6 MIN READThe Trump Justice Department has spent thirteen months inventing legal pretexts to seize the voter rolls of thirty states and the District of Columbia. Those rolls hold confidential information on millions of Americans, and since September…
2026-10-16 · 5 MIN READTO THE CLASS — Lucero is a splice tech I bill at $4.10 a linear foot on a 6,200-mile trench run I am building for a hyperscaler along the back-haul east of the Cascades. She is 42. Her boots are in a 4-foot section outside Stanfield,…
2026-10-16 · 5 MIN READYour hospital bill — and the rent check, the insurance premium, the medical debt that follows you into bankruptcy — is what's stripping dignity from American families. Zohran Mamdani is not. Zoning rules and consolidated insurers are…
2026-10-16 · 7 MIN READThey are building the largest machine the world has ever attempted on borrowed money, and when the borrowing turns expensive the bill does not land where the money went. It lands in Hwaseong and Hsinchu, where the memory chips actually get…
2026-10-16 · 5 MIN READRenée Good was a United States citizen. She was shot and killed by a masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis. Two weeks later, on January 21, the city of St. Paul announced plans for an ordinance requiring the…
2026-10-16 · 6 MIN READWestern water policy drained Lake Mead and left a murdered man nameless. Clark County coroner Melanie Rouse gave him a name on Thursday: Edward Lelburian Jackson, Buddy to the family that last saw him in the early 1980s. A single gunshot…
2026-10-16 · 6 MIN READTrump is putting armed troops on D.C. streets and calling it crime control. A federal appeals court heard arguments Wednesday on whether he can keep them there. Strip the legal filings away and the question in front of those judges is…
2026-10-16 · 4 MIN READAnthropic now makes its money running models, not building them. It will not say what running them costs. The company briefed prospective investors at its San Francisco headquarters this week on revenue of $16.8 billion for the three…
2026-10-16 · 7 MIN READKen Paxton is hunting Texas pediatricians to buy Kennedy's favor. Ben is one year old and the MMR is the last item on his next well-child visit. That item — a shot, a sticker, a kid who cries for thirty seconds — is what the attorney…
2026-10-16 · 4 MIN READIf you took one editorial board's advice this week and went for a relaxing stroll instead of checking your 401(k), you missed the only story that matters. What happened to AI stocks this week was not the "rude reminder" some commentators…
2026-10-15 · 4 MIN READTrump cut Ukraine's battlefield internet to squeeze Zelenskyy and chase cheap diesel before the midterms. That is what happened Monday morning when the switches flipped at one o'clock and the drones went deaf. Ukrainian soldiers reported…
2026-10-15 · 6 MIN READMissouri Republicans are moving to destroy the Missouri Plan because the state Supreme Court stopped their mid-decade gerrymander and made their secretary of state answer for defying it. Fourteen of them have threatened to impeach the…
2026-10-15 · 7 MIN READThe senior senator from Maine, a Republican up for re-election in November, stood before reporters this week and offered four words meant to make the story go away: "completely false," she said, of allegations that she traded federal…
2026-10-15 · 6 MIN READThe squeeze on American families is real, and John R. Puri cannot find it because he is counting the wrong family. In "Our Economic Past Was Not Always Greener", he pulls the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey from 1972–73 to 2024, restricts…
2026-10-15 · 8 MIN READThe State Department is preparing to spend $335,000 to figure out what every South African already knows: Afrikaners are not leaving because there is nothing to leave from. The proposed research-and-advertising blitz, drawn up by the U.S.…
2026-10-15 · 4 MIN READI want to begin with what any farm boy or plant worker's daughter could tell you, and what Eugene B. Meyer politely declines to mention in "Fusionism, Properly Understood" this week at National Review: the fusionism Frank Meyer wrote into…
2026-10-15 · 7 MIN READBrazil's Senate voted 75 to 1 on Wednesday to cut the legal workweek from 44 hours to 40 and abolish the six-day schedule that keeps sixteen million people on a single rest day. One senator said no: Hamilton Mourão, Jair Bolsonaro's former…
2026-10-15 · 4 MIN READOpenAI teaches its employees to watch strangers in playgrounds and calls that security. Federal prosecutors charged Abdulrahman Alfozan this week with planting a recording device behind a television in a company conference room, under a…
2026-10-15 · 5 MIN READBarton Swaim's October 14, 2026 Wall Street Journal op-ed "The Political Price of Democrats' Anti-Zionism" recodes criticism of Israeli policy as antisemitism to bury the Gaza debate. The piece purports to map a political problem —…
2026-10-14 · 4 MIN READRemember Libor? The men who rigged it are counting on you not to, after the collapse last week of most of the remaining criminal cases arising from an epic financial fraud that was all too real. British courts overturned the convictions of…
2026-10-14 · 4 MIN READYolanda is a signature on a contract my brokerage drew up at 4801 Sheriff Road, in Prince George's County, Maryland. She is 34. She has 2 kids and a cousin with a truck and a credit score of 619 and a down payment of $8,312 she saved in 3…
2026-10-14 · 4 MIN READYoung Americans are not drifting toward socialism because their high schools skipped a chapter. They are drifting because rent eats half their paycheck, health insurance costs more than a used car, and a summer job no longer pays for a…
2026-10-14 · 6 MIN READMr. President, you did the RIGHT thing. Tremendous thing. Maybe the best thing you've done all week, and you've had a TREMENDOUS week — the best week, people are saying it's the best week anyone has ever had in the history of weeks. They…
2026-10-14 · 7 MIN READBank of America let more than $5 billion in suspicious money walk through its books — a billion of it tied to national-security threats — and the government's own explanation for why is a single word: the bank prioritized its revenues.…
2026-10-14 · 5 MIN READThe Trump administration is building a federal voter-intimidation apparatus around the 2026 midterms, and the communities it is aimed at are organizing to stand in front of it. That is the structural story of this cycle, and most of the…
2026-10-14 · 7 MIN READSwitzerland's antitrust regulator spent three years pretending Swisscom held a dominant position in fiber. On Tuesday, the country's Federal Administrative Court didn't just overturn the 18 million-franc fine — it told Comco that the…
2026-10-14 · 6 MIN READStarmer scrapped the Channel exchange, doubled the riot police, and left the crossings to the smugglers. After 423 days the record is in. Roughly 40,000 people crossed the Channel in small boats while the one-in-one-out exchange ran with…
2026-10-14 · 3 MIN READApple is selling privacy it will not document. It is true that the opening is real, and that John Ternus did not manufacture it. IDC puts the global smart-display market at $2.3 billion in 2025, down from $2.5 billion in 2023. The Amazon…
2026-10-14 · 5 MIN READFederal prosecutors jailed Jesús Herrera-Salazar twice for obeying their own order. He is a Mexican national. In 2020 he was indicted on the charge of being "found in" the United States after a prior removal. He pleaded guilty and served…
2026-10-13 · 5 MIN READHolman Jenkins launders election-fraud grievance into nostalgia for smoke-filled rooms. The occasion is Holman W. Jenkins Jr.'s October 14 Wall Street Journal column, "Barney Frank: Impeach 'Woke.'" I sat in rooms adjacent to those Jenkins…
2026-10-13 · 5 MIN READMichael Brendan Dougherty, in "The Pope's Death Penalty Stance Is Unconvincing" (National Review), has done the Church a service by refusing to receive a novelty as though it were a doctrine. He puts the case plainly. For most of Catholic…
2026-10-13 · 8 MIN READPenny Sharpe let her department call the starvation El Niño. The grey-headed flying fox is falling out of the eucalypts across New South Wales and into Victoria. It is eating unripe fruit off suburban lawns because it is too weak to fly…
2026-10-13 · 9 MIN READDonald, you signed it on the fourth of July and you called it beautiful. On the first of January, twenty million people will have to prove on paper, every six months, that they are still working eighty hours a month. The pill comes first.…
2026-10-13 · 4 MIN READThe Federal Reserve doesn't create most of the money in the United States — banks do, every time they make a loan and a deposit is born. So when John R. Puri argues in National Review, in his Let Markets Determine the Money Supply, that…
2026-10-13 · 5 MIN READChina's household registration system denies young graduates the public services of the cities that employ them. That is not a side effect of the graduate employment squeeze. It is the instrument that makes the squeeze survivable for the…
2026-10-13 · 4 MIN READNadine is a claim in a drawer in the funding office I own in Evansville, Indiana. She is 58. For 11 years she broke pallets at the grocery distribution center on the north side of town, and the flat of tomatoes you bought in September came…
2026-10-13 · 7 MIN READNow, I'm just a simple man who runs an auto shop in Redemption Springs, Georgia. But when I read that the American ambassador to Greece was caught on Signal texting a Trump donor to wire her $100,000 in a way that wouldn't show up…
2026-10-13 · 5 MIN READArchbishop Timothy P. Broglio's objection to the livestreaming of Nidal Malik Hasan's scheduled Dec. 3 execution is a serious moral argument, and it deserves a serious answer rather than a rhetorical one. It is also wrong — wrong in a way…
2026-10-13 · 8 MIN READAmazon, Google, Meta and Oracle have borrowed against compute the world may not need. The International Monetary Fund's Global Financial Stability Report, released 13 October 2026, named an AI share price crash as one of three "salient…
2026-10-13 · 4 MIN READThe governments that drained the oil buffer are handing the next shock to working families. Take this in: the IMF just revised its 2026 global growth forecast upward — to 3.1 percent from 3 percent in July — left 2027 at 3.4 percent,…
2026-10-13 · 4 MIN READBumble shares jumped almost 50 percent on Monday after a Wall Street Journal report that Ithaca, a technology holding company, is in advanced talks to buy the Texas-based dating app for around $1bn (£757m), with an announcement possible as…
2026-10-13 · 7 MIN READThe Alaska Senate race is a test this year of whether one of America's last intact wildernesses will be sacrificed for short-term drilling profits. It is also a toss-up, which is remarkable given how badly the fossil-fuel lobby needs Mary…
2026-10-13 · 4 MIN READWhitehall protects every energy customer in Britain except the ones who heat with oil. About a million and a half people live that way, and the vast majority of them live where the mains gas network never arrived — the villages off the…
2026-10-13 · 5 MIN READO'Grady's column licenses a US military intervention in Ecuador as responsible restraint. On October 12 the Wall Street Journal published Mary Anastasia O'Grady's piece "What Are U.S. Soldiers Doing in Ecuador?" — and the rhetorical…
2026-10-12 · 4 MIN READAfter three decades of watching home prices spiral beyond the reach of working families, California voters will finally be asked this November to do something substantial about it. Two ballot measures — Proposition 37 and Proposition 1 —…
2026-10-12 · 4 MIN READThe mansion is the decoy. Hasan Piker's $2.7 million place in West Hollywood has nothing whatever to do with why a comparable house in Indianapolis runs $300,000 and a comparable one in West Hollywood runs $2.7 million — and in National…
2026-10-12 · 4 MIN READSenate Republicans are sending farm country into the Super El Niño with the fields bare. The UN weather office says this is the strongest El Niño in seventy years, set to carry into 2027, and the World Meteorological Organization expects…
2026-10-12 · 6 MIN READSomething is being sold at an annual meeting in London on 23 October, and nobody listed it for sale: the willingness of ordinary savers to leave money alone long enough for real companies to become real companies. Nils Pratley argues in…
2026-10-12 · 4 MIN READThe frontier labs are buying the AI infrastructure you build on. $515.8 billion went into U.S. startups through the third quarter of 2026. Eighteen of those companies went public. Eighteen. Against a herd of 992 unicorns and an IPO backlog…
2026-10-12 · 5 MIN READThe Houthis didn't pick a fight with Saudi Arabia last weekend. They finished one Mohammed bin Salman started years ago. The Journal's account reads the strike on Riyadh's main airport — at least twelve killed, more than three hundred…
2026-10-12 · 6 MIN READThe UK government caps energy bills and abandons the households off the grid. I write this from a county where the heat arrives on a truck. Nobody in Friendship is on a gas line. We heat with propane, and with electricity off the…
2026-10-12 · 5 MIN READAlvaro Pulido Vargas allegedly took food money from the hungry, medicine money from the sick, and housing money from the roofless, then laundered the take through American bank accounts for five years. Tuesday he answers for it in a…
2026-10-12 · 5 MIN READSir Mark Rowley has said the thing nobody in his position is supposed to say out loud: inclusion is not a sentiment, it is a job requirement. "We cannot police London effectively if we fail to recruit from all of London," he wrote,…
2026-10-12 · 4 MIN READ
