What Governments Are For

By John R. Puri

Sunday, October 18, 2026

 

Revisionist historians have claimed that the Declaration of Independence’s most essential part is not the famous opening passages, but its list of 27 grievances against King George III. These injuries, it is said, are the real meat of why the Americans sought to escape British rule and were willing to wage war to attain independence. Yet these revisionists make the mistake, in Alexander Hamilton’s words, of affirming “that the deputy is greater than his principal; that the servant is above his master.” The series of grievances serves as evidence of unjust government under a higher standard of what just government is and must be. That standard is laid out most clearly in the second paragraph of the Declaration.

 

For subsequent generations of Americans who study their founding document, this paragraph seems to contain two principles that appeal to different minds. The first is popular sovereignty, or democracy. “All men are created equal,” so each must have an equal say in how the society is governed. “Governments are instituted among Men” as their creation to control — no more divine right of kings to rule over the rest. All power is derived from the “consent of the governed.” When government becomes destructive of the ends for which it was established, “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” The people always remain in ultimate control of their government. When government turns to despotism, “it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government.”

 

The second principle apparent in this paragraph is the protection of natural liberty, or freedom from government even after its establishment. It begins in the same place: “All men are created equal,” so no man has any right to rule over another. We are each endowed with “certain unalienable Rights” that preexist government, including “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Government’s purpose, its raison d’être, is “to secure these rights.” Rights are inherent; government powers, including those exercised democratically, are conditional. The people must overthrow a tyrannical government so they may “provide new Guards for their future security” against illegitimate power. The security of rights remains the North Star.

 

These two principles of democracy and freedom can appear in tension. James Madison’s great fear was that unfettered majorities in the states would trample minority and individual rights if left unchecked. To him, letting the people have their way with government in every instance was a menace. Madison’s proposed remedy was an anti-democratic measure imposed from above: a national “negative in all cases whatsoever on the legislative acts of the States.” His idea was rejected at the Constitutional Convention, as Madison’s fellow framers wanted to respect the people’s sovereignty through their state governments. Decades later, another clash between popular sovereignty and natural liberty arose over slavery. Stephen Douglas famously favored the first principle; Abraham Lincoln, the second.

 

Even when the principles conflicted in practice, the Declaration’s second paragraph held them in harmony. This combination raises a theoretical question beneath the real-world conflicts: How can the people simultaneously govern themselves, yet be limited in how they can use that power to respect individual rights? The answer lies in the document’s most overlooked modifier: Government derives its “just powers” from the consent of the governed (emphasis added), which are decidedly not all powers a government could conceivably exercise.

 

In John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, from which Thomas Jefferson took obvious inspiration, a natural law of justice exists before any government is instituted. In a precursor to the Declaration’s retelling, men exist in a state of nature with equal rights to life, liberty (or self-direction), and property acquired through exertion. Each person may exercise these rights freely, but only within the bounds of others’ rights. When one man violates the rights of another — by harming him, enslaving him, or stealing from him — he enters an unjust state of war, and his victim has the right to uphold the natural law by punishing his aggression.

 

In Locke’s narrative, governments are established to bring formality and regularity to this just adjudication of rights. Yet it would make no sense for men to surrender more natural liberty than they secure when submitting to a government. Therefore, legitimate governments are vested only with the powers necessary to secure citizens’ rights, not to abridge or abolish those rights for any separate purpose. Government does not exist for one individual to force his will on others, but for the equal protection of all.

 

From this formulation, the scope of popular sovereignty is robust yet quite limited. The people must decide how to best secure their rights, both from one another and from those outside the political society. When rights come into conflict, as they often and inevitably do, they must create laws to settle disputes. The people are also free to establish certain public goods for everyone to share. What a majority of society cannot do through government — as it never had the right to do so in the state of nature, and thus could never have vested the power in a state — is vitiate the natural rights of others. Positive law must be aligned with the law of nature.

 

In a word, the singular principle of the Declaration’s second paragraph is “self-government.” Some may place a greater emphasis on the “self,” others on the “government,” but the compound term stands as freedom from external domination in both the private and public realm. Lincoln harkened back to the concept in his first major speech against slavery: When one man “governs himself that is self-government,” he said, “but when he governs himself, and also governs another man, that is more than self-government — that is despotism.”

 

By the Declaration’s standard, government is just when it enables the people to rule themselves, but becomes unjust when it lets one part of the people rule over another. The Constitution still to come would attempt to make that former kind of government a reality, and, perhaps even more critically, to protect against the development of the latter.

When the Political Circus Stops Being Fun

By Christine Rosen

Thursday, September 17, 2026

 

What are the characteristics of a good politician? Judging by the caliber of many current aspirants for public office, it’s a question we rarely bother to ask anymore, preferring instead to shrug and say, Who cares so long as the politician can win elections?

 

We ought to care, or so argued Stimson Bullitt in To Be a Politician, a quirky, forgotten book first published during the Eisenhower administration and reprinted in 1977, in the aftermath of Watergate. The son of a wealthy, well-connected Seattle family, Bullitt lunched with Franklin D. Roosevelt at Hyde Park as a teenager, earned a Purple Heart in World War II, and made two failed bids for Congress in the 1950s, running as a Democrat, before settling into a successful career as a lawyer. In other words, Bullitt was no everyman.

 

And yet, in his introduction to the 1977 edition of the book, sociologist David Riesman described Bullitt as “a salty man, without false heartiness; a brave man, without false heroics; a thoughtful man, without pretensions,” and these qualities are evident in Bullitt’s writing. It was, perhaps, Bullitt’s own two failed attempts to win election to Congress that prompted him to study what made for a winning public servant, although his book is thankfully neither a how-to manual nor a dry political science analysis. He wrote,

 

My intention is not to encourage those who consider entering politics either to go in or to stay out. It is to offer them comprehension with which to make their choice, . . . to give the reader better understanding of this vocation so that when he measures a politician’s character and record of performance, he may apply standards that not only fit what is and what can be done, but also are a guide for what a politician ought to do and be.

 

Although Bullitt was writing in the 1950s, his book offers insights that remain valuable for Americans who are deciding the fate of candidates in the upcoming midterm elections. Bullitt was ahead of his time in understanding the transformation of politics from a question of character into a contest of personality, the dangers of demagoguery, and the ways mass media and technology influence how voters perceive their leaders and how politicians view their responsibilities.

 

On the role of personality in politics in the modern era, Bullitt asked:

 

How do certain aspects of personality bear on a politician’s value and success? What kinds of personality in a politician can enable him best to reconcile his duties of democratic leadership — to give direction and to be responsive? How are the qualities of independent character and inner purpose in a politician related to the need for him to serve, survive, and lead?

 

He was not naïve about the competing motives that attracted people to politics, including “power, glory, zeal for contention or success, duty, hate, oblivion, hero worship, curiosity, and enjoyment of the work.” He knew many a politician who behaved like “a warm and shiny salesman who rehearses his sincerity before a mirror every morning and burns a candle to opinion polls each night.”

 

But the best politicians, he argued, were the men who understood that “to enjoy politics one must enjoy people,” adding, “It helps if one likes them as well.” That enjoyment was not a narcissistic desire to seek attention and adulation but a give-and-take tempered by an understanding that those same people might end up disliking the politician when he did his job. “When a politician makes people sacrifice for their own good,” Bullitt observed, “they may never forgive him the price he made them pay.” A good politician understands that this is part of the bargain.

 

Bullitt contrasted such leaders with the growing challenge of “men who enter politics to become the center of attention,” the kind of would-be leader who “thinks of himself as an institution” rather than serving the one to which he has been elected. “The demagogue who gives the people what they want has fewer dilemmas, and they are mainly tactical. He may enjoy an immediate ascendancy over the statesman who does not,” Bullitt wrote. Demagogues also tend to focus on grand schemes rather than the often unglamorous, day-to-day work of elected office, a problem that has only grown since Bullitt’s era. As the Manhattan Institute’s Andy Smarick argued recently,

 

America is now somehow burdened by countless public officials who seem entirely disinterested in their jobs. Our national legislature is inept. The current president appointed to many of the highest federal offices individuals comically unprepared for those responsibilities. The palace guard of the previous administration repeatedly lied about the cognitive decline of the president.

 

A surfeit of performative, unstatesmanlike politicians plagues our political culture.

 

The result is evident in the functional decline of many of our political institutions. “As both referee and advocate, [the politician] plays in a game for which he helps to make the rules, and the rules are the object of the game,” Bullitt argued. But demagogues lack the humility to understand fully the consequences of the political game: “Recognition for accomplishment is passing and uncertain.” Demagogues are politicians who “forget that high office is a tool and not a prize,” and that tool is meant to be used to improve the lives of the people who elected them.

 

Bullitt also offered prescient insights into the declining power of political parties and the rise of new media, particularly television, and its transformative impact on political messaging. Reading him today, we are reminded that such problems are not new, even if the transformation wrought by social media and the internet has accelerated them.

 

***

 

Although it may not have been his intention, Bullitt ended up giving readers a decent list of ideal qualities to look for in a politician. Two among them are relevant for our own time: first, “a sense of history to avoid living only in the present and therefore assuming either that his own epoch is eternal, that it is easy to transform, or that it can be insulated from change.” No wonder candidates on the progressive left offer fantasies of a new world without prisons or free markets, ruled over by a benevolent and omnipotent state. Likewise, populist candidates on the right offer visions of a nation that has jettisoned its allies and that rewards winners and punishes losers based on an ever-shifting set of partisan priorities — all to the purported end of restoring the country to the very time when Bullitt first wrote his book.

 

Second, Bullitt argued that a politician “needs an inner life with a system of principles for his direction.” Contrast that with the general other-directedness and evanescent, social media–driven pursuit of clout that characterizes so many younger politicians today.

 

Bullitt knew that we tend to get the politicians we deserve. “The kinds of politicians’ personalities that citizens encourage and permit partly decide the direction and execution of our public policies,” he wrote, lamenting that character seemed to be undervalued by voters. They were swayed, he thought, more by the appearance of “warmth” than by the evidence of virtue.

 

Today, performative politics is the rule rather than the exception. On the right, White House social media accounts offer a daily firehose of juvenile AI slop seemingly meant to keep the president’s ego soothed and his base entertained. On the left, politicians such as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani use public funds to pay social media influencers to promote his administration, often without disclosing that they are being paid. “In a campaign, people are not interested in theory,” Bullitt argued. “The lessons are more often moral than intellectual.” What moral lesson does our current politics impart?

 

What we permit in our politicians also points us in the direction of what we might, eventually, change. “As politicians have come to need to be liked, citizens have come to need to be entertained,” Bullitt said. “People have acquired more of the outlook of the guest or customer, whose function is not to act and to decide but to receive, consume, and be entertained.” He urged his fellow Americans to reject this passivity and to reject politics as entertainment. We could do the same, if we could summon the will. It makes no sense to complain about the quality of our politicians if we refuse to take responsibility for the permission structure that we, the voters, have created for them. Or, as Bullitt wrote, “If we insist on truth, we cannot wish for illusions to beguile us.”

France: Debt and Disorder

By Andrew Stuttaford

Sunday, October 18, 2026

 

Writing about the growing market jitters over the state of France’s finances in the Wall Street Journal earlier this month, Stacy Meichtry and Chelsey Dulaney pointed to, among other factors, “concerns that France has become so ungovernable that its political system can no longer take corrective action.”

 

News of the disorder in Paris and other French cities, let alone the images of the destruction of the town hall in Limoges, over 200 miles southwest of the French capital, will not ease those concerns. The trouble may have begun with protests over school conditions, but the scale of the disturbances that have ensued are, to say the least, evidence of profound dysfunction and are hardly likely to encourage the current French government to cut back on spending.

 

Five-year French sovereign credit default swap spreads (essentially the price paid to insure against a French default) have soared recently to around 80 basis points, against just over 30bp in late August. This is the highest they have been since the ebbing of the eurozone crisis (during which the spreads were as high as 250bp). Even at 80bp, the expectations of a French default are still very low, but the movement in the price of insuring against it is worth noting as another indication of deteriorating market sentiment. The yield on France’s benchmark ten-year OAT (government bond), which has been rising, as have yields elsewhere, since the beginning of the Iran war, started to move up sharply in August and has now reached 4.8 percent, the highest level in over 20 years.

 

Given the state of France’s finances, that’s not helpful. France’s government debt stands at around €3.6 trillion, meaning that it has a debt/GDP ratio of around 120 percent. Its budget deficit is about 5.4 percent, far above the “rules-based” eurozone stipulation of 3 percent. Cutting that further (it has been falling since the pandemic peak) is a feat that may elude the weak minority government now in place in Paris.

 

Moreover, as the WSJ’s Meichtry and Dulaney explain:

 

France has more than $1 trillion in debt coming due by 2030, and next year is set to sell a record of about $380 billion in debt into a market where once-reliable sources of demand have evaporated. France’s central bank is no longer buying government bonds and is instead letting its portfolio shrink as bonds mature. Once-steady investors like Japanese asset managers have also stepped back. Hedge funds that have stepped into the void have been burned by the recent volatility.

 

Oh yes, there is a French presidential election next year, for which the frontrunner is Marine Le Pen of the populist-right RN. She has said that she wants to reverse (or more) the leisurely planned increase in France’s pension age to 64. Meanwhile, at least until the current riots, her most likely opponent has been Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the far-left LFI. If that changes on the back of the LFI’s “association” (perceived or otherwise) with the drama playing out in France’s streets, Le Pen may face a less divisive opponent. In all other respects, it is hard to imagine that she has not been helped by the current disorder.

 

France, of course, is in the eurozone, meaning that a French debt crisis could spread elsewhere through a currency union distinguished mainly by shoddy construction and economic illiteracy. Heading off, to use the dread word, contagion will be something that Brussels and the European Central Bank will be intent on doing. The way things are headed, their ability to do so may soon be put to the test.

Xi’s Invitation to American Students Comes with Dangerous Strings Attached

By Christopher Nye

Sunday, October 18, 2026

 

At his White House welcoming ceremony last month, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced that China would invite 100,000 young Americans to study there over the course of five years. Daniel Di Martino of the Manhattan Institute wrote on X that the program is “clearly intended to indoctrinate young Americans in China,” and a column in The Hill warned of hostage-taking and stolen lab research. These worries are reasonable but may never materialize. As for indoctrination, many Americans who have lived in China come home more critical of Beijing than when they left; Matt Pottinger reported from China for seven years before helping shape the first Trump administration’s China policy.

 

Our concern should be the data these students will unwittingly hand over through their phones. Beijing will likely keep it for years and use it as it pleases. In practice, nearly every student will need WeChat, which New York University Shanghai’s IT guide calls “an essential communication and payment platform in China.” Some programs require it outright: A Tsinghua summer program tells students to install the app and join its WeChat group before arrival because “almost all course materials and information” go out through it. WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, and Gmail are blocked in China, and few people carry cash, so students use WeChat for cabs, meals, and class chats.

 

In 2024, after reverse-engineering the proprietary protocol of Tencent, WeChat’s Chinese owner, the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab confirmed that WeChat lacks end-to-end encryption and that “WeChat’s servers can and do decrypt and read each transmitted message.” A 2023 Citizen Lab study found that activity in WeChat’s mini programs — used for everything from doctor visits to campus paperwork — is automatically logged and sent to Tencent, with no way to opt out.

 

Under Article 28 of China’s Cybersecurity Law, network operators must provide “technical support and assistance” to public and state security organs, and Article 7 of the National Intelligence Law requires every organization to assist state intelligence work and keep it secret. Tencent is bound by both. China’s police, a term covering both public security and state security agencies, need no judge’s warrant to demand data, and companies have no formal way to refuse.

 

In 2019, Gao Zhigang of Taiyuan forwarded a video to a friend in the United States and was jailed, sentenced to ten months for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” Radio Free Asia, which reviewed the case file, reported that documents in the evidence showed China’s internet regulator and the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda department monitoring WeChat chats directly. Gao said he had deleted the video right after sending it and that the police screenshots could not have come from his phone. The chat he deleted still ended up in court as evidence.

 

Tencent’s help center says an account tied to a mainland phone number counts as a Weixin account, the domestic version of WeChat, and is subject to Chinese terms and privacy rules. Students usually buy a real-name-registered Chinese SIM card in their first week, and NYU Shanghai tells those who buy one through the university to “register for both WeChat and Alipay on-site before leaving,” which puts them on Weixin from day one.

 

Anything beyond monitored chat, starting with payments, requires uploading a passport and scanning one’s face. So does buying the SIM card, under a December 2019 rule, and at most of China’s top universities students scan their faces again at campus gates, dorms, and libraries.

 

The Citizen Lab has found that accounts first registered with a mainland number stay under China’s censorship rules even after switching to a foreign number, so a U.S. number back home does little. Most students keep WeChat anyway, since it is often their only link to friends and host families in China.

 

The State Department’s China travel advisory tells Americans using Chinese apps to assume China’s security services can read their messages “even when you are in another country, including the United States.” It adds that China “has detained people even when they sent these messages outside of China.”

 

Young Americans willing to learn Chinese and live in China are the ones most likely, a decade from now, to work on China at the State Department, in intelligence and the military, on Capitol Hill, and in newsrooms. By the time they are 20, Beijing could have a file on each of them — a passport-verified identity, a face, the people they met, where they went, what they bought, and what they said in private. As long as they use WeChat, even once they’re back in the U.S., the file keeps growing. That standing access is the most dangerous part, since how Beijing might use it later is hard to predict.

 

In 2004, Glenn Duffie Shriver, a Michigan student who had studied in Shanghai, answered an ad for papers on U.S.–China relations. Chinese intelligence officers cultivated him, paid him more than $70,000, and steered him to apply to the State Department and the CIA. When he was found out, he got four years in prison, and the FBI turned his case into a cautionary film for students abroad. Finding and developing a Shriver once took time, ads, and dinners; through WeChat, the Ministry of State Security can now size up these students and spot the next one with little effort.

 

In the 2018–19 academic year, 11,639 American students earned credit in China; in 2023–24, only 1,749 did. Those still willing to go deserve protection, as do the Chinese classmates on the other end of their chats, who face greater danger. Guarding against Beijing should not mean treating Chinese Americans or Chinese students here as suspects. The Justice Department’s China Initiative against espionage and technology theft, launched in 2018, ended up targeting scholars of Chinese descent and was shut down in 2022.

 

A spare phone protects only what is on a student’s regular one, since the WeChat account and contacts live on Tencent’s servers. Deleting the account at home retrieves no uploaded records or face data and cuts the student off from friends in China. Students can do little else on their own; the rest falls to Washington.

 

The simplest step is for the State Department to tell families the truth by moving its warning about Chinese apps off a little-read web page and into every exchange program’s pre-departure material. A parents’ group counts about 80 universities and more than 20 K-12 schools in Beijing-funded programs, and every family involved should see that warning before a student leaves.

 

Reining in WeChat at home will be harder but is necessary. Trump’s August 2020 ban on the app was blocked by a federal judge on free-speech grounds after users sued, and Biden later revoked it. Congress has since supplied a sturdier tool: the 2024 law aimed at TikTok. The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, unanimously upheld by the Supreme Court in January 2025, lets the president designate foreign-adversary-controlled apps with more than a million monthly U.S. users by determining that they pose a significant threat to national security. Trump should make that determination for WeChat and force Tencent to sell its U.S. business or leave the American market. Either outcome would limit Beijing’s free hand with Americans’ data.

 

At the White House, Xi said the hope of U.S.–China relations lies with the people and its future with the young. Beijing takes that line seriously — seriously enough that the United States had to stop recruiting exchange participants in China after Chinese authorities harassed, threatened, and in some cases arrested them. As up to 100,000 young Americans arrive over the next five years, Beijing will presumably take what is on their phones just as seriously. Washington should act before the first of them board their flights.

Congress Must Investigate Trump’s Aid and Comfort to Putin

By Andrew C. McCarthy

Saturday, October 17, 2026

 

There’s serious competition, but the Soviet Union could claim the title of modern history’s most monstrous regime. It killed tens of millions and enslaved hundreds of millions more. In the post–World War II era, it emerged as the mortal enemy of the United States in the Twilight Struggle that lasted four decades — during which nuclear war was barely averted in 1962 and the Kremlin sponsored proxy wars against our nation and our allies, killing thousands of Americans. As President Ronald Reagan declaimed, the Soviets were “the evil empire.” His Cold War solution was simple — “We win, they lose” — because peaceful coexistence with an enemy committed to our destruction was too precarious a prospect.

 

Vladimir Putin, the former KGB agent, is a born and bred devotee of the Soviet system. He solidified his despotic status by orchestrating a series of bombings inside Russia as a pretext to crushing Chechnya. We’re now well into his third decade as Russia’s murderous dictator. He openly regards the 1991 fall of the USSR — America’s foe in modernity’s greatest triumph for liberty — as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [twentieth] century.” Putin’s war of aggression and hoped-for conquest against Ukraine, like his war of aggression and conquest in Georgia (swaths of which he has occupied for nearly two decades), is part of his quest to reconstitute America’s Soviet enemy.

 

And President Donald Trump is giving him aid and comfort.

 

Congress has become a laggard even when it is in session. Now, it’s the political season, so it is inconceivable that midterm campaigns will be suspended to do the nation’s vital national security work. Yet in a properly functioning republic, there would be immediate hearings about this week’s shocking escalation of the Trump–Putin alliance.

 

Since the start of Trump’s second term, it has been excruciating to watch America’s president blame the victim, our ally Ukraine, for Putin’s war of aggression. Reagan and Poland this is not. As Ukraine fights for its survival against Moscow’s would-be hegemon, today’s president of the United States hectors it to surrender territory that Putin has been unable to take on the battlefield after four years of barbarism.

 

Notwithstanding the slew of war crimes through which Russia’s dictator persists in bombing civilian infrastructure, calculating that the prospect of Ukrainians freezing in the harsh winter will bludgeon President Volodymyr Zelensky into conceding defeat, Ukraine has staunchly resisted, despite glaring deficits in manpower and resources. Its astonishing military ingenuity has shredded Putin’s forces, leaving a staggering 1.5 million Russian casualties, including half a million killed in action. Kyiv’s innovative drone warfare has stopped Putin cold on the front lines, nullified Russia’s Black Sea fleet, and now markedly degraded its vaunted energy production platforms.

 

Russia is a pillar of an anti-American axis led by China and joined by Iran and North Korea — the trio providing Putin with the economic backstop, materiel, and manpower he desperately needs. In 2022, Putin and China’s Xi Jinping issued a joint statement of cooperation that bluntly challenged the United States and NATO. The Russian regime is actively abetting Iran’s military operations against the United States, providing intelligence for targeted attacks on U.S. personnel, as well as drone weaponry (which Iran initially designed but Russia can produce at scale). That is to say: While Trump embraces Putin, Putin aids and abets the “Death to America” regime.

 

Moreover, the Kremlin is actively provoking our NATO allies with what the Institute for the Study of War describes as a “coordinated series of kinetic campaigns,” including drone incursions. And just a month ago, the Justice Department announced criminal charges against named members of Putin’s intelligence services for conspiring to finance terrorism and carry out murders in our country.

 

Americans should thus be gratified by the Ukrainian war effort. Most who are paying attention probably are. Trump claims to want peace, but his fine print consistently spells out Russia’s terms. Regardless of the president’s personal interest, the vital American interest stems from Russia’s being America’s enemy, quite apart from being Ukraine’s enemy. Mindful of all our defense obligations, we should vigorously support Ukraine’s war effort for as long as Ukraine is willing to fight. For what is a relative bargain — about $127 billion in direct aid over four years (Trump’s claim that the U.S. has provided $350 billion is absurd) — Ukraine is hollowing out the armed forces and diminishing the war machine of our incorrigible geopolitical adversary.

 

Instead, President Trump has sided with the totalitarian aggressor over the allied European democracy upon which it preys.

 

This week, in lunatic public statements (see, e.g., here and here), the president again blamed Ukraine for the war and gratuitously insulted Zelensky (in stark contrast to Trump’s unconcealed admiration for Putin). Trump’s emissaries revived their pressure on Ukraine to settle the conflict by surrendering Ukrainian territory, and threatened that the administration would withhold crucial intelligence that Ukraine needs for its self-defense against Russian aerial attacks unless Ukraine halted its attacks on Russian oil refineries.

 

Simultaneously, as I detailed earlier this week, the president proclaimed his reprehensible diesel deal with Putin — stunning Kyiv by announcing that, with no concessions from Putin on Ukraine, the Trump administration will waive sanctions against Russia (in likely violation of federal law) in exchange for a relatively trivial amount of Russian diesel fuel that would have negligible impact on sky-high diesel prices (which have surged due to Trump’s decision to start a war with Iran, not, as he claims, Ukraine’s decision to keep fighting for its survival). And even this negligible price impact hinges on Russia’s capacity to deliver, which is doubtful, to put it mildly. (Putin’s invasion and Ukraine’s responsive attacks have so diminished Russian export capacity that it had to import diesel from South Korea during the summer.)

 

Subsequently, in a display of cynicism impressive even by Trump standards, the president tried to induce Ukrainian capitulation by decreeing that the parties had agreed to an “energy ceasefire” when they had not.

 

Not only was this agreement non-existent; it was patently rigged against Ukraine. For three days Zelensky heeded Trump’s warning to cease attacks on Russian refineries, but Russia continued pounding Ukraine’s electrical grid and other energy infrastructure. When Zelensky cried foul, the Trump administration countered that the “energy ceasefire” only applied to oil refineries. As Trump officials knew, Ukraine has no operational oil refineries, Russia having bombed the last one four years ago; by contrast, Russia has dozens of refineries. That is, the “energy ceasefire” was insidiously designed to prevent Ukraine from conducting the kind of strikes that most deter Russian aggression, yet enable Putin’s continued obliteration of the energy infrastructure Ukrainians need to survive the imminent cold season.

 

Now, we have what Congress — Republicans and Democrats, together — should regard as the last straw.

 

Starlink is the satellite communications system provided by SpaceX, which is owned by Trump’s pal Elon Musk, an unrestrained Zelensky detractor. SpaceX also makes Starshield, a military application of the Starlink technology.

 

SpaceX provides Starshield to the U.S. Defense Department. The Pentagon, in turn, provides Starshield to Ukraine, on a contract that runs into 2027. (Most reporting indicates that the U.S. pays for Starshield; citing an unidentified source in Kyiv, the journalist Alex Raufoglu reports that our NATO ally Germany pays.) Starshield has enhanced surveillance and communication capabilities that have been essential to Ukraine’s capacity to fend off, or at least minimize the carnage from, Russian aerial attacks.

 

This week, Ukraine was horrified to learn, without warning, that Starshield had been restricted. Right at the moment Trump was warning Zelensky not to attack Russian refineries, the Starshield settings were somehow altered, such that the system could not track objects traveling at speeds greater than about 100 miles per hour — woefully inadequate to detect Russian aerial assaults.

 

Coincidentally, while the system was compromised, Putin’s forces conducted some of the most intensive aerial attacks against Ukrainian territory since the war began, firing 39 ballistic missiles and 128 Shahed drones, mainly at the greater Kyiv and Kharkiv areas. At least nine civilians were killed, and many others wounded. Zelensky says 26 power facilities and four oil and gas facilities were damaged. More than 600,000 people lost power, for the most part, in the capital.

 

According to Musk, the restrictions on Starshield had to be caused by the Defense Department “and ultimately POTUS.” The government, not SpaceX, owns and controls the system. Initially (i.e., after the devastating Russian attacks), Trump officials denied that the White House had anything to do with the restrictions. As of this writing (on Thursday evening), neither the president, nor his staff, nor the Pentagon has responded to Musk’s statement. Reuters, however, has reported that the order to impose the restrictions came from inside the White House. (The report, behind the paywall, relies on two U.S. government officials and one official from a Western government, none of whom is identified.)

 

Immediately, Congress should hold hearings, demanding testimony under oath from Defense Department and other administration officials about the chain of events that led to restrictions that facilitated Russia’s suspiciously timed attack. Even if we suspend disbelief, ignore the Reuters report, and assume this was some sort of technological glitch, it would be critical to know that: After all, it would mean vital American interests around the world are vulnerable.

 

If we instead allow common sense to enter the equation, too many dark signs point in the direction of an American administration — at the very moment it was seeking Ukraine’s capitulation and threatening to leave it defenseless by denying intelligence — taking conscious action that left Ukraine exposed to an intense attack, which Russia just happens to have conducted right at the perfect time.

 

This is dark. It demands answers. Now.

A Blessing in Disguise

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, October 16, 2026

 

One problem with belonging to a political party composed of Leopards Eating Other People’s Faces is that the leopards eventually start eating each other’s faces.

 

Until recently, most of the mastication has happened at the grassroots level. For instance, some Trumpists of Indian ancestry have been dismayed to find that parts of their own base don’t care much for Indians, just as many Trumpists who support Israel have discovered some don’t care much for Jews. Who could have guessed that a movement of tribal postliberal demagogues might end up with a cohort of bigots that makes no exception for the suckers in its own ranks?

 

At long last, though, face-eating has begun inside the White House.

 

With a possible electoral disaster impending, the knives are allegedly out for chief of staff Susie Wiles. Donald Trump didn’t consult her before appointing his new (and now former) press secretary, the Washington Post claims, a move that “was viewed internally as undermining Wiles, creating the impression of a less-disciplined operation and an unsettled center of power inside the West Wing.” Elite toadies ranging from Stephen Miller to Bill Pulte to Lee Zeldin have reportedly already begun “angling” for her job in case a vacancy should open.

 

Meanwhile, former Trump lawyer Alina Habba Mildon apparently met with Trump last week to accuse Kennedy Center supremo Ric Grenell of what sounds an awful lot like embezzlement. Mildon claims that her husband sent millions to a bank account “at Mr. Grenell’s direction” in exchange for a promise that her husband would get to feed at the trough of Venezuela’s oil riches. (Grenell was Trump’s special envoy to that country before being demoted to entertainment impresario.) Of that money, $5.6 million was supposed to go to the Kennedy Center. According to Mildon, it never did. Grenell denies everything.

 

Only in this administration would the president be asked to mediate a dispute over whether a pay-to-play bribe made to one of his deputies failed to produce the specified “play.”

 

That’s not all. A few weeks ago the Wall Street Journal reported that Pulte, in his role as head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, “clashed” last year with then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. Pulte had dug up evidence of possible mortgage fraud by Trump enemies like New York Attorney General Letitia James and was frustrated that Blanche wasn’t pursuing the matter more aggressively. So, according to the Journal, he dug up Blanche’s own mortgage paperwork—presumably to see if he could find any irregularities he might use as leverage against him, to hurry him along.

 

That’s still not all. The Atlantic reported yesterday that it wasn’t just distaste for public executions that led J.D. Vance to oppose Pete Hegseth’s now-canceled Nidal Hasan snuff film. “One administration official told us that Vance’s response reflected his general frustration with Hegseth, who, like Vance, is said to harbor 2028 presidential ambitions,” the magazine alleged. Part of that frustration surely also has to do with Hegseth having pushed out Dan Driscoll, a longtime friend of the vice president’s, as Army chief. Payback will come at some point for Secretary Pete.

 

All of this face-eating has me wondering whether some leopards might secretly be hoping that they’ll get to feast on something more appetizing next year.

 

The downside for the Republican Party of controlling the government over the past 21 months is that it’s had no foil—no enemy to unite against, no opponent with whom to share blame for America’s misfortunes, no faces worth chewing on. So it’s eating its own. That fractiousness might persist if the GOP retains its House and Senate majorities on Election Day, ensuring two more years without a foil for a party that’s already facing an uncertain post-Trump future.

 

So if you’re a loyal partisan Republican, maybe you (gasp) shouldn’t want the GOP to overperform.

 

There’s no point trying to convince partisan conservatives that their party will benefit morally or civically from being repudiated at the polls this year. The sort of anti-anti-Trump chumps who’ve gone on pulling the lever through 10 years of Trumpist depravity are deaf to such things. But I wonder if they’d consider an appeal to their partisan power-lust—that is, an argument that the GOP will benefit strategically from a midterm loss. Is there a case to be made that the party will accrue more power on balance over the next two election cycles if it loses this year?

 

For conservative Republicans, could the blue wave be a blessing in disguise?

 

2028.

 

The case that conservatives might be better off with a Democratic Congress falls apart instantly if you think there’s a chance the president will spend his final two years in office governing in a reasonable manner. If he intends to embrace popular policies that will improve Republicans’ chances in 2028, then wanting the GOP in charge of the House and Senate to enact those policies is a no-brainer.

 

But he’s not going to do that, is he?

 

Trump will get worse. The fact that figures as loathsome as Pulte and Miller stand a chance of replacing Wiles as chief of staff tells you all you need to know about what his lame-duck era will look like. Liberated from any longer having to care what voters think, the president is about to go full Trump. And going full Trump will not make the Republican Party more popular come 2028. On the contrary.

 

That’s the first argument for why partisan conservatives should prefer a Democratic Congress. Democrats might save the president from some of his most self-destructive excesses by using their legislative leverage to thwart him, sparing Vance and Republican candidates downballot in 2028 from having to answer for those sins. If the president wakes up next year and decides, say, that he wants to start sending weapons to Moscow to help the Kremlin in its heroic crusade against Ukraine, a Democratic Congress might start cutting off funding to federal agencies to force him to relent.

 

But a Republican Congress? After Trump’s barnstorming helped deliver an unexpected midterm victory for them? I wouldn’t bet a dime on them intervening. And if they don’t, how do you like J.D.’s chances two years from now when he’s stuck having to explain to swing voters why arming the Russians was a good idea?

 

Having a common enemy to rally the right against is another key Republican benefit from a Democratic victory, as I suggested above. As Trump’s heir apparent, the vice president is facing a very dicey outlook if his party remains solely culpable for whatever insanity this country will spend the next 27 months being subjected to.

 

With the GOP in control of Congress, Vance will own the president’s failures completely in the 2028 election. He’ll also have his work cut out for him in trying to hold together an increasingly untenable Republican coalition of “America First” postliberals and traditional conservatives. As Trump staggers toward retirement, those factions will compete ferociously for control of the GOP’s direction. And, having spent more than five minutes observing the VP, I’m skeptical that Vance’s animal charisma will be enough to unify them.

 

A Democratic Congress might solve those problems for him. As Democrats begin antagonizing Trump, most of the right will do what it always does: putting aside differences and coming together behind him. And Vance will suddenly have a ready scapegoat whom he can blame for any policy disasters that America stumbles into. In the scenario I raised about Democrats shutting down the government to block some Russia-friendly Trump gambit, for example, the VP could and would spin any subsequent economic downturn during the president’s term as a product of that shutdown—whether that’s true or not.

 

We need to put Congress back in Republican hands to restore the glory days of 2026, he’ll say on the trail two years from now. And partisan conservatives will nod thoughtfully.

 

There’s one more reason those partisans might logically prefer to have Democrats in charge next year. As counterintuitive as it may seem, the GOP might benefit politically from having the opposition performing oversight of Trump.

 

Team Trump’s graft has been so flagrant and so grotesque that, according to a new Fox News poll, “corruption in government” is now the issue about which voters say they’re most concerned. “Inflation and high prices” has fallen to No. 2. Do you realize how unethical an administration has to be to make civically catatonic Americans care more about corruption than they do about the cost of living when diesel is $6 a gallon?

 

Do you further realize how much worse the White House’s graft will get over the final two years of Trump’s presidency if his party remains in charge of Congress, scrupulously indifferent to what he’s up to? MAGA’s heroes will steal everything that isn’t nailed down. And if they do, as much of a political problem as corruption is for the GOP right now, it will be an order of magnitude greater for Vance and his party come 2028.

 

The one thing that might cause the president and his cronies to keep their noses somewhat cleaner for the rest of his term is putting Democrats in charge of the House and/or Senate next year, armed with subpoena power. If that happens and the graft tails off, the vice president will be poised to argue in 2028 that Trumpist corruption is old news. “Some people around the president behaved badly in 2026,” he might say, “but then Donald Trump cracked down.” Afflicted with famously short memories and attention spans, American voters might buy it.

 

There are other things we could say here about why a Democratic Congress would be better for conservatism. Shaming the right by exposing Trump’s corruption would be good for Reaganites in the long term, for instance, because it would demonstrate that postliberals can’t be trusted with power. Likewise (and as strange as it may sound), having leftists in charge of the House and Senate until 2029 would probably make the government more fiscally responsible. Democrats will oppose Trump’s atrocious tariffs and runaway spending out of partisan spite, but Republicans will not.

 

The partisan conservatives we’re trying to persuade don’t actually care about conservatism on the merits, though, only about whether the laundry they’re rooting for gets to be in charge. So let’s move on.

 

Nominees.

 

I struggle to see any downside for right-wing partisans in Democrats winning the House. If your partisanship is so nihilistic that you’d prefer that the public simply not know how much racketeering our Republican head of state is engaged in, I suppose that’s a reason not to want the opposition in charge of the House Oversight Committee.

 

And if you can think of some important legislation that Trump hopes to pass over the next two years, that would also be an argument for preferring a GOP House majority. But if you do think of it, let me know. I’m stumped.

 

Given how dysfunctional Speaker Mike Johnson’s Republican conference has been this year and the probability that Democrats will gain at least a few seats next month, a Republican midterm “victory” might leave the party with a one-vote majority and a total inability to govern. Under those circumstances, isn’t it better to be in the minority, making life hell for Hakeem Jeffries instead?

 

There’s no good partisan case for wanting Republicans to retain the House—but there is a case for wanting to retain the Senate, which is responsible for confirming presidential nominees, of course. Judges judges judges was the argument in 2016 for conservatives to embrace Trump’s immorality, and judges judges judges remains the argument in 2026 for them to keep pulling that lever for garbage.

 

What type of judges, exactly, are partisan conservatives expecting in years seven and eight of a Trump presidency, though?

 

That’s probably a stupid question to ask. Again, these people don’t care about conservatism on the merits, so whether they get an Amy Coney Barrett or an Emil Bove, a Neil Gorsuch or a Todd Blanche, for the next Supreme Court vacancy is probably academic to them. They’ll get a Republican, and any Republican is good. (The motto of anti-anti-Trumpism, by the way.) But let’s be clear: They’re almost certainly not going to get someone of the caliber of the conservative triumvirate that the president added to the Supreme Court during his first term.

 

One of the few times Trump has ever admitted error in office came last month when he whined that Barrett, Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh had let him down again by blocking his attempt to restrict mail ballots in November. “These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court,” he wrote on Truth Social, “they are merely a shell of their original selves.” If I’m right that his postliberalism will grow more extreme after the election, when he’ll no longer need to care about public opinion, we should expect his taste in judicial nominees to grow more extreme as well.

 

Loyalists, not originalists. Toadies, not constitutionalists. A Republican Senate will rubber-stamp Trump’s nominees, fearing that every vacancy that goes unfilled before 2029 will eventually be filled by a Democratic president. A federal bench stocked for decades with eminent Federalist Society eggheads will be heavily diluted with Trumpists.

 

Which, I admit, would be a sort of poetic justice for anti-anti-Trumpers. Partisan conservatives rationalized supporting Trump 10 years ago by convincing themselves that doing so was necessary to keep the judiciary conservative. It’d be a fitting reflection of their ideological bankruptcy if they were to turn out next month to keep the Senate red, enabling the president to start unmaking judicial conservatism.

 

Again, though, that argument won’t appeal to the partisan mind. Ask an anti-anti-Trumper whether they’d prefer putting Aileen Cannon on the Supreme Court to letting Senate Democrats hold open a court vacancy so that the winner of the 2028 election can fill it, and they’ll look at you like you’re crazy. (Any Republican is good!) So here’s a more pragmatic reason for them to think twice about two years of the Senate GOP rubber-stamping any ol’ judicial candidate whom Trump happens to nominate: It’s going to turbocharge Democrats’ appetite for court-packing.

 

Democrats will pack the court eventually no matter what happens next month, partisans will say. Maybe—it depends on how big their Senate majority is after Trump leaves office, assuming they have a majority at all, and whether they regain the White House. But the spectacle of Senate Republicans approving obviously unqualified Trump hacks to the Supreme Court will finish off whatever misgivings remain on the left about expanding the court and “balancing” it with hacks of its own. If the right dispenses with all pretense that it’s selecting judges based on merit or judicial philosophy rather than their willingness to deliver certain outcomes, the left will treat that as license to dispense with any pretense that it, too, still cares about judicial norms.

 

If, on the other hand, a new Democratic Senate majority managed to block some of Trump’s judicial nominees, that might tilt some on the left back toward thinking that radical reform of the judiciary is unnecessary. The old ways of influencing the composition of the bench still work; all Democrats need to do is win elections.

 

Of course, judges aren’t the only presidential nominees whom the next Senate will consider. Lord only knows what an unleashed lame-duck Trump might find under the rocks he’ll turn over to fill vacancies in his Cabinet as they emerge. The worse his appointments are (Attorney General Bill Pulte? Defense Secretary Kid Rock?), the worse his administration will function and the more probable an electoral backlash to the GOP in 2028 becomes. For self-interested reasons, then, partisan Republicans should want Congress to impose some quality control over the president’s horrendous personnel choices. A Senate led by their own party won’t.

 

Failure.

 

I realize that none of this is likely to persuade anyone, though. For two reasons.

 

My original point about face-eating is probably overblown. I do think Republicans are more likely to go on feuding with each other if they don’t have a Democratic foil over the next two years, but one could easily argue the opposite. The finger-pointing and recriminations that would follow a midterm blue wave might accelerate the right’s fractiousness and ignite political war between conservatives and postliberals. We might wake up on November 4 to find faces being eaten everywhere, as far as the eye can see.

 

It would be like a chud version of Night of the Living Dead.

 

Besides, one should never underestimate the right’s ability to manufacture catastrophist “Flight 93 election” bulls–t to paper over its divisions and restore unity. No matter how fractious things get within the GOP, they’ll come up with something in 2028 to explain why a Jon Ossoff presidency would mean the end of civilization. You don’t need a foil when you’ve got a political movement that subsists entirely on propaganda.

 

The other reason no one will be persuaded is that partisanship in one election can always be rationalized by partisanship in every future election. Sure, it might be better on balance for the GOP if Democrats controlled the legislature for the next two years—but every seat liberals win next month is a seat Republicans will need to win back in 2028. That will make winning control of Congress harder during that cycle. And if winning is harder in that cycle, it might be even harder in the next cycle, when yet more seats might need to be regained.

 

Play that out and you’re forced to conclude, conveniently, that it’s never proper to vote against the team. Do it just once, and you’re potentially voting for … well, for the end of civilization.

 

That attitude explains how a party of Leopards Eating People’s Faces managed to get reelected after it tried to eat American democracy’s face on January 6, and how it stands a fair chance of holding on to the Senate next month despite its leader very publicly trying to eat Ukraine’s face right now. There’s no conservative appeal to be made to someone who’d rather be governed by fascists than by garden-variety Democrats simply because of the laundry they’re wearing. There’s a name for people like that, and it isn’t “conservative.”

California’s Peculiar ‘N-Word’ Case Against Tesla

By Will Swaim

Saturday, October 17, 2026

 

On September 21, I took a long tram ride through Tesla’s factory in Fremont, Calif. It was a marvel for a white-collar kid from the suburbs: helmeted men and women working in partnership amid a Jurassic Park of swinging robot arms inside 3.7 million square feet of industrial space — the equivalent, my notes show, of about 64 NFL football fields, including the end zones.

 

On that same trip, I accomplished something California’s state investigators never did in the course of an eight-year probe: I actually went to Tesla.

 

California’s Civil Rights Department (CRD) says the factory is a “racially segregated workplace,” where black employees encounter racist graffiti, hear racial slurs with astonishing frequency, and work in areas known as the “plantation” and “slaveship.” The state’s case went to trial the very day of my visit. Yet the CRD had never set foot inside the factory. Its investigators met with Tesla officials just once, for two and a half hours, before filing their lawsuit the following day.

 

The state alleges a range of discriminatory practices. But much of the case’s force comes from one accusation: that Tesla tolerated the frequent use of a single terrible word, one capable of making an entire room of Americans seize up before anyone has finished pronouncing it: the N-word.

 

The state will have its experts. But Tesla has called its own, Hiram L. Smith. A sociolinguist at Bucknell University, Smith specializes in African-American English and has just published a book on this lexical minefield, Wassup, My Nigga: The Hidden History of a Controversial Word.

 

Unlike me, Smith is black and refuses to deploy the customary euphemism “N-word.” It’s not because he is trying to be provocative — though provocation is an unavoidable occupational hazard here — but because he thinks the euphemism muddies the very distinction he is trying to examine. In a recent academic presentation, he told his audience, “In this talk, I do not use the word ‘nigga’; I refer to it.”

 

More important for Department of Fair Employment and Housing v. Tesla, Smith rejects the idea that the word is self-interpreting. Who said it? To whom? In what grammatical construction? With what pronunciation, intention, relationship, and social context? His research examines how the word has served different functions over time: insult, affiliation, masculine in-group marker, quotation, lyric, reference. Simply counting occurrences tells us remarkably little about what happened. Smith’s point is not that racial epithets are harmless. It’s that linguistics does not permit us to convert every utterance mechanically into a racial assault. A word that is unmistakably an insult in one setting may carry an entirely different meaning in another.

 

And there’s a related problem, one that the state doesn’t seem to account for, which sticks out from my own nonlawyer’s perspective: Many of Tesla’s factory workers are Latino and black. If Tesla executives had disciplined those workers for their use of The Word Which Cannot Be Uttered (TWWCU), California might be making a very different claim: that Elon Musk’s company was guilty of policing black language. You can imagine the headlines for that case.

 

Indeed, while my group of tourists and car buyers was ferried about Tesla’s “slave plantation” in a humming electric tram, the trial was beginning an hour’s drive north: in the Alameda County Superior Court, a 1960s brutalist admin building that includes the courtroom of Judge Peter Borkon. There, opening his defense of the carmaker, attorney Tyree P. Jones Jr., himself a black man, told the court that the state’s case against Tesla is, in fact, a case against black speech. “By this action, the state of California attacks the way many black people greet each other,” Jones said. “It’s offensive.”

 

This cannot mean that every invocation of TWWCU at Tesla was affectionate, harmless, or protected by some exemption from workplace rules. A black employee subjected to repeated racial insults by hostile co-workers has a serious complaint, and an employer that ignores it may be liable. Nor does Smith’s research answer the state’s separate allegations about pay and promotions.

 

But those distinctions make the circumstances of each alleged offense essential. Unfortunately, state law allows the state to make such allegations without what you and I — or anyone who grew up on a television diet of courtroom procedurals — would recognize as a named victim. In a pretrial hearing, one of the state’s attorneys explained that its expert witnesses would address Tesla’s human resources practices and their departures from professional standards, as well as the historical and sociological significance of the word. Smith’s presence this week makes that testimony considerably more interesting. The CRD appears prepared to establish that the word has a long, ugly history; Smith will ask Judge Borkon to consider what particular speakers meant by particular uses of it. One might suppose that an agency that has conducted an eight-year investigation would already have answered those questions.

 

***

 

The state’s case has a second peculiarity: the methods of its investigators.

 

From 2017 to 2022, Tesla claims, CRD (then called the Department of Fair Employment and Housing) investigated almost 50 claims of racism at the Fremont plant. “On every single occasion, when the DFEH closed an investigation, it did not find misconduct against Tesla. It therefore strains credibility for the agency to now allege, after a three-year investigation, that systematic racial discrimination and harassment somehow existed at Tesla.”

 

Tesla also claims that CRD officials never visited the factory and never interviewed the Tesla executives one might suppose were the architects of the Jim Crow system CRD says it has discovered. And although the department has a statutory responsibility to investigate discrimination complaints and attempt conciliation, its single encounter with Tesla consisted, the company says, of a single, two-and-a-half-hour meeting on the day before the state filed its 2022 lawsuit.

 

Despite all that, in May, Judge Borkon rejected Tesla’s effort to dismiss the case before trial. CRD Director Kevin Kish celebrated the ruling by declaring that Tesla’s employment practices were rooted in “some of the ugliest relics of the past.” Yet the judge himself seemed perplexed by one aspect of the department’s case. After years of investigation, the CRD had proceeded without identifying individual workers as plaintiffs in its lawsuit. In a let-me-get-this-straight moment, Borkon asked the CRD’s attorneys whether identifying an entire category of people but not a single named victim was, you know, sufficient.

 

“You don’t have to ever name the individual?” the judge asked.

 

A CRD attorney explained that the department brought the action in its own name to seek relief for affected workers. If Tesla wanted the names of every person potentially entitled to relief, she asked, “How would CRD have known that?”

 

“Why would you not have known that?” the judge replied with something like exasperation.

 

It’s a marvelous exchange, and not because the state necessarily lacks legal authority to sue on behalf of workers who aren’t individually named in the complaint. California law gives it that authority. Rather, the exchange raises an elementary question about an investigation that consumed years: How closely did the state investigate the experiences of the people it says were victimized?

 

The CRD’s answer may be that its evidence establishes a pattern of misconduct extending beyond the experiences of particular employees. But that raises the stakes of the evidence, not least because the agency is alleging something considerably more serious than bad behavior by a handful of employees. It is accusing one of the world’s best-known manufacturers of maintaining a workplace culture of racial discrimination. The distinction matters. A company that employs thousands of people can have racist employees without operating a racist employment system. Whether Tesla knew about particular instances of misconduct, tolerated them, punished them, or failed to prevent them is central to the case.

 

So are the meanings of the words the state has collected as evidence.

 

***

 

Tracking the evolution of California’s CRD over nearly 70 years is like examining the rings of an old tree. The agency’s changing names, expanding authority, and increasing appetite for litigation tell a larger story about California itself.

 

It dates to 1959, when California established the Fair Employment Practices Commission to enforce the state’s first broad workplace-discrimination protections. In 1980, the state’s employment and housing civil rights laws were consolidated, and the agency became the Department of Fair Employment and Housing. Four decades later, in 2022, Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation renaming it the Civil Rights Department.

 

The changes weren’t merely cosmetic. The department’s jurisdiction now reaches well beyond employment and housing into other areas of public and private life. Its lawyers can pursue sweeping institutional claims, as they have in the Tesla case. It can retain outside counsel and seek substantial monetary relief — winnings that it can plow back into its budget for future investigations and additional staff. Painful litigation and eye-popping settlements are its business model.

 

There’s an essential place in American jurisprudence for civil rights enforcement. But there’s also a danger in an agency whose mission has expanded from investigating discrimination into pursuing massive legal actions against corporations — and whose success is increasingly measured in the size of the settlements and the changes it can compel employers to make.

 

Consider Activision Blizzard, the California video game maker. The CRD accused the company of maintaining a pervasive “frat boy” culture and pursued litigation that brought it into conflict with federal employment-discrimination investigators. In 2023, after more than two years of legal combat, the state announced that Activision would pay $54 million to settle. In exchange, the state admitted that no investigation, including its own, “has substantiated any allegations that there has been systemic or widespread sexual harassment at Activision Blizzard.” Nor is there any evidence, California now admits, “that Activision Blizzard senior executives ignored, condoned, or tolerated a culture of systemic, harassment, retaliation, or discrimination; or that Activision Blizzard’s Board of Directors including its Chief Executive Officer, Robert Kotick, acted improperly with regard to the handling of any instances of workplace misconduct.”

 

But the litigation demonstrated the old adage that the process is the punishment. It proved the extraordinary leverage available to a government agency that can threaten years of legal investigations and ruinous costs, reputational damage, and enormous potential judgments.

 

***

 

My tour of the Tesla plant was lovely, even though it recalled my early terror of industrial labor. As a ten-year-old, along with 25 or so kids in my fifth-grade class at the Old Mission School, the Catholic school on the grounds of the Mission San Juan Capistrano, I visited a lima bean canning factory in nearby Costa Mesa. Inside a rust-colored, barnlike facility, a speeding, clanging belt conveyed a river of unmarked cans. I saw a man with a kind of poking stick. He was, the guide explained, making sure that no dented cans were sent off to grocery stores. And as I watched, the man — who seemed old but was perhaps in his 40s — occasionally jabbed his short, wooden broomstick-like tool at the rare can with (to me) invisible defects. These landed in a box on the other side of the belt, a box that went to the poor, our guide said, shouting above the mayhem. During our debrief, we agreed that this appealed to our Catholic sense of charity. But in the moment, all I could see was a man in a state of constant, animal awareness, working in semidarkness and in claustrophobic noise. With God as my witness, I declared I would never work in a factory so long as I could do anything else to survive. Soon after, I determined that I’d become a priest. (I failed at that on first contact with the reality of celibacy.)

 

Tesla’s Fremont plant was nothing like that canning factory. Near the entrance stood something resembling an Apple Genius Bar, except that the sign above it read “HR Answer Bar.” Other signs told employees where to report workplace concerns, from vacation and insurance matters to safety problems and, presumably, allegations of racism.

 

We climbed aboard a kind of Disneyland tram and moved slowly into a vast, brightly lit space with red robotic arms and hard-hatted humans. Our guide, Salim, drove us through a maze of buildings devoted to motors, painting, aluminum-pressing, body panels, and interior finishing. He waved at workers moving between tasks, sometimes calling out their names. They responded with nods, waves, and the occasional fist bump.

 

Above and beside them, robots moved with alarming speed and inerrant precision. Salim pointed out “ro-bats,” machines suspended upside down above their floor-mounted brethren, all choreographed by software that seemed to possess a better understanding of factory traffic than most Californians will ever have of the 405.

 

The humans worked hard, it seemed. They wore helmets, neon vests, boots, rubberized gloves, and safety glasses. Their jobs appeared repetitive, demanding, and intense. My pleasant experience as a visitor proved nothing about their treatment by co-workers or managers. Whatever ugliness might exist in their intimate relationships would be largely invisible to someone passing through on a tram. But that is precisely why I would have expected the investigators to go there, talk to the workers and examine the circumstances in which the alleged misconduct occurred.

 

Near the end of the tour, Salim drove our tram past the quietest part of the facility. There, behind transparent sheets of plastic, engineers were building the assembly line for Tesla’s newest project, Optimus — athletic-looking wasp-waisted bipedal robots that can climb stairs, lift boxes, and manage tools. The Optimus robots use the same visual-perception tech that Tesla cars use to drive themselves. It’s easy to imagine that the CRD is unintentionally accelerating the development of Optimus, by launching legal assaults that may well incentivize the creation of human replacements. These robots would seem to herald the end of much of the factory work we saw that day. They would require neither lunch breaks nor overtime, and presumably they would be indifferent to the race, sex, or ancestry of the machines working beside them. And then (as Marx predicted in a different but related context) deprived of “victims,” the California Civil Rights Department would simply wither away.