Red State Freedom Is Better for the Environment Than European Green Socialism

By Drew Bond

Sunday, July 19, 2026

 

Here is a fact that should embarrass every climate activist: States with the most liberated energy markets in America are producing better environmental outcomes than the green mandators of Europe — and doing it without impoverishing their people in the process.

 

Freedom, it turns out, is a remarkably effective environmental policy.

 

This isn’t how it’s supposed to be. For decades, Europe has proclaimed itself the vanguard of the environmental movement. Germany’s Energiewende — its sweeping top-down energy transition initiated in 2010 — was announced as the model every serious nation should follow. Germany shut down its nuclear plants, poured money into mandated renewables, and staked its future on wind generation in the North Sea and solar pulled from its perennially cloudy skies.

 

Germany does not stand alone. The U.K.’s Renewables Obligation scheme mandated aggressive renewable targets and layered green levies directly onto consumer bills. The Netherlands passed a legally binding Climate Act in 2019, committing to mandatory emissions reduction targets. Denmark required 100 percent renewable electricity by 2030. With few exceptions, European nations liberally used the heavy hand of the state to force an energy transition and “de-carbonize” their economies.

 

The results were staggering — and painful.

 

Denmark’s mandates drove household electricity prices to among the highest in Europe. The Netherlands backed down from its emission targets after a revolt from the nation’s farmers. And Germany, formerly the beating industrial heart of the continent, is becoming a manufacturing backwater. German households already pay among the highest electricity prices in the developed world. Now, industrial giants like BASF are relocating production out of Germany, citing uncompetitive energy costs, and energy-intensive production in Germany dropped over 15 percent from February 2022 to March 2026. Across the continent, the EU lost over 850,000 manufacturing jobs in four years.

 

The net impact is not environmental progress, but environmental arbitrage. When European factories close, production does not disappear. It moves — overwhelmingly to China, which generates more than 60 percent of its electricity from coal and has emitted more greenhouse gases than the entire developed world combined. Factory closures in Germany or Poland may cheer anti-industrial environmentalists, but only because they don’t see those factories reopen in Shenzhen or Guangzhou.

 

Thus, in return for economically immiserating their own people, Europe has not solved climate change. It has only outsourced it.

 

Americans are rightly perplexed by fatalistic Europeans who would rather endure unemployment, skyrocketing cost of living, and summers without air conditioning than accept marginally higher national emissions numbers. And Europeans can’t understand Americans who don’t take the “climate crisis” seriously.

 

In reality, Americans have always cared about the environment. We simply understand that enduring pain is not the same as being effective.

 

In America, we made incredible environmental gains with a growing economy thanks to the power of the market. As of last September, American carbon emissions dropped 20 percent since 2005. At the same time, from the mid-2000s U.S. energy consumption remained steady for nearly two decades until it surged to record highs in 2024 and 2025 largely due to AI data center investments.

 

American emissions didn’t decline because California and Massachusetts out-Europed Europe, using mandates to make up for the rest of the country’s pollution. Rather, America is improving the environment thanks to a red-state energy revolution led by natural gas — which is replacing higher-emitting coal — with a little help from wind, solar, and batteries. Natural gas is the clear driving force behind this progress, but since many climate activists don’t view natural gas as green, let’s focus on wind and solar, where red states are still beating the greens at their own game.

 

Four of the top five states for total wind, solar, and battery energy generation — Texas, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Kansas — are Republican states. Texas alone produced almost twice as much solar and wind energy as California. More than two-thirds of America’s added solar capacity in 2025 was built in states that voted for President Donald Trump, and 85 percent of clean-energy investments under Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act headed to Republican districts despite every congressional Republican opposing the legislation. Green energy is flourishing in red-state America.

 

It’s no paradox. Ask any developer, and they will tell you why: Republican jurisdictions have lower taxes, fewer regulations, and a much more welcoming business environment. Republican states have renewable energy not because regulators demanded it, but because people had the freedom to build it.

 

Call it Econ 101. In a free market, producers naturally deliver the most energy at the lowest price to win the most dollars from consumers. Where that energy comes from doesn’t matter nearly as much as how much it costs. And red states would do even more if the federal government didn’t hold them back — the federal National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) ironically stifles renewable energy more than it does oil and gas.

 

Europe spent two decades proving that mandates impoverish people without saving the planet. At the same time, red states built wind farms, pipelines, solar arrays, and refineries by embracing the free market. The result is the most dynamic energy market on earth — and one that is getting cleaner every year.

 

This prompts a question for climate activists: Is it progress you want, or propaganda?

 

If the answer is progress, there’s never been a better time in history to embrace the power of freedom. It’s a win-win for people and the planet.

The Great DEI Defunding

By Inez Feltscher Stepman

Sunday, July 19, 2026

 

The Trump administration is waging a quiet but seemingly effective war against a system that has tilted the playing field in favor of the left for generations.

 

The share of grants that contain woke terms awarded by the National Science Foundation has reportedly crashed from a high of more than a third under the Biden administration in 2022. Grants issued for projects that contain words related to DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) fell to 1990s levels — making up about 9 percent of the total — by the end of 2025, a trend that has likely continued this year.

 

The Washington Free Beacon used AI-assisted research to track the rise — and fall — of federal support toward institutional leftism in just this one agency, from almost nonexistent in 1990 to its peak in the post-racial reckoning of the early 2020s. The pattern at the NSF is likely one that has held across federal agencies, which are responsible for distributing and keeping tabs on the money Congress allocates to them.

 

Some have questioned the good  news, pointing out that reports like the Beacon’s don’t account for misleading language and that applicants may just be hiding the ball. Certainly, in hyper-ideological environments like universities, there is a lot of slippery renaming going on to avoid the Trump administration’s civil rights enforcement; DEI centers, for example, are being quietly christened “Centers of Community Belonging.”

 

But even if a certain percentage of the drop-off reflects renaming shenanigans, the numbers demonstrate real change and should be celebrated. Especially in the hard sciences, much of the DEI explosion among grant recipients was itself driven by the previous administration’s priorities or by cultural pressure. That environment has obviously shifted. Cancer labs or federal contractors may be relieved to lose some of the ideological baggage that came with federal money and focus on what they do best.

 

The Trump administration also is systematically examining the checks going out the door, in a way that has never been attempted by any previous administration. It’s not at all unlikely that this hard steering has produced real results among grant recipients.

 

In the first days of the president’s second term, a series of executive orders barring federal money from DEI and related projects were rolled out. This act of priority-setting was followed by the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency, which was unsuccessful in its stated aim of substantially reducing federal spending, but successful at identifying programs and grants with ties to woke buzzwords and ideology. This gave  political appointees an excellent roadmap of where to look in their own agencies. Just this past week, the comment deadline closed on a little-remarked-upon rule from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), requiring that grantmaking be closely supervised by political appointees and adding additional safeguards for transparency and against fraud.

 

For decades, a neat little game has been played between the sprawling federal bureaucracy and a mushrooming, left-wing NGO complex. Congress would appropriate money to agencies using vague legislative language, leaving flexibility for agency bureaucrats to translate mission statements into specifics and grants. And while critics of the OMB rule have absurdly come out against “politicized” grantmaking, the reality is that the prior status quo was that those who staffed the bureaucracy — that is, people who skewed to the left — were effectively shoveling enormous sums of taxpayer cash at fellow ideological travelers without the burden of having to explain themselves to voters.

 

The much-reduced USAID funding is a perfect example of this model. The enabling legislation for USAID, passed in the 1960s, says that the money is to be used to support U.S. foreign policy by assisting other nations with their development and security. (Some of the only concrete directions given by Congress for that pot of money were that it not be spent in communist countries, unless toward the goal of getting them out from under that system’s boot.)

 

From that gauzy instruction, federal bureaucrats in recent years have spun out grants such as $2 million for sex “transition” and “LGBT activism” in Guatemala, or $1.5 million to advance DEI in the corporate sector of Serbia.

 

The cozy relationship between the left-wing activist apparatus and federal bureaucracies has been an important background factor of American — and global —  politics for decades, turbocharging the left’s causes with taxpayer money, without even the cursory democratic check given to legislation actually passed by Congress.

 

If the Free Beacon’s report is any indication, the Trump administration is waging a quiet but highly effective war against a system that has been tilting the playing field in favor of the left for generations. The downstream effects of the Great DEI Defunding may not be evident for years to come, but may fundamentally transform the game in unanticipated ways.

Attacking Starlink

By Andrew Stuttaford

Sunday, July 19, 2026

 

Humanity’s ability to exploit space, especially (for now) in near-Earth orbit, is rapidly increasing. And where one country gains an advantage, there will be others looking to neutralize that lead.

 

Under the circumstances, a report by Mirek Toda for EUobserver is worth noting. He relates that according to research from The Insider, a well-thought-of, Latvia-based investigative website, China and Russia are working on a joint plan to “kill” Starlink. It’s not really a surprise, but still . . .

 

But first, some background.

 

The Insider:

 

The Insider, together with Der Spiegel, and Le Monde, has obtained a cache of documents containing previously undisclosed details about the growing military cooperation between Russia and China.

 

The documents date from 2023, and, along with much else, they make a nonsense of China’s claims to be some sort of neutral in the Russo-Ukrainian war, claims that few ought to believe anyway. The length of the war, and the impact of sanctions on Russia, has worked very well for China, forcing Moscow into a position of dependency on Beijing.

 

Given China’s long-term geopolitical ambitions, securing a huge, resource-rich quasi-vassal is a valuable prize. And for the much longer term, China has some territorial issues in Russia’s far east, which Beijing still regards as unsettled business. Additionally, while China will dislike the way that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is triggering the rearmament of NATO, it won’t be too sad to see that Western support for Ukraine is coming at a considerable cost in money, matériel, and distraction.

 

Russia can also offer China something else: battlefield experience.

 

The Insider:

 

A presentation by Li Rong of the PLA Academy of Military Sciences proposes formalizing that trade around loitering munitions [suicide drones]. China fields 160 types from more than fifty manufacturers, yet it has almost no real combat experience with any of them. Russia, however, has extensive battlefield data. The proposal calls for Russia to share what it has learned at the front while China contributes AI and mass-production capacity as the two powers jointly develop the next generation of autonomous “swarm” munitions. The results are already visible in Ukraine. According to Ukrainian military-intelligence documents from 2025, the V2U autonomous drone now used by Russian forces runs on Chinese AI modules, Chinese lidar sensors, Chinese batteries, and Chinese solid-state drives. As the Guangzhou participants discussed, Chinese engineering is, in effect, being combat-tested in Ukraine.

 

As for Starlink, perhaps the most interesting aspect of schemes to disable or weaken it is that they envisage not only cyber and physical attacks, but also using international or transnational regulatory structures to China and Russia’s advantage:

 

Starlink’s satellite density sharply raises the risk of collisions in low orbit, the authors argue, and so Moscow and Beijing should build an international coalition to win regulatory limits on the constellation’s expansion.

 

And:

 

China and Russia would jointly file for critical frequency bands and orbital slots, using their weight in international regulatory bodies to obstruct the future deployment of Musk’s company.

 

Beijing and Moscow’s belief that such bodies’ rulemaking powers can be used to serve their interests (see how well Beijing plays the climate game to weaken the West) is a reminder that the U.S. should carefully consider the extent to which its interests in space are subject to international control.

 

Not completely unrelatedly, there’s this (via Bloomberg, July 16):

 

Earlier this week, Google DeepMind Chief Executive Officer Demis Hassabis unveiled a proposal for a new international watchdog that would do “rigorous” tests and reviews of cutting-edge AI models before release.

 

There are plenty of reasons why that is a terrible idea. One of them is the advantage it would hand Beijing, which has no interest in playing by rules imposed on others.

 

Oh, yes (via Bloomberg, also on July 16):

 

President Xi Jinping used the rise of China’s AI models to stake his claim on shaping the technology’s global rules, even as their growing power stirs security concerns in Washington and Beijing alike.

The Great and Powerful Doug

By Hannah Anderson

Sunday, July 19, 2026

 

Pastor Doug Wilson gave a surprisingly dispassionate interview to NPR’s Leila Fadel last week. I describe it as “surprisingly dispassionate” because in the interview, Wilson espoused repealing the 19^th Amendment, ending no-fault divorce, and introducing religious tests for public office; yet his delivery of these radical ideas was decidedly unbothered—a marked contrast to the responses the interview elicited from exvangelicals and beyond. The emotional gap between Wilson’s rhetoric and how people respond to it is one of the defining features of his public presence. It’s also a key to understanding his ideas and how he uses them.

 

For the uninitiated, Wilson is an evangelical pastor in Moscow, Idaho, who’s come to greater visibility due to his association with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. As Wilson tells it, Hegseth became enamored of Wilson’s approach to education and moved his family to Tennessee to be part of a school that implemented it. Through those networks, Hegseth began attending a congregation in the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), a denomination Wilson started. (The pastor of that congregation, Brooks Potteiger, has since relocated to Washington, D.C., to start a congregation under the direct authority of Wilson.)Wilson downplays any influence with Hegseth, naming the relationship as one of overlapping circles, shared acquaintances, and the occasional text message. He was recently invited to preach at the Pentagon worship service Hegseth began last year.

 

Given his proximity to power, Wilson has become the subject of national media coverage, which often focuses on his claim to want to establish the United States as a Christian theocracy. Such language conjures visions of a real-life Gilead, the authoritarian and patriarchal republic that is the setting for The Handmaid’s Tale, but it would be a mistake to read Wilson as an ideologue. In fact, he spoke pragmatically in the NPR interview, naming the work of democracy as the work of persuasion. Wilson’s demeanor, even if slightly awkward, was not forceful or aggressive. He was measured, friendly, playful. But that disconnect—between the weight of what Wilson is suggesting and how easily he suggests it—is what’s concerning.

 

I first became acquainted with Wilson’s ideas more than 25 years ago. His books were being covertly passed around the fundamentalist college I attended. Wilson was a pastor, but he also smoked, drank, and used foul language. That devil-may-care sensibility was enough for my friends to believe they’d found something substantively different from the strict homes and churches in which we’d been raised. Wilson’s certainty on things like gender roles, family life, and education also appealed to those of us on the cusp of early marriage and parenthood. We were all in over our heads, and his confidence offered a sense of stability.

 

Over the years, my friends moved away from Wilson’s orbit. For some, it was a gradual process. For others, however, it came through a crisis when the “Moscow Mood” proved unsustainable in the face of actual life. Discussing male headship and the proper ordering of a home may work in a conversation in a dorm room or a church basement, but it doesn’t fare as well when your spouse cheats on you or is abusive. Wilson himself is not lost in the clouds, however. He’s planted churches, built schools (including a college), started a publishing house, and founded a denomination. In this way, Wilson uses the power of abstraction for very practical ends.

 

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Wilson’s ideas, however, is how much they recycle. When asked about Christian nationalist policies he would focus on today, Wilson replayed a narrow set of issues from the culture wars: abortion, LGBTQ rights, and feminism. Wilson runs his ministry along the tried-and-true template of the megachurch pastor or televangelist, presiding over a conglomerate of churches, schools, and media outlets that also employ his family. (Wilson’s daughters, Rebekah and Rachel, and his wife, Nancy, play significant roles as public communicators of Wilson’s message, billing themselves first as homemakers. His son-in-law, Ben Merkle, is the president of the college.)

 

And while Wilson claims the moniker “Reformed” (his college is “New St. Andrews,” echoing the University of St. Andrews), his lack of formal theological training (he has an M.A. in philosophy from the University of Idaho but no theological degrees from seminaries) and penchant for innovation are constitutionally at odds with that tradition. In many ways, Wilson’s approach reflects more of his upbringing as a child of the post-World War II religious revival than the traditionalism he espouses. Wilson’s parents, Jim Wilson and Bessie Dodds, met in postwar Japan while he was stationed there and she was serving as a missionary. Jim Wilson would eventually spend nine years as a naval officer and 12 years as an evangelist with the parachurch organization Officers’ Christian Union before moving to Moscow, Idaho, to open a Christian bookstore. In this way, their son’s path to preaching at the Pentagon is more than predictable.

 

One way Wilson distinguishes himself, however, is how he uses radical ideas. Unlike those who might hide a radical agenda, Wilson speaks openly about it—almost performatively. Those familiar with his broader body of work know that he delights in the drama of it all in much the same way that President Donald Trump seems to. Wilson doesn’t reverse course so much as place responsibility for the drama on others. He courts outrage and then retreats to the abstract when others react. “Screamers,” he called them in the NPR interview. Speaking with Fadel, Wilson suggested that previous interviewers just threw “mud at the wall. You’re a fascist. You’re a Nazi. You’re a thing, you know …” but now, he’s “risen to the dignity of needing to be intelligently opposed.” In other words, the problem isn’t what he said; it’s that you (mis)understood. You were too sensitive. Satire is a legitimate form of argumentation, and you don’t understand how rhetoric works.

 

In this way, Wilson can be deeply disorienting. The true ideologue speaks with wholeness—the totality of their words, demeanor, and actions all say the same thing. Completely given to their ideas and the promotion of them, their personal presence and posture reflect this unity, even if that means coming across as a little unhinged. But Wilson seems able to emotionally disconnect himself from many of his ideas as well as from other disturbing realities. In the NPR interview, Wilson discussed atrocities like rape and genocide as if they existed only in theory.

 

This ability to remain undisturbed while discussing deeply disturbing things is both a practiced posture and a necessary one. Over the last eight years, Wilson has been a main promoter of the idea of “the sin of empathy” within theologically conservative spaces. As before, the idea is not original to Wilson, but Moscow has been effective in pushing the conversation forward as a paradigm that can be used to justify increasingly extreme policies of the hard right, including President Trump’s mass deportation campaign.

 

As the argument goes, empathy is disordered insofar as it asks you to experience the feelings of another person or put yourself in their shoes. Instead, the morally and intellectually superior person is the one who is able to remain detached. You can grieve with them, but it must be a theoretical grief in the sense that the grief does not affect your supposed objectivity. And those who might be emotionally moved by the implications of eliminating no-fault divorce or disenfranchising non-Christians—moved to the point of action—deserve to be mocked for their naïveté and failure to remain unmoored.

 

The danger of this approach is that people’s actual lives become reduced to thought experiments. In the NPR interview, Wilson attempted to clarify previous statements around “the propriety of rape.” To do so, he likened violent sexual assault with having a wallet stolen because it was left open in a dangerous neighborhood—seemingly oblivious to how such words both objectified women’s bodies and might affect women who had been raped. Discussing the Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell decision making same-sex marriage legal across the country, Wilson kept referring to legal partnerships and civil protections against discrimination as the “LGBTQ thing.”

 

Wilson’s ability to separate the theoretical and actual also explains how he could devote his first book to a philosophical exploration of American slavery, writing that it was a “normal sinful situation” rather than an “apocalyptic evil.” The cover image is of a “black and tan,” a mixed drink made by pouring a darker beer over a lighter one. This same indifference explains how Wilson could guide a young woman who was a New St. Andrew’s student to marry a convicted pedophile who was a part of their church community (and who had abused children within the church as an NSA student himself). Not only did Wilson mishandle the previous cases of sexual abuse, he diagnosed the groom’s behavior as “temptation,” with the theoretical cure being sexual expression in marriage. The groom was later removed from the home when a judge ruled he could not live with his infant son due to failed polygraphs and further violations.

 

If being a pastor is akin to being a doctor, Wilson is the doctor willing to experiment on his patients. And now, it seems, the nation itself.

 

Over the last decade, there’s been a lot of conversation about how journalists should cover Trump. How do you seriously report on the words of a man who doesn’t seem to take his own words seriously? Similar questions apply to Wilson. How should we interpret the words of a man who operates in the theoretical? How seriously should we take his suggestions about repealing the 19^th Amendment?

 

Part of the answer lies in understanding Wilson’s own posture, but the rest also lies in understanding the context that allows someone like Wilson to flourish.

 

Over the last 30 years, Wilson has steadily built a presence within conservative evangelicalism, but for the most part, it’s been a contrarian and controversial presence. Much like Trump, he functioned as an outsider, which meant his presence was also somewhat contained. In the NPR interview, however, Wilson noted that in the last five years, his ideas have been getting “a much more significant hearing than we ever have before, where people are actually listening to what we say.” It’s a stretch to think that this is the natural outworking of the superiority of Wilson’s political vision any more than to believe that Trump’s business acumen landed him the presidency. But Wilson, like Trump, is particularly suited to this moment.

 

I first encountered Wilson’s writings in the early 2000s in the form of books and magazines. But as the digital age came, and then snowballed, we were inundated with more information—more words—than we could process. The people with an advantage in that setting are people who don’t take their own words as earnestly as other people take them. For Trump, that means a kind of showmanship; for Wilson, it means playing the theorist.

 

While the rest of us are drowning in the flood of information, trying to figure out what it all means, people like Wilson and Trump skim along the surface. Why? Because understanding and being understood are not necessarily the goal. Wilson does not sit for an interview to try to convince you of his ideas. He sits for an interview because “all press is good press,” as the saying goes. He gets a hearing, and regardless of whether you subscribe to his ideas or get lost trying to debate them, he wins. You get bogged down while he continues doing what he’s doing.

 

In an even more ironic twist, evangelicals are particularly vulnerable to the flood of information because the tradition places a disproportionate weight on words. Unlike traditions that prioritize embodied practices like prayers, fasting, penance, and good works, as an Enlightenment tradition, evangelicals often prioritize the mind, belief, and study. But this reliance on words also means that evangelicals are uniquely susceptible to the abuse of words. In a weird twist, evangelicals are more likely to follow the person who talks or writes about the importance of virtue than the person who is actually virtuous.

 

So what are we to do with men like Doug Wilson and his use of “radical ideas”? I don’t think the answer is to ignore them. I have seen firsthand the damage Wilson’s ideas wreak on the naïve and inexperienced—on those whose earnestness exceeds his own. I also don’t think the answer is to take Wilson’s words at face value. Not exactly.

 

While it is important to believe people when they tell you who they are, they tell us who they are through both words and deeds. So, it seems to me, the wisest response to someone like Wilson—whose wizardry depends on the smokescreen of the theoretical—is to engage the actual.

 

And when you pull back the curtain to reveal the man behind it, you find someone with a history of speaking philosophically about the goodness of common life while also undermining it. You find a man who was raised within mainstream evangelicalism who intentionally chose marginality. You find a man who speaks a lot about submission to authority while refusing to submit himself. You find a man who easily discusses the most extreme hypotheticals, seemingly unmoved by how they would actually affect the person sitting in front of him.

 

Wilson is not dangerous because he is an ideologue. He is dangerous because he’s comfortable entertaining radical ideas to further pragmatic ends, knowing that if they go wrong, he can always retreat to the safety of the theoretical. In this way, Wilson finds a natural home among the protected class of lawmakers and bureaucrats in Washington who seem beyond the reach of voters—who increasingly engage in the work of public policy as if it were a game or reality show, who are insulated from the consequences of their choices, who remain theoretically detached while others suffer and even die under their watch.

 

As I observe Doug Wilson, I can’t help but think of my friends who followed him decades ago. They had their reasons, and most of them had less to do with Wilson than with their own wounds and personal histories. Wilson’s paradigms offered an escape from reality and the need to deal with the truth of their actual lives. And like any other coping mechanism, it worked until it didn’t. But today, as they continue to pick up the pieces of their shattered marriages and families, Wilson preaches at the Pentagon.

‘People Aren’t Stupid’

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, July 17, 2026

 

Democracy is the least bad form of government, which is to say that its flaws are less oppressive than any other’s.

 

In an autocracy, public officials aren’t allowed to call the ruler stupid even when it’s true. Far better is democracy, where public officials need only avoid calling the public itself stupid.

 

Even when it’s true.

 

Modern America is a hybrid of the two. The Republican Party is an autocracy, and its members behave accordingly whenever the subject of the ruler’s idiocy is broached. Whereas the Democratic Party remains free to notice and comment on his idiocy—although not, of course, the idiocy of the people themselves.

 

“People aren’t stupid,” Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin dutifully declared after the president delivered a televised speech last night about foreign influence in the 2020 presidential campaign. Her point was that voters won’t forget about an endless, aimless war in Iran and the spike it’s caused in gas prices just because Donald Trump is dangling a shiny object in front of them. And I suppose that’s true.

 

But “people aren’t stupid” is a hell of a claim to make about America in 2026.

 

For instance: A few days ago the House overwhelmingly passed a bill that would make daylight saving time permanent. That’s objectively stupid for all the reasons Josh Barro lists here. It was tried before with disastrous results; it ignores obvious trade-offs, like pushing sunrise to 8:30 a.m. in the winter; and it’s a gross overreaction to the burden of having to adjust clocks twice a year, something that most digital technology does automatically.

 

Stupid. But popular!

 

Another example: On Wednesday, while preparing for an air show in Florida, a Blue Angels pilot buzzed the crowd on a beach in Pensacola by descending to an altitude of a few dozen feet while banking at a nearly 90-degree angle. That triggered a safety review, as the altitude was “lower than standard profiles”; any error, like a bird strike to the engine, could have caused mass death. And if it had, it wouldn’t be the first time that a military daredevil had needlessly killed a bunch of people while showing off on what should have been a routine flight.

 

But if you know how Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon operates, you can guess what happened next. “No reprimands. No firings. No problem. That’s the sound of Freedom!”, acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao tweeted alongside a video of the incident. Hegseth himself snarked that “the flyovers will continue until morale improves,” to which one person replied—not implausibly—“someday this tweet is going to be evidence in court.”

 

The people who lead our “High-T Department of War” are maliciously reckless morons, so bent on creating a culture of impunity that they’re willing to excuse aggressive idiocy purely because it’s aggressive. This episode isn’t the only reminder they’ve had lately that bad things happen when you decide that caution and prudence are for wimps, but the essence of stupidity is failing to learn lessons despite being taught over and over. That’s our military leadership.

 

And that’s our electorate, which failed to learn an obvious lesson the first time around about what sort of bad things might happen when you trust Donald Trump with power.

 

I’m less confident than Elissa Slotkin is that “people aren’t stupid” enough to fall for the president’s latest scheme to manufacture a pretext to interfere in November’s election. But I also don’t think trying to fool the rubes was the reason he spoke on Thursday evening.

 

An IQ gut check.

 

The crux of his speech was that the U.S. had raw intelligence in 2020 that China hoped to interfere in that year’s presidential election. The Chinese obtained American voter rolls, Trump claimed, and supposedly intended to “manufacture illegal ballots for Joe Biden” to that end. On top of that, more than a quarter-million illegal immigrants are supposedly registered to vote right now in swing states. And America’s cybersecurity around voting machines is alarmingly weak, he noted.

 

The only possible conclusion, the president went on to say, is that, “These disclosures reveal an election system so broken and vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it.”

 

Let’s start with China. If they have America’s voter rolls, it’s no great feat of espionage: The rolls are publicly available to anyone who wants them. And the “ballots for Biden” idea appears to be a deliberate or, well, stupid misreading of the intelligence, which apparently came from a single source who got the information second-hand and was viewed skeptically by some intelligence officials. The actual claim was that the Chinese were planning to manufacture fake driver’s licenses that could be used to cast tens of thousands of mail-in ballots.

 

But they didn’t. There’s no evidence that fake ballots were created or cast. Even Trump didn’t say so, ultimately going no further than to accuse the Chinese of having conducted an influence operation—the sort of thing that happens all the time, as J.D. Vance admitted two days ago—aimed at “undermining domestic confidence in the U.S. president.”

 

So here’s our first gut-check on public stupidity. If what China did is so outrageous, the public should now expect the president to take harsh official action against it, no? Diplomatic penalties, sanctions, maybe even war: Everything’s on the table when you meddle with the American people’s sovereignty.

 

If Trump doesn’t act—if he continues to sound like a 13-year-old girl talking about Taylor Swift when he talks about Xi Jinping—Americans should draw a pretty firm conclusion from that about how seriously to take his accusations, one would think.

 

Illegal immigrants voting en masse is another longtime hobby horse of the president’s, dating back to when he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and needed a way to explain it aside from the obvious. No one knows where he got last night’s figure of 278,000 illegals supposedly being registered in battlegrounds, though; officials from one of the states he named, Nevada, claimed after the speech that just 138 voters out of 2.1 million failed to provide either a driver’s license or Social Security number when they registered.

 

Another IQ gut-check, then: If voting by illegal immigrants is a widespread problem in America, the Todd Blanche/Kash Patel Justice Department should be spitting out indictments around the clock. The department has charged people for that crime, and you’d better believe they’re looking for more, yet the numbers remain small. What should Americans deduce from the fact that so few prosecutions have resulted?

 

As for cybersecurity around elections, Trump is doubtless right that there are holes that need plugging. Gut-check No. 3e: How sincere are his concerns considering that he hollowed out the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, purged the Election Assistance Commission, and had the DOJ back way off of its usual measures to protect an upcoming federal election?

 

We’re not done. If there was evidence of Chinese shenanigans before the election in 2020, why is John Ratcliffe still head of the CIA this evening? Ratcliffe was the director of national intelligence at the time; it was his job to make sure that the dreaded “deep state” wasn’t concealing information from then-President Trump. Evidently he failed in that duty, per Trump learning only years later that China had been up to no good. When is Ratcliffe being fired?

 

If the dastardly duo of Chinese spies and illegal-immigrant voters was clever enough to thwart Trump’s reelection in 2020, when he and his team were in charge of the government, why weren’t they clever enough to thwart it when the Biden administration was in charge in 2024? It’s very strange, as GOP Rep. Thomas Massie observed, that Republicans continue to win election after election in a system that’s supposedly rotten with fraud and foreign plots contrived to block them from power.

 

After five years of paranoia and propaganda, the president has so little credibility on this subject that even friendly news outlets had to tread lightly when reporting on the speech. Fox News made a point of noting on the air that it couldn’t vouch for the accuracy of Trump’s claims, and it had 787.5 million reasons to do so. Bari Weiss’ CBS News opened its coverage by flatly acknowledging that “much of what the president had said on this topic [in the past] has been false.” Other networks declined to carry the speech altogether, naturally drawing fascist threats about revoking their broadcast licenses as punishment.

 

In the same way that no one took Trump seriously when he suddenly announced that America would be charging a 20 percent toll on tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, no one with more than a room-temperature IQ takes him seriously when he starts babbling about election fraud. He’s so prone to insane lies about election conspiracies that for news networks merely to transmit his words on the topic, live and unedited, is to invite a grave risk of defamation suits.

 

Yet the fact remains that Americans were stupid enough to reelect him. Why wouldn’t they, or at least a meaningful number of them, also be stupid enough to swallow this latest sore-loser nonsense?

 

Many will. But getting people to believe that a new election conspiracy is afoot wasn’t really the purpose of his speech, I think.

 

Influence and interference.

 

Last night’s remarks were the electoral equivalent of the address Trump made on February 28, after bombs had begun falling on Iran. The president had done next to nothing before the war to prepare Americans for the conflict and nothing at all to gain Congress’ approval in advance, and so the point of that speech wasn’t “here’s what we need to do and I’d like your support.” If it had been, he would have delivered it before the war began.

 

The point was “here’s what I’m doing, just FYI.” It was a bare-minimum check-the-box simulacrum of democratic accountability about a course of action he intended to pursue whether Americans liked it or not.

 

That was also the point yesterday. As our own Steve Hayes put it, “The important thing isn’t the speech, it’s what the speech is meant to set up.” The president intends to do something to tamper with the midterm election, just FYI, and last night was his check-the-box gesture of faux-accountability to justify it preemptively.

 

And he’s going to do it whether Americans like it or not.

 

That may explain the most curious thing about his remarks, the fact that he didn’t resort to his usual wild 2020 claims about voting machines being hacked or ballot-harvesting “mules” delivering fake votes for Biden en masse. Trump was uncharacteristically circumspect, implying that the outcome of the election was suspect due to Chinese scheming and illegal-immigrant chicanery but never asserting it. Even some of his favorite “rigged election” instigators toned things down for the event. How come?

 

I doubt that he did it at the behest of members of his party. They were reportedly “scared sh-tless” before the speech that he would veer off-script and ad-lib his way into a televised fever dream they’d spend the next four months having to defend (as autocracy requires!), but Trump isn’t one to ease off the paranoia just because doing so would help candidates from his party. Ask Republicans in Georgia about that.

 

I doubt, too, that his goal was to pressure Senate Republicans into finally passing the SAVE America Act, his obsession for most of this year. He ended the speech by calling on them to do so, but passing that bill would require eliminating the filibuster, and Majority Leader John Thune and others have explained to him many times that the votes aren’t there. Even if it did pass, it couldn’t be implemented before November. And the legislation wouldn’t address some of Trump’s core complaints in the speech, like China conducting an influence campaign to damage his image.

 

He didn’t give the speech because he’s trying to get the SAVE America Act passed. He gave it because he needs to rationalize what he intends to do after the SAVE America Act doesn’t pass.

 

The president himself might not know yet what the plan is. Maybe he’ll try to extort state election officials into doing his bidding by threatening to charge them criminally if they don’t. Maybe he’ll dispatch the National Guard and ICE to polling places in nonwhite districts to try to intimidate voters. Maybe he’ll send agents to seize ballot boxes in swing counties where the GOP ends up having a rough night. Or maybe he’ll issue an order claiming the authority to compel states to implement parts of the SAVE America Act—namely, voter ID and a ban on mail-in ballots—as a matter of executive power.

 

That’s not hypothetical. According to the Washington Post, a 17-page draft order to that effect has already been prepared by “activists” who are in touch with the White House. The draft reportedly “claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.” The Post published that scoop in February; now, five months later, here we are.

 

That’s why the president surprisingly stuck to the available “facts” last night instead of indulging in his usual wild theories, I suspect: He’s planning to take legal action on the election and saw the speech as a way to establish an evidentiary predicate for it. Whatever orders he ends up issuing will be challenged in court, and when they are, it will help his case that those orders aren’t based on something obviously insane about Venezuelan communists changing votes in Pennsylvania or whatever.

 

Sam Stein drew the correct, and ironic, lesson in a piece for The Bulwark this morning. The speech was Trump’s own version of a foreign influence campaign aimed at undermining public trust in U.S. elections. Postliberals abroad have connived for ages to try to weaken Americans’ faith in their nation, but it took a homegrown version with a keener sense of how stupid the people are to succeed at it. “No regime, no spies, no saboteurs have yet matched the damage that America’s own president did tonight,” The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols observed after Trump’s remarks.

 

The key point, though, is that it’s an influence campaign only for the moment. The president won’t content himself with trying to shape public opinion about the coming midterm election and then resolve to take his lumps on election night. This will end up as an interference campaign, in which a malign actor tampers directly with the outcome. And it was destined to become one from the moment the certainly-not-stupid American electorate reelected him in 2024.

 

The Trump era will be remembered as a period of supreme, grotesque, relentless demoralization, in which the person trusted with leading the United States did everything he feasibly could to destroy respect for the country even among its own citizens. Calling any American institution “so broken and vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it” is Trumpism at 100 percent purity. When someone tells you that his speech was a calculated “distraction” designed to steer public attention away from Iran or gas prices, they’re telling you that they still haven’t grasped that yet. The demoralization is the point. There’s nothing postliberals desire more.

Yes, Tim Walz, Deporting Child Rapists ‘Makes Us Safer’

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Friday, July 17, 2026

 

The Trump administration has deported a Laotian national who had been convicted of raping a 10-year-old. Responding to this  news, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, who had for some reason pardoned the man, asked the following questions:

 

“Did that make us any safer?” Walz said Tuesday, according to KTTC. “Did that make the children that are left behind any more stable?

 

“Did it improve the idea that we can’t all be judged by our worst day?”

 

What? What?

 

What?

 

Has it “made us any safer” that a man who was convicted of sexually abusing a  child has been removed from the United States? Yes, quite obviously it has. About one in four men who have been convicted of sexual abuse against children go on to commit another offense within 15 years. By deporting this man, the Trump administration has reduced his chance of reoffending in the United States to zero.

 

As for Walz’s second question:

 

“Did it improve the idea that we can’t all be judged by our worst day?”

 

Again: what? I don’t even know where to start with that. Who is “our”? Nobody I know has done anything of the sort. And, yes, it is absolutely acceptable to judge someone who raped a ten-year-old for raping a ten-year-old. There are no possible circumstances in which one is obliged to “who amongst us?” the rape of a ten-year-old — especially when, like Tim Walz, one has been elected to enforce the law. Nor, by the same token, is there anything wrong with our immigration services kicking people out based on their “worst day.” Americans get to have “worst days” and stay in their own country — even if staying involves a prison term. Foreign nationals do not.

 

Tim Walz seems to believe that the man who did this has been treated badly. I, by contrast, think that the man who did this ought to count himself lucky that he wasn’t taken out to a gallows within 24 hours of his conviction and dispatched from the face of the earth.

Andrew Ross Sorkin Thinks You’re Stupid

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Friday, July 18, 2026

 

In this morning’s DealBook, Andrew Ross Sorkin laments that the House of Representatives has passed a bill, the Protecting Privacy in Purchases Act, that:

 

prevents credit card networks and banks from using a unique merchant category code, or M.C.C., for firearms retailers.

 

Instead, gun dealers must be grouped under broader classifications like “general merchandise” or “sporting goods.”

 

Per Sorkin, this is a problem because it will prevent “common-sense ways the financial industry could help identify suspicious purchasing patterns before mass shootings occur.” He concludes that:

 

The merchant code may be swallowed up by the culture wars. Proponents of banning use of the code say that it’s a step toward a “backdoor gun registry.”

 

The “culture wars”? “Proponents say”? “Suspicious purchasing patterns”? A “step toward a ‘backdoor gun registry”? “Common sense”?

 

My jaw is on the floor. Here is the same Andrew Ross Sorkin, writing in the same newspaper, in the same newsletter, in 2018:

 

Here’s an idea.

 

What if the finance industry — credit card companies like Visa, Mastercard and American Express; credit card processors like First Data; and banks like JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo — were to effectively set new rules for the sales of guns in America?

 

Collectively, they have more leverage over the gun industry than any lawmaker. And it wouldn’t be hard for them to take a stand.

 

PayPal, Square, Stripe and Apple Pay announced years ago that they would not allow their services to be used for the sale of firearms.

 

“We do not believe permitting the sale of firearms on our platform is consistent with our values or in the best interests of our customers,” a spokesman for Square told me.

 

Gosh, I wonder where the House might possibly have got the idea that allowing credit card companies to track gun purchases could present a substantial problem for the right to keep and bear arms! Could it be from Andrew Ross Sorkin, who, just eight years ago, was openly calling for that system to be implemented so that those same credit card processors could “set new rules for the sales of guns in America” — rules that would, he hoped, go as far as completely preventing “their services to be used for the sale of firearms”? Back then, Sorkin wasn’t even trying to hide that he hoped to achieve via the financial system what he could not get through Congress or the states:

 

The big financial firms don’t even have to go that far.

 

For example, Visa, which published a 71-page paper in 2016 espousing its “corporate responsibility,” could easily change its terms of service to say that it won’t do business with retailers that sell assault weapons, high-capacity magazines and bump stocks, which make semiautomatic rifles fire faster. (Even the National Rifle Association has said it would support tighter restrictions on bump stocks.)

 

If Mastercard were to do the same, assault weapons would be eliminated from virtually every firearms store in America because otherwise the sellers would be cut off from the credit card system.

 

There is precedent for credit card issuers to ban the purchase of completely legal products. Just this month, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America banned the use of their cards to buy Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

 

That is an unmistakable call for Visa, Mastercard, and the other processors to “eliminate” the most popular rifle in the United States and “ban the purchase of completely legal products.” And yet Sorkin now has the gall — the unmitigated brass — to suggest that the House of Representatives is being motivated to act against the very plan that he himself laid out by . . . the “culture war”?

 

In 2018, Sorkin didn’t stop there. He also mused aloud about the other financial institutions that could choose to undermine the right to keep and bear arms:

 

There are other sectors of the finance industry that could step up. For example, Lloyd’s of London is the favored insurance company for gun shows. It could pull out.

 

I am not sure I have ever seen a better example of the cynical games that gun-control advocates like to play than this. First, they demand the abolition of the Second Amendment. Then, when their opponents howl, they dramatically reduce their ask and inquire as to why their critics are so “upset.”

 

Given the sheer brazenness of this move, I can only conclude that Andrew Ross Sorkin believes that his critics are stupid. That being so, let me make this abundantly clear for him: The “proponents of banning use of the code” are not worried about the creation of a virtual “gun registry.” They’re worried that Sorkin’s plan to have credit card companies unilaterally “set new rules for the sales of guns in America” will be implemented in full. The answer, as ever, is “No.”