Consider a man who holds clear title to a parcel of land at the end of a long dirt road. The deed is recorded, the county recognizes his claim, and no neighbor disputes it. But the road washes out every winter, and he owns no vehicle capable of crossing it. For four months of the year he cannot reach his own property. Does he own it? In the legal sense the answer is obvious. In the practical sense that becomes urgent the moment somebody else decides to pitch a tent on the far acreage, the answer grows less comfortable. Sovereignty works the same way. It is not merely a relation between a nation and a map. It is a relation between a nation and a place, and relations of that sort require the physical capacity to arrive.

President Trump’s Arctic icebreaker program should be read against that background. Most of the commentary has fastened on a single detail: four of the new Arctic Security Cutters will be built in Finland rather than in the United States. Critics have treated that detail as the whole of the policy. It is not. Four ships built quickly abroad make possible seven more built here, in Louisiana and Texas, by American welders working from designs and methods that Finnish yards have spent a century refining. The foreign ships close a military gap. The domestic ships begin to close an industrial one.

Trump’s October 2025 memorandum invoked national security authorities to permit limited foreign construction while directing the Coast Guard to structure the acquisition so that expertise moves onshore. Rauma Marine Constructions will build two cutters in Finland. Davie Defense will build two more at its Helsinki yard. Bollinger will then build four in Houma, Louisiana, and Davie will build three at Gulf Copper facilities in Galveston and Port Arthur. That is four abroad and seven at home out of a program of eleven medium icebreakers, running alongside a wholly separate program of up to three heavy Polar Security Cutters being built in Pascagoula, Mississippi. Congress appropriated more than $8.6 billion for the effort, and by February 2026 the Coast Guard had completed awards on all eleven medium hulls.

You might ask why the United States does not simply build all eleven here and skip the Finnish step. The answer is that we cannot, not yet, and not on any schedule that answers the threat. The United States laid down its last heavy polar icebreakers in 1974. The last purpose-built medium polar icebreaker, Healy, was commissioned in 2000. A shipyard is not a factory that can be switched on. It is a body of knowlege distributed across welders, pipefitters, naval architects, procurement officers, and a supplier network, and that body of knowledge decays when it is not exercised. The Government Accountability Office found precisely this when it examined the heavy icebreaker program: limited domestic expertise in designing and constructing such vessels, hull steel as much as twice the thickness of a conventional ship, internal framing spaced far more densely, and beams in the icebelt roughly three times as deep as those in a comparable non-icebreaking hull. Those differences are not cosmetic. They change how a ship is welded, how equipment is routed, how weight is managed, and how production is sequenced.

Finland preserved what we discarded. Finnish firms have designed approximately 80% of the world’s icebreakers and Finnish yards have built roughly 60% of them. More than thirty Finnish companies participate across design, systems, construction, and operations. This is not an accident of national character. It is the predictable result of continuous demand. Finland must reach its own frozen ports every winter, so Finland never stopped building the ships that make that possible. President Alexander Stubb called the arrangement with Washington a huge strategic decision, which is striking language coming from the seller. Routine export sales do not usually earn that description from the exporting head of state.

The arrangement treats Finnish capability as a temporary teaching resource rather than a permanent crutch. A conventional foreign purchase would deliver hulls and leave the United States exactly as dependent as before, so that the next order, the next spare part, the next modification would again have to be sourced abroad. This program does something different. The American yards begin work in parallel rather than waiting for the Finnish ships to finish. Bollinger cut steel in Houma in April 2026, roughly two months before its final contract terms were signed. Davie broke ground on a modernization of its Texas facilities that may reach $1 billion, following an earlier commitment of more than $730 million in capital investment supported by a $21.771 million Texas Enterprise Fund grant. Admiral Kevin Lunday, the Commandant, described the purpose of the accelerated program as strengthening domestic shipbuilding and reinforcing the nation’s industrial base. That is the service itself naming reindustrialization as an operational objective.

The historical case for urgency is grim. In 1965 the transfer of Navy vessels gave the Coast Guard a polar fleet of eight icebreakers. Those ships escorted the tanker Manhattan through the Northwest Passage in 1969 and freed an icebound convoy of twenty tugs and forty barges bound for Prudhoe Bay in 1971. Then Washington replaced the fleet on the cheap. Budget pressure limited the new Polar class to two hulls, laid down in 1974. By 1990 the fleet had fallen from eight ships to two, and the consequences arrived on schedule. In 2010 Polar Sea suffered a service-ending engine failure while Polar Star sat in caretaker status, and the United States was reduced to hiring foreign icebreakers to resupply its own Antarctic station at McMurdo. A country that had loaned three Wind-class icebreakers to the Soviet Union between 1945 and 1950 was, sixty years later, renting polar access from strangers.

Russia did not make the same mistake. Reuters counted forty-two operational Russian icebreakers in June 2026, several of them nuclear-powered, against two operational American ships at that same moment. The Heritage Foundation’s broader inventory, which includes additional ice-capable vessels, puts the Russian figure at fifty-seven. Russia has reopened dozens of Soviet-era Arctic bases and now fields military installations in the region that outnumber NATO’s by more than 30%. The Kola Peninsula houses roughly two-thirds of Russia’s second-strike nuclear capability, including six of its twelve nuclear-armed submarines. China, which has no Arctic coastline whatsoever, has declared itself a near-Arctic state, promoted a Polar Silk Road, and sent research vessels into and near American waters with rising frequency. In July 2026 the Coast Guard tracked Xue Long and Xue Long 2 through the exclusive economic zone in the Bering Sea. Reuters, which is nobody’s conservative pamphlet, concluded simply that Russia has raced far ahead.

The fragility of what we have left was demonstrated that same month, when Healy suffered a significant engineering casualty and had to return to port for major repairs. A nation with forty icebreakers absorbs a mechanical failure as an inconvenience. A nation with three absorbs it as a strategic loss. At that moment Storis was on patrol, and Munro was shadowing Chinese vessels, and one broken gearbox had removed a substantial fraction of American polar capacity overnight. Lunday said the incident underscored the vital importance of the President’s vision; he said it not at a groundbreaking ceremony but in the aftermath of a real failure, which is the sort of context that separates institutional conviction from institutional public relations.

What follows is not merely a purchase of hulls. Texas will build three medium icebreakers at yards receiving up to $1 billion in modernization, projected to create roughly 2,400 direct jobs and support nearly 7,000 across the state economy. Louisiana will build four at Houma. Mississippi will build up to three heavy cutters at Pascagoula. Governor Abbott called the Texas project a quintessential America First endeavor, and Davie’s chief executive described complex shipbuilding as something being brought back to Texas for the first time in generations. Those statements describe a supplier network, an apprenticeship pipeline, and a production horizon long enough that a young man can plan a career around it.

Theodore Roosevelt observed in 1901 that it is not possible to improvise a navy after war breaks out. You cannot improvise a welder who knows how to join four-inch ice-belt plating, and you cannot improvise the vendor who forges the shafting, and you certainly cannot improvise them in the winter of the year you discover you need them. The Arsenal of Democracy that produced 5,777 vessels during the Second World War was not conjured in 1941. It was the accumulated residue of decades of ordinary commercial demand. We let that residue wash away, and today we build 0.2% of the world’s ships while China builds 74%. Rebuilding it will take years, and it will begin with something unglamorous, namely a guaranteed production run of ships that somebody has actually ordered.

That is what the program purchases. Not four Finnish icebreakers, though it purchases those too. It purchases the conditions under which Americans learn again to build ships that can reach American territory. The legal claim to the far acreage was never in doubt. The practical capacity to get there is what had eroded, and that capacity is what is now being restored.

My 2025 article about the problem:

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in a sponsored partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

Evan Mintz spent a Houston Chronicle column (Disclosure: I delivered the Houston Post, the Chronicle’s competitor at the time, as a 7th grader) explaining why Ken Paxton’s Texas Promise Agenda will not help ordinary Texans. He worked through three deductions carefully enough. He never reached the provision that would move the most money: Paxton’s proposal to double the Child Tax Credit from $2,200 to $4,400 per child. Credits come off the tax bill directly rather than off taxable income, so a family with three children would keep something on the order of $6,600 more. About 9 in 10 taxpayers with children already claim the existing credit, and through the middle-income brackets participation runs above 96%. How much of an increase would reach the lowest earners depends on refundability rules Congress ultimately passes. A reader finishing that column would not know the proposal was on the table at all.

The omission would be easier to forgive if the rest of the piece engaged the plan as announced. What it engages is a set of assumptions about how the plan would eventually be drafted. Roughly 90% of American filers take the standard deduction, so a new deduction, Mintz reasons, is a favor to the shrinking minority who file Schedule A. The reasoning is fine on its own terms. It requires knowing that Paxton’s deductions would be itemized deductions, and there is no legislative text yet, no bill number, no section reference. The Chronicle’s own news coverage of the July 31 announcement lists $25,000 for out-of-pocket medical costs, another $25,000 tied to dependents, $5,000 for healthy lifestyle spending and $50,000 for homebuyers, without saying where any of them would live in the code.

Congress settled that design question about a year ago. The tax law President Trump signed created narrow deductions for tips, overtime, qualified auto loan interest, and seniors, and the IRS states plainly that all of them are available to itemizing and non-itemizing taxpayers alike. The agency built a new form, Schedule 1-A, to administer them. So the architecture Mintz treats as unavailable has already been drafted, scored, passed, and put into service. His 90% figure is accurate. It bears on Paxton’s plan only if Paxton picks the one drafting option Congress has most recently declined to use.

The second charge is redundancy: that taxpayers can already deduct medical expenses. They can, above a floor, and the floor is where the argument comes apart. Section 213 reaches only unreimbursed expenses exceeding 7.5% of adjusted gross income, and only for itemizers. Picture a Houston couple with $100,000 in combined income and a rough year that produced $7,000 in medical bills. Their floor sits at $7,500, so their deduction is $0. Push their spending to $10,000 and $2,500 becomes deductible in principle, at which point they still need total itemized deductions exceeding a $32,200 standard deduction before any of it does them any good.

How many households sit in that position? The Federal Reserve’s 2025 survey suggests a great many. One adult in four skipped medical treatment on cost grounds, and among those earning under $25,000 the figure reached 38%. Roughly a fifth faced a major unexpected medical expense, and of those who named an amount, 40% paid at least $2,000. Nobody in that group is gaming the code. They are absorbing real bills with after-tax dollars, which is the condition Paxton’s provision is built to address, and the current deduction reaches almost none of them.

Health savings accounts do not close that gap either, though the column treats them as if they did. For 2026, an individual can contribute $4,400 and a family $8,750, against a proposal running to $50,000 across taxpayer and dependents. Eligibility narrows things further, since participation generally requires a qualifying high deductible plan. The deeper trouble is timing. An HSA helps only to the extent it has already been funded, and just 63% of adults say they could cover a surprise $400 expense in cash, which tells you roughly how well stocked the average account is on the day the bill arrives.

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On wellness, the column is imprecise in a way that matters. Mintz suggests a doctor’s note converts a gym membership into a qualified expense. The IRS position is considerably narrower, covering gym costs only where they treat a specific diagnosed condition, and stating that expenses merely beneficial to general health fall outside the definition even on a physician’s recommendation. Paxton’s $5,000 healthy lifestyle deduction is aimed at precisely the spending current rules exclude, so the two provisions do different work.

Is that work worth doing? I would not overstate the case. Obesity carries an estimated $2,500 a year in added medical spending per affected adult, a large figure applied to a large population, and randomized trials show financial incentives can shift behavior while the money is flowing. One trial raised the share of days participants hit a 7,000-step target from 18% to 35%. Others found smaller effects, or effects that faded once payment stopped, and none of them tested anything resembling a tax deduction. What survives is a modest claim that using the code to encourage prevention has evidence behind it, and that treating the idea as frivolous is unearned.

The housing objection has the same shape. Homeowners, Mintz notes, already deduct mortgage interest and property taxes. Both are true, and neither touches the barrier at issue. The IRS is explicit that the portion of a payment retiring principal cannot be deducted, and interest deductions in any case begin at closing. A renter who cannot assemble the cash to close gains nothing from the promise of a deduction he will qualify for once he no longer needs it. The Federal Reserve calls the down payment a crucial barrier, finds 73% of recent first-time buyers drawing on personal savings for at least part of it, and estimates in newer work that parental transfers account for something like a quarter of young household homeownership. Take that last figure as suggestive, since it comes out of a model rather than an experiment.

What I cannot accept is the certainty that such relief inevitably drives prices higher. The worry itself is legitimate. Subsidize demand into inelastic supply and some of the subsidy lands in the price. Yet the record contains a clean test pointing the other way. When the FHA cut its annual mortgage insurance premium by 50 basis points in 2015, Federal Reserve economists exploiting the timing found purchase originations among FHA-dependent borrowers rose by nearly 14%, concentrated among lower-income buyers, with no detectable movement in house prices. The 2009 homebuyer credit generated somewhere around 400,000 to 550,000 additional sales on NBER’s estimate and did help support prices, which cuts against Paxton and ought to be said out loud. HUD’s research finds liquid assets predicting who makes the jump out of renting, and modest assistance making a measurable difference. Incidence turns on local supply, program design, and market conditions. A columnist writing “inevitably” has claimed knowledge the literature does not supply.

Mintz overreaches by converting the deficit into a specific claim about mortgage rates. CBO’s own econometric work puts the effect of a 1 percentage point rise in debt-to-GDP at 2 to 3 basis points on long-term rates. No spike in borrowing costs has occurred in that arithmetic, and none can be estimated without a cost figure that nobody has produced.

What I wanted from this op-ed is the argument it nearly made. There is a serious case that deductions are a clumsy instrument, that credits distribute relief more evenly, that unfunded tax cuts are hard to defend with debt at 101% of GDP. Mintz gestures at all three and develops none of them. He falsely asserted instead that the plan cannot help anyone, and getting there required assuming a drafting choice nobody would willingly make, overstating what current law already delivers, and walking past the largest provision in the package. Paxton will deliver voters legislative text and a list of cuts. His critics owe him a reading of what he actually proposed.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in a sponsored partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

Consider a model home. A builder puts up 200 houses in a new subdivision and finishes exactly one of them to perfection, with good countertops, landscaping, furniture staged by a professional, and lightbulbs all matching. Nothing about that house is fake. You can walk through it, open the cabinets, stand in the shower. The deception, if there is one, lies entirely in the inference the builder wants you to draw, namely that the other 199 houses will be like this one. The model home is real and unrepresentative at the same time, and those two properties are not in tension. They are the whole point.

New York City is building five model homes and calling them grocery stores. Conservatives should understand this before the ribbon is cut, because most of us are preparing to fight the wrong battle. The standard right-of-center prediction is that municipal groceries will produce surly clerks, bare shelves, rotting produce, and a quiet bankruptcy two years in. That prediction is reasonable if you look at Baldwin, Florida, which absorbed its town grocery in 2019 and gave up in 2024, or at Kansas City, which spent roughly $17 million on Sun Fresh Market and watched it close in August of 2025 after stretches of empty shelving and security problems. Those cases are instructive. They are also, I think, about to become a trap.

David Friedberg said as much on the All-In Podcast, and the remark deserves more attention than it received. His warning was that the stores would not fail in the visible way conservatives expect, and would instead “create an incredible success story for socialism,” complete with flattering coverage, contented employees, and demands that other cities copy the model. He was right, and the reason he was right is written into the city’s own procurement documents. New York has studied the American failure cases and designed around every one of them.

Start with who runs the stores. The July 2026 operator request for proposals does not contemplate a municipal department learning to buy lettuce. It solicits experienced private grocers with urban track records, existing wholesale relationships, functioning logistics, merchandising systems, and back-office infrastructure, and it gives preference to bidders willing to take all five locations at once. The city supplies capital, real estate, and political cover. The private operator supplies competence. This is not socialism in the textbook sense, where the state seizes the means of production and then discovers it cannot run them. It is something cleverer. Execution is privatized, losses are socialized, and credit is monopolized.

Then look at what the operator does not have to pay. The city funds construction. The operator pays no rent. The operator pays no property taxes. Where discounted prices generate an operating deficit, the city covers it through what the RFP calls affordability payments, and additional performance payments may be available for hitting targets on customer satisfaction, employee retention, merchandising, and stocking levels. Rent, taxes, capital, and losses are the four horsemen that kill grocery stores. New York has shot all four before the doors open.

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The discount itself is engineered with equal care. The advertised 30% reduction applies not to everything but to a defined Core Basket, all fresh produce, meat, and seafood, plus roughly 20 categories of staples like eggs, dairy, bread, beans, oil, and cereal. Everything outside that basket can be priced at ordinary New York retail. The city projects that the average shopper’s total bill falls about 15%, something on the order of $90 a month, or $1,000 a year. So the headline number is 30%, the experienced number is 15%, and the difference is quietly financed by normally priced goods that customers buy on the same trip. That is a loss leader strategy, which private grocers use constantly. The novelty here is that the loss is underwritten by taxpayers rather than by the rest of the store.

Now the arithmetic that ought to end the debate but won’t. Food retailing runs on margins that would embarrass a lemonade stand. The Food Industry Association put average food retailer profit margins at 2.1% in 2025. NYU Stern’s January 2026 dataset put grocery net margins at 1.32%, and lease-adjusted after-tax margins at 1.50%. Gross margin across the industry was 26.31%. Read those figures against a 30% discount, and the conclusion is unavoidable. Eliminating private profit entirely, confiscating every dollar the greedy supermarket owner takes home, would lower your grocery bill by something like 1% or 2%. The Core Basket discount is roughly 20 times that, and it exceeds the industry’s entire gross margin. Ryan Bourne and Nathan Miller at Cato reached the same place by the same route. The money does not come from squeezing profiteers, because there is not enough profit there to squeeze. It comes from you.

Here a puzzled reader might object that this is precisely why the program will collapse. If the economics are that bad, surely the bill comes due. But this is where the scale of New York changes everything. The adopted fiscal year 2027 city budget is $125.8 billion. The mayor has committed $70 million in capital for the five stores, which is 0.0556% of a single year’s budget, about five and a half basis points. Suppose each store loses $10 million a year, a generous assumption for a 15,000-square-foot location. That is $50 million annually, under 4 basis points. Scale to 20 stores losing $10 million each and you reach $200 million, still less than a quarter of 1%. A private chain treats a $50 million loss as an extinction event. A political movement can treat the identical number as a media buy.

That is the sentence conservatives need to internalize. The loss is not the failure. The loss is the advertising budget.

And New York is buying the advertising too. Before it selected a grocery operator, the city procured a design firm to build the brand, covering visual identity, signage, private label, store architecture, and customer experience, with the mayor explaining that the goal was to bring “public excellence” to life. The operator RFP then requires multi-channel marketing, coordinated press engagement, citywide campaigns, public price comparisons against private competitors, message alignment with the city, and limited-edition merchandise to build brand affinity. Set aside the groceries for a moment and notice what is actually being purchased here. A recognizable government brand. A permanent association between that brand and low prices. A physical set where a television crew can film a mother saying she saved $90. And a constituency of shoppers, employees, unions, and suppliers with a personal stake in defending the program.

None of that requires anyone to lie. The savings will be real, the shelves will be full, the cashier’s health insurance will be real, and the store will very likely be beautiful. What is false is the inference, and only the inference. The city’s own RFP states that the program “will prove that government can make healthy food more affordable” and serve as a model for future public programs. That is not a conservative accusation about motive. That is the city announcing, in a procurement document, that it is running a demonstration.

History is unkind to those who mistake demonstrations for evidence. Mao’s Dazhai was celebrated as proof that collectivism and revolutionary spirit could transform Chinese agriculture, and roughly 20,000 pilgrims a day passed through it in the early 1970s while other regions were ordered to copy its methods regardless of soil or terrain. After the model was discredited in 1980, it emerged that Dazhai had recieved extensive help from the People’s Liberation Army and had used heavy machinery all along, which the propaganda had simply deleted from the story so that the achievement could be attributed to ideology instead of to the tractors. Soviet Intourist did something gentler and more effective, curating routes and factories and apartments and cheerful citizens for foreign visitors, showing them nothing fabricated and everything selected. Chávez’s Mercal network really did sell food 25% to 40% below market to a third of Venezuela’s population, funded by roughly $24 million a month in oil revenue, and the later CLAP boxes were candid enough that the administrator told Reuters they had “helped us stop a social explosion and enabled us to win elections and to keep winning them.” The pattern in each case is identical. Concentrate resources on a visible site, shield it from ordinary constraints, curate what the observer sees, display the output while hiding the input, and generalize the exception into a law.

So what should the right actually do? Not predict a fiasco. If we spend two years insisting the shelves will empty and New Yorkers walk into a clean store with cheap chicken and a friendly cashier, we will have handed the other side its argument and forfeited ours. The correct posture is not prophecy but accounting. Demand, now, before the first store opens, an audited store-level profit and loss statement, capital depreciation charged against operations, imputed market rent and property tax, total subsidy per transaction, taxpayer dollars spent per $1 of customer savings, central marketing and administrative costs, stockout rates and purchase restrictions, and a count of the bodegas and independent grocers that open or close within a mile. The published performance metrics measure sales, satisfaction, and stocking. They do not measure what each shopping trip costs the public.

Everything turns on one distinction, and it is worth stating plainly. A taxpayer-funded store can sell groceries cheaply. That does not show it can produce groceries cheaply. The first is a transfer, the second is efficiency, and the entire political argument depends on the public confusing them. Five stores out of more than 1,100 grocers and some 10,000 bodegas is less than half of 1% of the city’s food retail. It is not a system. It is a showroom, and the model home is always the nicest house on the street.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in a sponsored partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

On July 29th, Anthony Fauci sat in a Senate hearing room, surrounded by lawyers, and invoked his Fifth Amendment right 111 times. He had been subpoenaed by Senator Rand Paul, who two days earlier had released 1,141 pages of Fauci’s pandemic diaries. The man who spent three years telling Americans that questioning him was questioning science declined to answer questions about what he had done. That image is arresting on its own. But it does not explain anything, and explanation is what has been missing.

Consider the strange shape of the Fauci controversy. For five years, investigators have accumulated an enormous quantity of material. There are grant documents, emails, inspector general findings, congressional depositions, failed predictions, guidance that reversed itself without acknowledgment, and evidence of pressure on dissenting scientists. What there has not been is a coherent account of why. Critics have generally settled for one of two stories, neither satisfying. Either Fauci was an ordinary bureaucrat who made ordinary errors under pressure, which fails to explain the pattern in those errors, or he was a cartoon villain executing a plot, which fails because no document shows anyone planning anything of the kind. Jeffrey Tucker has now supplied the missing piece, and it is worth understanding why his account deserves attention.

Tucker is not a newcomer to this subject. He is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute, a research organization he established in 2021 specifically to document the consequences of pandemic policy. Before that, he spent decades in economics publishing, working closely with Murray Rothbard, running the Mises Institute’s book program, and writing for the Epoch Times. In 2020, he helped organize the signing of the Great Barrington Declaration at the American Institute for Economic Research, which put him in the room with the scientists Fauci’s circle set out to destroy. He has ten books to his name. More to the point, he spent nearly a full week reading all 1,141 pages of the diaries before writing about them, which is more than most commentators managed, and it shows.

His thesis is stated plainly. Fauci, Tucker argues, was “trying to turn himself from villain to hero in the story of manufactured pathogens should it ever be revealed.” The awards, the media saturation, the lockdowns, the hostility toward cheap therapeutics, the vaccine absolutism, all of it functioned as cover. Fauci made himself the indispensable solution to a problem his own institutional world almost certainly helped create.

Now, a reader might reasonably object that this is a claim about a man’s inner life, and inner lives are not observable. That objection deserves a serious answer, and the answer is that Tucker’s thesis does not require mind reading. It requires only four propositions, each of which rests on the documentary record.

The first is that Fauci was a longtime advocate of research that deliberately enhances dangerous viruses. This is not an inference. In December 2011, Fauci wrote in the Washington Post, together with Francis Collins and Gary Nabel, that “important information and insights can come from generating a potentially dangerous virus in the laboratory.” That was his considered public position, defended under his own name. The federal government found the underlying risks serious enough to pause funding for such work in 2014 and to impose a new oversight framework in 2017.

The second is that his agency carried real institutional exposure. In 2023, the HHS Office of Inspector General audited three NIH awards to EcoHealth Alliance totaling roughly $8 million, including $1.8 million in subawards to eight recipients, among them the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The audit found that NIH identified potential risks and then failed to monitor the awards effectively. A critical progress report arrived nearly two years late. EcoHealth could not obtain full scientific documentation from its Wuhan partner. In January 2025, HHS formally debarred both EcoHealth and Peter Daszak for five years. Whatever one believes about the virus itself, the government’s own auditors concluded the oversight had failed.

The third is that Fauci helped organize the scientific response to the origin question at the exact moment that exposure mattered most. On February 1st, 2020, he joined a private call about the virus’s origins. Kristian Andersen, writing to a Nature editor days later, described the resulting project as “prompted by Jeremy Farrar, Tony Fauci, and Francis Collins.” The paper that emerged, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” declared flatly that the virus was not a laboratory construct. NIH promoted it. When it failed to end the discussion, Collins asked Fauci whether NIH could do more to put down the lab theory. The next day Fauci cited the paper from the White House podium as though it were an independent finding rather than something his own circle had concocted.

Here is where the argument acquires real force. Privately, the authors were nowhere near as certain as the paper sounded. In June 2020, Andersen wrote that there was “no hard evidence one way or the other,” that deliberate insertion could not be ruled out, and that the paper had been too strong. He noted that Wuhan had cultured bat coronaviruses under BSL-2 conditions and that he considered natural and laboratory scenarios roughly equally probable. In May, Edward Holmes worried about how to warn people about gain-of-function risk without helping the lab leak camp, and Andersen replied, “Exactly, that’s why I haven’t said anything.” Ralph Baric, who knows this research better than almost anyone alive, told Senate investigators this year that he disagreed with the idea that a lab leak could be completely ruled out.

Public certainty, private doubt. That gap is precisely what a reputation management project predicts and what honest inquiry does not.

The fourth proposition is where the diaries earn their keep. They show a man consumed by status. Tucker documents a single day containing 11 media appearances. The pages are thick with celebrity contacts, tributes, awards, and elite access, and thin to the point of absence on the human wreckage below. Fauci records calling the Great Barrington authors, credentialed scientists from Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford, the “3 stooges.” Collins, in a separate email, wanted a “quick and devastating published takedown” of their declaration. These are not the reactions of men weighing evidence. They are the reactions of men defending a franchise.

Put the four together, and the motive is not mysterious at all. Fauci did not need to know the virus came from a laboratory. He needed only to grasp that a serious investigation into that possibility would threaten his agency, his research philosophy, his standing, and his place in history. That recognition alone is sufficient to explain everything that followed.

The thesis also explains something the ordinary-error story cannot: why failure produced escalation instead of humility. The diaries show Fauci knew by January 2021 that mutations were outrunning the formulas. By mid-2021, he acknowledged that the vaccinated were getting infected, then publicly blamed the unvaccinated days later. By July 2022, he noted that Americans were being told to get boosted with a shot that did not cover the circulating variant, with a matched booster five weeks away. A leader whose authority rested on evidence adjusts when the evidence moves. A leader whose identity has fused with the solution treats every disappointment as proof that compliance was insufficient, and so the mandates continued and the messaging hardened and the children who had never been at meaningful risk were enrolled anyway, and none of it can be understood as adaptive public health because it was never adaptive and it was never really about health.

Fauci himself gave the game away in November 2021 when he told CBS that people criticizing him were “really criticizing science because I represent science.” That sentence is the whole era compressed. It is also, as it happens, the clearest confirmation of Tucker’s reading that anyone could have asked for, because it shows the fusion had already occured in Fauci’s own mind.

None of this requires believing that Fauci engineered a virus or ordered its release. Tucker does not claim that, and the case does not need it. What it requires is recognizing that we allowed one man to fund the research, oversee the research, define whether the research was risky, convene the scientists who assessed the origin, promote their conclusion, set the policy response, and serve as the sole authorized interpreter of all of it. No serious system of accountability permits that concentration. A bank does not audit its own books after the crash.

Tucker’s closing judgment is that Fauci “sought immortality through power and fame,” and that his immortality is now earned in infamy. That reads like literary flourish until you sit with the record, and then it reads like a finding. The diaries were assembled, Tucker suspects, as raw material for an autobiography, a monument to a great career. They have become the primary evidence against him. He was preemptively pardoned by Joe Biden. He pleaded the Fifth anyway, 111 times.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

Xavier Bautista left his home a little after 4 in the morning on the Fourth of July, wearing the uniform of the Cambridge Department of Public Works. Investigators believe he was shot around 4:30. Pedestrians found him at roughly 5:24, lying between a parked car and the curb. In the intervening hour, nobody called 911. That intersection, Broadway and Norfolk, had until six weeks earlier been covered by an acoustic gunshot detection network that the Cambridge City Council voted to switch off.

No honest person can say that ShotSpotter would have saved Bautista’s life. Two gunshot wounds killed him, and we do not know the medical timeline. What we can say with confidence is narrower and still damning. Cambridge deliberately disabled a system built for precisely the circumstance that occurred: gunfire that no witness reports, and then that circumstance occurred. The city did not lose a gamble it never took. It took the gamble and lost.

The reason it took that gamble is where the interesting philosophical failure lies. Cambridge did not turn off ShotSpotter after establishing that the technology discriminated by race. It turned the system off because activists persuaded a council majority that the placement of the sensors was itself a racial harm. The sensors sat in The Port and in Riverside, neighborhoods with substantial black, brown, immigrant, and lower-income populations. From that geographic fact, an accusation was constructed, and from the accusation, a policy followed.

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Consider what has to be true for that inference to work. Three distinct claims got fused into one, and separating them is the whole ballgame. The first is that sensors are unevenly distributed across neighborhoods that differ by race. The second is that exposure to gun violence is unevenly distributed across those same neighborhoods. The third is that the technology itself, the classifier that hears a sound and decides whether it was a gunshot, operates differently depending on the race of the people nearby. Only the third is an accusation of racial bias. The first two are descriptions of a city.

Cambridge police said the 2014 placements were selected using historical gunfire data, and no one at the hearings produced evidence otherwise. If that is so, the demographic footprint of the network is a downstream consequence of where guns had been fired. A detection system aimed at gunfire in a city where gunfire is concentrated will necessarily have a skewed demographic footprint. That is not a scandal. That is arithmetic. You might as well complain that the Coast Guard keeps its rescue assets near water.

Here a puzzled reader might object that disparate impact is a real category, and that intentions do not exhaust the moral analysis. Quite right. Disparate impact matters when a neutral-seeming practice imposes a burden on a protected group without adequate justification. So we should ask the obvious follow-up question, the one that the Cambridge debate almost entirely skipped. What, exactly, is the burden? The burden alleged was that gunfire in these neighborhoods would come to the attention of the police. Set that sentence down and look at it. The claim is that a black neighborhood suffers a distinctive harm when the government learns someone is shooting there.

The Port is nearly 30% black, the highest concentration in Cambridge. Between 2010 and 2024, Cambridge recorded 21 murders. Six of them happened in The Port, more than in any other neighborhood, and four of the six involved firearms. These are not the numbers of a community that has been over-served by the emergency apparatus of the state. They are the numbers of a community that carries an unequal share of the city’s lethal violence, and that had been given, in the sensors, one small instrument aimed at that inequality.

This is what I would call the moral inversion at the center of the case. Genuine racial equity in emergency services would ask whether black residents receive the same speed of detection and response that residents of wealthier neighborhoods take for granted after a gunshot. Cambridge asked a different question. It treated the government’s awareness of violence as itself the injury, and then cured the injury by making the government less aware. The remedy for unequal exposure to gunfire was reduced capacity to detect gunfire. Whatever that is, it is not equality.

The immigration argument was weaker still, and it is worth walking through slowly because it shows how a chain of true premises can produce a false conclusion. Cambridge is a sanctuary city. The roughly $50,000 annual cost was covered through an Urban Areas Security Initiative grant. FEMA administers that grant. FEMA sits inside the Department of Homeland Security. ICE also sits inside the Department of Homeland Security. Therefore, the argument ran, ShotSpotter data might reach immigration enforcement. But bureaucratic proximity is not a data pipeline, and one commenter went so far as to call the program ICE-funded, which it was not. Acting Police Commissioner Pauline Wells answered directly: “We will not and do not and have not shared information with ICE.” Local reporting turned up no evidence that the vendor had supplied Cambridge recordings to federal authorities. What the council had was a hypothetical, dressed in the political urgency of the Trump administration and presented as an established practice.

Now, someone might say that a hypothetical risk still warrants precaution, and I agree. Precaution has a name in municipal governance, and it is called a contract. Require automatic deletion of non-gunfire audio, city ownership of city-generated data, immutable access logs, a warrant before any outside disclosure, and a flat prohibition on immigration-related sharing absent a judicial order. Councilor E. Denise Simmons proposed essentially this, keeping the system while rewriting the agreement to restrict data use. The council rejected it, 5-4. That vote is the tell. A body seeking privacy safeguards accepts privacy safeguards. This body wanted abolition, and the May 18 tally, 5-2-2 rather than the cleaner 5-2 usually reported, shows how thin the coalition for it was.

Which brings us to the paternalism, and to the part of this story that ought to trouble progressives most. The May decision rested on organized public comment. Roughly 30 people spoke against the system. Activist survey evidence amounted to an online poll of 10 respondents and a paper survey of nine. Nineteen people, in a city of more than 100,000, functioning as the voice of the marginalized. Meanwhile, the residents who work overnight shifts, who mind children, who do not belong to advocacy organizations and do not spend Monday evenings at City Hall, were absent. Simmons warned that the process was “exclusive” and that it “infantilizes a group of people.” She was dismissed. She was also right.

After Bautista was killed, the missing voices arrived. Richard Harding, a Port resident and vice president of the Cambridge NAACP chapter, told reporters that “I don’t think the police are the problem. I believe that the real issue is how the police are deployed.” Former Mayor Ken Reeves told the council to “listen to the people who do have the problem, who want your help to not have the problem.” Joanna Jimenez, whose son Angel Nieves was murdered in 2025 in a shooting the system failed to detect, still argued for repair rather than removal, saying “we don’t abandon public safety tools because they need improvement. We make them better.” That is a grieving mother whose own son’s death exposed the technology’s limits, and she was more sensible than the council.

On August 3, the council voted 6-3 to restore the system for 90 days while a randomly selected resident assembly reviews it. Marc McGovern and Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui, both of whom voted for termination in May, switched. McGovern’s explanation deserves to be carved somewhere permanent: “We heard from a lot of people we haven’t heard from before.” He did not cite new research or a revised accuracy study. He conceded, in the plainest language, that the original decision had been made without hearing from the people whose interests were invoked to justify it. Siddiqui said residents had not felt fully included. That is not a technology correction. That is an admission that an organized campaign was mistaken for a community.

The empirical case against the sensors was always shakier than its confidence suggested, and this is the part where the debate went most badly wrong, because opponents took the roughly 35% of Cambridge alerts confirmed as gunfire and treated the remaining 65% as false alarms, which is simply not what the category means, since an unconfirmed alert is one where officers found neither casings nor a victim nor a witness willing to talk, and casings get picked up, revolvers do not eject them, bullets miss walls, people scatter, and rain falls, so the honest classification is that the occurence remains unresolved rather than disproven. New York City’s comptroller audited 940 alerts and found 13% confirmed, 82% unconfirmed, and only 5% actually unfounded. A Winston-Salem review put confirmed false positives at 1%. Cambridge police, for their part, reported a 40% confirmation rate for sensor activations against 28% for 911 calls reporting possible gunfire, which means the machine was outperforming the humans on precision, and Wells told the council that “there have been at least 11 times when ShotSpotter detected gunfire in our city, and not a single 911 call came in.” Eleven times, and then a twelfth on the Fourth of July, with nobody listening.

Ronald Reagan said in 1981 that “government’s first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives.” Cambridge managed to fail both halves at once. It convinced itself that a few seconds of impulsive audio amounted to the state running its residents’ lives, and in the name of that conviction it made itself unable to hear a man being shot on a public street. The 90-day trial now underway is unserious on its own terms, since a city averaging 1.4 murders a year will see roughly a third of one in that window, but it was never about measurement. It is about giving five councilors a dignified path back from a position they should never have taken.

The lesson generalizes well beyond one city and one contract. When a policy is justified by appeal to a vulnerable community, someone should check whether the community was asked. Cambridge listened to the people who claimed to speak for black residents, and only afterward, at a cost measured in one silent hour, to black residents themselves.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

My daughter leaves for Yale College this fall, and before she goes, she asked me for one thing: Paris, the two of us, no agenda but hers. I said yes before she finished the sentence. Any father would. What I did not understand, and would not understand until we were standing in a queue on a side street in the 2nd arrondissement, was that I had not agreed to a trip. I had agreed to an itinerary, and the itinerary had been written for her, in advance, by a recommendation engine.

She arrived with a list. Not a vague one. She wanted a customizable leather journal from Louise Carmen in the Galerie Vivienne, ballet flats from Repetto on the Rue de la Paix, and she had already decided between the Cendrillon and the Camille. She wanted dinner at Le Relais de l'Entrecôte, where the menu asks you exactly one question and the second platter of fries arrives without your asking. She wanted the glow-in-the-dark Smiski figures at Fioko in the Passage Choiseul, a Jellycat plush, a thick hot chocolate at Carette, a crookie, and a pharmacy haul she had priced out to the euro. She had never been to France and had never opened a guidebook. She could nevertheless tell me which counter to approach and how early we needed to arrive.

For the first two days I found this charming, the way one finds a well-prepared child charming. By the third day I found it strange. Every place we entered, we entered because of a video. Not one video. Dozens, watched over months, saved into a folder she treated the way my generation treated a AAA TripTik. The souvenirs had not been chosen after the trip was booked. The souvenirs were the reason the trip was booked.

Then came the part that turned a private curiosity into a public argument. In the line outside Repetto, my daughter fell into conversation with two girls from London. Inside Fioko, it was a family from Orlando. At the entrecôte restaurant, the table beside us held four young women from Chicago, and beyond them a mother and daughter from Los Angeles. Everyone was working from the same list, and everyone believed she had assembled it herself.

Here is the claim I want to make, and I want to make it carefully. TikTok does not merely show Americans France. It turns France’s cultural inheritance into an itinerary.

Consider how travel persuasion used to work. A magazine sold you the destination first. It showed you a boulevard at dusk, and only after you had committed to the flight did you take up the secondary work of deciding what to do once you landed. TikTok reverses that sequence. It sells hundreds of small objects and experiences first, one at a time, each with its own address, and the accumulated desire for those objects eventually justifies the airfare. My daughter did not think, I would like to see France, what should I do there. She thought, I want that journal, that hot chocolate, that steak, that shoe, that plush, and they are all in one city, so we should go to that city.

That distinction is not cosmetic. TikTok converts products into geographic anchors. Each saved video drops another pin on the map, and when enough pins accumulate in one place, they constitute a trip. The souvenir, which once commemorated a journey already taken, now causes the journey.

The platform has the reach to do this at scale. Pew Research Center’s 2025 survey found that 37% of US adults use TikTok, up from 21% in 2021. The concentration among the young matters here, because they supply the ideas that households act on. By late 2025, 43% of Americans ages 18 to 29 said they regularly got news from TikTok. News is not travel planning, but the figure establishes that this generation treats creator video as an information system rather than as entertainment. Travel content on the platform reportedly grew 410% between 2021 and 2024, and TikTok’s own business materials describe the traveler’s path as discover, plan, book, and share, which is an unusually candid description of a commercial funnel.

The demand side was already there. France received more than 5 million American visitors in 2025, a 17% increase over the prior year, within a record 102 million international arrivals, and tourism receipts reached €77.5 billion, 9% above 2024. TikTok therefore does not have to sell a cold audience on France. What it supplies is specificity. Which journal, which café, which pharmacy, which collectible, which model, which color, how French sizing runs, how early to arrive, what to expect to spend. Specificity is the expensive part of planning a trip, and TikTok gives it away.

The algorithm then does what algorithms do. Independent audits of TikTok’s recommender have found that following an account exerts the strongest pull on what you are shown, followed by likes and by how much of a video you actually finish. So a girl pauses on a journal video. The system logs the longer watch. She opens the comments for the price, searches the shop, watches a second video. Within days, the platform can infer a whole cluster: Paris, leather goods, personalization, quiet luxury, balletcore, graduation gifts. Then it floods the zone. She experiences this as consensus, as everyone going there, when the platform is repeating one subject precisely because she, individually, revealed an unusual appetite for it. A magazine shows the identical page to every reader. TikTok tests a stimulus on one person and intensifies it when that person responds.

Short video also happens to suit the merchandise France sells, because French retail is full of ritual and ritual films beautifully. Initials are stamped into a blank leather cover. A waitress pours green sauce over sliced steak and a second platter of fries appears. A small figure glows when the lights go down. A pharmacy bag is emptied onto a hotel bed to show what $60 buys. Prose cannot deliver that proof in 15 seconds. Video shows you not what the object is but what possessing it feels like.

Repetto is the clearest case I saw, and the most instructive. Rose Repetto founded the house in Paris in 1947 at the request of her son, the dancer and choreographer Roland Petit, who wanted a more comfortable shoe. Brigitte Bardot wore the Cendrillon flat in And God Created Woman in 1956, and the Cendrillon lists today at €295. None of that is a social media invention. It is an old French house with real craftsmanship and a documented place in French cinema, receiving a new wave of algorithmic attention. Vogue Italia reported in May 2026 that sales of the low-heeled Camille had soared after the shoe went viral, and the trend was strong enough by this summer that Repetto launched a Birkenstock collaboration that reached stores globally on July 16, 2026. In the boutique on the Rue de la Paix, you see why the camera loves it. A wall of ballet shoes, ribbons, satin, and pale pinks; a fitting ritual; a specialist who warns you the shoes run narrow; and a bag at the end that concludes the video. My daughter could have ordered the same shoe to Dallas. She wanted to be fitted at the source. The object available online is a shoe. The boutique is the whole story. One warning: they won’t let you use the bathroom, and you have to stand in a specific spot to wait to be helped.

So is any of this authentic? The desire is authentic, and the distribution is artificial. Call it algorithmically accelerated authenticity. Nobody at TikTok invented Rose Repetto, or the entrecôte sauce, or a handmade journal, or the ballet tradition those slippers came out of. The platform finds the most visually communicable features of things that are already real and delivers them, again and again, to the consumers most likely to want them. What is manufactured is not the product. It is the sense of urgent, universal, spontaneous discovery, and my daughter’s conviction that she had found something before everyone else, when everyone else was standing in the same line.

There is a stranger wrinkle. Jellycat is not French. It is a British brand sold in every major market on earth, and yet it appears constantly in Paris haul videos, and a plush bought in a Paris shop carries more narrative value than the identical plush bought in a mall in Plano. Its worth comes not from origin but from the context of acquisition. That is a new category, the non-local souvenir, and it shows that the machine is not merely amplifying French authenticity. It is assigning geographic meaning to consumption itself.

Conservatives should sit with the lesson here rather than reflexively lamenting the medium. France is winning this because France kept things worth filming, a 1947 shoemaker, a restaurant with one item on the menu (One important note, if you prefer your steak medium-rare, order it medium as they don’t offer a medium rare), a workshop that stamps your initials by hand, dense walkable streets where a small business can still afford a door, and the deeper point is that inherited cultural capital, the sort of thing we are usually told is sentimental and unproductive, turns out to be the single most monetizable asset a country can own in an attention economy, while our own commercial landscape has spent 50 years standardizing itself into places that no teenager on earth would cross an ocean to photograph. We have thousands of makers with real histories. We have almost no habit of telling those stories in the visual language the young actually speak. That is a solvable problem, and it is a seperate problem from the one I would flag next.

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The uncomfortable part is the curator. The most effective tourism promotion agency operating in the American market today is not the French government, which spends real money on the effort, and it is not any American institution. It is a recommendation system owned abroad and unaccountable to anyone here, deciding which authentic desires get repeated, concentrated, and monetized. It pointed my daughter toward a leather journal and a ballet flat, which is benign. It could point somewhere else tomorrow, and the mechanism would work the same way.

We are coming home with the journal, the shoes, the plush, the pharmacy haul, and a phone full of pictures. The journal is going to Yale with her, and she intends to write in it, which pleases me more than I expected. A small object can now exert international gravitational pull. That is the economic headline. The personal one is simpler. I’m getting a full week with my daughter before she leaves, and I will take the algorithm’s itinerary over no trip at all.

If you enjoy my work, please subscribe https://x.com/amuse/creator-subscriptions/subscribe

Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

I have been in the European Union for a week now, and I have yet to sit through a dinner, a coffee, or a hallway conversation that did not eventually arrive at the same subject. Not immigration, not energy prices, not the war. Article 50 of the EU AI Act. Founders raise it the way farmers raise the weather, with a kind of exhausted fatalism, because the rule became enforceable on the second of August and nobody I spoke with was confident they understood what compliance actually looks like. One founder told me his legal budget for the year now exceeds his engineering budget. He was not complaining about the principle of transparency. He was complaining that he cannot tell, with any precision, what the state expects him to build.

In 2024, American institutions produced 40 notable AI models. China produced 15. All of Europe, the whole continent, with its universities and its research traditions and its 450 million people, produced 3. In 2025, US private AI investment reached $285.9 billion and funded 1,953 new AI companies, more than 10 times the total of the next closest country. The US hosts 5,427 data centers, again more than 10 times any rival. Europe’s answer to this gap was not a capital program, a compute buildout, or a serious attempt to keep its own founders at home. Europe’s answer was a rulebook.

Brussels has mistaken the power to obstruct a market for leadership in that market. Those are not the same thing, and the difference matters enormously. A tollbooth operator collects from every car that passes, and he may even feel important doing it, but he did not build the road, and he cannot drive faster than the traffic he is metering. Europe has built the world’s most elaborate AI compliance bureaucracy on top of a domestic AI industry that barely exists. The tollbooth is impressive. The road belongs to somebody else.

Transparency sounds harmless. Should a chatbot not tell you it is a chatbot? Should a deepfake not be labeled a deepfake? Put that way, the objection is sensible, and if that were the whole of Article 50 I would not have written this. But the text does not say “put a sticker on it.” It requires that synthetic text, audio, images, and video carry marks that are effective, reliable, robust, interoperable, and machine-readable, marks that survive ordinary processing and remain detectable after the content leaves the provider’s hands. That is not a disclosure notice. That is a provenance infrastructure, and it has to work across four modalities and across every downstream tool that touches the file.

The engineering community has already reached its verdict on this. A technical paper published earlier this year found that Article 50 compliance cannot be achieved through post hoc labeling at all. The authors identified three structural problems. There is no universal cross-platform marking format for content that mixes human and machine authorship, which is nearly all content. There is a genuine tension between the law’s demand for reliability and the probabilistic nature of what these models produce. Robust markings tend to contaminate synthetic training data, while fragile markings simply vanish during ordinary file conversion. The law asks for something the field does not yet know how to deliver.

Chamath Palihapitiya put the engineering point plainly on 𝕏, and he is right. You cannot bolt this on at the end. The disclosure has to be designed into the generation and distribution pipeline from the beginning, which means a company must be able to reconstruct, on demand, what a system was intended to do, who approved that intent, how it became code, which tests verified it, what version shipped, how outputs were marked, and what changed afterward. His firm’s software factory is built to produce exactly that chain of evidence, and its work extracting more than 100,000 business rules from 18 million lines of Medicare claims code shows what real traceability costs. It is an excellent commercial answer to the problem. It is also, read another way, a measurement of the burden. When sophisticated new infrastructure becomes necessary just to survive a disclosure statute, the statute has told on itself.

Regulations of this kind are always sold as a check on powerful corporations. In practice they are a subsidy to them. Compliance costs are largely fixed. A company with $50 billion in revenue absorbs a compliance department the way a whale absorbs a barnacle. A company with four employees and a seed round absorbs it by not shipping the product. Every compliance lawyer, every provenance engineer, every audit system, and every regulatory filing raises the capital required to challenge an incumbent, and Cato’s Jennifer Huddleston has documented this pattern across a decade of technology rulemaking. The firms Brussels claims to distrust are the firms best positioned to pay the toll, and they know it.

We are not speculating about this, because Europe already ran the experiment. The General Data Protection Regulation was sold in precisely the same language: accountability for the giants, protection for the citizen. A National Bureau of Economic Research study of 4.1 million applications found that GDPR drove roughly one third of available applications out of the market and cut the entry of new applications by half in the quarters after implementation. Consumer welfare fell by roughly a third by the authors’ estimate. A separate study found European technology ventures suffered a sharp decline in funding relative to American peers, on the order of 17.6% fewer weekly deals and 39.6% less capital per deal. The giants survived GDPR comfortably. The challengers did not.

What Europeans actually get from all this is less technology, later. Mark Zuckerberg and Daniel Ek warned in 2024 that regulatory uncertainty would keep Meta’s multimodal Llama model out of Europe, and it did, for a year, after which the European Data Protection Board’s own opinion confirmed that Meta’s original approach had been lawful all along. No fine was ever issued. The mere possibility of enforcement was sufficient to freeze a lawful product. Apple announced in June that Siri AI will not ship to European users with iOS 27, saying regulators had rejected every technical proposal it offered, and that European developers would be unable even to test the features their American counterparts use daily. That is the Digital Markets Act rather than the AI Act, but it is the same regulatory culture producing the same result, and the result is that Europeans go to the back of the line for the tools that raise output per worker on a continent projected to lose nearly 2 million workers per year by 2040.

Americans should not read this as a foreign curiosity, and here is the part that ought to worry Washington. The AI Act reaches any provider anywhere on earth whose system’s output is used inside the EU, which means an American startup in Austin is inside the perimeter whether or not it ever opened a European office, and because maintaining seperate product architectures for two continents is expensive, multinational firms routinely standardize on the strictest rule they face, which means European regulators end up deciding what Americans are permitted to build and use without ever answering to an American voter. That is the Brussels Effect in its purest form. It is regulation by market access rather than by consent, and the penalty structure gives it teeth, since an Article 50 violation can reach €15 million or 3% of worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher. Note the logic there. The exposure is tied to the global revenue of the entire company, not to the revenue of the disputed feature, not to the size of the European deployment, and not to any demonstrated injury to a single human being.

The administrative conduct surrounding all of this deserves its own indictment. The Commission published its Article 50 transparency guidelines on the twentieth of July. The AI Omnibus, which altered deadlines and other elements of the framework, entered into force on the twenty-seventh of July. Enforcement will begin on the second of August (tomorrow). Six days. Global firms were expected to redesign generation pipelines, rewrite contracts, classify use cases, build marking systems, train staff, and coordinate downstream deployers, all under threat of turnover-based penalties, while Brussels was still amending the rules the week before the deadline. DIGITALEUROPE said the quiet part out loud in February, warning that businesses cannot comply without the missing pieces, because the standards and enforcement structures simply were not finished.

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None of this is a partisan American complaint, which is what makes it damning. Mario Draghi, a former president of the European Central Bank and hardly a critic of the European project, wrote in his competitiveness report that Europe largely missed out on the digital revolution led by the internet, that only four of the world’s top 50 technology companies are European, and that nearly 30% of European unicorns founded between 2008 and 2021 moved their headquarters abroad. The Commission itself now concedes that its digital rulebook has produced high compliance costs and legal uncertainty. Heritage’s Jake Denton put it more bluntly, arguing the AI Act has sealed Europe’s fate as a digital vassal, dependent on foreign models, foreign chips, and foreign clouds while performing sovereignty through paperwork.

A continent that produced 3 notable models in a year is now demanding that innovators construct enterprise-grade compliance factories before they construct competitive companies. The founders I met this week are not ideologues. They are simply doing arithmetic, and the arithmetic is pushing them toward Delaware. America’s advantage was never that we are smarter. It is that we let people build first and argue later. We should guard that advantage jealously, because Brussels is proving, in real time and at great expense, exactly what the alternative produces. The world’s best documented technological decline.

If you enjoy my work, please subscribe https://x.com/amuse/creator-subscriptions/subscribe

Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

Imagine your neighbor comes to you with a business plan. He needs $100,000 to open a machine shop, and he cannot get the money anywhere else. You have two options. You can hand him the cash as a gift, wish him well, and accept that if the shop succeeds, he keeps every dollar of the profit while you keep nothing but the memory of your generosity. Or you can hand him the cash in exchange for a slice of the business, so that if the shop thrives you thrive with it. No sensible person calls the second arrangement socialism. We call it investing. We have called it that for as long as there have been shares to buy.

For roughly 40 years, Washington chose the first option, over and over, on a scale that would stagger your neighbor. It handed out grants, loan guarantees, procurement commitments, export licenses, and regulatory blessings, and it asked for nothing in return but press releases. When the subsidized company failed, the taxpayer ate the loss. When the subsidized company succeeded, the shareholders ate the gain. That is not a free market. That is a system in which losses are collectivized, and profits are privatized, which is to say a system in which the public bears the risk of production without owning any part of the reward. President Trump has begun to reverse that arrangement, and the reversal has been met with the strangest accusation in recent memory: that it is socialism.

It is worth being precise about what socialism actually is, because the word is doing an enormous amount of unearned work in this debate. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy identifies capitalism by three features. The bulk of productive property is privately owned, workers own their own labor, and markets allocate inputs, outputs, consumption, and investment. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts the contrast plainly: an economy becomes socialist when it rejects private ownership of the means of production in favor of public or social ownership. Notice what these definitions do not say. Neither says that an economy becomes socialist when the government holds a financial asset. Socialism is a claim about who owns and directs production, not a claim about whether a public entity appears anywhere on a cap table.

Ludwig von Mises, who was hardly soft on the subject, drew the line with characteristic bluntness. Publicly owned enterprises operating inside a larger structure of private firms, market prices, and economic calculation remain subject to the laws of the market. “The system remains a market society,” he wrote. Real socialism arrives when the state decides what factories produce, whom they hire, what wages they pay, where they buy their inputs, and where they sell their output. Apply that test to the transactions actually in front of us and the accusation collapses. Not one of these agreements transfers a single one of those decisions to a government office.

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Consider Intel, which is the case the critics lead with. The federal government invested $8.9 billion, made up of $5.7 billion in CHIPS grants that had already been awarded but not yet paid and $3.2 billion from the Secure Enclave program. In exchange, it received 433.3 million newly issued common shares at $20.47, roughly 9.9% of the company, plus a five-year warrant on another 5% if Intel ever drops below majority ownership of its foundry. Here is the term that matters, and it is not the percentage. The stake is passive. No board seat. No special governance rights. No special information rights. Outside narrow exceptions, the government agreed in advance to vote with Intel’s own board. A shareholder who has contracted away his vote is not running the company. He is along for the ride.

And what a ride it has been. That block cost $8.9 billion. At Intel’s price of $92.70 on July 31, the same shares carried an indicated value of about $40.17 billion, which means roughly $31.27 billion in paper appreciation, and that figure excludes the contingent warrant entirely. Ask yourself how the government produced that return. It did not set Intel’s output quotas. It did not fix semiconductor prices or assign engineers to fabs. The market repriced the stock, and a shareholder who owned the stock benefited, exactly as any shareholder would. A gain generated by market pricing on passively held common stock is the least socialist thing imaginable. It is capitalism doing precisely what capitalism does.

The MP Materials agreement is, if anything, even more thoroughly a creature of private finance. The Pentagon bought $400 million of convertible preferred stock carrying a 7% payment-in-kind return, convertible at $30.03 per share, alongside a ten-year warrant on as many as 11,201,659 common shares and a $150 million loan running 12 years. Once the planned magnet facility clears its minimum earnings threshold, taxpayers take the first $30 million of excess EBITDA and half of anything above that. Meanwhile, MP committed as much as $600 million of its own cash, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs committed at least $1 billion in secured financing, and the government’s beneficial ownership is contractually capped at 19.9%. Preferred equity, warrants, debt, bank syndication, offtake agreements, and performance-based profit sharing are the vocabulary of an investment bank, not a politburo.

Thacker Pass may be the cleanest refutation of all. In connection with an expected $2.23 billion Department of Energy loan, the government received penny warrants for about 5% of Lithium Americas and a separate 5% economic interest in the joint venture. That project interest is expressly nonvoting and nontransferable. The voting interests remain where they were, 62% with Lithium Americas and 38% with General Motors. The Department of Energy holds 5% of the economics and 0% of the votes. Whatever else that is, it is the precise opposite of state control. Private owners run the mine, hire the workers, sign the contracts, and set the production schedule. The public simply holds a claim on value that public credit helped bring into being.

Now the honest objection, and it deserves a real answer. Isn’t this still industrial policy, still government picking winners, still corporate welfare with better paperwork? Partly, yes. But the relevant comparison is not between these deals and some imagined republic where Congress appropriates nothing. Congress had already authorized the money. The CHIPS grants existed. The loan programs existed. Cato estimates federal corporate welfare at roughly $181 billion a year, and 64% of likely voters told Cato they want it ended while only 20% disagreed. Given that the spending was going out the door regardless, the actual choice was between an unrecoverable gift and a priced, documented, recoverable security. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick put it about as plainly as it can be put: “We’ll get equity in return for that ... instead of just giving grants away.” A warrant is more conservative than a handout. A royalty is more conservative than a grant. Preferred stock paying 7% is more conservative than a check that vanishes into a treasury.

Then there is the golden share at US Steel, which critics wave around as though it were a nationalization decree. Nippon Steel bought the company for $14.9 billion and owns it. The government’s share is non-economic, meaning it collects no dividends and no appreciation, and it carries narrow consent rights over plant closures, capacity cuts, transfers of production, and headquarters relocation, plus the right to name one independent director. Anyone tempted to call that socialism should look up who else used the instrument, because Margaret Thatcher’s government retained golden shares in British Aerospace, Rolls-Royce, and the British Airports Authority while selling 100% of the ordinary stock to private investors. Those shares typically had a nominal value of £1 and conferred no right to profits. The golden share was not an instrument of nationalization. It was the device that made privatization politically survivable.

None of this is unprecedented at home either, and the history is a good deal less exotic than the current panic suggests. In 1979 Washington guaranteed Chrysler’s loans and took 14.4 million warrants at $13 a share, and Jimmy Carter defended the package on the grounds that it kept Chrysler a private competitor rather than a government agency, which it did; the loans were repaid, and in September 1983 the government sold the warrants back for $311 million. Treasury’s Capital Purchase Program during the financial crisis ran on preferred stock and warrants and recovered nearly $275 billion against $245 billion invested. The CARES Act, signed in Trump’s first term, required airlines to hand over warrants, equity, or senior debt as taxpayer compensation, and the June 2024 auctions of those warrants returned $556,685,001 to the Treasury. Nobody seriously argued that Delta had been nationalized.

There is also the domestic example nobody on the right seems eager to discuss. Alaska, one of the most conservative states in the union, holds roughly $31.2 billion in public equities, $14.4 billion in private equity, $19 billion in fixed income, and $8.2 billion in real estate, about $90.7 billion in all, and it has generated something like $114.5 billion in returns since 1977. Alaska does not run the companies whose stock it owns. It collects the returns and cuts checks to its citizens. If public ownership of equity were socialism, Juneau would be Havana, and it plainly is not.

The most revealing testimony comes from the left, which had every incentive to claim these deals as a victory and declined the priviledge. Bernie Sanders conceded the underlying principle outright, saying that “the taxpayers of America have a right to a reasonable return on that investment.” Jacobin, a magazine that would very much like to find socialism where it exists, examined the Intel stake and concluded that the nonvoting shares “do not give the government any meaningful control over the company.” Socialists know what social ownership looks like. They looked at this and saw a shareholder.

So what is actually happening here is simpler than the label suggests. Executives profit. Venture capitalists profit. Banks charge interest, shareholders take dividends, and lawyers, consultants, and bankers collect their fees, and there is no principled reason at all why the taxpayer, alone among everyone at the table, must be required to accept a return of zero. The public was already a partner in these ventures. It just happened to be the partner that supplied capital, absorbed risk, guaranteed demand, and received nothing. Trump has not made the taxpayer an owner of American industry. He has made the taxpayer a paid counterparty instead of an unpaid one, which is the difference between a market economy and a very expensive charity. He is not socializing production. He is de-socializing corporate losses, and it is about time somebody did.

If you enjoy my work, please subscribe https://x.com/amuse/creator-subscriptions/subscribe

Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

Like most Texans, I first encountered Texas Public Opinion Research the way you are supposed to encounter it: secondhand and already vouched for. The Texas Tribune ran the headline that James Talarico led Ken Paxton by 5 points in the US Senate race, and the Talarico campaign promoted it within the hour. The organization behind it carried the word "nonpartisan" in every description, so the number arrived as a finding rather than as a claim. I had never heard of the outfit before that morning. What made me curious was not the politics of the result but its loneliness, because every other public survey of that race had been describing something entirely different.

Set the sponsor question aside and place the polls side by side. The New York Times and Siena found the race tied at 47% each. The University of Texas Politics Project found Paxton at 43% and Talarico at 42%, which it correctly called statistically indistinguishable. Quantus found Paxton ahead by 2, A2 Insights found Talarico ahead by 2, and Texas Pulse found him ahead by 3. Average those five and you land within half a point of a dead heat. Then TPOR arrives at Talarico +5, the friendliest number in the field, and that is the one that becomes the headline. An outlier is not a lie, and outliers are ordinary. An outlier treated as the consensus is a different problem, and it is a problem about labels rather than about arithmetic.

So I read the release, and the poll does not support the headline even on its own terms. The American Association for Public Opinion Research advises that a candidate generally must lead by 1.5 to 2 times the stated margin of sampling error before the lead is statistically meaningful. TPOR reported a margin of 3.4 points. Divide 5 by 3.4, and you get 1.47, below even the lower boundary of that rule. Undecideds stood at 14%, nearly three times the size of the gap being reported as a lead, and TPOR’s own follow-up found those undecideds leaning toward Paxton by roughly 19% to 10%. Push them mechanically, and the margin falls under 4.

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TPOR called its finding a widening lead, and this is where the release passes from optimism to fabrication. In May it had Talarico at 47% and Paxton at 44%. In July it had Talarico at 45% and Paxton at 40%. Talarico did not gain a point in that stretch; he lost two. The gap grew because Paxton lost four while undecideds doubled from 7% to 14%. A lead that widens because both candidates are shedding support is not momentum in any sense a reader would recognize from the word. It is an electorate becoming less settled, which is the opposite of what the coverage conveyed.

The crosstabs are stranger still. Between the May and July waves, TPOR’s statewide margin moved 2 points. In those same seven weeks, its Latino margin moved 50 points, from Paxton +4 to Talarico +46, its noncollege margin moved 30 points toward Talarico, its college margin moved 29 points toward Paxton, and its white margin moved 19 points toward Paxton. Those are not findings; they are cancellations. Real electorates do not lurch 50 points among Hispanics while barely moving overall. Samples do that when subgroups are small, or weights have changed, which is why professional standards require pollsters to publish unweighted subgroup sizes. TPOR did not publish them, nor did it disclose its recruitment source, mode, languages, likely-voter model, weighting targets, or design effect.

What it did publish was an invitation. The release states that crosstabs are available upon request, which is the industry’s way of signaling that nothing is being hidden. I know of two media outlets that took TPOR up on it, and neither received a response, not from TPOR and not from Slingshot Strategies, the firm that fields the surveys and whose address appears as the press contact. Curious, indeed. An organization that wants its number treated as a public good has an odd way of behaving when the public asks to see the work. The offer of transparency turns out to be part of the product rather than a description of it.

Which brings me to the part of the inquiry that changed the piece I meant to write. TPOR’s materials say it operates “without allegiance to any political position or special interest,” and its director said at launch that he hoped it would become a “go-to neutral source of reliable information.” Those are not moods; they are factual assertions about institutional structure. “No allegiance to any special interest” describes relationships that either exist or do not, in the way that “grass fed” is checkable while “the best beef in Texas” is not.

Here is what the relationships look like. TPOR's director is Luke Warford, former Chief Strategy Officer of the Texas Democratic Party and the party's 2022 statewide nominee for Railroad Commissioner. That alone would prove nothing, because a résumé is not a conflict. Warford is also, right now, a founding partner of the Agave Democratic Infrastructure Fund, an organization that says its purpose is to help Democrats win in 2026 and that funds research and messaging to determine what Democrats in Texas should be saying to voters. Agave has paid almost $200,000 to Slingshot Strategies. Slingshot advertises that it works with candidates, progressive organizations, and issue advocates, and that it powers separately branded public polling initiatives. TPOR is a separately branded public polling initiative.

State the principle plainly, because a principle nobody can state is a principle nobody can apply. My objection is not that Warford has a Democratic past. If it were, I would have written an indictment of Marist, of Quinnipiac, and of half the university survey centers in the country, and any competent defender would say so in his first paragraph. My objection is concurrency. Warford has a Democratic present, running simultaneously and performing the same functions. One organization exists to elect Democrats. The other claims allegiance to no political position. Both do polling, messaging, and research through the same consultancy, under the same director, in the same week, about the same electorate. The standard is not purity of biography; it is simultaneity of control. A former strategist can run a neutral shop. A sitting strategist running an active electoral fund cannot run one at the same time and call it neutral, any more than a judge holding stock in the defendant becomes impartial by promising to be fair. One last thing to note is that Warford launched Agave in January 2024 and TPOR just six months later, not because Agave wasn’t successful but likely because it needed the services of a ‘nonpartisan’ polling firm it controlled.

Notice why the label is worth paying for rather than merely nice to have. “Nonpartisan” performs one function: to move a survey out of the folder marked “Democratic research,” where a reporter treats it as an interested party’s claim, and into the folder marked “public opinion,” where he treats it as a finding. That reclassification is the entire value proposition, and in July it worked perfectly. The outlier became the headline, and from there the number traveled into the fundraising materials of a pro-Talarico super PAC pitching donors. The loop closes neatly. Democratic-adjacent money produces neutral-labeled research, the label secures the coverage, the coverage becomes evidence in a fundraising appeal, and the appeal produces more money. The label is not a byproduct of the operation; it is the mechanism.

Let me concede the strongest objection completely, since the concession costs nothing. Even if we assume that every TPOR number is accurate as arithmetic. The misrepresentation remains what it was, because the challenged claim is not “these results are wrong,” it is “this organization has no partisan allegiance.” Still, the record is worth knowing, because a neutral label asks readers to extend confidence and it is fair to ask what they got for it. TPOR had Trump up 8 in Texas in 2024, and he won by roughly 13.7. It had Jasmine Crockett leading Talarico by 1 in the January primary, and Talarico won by roughly 6.2, meaning the poll named the wrong leader. It published Paxton over Cornyn by 8 in March and again in April, and Paxton won the runoff by approximately 27.7 points. Across the completed contests, the average distance between the published margin and the eventual result runs to roughly 9 points. As a pollster, Warford leaves a lot to be desired.

The legal question is narrower than my critics will pretend. Texas does not regulate bad polls, and it should not. It regulates false representations about the characteristics, source, and sponsorship of goods and services, which is ordinary consumer protection law and applies to the sale of expertise as readily as to the sale of a used car. The Attorney General’s office has twice advanced this exact theory, that ideologically committed work may not be marketed as objective civic expertise, in its actions involving the Center for Tech and Civic Life and Institutional Shareholder Services. In both, the alignment had to be inferred from conduct. Here nothing needs inferring, because the director publishes it himself on the website of the other organization he runs. In my opinion, TPOR is ripe for a Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act investigation.

Two quick answers before I close. Someone will call the neutrality language puffery that no reasonable person credits, but puffery is opinion about quality, and this is a verifiable statement about relationships, which is the category the law treats as actionable when false. Someone else will say this chills speech, and that takes one sentence: nobody is being told what to publish, only what to disclose about who paid.

So here is the offer that should settle it. TPOR may operate as a Democratic polling shop, which is lawful and arguably overdue, since Texas Democrats plainly need better information than they have been getting. It may not be that and simultaneously sell Texans the opposite. Drop the label or drop the fund. Either choice is honorable, and the refusal to choose is the only thing here that is not.

If you enjoy my work, please subscribe https://x.com/amuse/creator-subscriptions/subscribe

Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in a sponsored partnership with Grammerly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

Consider a homeowner who hires an exterminator to deal with a wasp nest in the eaves. The exterminator removes the nest, seals the gap, treats the perimeter, and absorbs a lawsuit from neighbors who felt the wasps were being persecuted. Then one morning the homeowner walks onto his lawn and announces to the street that nothing has been done. He has not said the work was slow or partial. He has said it never happened, and that distinction matters, because the first complaint can be answered with evidence and the second cannot be answered at all. It is not a claim about the world, but about the speaker's willingness to look at it. That is the precise shape of what Rob Schneider did to Texas in late July.

On May 11 he told his followers to vote John Cornyn out of the Senate. On May 17 he retweeted Scott Presler's appeal to Texans to defeat Cornyn and elect Ken Paxton, and he stumped for Chip Roy twice in the same stretch. Nine days later Paxton beat Cornyn 63.8% to 36.2% on more than 1.38 million votes, the first successful primary challenge to a sitting Texas US senator since Lloyd Bentsen unseated Ralph Yarborough in 1970. Schneider had spent roughly 11 weeks pushing that outcome to 2,273,090 followers. Sixty days after the runoff, he wrote this: "DEAR TEXAS, YOUR ATTORNEY GENERAL, KEN PAXTON MUST BE PLANNING SOMETHING BIG TO PROTECT TEXAS CHRISTIANS FROM THE DANGERS OF ISLAMIC TERROR, BECAUSE HE HAS DONE NOTHING SO FAR… ABSOLUTELY NOTHING."

The rest of the week ran on rails. July 22 brought the first attack on Greg Abbott of Schneider's life, July 24 the first on Paxton, July 26 the first on Dan Patrick, rendered as "Mufti Dan Patrick," and July 27 the manifesto, "THE CONQUEST OF TEXAS And the Republicans Who Allowed It." Five days, three men, one November ballot.

A complete extraction of his 𝕏 timeline, 3,217 posts reaching back to January 27, tells us something a casual reader would miss. His interest in Islam is genuine and longstanding, as he averaged 23 Islam-related posts per month from February through June. But almost none of it concerned Texas. Those posts are about New York’s Mamdani, the mullahs in Iran, and Europe. Across the first five full months of 2026, he mentioned Texas twelve times, then 36 times in July, nearly all after the 17th. Read the Abbott and Patrick columns first. Zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero. Then eleven and eight.

Schneider supplies the explanation himself, in the most damaging sentence in his feed: “What I never fully understood until recently is how deeply this threat is already embedded.” He is dating his own expertise. A man who learned the file eight weeks ago is grading the men who have litigated it for a decade.

Now walk his charges against the record. On July 27, he told two million people that Texas has Sharia courts and Sharia judges and that not one has been shut down. On April 6, 112 days earlier, Paxton had served a civil investigative demand on the Dallas-based Islamic Tribunal, which claimed jurisdiction over all aspects of Muslim life and, per the filing, falsely represented that its decisions were approved by the Texas judicial system. Paxton’s office stated that religious liberty rights “do not permit a religious organization to act as a court, apply foreign laws that conflict with Texas or federal law, or issue rulings that imply government authority.” The Tribunal scrubbed its website and now insists its role is “strictly spiritual.” That is what dismantling a parallel legal system looks like in a republic, not a raid but a subpoena that forces the entity to renounce the authority it claimed.

He complained that organizations with ties to terrorism enjoy nonprofit status and political access. On November 18, 2025, Abbott designated the Muslim Brotherhood and the Council on American-Islamic Relations as foreign terrorist and transnational criminal organizations, barring them from acquiring land in Texas. No state had ever done it, and his language was blunter than anything in Schneider’s feed: “The Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR have long made their goals clear: to forcibly impose Sharia law and establish Islam’s ‘mastership of the world.’” CAIR and the Muslim Legal Fund sued him in federal court within 48 hours, and on February 2 he directed Paxton to strip CAIR of its nonprofit status outright.

He asked why the Muslim Brotherhood is building cities inside Texas. The development he could not name is EPIC City, a roughly 400-acre site with 1,000 planned homes near Josephine. Abbott ordered multi-agency investigations in early 2025, and Paxton opened a consumer-protection probe that March, demanded Plano ISD records in April, referred securities violations to the state board in October, sued in December, and sued again in February 2026 over an alleged takeover of a municipal utility district board, winning a restraining order and then an injunction. This is the most aggressively litigated Islamic land development fight in American history, and in 3,217 posts Schneider has never once typed “EPIC City,” “East Plano,” or “Josephine.” He does not know the name of the thing he is angry about.

He objected that foreign Islamic holidays are celebrated officially on American soil. The most prominent such event in Texas, a Muslim-only Eid celebration at the taxpayer-funded Epic Waters park in Grand Prairie, was canceled weeks earlier after Abbott threatened $530,000 in state grants. He demanded to know where Paxton was five years ago, ten years ago. In June 2015, Paxton was writing the attorney general opinion on foreign law in Texas courts that the Legislature codified in 2017 as HB 45, the American Laws for American Courts Act, which Abbott signed and CAIR denounced. That is eleven years ago. As for the mufti insult, Patrick had made “Preventing Sharia Law in Texas” a formal Senate interim charge on January 30, writing that “only state and federal laws apply in Texas and ‘Sharia law’ or other secondary judicial systems have no place in Texas.” Schneider’s slur arrived 177 days later.

The most useful corroboration comes from men who despise all three. In February, the San Antonio Current, under the headline “Texas governor, lieutenant governor ramp up attacks on state’s Muslim community,” reported that “Texas Republicans intensified their attacks against Islam this week, playing on unfounded concerns.” A left-leaning alt-weekly, writing in condemnation, thereby documented that Abbott and Patrick were running the most aggressive campaign against Islamic law of any state leadership in America, five months before a comedian announced they had done nothing. When your accuser and your critics cannot both be right, quote the critic.

Then there are the two moments Schneider undercut himself on the record. On July 25, he wrote to Paxton, “I don’t want YOUR LUNATIC opponent to win.” He knows the Democrat is worse, and proceeded anyway. About two hours after declaring that Paxton had done absolutely nothing, he wrote, “Paxton filed ONLY 4 lawsuits!!” The charge collapsed inside an afternoon, in his own words. A man who says zero and then says four is not auditing a performance; he is negotiating with himself.

Take his donor claim seriously. His most-viewed Texas post, 516,209 views, suggested that money Abbott took from Muslims explains the conquest, escalating to “EVERY DOLLAR HE TOOK FROM THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD.” The kernel is one man, Syed Javaid Anwar, a Midland oil executive and Abbott appointee who has given roughly $2,222,086. Ask about that relationship if you like. But Schneider converted a disclosed donation from an energy executive into the claim that a governor had been bought by an organization that same governor had designated a terrorist entity three months earlier.

So the question is why, and it deserves an honest answer rather than a satisfying one. There are three candidates. The first is the convert’s zeal, the tendency of the newly informed to mistake their own ignorance for the world’s inaction. The second is engagement, which the data only partly supports: his attack posts beat his baseline reach by about 62% at the median, while his non-attack posts that same week did nearly as well, and his truly viral material is about baseball and Bible verses. The third is that someone helped this along.

I cannot prove the third. What I can point at is the design. The campaign never names a single tribunal, statute, development, or organization, which means no specific victory can ever satisfy it, and an unfalsifiable demand is not a demand at all. The timing is likewise exquisite, since the Texas primaries concluded May 26, so every round fired since July 22 lands on a Republican nominee and none on a Democrat. Whether or not anyone designed it, the campaign behaves exactly as a designed one would behave, and this is the genuinely uncomfortable part, because a psyop and a sincere man with a bad information diet produce identical outputs when those outputs are unfalsifiable, aimed at no Democrat, timed for the general election, and directed at the seperate offices of the only three Republicans on the statewide ballot in November, which means the question of intent, interesting as it surely is, is not the question that decides anything.

Consider what he spent that week ignoring. On July 27 and 28, the same days he was calling Paxton Christianophobic, James Talarico was under fire for crediting Islamic mystics and the Sufi poet Rumi with shaping his Christian faith as much as Christian writers had. One of these men is on the November ballot against the other, and Schneider attacked the Republican.

Here is the moral core, and it concerns incentives rather than a comedian. Abbott absorbed a federal First Amendment lawsuit over a designation no other state had dared to make. Paxton put his name on five legal actions and a securities referral. Patrick made Sharia a formal legislative priority beside property taxes. That is seventeen dated actions across eleven years, and the reward was a man with 2.27 million followers telling Texas they had done nothing. If that is the return on real legal risk, every ambitious official watching will draw the lesson and simply post instead.

There is no version of this campaign that ends with Texas more resistant to Islamic law. There is a very plausible version that ends with James Talarico in the United States Senate. The only lever Rob Schneider is actually pulling is Republican turnout in a general election, and he is pulling it downward.

If you enjoy my work, please subscribe https://x.com/amuse/creator-subscriptions/subscribe

Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in a sponsored partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

This week I am in Europe with my daughter, who leaves for college next month, and this trip is our last proper daddy-and-daughter hurrah before she becomes someone who visits rather than someone who lives down the hall. Listening to the Planet Money Podcast on the plane about how Norway beat the resource curse, I found myself thinking about food, and specifically about the one dish I order more than any other. At R+D in Dallas, I have a habit that probably irritates the kitchen. I ask the sushi chef to take the mixed platter and make the entire thing salmon. No tuna, no yellowtail, no eel. Just salmon, raw, sliced thick, cold and faintly sweet, with a clean fat that coats the tongue and then disappears.

So it was a genuine surprise to learn that the dish I treat as a fixed feature of the universe is younger than I am. Salmon nigiri is not an ancient Japanese tradition. Until the 1980s, Japanese sushi chefs did not use salmon at all, and would have found the suggestion mildly revolting. The reason was not snobbery but biology. Raw salmon in Japan carried Anisakis and other parasites, and a chef who served it was not being adventurous; he was being reckless. Japanese consumers ate a great deal of salmon, but they ate it grilled, salted, or cured. Traditional sushi chefs therefore did not regard a raw slice of salmon as an established sushi ingredient at all.

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The story of how that changed begins not with a chef but with an oil field, and once you see how the two threads run together it becomes a case study in something conservatives should care about more than we usually do. What separates a nation that gets rich from natural resources from a nation that gets ruined by them?

Two revolutions arrived in Norway at almost the same moment. Phillips Petroleum found the Ekofisk field just before Christmas of 1969, and Norwegian oil production began on June 15, 1971. Meanwhile, on the island of Hitra, two brothers named Ove and Sivert Grøntvedt placed a generation of Atlantic salmon into a floating sea cage in 1970 and took their first commercial harvest in 1971. Modern Norwegian oil and modern Norwegian salmon were, in effect, twins. Nobody planned it that way, and for a decade the two industries had nothing to do with one another.

The oil problem has a name. Economists call it the resource curse, and its symptoms are familiar to anyone who has looked at Venezuela, Nigeria, or Russia. A commodity windfall arrives, the currency strengthens, costs rise, the political class discovers that money can be distributed faster than it can be earned, rent-seeking crowds out production, and within a generation the country can no longer make or sell anything that is not pumped out of the ground. The Heritage Foundation put the diagnosis about as cleanly as it can be put, observing that it is a nation’s policies, not its products, that determine its economic well-being. Norwegian petroleum was chemically identical to everyone else’s. The difference was institutional.

What Norway did was build the rules before the money showed up. It asserted sovereignty over its continental shelf in 1963, before anyone knew there was anything down there worth owning, and opened its first licensing round in 1965. In 1971 the parliament adopted what became known as the Ten Oil Commandments, the first of which insisted that national supervision and control be ensured for all operations on the shelf. In 1972 Norway created two separate institutions, the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate as regulator and Statoil as commercial operator, which meant the national champion could not serve as its own judge. Private and foreign companies kept their access, supplying capital and engineering, while the state captured the rent. The combined marginal petroleum tax rate today is 78%.

Then Norway added a second layer of protection. Beginning with the first transfer in 1996 and the fiscal rule adopted in 2001, net petroleum cash flow was routed into a sovereign fund invested almost entirely outside the country, with annual budget withdrawals limited to the fund’s expected real return, a benchmark reduced from 4% to 3% in 2017. At the end of 2025, that fund held roughly $2.1 trillion. Net government deposits accounted for only about $540 billion of it. Investment returns accounted for roughly $1.3 trillion. Compounding, not drilling, is now the larger source of the wealth, and because the money sits abroad, it cannot flood the domestic economy all at once.

Here is the part of the story usually left out, and the part I find most instructive. Norway did not resist every temptation. Its fishing industry had operated under a General Agreement since 1964 that made government assistance a permanent fixture, and when oil money arrived, those payments became painless to finance. The OECD later reviewed the episode and described the correlation between oil prices and Norwegian fisheries subsidies as astonishingly high. By one measure, support reached approximately 70% of the industry’s value added around 1981. That is not a safety net; that is life support, and it was doing what such programs always do, which is preserve fishing capacity the stocks and the market could not sustain. Norway had already watched its spring-spawning herring collapse in the 1960s and knew what happens when you pay more boats to chase fewer fish.

Then Norway did the thing almost no government does. It reversed. Subsidies were reduced through the 1980s, a 1989 European Free Trade Association commitment locked in the phaseout, and support had become negligible by the mid-1990s. In their place came limited entry, quotas, capacity control, and stock rebuilding, which is to say property-like access rights and resource discipline rather than checks. Norway kept using government, but it stopped using government to guarantee income regardless of productivity. That distinction is the whole argument, and American conservatives ought to be able to articulate it in our sleep.

Which brings us back to the fish. Freed from subsidy and pushed by biology, Norwegian aquaculture grew at roughly 40% annually from 1972 through 1975 and kept climbing. Production went from about 500 tonnes in 1970 to about 8,000 tonnes in 1980 to roughly 170,000 tonnes by 1990. A country of four million people cannot eat that. Prices fell, and finding a large foreign buyer stopped being a marketing exercise and became a matter of survival.

Japan was the obvious target and the hardest one. It had an enormous seafood-consuming population, an established premium market for raw fish, and shortages in prized species. It also had that inconvenient conviction that raw salmon was inedible. Norway shipped two tonnes of salmon to Japan in 1980. In 1985, Norwegian fisheries authorities and the industry launched the effort known as Project Japan, whose ambition Bjørn Eirik Olsen later summarized by saying they set out to inject Norwegian salmon into Japanese sushi. The economics were stark. Salmon sold for grilling competes in an ordinary protein market, while salmon accepted for sashimi commands several times as much, and Olsen estimated the premium at up to tenfold.

The initial reception was total rejection. Japanese seafood executives objected to the color, the smell, the texture, the consistency, the gills, and even the shape of the head. Olsen’s summary was that everything was wrong. Norway had one real advantage: its product genuinely was a different animal. Farmed Atlantic salmon raised on processed dry feed never eat the live prey that carries Anisakis, and the European Food Safety Authority has concluded that such fish present a negligible parasite risk, while Norwegian Institute of Marine Research studies from 2014 to 2016 found no such worms in market-quality farmed salmon. Yet Norway wisely declined to advertise the absence of parasites, since saying no parasites only places the word parasite in the customer’s head. The campaign sold origin instead: cold water, clean fjords, snow, and freshness, and it quietly encouraged a separate name. Familiar domestic salmon was sake or shake, while the imported Atlantic fish meant for raw consumption was sold as sāmon, in katakana, which placed it outside the old culinary rules entirely.

Consumer advertising accomplished nothing, including a cartoon Viking mascot, because consumers cannot buy what wholesalers refuse to stock. The veto sat inside the Japanese distribution system, and unlocking it took roughly a decade of tastings, embassy dinners, and patient relationship building. The breakthrough finally came out of a disaster. In 1991, the Norwegian farmers’ sales organization collapsed, leaving approximately 30,000 tonnes of frozen salmon in storage and enormous pressure to dump it cheaply into the grilling market. Olsen refused, understanding that a fire sale would permanently confirm that Norwegian salmon was ordinary cooking fish.

He went instead to Nichirei, one of Japan’s largest food companies, and offered roughly 5,000 tonnes at an attractive price on a single condition: that the fish be distributed for sushi, particularly through supermarkets. That one transaction was more than thirteen times Norway’s total 1985 salmon exports to Japan, and what it really transferred was trust. A Japanese family might ignore a Norwegian advertisement, but a familiar Japanese brand in a familiar supermarket signaled that the product had been inspected and accepted by their own food system. The low price made trial cheap, conveyor-belt restaurants made it nearly free, and nobody got sick. Chef Tadashi Ono, who initially feared raw salmon would make him ill, ended up calling it buttery, creamy, and melt-in-your-mouth, which explains why it worked. It was rich enough for connoisseurs and mild enough for children.

Exports to Japan went from 385 tons in 1985 to nearly 20,000 tons by 1995 and past 45,000 tons about two decades after that two-ton start. Olsen knew he had won when he saw plastic salmon-sushi replicas in Tokyo restaurant windows, because advertising can be purchased but a spot in the permanent display cannot. The rest is on every menu in America. Norwegian Seafood Council research now finds salmon to be the preferred sushi topping in 17 of 20 surveyed countries, estimates that roughly 30% of Norwegian salmon is eaten raw or as sushi, and puts Norway’s share of the global salmon market near 53%. In 2025, Norway exported 1,414,909 tonnes of salmon worth about $12.5 billion, with total seafood exports reaching roughly $18 billion.

That is the real test, and it is worth stating plainly for the American reader. A country has not escaped the resource curse merely because it has accumulated a large treasury. It has escaped only when the rest of its economy can still make things strangers want to buy. Norway captured its geological rent, refused to spend the principal, stopped paying its fishermen to remain unproductive, and then helped them open a market no individual farmer could have opened alone, after which consumer demand did the rest. The state supplied the collective goods, science, standards, diplomacy, and national reputation, and then stepped aside. That is not central planning; it is disciplined national capitalism, and the proof of it is riding past you on a conveyor belt.

My daughter, who heard a version of this over dinner and was more patient about it than she needed to be, observed that the only reason her father has a favorite food is that a Norwegian salesman refused to unload frozen fish cheaply in 1991. She is right, and she is about to go study matters far more consequential than aquaculture policy. Still, there are worse lessons to send a kid off to college with. Windfalls do not make you rich, traditions are not permanent, and the difference between a nation that squanders its luck and one that compounds it comes down to whether anybody had the discipline to write the rules before the money arrived.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly.

When the Supreme Court decided Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, the conventional verdict in Washington was that the tariff agenda had been decapitated. That reading confused a vehicle with a destination. The Court did not hold that presidents may not impose tariffs. It held that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act was not the statute that authorized these particular ones, because IEEPA lacks the express duty language and the defined ceilings that Congress ordinarily supplies when it delegates the taxing power over imports. Chief Justice Roberts explained that Congress delegates tariff authority in explicit terms and under strict limits. Then the majority did something unusual for an opinion striking down executive action. It named a statute that satisfies its own test.

That statute is Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, codified at 19 USC §1338. Justice Kavanaugh, in dissent, was blunter still. He wrote that the tariffs had simply been placed in the wrong statutory box, and he identified Section 338 as one of several boxes that might have held most or all of them. Earlier this month, President Trump signed three proclamations under that provision, imposing an additional 50% duty on roughly $20 billion in Canadian goods, effective August 19, after the statute’s mandatory 30-day waiting period. It is the first time in 96 years that a president has actually used Section 338 to impose tariffs.

I want to walk carefully through why this is not merely a lawyer’s workaround but a genuinely superior instrument, because the distinction matters. A workaround preserves a policy by finding a technicality. What happened here is different. The administration abandoned a broad, contested authority and replaced it with a narrow, express one, thereby acquiring capabilities the original approach never had.

Consider first what Section 338 actually says. It authorizes the president to impose new or additional rates of duty when he finds that a foreign country imposes any unreasonable charge, regulation, limitation, prohibition, classification, or administrative practice on American products that it does not apply equally to like products from every other country. The trigger is not an emergency. It is discrimination. Congress capped the additional duty at 50%. Congress required the president to find that the public interest will be served. Congress required that the duties be designed to offset the burden on American commerce. Congress imposed a 30-day delay before collection begins. Congress permitted the president to suspend, revoke, supplement, or amend the proclamation at will. Congress permitted action against a whole country or against particular subdivisions of it, which matters enormously when the discriminating parties are provincial liquor monopolies. Congress even authorized duties on goods produced in a third country that benefits from the discrimination.

Read that list again with the Court’s opinion in mind. Express tariff language, a numerical ceiling, a defined factual trigger, a public interest finding, a waiting period. These are precisely the features the majority said distinguish a legitimate tariff delegation from an improvised one. The administration did not resist the ruling. It complied with it, and that compliance strengthened the policy.

The constitutional pedigree here runs deep, and it is worth pausing on, since critics will call this novel. In Field v. Clark, decided in 1892, the Court upheld a reciprocity provision empowering the president to respond when foreign nations imposed unequal or unreasonable burdens on American products. Congress had made the policy; the president merely found whether the triggering condition existed. In J.W. Hampton, Jr. & Co. v. United States, decided in 1928, Chief Justice Taft wrote for a unanimous Court upholding flexible tariff adjustment under congressionally prescribed standards, and gave us the intelligible principle doctrine that still governs delegation law. Section 338 sits comfortably inside that tradition. Indeed, it is more constrained than the statutes upheld in either case, since its operative finding is tied to identifiable foreign misconduct rather than to production cost differentials or presidential judgment about what the national interest requires in the abstract.

Now to the facts, which are the strongest part of the administration’s position and the part critics most want to skip past. Since April 2025, Canada has imposed a 25% tariff on non-USMCA-qualifying American vehicles and has applied that rate to non-Canadian and non-Mexican content in qualifying vehicles, reaching up to 85% of a vehicle’s value. It created company-specific tariff-rate quotas. Most remarkably, it reduced quota access for companies that moved manufacturing from Canada to the United States. The measurable result was that American vehicle exports to Canada fell by about 22%, from $25.9 billion to $20.3 billion, while Mexican vehicle exports to Canada rose by 23.6% and shipments from Japan, Korea, and Germany rose by between 10.1% and 13.5%. Non-US suppliers picked up roughly $2.85 billion in Canadian sales, with Mexico accounting for nearly $2 billion of that.

Alcohol tells the same story with even sharper numbers. Beginning in March 2025, every Canadian province and territory suspended the purchase, distribution, or retail sale of American alcoholic beverages. Ontario’s monopoly canceled orders, delisted American products from its catalog, and pulled them from shelves. Only Alberta and Saskatchewan later relented. No comparable national-origin ban was applied to anyone else’s liquor. Canadian imports of American alcohol collapsed by 81%, from about $718 million to $137 million, while imports from other countries rose by more than $170 million, even as total alcohol imports fell by 12%. European suppliers absorbed more than $100 million of that shift.

Dairy is the quietest of the three and in some ways the most instructive. Canada operates one cheese tariff-rate quota under the USMCA and another under its agreement with the European Union. Under the American quota, retailers may not obtain or use allocations. Under the European quota, they may. Same product, same market, different rules, and the difference is drawn by nationality. That is, in fact, discrimination, which is exactly the phrase Congress used.

So the statutory trigger is satisfied not by inference but by documentation. Compare this to the posture the administration occupied under IEEPA, where the legal predicate was a declared emergency, and the remedy was global. Here the predicate is a specific foreign rule, the injury is quantified in trade data, and the remedy is tailored to it.

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Tailored is the operative word. The three proclamations cover 554 tariff classifications and approximately $20 billion of imports, which White & Case calculated at roughly 5% of everything America buys from Canada, and Reuters put at 5.2% of 2025 volumes. The White House excluded energy, potash, critical minerals, fish, civil aircraft covered by the World Trade Organization agreement, and goods already carrying Section 232 duties. Every one of those exclusions protects a supply chain where American substitution would be slow or where continental security interests are implicated. The administration chose pressure points rather than mirroring Canada line by line, which the statute expressly permits, since Section 338 allows duties on any products of the offending country rather than only the products caught up in the discrimination.

The three-proclamation structure deserves more credit than it has received. Each contains its own factual record, its own finding, its own product list, its own severability clause. Each can be negotiated, narrowed, suspended, or defended in court independently of the others. If a judge somewhere finds a defect in the dairy action, the auto action survives untouched. That is what legal durability looks like when it is engineered rather than hoped for.

Then there is the clock, which is the whole point. The 30-day delay is not bureaucratic sludge; it is the bargaining instrument, and Ottawa understood this immediately. Prime Minister Carney announced within a day that he and the president had agreed to intensify negotiations, Canadian officials publicly discouraged preemptive retaliation before August 19, and none of that would have occured if the schedule were not credible. Canada knows the rate, the products, the effective date, the conduct that caused it, and the conduct that would end it. Ambassador Greer told the Senate Finance Committee that the administration remains open to discussing a path forward, which is the language of leverage rather than punishment.

History suggests this is how the provision was always meant to work. Section 338 was copied largely from Section 317 of the Tariff Act of 1922, which the Tariff Commission designed to secure equality of treatment for American commerce. Veroneau and Gibson’s scholarship found that the prospect of tariff action was frequently sufficient on its own. In 1932, the United States threatened Section 338 action against France over discriminatory quotas and a tax arrangement favoring Belgium, and obtained an agreement assuring equal treatment without ever imposing a duty. The weakness of the old model was that the threat was eventually no longer believed. Trump has repaired that, permanently. Every trade ministry contemplating a discriminatory digital tax, licensing rule, port fee, or shelf ban must now price in a statute they had written off as decorative.

This is why the move works regardless of which way Canada jumps. If Ottawa and the provinces restore equal treatment before August 19, American producers get what reciprocity was always supposed to deliver, and not a dollar is collected. If Canada refuses, collection begins, and the world learns that access to the American consumer is conditional on treating American goods no worse than anyone else’s. The America First Policy Institute called Section 338 the best statutory vehicle available two months before the proclamations issued, and even the Center for Strategic and International Studies, hardly a friendly forum, concedes the statute gives this administration a faster path to the table.

Greer testified that the goods deficit with Canada grew from $13 billion in 2020 to $61 billion in 2024, and American Compass has documented that the average world tariff of 6.7% is more than double the 2.7% American rate. Those numbers describe an asymmetry that decades of polite negotiation failed to correct. A defeat at the Supreme Court has produced a narrower, faster, better-grounded, and considerably more dangerous instrument than the one it replaced. That is not luck. That is reading the opinion carefully and doing what it said.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in partnership with Grammerly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

Consider a man who lives in Kotzebue, above the Arctic Circle, off the road system, reachable only by air. Every January he fills out an application for the Permanent Fund Dividend. If it is his first time, the State of Alaska tells him something rather demanding. It will not accept a photocopy. It will not accept a hospital certificate. It wants the original birth certificate, or the original passport, or the original naturalization certificate. So he puts the document in an envelope, encloses a self-addressed stamped envelope, and mails it to Juneau. The state examines it, verifies him, returns the original, and eventually sends him money. He never boards a plane.

Now ask the obvious question. If Alaska can authenticate that man’s identity and legal status well enough to hand him a check drawn on the state’s oil wealth, why can it not authenticate him well enough to hand him a federal ballot? That question is the heart of the dispute over the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, and Sen. Lisa Murkowski has not yet answered it.

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Murkowski does not oppose voter identification. She has written that she agrees voters should verify who they are and that she strongly supports voter ID, as Alaska already requires. On the Senate floor, she went further, saying of documentary proof of citizenship, “Requiring proof of citizenship. OK. We can figure this out.” Asked whether the logistical burden was insurmountable, she answered, “Is it insurmountable? Maybe not.” Those are not the words of a senator who rejects the principle. They are the words of a senator who objects to an implementation detail and has allowed that objection to swallow her vote.

Her strongest complaint is narrow and, taken on its own terms, fair. The House-passed substitute to S.1383, adopted on February 11, 2026, by 218-213, would generally require that a person who registers by mail later present documentary proof of citizenship in person. Murkowski notes that more than 80% of Alaska’s 2024 registration applicants used mail, online registration or the PFD pipeline, and that of roughly 29,000 new registrations, perhaps 25,000 would have been routed into an in-person process. She notes that Alaska REAL IDs do not state citizenship. She notes that airfare from a village to a regional hub is not a trivial expense. All true.

But notice what follows and what does not. What follows is that the in-person clause is badly drafted for Alaska. What does not follow is that Alaska cannot verify citizenship. The first is a drafting problem with an obvious fix. The second is a claim about administrative impossibility, and Alaska’s own government refutes it every single year.

Here is the refutation. In 2025, Alaska’s estimated population was 738,737. The Permanent Fund Dividend Division received 665,327 applications, roughly 90% of the entire state, and paid 618,863 people a total of $619,648,403.43. It did this with three dedicated offices in Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Juneau. In 2022, when the dividend was $3,284, the program moved more than $2 billion. This is not a boutique operation serving a few urban applicants. It is a statewide eligibility system that individually screens nearly every resident of the state, requires original documents from newcomers, distinguishes between citizens, lawful permanent residents, refugees and asylees, and manages the whole business by mail because the alternative was never available to begin with.

If Murkowski’s geographic argument were sound in its broad form, the PFD could not exist. The dividend would have collapsed decades ago under the weight of the same distances, the same weather, the same absent roads. It did not collapse. Alaska simply built a remote process, and it has been running that process at enormous scale, with real money at stake and real incentives to cheat, since before most of the current voter-ID debate began.

There is a further wrinkle, and it cuts in an uncomfortable direction for the senator. The PFD is already part of Alaska’s election machinery. In November 2016, Alaskans approved Ballot Measure 1, which registers eligible PFD applicants to vote or updates their existing registration unless they opt out. The margin was 197,702 to 108,467, or 64.57% to 35.43%. In 2025 alone, the state processed 389,935 valid PFD applications for automatic registration purposes, mailed 68,717 notices, recorded 7,220 opt-outs, registered 7,041 new voters and updated 371,480 existing records, all at an annual program cost of $262,130.89. Alaska already conducts mass data matching, individualized mailed notice, response processing and hundreds of thousands of record changes every year, for about a quarter of a million dollars. The administrative muscles exist. They are being exercised right now.

And here is where the argument becomes difficult to answer. Alaska’s own Division of Elections warns residents that receiving a voter identification card does not mean you are a US citizen. It explains that a noncitizen may have been automatically registered through PFD information and instructs that person to call and cancel. That warning is remarkable. The state is publicly conceding that its principal registration pipeline can enroll people who are not eligible to vote, and its remedy is to hope the ineligible registrant volunteers to fix it. So Alaska demands an original naturalization certificate before it will send a $1,000 check, and accepts self-correction before it will send a ballot. That asymmetry is the actual scandal here, and it is not one the SAVE Act created.

The July 2026 episode in which Alaska mailed 3,048 letters asking voters to confirm citizenship, against a normal DMV-match yield of roughly 200, illustrates both halves of the point. It shows the state is already checking. It also shows the checks run on stale data, because officials suspect many recipients had naturalized without updating DMV records. The lesson is not that verification is hopeless. The lesson is that verification done through good records, with notice and a chance to respond, is better than verification done through a database mismatch and a form letter.

None of this requires pretending the House text is perfect. Murkowski has identified genuine flaws, and a serious conservative should say so plainly. The in-person clause should be replaced with a PFD-style remote channel: trackable mail with return of originals, certified electronic records, direct agency-to-agency confirmation with vital statistics offices and the passport agency. Citizenship should be verified once and carried on the record as a durable flag, because naturalization is not a status that expires. Documents and the ID itself should be free. Tribal governments, municipal clerks, libraries and mobile teams should be authorized verification points, which is precisely what the bipartisan Carter-Baker commission recommended back in 2005 when it paired uniform photo ID with free cards, mobile units and a five-year phase-in. Only 3 of that commission’s 21 members dissented. Jimmy Carter and James Baker put it better than any of us have since: make it easy to vote but tough to cheat. And the three-day cure period for a provisional ballot is plainly too short for a village where the mail plane may not fly for a week, so lengthen it.

Those are amendments. Murkowski could offer every one of them tomorrow. She has the leverage, the credibility and the seniority to write the Alaska accommodations into the bill herself, and the fact that she has instead chosen to be the obstacle rather than the author is the part that genuinely puzzles me, because in a chamber where Republicans hold 53 seats and need 60, the senator who can deliver the rural fix is worth more than the senator who explains why the fix is impossible.

The empirical objections are weaker than they are usually presented. Enrico Cantoni and Vincent Pons, publishing in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, examined a panel of 1.6 billion observations from 2008 through 2018 and found no negative effect of strict ID laws on registration or turnout, overall or by race, gender, age or party, with central estimates near negative 0.1 percentage points and confidence intervals spanning zero. Hoekstra and Koppa, studying more than 2,000 races in Florida and Michigan, calculated that no more than 0.10% and 0.31% of votes, respectively, were cast without identification. The Supreme Court settled the constitutional question in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board in 2008, emphasizing free ID and provisional ballots as the features that make such laws sustainable. Thirty-six states already request or require identification, 23 of them photo. Alaska is one of the separate handful classified as non-strict and non-photo.

The public is not confused about any of this. Pew found 83% of US adults favoring government-issued photo ID in 2025; Gallup found 84% in 2024, with 83% supporting proof of citizenship at first registration. In Alaska specifically, a Heritage Action survey of 415 likely voters in February 2026 found 69% supporting proof of citizenship at registration, including 61% of independents and 48% of Democrats, with 75% favoring removal of noncitizens from the rolls. An earlier 2022 survey of 512 likely Alaska voters found 66% supporting photo ID. Both polls were sponsored by groups favoring election-integrity measures and should be read as directional, but the 2016 dividend-registration referendum was not a poll at all, and Alaskans passed that by nearly two-thirds.

So the senator should stop arguing about whether Alaska can verify voters and start arguing about how. Rural Alaska has earned accommodation in the method. It has not earned exemption from the rule. The state that will not mail a man his oil check until it has held his original birth certificate in its hands has already conceded the principle. It only remains for Lisa Murkowski to concede it too, and then to vote.

If you enjoy my work, please subscribe https://x.com/amuse/creator-subscriptions/subscribe

Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in partnership with Grammerly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

Imagine a 24-year-old sergeant from Ohio. He is deployed to a country that joined a treaty his own country voted against, refused to ratify, and formally repudiated. He took an oath to the Constitution. His conduct is governed by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, reviewed by his chain of command, and subject to prosecution in American courts if he breaks American law. Now ask a simple question. Who may lawfully take away his liberty? The intuitive answer is his own government, acting through institutions his fellow citizens created, or a foreign government exercising ordinary territorial law under the familiar rules of extradition and diplomacy. The International Criminal Court gives a third answer, and that third answer is the whole controversy.

Consider an analogy. Two neighbors sign a contract creating a private arbitration board and agree to be bound by its rulings. That is unremarkable. Now suppose those two neighbors declare that the board may also summon, judge, and punish a third neighbor who read the contract, objected to it, and refused to sign. We would not call that arbitration. We would call it an imposition dressed in the vocabulary of agreement. Article 12 of the Rome Statute does precisely this. It permits the Court to exercise jurisdiction over a citizen of a nonmember state whenever the alleged conduct occurred on the territory of a member state. The United Nations’ own legal history describes this as territorial jurisdiction applying irrespective of the nationality of the alleged perpetrator. One country’s decision to join thereby generates criminal exposure for the citizens of a country that declined.

Defenders of the Court often reply that this is a technical byproduct of territoriality, an unfortunate wrinkle that clever lawyers discovered later. The record says otherwise. At the Rome conference in 1998, with 160 delegations and 135 nongovernmental organizations present, the American delegation proposed an amendment protecting nationals of nonparty states absent their government’s consent. The conference did not debate that amendment on its merits and reject it. It approved a motion to take no action on the American proposal at all, 113 to 17 with 25 abstentions, then adopted the statute 120 to 7 with 21 abstentions, the United States voting no. The drafters were told exactly what the objection was. They were handed language that would have cured it. They declined even to consider it. The defect is therefore not a scandal that a better prosecutor might repair. It is the founding bargain.

This matters because the objection is frequently caricatured as partisan and recent. It is neither. President Bill Clinton signed the treaty on the last day of 2000, and his signing statement is worth reading closely, because it is not an endorsement. He called the Court’s assertion of authority over personnel of nonparty states a significant flaw, declined to recommend the treaty to the Senate, and said plainly that jurisdiction over American personnel should come only with American ratification. In May 2002, the Bush administration notified the Secretary-General that the United States did not intend to become a party. By 2005, the United States had concluded non-surrender agreements with 99 governments. The Biden administration rejected the Court’s jurisdiction over Americans and Israelis. Five administrations, three of them Democrat, reached the same conclusion. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s July 2026 campaign to dismantle the Court is not a rupture. It is the terminus of 28 years of continuous American judgment.

Now consider what the sergeant loses. American criminal procedure is not a collection of nice-to-have courtesies. It is a chain of consent. Congress defines the crime. A president accountable to voters appoints prosecutors confirmed by the Senate. A grand jury of citizens decides whether an accusation may proceed at all. An Article III judge, holding office during good behavior with protected compensation, presides. A jury drawn from the community determines guilt. The Supreme Court reviews. At the ICC, none of this exists. The judges are chosen by an assembly of foreign governments. The prosecutor is elected by member states to a nine-year term. There is no grand jury, no trial jury, no vicinage guarantee, no American appellate review, and no complete body of confrontation, compulsory process, and exclusionary doctrine. The Rome Statute does provide a presumption of innocence, counsel, and notice of charges. That is not nothing. But the question is not whether ICC procedure resembles a show trial. It does not. The question is whether an American may be deprived of liberty under a system that omits protections his own Constitution makes mandatory.

Congress answered that question in 2002, and the answer it gave is far more forceful than most Americans realize. The American Service-Members’ Protection Act, passed with bipartisan support and signed into law in August of that year, restricted cooperation with the Court, limited participation in peacekeeping operations lacking protection for US personnel, and barred certain military assistance to states parties that had not concluded Article 98 agreements. Those are the provisions the law reviews tend to discuss. They are not the provision that gave the statute its nickname. Section 2008 authorizes the President to use “all means necessary and appropriate” to bring about the release of covered United States persons and covered allied persons detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court. Critics promptly dubbed it the Hague Invasion Act, and they meant it as ridicule. They should have read it as a warning.

Pay attention to what Congress did not write. It did not authorize the President to pursue diplomatic remonstrance. It did not confine him to sanctions, visa restrictions, litigation, or the withholding of assistance. It selected a formula with a long and well-understood pedigree in American statutory and international practice, a formula that in the resolutions authorizing the Gulf War and subsequent military campaigns has always been understood to encompass the use of armed force. Congress legislates against the background of settled usage. When it chose “all means necessary and appropriate,” it chose the broadest available grant, and it did so knowingly, over the objections of members who wanted narrower language precisely because they understood what the broader phrase permits. The statute does not command a rescue operation. It authorizes one, should a President determine that nothing short of it will return an American soldier held at the request of a foreign court his country never joined.

I want to be careful about the register here, because the point is not that American paratroopers are likely to descend on the Dutch coast. The point is jurisdictional, and it is one of the clearest statements Congress has ever made about the limits of foreign authority over American citizens. A legislature does not authorize the use of force to recover its own nationals from an institution it regards as legitimate. It authorizes force when it has concluded that the detention itself would be a wrong, that no appeal to the detaining body could cure it, and that the citizen’s liberty is not a matter on which the United States will negotiate. Congress made that judgment 24 years ago. It has never repealed it. Every subsequent administration has operated in its shadow, and the ICC has operated in its shadow too, which may partly explain why the Court has never actually attempted to take an American into custody.

That restraint should not be mistaken for a guarantee. Consider what the Court has already done. It sought and obtained authorization to investigate conduct in Afghanistan, a member state, with potential exposure for US military and intelligence personnel, and it did so after an initial pretrial chamber declined and an appeals chamber reversed. The Military Coalition, representing more than 5.5 million service members, veterans, families, and survivors, warned that the investigation could lead to the arrest, prosecution, and detention of American personnel in foreign countries. That is the practical form the abstraction takes. Not a courtroom in The Hague, but an airport in a member state, a retired officer on vacation, and a warrant executed by an allied government that believes itself obligated.

Independence, meanwhile, is not the same thing as accountability, and the Court has systematically confused the two. Under Article 15, the prosecutor may open investigations on his own motion, subject only to authorization by judges within the same treaty system. No electorate can remove him. No legislature can narrow his jurisdiction. When misconduct allegations against Prosecutor Karim Khan surfaced in 2024, the institution required nearly two years to resolve them. He went on leave in 2025. On July 24, 2026, 82 of the 125 member states voted to remove him for serious misconduct and a serious breach of duty. He denies the allegations and intends to challenge the process, and he is entitled to that. But note the lesson. A court claiming authority to declare whether entire nations are genuinely willing to investigate wrongdoing spent two years failing to resolve allegations against its own chief prosecutor, while the warrants he had sought remained in force.

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The record compounds the problem. As of February 2025, Reuters reported an annual budget of roughly $223 million, 60 arrest warrants, 11 convictions, and 31 suspects still at large. The Associated Press estimated spending exceeding $2.5 billion over the Court’s first two decades. Some of those convictions involve offenses against the administration of justice rather than genocide or war crimes. The first Darfur conviction arrived in 2025, more than 20 years after the atrocities began. Joseph Kony has been a fugitive since 2005. Omar al-Bashir traveled for years unmolested. Russia will not surrender Vladimir Putin. China never joined. What the Court can reach are officials of cooperating states, leaders of collapsed governments, and democratic politicians who travel openly because they have nothing to hide. Accessibility, not culpability, becomes the selection criterion.

The Israel proceedings show where that leads. In May 2024, the prosecutor announced warrant applications involving Prime Minister Netanyahu, Defense Minister Gallant, and Hamas leaders in a single event, and in November the judges issued warrants. Israel is not a member. The Court proceeded on jurisdiction derived from Palestine and rejected Israeli objections regarding notification and complementarity, despite Israel’s functioning courts, military lawyers, parliamentary opposition, and internal investigative machinery. President Biden’s own reaction was that there is no equivalence, none, between Israel and Hamas. He was right, and the Court’s formal protestations that simultaneous charging implies no moral equivalence miss the point entirely, because equivalence in political effect is produced by the packaging, by the shared seal and the shared press conference and the shared news cycle. A terrorist organization that embeds its fighters among civilians can manufacture casualties, feed the imagery to sympathetic organizations, and watch an international prosecutor convert its own strategy into charges against the democracy defending itself.

Complementarity offers no refuge either. In the Kenya litigation, the government argued that domestic proceedings were underway, and ICC judges held that those proceedings did not sufficiently cover the same persons and the same conduct. So complementarity does not mean the Court stands aside when a nation investigates. It means the Court decides whether the nation’s investigation counts. An American inquiry could be deemed too narrow, too slow, aimed at the wrong ranks, or resolved administratively rather than criminally, and foreign judges would render that verdict on American sovereignity.

There is also a humanitarian cost rarely tallied. Allard Duursma’s peer-reviewed study of intrastate conflicts from 2002 through 2018 found that ICC warrants undermined the prospect of ending civil wars through negotiated settlement. The mechanism is not mysterious. A commander who believes surrender means a flight to The Hague has every reason to keep fighting. Ugandan mediator Betty Bigombe said it had become extremely difficult for her to talk meaningfully to the leadership of the Lord’s Resistance Army. Two decades later, Kony is still free, and in November 2025 the Court confirmed 39 charges against a man it has never once had in custody, which is a strange sort of triumph.

None of this is an argument for impunity. America prosecuted at Nuremberg. America supported the Yugoslavia and Rwanda tribunals, both of which had defined conflicts, defined mandates, and endpoints. The alternative to a permanent supranational prosecutor is not lawlessness. It is national courts, military justice, extradition, and tribunals constituted for particular atrocities by bodies answerable to actual populations. A temporary tribunal finishes its work and dissolves. A permanent one must forever find new work to justify its budget, which is exactly the incentive you would design if you wanted jurisdictional creep, and creep is what we have seen, from the Myanmar theory that reached a nonmember through a single cross-border element, to the activation of the crime of aggression in 2018, to a Palestine theory that reached the elected leader of a democratic ally.

So dismantling is the right word. It means denying the Court legitimacy, prohibiting cooperation and funding, enforcing and expanding non-surrender agreements, sanctioning those who materially assist unauthorized proceedings against Americans, and encouraging member states to withdraw. Rubio has committed to taking the thing apart brick by brick if necessary. Critics call this hostility to international law. It is better understood as fidelity to the only law that can legitimately imprison a free person: the law he had a hand in making. Congress said as much in 2002, in language it chose deliberately and has never softened. The sergeant from Ohio never voted for the Rome Statute. Neither did you. That should be the end of the matter.

If you enjoy my work, please subscribe https://x.com/amuse/creator-subscriptions/subscribe

Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed was edited for grammar and clarity using AI in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

Stand at Hains Point on a Saturday morning in spring, and you will see two things at once. The first is a crowd. Golfers are stacked at the starter's window, the range stalls are full, and the tee sheet has been sold out for days. The second is the condition of the ground they are standing on. The irrigation is failing, the drainage is worse, the clubhouse has taken on water, the cart paths are worn through, and the trees overhead include a number that arborists have flagged as hazards. East Potomac Golf Links is simultaneously one of the most popular recreational facilities in the nation's capital and one of the most neglected.

The numbers are not in serious dispute. The course recorded 124,960 rounds in 2025, which works out to roughly 342 rounds for every day on the calendar, including the frozen ones. On May 3, 2026, golfers played nearly 900 rounds in a single day. A 2026 condition assessment placed numerous facilities at the property in “poor or critical” condition, citing water damage, broken fixtures, structural concerns, and potential safety hazards. The federal repair inventory reads like a punch list for a foreclosed property, running from the parking lot and the retaining wall to the light poles, cart paths, driving range building, golf barn, and starter building. The Justice Department, defending the government in federal court, described a “state of deterioration” requiring “significant maintenance, rehabilitation, and reconstruction.” That admission was made in litigation, under the discipline of the record, not in a press release.

So here is the puzzle worth thinking about carefully. Nobody argues that East Potomac is fine. The National Park Service does not argue it. The former leaseholder does not argue it. The plaintiffs suing to stop the renovation do not really argue it either. What they argue is that the wrong person is fixing it, at the wrong speed, under the wrong procedure. That is a very different objection, and it deserves to be examined on its own terms rather than dressed up as environmental stewardship.

Consider an old philosophical puzzle that turns out to be the whole argument in miniature. A ship is repaired at sea. A plank rots and is replaced, then another, then another, until in time no original plank remains. Is it the same ship? The commonsense answer, and I think the correct one, is yes. A ship is not a pile of specific boards. It is a form, a function, and a continuous history of use and care. Replacing rotted planks is not what destroys a ship. Refusing to replace them is.

East Potomac is that ship. Its historic significance does not reside in a particular length of failing irrigation pipe or a particular diseased tree. It resides in the fact that for more than a century, ordinary Washingtonians have walked that ground with clubs in their hands, on public land, at public prices. Preservation, properly understood, means keeping that alive. What the litigants are demanding is not preservation but embalming, the freezing of a decaying object in its current state on the theory that decay is more authentic than repair. That is a category error, and it is one that has cost the District dearly.

The accountability question is where the case becomes airtight. In July 2019, the Park Service announced it wanted a long-term lease for the District’s public courses precisely because a long lease would, in its own words, “allow for substantial capital investments.” That was the federal government’s own diagnosis. Short concession agreements were not producing capital. A 50-year horizon might. In September 2020, NPS signed exactly such a lease with National Links Trust, a nonprofit whose proposal called for reconstructing the Red and White courses, restoring the historic design, redesigning the driving range, building an 18-hole putting course, and rehabilitating the clubhouse.

Notice what that proposal concedes. The tenant itself said the property needed a comprehensive rebuild. The lease assigned it responsibility for ordinary and extraordinary repair, structural and nonstructural, replacement of obsolete equipment, grounds care, and capital construction. This was not a landscaping contract. It was a stewardship agreement drafted for a property everyone knew was in trouble.

Five years later, the transformation that justified a half-century lease had not happened. The trust did real work, and it is not necessary to pretend otherwise. It grew rounds, restored the miniature golf course, ran youth programs, and reported $8.5 million to $11 million in improvements spread across three properties, while its revenue climbed from roughly $2.6 million in 2020 to $15 million in 2024. But growth in an organization’s balance sheet is not the same thing as a rebuilt golf course, and by December 2025 the Interior Department had seen enough. It terminated the master lease, citing unfinished projects, an inadequate cure proposal, and a claim for up to $8.8 million in unpaid percentage rent. In May 2026, a revised arrangement left the trust operating Langston and Rock Creek, with East Potomac reverting to federal management.

That is not a scandal. That is a landlord finally acting like an owner. The government held title the entire time, and when the mechanism it chose failed to deliver, it changed the mechanism. Anyone who has ever fired a contractor understands the logic instinctively.

What replaced it is more ambitious than anything the District has been offered in living memory. Interior and the Park Service will manage the work. Tom Fazio’s firm will design it. As much as $150 million in private charitable contributions will pay for it, which means the capital burden does not land on the taxpayer. The plan calls for an 18-hole championship layout playable from about 5,700 yards to 7,660 yards, rebuilt irrigation and drainage, modernized practice facilities, a short course, and a new clubhouse. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has promised “championship-quality golf at affordable, highly discounted rates” for residents of the National Capital Region. President Trump has said plainly that the course stays public.

The predictable objection is that excellence and access cannot coexist, that a Fazio course must inevitably become a playground for lobbyists. The objection collapses on contact with evidence. Bethpage State Park in New York is owned by the state, hosts roughly 300,000 rounds a year across five courses, and has staged two US Opens, a PGA Championship, and the 2025 Ryder Cup. Torrey Pines belongs to the City of San Diego, hosts a PGA Tour event annually, has hosted two US Opens, and charged residents $73 for a weekday round on the South Course in 2026 while nonresidents paid $258. Visitors subsidize locals. That is the model; it works, and there is no reason the capital of the United States should settle for less than a New York state park.

Which brings us to the lawsuit, and to a pattern that has become impossible to miss. In February 2026, the DC Preservation League and two individual plaintiffs sued Interior, Burgum, and the Park Service under the Administrative Procedure Act, NEPA, the National Historic Preservation Act, the Organic Act, and an 1897 statute providing that the land be held as a park for recreation and pleasure. Set aside the last one, since golf is quite obviously recreation and has been on that ground since before most of the neighborhood existed. The substance of the complaint is procedural. It says the paperwork is not finished.

Judge Ana Reyes has not been persuaded that anything unlawful has occurred. In early May she declined to grant the sweeping emergency relief the plaintiffs sought, permitting routine maintainance to continue while requiring notice before major work. At a hearing on July 2 she said, in as clear a statement of the situation as anyone has managed, “I don’t want to file an injunction. I’m not there yet.” As of late July, there has been no merits ruling declaring the project unlawful and no project-wide injunction.

I want to be careful here, because process statutes exist for good reasons and the administration should satisfy them. Soil and demolition material placed at the site should be tested and the results published, and if the material is unsuitable it should be removed. A renovation completed by the book is far harder for a future administration to unwind. But there is a difference between a process and a veto, and the plaintiffs know exactly which one they are seeking, they are not asking for a better golf course or a cleaner one or a more historically faithful one, they are asking for delay, because delay is the only tool that reliably works and because every month of delay is a month in which the President cannot be seen to have accomplished something in a city his opponents have governed into the ground.

We have watched this movie repeatedly. He sent resources to make the District safer, and crime fell, and the response was litigation. He moved to repair crumbling parks, dry fountains, and stained monuments, and the response was litigation. He proposed a ballroom at the White House, a building that has been renovated, expanded, and rebuilt by nearly every generation of Americans who occupied it, and the response was litigation. He proposed new monuments honoring American heroes, and the response was litigation. Now he proposes to rebuild a public golf course that all parties describe as deteriorated, using private money, on federal land, for public golfers, and the response is, once again, litigation.

The Tidal Basin ought to settle the competence question. More than 6,000 feet of seawall were rehabilitated and reopened in April 2026, with 426 trees replanted, including 269 cherries, roughly eight months ahead of schedule and about $30 million under budget. Burgum called it proof of “what can be accomplished when we invest in America’s treasures.” Anyone who walked those paths when they flooded twice a day knows he is right.

So the question in front of Washington is not whether East Potomac needs to be rebuilt. Every institutional actor in the story, including the tenant that lost the lease, has conceded that it does. The question is whether a city can still build anything at all, or whether we have constructed a legal architecture in which the mere act of improving public property is presumptively suspicious. Nearly 125,000 rounds a year say the people of the District want this course. They deserve a great one. They have earned better than mud, broken pipes, and a lawsuit filed on their behalf by people who did not ask them first.

If you enjoy my work, please subscribe https://x.com/amuse/creator-subscriptions/subscribe

Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed was edited for grammar and clarity using AI in a partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

In February 2026, a Flock Safety camera in Sherwood, Arkansas, misread a single digit on a license plate. Police treated the alert as a stolen vehicle hit and conducted a high-risk stop. An innocent couple was ordered out of their car at gunpoint while their six-week-old baby sat in the back seat. Five months earlier and 500 miles away, a Hays County, Texas jury sentenced Omar Galvan-Ochoa to life in prison for shooting a man three times in the back at a Buda gas station. The surveillance video of the murder was too grainy to reveal the killer’s plate. Flock images identified the truck. A local witness confirmed it. A murderer is behind bars because those cameras existed.

Both of these things are true. Both happened because of the same technology, operating exactly as designed. And studying the record, I cannot tell you whether Flock is a net good or a net evil. I genuinely do not know. What I can do is arm you with both sides of the ledger, because your city council, your sheriff, your state legislature, and eventually Congress are going to have to decide, and they should decide with eyes open. Let me warn you, no matter where you stand on the Flock issue, you’re not going to be happy with this op-ed.

Start with what the cameras accomplish, because the case is stronger than critics admit. Flock operates more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states, generating an estimated 20 billion scans per month. The company’s 2025 Impact Census, drawn from nearly 700 agencies in 43 states, reported that its systems supported more than 1 million investigations and assisted in roughly 20% of solved cases in customer jurisdictions. Approximately 10,000 missing persons were located, about 27 per day. Those are company figures and deserve appropriate skepticism, but independent research points the same direction. A randomized National Institute of Justice experiment in Mesa, Arizona found that license plate readers checked 8 to 10 times as many plates as manual methods, produced nearly three times as many stolen-vehicle hits, and doubled recoveries. That is the definition of a force multiplier.

The prosecutorial record is concrete. In July 2026, a robber hit the First Convenience Bank on Houston’s Eastex Freeway and fled in a gray sedan. Bank surveillance captured the plate. Flock located the car. Deputies found the suspect still wearing the same clothing, still holding the handwritten demand note and the bank’s money. In Norfolk, Virginia, a detective searching a two-hour window on two cameras turned a vague description of a white BMW with black rims into a plate, a registration match, search warrants, recovered stolen property, and guilty pleas that survived appellate review. San Diego’s official 2025 surveillance report documents 361 cases advanced, 269 arrests, 12 firearms recovered, $3.1 million in stolen property returned, and assistance in nearly a third of the city’s homicide investigations. As Hays County prosecutor Elizabeth Schmidt put it after the Galvan-Ochoa verdict, bringing the killer to justice was a team effort. The camera was one member of the team. It did not convict anyone by itself. It gave human investigators a lead that would otherwise have evaporated, and ordinary warrants, witnesses, and juries did the rest.

Now the other ledger, and it is long. The Institute for Justice, a libertarian legal foundation not known for hostility to property rights or police, has documented at least 26 cases of officers using license plate readers to stalk romantic interests, most since 2024. These were not rookies who misunderstood policy. A Kansas police chief searched his former girlfriend’s vehicle 164 times and her new boyfriend’s 64 times. A Georgia deputy allegedly searched the plate of a woman he was having an affair with 1,639 times. Georgia alone has produced at least 19 public employees implicated in Flock or ALPR misuse, including a police chief charged with stalking, five Albany officers arrested in a single July 2026 sweep, and a dispatch supervisor arrested just this week. Critically, IJ found that only a few of these cases were caught by internal controls. Most surfaced because a victim complained. The audit log existed the whole time. Nobody was reading it.

The mission creep is worse than the stalking, because it is institutional rather than personal. A Johnson County, Texas investigator searched 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks looking for a woman, reaching cameras in Illinois and Washington whose local governments never consented to that use. Ventura County, California, discovered more than 364,000 out-of-state queries of its data in roughly two months, without the county’s knowledge. An Illinois audit found federal Customs and Border Protection accessing state camera data in violation of state law. A DEA agent in Louisville used a local detective’s password without the detective’s knowledge. Flock’s own CEO, Garrett Langley, admitted the company “didn’t create distinct permissions and protocols” to ensure federal users followed local rules. The Electronic Frontier Foundation examined more than 12 million searches and found over 50 agencies running protest-related queries, including searches justified simply as “KINGS DAY PROTEST.” Whatever your politics, understand the symmetry: a network that can identify every vehicle near an anti-ICE march can identify every vehicle near a pro-life vigil or a gun rights rally. The infrastructure does not care which side you are on.

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Then there is error. IJ catalogs 27 mistaken stops from stationary plate readers since 2018, with 19 traced to Flock cameras, and in nearly two-thirds of them officers drew or pointed guns before discovering the mistake. Grandparents held at gunpoint in Tennessee because a camera read an O as a zero. A Toledo man jailed and bitten by a police dog over a misread 7. An innocent motorist in Volusia County who spent 13 days in jail. And the security picture is genuinely alarming: at least 35 sets of stolen customer credentials, some offered on a Russian-language cybercrime forum, more than 60 camera feeds sitting on the open internet with no password, and 15 published CVE vulnerabilities including hardcoded passwords and disabled secure boot. Douglas County’s Republican sheriff, Darren Weekly, canceled his contract after finding one of his own feeds exposed online. “Trust was lost,” he said. Even the vendor’s conduct raises questions. Flock employees accessed Dunwoody, Georgia’s cameras overlooking a children’s gymnastics facility, a playground, and a Jewish community center more than 480 times, some of it for sales demonstrations.

So which is it? Here is where honesty requires me to disappoint you. The tool that found the Buda murderer’s truck and the tool that let a chief stalk his ex are the same tool, and not accidentally. The very feature that makes Flock powerful for prosecution, the ability to reconstruct where a vehicle has been across time and across jurisdictions, is precisely the feature that makes it irresistible for abuse. You cannot have one without at least the standing temptation of the other. A single officer at one intersection seeing one plate is traditional policing. A searchable 30-day national history of a vehicle’s movements is something categorically different, and our law has not caught up to the difference.

Can regulation thread the needle? Perhaps. The reform menu is well developed: warrant requirements for historical movement searches, mandatory multifactor authentication, prohibition of shared credentials, monthly insider-threat audits, automatic flags when the same private vehicle is searched repeatedly, verification of plate and vehicle before any high-risk stop, criminal penalties for personal use, and public reporting of outside-agency access. Georgia’s cascade of arrests suggests audits work when someone actually performs them, which raises the uncomfortable question of what every non-auditing state would find if it looked. San Diego proves that detailed public reporting is practical. But the skeptic’s rejoinder deserves equal weight: nearly every abuse cataloged above occurred despite existing policies, existing logs, and existing rules. The Fort Bend County lieutenant who ran hundreds of personal searches received a two-day suspension. Rules that are not enforced are decorations, and a movement database may simply be too tempting for the roughly 800,000 sworn officers, countless civilian employees, federal agents, and vendor staff who can touch it. I find I cannot confidently predict whether the reform program tames the tool or merely papers over it, and anyone who claims certainty on this question is selling something.

What I am certain of is this: the decision belongs to you and your neighbors, not to a vendor’s marketing department and not to a privacy group’s press release. Oshkosh rescinded its contract in under 24 hours after learning the company misdescribed a heat map feature. Evanston pulled 19 cameras. Harris County renewed for $868,975. Each community weighed the same evidence and reached a different answer, which is federalism working as intended. Ask your police department for its search logs, its audit schedule, its error rate, and its outside-access list. Ask your prosecutor how many cases the cameras actually built. Then decide whether the murderer caught in Buda outweighs the infant at gunpoint in Sherwood, or the reverse. I have laid out both pans of the scale as fairly as I can. I do not know which way it tips. That judgment, in a free country, is yours.

If you enjoy my work, please subscribe https://x.com/amuse/creator-subscriptions/subscribe

Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in partnership with Grammerly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

Begin with a small act of generosity. A Brooklyn graduate student, a dues-paying member of the Democratic Socialists of America, gives $250 to a socialist candidate for mayor of New York City. She believes she has contributed $250. She has not. Under New York City’s public campaign-finance system, that qualifying contribution is matched by the taxpayers at a rate of 8 to 1 on the first $250. Her gift generates $2,000 in public money, and the candidate banks $2,250. One donation became nine. Multiply that transaction by 20,000 committed donors and you begin to understand how Zohran Mamdani became mayor of the largest city in the US, and why the socialist left keeps defeating Democratic incumbents who outspend it by margins that would embarrass a lottery.

Before the 2025 Democratic primary, Mamdani’s campaign had raised approximately $1.7 million in private money. The New York City Campaign Finance Board then delivered $7,050,417 in public funds, roughly 4.15 times what the campaign had raised on its own. Across the full election cycle the ratio grew worse. The campaign raised $3,978,435 privately and received $12,787,729 in public money, more than three times its private haul. Fully 96.1% of Mamdani’s donors were classified as small donors, which is precisely the donor profile the matching system is designed to reward. The city did not merely permit a socialist campaign. It financed one, at scale, with money extracted from the very taxpayers whose police department, housing stock, and business climate the Islamic Marxist candidate proposed to transform.

Of course, the DSA did not create New York’s matching system. And other candidates like Andrew Cuomo used it. The system is neutral on its face. But a neutral mechanism can still confer a wildly asymmetric advantage, the way a tax loophole available to everyone in principle enriches only those organized enough to exploit it. The matching program multiplies qualifying small donations. The organization best positioned to profit is therefore the organization that can manufacture the largest number of small, qualifying, ideologically motivated donations on command. That organization is not the Democratic establishment, whose model runs on large checks, bundlers, and committee transfers. It is DSA, whose entire financial culture is built on recurring small payments from true believers. New York wrote the rules of a game that socialists happen to play better than anyone else in American politics, and the socialists noticed.

Here is where the story becomes larger than one city’s campaign-finance ordinance. The comfortable assumption among Republicans and moderate Democrats alike is that the socialist left must be swimming in dark money, that some hidden billionaire or foundation network explains its victories. While that may be true in reality, on paper the filings say otherwise. National DSA reported $6.4 million in total 2024 revenue. The Democratic National Committee raised $684 million in the 2023-24 cycle, roughly 107 times as much, and the full complex of Democratic federal committees raised about $1.6 billion. DSA’s federal PAC is almost comically small. Between January 2025 and June 2026 it reported zero receipts, $84 in expenditures, and $34.22 in cash on hand. Anyone hunting for a socialist super PAC will conclude there is nothing to see. That conclusion is exactly wrong, because the money was never the weapon. The organization is the weapon, and the money is merely its fuel.

Consider how the machine is actually assembled. The InfluenceWatch review of DSA’s tax filings found that membership dues rose from 43.8% of revenue in 2016 to 88.8% by 2021. DSA’s own donation page announces that “as a working class organization, we are funding ourselves.” This is not spin. It is an accurate description of a recurring-revenue model that would make a software executive envious. Membership hovered near 5,000 for decades, reached about 50,000 by 2020, and after President Trump’s second inauguration exploded to a reported 120,000 by July 4, 2026, a 135% increase in under two years. Every new member is not a one-time donor but a subscription. The New York City chapter states that 20% of national monthly dues flows back to the local chapter, which also collects its own separate local dues of $15 to $50 per month. National growth thus automatically finances local electoral infrastructure, offices, literature, technology, and staff, year round, in the exact neighborhoods where the next primary challenge will be mounted.

Then comes the labor, which appears on no campaign-finance report at all. Mamdani’s primary operation deployed more than 50,000 volunteers who knocked on 1.5 million doors and made more than 2 million phone calls. By the general election, NYC DSA claimed more than 100,000 unique volunteers and more than 3 million doors. Political science supports the tactic. The famous Yale field experiment by Gerber and Green, covering roughly 30,000 registered voters, found that personal canvassing substantially increased turnout while phone calls showed no measurable effect. DSA read the literature and built its doctrine around it. The organization’s own electoral manual instructs chapters to “calculate the win number,” study where members are concentrated, and pour energy into door-to-door contact. This is not romantic movement politics. It is cold electoral arithmetic, executed by people who work for free because they believe.

The results are now a pattern, not a fluke. In 2018 Joe Crowley, the fourth-ranking House Democrat, outspent Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez 18 to 1 and lost his primary. She summarized the mechanism in seven words: “We beat a machine with a movement.” In 2020, DSA reported that at least 36 of 48 members on the ballot won. In June 2026 the wave reached Congress in earnest. Dan Goldman raised $8.364 million and spent $8.137 million, including $2.125 million in personal loans, against Brad Lander’s $1.756 million in spending, a 4.6 to 1 advantage, and lost. Adriano Espaillat, chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, outspent DSA member Darializa Avila Chevalier nearly 3 to 1 and lost. In Denver, Diana DeGette had held her seat since 1997 and lost her primary to DSA endorsee Melat Kiros. Even Third Way’s Matt Bennett, no conservative, conceded that a socialist toppling the Hispanic Caucus chairman “could matter” nationally. When your reluctant witnesses are centrist Democrats, the case is closing itself.

What should trouble readers most is not any single upset but the accountability structure behind them. DSA’s endorsement criteria, adopted after its 2025 convention, require candidates to uphold the national platform, grow their chapters, recruit members, caucus with fellow socialist officeholders, and regard themselves as “socialist organizers first, and legislators second.” Pause on that phrase. Voters in these districts believe they are electing a representative. DSA believes it is deploying an organizer who happens to hold office, one who answers to a membership organization that predates his election and will outlast it. Campaign filings even show the money flowing backward: Mamdani’s campaign paid NYC DSA more than $33,000 for coordinated texting and email communications, meaning the candidate compensated the chapter for access to its own mobilization machinery. A party within a party is not a metaphor here, it is an org chart.

The final piece is the flywheel, and it is here that the taxpayer’s role becomes hardest to excuse, because every victory produces publicity, publicity produces members, members produce dues and volunteers, volunteers produce the next victory, and at the center of the New York version of this cycle sits a municipal matching program that converts each $250 of socialist conviction into $2,250 of campaign capacity. NYC DSA co-chair Gustavo Gordillo put it with admirable candor after the general election: “they have money, but we have power.” He was right, and the distinction is the entire story. The Heritage Foundation and other conservative researchers have long warned that public campaign financing subsidizes the most organized factions rather than the most representative ones, and the Mamdani ledger is the strongest confirmation of that warning yet to have occured in American municipal politics.

So the thesis must be stated precisely, because precision is what makes it damning. DSA is not out-raising the Democratic establishment. It could not do so if it tried. It is out-organizing, out-targeting, and out-converting that establishment, selecting small primary electorates in safely Democratic districts, calculating the win number, saturating the ground with ideologically committed labor, multiplying member donations through taxpayer matching wherever such programs exist, and then converting each officeholder into a recruiting sergeant for the next campaign. A $6.4 million organization is assembling a bloc of local, state, and federal power that a $683.6 million party committee cannot seem to stop. Republicans who comfort themselves with fundraising comparisons are reading the wrong ledger. The relevant currency is organized human commitment, and at the moment, the socialists are the only faction in American politics minting it. The first step toward answering them is understanding, honestly and without cope, how the machine actually works. The second step is asking why taxpayers in America’s largest city are paying to keep it running.

If you enjoy my work, please subscribe https://x.com/amuse/creator-subscriptions/subscribe

Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Data in sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

For 60 years, Americans told jokes about Cuba. The island of 1957 Chevrolets held together with wire and paint. The ration books. The crumbling facades of Havana, photographed lovingly by tourists who mistook decay for charm. The sugar harvests that missed their quotas year after year. We measured Cuba the way we measure most countries, by GDP, by military hardware, by the living standards of its people, and by that measure Cuba was a punchline. A failed state 90 miles from Florida, propped up first by Soviet subsidies and later by Venezuelan oil, exporting little besides cigars and refugees.

The joke, it turns out, was on us. While we were counting Cuba’s broken tractors, Havana was counting something else entirely: its converts. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s new State Department report, Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism, makes the case that the Castro regime’s true export industry was never agricultural. It was revolutionary ideology, intelligence tradecraft, activist networks, and the methods of state subversion. And by that measure, the measure Havana itself used, Cuba was one of the most successful small powers of the modern era.

Consider first what Fidel Castro said he wanted. In 1958, before he had even taken Havana, Castro wrote that when the Cuban conflict ended, a much wider and bigger war would begin for him, the war he intended to launch against the Americans. This sentence deserves more attention than it has received. It was written before the embargo, before the nationalizations, before the Bay of Pigs, before any of the grievances that generations of apologists have offered as explanations for Cuban hostility. The war against the United States was not a reaction to American policy. It was the point.

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Castro converted that ambition into doctrine with remarkable speed. His Second Declaration of Havana proclaimed that the duty of every revolutionary was to make the revolution. The 1967 Organization of Latin American Solidarity conference, hosted in Havana, declared armed revolutionary struggle the path for the entire continent and called for the destruction of existing political and military institutions. A joint US intelligence assessment in 1971 concluded that as soon as Castro assumed power in January 1959, Havana became the center for subversive operations against other Latin American countries, and it documented the money, weapons, training, propaganda, and personnel flowing outward from the island. Nearly every republic in the hemisphere felt the interference. During the regime’s first three decades, at least 20,000 guerrillas passed through Cuban training. By 1982, the CIA counted more than 40,000 Cuban personnel operating in Africa alone.

Exporting guerrilla war to Bolivia or Angola is one thing. What does any of this have to do with the United States, a country that faced no serious insurgency? The answer lies in Cuba’s genuine innovation, which was not military but conceptual. Orthodox Marxism organized history around economic class. It appealed to industrial workers on the basis of material interest, and in prosperous postwar America that appeal fell flat. Cuban Third Worldism solved the problem by changing the revolutionary subject. The protagonist of history was no longer the factory worker. It was the colonized nation, the racial minority, the student, the guerrilla, the oppressed of the earth. Under this framework, a black resident of Detroit, a Vietnamese peasant, a Puerto Rican separatist, and an Algerian revolutionary could all be cast as soldiers in a single transnational war against the same imperial center. The enemy was no longer the capitalist class. It was the West itself.

This was a weapon designed for a free and diverse society. It did not require poverty to work. It required only grievance, and it offered young Americans something economic Marxism never could: a heroic identity. A student at Columbia or Berkeley could spiritually defect from his own civilization and enlist in the imagined ranks of the world’s oppressed without leaving campus.

The evidence that this transmission actually occurred does not come primarily from conservative sources. The historian Teishan Latner, writing an academic study with no conservative agenda whatsoever, concluded that Cuba became the primary Third World influence on the US Left for more than three decades. Cynthia Young’s Soul Power, published by Duke University Press, documents in detail how American activists appropriated theories, strategies, films, literature, and political vocabularies from Third World anticolonial struggles. These scholars were not writing indictments. Some wrote with evident sympathy. That is precisely what makes their findings so valuable. When your opponents’ own historians confirm the scale and durability of the influence, the debate over whether it happened is finished. The only remaining question is what it meant.

Havana did not leave transmission to chance. The 1966 Tricontinental Conference brought more than 500 delegates from 82 countries to Havana and created a permanent organization, headquartered on the island, to coordinate anti-imperialist activity worldwide. The Venceremos Brigade, founded in 1969, transported roughly 10,000 Americans to Cuba over the following decades for what was billed as agricultural solidarity work but functioned as political education inside an environment controlled by the Cuban state and penetrated by Cuban intelligence. The Fair Play for Cuba Committee bought newspaper advertisements and built local chapters. Cuba’s official friendship agency, ICAP, eventually claimed more than 2,000 solidarity organizations in over 150 countries.

Did any of this matter operationally? The record says yes, and the sequence is unusually clear. Several early Venceremos figures were simultaneously founding the Weather Underground. In Havana, Weather leaders met Cuban and North Vietnamese representatives, and a top-secret FBI assessment later concluded that those meetings intensified the group’s commitment to bringing armed struggle home. The group declared war on the US government, went underground, and by 1975 had claimed 25 bombings, including attacks on the Capitol, the Pentagon, and the State Department. The FBI counted roughly 2,500 bombings in the United States during one 18-month stretch in 1971 and 1972, the high-water mark of the revolutionary wave. In Puerto Rico, the connection was even more direct. Filiberto Ojeda Ríos spent years in Cuba, received training as a Cuban intelligence officer, and helped found the FALN, whose bombing campaign killed 6 people. He later led the Macheteros, who murdered US sailors, staged eight coordinated bomb attacks on federal facilities in a single day, and destroyed 9 American fighter aircraft in a 1981 raid on a Puerto Rico air base. And when American revolutionaries needed refuge, Havana provided it. Joanne Chesimard, convicted of murdering New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster, escaped prison and surfaced in Cuba, where the regime converted a cop killer into a revolutionary icon whose writings still circulate in American activist movements today.

The deepest penetration, however, came through the true believers. Cuban intelligence perfected a recruitment model that most spy services could only envy: find a politically alienated young American, convert grievance into loyalty, and then patiently encourage the recruit into positions of access. Ana Montes was noticed for her hostility toward US policy in Central America, recruited, and steered into an intelligence career. She rose to become the Defense Intelligence Agency’s senior Cuba analyst, distorted American assessments from the inside, and exposed 4 undercover US officers. The FBI’s conclusion about her motive was stark: pure ideology. She took no meaningful payment. Victor Manuel Rocha was recruited in 1973 and served Havana for half a century while climbing through the Foreign Service, the National Security Council, and an ambassadorship, boasting near the end that his contribution was more than a grand slam. James Olson, the former chief of CIA counterintelligence, rendered the professional verdict: the Cubans were much better than the KGB ever was. Ideological agents cost little, leave no financial trail, and believe their betrayal is virtue, which is why they last for decades, and which is why the Wasp Network could sit inside a Florida humanitarian aviation group feeding flight schedules to Havana until Cuban fighters shot down two unarmed civilian planes over international waters in 1996, killing 4 Americans, an operation for which the Justice Department finally indicted Raúl Castro himself this past May.

Some will object that all of this is Cold War history, that the Soviet collapse ended whatever threat the island posed. The record suggests otherwise. Cuba’s model did not die in 1991, it adapted, narrowed, found new patrons, embedded itself in Venezuela’s security services where Cuban advisers rebuilt military intelligence into an inward-facing instrument of regime survival with at least 1,500 personnel, and offered its geography to Beijing. CSIS satellite analysis has identified 4 active Cuban sites capable of electronic surveilance against the United States, and a 2026 update found that a new 32-antenna array at Bejucal appears complete and likely operational, positioned to monitor sensitive American military activity across the southeastern seaboard, the Caribbean, and the Gulf.

The Heritage Foundation has been documenting this architecture since the 1970s, often to an indifferent audience. Mike Gonzalez’s recent Heritage study reaches the same conclusion Rubio’s report does: six decades of terrorism, subversion, and the deliberate corrosion of American cohesion. The strongest moral charge in the indictment is also the simplest. A totalitarian state that imprisoned its own dissidents and denied its own people the right to speak, organize, or travel exploited American academic freedom, free speech, free association, and due process to organize against the society that guaranteed them.

We spent 60 years measuring the wrong things. Cuba never needed a functioning economy to wage its war, because the war was never economic. It was a war for the loyalties of the West’s own children, fought in universities, solidarity brigades, and government agencies, and it compounded across generations long after the original handlers were gone. Rubio’s report is not nostalgia. It is an audit, and the audit shows that the poorest country in the hemisphere ran the most patient and most successful influence operation ever mounted against the United States. The ruins of Havana were never the scoreboard. The converts were.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Data in sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

Shortly after Republican primary voters rejected him by nearly 28 percentage points, Senator John Cornyn published a column warning that closing the Texas Republican primary would betray the legacy of American voting rights. He invoked poll taxes, property requirements, and the long struggle for suffrage. He described the runoff that ended his Senate career, in which roughly 7.4% of registered voters participated, as evidence of creeping oligarchy. The column was eloquent. It was also built on a category error so fundamental that once you see it, the entire argument collapses.

Here is the error. Closing a party primary does not deprive anyone of the right to vote in a public election. It determines who may participate in a political organization’s internal nomination process. These are different things, and the difference is not a technicality. A general election is the mechanism through which the public selects its officeholders. A primary is the mechanism through which a private political association selects the candidates it will present to that public. Under every closed-primary proposal now before Texas, every eligible Texan would remain free to vote in November, register as a Republican, register as a Democrat, join another party, or remain unaffiliated. Nobody loses the franchise. What changes is that helping the Republican Party choose its standard-bearers would require the minimal act of joining the Republican Party first.

Cornyn’s rhetorical strategy depends on blurring this distinction. He treats access to the Republican ballot as though it were synonymous with universal suffrage, then borrows the moral authority of the civil rights era to defend it. But the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments, and the Voting Rights Act that followed them, secured access to government elections regardless of race and sex. They did not create a constitutional right for Democrats to help select Republican nominees. Nobody believes a labor union violates democracy by restricting leadership votes to union members. Nobody believes a church disenfranchises the public by letting only congregants choose its elders. A political party is the same kind of thing, an association organized around shared political goals, and the Supreme Court has said so repeatedly.

Consider California Democratic Party v. Jones. California had adopted a blanket primary allowing any voter to vote for any candidate of any party. The parties sued, and the Supreme Court struck the system down. Writing for the majority, Justice Scalia explained that a party’s selection of its nominee is among its most important associational functions, because the nominee becomes the party’s public face and message. Forcing a party to accept outsiders in that decision can change its leadership, its identity, and what it stands for. Tashjian v. Republican Party of Connecticut established the mirror principle, that a state could not stop a party from inviting unaffiliated voters in if it wished. Put the two cases together and the doctrine is clear: the party, not the government and not the losing candidate, holds the constitutional interest in defining who participates in its nomination.

Cornyn’s column never engages this body of law. He discusses only the voter’s interest in access while ignoring the party’s interest in association, which is rather like analyzing a trespassing dispute by considering only the visitor’s interest in the view. The Republican Party of Texas has now put the question squarely before a federal court, arguing that the state forces it to accept participants who may oppose its principles and candidates. Attorney General Ken Paxton, the man who defeated Cornyn, has joined in seeking recognition of that claim. Even Secretary of State Jane Nelson, whose office was defending the current statutes, conceded that she has never expressed opposition to closed primaries and would implement whatever the Legislature enacts. The official on the other side of the lawsuit does not claim closure is undemocratic. Only Cornyn does. FWIW, it is unknown was the new Secretary of State, Robert Howden, will do with the legislation.

If you want to see what a closed primary actually does to an establishment incumbent, look east to Louisiana. In 2024 Louisiana abandoned its all-comers jungle system and adopted closed party primaries. Senator Bill Cassidy, who had voted to convict President Trump at the second impeachment trial and had spent years counting on a structure that let Democrats and independents pad his numbers, suddenly had to face an electorate composed of actual Republicans. He finished third in his own primary. Not second. Third. No crossover cavalry arrived to rescue him, because the new rules meant there was no crossover cavalry to summon. Cassidy’s defeat was not a failure of democracy. It was democracy functioning inside the association whose name he carried, Republicans deciding that a senator who votes to convict a Republican president should not wear the Republican label into November. Cornyn watched that happen and drew precisely the wrong lesson. He concluded that the rules that ended Cassidy must never reach Texas, when the honest conclusion is that closed primaries make Republican senators answerable to Republicans.

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Cornyn dismisses crossover voting as a solution in search of a problem, insisting there is no evidence Democrats enter Republican primaries in a meaningful way. Notice the architecture of that claim. Texas does not maintain permanent party registration. Affiliation arises when a voter requests a primary ballot and expires every December 31. The state is structurally incapable of producing the comprehensive crossover data Cornyn demands, and he then cites the absence of that data as proof the phenomenon does not exist. He is using the opacity of the system he defends as evidence that the opacity has hidden nothing. That is not empiricism. It is circularity.

The evidence that does exist points the other way. The Republican Party of Texas reported that nearly 9% of voters in former House Speaker Dade Phelan’s 2024 primary were known Democrats, in a contest Phelan survived by a whisker. In a heavily Republican district where the Democratic primary offers no meaningful contests, the Republican primary is functionally the election, and a crossover bloc far smaller than 9% can decide it.

And here is the delicious irony of Cornyn’s own defeat. The 2026 cycle handed Texas a natural experiment on exactly this question. In most years, a Democrat in Texas faces an empty or sleepy primary ballot and can wander into the Republican contest at no cost. Not this year. Democrats had their own genuinely competitive Senate runoff between James Talarico and Jasmine Crockett, a contest that consumed Democratic attention, money, and enthusiasm. Every Democrat who wanted a say in that fight had to take a Democratic ballot in March, and Texas law then barred them from the Republican runoff in May. The crossover lifeline that open-primary incumbents quietly depend on was severed, not by a rule change, but by the accident of a compelling Democratic race. Deprived of that cushion, Cornyn faced something he had perhaps never truly faced before, an electorate of committed Republicans. They rejected him 63.8% to 36.2%. Cornyn now argues that the electorate which judged him was too narrow. But the electorate was narrow only in the sense that it was Republican. His complaint, stripped of its civic ornamentation, is that he performs better when Democrats are available to vote for him in Republican contests. That is not an argument against closed primaries. That is the argument for them, delivered by their most prominent victim.

There is a deeper problem with the oligarchy framing regardless. The runoff drew 7.4% of registered voters, which reporters noted was a record for a Texas runoff, under the open system Cornyn defends. Runoffs always attract fewer voters than general elections, as do municipal and constitutional amendment elections, and their legitimacy has never depended on approaching presidential turnout. The March 2026 primaries, likewise open, drew about 24% of the state’s roughly 18.7 million registered voters, up from 18% in 2022. Open access plainly does not cure low participation. And the 93% who stayed home did not cast hidden ballots for John Cornyn. A losing candidate cannot convert abstention into implied support, especially after spending roughly $81 million against Paxton’s roughly $10 million and losing by nearly 384,000 votes.

Cornyn’s most sympathetic argument is the wide tent. He is right about the goal and wrong about the mechanism. Registering as a Republican is not an ideological examination. It asks only that a voter identify with the coalition before governing its decisions. Research comparing presidential primary electorates found that open and closed primaries can produce nearly identical ideological compositions, undermining the assumption that closure breeds extremism. Experimental work comparing Florida’s closed system with North Carolina’s semi-closed one found that independents who learn about closed-primary rules become more likely to recommend registering with a party. Rules shape behavior. When affiliation carries consequences, people affiliate. A wide tent argues for easy affiliation, not for no affiliation at all.

Nor was closure imposed by a fringe. Republican primary voters overwhelmingly approved a closed-primary proposition in March 2024. The party’s Rules Committee advanced Rule 46 by a vote of 26 to 4, and the convention, with 97% voting strength and delegates from 75% of Senate districts, wrote closure into the platform and legislative priorities. Cornyn frames himself as the defender of Republican voters against party insiders, yet the formal record shows Republican voters repeatedly choosing the policy he condemns.

The bottom line is simple. Democrats should choose Democratic nominees, as they did in the Talarico-Crockett runoff. Republicans should choose Republican nominees, as Louisiana Republicans did when they retired Bill Cassidy and as Texas Republicans did when they retired John Cornyn. Every Texan should choose between them in November. A party whose nominees can be selected by people unwilling to call themselves Republicans is not a broader coalition. It is an organization denied control over its own name, and the prediction market’s read on the underlying litigation suggests the courts may soon agree. Cornyn invokes democracy, but democracy requires meaningful institutions, and the most meaningful thing a political party possesses is the right to decide, for itself, who it is.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Data in sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of the Odyssey is now in theaters, and millions of Americans are watching a story that is roughly 2,700 years old in its poetic form and perhaps 3,200 years old in its historical core. Most of them will assume they are watching pure fantasy. Gods, monsters, a decade of wandering, a wooden horse. Surely none of it happened. That assumption is understandable, and it is wrong in the way that matters most. Behind the myth stands a real city, a real war, and one of the most astonishing feats of memory in human history. Understanding how the Greeks preserved that memory across 5 centuries without writing a single narrative history should change how we think about our own inherited stories, including the American founding, and about the people who make careers out of tearing such stories down.

Begin with the fact the skeptics got wrong. For generations, sophisticated opinion held that Troy was a fable, a city as imaginary as Atlantis. Then Frank Calvert pointed Heinrich Schliemann at a mound in northwestern Turkey called Hisarlık, and in 1870 the digging began. Schliemann was a romantic and a vandal. He cut a brutal trench through the mound and identified the wrong layer as Priam’s city, missing the mark by roughly a millennium. But the central traditional claim survived every correction. There really was a wealthy, fortified Bronze Age city exactly where the tradition placed it, 4.8 kilometers from the southern entrance to the Dardanelles, overlooking the Trojan plain. Later excavation revealed 23 wall sections, 11 gates, and 5 bastions, plus a lower town of roughly 30 hectares ringed by a defensive ditch traced for 930 meters. The layer known as Troy VIIa burned violently around 1180 BCE, its destruction environment littered with spearpoints, arrowheads, and a cache of 157 sling stones. This was not a literary phantom. It was a strategic city at a chokepoint, and it died by fire at precisely the moment the Greek tradition remembers a catastrophic sack.

The documentary evidence is even more remarkable. The Hittite empire, the Anatolian superpower of the Late Bronze Age, kept diplomatic archives at its capital, and 26 surviving tablets refer to a western power called Ahhiyawa, which most specialists identify with the Mycenaean Greek world. The same archives know a city called Wilusa, which corresponds to the Greek Wilios, or Ilios, the very name Homer uses for Troy. Around 1300 BCE a Hittite king signed a treaty with a ruler of Wilusa named Alaksandu. Homer’s Paris carries the alternate name Alexandros. A ruler bearing essentially the right name governed the right city in the right era. Another Hittite letter, addressed to the king of Ahhiyawa, recalls “the matter of Wilusa concerning which he and I were hostile to one another.” Read that sentence slowly. It is a Bronze Age diplomatic archive remembering a great power dispute over Troy, written by neither Greeks nor poets. The Cambridge Guide to Homer counts at least 4 wars fought in Troy’s vicinity between the 15th and 12th centuries BCE. The tradition did not invent a war. If anything, it compressed several.

So the city was real and the conflict cycle was real. Now comes the deeper mystery, the one worth an op-ed rather than a trivia answer. The Iliad and Odyssey reached their recognizable form in the late 8th century BCE. Troy VIIa fell around 1180 BCE. That is a gap of 4 to 5 centuries during which the Greeks had no historians, no chronicles, and for most of the period no writing at all. The Mycenaean palaces had used a script called Linear B, but when Michael Ventris deciphered it in 1952 and found it to be, in his words, a difficult and archaic Greek, but Greek nevertheless, the tablets turned out to contain no stories. They were inventories, tax records, lists of livestock and personnel, the paperwork of palace bureaucrats. Roughly 1,000 tablets from Pylos, written by at least 30 scribes, survive only because the fire that destroyed the palace baked the clay. When the palaces burned, literacy itself vanished from Greece for centuries. How, then, did the memory of the war survive?

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The answer came from an American scholar named Milman Parry, and it is one of the great intellectual discoveries of the 20th century. Parry noticed that Homer’s poetry is built from an enormous interlocking system of repeated phrases. Swift-footed Achilles. The wine-dark sea. Hector of the shining helm. These formulas are not lazy clichés. They are a compositional technology, a system so vast and so efficient that no single poet could have invented it. Parry concluded that the technique could only have been created and used by oral poets, generations of trained singers who learned an inherited repertoire of phrases, scenes, and story patterns, and who recomposed the tradition in every performance. He and Albert Lord then proved the mechanism by recording living oral poets in the Balkans doing exactly this, composing epics thousands of lines long without writing a word. The formulas function as a living archive. Once a name, a title, or an object is embedded in a metrically useful phrase, singers transmit it faithfully long after they have forgotten what it originally meant.

The proof sits in the poems themselves like fossils in limestone. In Book 10 of the Iliad, Homer describes a helmet plated with rows of boar’s tusks. No such helmet existed in Homer’s own century. It is a distinctively Mycenaean object, known from excavations and from a British Museum seal dated to roughly 1600 to 1400 BCE, obsolete for half a millennium before the Iliad was composed. Homer had never seen one. The tradition remembered it for him. The same is true of political vocabulary. Homer calls Agamemnon anax andrōn, lord of men, and the Linear B tablets reveal that wanax was the authentic Mycenaean title for a paramount king, a word already archaic in Homer’s day. The poets preserved the org chart of a dead civilization. They preserved place names that match the palace sites archaeology later uncovered. Thucydides, the founder of realist history, took the tradition seriously enough to argue that Agamemnon assembled his coalition not because of romantic oaths but because he surpassed his contemporaries in power and naval strength, an analysis that fits the palatial world of the tablets almost perfectly.

None of this means Homer is a stenographer. Athena did not walk the battlefield, and no one can verify the carpentry of a giant horse. The epics are cultural fossils, poetry wrapped around a genuine core. The tradition fused separate campaigns and generations into a single 10-year war, gave the conflict a memorable grievance in Helen, and converted a violent breach of the city’s defenses into the unforgettable image of the horse. But the skeleton is historical. The city, the location, the fortifications, the Mycenaean contact, the repeated wars, the names, the titles, the equipment, the fire around 1180 BCE. Independent lines of evidence converge, and convergence is how history is actually established.

Here is where the ancient story becomes an American argument. Every healthy civilization runs on inherited memory. The Greeks had no archives after the collapse, so they entrusted their history to singers, and the singers kept faith across 500 years. We have every archive imaginable, libraries, film, the papers of the founders preserved down to the grocery lists, and yet we are governed by an academic and media class that treats our founding stories primarily as material for debunking. The fashionable posture is that Washington was merely a slaveholder, that 1776 was a false front for 1619, that the Constitution was a property scheme, that patriotic memory is propaganda for the credulous. This posture presents itself as sophistication. It is actually the same error the Troy skeptics made, the assumption that because a tradition contains idealization it must contain no truth, and it does to the republic what centuries of sneering did to Homer, it teaches a people to discard the inheritence that binds them together.

The Troy story offers the correct model. Tradition should be tested, not worshipped and not burned. Schliemann’s chronology was wrong, and archaeology corrected him without discrediting the tradition that sent him to the right hill. Likewise, honest scholarship has deepened our picture of the founding, including its contradictions, without any need to poison the well. The founders themselves would have understood the distinction, they were raised on Homer and Plutarch, they knew that a nation’s stories are its operating system, and they deliberately built a story worth transmitting. A shared pride in 1776 is not a lie agreed upon. It is the American equivalent of the singer’s formula, the mechanism by which a free people remembers what it is and why it is worth defending. Strip that away and you do not get a more truthful citzenry. You get an amnesiac one, and amnesiac nations do not remain nations long.

Homer knew this better than anyone, because his poems are not victory songs. Troy fell around 1180 BCE, and within a generation or two the victors’ own palaces burned, the Hittite empire dissolved, and the entire Late Bronze Age order collapsed. Agamemnon came home to a knife. Odysseus came home alone. The singers who preserved the war knew that the civilization which won it had not survived it, which is why the epics read as elegies rather than triumphs. That is the final lesson Nolan’s audiences should carry out of the theater. Civilizations are mortal, memory is the only immortality they get, and the people who tend the memory, the singers then and the honest historians and patriotic citizens now, are not sentimentalists. They are the archive. The Greeks kept faith with a real war for 500 years through nothing but trained human voices. Americans, with every advantage of documentation, owe our own founding at least the same fidelity.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Data in sponsored partnership with Polymarket.