Donald Trump should enter January ready to govern with confidence. Last Tuesday the Democrat Party captured both the House and the Senate, then joined its willing accomplices in the drive-by media in spending the week composing his political obituary. They mistake a congressional majority for control of the presidency. Chuck Schumer will run the Senate calendar and Hakeem Jeffries will hold the House gavel. Neither will inherit the executive branch, its lawful authority, or the money already appropriated for Trump’s priorities.

His agenda never depended on a Republican Congress that, for most of two years, acted like an obstacle wearing an ally’s uniform. Chasing 218 House votes and 60 Senate votes for bills that never arrived consumed attention better spent governing. Victor Davis Hanson identified the opportunity within days of the results: a nominal majority of 53 senators can mean 53 private vetoes. Divided government can strip those vetoes of their bargaining value.

Consider how that pressure can work. A senator needed for a spending agreement might quietly ask that enforcement bypass a large employer in his state. A representative needed for reconciliation might seek protection for a hometown contractor or prestigious university. Such requests need never become public to consume presidential attention. Once a cooperative legislative program becomes impossible, its value collapses. Trump can enforce the law without bargaining for votes he never would have received.

He also has something more durable than another promise of congressional cooperation: enacted money. The 2025 reconciliation law appropriated $45 billion for detention capacity and $29.85 billion for ICE enforcement and related functions, both available through September 30, 2029. The Secure America Act, signed June 10, 2026, supplied another $31.075 billion for ICE enforcement under section 202, available through September 2029. That is more than $105 billion in multiyear immigration-enforcement appropriations. Democrats cannot erase it by refusing the next annual increase. A clawback requires legislation, which Trump can veto; competent, timely execution is his responsibility.

Passing ambitious legislation takes affirmative cooperation in both chambers and a filibuster-proof Senate. Protecting existing authority or appropriations from hostile legislation requires blocking an override in just one chamber. With every senator voting, 34 sustain a veto. That defensive coalition is far easier to maintain than agreement on a comprehensive Republican program. Trump should protect it as the legislative coalition that matters most, rather than confuse holding it together with the exhausting business of buying support for new bills. The president can spend his political capital defending action instead of financing excuses for inaction. That is an enormous improvement in his position, even if Democrats and the drive-by media prefer to describe it as defeat.

Democrats understand this arrangement because their presidents used it. In 1995, Bill Clinton’s $40 billion Mexico loan-guarantee package stalled in the newly Republican Congress. He turned to the Exchange Stabilization Fund and made up to $20 billion available without another vote. The Government Accountability Office later confirmed Treasury already possessed the authority. The next year, he designated roughly 1.7 million acres as Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument under the Antiquities Act of 1906, a nine-decade-old delegation of authority. Congress needed a bill to reverse him, and he could veto it.

Barack Obama announced normalization with Cuba in December 2014, weeks after losing the Senate, and implemented it under a Republican Congress. He concluded the Iran nuclear agreement in July 2015 and joined the Paris Agreement in September 2016, submitting neither for a treaty vote. On September 10, 2015, 58 senators voted to advance disapproval of the Iran deal. It died because 58 was not 60. Conservatives were furious to discover that controlling both chambers did not supply the votes to stop him.

Article II assigns him the duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. Those are the laws Congress passed, not the legislation he hopes Congress might someday consider. Neglecting existing authority while lobbying for more gets the presidency backward. Trump can make the next two years an emphatic demonstration that a president willing to do his job need not wait for Schumer’s permission.

Immigration enforcement offers a revealing place to begin. In Des Moines on July 3, 2025, Trump described farmers complaining about lost workers, floated allowing them to vouch for those workers, and extended the concern to hotels and leisure businesses. He named Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins as the official who brought him the problem. A favored constituency had collided publicly with enforcement and won. That accommodation need not dictate the next two years.

Section 1324a of Title 8 makes knowingly hiring unauthorized workers a federal offense and requires employment verification. The administration can expand I-9 audits, bring civil proceedings against knowing violators, and investigate sustained document fraud. Evidence and consistency must govern, and politically connected employers must be held to the same standard as everyone else. Abroad, section 243(d) of the Immigration and Nationality Act permits the State Department to suspend all visas, or a chosen subset, when countries refuse or unreasonably delay accepting their deported nationals. Universities and tourism interests will object; Trump can tailor sanctions for cooperation rather than a senator’s donor base.

The same freedom matters wherever Republicans applaud construction nationally and resist it locally. The Department of Energy has LNG export applications awaiting decisions. Executive Order 14318 already directs federal permitting work for data centers and supporting infrastructure, while the Supreme Court’s Seven County decision in May 2025 narrowed NEPA review to the project before the agency. That removes a favorite excuse for delay. A friendly member’s local objections should no longer leave federal permits sitting untouched.

Nor should friendship purchase immunity elsewhere. OPM finalized Schedule Policy/Career in February 2026 for policy-influencing positions while preserving merit hiring. Trump can insist on performance standards and act against documented obstruction without fearing that a member representing 10,000 federal employees will withhold a vote. At universities, Title VI provides an established process for investigating racial discrimination and antisemitic harassment, negotiating enforceable remedies, and pursuing funding consequences with notice and hearings. Affection for a prestigious institution back home does not excuse selective enforcement.

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The business wing has enjoyed an easy two years, too. The Justice Department’s RealPage litigation, including the March 2, 2026 Greystar judgment, represents rent-lowering antitrust enforcement that irritates donors. Executive Order 14265 directs defense acquisition toward competition and commercial solutions, against quiet resistance from members protecting hometown contractors. Section 301 of the Trade Act, through 19 USC 2417, permits modifying or terminating tariff actions for enforceable foreign concessions. That route matters more since the Supreme Court rejected IEEPA tariff authority on February 20, 2026. Protected industries should lose their leverage to hold those decisions hostage to unrelated votes.

Executing delegated authority is a conservative obligation, not a license to invent powers. Conservatives condemned Obama’s pen and phone for eight years; the Supreme Court’s 4-4 deadlock on June 23, 2016, left the injunction against his DAPA amnesty standing. The objection was that he invented authority Congress had refused to grant. Spending enacted detention appropriations, auditing employers under a 40-year-old statute, and deciding legally required permit applications run counter to DAPA. Trump should choose clear statutory footing, identify valid funding, and build administrative records that survive review. A durable order accomplishes more than dramatic language that leaves agencies frozen in litigation.

That discipline strengthens the case for optimism. The president already possesses authority to act, and exercising it carefully denies Democrats the easy victory of watching an avoidable legal failure stop the work. Due process, evidence, and a defensible record belong inside an aggressive program of execution. They make the results harder to undo.

Transparency can expose the protected interests in both parties. Trump’s January 2025 assassination-records order demonstrates the mechanism, and a systematic declassification review of surveillance abuses under Executive Order 13526 would embarrass officials on both sides. Good. A Republican presidency should not exist to spare Republican insiders discomfort; the public deserves the lawful review even when the findings make powerful people unhappy.

Preparation should begin before the new Senate is sworn in. Finish every essential confirmation the current Republican majority can deliver, because Schumer will deliver none, and map initiatives that can proceed with existing personnel and money. During the first 100 days of divided government, require each agency to publish an execution schedule with measurable outputs: permit decisions completed, employer cases resolved, procurement milestones met, deportation agreements signed. Voters deserve completed work, not another announcement of intentions.

Remain open to any deal the Democrat Party offers that is worth taking. But the possibility of a deal must never again become an excuse to postpone executing the law. Democrats want the election to mean paralysis, and Trump should deny them that satisfaction. He can make their obstruction an argument for presidential resolve rather than an explanation for presidential retreat.

For half a century, conservatives have complained that Washington is too big, too slow, and too pleased with announcements it never fulfills. The answer was never simply more statutes. Impartial enforcement, competent spending of appropriated funds, and room for people who build would vindicate the conservative argument through performance. Trump has two years to deliver without senators demanding softer enforcement or members insisting on protection for contractors.

Clinton and Obama used divided government to work around their opponents. Trump can use it to leave his own party’s excuses behind and carry out the promises Republicans elected him to keep. The Democrats won Congress; they did not extinguish his presidency. He should greet their victory with the confidence of a president who knows the law, has the resources, and intends to use both competently for the country. His strongest governing years can still be ahead.

If you enjoy my work, please subscribe.

Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes political analysis at amuseonx.com. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact me directly. Each op-ed is edited for grammar and clarity using AI with Grammarly.

CNN advised Americans watching gasoline prices slip below $4 in August 2022 to enjoy the relief. Two months earlier, regular gas had averaged $4.93 a gallon, and annual inflation had reached 9.1%. Now the network called a retreat from that misery an “unexpected form of economic stimulus,” worth thinking of as another $100 a month. At the peak of the worst inflation in four decades, the drive-by media offered a grateful shrug.

Those same outlets now describe an economy with 3.7% inflation, 6.9 million more jobs, and $11 trillion in announced investment as devastating. Their generosity seems to have expired with the Democratic administration. Compare the numbers, though, and the difference between the coverage and the record becomes difficult to explain as anything but politics.

Donald Trump promised lower prices, stronger paychecks, and a country that makes things again. He has delivered on those promises: prices are down, purchasing power is up, with 4,000 factories under construction. His record deserves comparison against Biden’s record, when inflation and gasoline prices peaked, and the Biden White House insisted the problem would cure itself.

An hour of work ought to buy more, and American industry ought to make that hour more valuable next year. GDP growth matters when it shows up in the grocery budget, rent, or mortgage payment. An investment announcement matters when a plant opens and hires people. Those are fair tests for Trump, and they are the tests on which Biden failed families watching their earnings lose ground.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics releases put annual inflation at 9.1% in June 2022 and 3.7% this September, down 5.4 percentage points. Core inflation, excluding food and energy, declined from 5.9% to 2.6%. Grocery inflation slowed from 12.2% to 1.8%. Slower inflation means prices are rising less quickly, not that the grocery bill has returned to its old level. Families understand that distinction without a CNN lecture. They also know that a 1.8% increase in grocery prices hurts less than a 12.2% increase. Remembering the old rate does not erase the accumulated expense; forgetting it makes the improvement disappear from the argument.

The comparison extends across household expenses. Piped natural gas inflation went from 38.4% to 5.0%; electricity from 13.7% to 4.4%; new vehicles from 11.4% to 0.6%. Household furnishings slowed from 9.5% to 1.6%, medical care from 4.5% to 1.5%. These are comparisons between two Bureau of Labor Statistics releases, not a White House slogan. They show substantial relief from the pace of increases that battered household budgets under Biden.

There are outright price declines, too. Regular gasoline averaged $4.929 in June 2022 and $4.310 this October, down 12.6%. The latest weekly reading, November 2, was $4.153, or 15.7% below Biden’s peak month. West Texas Intermediate crude averaged $114.84 a barrel then, against $102.07 now. Domestic crude production rose 16.9%, from 11.94 million barrels a day to 13.97 million. Producing more at home offers cheaper fuel without begging the Saudis or draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

A dozen large Grade A eggs cost $2.70 in June 2022 and $2.27 this September. Against the December 2022 peak of $4.25, the decline is 46.5%. The used cars and trucks index is 13.4% lower, welcome relief in a market that humiliated working families under Biden.

Private employees’ average hourly earnings increased from $32.19 in June 2022 to $38.00 this October, an 18.0% gain. Adjusted for inflation, hourly purchasing power stands about 3.2% above Biden’s peak-inflation baseline. For most of Biden’s presidency, prices outran paychecks. Under Trump, that order has reversed without the recession forecasters promised would be necessary to beat inflation. The full gain since June 2022 remains a multiyear comparison, not a measure of one president’s contribution.

Real GDP grew at a 0.6% annualized rate in the second quarter of 2022, compared with 3.4% in the third quarter of this year. Real GDP is 12.0% larger after inflation, at $24.61 trillion versus $21.98 trillion. Payrolls total 159.29 million jobs, up 6.94 million. The S&P 500 has nearly doubled from 3,785 to 7,377. None of that cancels a family’s remaining difficulties. It does make the drive-by media’s language of economic devastation look awfully selective.

Young families who felt Biden’s housing market most sharply now have more room to negotiate. New single-family home sales run at a 676,000 annual pace, up 19.9%, while the median new-home price fell from $431,700 to $400,400. Existing-home inventory increased from 1.26 million to 1.60 million, and months of supply rose from 3.0 to 4.8. A typical home sits for 33 days instead of 14. The June 2022 buyer had two weeks and little bargaining room; today he has about a month and leverage.

Renters have seen relief as well. Apartment List’s national median fell from its mid-2022 peak of $1,442 to $1,384.

Realtor.com

reports one-bedroom asking rents in the 50 largest metros down 5.6% from their 2022 peak, with two-bedroom rents down 4.1%. These changes matter for people whose monthly bills leave little room for mistakes.

The longer-term argument rests on production. The White House’s running tally of major investment announcements is roughly $11 trillion, and the administration counts some 4,000 factories under construction. Construction matters more than a press-release total because it puts actual work behind the commitment. Investment is forward-looking by nature, and judging it requires looking beyond the next quarterly release. The roughly 4,000 construction sites matter more than the tally precisely because the country needs factories with workers inside, not another collection of promises from Washington.

Micron is spending $200 billion on American memory-chip fabrication, including a second fab. Vantage Data Centers is putting $25 billion into a 1.4 gigawatt campus in Shackelford County, Texas, with more than 5,000 jobs attached. Kraft Heinz committed $3 billion to American plant upgrades, its largest such investment in decades. Gilead added $11 billion to its domestic manufacturing plans. These commitments deserve scrutiny, but they also deserve to be counted when discussing the direction of American industry.

Trump’s policies give manufacturers reasons to build here. Tariffs make domestic production more attractive relative to shipping goods into the country, while the tax law restored 100% expensing for equipment and extended it to new factory construction. Expensing lets a business deduct qualifying costs upfront rather than spread the deduction over time. That changes the calculation for a company deciding where to put its next plant.

A chip fab takes four years from permit to wafer; a petrochemical plant takes five. The wait is real, and a pledge is no guarantee of completion. Yet the same reporters who dismiss Trump’s commitments as vapor celebrated every Biden CHIPS Act press release as a manufacturing renaissance, including projects since shelved. Apply the same scrutiny to both. One-directional skepticism is partisanship with a notebook.

The habit predates the factory announcements. In 2021 and 2022, the Biden administration called inflation “transitory,” and the drive-by media repeated it for most of a year as inflation climbed from 5% to 9%. When a Fox reporter asked Biden about inflation in January 2022, the president answered with an obscenity on a hot mic and the press corps chuckled. When gasoline crossed $5, CNN supplied silver linings. When two consecutive quarters of negative growth arrived that summer, the White House redefined recession and the networks adopted the definition within a news cycle.

By 2024, those outlets had coined the “vibecession,” treating complaints about grocery bills as a mood rather than a receipt. Now the Daily Beast advertises Trump’s “humiliating reality check” on manufacturing while 4,000 plants go up. Democrats and their willing accomplices in the drive-by media graded Biden on a curve. Trump gets a standard they never applied to his predecessor. Americans were asked to appreciate a retreat from Biden’s worst prices as an economic benefit.

Congress should make factory-structure expensing permanent before the window closes. A manufacturer choosing Ohio or Monterrey needs confidence that the rule survives the next election. The permitting reform both parties profess to favor should impose hard deadlines on federal goverment review. A 1.4 gigawatt data center needs 1.4 gigawatts of generation, and America cannot make a gas plant wait on a seven-year timeline.

The administration should publish its investment tally quarterly, plant by plant, with groundbreaking dates. Make the next CNN fact-check confront a spreadsheet, not a speech. Republican candidates should stop apologizing and recite the comparisons; the drive-by media will never do it for them. Voters remember $4.93 gas better than a thirty-second ad can remind them, so the reminders should be constant and specific.

The Democrat Party’s theory of prosperity runs through Washington: send checks, subsidize demand, then apologize when prices arrive. Trump’s wager is on production, with more oil, more plants, lower taxes on machinery, and paychecks catching up. The 2022 baseline records the failure of the first approach; the 2026 snapshot gives voters grounds to favor the second without crediting Trump for every change between them. Build the promised capacity, and Americans will have evidence harder to dismiss than a speech. Their sons and daughters will be working inside it.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes political analysis at amuseonx.com. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact me directly. Each op-ed is edited for grammar and clarity using AI from Grammarly.

Democrats swept Congress on Tuesday, flipping Senate seats in Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, Maine, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas, and taking the House by a margin wide enough that Speaker Mike Johnson told his staff he would not stay on as Republican leader. By Wednesday morning, Vice President JD Vance had posted a long explanation on 𝕏. "The reason we lost is the war," he wrote. "The president himself said so last night." He went further, daring anyone who thought the Iran war was worth it to argue that "losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it." That candor has made him a lightning rod, and a familiar complaint is back in circulation on the right. If Vance saw the cliff coming, the argument runs, why didn't he walk into the chamber months ago, take the gavel, fire Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough, kill the filibuster and pass the SAVE America Act himself?

The frustration is fair. The theory behind it is not, and it is even less workable now than it was in the spring. The Republican Senate that exists today expires on January 3, 2027, when the 20th Amendment seats the new Congress and hands the majority to Chuck Schumer’s party. Whatever conservatives want from this Senate has to happen in the lame duck, and the lame duck runs on the same arithmetic that sank the takeover idea the first time.

Start with the Constitution, because that’s where the takeover fantasy goes to die. Article I, Section 3 says the Vice President “shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided.” That is it, period. Everything else he does in the chamber comes from rules the Senate writes for itself under Article I, Section 5, which lets each house “determine the Rules of its Proceedings.” Elbridge Gerry and George Mason fought the clause at the Convention, with Mason warning that “the legislative and executive are hereby mixed and incorporated together.” It passed ten days before adjournment, 8 states to 2 with 1 abstaining, and it passed only because the job was kept small.

The chair’s limits show up most clearly in the fight conservatives care about most. MacDonough has held her post since 2012, when Harry Reid installed her, and she has carved up Republican priorities across two Trump terms. She serves at the pleasure of the Majority Leader, on the staff of the Secretary of the Senate. Robert Byrd fired Robert Dove in 1987, and Trent Lott fired him again in 2001 after Dove’s rulings got in the way of the Bush tax cuts. Dick Cheney was Vice President in 2001 and had nothing to do with it. If MacDonough was going to go, John Thune had to order it, and he never did.

Here the 𝕏 version of the story skips a step. The Parliamentarian advises; the presiding officer rules. William Hoagland of the Bipartisan Policy Center put it best: “She advises who’s sitting in the chair. She doesn’t rule.” So yes, Vance could sit down and rule against her advice. But Senate Rule XX makes every ruling of the chair “subject to an appeal to the Senate,” and a simple majority decides the appeal. Nelson Rockefeller beat Parliamentarian Floyd Riddick in 1975 because the Senate backed him and tabled the appeals. Kamala Harris, sitting over a 50-50 Senate in March 2021, refused 24 House progressives who wanted her to overrule MacDonough on a $15 minimum wage, because Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema would have overturned her within the hour. The chair has precisely as much power as 51 senators lend it, and not a vote more.

Vance has said all of this himself, in plain English, long before Tuesday. In a September 29 interview with Vince Coglianese, he admitted that he and President Trump had “war-gamed” the whole maneuver. “Could I assume the chair of the Senate and fire the parliamentarian? Yes, I could,” he said. Then he played it out: “Four or five Republicans, at least, and maybe ten Republicans, they join the Democrats to then overrule the new chair.” He named the four: Mitch McConnell, John Cornyn, Thom Tillis and Lisa Murkowski. Forty-seven Democrats plus those four make 51, and at 51 the Vice President cannot break a tie because there is no tie. “You have a fun little ceremonial battle that you lose,” he said. The man being blamed for not seizing the Senate is the same man who did the math in public and explained why it fails.

Nothing about Tuesday improved that math for the next 59 days. The lame-duck Senate is still 53-47. McConnell and Tillis are retiring, and Cornyn lost his primary, which means three of Vance’s four have no voters left to answer to and no reason to change their minds now. Recognition is no better. Rule XIX requires the chair to recognize the first senator who seeks the floor, and the one exception, set by John Nance Garner in 1937, gives priority to the Majority Leader, not the Vice President. A Vance takeover in December would be a televised loss followed by a Democratic victory lap, and the left would spend January 3 dancing on the result.

The nuclear option never ran through the chair either. Reid used it in November 2013 for most nominations, and McConnell extended it to the Supreme Court in April 2017. Each time the Majority Leader raised the point of order, lost the ruling, appealed, and won on a party-line vote. Thune has said flatly that “there aren’t anywhere close to the votes, not even close, to nuking the filibuster,” and Collins, Tillis, Murkowski, and McConnell have all said publicly they oppose it.

So stop yelling at the Vice President. The man who still holds the levers for the next 59 days is the Majority Leader, and conservatives should spend every one of those days on him. Thune has three moves left, and each of them is his to make.

The first is nominations. The Hill reports that more than 30 administration nominees have cleared committee and are waiting only for a floor vote, with a batch of judicial nominees expected in the lame duck as well. Under Senate rules, nominations not confirmed before this Congress ends go back to the President, and a Democratic Senate is not going to confirm them. Nominations now need only a simple majority, which Reid himself made possible, and Republicans have 53 seats until January 3. Thune should keep the Senate in session, file cloture in batches, and confirm every one of them before Christmas.

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The second move is the one Thune has refused all year. If the Senate will not confirm the President’s people, it can get out of the way and let him appoint them. Article II, Section 2 lets the President fill vacancies “during the Recess of the Senate.” In NLRB v. Noel Canning in 2014, the Supreme Court held that a recess of fewer than 10 days is presumptively too short to count, and that pro forma sessions, where the Senate gavels in for a few seconds every three days, count as sessions that block the clock. Thune knows the trick well, because he used it in August, when the Senate left town for more than a month and met only in pro forma sessions on dates like August 10 and August 13, keeping recess appointments off the table. He can stop doing that. If he adjourns for more than 10 days with no pro forma sessions, the President can install his nominees until the end of the next session. Article II, Section 3 also gives the President the power to adjourn Congress when the House and Senate disagree on the time of adjournment, a power no President has ever used, but one that exists precisely for a Congress that will neither act nor leave.

The third move is the SAVE America Act, the photo ID and proof-of-citizenship bill Republicans have chased all year. It failed under the 60-vote rule, and Thune rejected Trump’s call to keep the Senate in town in August to grind it through. There is a way to pass it with a simple majority without abolishing anything. Rule XIX says no senator “shall speak more than twice upon any one question in debate on the same legislative day.” A legislative day lasts until the Senate adjourns, and a recess does not end it, so a majority that refuses to adjourn can keep the whole fight inside one very long day. Every Democrat who wants to filibuster has to stand and talk, and once each has used his two speeches, debate ends, and the presiding officer can call the vote.

Senator Ron Johnson has pointed out the catch honestly: a 1986 precedent pushed by Robert Byrd means offering motions and amendments does not count as a speech, so Democrats can stall with paperwork instead of stamina. That is a real obstacle, and it is exactly the kind of obstacle a determined Majority Leader fights through with rulings from the chair backed by 51 votes, the same 51 votes Vance was missing. It would mean nights, weekends, and the holiday calendar; it would mean Democrats explaining on live television why Americans should not have to show identification to vote, and it would mean the Senate actually working for once, which is definately not the worst thing that could happen to Republicans who just lost an election in part because voters thought Washington wasn’t fighting for them. If it fails, Democrats own the failure on the record. If it works, this Republican Senate's last act is the law Trump wanted most.

Vance will be argued about for a long time, and his post has given his critics plenty of material. But the argument that he could have rescued the Senate from the chair was wrong in May and is wrong now, because the Founders built a Senate that answers to 51 votes and to its own leader. That leader is John Thune, and for 59 more days the votes are still his. Confirm the nominees. Or recess and let the President appoint them. And make the Democrats talk.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes political analysis at amuseonx.com. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact me directly. Each op-ed is edited for grammar and clarity using AI in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

On the afternoon of Friday, October 30th, Poland's president boarded a plane for Senegal. Karol Nawrocki was somewhere over Spain when the news reached the cabin. Back in Warsaw, Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, who had never taken the oath before the president that Polish law requires of a Constitutional Tribunal judge, ordered the suspension of the Tribunal’s president, Bogdan Święczkowski, and its vice president, Bartłomiej Sochański, for one month. She announced that she was now running the court. Nawrocki told the pilot to turn around at around 6:12 in the evening, and by midnight he was standing inside the Tribunal building beside the First President of the Supreme Court, telling the people inside they were not judges.

Seven weeks earlier, Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin sat across the table from the men who organized that night. She went to Warsaw and Budapest in early September, came home, told a Washington think tank that she had dusted off their playbook, and was then caught on hidden camera assuring a voter that the Democrat Party has its own list of signature legal cases ready and that January is when you will see them. That is the whole story, and it is why Tuesday, November 3, matters more than any midterm in my lifetime. The people who intend to govern you have told you how they plan to do it; the only question left is whether you give them the majority they need to start.

A republic rests on one dull rule. Those who hold office keep it until voters or the constitution remove them, and nobody else gets a vote. Every other protection, every court and every election law, is scaffolding on that rule. Once a governing faction decides that the right people may skip the step, the scaffolding is still there, but it holds nothing up. What happened in Warsaw was an attempt to skip the step. Study it closely, because the people who built it have already briefed the senator who wants to import it.

Here is the sequence. The legal hook Korwin-Piotrowska reached for was Article 130 of Poland’s Law on the System of Common Courts, a housekeeping provision that lets a court president or the justice minister bench a judge for up to a month when the court’s dignity demands it. It was written for ordinary judges in ordinary courts. Polish constitutional lawyers say it does not reach the president of the Constitutional Tribunal at all, and nothing in it lets one unsworn appointee fire the leadership of the court she wants to join. The hook was weak, so the operation needed muscle. The new appointees did not walk in the front door. They entered through a side gate from the grounds of the Prime Minister’s Chancellery, escorted by the State Protection Service, which answers to the interior minister. Police ringed the perimeter after Korwin-Piotrowska reported vague threats to staff, which kept the suspended leadership outside while her group worked inside. The Tribunal’s own website was used to post the suspension orders. Then Justice Minister and Prosecutor General Waldemar Żurek filed motions to strip Święczkowski and Sochański of immunity so criminal charges could follow for running their own court.

Jan Grabiec, who heads the Prime Minister’s Chancellery, confirmed on November 2 that he was told in advance and approved the passage through government grounds. He said, “The judges chose the moment.” The moment they chose was when the head of state was 30,000 feet over the Iberian Peninsula. Polish television reported that Tusk’s government tried to divert the returning plane to another city and that the Polish army declined to go along and let it land. When Nawrocki arrived at the court after midnight, police shoved back his own security detail before he got through. Video circulating from the days before shows German police vans on a Polish highway, and witnesses reported that officers blocking the court wore no identification numbers and did not speak Polish. Poles have long memories about uniformed Germans at the border.

Brussels wasted no time picking a side. Commissioner Michael McGrath declared that appointing the new judges lies within the power of the Sejm, citing the Venice Commission, which is the same body the European Commission has leaned on for years while freezing Polish funds and opening infringement proceedings against the Tribunal as it existed under the previous government. Dominik Tarczyński, a Polish member of the European Parliament, laid out where this leads in three moves: first the court, then Poland forced into the euro, then Poland’s gold shipped to the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. Poland’s central bank holds more gold than any other in Europe. Follow the money and the night of October 30 stops looking like a legal dispute.

The Hungarian model is cleaner because it is finished. Viktor Orbán lost in April after 16 years, and Péter Magyar replaced him. Magyar’s party had worked with the European Union since 2018 to squeeze Hungary under Article 7 of the EU treaty. By 2022, the Commission had suspended €6.3 billion in funding, a figure that grew to somewhere between €16 billion and €35 billion. The message to Hungarian voters was plain: remove Orbán, install Magyar, and the money flows. After the election, the Commission released €4.2 billion and switched future funding back on. That is the playbook. Starve, replace, reward.

Slotkin sat with Magyar in Budapest and heard how his government drew up separate plans for every electoral outcome, from a narrow majority to a supermajority, and how it handled what it called the prior government’s corruption and legacy through what it called accountability tools. On September 9 in Warsaw she met Żurek, who briefed her on judicial reform, criminal law cooperation, and the fight over the Constitutional Tribunal appointments, and who seven weeks later would be the man filing to strip the court’s leadership of immunity. On September 10th, she met Adam Bodnar at the Polish Senate, the former justice minister who called the new Tribunal nominations and the moves against the National Prosecutor’s Office breakthroughs. Court packing and expanded lawfare were on the table as options for the United States. She was in the room while they described what they had done and what they were about to do.

Then she told us herself. On September 30th at the Carnegie Endowment, with Anne Applebaum handling the questions, Slotkin said she had visited Poland and Hungary at the beginning of the month, praised Hungary’s broad coalition for defeating Orbán, pointed to Poland’s “Iron Broom” accountability campaign, and talked about applying signature cases against alleged corruption here at home. The hidden camera came later. A voter raised prosecutions of the Trump administration. Slotkin said she was with him, told the Budapest story about removing a leader of 16 years through signature legal cases, said the Democrat Party has its own list ready, and said that is what you are going to see in January.

Her defenders will say she was doing oversight, and that Donald Tusk is restoring the rule of law after years of PiS mischief, and that a dysfunctional Tribunal had to be unblocked. Lawful acts are done at noon through the front door. If the Sejm’s appointments were valid, Tusk wouldn’t have needed an absent president, a side gate, policemen without name tags, or a one-month suspension under a statute meant for district judges who show up drunk. Likewise, if Slotkin’s trip were oversight, it would have ended in a committee report rather than a whispered promise about January. The method tells you what the actors believe about their own legality.

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The method is already staged here. The Democrat Party has retained Marc Elias’s firm, and Elias has bragged that the lawyers are lined up, the papers are drafted, and they intend to fight the election results and anything Trump does afterward. He said this before a single vote was counted. Data Republican has reported on a group waiting for its moment around the midterms to manufacture chaos, provoke Trump into calling in troops, scream coup, and then move through governors they have already approached. That is the Lula sequence from Brazil and the Warsaw sequence from Friday, with American names in the boxes. The Democrats and their willing accomplices in the drive-by media will call every piece of it normal. In Warsaw they called it normal, too.

Step back, and the pattern is not subtle. Călin Georgescu won the first round in Romania, and they threw out his election because he was a conservative; a year ago, he warned that if nobody stood up, they would do it again somewhere else. Hungary followed, then Serbia, then Poland. Every one of those leaders stood with Trump. Nawrocki in particular has been credited by Trump with pushing a permanent American base in Poland, roughly 4,000 to 5,000 troops, with Poland prepared to spend $3 billion to $4 billion on the infrastructure, plus a PAC-3 Patriot servicing center, the first outside the United States, with Polish defense spending near 5% of GDP. Remove the allies one by one, and Trump stands alone, which is the point, and then the people who answer to Brussels take the chairs.

So here is what you do. You vote on Tuesday, and you bring people with you, because the only thing that beat the coup in Warsaw was that the president did not hide and the people showed up at the gate. Then you get inside the polling places as a poll watcher or a challenger, and you volunteer so the count happens in front of witnesses. At the end of the day, Warsaw taught a lesson the globalists did not intend to teach. Brussels wanted the court, Frankfurt wanted the gold, and Tusk wanted the president out of the country, and what they got was a crowd at the gate and a plane turning around over Spain. The playbook works only on an empty square. Fill it.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes political analysis at amuseonx.com. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact me directly. Each op-ed is edited for grammar and clarity using AI from Grammarly.

On October 27th, Democrat donors were invited to log on to a virtual fundraiser to elect “climate utility leaders,” with Kamala Harris billed as the special guest. The beneficiaries were not Senate candidates or governors. They were four people running for the Georgia Public Service Commission and the Arizona Corporation Commission, offices most voters couldn’t find on their own ballot with a flashlight. The cohosts included a DNC council on climate, the Georgia Democrat Party, and a PAC called Lead Locally, whose website explains that by winning races like these, “we can block permitting for new pipelines, ban fracking across states.” The pitch tied cheaper electricity to data center bans and a march toward 100% clean energy.

The Democrat Party has taken the playbook it used to elect so-called Soros prosecutors and pointed it at the obscure commissions that decide whether data centers get electricity. Ten states still elect the commissioners who regulate their utilities. Those races are cheap and ignored, settled by voters who tend to stop reading somewhere around the county coroner. A few million dollars, spent patiently, can seat regulators across those ten states who never cast a vote to ban a data center and still make sure almost none get built. Republicans who want America to win the superintelligence race should treat these contests as the main event, and legislators should write rules that keep a power hookup from becoming a political veto.

The prosecutor model worked beautifully, which is why it’s back. In April 2017, George Soros gave $1.45 million to Philadelphia Justice & Public Safety, an independent PAC backing a defense lawyer named Larry Krasner for district attorney. None of it went into Krasner’s campaign account; it paid for television, mail, digital ads, and canvassers. Krasner won. By February 2018, his office had announced that prosecutors would generally stop asking for cash bail for lower-level offenses. Judges still set bail, of course. Yet the office that brings the criminal cases in the country’s sixth-largest city had changed its posture toward thousands of defendants, and no legislature ever voted on it.

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Chicago got the sequel. In February 2020, according to the Washington Free Beacon, the Soros-founded Democracy PAC sent $2 million to Illinois Justice & Public Safety PAC to protect Kim Foxx, the Cook County prosecutor whose office had dropped the charges against Jussie Smollett. Foxx won reelection. The method in both cities was the same: find an office with vast discretion and little public attention, flood it with dark money, and let the winner remake policy through administrative choices rather than statutes. Conservatives then spent years cleaning up, recalling Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, impeaching Krasner in the Pennsylvania House, and finally retiring George Gascón in Los Angeles. Undoing an election, it turns out, is a lot harder than winning one.

Democracy PAC’s April 2026 report to the Federal Election Commission shows a $2 million contribution to Working Families Party PAC on January 16, plus $423,000 a week earlier to Justice & Public Safety, the same NGOs that installed Krasner and Foxx. Working Families endorses Clara Pratte and Jonathon Hill, the Democrats running for the Arizona Corporation Commission, and its federal and Arizona committees share a name, an address, and a treasurer. Along with Chispa AZ and EDF Action Votes, Working Families helps fund Arizonans for Affordable Energy, which reported $85,000 in radio streaming on October 28 to promote Pratte and Hill and attack Republicans Kevin Thompson and Ralph Heap. All told, outside groups have spent nearly $2 million on the Arizona race.

The Democrats and their willing accomplices in the drive-by media will call this guilt by association. I’m not claiming George or Alex Soros hand-picked four commission candidates, and honestly the argument doesn’t need it. A network like this exists so that nobody has to. The founder capitalizes Democracy PAC, Democracy PAC capitalizes Working Families, and Working Families chooses the races and buys the ads. The prosecutor campaigns ran the same way, which is why every denial sounded so sincere.

Utility commissions offer even better arithmetic than district attorneys. Project Blue, a data center planned outside Tucson, came with a developer forecast of $3.6 billion in initial investment, 3,000 construction jobs, and 180 permanent ones. Tucson rejected the annexation in August 2025, and the Corporation Commission later approved the project’s power agreement anyway. Pratte has said she and Hill would have opposed that agreement. Put the roughly $2 million spent on Arizona’s race next to the $3.6 billion riding on a single project, and you have found the cheapest veto in American politics. In Georgia, the maximum check to a commission candidate is $8,400, about the price of a decent used Corolla, and it buys a stake in a body that recently approved nearly 10 gigawatts of new generation.

Nor is the goal much of a secret. On October 20, Lead Locally published an endorsement slate of local candidates running to stop data centers, people it describes as wanting to regulate, restrict, and stop them. Peter Hubbard, the Democrat commissioner defending Georgia’s District 3 seat, was blunter in a September statement with former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms: “Data Centers should not be allowed here in Georgia, unless they agree to the following conditions.” The list that followed included renewable energy, union labor, disclosure rules, community protections, and operating flexibility. Georgia’s commission is 3-2 Republican today. If Hubbard holds his seat and Shelia Edwards wins District 5 on Tuesday, Democrats run it. Arizona’s commission is 5-0 Republican and can’t flip this year, but two seats buy a beachhead and a running start on 2028.

Georgia and Arizona are canaries in the coal mine. The ten states that elect utility regulators are Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and South Dakota. Commission seats were on the ballot in nine of them this year, and in Georgia, Louisiana, North Dakota, and Alabama, control of the commission was mathematically in play. These bodies mostly have three or five members, so a determined network needs to win two or three races to own a state’s electricity policy. A statewide down-ballot race in North Dakota or a commission district in Louisiana costs a fraction of one competitive House seat. For less than the price of a single Senate race, you could assemble working majorities across most of these commissions, and no legislature would ever take a vote.

Democrats will answer that this is all about affordability. A retiree in Macon shouldn’t subsidize a tech giant’s server farm, they say, and commissioners only want developers to pay for the power plants and transmission lines they require. That is roughly Edwards’s platform, and on that narrow point she is right. So is President Trump, whose March Ratepayer Protection Pledge calls on developers to cover their own energy and infrastructure costs. Georgia has already done it. In August, Georgia Power and commission staff filed a joint statement committing that, under the reviewed large-load contract, ordinary customers would not be stuck with specified costs if the data center walked away early. That’s ratepayer protection, and it came out of a Republican-majority commission without a single mandate about where the electrons come from.

Which tells you what the rest of Hubbard’s list is for. A union-labor requirement doesn’t lower anyone’s power bill. Forcing a data center onto renewables doesn’t shield a family in Valdosta from stranded costs; it shrinks the pool of power the project may buy and raises the price of what’s left. Those conditions are tolls, and if you put enough tolls on a road, sooner or later nobody drives on it. Lead Locally has said much the same in writing. Affordability is the banner, while the money, the cohosts, and the organizers’ own words reveal the goal of outright bans on data centers.

Legislatures in the elected-commission states should settle the affordability fight by statute. Require large-load tariffs with minimum bills, exit fees, and collateral, so household protection doesn’t hinge on who wins a November race. In the same bill, bar commissions from conditioning service on labor agreements or on fuel choices beyond what reliability and cost actually demand. Commissions, meanwhile, should approve flexible-load tariffs. Researchers at Duke estimated in 2025 that the grid could accomodate about 98 gigawatts of new large load if those customers agreed to curtail just 0.5% of their annual energy use, which is how you connect quickly without building plants for customers who never show up.

Then there’s the money. Republican donors will spend tens of millions on a Senate race without blinking; they will not spend $500,000 on a commission seat that decides whether a $3.6 billion project gets power, and that is a mistake the left stopped making years ago. Party leaders in Georgia, Louisiana, and North Dakota should recruit commission candidates with the seriousness they bring to governor’s races. And voters, for their part, might try reading to the bottom of the ballot.

Berkeley Lab projects that data centers will use about 11.8% of American electricity by 2030. The White House pledge says the country’s technological leadership depends on that infrastructure being “built here at home.” Which part of home, and whether it ends up being home at all, will be decided less in Congress than in hearing rooms in Atlanta, Phoenix, Baton Rouge, and Bismarck. Capital goes where the power is, whether that means Texas, where the governor appoints the regulators, or countries happy to host what we decline to build. The left learned in the prosecutor wars that discretion is power and that the cheapest office to win is the one your opponent ignores. At the end of the day, conservatives learned the same lesson the expensive way, one recall at a time, and I would rather not pay that tuition a second time with the AI economy.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes political analysis at amuseonx.com. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact me directly. Each op-ed is edited for grammar AI with Grammarly.

On the morning of October 25th, Polymarket traders gave Flávio Bolsonaro roughly an 80% chance of becoming Brazil’s next president. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took the runoff that night, 51.7% to 48.3%, and many confident bettors went to bed poorer. Because Brazil bars its own citizens from these markets, foreigners trading a thin book from abroad set most of the price. They got the race wrong and paid for it in cash.

Now, 6 days later, the same platform puts Ken Paxton’s chance of beating James Talarico (CIS) in the Texas Senate race at 28.5%. The explanation making the rounds on 𝕏 is that some billionaire is buying a gloomy number to demoralize Republicans before Tuesday. I think it is wrong. The Paxton market may well be mistaken, as the Brazil market was, but there is no evidence anyone is rigging it, and the market’s design makes rigging hard if not impossible to pull off undetected. A wrong market and a rigged market are different animals, and conservatives of all people should know the difference.

Friedrich Hayek explained why in his 1945 essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” Every buyer and seller, he argued, folds a sliver of what he knows into a price, so the price gathers scattered knowledge no planner ever could. A price is a summary, and summaries can be wrong. A free price earns trust because anyone who thinks it wrong can profit by correcting it, and that standing invitation guards the Paxton market better than any regulator could.

The boring explanation fits the facts. In the RealClearPolling average, Talarico (CIS) sits at 48.8% and Paxton at 47%, a gap of 1.8 points. People routinely confuse a candidate’s share of the vote with his chance of winning. If polls can miss by a typical 3 points either way, a 1.8-point lead works out to roughly a 73% chance of victory, almost exactly where Polymarket sits. Kalshi, a separate federally regulated exchange with about 7 times Polymarket’s trading volume, prices Paxton at 29%, and any rigging theory has to explain that too.

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A billionaire manipulating the price would leave tracks, big lopsided trades about as subtle as a bulldozer in a flower bed. There are none. The largest single bet tracked in the Texas Senate event is $58,100 against Paxton, and the largest bet for him, $35,700, came from a first-time wallet. Since September 22, trackers count 189 purchases of $5,000 or more from 85 wallets, about $2.2 million in all, spread across both sides. The biggest wallet backing Paxton holds about $122,000; the biggest against him, about $198,000. To a billionaire, those are rounding errors.

Part of the alarm comes from misread data. Pull the raw list of Paxton “No” holders off the Polygon blockchain and one address sits on roughly 903,477 shares, which looks like the mother of all anti-Paxton wagers. Nobody owns it. Polymarket’s public contract code sends tokens there whenever a trader converts a bet against one candidate into equivalent bets on the others, and no one is known to hold a key that could spend them. The address works like a shredder whose contents stay visible on the ledger, and a hasty analyst mistakes it for a whale. Set it aside, and no real wallet holds more than about 15.5% of either side, among roughly 4,300 wallets with a stake in the race.

A clever billionaire, the theory goes, would hide behind 1,000 small accounts. Opening an account on Polymarket US requires a legal name, birth date, address, phone number, and Social Security number, and the exchange can demand a government ID and a selfie. Rule 7.2(m) of its rulebook prohibits concealing or fragmenting ownership to defeat surveillance. This contract trades on the international platform, where wallets are pseudonymous, but money still has to come from somewhere and go somewhere. Polymarket says it hunts for wallets that share funding sources, trade in correlated sizes and times, and withdraw to the same destinations, and it uses Chainalysis, the blockchain forensics firm. In April, the Justice Department credited Polymarket’s cooperation when it charged a soldier with trading on classified information. A billionaire can create 1,000 wallets. He cannot create 1,000 strangers.

In October 2024, the Democrats and their willing accomplices in the drive-by media were certain a French trader called Théo was rigging Polymarket for Donald Trump. He had spread about $30 million across 4 accounts; within days, sleuths tied all 4 to one man, and Polymarket concluded he was making a very large bet. He was also right.

Critics also picture the wrong kind of market. Betting at the racetrack is pari-mutuel: every dollar goes into a common pool, the track takes its cut, and the odds are whatever the leftover money says when the gates open. A rich man who drops $1 million on a long shot changes the payout for everyone, nobody across the counter offers to bet against him at a better price, and once his ticket prints he cannot sell it. A casino sportsbook is no better, since the house sets the line on Sunday’s football game, takes the other side of your bet, and locks you in until the final whistle.

The stock market comes closer but has a weakness a manipulator can exploit. A company issues a fixed number of shares, and once a buyer gobbles up enough, nobody can conjure more. That is how a squeeze briefly made Volkswagen the most valuable company on earth in October 2008. A stock also never expires and has no fixed final value, so a distorted price can drift for years.

Polymarket is different. Picture the currency booth at an airport, posting one price to buy euros and a slightly higher price to sell them. Now imagine hundreds of competing booths, each posting its own prices with its own capital, all shown on one board. That board is the order book, and the booths are market makers. On Saturday, the best offers for Paxton “Yes” stood at 28¢ to buy and 29¢ to sell, a 1¢ spread, and the 28.5% headline is the midpoint.

Shares in a prediction market have no fixed float, and that fact alone should end most conspiracy talk. Since exactly one of the two will pay $1 when the race is called, anyone can deposit $1 and receive a “Yes” share and a “No” share on Paxton. Say a billionaire bids “Paxton loses” up to 85¢. A market maker who thinks that price is absurd deposits $1, sells the “No” share to the billionaire for 85¢, and keeps the “Yes” share at an effective cost of 15¢. If the maker believes Paxton’s true chance is 30%, he has just bought a 30¢ asset for 15¢ and can repeat the trade as long as the billionaire keeps buying. Nobody corners a supply that grows every time he pushes on it.

These contracts, unlike a racing ticket or sportsbook slip, can be bought or sold at any moment until the race is called, which turns the manipulator’s job from a single expensive shove into a siege. Holding Paxton at 15¢ for weeks means buying against every trader who spots a bargain, on a public blockchain that timestamps each trade and records each wallet. At 29¢, 100 Paxton shares cost $29 and pay $100 if he wins. A trader who honestly thinks the race is a coin flip sees $21 of expected profit, and the lower a manipulator drives the price, the fatter that profit gets. He would be paying strangers to bet against him, in public, against a deadline, and on November 3 every contract settles at $1 or nothing.

In the Republican primary market, the Anti-Corruption Data Collective, no cheerleader for prediction markets, documented a $1,240 trade that lifted Paxton’s price by 11¢, and the higher price held for weeks. That happened, but months ago in a thin market, when a trader with pocket money could move the needle because few others were watching. The same report found about $24,000 in February trades lifting Wesley Hunt’s price and roughly $38,830 pushing Paxton’s down, then watched both moves reverse once polling showed Paxton leading Hunt 38 to 17. Thin markets wobble, and more traders steady them.

Washington’s answer should be sunlight. The CFTC ought to require regulated exchanges to publish trade-level data with a short delay, along with holder-concentration figures that exclude protocol addresses like that burn wallet, so anyone alleging manipulation can test the charge against real price movements. Prosecutors should keep pursuing genuine fraud, as they did in April, and lawmakers should resist the blue-state itch to sue these markets out of existence. Republicans have homework too. We laughed at the left in 2024 for blaming a market it didn’t like, and we should not borrow its excuse in 2026.

Texas voters can read 28.5% the way they read a weather forecast. A 30% chance of rain means you carry an umbrella, not that the clouds are conspiring against you. FiveThirtyEight gave Donald Trump about a 29% chance on the eve of the 2016 election, and we all remember how that ended. Paxton’s odds are a snapshot of polls and opinion this weekend, definately not a billionaire’s decree. Early voting closed Friday; Election Day is Tuesday. The only number that matters will be tallied by county clerks from Texarkana to El Paso.

The larger quarrel is about free institutions. For decades the Democrat Party has blamed billionaires for every result it dislikes, the Kochs one year and Elon Musk the next, because a conspiracy spares you the labor of persuading anyone. Conservatives hold a harder view. Free people trading openly under clear rules produce knowledge no committee could assemble, and sometimes that knowledge is wrong, the way a jury is sometimes wrong, and we keep both anyway because each answers to evidence. A Republican who cries “rigged” every time a price disappoints him has quietly adopted the other side’s theory of the world. Polymarket is guessing about Texas, and on Tuesday Texans get to answer. I’m betting the market is wrong and that Ken Paxton will be our next U.S. Senator.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes political analysis at amuseonx.com. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact me directly. Each op-ed is edited for grammar and clarity using AI in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

On October 22, the energy analysts at Kpler reported a number that the drive-by media refused to report. The volume of Iranian crude floating outside the blockade zone had fallen to zero, down from roughly 136 million barrels when the war began in February. No new Iranian cargo had loaded since August 25. Because payments lag deliveries, Kpler expects the associated revenue to dry up by mid-December. For a regime that has spent 45 years converting oil into terror and rockets, that is the sound of the register closing.

President Trump’s decision to finish what the June 2025 strikes began was the right one, and the price we are paying for it- higher gasoline, a drawn-down global inventory, and the regrettable loss of American lives- is worth it for a simple reason. The costs are temporary, and the gains are durable. Thousands of lives will be saved. Oil inventories refill. Centrifuge halls, missile plants, and the financial plumbing of the world’s largest state sponsor of terror do not.

The governing principle is one every conservative understands from the schoolyard. A nation that can be held hostage will be held hostage. Since 1979, the Islamic Republic has treated the Strait of Hormuz as its insurance policy, the threat that made every American president calculate the cost of an oil shock before deciding how many Iranian war crimes to tolerate. The Navy’s own history of the 1987 Tanker War records Iranian mines in the shipping lanes and the escort mission, Operation Earnest Will, that followed. We fought that round and then went back to tolerating the rest. Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis grew up under that umbrella. Treasury reported that the IRGC Quds Force moved more than $1 billion to its clients in 2025 alone, and that was a year in which Iran was supposedly weakened by the fall of Assad.

Why now, rather than in 2027? Because the clock was running in Tehran’s favor. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell assessed in July 2025 that the June strikes had set the nuclear program back by one to two years, and the regime wasted none of that time. With oil money flowing, it simply started rebuilding. More alarming still was the pace of conventional production. Ballistic missiles and attack drones were rolling off assembly lines by the thousands, and the hard truth about even the finest air defenses in the world is that they can be saturated. Shoot enough objects at a Patriot battery at once, and some will get through. The campaign objective followed from that arithmetic: destroy the stockpiles, destroy the factories that replace them, and cut off the cash that would otherwise replace the factories.

Each leg of that strategy now has receipts. CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper said on October 16 that American operations had prevented $25 billion in Iranian oil exports and helped freeze roughly $350 million in cryptocurrency. Treasury’s October 8 action targeted what it called the regime’s remaining shadow fleet; its October 15 action targeted the banks and oil-sale intermediaries that turn tanker cargoes into usable currency. The proxies are feeling it too. On August 20, the Treasury designated ten people running a cash network for Hezbollah that moved hundreds of millions of dollars across borders. On October 2, it dismantled a France-linked Hamas fundraising ring. On January 16, before the first bomb fell, it hit 21 individuals and entities financing the Houthis. And on October 27, IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi told the Security Council that his agency had identified no effort by Iran to repair or reconstruct the facilities damaged in 2025 and 2026. A regime with no cash does not rebuild what it cannot pay for.

Now the bill, stated plainly. The International Energy Agency’s October 14 report puts global observed oil stocks 509 million barrels below their end-of-February level. Aramco’s chief executive, Amin Nasser, said on October 5 that replenishing those stocks while meeting demand could take up to two years once the strait fully reopens. Those are the honest numbers, and they are smaller than they sound. Spread across 730 days, refilling 509 million barrels requires an average net build of about 697,000 barrels a day. The world consumes about 102.4 million barrels a day. The refill is 0.68% of consumption; the entire hole is roughly five days of global use. On March 11 the 32 members of the IEA agreed to release 400 million barrels of emergency stocks, which is precisely what emergency stocks exist to do. You draw the reserve during the storm, and you rebuild it in the calm.

Compare that bill to the one the Democrat Party handed Americans without any war at all. AAA’s national average for regular gasoline today is $4.20. Joe Biden’s record, set June 14, 2022, was $5.02. A driver filling a 15-gallon tank pays about $12.18 less today than at Biden’s peak, during a shooting war in the Gulf, with the world’s most important chokepoint disrupted. Adjusting the 2022 figure for the inflation Biden also gave us and his peak works out to about $5.70 in today’s dollars, making today’s pump price roughly 26% lower. Crude tells the same story. Brent closed October 29 at $115.28 against a 2022 daily peak of $133.18; WTI closed at $105.51 against $123.64. Biden had no Hormuz closure and no Iranian campaign to blame. Instead, he waged a war on American drilling, and prices were higher.

The Democrats and their willing accomplices in the drive-by media promised something far worse than this. They promised $7 gasoline, a global depression, and a Middle East in flames from Beirut to Muscat. What actually happened is that American exposure proved limited: about 0.4 million barrels a day of crude moved through Hormuz to the United States before the war, around 2% of our consumption, and the Gulf adapted faster than the pessimists allowed. The Energy Information Administration estimates Middle Eastern production shut-ins fell from 10.9 million barrels a day in May to 4.8 million in September, a 56% recovery in four months. Its October outlook has Brent averaging $84 in 2027 and $74 by that year’s fourth quarter, with gasoline just under $3.60. Roughly half of American households heat with natural gas or propane, and the EIA expects them to spend less this winter than last.

The adaptation is the part of this story that will matter in 2036. The IEA recorded 5.6 million barrels a day of Gulf exports bypassing the strait in September. Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline to Yanbu can carry 7 million barrels a day and was moving about 2 million early this year; the war filled it. The UAE’s Habshan-Fujairah line carries roughly 1.8 million a day to the Gulf of Oman. ADNOC’s second Fujairah pipeline, half finished in May, has been accelerated toward completion in 2027, and Kpler puts combined UAE bypass capacity near 3.6 million barrels a day when it is done. Kuwait’s oil minister is now discussing routes through neighboring states. None of this was happening at this speed in January. The Gulf states had tolerated concentrated transit risk for decades because the alternative cost money; the war made the risk cost more. September’s attacks on the East-West line, after it was repaired, taught the second lesson in the same semester. Build redundant routes, and defend the pumping stations and ports that feed them.

The strongest objection deserves an answer, so here it is. Diesel sits at $6.32 a gallon, near its September record, and the truckers and farmers who burn it are carrying more of this war than the rest of us thanks to targeted attacks by Ukraine on Russian refineries. The IEA expects global demand to contract by 2.6 million barrels a day this year, and some of that is real hardship. Americans have died. All true, and all of it has to be weighed against the alternative, which was a nuclear-capable Iran with a treasury full of oil money and a missile force built to overwhelm whatever we could put in the sky. The price of that world would not have been denominated in cents per gallon; it would have been denominated in cities, and the people who would have paid it first live in Tel Aviv, Riyadh, and Manama, not in Georgetown.

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Consider also what it cost the president to choose this. He launched a major campaign in February of a midterm year, with every pollster in Washington telling him that voters punish the party in power for gasoline prices and nothing else; he could have waited until November, run on peace and quiet, and left the missile factories humming for his successor. He did the opposite; he played the decade instead of the quarter. That is what conservatives say they want from a president and almost never get.

What should Washington do with the ground it has taken? Keep the blockade on Iranian oil and lift it on everyone else; lawful commercial passage should be protected and prohibited Iranian trade should be strangled, and the Navy can tell the difference. Make Gulf producers finish and defend their own bypass infrastructure with their own money, since the pipelines serve their trade. Refill strategic reserves gradually as supply allows rather than chasing barrels at the top of the market. Keep Treasury aimed at the facilitators and shadow banks while leaving humanitarian channels open. Judge the nuclear question by inspector access, material accounting, and reconstitution indicators rather than by replaying footage from last June. If Iran creeps back toward a bomb, the United States now has an option it did not have for 45 years: go in and destroy it again, at a time of our choosing, without the strait as a gun to the world’s head.

At the end of the day, deterrence is a reputation, and reputations are built by paying prices that adversaries assumed you would refuse. Every administration since Carter did the math on Hormuz and concluded that the Islamic Republic’s proxies were cheaper to live with than to confront. Trump did the math differently, and the ledger now shows a terror sponsor with no oil revenue in sight, a nuclear program nobody is repairing, and a Gulf that is paving its way around the trap. Two years of refilling tanks is a modest fee for that. The question for the next president, of either party, will be whether he has the nerve to keep the account current.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes political analysis at amuseonx.com. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact me directly. Each op-ed is edited for grammar and clarity using AI in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

Two months before Wedgewood Polls entered her life, Mallory McMorrow was tied for first in Michigan’s Democrat Senate primary at 24%, according to a legitimate Emerson College poll. Then, on June 24, Wedgewood released its own survey. Abdul El-Sayed led with 46%, Haley Stevens had 39%, and McMorrow was down to 9%; for good measure, the release cast her as the only Democrat who couldn’t beat Mike Rogers in November. She left the race eleven days later.

None of it was real. Wedgewood now admits that nearly everything it published this cycle was fabricated, and the New York Times has quietly pulled 15 Wedgewood surveys from its polling tracker. McMorrow says the money dried up, her volunteers lost heart, and reporters started asking when she would withdraw. The woman who ran the super PAC backing her says donors pointed to the Wedgewood numbers when they closed their checkbooks.

That audience is where a fake poll does its work. It never has to change a single vote at the ballot box because the people who decide whether a candidate is viable read the polls long before voters do: donors, endorsers, party committees, reporters, and finally the candidate herself. Four firms exploited that fact in 2026. Four firms exploited that fact in 2026, and the Department of Justice and the state attorneys general, beginning with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, should treat them as the fraudsters they are.

FiftyPlusOne caught Wedgewood when It confronted it with crosstabs that couldn’t exist and got an admission that most of its releases were made up, which the firm later repackaged as a “social experiment.” Wedgewood named Jack Sims and Andrew Prater as its operators. Sims, it turns out, has real polling experience, and that detail should end any talk of a prank. Somebody who knew exactly what a credible poll looks like built a product designed to pass as one.

SoCal Strategies, a Florida business connected to the same Jack Sims, listed Wilson Rochford as its lead pollster. Rochford’s actual role is disputed, and investigators have been told someone may have been using his identity. A prosecutor with subpoena power ought to settle that question, since a blogger with a browser cannot. SoCal vanished from the internet within hours of Legal Insurrection and others asking about its ties to Wedgewood, and FiftyPlusOne stopped collecting its polls on October 22.

The Public Sentiment Institute (TPSI), run by head pollster Lester Tellez alongside Dustin Smith, was banned after FiftyPlusOne found an undisclosed $1,575 payment from James Fishback’s Florida gubernatorial campaign, along with an internal postmortem describing how Jay Collins supporters were reassigned to Fishback. Rahil Prakash, a 21-year-old recent graduate, created Median Strategies and told reporters he built the whole operation alone with AI. He invented polls in Los Angeles, Wisconsin, and Nevada. Then he watched Karen Bass’s mayoral campaign promote his fiction as fact, which tells you how little curiosity a Democrat campaign brings to a number it likes.

The fakes hit the Democrat primaries first, and they negatively impacted moderate Democrats. Wedgewood’s July 21 Wisconsin survey showed the progressive Francesca Hong at 38%, Mandela Barnes at 30%, and David Crowley at 9%, and Hong’s campaign put the numbers in a press release the next day. On the prediction market, Crowley’s price fell from roughly 23% to 13% within 15 minutes of the release. David Crowley even suspended his campaign and endorsed his opponent. He reentered the race only because she dropped out. In the end, he won. A weaker candidate would not have survived the fortnight.

Mississippi got the same treatment. Wedgewood claimed Cindy Hyde-Smith led Scott Colom by just 52% to 48%, Colom’s campaign trumpeted it, and the Democrats and their willing accomplices in the drive-by media spent a week running breakthrough stories about a red state in play. Silver’s own analysis found that Wedgewood’s numbers ran more Democratic than his averages and were especially generous to the furthest-left (DSA & Islamic Marxist) candidates in several contests. The lies leaned left.

Later the operation turned its guns on Republicans. TPSI’s Florida numbers nudged Collins voters toward Fishback for a paying client nobody disclosed. SoCal released a Texas Senate runoff survey of 700 likely voters showing Ken Paxton at 57% and John Cornyn at 35%, and Capitol Inside promptly reported that Paxton was approaching a decisive victory. SoCal’s Kentucky survey of 450 likely voters put Ed Gallrein at 49% and Thomas Massie at 42%. Jim McLaughlin, the president’s pollster, calls these suppression polls. Tom Bevan laid out in RealClearPolitics why RCP refused to carry them, even as the Times and FiftyPlusOne did.

The forgers walked into an already poisoned environment. CNN has conceded on air that Republicans outperform the so-called legitimate polls by roughly 5 points, and Republican voters stopped believing them. Here in Texas, pollsters admit openly that they cannot reach Republican voters because Republican voters hang up on them. Then there are a dozen or so polling shops, financed and staffed by partisan organizations, that still describe themselves as independent. In an industry like that, the honest practitioner is hard to tell from the operative, and the four fake firms sit at the far end of a spectrum the profession tolerated for years.

A voter who already suspects the polls are rigged against him will not be surprised by a bogus 22-point deficit. It will discourage him, and a discouraged voter stays home. In a primary, a fake poll ends candidacies, while in a general election it drains turnout from exactly the voters who had learned to distrust the polls in the first place.

Pollster Nate Silver insists the damage was small, and he has a number to back him up. Pulling Wedgewood out of his Michigan average moved El-Sayed’s lead by 0.6 points, from 3.6 to 3.0. The figure is accurate and also beside the point, since the average was never what the forgers were aiming at. The donor was. So was the reporter who asked McMorrow when she planned to drop out.

Deleting a fraudulent poll from an average cannot undo the campaign decisions and public perceptions it helped create. McMorrow cannot un-withdraw. Crowley’s donors cannot get back the week they spent hedging, and no correction on a polling tracker returns the money a Mississippi Democrat raised on a lie. Real money changed hands, real decisions were made, real markets moved, and harm like that is exactly what criminal law exists to address.

Attorney General Todd Blanche should begin with the wire fraud statute, 18 USC §1343. It carries up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine per count, and every email, every crowdfunding solicitation, and every invoice sent across state lines is its own count. Wedgewood asked the public for money to pay for polling it never conducted. In Kousisis, decided in 2025, the US Supreme Court settled that fraudulent inducement, which means lying to get someone to hand over money, is wire fraud even when the victim cannot show a net loss. Conspiracy under §1349 carries the same 20 years for anyone who knowingly joined the scheme.

Where an account connected to the operation traded before a release, as the trade analysts at BETINT allege happened with SoCal, prosecutors should add 7 USC §13(a)(2), which makes it a crime to manipulate a regulated contract market and carries up to 10 years and a $1 million fine. The CFTC’s February 2026 advisory on event-contract fraud gives civil enforcers a running start. TPSI’s secret work for a campaign also implicates the Federal Election Campaign Act. When a campaign pays for a poll that is then released as independent research, the campaign has made an in-kind contribution it never disclosed, and under 52 USC §30109(d), a knowing and willful violation involving more than $25,000 in a year carries up to 5 years.

Texas does not have to wait on Washington, and General Paxton should move now. Senate Bill 12, effective December 4, 2025, restored his authority to prosecute election crimes, though the quicker route runs through the Deceptive Trade Practices Act. That law forbids falsely representing the sponsorship, characteristics, or quality of a service, and §17.47 authorizes injunctions, civil penalties of up to $10,000 per violation, and restoration of every dollar obtained by deception. Sections 17.60 and 17.61 give the attorney general civil investigative demands, which work like subpoenas issued before any lawsuit is filed. He could compel the bank records, vendor contracts, and survey identifiers tomorrow.

On the criminal side, Penal Code §32.32 punishes a false written statement made to obtain property and grades it like theft, so a scheme that took in between $2,500 and $30,000 is a state jail felony carrying 180 days to 2 years, and one that took in more than $30,000 is a third-degree felony carrying 2 to 10 years. Forgery under §32.21 reaches invented respondent records passed off as genuine. Deceptive business practices under §32.42 adds a Class A misdemeanor and up to a year in county jail.

Paxton stands in a peculiar spot, because his own runoff was the subject of SoCal’s 57% to 35% fiction. The fastest way to prove the attorney general’s office is not an instrument of his campaign is to prosecute the people who tried to help it, and Government Code §402.028 lets him bring in the district attorneys so the operators’ home counties can file the charges.

Somebody will object that lying is protected speech, and the US Supreme Court did say as much in Alvarez. The Court has never said that taking money for a service you never performed is protected, though, and it has never said so about manipulating a regulated market or about funneling secret campaign contributions through a fake research shop either; that is why every charge above rests on the money and the market instead of the lie itself. The First Amendment defense will definately collapse the moment a prosecutor produces the first invoice for interviews nobody conducted. Juries understand the distinction, even when pollsters pretend they don’t.

A poll is public infrastructure, like a bridge inspection or a bank audit, and a republic that lets forgers counterfeit it will eventually get the candidates the forgers prefer. We prosecute the man who prints fake currency even when the economy absorbs his bills. The next printer will be better at it, and the one after him will be a foreign goverment.

The 2026 fakes were caught because a few statisticians noticed crosstabs that could not exist. Nobody should count on the next batch being that careless.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes political analysis at amuseonx.com. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact me directly. Each op-ed is edited for grammar and clarity using AI in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

By Monday, my inbox was full of screenshots from readers, all asking the same thing: What do Europe’s governments know that we don’t? The screenshots came from a Sunday post by an 𝕏 account called Open Minded Approach. It told its followers that Europe is preparing for the final war, and its evidence was a list. Britain wants households to keep 3 days of food and water. The European Union wants 72 hours, Germany wants 10 days, France has published a guide, and Sweden has mailed booklets. Add a rumor about rich men buying bunker suites and the post travels.

The honest answer is nothing, or at least nothing new. Every item on that list is real, and nearly every item is old. The post strips the dates off a decade of routine civil defense announcements and presents the pile as one alarm sounded this week; put the dates back on, and the alarm stops ringing. It rang for Americans because we didn’t get copies of the European preparedness booklets. A continent that lived through two wars at home keeps its pamphlets and its tins as a chore, and there a ministry notice about bottled water sounds like the fire marshal. A country that has not been invaded since 1814, where most people have never been told by Washington to keep a case of water in the garage, hears the same notice from Berlin or Stockholm as a warning. Conservatives ought to hear something familiar instead. The advice is ours.

Germany’s 10 days, the scariest number on the list, comes from the federal civil defense concept published in 2016, which also advised 5 days of water. The Bundestag recorded the figure in October, during the Obama administration. Since then, it has been revised to 10 days of food and drink, and it now sits on the Federal Office of Civil Protection website beside a checklist that reads like the back of a Boy Scout handbook.

Sweden has been at this since 1943, when the government mailed every household a booklet called If War Comes. New editions went out in 1952 and 1961, another in 2018, and the latest in November 2024, which tells households to manage for at least a week without electricity, running water, or a working grocery store. The edition now circulating on 𝕏 is titled If Crisis or War Comes, and that title does most of the work for the panic merchants.

The word war is right there on the cover, and the other governments use it too. The EU strategy lists geopolitical crisis among its hazards. The British campaign calls itself practical preparation for disruptions to essential services, and nobody in Whitehall pretends Russia isn’t among the things that could disrupt them. A risk register lists what could happen; treating it as a forecast of what will happen is the error every one of these posts commits. A hospital keeps a plan for a plane crash, and the plan is not evidence that a plane is coming. Sweden printed war on its cover in 1943, 1952, and 1961, and no Soviet division ever landed on Gotland.

Norway raised its own recommendation from 3 days to a week in May 2024 and mailed updated guidance that fall. Its annual preparedness week, Egenberedskapsuka, runs right now, October 26 through November 1, the kind of coincidence a lazy poster treats as confirmation. The country’s emergency management agency fixed those dates in a planning document issued on January 16, 2026. A government expecting Russian armor on the E6 next week does not give itself 9 months of lead time.

The EU’s 72-hour date is March 26, 2025, when the Commission released its strategy. A YouTube channel caught up 18 months later with a video titled Europe JUST Told Its People Prepare for War, and on October 13, a Canadian Substack promoted the video as proof that Brussels had ordered 450 million households to hoard cash. The strategy covers natural disasters, cyberattacks, failures of essential services, and security threats. And 450 million is the Union’s population, not its households.

Nothing else on the list was secret either. France published its national guide, Tous responsables, on November 20, 2025, recommending a 72-hour kit with 6 liters of water per person. The Netherlands launched Think Ahead that same month and delivered a booklet to 8.5 million households between late November and early January. Denmark advised 3 days in June 2024, and Ireland announced Be Emergency Ready in August and began delivering about 2.2 million copies in September. Each came with a press release, a minister at a podium and, usually, a cartoon of a flashlight.

Britain deserves the longest look, because its announcement is the freshest and the one most often cited as the trigger. In July 1939, the civil defense leaflet Your Food in War-Time urged families who could afford it to keep a week’s extra supply of tinned meat, flour, dried milk, sugar and tea, and to rotate it through the pantry so nothing spoiled. In July 2004, the Preparing for Emergencies booklet went to all 25 million British households. On May 22, 2024, Oliver Dowden, then deputy prime minister, introduced the Prepare website in a speech about bottled water, batteries and wind-up radios. The Be Ready campaign launched last week. The written statement laid before Parliament on October 22 says it was announced on July 14, built with more than 500 organizations, and will run for 3 years; the launch notice says much of the advice is unchanged from the old Prepare website. London has been asking its citizens to keep a few days of food on the shelf for 87 years. What is new is that Americans have started reading it.

Switzerland went further than anyone. After 1945, federal authorities told households to keep 2 months of sugar, rice, oil, and fat, and they sold the Notvorrat through school lessons, exhibitions, and a 1960 brochure that paired a soldier cleaning his rifle with a housewife checking her tins. Finland’s trade ministry drafted a 2-week household reserve guide in 1966 and, by the University of Helsinki’s account, never distributed it, apparently for fear that publishing it would convince Finns war was coming.

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We used to do this too. In 1955, Val Peterson, the federal civil defense administrator, told a Senate subcommittee that families should stock shelters with 5 or 6 days of food and water against the hydrogen bomb, and his agency ran a campaign called Grandma’s Pantry urging a week’s supply. The Defense Department’s 1968 handbook, In Time of Emergency, told families with a fallout shelter to gather 2 weeks of necessities, and nobody concluded that nuclear war was scheduled. The practice never stopped; we simply forgot it. Ready.gov still tells every American household to keep 3 days of nonperishable food and 1 gallon of water per person per day, which Britain now asks for against a storm and which half of 𝕏 reads as a calendar entry for the Third World War.

Some of the panic is honest confusion. A worried student, not a propagandist, wrote the April 2025 Reddit post that retitled the Commission’s crisis guidance as preparation “for the war.” The Mumsnet thread that opened on September 2, asking whether officials “know something,” ran to 14 pages of mothers comparing notes. The larger accounts are another matter, and what they sell is the thrill of secret knowledge. A Substack piece from September 20 bundled British stockpiling advice with hospital drills and military radio chatter, then concluded that NATO leaders want war with Russia and will stage an incident to get it. That is a plot summary in search of a plot. It finds a ready audience with American conservatives, among people who have correctly learned not to trust the Democrats and their willing accomplices in the drive-by media, and who have concluded that anyone the media ignores might therefore be telling the truth.

A government that tells families to keep a few days of food, a radio, and a jug of water is asking citizens to look after themselves and their neighbors before the state arrives, the oldest conservative instinct. The 3-day figure estimates how long a household should expect to stand on its own while responders go first to the hospital and the nursing home. A family that can manage that does not need rescuing. The Swiss understood this, and the British understood it in 1939, and the American civil defense planners of the 1950s understood it too; they simply assumed their citizens would take the hint and get on with it rather than reading it as a death notice.

So keep the kit. Follow ready.gov, buy the water, and rotate the cans the way the British were told to rotate theirs in 1939. Then, the next time a post says Europe “just” did something, open the government document it describes and find the date before you share anything; in every case I checked, that took under a minute. A ministry’s checklist isn’t a leak, and nobody needs a new agency or campaign to learn that.

At the end of the day, the thing worth losing sleep over is in Berlin. Telling Germans to keep 10 days of food is no scandal. Spending under 2% of the German economy on defense for most of the past decade while telling them to keep 10 days of food is one, and a government that papers over an empty arsenal with a well-stocked pantry is preparing an alibi rather than a defense.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes political analysis at amuseonx.com. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact me directly. Each op-ed is edited for grammar and clarity using AI in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

James Talarico (CIS) recently traded near 65¢ on Polymarket while Ken Paxton traded near 35¢, and a price like that invites a familiar complaint: some rich partisan has simply bought the number to manufacture a headline that tells the country the race is settled. The worry has a kernel of truth. A thin order book can be nudged, and a small trade can throw off a dramatic tick in the last price, which a dishonest commentator can then post as though a momentary print were the settled judgment of the public.

Sustaining a price costs far more than touching one. A wealthy bettor who wants Paxton higher ends up holding a stack of Paxton contracts and every dollar of risk attached to them, yet he can’t order thousands of other traders, market makers, arbitrageurs, and contrarians to forget arithmetic, so a durable market consensus stays well beyond his cheap reach. The Texas number deserves scrutiny, not reverence. It is not a poll or an official forecast, and it is certainly not a vote count. Neither is it a figure some billionaire casually typed into existence.

At roughly 3:02 PM Central on October 26, Paxton sat at a 35¢ bid and a 36¢ ask. Anyone who wanted to sweep every visible Paxton contract offered below 51¢ would have needed about $124,000, and for that sum he would have collected roughly 311,000 contracts at an average price near 39.7¢. The next offer waited at 52¢, so a sufficiently determined buyer could have created a 52¢ last-trade print. The expense comes from the book itself. Every contract he bought had a seller, the cheapest shares went first, and each layer above them cost more than the one before, so his order would have climbed the book level by level.

What he would have bought is a position. If Paxton wins, each contract pays $1; if he loses, the contracts may become nearly worthless. The bettor has not donated $124,000 to a cause. He has exposed $124,000 to whatever Texas voters ultimately do, which is a strange way to run a propaganda operation.

His isolated 52¢ contract would not amount to a credible 52% Paxton consensus, either. The Paxton bid would still sit near 35¢, and the resulting 17¢ spread looks like a shoved market: temporarily pushed rather than genuinely repriced. Polymarket displays the midpoint only when the spread is narrow; when the gap widens, the platform can show the last trade, and the screen may then show whatever the impatient buyer paid on his final click. A flashy last price and a durable clearing price are different animals.

Going after Talarico instead was no bargain. In the same snapshot, pushing him below 50¢ directly required roughly $168,000 to $172,000 of displayed Talarico-side depth. Texas is also a linked market, with the candidate contracts sitting inside an augmented negative-risk structure, so an inconsistency between the Paxton and Talarico prices creates an opportunity for arbitrageurs who can exploit the mismatch. A would-be kingmaker trying to force Paxton into a durable lead would meet replenishing offers, counterparties eager to sell at an inflated price, and traders who understand how the candidate books relate to each other.

Every cent he bids above what a seller considers fair makes the opposite trade sweeter, and the people best placed to notice need not share his politics at all. A contrarian only has to believe he paid too much. The market maker, whose living depends on standing on both sides of the book and pocketing the spread from anyone in a hurry, will cheerfully sell him all he cares to buy. His overpayment becomes somebody else’s opportunity.

Think of a wealthy man trying to corner the bakery on Main Street. He can buy every loaf in the display case. He cannot command every other bakery, supplier, customer, and competitor in town to accept his preferred price for bread, and the more obviously he overpays, the more people find a reason to bring bread to market.

The recent Texas Senate Race market supports this. Directional bursts of $10,000, $20,000, and $30,000 moved the market several cents at a time, which is meaningful and nowhere near enough to turn a 65¢-to-35¢ split into a stable Paxton lead. A billionaire can make the market pay attention; he cannot make it stop offering him the other side of a bad trade. At the end of the day, Polymarket is harder to move substantially than its critics admit. Resisting unilateral coercion, however, is a different virtue from being right, and Brazil supplied a painful lesson in the difference.

Brazilian polling firms put Flávio Bolsonaro at 51% and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva at 49% among valid votes in their final public polls, a virtual tie within the margin of error. Just before voting opened in the October 25 presidential runoff, Polymarket gave Bolsonaro roughly an 80% chance of winning, on about $249 million in cumulative volume, pricing a competitive race as though he were on the verge of a landslide. Lula won 64,256,232 votes, or 51.79% of valid ballots, against Bolsonaro’s 59,826,041, or 48.21%, a margin of roughly 4.4 million votes.

The traders had their reasons. Bolsonaro led the first round 47.03% to Lula’s 45.16%, and markets tend to extrapolate; a narrow plurality can swell into a story about momentum and turnout, then ideological realignment, until it hardens into a story about inevitability. Traders can mistake a narrow advantage for a settled fact, and they can grow overconfident together while reading the same data and the same early returns.

That does not prove manipulation. A market aggregates its participants’ judgments, blind spots included, and it cannot manufacture omniscience from a crowd that lacks it. Traders may lack local knowledge or overvalue financial sentiment. They may share the same mistaken turnout model and overreact to a first-round result. Brazil’s restrictions on election prediction markets also likely narrowed local participation precisely when Brazilian knowledge would have been most valuable.

Easy money doesn’t guarantee an instant correction. When a price is wrong, someone still has to spot the error, have the capital to act on it, and get there before the event resolves. Markets reward dissent, but nothing guarantees that the wisest dissent shows up on schedule.

Polymarket should make its own mechanics more transparent. The headline probability should clearly label whether the on-screen number reflects a midpoint or just the last trade. Beside it should appear the best bid and best ask, the spread between them, open interest, and depth at the next 1¢, 5¢, and 10¢ levels. Gross volume should sit next to open interest, because $249 million in turnover doesn’t mean $249 million in independent conviction.

With that information on the screen, a bad-faith actor waving a convenient screenshot as proof would have a harder time, and so would partisans who dismiss every inconvenient price as a whale’s fantasy. A reader could see for himself whether a move held and whether the book refilled. He could check whether the spread stayed tight, whether the price agreed with related markets, and whether public facts support the repricing.

The price should never travel alone. I would still read the polls, study turnout, and weigh campaign spending, candidate quality, local conditions and the electorate itself, and the most useful thing a disclosed book could add is a measure of how much money stands behind any gap between the market and the polling. Brazil’s market sat near 80¢ while Brazilian polling firms Datafolha and Quaest had the race at 51% to 49% and nobody looking at the headline number could tell whether that distance rested on deep conviction or on a crowd of traders leaning the same way. The flashing number is useful. It is neither gospel nor garbage.

Imagine a manipulator spends $1 million on Paxton contracts all at once. At about 7:04 PM Central on October 26, an order that size would have bought every visible offer on the book, roughly 1.46 million contracts at an average of about 68.6¢, and left a final trade at 99¢. For a moment, Polymarket’s headline would read 99% Paxton because the platform shows the last trade instead of the midpoint when the gap between the best bid and best ask is wider than 10¢. But the best bid would still sit at 35¢. Nobody would have changed their mind about Texas. One buyer would simply have bought out the sellers. That gap is an invitation. Traders who think Paxton is worth closer to 35¢ would rush to sell him new contracts at inflated prices, and market makers would post fresh offers far below 99¢. Because the Paxton and Talarico contracts are linked, the spike would also make Talarico look absurdly cheap, and arbitrageurs would buy him until the two prices again added up to about a dollar. As the spread narrowed, Polymarket would return to showing the midpoint, and the price would likely slide back toward the 35¢ to 40¢ range where real buyers and sellers actually meet. The manipulator would get a screenshot that lasted minutes. He would be left holding a million-dollar position, much of it bought near 90¢ or higher, in a market that values it far less. He would not have bought a consensus. He would have paid every skeptic to bet against him.

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Texas and Brazil point to the same conclusion. A rich bettor can buy attention, he can buy contracts, and he can occasionally buy a temporary chart pop, but he cannot casualy buy a durable political consensus from an active market, because his overpayment becomes another trader’s opportunity. It should be clear that rigging a prediction market is basically impossible. That being said, a market that resists manipulation can still aggregate bad assumptions and produce a bad forecast. A price is a forecast. It is not a vote count, and the only count that settles anything belongs to Texas voters. Join my Polymarket Squad ‘MAGA War Room’ for more in-depth discussion on political prediction markets.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes political analysis at amuseonx.com. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact me directly. Each op-ed is edited for grammar and clarity using AI in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

This month, Microsoft reported that a China-aligned crew it tracks as Storm-0940 pushed an agentic AI penetration-testing framework through a ConnectWise supply-chain compromise and turned it loose on hundreds of organizations, in some cases reaching privileged cloud access in under 3 hours. Set that beside Cathedral, a startup founded by former DOGE staffers and barely known outside the security trade, which sent its own team of AI agents after Anthropic and got inside. The agents did not crack Claude. They went around it, working through third-party enterprise software until they reached meeting transcripts, compensation and job-offer records, and internal Slack threads where employees discussed advanced models.

Anthropic tells a different story. The company says the exposure was limited to a set of sales, HR, and IT systems accessed through vendor-connected tools, and that Cathedral never touched Claude conversations, source code, or model weights. It says Cathedral spent several days trying to access its software directly before pivoting to the vendors. Anthropic has since closed the pathways, disputes Cathedral’s framing, and says the startup did not fully follow its disclosure rules. Grant every word of that, and the comparison gets sharper. A fledgling American startup needed only days of failed attempts at the front door before it found a side entrance, then told the owner; a Chinese crew needed an afternoon, told no one, and kept the keys. Same technology, same category of vulnerability, two entirely different moral universes.

Washington should read the two episodes as a single warning. America’s defenses are too slow for the AI age, and the proper response is to accelerate defensive AI and push it into every serious American institution, from federal agencies to regional hospitals. Retreating from the field would hand the advantage to the people already using it.

A medieval lord could post his best men at the main gate every morning and still lose the castle through the back wall, where guilds kept 12 tradesmen’s entrances with their own locks and habits. He inspected the gate; he rarely walked the wall. The guilds were busy, and each assumed someone else was watching it. Likewise, every modern company, Anthropic included, guards its own software while it lives inside a web of sales platforms, HR systems, identity providers, cloud applications, contractors, access tokens and collaboration tools. Each connection buys convenience, and each connection also hands a stranger a key. Cathedral’s agents walked that wall latch by latch and came back with the name of the guild that forgot to turn its key.

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Cathedral tried the latches, wrote up what it found, and sent the write-up along. An operator working for Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, or Pyongyang would walk the same wall with none of that restraint, taking far more than the minimum access needed to prove a point and telling neither the affected vendors nor a newspaper. Then he would stay. The compensation records and the Slack threads about advanced models would sit behind his foothold, untouched, until someone in his capital found a use for them. The victim might never trace the leak back to a sales tool.

What separates a security test from an intrusion is the character of whoever runs it, and the companies building these tools have been cataloguing the character on the other side. Anthropic says it identified a Chinese state-sponsored group that used Claude Code in an effort to penetrate roughly 30 global targets, succeeding in a small number of cases, a campaign it called a major step toward AI-directed cyber espionage; the same company has reported an Iranian threat actor using Claude to build malware, phishing infrastructure and a delivery pipeline, and its September threat report detailed cases tied to China and Russia involving weapons-development software, military procurement and intelligence gathering. Microsoft, which published the Storm-0940 findings, says North Korean actors already use AI to scale identity fraud, social engineering, persistence, vulnerability research, and malicious access operations. Microsoft also says fully agentic use is still emerging and hasn’t been observed at scale, and these reports don’t prove every hostile government fields an autonomous cyber army today; the attack cycle is compressing in front of us all the same, which is exactly why the moment is now. Reconnaissance and phishing get cheaper with AI, and so do translation, malware debugging, vulnerability research, data triage and persistent probing; a job that once required a well-funded team and weeks of labor can now be sliced into machine-speed assignments and run around the clock.

The Democrats and their willing accomplices in the drive-by media took a different lesson from the Post’s story, which is that the American labs should be throttled. A city that responds to a burglary wave by licensing fewer locksmiths ends up with more open doors and fewer people qualified to close them, while the burglars, who never applied for a license, keep working. China has its own models, open-weight models downloaded from American servers, stolen tools, compromised accounts, and state-backed compute, and it will keep using all of it on the day Washington votes for a pause. Powerful AI needs safeguards, and companies must secure their models, data, vendor connections, and the people with access; nobody serious wants untested autonomous systems wired into the power grid. An American slowdown slows nobody in Beijing, and it leaves American hospitals, utilities, and banks as softer targets, denied the only tools capable of detecting, deceiving, and defeating an intrusion that arrives at machine speed.

The governing answer is defensive overmatch: American defenders doing to themselves, continuously, what Cathedral did to Anthropic once. Vetted teams at federal agencies, hospitals, utilities, banks, data centers, and other critical-infrastructure operators should have capable defensive models in hand and run agents against their own systems and vendor ecosystems, so friends find side doors on Tuesday before enemies find them on Friday. The Trump administration has already poured the foundation. Executive Order 14409, which the president signed in June, promotes advanced AI innovation and security, and the GOLD EAGLE initiative the White House launched in July coordinates cybersecurity vulnerability discovery on a scale the federal government has never attempted. Both should grow into a standing national network for AI-powered vulnerability discovery, verification, prioritization, and repair.

That network depends on testers willing to test, and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act still reads broadly enough to make a good-faith researcher nervous. Cathedral’s quarrel with Anthropic over disclosure shows how fast a test can curdle into a dispute. The statute gives a researcher in that position no clear line to stand behind. The protection researchers lean on today is the Justice Department’s 2022 charging policy promising not to prosecute legitimate security research, and that is a memo from a prior administration, not a statute, and the next attorney general who finds it inconvenient can withdraw it so the people most willing to find the next side door are operating on a handshake. Congress should write a real safe harbor for good-faith testing and pair it with firm limits on how much data a tester may touch, how long he may keep it, and a hard deadline for the owner to remediate whatever he finds.

The agents also need somewhere to run, and that need is growing across North Texas. Those server halls are, among other things, the arsenal of the next decade’s cyber defense, and the permits and transmission lines they wait on are national-security questions wearing a zoning board’s clothes. The Texas Legislature and the Public Utility Commission should treat them that way. President Trump’s March cyber strategy names the mission: use AI-enabled tools to detect, divert, and deceive threat actors while scaling defense across federal networks and critical infrastructure. That mission runs on chips, domestic compute, secure data centers, reliable electricity, and the engineers to run it all; a strategy document cannot run an agent, only a data center with power on the line and talent in the building can. Every regulatory delay on a substation or a server hall is, in effect, a gift to the man walking the back wall.

At the end of the day, the Americans who ran this test were former DOGE staffers with a thin budget and a point to prove, and they found what a company among the world's best-defended had missed, then said it out loud. Countries that find their own weaknesses first keep them from mattering; countries that leave the search to their enemies learn about them the worst possible way, usually years later and usually from a foreign intelligence service. Within a few years Cathedral’s agents will be standard kit for every intrusion crew on earth. American defenders should have the same tools first, or we’ll spend those years debating whether we are permitted to compete. A free people has an advantage Beijing cannot copy: citizens who can test the powerful and publish what they find, and Congress should build on it by giving GOLD EAGLE its own statute, adding a line to the next defense authorization, and writing the safe harbor into the same bill.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes political analysis at amuseonx.com. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact me directly. Each op-ed is edited for grammar and clarity using AI in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

On August 12th, Amy Acton's campaign for governor of Ohio put out a press release under the headline "Billionaire Scammer Ramaswamy Used Mother to Manipulate Clinical Trials in 'Pump and Dump' Scheme to Make Millions." The mother in that headline is Geetha Ramaswamy, a physician, whom the release accused of helping her son manipulate clinical trial data in an Alzheimer's drug study. Acton's communications director, Addie Bullock, said Vivek had gotten "his own mother to manipulate clinical trial data." The release printed no response from Dr. Ramaswamy and gave no sign that anyone had asked her for one. The drive-by media didn't seem even slightly concerned, much less outraged, that Acton had brought Vivek's mother into the campaign.

In October, Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign committed $4 million to an ad in which Donna Arthur, Acton’s mother, says she loves her daughter and believes she has lied about her past. The same people who shrugged in August now call it an outrage. Ramaswamy was right to run it. Ohio voters are entitled to hear firsthand testimony about a candidate’s honesty, and the case is stronger when the candidate built her campaign on her own childhood story and was the first to make an opponent’s mother a political target. What the Democrat Party and its allies propose instead is a rule under which a relative becomes untouchable only when she speaks against a Democrat. That is a one-way taboo, and Ohioans should call it what it is.

Acton’s release went well past any corporate filing or stock chart. It put Dr. Ramaswamy in the headline and used her motherhood to sharpen the moral charge against her son. Even Gov. Mike DeWine, who dislikes both ads, has acknowledged that Acton’s earlier line of attack referenced Geetha Ramaswamy, and Ramaswamy’s campaign put it more bluntly, saying the first and only candidate to attack the mother of her opponent in this race was Amy Acton. A press release speaks about a person; a video lets a person speak for herself. If the first is fair campaign scrutiny, the second cannot be a scandal.

Donna Arthur speaks in her own voice in Ramaswamy’s ad, identified on screen as the candidate’s mother. No anonymous announcer carries the accusation. A named witness faces the camera, and viewers learn who she is before they hear what she thinks. She was not paid, and she was not disguised. The long estrangement between mother and daughter was known to any viewer who cared to look.

The claim that families have always been off limits will come as news to the Kennedys. In April 2024, President Biden’s campaign staged an event in Philadelphia with 15 Kennedy relatives, including 6 of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s siblings, to undercut his candidacy, and the press covered it as a coup. When RFK Jr. endorsed President Trump that August, CNN put Kerry Kennedy on air to say she was “outraged and disgusted” by her brother and that nearly the whole family was working for the Harris ticket. During the 2025 confirmation fight over his nomination to run HHS, Caroline Kennedy wrote a letter calling her cousin a predator and accusing him of leading younger relatives toward addiction. That letter was read into the Congressional Record and amplified by every major outlet. Nobody at the New York Times argued that a cousin should stay silent. The family tie was treated as the reason the testimony mattered.

The pattern holds down the ballot. In 2018, Democrat David Brill ran an ad against Rep. Paul Gosar in which 6 speakers urged voters to defeat him, withholding their identities until the end, when viewers learned they were Gosar’s siblings. In 2020, Amy McGrath’s campaign put Elaine Chao’s family shipping business and inheritance at the center of a charge that Mitch McConnell got rich off China. The DCCC’s independent expenditure arm followed in 2022 with a paid television spot in North Carolina’s 1st District built around allegations from Republican candidate Sandy Smith’s own daughter, and in 2024 Josh Stein’s campaign went after a daycare once run by Mark Robinson and his wife, Yolanda Hill. A progressive PAC drove a billboard truck to the clinic where Josh Hawley’s sister practices medicine. The Washington Post once published a cartoon depicting Ted Cruz’s young daughters as monkeys on leashes and pulled it only after the backlash. The Democrat Party treated none of this as beyond the pale, and some of it was celebrated. Republicans who accept that arrangement are agreeing to fight with one hand tied while the Democrats and their willing accomplices in the drive-by media hold the rope.

Acton has made her upbringing the spine of her public identity. Her accounts of childhood hardship, homelessness, and abuse are offered to voters as the explanation for who she is and why she entered public service, which turns the story into a character credential. A résumé line can be checked against a payroll record; a childhood can be checked only against the people who were there. Donna Arthur is a firsthand witness to those years. When she says her daughter has lied about her past, she challenges the credential and testifies to a pattern of dishonesty in someone who wants to wield those powers, which bears on whatever one concludes about Arthur herself. How much it weighs is for Ohioans to decide.

Arthur has not been close to her daughter for many years. That fact bears on her credibility, and voters are free to discount her testimony for it; Ramaswamy’s ad concealed none of it. Estrangement is information, not a disqualification. A rule that silenced estranged relatives would have silenced the Kennedy cousins, the Gosar siblings and Sandy Smith’s daughter, every one of whom had broken with the candidate in question, and the Democrat Party raised no such rule then.

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A public hearing works the same way. A witness may be biased or carry a grudge, and the opposing side is free to say so, because bias is an argument about weight. It never bars the witness from the room, and the proper response to testimony is contrary evidence rather than a gag order. Acton can rebut her mother with records, siblings, teachers, and neighbors. She cannot, consistent with any defensible principle, declare the witness disqualified because of who she is.

Acton chose to make those years a campaign asset, so calling the ad cruel because it relitigates childhood trauma gets the sequence backward. She opened that household to inspection before her mother said a word on camera. The ad renders no verdict on specific events from half a century ago and asks no one to adjudicate the 1970s. It tells Ohioans that the person best positioned to know what happened in that household disputes the candidate’s version. A candidate who wants her childhood treated as private can keep it off the stump. The proposed rule would let a candidate invoke family history for political benefit while forbidding any family member from offering a contrary account.

Ramaswamy should keep the ad on the air and keep pointing interviewers back to August 12. Acton should answer her mother with evidence and drop the demands that the ad be pulled, and reporters who ask Ramaswamy about decency ought to be asked whether they put the same question to Acton’s campaign that day; I’d wager the honest answer is an embarassing one. Republican campaigns nationally should go a step further and write down the actual rule: no anonymous smears of relatives, no impersonation, no threats, and no use of a family member without consent. Donna Arthur was identified, willing, unpaid, and on camera; she met every element of that standard, and the Democratic Party has never applied it to itself, no matter how many siblings, cousins, and daughters it has put in front of a camera over the years. Measured against it, the Brill ad, which hid the Gosar siblings’ identities until the end, sits closer to the line than anything Ramaswamy has aired, and the Acton release, which put a mother in a headline with no sign anyone had asked for her side, fails outright.

At the end of the day, consent and disclosure protect the relative who never asked to join a campaign and the voter who deserves to know who is talking. The taboo the Democrat Party and its allies prefer protects only the candidate. It lets the political class curate the evidence, deciding in advance which witnesses the public may hear and which must stay off the air. Brandeis called sunlight the best disinfectant, but he wasn’t describing a country where the press chooses which windows stay shuttered. Curation always sounds like decency to the curator. Ohioans can listen to a mother, listen to a daughter, read the records, and weigh both sides’ motives. A rule built on consent trusts them to do it. A rule built on party registration assumes they are too fragile, and Republicans in every state should insist on the first before another cycle of selective outrage hardens the second into custom.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes political analysis at amuseonx.com. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact me directly. Each op-ed is edited for grammar and clarity using AI in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

When Justice Stephen Breyer announced his retirement, President Biden repeated his campaign promise to appoint the first black woman to the Supreme Court and narrowed the pool to three black women in advance: Ketanji Brown Jackson, J. Michelle Childs, and Leondra Kruger. Justice Jackson is the product of that process, and her performance on the Court since then confirms that identity-based selection yields mediocrity. A justice owes the country impartial reasoning, intellectual humility, and precise craftsmanship. Jackson’s writing and reasoning repeatedly fail those standards, and publicly enough that she has become an embarrassment to the institution she serves.

Biden never said he would nominate the best legal mind available, and he never opened the search to all Americans; talent from every other background went unexamined. Symbolic firsts may carry some social value, though symbolism cannot replace substance, and a president who promises a justice of a particular race and sex damages the credibility of the office the nominee will fill. Black women have no shortage of ability. Biden made ability secondary. Jackson’s defenders point to her résumé: Harvard degrees, a clerkship with Breyer, and service on the U.S. Sentencing Commission. Those are real accomplishments, and hundreds of federal judges, law professors, and appellate advocates have equally strong records. What set Jackson apart was how well she fit the president’s demographic promise. Once a selection criterion comes before any evaluation of competence, the process becomes discriminatory, and a racial filter guarantees a smaller pool that is searched less deeply, with worse odds of finding the best candidate.

VIDEO: Justice Jackson, “My biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways.” That is, quite literally, the entire point of the First Amendment, of the entire Bill of Rights.

In Students for Fair Admissions v. UNC, the majority read the plain text of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI to forbid government, and institutions that take federal money, from discriminating on the basis of race. Jackson’s dissent ignored that legal command. She celebrated diversity and lamented America’s historical wrongs, accused the majority of “let them eat cake obliviousness,” and mocked the idea of “colorblindness for all.” She never articulated a coherent legal principle explaining when and why racial discrimination might be lawful. Her dissent read like a sermon on social justice rather than a legal analysis. A justice’s role is to interpret the Constitution, not to moralize about history, and on that measure her opinion failed.

Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo was the first case Jackson decided as a lower-court judge that reached the Supreme Court. The Court overturned her ruling in spectacular fashion and explicitly rejected her deferential reasoning toward the administrative state. The gap it exposed between her rhetoric and the rule of law runs through the rest of her work. She claims fidelity to original meaning and gestures toward textualism in confirmation hearings, then reverts to living constitutionalism in her writing, an inconsistency, whatever her admirers call it. She warns of threats to democracy when the Court's issue concerns jurisdiction or administrative delegation, anchoring her conclusions in broad moral premises when the case required legal ones. A justice may hold passionate views about fairness or policy; her duty is to apply the rules as written, not to rewrite them.

VIDEO: Justice Kentaji Jackson says laws banning sex changes for young children are "sort of the same thing" as banning interracial marriage.

Justice Sotomayor, usually an ideological ally, wrote a separate concurrence in Trump v. Casa, a 2025 separation-of-powers dispute, to distance herself from Jackson’s reasoning. Jackson’s dissent had warned that the majority’s reasoning posed an “existential threat to the rule of law.” Justice Barrett’s majority opinion answered in strikingly blunt terms, noting that Jackson’s theory departed from two centuries of precedent and envisioned an imperial judiciary unconstrained by constitutional limits. The liberal bloc rarely airs disagreement this way in public, and I read Sotomayor’s as alarm at a colleague’s disregard for doctrinal discipline.

Barrett has gone further than tone. In one opinion she issued a pointed rebuke, cautioning that Jackson’s reasoning lacked connection to the controlling legal framework and warning that persuasive rhetoric cannot substitute for disciplined analysis. Even her allies have noticed. Laurence Tribe and Neal Katyal, liberal commentators who have praised her advocacy, have expressed unease at her lack of doctrinal focus. Conservative scholars have been harsher, describing her opinions as “rhetorical essays masquerading as law.” Neither assessment is flattering, and both agree that her writing prioritizes persuasion over precision.

Humility is the standard her oral arguments test, and the numbers are unkind. Empirical SCOTUS data show that in her first eight arguments she spoke more than 11,000 words, far exceeding any other justice; none of the others exceeded 2,000. Her conduct on the bench has drawn criticism for verbosity and self-display. A high word count does not prove incompetence, but it suggests a justice more inclined to lecture than to inquire. Oral argument tests ideas. By monopolizing the time, Jackson deprived advocates of chances to clarify essential issues, and her long interventions blurred the line between advocacy and adjudication.

A telling moment came during Louisiana v. Callais, when she compared racial vote dilution to a lack of wheelchair ramps under the Americans with Disabilities Act. She meant to analogize unequal access. Disability accommodations involve no racial classifications, though, and racial gerrymandering does, so the comparison produced confusion. Critics pounced, interpreting her words as equating black voters with the disabled. That reading was uncharitable. A justice who keeps choosing moral theatrics over precise argument invites it anyway.

Calling Jackson the most embarrassing justice in US history is a strong charge, and I mean it without any hint of scandal. I mean a visible deficiency in reasoning, repeated disregard for legal form, and public correction by peers; when both conservative and liberal colleagues find her work off course, the criticism transcends partisanship and signals professional concern.

Some accuse critics of racism for questioning the DEI framework that produced her nomination. That accusation collapses under its own logic. President Biden made race central to the appointment; critics merely observed that he did so. Arguing for open competition is not an attack on any group; it defends the ideal that the law should be blind. In every field where performance matters- medicine, aviation, the military- we understand that excellence requires merit-based selection. The Supreme Court is no different. When identity politics governs appointments to the nation’s highest tribunal, the consequence is predictable: the erosion of competence and the politicization of law.

The Court will survive Justice Jackson, as it has survived lesser minds before. But her tenure should stand as a warning. When presidents choose symbolic representation over merit, they degrade the institutions they claim to honor. The next administration must learn that lesson. Search broadly. Judge carefully. Select on excellence alone. The Supreme Court deserves nothing less.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes political analysis at amuseonx.com. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact me directly. Each op-ed is edited for grammar and clarity using AI in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

The employee at the Apple Store recognized my problem before I finished describing it. This week, my iMessage stopped working with no warning, no email, no on-screen notice, and no mention of any rule I had broken. I walked in expecting a rare technical glitch. He told me several people bring that complaint to the store every day, then apologized, handed me a phone number, and sent me on my way. I have carried an iPhone since the first one shipped in 2007 and used iMessage since Apple introduced it in 2011. Laptops, desktops, Mac minis, Apple TV, HomePods, AirPods: all of it runs on Apple’s platform, because Apple spent 15 years persuading me that everything would work together, and it did, right up until the morning the company decided I was no longer welcome in its messaging system and declined to tell me why.

Texas should make Apple explain itself. Attorney General Ken Paxton should open a consumer protection investigation into how Apple handles suspended messaging accounts, and the Legislature should follow with a narrow statute requiring large messaging providers to give notice, state the rule, offer a real review, and guarantee a reliable way to pull a phone number out of a proprietary system the customer can no longer use. I still do not know whether I violated some provision of Apple’s terms, whether an automated filter misfired, or whether someone compromised my account and used it to send garbage. Apple will not say. Its position, as best I can reconstruct it, is that I may have done something wrong, and that this is all I am entitled to know.

Apple operates 17 retail stores in Texas and roughly 269 across the United States. If one Dallas-area store sees a handful of silenced customers every day, the company is restricting a substantial number of accounts, perhaps 200,000 a year, but only Apple knows exactly how many.

The store employee gave me the number for a representative who had no information about why Apple had restricted my account. For my privacy and protection, he explained, he wasn’t permitted to have it. I told him I waived the privacy; I wanted someone at Apple to tell me whether I had been hacked, whether I had tripped a rule, or whether a machine had made a mistake. He suggested I read the terms of service, all 10,000 words, without indicating which clause I supposedly violated. That is a bureaucratic dead end dressed up as customer care.

The blue bubbles are the least of it. A text from one iPhone to another travels through Apple’s servers rather than the carrier’s, and Apple keeps a directory of registered phone numbers. If the company suspends an account but leaves the number registered, every iPhone owner who has ever texted me goes on sending messages into a mailbox I cannot open. They see the familiar bubble, so they have no reason to call, email, or try again. Apple publishes a deregistration tool for people who switch to Android. I have not switched, and I still own the phone. Apple has locked me out of one room in the house while it keeps telling the neighbors I am home.

Nowhere in its United States iCloud terms, revised on September 14, 2026, barely a month before my suspension, does Apple claim an unlimited right to terminate for any reason. The terms list specific grounds, including contractual violations, legal requests, security problems, fraud, and nonpayment, and promise 30 days’ notice and a chance to cure nonmaterial breaches. Either Apple thinks my breach was nonmaterial and its contract owed me a chance to fix it, or it thinks the breach was material or my account compromised and can say so. Silence is the one option the agreement Apple drafted does not leave it.

The Deceptive Trade Practices Act, codified at Chapter 17 of the Business and Commerce Code, prohibits false, misleading, or deceptive commercial practices under §17.46 and hands the Attorney General enforcement authority under §17.47. Sections 17.60 and 17.61 allow the Consumer Protection Division to issue civil investigative demands for documents and sworn testimony, a power the Texas Supreme Court reaffirmed in March 2026 after a company tried to resist. I know Paxton is a little busy right now, but I would appreciate it if he’d have his office put six questions to Apple. How many Texas accounts has it restricted? Did people make those decisions, or did software? Do suspended numbers remain registered as iMessage destinations, and do senders see delivery confirmations for messages the recipient cannot read? How many suspensions have been reversed on review? And what, precisely, is a locked-out iPhone owner supposed to do?

Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act reaches unfair practices, and the test at 15 U.S.C. §45(n) asks whether a practice causes substantial injury that consumers cannot reasonably avoid and that no countervailing benefit outweighs. A customer cannot avoid a routing failure he cannot see. The Department of Justice sued Apple on March 21, 2024, alleging the company maintains monopoly power in smartphone markets, and its complaint singled out messaging restrictions as a tool for discouraging customers from leaving. Apple disputes the claim. I make a clean exhibit for the government anyway, because I can neither leave Apple’s messaging system cleanly nor stay in it, and that is what a switching cost looks like from the inside.

Apple’s best argument is security. Spammers, fraudsters and account hijackers are real, and a company that explains exactly why it flagged an account hands the next bad actor a map. The answer is already in operation on the other side of the Atlantic. Article 17 of the European Union’s Digital Services Act requires covered platforms to give a statement of reasons when they suspend an account, and Article 20 requires an internal complaint system. Both carve out security and law enforcement. The United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act imposes similar duties. Europe is no one’s idea of a free-market paradise, yet Apple complies there without surrendering its servers to scammers. If Cupertino can explain itself to a Belgian, it can explain itself to a Texan.

Justice Clarence Thomas, concurring in Biden v. Knight First Amendment Institute in 2021, observed that today’s digital platforms resemble the old common carriers and public accommodations and that the doctrines built for them may apply again. Those doctrines bound innkeepers, ferrymen and carriers who held themselves out to the public; each owed reasonable service, and none could shut the door on a traveler at whim. Conservatives honor contracts and private property, and a business may ordinarily refuse service to whom it likes, but the common law has never treated every business alike. iMessage is not a telephone company and should not be regulated like one. A service bolted into the only messaging app on the phone in your pocket, however, sits closer to the ferry than to the restaurant.

In Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck, the Supreme Court held in 2019 that a private forum operator is not the government, so Apple owes me no due process under the Fifth or Fourteenth Amendments. Halleck is correct as far as it goes, which is why this belongs with the Legislature, the body that can write into statute the kind of duty the common law once laid on the innkeeper and the ferryman. NetChoice v. Paxton, decided in 2024, cautions that a Texas law compelling a platform to carry speech will face serious First Amendment scrutiny. A law requiring a truthful delivery indicator and a working off-switch for your own phone number regulates a product, the way a lemon law regulates a car, and courts have never treated an honest odometer as compelled speech.

The Legislature should require large providers of messaging services tied to consumer devices or phone numbers to promptly notify customers when they restrict access and to state whether the restriction is temporary or permanent, as part of a Digital Communications Consumer Protection Act. The notice must identify the contractual provision at issue and describe the alleged violation in enough detail that the customer can respond, with narrow exceptions for active security investigations, and any permanent restriction must go to a human reviewer. The provider must not knowingly maintain a routing state that silently swallows messages when a safer alternative is technically feasible. It must let a suspended customer deregister the phone number without first regaining access to the service that suspended the account, and it must open its enforcement records, in confidence, to the Attorney General. None of that forces Apple to carry a single message it does not want to carry; it forces Apple to tell the truth about where the messages go.

Texas has done this before with telemarketers, data brokers, and age verification for app stores, and messaging is a smaller lift than any of them. The conservative instinct is to let a state of 30 million people with a functioning attorney general’s office do the work, under a rule narrow enough that a company can obey it on a Tuesday.

Apple became the most valuable company on earth, a $3 trillion corporation, by making its products indispensable and asking customers to pour their families, their businesses, and their memories into a single ecosystem. That kind of dependence creates responsibility, and conservatives who spent a century warning against arbitrary power in government hands have no reason to excuse it when a corporation holds the switch. At the end of the day, I am asking for three things any innkeeper owed a traveler in 1850: tell me why you are putting me out, let me answer, and do not keep telling my friends I am still in the room. Meanwhile, if you need to reach me, you can on Signal: amuseox.01

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes political analysis at amuseonx.com. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact me directly. Each op-ed is edited for grammar and clarity using AI in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

Steve Randall Howe of Denver fraudulently obtained more than a million dollars in Paycheck Protection Program loans for companies with no employees and no business operations. He spent it on a house, luxury goods, travel, club memberships, and wire transfers to China, and a federal judge sentenced him to 30 months in federal prison earlier this month. Last month, the Justice Department, the Small Business Administration, and the SBA inspector general announced Operation No Doze, a nationwide enforcement surge against pandemic-loan fraud. With 44 U.S. Attorney’s Offices and 20 investigative agencies involved, it brought in more than 160 defendants and hundreds of millions in intended losses to taxpayers.

Attorney General Todd Blanche put it plainly: “Pandemic loan relief was meant to keep American small businesses alive during government lockdowns, not line the pockets of fraudsters.” That sentence ought to settle a debate that has dragged on for 6 years. The Democrats and their willing accomplices in the drive-by media have spent those years calling PPP an $800 billion giveaway to wealthy owners and connected insiders, and more than a few conservatives have come to believe them. They have it backward. PPP was a temporary bridge for businesses the government, at Dr. Fauci’s insistence, closed, restricted, or starved of customers, and it worked by holding employer and worker together, along with the productive machinery around them, until commerce could resume. Conservatives should defend it, and they should hunt down every thief who robbed it.

Picture a restaurant owner who spent 15 years building a place that employs 25 people. Before March 2020, it brought in $200,000 a month, paid $170,000 in expenses, and cleared $30,000 in operating profit. Then the state closed the dining room. Customers vanished, and revenue collapsed, while payroll, rent, insurance, utilities, and the vendor invoices kept arriving on schedule. The owner could burn through savings paying people for work the government would not permit, or lay off all 25 and hope to rebuild someday. A business that fails in open competition deserves no rescue. This one failed for no reason other than the state ordering it to stand idle. When government forbids a lawful enterprise from earning a living, the loss isn’t the entrepreneur’s fault, and justice runs toward restitution. Conservatives who defend property rights should be the first to see it. Money advanced on those terms is bridge financing for an interruption the government itself imposed, and it has little in common with the corporate welfare we rightly despise.

The scale of the emergency Dr. Fauci outlined explains why Congress moved so fast. In April 2020, nonfarm payrolls fell by 20.5 million, and unemployment hit 14.7%. The worst of it landed on the smallest employers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics found that among employers with 1 to 9 workers, closures accounted for the largest share of pandemic job loss, and those firms carry the thinnest reserves and the least ability to survive a mandated pause.

The CARES Act, which President Trump signed with bipartisan support on March 27, 2020, never asked about revenue, profit, enterprise value, or the owner’s net worth. It asked about payroll. Loans were calculated from historical payroll, typically 2.5 times the average monthly figure and subject to statutory caps, and the money could cover payroll, health benefits, rent, utilities, and related operating costs. By June 2020, full forgiveness required at least 60% to go to payroll, with the balance limited to qualified expenses. Senator Marco Rubio, who wrote the program, wanted workers to have “the security of a job to return to,” and the formula was built to deliver exactly that.

Suppose our restaurant received a $150,000 forgivable loan. Over 3 normal months, it would have rung up $600,000 in sales and cleared $90,000 in operating profit, and the loan replaced neither. It paid the cooks and servers, covered the rent, and kept the lights on through the shutdown. Given the choice, and by a wide margin, the owner would have served customers and earned a normal return without a dollar from Washington.

The $150,000 actually bought the restaurant itself. A going concern is a line cook who knows the menu cold, a lease, kitchen equipment, permits, supplier accounts, a schedule people have built their lives around, the goodwill of regulars and the local knowledge of 15 years in business, all of it perishable if payroll and core expenses cannot be carried through a temporary shutdown. Once the doors close for good, the cook files for unemployment, the landlord goes looking for a tenant, the produce vendor loses an account, and the neighborhood waits for someone to assemble a replacement from scratch. Keeping an engine idling while the road is closed costs money; scrapping the truck and hiring a new driver later costs far more.

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The Congressional Budget Office estimated that PPP saved roughly 106 million job-weeks in 2020 and concluded that it would speed recovery by limiting closures and preserving the match between employers and workers. Federal Reserve researchers later looked at what happened when the money stopped. The first appropriation ran dry in April 2020, and the 10-day lending gap that followed raised May job losses and reduced recalls all summer. About half the jobs lost to it were at firms with fewer than 10 employees, though such firms account for less than 20% of employment. A windfall does not leave that footprint; employers living month to month do.

Olga Gorbachev, Maria Luengo-Prado and their coauthor, writing in the Journal of Public Economics in 2026, estimated that PPP preserved about 5.85 million job-years across the urban counties they examined during 2020 and 2021, at an implied gross cost of about $89,000 per job-year. Fully 47% of those job-years fell in 2021. In the matched-firm analysis, recipients recovered customer traffic faster than comparable nonrecipients, and the gap widened through February 2022. A program that funded only 8 weeks of payroll would not show that pattern; a program that kept firms alive long enough to join the recovery would.

Early access to PPP was flawed. Existing bank relationships mattered more than they should have, and the Government Accountability Office found that the first round skewed toward the larger end of small business. Yet Congress authorized about $814 billion in commitment authority across 3 phases, required a certification of necessity, and covered ordinary employers and the self-employed alike. David Autor and his MIT colleagues estimate that 94% of employers with fewer than 500 workers took a loan. One of my own companies received a PPP loan, and it saved it from bankruptcy. The PPP loan let it keep everyone on the payroll, but the shutdown erased millions in revenue and enterprise value. When I hear people angry at companies that took PPP loans, I realize they think business owners got the money, but most of us got none of it; we just got to stay in business and try to rebuild after the pandemic. We all would have preferred that the government lets us simply stay open.

David Splinter and colleagues tracked 2020 first-draw loans through tax records in a 2026 study and estimated the gross cost at roughly $133,000 per retained job-year. Higher income and payroll tax receipts, together with lower unemployment compensation, cut that by about 24%, to $101,000, so even the gross figures overstate what taxpayers paid. Either number, $89,000 gross or $101,000 net, exceeds what most preserved jobs paid, and critics conclude from that arithmetic that the money would have been better spent on direct unemployment benefits, or not spent at all. The Heritage Foundation made the case against the first option in 2020: keeping workers attached to their employers beats paying them to stay home, and the data since have vindicated it.

That arithmetic prices a single output, a paycheck in a single month. It leaves out the leases kept, the supplier accounts kept, the trained teams kept, and the local services kept, along with a recovery that began with existing firms instead of waiting on new ones. The honest comparison was never $814 billion against zero. It was $814 billion against more unemployment compensation, lower tax receipts, more permanent closures and the long, expensive work of rebuilding viable enterprises after the fact. No study has produced a complete accounting of that counterfactual, so nobody can claim a precise all-in savings figure, and nobody can pretend the alternative was free.

Fraud is the harder stain. GAO draws the line carefully: every fraudulent payment is improper, but not every improper payment is fraud, and neither category describes an employer who followed the statute. Howe fabricated payroll records and tax filings for shell companies and then bought a house; the restaurant owner down the street documented real wages for real cooks, spent the proceeds on authorized purposes, and satisfied the forgiveness rules Congress wrote. SBA accepted far too little verification in the rush to move money in April 2020, and Congress knew it at the time. The theives who exploited that gap belong in prison, which is exactly where Operation No Doze is sending them.

In 2022, Congress wisely extended the statute of limitations on PPP fraud to 10 years, and it should keep the SBA inspector general and the DOJ fraud division funded through the last day of that window. It should insist on clawbacks alongside convictions, so recovered dollars actually return to Treasury. That work keeps the thief and the employer apart, and the left has every reason to blur them into a single figure, because a Main Street that remembers PPP as theft will accept more federal supervision the next time, while a public that remembers it as rescue will ask harder questions about lockdowns. The workers who kept their paychecks, the owners who kept their doors, and the towns that kept their employers belong in the ledger alongside the waste and fraud, and the men now standing before federal judges in 40 districts prove such a ledger can be kept honestly.

For the next emergency, and there will be one, lawmakers should require that any payroll-based relief be checked against the quarterly Form 941 filings employers already submit to the IRS before a dollar moves; that step alone would have stopped Howe at the door. At the end of the day, a government that interrupts lawful business owes the people it interrupts a seperate accounting from the one it owes the criminals who robbed it. The first entry belongs to governors and mayors, because the $814 billion was the price of their orders, and anyone who reaches for shutdown powers next time should be required to score the cost of closing commerce before signing the order.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes political analysis at amuseonx.com. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact me directly. Each op-ed is edited for grammar and clarity using AI in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

Approximately 3,000 officers from Siad Barre’s military escaped large-scale purges after his overthrow and resettled in the United States, many in Minnesota, hiding their identities from authorities. America unknowingly admitted members of a ruling apparatus responsible for mass killing. Neither Minneapolis residents nor Minnesota’s broader population voted to accept thousands of Somali refugees. President Clinton, then Bush, and then Obama imposed that decision on unsuspecting communities.

The United States imported tens of thousands of Somali pirates and fraudsters, along with hundreds of deadly killers, through a refugee program that put volume ahead of scrutiny. The hasty resettlement of Afghan refugees after the 2021 withdrawal followed the same pattern. Washington owes the communities bearing the consequences an accounting, and the Trump administration should pursue denaturalization and removal wherever war crimes or immigration fraud warrant them.

Barre’s Marxist dictatorship fell in 1991. Before its collapse, it conducted the Isaaq genocide of 1987–1989 against the clan inhabiting northern Somalia, now Somaliland. More than 200,000 civilians died through aerial bombardment and summary execution, through burned villages and man-made famine. The Somali National Army carried out the campaign systematically; its senior officers bore command responsibility.

Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the UN-commissioned Mburu Report describe a state-directed undertaking. The infamous “Letter of Death,” attributed to General Morgan, expressed a national policy of extermination. Those records matter when assessing the officers who subsequently arrived here claiming refuge. Their government’s defeat did not turn its military leadership into innocent victims.

Nur Omar Mohamed, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s father, held the rank of colonel in that army. His senior position placed him in the top 1% of the officer corps during the genocide. He arrived in America in 1995, having served as a key participant in the regime’s repressive machinery. Units under his command conducted the brutal campaign against the Isaaq, handling logistics and troop deployments while enforcing genocidal policies.

Rank carried obligations in Barre’s Somalia. Loyalty required active participation, and successful senior officers enforced the regime’s grip through terror. Compelling independent reporting and community accounts from Somaliland consistently identify Nur as a high-ranking officer implicated in those crimes. Command responsibility, recognized in US precedents involving other Somali officials, makes leaders liable for atrocities committed under their authority. The evidence meets the civil balance-of-probabilities standard and the criminal threshold of proof beyond reasonable doubt.

Yet Americans encountered an “educator.” That was Omar’s description of her father in her 2020 memoir, language inviting an American reader to picture civilian academic work. No publicly available evidence shows that Nur held a civilian education post outside the military. This strategic reframing sanitized and laundered his past, and his concealed identity became a sanitized biography.

At 13, Ilhan was trained to hide her father’s true rank in Barre’s regime. She continued the deception into adulthood. An acknowledgment that he served a Marxist military accused of genocide would have complicated her account of escaping state violence, especially as she established herself as a critic of US power. Concealment protected him against potential war-crimes charges and inevitable deportation; authorities would have denied asylum and eventual naturalization had they known his true status. Her silence about his involvement, despite her advocacy on other human-rights questions, reveals a hypocrisy that undermines her public persona.

Her own age got the same treatment. Omar’s original Minnesota legislative page listed her birth date as October 4, 1981. In 2019, two days after former congressional candidate A.J. Kern posted a video about it, Omar’s staff asked the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library to change the year to 1982, according to an email obtained by NewsNation, and the New York Post reported this month that the change went through. One year carries a great deal of weight here. Omar says she became a citizen in 2000, at 17, through her father’s naturalization, and derivative citizenship requires both a naturalized parent and a minor child. Born in 1981, she appears to have been 18, old enough to apply on her own. The Post also reported that a 2023 search by US Citizenship and Immigration Services found no record of Nur’s naturalization.

Snopes has claimed that no publicly documented evidence connects Nur to specific war crimes. Its dismissal willfully ignores a trove of evidence from Somalia and Somaliland, including thousands of eyewitness accounts. Modest journalism would have uncovered reports implicating him in oppression and genocide. Critics of Snopes and similar outlets charge that their reliance on limited Western records excludes primary sources describing the chain of command. Not all such evidence may be flawless, but it is untrue to say none exists.

The drive-by media, biased toward protecting Islamic migrants as a de facto protected class, presents Omar as a symbol of Somali refugees escaping civil war. These outlets know her father benefited from the Marxist regime, his clan position, and senior military rank as a perpetrator. Their preferred portrait survives because they refuse to confront its history.

Nur belonged to a larger migration of military authority. The 3,000 other officers occupied the upper ranks of their clans, and lower-ranking refugees, including enlisted men from Barre’s forces, remained attached to their networks. Figures such as Nur and his daughter benefited. The clan, or qabiil, supplies identity and insurance while organizing political allegiance. Transplanting that arrangement preserved loyalties that competed with assimilation.

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Minnesota now bears the cost. Somali communities have stolen billions from taxpayers through schemes including Feeding Our Future, with funds sent back to Somalia to support terror networks. The amount stolen by the Somali community in Minnesota is a number greater than the gross domestic product of Somalia. The patronage system has taken hold in state politics, including the governor and attorney general, and enabled massive fraud. Failed vetting allowed men with criminal and murderous backgrounds to establish themselves as community leaders, recreating their culture of corruption and patronage.

Concentrating the command structure of a failed Marxist state in a single area invited foreseeable consequences, a concentration then-President Obama insisted upon. Dispersal across dozens of states and hundreds of communities might have encouraged assimilation; Minnesota’s concentration preserved clan patronage instead. These groups have seized control of local communities, sustaining fraud and resistance to integration. Islam practiced faithfully is incompatible with Western civilization, further aggravating that conflict. America owes these imports no sympathy.

Omar’s present conduct shows how that patronage operates. Recently, she earmarked $1,031,000 through the Department of Justice for Generation Hope MN, a group located in a Somali restaurant where she has held campaign fundraisers and events.

Her husband, Tim Mynett, has funneled millions from her campaign to his firm. His ventures rose in value from $51,000 to as much as $30 million in 2024, likely through Somali patronage and possibly through laundered funds. Whether legal or not, these arrangements exemplify the imported system.

Then the millions disappeared on paper. Omar’s 2024 disclosure valued Mynett’s two companies, a winery in Santa Rosa and a venture-capital firm in Washington, at between $6 million and $30 million. After the Office of Congressional Conduct sent her a letter in March, she filed an amendment in April, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, listing both companies at “none” and cutting the couple’s assets to between $18,004 and $95,000. Her lawyer blamed an accountant who left out the liabilities.

Officers such as Nur and their offspring sit atop the clans; they sustain the patronage and benefit from the loyalties that federal resettlement preserved. Removing that leadership must come first. They lied on immigration and naturalization forms to obtain asylum and citizenship, and Washington should examine those deceptions without deference to the political standing their beneficiaries subsequently acquired.

Federal investigators have started doing exactly that. On October 12, Homeland Security Investigations agents searched Omar’s Washington home under a judicially authorized warrant and seized her phone, the Associated Press reported. Beforehand, agents collected the family’s discarded trash hoping to obtain DNA from Omar and her relatives. CNN reported that US Magistrate Judge Matthew Sharbaugh approved the warrant, and Mike Davis noted in Fox News that Sharbaugh donated to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and twice clerked for an Obama appointee, hardly a judge eager to do the Trump Justice Department’s bidding. CBS News and the AP report that more than a dozen grand jury subpoenas have gone out, several to Omar’s relatives.

The State Department should take the unprecedented step of denaturalizing Omar and removing her from the country. She has sworn allegiance to Somalia and its president; she also committed immigration fraud by allegedly marrying her brother to bring him to America. The Trump administration’s termination of Temporary Protected Status for thousands of Somalis, requiring them to leave, is a necessary first step. Denaturalization proceedings against war criminals and fraudsters should follow, as cases involving other Somali officials demonstrate. More is needed to excise the rot, because America cannot afford to harbor those who undermine its integrity.

The charge of unfairly singling out Somalis fails to answer the record of unvetted resettlement. The systemic failures here dwarf the 2020 election’s integrity lapses. The New York Times and Washington Post, hostile to conservatives, obscure these realities; their accounts then supply skewed facts to LLMs such as ChatGPT and Claude. Yet the reality persists.

The United States did import killers alongside pirates and fraudsters and embedded them in communities that never saw them coming, and what came with them was more than a string of individual deceptions; it was a transplanted patronage that drains resources and erodes trust. Removing the leadership through denaturalization for war crimes and immigration fraud is the only remedy that reaches the top of that system, and the persistance to pursue it now is what prevents further harm.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes political analysis at amuseonx.com. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact me directly. Each op-ed is edited for grammar and clarity using AI in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

President Biden and the Democrats’ climate hysteria forced consumers to pay electric utility companies across the nation to shut down their coal- or gas-fired electric power plants that would not meet new emission rules by 2032. This perverse policy let utility companies cut costs while raising electricity rates. Thankfully, President Trump has ended this madness.

Here is how it worked. Six years ago, the Michigan Public Service Commission allowed Consumers Energy to place up to $688 million in early-retirement costs for D.E. Karn Units 1 and 2 on customer bills. The commission found the arrangement about $124 million cheaper than ordinary recovery. Cheaper still leaves a bill. The charge for the twelve months through September 2026 is about $112 million, and the units went cold in 2023. Public Service of New Mexico received authority to issue about $360 million in bonds so it could abandon the San Juan Generating Station and still be paid through a charge customers cannot avoid. Customers kept paying for plants that no longer produced electricity.

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EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has finalized the repeal of the 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards. President Trump deserves the credit. The 2024 rule told long-lived coal and gas plants they could stay open only if they captured 90% of their CO2 by 2032. That capture required interstate pipelines and underground storage wells that the plant owner does not control and cannot force anyone to build. The easier path was to promise an earlier shutdown and meet a lighter standard by co-firing natural gas. Shutdown became the practical way to comply. In this business, shutdown is rarely unpaid. Ratepayers were left covering the undepreciated cost of plants that closed before replacement generation was ready. That arrangement is over.

A coal unit built to run deep into the next decade had to hit 90% capture by 2032 or take the retirement path. New baseload gas turbines faced the same 90% target in what the rule called Phase 2. Staying open depended on pipes and wells the owner could not order. Closing the plant did not. Carbon capture begins with equipment at the smokestack. The compressed CO2 must then travel through interstate pipelines into permitted underground wells. The owner can buy the capture equipment. He cannot order the pipeline or the permit. NRG tested the equipment at Petra Nova, a 240-megawatt slipstream on W.A. Parish Unit 8 south of Houston, and recorded 92.4% capture on the gas it processed before oil prices idled the project. SaskPower’s Boundary Dam Unit 3 in Saskatchewan remains the only commercial full-unit coal capture plant on the continent. EPA’s record treats its annual capture as well below the 90% figure written into the 2024 rule. Summit Carbon Solutions has spent years in South Dakota and Iowa fighting over routes and eminent domain. That line was built around ethanol plants, not a national fleet of coal and gas units.

EPA now finds that 90% capture has not been adequately demonstrated for these requirements, that the costs are unreasonable, and that the capture, pipeline, and storage network is significantly unlikely to be in place across the affected fleet by 2032. A utility that wants a capture unit may still build one. Plants from West Virginia to Wyoming are no longer held to a fleetwide path the agency itself has stopped defending. The repeal withdraws the emission guidelines for existing coal, oil, and gas steam units, the capture standards that applied when a coal unit made a large modification, and the Phase 2 standards that would have bound new baseload combustion turbines. A companion proposal would erase the remaining greenhouse-gas findings for the power sector. That proposal rests on a wider theory and needs its own defense.

A standard a plant cannot meet does not sit unused. Operators with no workable path cut hours or name a retirement date. Later accounts treat the retirement as a market decision. When government makes survival depend on a network that does not arrive, the closure is a regulatory choice dressed as a commercial one. Section 111 of the Clean Air Act requires an emission-reduction system that has been adequately demonstrated and accounts for cost. West Virginia v. EPA already told the agency it may not use that section to force a shift away from coal. EPA now says the 90% mandate, paired with the retire-or-capture choice, left long-term units one practical option, closure, and that this is generation shifting by another route. Daren Bakst of the Competitive Enterprise Institute has made the point for years. An emissions standard that decides which generators stay commercially alive puts EPA in the role of grid manager. That choice belongs to Congress.

Close early and the undepreciated plant often stays in rates, or a commission authorizes bonds that customers repay so the company is made whole for quitting. The Karn charge is still being collected for stopped boilers. San Juan’s bonds paid an owner to abandon a station. The 2024 rule gave every other owner a federal reason to seek the same bargain: skip a capture system you cannot finish, promise to shut down, and leave the steel for the rate case. The repeal takes away that reason. Bonds a state has already sold will keep being paid, because those retirements already happened. The next plant can no longer be told that closure is how it complies with Washington.

Demand is moving the other direction. The Energy Information Administration’s latest Short-Term Energy Outlook projects U.S. generation up 2.2% this year, to a record 4,368 billion kilowatt-hours, and up another 1.7% next year. EIA ties the growth to data centers and manufacturing, strongest in the West South Central region. Coal’s share still slips in that forecast, from 16% this year to 14% the next. The numbers describe the system the repeal enters. They are not yet an effect the repeal has produced. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation found resource-adequacy trouble in 13 of 23 assessment areas over the next ten years, and more than 105 GW of announced potential retirements. It told planners to keep deactivation dates flexible while new projects catch up. Energy Secretary Chris Wright stated the operating fact in the EPA release. “During periods of peak electricity demand, coal and natural gas continue to play a critical role in keeping the lights on.” Wright has used emergency authority to keep TransAlta’s Centralia Unit 2 available in Washington, as he did earlier at J.H. Campbell in Michigan and at Schaffer in Indiana. An order of that kind covers a winter or a summer. It does not replace a standard.

NERC’s summer snapshot is closer in. Additions of more than 58 GW, solar, batteries, and some new gas, improved readiness this season. Elevated risk under abnormal conditions remains in New England, the Northwest, Saskatchewan, and far-west Texas. Every megawatt that arrives and actually runs is welcome. EPA’s regulatory impact analysis estimates a $310 billion present-value reduction in economy-wide social costs over two decades, in 2024 dollars, from the SAGE model. Power-sector compliance savings are smaller, at $160 billion in present value at a 3% discount rate. The analysis notes adverse health effects from the emissions changes and does not price them. Aaron Szabo, EPA’s assistant administrator for air, told Thomas Catenacci of the Washington Free Beacon that energy costs hit poorer customers hardest. A household already spending a large share of its income on the utility will feel the next compliance dollar when it reaches a rate case.

Opponents filed as soon as the Federal Register published the notice. The American Public Health Association, the American Lung Association, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Clean Air Council, and Clean Wisconsin petitioned the DC Circuit in case 26-1238. Their argument is direct. The Clean Air Act obliges EPA to address climate pollution from power plants. They say the 2024 standards used controls at the individual facility, which the statute contemplates. The court may side with them.

What meets that case is the demonstration test in Section 111, a standard the source can meet with a system applied at its own plant. The repeal contains no finding that carbon dioxide is harmless. A control that works only if other people permit the pipelines and the wells asks the plant to answer for strangers. EPA’s further proposal to eliminate the remaining greenhouse-gas standards is a seperate proceeding on a broader theory of the agency’s power. The engineering record is what can be defended now, in public, with the health effects left where the analysis put them.

Jack Spencer of the Heritage Foundation drew the line in a recent essay on nuclear policy. “The government’s role should be to protect public health and safety,” he wrote, while private firms compete and carry their own business risk. He warned that political uncertainty compounds the financial and technological risks investors already bear. Spencer was writing about reactors. A coal or gas unit with decades of life ahead faces the same split. Nuclear power is the long-run answer, and flexible natural gas is the bridge until that fleet is actually built.

At the end of the day, the Democrat Party and their willing accomplices in the drive-by media will call every kept plant a step backward, yet the rule they defended forced closures before replacements were ready and left ratepayers paying for the plants that no longer ran. President Trump and Administrator Zeldin ended that arrangement. Customers should no longer be billed for power plants that government rules told utilities to shut down early.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes political analysis at amuseonx.com. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact me directly. Each op-ed is edited for grammar and clarity using AI in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

For the better part of two weeks this fall, the most expensive Senate race in America had only one visible candidate. Ken Paxton led a San Antonio crowd in the chant “Where is James Talarico?” The Democrat nominee’s last in-person Texas event was a September 26 press conference, and his last in-person event anywhere was a September 28 New York fundraiser with Robert De Niro. On September 30th, he joined a U.S. Hispanic Business Council event by video, saying he had the flu. Then nothing, until he turned up at Austin City Limits on October 9th.

The left and right have spent the days since arguing about where he was. Both are missing the bigger story, which is that two weeks is a short absence by the standards of James Talarico (CIS). Vanishing when the work gets hard is the through-line of his public career. He has walked out on the Texas House twice, missed more than 800 votes by one count, and now wants a 6-year term in a chamber where one vote can decide the fate of a nominee or a bill. Texans should take his record at its word and send Ken Paxton to Washington instead.

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The Texas Constitution requires two-thirds of the House to be present before it can conduct business. The rule assumes something modest: that members will show up, argue, and lose votes like adults. A legislator who flees the state to break a quorum cancels the votes of 149 colleagues and the 30 million Texans they represent. Paxton put it in words any welder in Odessa would recognize: “If you don’t show up to work, you get fired.”

In July 2021, Governor Greg Abbott called a special session to pass an election integrity bill. On July 12th, Talarico boarded a private jet to Washington with more than 50 House Democrats. The House Democratic Caucus paid for the planes, the Mexican American Legislative Caucus helped cover meals and lodging, and Beto O’Rourke’s Powered by People wired $600,000 to keep everyone comfortable on the Potomac. Talarico stayed gone until August 9, a 28-day quorum break that ran 38, and even his return left the House 5 members short. His monthly salary kept arriving throughout. Imagine telling your boss you will be gone a month, on someone else’s dime, so nobody else in the office can work either, and then cashing the paycheck.

In August 2025, he did it again. This time the destination was Illinois and the target was a new congressional map, and the House again issued civil arrest warrants while Paxton asked the Texas Supreme Court to declare absent members’ seats vacant. Powered by People again helped pay the freight. Talarico stayed away 15 days, and the walkout finally came with a bill: $8,354.25, covering 12 unexcused days at $500 apiece plus his share of what the Department of Public Safety spent bringing Democrats back. Talarico sat on the House Administration Committee that set the penalty. He voted to erase his fines entirely, a motion that failed 5 to 6, and then voted against the final assessment. The payment deadline was May 5. A month later, he was still on the list of Democrats who hadn’t paid, and I found no record of him paying since.

Then there are the ordinary absences, the kind that don’t require a private jet. The Daily Signal counted more than 800 missed House votes between May 2019 and May 2025, and the Texans for Fiscal Responsibility scorecard shows him absent in 2025 for the vote on a constitutional amendment requiring citizenship to vote. When the record came up on The View, Talarico waved it off as a “Republican talking point” and pointed to the redistricting walkout. That walkout began in August 2025. The count ends in May 2025. An alibi that arrives 3 months after the absences it is supposed to explain explains little.

Nor can he plead a crushing schedule. The Texas Legislature meets 140 days every other year, which is why everyone calls it a part-time job. Talarico’s outside work included consulting for MAYA Consulting, an Austin firm that collected millions in Texas Education Agency contracts while he sat on the House committee that oversees the agency; by his own disclosure, the firm paid him $83,333 in 2025. His Senate financial disclosure lists a single checking account, held jointly with his mother. For more than two years after buying his own house, he kept his voter registration at his parents’ address and voted from it 5 times. A man carrying that light a load still could not make the votes. Send him to Washington, and the only question is whether he leaves the Senate floor as easily as he left the Texas House.

The October disappearance fits the pattern. After the September 30 video call, the schedule went dark: the October 5 Central Texas African American Civic Engagement Symposium was canceled, and so was the October 6 “Final Austin Fundraiser for James Talarico.” Candidates in races this close do not cancel their own October fundraisers lightly. His influencer army fretted in a private Slack channel about the missing candidate and the momentum he was losing, according to messages the New York Post obtained. Even his friends were nervous.

Into that silence stepped Rhein Amacher, an independent reporter acting on a tip that Talarico had been at the Lindner Center of Hope, a psychiatric hospital outside Cincinnati. Amacher started dialing, and over several calls, a woman answering for the facility told him on tape that he “was just discharged this evening.” Nick Sortor took the recording to his audience, and Sortor says his attorneys reviewed Amacher’s carrier records and confirmed the calls reached Lindner at times matching the audio. Nobody has produced evidence that the recording was altered or manufactured. Sara Gonzales made follow-up calls and demanded that the facility explain what its staff had said.

The response came fast. The campaign said Talarico had been home in Austin with the flu, and Talarico said he had never even been to Ohio. Lindner posted on 𝕏 that “Representative James Talarico has never received treatment from Lindner Center of Hope.” The campaign shared selected home-security stills with the New York Times and CBS on terms it set, rather than putting them out for everyone to examine. Frank Luntz called for retraction graphics from Sortor and Gonzales, and the Democrats and their willing accomplices in the drive-by media pronounced the matter debunked.

Debunked means shown to be false. What has been shown is that everyone with a stake in the answer denies it. Neither the campaign nor Lindner has claimed that the Lindner staffer on the phone didn’t say what the tape records her saying. Lindner’s stated practice is to neither confirm nor deny whether someone is or has been a patient; it set that practice aside for Talarico and has offered no account of what the person who answered its phone was looking at, or why she said what she said. Maybe she was mistaken. Maybe she read the wrong screen. Amacher accurately reported what the voice on Lindner’s line told him, and that reporting stands, while the question of whether Talarico was ever a patient remains open. Nobody owes a retraction for a recording that exists and says what it says.

Talarico’s defenders have a sympathetic reply. He has lived with type 1 diabetes since a 2018 emergency that put him in intensive care for 5 days, and the flu is no small thing for a diabetic. Perhaps a sick man stayed home and is being hounded for it. If so, it would take an afternoon to prove: a letter from his physician, the urgent-care record from September 29, the camera images handed to an independent examiner, and a day-by-day account of his whereabouts. Presidential candidates release medical summaries as a matter of course, and a man asking for a 6-year Senate term can manage a doctor’s note. Instead, the campaign gave a few sympathetic newsrooms a private look and called the Ohio story a lie meant to promote a “pathetic conspiracy theory.” A campaign that wanted this closed would have closed it.

Democrat money has been hedging on this nominee all fall. Republicans have spent more than $190 million on Texas ads from September through Election Day, compared with $52 million reserved by Democrats over the same stretch. In fact, after Talarico reappeared, advanced television ad purchases for him had been slashed to just $5.5 million for the last 20 days of the campaign compared to $55 million for Ken Paxton. As late as August, Chuck Schumer’s Senate Majority PAC hadn’t booked a dollar of Texas airtime past September 1, even as it bought time in other battlegrounds. Two quiet weeks in October are hardly the thing to change the minds of the people writing those checks.

This week’s CNN town hall in Fort Worth gives Talarico a stage to start setting things right. He should pay his $8,354.25 before asking Texans for a promotion, and he should release the records that would settle where he spent his two-week vacation from the campaign trail. The Legislature has homework too. Current House rules withhold 30% of a delinquent member’s office allowance, which has plainly not been enough, and it is embarassing that a fine can sit unpaid for months while the man who owes it runs statewide, so next session lawmakers should make the penalty self-executing and pull it from salary and office accounts the day a member crosses the state line so that no committee vote can wash it away and no member can treat it like an out-of-state parking ticket that nobody will ever bother to collect.

Washington offers no Illinois. The Senate needs only a simple majority for a quorum, so a senator who dislikes the agenda cannot stop the work by leaving; he can only stop showing up, and the roll gets called without him and without the 30 million Texans he was sent to speak for. In a chamber where majorities are counted a seat or two at a time, that empty desk is a gift to the other side. At the end of the day, Ken Paxton has spent his career in the fight, sometimes more combatively than his critics would like, and no one has ever needed state troopers to walk him back to his desk. Texans who want a senator they can find on a Tuesday should vote for him in November.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes political analysis at amuseonx.com. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact me directly. Each op-ed is edited for grammar and clarity using AI in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.

In February 2023, a copy of the Quran that a 14-year-old autistic boy had brought to his school in Wakefield, England, was dropped and lightly scuffed. No law in England makes that a crime. Within days, however, the boy had received death threats, and his mother stood before a crowd in a local mosque, with a police officer in the room, apologizing for what her son had done. A secular country watched a family submit to a blasphemy rule that Parliament had abolished in 2008.

Liberal societies measure freedom by asking what the state forbids. By that measure the Wakefield mother was free, and so, in the same sense, would be a Dearborn engineer who quietly stops ordering wine at company dinners. In either case, the state forbids nothing. Something else does. The economist Timur Kuran named the mechanism preference falsification in his 1995 book Private Truths, Public Lies. People misrepresent their private views when dissent is costly, and each public act of conformity raises the price of dissent for everyone else. Moderates cannot find one another because each sees only the rest of the conforming faces. Outsiders mistake the conformity for consensus.

Selection, more than conspiracy, explains who sets those demands. The devout volunteer for the mosque board, write the checks, and teach the weekend and afternoon school. The moderate who disagrees rarely fights; he simply attends less, which is what Albert Hirschman called exit, and every exit leaves the institution more orthodox than the community it claims to represent. Gulf money and imams trained in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan accelerate the sorting. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who helped found the European Council for Fatwa and Research in 1997, predicted that Islam would return to Europe through preaching rather than conquest. In France, Bernard Rougier’s 2020 study of the suburbs documented entire ecosystems of mosques, bookshops, associations, and sports clubs under Islamist rule.

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The orthodox also hold a warrant the moderates lack. Quran 3:104 and 3:110 describe the believing community as one that commands the right and forbids the wrong. Classical jurists built those verses into hisba, a standing duty to correct deviations in worship, dress, sexual conduct, and public morals, a duty that could fall on an official or on any qualified Muslim. Apostasy, in all four Sunni schools, was a communal breach rather than a private change of mind, and the prescribed penalty was death. A moderate who treats these rules as optional, on the orthodox reading, fails an obligation his neighbors can enforce. That asymmetry settles most contests before they start. The orthodox man believes God requires him to intervene, while the moderate believes only that he would prefer to be left alone.

Enforcement in a Western enclave requires no religious police, because the levers already sit in community hands. A couple married by nikah alone, never registered with civil authorities, has no civil divorce to seek, so a wife who wants out must petition a religious body. Britain’s 2018 Siddiqui Review of Sharia councils documented precisely that dependence. Dame Louise Casey’s 2016 review found self-appointed leaders, usually older men, claiming to speak for entire communities. Add the matchmakers who govern a family’s prospects, the imam who will or will not bury your father, the ethnic business network that offers a newcomer his only job, and the madrasa where the children spend their Saturdays. Each is voluntary. Together they amount to a jurisdiction.

Nassim Taleb calls the result the dictatorship of the small minority. When compliance costs the flexible majority little, and the inflexible minority will accept nothing else, the minority sets the default. Halal-only catering, no alcohol at the wedding, modest dress at every gathering: each concession is small, which is why they grant each one. The sanctions for refusing climb in steps, from gossip and the label of a bad Muslim, to exclusion from the marriage market, to takfir, declaring a fellow Muslim an apostate. At the top of the ladder sits rare violence, which deters far beyond its frequency. Samuel Paty was beheaded in October 2020 after an online campaign begun by a student’s father. A religious studies teacher at Batley Grammar School has lived in hiding since 2021 for showing a cartoon of Muhammad in class. Every moderate who reads those stories does the arithmetic.

The most damning evidence concerns the children. The secular forecast held that immigrants’ descendants would drift toward the host culture, as Italian and Polish grandchildren did. In France the drift is running backward. The IFOP survey released in November 2025 found that 57% of Muslims aged 15 to 24 rank sharia above the laws of the Republic, and that Friday mosque attendance among Muslims under 25 had climbed from 7% in 1989 to 40%. In Britain, Policy Exchange, the center-right London think tank, found in 2007 that Muslims aged 16 to 24 were roughly twice as likely as those 55 and older to prefer sharia, 37% to 17%, and to support death for apostasy, 36% to 19%. Across six Western European countries, the sociologist Ruud Koopmans found in 2013 that about two-thirds of Muslims surveyed placed religious rules above national law.

Olivier Roy, no man of the right, calls the mechanism deculturation. The first generation brought a village Islam braided with local custom. Their children lose that culture without being fully admitted to the new one, and they replace it with a portable, scriptural Islam learned online, stricter on dress, sex, and apostasy than anything practiced in the old village. Minneapolis supplied the extreme American case: beginning in 2007, dozens of young Somali-American men left to fight for al-Shabaab, and in 2016 nine more were convicted of conspiring to join the Islamic State. The sons came out harder than the fathers.

The ratchet does not stay inside the family. Hamtramck, Michigan, once a Polish Catholic town, compresses the whole arc into a single generation of municipal history. Two decades ago, a Christian-majority council allowed mosques to broadcast the call to prayer. In 2015, liberal residents celebrated the election of the first Muslim-majority city council in America. In 2023, a council, by then entirely Muslim and socially conservative, banned Pride flags from city property, and many of the residents who had cheered in 2015 showed up to object. They lost. The old majority’s tolerance turned out to be a one-way grant, extended by people who assumed they would always be the ones doing the extending.

North Texas has its own exhibits. In 2008, federal prosecutors in Dallas won convictions against the Holy Land Foundation, a Richardson charity, for funneling money to Hamas. The trial evidence included a 1991 Muslim Brotherhood memorandum describing the group’s work in America as “a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.” Today the model has a site plan. EPIC City, since renamed The Meadow, proposes more than 1,000 homes, a K-12 faith-based school, a mosque, clinics, and retail on 402 acres in Collin and Hunt counties. In 2025, the Texas Legislature responded with House Bill 4211, banning religiously exclusive resale rules and routing disputes into Texas civil courts. An institution that decides who may buy, who may sell, and where quarrels are settled converts voluntary membership into leverage. In November 2025, Governor Greg Abbott designated the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim Brotherhood as foreign terrorist and transnational criminal organizations and barred both from acquiring land in Texas.

A national majority is unnecessary for national concessions. Leverage suffices. Denmark repealed its blasphemy law in 2017. In December 2023, after Quran burnings brought security threats and diplomatic pressure from Muslim governments, the Danish Parliament made the improper treatment of religious texts a crime, restoring a blasphemy rule in all but name within six years. Yale University Press, publishing Jytte Klausen’s 2009 scholarly book about the Danish cartoons, removed the cartoons themselves for fear of violence. No Muslim majority existed in Copenhagen or New Haven to demand either concession. Each was extracted by the credible prospect of disorder.

History shows where the road ends once the numbers allow. Richard Bulliet’s study of medieval conversion found that Iran took two to three centuries to become majority Muslim, with a curve that stayed flat for generations and then rose sharply once Islam became the social default. Status, taxes, and networks did most of the work. Most women at Cairo University went unveiled in the 1960s; by the 2000s, most were veiled. Bangladesh, founded as a secular republic in 1972, made Islam the state religion in 1988. Turkey, the 20th century’s model of Muslim secularism, reconverted Hagia Sophia into a mosque in 2020. In each case, the agents were organized minorities, the Brotherhood, Jamaat-e-Islami, and Gulf-funded preaching networks, working on societies that had seemed to be secularizing a generation earlier.

Americans heard a version of this warning in 1835, when Samuel Morse’s Foreign Conspiracy claimed that Catholic immigrants under priestly control would subvert the republic. The Catholics assimilated, and the Know-Nothings became a punch line. Why expect a different ending now? The American Church never asked its parishioners to settle contracts, inheritances, or crimes anywhere but in secular courts, while sharia claims jurisdiction over all three. Distance once weakened immigrants’ ties to the old country’s clergy; satellite television and preachers on YouTube now renew them every hour. Muslims are about 1% of Americans, but Bulliet’s curve always looks flat in its early decades, and enclaves run on local density rather than national share.

The first casualties are moderate Muslims, many of whom crossed an ocean to escape the clerics and found that the clerics had followed them onto the mosque board. A secular goverment that treats self-appointed leaders as the community’s voice hands those leaders a second lever, its own deference. Require civil registration of every religious marriage, refuse to enforce any religious arbitration that strips a woman of rights a civil court would grant her, and prosecute threats against apostates like any other threat; the orthodox are patient, and a secular state that waits for a crisis will find the curve already bending. Liberalism promised the moderate Muslim the right to be left alone. It cannot keep that promise by leaving his community alone.

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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.

On December 3 at 1 PM Central, if the courts allow it, an Army firing squad at Fort Hood will execute Nidal Hasan, and anyone with an internet connection will be able to watch. The Pentagon confirmed the livestream on October 8, six days after President Trump approved the death sentence and two days after Acting Army Secretary Adam Telle signed the execution order. Hasan murdered 13 people and wounded 32 on that same post on November 5, 2009. A military jury convicted him in August 2013. The Supreme Court declined to hear his case in March 2025. Seventeen years will have passed between the crime and the punishment, and for all but the last few minutes of those 17 years the public has been permitted to watch. It watched the trial. It read the verdict. It followed the appeals. The objection now is that the defendant should be sent out of the room for the ending.

Think about what we already accept. The Sixth Amendment guarantees the accused a public trial. In Richmond Newspapers v. Virginia (1980), Chief Justice Warren Burger traced the open courtroom from the English assizes through the colonial courthouse and concluded that “a presumption of openness inheres in the very nature of a criminal trial.” Burger’s reason had nothing to do with whether spectators enjoy trials. A judge who knows he is being watched is less likely to cut corners, a prosecutor under observation is more careful with the truth, and a public that can see justice done is more likely to believe it was done. Every one of those reasons applies with greater force to the moment when the state actually kills a man. The trial decides whether the government may take a life. The execution is the taking. We have arranged things so that the deliberation is open and the act is hidden, which is exactly backward.

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For most of American history nobody would have found that arrangement natural. Colonial hangings took place in town squares and courthouse yards, usually with a sermon. Pennsylvania and New York began moving executions inside prison walls in the 1830s, and the other states followed over the next 70 years, with Virginia still hanging men publicly in Richmond until 1907. Britain made the same move in 1868 with the Capital Punishment Amendment Act. What strikes you about the 1866 parliamentary debate that preceded it is that almost nobody in the chamber wanted to abolish hanging. The question was whether the public should see it. Defenders of the old practice argued that publicity was the only guarantee the sentence was carried out, and that it was carried out the same way against a lord as against a laborer. Opponents answered that the crowds at Newgate treated the morning as a holiday. Both sides were right; the opponents won, and the rule they left behind, that the state should inform the public of executions without letting it watch, has governed Anglo-American practice ever since.

The American endpoint came on August 14, 1936, in Owensboro, Kentucky, when something like 20,000 people turned out to see Rainey Bethea hanged. Kentucky permitted public hanging for rape but required murderers to die inside the penitentiary, so prosecutors charged Bethea with rape alone even though he had confessed to killing his victim. The crowd behaved like the Newgate crowd, with vendors and picnics, and the national press was appalled. Kentucky abolished public hanging in 1938. Since then an American execution has been witnessed by a few dozen designated people, officials, a handful of reporters, relatives of the victim, a representative of the condemned, while the rest of the country reads a wire story the next morning.

Owensboro is the strongest card the critics hold, and it deserves a straight answer. What went wrong in 1936 was not that the public could see the hanging. The state surrendered control of the event to a crowd that came for a show. The distinction matters because the Pentagon is not proposing to sell tickets on a parade ground. A livestream from Fort Hood, run by the Army, with a fixed camera, no commentary, and no crowd, is closer to the C-SPAN feed from a Senate hearing than to a county fair. Nobody argues that televising Congress turned legislation into entertainment, or that opening the courtroom turned the murder trial into theater, though in each case some people watch for the wrong reasons. The remedy for a bad audience is rules of decorum, enforced, and nobody has ever thought the better remedy was to turn off the lights.

The argument that should move even opponents of capital punishment concerns what happens when the lights are off. A government that executes in private controls the account of what it did. The witnesses are chosen by the warden, the curtain is drawn when the officials want it drawn, and the public learns of a botched lethal injection, if it learns at all, from the condemned man’s lawyer weeks later. This past June, Judge Candace Jackson-Akiwumi of the Seventh Circuit wrote in dissent that independent observation of executions promotes accountability, encourages compliance with lawful standards, and can expose procedural failures. It was a dissent and creates no right to a camera, but the reasoning is hard to answer. Deborah Denno of Fordham Law, who has spent a career documenting what goes wrong in American death chambers, told the Associated Press that a broadcast could improve transparency and public understanding, and she is no friend of the death penalty. The people most worried about state misconduct should be the first to want the state watched. I have previously written that while I don’t oppose the death penalty in principle, I oppose it in practice because I don’t trust the government to get it right 100% of the time.

A second argument, older and less comfortable, is that Pete Hegseth stated plainly on October 8. “People need to understand that there are serious consequences for these types of things,” he said. Nobody thinks a future jihadist will run the odds before he fires, and Hegseth did not say so. He claims punishment speaks, and that punishment nobody can see says very little. Hasan put on his uniform, walked into a processing center where soldiers were preparing to deploy, shouted “Allahu Akbar,” and shot unarmed men and women until civilian police brought him down. The Army tried him on the post where he did it, and it will execute him there. A death sentence announced in a press release is an abstraction. A firing squad on the ground at Fort Hood, before the country, is the law finishing the sentence it began in 2009. The retributive theory of punishment holds that a sentence is society’s formal verdict on an act, and a verdict delivered in secret is barely a verdict at all.

Objections remain. Some relatives of the Fort Hood dead will not want to watch, and some will not want anyone else to watch either. A decent policy consults them, warns them, and never cuts them off, and nothing about a livestream requires a single family member to turn it on. Others point out that Iran and the Taliban hold public executions and ask whether America wants that company. The comparison fails at the first step. What makes an Iranian hanging monstrous is the trial that preceded it, the offense that was charged, and the dissent that was being punished, and none of that changes if the hanging moves indoors. Hasan received 13 years of review by military courts, the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, and the Supreme Court. Visibility does not launder an unjust sentence, and secrecy does not stain a just one. The remaining worry, that jihadists will circulate the footage as propaganda, assumes they lack material already. The men who admire Hasan have his own words and his own deed, and a clip of the state answering him is hardly the recruiting poster they would choose.

What is genuinely new is scale. Owensboro required a train ticket; December 3 will require a phone. People the Army cannot control can clip, loop, and set a broadcast to music, and an honest defender of the policy has to concede that the Pentagon is taking on a problem the sheriff of Daviess County never faced. That argues for care in the production, for a single fixed shot, for no replay from official channels, for the solemnity of a military ceremony rather than the pacing of cable news; it does not argue for the curtain. The curtain was always a concession to our squeamishness rather than a safegaurd for anyone’s rights, and squeamishness is a poor basis for a rule about how the most powerful government on earth exercises its most irreversible power.

A citizen who opposes capital punishment should want the country to see what it authorizes, on the theory that the sight will change minds. A citizen who supports it should be willing to look at what he supports. Either way, the republic is better served by people who know what is being done in their name than by people who have arranged not to know. On December 3, the Army will fire, the country will watch, and for the first time in 90 years the last act of an American criminal judgment will be as public as the first. That is not a return to the county fair. It is a return to the courthouse.

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.