I made the mistake of irrational optimism Thursday afternoon. My phone was an old Samsung S22, and I absolutely loved the thing. Maybe I don’t have elite expectations for a cell phone, or maybe I just got to the point where I’d managed to get really good at all of its apps. But all of these people I know were giving me the snob treatment about my phone, and I just shrugged at them. Until the battery on that phone began taking a turn. And on the way to lunch Thursday, the damn thing was actually hot in my pocket, which was… different. Considering it ran from a 100 percent charge to 14 percent between 7 AM and noon, it seemed like it was finally time to accept the inevitable. So after lunch, I went to the Verizon store and traded it in for a brand-new S26. Which appears to be the exact same phone, but bigger and with a slightly better keyboard interface. I guess I’m happy. Except that I spent the entirety of Thursday afternoon transferring apps, settings, data, and whatever else a phone needs from the old phone to the new, and then it was time to fight the password battle. Finally, Lori Mashburn — Editor Par Excellence at The American Spectator — sent me a text message. “Excuse me,” it said (I’m paraphrasing), “but are you sending in a column, or what?” I congratulated her on being the first sender of texts to my new phone and explained that I was about to begin work on the column, but what I thought would take one hour was now taking four, and counting. Lori was nice about it and sympathetic. Not exactly excited for me. So I resolved to put down the phone and write a Five Quick Things. And to write it quickly. So here’s what we’re going to do — I’m going to show you posts on X, and give fast reactions to them. That’s it. These will actually be quick things for the 5QT. I know I’ve promised this countless times and very seldom delivered. But I’m serious this time. Watch me. 1. Doug Jones Simps for the SPLC and Shows Us Why He Never Should Have Been in the Senate Remember Doug Jones? He was the leftist jackass who managed an upset victory over Roy Moore in the Alabama Senate special election after Jeff Sessions was named as President Trump’s first attorney general back in 2017. Jones caught a bolt of lightning that year, in that the country-club GOP types decided Moore gave them a case of the ick after he won the Republican primary, and Moore went down in a flaming heap. Jones did too, in the next election. He’ll never win anything in Alabama ever again. Folks in that state reacted to Jones as their senator like that guy in the first Alien movie did when that damned thing jumped on his face. But somehow he’s still around, and he had this to say after the Justice Department indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center for wire and bank fraud and a count of conspiracy to commit money laundering… Charging the Southern Poverty Law Center with a federal crime for paying informants to help dismantle hate groups is an outrageous weaponization of the Dept of Justice and the FBI. As someone who has been a prosecutor and has taken on the Klan I can tell you that use of paid… pic.twitter.com/MgZMCESbNa — Doug Jones (@DougJones) April 23, 2026 To call this a poor argument is pretty charitable, no? Doug Jones just told you that the Southern Poverty Law Center is the government. (RELATED: Eventually, the Grift Does Get Exposed) I don’t know about you, but I don’t consent to be governed by the defamatory communists at the Southern Poverty Law Center, who slandered Charlie Kirk as a white supremacist four months before he was assassinated. 2. How Much Sympathy Can You Summon For This Woman? I’m not even going to comment on this one. I’ll let you people have at it below. “Sheryl Cowan, 57, was making $272,000 a year as a senior VP at a U.S.A.I.D.-funded nonprofit when she was let go at the end of March 2025. Last month she had an online interview for a $19-an-hour job managing a Penzeys Spices store in Falls Church, Va.”https://t.co/OGDiHFV79u — Alec MacGillis (@AlecMacGillis) April 23, 2026 3. The Brits Would Call Him “Cheeky Bernie” for This Check out Bernie Sanders running his mouth about the Trump family and their “monetization” of the White House… The Trump family has made $4 billion off the presidency. Crypto: $3.02B Persian Gulf deals: $425.8M Qatari jet: $150M Legal fees/merch: $127.7M Mar-a-Lago: $125M Corporate deals: $91M Hanoi hotel: $40M Truth Social: $25M Don Jr: $19.6M Unprecedented kleptocracy. — Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) April 23, 2026 The nerve of this old commie sonofabitch is really something, isn’t it? First of all, the Qatari jet isn’t for the Trump family; it’s for the country. And second, is Bernie Sanders actually going to complain about anybody else raking off the filthy lucre from their political office? Everybody here knows Bernie’s scam, right? He “writes” a book, and then his campaign buys oodles of copies of said book and sends them out to the suckers who donate to it. Probably most of those books get thrown in the garbage rather than being distributed to anybody. Bernie doesn’t care. He’s billed his campaign something like $2.5 million for those books since 2011. This is pretty likely the same scam Ilhan Omar and her white-boy husband were running with that fake winery they owned, which went from being valued in the eight figures to being legally dissolved earlier this month. The con goes like this — because a bottle of wine doesn’t have an inherent price, you buy trash wine in bulk from actual vinyards, slap your own label on it and then sell it at a premium to “wine afficionados” who happen to be your campaign donors — or, let’s say, blood-soaked warlords from back home in Somalia, who’ve gotten rich on Medicaid fraud in Minnesota and have money to burn on trash wine with a fancy label with a name like “Blockchain” or “Clothesline.” You do that for a while, then after you’ve milked the gag dry, you move on to some other scam. (RELATED: The Spectacle Ep. 308: Ilhan Omar: Queen of Corruption) It isn’t necessarily illegal, but it’s still greasy as hell. And these people have a whole lot of nerve criticizing Trump over the Qataris giving him a jet to serve as Air Force One. 4. The Dems’ Hasan Piker Problem I’m not even going to launch into the full list of atrocious things that have come out of the pie-hole of this Turkish communist the Left has decided is their version of Rush Limbaugh. You probably already know about Hasan Piker, and if you don’t, I’m not going to disturb the bliss of your ignorance. Let’s just say Piker is becoming a big deal on the Left, and that’s awesome for the Right, because you can’t sell him to Normie America. Some in the Democrat Party have recognized that. For example, here’s old Obama flunky Jon Favreau, who had Piker on his podcast five minutes ago, now scoffing about his celebrity… Zero people have tried to make Hasan Piker “the spokesman for Democrats.” He showed up at one campaign event with one candidate in a primary and sat for some interviews. What’s embarrassing is the number of people on here treating him like he’s a 2028 contender or DNC Chair. https://t.co/g1zlfhwAGG — Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) April 23, 2026 This is worth watching. It’s a lot of fun. 5. “Don’t Fear the Dead. And Don’t Fear Me.” In Blockbusters, which you can and should go and buy on Amazon, I had as one of the plot points the presence of a breakthrough AI app which would let you recast a movie with actors of your choice, and then the app would stream it for you in an hour. So, for example, if you wanted to watch Casablanca starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, you could do it. That capability, by the end of the book, had led to all kinds of developments. If you’ve done any playing around with AI video apps, and I’ve done a lot, you know that in real life, we aren’t quite there yet. But we are not far away. All of the elements of the app in the book are with us. And we’re starting to get AI actors. Like Val Kilmer. He’s an AI actor now. Yes, he’s dead, but that’s no longer a problem. Kilmer is in a new movie coming out later this year called As Deep as the Grave, about a real female archaeologist who essentially found the Anasazi, who’d been lost to history. Here’s the trailer… Hollywood actor Val Kilmer resurrected after his death with AI to star in new movie ‘As Deep as the Grave.’ The actor passed away in April 2025 aged 65. pic.twitter.com/GfeUV7uevZ — Oli London (@OliLondonTV) April 16, 2026 He looks pretty good for a dead guy. And now there is nothing, assuming the heirs are OK with it and the royalties are paid, stopping filmmakers from casting Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne, Rita Hayworth, and Chuck Norris in feature films to come. READ MORE from Scott McKay: Eventually, the Grift Does Get Exposed Mitch Landrieu, Low-Functioning Political Vampire Five Quick Things: A Quite Cranky 5QT

From around 2010 to the present, a woke supremacy took charge on many American college campuses, upending a traditional emphasis on a lively but civil dissemination of time-honored ideas and discovery of new ones, replacing it with ideologically driven support of a leftish agenda. Over the past seven years, I wrote a couple of books totaling close to 200,000 words about all of this, but the Wall Street Journal in an excellent recent editorial provided a nice 50 word summary of the current state of collegiate affairs: “rising tuition that prices out the middle class; an explosion in bureaucracy that steal resources from instruction; runaway grade inflation; an opaque admissions process that prizes race, gender and identity over achievement; disdain for America’s founding and its abiding principles; and a largely left-wing monoculture that discourages honest…debate…” (RELATED: Graduated, Not Educated) Offering a perceived shoddy product has adverse consequences, even in academia. Enrollments are lower than they were in 2010, the number of school closings is starting to grow (most recently: uber wokish Hampshire College in Massachusetts), public confidence in colleges had until recently declined, some governments (including the federal one) were reducing financial support, attacking academic tenure, creating traditionally oriented civic institutes, and threatening other reforms such as redoing a flawed accreditation system. (RELATED: A Bag of Rocks for $400,000?) Meanwhile, some prominent private donors publicly announced a withdrawal of financial largesse, and some presidents of prestigious universities embarrassed themselves and their institutions in widely reported congressional testimony. “On many campuses, students are exposed to a limited range of perspectives, signaling to them what rather than how to think.” Lately, however, there has been an upsurge in campus sanity. In a thoughtful report, a faculty committee at Yale conceded that much recent criticism had merit and that some concrete reforms (such as reducing preferential admissions not based on academic merit, and moderating inflated grades) are needed. The president of Dartmouth College, Sian Beilock, wrote an excellent op-ed for the Wall Street Journal extolling the virtues of institutional neutrality and vigorous but civil discourse, suggesting that “requires a campus culture where controversial speakers are heard rather than cancelled, where disagreement is expected rather than feared…” As she put it, “American higher education has a trust problem.” She recognized what many other Americans have: “On many campuses, students are exposed to a limited range of perspectives, signaling to them what rather than how to think.” Beilock was following the path-setting efforts of two other prominent university presidents or chancellors, Vanderbilt’s Daniel Diermeier, and Washington University in St. Louis’s Andrew Martin. Diermeier’s innovations extend beyond promoting intellectual diversity, including a raft of new initiatives, including establishing several new campuses long distances from the school’s Nashville hub. Even Harvard has shown some retreat from maximum wokeness. According to the Harvard Crimson, university Provost (and former Law School dean) John Manning, described as a “prominent conservative legal scholar,” has suggested that there should be a campaign to endow a healthy number of professorships that would reduce the left-wing monopoly (affirmative action for conservatives?) The idea may make sense. Politically, asking leftish dominated departments to hire conservative and libertarian professors is probably an exercise in futility, so Manning appears to be proposing an end run that would circumvent that problem, but skeptics might reasonably consider it a hustle to extract a few hundred million dollars from an increasingly recalcitrant alumni fed up with campus leftish shenanigans. In many public universities, state governmental officials have pushed some constructive change, such as increasing emphasis on America’s historical and civic heritage (notably in Ohio), creating traditionally or conservative-oriented civic institutes with considerable autonomy within existing university structures, or eliminating anti-meritorious DEI programs (in several states). In some cases, the push for reform has come from members of school governing boards. (RELATED: Gender Studies Got So Unhinged That Texas A&M Shut It Down) And it appears these efforts have stopped the precipitous decline in public confidence in higher education, if recent Gallup polling data is any indication. The big decline, in my judgment, in large part reflected a lack of clarity over who “owns” and controls universities — the faculty, the students, major donors, the official governing board, and, for state or church-controlled schools, sometimes their legally constituted “owners.” The adult overseers (governing boards, state governments, sometimes very large donors) are being jolted out of serving almost as ceremonial participants into having to make real decisions. Muting or ending the woke policies that have contributed to falling public confidence is not enough: higher education’s future does not look overly bright. The number of college-aged American students is going to decline because of falling fertility. Foreign student enrollment may have peaked as other nations develop increasingly top-flight universities. The nation’s capacity to fund higher education is being increasingly reduced by rapidly rising federal debt obligations reflecting irresponsible fiscal behavior in Washington. Debt service may soon crowd out student or research support. Possibly AI technology will cause declining employment opportunities for bright college graduates, but not for such non-college trained occupations such as welding, plumbing and home health care. This short assessment ignores still other problems, such as a scandalous rise in academic dishonesty, including fictitious research results and widespread student cheating on exams and elsewhere. It ignores the absurdity of requiring students in America to study four years for degrees conferred elsewhere (i.e., Oxford University) in three. It does not fully convey that administrative bloat has not only raised costs but diverted universities from job one: creating and disseminating knowledge. Channeling Winston Churchill: never have so many/ spent so much/ for so long/ learning so little. Hopefully, the anti-woke counterrevolution may ease these problems. READ MORE from Richard K. Vedder: Why Does Congress Keep Kicking the Fiscal Can? Gone With the Wins: College Sports Fiscal Insanity Go South, Young Man, Go South Richard Vedder is distinguished professor emeritus at Ohio University and senior fellow at both Unleash Prosperity and the Independent Institute.  

More than a century after Boss Tweed perfected the art of siphoning public money through friendly contractors and fraudulent billing in the building of New York City’s $12 million Courthouse, the same pattern continues to surface in government‑funded programs and projects throughout the country. In Minnesota, prosecutors and auditors have spent the past year unraveling fraud schemes involving non-existent early‑learning centers, corrupt Medicaid billing, and fake feeding programs for children. California has faced its own wave of Medicaid and hospice‑related scandals, with state investigators documenting widespread billing for phantom patients, sham end‑of‑life services, and clinics that appeared to exist only on paper. These abuses have cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars while exposing deep structural weaknesses in the administration of federally supported programs. (RELATED: Californian Medicare Hospice Hustle Meets the Long Arm of the Law) This problem is not confined to social services. Even at the federal level, projects billed as routine upgrades can expand into massive cost overruns with little transparency. In an administration that prides itself on oversight and fiscal discipline, the delays and out-of-control costs surrounding the renovation of the Federal Reserve Headquarters in Washington, D.C. suggest that government spending can still spiral far beyond its promises. Last week, federal prosecutors made an unannounced visit to the construction site at the Federal Reserve in an attempt to investigate the status of what has ballooned into a $2.5 billion renovation project. According to media reports, the investigators were turned away by the building contractor and referred to federal attorneys. As extreme as these federal cost overruns appear, they are not without precedent. Public works projects have always revealed something essential about the governments that build them. More than a century ago, New York City dealt with a public‑works scandal so flagrant that it still stands as the benchmark for how political power, weak oversight, and vast sums of public money can collide. In the 1870s, New York’s William M. “Boss” Tweed turned the construction of the New York County Courthouse into a monument of graft. A project originally budgeted at under $300,000 ballooned through padded invoices, fake contractors, and political kickbacks into more than $12 million. What is still called today the “Tweed Courthouse” is a public works project in which even the brooms, chairs, and window shades cost more than entire buildings elsewhere in the city. The unraveling of the Tweed Ring owed much to the investigative courage of the New York Times in 1871 and the relentless visual assault waged through the satiric cartoons of Thomas Nast. At a moment when Tammany Hall had hardened into a dominant and deeply corrupt Democratic Party political machine, fueled by the votes of the newly arrived Irish immigrant workforce who routinely intimidated the press to keep critical voices silent, the Times took the extraordinary risk of publishing the leaked city ledgers that exposed the courthouse fraud in detail. (RELATED: Weaponized Governmental Failure: A Primer) But it was Nast, working from his desk at Harper’s Weekly, who translated the scandal into a language that even Tweed’s most loyal supporters could not ignore. His cartoons — Tweed as a bloated monarch, Tweed surrounded by bags of stolen money, Tweed pointing to his cronies in a circle of blame, Tweed depicted with a moneybag in place of his head — cut through the illiteracy and political loyalty of the new immigrants to the City that had long protected the machine. Tweed himself reportedly fumed, “I don’t care a straw for your newspaper articles, my constituents don’t know how to read, but they can’t help seeing them damned pictures!” Between the Times’s documentary evidence and Nast’s imagery, the public finally saw the scale of the theft that had been hiding in plain sight. Boss Tweed and the Tammany Ring, caricatured by Thomas Nast for ‘Harper’s Weekly,’ August 1871 Generations after Tweed’s reign, critics of modern infrastructure spending point to similar patterns at both the state and federal levels. Commentators have noted that California’s high‑speed rail project, championed by Governor Gavin Newsom, has faced repeated delays, route changes, and escalating costs. News coverage has documented how a project originally sold to voters at roughly $33 billion has grown to estimates exceeding $100 billion, with only partial segments under construction after nearly a decade and no end in sight. (RELATED: California Doubles Down on a Boondoggle) [P]ublic works often become mirrors reflecting the strengths and weaknesses of the political systems that produce them. While supporters argue that the project remains a visionary investment in clean transportation, those willing to acknowledge the reality of the project acknowledge it as a case study in political overpromising or worse. Whether through corruption, mismanagement, or structural inefficiencies, public works often become mirrors reflecting the strengths and weaknesses of the political systems that produce them. But it is not just the weakness of the political systems. The media plays an important role in all of this — or at least it used to. The Tweed Courthouse scandal only came to light because heroic journalists at the New York Times were willing to publish information on the falsified city ledgers they received from a whistleblower by the name of Matthew O’Rourke, who had been a clerk in the county auditor’s office and was fired by the Tammany Hall machine, prompting him to seek revenge against the Tweed Ring. The role of the press in exposing abuses of public money has always been central to democratic accountability. In the past, investigative reporters were often the only ones willing to do the real work of sifting through contracts and billing schemes to reveal what internal audits and government press releases preferred to obscure. The Tweed Ring kept two sets of books, and once the New York Times was able to retrieve them and publish the fraudulent expenses, the public realized just how far the corruption went. That tradition is fading. While a handful of citizen‑investigators, including Nick Shirley in Minnesota, have shown what real scrutiny can uncover when they are willing to confront the fraudsters. But their work is the exception. As a result, the contracting complexity of projects like the Federal Reserve renovation can remain hidden because too few journalists are willing or able to do the hard work of looking closely at the billing practices of contractors, sub-contractors, zoning officials, and others involved in the renovation. (RELATED: Uncovered: The Power of the Citizen Journalist) The Tweed scandal proved that a dedicated press can dismantle even the most entrenched political machines. Oversight bodies may issue reports, and agencies may promise reforms, but without truly independent journalists willing to investigate deeply, verify, and expose information that officials would prefer to bury, the public is left in the dark. The persistence of fraud in state programs and the expanding costs of federal projects show that the need for rigorous, independent reporting has never been greater. But the fact that federal prosecutors were turned away last week by the building contractor at the Federal Reserve when they attempted to investigate the status of the renovation does not bode well for the future of that project. If the Tweed Ring and their $12 million Courthouse in 1871 taught us anything, it is that when officials block scrutiny, questions of corruption will emerge. READ MORE from Anne Hendershott: New York’s Envy Tax Reading Pope Leo Charitably in a Time of War The Collapse of Courtship for Gen Z Image licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.

Flying under the radar of the legacy media, which does not like to report good economic news while Donald Trump is president, there is a massive industrial renaissance underway in the United States. (RELATED: The Productivity Boom Economists Didn’t See Coming) Pretty much every mass-market auto manufacturer is committing to new U.S. plants — or major expansions — in an effort to avoid tariffs and to be able to manufacture domestically most of the vehicles they sell in the United States. Hyundai, Toyota, Nissan, Mercedes, and Toyota have all announced major construction projects in recent months, which will pour tens of billions of dollars into the economy. After the construction is done, those projects will then create tens of thousands of new direct jobs. Wherever new auto plants have sprung up, a great deal of economic prosperity has followed, as new suppliers emerge, as well as suppliers to those suppliers, and so forth. This will now be amplified as the inflow of more capital recirculates throughout the economy, where it was once shipped offshore. Of course, it’s not just auto companies that are re-shoring manufacturing; the industrial renaissance is across all industries. We have recently moved into a golden era for trucking companies. Trucking has always been an economic bellwether, with the volume of goods being shipped declining during down times and increasing during economic expansions. Irrespective of the crackdown on foreign drivers who should not have been issued commercial driver’s licenses, the absolute volume of freight being transported by trucks is surging right now. (RELATED: Will Congress Keep on Trucking?) Rail is also seeing strong growth. As recently documented at Freightwaves, rail car loads in Q1 2026 are up 4.2 percent year-over-year. It’s the strongest first-quarter performance since 2019, suggesting that the improvement in rail volumes is not a temporary blip but rather a sustained shift in underlying economic activity. Diving deeper, the trends involving specific companies that serve as bellwethers of American industrial activity are showing very strong growth, along with a growing book of orders to be fulfilled. Caterpillar is a manufacturer of construction and mining equipment, and has shown to be a highly cyclical company. When its sales are booming, so is the economy. Right now, its sales are booming. Caterpillar’s most recent quarterly results show revenue up a whopping 19 percent year over year. But most impressive, its “backlog” (e.g., its order bank) as of Dec. 31, 2025, was a record $51 billion, which was up 70 percent from $30 billion at the prior year-end. Of course, Caterpillar’s exploding sales mean tremendous growth for its suppliers, and because of tariffs, Caterpillar is heavily incentivized to use U.S. suppliers. Eaton is a technology components business that is also seeing very rapid growth. Eaton’s most recent quarterly revenue was an all-time record, up 13 percent year-over-year. Perhaps more telling, its backlog is now at a record $20 billion, up 25 percent. At the raw material level, companies such as Vulcan Materials and Martin Marietta Materials have seen very strong growth since the middle of 2025. I could keep going. None of these companies is a software company selling a digital product. These companies’ products are tangible industrial goods that are used for traditional industrial purposes. In fact, even US Steel is expanding capacity at its U.S. mills. It was just announced a few days ago that its Gary, Ind., tin mill plant will be restarted, providing 225 new jobs at this plant, which had been idled since 2022. As if all this news wasn’t good enough, it gets even better. The fuel costs for America’s industrial revival are falling. Natural gas is the fuel that drives American industry. Unlike petroleum prices, which have risen since the start of the war in Iran, natural gas prices are trending downward. This is because the U.S. is awash in natural gas, and under the Trump administration’s pro-fossil fuels agenda, it is being extracted in record volumes. Per the U.S. Department of Energy, at an average March 2026 price of $3.04 per MMBtu, the price of natural gas is down 29 percent since the beginning of the year, and down 26 percent year-over-year. By the middle of April 2026, the price had dropped even lower, slipping under $2.80 per MMBtu. (RELATED: Drill, Baby, Geopolitics: Now It’s a Matter of National Security) The media will not stop trying to spin economic news as being bad for President Trump, but the simple fact is that his effort to re-shore American industry is proving wildly successful. The explosive industrial growth in the U.S. and the cheap natural gas to fuel it have put us in a position for a period of remarkable economic growth and job creation. READ MORE from Buck Throckmorton: Texas and Florida Shatter the ABA’s Gatekeeping Power Shipping Interruption in Persian Gulf Is Yet Another Reminder of the Risks of Offshoring Media Dishonestly Blames Rising Sea Levels for Houses Lost to Surf in North Carolina’s Outer Banks

Alito: The Justice Who Reshaped the Supreme Court and Restored the Constitution By Mollie Hemingway Basic Liberty, 352 pages, $32 Suffice to say, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is a conservative’s conservative. Nominated to succeed Reagan-appointed Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, these Supreme Court nominations have long since evolved after the Reagan nomination of the conservative Robert Bork into battles royal, and Justice Alito has long since vindicated President George W. Bush’s desire to keep the conservative tradition on the Court alive and going. Mollie Hemingway, the editor-in-chief of The Federalist, has done Alito’s time on the Court — and his admirers — a decided service in her biography Alito: The Justice Who Reshaped the Supreme Court and Restored the Constitution. Right on the flyleaf of the book’s cover, it notes that Mollie’s book is “comprehensive” and “explains how his common sense and prosecutorial experience combined with fearless intellectual rigor has shaped the man and the jurist.” I should say at the outset that while I am not a lawyer, as a member of the Reagan White House political staff, I was, along with colleagues, deeply involved in what became the massive and first-of-its-kind battle over a Supreme Court nominee. In that case, the Reagan nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Bork was a seriously qualified Court nominee and a decided conservative. The two factors together were exactly what terrified Bork’s left-wing opponents, and they launched a never-before-seen and decidedly brutal political campaign to defeat Bork. This included a very divisive first back in the day — campaign-style television commercials attacking Bork. With a massive lobbying effort to defeat him, a campaign so vicious that it became a verb: “Borking.” As in a judicial nominee was being “Borked” — so massively smeared as if in a political campaign that the nomination simply could not prevail. (RELATED: The Left’s Never-Ending War to Disqualify Justices) Bork himself would later write in his memoirs: The clash over my nomination was simply one battle in this long-running war for control of our legal culture. There may be legitimate differences about that nomination, but, in the larger war for control of the law, there are only two sides. Either the Constitution and statutes are law, which means that their principles are known and control judges, or they are malleable texts that judges may rewrite to see that particular groups or political causes win. Suffice to say, not unlike Bork himself and other conservative jurists (like Alito’s colleague Justice Clarence Thomas or the late Justice Antonin Scalia), Justice Alito is a decided and quite open conservative. Notably, Hemingway recounts the seemingly endless assaults on the Court that followed Bork’s nomination over the succeeding years. And notably, Hemingway details Alito’s decidedly brave move in voting to overturn the legendary Roe v. Wade decision that had tried to institutionalize abortion. That decision, Dobbs v. Jackson, was a decidedly landmark decision, with the decision’s majority opinion, as noted, drafted by Justice Alito. To say that the reaction to the overturn of Roe was tumultuous is decidedly understated. And Hemingway, after detailing the craziness that surrounded the reaction to that decision and Alito’s role in overturning the decision, writes: But testimonies to Alito’s character and intellect are inadequate to capture the quality of his conduct through this tumultuous period. In spite of political threats to the legitimacy of the Court — accompanied by very real threats to the justices’ own lives — Alito had quietly and consistently delivered justice while also anchoring the team through its most controversial decision in half a century.’ The heavens had fallen, and Alito had done his duty, unawed. This superb biography of Alito, his life, judicial philosophy, and actions on the Court, goes on, in detail, to give a serious historical rendering of exactly the role Alito plays as a serious scholar and player on the Court. When she ends this telling, Mollie notes: When he attends functions in Washington, a city of inflated egos, Alito can be found in the corner, quietly talking to a few people. He does not need to be the center of attention. In a room where he is the most important person, he makes those he is having a conversation with feel comfortable. Polite and deferential, he does not draw people into his vortex as many powerful figures do. If someone else starts talking, he stops. He does not seek glory, status, or fame. Some people get energy from holding a glass of wine and having people come up and pay homage to them. Alito gets energy from reading a law review article. ….. Alito is not a melancholy warrior, but he is not a happy one, either. He cares deeply about the law and getting the big issues correct, and he is affected by what the Court does….. Mollie ends with this from her judicial subject, quoting from a speech he gave to the Federalist Society: “For all Americans, standing up for our Constitution and our freedom is work that lies ahead.” To which a reader can only add an “Amen!” to that. Without doubt, Mollie Hemingway’s biography of Justice Samuel Alito is a superb addition to the small library of books written over the decades that detail the lives and works of Supreme Court decisions and the Justices who wrote those decisions. It is well done indeed. READ MORE from Jeffrey Lord: Whither the Democrats? Justice Thomas Stands Up for the Declaration and Constitution New York’s Mamdani Plays the Race Card