“Look.” I elbowed James, a Hill comms guy I’d just met in line. “It’s Taylor Lorenz, the founder of, uh, User Magazine.” “Good lord,” he said. At 7:57 she scurried up the sidewalk, chin down and shoulders turned in, wearing a surgical mask that was slightly too big — it stretched from the bridge of the nose to the chin, obscuring everything but her wide-set eyes. Two crowd-control lanes had been set up out front, and all us proles were squeezed into one of them. The other was empty, presumably reserved for big celebrities like Lorenz. “Hey, Taylor!” I said, loud enough that she had to acknowledge it. “Heeeyyy.” She didn’t quite stop. “What’s going on, guys?” The “guys” in question were James, me, and a cluster of boomer couples who paused their conversation long enough to look at her, register nothing, and resume it. I considered asking some obnoxious question about her age (Lorenz is famously secretive about the exact birth year) and decided against it. I was worried she’d denounce me as a troll, at which point I’d be frog-marched off the premises of this third and most extravagant New Media Party, promoted by Substack as the founding event of a new American press. What had been advertised, in the run-up to the night, was a celebrity gathering. Looksmaxxing icon Clavicular was supposed to attend and didn’t. Quentin Tarantino was supposed to attend and didn’t. Gavin Newsom was supposed to attend and didn’t. What did attend was a couple hundred people who write newsletters for a living, a handful of former CNN anchors, a Miami Herald reporter who covers Jeffrey Epstein, and David “Fluoride Stare” Pakman. By any measure, this was a less impressive room than the one I’d been promised. It was also, almost certainly, a more honest one. Every previous new intellectual class — the New York Intellectuals arguing about Trotsky in a City College cafeteria in 1937, the soixante-huitards throwing cobblestones at French police in 1968 — has looked, at the moment of its emergence, like a cheap imitation of the elite it was about to replace. If the Renwick was any indication, the next American intelligentsia was going to look like Jim Acosta threatening to fight Michael Tracey on the floor of a federal museum. Which is, I came to suspect, a more accurate sample of the future than anything happening at the Hilton. I went through the metal detectors at 8 p.m. sharp. A red-carpeted staircase climbed two stories under a vaulted ceiling, and through the arch at the top of it, I could just barely hear a party. The Grand Salon at this hour held maybe fifty people, all sober, all standing in the unsettled clusters peculiar to early arrivals. I needed a drink immediately. The bartender, an African migrant whose grasp of English was tenuous, took my order for a double tequila soda and reached for a bottle of Tito’s. I corrected him. “Ahahaha! Sounds just the same, eh?” he said. “Uh, yeah. I guess so,” I said, and chuckled politely. He set down the Tito’s, surveyed his station, and reached for a bottle of Absolut. I corrected him a second time. He started over. He worked at a pace that, by the third round, I came to understand was less a function of skill than of an entire continent’s relationship to time, and possibly to the postcolonial project as a whole. By the time the drink was in my hand, the room behind me had quadrupled. It operated on a geometry I recognized from every other DC event I’d been to — cliques of three and four, each one a closed circuit that opened occasionally to admit someone, then sealed shut behind them. The conversations all had the same posture: people facing each other but looking past each other, scanning for the next conversation while performing the present one. I didn’t know who any of them were yet, but I knew what they were. They were people, by and large, who had figured out that you could leave a real publication, take your Twitter following with you, and charge five dollars a month for what you used to give away for free. Some of them were making more money than they’d ever made. Most were only pretending to. The first person I spoke to was David Pakman. I found James, the comms guy from outside, deep in conversation with him near the bar, and inserted myself. The subject was Virginia congressional redistricting, on which Pakman had strong views. He was small and quick and never quite still — he held forth on the redistricting question while alighting on James’s words for a beat at a time then shifting to whatever conversation was happening around him, the way a lemur tracks movement. When he had exhausted the redistricting subject I mentioned I was writing a piece for the Daily Wire. “Oh. How is the Daily Wire lately?” he said. There was an accusation in the cadence, like he’d recently read something disqualifying about the place and assumed I had too. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t work there. I’m a freelancer.” “OK. Well. I’m going to go mingle.” Then he was gone. I didn’t see him for the rest of the night. Michael Tracey was easy to find. He was the loudest person in his vicinity, and his vicinity contained two young men in suits who, in the course of about thirty seconds of eavesdropping, identified themselves as Oxford PPE graduates working somewhere or other. I had only ever seen Tracey in his X profile picture, the sort of stylized cartoon avatar a man commissions of himself on Fiverr when he wants to be perceived as a serious thinker — bearded, bespectacled, knuckles to chin. In person he was sweaty, faintly purple, and topped with the kind of hair a bald man might acquire by rubbing glue on his scalp and rolling around on a barber shop floor. He was already belligerent when I joined the conversation. The subject was Julie K. Brown, the Miami Herald reporter who has spent the better part of a decade documenting the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein. “She’s a cunt,” Tracey said, “and I don’t use that word lightly.” I said that on the contrary I considered her a beautiful angel and one of the most important journalists of our time. The British guys found this funnier than Tracey did. Tracey did not look at me; he continued his train of thought as though I hadn’t spoken, which was probably the most impressive thing he did all night. Substack had advertised the party as “an ideologically diverse mix.” This was technically accurate but beside the point. What Tracey and Pakman and the several hundred others sipping cutely named cocktails — one was called “The Hot Take” — had in common was not a politics or a sensibility but an enemy. Every person in the room had built an audience on the conviction that the institutions producing the news a mile and a half north, at the Hilton, where the actual White House Correspondents’ Dinner was getting underway, were no longer fit to do so. The two routes were both in the room. Acosta had been pushed out of CNN. Tracey had been on the outside throwing rocks at it for fifteen years. And now they were both under the forty-foot ceiling of the Grand Salon, drinking all night from the same open bar. A little after 8:30 the music stopped. A man I didn’t recognize was standing at the DJ booth, behind a Marlboro-styled Substack logo, asking for everyone’s attention. There had been an incident, he said. The Renwick was closing its doors as a precaution, which meant that nobody inside would be permitted to leave. Since we were all already here, he added, we were going to keep the party going, and somebody would let us know when it was safe to step out. He thanked us for our patience and the DJ resumed. He wasn’t telling most of the room anything new. For some minutes before he spoke, the news had been spreading unevenly through the Salon. A handful of people had drifted into the side galleries — past the butter cow in its refrigerated case, past a stack of jars called Mount Zeitler — and were pacing on phone calls, faces troubled. For others, the announcement was the first they’d heard of it. Nobody left, because nobody could. The complaint I heard most often in the hour that followed was not about the shooting itself but about Tarantino and Newsom: multiple people informed me, with apparent disappointment, that it was why they hadn’t made it to Substack that night. While we drank, the Hilton was being evacuated. A man named Cole Allen had charged the security checkpoint outside the ballroom with a 12-gauge shotgun, a .38, and a manifesto he had emailed to his family ten minutes before. The president was being lifted from the dais. The speaker of the House, the vice president, the secretary of state, and the directors of the FBI and HHS were all escorted out in a hurry. The press corps — the people most of the room at the Renwick had built their careers denouncing — were diving under their tables in evening dress. The Renwick stayed locked for another 90 minutes. None of us could leave. Neither, it turned out, could Julie K. Brown. What happened next, I missed. I had drifted into the side galleries, or to the bathroom, or to whoever I’d been introduced to in line for the bar. Tracey, who at 8:45 had merely been calling Brown a cunt, had by 9:30 graduated to the physical phase of his plan. Allegedly, he cornered her, started screaming, and blocked her when she tried to walk away. What I learned the next morning, in pieces, on Twitter, was that several men intervened. Acosta was among them. So was security. Acosta, by his own account and Brown’s confirmation, stood between them and helped escort her away. At which point Acosta turned to Tracey and yelled, “LET’S STEP OUTSIDE.” Tracey accepted, replying, “OK JIM LET’S GO.” Security pulled Tracey out before either of them could leave. In any case, they couldn’t have gone anywhere. The Renwick was still sealed. But the gesture had been made, and Tracey, escorted out and free of the lockdown that constrained the rest of us, took it with him. He walked east, arriving sometime after midnight at the Hampton Inn on 6th Street, where he’d been told Acosta was staying. He lurked on the sidewalk. At 1:01 a.m., he posted to X that he still had no idea what had happened with Trump that night. Six minutes later he posted a photograph of the entrance with the caption: Jim, I’m literally waiting for you right now, you piece of shit. Acosta did not come downstairs. The image of a middle-aged man standing alone outside a Hampton Inn at 1 a.m., posting threats at another middle-aged man on a website neither of them owned, was a degraded image. But it was an old one. Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal — members in good standing of the New York literary establishment that produced both of them — had spent the ‘70s trying to kill each other at parties. Mailer headbutted Vidal in the green room of The Dick Cavett Show in 1971. He threw a drink at him at a Lally Weymouth party in 1977. Mary McCarthy went on television in 1980 to call Lillian Hellman a liar; Hellman sued her for libel; the suit was still unresolved when Hellman died. None of these men or women were friends. Several of them loathed each other, for legitimate reasons. Mailer’s grievance with Vidal was that Vidal had compared his writing in print to the work of Charles Manson. McCarthy’s grievance with Hellman was that Hellman had spent decades lying in her memoirs about her Stalinism. They were serious ideological feuds — about American masculinity, about the responsibility of the intellectual to political truth, about what could and could not be said about the Soviet Union — that found, in time, a personal form. The class that fought through these feuds eventually replaced the older liberal establishment it had grown up wanting to displace. It produced Trilling, Bellow, Sontag, Hardwick. It also produced Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, and most of the intellectual scaffolding for the neoconservative project, including a great deal of what came later in the way of American foreign policy. Sometimes it honored its inheritance — but it often squandered it, too. The record is mixed in a way that should give anyone watching the next emergence pause. What I’d watched for three hours at the Renwick was, I believe, an emergent class of the same model. The substrate was different — Substack rather than the little magazines. The disputes were smaller, pettier. The people were obviously less impressive and more embarrassing. But the resentments were structured the same way. They will probably win, in the sense that previous classes of this type have won. Whether what they produce will be worth what they replace is a question I’m in no position to answer, and neither, on the evidence I’d collected over three hours of standing in the room, were they. *** Thomas English

The man accused of attempting to assassinate President Donald Trump at Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner also shot a Secret Service agent’s bulletproof vest, according to NBC News.  Cole Thomas Allen, 31, was armed with a shotgun, handgun, and knives when he charged through a security checkpoint inside the Washington Hilton Hotel, where the event was being held. One floor above the ballroom packed with government officials and reporters, Allen discharged one of his weapons, hitting a Secret Service agent in the vest, NBC reported on Wednesday. Some early reports indicated the agent may have been hit by friendly fire. The Secret Service agent was released from the hospital over the weekend. Federal authorities have charged Allen with discharging a weapon, but he has not been separately charged with assaulting a federal officer. Investigators are continuing to review digital evidence, including computers from Allen’s California home and devices recovered from his hotel room, a law enforcement source told NBC. The Daily Wire reported Wednesday that Allen tracked Trump’s movements online and arming himself for the occasion, according to documents filed by the Justice Department. A photo included in the filings shows items laid out in Allen’s hotel room at the Washington Hilton, including what prosecutors identified as an ammunition bag, shoulder hoster, sheathed knife, and tools. Credit: DOJ According to the documents, Allen monitored live coverage of Trump’s arrival at the event shortly before the attack. At about 8:30 p.m., Allen left his hotel room and made his way toward the event. As he approached a security checkpoint, he threw off a long black coat that concealed his shotgun, then charged through the checkpoint and headed toward a staircase leading to the ballroom. “Had the defendant achieved his intended outcome, he would have brought about one of the darkest days in American history,” prosecutors wrote. Allen faces charges of attempting to assassinate the president of the United States, transporting a firearm and ammunition across state lines with intent to commit a felony, and discharging a firearm during a crime of violence. If convicted, he faces life in prison.

A newly approved Florida congressional map could eliminate up to four Democratic-held seats ahead of the November midterm elections, intensifying a nationwide redistricting fight. Florida Republicans, who hold supermajorities in both chambers of the state legislature, passed the map on Wednesday over loud liberal opposition, sending it to Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s desk. DeSantis is expected to sign the bill.  The redrawn districts target Democratic seats in the Tampa, Orlando, and South Florida areas, aiming to flip them to Republican control. Democrats currently hold seven of Florida’s 28 districts.  Under the plan, Florida Democratic Reps. Kathy Castor, Darren Soto, Jared Moskowitz, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz could face significantly tougher re-election fights.  If enacted, the map would reflect the Sunshine State’s broader political shift in recent years. Once a swing state that backed Barack Obama twice, Florida has moved decisively to the Right, with Republicans now holding a roughly 1.5 million-voter registration advantage. “Florida got shortchanged in the 2020 Census, and we’ve been fighting for fair representation ever since,” DeSantis told Fox News Digital. “Drawing maps based on race, which is reflected in our current congressional districts, is unconstitutional and should be prohibited.” The push to redraw Florida’s map coincides with a bombshell Supreme Court ruling sharply limiting the use of race in congressional redistricting.  In a 6-3 decision, the court struck down Louisiana’s map, which included two majority-black districts, as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Writing for the conservative majority, Justice Samuel Alito said the Constitution generally forbids race-based line drawing absent a compelling justification. Wednesday’s ruling clears the way for other states with majority-minority districts to change course. New maps in states including Louisiana, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Tennessee could net Republicans as many as 12 seats in Congress, according to a New York Times analysis.  Democrats decried the decision as an attack on democracy, despite pursuing partisan gerrymandering in California and, more recently, Virginia.  “Now we’re now at a point where affirmative action is gone, diversity is gone, equity gone, inclusion gone, racial tolerance gone, the Voting Rights Act largely gone, but guess what, extremists, we’re still here, and we’re not going anywhere,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said. Hakeem Jeffries: “We’re now at a point where affirmative action is gone, diversity is gone, equity is gone, inclusion is gone…” pic.twitter.com/4b9Bm7KNwy — TheBlaze (@theblaze) April 29, 2026 Florida’s map is likely to face legal challenges. A provision in the state constitution effectively bars partisan gerrymandering, according to The New York Times. DeSantis has argued that recent court rulings from both the state and U.S. Supreme Court have laid the groundwork to uphold the maps. The SCOTUS ruling also invalidates the below provisions of the FL Constitution requiring the use of race in redistricting: ”…districts shall not be drawn with the intent or result of denying or abridging the equal opportunity of racial or language minorities to participate in… https://t.co/IqrLoWdO0L — Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) April 29, 2026 Zack Smith, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said Wednesday’s Supreme Court ruling did not address political gerrymandering.  “So at least from a federal constitutional perspective, the federal constitution isn’t going to have anything to say about political gerrymanders,” Smith said in an interview with The Daily Wire.  “That’s going to be left to the states and really depend on what each state’s laws in each state’s constitution says about how their state legislatures draw their legislative maps,” he added.

Far-left senator Bernie Sanders is working with individuals closely linked to the Chinese Communist Party in his crusade against artificial intelligence. Sanders on Wednesday evening will sit down with Chinese nationals Xue Lan, a professor at the CCP-funded Tsinghua University, and Zeng Yi, the dean of the Beijing Institute of AI Safety and Governance. The event is slated to examine the “existential threat” posed by AI and the need for international cooperation to regulate it. The Tsinghua University is China’s top engineering school and works hand in hand with the Chinese government and military. The university has been linked to the CCP’s cyber-espionage campaigns targeting the United States — the university owns companies and projects tied to Beijing’s priorities to achieve technological breakthroughs. In 2018, Chinese cyber actors targeted Alaskan networks and organizations at the center of trade negotiations with the Alaska state government. The surveillance attacks occurred before, during, and after the negotiations between China and the governor. The United States is a top study abroad destination for the highly skilled student engineers whose top employers after university are Nvidia’s Chinese rival Huawei, the State Grid Corporation of China, and China’s Aerospace, Science, and Technology Corporation.  Yi, of the Beijing Institute of AI Safety and Governance, is an advocate of scaling back AI, warning of environmental concerns that “fall disproportionately on the most vulnerable.” He argues AI is driving mass surveillance and discrimination. The campaign from Sanders and his Chinese allies to scale back AI comes as President Donald Trump pushes to make sure the United States stays at the front of the AI race. Trump launched his “American AI Action Plan” in July 2025, which made a commitment to AI development, absent onerous regulation and infrastructure inhibitions. Sanders’ event advocates for the opposite. The event has been criticized by prominent voices in the American tech industry, such as Marc Andreessen, who called the involvement of China “concerning.” There have been warnings from the tech industry that the American left will be China’s only hope to leapfrog America.  Joe Lonsdale, the co-founder of the defense giant Palantir, said China is desperate to catch up with the United States in the AI fight. “The United States has opened a significant civilizational lead versus China when it comes to the defense and economic situation around Artificial Intelligence,” Lonsdale said, warning that China is “desperate to use the left” to set America back. He said it’s difficult to tell whether the left is on China’s side or just naive. “CCP leadership encourages regressive socialist views in the United States of America, in [a] desperate attempt to slow adversaries’ economic and military advantage.”  Sanders leads the Left’s campaign against AI, proposing an AI moratorium in December. He also frequently voices concern over the technology turning on humans. “If AI becomes smarter than human beings, we could lose control over this revolutionary technology and AI could turn against the human race with cataclysmic consequences,” he said.  Trump’s AI czar David Sacks argues the opposite. “As I’ve said many times before, the biggest risk of AI isn’t James Cameron’s The Terminator, it’s George Orwell’s 1984,” he wrote in an X post. Sacks says the AI safety crowd will inevitably “bring about the Orwellian future they claim to oppose” because “their solutions always favor more government centralization and control.”  He also argues it’s crucial that the United States reign over China on AI superiority, or the rest of the world will embed China’s technology into their ecosystems. Sacks claims China’s models enforce ideological bias, censorship, and historical revisionism.

We are about to have a mugshot of “America’s Tallest Teenage Girl,” as my boss, Ben Domenech, likes to joke. Yes. All 6 feet and 8 inches of James Comey, the former FBI director who spent years weaponizing the Justice Department against President Donald Trump, is surrendering to federal authorities today after a grand jury in North Carolina handed down two felony counts, each carrying up to five years in prison. To quote the wise Hillary Rodham Clinton: “No one is above the law.” I can’t help but laugh at the sheer teenage drama of it all, because as a former teenage girl myself, I know this character arc by heart. Comey’s entire career has been one long, awkward coming-of-age story, and he’s finally reaching the make-or-break point of girlhood. In the beginning, there is a quest for autonomy. That early-teen “you’re not the boss of me” phase my mother begrudgingly endured, where you suddenly become the smartest person in the house. As FBI director, Comey weaponized the Department of Justice against a duly elected president, signed off on FISA warrants built on a phony Steele dossier, pushed the Russia collusion hoax for years, and leaked sensitive memos to the media while dressing it up as “higher loyalty.” Classic teenager move: convinced that perceived righteousness exempts you from the rules everyone else has to follow. He then enters the social performance stage of life, that unruly stretch of caring too much what your tribe thinks. Comey began this stage last year when he “stumbled upon” seashells on the seashore, arranged to spell “86 47.” For anyone who doesn’t speak dinner-table shorthand: “86” has meant “get rid of it” since the 1930s. “47” is, of course, the 47th president, Donald Trump. But you needn’t know either of those facts to get the message. At the time he posted it, Leftist protesters were plastering that phrase everywhere. It was the new viral call-to-death chant against the president. Comey himself admitted he recognized it as a “clever political thing,” before gushing over the “artistic flair” of the seashells, snapping a photo, and posting it to Instagram for his hundreds of thousands of followers. He knew exactly what he was doing. This is the same man who spent decades prosecuting gangs for far less direct threats, but he believes he’s above institutional power, so he thought a simple “delete and play dumb” would suffice. That’s how coded language works in the assassination culture the Left has mainstreamed — where 56% of left-wingers say it would be somewhat justifiable to murder the president — plausible deniability built right in. “They were just pretty seashells!” This matters more than a beach photo op. At the time Comey posted it, Trump had already survived at least two assassination attempts. The shot had already been fired. The bullet had already grazed his ear. And Comey, the former head of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, decided that was the moment to signal to the mob. Finally, Comey has entered his principled idealist phase. The late-teen “I’m immovable and morally superior” stage. After the indictment dropped, Comey released a video declaring, “I’m still innocent, and still not afraid.” He’s the protagonist in his own head, forever the hero resisting the big bad demagogue. We can be certain of this because he quite literally wrote a book about it. His new novel explores how right-wing podcasters are radicalizing people into political violence. You can’t help but laugh. The man who posted a public call to “86” a sitting president — one who had already survived multiple assassination attempts — is now lecturing America about incitement. Let’s also be honest about the obvious double standard: imagine, for one second, current FBI Director Kash Patel posting a photo of seashells spelling out “86 46” about Joe Biden. We all know what it would mean. We all know exactly how fast the media and the DOJ would have detonated. But when Comey did signal the useful idiots to remove the 47th president? Crickets. This was never about seashells. It’s about an assassination culture the Left spent years building. The manifestos, the cheers when the bullet missed, the “mostly peaceful” rhetoric that somehow always ends with conservatives in the crosshairs. Comey didn’t just participate in that culture. He performed it on the national stage, with his name, his platform, and his hundreds of thousands of followers, and then acted shocked when his actions had consequences. America’s Tallest Teenage Girl is finding out.  He’ll whine, he’ll cry, he’ll insist it was just a silly beach photoshoot. But we know better, and more importantly, so does a grand jury in North Carolina. As the teens would say, Karma is a B*tch.