At least seven people have been killed including two children during intense Russian drone and missile strikes on Ukraine, officials say. A kindergarten was hit in Ukraine's second biggest city Kharkiv and there was widespread damage in Kyiv. Children were among the 27 people wounded.

Russia launched a wide drone and missile attack across Ukraine on Wednesday, killing at least six people, Ukrainian officials said, a day after President Donald Trump put his planned meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin on hold, saying he didn’t want it to be a “waste of time.”

Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic front-runner for mayor of New York City, said on Wednesday that he intends to ask Jessica Tisch to stay on as the police commissioner if he is elected in November. The decision settles one of the most discussed questions around his potential mayoralty. And it caps months of deliberations and a lobbying campaign by powerful New Yorkers pressing him to keep Ms. Tisch, a widely respected technocrat.

"Molesters of children, corruptors of youth / It's there in the paper, it must be the truth". The post ‘Glad to be Gay’: The subversive story of an LGBTQ punk anthem first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

"There's something about that." The post How Nick Drake shaped Chris Cornell: “This icy voice” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

Nicolas Kristof has been a longtime critic of Israel. Most recently, he has aggressively promoted notions that Israeli policies created Sudan-like hunger problems in Gaza, and that there has been equivalence of violence between past Arab and Jewish actions. Kristof has chastised Trump because he “allowed the [Gaza] war and starvation to drag on,” and elsewhere that the U.S. is “underwriting mass starvation,” and “inflicting famine on children.” While there is evidence of substantial malnutrition, claims of mass starvation or famine are unfounded. Kristof references a New York Times report that only states, “there is impending famine,” based on the Hamas Ministry of Health’s claims of 111 hunger deaths since the beginning of the war. Hard to see how this qualifies as mass starvation. To amplify the seriousness, a photo of an emaciated 18-month-old child was placed on its front page. Only after protests did the New York Times amend its story to indicate that the child “had pre-existing health problems affecting his brain and his muscle development,” but neglected to publish an accompanying photo of his robust-looking three-year-old sibling. …[S]tarvation stories were based on incorrect data, and media outlets repeated each other’s alarming allegations without investigating the original data. The most serious distortions are claims that Israeli policies have caused severe food shortages. A comprehensive study by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies demonstrated that starvation stories were based on incorrect data, and media outlets repeated each other’s alarming allegations without investigating the original data. The study demonstrates that the use of 500 trucks per day entering was an inappropriate measure of the minimum requirements. While Amnesty International reported that Gazans gained 44 percent of their food from domestic production, the study noted it was at most 15 percent. As a result, “throughout most of the war more provisions were delivered into Gaza than prior to October 7 [2023], by a margin greater than any credible estimates of loss of Gazan agricultural production.” In mid-2024, U.N. agencies claimed that Israeli military operations had reduced the number of trucks entering Gaza by nearly 70 percent, painting a picture of deliberate strangulation. But Israeli records indicated deliveries in the months after the alleged drop were higher than the previous year. In late 2024, the U.N. quietly corrected its figures to align with the Israeli data, essentially admitting that the 70 percent decline had never actually occurred. Of course, these facts do not negate the serious hunger problem, especially given the havoc accompanying the attempted distribution of food aid. But it does undermine the notion that there was inadequate food delivered and Kristof’s claims of Israeli complicity with the malnutrition (not starvation) being suffered by a significant share of the population. In his most recent column, Kristof finds striking equivalences between Zionist and Palestinian actions and narratives: “Arabs massacred Jews in Hebron in 1929, and Jews slaughtered Arabs at Deir Yassin in 1948 and Qibya in 1953.” (Notice he gives one Arab but two Jewish examples.) Kristof neglects to mention that the 1929 Hebron massacre was unprovoked, as was a similar pogrom in 1921, and there were continuous unprovoked attacks on Jewish settlements throughout the period. These attacks were instigated by Amin al-Husseini, who, despite these actions, was appointed Grand Mufti by the British and only relieved and forced to flee when he led an Arab uprising against the British during the 1930s. It is worth noting that he then went to Iraq and instigated pogroms. When the British defeated an uprising he led, al-Husseini went to Germany and did propaganda work for the Nazis. Finally, when he was able to escape house arrest and came to Cairo in 1947, the Arab League selected him to be the leader of the Palestinian community. By contrast, the two Jewish excesses Kristof cites were in the context of military conflicts. During April 1948, Zionists began clearing villages, including Deir Yassin, to open a lifeline to the besieged Jewish Jerusalem community. After receiving unexpected resistance, Zionists brutally responded, killing 110 Arabs, including many women and children. According to Benny Morris, Most of the villages fled or were trucked through West Jerusalem and dumped at Muscara, outside the Old City walls. The atrocities were condemned by the Jewish Agency, the Haganah command, and the Yishuv’s two chief rabbis. Arab officials more than doubled the death total and called for revenge, which soon took place. A week later, a medical convoy headed for Jerusalem was ambushed, and the majority of Jewish doctors and nurses were killed. A month later, the Zionist settlement of Kfar Etzion was overrun, and a true massacre occurred: Groups of defenders carrying white flags emerged from bunkers and trenches. … The bulk of the defenders, more than a hundred men and women, were assembled in an open area … Then a photographer with a kaffiya arrived and took photographs.  When the photographer stopped taking pictures fire was opened up on us from all directions. … Almost all of the men and women were murdered. Between June 1949 and October 1954, Israel accused Jordan of violating the armistice agreement 1,612 times, killing at least 124 Israelis, wounding hundreds more. In an effort to prevent further attacks, Israel launched a reprisal raid on Qibya. Israeli forces destroyed 50 homes, killing 69 Jordanian civilians who were hidden inside. Its leader, Ariel Sharon, claimed he did not know the houses were occupied. In his autobiography, Warrior, Sharon wrote: As I went back over each step of the operation, I began to understand what must have happened. For years Israeli reprisal raids had never succeeded in doing more than blowing up a few outlying buildings, if that. Expecting the same, some Arab families must have stayed in their houses rather than running away. In those big stone houses … some could easily have hidden in the cellars and back rooms, keeping quiet when the paratroopers went in to check and yell out a warning. The result was this tragedy that had happened. Arab prewar actions were unprovoked killings of civilians, and their retaliation during wartime was complete massacres after rounding up Jewish prisoners. By contrast, Jewish excesses never included intentionally massacring entire communities and giving complete and heartfelt apologies for unjustified actions. Kristof should be condemned for not making these distinctions. READ MORE from Robert Cherry: False Claims Made by Globalist Anti-Israel Forces The Hypocrisy of Zohran Mamdani’s Liberal Apologists The ‘BBB’ Brings Accountability to the Food Stamp Program — Not Catastrophe Robert Cherry is an American Enterprise Institute affiliate and author of the forthcoming Arab Citizens of Israel: How Far Have They Come? (Wicked Son, February 2026).

It was a heartwarming sight: the vice president of the United States disembarking from Air Force Two, holding his pajama-clad, cape-wearing little daughter with his young sons in tow. The scene also conveyed some important lessons about family. For one, it offered a glimpse of Vance’s personal determination to keep family life strong even amidst the pressures of the vice presidency. The image of Vance’s daughter resting her head on his shoulder communicated something else vital to family life: No matter their status or power (or lack thereof), parents are irreplaceable in the hearts of their children. Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our fall 2025 print magazine. The Vance family is not an outlier. Role models and family-friendly rhetoric abound in the conservative world. Young conservative women like Riley Gaines and Karoline Leavitt exude happiness about being mothers. Cabinet secretaries Pete Hegseth and Sean Duffy routinely include their children at official events. The late Charlie Kirk extolled the importance of marriage and family, exhorting men to embrace the sacrifices of family life to experience its joys, and he was joined in doing so by conservative activists like Ben Shapiro and Michael Knowles. These are small but encouraging signs that the Trump administration intends to get “family” right, both in policy proposals and personal practice. The conservative transformation of America requires both — good policy and good families. And indeed, the conservative “pro-family” agenda is taking shape, energized by new ideas, new coalitions, and a focus on working families. It upholds the sacredness of the family and recognizes the importance of strong families to a healthy civilization. “The purpose of family policy,” according to Ethics and Public Policy Center scholar Patrick Brown, is “to strengthen the fundamental unit of social life, the locus of childbearing and rearing, not simply to help adults find meaning and support amid difficult patches.” Practically speaking, good policies should support the integrity of the family, “prioritize expanding choices for parents, and stress the importance of making it more achievable to have and raise children.” Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our latest print magazine. On that score, hopeful signs include new discussions about government’s role in supporting families, exciting opportunities afforded by emerging technologies, the popularity of the parental rights and school choice movements, innovations that strengthen safety nets for needy families, and Trump policies designed to maximize economic prosperity.  But more is required, for both the big picture and the achievement of concrete solutions. First, the big picture: How do we create a society that supports families? On economics, I will leave the details to others, except to reiterate the obvious: Wages, healthcare, housing, and tax policy must support and incentivize strong family life. For families, the big picture, however, is more than economics — it includes culture. One of the GOP’s past sins was to treat “culture war” issues as unseemly, unsophisticated distractions from core economic concerns. The subsequent leftist capture of our cultural institutions, accomplished over decades, has made family life incalculably more difficult. The successive onslaughts of the sexual revolution, divorce, abortion, pornography, addiction, gender ideology, and social media have shredded the traditional fabric of family life. This in turn has engendered new problems that threaten America’s economic and political stability, including the demographic decline.  A pro-family agenda, then, must care about and shape the culture, turning it toward the good, the true, and the beautiful — for the sake of families, and for America. This is one area where conservative women’s voices are essential. In 1988, Pope St. John Paul II emphasized in Christifideles laici that “two great tasks” have been “entrusted” to women in particular: witnessing to the dignity of marriage and motherhood and “assuring the moral dimension of culture … namely of a culture worthy of the person.”  The moral distortions, degradation, and dehumanization rampant in our culture today, however, suggest that the dominant voices shaping the culture have been progressives, not conservative women (or even conservative men).  A pro-family agenda, then, must care about and shape the culture, turning it toward the good, the true, and the beautiful — for the sake of families, and for America. It is refreshing, then, to see an unapologetic pro-family attitude in Washington today on issues like gender ideology and the problem of technology. It is discouraging, however, to see Republicans scatter and hide on issues like mail-order access to the abortion pill, or to see them jump on the IVF and marijuana bandwagons, with little regard for human dignity and the impact on families. In some instances, the administration has committed an “own goal,” proposing policies that contradict its pro-family stance. Shortly after his inauguration, President Trump ordered federal workers to return to full-time, in-person work. Presented as a win for government efficiency, the blanket dictate is an ’80s throwback, a return to pre-internet, inflexible work arrangements that are particularly unfriendly to families. Unnecessary in-office requirements mean a return to brutal daily commutes, which steal time better spent with families. Workplace flexibility, including remote work and hybrid options, benefits everyone by supporting family life and producing highly engaged and happy employees. Evaluating job performance based on quality of actual work (merit!) instead of hours spent in the office is a pro-family policy. Where were the pro-family voices in the administration on this issue? Vetting policies in light of family impact — something the underutilized Family Policymaking Assessment was designed to do — would help avoid these missteps. This brings us to the second point: Structuring one’s own family life, consistent with conservative principles.  Here too, conservative women have an important role to play in shaping the solutions on offer. A woman’s “experience of motherhood,” writes Pope St. John Paul, equips her with a “specific sensitivity towards the human person” and wisdom in recognizing “the individual’s true welfare.” The future of the family depends on women’s commitment to nurturing the children entrusted to them and shaping the culture that surrounds them.  A recent Wall Street Journal titled “The Conservative Women Who Are ‘Having It All’” completely missed the mark. It purported to celebrate “mission driven” conservative women in media and politics but ultimately shoehorned them into the one-size-fits-all feminist paradigm of “having it all.” The Wall Street Journal’s framing maps onto progressive narratives that center the individual (regardless of commitments to family) and equate happiness with ambition, success, wealth, and other material goals. The needs of children barely registered.   The Wall Street Journal article drew serious backlash from conservatives who rightly reject the “having it all” paradigm. Over at the Institute for Family Studies, scholar Brad Wilcox crunched the data and found: “Across America, most married mothers of young children do not aspire to be this sort of Supermom — instead, they are hoping to be super mothers by not working at all outside the home or by working part time.” Parents (and employers) must face facts: Children have objective needs, not only physical, but also emotional and intellectual, that must be met. Writer Maria Baer decried the Journal’s lopsided perspective for ignoring “the most vulnerable stakeholders” in a woman’s quest to “have it all” — her children. As counselor Erica Komisar explains, “In the first three years of life, children require consistent, predictable, and emotionally attuned care, usually from a parent — most often the mother.” Nature privileges mothers in fostering strong attachments and making them attuned to their babies through pregnancy, birth, and nursing. This is a beautiful fact of life. When women embrace this, it’s not surprising for their career trajectories to look different from those of men or women without children. “Real life is seasonal,” notes Komisar. “Choosing to focus on your child’s early development does not mean you’ve ‘given up’ your career forever. It means you’ve made a strategic investment that will pay off in your child’s mental health, your relationship with them, and your long-term satisfaction as a mother and professional.” Komisar concludes, “[W]omen can have it all — just not all at once.” She urges men to “step up” and be “supportive partners.” Choosing how best to care for children requires prudent and prayerful discernment by mothers and fathers together in light of family goals, individual capacities, and concrete situations. They must ask the right questions: What has God called us to do? And what does our family need? And then they must continually reassess how they balance work and family, even when “work” is mission-driven at a high level. My parents were both strongly committed to ending the injustice of abortion. Besides raising ten children, my mother helped found a local pregnancy resource center, ran a nonprofit, and volunteered at our church and schools. My father, a professor of constitutional law, traveled extensively, defending the unborn in courtrooms, Congress, and conferences. Many of their closest friends were similarly generous and committed to ending abortion. But my parents regularly recalibrated their commitments to the pro-life cause as our family’s needs changed. They recognized the harm to family life when children become “orphans for the cause” (figuratively speaking), when their needs are eclipsed by parents’ devotion to important causes or mission-driven careers. A few years back, Arthur Brooks penned a thoughtful piece on ambition, fulfillment, and the phases of life to explain the timing of his resignation as president of the American Enterprise Institute. The peak of professional life and public influence, he observed, arrives and departs sooner than most people anticipate. The wise person who lives a life of purpose and invests in relationships will enjoy lifelong happiness. “Time is limited,” he wrote, “and professional ambition crowds out things that ultimately matter more. … [T]he costs of catering to selfishness are ruinous…. But an abundance of research strongly suggests that happiness — not just in later years but across the life span — is tied directly to the health and plentifulness of one’s relationships.”   Put differently, never forget that the only place we are irreplaceable is in our relationships.  The conservative transformation of America, including getting “family and work” right, may well depend on asking the right questions. Mary Rice Hasson is the Kate O’Beirne Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and director of the Person and Identity Project. Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our fall 2025 print magazine.

In a year that brought such cinematic classics as Sunset Boulevard, Born Yesterday, The Third Man, and The Asphalt Jungle, one picture — which was released 75 years ago on October 27 — broke all pre-existing records for Academy Award nominations and went on to win in six categories, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay. The directing and writing awards both went to one man: Joseph Mankiewicz, who only a year earlier had accomplished the same rare feat with A Letter to Three Wives. The earlier movie was an impressive accomplishment (although it lost Best Picture to All the King’s Men), but All About Eve was even more extraordinary. It didn’t just win the Oscar: it won the BAFTA and the top prize at Cannes, along with a slew of other accolades. As for Mankiewicz’s script, which was based very loosely on a Cosmopolitan short story, “The Wisdom of Eve,” by an obscure actress and writer named Mary Orr, was widely hailed as perhaps the most literate ever put on screen. Gary Carey writes in the invaluable 1972 book More About All About Eve that it “must surely be the most honored screenplay ever written.” In 2006, when the Writers Guild of America put together a list of the 100 greatest screenplays ever, All About Eve came in at #5 — preceded only by Casablanca, The Godfather, Chinatown, and Citizen Kane. (RELATED: Missing the Mank) Yes, the splendid cast of All About Eve shouldn’t be discounted: Bette Davis, who had the role of a lifetime as Margo Channing, a Broadway star who’s insecure about her age (she’s just turned 40); Anne Baxter as Eve Harrington, her adoring, doe-eyed young fan who turns out to have theatrical ambitions of her own, as well as an unsettling degree of moxie; Celeste Holm as Karen Richards, Margo’s best friend, who unwittingly brings the calculating Eve into her life; Thelma Ritter as Birdie, Margo’s maid, who has Eve’s number before anyone else does; and George Sanders as Addison DeWitt, a cutthroat Broadway critic who’s decided that Eve will be his, whether she likes it or not. Aside from Sanders (who won the only acting Oscar for All About Eve), there are other men in the cast — notably Gary Merrill (who would go on to become Davis’s fourth husband) as Bill Sampson, Margo’s boyfriend and director, and Hugh Marlowe as Lloyd Richards, Karen’s husband and Margo’s go-to playwright — but these two characters don’t leap off the screen to the extent that Margo, Eve, Karen, and Birdie do. Neither do they measure up to Addison, rightly described by Carey as the film’s one “dynamically drawn male character.” “Men react as they’ve been taught to react, in what they’ve been taught is a ‘manly’ way. Women are, by comparison, as if assembled by the wind.” Mankiewicz readily admitted to being focused on his female characters. “Writing about men,” he told Carey, “is so damned…limited. [Ellipsis in original.] They’re made up, for the most part, of large, predictable, conforming elements. Men react as they’ve been taught to react, in what they’ve been taught is a ‘manly’ way. Women are, by comparison, as if assembled by the wind. They’re made up of — and react to — tiny impulses. Inflections. Colors. Sounds. They hear things men cannot.” Is this true? Well, Mankiewicz thought so — which explains, I guess, why his female characters are so arresting. Indeed, for all the bravura performances in All About Eve, the film’s triumph begins and ends with Mankiewicz’s script. It tells a story about the theater, and the screenplay itself is nothing if not reminiscent of a “well-made” old-school (i.e., pre-Beckett, Pinter, and Orton) stage play. Dialogue-heavy and packed with wit, it contains no car chases, no violence, no sex scenes, not even a long, quiet patch or two in which we observe somebody walking or thinking or crying. In fact hardly any of it takes place outside. And all of it except the closing sequence is told by way of flashbacks that are narrated by three different characters, making for a rare level of structural complexity that invites comparison to Citizen Kane, co-written (or, some would argue, written almost entirely) by Mankiewicz’s brother Herman. All About Eve could, in other words, very easily have been a play instead of a film — and in 1970, as a matter of fact, it became a Broadway musical, Applause, starring Lauren Bacall. It won the Tony for Best Musical, but only because the competition was lame (Pippin, Coco). In truth, it was a serious misfire, and Carey explains why: while Eve is, structurally, the central character of All About Eve (hence — duh — the title), Davis’s Margo has always overshadowed her, and when Adolph Green and Betty Comden wrote Applause, they turned it into a vehicle for Lauren Bacall, playing Margo, while drastically reducing the role of Eve. One problem with this absurd decision was that Margo “appears practically not at all in the last third of the film” — forcing Green and Comden to write a second act which has “Margo, after Bill walks out on her, repeat endlessly her need for him in both song and dialogue.” Mankiewicz lived 43 more years after All About Eve, but never topped it. Part of the reason why is that after around 1950, something — a few things, really — happened to Hollywood. With television becoming a more formidable competitor every year, filmmakers strove to do things that TV couldn’t: they made huge, wide-screen, overpopulated Biblical epics like Quo Vadis? (1951), The Robe (1953), The Ten Commandments (1956), and Ben-Hur (1959); they abandoned the backlot and shot on location, as in The Quiet Man (1952), Roman Holiday (1953), and Gigi (1958); and they knocked out splashy, colorful, all-star, family-friendly nonsense like The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) and Around the World in 80 Days (1956). While many of these films were outstanding, they marked a sea change from the likes of All About Eve. And the 1960s and 70s, of course, brought with them big-screen fare that was, as they say, gritty — from Easy Rider to Panic in Needle Park to A Clockwork Orange. Yes, this trend resulted in some meritorious work, but it also led to the creation of material — some of it, dare one say, subliterate — that seemed to have been conceived on a different planet than All About Eve. In All About All About Eve — published, remember, in 1972 — Mankiewicz tells Carey that if he had no screenwriting plans for the near future, it was, in part, because in the years since All About Eve Hollywood films had developed a “preoccupation with externals.” That’s a kind way to put it. Not that Mankiewicz was left behind in the aftermath of All About Eve: on the contrary, he went on to direct the most notorious, overpriced epic ever, Cleopatra (1963), which was 50 percent Shaw, 50 percent Shakespeare, and 100 percent grotesquely expensive, over-the-top spectacle. It was the first film for which an actor – Elizabeth Taylor – was paid a million dollars, and it broke box-office records (but took years to earn back its budget). It was, however, far from Mankiewicz’s proudest moment: in later years, he wouldn’t even mention the picture by name and deleted it from his filmography. Such, alas, was the new Hollywood: not so very long after Mankiewicz had won an Oscar for writing All About Eve, such scripts had begun to be seen in Tinseltown’s corridors of power as labored, wordy, stagy — in short, insufficiently cinematic. No surprise, then, that of his later screenplays, the most notable were faithful adaptations of familiar material — Julius Caesar (1953), from Shakespeare; Guys and Dolls (1955), from the hit Broadway musical; and The Quiet American (1958), from Graham Greene’s novel — and thus lacked his distinctive touch for dialogue, whereas Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) and Sleuth (1972), both of which he directed successfully, had scripts by other hands. (RELATED: Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair: A Reflection) Yes, several of these later pictures are gems. But none of them match All About Eve. Few films do. READ MORE from Bruce Bawer: Who Was Vernon Duke? Hanging Up at 25 Prepare to Say Goodbye to the Transgender Moment

When House Speaker Mike Johnson lashed out at last weekend’s “No Kings” rallies soon to arrive on Washington’s National Mall, he reached for an old conservative refrain: “They hate capitalism. They hate our free enterprise system.” (RELATED: The Ridiculous No Kings Protest) I am sure he’s correct about some of the protesters. But the message rings hollow coming from a party leader who stands by as President Donald Trump does precisely what Johnson rightly decries: substituting political control for market choice and ruling by executive order. Indeed, what began as a populist revolt against so-called elites has become a program of state ownership, price fixing, and top-down industrial control. Indeed, what began as a populist revolt against so-called elites has become a program of state ownership, price fixing, and top-down industrial control. Take a look. Recently, the Trump administration quietly converted CHIPS Act subsidies into an $8.9 billion equity purchase in Intel, making Washington a 10 percent owner of one of America’s largest technology companies. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick insists, “This is not socialism.” That’s semantics. (RELATED: Trump and the Ownership of Intel) Socialism is government control of the means of production. When the government becomes your largest shareholder, that’s a strong first step. The Intel case offends two basic economic truths. First, no group of officials can ever know enough to guide a complex industry better than millions of private investors, engineers, and consumers spending their own money. Second, the power to “partner” with business is the power to control it. The more political capital the government invests, the more it demands in return. It’s only a matter of time until politically favored locations, suppliers, or hiring quotas shape Intel’s decisions. That isn’t capitalism. The administration has taken shares in companies before, and it likely will again. In July, the Pentagon became the largest shareholder in MP Materials, considered the only fully operating rare-earth mine of scale in the U.S. The deal guarantees a 10-year price floor for MP output at nearly double the current market rate. MP competitors were rightly shocked Yet Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently told CNBC that Washington will continue to “set price floors” and “forward-buy” commodities “across a range of industries” to encourage more investments into U.S. production and away from China. While this may encourage more U.S. investments in the short term, guaranteeing an unfair advantage over competitors by setting a minimum price reduces American companies’ long-run incentives to innovate and produce better output. Economists have understood for more than a century what happens when the government fixes prices above their market level: Buyers purchase less, sellers produce more, surpluses pile up, and waste follows. It’s the logic of failed farm-price support in the 1930s. There are far better options than schemes like these. As for those rare-earth minerals, the U.S. sits on billions of dollars’ worth, yet MP is almost alone in extracting them. That’s in part because excessive regulation keeps the potential locked underground, deterring investment in innovative mining solutions, processing plants, magnet factories, and the skilled workforce needed to turn our geological abundance into economic value. Deregulation is the free-market way. Mimicking the Chinese model isn’t. If that’s not enough, the administration has nationalized all but in name the company called U.S. Steel. To approve its market-driven purchase by Nippon Steel, Trump required a “golden share,” giving him veto power over plant closures, production levels, investments, even pricing. The White House effectively dictates how U.S. Steel can operate inside the United States. In the name of economic patriotism, we have recreated the structure of the state-owned enterprises that American trade negotiators once fought against in China and Europe. The same government that lectures Beijing about state capitalism and nonmarket behaviors now practices it at home. Future presidents of either party will inherit this precedent and run with it. If the White House can seize control of a steel company today, it can do the same to an automaker, chip designer, or energy producer tomorrow in the name of whatever is deemed an emergency at the time. Republicans once warned that socialism begins with good intentions and ends with bureaucratic command. They were right. If we ever see a Sovietization of American capitalism, it probably won’t come through a Workers’ Party or a proletarian revolution. It will more likely come through populists managing markets. The U.S. became prosperous because the government did not own or direct industry. Entrepreneurs built the modern economy precisely because they were free to invest, trade, and fail when something doesn’t offer enough to consumers. Interventionist industrial policy betrays that legacy. So, Mr. Johnson, while many of the protesters don’t share my free-market beliefs, it’s not obvious to me how an administration that sets prices, owns companies, and dictates production loves capitalism or free enterprise either. READ MORE from Veronique de Rugy: Government Shutdowns and Pandemic-Level Spending: The New Normal? America’s Turn Toward Ad Hoc State Capitalism Trump Is Not the Biggest Threat to the Fed’s Independence Veronique de Rugy is the George Gibbs Chair in Political Economy and a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. To find out more about Veronique de Rugy and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2025 CREATORS.COM

The 21-year-old semi-truck driver arrested after a multi-vehicle pile-up that killed at least three people is an “Indian illegal alien,” Fox News national correspondent Bill Melugin reports. WATCH: Multiple Fatalities After Semi-Truck Causes HORRIFIC Pile-Up, 21-Year-Old Driver Arrested "Per multiple ICE sources, Jashanpreet Singh, the semi-truck driver suspected of killing three people in a DUI crash on the 10 freeway in Ontario, CA yesterday, is an Indian illegal alien who was caught & released at the CA border by the Biden admin in March 2022. DHS photo of him attached via federal sources," Melugin said. "I’m told ICE is placing a detainer request on Singh with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, where he is in custody on suspicion of DUI causing great bodily injury and gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated. He has not been formally charged yet," he continued. "Police say Singh was speeding and under the influence, never hitting his breaks, when he crashed into slow moving traffic on the freeway, causing a devastating and deadly chain reaction crash that killed 3 people. The victims have not been identified yet," he added. BREAKING: Per multiple ICE sources, Jashanpreet Singh, the semi-truck driver suspected of killing three people in a DUI crash on the 10 freeway in Ontario, CA yesterday, is an Indian illegal alien who was caught & released at the CA border by the Biden admin in March 2022. DHS… pic.twitter.com/ewxt7ZGfJs — Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) October 23, 2025 The Economic Times has more: A witness, who was standing by a parking lot that faces the 10 Freeway at the time of the incident, said the crash sounded like a big explosion as he recalled a red truck, allegedly driven by Singh, barreling down the freeway before the impact, according to NBC Los Angeles. “It didn’t stop. It didn’t swerve. It didn’t make any kind of maneuvers. It just went straight in,” Jason Calmelat said describing the horror. “The truck rolled and veered to the right into the embankment, and I saw the truck drive jump out because it was on fire,” Calmelat said. The three victims who were killed in the crash were not identified. The four injured people including Singh, and a mechanic who was helping change a tire on the side of the freeway at the time of the crash. “It was one of those crashes where there were car parts everywhere. We had a hazardous material incident. It was a very large scene,” Officer Rodrigo Jimenez with the CHP said. “This could have been prevented if somebody had been paying attention sober. Watch footage of the deadly crash below: NEW: 21-year-old semi-truck driver arrested on suspicion of DUI in a horrific crash on the 10 Freeway in Ontario, California. California Highway Patrol investigators say the man, from Yuba City, was believed to have been on drugs. Eight vehicles were involved in the crash, and… pic.twitter.com/h2e84BM1ov — Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) October 22, 2025 KTLA shared further info: Rodrigo Jimenez of the CHP said two of the victims were in a vehicle that was so badly mangled and burned that investigators still aren’t able to determine the make and model. The third victim was riding in a pickup truck. Part of the investigation now involves reconstructing the crash and determining if there are additional factors that may have contributed, including potential mechanical issues that played a role in addition to alleged impairment. “The fact that there are so many commercial vehicles involved in the crash, there’s a lot of weight behind the crash force,” Rodrigo said. “This is a very complex investigation and that’s why officers from our multi-disciplinary accident investigation team have taken over.” A video purportedly from the involved big-rig’s dash cam was shared to social media and appeared to show the moments leading up to the crash and the decimation of vehicles caught in the path of the speeding truck. Rodrigo confirmed to KTLA’s Ellina Abovian that the video will be part of the overall crash investigation. He urged any and all drivers on California roads to follow traffic laws, drive the speed limit and help each other prevent future unnecessary deaths. “This is a tragic crash because it was very preventable,” Rodrigo said. “If somebody had just paid attention, if everyone was driving sober, this tragedy would not have occurred.” Bill Melugin, a correspondent for Fox News, reported Wednesday that Singh is an Indian immigrant who is in the country illegally. KTLA has reached out to the Department of Homeland Security for confirmation.