'The Right is now allied with the working class'

Books Ships in the Night How Do You Solve a Problem Like Romantasy By Jenny Hamilton | Published on May 15, 2025 Photo by Theo Crazzolara [via Unsplash] Comment 0 Share New Share Photo by Theo Crazzolara [via Unsplash] A few years ago, I proposed this column to meet a shift in SFF publishing, where the major SFF tradpub imprints—Tor, Orbit, even Harper Voyager—had begun to seem less shy about including kissing, sex, and central romance storylines in their books. The genre crossover already existed in romance, but here came a crop of new books from genre-savvy SFF writers (CJ Polk, Aliette de Bodard, Freya Marske) who happened to be genre-savvy in romance, too. As a fan of both genres, I was thrilled to see SFF finally accepting the joys of cross-contamination. Then, uh, the landscape changed. Romantasy rode into tradpub on the coat-tails of Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorn and Roses series and Rebecca Yarros’s Empyrean series. Various writers have proposed ways of defining romantasy books, but I tend to ascribe to the Print Run podcast’s assertion that romantasy describes an audience rather than a group of books, which is why attempted genre definitions haven’t worked for me. You kind of know romantasy when you see it. Because of the sprayed edges. And the porn. (This is a joke; please do not yell at me.) I believe these to be two distinct phenomena, arising from two distinct sets of trends. Thing 1 and Thing 2, if you will. The audiences for these books overlap, to some extent. But they’re not coterminous. What is now, and ever shall be, coterminous is the scope of each and every SFF imprint’s desire to get Sarah J. Maas money for the SFF romances they are publishing. They have all figured out that the path to that outcome, whether their books are Thing 1 or Thing 2 or some blurry place in between, is paved with the word romantasy. I say that without judgment for anyone’s marketing department. Marketing books is hard. I have great respect for the people who do it well. As publishers have rushed to capitalize on the success of Thing 2, the SFF section at the bookstore has suddenly gotten packed with titles aimed at audiences other than the usual segment of SFF readership. It’s led to a certain level of, let’s say, bemusement among segments of the SFF reading audience who have less familiarity with (or interest in!) the romance genre. As a lifelong SFF fan myself, but a more recent convert to romance, I thought I’d have a go at finding the point of disconnect. Speculative fiction is a problem-proposing genre. It proposes problems like How shall we interact with monsters and How shall we navigate time travel, and then it dives in with relish, it gets its hands dirty, it reminds us that we are flawed and messy creatures who can no better answer how shall we travel among the stars than we do, in fact, answer how shall we manage world hunger. Piecemeal. Badly. With a lot of arguing. Maybe the problem will be solved in the end. Maybe in the end the problem will have gotten much much worse. Science fiction and fantasy aren’t making any promises about that. As a result, SFF readers tend to conceptualize our genre as one that challenges readers to think creatively and in fresh ways about the world we live in and the other worlds that might be possible. I don’t so much disagree with that idea as I worry about the way it gets framed as morally superior to other genres or ways of reading. For one thing, I don’t accept that “being challenged” is the goal everyone should be pursuing every time we pick up a book. For another thing, proposing problems isn’t the same thing as challenging readers to think new and more interesting thoughts—that varies tremendously depending on the author and the reader. By contrast, romance is primarily a problem-solving genre. The problem is how to sort out these specific characters, how to put them in happy relationships and lives they find fulfilling. Romance doesn’t need to propose the problem, because the problem is already here. How do we exist in relationship with other people? A given romance novel may concern itself with other questions, but the problem animating the plot is that of relationship, and the genre promises the reader that’s one problem that will be solved by the end. The answer is always the same; the answer is infinite variety. At the risk of repeating myself, I want to emphasize that I don’t consider the pursuit of shared happiness to be a less important question than anything speculative fiction takes up. In romance, I’ve found some of the most nuanced explorations of emotional truth and the complexities of human behavior that I’ve ever seen anywhere. I want to be clear that I’m speaking here about the structure of what each genre is trying to do. If you’ve read a romantasy that nebulously feels more like romance than SFF, it’s typically because the structure of the Thing 2 books tends more toward the romance side, the problem-solving side. Thea Guanzon’s Hurricane Wars series, for instance (Thing 2), cares most about these two people making it work, which they can’t do if the prince of the evil empire stays evil and the empire stays an empire. He loves her, so we know he’s going to have to start doing less oppression. CL Polk’s Kingston Cycle series (Thing 1) cares most about class injustice in Aeland, so each book in the trilogy builds on the work of the previous books to show us what a more just future for the country can look like (and the characters also kiss. It’s both!). You’re picking up on something real, but at the risk of drawing the wrong conclusion. To draw the right conclusion, I encourage SFF to take a page from the romance genre’s playbook. For all the genre’s faults, and they are many, romance readers are pretty much always excited to welcome new readers into the genre. The path by which someone comes to romance just doesn’t matter that much. If they’re here, it’s something to celebrate, and Romancelandia has a thousand amazing, smart, diverse book recs to guide them to the best of what our genre has to offer. I’d love to see speculative fiction taking a similar tack, rather than trying to redraw genre boundaries to keep romantasy outside our gates. We lose nothing by accepting that SFF is expansive enough to include writers and readers who came to the genre by different paths than we did, who arrived via Rebecca Yarros and Ali Hazelwood rather than CS Lewis and Orson Scott Card. Romantasy takes nothing from longtime SFF readers, but it does offer us a bright and golden chance to ensnare new readers in our genre nets.Thrillingly, marketing departments are already doing this (see above), by using the same term to describe Thing 1 and Thing 2. Did I personally dislike The Wren in the Holly Library? Yes. Will that stop me from joyfully telling its fans to read Lady Eve’s Last Con and The Scandalous Letters of V and J? Hell no. It has never benefited SFF to exclude writers like Nalini Singh and Kit Rocha and Alyssa Cole, and it won’t benefit us to exclude this batch of newcomers to our genre either. Whatever you think of the advent of romantasy onto the SFF scene, be assured that it isn’t a problem to be solved. It’s an opportunity.[end-mark] The post How Do You Solve a Problem Like Romantasy appeared first on Reactor.

Today, in the United States of America, a Jewish student walking across his college green will be scared. Not because he is worried about finals or finding a job, but because the university he attends has empowered terrorists to attack him for who he is. The hatred of Jews, antisemitism, is the most virulent form of discrimination. Often called “the oldest hatred,” it’s literally biblical. And under Joe Biden and Democrat rule, and in the aftermath of the largest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, antisemitism was greenlit on America’s college campuses. I understand it better than most. Being a conservative Jewish student at Harvard 35 years ago was not easy. The woke mind virus was alive and well even then. But what I never felt, unlike Jewish students and faculty today, was a fear for my safety. I never saw Muslim terror supporters, brandishing modern day swastikas in the form of a terrorist scarf invented by Jew killers, allowed to run roughshod over campus. I never saw masked thugs masquerading as students openly calling for a resumption of the Holocaust. Today, on too many campuses across this country, leftist administrators lie about these terrorist gatherings and claim pro-Hamas protests are peaceful and organic. They are neither. Rather, they are the American front of an organized world-wide Muslim terror program to target Jews and western civilization. Then-President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris actively embraced this terror campaign calling for the extermination of Jews, trying to quietly settle antisemitism agreements with schools and shielding those schools from anything remotely resembling accountability. It should come as no surprise that the same Democrats sanctioning antisemitism want to finance it as well by forgiving over $1.6 trillion in student debt and making college free. The Democrat strategy seems to be to force working-class Americans to bankroll the very institutions that churn out violent agitators and ideological foot soldiers for their radical causes. Under the guiding hand of left-wing administrators and progressive professors, with a healthy dose of federal funding, America’s universities have become little more than taxpayer-funded academic terror training camps pushing antisemitism, moral cowardice, and anti-American philosophy. For eight years in the Florida Legislature, I passed bill after bill to target this threat, and while no institution is perfect, our legislative successes showed that we could fight antisemitism at the state level. In the aftermath of the October 7 terrorist attack, Florida institutions performed far better than their peers throughout the nation. Now, under the leadership of President Donald Trump, we take it national. Last Congress the Committee on Education and Workforce, of which I am the newest member, held landmark hearings with the leaders of the universities we were once so proud of, places like Harvard and Penn, on their embrace of Muslim terror and the terrorizing of Jews. With every hearing and roundtable, the Committee documented the failures of school leaders to do what is legally (and morally) required of them: create a safe community for every student. With Trump in the White House, we are fighting with renewed strength to build on  Republican efforts to combat the disease of antisemitism. On January 30, Trump signed an executive order to marshal federal tools to investigate and address antisemitism. His Justice Department is leading a multiagency task force to quell the antisemitic fury gripping our schools. The president made it clear that an attack on American Jews is an attack on America, and it will no longer be allowed. I am thrilled to be joining the Committee on Education and Workforce at the right time. Last week, university presidents testified about their failures to address antisemitism on campus. They proved themselves hostile to Jewish students, and that isn’t a mistake, it’s by design. Democrats have backed polices that make it easier for antisemitic terrorists to receive an education than American Jews. The last administration chose to embrace Muslim terror at the expense of Jewish Americans. No longer. Under President Trump, we will build on the immense progress of the last 100 days to fight for what is right and to make every campus and classroom safe for Jewish students and every American.    We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Antisemitism Is Raging on College Campuses. President Trump Will Stop It. appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Senators have once again put forward the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), reviving a bill that, if enacted, would radically reshape how Americans experience the internet. Promoted as a measure to protect children, this latest version now carries the backing of Apple, a tech giant that has publicly endorsed the legislation as a meaningful step toward improving online safety. But behind the bipartisan sales pitch and industry support lies a framework that risks expanding government control over online content and eroding user privacy through mandated age verification and surveillance infrastructure. We obtained a copy of the bill for you here. KOSA is often described as a child protection bill, requiring platforms to limit exposure to content that could contribute to mental health issues such as depression or disordered eating. What is less emphasized by its sponsors is how the bill empowers the Federal Trade Commission to investigate and sue platforms over speech that’s deemed “harmful” to minors. Though lawmakers insist the bill does not authorize the censorship of content, it effectively places government pressure on websites to sanitize what users see, or face liability. Such chilling effects rarely need explicit censorship orders to shape outcomes. More: The Digital ID and Online Age Verification Agenda Among the more consequential additions to the current version is a directive that could serve as the foundation for mandatory age verification across the internet. The bill instructs the Secretary of Commerce, along with the FTC and FCC, to study and propose systems capable of verifying a user’s age at the device or operating system level. In practice, this lays the groundwork for a digital ID regime that links individuals’ real-world identities to their online activity. By stripping away anonymity, the measure would transform the nature of internet participation, tying everything a person reads, shares, or says to a verifiable identity. The implications for privacy are significant. Age verification at the system level requires collecting and storing more personal data, potentially exposing users to greater surveillance and risk. Once identity becomes a prerequisite for access, the door opens to deeper tracking, profiling, and data harvesting. It also sets a dangerous precedent: laws marketed as child safety initiatives become a convenient backdoor for instituting online ID requirements. Civil liberties advocates have long raised alarms about this dynamic. They argue that by creating vague standards around “harm,” the government incentivizes platforms to over-moderate. Though KOSA’s sponsors have made edits to assuage concern, removing state attorneys general from enforcement authority and inserting language that purports to protect free speech, those changes do not neutralize the structural pressures the bill creates. And while Apple’s endorsement adds corporate polish to the proposal, it also highlights a growing divide between companies seeking to maintain control over closed ecosystems and users who value an open, private internet. “Big Tech platforms have shown time and time again they will always prioritize their bottom line over the safety of our children,” Senator Blackburn stated in support of the legislation. The irony is that KOSA while appearing to reign in Silicon Valley, may end up entrenching its power by pushing for universal identity verification and more extensive user data collection. This reintroduction comes after the bill’s previous failure in the House, where Republican leadership balked at its implications for speech. Even after last-minute revisions negotiated with Elon Musk’s platform X, House Speaker Mike Johnson voiced skepticism, saying he “love[s] the principle, but the details of that are very problematic.” His hesitation reflects a deeper unease that many continue to share: that child safety is being used to justify systems of control incompatible with a free and private internet. Whether KOSA can clear the legislative hurdles this time remains uncertain. But if it does, it won’t just change how tech companies serve content to minors, it could permanently shift the architecture of the internet toward identification, monitoring, and top-down content moderation. And once online privacy is further eroded, it’s not easily restored. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post KOSA Reintroduced: Child “Safety” Bill Raises Alarms Over Internet Surveillance, Digital ID, and Free Speech Risks appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Gabriel Quadri’s legal struggle over the right to speak freely about sex and gender has reached the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights after he was punished in Mexico for expressing views that the state deemed politically unacceptable. Represented by ADF International, the former congressman and presidential hopeful now seeks relief from a regional body, arguing that his conviction for “gender-based political violence” amounted to an assault on basic freedoms. The controversy stems from a series of posts Quadri made on X in which he condemned the allocation of congressional seats reserved for women to individuals who identify as female but were born male. He also raised broader concerns about the erasure of women’s spaces in sports and politics. These statements triggered legal proceedings that ended in a unanimous ruling by Mexico’s Superior Electoral Tribunal in April 2022. As part of the sentence, Quadri was ordered to remove the posts, undergo re-education courses, and repeatedly issue a court-written apology on his social media account over a two-week period. He was also placed on a registry branding him a “gender-based political violator,” a label that, according to his legal team, may have damaged his chances in the 2024 election, which he lost. “I am committed to safeguarding every Mexican’s fundamental right to speak freely. My career has been dedicated to a prosperous and free Mexico for all, which demands that our country abide by its human rights obligations. I look forward to the day when all in Mexico can share their beliefs and opinions without fear of censorship or reprimand,” Quadri stated. The case underscores growing concerns about how laws supposedly aimed at protecting marginalized groups are being used to silence individuals who dissent from prevailing gender orthodoxy. “Gabriel Quadri was convicted in 2022 as a ‘political violator’ for stating the obvious fact that a man cannot be a woman. In 2024, he lost his re-election bid. Now, just a few years later, sanity is being restored across the world as the tide turns against gender ideology. Countless public officials at the highest levels are stating the same things that landed Quadri with a guilty verdict. It is egregiously unjust for Quadri to have suffered the ignominy of a conviction, and having his reputation damaged because of his registration as a ‘political violator’, which could have negatively impacted his re-election bid, for simply standing up for the truth,” said Julio Pohl, lead attorney for ADF International. With no legal recourse left within Mexico, Quadri’s legal team brought the matter to the Inter-American system in late 2022. Despite a formal request from the Commission for the Mexican government to respond, there has been no reply. The Commission is now preparing to make a decision based on the case’s merits. Pohl sees this stage as critical: “We are pleased that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights will decide the case on the merits. This is a pivotal moment for fundamental freedoms—if elected officials are not free to debate the issues of our time, what hope is there for everyone else? The Commission should work to reach a just resolution for Mr. Quadri, paving the way for greater free speech accountability in Mexico.” If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Gabriel Quadri Appeals to Inter-American Human Rights Commission in Landmark Free Speech Case Against Mexico appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

Oh, Noes! Some San Fran NGO Funding Collapsing Like a Cake in the Rain

Melvin M. Vopson: We have long taken it for granted that gravity is one of the basic forces of nature – one of the invisible threads that keeps the universe stitched together. But suppose that this is not true. Suppose the law of gravity is simply an echo of something more fundamental: a byproduct of the universe operating under a computer-like code. That is the premise of my latest research, published in the journal AIP Advances. It suggests that gravity is not a mysterious force that attracts objects towards one another, but the product of an informational law of nature that I call the second law of infodynamics. It is a notion that seems like science fiction – but one that is based in physics and evidence that the universe appears to be operating suspiciously like a computer simulation. In digital technologies, right down to the apps in your phone and the world of cyberspace, efficiency is the key. Computers compact and restructure their data all the time to save memory and computer power. Maybe the same is taking place all over the universe? Information theory, the mathematical study of the quantification, storage and communication of information, may help us understand what’s going on. Originally developed by mathematician Claude Shannon, it has become increasingly popular in physics and is used in a growing range of research areas. In a 2023 paper, I used information theory to propose my second law of infodynamics. This stipulates that information “entropy”, or the level of information disorganisation, will have to reduce or stay static within any given closed information system. This is the opposite of the popular second law of thermodynamics, which dictates that physical entropy, or disorder, always increases. Take a cooling cup of coffee. Energy flows from hot to cold until the temperature of the coffee is the same as the temperature of the room and its energy is minimum – a state called thermal equilibrium. The entropy of the system is a maximum at this point – with all the molecules maximally spread out, having the same energy. What that means is that the spread of energies per molecule in the liquid is reduced. If one considers the information content of each molecule based on its energy, then at the start, in the hot cup of coffee, the information entropy is maximum and at equilibrium the information entropy is minimum. That’s because almost all molecules are at the same energy level, becoming identical characters in an informational message. So the spread of different energies available is reduced when there’s thermal equilibrium. But if we consider just location rather than energy, then there’s lots of information disorder when particles are distributed randomly in space – the information required to keep pace with them is considerable. When they consolidate themselves together under gravitational attraction, however, the way planets, stars and galaxies do, the information gets compacted and more manageable. In simulations, that’s exactly what occurs when a system tries to function more efficiently. So, matter flowing under the influence of gravity need not be a result of a force at all. Perhaps it is a function of the way the universe compacts the information that it has to work with. Here, space is not continuous and smooth. Space is made up of tiny “cells” of information, similar to pixels in a photo or squares on the screen of a computer game. In each cell is basic information about the universe – where, say, a particle is – and all are gathered together to make the fabric of the universe. If you place items within this space, the system gets more complex. But when all of those items come together to be one item instead of many, the information is simple again. The universe, under this view, tends to naturally seek to be in those states of minimal information entropy. The real kicker is that if you do the numbers, the entropic “informational force” created by this tendency toward simplicity is exactly equivalent to Newton’s law of gravitation, as shown in my paper. This theory builds on earlier studies of “entropic gravity” but goes a step further. In connecting information dynamics with gravity, we are led to the interesting conclusion that the universe could be running on some kind of cosmic software. In an artificial universe, maximum-efficiency rules would be expected. Symmetries would be expected. Compression would be expected. And law – that is, gravity – would be expected to emerge from these computational rules. We may not yet have definitive evidence that we live in a simulation. But the deeper we look, the more our universe seems to behave like a computational process. Melvin M. Vopson, Associate Professor of Physics, University of Portsmouth This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. The post Could gravity be evidence that the universe is a computer simulation? appeared first on Anomalien.com.

In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Robert Bork Jr. attacked Gail Slater, President Trump’s new assistant attorney general for antitrust. I remember watching with sadness and dismay in 1987 as Mr. Bork’s father, the late Judge Robert Bork, endured a malicious and unfair confirmation process that ended with the Senate rejecting his nomination to the Supreme Court. Now, to my regret, his son has “borked” Slater in much the same way. The heart of Trump’s America First antitrust agenda: Protect markets before they grow too big to regulate. Break up monopolies so Washington doesn’t have to control them. Rather than engaging with Slater’s actual record, Bork resorted to baseless claims. He suggested her antitrust philosophy boils down to a simplistic belief that “big is bad, little is good.” That isn’t her philosophy, she’s never said that, and it’s dishonest to imply otherwise. The Trump administration’s antitrust team isn’t capitulating to monopolies. It’s doing the opposite — charting a course that breaks from the status quo of the last four years of Joe Biden and eight years under President Obama. Monopolies rightly understood Bork claims that Gail Slater and Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson “discarded the consumer welfare standard,” the long-standing antitrust principle that limits government action to cases where consumers suffer harm. But Bork sets up a straw man. Slater never said anything of the sort — not in her speech, not even by implication. In fact, Slater made her position clear: She supports “respecting the original public meaning of the statutory text and the binding nature of Supreme Court and other relevant precedent.” That’s not a rejection of the consumer welfare standard. Bork also misrepresented Slater’s concern over monopolistic control by tech platforms. He mocked her for saying these companies “control not just the prices of their services, but the flow of our nation’s commerce and communication.” Bork scoffed: “What prices? Facebook, Instagram, Google, LinkedIn, and YouTube don’t charge consumers a penny.” RELATED: YouTube deserves its own antitrust scrutiny Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Image Slater might have spelled out more clearly how these platforms profit through exploitative practices and suppress conservative voices through debanking, shadow-banning, and viewpoint discrimination. But her time was limited. Bork’s refusal to acknowledge the damage done to conservatives by monopolies that dominate the flow of information is not just blind — it’s disgraceful. I, for one, applaud a Justice Department finally willing to confront monopolies not just over dollars, but over speech. Americans deserve protection whether the cost of control impinges upon their wallets or their freedom. This isn’t Biden 2.0 Calling Slater a continuation of Biden’s antitrust policy is the coup de grâce of Bork Jr.’s “borking” campaign. The claim doesn’t hold up. From day one, Slater made clear her intention to restore objectivity and restraint to antitrust enforcement — anchored in law, not ideology. Biden’s FTC and Justice Department had weaponized antitrust, targeting deals that posed no real threat to consumers, often on laughably flimsy grounds. Bork, in another op-ed, pointed to the Biden administration’s lawsuit against Visa over razor-thin fees as an example of legitimate enforcement. But Visa wasn’t harming consumers. The lawsuit looked more like an effort to strong-arm a private firm into acting as another weapon in the administration’s anti-conservative arsenal — just as it had done with major banks and social media platforms. The Biden administration even blocked the merger of Spirit and JetBlue, smaller carriers that offered real competition to the Big Four airlines. The move led to bankruptcy, obviously hurting consumers. Had Democrats won last November, the Big Four likely would have been expected to repay the favor politically. But those were Biden’s decisions — not Slater’s. She has already made clear she intends to reverse course. She’s not in office to weaponize antitrust law. Her aim is to enforce the law and uphold precedent. In an April interview with Sohrab Ahmari, Slater didn’t mince words: “If you’re doing a merger that’s benign, we’ll just get out of the way.” In her first public address on April 21, she pledged to give economists a stronger role in enforcement and criticized regulation that “saps economic opportunity by stifling rather than promoting competition.” That doesn’t sound like central planning. It sounds like a welcome return to sanity. Deregulation by prevention So why is Bork trying to paint her as Chairman Mao? Probably because Slater understands what many in D.C.’s think-tank class still miss: Big Business isn’t always Big Government’s victim. More often, they work together. Corporate giants gain dominance, then lobby for regulations that kneecap smaller competitors. Bureaucrats play along because it’s easier to deal with one entrenched firm than a dozen fast-moving upstarts. That’s not capitalism — it’s cartel economics. And for once, a president is pushing back. Slater has made it clear that monopolies don’t just crush competition — they endanger core American freedoms. She watched Big Tech silence dissent during the 2020 election. Her response? Use antitrust to reduce the need for government, not expand it. That’s the heart of Trump’s America First antitrust agenda: Protect markets before they grow too big to regulate. Break up monopolies so Washington doesn’t have to control them. Call it what it is — deregulation by prevention. It’s the opposite of socialism. In truth, restoring power to the people, not the government, is exactly what the founders envisioned. Just read the 10th Amendment. A seismic shift FTC Commissioner Mark Meador, a Trump appointee, points out that “consumer welfare” doesn’t just mean cheap products. It also means protecting Americans from economic overlords who silence dissent, distort democracy, and punish disfavored speech. Sound familiar? Meador rightly rejects the progressive notion that “bigness” is always bad. But he also rejects Bork-style libertarianism that shrugs at monopolies unless they raise prices. That view ignores what consumer welfare really demands — fair markets, not just cheap goods. The 2024 election wasn’t just a political win for Trump. It marked a seismic shift in what the Republican Party stands for. Democrats now serve Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and multinational conglomerates. Trump’s GOP champions the working American — the factory worker, the tradesman, the small business owner. Too often, well-meaning but outdated Republicans cry “socialism” when anyone dares challenge corporate power. But they’re not defending capitalism. They’re defending a rigged system. And voters finally noticed. Trump wasn’t sent back to Washington to coddle monopolies or rubber-stamp mergers. He was sent to drain the swamp — including the one where corporate lobbyists and bureaucrats make backroom deals to preserve their government-aided monopoly grip. If that makes the old guard nervous, they can always file a complaint — with one of their apps.

There may be hurdles in front of Pete Rose's possible induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, even though Major League Baseball recently reinstated the legendary player.Rose had been banned from baseball — and Hall of Fame eligibility — because he gambled on MLB games, but commissioner Robert D. Manfred Jr. declared earlier this week that permanent ineligibility "ends upon the passing of the disciplined individual."'They take violations very seriously. Joe Jackson fixed games. OK? Pete Rose bet on games as a manager of one team. That doesn't go away.'The decision affected 17 individuals — all of them players except for William Cox, a former owner of the Philadelphia Phillies, who was banned for betting on his team's games. The most famous examples among the 17 are "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, who died in 1951, and Rose, who died in 2024. Jackson was banned due to his part in the infamous Black Sox scandal of 1919, while Rose was shut out in 1989.RELATED: Pete Rose reinstated as eligible for Hall of Fame — but new rule will revive MLB's darkest eraWhile much of the commotion has surrounded the possibly of Rose being enshrined into the Hall of Fame after decades, it would not exactly be a walk in the park to get the former Cincinnati Red and Phillies phenom on a plaque. The problems start to emerge when factoring in that Rose's eligibility period originally was from 1992 to 2006, according to the Associated Press. MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred has been accused of blocking Pete Rose's eligibility.Photo by Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Fortune Media Rose garnered 41 write-in votes in 1992 and was written in on 243 more ballots over the next 15 years, but those votes did not count. What's more, now that the ban has been lifted, both Rose and Jackson are eligible only for the Hall of Fame's Classic Baseball Era — and that requires a rigorous process prior to enshrinement in Cooperstown.Jane Forbes Clark, who chairs the Hall of Fame board, told ESPN the first step will be a 10-person Historical Overview Committee that selects eight ballot candidates to present to the Classic Baseball Era Committee.Who is on the committees?While the identities of current members of the Historical Overview Committee are not known, they are assumed to be veteran members of the Baseball Writers' Association of America.Longtime sports broadcaster Tony Kornheiser knows how that goes."The baseball writers who are members put you in the Hall of Fame. Those baseball writers, as we know well, are guardians of the game," Kornheiser said on his show, "Pardon the Interruption."RELATED: March Madness money: How the NCAA makes a billion dollars every yearKornheiser added, "They take violations very seriously. Joe Jackson fixed games. OK? Pete Rose bet on games as a manager of one team. That doesn't go away." 'Shoeless' Joe JacksonPhoto by Sporting News via Getty Images/Sporting News via Getty Images via Getty ImagesIf Rose and Jackson pass muster with the Historical Overview Committee, their names would be sent to the Classic Baseball Era Committee to vote at its next meeting.Members of the Classic Baseball Era Committee presently include Hall of Fame players — icons such as Paul Molitor and Ozzie Smith, per ESPN. Jackson and Rose would need 12 votes from the 16-person Classic Baseball Era Committee to get into the Hall of Fame.Another hurdle is the fact that it would take years for this process to play out. The Classic Baseball Era Committee, according to Clark, does not meet until December 2027. At that point, an entirely new committee could be in place — and who knows how they would view Rose and Jackson.'It essentially comes down to whether the committees think gambling is worse than using human-growth hormones or steroids.'Given that the MLB writers have excluded from the Hall of Fame some of the most successful players of all time — Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire, and Alex Rodriguez, for example — potential inductions of players like Jackson and Rose may come down to where committee members draw their ethical lines."It essentially comes down to whether the committees think gambling is worse than using human-growth hormones or steroids," said Dave Shrigley, a writer and editor for Rebel News.Shrigley told Blaze News, "Steroids weren't exactly banned by the league, so not only is there an ethical question, but there's also the question as to what is actually a ban-worthy offense."Commissioner Manfred slightly touched on this topic in 2020 when he said Rose "violated what is sort of Rule One in baseball," adding that the MLB would continue "to abide by [its] own rules."Some have criticized Manfred in the past for stonewalling Rose's possible induction, including in 2015 when he denied Rose's application for reinstatement. Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Dear Mr. President:I want to draw a parallel between two worlds that don’t seem connected but are. I’m not sure if you follow long-distance running. Perhaps you should.Is it hubris, or fear, or something else entirely that keeps us clinging with white knuckles to our positions of power — refusing to pass the torch until God breaks our fingers?Last month, on Patriots' Day, Des Linden crossed the finish line of her 12th Boston Marathon, triumphantly concluding a professional career that has cemented her legend status on Boylston Street.It was there in 2018 that she made history, becoming the first American woman in 33 years to win, doing so under punishing conditions that overwhelmed many of the sport’s top contenders. That year, she famously slowed down mid-race to help fellow runner Shalane Flanagan rejoin the pack, only to kick ahead of Mamitu Daska and Gladys Chesir on the Newton Hills to claim victory. Linden capitalized on persistence, grit, and her competitors’ fatigue.'That was a really good day'Linden's career spans decades at the highest level of competition, including two Olympic appearances (London 2012 and Rio 2016), a personal best of 2:22:38, and countless top American finishes at many of her 24 major marathons.Just before lining up at the start of the 2025 event, she shocked fans by announcing her retirement from marathoning at age 41.Though her 2025 time of 2:26:19 marked her fastest event performance since 2017, she knew it was time to hang up her Brooks Hyperions. “I was happy with the time I ran, I was happy with how I ran ... and it was also just kind of perfect,” she said on "Nobody Asked Us," her podcast with fellow distance runner Kara Goucher. “It’s just not competitive. That was a really good day, and it’s just not competitive.”“There’s a level of dignity to it,” she continued. “I don’t want to just limp through these races or be there just to be there. I want to do it well, and if I can’t do it well, I need to move on.”Aging ungracefullyDignity is a waning virtue in American politics. Our ruling class is aging, ungracefully, in public. Dianne Feinstein, a once formidable senator, was wheeled daily into the Capitol in her final months, visibly confused, voting only when prompted by staff, and at one point attempting to give a speech when directed simply to say “aye.” Mitch McConnell, twice in one year, froze silently mid-sentence at press conferences — eyes locked, hands clenched — and was escorted away like a man forgetting where, or who, he was.Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a liberal icon, chose not to step down when President Obama could have appointed her successor — clinging to her seat until her death in 2020, which opened the door for you, Mr. President, to replace her with conservative Amy Coney Barrett, reshaping the Supreme Court for a generation.And, of course, Biden’s presidency was marked as much by gaffes and confusion as by ill-fated policy. He tripped repeatedly up the steps of Air Force One, wandered away from press events unsure of where to exit, and at times struggled to finish coherent sentences during major addresses. In one widely circulated moment, he mistook the president of Egypt for the president of Mexico. At international summits, he appeared disengaged, sometimes gazing blankly while other leaders spoke and sometimes falling asleep. His handlers often cut his mic or shuffled him away mid-question. What’s more, he was selfishly propped up by his party and his family to run for a second term.White-knuckle leadershipIs it hubris, or fear, or something else entirely that keeps us clinging with white knuckles to our positions of power — refusing to pass the torch until God breaks our fingers, through infirmity, humiliation, or death, to take it from us? I don’t know.What’s certain is that we have a choice — one with the power to shape our legacies and reveal the true motivations of our hearts.Our first president understood this better than most, as articulated in his farewell letter to the nation. George Washington’s resignation after two terms — at the height of his ability and at the age of 64 — was a deliberate decision, modeling restraint, humility, and faith in the next generation.“In a country whose institutions are essentially free, the voluntary relinquishment of power is as necessary as the wise exercise of it,” he said in his 1796 address.And then, reflecting on his service: “Though in reviewing the incidents of my administration I am unconscious of intentional error, I am nevertheless too sensible of my defects not to think it probable that I may have committed many errors.""I shall carry with me the hope that my country will never cease to view them with indulgence; and that,” he continued, “the faults of incompetent abilities will be consigned to oblivion, as myself must soon be to the mansions of rest."That joke isn't funny any moreAt first, I smiled and rolled my eyes at your mention of a third term. In April 2018, during a White House event, you quipped, “Should we go back to 16 years? Should we do that? Congressman, can we do that?” The crowd laughed; it was a joke, we thought. You’re a stand-up comedian, I explained to fretting leftist friends, whose apoplectic reactions no doubt egged us all on — a brawler with a flair for provocation, not a man mounting a serious challenge to constitutional norms.Then came the merchandise — “Trump 2028” hats — and the repeated musings: “After that, we’ll go for a third term,” you said at a rally in Nevada. By 2025, the line between jest and intent had blurred. When pressed on the matter in a March 30 interview with Kristen Welker, you replied, “No, no, I’m not joking.”Good Trump, bad TrumpHerein lies the bind of the Trump supporter: trapped in an exhausting game of "good Trump, bad Trump" — squaring your achievements and impulses, downplaying your unconstitutional suggestions, all while hoping your next move isn’t one we truly can’t defend.And then, during an exclusive "Meet the Press" interview last week, you offered your clearest indication yet that you’d leave office after two terms, without attempting to extend your stay. “I’ll be an eight-year president; I’ll be a two-term president. I always thought that was very important,” you told moderator Kristen Welker.Some conservatives in my circle breathed a sigh of relief. Others still wait with bated breath, not sure what to believe. Stances have shifted before. For many on the right, your unpredictability is part of your strength: a negotiating tactic, a strategic ambiguity. However, when it comes to the peaceful transition of power — a foundational tenet of American conservatism — unpredictable rhetoric doesn’t inspire confidence.A broken clockThat’s why, though I’m loath to admit it, a May 6 New York Times editorial raises a valid concern. "Trump’s Third-Term Jokes Deserve a Serious Response" argues that this kind of rhetoric doesn’t just amuse or provoke — it reinforces your critics’ worst fears. “He has a history, after all, of using seemingly outlandish speculation to push ideas he genuinely favors — such as overturning an election result — into mainstream discourse,” the editorial board writes. They continue:He tests boundaries to see which limits are actually enforced. Even when he backs away from a provocation, he often succeeds in raising doubts about those limits. His behavior is consistent with a president who indeed wants to serve a third term, if not more, and who keeps raising the idea in the hope of getting Americans comfortable with it.Those who watched January 6 unfold or listened to your musings about “stolen elections,” even in jest, fear that uncertainty and volatility may once again destabilize faith in our political process. In a climate rife with cynicism, some conservatives aren’t just asking what you’ll do — they’re wondering whether your word, this time, will be final.Going out on topIn an Instagram post on race day, Des Linden took her final bow. “People say you should go out on top, and that’s what I’m doing — because getting to race my final professional marathon in Boston is indeed going out on top. I’m ready to leave it all out on the course one last time,” she wrote. “See you on Boylston.”Mr. President, please keep your promise — for the sake of the Republican Party that you’ve reshaped for the better, for the young conservatives you’ve energized, for the party’s dignity and your own. Run the three-year race set before you, and then go out on top.