California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s roaring start to the 2028 presidential election may already be scaring away potential competitors. That could be true when it comes to the candidate who possibly looks the best on paper: Gretchen Whitmer. As the center-left governor of a critical swing state who held major roles in the Joe Biden and Kamala Harris campaigns and who has managed to retain strong approval ratings, Whitmer seems to have everything going for her. (RELATED: Whitmer Says America Is Ready for a Female President) And yet, Michigan’s governor has numerous times in recent months suggested that she may not wage a presidential bid. Speculation that she may pass on the race kicked off in April when she responded to the question of what she is looking forward to in 2026 by saying, “Retiring.” This year, her appearances on national news shows have grown few and far between, leading many to conclude that she is stepping away from the limelight. Some also view her decision to prioritize working with President Donald Trump on Michigan’s needs — such as securing a new fighter jet mission at Selfridge Air National Guard Base — rather than fighting him at every turn, à la Newsom, as a retreat from a national political future. This term in office, Trump has, in appreciation of her strategy, called her “a very good person” and said she is doing an “excellent job.” Whitmer’s prioritization of collaboration with the president has disappointed some Democrats, with Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel saying, “Appeasement is not workable strategy with a fascist.” The famous picture of Whitmer holding up a folder to hide her face in the White House captures her effort to work with Trump despite the frustration within her own party. In October, Whitmer was asked head-on about whether she would run for president by a Canadian journalist. She said, “I don’t know if I need to be the main character in the next chapter, but I want to have a hand in writing it.” Whitmer added that the speculation that she could run for president was a “big compliment.” “I think I’ve got an important vantage point as the governor of an important swing state,” she continued, “so I anticipate helping, but I don’t know if I’m going to be the person.” Whitmer also clarified that she wants to keep her attention on Michigan. “I got a big job right now to stay focused on, and I’m going to do that,” she said. “I don’t want to take my eye off the ball and go out having missed something, having lost something, having a catastrophe happen under my watch.” Contrast that with Newsom’s splashy declaration on CBS News that he is considering a presidential run and will make a decision after next year’s midterms. (RELATED: Gavin Newsom’s Very Good Year*) The different strategies come as early polling shows that Newsom has pulled well ahead of the pack. In a poll this month by Emerson College that asked voters the open-ended question of who they would support for the Democratic nomination for president, 24 percent said Newsom, while only 0.4 percent named Whitmer. Kamala Harris followed Newsom with 10 percent support, while Pete Buttigieg pulled in 9 percent. (RELATED: Pete Buttigieg: America’s Second Gay President?) Whitmer may have decided that it’s wiser to wait for Newsom to grow stale with voters or stumble on the trail before making her move. But as Newsom has burst out of the gate at full speed and continues to garner headline after headline crowing him Democrats’ frontrunner (“Admit It. Gavin Newsom Is the 2028 Front-runner”; “Gavin Newsom ‘light years ahead’ in 2028 Democratic field after Prop. 50 win”), Whitmer may have decided that it’s wiser to wait for Newsom to grow stale with voters or stumble on the trail before making her move. If she wants to be in the race, however, she may have to act sooner rather than later. This week, Axios reported that some of her senior aides have begun looking for new jobs to take after Whitmer finishes her second term in office in January 2027 because “they haven’t got a signal to play for anything after her term ends.” Whitmer, Axios reported, is “privately expressing ambivalence about running for president in 2028.” Even still, the outlet added that the governor has also privately said that she is keeping her options open. Last month, Whitmer did tell Bloomberg News: “I can’t rule anything out at this juncture.” Also, a “senior Michigan Democrat” told Axios that the idea that Whitmer is taking herself out of the race is merely “wishful thinking on behalf of some Democrats.” In other private discussions reported on this week by Axios, Whitmer has reportedly told people that she “feels obligated to focus on Michigan through the end of her term rather than take more steps for a presidential campaign.” Gavin Newsom has chosen to go the route of unabashedly running for president even while governor of California. If resentment grows over the perception that Newsom is in it only for himself and that he isn’t solving California’s problems — as it has in the past — then that strategy could come back to bite him. If it does, then Whitmer will be able to say that she was the one who remained focused on the people of her state. And if Newsom’s strategy doesn’t backfire? Well, then maybe Whitmer will retire to spend more time with her kids rather than wage a losing battle. READ MORE from Ellie Gardey Holmes: Temple Shows DEI’s Ongoing Hold on Medical Schools Woman Who Gave Birth at 62 Via IVF Accused of Committing Fraud to Get More Children Gavin Newsom’s Very Good Year*

Despite overwhelming evidence, the replacement of European societies remains — frustratingly — a contested concept. Across the continent, cities and towns are unrecognizable. Novel social ills confront Europeans who remember better days. Corporate media regularly broadcast projections of minority-native populations later this century. Despite this incontrovertible evidence, institutional figures still insist replacement is a “far-right” conspiracy theory. In diminutive, secluded Iceland, the crisis has arrived. The extinction of the Icelandic people cannot be dismissed as a theory. More accurately, it is a civilizational crime. According to estimates from Statistics Iceland, the country’s population will reach half a million within 16 years, up from an estimated 392,000 today. In 2020, the population stood at 354,000, an increase from 317,000 in 2010. As in other European countries, immigration will drive this projected population growth. Until 2012, following Iceland’s catastrophic banking collapse, the country maintained a birth rate above replacement level, but that figure has swiftly sagged to 1.56 children per woman of childbearing age. Nonetheless, the country will grow rapidly, and it will be considerably less Icelandic. Even assuming modest inflows, Icelanders will be a minority in their land within three or four decades. Statistics Iceland forecasts that the country will absorb a net migration of over 85,000 people by 2042. By comparison, the country experienced a net migration of 61,000 people from 1986 to 2024, a period of unprecedented immigration to the secluded, long-homogeneous island. Next year alone, the country expects to receive over 5,000 newcomers. Currently, over 20 percent of the population is of immigrant origin. Even assuming modest inflows, Icelanders will be a minority in their land within three or four decades. (RELATED: The Vanishing Englishman: Inside the Schools Forecasting the UK Future) This process arguably started in 1994, when Iceland joined the European Economic Area. Large numbers of foreigners began to arrive in 2005, soon after the European Union welcomed ten mostly Central and Eastern European members. These were primarily Poles who arrived to boost Iceland’s thriving economy, though Lithuanians and Slovaks also contributed to the regional flavor. (RÚV, the national broadcaster, now offers content in English and Polish, in addition to Icelandic.) Many of these migrants arrived to work construction jobs, often in the secluded Westfjords and Eastern Region. (RELATED: Asylum to Austerity: Germany Leads Europe’s Retreat From Open-Ended Migration) The Icelandic economy crumbled in the catastrophic banking collapse of 2008-11. By 2015, after emerging from the wreckage, Iceland featured an immigrant-origin population of nearly nine percent. At this point, Icelandic leaders should have rejected short-sighted economic exploits, foreign-labor dependence, and NGO soft power. Like their counterparts in Ireland, they embraced all three, and migrants began to arrive from culturally distant locales in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. (RELATED: Ireland Just Sealed Its Fate on Mass Migration) “Visitor numbers have quadrupled over the past decade, making Iceland’s economy among the most tourist-dependent in the Western world,” wrote Egill Bjarnason in his 2021 book How Iceland Changed the World. “Without immigrants, the growth would have been impossible to sustain: every second job added to the economy in recent years has, eventually, been filled by someone not yet living in the country,” he added approvingly. In the classic Western formula, growth and diversity are indisputably desirable ends. They have wrought liberal horrors in just one short decade. An outspoken basketball coach has coined the nickname “Little Malmö” for Breiðholt, a working-class district of Reykjavík that has rapidly developed a high concentration of migrants. Foreign gangs have arrived from continental Europe’s migrant-heavy districts. Schoolchildren have encountered violence from culturally distant classmates. Episodes of migrant street violence circulate online, even when Icelandic media choose not to cover them. High-trust Iceland is also no longer immune to conspicuous cases of culture shock. Last year, three male migrants interrupted a session of the Alþingi (Parliament), with one climbing over the upper-gallery railing, during a debate on asylum policy. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court of Iceland ruled that a Syrian migrant had repeatedly raped and sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl student from the school where he worked. This came after a district court had cited cultural misunderstandings to dismiss the most serious charges. He will walk free in just five years. This week, a video of Middle Eastern men in Reykjavík, brandishing what appear to be assault rifles and pistols on top of vehicles, began to circulate online. In response, police closed a street in central Reykjavík, though police spokesmen and journalists were initially silent on the matter. Eventually, the story could no longer be contained, and politicians addressed the incident in a country where non-hunting firearms are rare and gun crime has been nearly nonexistent. Helgi Magnús Gunnarsson, a former Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions, told an interviewer the West is “sleeping in the face of a cultural revolution” by permitting mass migration from Muslim countries, and he related an episode in which a Muslim migrant allegedly threatened to kill him. According to Gunnarsson, Israeli intelligence officials have warned about extremist elements among some men newly admitted to Iceland. As in other European countries, Iceland’s politicians, journalists, and academics are fiercely defensive of pro-migration orthodoxy in the public sphere. As evidenced in the firearm-video affair, Icelandic media try to suppress stories that paint migration in a negative light. Political figures like Social Democratic Prime Minister Kristrún Frostadóttir have been unwilling to say anything remotely critical on the subject. “We must bear in mind that the proportion of immigrants in Iceland has grown extremely rapidly in just a few years, and naturally this makes people think,” she stated this summer. Already in his 2010 book Wasteland with Words: A Social History of Iceland, Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon spoke of “profound effects on Icelandic society that many native Icelanders have still not adjusted to,” suggesting it is their unfortunate character flaw. “At the turn of this millennia [sic], when the Icelandic population was only 2.5 percent foreign-born, few envisioned that Húsavík, a traditional port town, would be home to twenty-six different nationalities only twenty years later,” wrote the aforementioned Bjarnason in 2021. “These are exciting times to be in Iceland, suddenly the land of opportunities.” They are less exciting for Icelanders publicly contesting this issue. Some are willing to do so only anonymously, for fear of professional repercussions. In the Icelandic political scene, only the opposition Centre Party (Miðflokkurinn), currently the fifth-largest party in the Alþingi, is reliably critical of prevailing migration policies. “The unique heritage of generations and the historical continuity of a thousand years are at stake,” wrote party deputy chairman Snorri Másson in a bold editorial last month. Online news website Vísir rewarded him this month with a headline article calling him a racist; the accompanying photo (later updated) showed him holding his two-year-old child, a gesture many Icelanders found to be distasteful. The national political landscape will need to transform rapidly if Icelanders are to stave off extinction through policy initiatives. Icelanders perceive their country as being rapidly consigned to the status of economic zone — an English-speaking one, to boot. Noting a lack of Icelandic historical analysis in foreign languages, historian Gunnar Karlsson wrote thus in his 2000 study The History of Iceland: “[T]he history of Iceland is for the most part a secret kept for those who can read the language which has developed in the country through eleven centuries.” It is a secret that will be lost if the Icelandic population replacement continues unabated. If that comes to pass, it will rank as one of the great civilizational crimes of our time. READ MORE from Michael O’Shea: Ireland Is a Democratic Late Starter It’s Past High Noon for Poland’s Liberals What Next for Poland After Nawrocki Victory? Michael O’Shea is an American-Polish writer and translator. He is a Danube Institute visiting international fellow. 

The curtain fell quietly on a 232-year tradition as the U.S. Mint struck the last penny this month in Philadelphia. This ended one of the longest runs in American history. For years, the penny had become a costly relic and was more nostalgic than useful, and too expensive to mint. In their 2024 Annual Report, the U.S. Mint reported that the cost of producing one penny was 3.69 cents, more than three times its value. Minting 4.5 billion pennies drained $179 million from taxpayers. Is there any business that produces a product costing over two times what it sells for, other than the U.S. government? This is poor fiscal policy disguised as tradition. Against a $38 trillion debt, the savings amount to pocket change, but it’s a start. It is also a viable litmus test of what is politically feasible in Washington. The delay in addressing this issue underscores the depth of dysfunction in U.S. governance. (RELATED: How Did We Reach a $38 Trillion Debt During a ‘Shutdown’?) Why stop at the penny? A nickel costs 13.8 cents to mint. Symbolic gestures should not come at a nine-figure annual cost. In addition, we also need to rid ourselves of Daylight Saving Time, the two-dollar bill, and the fraction of a penny for gas. As the majority of transactions via credit cards or debit cards increased, Australia and New Zealand ended minting pennies back in the 1990s. Canada’s Royal Mint stopped in May 2012. For cash transactions, prices have been rounded up by one or two cents; others would be rounded down. Their economies adjusted, proving that practicality trumps sentimentality. Continuing to mint the penny would serve to subsidize zinc producers while pilfering from the taxpayers. If we can’t agree to stop using valuable metals to produce fewer pennies, then what hope do we have when it comes to the big chunks of the federal budget? By retiring it, the Treasury underscores that efficiency matters even in the smallest denominations. Moreover, eliminating the penny streamlines commerce, reduces inefficiency, and aligns U.S. currency with other Western economies. (RELATED: Aristotle on a Balanced Budget Amendment) It makes sense — pun implied. A penny could never buy you much, but what it lacked in economic prowess, it held an outsized place in Americana, instantly recognizable both physically and symbolically. Pennies were tucked in every pocket, scattered under couch cushions, and immortalized in Ben Franklin’s wisdom of “a penny saved is a penny earned.” Words that were a creed of a simpler time that leaves behind only nostalgia for a coin that could never buy much, but embodied thrift and austerity. We have traded nostalgia for necessity. But in that trade, something tender slips away. In its place, we gain efficiency, fiscal restraint, and a currency system that reflects reality rather than melancholy, underscoring that sometimes, the smallest change makes the biggest difference. Critics argue that ending the minting of the penny expunges a piece of American life. Symbolic gestures should not come at a nine-figure annual cost. The Treasury’s decision underscores fiscal responsibility, as the government should not spend more to make money than the money is worth. The penny will live on as a collector’s item, a teaching tool, and a nostalgic artifact. There are 240 billion in circulation, so it’s not going anywhere too soon. Its image of Lincoln remains iconic, and its role in American lore is secure. But coins are meant to circulate, not linger as artifacts in our pockets and mason jars tucked away in a closet. The Treasury’s decision acknowledges that currency must serve the economy, not sentiment. The penny may be gone, but its mythology still jingles. Saving pennies seems almost pointless in our seemingly cashless world. At one time, we were “in for a penny, in for a pound,” but that pound costs a pretty penny, and the old adage asking for a “penny for your thoughts” now comes with a subscription fee. A hard job was “working for pennies,” while someone who was tight with their spending was a “penny pincher.” Some complain they don’t have “a penny to their name” but still maintain their oversized morning latte. Such a legacy reminds us that even in a world moving toward a cashless society, irony still holds value, especially when there are plenty of puns to spend my two cents on with no change required. READ MORE from Greg Maresca: Habits May Fade, the Marine Remains A Defining Search: Penn State’s Hunt for a New Coach The Faulty Idealism of the Anti-Wealth Brigade

Former British Prime Minister Harold McMillan was once asked what the hardest part of being Prime Minister had been. “Events, my dear boy, events,” he replied. It’s two weeks now since the most recent elections, and as I try to wrap my head around reams of fevered commentary about the implications for the 2026 and 2028 elections, I find my thoughts returning over and over again to McMillan’s observation. The issues that drove the most recent elections could well become irrelevant a few short months from now. We’re told, repeatedly, that the Democrats have broken the code for winning in 2026. They believe they’ve succeeded in painting Trump’s economic recovery as “disappointing,” they’ve accomplished the mind-bending feat of deflecting their own responsibility for the recent government shutdown, and they’ve seemingly buried the culture war issues under a mountain of BS, typically BS of the “but Trump” variety. Energy costs are dropping, and, most visibly, gas prices are down, but the knock-on benefits in terms of reduced cost for everything that must be grown or manufactured or shipped have not yet gained sufficient visibility. This, of course, reflects the persistent problem of leftist control of the media. We may be living in a new era of independence from the legacy media, but make no mistake — the legacy media still exerts a huge influence, and it is heavily invested in either minimizing or ignoring altogether the accumulating positive signs for the economy. Even Trump’s most important domestic policy achievement, his success in virtually shutting off the Biden-era flood of illegal immigration, now works against him. Success at the border means a shift in public attention to the knottier problem of what to do about the illegal immigrants already in the country. Unfortunately, and despite ICE’s focus on arresting the worst violent criminals, drug smugglers, and human traffickers, the narrative has been captured by “#BeKind” rhetoric, propagated insistently by all the usual suspects, including, sadly, the US Council of Catholic Bishops. Even our new American pope seems to be infected by this. Put it all together, and the message seems clear. As signaled this past November 5th, the Democrats are on a roll, and the Republicans are playing catch-up. Coupled with Donald Trump’s looming “lame duck” status, third term fantasies to the contrary notwithstanding, and the path ahead seems clear, and clearly depressing for those of us of a conservative bent. Both Democrat- and Republican-leaning commentators seem to be lining up behind the same vision. In 2026 the Democrats will flip the House, and the story of Trump’s presidency will become one of impeachment, impeachment 24/7, and nothing else. If the Republicans hold the Senate and refuse to actually impeach, then the Democrats will simply try again and again, a repetitive process that will consume every ounce of legislative energy and every inch of headline space. If by some chance the Democrats win the Senate as well, they will face the dilemma of arising from a J.D. Vance succession, but one suspects that’s a problem they would like to have. To further follow the emerging narrative, Democrat success in 2026 will cripple any chance for successful completion of the Trump agenda. With the exception of the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” virtually all of Trump’s signature achievements have been the result of executive orders, and even as many of these have reversed the actions of Obama and Biden, so, too, will they be vulnerable to reversal if Democrats capture the White House in 2028. We saw this, after all, when Biden won in 2020. As moribund as the legislative branch has become, permanent change still requires change in law, change not reversible at the stroke of the presidential pen — or, God help us, the auto-pen. It would be easy, then, for those of us of a conservative bent to give way in the present moment to doom and gloom. Instead, we might be better served by recognizing that “events” matter and are rarely predictable. Things may not turn out the way we’d like between now and 2026 or 2028, but they’re unlikely to follow a linear path to a leftist triumph. Even the most hastily assembled list of reminders suggests a different outlook. Start with perhaps the most obvious, the emergence of Donald Trump. In 2015, at the beginning of the serious political campaigning season, no one — I repeat, no one — confidently predicted that he’d win the Republican nomination. Even as the usual suspects fell by the wayside, the pundits, even conservative pundits, wondered at the notion that this improbable outsider candidacy might succeed. And even fewer predicted that, having earned the nomination, he would prevail against Hillary Clinton in the general election. The most delicious moments of that election night, the consternation of the James Carville’s, or watching Hillary slink away from the carefully staged “breaking the glass ceiling” victory party — these became delicious moments precisely because they were so unexpected. Love him or hate him, Republican and Democrat alike, none can deny that, a decade into Trump’s improbable journey, he stands like a colossus on the world stage, something no one predicted in 2015. Or consider the consequences of the October 7th Hamas atrocities. Few — including the much-vaunted Israeli intelligence services — predicted the attack. But fewer still predicted that from this horror would emerge a level of military resolution that succeeded in breaking Hamas, crippling Hezbollah, and humbling the mullahs of Iran. And after years of U.S. and European appeasement of Teheran’s nuclear ambitions, no one anticipated the moment when Israel would seize direct control of Iranian airspace, enabling American bombers to obliterate Iran’s nuclear facilities. A scant decade ago, no one predicted that the U.S. government would turn its back on climate change fanaticism to once again pursue both “drill baby drill” and a nuclear power renaissance. Nor did anyone predict that European governments would, however hesitantly and often dishonestly, begin their own quiet retreat from unachievable climate targets. The executives of the world’s major automobile companies, paid handsomely to see market trends five years down the road, now see their costly assumptions about future electric vehicle sales in ruins, no longer driven by left-wing government’s thumbs on the pricing scale. Even so short a backward glance should counsel humility about the political environment of the next two years. The same might be said of even a hesitant forward glance. The Ukraine war, which the experts predicted would end in weeks with a Russian victory, soon will enter its fourth year. Despite periodic flurries about “peace plans” or the internal collapse of either Ukraine or Russia, there is, frankly, no obvious quick end in sight. Despite much wishful thinking inside the Beltway and in the various European capitals, the objective conditions that might lead to a stable peace simply do not exist, and no one seems prepared to do the things necessary to bring these conditions about. More likely, the situation dissolves into chaos, with unpredictable consequences. The only likely aspect is that the chaos will reach far beyond the current borders of the conflict. We should also remind ourselves that, despite the ebb and flow of our own government’s policy toward China, certain things remain constant. We often make the mistake of listening to ourselves talking when it comes to China, because listening to the Chinese themselves, even when they speak in plain English, takes effort and is discomfiting. Notably, Xi Jinping has never deviated from the goal of “resolving” the Taiwan situation no later than 2027. We can tell ourselves that, somehow, we can avoid the consequences of such a “resolution,” but geopolitical and economic verities argue otherwise. None of the scenarios are comforting, not a Chinese naval blockade, not an all-out invasion, not Putinesque nuclear saber-rattling, not hybrid warfare waged on U.S. soil by Chinese cartel proxies or even Chinese agents themselves. And make no mistake — as I’ve sketched in my new novel, the Chinese would readily engage in manipulating the 2028 elections to serve their strategic purposes. It’s already evident that Chinese money is flowing to disruptive left-wing elements here in the U.S. These are just a few of the “known, unknowns.” More salient in considering the politics of the next two years are the “unknown, unknowns,” to borrow a phrase made famous by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld garnered contempt for many reasons, most of them justified, but the mockery attached to this phrase reflected the political establishment’s overweening hubris in the face of uncertainty. The so-called “experts” hate uncertainty, so much so that they insistently ignore their failed predictions even as they double down on them — witness Al Gore’s persistent — ludicrously persistent — climate change pessimism. We would do well, then, to not lose much sleep over the results of the most recent elections, nor to spend too much of our time trying to predict the results of 2026 or 2028. Small shifts can make a big difference in voter perception. Here in Virginia, for example, no one expected that the left’s pompous dismissal of parental rights would propel Glenn Youngkin to a narrow victory four years ago. And then there are the “Black Swans,” defined as “extremely rare, unpredictable occurrences that have severe, wide-ranging consequences.” The Covid-19 pandemic serves as a near-perfect example of a Black Swan event. Since first popularized by author Nassim Nicholas Taleb nearly two decades ago, the concept has been applied — or misapplied — to virtually any slightly surprising phenomenon, and library shelves have filled with tomes counseling businesses, investors, and government leaders on how to predict and overcome these events. This, of course, misses the point entirely. What seems predictable with hindsight originated as one of Rumsfeld’s “unknown, unknowns.” Instead of struggling to predict every contingency, we’d be better served to follow Taleb’s prescription, by focusing on “resiliency.” This is not as hard as it may seem, and, contrary to the naysayers, it doesn’t require vast expenditure to cover every conceivable scenario. Instead, we should view it as a thought process, a way of taking existing capabilities and bending them to fresh purposes. The B-2 stealth bomber and the bunker buster bombs weren’t conceived with the Iranian nuclear program in mind, but when the opportunity arose, they offered a “resilient” solution. Looking ahead to 2026 and 2028, what lessons should we draw? The issues that drove the most recent elections could well become irrelevant a few short months from now. If we want “political resiliency” then we’d best concentrate on solving today’s problems rather than guessing about the future. In an era marked by bloviating politicians whose sole attribute seems to be kicking cans and blaming others, real accomplishment will translate into electability. The real issue of public trust remains not just a lack of authenticity, but a demonstrated incompetence. The party that makes an honest effort to identify and solve problems in the present will be the party voters trust when unexpected “events” arise in the future. READ MORE from James H. McGee: Defending Nigeria’s Christians from Islamist Genocide Simple Decency Is on the Ballot in Virginia Remembering the True Victims of Injustice: Iryna, Logan, the Oltons James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. He’s just published his new novel, The Zebras from Minsk, the sequel to his well-received 2022 thriller, Letter of Reprisal. The Zebras from Minsk find the Reprisal Team fighting against an alliance of Chinese and Russian-backed terrorists, brutal child traffickers, and a corrupt anti-American billionaire, racing against time to take down a conspiracy that ranges from the hills of West Virginia to the forests of Belarus. You can find The Zebras from Minsk (and Letter of Reprisal) on Amazon in Kindle and paperback editions.

The ATF’s long record of abuses against American gun owners should be ample reason to strip the agency of its power — and its funding — but the recent government shutdown put yet another spotlight on why this hyperpolitical bureaucracy has no place in a free society. As Democrats held Congress hostage for 43 days, playing political chess with millions of their own constituents, American gun owners discovered their own Second Amendment rights were also being curtailed. Though the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) continued operating, much of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) — including the National Firearms Act (NFA) Division, the Firearm and Ammunition Technology Division (FATD), and the Federal Firearms Licensing Center (FFLC) — were understaffed or closed. (RELATED: When Public Service Really Matters) These divisions are imperative for enforcing every aspect of gun ownership laws and hold sway over how Americans utilize their Second Amendment rights. As a result, essential approvals and classifications ground to a halt — leaving gun owners stuck in legal limbo and unable to take possession of guns they’d already lawfully purchased. (RELATED: The Spiritual Roots of the Second Amendment) Manufacturers and dealers were hit just as hard, as new products couldn’t be classified, and federal firearms licenses (FFLs) couldn’t be renewed or processed. While it’s ordinary for “non-essential” departments to be shuttered during a shutdown, it is inconceivable to assume that would include a constitutionally protected right. If anything, it’s very telling of how the unelected bureaucrats behind the ATF view gun ownership. How has an agency with a hostile history towards firearm ownership continued to retain final say over a God-given right? This realization undeniably calls into question the legitimacy of the agency and highlights two very unavoidable questions: How has an agency with a hostile history towards firearm ownership continued to retain final say over a God-given right? And if the government shutdown can hinder the Second Amendment, are we truly free to defend ourselves and our republic against tyranny? Congressional Republicans, for their part, took well-intentioned steps toward fixing this problem even during the shutdown. Idaho Sen. James Risch (R) introduced the Firearm Access During Shutdowns Act of 2025 (SB 3085) in late October, while Virginia Rep. Ben Cline (R) introduced the Firearm Access During Shutdown Act (HR 5874). These bills would guarantee law-abiding citizens the ability to exercise Second Amendment rights regardless of the government’s funding status. While Risch, Cline, and 29 colleagues have the right idea, it’s the wrong execution — a band-aid for a bullet wound. The truth is that, even if these bills pass, this issue will come up again in the next government shutdown because the ATF is too easily weaponized. Many Americans are already aware of the sometimes-sinister nature of the government; take the CIA, for example. But what few realize is that the ATF is no different… just far less discussed. Time to Think Bigger Under the Biden administration, the ATF proved to be the White House’s weapon for circumventing gun rights numerous times. The agency, under the directive of President Joe Biden, implemented a “zero tolerance” policy that targeted FFL carriers for minor clerical errors. Instead of helping the FFL holders fix the issues, as a regulatory agency should, the ATF began to close stores at a rapid rate — creating a 16-year high for FFL revocations. Under Biden, the agency also began to rewrite rules and edit definitions for firearms. One rule redefined “Short Barrel Rifles” — a decision that effectively transformed millions of lawful gun owners into overnight felons if they didn’t pay a tax and comply with the ATF’s new rule. When the ATF’s horrific overreach does come up, we often recall Ruby Ridge, where U.S. Marshals and other federal agents killed a family in cold blood over the sale of two shotguns, or the Waco debacle, when the ATF launched a military-style assault on a religious group led by David Koresh — an operation that ended with 76 people burned alive. Yet too many conservatives delude themselves that such horrific actions won’t happen again. Our misplaced trust and naïve belief that the government won’t harm lawful gun owners is a blind spot, even on the America First Right. But we don’t have to look far to see a recent example of the ATF’s outrageous violence. In March 2024, the ATF sanctioned the killing of Brian Malinowski in cold blood, far exceeding its mandate as a regulatory agency. Malinowski was the 53-year-old executive director of the Bill & Hillary Clinton International Airport in Little Rock, Arkansas. By all accounts, he was a good father, faithful husband, and upstanding member of his community. Malinowski’s “sin” in the ATF’s eyes: He was an avid, legal gun collector, landing him on a government watch list. Around 6:00 AM on a frigid spring morning, ATF agents knocked on the Malinowskis’ front door, allowing Brian just 28 seconds to rise from his bed and open the front door before agents stormed inside — and fatally shot him. Their justification for treating Malinowksi like a terrorist: He had legally accumulated about 150 firearms over three years and engaged in transactions with fellow collectors. Malinowski, who may have believed he was defending his home from intruders in a state that honors the castle doctrine, should never have been placed in that position. The ATF could have simply called Malinowski or scheduled an interview if they believed he needed to clarify some of his purchases and transactions. The tragedy underscores a hard truth: the ATF remains the same rogue agency from Ruby Ridge and Waco, a regulator operating as a paramilitary organization. There’s certainly value in an agency capable of combating cartel activity and policing explosive devices. But that’s no reason to continue allowing an agency to block our Second Amendment rights if the government shuts down, or if Democrats unleash it on law-abiding citizens. The right to self-defense isn’t a privilege, but the bedrock of the Constitution. Our founding Declaration says we hold these truths to be self-evident. Until conservatives start acting that way, however, we’ll continue to watch those rights disintegrate. READ MORE from Bronson Winslow: Tesla Terror Attacks Show Americans Aren’t Buying the Left’s Fake ‘Grassroots’ Game Anymore Trump Struck a Blow for Gun Rights in 2024. Now We Must Make That Victory Permanent. Bronson Winslow is an investigative researcher for Restoration News covering gun control and crime policy.

Arguably the greatest MMA fighter of all time, Dagestani Khabib Nurmagomedov defined his strategy in the octagon: “I take people into deep waters and they discover themselves.” A century after its publication, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby does the same, plunging readers into the depths of human desire, ambition, and illusion, forcing us to confront ourselves, our restlessness, and the costs of living anywhere but the present. Gatsby is a cracked, hangover mirror that reflects a sober truth about who we are and what we might still be. The novel remains unsettlingly relevant. Fitzgerald assembles a dark work, a cautionary tale that exposes the perils of stalking shallow illusions. It throws harsh light on society’s hollowness and superficiality and stands as an elegiac testimony to America’s restless spirit. Gatsby is a cracked, hangover mirror that reflects a sober truth about who we are and what we might still be. At its core, the book warns us about the danger of living anywhere but the present — either in a utopian future or an idealized past — and hints, shyly, at a different path. (RELATED: The War on White Male Fiction Writers) Narrated by Nick Carraway, the novel tracks the two faces of Jay Gatsby and his compulsive pursuit of wealth, status, and the unattainable Daisy Buchanan. It exposes a void at the center of the so-called American Dream. The book flopped with critics and readers when it first appeared in 1925. But despite Fitzgerald’s claim that “there are no second acts in American lives,” Gatsby enjoyed just that. During World War II, the Red Cross handed pocket-sized copies of the novel to GIs, and in the postwar years, it gained critical acclaim from scholars like Lionel Trilling. Today, it is canonically cemented in syllabi and serves as a lodestar of twentieth-century American literature. Gatsby endures for myriad reasons. Foremost is its prose — wry, sophisticated, nostalgic, and syrupy smooth. Fitzgerald’s sentences lift off and then collide within the chaotic worlds of Long Island’s Gold Coast, Manhattan Island, and the downtrodden Valley of Ashes. They can be rhythmic — “there are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired” — hypnotic — “he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder” — and perfectly blunt: “Roaring noon.” To truly comprehend the novel, one should start at the end, with its iconic final four paragraphs — arguably the most breathtaking prose in American literature. Standing in front of Gatsby’s empty mansion and looking out over the Long Island Sound, Nick ponders “the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes.” In that moment, Fitzgerald fuses America and Gatsby into a single, lucid mirage. Nick imagines this stretch of shore as the place where the American Dream first blossomed and seems to want to linger forever in the “orgastic” and “transitory” moment when the continent “had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams … face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” But his satisfaction and happiness hover either in a vanished past or in some ever-receding future, never in the present moment. The ending primes the pump for the book’s meditative nature. It reframes its set pieces as variations on a single theme: illusion, restlessness, and the spiritual cost of refusing to live where you actually are. The answer comes in the novel’s central enigma: Why does Nick, an educated and perceptive young man, remain captivated by Gatsby, despite acknowledging his frailties — “There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams — not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion” — and his deceptions — “What part of the Middle West?” [Nick] inquired casually. “San Francisco.” It is Gatsby’s relentless hope, his audacious dreams, and his refusal to quit that hold Nick’s attention. Yet Nick recognizes that Gatsby’s whole persona is childish cosplay — a fantasy “that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent.” But Nick holds true, forever admiring the purity of Gatsby’s stubborn idealism that drives him forward … to his death in his swimming pool. Nick senses the fatal danger in his friend, the striving for something greater, despite the fact that he also knows that it is all vanity and deception and hollowness. Nick and the reader live in that tension, and it is supremely enchanting. Gatsby’s reckless pursuits collide with the seemingly grounded, comforting joys of Nick’s Midwestern past, especially as he remembers returning home by train at Christmas. The tone in this flashback buzzes with nostalgic warmth, edging toward Hallmark sentimentality, yet it holds back just enough to preserve its verisimilitude and show how powerful memory can be. We almost live inside the snow-globe beauty he evokes — the “chatter of frozen breath,” “long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands,” and “the real snow, our snow” — until he reaches the final crescendo: “That’s my middle-west — not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns but the thrilling, returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow.” Yet Nick’s sense of beauty and fellowship floats above the Midwestern hoi polloi who actually haul the wheat, milk the cows, and build those now lost Swede towns. His nostalgia edits them out. This blind spot paradoxically sparks his great epiphany: “I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all — Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.” He dimly grasps that their “deficiency” lies in trying to live as Eastern dreamers rather than Western realists, but he never fully accepts what that implies. Instead, he stays undyingly loyal to Gatsby’s “extraordinary gift for hope,” a loyalty that tempts him to abandon the present and live inside a utopian dream stretched between two opposing horizons — an idealized East and an idealized West. Nick has been dragged into deep waters too; he can name the danger, but he can’t quite renounce the dream. Caught between Gatsby’s fevered future and his own sentimental past, Nick never learns how to live in the present — but the novel does not leave us without a guide. Fitzgerald hides his answer in a nearly forgotten figure: Michaelis, the lowly coffee shop owner in the Valley of Ashes. Only Michaelis serves as an eyewitness, comforter, and moral guide, offering clarity and mercy amid tragedy. While the Buchanans retreat into money and Nick retreats into memory, he stays put in the Valley of Ashes. He sits with George Wilson through the long, awful night after his wife Myrtle’s death, makes him coffee, asks him questions, and tries to keep him from coming apart. When Wilson stares up at the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg and mutters, “God sees everything,” Michaelis sees what Wilson is looking at and is shocked, exclaiming, “That’s an advertisement.” In that moment, he offers the only honest theology in the book: that false gods do not see, do not judge, and do not save, exposing the hollowness of what we falsely revere. Michaelis has little money, no pedigree, no myth attached to his name, yet he behaves with a compassion and steadiness that no one from East Egg or West Egg could ever muster. Fitzgerald saw all this and staged a spectacle of false worship and self-destruction — Gatsby’s dream, Daisy’s carelessness, Tom’s brutality — and quietly set a humble man in their midst who simply stays, listens, and serves. If Gatsby shows us the danger of living entirely inside a fantasy, Michaelis shows us the modest, unglamorous habits that make real community and real mercy possible. This, finally, is what The Great Gatsby teaches us. Beware of mistaking longing for virtue, ambition for fulfillment, and restlessness for progress. The anxious striving that drives these characters — toward money, status, romance, reinvention — never lets them rest where they actually are. St. Francis de Sales warned of the same spiritual disease that consumes Fitzgerald’s characters. In his Introduction to the Devout Life, he writes, “Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsoever, even if your whole world seems upset… What is anything in comparison with the peace of heart?” All the major figures in Gatsby suffer from that anxiety, and it destroys them. Only Michaelis lives as St. Francis counsels: quietly, attentively, in the present, extending mercy instead of chasing illusion. A hundred years old, The Great Gatsby still takes us into deep waters and demands that we swim — not in pursuit of some shimmering green light fantasy on some distant dock, but in the difficult work of knowing ourselves. READ MORE from Pete Connolly: Yes, New York Times, A Christian Can Be Both Pro-Life and Pro-Secure Borders When Youth Sports Stopped Being Fun The Case for the Filibuster: A Check on Zeitgeist Impulses

Some of the finest works of architectural criticism in recent memory have been written in response to the existential cultural threat posed by modernism — Henry Hope Reed’s The Golden City (1959), Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House (1981), or Branko Mitrović’s Architectural Principles in the Age of Fraud (2021), to name just a few. Perhaps the most withering indictment of the modernist architectural movement is to be found in the Ulster-born architectural historian James Stevens Curl’s magisterial 2018 book Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism. Curl, in his own words, was attempting “to explain, expose, and outline the complex factors that have managed to create so many Dystopias in which, arguably, an ‘architecture’ devoid of any coherent language or meaning has been foisted on the world by cliques convinced they knew or know all the answers, yet demonstrated or demonstrate an incompetence with buildings that fail as architecture at almost every level and by almost every criterion.” In this, he succeeded marvelously, and if there ever comes a time when, to borrow a phrase from Plutarch, Poterunt discussis forte tenebris Ad purum priscumque iubar remeare nepotes [Then perhaps, with the darkness dispelled, Our descendants will be able to return to the pure radiance of the past] it will be thanks in no small measure to scholars like Curl, who sustained the architectural heritage of the past, and passed the torch of traditionalism on to new generations. I was very sorry to hear of the passing earlier this month of Professor James Stevens Curl, MRIA FSA FSA Scot FRIAS, at the venerable age of 88. Curl left behind an extraordinary body of scholarship, which began with The Erosion of Oxford (1977), a spirited inquiry into “how the fabric of the humbler buildings has deteriorated through blight, official policies. demolitions, and gradual changes.” He charted the deterioration of the Oxford cityscape in part through the comparison of before-and-after images that made clear the deleterious effect of harsh building styles, on-street parking, and all-around poor city planning. These sorts of juxtapositions would appear throughout Curl’s career, most memorably in his analysis of the decline of Belfast’s High Street, included in Making Dystopia, illustrating “the damage the Modern Movement could do to grain and character, typical of the way in which established geometries were destroyed by Modernist interventions that paid no heed whatsoever to context.” (RELATED: Bauhaus and the Cult of Ugliness) It was a trick he had learned from the great Gothic Revival architect Augustus Pugin, who employed that technique in his best-known work, the satirical, polemical 1836 treatise Contrasts: or a parallel between the noble edifices of the middle ages, and corresponding buildings of the present day; shewing the present decay of taste, and from Henry Hope Reed, who did likewise in The Golden City. But Curl was, to my mind, a far more perceptive and humane critic than the doctrinaire classicist Reed, who felt that, for example, the Smithsonian Institution was a “lamentable pseudo-Gothic error on the Mall.” Curl, the author of such works as Victorian Architecture (1990), The English Heritage Book of Victorian Churches (1995), Piety Proclaimed: An Introduction to Places of Worship in Victorian England (2002), and The Victorian Celebration of Death (2004), understood that the inventive, confident, and pious architects of the Gothic Revival gave us some of the most sublime architecture ever seen on either side of the Atlantic. There was something nefariously, even infernally destructive about many of these modernist architects and town planners. Curl’s cause célèbre, of course, was the counter-offensive against architectural modernism, on behalf not just of pure classicism but the Baroque, the Gothic Revival, the Arts and Crafts movements, and ornamentation and beauty in general. Like his contemporary, Sir Roger Scruton, he harbored a particular disdain for modernist heroes like Le Corbusier, an antisemite who in 1940 was positively giddy at the prospect that “Hitler can crown his life with a great work: the planned lay-out of Europe,” and Mies van der Rohe, whose resignation from Prussian Academy of Arts included a hearty “Heil Hitler!” below his signature. There was something nefariously, even infernally destructive about many of these modernist architects and town planners. Le Corbusier’s notorious “Plan Voisin” envisioned the wanton destruction of all the glories of downtown Paris, to be replaced by dystopian identikit skyscrapers, which no doubt would have begun to leak and crumble immediately, had they ever actually been built. The folly of “Plan Voisin” was rejected by the sensible Parisians, but in 1968, the imbecilic academic Patrick Abercrombie tried to do the same in London with his proposal to flatten all, yes, all of Covent Garden and throw up a hideous expanse of concrete towers. What Nazi bombers had failed to achieve, the modernists sought to carry out at their leisure in peacetime. Only a concerted preservationist campaign by local residents, local councillors, cultural figures like John Betjeman, and national heritage bodies like the Georgian Group managed to prevent an utter catastrophe for the city of London. Curl rightly saw the groundworks being laid for a veritable urban dystopia to be erected upon the ruins of a far superior civilization. As he wrote in his 2018 masterpiece, It became apparent that something very strange had occurred: an aberration, something alien to the history of humanity, something destructive aesthetically and spiritually, something ugly and unpleasant, something that was inhumane and abnormal, yet something that was almost universally accepted in architectural circles, like some fundamentalist quasi-religious cult that demanded total allegiance, obedience, and subservience. Right to the end, the Northern Irish critic fought back against this mad cult. In his last article, published by The Critic on November 2, 2025, only three days before his passing, Curl despaired of the extent to which the splendid architectural heritage of the Scottish people was being systematically betrayed. He launched one last salvo against Enric Miralles Moya and his botched Scottish Parliament Building: “for some weird reason he incorporated shapes based on upturned boats as part of the over-complicated roof-structure. Apart from the highly questionable logic of such allusions, the roofs leak, and still do.” He complained of the “excessive ‘wokery’, nannying, and insularity” on display in modern Scotland, evidenced not just in everyday politics but in the treatment of the monuments to the dead (a subject near and dear to Curl, who was a patron of the Mausolea and Monuments Trust and the President of the Friends of the Old Southampton Cemetery.) “Many tombstones and monuments,” Curl was sorry to report, are being toppled, just in case youthful vandals trying to push over memorials might get hurt, so local authorities do the pushing for them. This, together with absurd speed-limits, barriers, scaffolding, and much else of a prohibitive or restrictive nature, suggests a very disturbing tendency in contemporary Scotland that is essentially extremely destructive, a kind of suffocating, modern, controlling iconoclasm knocking the stuffing out of life itself. In this way have the Scottish, but not just the Scottish, authorities “committed an æsthetic crime, wrecking harmony, civilised environments, and the legacy of men and women far nobler and greater in every way than themselves.” There is no one who could have put it better. I will sorely miss Curl’s regular contributions to The Critic, and his book reviews, with their keen insight and curmudgeonly (but altogether endearing) complaints about the various deficiencies of captions, illustrations, and the print quality of Chinese presses. I will regret the lack of new books issuing from the wellspring of his creative mind, although it seems that at least one more treatise is on its way, a study entitled The Life & Work of Thomas Downes Wilmot Dearn (1777-1853), on the intriguing subject of a relatively obscure architect who produced such works as Designs for Lodges and Entrances to Parks, Paddocks and Pleasure Gardens (1811) and An Historical and Descriptive Account of the Weald of Kent (1814), a publication event to which I am very much looking forward, though not without a certain melancholia. All things considered, however, the passing of James Stevens Curl is no tragedy. He died full of years, survived by his loving wife, Professor Stanisława Dorota Iwaniec, and his daughters, Astrid and Ingrid. He left behind a truly remarkable corpus of criticism and a template for how to combat the demons of modernism that plague the professions of architecture and architectural criticism. His work is done, and ours continues. It would be altogether appropriate to conclude this obituary, this necrologue, this celebration of a great man’s work, with some words from John Ruskin, the Victorian critic who represented a powerful touchstone for Curl’s own scholarship: “Work first and then rest. Work first, and then gaze…” Mortui vivos docent READ MORE from Matthew Omolesky: The White House East Wing Renovations: Exorcizing the Daemons of Modernism Some Dare Call It Treason G is for Gorey

A little more than 40 years ago, the esteemed editor-in-chief of this journal, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., penned an instant classic titled The Liberal Crack-Up. It was the most accurate and most devastating critique of liberalism since James Burnham’s Suicide of the West. And it was a lot funnier. It began with a chapter on the hapless Jimmy Carter, who Tyrrell dubbed “the Wonderboy” and “the worst president of the twentieth century,” and ended with identifying liberals’ “one sublime goal that unites all the diverse enthusiasts: … to disturb their neighbors.” Yet, Tyrrell presciently warned that, despite their idiocy, if the liberals’ “dominance of the cultural and intellectual life of the Republic is not broken,” we would share the fate of the Greeks and Romans, i.e., civilizational decline. (RELATED: The Liberal Crack-Up) In the book, Tyrrell examined in a serious but sometimes hilarious way Liberalism’s devolution from the Age of Roosevelt to “New Age” Liberalism, which sought an escape from the normal. He described the liberals’ journey as beginning with a “concern for society and progress” and ending “with petty personal indulgences,” “diminished freedoms,” and “expanded absurdities.” Our government, he wrote, “became a hectored, driven nanny, ministering to a host of louts, all of whom were ingrates and some of whom were obvious morons.” The liberals “botched” civil rights and welfare as part of what they called the Great Society, Tyrrell explained. Our government, he wrote, “became a hectored, driven nanny, ministering to a host of louts, all of whom were ingrates and some of whom were obvious morons.” (I told you it was funny). Affirmative action quotas replaced equal rights. Feminism disdained motherhood and male masculinity. Victimhood became all the rage, usually followed by a demand for federal dollars and special preferences. The federal government assumed the duties of fatherhood for generations of the underclass. The liberals’ foreign policy was no better. The Vietnam War, Tyrrell noted, was the liberals’ war deliberately fought to indecision by Robert McNamara and his whiz kids. Tyrrell characterized liberal foreign policy as a “combination of Wilsonian fustian and he-man bellicosity.” And then the liberals blamed it on Nixon. And when Nixon, who understood the world, was chased from office, we ended up with the insufferable and amateurish Carter administration, and the “correlation of forces” shifted in the Soviets’ favor until Ronald Reagan put an end to that. The Liberal Crack-Up described in Tyrrell’s book included environmental extremism, anti-nuclear apocalypticism, extreme feminism, enthusiasm for the Third World, the so-called “peace movement” that always, to borrow Jeane Kirkpatrick’s phrase, blamed America first, economic illiteracy, and egalitarianism. Tyrrell’s book was a damning indictment of 60s, 70s, and early 80s liberalism. But compared to the liberalism, or should I say, the progressivism, of today, the first Liberal Crack-Up seems almost quaint. Today’s Liberal Crack-Up includes enthusiasms that Bob Tyrrell would never have imagined 40 years ago. The Liberal Crack-Up 2.0 includes a preference for illegal aliens over American citizens; the promotion of transgender lifestyles; the proliferation of previously unimagined genders; drag queen shows for kids; the widespread use of he/she, they/them pronouns; the redefinition of marriage; the hatred of American nationalism and traditional Christianity; the promotion of political violence against conservatives and actual political violence against conservatives; Trump Derangement Syndrome; politicized science; institutionalized Diversity, Equity and Inclusion; and worshipping wokeness. (RELATED: A Passionate Defense of Christian Nationalism ) The first Liberal Crack-Up reached its nadir with the presidency of Jimmy Carter and resulted in the corrective Reagan presidency. Liberal Crack-Up 2.0 manifested itself in the Obama–Biden presidencies and resulted in the corrective Trump presidency. But, as Bob Tyrrell warned more than 40 years ago, the liberal/progressive dominance of our cultural and intellectual life still threatens civilizational decline. Conservative political restorations will only be episodic until the liberal/progressive cultural/intellectual dominance is brought to an end. READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa: National Review Turns 70 Trump Revives the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine Armistice Day on the Western Front and in Russia

Sacramento — California officials are adamant about regulating the emerging Artificial Intelligence industry even though most of the world’s top AI companies are based here. A heavy-handed approach toward this burgeoning industry will not only harm the state’s economy, but the national one as well given that California’s huge market makes our regulations the de facto national standard. That’s why it’s refreshing to see the Trump administration, which is hardly a bastion of laissez-faire thinking, take a hands-off stance on this important issue. My point: When it comes to technology, the state has a long track record of failure. As CalMatters reported this week, the Trump administration and congressional Republicans have angered California officials by circulating a draft executive order that attempts to limit the ability of states to pass their own AI rules. The president proposes creating a litigation task force with the sole responsibility of challenging state regulations. “American AI companies must be free to innovate without cumbersome regulation,” the draft EO explained. “But state legislatures have introduced over 1,000 AI bills that threaten to undermine that innovative culture. California, for example, recently enacted a complex and burdensome disclosure and reporting law premised on the purely speculative suspicion that AI might ‘pose significant catastrophic risk.’” That’s a correct read on what’s going on. It’s awfully hard for a company to innovate if it faces an avalanche of proposed rules in 50 legislatures. This is a good sign given that the Republican-controlled Senate last year killed a measure that would have passed a 10-year moratorium on state AI controls. So far, California Gov. Gavin Newsom has taken a moderate course on such bills. Last session, he vetoed the most noxious one: Assembly Bill 1064 would have prohibited companies “from making a companion chatbot available to a child unless the companion chatbot is not foreseeably capable of doing certain things that could harm a child.” Heaven knows how a company or government agency could determine whether an algorithm is “foreseeably capable” of doing “certain things” that could lead to a child’s “harm.” That’s insanely broad and imprecise language that would lead to endless litigation. AI is arguably the most complex innovation the world has ever seen, so it’s mind boggling to suppose that bureaucrats in some Sacramento office, or judges in the civil court system, could parse out the foreseeability of doing potential harm. Talk about a bill based in hubris. But, as I wrote for The American Spectator last month, “Unfortunately, [Newsom] has signed several AI-related bills (including some problematic ones) and dozens of others will surely make their way to his desk next year. In effect, Newsom and the California Legislature are now making AI policy for the entire nation instead of Congress, which is extremely troubling for the future of the industry.” Other states — and not solely liberal ones — will likewise hobble the industry with their own peculiar concerns. The president is rightly worried this will propel China into the forefront of this technology. In a letter to congressional leadership cited by CalMatters, California Attorney General Rob Bonta made what sounds like a reasonable argument not to pre-empt state AI regulations: “Preemption of state AI laws would undermine these and similar efforts across the country to enact common sense guardrails on AI, and deny all Americans the benefits of state-led experimentation and progress in this rapidly evolving space. Any federal AI law should serve as a floor, not a ceiling, preserving flexibility for states to go further where necessary to protect their residents.” Most Americans have no problem with “common sense guardrails” on this powerful technology, especially to protect children from deception and abuse. Furthermore, states are indeed the laboratories of democracy. As a believer in federalism, I usually defer to the states to come up with their own rules, then the rest of the nation can get out the popcorn and watch how it plays out from afar. Sadly, California’s laboratory usually serves as evidence of what the other 49 states should avoid, but such is life in our decentralized system. Bonta’s argument doesn’t work when it comes to a technology that is national or really international in nature. California is essentially doing with AI as it always does with environmental law and labor policy by trying to write laws for the nation, which isn’t real federalism. As my R Street colleague and AI expert Adam Thierer explained in his congressional testimony in September: The Constitution assigns Congress the lead role in protecting interstate commerce. The Founders wisely provided Congress with this power so that it could facilitate commerce between the states by eliminating barriers that states might otherwise be inclined to erect if left to their own devices. It is essential that Congress exercise that responsibility promptly to ensure the robust development of the national AI marketplace. And allow me two slight detours. First, some San Francisco officials have been pushing for the Legislature to let localities determine their own rules to regulate self-driving taxis such as Waymo after one of those robotaxis ran over a beloved neighborhood cat. As I pointed out in my newspaper column, 5.4 million cats are run over each year, with 5,399,999 from the wheels of human drivers. Autonomous Vehicles are indeed a form of AI, and offer myriad life-saving benefits for critters and, most important, for human beings given that they are better drivers than people. California’s lawmakers understand that the state can’t allow every one of its 483 municipalities and 58 counties to impose their own driving rules or bans if we hope to see this technology take off. The Legislature has killed efforts to let the locals dictate state driving policy, so likewise the feds need to tamp down on state efforts to dictate technology policy. Second, a recent Sacramento Bee investigation revealed that California’s state government spent $450 million since 2019 to revamp its antiquated 911 systems and several years later found the system didn’t work. The state is coming up with yet another new system that will take years and many more millions of dollars to implement. My point: When it comes to technology, the state has a long track record of failure. The 911 system is far less complex than AI. Who would trust the state to know what it’s doing regarding AI systems? The feds should go with their instincts, get the government out of the way and let the AI market evolve. If there’s a need for “common sense” rules, then let Congress do it for the whole country, rather than let California and other states constantly move the goal posts in a haphazard manner. READ MORE from Steven Greenhut: LA Is Destroying Its Housing Market California’s Hypocrisy on Property Rights Post Prop. 50, California GOP Needs Reality Check Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.