There was a sizable crowd gathered, but at a bit of a distance. People were taking photos, and people politely lined up and encouraged each group to take their time posing by the statue before the next people came in. The mood was reverent, but pleasant: These were people there to pay their respects, not simply to mourn, and one way to respect Dolly was to be nice to the other people who were there for the same purpose.

Every business had signs up, mostly on the theme of “we will always love you” (as shown above). Flags everywhere were at half-staff. Dolly meant a lot to a lot of people, and a lot more to people from Tennessee, and more still to people from East Tennessee (a very distinct region, one of the three “grand divisions” in the state, which have very real cultural, and to some degree legal, identities). And more still, of course, to the people of her hometown, which she never forgot, and which will never forget her.

Dolly’s rags-to-riches story was a real one — though she did get a boost from her uncle Bill Owens, a fairly successful Nashville songwriter who spotted her talent early and did what he could to promote her early on — and that story resonated with the people of her town. Even more important was her generosity, both spiritual — she never forgot her roots, and never disrespected her town, her state, or the South — and financial, as Dolly was there for her community in good times and bad. Dollywood has brought over a billion dollars to Sevierville, providing jobs galore and more. When Hurricane Helene devastated East Tennessee she and her businesses donated 2 million dollars to the victims. When wildfires struck her community, she raised 9 million dollars to help: “After the 2016 wildfires in Sevier County, where Parton grew up, her My People Fund raised nearly $9 million to help families who lost their homes. Families received $1,000 a month to help them get back on their feet. The fund also later provided $200,000 to local volunteer fire departments and their training center.”

She made a huge donation to the Knoxville-based East Tennessee Children’s Hospital, which is now known as the Dolly Parton Children’s Hospital. The renaming was scheduled for the day after her death. Literally millions of children have gotten books from her Imagination Library. As Mary Katharine Ham writes, generosity, along with gratitude, was her defining characteristic — not only financial generosity, but a generosity of spirit that was where the financial generosity came from.

People hearing you’re from East Tennessee usually ask if you know Dolly. I never knew her except in her public persona. I only met her once, very briefly, in the 1980s. I was staying at the Plaza hotel, and her corner suite was only a few doors down from my room. We were getting to our doors at the same time and I recognized her (it wasn’t hard). She could see that recognition and smiled at me and said “I hope you had a good night.” I thought she looked tired, and that that was, well, generous of her. Aside from my high school coach who had dated her when they were in high school together, that’s my only connection.

But you can’t live in East Tennessee, or in America, or really a lot of places in the world, without having a connection to Dolly Parton.

Goodbye, Dolly. We’re grateful for your time here.

The old ads used to say “it takes two hands to handle a Whopper.” But not anymore. Part of that is because my hands are quite large. Also, they now present it in a wrap for easy holding.

As you can see, it fits comfortably, at least in my oversized mitts. And it’s a good-looking burger. Compared to the old Whopper, the presentation is much better. The box means it arrives un-smushed, the garden looks fresh and healthy, the bun is a bit more substantial, and the cheese and ketchup stand out attractively. Visually, it’s a big improvement over the old Whopper.

But take a bite and, at least in my opinion, it’s not as good. I mean it’s fine, it’s a decent burger. But the substantial bun is (by design) kind of sweet. I don’t like that. I don’t like brioche buns and this is halfway there. They’ve changed the mayo and the “upgrade” is a downgrade to me. The old mayo was nicely tangy, the new one is kinda flavorless.

The tomatoes, pickles, onions, etc. are good — the grilled fresh onions are an upgrade — but worst of all, the meat is a big step down. My burger had not a trace of the flame-broiled taste I associate with a Whopper. Its primary overtone was saltiness. Between that and the flavorless mayo, I found the whole burger disappointingly bland.

Your results may differ — maybe you like bland burgers — but the new Whopper doesn’t deliver what I’m looking for when I order a Whopper. And while I don’t crave a Whopper super often, it’s a bit sad that now I won’t be able to get what I crave when I do.

Maybe I’ll wait a while and try again, but I’m disappointed. But hey, if that’s the worst disappointment I face this month, I’m doing okay.

Fill in your views in the comments!

I asked Grok “Based on the columns in the linked archive, what news topics should I write a column about today and what should the column argue?” I included a link to my column archive at the NY Post. Grok responded with three topics:

Strong fit for today (August 10, 2026): Democratic socialists / Mamdani-style power grabs in blue cities/statesCurrent NY Post opinion coverage highlights “democratic socialists” acting like communists once in office and Mamdani testing legal/institutional limits to push an agenda in New York. This aligns tightly with Reynolds’ July piece on socialists preying on apathy (even in unexpected places) and earlier critiques of left institutional capture, enemies lists, and Cuba-style hypocrisy.

Argue: Once elected, “democratic socialists” predictably abandon democratic norms and treat institutions as tools for permanent ideological control rather than neutral public services—exactly as history and their own actions show. Low-turnout or captured local politics let them expand power while voters remain distracted or apathetic; the result is economic damage, eroded rule of law, and migration of taxpayers/businesses. Taxpayers and legislators should stop subsidizing the enabling ecosystems (universities, NGOs, soft enforcement) and demand accountability before the model spreads. Practical pushback (like Trump-era pressure tactics or simple enforcement) works better than elite hand-wringing.

Secondary strong fits

• Iran / Strait of Hormuz leverage and “semi-negotiating.” Current reporting shows Iran issuing demands (lift blockade/sanctions, withdraw forces, reparations) while the U.S. watches its economic pain; UAE reports related attacks. This maps to Reynolds’ “anaconda” economic squeeze columns and skepticism of expert bluster.
  Argue: Trump-style economic and strategic pressure (not endless expert-managed process or premature concessions) is correctly squeezing a regime that has long threatened the U.S. and allies. Ignore the predictable “war crime”/escalation hysterics from the usual experts; results matter more than process theater, and America’s adversaries respond to strength and cost imposition.

• Higher education / expert-class credibility after the Fauci column. Campuses remain a recurring target in his archive.
  Argue: The same institutional groupthink and politicization that produced Fauci-era overreach continues to hollow out universities; as public trust and enrollment erode, the left loses a key power pillar, and taxpayers/parents should accelerate the reckoning rather than prop it up.

Any of these stay in Reynolds’ lane: punchy, anti-elite, focused on incentives and revealed preferences over stated ideals, and oriented toward practical restoration or constraint of overreaching power. The socialist/institutional takeover angle is the most immediate match to both his recent output and today’s visible NY Post conversation.

Image generated by Grok.

Next, I asked Grok to write those columns. Here’s what it came up with (I did introduce New York Post-style paragraph breaks):

Column 1: Democratic socialists and the Mamdani model. Once “democratic socialists” get power, the democracy part evaporates faster than a New York summer. Look at Zohran Mamdani’s New York City. Elected on promises of affordability and justice, he’s moved with impressive speed to lock in the permanent machinery of control: rent freezes on hundreds of thousands of apartments, a pied-à-terre tax aimed at the wealthy, city-run grocery stores, and a thicket of new offices and czars staffed by the reliable.

This isn’t governance. It’s capture. Mamdani’s first acts included wiping out his predecessor’s late executive orders and installing loyalists. He pushed a “Block by Block” housing plan heavy on preservation and expansion of rent regulation. The Rent Guidelines Board, stacked with his appointees, delivered the freeze. Albany handed him tools—pension restructuring, delayed class-size mandates, more mayoral control of schools.

The message is clear: institutions exist to serve the ideology, not the other way around. We’ve seen this movie. Socialists talk about democracy when they’re out of power and treat it as an inconvenience once they’re in. Low-turnout elections and primary systems give the disciplined minority its opening. Then the real work begins: rewriting rules, creating parallel bureaucracies, and making reversal expensive.

City grocery stores sound folksy until you realize they’re another lever for political distribution and another competitor to the actual private sector that keeps shelves stocked. Rent freezes feel compassionate until the housing stock deteriorates and new construction stalls. The pattern is older than Mamdani. From municipal experiments a century ago to more recent DSA gains in unexpected places, the playbook is consistent. Mobilize the committed few. Exploit apathy. Then institutionalize.

Plato warned that those who ignore politics will be ruled by their inferiors. Today the inferiors arrive with better organization and zero attachment to the norms that restrain everyone else. New Yorkers who thought they were voting for cheaper rent and better services are discovering the secondary effects. Businesses and higher earners notice the signals. The tax base that funds the programs begins looking for exits. Services that depend on competence rather than ideology start to fray. Meanwhile the rhetoric remains pure: it’s always the rich, the landlords, the residual capitalist holdouts who stand in the way of paradise.

This is not unique to New York. Blue cities and states that elect the hard left repeatedly discover that “democratic” is a temporary adjective. The goal is not better management of the existing system; it is transformation of the system so that future majorities cannot easily undo the work.

Charter revisions, commission packing, and creative new agencies are the tools of choice. Taxpayers and parents should stop treating this as quirky local color. The same forces that hollowed out universities and turned federal agencies into ideological fiefdoms are now operating at the municipal level with fewer constraints.

The answer is not more elite hand-wringing. It is higher turnout, aligned election dates that make it harder for the radical 7 percent to dominate, and a refusal to subsidize the enabling institutions. Mamdani is not an aberration. He is the logical product of a politics that rewards intensity over numbers and treats institutions as spoils. Once that logic takes hold, the democracy that delivered the office becomes an obstacle to be managed.

History is littered with examples. We should stop pretending this time will be different. No more illusions. The socialists are not confused about what they want. The only question is whether the rest of us remain too apathetic to notice until the machinery is fully in place. (Approximately 750 words)

Column 2: Iran, Hormuz, and the economic anaconda, President Trump is “low-keying it” with Iran, and the usual experts are having fits. Tehran has issued a maximalist list of demands before it will reopen the Strait of Hormuz: lift the naval blockade, withdraw U.S. forces, pay war reparations, release frozen assets, end sanctions, and permanently stop actions against its regional proxies.

Trump’s response has been to point at Iran’s collapsing currency and soaring inflation and essentially say, “We’ll wait.”

This is not weakness. It is pattern recognition. Iran has spent decades threatening the region, funding proxies, and treating international norms as optional. Closing Hormuz was always a high-risk play. The waterway matters to global energy markets, which means it matters to American consumers and to every economy that buys oil. But regimes that live by blackmail eventually discover the costs of their own leverage. Trump’s approach treats the problem as a business proposition rather than a seminar on international law.

Squeeze the revenue. Watch the rial crater. Let internal pressure do some of the work that airstrikes only partially accomplish. The “anaconda” strategy—economic constriction rather than theatrical escalation—has the virtue of aligning incentives with reality. Iran’s leadership can posture all it wants; empty coffers and angry populations are harder to ignore than another round of carefully calibrated statements from Foggy Bottom.

The experts, of course, prefer process. They want summits, phased sanctions relief, and carefully worded memoranda that collapse the moment one side decides the optics have changed. We’ve watched this cycle for years. Iran pockets concessions, reconstitutes its nuclear program or proxy networks, and returns to the table with higher demands. The current list—reparations included—is simply the latest iteration.

Trump’s willingness to sit tight while the economic pressure mounts frustrates the permanent class because it rejects their preferred vocabulary. “Semi-negotiating” is not a term of art in the foreign-policy journals. It is, however, a description of a strategy that refuses to pretend the other side is acting in good faith.

When the other side’s currency is trash and its inflation is crushing ordinary Iranians, time is not necessarily on Tehran’s side. None of this requires romanticizing force or ignoring risks. Shipping disruptions raise prices. Regional allies feel the heat. But the alternative—endless talks that reward maximalism—has already been tested to failure.

Iran’s demand for compensation for the very conflicts it helped fuel is peak regime logic: inflict costs, then bill the victim. The United States has leverage precisely because energy markets and financial systems still run on rules Iran did not write.

Using that leverage without constant kinetic theater is not isolationism. It is prioritization. Let the internal contradictions of a theocratic petro-state do some of the heavy lifting.

Critics will call this dangerous. They always do when the preferred tools of managed decline are set aside. Yet the record of expert-managed engagement with Iran is not encouraging. Trump’s bet is that regimes respond more reliably to empty treasuries than to carefully calibrated diplomatic language. Early evidence suggests the bet is not crazy. Watch the rial. Watch the streets in Tehran. And ignore the people who have been wrong about this for decades. Strength is sometimes the willingness to wait while the other side’s position deteriorates. (Approximately 750 words)

Column 3: Higher education’s long-overdue reckoning. Higher education is finally getting the comeuppance it earned. Enrollment has been soft for years. Closures and mergers are accelerating. Public confidence has cratered. And the same institutional habits that produced the Fauci-era “science is settled” groupthink continue to alienate the people who once funded and attended these places without question.

This is not a sudden crisis. It is the delayed bill for decades of mission creep, political monoculture, and administrative bloat. Universities stopped treating themselves as centers of open inquiry and started acting like ideological finishing schools with luxury amenities. Parents and taxpayers noticed. Employers noticed. Students who graduated with debt and diminished skills noticed.

The enrollment cliff—demographic decline in the traditional college-age population—was always coming. What no one fully priced in was the simultaneous collapse in trust. When large majorities of Americans say higher education is headed in the wrong direction, the product has a problem. Elite schools still attract applicants, but the broader sector is feeling the squeeze: small private colleges closing, discount rates climbing past 50 percent, international enrollment under pressure, and state legislators asking harder questions about subsidies.

The deeper issue is cultural. Campuses that treated dissent as violence, elevated identity over competence, and enforced orthodoxy on everything from climate to race to gender produced graduates and research that many Americans no longer respect. The same dynamic that let a long-tenured bureaucrat like Fauci treat science as personal property operates inside university departments and administrative offices.

Groupthink is not a bug; it became a feature. Alternative hypotheses get sidelined. Critics get investigated. The result is slower progress and lower credibility. Lysenkoism is the historical cautionary tale, but we don’t need Soviet agriculture to see the pattern. When institutions reward conformity over evidence, they eventually pay for it in relevance and resources.

American higher education is discovering that prestige is not infinite and that public subsidies are not an entitlement. Reform will not come from inside the guild. It will come from declining applications, state budgets that tighten, and employers who stop treating the degree as a reliable signal. Some schools will adapt—cutting administrators, restoring viewpoint diversity, focusing on actual skills.

Others will close. That is how markets, even heavily subsidized ones, eventually clear. Taxpayers and parents should accelerate the process rather than prop up the status quo. Why continue writing blank checks to institutions that treat half the country as moral defectives? Why subsidize research enterprises that suppress inconvenient findings? The Fauci episode was a symptom of a broader disease: concentrated power plus ideological capture produces arrogance and error. Higher education has both in abundance. The good news is that the correction is underway. Declining enrollment and rising skepticism are the market’s way of saying the product no longer justifies the price. The institutions that survive will be the ones that remember their actual purpose: the pursuit of truth through open argument, not the enforcement of a political line. Everything else is optional, and increasingly unaffordable. The comeuppance is not cruelty. It is accountability arriving several decades late. (Approximately 750 words)

Well. My authorial vanity has no boundaries. (No, really. I know fine writers who cringe at reading their own stuff later. I read things I wrote decades ago and am like “nailed it!”) That may be (may be?) evidence of an inflated ego, but it’s an important motivational factor for me. And my vanity would stop me from submitting any of these as actual columns under my own name, along with a vague sense that it would probably be some sort of weaseling.

That said, these really aren’t bad. They sound a bit like me on tone and more like me on substance — not surprising, as the “training set” for this particular assignment was my own columns on similar topics — and while I think my actual writing has more panache, I think you could run these in most any paper without them being obviously out of place.

Am I being too easy on the AI? Or — more disturbing — is my authorial vanity stopping me from recognizing that these columns are actually better than my own work? Answer in the comments.

Way back in the early aughts, Richard Bennett had an automated RSS reader setup he called “robopundit.” I recall him saying it was going to replace InstaPundit, and I responded that I would be happy to be replaced by a robot.* Nowadays, in 2026, I’d modify that to “I would be happy to be replaced by a robot — so long as I get royalties.” I have learned — information wants to be paid!

*(I remember this interchange clearly, but I can’t find it in my archives, which don’t work very well for the early aughts.)

So am I in danger of being replaced by a robot? And if not this year, next year? Remember, the machines keep getting better, and people (in this case, it’s me, I’m the people in question) stay pretty much the same. And in fact I tried this same experiment about a year ago and the results were much more wooden. Instead of a Turing Test, the Reynolds Test would be when Grok could write a column that I couldn’t tell from one of my own. . . .

Anyway, weigh in below. And reminder: If you like these essays, please take out a paid subscription, or make a one-time donation here. I’ll appreciate it, especially if I’m soon to be replaced by robots.

UPDATE: My actual editor from the Post texts: “On another note, I don’t think those Grok columns sound the least bit like you! Not a single set of parentheses (dead giveaway lol) and littered with those annoying Grokian “not this / it’s that” constructions. You’re way better than that, man, c’mon.”

I accept this criticism/praise. Especially the praise part.

InstaPundit turned 25 on Saturday.

I didn’t mean for it to last this long. When I started InstaPundit, it was just the latest in a series of Internet ventures, ranging from Internet radio stations, and bands, on MP3.com, to RaveRights.com, an electronic music civil-rights site I set up because the DEA was at the time prosecuting raves under the so-called “crack house law,” which criminalizes owning or operating a building for the purpose of taking drugs. (The DEA took the position that no one would go to raves for the music, so they must be there for the drugs.) That site was quickly replaced by the Electronic Music Defense Fund, a nonprofit funded by musician Moby, but I did work with the ACLU on a friend-of-the-court brief in a New Orleans case, where I explained the nature and background and audience of electronic music.

So then I started a blog. I still remember following a link from Slate to Mickey Kaus’s then-new blog Kausfiles. I was struck by how seamless it was – one second you were on an expensive site funded by Microsoft, then with a single click you were on an independent journalism site funded by an individual – and it looked every bit as slick and professional. Still, my RaveRights experience involved web design and maintenance using a program called DreamWeaver, which wasn’t very user-friendly, to put it mildly, and that didn’t make me want to start a new site. (Anyone out there remember DreamWeaver?)

Then Slate was taken in by a minor hoax involving “monkeyfishing,” in which Cajuns allegedly caught wild monkeys living on an island in the Mississippi Delta using baited hooks cast into the trees. That lead to the creation of a short-lived blog of journalistic criticism called Monkeyfishing, and when I followed a link to the blog it was “powered by Blogger” and hosted on Blogger’s own site, Blogspot. An ad invited me to start my own blog in 15 minutes, and that’s literally how long it took to set up the initial version of InstaPundit. Instead of composing stuff in an unfriendly piece of software and then uploading to a server, the Blogger/Blogspot combination meant I could compose and publish on the Web. At the time, in the summer of 2001, that was revolutionary.

I had been a regular and prominent commentator on Slate’s discussion board, The Fray, for quite some time, and the Slate editors were quick to include InstaPundit in their “Me-Zine Central” directory, at which point I thought I had really made it. I remember by late August I was talking with a colleague about my traffic, at the time around 200-300 visits per day, and we both thought that was a lot.

Links from Slate, Virginia Postrel, and James Taranto’s Best of the Web feature at the Wall Street Journalboosted traffic, and by September 10, 2001, I had reached the heady heights of 1500+ visits per day. The next day was September 11, 2001, and everything changed. . . .

Well, we’ll soon hit the 25th anniversary of 9/11 and in many ways that will be the true 25th anniversary of InstaPundit. InstaPundit started out looking a lot like the “Notes” section at the front of The New Republic, or — and this column was a big influence on me in my youth, as one of the relatively few 14-year-olds who subscribed to Forbes — Malcolm S. Forbes’ “Fact and Comment” column in every issue of that magazine: Short one-or-two paragraph comments on things, but mine came with a link.

In the early days the blog was more focused on tech and pop culture. I remember linking to an article on who had the best abs at the Video Music Awards — I backed Alicia Keys — and similar stuff. However, some later InstaPundit themes appeared: I had a post titled “Blood and Iron” about donating blood and life expectancy, and there were numerous posts on FBI and Secret Service incompetence and wrongdoing, which are themes that persist to this day.

But after 9/11 InstaPundit became a “warblog,” as they were called then. (A term that had some cachet for a while, with Charlie Stross including a famous warblogger in his book Iron Sun.) In a way it still is; we’re not just in a war with Al Qaeda now, but a war for western civilization.

Along the way there were podcasts — the late, lamented Glenn and Helen Show, which I really enjoyed, several years with PJTV, and various columns for TechCentralStation, the Washington Examiner, USA Today, nearly a decade of columns in Popular Mechanics, and now the New York Post.

Me, covering the 2008 Republican National Convention for Pajamas TV (later PJTV).

But always there was the blog. Behind everything there was the blog. Most of my ideas came from the blog, even when they appeared in columns, podcasts or TV shows. Many of the ideas on the blog came from readers who emailed me, or, later, commented on posts. And it’s still here. As I said in my brief anniversary observation on Saturday, I never expected to do this for 25 years, and I can’t promise I’ll still be doing it in 25 more. But I can’t promise that I won’t be, either.

So what are some takeaways from my experience?

First, I love the readers. The comment section on InstaPundit today has gotten a bit . . . crotchety compared to the old days, but there are still lots of people whose comments I treasure, and who I feel like I know. (And a few that I actually do know in person). Over the years I’ve met a number of readers and that’s been universally a delight. This goes to #2:

Second, there are an awfully lot of smart people out there, and many of them are to be found outside of traditional “smart people” jobs. I get emails from over the road truckers (Gerald Dearing used to send me a lot of stuff, now he’s on X), farmers, soldiers, stay-at-home moms and more, filled with keen observations and insight. One of the big lessons of the past twenty five years is that the preening self-regard of the laptop class is largely unjustified. There’s a lot of ignored wisdom out there.

Third, speaking of the laptop class, the press is much, much worse than I thought it was at the beginning of this exercise, and I was pretty skeptical about the press then. (And old girlfriend switched from journalism to PR because, she said, PR was “more honest.”) But hoo boy today the amount of outright conscious agenda-based lying, not just “spin” or “bias,” is off the charts. This turned up with Rathergate, when CBS deliberately tried to pass off forged National Guard documents as a real smoking gun about George W. Bush’s Vietnam record, and who can forget when the Boston Globe ran alleged pictures of gang rape by U.S. soldiers in Iraq that actually came from a porno site? And it’s only gotten worse.

The Rathergate memo, allegedly from 1973, matched a default format in Microsoft Word.

One thing that has changed is that the press used to have some shame when it was caught. Nowadays it often either ignores the critics or doubles down.

But the truth comes out, nowadays usually on X.

And in some ways, InstaPundit has been obsoleted by X, though I prefer to think of the blog as “classic,” not old. The formats have a lot in common — people used to joke that InstaPundit was tweets before there were tweets, and that’s not crazy.

At any rate, what a long, strange trip it’s been. Many of you have been here for all or most of it, and I appreciate your company along the way. Thanks.

[And if you enjoy these essays, or classic InstaPundit, please either take out a paid Substack subscription, or make a one-time donation here. I appreciate your support.]

Of course, we weren’t in London. We were in the same restaurant where we usually go for lunch when I take her out, and she was eating the same thing she always orders there. (If I’d known where she thought she was, I would have ordered her fish and chips!) I hadn’t flown to London, and she hadn’t been in Paris. I did in fact give her some cash, a couple of twenties, but that was just to make her happy. She has a tendency to hide cash and other things she regards as valuable for fear of theft, which mostly just means that nobody can find them again without turning her room at the memory care place upside down. (And sometimes not then.)

My mom, after prompting to smile.

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Old time (and I mean old-time) blog readers may remember Jeff Jarvis’s fierce post-9/11 warblogging, which pivoted rather suddenly into leftish pro-Democratic blogging in time for the 2004 election. Jeff and I were close before the pivot (he got me my long-ago MSNBC gig), and remained friendly even after. We were Facebook friends from the beginning, though our interactions over the past decade-plus were confined to the occasional like or happy birthday.

Then the other day I posted this:

Jeff’s response was “He saved lives. What have you done?” My reply was “Did he?”

A few of my friends came on to suggest, politely enough, that Fauci’s contribution was mostly negative and Jeff abruptly responded “Good-bye, Glenn,” and unfriended me.

Well, I will survive the shock of that blow, but it struck me — after all those years of disagreeing on politics, this was the straw that broke Jarvis’s back? Anthony Fauci? Especially now, when he’s the butt of self-incrimination jokes? In front of Congress, Fauci wouldn’t even say what color his tie was. (I’m trying to talk one of my distiller friends into putting out a limited run of Fauci whiskey, with the slogan “Take the Fifth!”)

Why Fauci, and why now?

I think the answer is that Fauci, and Faucism, represented the apotheosis of what the managerial/academic/journo class desires: An excuse for sweeping power, based on (alleged) expertise, in which they could ride roughshod over those stupid proles and flyover people while preening about the allegedly superior moral and intellectual qualities that justify their rule.

Then it turned out that they were wrong about nearly everything and — as Fauci’s diaries demonstrate — knew it at the time, at least at the top. And their overreach is one of the things that gave us Trump 47.

That this is out in public now produces cognitive dissonance. The easiest thing to do is to check out of the discussion. And so. Well, goodbye, Jeff, if by chance you’re reading this. I never stopped liking you, but I confess I liked the pre-pivot Jeff better. Enjoy your life as you are now.

My main summer project is an article on the Supreme Court’s recent Second Amendment decisions, which I didn’t start until this month because the Court didn’t cough them up until the very end of June. That meant they came out just before we left for our family beach vacation. I spent June promoting my Seductive AI book, doing other writings (a review of Carson Holloway’s No Liberty to Libel, a book on overturning the Sullivan case) and, sadly, doctor appointments.

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It has long been interpreted as requiring states to maintain governments based on majority rule through regular elections and popular sovereignty, while prohibiting monarchy, aristocracy, dictatorship, or permanent military rule (even if adopted by majority vote). It does not, however, prescribe specific details of election procedures, voting qualifications, or structures like primaries or redistricting. Presumptively, however, votes must be counted honestly to qualify as republican government.

Supreme Court precedent (starting with Luther v. Borden, 48 U.S. (7 How.) 1 (1849)) has generally treated Guarantee Clause claims as nonjusticiable political questions committed to the political branches (Congress and the President), not the courts. This view was reinforced in cases like Pacific States Telephone & Telegraph Co. v. Oregon (1912) and Colegrove v. Green (1946).

Enforcement historically occurred through Congress (e.g., Reconstruction-era legislation and seating/exclusion of representatives) or presidential action in crises.

The Constitution simply says that “the United States” shall guarantee states a republican form of government. It doesn’t say how, or what process is involved, or how the duty/authority is allocated within the United States government. Many people will argue that the president should execute laws passed by Congress for this purpose, but it doesn’t say that. It says “the United States.” Plausibly, in acting to protect a republican form of government — as defined above — the President would be executing a policy laid out in the Constitution, and would not require policy from Congress to authorize his action. Congress could, under its “necessary and proper” power in Article 1 section 8, clause 18 “to make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof,” make rules for how the President could act in executing that power, but it need not do so, nor has it.

So if President Trump announces that we have uncovered massive electoral fraud — as he almost certainly will — and that he is dispatching huge numbers of federal election watchers to oversee voting and counting in areas where fraud has occurred, he would be acting directly under a power that the Constitution has vested in him. For a state to have a “republican form of government,” it must have meaningful elections, and elections that are rigged are not meaningful. Stopping them from being rigged would be protecting a republican form of government. Congress has passed other election laws, mostly for reasons of combating race discrimination, but those aren’t strictly applicable to these circumstances.

Will Trump do that? I have no insider information. But thinking about this today, I think it’s what I would do. One could even argue that widespread, decisive election fraud is itself effectively an insurrection, justifying action on that basis. (Probably the best argument against invoking the clause is that many in the press will — deliberately or out of actual ignorance — confuse the small-r “republican form of government” with the Republican Party because of course.)

The extent of presidential authority here is largely uncharted ground, as is the Guarantee Clause itself to a large degree. Courts have, as noted above, held it non-justiciable, meaning that all decisions are left to the political branches, Congress and the President. Trump’s timing is probably calculated to allow the usual frivolous lower court injunctions that seem to be aimed at anything he does to be overturned before the midterms; he might also simply ignore such injunctions, as an obvious judicial overstep in an area that courts have stayed out of since Luther v. Borden.

As in everything on this subject, he will have plausible arguments and there’s no such thing as a clearly winning argument either way, due to lack of precedent.

Will Trump be this bold? I suspect he feels vindicated by all the evidence of fraud that has come out, and wants to strike hard at his enemies. (Who, ironically, would have had an easier time of it if Trump had just won in 2020). As Napoleon said, the tools belong to the man who can use them.

Anyway, these are my, somewhat half-baked thoughts, though the Guarantee Clause itself has never had the chance to fully bake. From a professional standpoint, I kind of hope Trump does invoke it. The Guarantee Clause has always fascinated me, and I’d love to see it get some attention. Stay tuned.

Just last week, Congressman Keith Self introduced a resolution to repeal the Seventeenth. And this time the idea doesn’t seem quite as crazy.

Background: When the Constitution was drafted, and for well over a century afterward, the Senate wasn’t popularly elected. The Constitution provided for the choice of Senators by state legislatures. One did not really campaign for a Senate seat, one lobbied. This was consistent with the Constitutional plan, in which the House of Representatives represented the people, while the Senate represented the states.

The Progressive movement didn’t much like this (a cynic might suggest that they thought it would be easier to demagogue the public than state legislatures made up of cynical politicians.) The 17th was also very much in keeping with the more democracy mood of the era. The franchise had been expanded from a minority of white men with property, to all white men, to all men, and was well on the way (just two amendments later!) to being extended to women.

Voters were impatient, and there was less appreciation of the careful structural compromises that had been made when the Constitution was drafted. By having a house of Congress that was responsive to the concerns of the states as states, the original design of the Senate served as a counterweight to federal ambition. Once the Senate was just a smaller version of the House with bigger districts, that changed. Public passions mattered more (vitiated only somewhat by the Senate’s longer terms) and Senators now had to campaign.

The effect was to make the Senate more, not less, dependent on special interests. Instead of lobbying legislators, now its members had to campaign and that costs money, especially when campaigning across a big state. The effect is beautifully captured in a story I heard from former Tennessee Governor Ned Ray McWherter when we were serving together on a state commission under Gov. Phil Bredesen. When Al Gore was elected Vice President, that left his Senate seat open, and left Ned Ray empowered to fill it for the remainder of the term. Ned Ray offered it to Rep. John Tanner, an old West Tennessee crony, who decline in (Ned Ray reported) these terms: “Oh Ned Ray, don’t make me go to the Senate. I have a nice safe House seat; if I go to the Senate I’ll be asking people for money 24/7.” Harlan Matthews got it as a caretaker, to be replaced by Fred Thompson two years later.

But John Tanner was very perceptive — Senators do have to ask people for money 24/7, something that’s a big departure from the pre-17th Amendment world. If you’re worried about the influence of special interest money, you should probably give a thought to repeal. Beyond that, State legislatures choosing senators would make senators more accountable to state interests, acting as a check against federal expansion, unfunded mandates, and overreach. This aligns with the Founders' intent for vertical separation of powers. And the need to be asking for money 24/7 demonstrably discourages otherwise qualified people from seeking office.

What’s more, Senators chosen by legislatures would be less likely to support expansive federal programs (e.g., certain aspects of Obamacare or No Child Left Behind) that impose burdens on states, as they would prioritize state budgets and sovereignty.

Putting the confirmation of federal judges and cabinet officials in the hands of a body appointed by state legislatures would also likely change outcomes and emphases. And, for that matter, the courts would be less likely in general to discount the importance of the states, when they are represented directly by a part of the federal legislature.

Over the years I have gone from skeptical of claims to repeal the Seventeenth to reasonably supportive. Part of that is just from observing how the system works today. And once we’re done repealing that one, maybe we can repeal the Sixteenth? It’s just a thought….

Well, she’s a University of Michigan law professor who is, even by law professor standards, far gone into Trump Derangement Syndrome.

But why wouldn’t we want a president to “clean house?” Do we want a dirty house?

As for our professional, independent civil service — it is to laugh. The civil service isn’t independent: It happily does the bidding of Democratic presidents. It’s just partisan, in that it does its best to stall and undermine the work of Republican presidents. (By now we’ve all seen the emails.)

But more importantly, the proof of the pudding is in the eating: We’ve run America with and without a “professional, independent civil service,” and there was more trust in government — and better execution of policy — before the creation of the civil service than after, and particularly before the now-overturned case of Humphrey’s Executor, which protected “independent agencies” from presidential supervision.

But the ramifications of this new decision suggest that the Pendleton Act itself might be at risk, and it should be.

Prior to the adoption of the Pendleton Act in 1883, government employment operated according to the “spoils system,” which meant that hiring in the executive branch was controlled by the Executive. When a new administration came in, everyone’s job was up for grabs, at least potentially. This “rotation in office” had several advantages, which were widely appreciated at the time, and propounded by presidents from Jefferson to Jackson to Lincoln.

“Jackson argued that one serving in government for too long would inevitably lose sight of the public interest and come to use office for personal gain. He also maintained that government was or could be made simple enough for men of ordinary ability and experience, so ‘more is lost by the long continuance of men in office than is generally to be gained by their experience.’”^[i]

Contrary to popular belief, though, the arrival of a new president didn’t mean that everyone left. Even Andrew Jackson, upon taking office, replaced only about 10% of the federal work force with his own people. Every president understood the value of continuity, and hiring new people is hard work.

But under the spoils system, the fact that the president could replace anyone mean that everyone worked for him. And that meant both that everyone was responsible to the president, and that the president was responsible for everyone in the government, and everything the government did. This is consistent with the Constitution’s vesting clause, which provides that “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” If the executive branch does it, it’s an executive power, and if it’s an executive power it should be controlled by the president.

Contrast this to a “professional” civil service, in which the president does neither the hiring nor the firing, except with regard to a comparatively small number of senior officials. The civil service doesn’t think of itself as working for the president, really, and will happily drag its feet when it doesn’t like the president’s priorities (which is usually, though not entirely, when the president is a Republican.) And when the bureaucracy misbehaves, or fails to perform, the president can, at least to a degree, blame its recalcitrance for the trouble or lack of results that occurs.

Congress is also let off the hook, yet simultaneously weirdly empowered. Congress can blame “the bureaucracy” for bad things, even when those things result from laws that Congress has passed. Then it can turn around and “help” constituents by intervening with the bureaucracy it has rendered dysfunctional, earning gratitude that may be deserved in a narrow sense, but not in terms of the big picture.

Under a spoils system, on the other hand, nobody gets off the hook. If the bureaucracy misbehaves, the president can fire the misbehavers. If Congress is unhappy with what bureaucrats do, they can demand that the president fire them, and make an election issue out of it if they want.

So why did we wind up with a civil service? As is typical, the fantasy of a neutral, efficient, expert civil service was laid next to the reality of a messy functioning government. But, as is also typical, the fantasy in practice turned out to be considerably less appealing than as proposed.

The big objection to abolishing the protected civil service is that government by “expertise-driven civil service”would be gone. The response to this objection is twofold. First, we don’t have an “expertise driven civil service.” At least the record of our civil service in addressing problems has been pretty unimpressive, and not particularly marked by expertise. From government nutrition guidelines, which were based on politics and bad science, to the Covid fiasco, to energy policies and education, it’s hard to think of very many significant areas where neutral, technocratic expertise has carried the day. Looking on this record, I’ve commented in the past on the “suicide of expertise,” and I think it’s pretty obvious now that the expertise has often been a sham. (Or, even when it existed, has been subordinated to politics: Released emails, etc., have revealed that Anthony Fauci et al. knew that what they were telling the public wasn’t true, and in fact were saying the opposite in private, but lied to the public anyway.)

The modern civil service system (post-Pendleton Act) – like so many calamities of the 20^th Century – sprang from the brain of Woodrow Wilson, a political scientist before he was president, who wrote of the importance of separating politics from administration. In his view, cool, technocratic administrators would execute the policies chosen by politics – though with the suggestion that politics should generally defer to their expertise. That theory may have seemed beguiling in the late 19^th Century, but by the 21^st Century it has become clear that that’s not how any of this works.

All of this would be true even if the civil service was nonpartisan, or at least divided along partisan lines that resembled those of the nation at large. This is, of course, not the case at all. The civil service is effectively a left-liberal monoculture, with its primary loyalty being to the Democratic Party. (And donations from federal employees heavily favor Democrats). The politicized behavior of the Department of Justice, FBI, IRS, and other federal agencies during the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations has made that obvious.

So the question isn’t whether we’re going to have a nonpartisan, expert civil service or a partisan nonexpert one. The question is whether we’re going to have a calcified, one-sided partisan nonexpert service or a partisan nonexpert service that changes its composition and is subject to democratic supervision. As I’ve argued elsewhere, political turnover helps limit special-interest domination in politics. But the lack of political turnover in the bureaucracy means that there’s no such effect in the part of the government that does most of the work.

Replacing the civil service, which I think has indisputably failed to fulfill the promises of its champions, with something more politically responsive is likely to be better, and certainly more in line with notions of democracy, than leaving most of government to an unaccountable left-liberal gentry class monoculture.

Even New Dealers got this: Writing in 1937, William Turn defended patronage against the claims of expertise and the “hysterical indictments of political patronage which are made today with little or no actual knowledge of what it is about.” His argument was that turning the civil service over to the gentry class removed a major incentive for ordinary Americans to participate in politics. Under patronage, distinguishing yourself in party work could earn you a pleasant job. And it was disciplined, because bad patronage appointments weaken the party.

Without patronage the only reason to volunteer was for ideological reasons. And keeping ordinary Americans involved in politics was important for “keeping in close touch with the great masses of ‘average folks’ whose participation is vital to any truly democratic process, learning what they are thinking, and interpreting for them the policies which are being put into effect.”^[ii]

Even in 1937, Turn was decrying the “chasm” that had opened up between the governing class and society at large,^[iii] and that chasm has grown much wider in the near-century since. And Turn was already warning against the gentry-class takeover I mention above: “Quite aside from the unsatisfactory character of the type of person attracted by the civil service procedure, there is good reason to question the accuracy of an arbitrary examination (or the possession of a college degree) as a true measure of an applicant’s ability.”^[iv]

And in prescient terms, Turn notes: “Patronage appointments for demonstrated party loyalty seem to me most likely to promote efficiency. Too light weight is given to the protection which patronage gives the government against bureaucratic sabotage, which its enemies naively deny.”^[v] No president can be effective if every policy must be filtered through a hostile bureaucracy. One suspects that is the goal, at least where Republican presidents are concerned.

I agree with Turn that we’re better off without the civil service system. The Supreme Court’s decision in Slaughter today moves us pretty far down that road. Under its logic, any employee engaged in executive functions should serve at the pleasure of the President. Which is, as I suggest, entirely consistent with the Constitution.

Bring it.

But while the Russians weren’t actually calling the shots, the the Latté Communist Party, more officially known as the Democratic Socialists of America, has been seeking out election victories everywhere. And winning some.

New York’s Islamo-Communist Mayor Mamdani is their biggest winner, but as the recent New York primaries demonstrate, not the only one they’ve been pushing. Then there’s the member of the DSA’s “Das Reich” division, Graham Platner, who’s running for Senate in Maine.

And even in my hometown, not very Communist-friendly, we have a candidate for County Mayor, Beau Hawk, who’s sort of East Tennessee’s Graham Platner: A beefy guy, with a name Southern enough to make him a friend of the Duke boys. Except that the Duke boys didn’t run with no commies.

Is Hawk a commie? Well, he marched in support of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, and was quoted by the Venezuelan outlet, the Orinoco Tribune, in support of Nicolas Maduro and in opposition to Donald Trump. Hawk says he was “young and dumb” when he did this — it was in 2020, so all of six years ago, but now he’s mature enough to be mayor? — and that he was misquoted by the Orinoco Tribune. Well, possibly. The American press mangles — or makes up — quotes often enough that we can’t dismiss the possibility that it happened here.

But. What else in his career really suggests that he’s changed his mind?

The DSA and its allies have targeted local elections because they can mobilize a small but decisive number of voters in low-turnout elections. This is precisely the strategy I described here a while back in “The Future Belongs to Those Who Show Up.” And even though very few Knox County voters favor Maduro or communism, here’s why our current (term-limited) conservative/libertarian mayor, Glenn Jacobs, might be replaced by a guy who looks pretty commie-ish to me.

I’m often reminded by a scene in the Apple TV show, Physical, set in the early 1980s when Republicans were still viable in California. The protagonist’s husband, a lefty enviro-type, is running for State Senate and it’s looking good: Poll watchers report a lot of people with long hair and birkenstocks showing up to vote. He thinks he has it in the bag when suddenly a fleet of buses pulls up and disgorges hundreds of Mormons, neatly dressed and obviously there to vote for his Republican opponent, who winds up beating him handsomely.

I sometimes ask local Republicans, “where are your busloads of Mormons?”

The DSA has them. Hence its wins in New York City:

That’s all it takes, when most people stay home.

They know it, and most voters are asleep. Between now and November, people who don’t want to be ruled by commies need to get to work.

Oh, sure, it’s fun to mock the DSA as social losers, a sort of Incel-revenge story:

But, you know, commies are usually social losers, downwardly mobile scions of upscale families. That’s why they go into leftist politics: Because they can’t get status through normal, more productive paths.

And even where they don’t win they drag the “mainstream” Democrats with them:

Other than James Carville, there’s no loud opposition from within Democratic leadership ranks. If you want to stop the commies, it’s up to you. Turnout, turnout, turnout.

And, you know, call them out. We’re seeing that in my community:

Most people don’t want to vote for communists, which is why the commies call themselves “Democratic Socialists.” But that’s just branding. Spread the news, and spread it fast, if you don’t want to see this succeed.

There are two kinds of reactions to this: Celebration, and jealousy. They are diagnostic.

There’s lots of room for celebration. James Pethokoukis is one of the celebrants. He writes that it’s good that Elon Musk is a trillionaire now, because of what he’s accomplished: “If more trillionaires emerge because AI, robots, clean energy, genetic editing, and space access become vastly cheaper and more capable, everyone gains.”

Yes, SpaceX is worth a lot of money — and with it Elon’s shares — because it’s already doing amazing things and people expect it to do a lot more of them in the future. He writes:

It’s definitely a good thing for Americans when someone becomes superrich starting a company that provides goods and services deemed desirable and valuable by society through its purchase decisions. It’s a sure sign American techno-capitalism is working.1 Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and the Google founders all started companies that sell an economically valuable product. Apple gave us the one device. Amazon built the everything store. Google became the internet’s front door.

And as wealthy as those businesses made their founders, we assuredly made out even better. We always do when an entrepreneur builds a business around an innovative technology or a cheaper way to make something people want. Nobel laureate economist William Nordhaus actually ran the math, finding that innovators captured barely 2 percent of the value their inventions threw off across half a century, leaving the other 98 percent to the rest of us.2

The same will be the case for Musk and SpaceX if the vision outlined in its IPO prospectus—cheap and fully reusable rockets, a planet-scale Starlink business, orbital AI infrastructure, and ultimately cities on Mars—pans out. Massive benefits for humanity, not just SpaceX shareholders. . . .By the way, no Starship means no guarantee on that trillionaire status. The sustainability of the vast bulk of Musk’s wealth depends on his ability to create value through SpaceX that civilizationally benefits us more than it ever will him. Fixating on the size of any Musk’s or any individual fortune misses what is surely the bigger story: If more trillionaires emerge because AI, robots, clean energy, genetic editing, and space access become vastly cheaper and more capable (or simply because someone started a company that’s really good at selling stuff we really want) everyone gains.

That’s clearly true. And in putting together his various companies, Musk has walked a long and rocky road, flirting with bankruptcy more than once and displaying near-supernatural engineering and managerial talents. (As I’ve written before, the largely untold story is how he managed to put together such huge teams of super talented people. I mean, Boeing can’t do that.)

Musk is a once-in-a-millennium piece of human capital, and he’s chosen to use his abilities for good. He should be praised and admired.

But.

The more he accomplishes, and the more obviously good it is for humanity, the worse it makes people whose accomplishments are minor and whose self-regard is immense. He’s a threat to their self-image, and must be brought down.

My old law professor Charles Black, who wrote the brief with Thurgood Marshall in Brown v. Board of Education, wrote a famous essay on how his exposure, as a Texas high-school student, to the blistering genius of Louis Armstrong in 1931 changed his views of race and led to his civil rights work. But the reaction of the “good old boy” student who was with him is what I’m reminded of now. “We listened together for a long time. Then he turned to me, shook his head as though clearing it — as I’m sure he was — of an unacceptable though vague thought, and pronounced the judgment of the time and place: ‘After all, he’s nothing but a God damn n*gger.’”

A lot of people, mostly though not exclusively on the Left, are doing something similar now regarding Elon Musk.

"There shouldn’t be trillionaires” is junior-high-level stuff. We should have people producing trillions of dollars in value for society. The argument that Elon should be spending his money on “feeding the hungry” is stupid in a country where the federal government spends multi-trillions a year on just that, with dubious results. It also betrays either a notion, or a lie, based on Musk having a Scrooge McDuck style Money Bin with a trillion dollars in it. In fact, of course, he owns assets that are busy producing useful things, not cash just lying around somewhere going to waste. Most of the people pretending otherwise know better, but hope their listeners don’t. The rest are just imponderably stupid.

SpaceX’s IPO created 4,400 millionaires, according to the New York Times. Critics like Bernie Sanders, AOC, and Elizabeth Warren have created one each — themselves.

People denounce Elon, and many other billionaires, for “greed.” But most self-made billionaires — which is 70% of all billionaires in America — weren’t operating from greed, so much as the desire to build something. That’s certainly true in spades for Elon Musk. Money for him is a tool.

And it’s not as if he isn’t doing good with it already.

(And where have we gotten when the Financial Times, of all newspapers, would characterize Elon Musk as a Bond villain?)

But while Greed is a sin, so is Envy. And Elon’s critics envy not just his wealth, but his significance. He is doing great things, and they are not, and they really, really need to feel significant. But they aren’t, and it just kills them. The attacks are about trying to assuage that narcissistic wound more than anything.

Back after Apollo 11, Norman Mailer wrote that Apollo was the revenge of the “squares.” The hippies, with their tie-dye and their music and their psychotropic drugs were trying to bring something into being that humans had never achieved. But in fact it was those squares in their short-sleeve dress shirts and skinny ties, with their crewcuts and slide rules, who actually went and did it. It was unforgivable, and the hippies turned their considerable cultural power toward killing it and making it uncool, and they almost succeeded.

Almost. I have $2 trillion that says they failed.

Which is good news not just for Elon, but for humanity.

Years ago a friend of mine in DC commented that he knew a lot of people who thought they were big shots, because while they were in important government jobs people treated them like big shots. It was nice to be so liked and admired.

Then when they left the important jobs, they didn’t feel nearly so liked and admired anymore. Turned out that what people liked and admired about them wasn’t their personal qualities, but the big shot jobs — or, more specifically, what they hoped the holder of those big shot jobs could do for them. No job, no big shot treatment.

He commented that it was hilarious how often people felt this way, especially since most of them had been dealing with other people in and out of big shot jobs for most of their careers.

Well, that’s Scott Pelley’s situation, but I don’t think he knows it yet.

What’s a news anchor’s skillset? You have to be able to look at the camera and read off a teleprompter while sounding natural — not as easy as it looks, if you’ve never done it before, but my daughter mastered it in an afternoon at a local TV station when she was in 8th grade. You have to look good on camera — maybe not movie-star good, but you have to have a pleasant, trustworthy face. And that’s mostly it.

Those skills serve you well as long as you’re occupying your network perch, but there aren’t many such perches, and once you’re off of them they don’t carry you very far.

That’s especially true since in the last couple of decades TV news has been less important, and people care about it less. Who actually misses David Muir or Jeff Glor? More people miss Alex Trebek, the departed host of Jeopardy. Brian Williams at least inspired some amusing liar memes, but nobody actually misses him.

The original idea of the anchorman sort of made sense: Nobody could trust the faceless crews that produce TV news. But everyone knew the anchorman (or, later, -woman). The thinking was that if viewers felt they could trust the anchorman not to present news that was false or misleading, they’d trust the program. If you thought Ron Burgundy would quit rather than present false news, you’d trust him and by extension the news he was presenting in a voice like velvet.

The problem was, you couldn’t trust the anchors because in fact they lacked the integrity. They were, at bottom a mixture of corporate drones and ideological warriors. (There wasn’t much conflict between these roles because the corporate operation itself was also made up of ideological warriors. Political diversity in newsrooms disappeared in the last century, and it was never great. Leslie Stahl couldn’t name any conservative journalists at her network back in 2003. It hasn’t gotten better.) Even such highly trusted a figure as Walter Cronkite was basically a fraud offering — knowingly — liberalism in the guise of objectivity.

People caught on. Of course, TV news is obsolete anyway, with more people getting their news from X — the single biggest news media source on the planet — and from various other news media sources. But one reason that people turned to those alternatives was a loss of trust in, and affection for, the old media.

At any rate, Scott Pelley was a big shot in the media world when he sat atop a big CBS operation. But even then he mattered a lot less in the real world than he thought. He will no longer be such a big shot anywhere after he’s gone. Just ask Keith Olbermann.

If you can find him.

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Why don’t Democrats like Spencer Pratt? Because he’s standing up for normal things, and the political system in L.A., as dominated by Democrats and their satraps for decades, has made a point of not delivering those normal things.

Not all that long ago, really, every local politician would talk about potholes, garbage collection, crime control, clean sidewalks, and the like. Now it’s “controversial” — which means a threat to the power of the ruling machine — to even talk about those things.

That’s because those are things that voters want, that the machine doesn’t want to give them.

Why doesn’t the machine want to give voters these very basic, normal things?

There are a lot of reasons. The first is that they’re spending the money on other stuff, which basically means themselves and their cronies. There’s a Nigerian joke that’s on point here, though sadly obsolete nowadays. A Nigerian visits his rich cousin in the United States and is gobsmacked by his wealth. The rich American cousin says, “See that bridge over there, that stadium, that school building?” The Nigerian cousin nods. The American cousin points at himself and says “Ten percent!”

Some years later the American cousin goes back to Nigeria and visits his Nigerian cousin, who has become fabulously wealthy, much richer than the American. “How did you do that"? he asks. The Nigerian says, “do you see that bridge over there, that stadium, that school building?”

“Er, no,” says the American. The Nigerian proudly points at himself and says “One hundred percent!”

The joke is obsolete because Los Angeles has moved close to the one hundred percent level. When you’re spending upwards of $800,000 to house a single “homeless” person you’re nearly there. (And Gavin Newsom’s high speed rail, which has gobbled up billions but produced no trains, is basically in one hundred percent territory already.) So the current rulers of L.A. couldn’t easily fix the potholes if they wanted, because too many constituencies are living off the taxpayer’s teat, leaving not enough money to do it without nasty political fights. As Vaclav Havel says, ossified. (See also Mancur Olson’s The Rise and Decline of Nations.)

But another, possibly bigger, reason that the machine doesn’t want to give the voters basic, normal things is because they are normal.

If you value clean streets and sidewalks, it’s not that hard to get them. (Look what Gavin Newsom did to pretty up San Francisco before Chairman Xi’s visit). If you want crime rates down, as Nayib Bukele in El Salvador — and Donald Trump in places like Memphis and Washington, DC — have demonstrated, it’s not that hard.

The purpose of a system is what it does, and what the political system in Los Angeles, as in most big, blue cities, does is generate crime, homelessness, rampant drug use, and decayed common spaces.

It doesn’t do normal things because it doesn’t want to do normal things, and it doesn’t want to do normal things because, at core, leftism doesn’t want things to be normal. Why that is is open to interpretation (personally, I think it’s because leftists want the outer world to be as disgusting and disordered as their inner selves) but the pattern is there. And you can get away with it, so long as people think the decline in their world stems from some sort of organic causes, rather than being a choice.

But decline is a choice.

This is also one of the reasons why leftist architecture and public art are are so awful, and why Donald Trump’s efforts to pretty things up are getting so much pushback:

Will Spencer Pratt win? I don’t know. Some right-leaning commentators look at the polls and say that he doesn’t have a chance. But local polls aren’t super reliable — and, for that matter, neither are national polls sometimes. I’m reminded of election day 2016 when my colleague Penny White asked me how I thought it would turn out and I said that according to the polls Hillary had it won, but that I felt a vast current of fuck-you in the electorate that I didn’t think the polls had captured.

I was right, of course, and that might be the case here.

But even if Pratt loses, he’s opened up these issues that no one was supposed to talk about, and gotten people talking about them. That’s a brutal blow to a machine that has for years relied on making sure people weren’t able to talk about the things that might be dangerous to it. That will raise pressure, and likely lead to change in time anyway.

Stay tuned.

That was a comment to a blog post I wrote on Friday’s successful SpaceX Starship v.3 launch. I wholeheartedly agree. When I was still a kid, I read Jerry’s column “A Step Farther Out” in Galaxy magazine religiously. Jerry saw it all coming: vertical takeoff and landing spaceships, the need to lower costs to orbit, and the absolute necessity for both reusability and launch volume to make things cheap enough, and reliable enough, to build an interplanetary economy. He wrote about the immense resources of space (both in terms of energy and material), and the wide-open human future they could support. As the blurb for a collection of his work published in 2022 says, “If you wanted a strategy for the technology of going to space in the 1970's, 80's and 90's, Dr. Jerry Pournelle was your man.”

I don’t know this firsthand, but I feel certain that he was a big influence on Elon Musk’s thinking.

Jerry saw it coming, and lived to see the beginning of SpaceX, but like Moses he saw the promised land but didn’t get to enter it.

Now, we’re about to enter it.

Image via SpaceX.

There are still bugs to work out, and capabilities to add, but what we saw on Friday was a full-fledged interplanetary spaceship. Starship v.3 is big enough to carry cargoes to the Moon and Mars. It uses methane fuel which — as Bob Zubrin demonstrated in the 1990s in support of his “Mars Direct” exploration/settlement architecture — can be manufactured on-site from the Martian atmosphere using 19th Century chemical technology. (I’m positive that Musk has studied Zubrin’s work carefully too.)

It will also support missions to asteroids, which are loaded with precious and valuable metals, carbon compounds, and other useful stuff. (Even rock is useful for radiation shielding, and using stuff that’s already in space is generally cheaper than launching it from Earth.)

A moon base is practical with Starship. Artemis, for all the hype, uses NASA’s SLS rocket, which is based on technology over half a century old — Congress mandated that it use Space Shuttle technology — and costs literally billions per launch.

Large structures in Earth orbit are practical with Starship. Elon wants to build data centers in orbit, and others are following his lead. (As I wrote decades ago, the first Earth explorers brought back spices because they had an enormous value-to-weight ratio; space-based communications is even better because photons don’t weigh anything. Computation is similar. Also, the anti-AI-data-center movement on Earth is just playing into his hands.) Space solar power plants, converting the 24-hour, unfiltered sunlight of outer space into electricity that is beamed to Earth via microwave (a technology long-since demonstrated) are practical with Starship.

And it’s not just lift capacity. The Musk empire also stresses AI and robotics. When we were thinking about large space structures in the 1970s we assumed they’d be built by humans, like offshore oil rigs. In my Space Law seminar last fall we did some rough modeling on how much faster you could build them using robots controlled by AI. The answer was rough, but clear: Much, much faster. And more cheaply, and without labor issues.

Elon’s other company, The Boring Company, which specializes in tunneling, is often forgotten, but it’s actually revolutionary in itself. And you know what you need for bases and colonies on the moon and Mars? Tunnels. Lots of tunnels. (Also, later, for asteroid habitats.)

It’s like he’s been thinking about this stuff all along. It’s like that because he has.

You can sort of imagine what he’s been doing as like a rocket. Tesla was the booster, which brought in a lot of money, created a lot of manufacturing expertise, and built credibility. SpaceX/Falcon and Starlink were the second stage. Elon built a rocket company with a better, cheaper rocket, but to refine things and cut costs you need launch volume. There weren’t enough customers to provide that volume, so he created his own customer with Starlink, which is now SpaceX’s biggest moneymaker.

In the early days of Starship, he’ll supply transportation for NASA once it gives up on SLS. (It needs another flight or two so they can pretend it wasn’t a failure, then they’ll fold it up. Everyone in the field has known this for a while.) But the moon base will be built with Starship lift, not recycled Shuttle tech.

Data centers will do for Starship what Starlink did for Falcon, providing the necessary launch volume to be economical. Meanwhile Mars flights will begin. Asteroid exploration is still far away enough to be left to NASA, which has a mission going to Psyche, which appears to be an enormously rich asteroid, right now. Serious commercial exploration/exploitation will follow, either by SpaceX or by one of several startups that have already appeared. (In fact, we had an asteroid-mining tech bubble over a decade ago, but it was too early to get off the ground, so to speak.)

Large structures in Earth orbit will ultimately be built with materials from the Moon and the asteroids more than with materials from Earth. They may be delivered from the Moon to Earth orbit by electromagnetic mass drivers on the Moon, probably powered by solar power.

None of this would surprise Jerry Pournelle, though it’s surprising how few of Elon’s critics — and even of his boosters — really grasp the extent and integration of the plan here.

There’s another thing that would make Jerry happy.

After the mission concluded, the SpaceX crew was chanting “USA! USA!” Jerry always said that it was nearly certain that space would ultimately be settled by humans, but that it would make a big difference which humans got there first. The USA is the planet’s beacon of freedom and hope — and, frankly, the only country that could have supported the development of a company like SpaceX, with a freewheeling and creative yet utterly results-oriented culture. If we get there first, the coming millennium will look very different than it would if it was, say, China who got there first. (And speaking of culture, one of the largely untold stories is how Elon Musk has managed to hire so many utterly competent people, both engineers and non-engineers for his companies. I think a lot of it is that he gives them important things to do and doesn’t bother them with bullshit. People are willing to work very hard indeed for important results.)

The Kardashev scale was initially created by Soviet astronomer Nicolas Kardashev as a way of ranking civilizations by resources. A Kardashev I civilization has control of all the resources of a planet. (We aren’t there yet, we’re probably about a Kardashev 0.7). A Kardashev II civilization controls the resources of a solar system. A Kardashev III civilization, which we can’t really even imagine, would control the resources of a galaxy.

We aren’t even a Kardashev I yet, but Starship v.3 is an indication that we’re on the path to Kardashev II. That’s a promised land I won’t live to see — and neither will Elon, or probably anyone alive at the moment — but we are heading there, and will be there in a jiffy by human-historical standards. A huge accomplishment, made possible by a lot of hard work, smarts, and creativity. Ad Astra, per ardua!

Things are going badly on redistricting, and Democrats are losing it.

But it’s more than that. They’ve got themselves into a position — which began with Barack Obama’s hollowing out of the party over a decade ago — in which they can’t afford to lose the next couple of elections, even as their position erodes.

Due to an “accidental error” in the 2020 census, blue states got more seats in the House — and more electoral votes — than they were entitled to. When that “error” is fixed, the situation will be worse for them. Then there’s the flood of refugees from blue states to red, further expanding their Congressional majorities. (But beware of the refugees who continue to vote blue. Where’s my “welcome wagon” proposal?)

Meanwhile, the Trump Administration is choking off the flood of taxpayer money that has kept leftist organizations and institutions afloat, buying votes with taxpayer dollars. And the federal workforce has shrunk 10% with more “draconian cuts” on the way.

It’s a bit like Winfield Scott’s “Anaconda Plan” to choke off the Confederacy — which worked once it was actually employed. (And Trump is doing something similar with Iran, choking it off gradually rather than going for a swift coup de main, which is disappointing some people but which will work at a much-reduced cost in lives. But that’s another essay.)

This is why the Democrats, and the left, but I repeat myself, are unhappy. They feel it happening.

And you hear more about it from them than from the media and influencers on the right, interestingly.

It’s also the case that many on the right don’t know what winning feels like, because there hasn’t been that much of it. Oh, there have been election wins, but those mostly wind up in legislative and administrative paralysis. The political world is full of midwit blather about why you can’t do things. The right used to believe that blather, but now the administration has realized that you can just do things regardless of the blather.

It’s not over yet, but there’s a major realignment of forces underway, and if it proceeds to its natural conclusion the modern left as we know it will cease to exist, or at least to matter.

Of course, they’ll be resisting all the way, and their decades of success indicate that they’re not to be taken for granted, even if constant winning and power, even when nominally out of power, has made them sloppy. I expect the psychotic break from loss of power, which we’re already seeing some signs of, will be violent and ugly, though also futile. Hold on, it’s going to be a bumpy ride. But, I suspect, with a happy finish.

But as some of you know, I’ve been dealing with my mother’s dementia, which has progressed pretty rapidly. It comes and goes day to day, and sometimes hour to hour, but the overall trend is clearly downward. A year ago she was driving herself around, keeping her own house, and had just done her own taxes. This year she can’t do any of those things. She’s now in a memory care facility, which she sometimes thinks is a school dormitory (that’s good) and sometimes realizes is what it is, which isn’t so good.

I visit her and take her out to lunch regularly, and she gets visits from my siblings and her grandkids frequently. (According to the staff, she gets more visits than most of the patients there — my mom sometimes calls them “inmates” in her darker moments — get put together.) But it’s hard on her, and she often wakes up not knowing where she is, and being disoriented in general.

My brother and sister recently came up with what turned out to be a terrific idea. They got a digital picture frame (I think it’s this one) and loaded it up with family pictures. She loves seeing them go by, and will tell you the whole background of each one. (That part of her memory still works, and I think that makes her feel good about herself).

My mom at about age 40.

She especially likes to pictures of herself when she was young and pretty, which she remained for quite a while. It’s been one of the best things we’ve done for her — the other being sending in a caregiver/companion a few days a week who, like my mom, is a fan of 1920s hot jazz, which they can discuss endlessly.

It’s hard to see her decline. Even ten years ago (she’s 86, almost 87 now) she was tall and straight and together. Now a woman who used to run her own computer network has trouble using a phone, even the special dementia-friendly phone we got her, and the TV remote is nearly beyond her. But, you know, the real her is still in there somewhere. She appreciates the attention and the company, and I’ve used my clout at the facility — which basically consists just of asking, I don’t think most patients there have family members who are that hands-on — to make sure she gets coffee first thing in the morning, extra portions at breakfast, and to stay on top of her medical care, physical therapy, and the like. The place is very good, heavily staffed with nice competent people, but even more than a regular hospital, patients do much better with an advocate who, you know, doesn’t have anything wrong with them and can deal with the system.

My mom with my niece Ojie about a decade ago.

With my brother, sister, and grandmother, around 1974.

At lunch recently.

It’s hard to experience the decline, but most people wind up that way unless they die first. It would be nice if they had a treatment or cure for dementia, but they really don’t: Last fall after an extensive examination at the Pat Summit Center, they diagnosed her with moderate-to-severe Alzheimers; my mom, not too far gone to ask questions, said all this diagnosis is nice but can you do anything to make me better?

No, said the neurologist, looking a bit sheepish. No, we really can’t.

In Canada or the Netherlands they’d probably be wanting to euthanize her, but her life is not “life unworthy of life.” She enjoys her days most of the time, she’s made friends at the facility, and she has her family. That’s not so bad. And fortunately, the very cheapness that sometimes irritated me in my youth (Kmart brand ketchup was not as good as Heinz) means that she has plenty of savings, and an excellent long-term care policy, so good, as the guy at the insurance company told me, that they haven’t sold anything like it in years.

Life is what it is, and this is her life, and mine, and my siblings’. I should note that Helen is super-good with her. My mom and Helen were never at odds, but weren’t particularly close for many years, but now get along great, with my mom always asking me to bring Helen along for lunch. Helen’s clinical skills, and general awesomeness, make her a great conversationalist for someone with dementia, not least because she’s just not put off by it as many people are.

If some of you are, or will be, dealing with this stuff I hope these observations will be useful. If not, well, good for you!

This is how we know that America is a very successful system indeed. But every system has a limit to how heavy a parasite load it can carry, and I think we’ve reached ours.

One often sees graphics like this:

They’re shocking, and yet not really because everyone knows it’s true, and you see it everywhere. For example:

No one believes that all these administrators create value commensurate with their numbers. Mostly they’re a drain on productivity.

These administrative jobs exist not because they add value, but because of politics (political machines need supporters on the government payroll, because those supporters’ jobs give them an incentive to vote even in low-turnout elections), because of regulatory pressure (often designed to increase administrative payrolls) and because of bureaucratic empire-building. Whether in government or corporate bureaucracy, having more people report to you makes you more important, and often more influential.

When it comes to the operation of government, though, there is a second level of parasitism. Once the government became big, and rich, and prone to handing out cash on the one hand, and interfering in everyone’s business on the other, it created whole industries dedicated to influencing its operations. How much growth? It’s huge, but hard to measure. Some might, as Jeff Bezos did, buy the Washington Post for political influence and, more importantly, protection. Many (most) nonprofits and NGOs exist for the purpose of influencing the government, as do Political Action Committees, public-employee unions, and the like.

But just picking two core measures, lawyers and lobbyists in Washington, D.C., the trend is ever-upward. Graphic generated by Grok, using BLS statistics:

• Lawyers (blue line, left axis): Steady, long-term growth since the 1970s, reflecting the expansion of the federal government, regulatory state, and legal services in the capital region. From ~16,000 in 1970 to nearly 49,000 recently.

• Lobbyists (red line, right axis): Shorter modern series (consistent data from 1998 onward). Sharp rise in the mid-2000s, peak around 2008, dip post-financial crisis, and recent rebound.

• Both professions have grown significantly over decades, but lawyers show smoother, more consistent expansion while lobbyist numbers are more cyclical (tied to major legislation, elections, and economic events).

Bottom line: Fast growth. Hey, when it’s raining goverment-money soup, you’d be a fool not to bring a bucket. And that goes way beyond the lawyers and lobbyists, they’re just an indication of the trend.

Now a certain amount of that is to be expected, and goes back to the early days of the Republic, when Presidents and Senators had to put up with regular visits by “office-seekers” — people seeking cushy government-job appointments, which in those days usually involved the Post Office, for the simple reason that it was the most-populous government operation.

But now whole sectors of the economy depend on government money. President Trump’s abolition of USAID cost thousands of phony-baloney jobs. The New York Times recently ran a tear-jerker piece on how people who lost cushy NGO positions funded by USAID money haven’t been able to obtain comparable private sector employment. "Sheryl Cowan, 57, was making $272,000 a year as a senior VP at a U.S.A.I.D.-funded nonprofit when she was let go at the end of March 2025. Last month she had an online interview for a $19-an-hour job managing a Penzeys Spices store in Falls Church, Va." (Her husband also lost his job running a nonprofit that was 100% funded by U.S.A.I.D. My take: If your nonprofit or NGO goes out of business without government money, it’s just an arm of the government seeking deniability. And freedom from government pay scales!)

These victims receive a lot more compassion than the laid off coal miners and steelworkers who were dismissively told to “learn to code” a few years ago. But someone whose labor is valued at $19 an hour in the private sector who can make well over a quarter million a year is doing better than any 19th Century assistant postmaster in the cushy-job department.

Even the sympathetic Times piece acknowledges: “Others acknowledged that there was bloat and waste in the agency and a need for reform. Much of the $35 billion it managed in 2024 went to Washington-based contractors, not directly to people in need overseas. The success of many projects was hard to measure.”

Most of it went to Washington-based contractors. The purpose of a system is what it does, and what U.S.A.I.D. did was put money in the pockets of Washington-based contractors. By a curious coincidence, these same contractors almost always vote Democratic, and have turned the state of Virginia blue. (And it will be even bluer if the disputed Virginia redistricting effort, which was designed to amplify the political power of the Northern Virginia Washington suburbs, succeeds).

As you might imagine, pumping all that money into people who will vote for spending lots of money is a recipe for spending more money later. And that’s what’s happened.

So is there a solution? Or will the government keep going until the parasites kill it?

Well, the parasites were attracted by the money. If you spread enough honey — or shit — around flies will come. Get rid of the money and that will get rid of the parasites. Of course, cutting government spending is hard, but as we find more and more fraud it looks like we might actually be able to eliminate the deficit by not paying people to sit in cushy offices doing nothing useful (and often something harmful).

The DOGE effect has demonstrated what can be done, and there wasn’t much of a political outcry from actual voters when U.S.A.I.D. was abolished. I think there’s room to slash more if — and this is a big if — there are Republicans willing to do it.

If — when — there’s a financial crisis for the federal government the cutting will be easier. In my own world of academia, financial crises are also opportunities, because they’re usually the only time you can cut bad programs. Same here.

But I want to spend a minute looking at the supply side. Peter Turchin has argued that we are suffering from an overproduction of elites, and I think he’s onto something. Starting in the 1970s, roughly, we sent a much larger number of people to college, and they pretty much all expected clean, well-compensated white-collar jobs. They also generally expected a degree of social status that could not realistically be bestowed on as many people as we were turning out from college. Social status is a positional good, and you can’t have everyone, or even a large number of people, as the “elite.” To some degree that was dealt with via different kinds of eliteness — academics weren’t financially elite, but they felt intellectually superior.

But there are still limits.

19th Century Europe, especially Britain, had this problem as more children, including those of the aristocracy, survived. You needed “an heir and a spare” — a male to inherit the property (it was entailed, so it could only go to one male heir, the firstborn). A second son could to to the Navy, third to the Army, fourth to the Church, and any others might have to make a go in banking or something. Past the second or third son, they weren’t as elite.

Or they could go abroad to the colonies, where every Englishman was elite. Go to India and you’d be a sahib regardless. And it was possible to make a lot of money, which wasn’t as good as a dukedom but wasn’t to be sneezed at. Similar dynamics applied elsewhere. I’ve heard historians suggest that the main return for the British from the Empire wasn’t economic — colonialism was not for the most part (India was an exception) particularly lucrative — but rather as a place to shed the lesser scions of the aristocracy, who might be destablizing, or at least unpleasant, if left to languish at home.

America doesn’t have colonies abroad, but the numerous make-work jobs at NGOs, nonprofits, and, to be honest, many government agencies, provide an income and a feeling of importance for people who have graduated from often-elite universities but whose real skill set probably qualifies them to run a spice shop in a mall. Holding those jobs lets them put on airs, feel superior to, and often boss around or lecture their fellow citizens who are often treated as inferiors.

In short, America has been colonized from within.

Well, nations that are colonized usually wind up tossing out the colonizers. And, often as not, that’s driven as much by resentment about being treated as inferiors as by real economic complaints.

Is that what’s happening here? We can hope so.

There may be another source of change. Palantir CEO Alex Karp caught a lot of flak for saying that AI would destroy the kind of jobs mentioned above — he noted that they’re disproportionately held by Democratic women — and that that would have a major effect on the balance of political power. Well, maybe.

To be fair, Karp was talking about economic power: “This technology disrupts humanities-trained — largely Democratic— voters, and makes their economic power less, and increases the economic power of vocationally trained, working-class, often male, voters. . . . And so these disruptions are gonna disrupt every aspect of our society. And to make this work, we have to come to an agreement of what it is we’re going to do with the technology; how are we gonna explain to people who are likely gonna have less good, and less interesting jobs.”

And, more importantly perhaps, less prestigious jobs, at least in their own minds.

I’ ve written before about these effects, and quoted Erik Hoffer: “Nothing is so unsettling to a social order as the presence of a mass of scribes without suitable employment and an acknowledged status.”

Women — and men — losing their jobs to AI may lose economic power, but in a democracy they don’t lose their votes. It’s likely that many, even most, will drift to other lines of work, or retire, or otherwise go fairly quietly. But many will be radicalized. And as I noted before, laid off coal miners were told to “learn to code” (terrible advice in the face of the AI revolution, it turns out!) but when upper-class college graduates lose their cushy jobs it gets, well, sympathetic tear-jerker pieces in the New York Times.

Hang on. It will be a bumpy transition even if, as I expect, it will be very good for the country in the end.

Nonetheless, the city still has a large minority of Republicans. And since city elections — which are in an off-year cycle that does not coincide with federal or statewide races — have very low turnout, a large minority could win, if you could just get a substantial portion to vote. Sadly, that hasn’t been happening.

Knoxville has approximately 97,856 registered voters (as of late 2025). The 2023 Knoxville mayoral primary (the last contested mayor’s race) saw only 16,400 votes cast (17% turnout). Knox County as a whole has ~318,000 registered voters, but county commission and other local races in off-years often see turnout in the teens or low 20s percent in individual districts.

I voted today!

Because elections are nonpartisan (there is no party registration in Tennessee), outcomes depend on who shows up. Knoxville city races tend to favor progressive/Dem-leaning candidates in low-turnout environments, while the broader county leans Republican. Conservative/GOP-aligned candidates often underperform relative to their strength in high-turnout races because their base (more suburban or conservative voters) participates less in purely local contests. Increasing GOP turnout—by mobilizing their potential voters while assuming opponent turnout stays roughly stable—can flip races with relatively modest absolute gains due to the small number of total votes cast.

Every time I look at local election results, I’m amazed, because if the GOP could achieve even a fairly low, but higher, turnout it could swing them. We literally have numerous local races decided by a few hundred votes, with many recent races decided by fewer than 25 votes. (And the Democrats can win in the County if they get high turnout from their voters).

I’m often reminded by a scene in the Apple TV show, Physical, set in the early 1980s when Republicans were still viable in California. The protagonist’s husband, a lefty enviro-type, is running for State Senate and it’s looking good: Poll watchers report a lot of people with long hair and birkenstocks showing up to vote. He thinks he has it in the bag when suddenly a fleet of buses pulls up and disgorges hundreds of Mormons, neatly dressed and obviously there to vote for his Republican opponent, who winds up beating him handsomely.

I sometimes ask local Republicans, “where are your busloads of Mormons?” Or the equivalent. If you could get 500 people to pull up to the polls, you could win a lot of local races here. If you could get 5000 you could win pretty much all of them. The former is eminently doable; the latter is certainly not beyond possibility.

But you need a turnout operation, and the Knox County GOP — like the GOP statewide — doesn’t have much of one. The local Democrats are better organized (much of it through the Democratic Socialists of America, who have a lot of money from leftist billionaires to aim at local elections, as they have done since 2017, with Zohran Mamdani being their showpiece victory). They also seem to have more active social media, and to keep their cadre more organized and motivated between elections using happy hours, speakers, and the like.

Republicans invest less of their lives in politics, which is healthier but also a vulnerability, especially in low profile elections. (That’s why the DSA has targeted those.) But as we’ve seen with the Soros campaign to elect lefty local prosecutors and judges, those local elections matter.

It’s also the case that people in deep red states are complacent. The refugees who come here from blue states — like refugees from Cuba or Venezuela or Iran — seem to have more fervor, because they’ve experienced first hand what it’s like to live in a one-party state.

But the GOP, both in my locality and elsewhere, needs to pay more attention to local turnout. Talking about Iran or Europe is nice, but much of the real action is at your doorstep.

Any thoughts on concrete steps that might increase turnout?

[And as always, if you like these essays, please take out a paid subscription. I will appreciate it very much.]

As Wretchard put it:

As someone who used to use computers to (literally) improvise new tunes from fragments of songs I got to thinking that all that staff work is the kind of thing that AI is good at. I was talking last night over backyard beers with my neighbor, a CTO who is doing a lot of interesting stuff for his company with AI, and with his son, who is starting up his own, very interesting, AI-based business, and both of their approaches basically use AI to do in minutes what normally takes groups of staffers hours or days to do.

We know, because they told us, that the Pentagon and the IAF have been using AI to identify and track targets. This would be a logical step. Say you want to build an airstrip; AI could identify suitable locations, calculate needed units and resources, allocate them, estimate completion time, and turn it all into orders, etc., etc. And it could do it fast.

Of course, for this to work, you have to have a very sophisticated and high-quality military. Units and resources have to actually be where and what they say they are, commanders have to be prepared to execute orders as soon as they are received, and everyone has to have a very high degree of professional skill to move so fast. (This will make it more difficult for adversaries like Russia and China, for whose militaries those conditions don’t really hold, to copy us). And you’d want humans in the loop still to make sure the orders made sense and were actually doable. But you could get by with far fewer humans (improving secrecy) and much less time (increasing speed).

Is that what happened? Maybe. I’d be inclined to bet on it.

Now looking more broadly, does it seem like Trump is anticipating and outmaneuvering his opponents in general much more effectively than in his first term? Has he perhaps acquired a supporter/ally with a lot of expertise in Artificial Intelligence?

History will tell us if I’m right, but this seemed interesting enough that it was worth writing about. What do you folks think?