Peace among political rivals often depends on deterrence. Each side understands that destroying its opponents today invites the same treatment when power changes hands tomorrow. That understanding is supposed to keep a republic from becoming an endless exercise in retaliation revenge. Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) seems eager to test it.

At an October 13 appearance at the University of Chicago, Slotkin called for “signature cases” against people she believes enabled President Trump. She wanted graduates considering administration jobs to worry that they might be “buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want” and to avoid taking those jobs. “I want that deterrence message sent,” she said.

Democrats are not hiding the ball. They plan on bringing lawfare back with a vengeance. Americans should take them at their word.

Slotkin says she meant accountability for actual violations of law, not punishment for accepting a government job. Then why advertise scaring young people away from public service as a desired result? Holding criminals accountable is one thing. Making prospective employees fear the next election is another.

She says she wants to pursue the people who “enabled” Trump’s “corruption.” Who defines enabling? Who decides whether carrying out a lawful policy, drafting a legal argument, or simply working for the wrong president is corrupt? Slotkin and her fellow congressional HR ladies, apparently.

Political appointees serve an elected president and help carry out his agenda. That does not relieve them of responsibility for their own unlawful acts, obviously. But neither does it make every aide personally culpable for every decision made above him. A junior employee at the Department of Homeland Security might execute a lawful order without ever having devised the policy. Does that make him an enabler worthy of an investigation?

Perhaps he should have resigned, saluted Our Democracy™, and gone to work for the Bulwark instead. “I was just following orders” is no defense to a crime, of course. But “I worked for an administration you despise” is not evidence of one, either.

This is what is alarming about Slotkin’s language. She says accountability. I hear a political warning directed at people who have not yet taken a job, much less committed an offense. Once the process itself becomes the punishment, prosecutors do not need to win every case to discourage the next generation from entering government.

And where does this lead? A departing Republican president could feel compelled to issue sweeping pardons for his staffers before they leave office. That would be a grotesque transformation of a constitutional safeguard into a routine parting gift.

Even then, presidential pardons cover federal offenses, not state charges or civil litigation. They cannot immunize crimes that have not occurred. A president could never make the threat of politically motivated litigation disappear by signing enough papers.

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Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) put the objection plainly: “I’m not aware of any Republican in office who has advocated the mirror-image approach — using the threat of prosecutions to deter people from serving in a Democratic administration.” His point deserves an answer. Is Slotkin trying to deter misconduct or Republican public service? Her own remarks invite the question.

Conservatives should not respond with a folksy, foolish “Schoolhouse Rock” pep talk about the glories of public service. Young people considering government jobs deserve to know that an incoming administration may examine their work. They also deserve confidence that investigators will pursue evidence of actual crimes, not guilt by association.

Democrats were serious about lawfare the first time around, and they will be again.

One-party rule has always been the goal. Young people need to be clear-eyed about what they are signing up for by working for Republicans, and voters need to understand the gravity of Democratic threats.

Democrats are not hiding the ball. They plan on bringing lawfare back with a vengeance. Americans should take them at their word.

The knuckleball taught a father when to step back

October baseball brings every pitch into sharper focus. A ball that catches the corner of the plate can decide a season. For Brian Gaffney and his three sons, however, baseball’s most unpredictable pitch became the occasion for a different lesson: How much should a father push, and when should he let his boys find their own way?

Gaffney recounts the experience in “School of Hard Knucks: My Three Sons and Baseball’s Wildest Pitch.” He sets out to help Joe, Emmett, and Ben master the knuckleball, a pitch that demands almost no spin and can flutter in any direction. Even seasoned professionals struggle to control it. In a backyard with three eager boys, the possibilities for frustration are considerable.

A boy struggling with the knuckleball may learn persistence. His father may learn to listen. They may both discover that a failed experiment can lead to a worthwhile afternoon.

What begins as a family experiment becomes an education in baseball and parenting. The boys practice, adjust their grips, and keep trying to command a ball determined to do as it pleases. Gaffney has to confront something equally stubborn: his own desire to see his sons succeed.

Parents know that temptation. We want to spare our children disappointment, help them clear every obstacle, and give them opportunities we never had. Good intentions can make a game feel like a job. The child who once begged to play may begin worrying more about satisfying a parent than enjoying the sport.

Gaffney recognizes that risk in himself. His pursuit of the knuckleball is ambitious, and his sons’ progress becomes something he cares about intensely. But a father cannot take every pitch for his child. He has to decide when instruction helps, when encouragement is enough, and when to get out of the way.

Baseball offers plenty of chances to practice those distinctions. Even the best hitters make outs far more often than they reach base. A bad inning does not prevent a player from contributing in the next one. A young athlete learns to recover, to trust teammates, and to return to the field after falling short. Parents get lessons of their own from the bleachers.

Along the way, Gaffney draws on the experience of knuckleball specialists, including Phil Niekro, Charlie Hough, and R.A. Dickey. Their unusual craft gives the book its baseball appeal. A pitch that survives on patience and feel, rather than sheer velocity, rewards players willing to keep experimenting after a conventional approach fails.

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The greater reward, though, is the time Gaffney spends with his sons. Families can fill a calendar with practices, games, and travel while overlooking the pleasure of simply being together. A catch in the back yard or a ride home after a loss may outlast the memory of the final score. Children grow older, and the seasons that seemed endless eventually stop coming.

For Christian parents, the story also raises a question of stewardship. Children are entrusted to us with gifts, limitations, and ambitions of their own. Our responsibility includes teaching discipline and right conduct, but it also requires humility. A son’s worth cannot rise and fall with his batting average, and a parent’s pride should never become the price of affection.

A boy struggling with the knuckleball may learn persistence. His father may learn to listen. They may both discover that a failed experiment can lead to a worthwhile afternoon. Neither needs a trophy to show for it.

As the major league postseason unfolds, young fans are already imagining the spring when they will take the field again. Their parents will buy gloves, drive to practice, and cheer from the stands. If “School of Hard Knucks” reminds those parents of anything, it is that the most important thing they can give their children is not a perfect swing or a winning season. It is their time, their encouragement, and the assurance that their love does not depend on the scoreboard.

When October’s last out arrives, the championships will belong to a few teams. The hours spent playing catch will belong to the families who made time for them. Those are victories no scoreboard can record.

The 1776 immigration fight America forgot — and why it matters now

The mass rioting and destruction across France in recent weeks has laid bare the direct connection between multiculturalism and authoritarian political movements across the West, as does the similar chaos in countries such as Albania, Belgium, Italy, and Portugal.

The resemblance to the mass disturbances in the United States in 2020 is obvious, with all these incursions combining ethnic agitation with socialism and Marxism, a red-green alliance financed significantly by outside forces such as foreign billionaire Neville Roy Singham and communist parties around the world.

America is the home of Americans: a people born of liberty who are intent on maintaining the world’s greatest home for freedom and serving as an example to the rest of the world.

This combination shows that the planned destination of multiculturalism is hard socialism or, looking further down the road to perdition, outright communism.

The same struggle over identity and political power is visible in American cities and states where progressive movements seek to make group identity the organizing principle of public life. The Trump administration has begun reversing Biden-era immigration policies, but enforcement alone cannot answer a more fundamental question: What holds Americans together?

A fierce argument over national identity runs through our immigration debate. The 250th anniversary last week of an obscure Virginia bill offers a revealing glimpse of how long that argument has endured.

On October 14, 1776, Thomas Jefferson presented a naturalization bill drafted by Edmund Pendleton to Virginia's General Assembly. He entitled it “Naturalization of Foreign Protestants” and proposed citizenship for foreign Protestants who swore fidelity to the commonwealth and obedience to its laws. The bill also offered newcomers $20 toward passage and 50 acres of unappropriated land. In Pendleton's original conception, the invitation was explicitly religious: Protestants would enlarge a people whose convictions he regarded as central to the commonwealth.

Jefferson revised the bill, removing its Protestant restrictions and replacing “foreign Protestants” with broader language. The editors of Jefferson’s papers say his changes were designed to open citizenship to Jews, Catholics, and other non-Protestants. The Assembly did not enact the bill. Yet the disagreement survives in another form today: Is America a particular people shaped by an inherited way of life, or a proposition to which newcomers can subscribe?

Pendleton emphasized the formation of a people, while Jefferson rejected a religious test for joining it. Both drafts required an oath of fidelity; neither can be reduced neatly to today’s slogans. But they reveal different instincts about what a political community needs in order to endure.

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Americans still debate those instincts. One vision sees the United States as a “shining city on a hill,” a people demonstrating the value of a distinctive inheritance. Another emphasizes its welcome to the “wretched refuse” of other nations, placing faith in the power of American principles to transform those who arrive. The economic claims made for immigration are important, but the fiercest disagreements concern what newcomers must share with the people already here.

Those who describe America chiefly as a proposition often claim the moral high ground, dismissing their opponents as bigots or religious zealots. That tactic has proved effective in a cultural struggle in which collectivists seek to redefine the country in their own image. In my view, progressives, socialists, and communists increasingly subordinate freedom of speech, religion, association, and enterprise to an expansive conception of equality enforced by the state.

The result is a politics that invokes equality while giving ever more authority to government officials. If America is only an abstract proposition, the meaning of that proposition can be rewritten by whoever captures the institutions that teach and enforce it. Equality can then displace liberty as the nation’s defining value.

We have reason to take the ideological change seriously. In a July survey, the Cato Institute found that 38% of Americans under 30 held a favorable view of communism. That is a striking measure of the ground an ideology once broadly rejected has gained among the young.

The answer is not to replace a purely propositional identity with an ethnic test or a mandatory religion. Pendleton’s Protestant requirement was itself a statement of values, however narrowly he understood them. He wanted to establish Protestantism as the premise behind Virginia’s expansion of immigration, considering an obvious connection between Protestantism and the rise of representative government.

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In reality, America’s inheritance is centuries of struggle to build and preserve a constitutional order that protects liberty. Americans are born into that legacy, and newcomers can join it. The common obligation is to sustain it, even when powerful institutions press us to abandon it. Such an identity requires more than a passing declaration of agreement with an abstract creed.

The public may be more receptive to this argument than our political disputes suggest. Cato also found that 71% of Americans surveyed believe the ideals and institutions of the founding are part of their inheritance. That is a foundation on which to build a common national life.

We need to build on that attitude and reinforce the public appreciation of our inheritance as Americans. The flying of other nations’ flags at anti-government rallies is an obvious manifestation of the weakening of our national identity by mass immigration and collectivists’ domination of the nation’s education system and mass culture over the past several decades.

Protection and reinvigoration of respect for the nation’s founding values will require a general agreement on the answer to the question of “What is an American?” I believe that the unifying answer is that America is the home of Americans: a people born of liberty who are intent on maintaining the world’s greatest home for freedom and serving as an example to the rest of the world.

A roomful of young conservatives ... and just one parent

A little more than a week ago, I attended a gathering for “young conservatives” at Lazarus, a bar on East Sixth Street in Austin. The occasion was a book talk about holidays and preserving family traditions. I arrived early, passed the build-your-own nacho station, redeemed my free drink ticket, and found a seat among roughly 30 people, mostly men in their 20s and 30s.

The author, a working astronaut, began with a question: “How many of you have children?” Just one hand went up. Once the nervous laughter faded, the conversation moved to spacesuits. But the moment captured a problem that is far larger than one room in Austin: Why are so few young people starting families?

A culture devoted to personal possibility can lose sight of the people who come after us.

The numbers are sobering. The United Nations estimates that the global fertility rate fell from 4.8 children per woman in 1970 to 2.2 in 2024. The world's population is still growing, but more countries are having fewer children than would be needed to replace one generation with the next. That shift will affect economies, communities, and how people imagine their futures.

The usual explanations are familiar. Young adults date less, marry later, struggle with housing costs, and find relationships harder to build in a screen-mediated world.

Yet economics and technology do not settle the question. In a 2024 Pew Research Center survey, 57% of adults under 50 who said they were unlikely ever to have children cited a simple reason: They don’t want to. That figure describes a particular group, not all young adults. Still, it invites a cultural question: What has changed about our understanding of a good life?

Fifty years ago, Tom Wolfe offered one answer. His 1976 essay “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening” described Americans absorbed in “remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing” the self. He contrasted that obsession with an older sense that people belonged to a “great biological stream”: They carried forward something inherited from their ancestors and entrusted something to their descendants. Wolfe saw more Americans daring to step outside that stream.

French philosopher Jean Baudrillard later encountered a similar restlessness in America. He saw a country fascinated by speed, reinvention, and the perpetual justification of its own existence. The self was no longer merely something to be cultivated. It was a project that could be endlessly redesigned.

The older warning came from Alexis de Tocqueville. In “Democracy in America,” he described individualism as a “mature and calm feeling” that draws a person away from the wider community into a small circle of family and friends. Tocqueville's individualist still had that circle. What happens when it contracts further, until the individual becomes the central obligation?

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Individualism has given America extraordinary wealth, innovation, and freedom to pursue a life of one's choosing. Those achievements should not be dismissed. But a culture devoted to personal possibility can lose sight of the people who come after us. Children demand time, sacrifice, and commitments that resist being rearranged around our preferences. If freedom becomes simply the absence of such obligations, family formation begins to look less like a natural part of life and more like an obstacle to self-realization.

Governments have tried to make parenthood easier. Singapore subsidizes child care; Hungary offers housing and tax benefits; South Korea supports fertility treatments. These policies can relieve real burdens, especially for people who want children but cannot afford them. Yet they have not produced a reliable formula for reversing low fertility. “No government has discovered a policy that produces sustained bumps in fertility,” Texas A&M historian Trent MacNamara told Business Insider.

Long before today's demographic debate, Theodore Roosevelt worried about what he called “willful sterility.” Writing in 1911, he blamed “selfishness,” the “love of ease,” and a retreat from risk and duty. His language was severe. His underlying challenge remains recognizable: What are we willing to sacrifice for a future we will not live to see?

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Allan Bloom later worried that young people’s “primary preoccupation” was themselves, “understood in the narrowest sense.” Oswald Spengler reached for an even bleaker formulation in “The Decline of the West”: “Children do not happen,” he wrote, when people can no longer find a reason for their existence. Neither writer supplied a birth-rate policy. Both were asking what people believe their lives are for.

No tax credit or dating app can answer that question by itself. Financial help may make it possible to have children, but a society must also regard family life as something worth choosing. It must leave room for obligations that cannot be measured solely by their return to the self.

Back at the bar in Austin, one hand rose when the astronaut asked who had children. The talk moved on. The question should not. A civilization that prizes individual freedom must still decide what, and whom, it hopes will come after it.

The GOP's favorite business model: Lose, beg, repeat

My wife, Gracie, recently heard Dana Perino on “The Five” discussing how poorly Republican candidates explain their accomplishments. “Why won’t the Republicans listen to her?” she asked. Tyrus often makes a related observation: Republicans don’t know how to play with a lead. I told Gracie that much of what’s wrong with this country belongs squarely at the feet of the GOP.

Democrats announce their intentions. Republicans raise money promising to stop them. Washington gets bigger, Americans get the bill, and another Republican email requests $25. Before midnight, naturally. Apparently, losing requires a subscription.

Republicans want our votes; our opinions apparently weren’t part of the purchase.

In “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers,” Aragorn commands the defenders of Helm’s Deep: “Show them no mercy, for you shall receive none!” The mercy rule belongs in T-ball for 5-year-olds, not politics, where a nation’s survival is at stake. Yet Republicans have spent decades playing as though their first obligation were to avoid upsetting the opposition.

We watched Bush absorb political beatings, McCain court people who never returned the favor, and Candy Crowley intervene during Romney’s confrontation with Obama. McCain reached so far across the aisle that he was practically horizontal. We sent Republicans to oppose the Democrats. They seemed determined to impress them.

Meanwhile, Rush Limbaugh labored daily, exposing the left and teaching millions what fighting it looked like. “I don’t want to stand with them. I want to stand over them,” declared the booming voice of the Doctor of Democracy. “What do they offer that we want? What do they stand for that’s good for the country?” His exasperation carried through the golden EIB microphone and across the fruited plain.

Rush understood the glass jaw beneath the left’s self-appointed moral superiority. Its champions claimed the virtue, assigned themselves the intelligence, and expected everyone else to accept the verdict. Rush laughed at that verdict. He challenged the falsehoods beneath their claims and mocked the people accustomed to doing the mocking. As he put it, “Mock them, and they become unhinged.”

The Tea Party had put Washington on notice, and Romney’s defeat deepened the frustration. Voters who followed the experts’ advice about electability were tired of lectures from people who kept losing. Then Trump came down the escalator.

I told my son in 2015, “Trump’s going to win.” He asked how I knew. “Because the establishment doesn’t understand how pissed off the American people are.” Voters were furious about government fraud, grift, and overreach. Republicans campaigned against Washington, then unpacked as though they had checked into a resort. People wanted someone willing to take a political swing and make it hurt.

Trump did.

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Suddenly, people who had spent decades sneering at conservatives discovered an urgent national need for civility. Their media scribes encountered a Republican who questioned the interrogator, and their disapproval failed to produce the customary apology. Rush had shown us the glass jaw. Trump kept pounding it. I’ve never seen political derangement displayed so relentlessly or applauded so enthusiastically.

They warned Trump’s voters that he was combative. Yes. That was in the job description. His victories exposed Republican excuses, and his willingness to confront the press exposed their deference.

How much of the GOP’s helplessness had been habit? Some Republicans learned. Others still regard Trump’s voters as an unpleasant condition the party might recover from. They want our votes; our opinions apparently weren’t part of the purchase.

Now Republican candidates need coaching to defend their own record. How many seminars does this require? Dana, too many Republicans spent years selling us the fight. Trump made their customers start asking about delivery.

Start with the border. Maintaining control there would be enough for me. Customs and Border Protection reports that fiscal year 2026 was the first full fiscal year with zero Border Patrol releases into the country’s interior. Apparently, enforcement was possible!

Under the trade agreement with Japan, GlobalFoundries plans two new American chip factories, financed by up to $21 billion in Japanese investment. Trump’s Justice Department announced charges against 324 defendants in 2025 in alleged health care fraud schemes involving more than $14.6 billion in intended losses.

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Trump’s administration also moved to speed permitting for AI infrastructure and canceled thousands of USAID awards. Innovation deserves room. Taxpayer spending deserves scrutiny. There is a record to campaign on, so defend it. Make opponents defend theirs. When reporters put words in your mouth, spit them out.

Here’s a freebie: Biden signed a law providing nearly $80 billion in additional IRS funding. Meanwhile, it took a young man with a camera to put Minnesota’s day care spending under national scrutiny. Why did elected Republicans need a YouTuber to make people ask where the money went?

Trump cannot supply every Republican’s backbone. If Democrats take Congress, candidates who failed to make their case should answer for it. If Trump carries them across the finish line, a thank-you should precede complaints about his manners.

They should also remember one of Rush’s favorite sayings: “They don’t make statues of great moderates in history.” I miss Rush. He spent decades teaching us how to fight, and millions of listeners learned. Too many Republicans learned only how to fundraise. They have less than two weeks to prove that winning wouldn’t ruin their business model.

Kamala’s voter-roll freakout hits blue states hard

Kamala Harris has made election integrity a big talking point ahead of the midterms. The former vice president’s latest claims of cheating raise an obvious question: Does she object to voter-roll maintenance itself, or can she identify a lawful safeguard she actually supports?

At an appearance in South Korea last week, the former vice president alleged “overt cheating” in American elections, citing voter-roll purges. In September, she accused officials of “cheating by purging voter rolls.” Over the summer, she also criticized the SAVE America Act for requiring documentary proof of citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections.

Harris can keep calling voter-roll purges ‘cheating.’ But California’s unanswered questions and New Jersey’s documented registration failure demand more than talking points.

Harris wants to turn basic election safeguards into the boogeyman of election administration. But isn’t the point to ensure that only American citizens vote in our elections?

Election officials must not improperly remove eligible voters. They also have an obligation to identify ineligible registrations. Harris talks about purges without making that distinction. Americans deserve to know which safeguards she opposes and why.

Start with California, Harris’ home state. On Monday, the Justice Department charged 28 lawful permanent residents with federal election-related offenses, including fraudulent registration and illegal voting. Eleven were arrested. The charges are allegations, not convictions, but the cases warrant serious attention.

Federal prosecutors say all 28 appeared on a list of more than 20,000 people the government believes are likely noncitizens registered in California. The Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security sued the state on October 15, seeking to stop ballots attributed to people on that list from being counted until their citizenship is verified.

Governor Gavin Newsom (D) called the lawsuit an attempt to “suppress California voters.” The state should be able to show how it verifies eligibility and corrects its rolls.

It cannot. A separate public records response exposes an accounting problem: California’s statewide voter-registration system “does not contain a voter status reason for cancellation due to non-citizenship.” The state could not provide a count of registrations canceled for that specific reason. Why not?

New Jersey supplies an even clearer example of why verification cannot be an afterthought. In July, Governor Mikie Sherrill (D) acknowledged that a “serious software error” had registered approximately 6,600 people who answered “no” when asked whether they were U.S. citizens during motor vehicle transactions. The “error” occurred between June 2023 and June 2024.

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A subsequent state accounting found that about 340 newly registered people had actually voted. New Jersey claims it has no evidence that those votes changed an election result. That does not excuse a system that registered people after they expressly declined to attest to citizenship.

At a House Judiciary hearing in September, I noted that at least three New Jersey elections in 2025 were decided by a single vote or ended in a tie. When a race is that close, election officials cannot shrug off registration errors.

New Jersey voters understand the stakes. A Rutgers-Eagleton poll released this month found that 82% of state residents support requiring photo ID to vote in person, while 71% favor documentary proof of U.S. citizenship to register.

Even Sherrill has expressed support for voter ID. That requirement establishes identity; proof of citizenship establishes eligibility. They serve different purposes, and neither question should be brushed aside with a slogan about voter suppression.

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Minnesota has its own lesson in the need for clear rules. Governor Tim Walz (D) signed a 2023 law that lets residents get standard driver’s licenses without proving lawful immigration status. During an October 2025 legislative hearing, state Rep. Patti Anderson (R) pressed state elections director Paul Linnell on whether those licenses could be used as voter identification. He failed to give a direct yes-or-no answer.

Minnesota does permit a driver’s license as proof of residence for Election Day registration. Citizenship eligibility is a separate requirement. Election officials should be able to explain the distinction simply, especially when lawmakers ask about vulnerabilities.

Accurate voter rolls, citizenship verification, and clear identity rules protect the votes of eligible Americans. Officials should explain how those safeguards work and correct failures when they find them.

Harris can keep calling voter-roll purges “cheating.” But California’s unanswered questions and New Jersey’s documented registration failure demand more than talking points. If she believes these safeguards are improper, she should explain which ones — and what she would do instead.

Metallica’s best act of rebellion? No political lectures

I was scrolling in bed when a clip of James Hetfield at the Sphere in Las Vegas came across my feed. I watched it three times.

He thanked the crowd for traveling to see Metallica, then said the band wasn’t there, like some other entertainers, to influence anybody. “Metallica’s agenda is love, energy, and heavy music, baby!”

The second you make half your audience feel unwelcome, you have a problem. Nobody buys a ticket to see a spokesperson.

The place went nuts. I might have cheered a little myself.

Hetfield has never been one for political sermons. Lars Ulrich, who leans left, has said the two hardly ever talk politics. They’ve spent more than 40 years in a band together and somehow managed. Their fans have too.

I spent my early 20s singing in a band on the road, including five summers on Warped Tour, so I’m not going to pretend music and politics never mix. Warped had plenty of both. Bands railed against the government between songs every day. But it was anti-establishment stuff: kids sticking it to whoever was in charge. I don’t remember anyone telling half the parking lot they were bad people because of how their parents voted. We were all in it together, sweaty, sunburned, and broke.

That’s what has changed. Too often, what comes from the stage isn’t rebellion. It’s a lecture aimed at the people who paid to be there.

Look at what happened to Macklemore. He was dropped from Ed Sheeran’s tour in September after saying “Free Palestine” onstage. Stadium operators objected; other performers quit in protest. Suddenly the tour itself was a political fight, and the music was an afterthought.

Here’s the part that gets me. On Warped Tour, the bands were the ones pushing back against people in power. Sure, the whole thing was sponsored by Vans. But the feeling was rebellion, not a lecture dressed up as a concert.

Now some of the biggest artists are among the richest, most-followed voices in the culture. They wield plenty of power themselves, and they use the stage to tell regular people what to think. It feels corporate and ridiculous.

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That’s not punk. That’s a sermon with a light show.

Which means a 63-year-old guy at the most high-tech venue on the planet, refusing to join in, might be the most rebellious thing I’ve seen from a stage in years.

I’ve worked in PR a long time, and I’d tell any client the same thing: The second you make half your audience feel unwelcome, you have a problem. Nobody buys a ticket to see a spokesperson.

Write the political song if you’ve got one in you. Metallica has. But when the lights go down, that room belongs to the people who paid to be in it. Hetfield is one of the few who still acts like it.

Love, energy, and heavy music. That’s the whole agenda, and it’s the right one.

Democracy may be dying. Conservatives can’t sit this one out.

U.S. Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) told an audience at the University of Chicago that she wants future investigations of Trump administration officials to send a deterrent message. Young people considering jobs in a Republican administration, she said, should wonder whether joining it might buy them “a ton of problems.”

Slotkin describes her proposal as accountability for corruption. But listen to the threat embedded in her political strategy: Make public service under the wrong president so frightening that talented young conservatives never enter government. She said the quiet part out loud, and conservatives would be fools to ignore it.

If the system is fraying, the worst response is to abandon every position of legitimate authority while the other side organizes.

The peaceful transfer of power depends on losers believing they can survive defeat and return to fight another election. That assumption is eroding.

From the Bush-Gore recount to birtherism, Russiagate, and the battles over COVID-era voting rules, every disputed election has taught Americans to question the legitimacy of the next result. A political system cannot endure indefinitely when losing means permanent exclusion, financial ruin, or the threat of prosecution.

Eventually, the incentive to win at any cost overwhelms the willingness to accept defeat. The ballot is supposed to decide who holds office, not which faction gets to use the state to erase its rivals.

Donald Trump accelerated that deterioration because he inspires a peculiar derangement in his enemies. Progressives convinced themselves that Trump was a fascist dictator preparing a thousand-year Reich. They portrayed ordinary political disagreements as existential emergencies and justified extraordinary tactics as necessary resistance.

The campaign to stop Trump continued after he left office. His opponents pursued lawsuits, criminal cases, and ballot challenges designed to prevent his return. Conservatives watched the machinery of politics become an instrument for destroying the opposition. The law may permit a particular lawsuit or prosecution. That does not mean Americans should be comfortable watching every political contest turn into a criminal investigation.

Trump also survived two assassination attempts in 2024. The atmosphere of political hatred should disturb anyone who expects elections to settle disputes without bloodshed. Instead, much of the left treats Trump's second administration as an even more terrifying prospect because he has learned something from the first: Personnel determine whether a president can govern. The specter of Cheeto Hitler now excuses an endless war against anyone who might help him.

Trump entered Washington in 2017 without understanding how thoroughly permanent bureaucracies could frustrate his agenda. Officials who considered themselves guardians of the government against its elected leader resisted him from within. This time he has pursued loyal appointments and executive action aggressively.

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Progressives understand that a Republican administration staffed by people committed to its program is harder to neutralize than one staffed by its enemies. So the fight has shifted from Trump himself to the Americans willing to serve him.

That is what makes Slotkin's remarks so revealing. Young graduates already face a difficult choice between a prosperous private career and the headaches of federal service. Now imagine telling them that four years at the Department of Justice or Homeland Security could lead to crippling legal bills once Democrats regain power. You need not imprison every conservative official. Ruin a few careers, and the next generation will learn to stay away. An opposition that cannot recruit competent personnel cannot govern, however many elections it wins.

Trump's greatest failure may be his refusal to impose meaningful costs on those who abused power against his movement. Anthony Fauci is not in prison. Officials who conservatives believe weaponized investigations have escaped accountability. Radical activists continue to operate, while prosecutions of political violence remain uneven at best. In repeated games, cooperation survives only when defection carries a price. Tit for tat is not a pleasant rule, but one side cannot endlessly punish the other while expecting restraint in return. Without consequences, bad conduct becomes a winning strategy.

The danger reaches beyond staffing.

Researcher Jennica Pounds, known online as DataRepublican, has published recordings and documents she says reveal preparations for a constitutional crisis involving a network called the United Democracy Alliance. According to her account, former military, intelligence, and diplomatic figures have discussed scenarios in which contested elections, executive branch action against protests, and defiance by Democrat governors could trigger a challenge to federal authority.

DataRepublican interprets those preparations as the groundwork for a seizure of power. Her account describes proposed political red lines, including a federal response to mass protests, that could become triggers for a confrontation between governors and Washington.

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One can chalk up the recordings as contingency planning, but the distinction grows thin when political operatives begin gaming out how governors might seize power amid a constitutional crisis. Elections are supposed to settle who governs. Planning to declare Washington illegitimate when an election or federal response goes the wrong way raises the stakes beyond ordinary opposition politics. Conservatives cannot afford to treat that possibility as an abstraction. They should examine the recordings, demand public answers, and prepare to defend their institutions.

No sane person should welcome domestic unrest. A country in which each election threatens imprisonment, confiscation, and violence would become unrecognizable. Americans have spent generations assuming that partisan combat ends when the ballots are counted. That bargain cannot survive if each party views the other as an enemy to be destroyed. Conservatives should demand lawful accountability for genuine wrongdoing, defend constitutional procedures, and refuse the comforting fantasy that decorum alone will restore the old rules.

None of this is permission to withdraw from politics. It is a reason to become harder to exclude. Vote. Recruit candidates. Build institutions. Win local offices. Know your sheriff, your neighbors, and the people responsible for keeping order. Cultivate lawyers, administrators, and young professionals willing to serve despite intimidation.

If the system is fraying, the worst response is to abandon every position of legitimate authority while the other side organizes. Democracy may not survive in the form Americans remember. The power conservatives build now will determine whether they have any say in what follows.

Conservatives demand competition — except in their own primaries

Conservatives say they believe in competition. So why on earth do we tolerate a political system in which one man effectively picks our candidates before voters have a chance to examine them?

Friedrich Hayek understood why monopoly is dangerous: “Our freedom of choice in a competitive society rests on the fact that, if one person refuses to satisfy our wishes, we can turn to another. But if we face a monopolist we are at his absolute mercy.” That principle applies to political candidates as surely as it does to products. Competition forces people to earn our support. Coronations teach them that our votes are theirs by right.

Trump’s terrible endorsements are not a minor blemish on an otherwise beloved political figure. They are a debilitating obstacle to rebuilding the right.

Instead, Republican voters have been handed one establishment dud after another, especially in states where the GOP should have the freedom to nominate a fighter. Then, when the general election arrives, we are ordered to fall in line because the Democrat is worse. That is a political monopoly, and it is killing the conservative movement.

Consider the 22 Senate contests this November in states Donald Trump carried in 2024. The incumbent Republicans include Dan Sullivan in Alaska, Tom Cotton in Arkansas, Jim Risch in Idaho, Roger Marshall in Kansas, Ashley Moody in Florida, Cindy Hyde-Smith in Mississippi, Pete Ricketts in Nebraska, Jon Husted in Ohio, Mike Rounds in South Dakota, Bill Hagerty in Tennessee, and Shelley Moore Capito in West Virginia. South Carolina has an appointed incumbent, Darline Graham, seeking a full term.

The other nominees include Barry Moore in Alabama, Mike Collins in Georgia, Ashley Hinson in Iowa, Andy Barr in Kentucky, Julia Letlow in Louisiana, Mike Rogers in Michigan, Kurt Alme in Montana, Michael Whatley in North Carolina, Ken Paxton in Texas, and Harriet Hageman in Wyoming.

How many of these 22 are Ron DeSantis-tier conservatives? How many would fight the interests that actually control Washington? How many would champion an immigration moratorium, end vaccine liability immunity, oppose government subsidies for Flock surveillance cameras and data centers, or take a machete to federal spending? How many would even answer those questions without consulting a donor?

My count is maybe four decent conservatives and no genuine superstars. Feel free to dispute my rankings. The larger scandal is that Republican voters rarely got a serious contest in which to test these candidates and force them to take positions on the issues that count.

The reason is Donald Trump’s primary endorsements and the Republican establishment that treats them like royal decrees.

No, the president has not canceled elections. He didn’t need to. His endorsements routinely settle them in practice. Ballotpedia reported a 97% primary success rate for his endorsed candidates as of July, with every endorsed congressional candidate who had faced a primary by then advancing. That is a remarkable record for a man who claims to oppose the swamp.

Sometimes a stronger conservative alternative ran and lost. Sometimes the endorsement deterred a challenge in the first place. Either way, candidates escaped the serious ideological cross-examination they should have faced. They learned to court Trump instead of courting conservative voters.

Montana supplies the most outrageous example. Sen. Steve Daines withdrew from his re-election bid minutes before the filing deadline, just after U.S. Attorney Kurt Alme filed for the seat. Trump endorsed Alme almost immediately. With no time for other Republicans to enter, the primary was effectively over before it began. Call that a coincidence if you like. To me it looks like a backroom succession plan that stripped Montana conservatives of a meaningful choice.

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Does Alme support an immigration pause? Would he end vaccine liability immunity or subsidies for data centers? Would he actually stand in the way of runaway spending? Those questions should have been contested in a primary, not left to be answered after a nominee was already installed.

The consequences extend beyond conservative principles. North Carolina Republicans rallied behind Michael Whatley, Trump’s choice for an open Senate seat, only to see him struggle badly against Roy Cooper in the general-election campaign. This is a state Republicans have carried in every presidential election since 1980 except 2008. An endorsement is no substitute for a candidate who can persuade voters.

Even where Republican nominees survive November, what then? Hinson, Sullivan, and the rest are supposed to lead the fights conservatives actually care about. On what evidence? Where were the primary debates on spending, immigration, government surveillance, and corporate welfare that might have forced their hands?

Trump’s terrible endorsements are not a minor blemish on an otherwise beloved political figure. They are a debilitating obstacle to rebuilding the right. We cannot claim to oppose a ruling class while allowing one man to decide which members of that class get another six years in power.

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I am not writing this to relitigate every lost primary in 2026. I want to know what conservatives intend to do before the 2028 cycle begins.

Recruitment and organizing start well before Election Day. If prospective challengers assume Trump will automatically bless the incumbent RINO or an establishment favorite for an open seat, many will never bother running. And the people who claim to speak for the grassroots will shrug and tell us to vote Republican anyway.

That problem needs an answer on November 4, the morning after these midterms, not when the next slate of candidates has already been anointed. Find and recruit challengers. Demand debates. Make candidates state their positions. Stop treating the president’s endorsement like a substitute for the judgment of the voters who built this movement.

And yes, the same standard should apply to the 2028 Republican presidential primary. Even a candidate we like should have to sweat through hard questions about electability, the failures of GOP leadership, and why the next Republican trifecta would accomplish more than the last.

Thomas Sowell wrote that “competition does a much more effective job than government at protecting consumers.” Conservatives understand that when discussing monopolies in the marketplace. If we refuse to apply it to the politicians who govern us, we deserve every political dud we get.

AI doesn’t know you, but a good physician does

The timing couldn’t be better.

Just as an Anthropic safety researcher resigned over the company’s irresponsible behavior and another researcher warned that AI developers are creating systems with a 10% chance of killing all humans in the next decade, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel is enthusiastically lobbying our medical system to entrust AI to become our primary physicians.

Now, as a physician who has practiced internal medicine for nearly 30 years, I appreciate Emanuel’s enthusiasm. I really do. But he is simply wrong.

When it comes to our best and worst moments in life, we will always want another person with us.

Let’s begin with his recent essay in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the flagship journal of internal medicine. Citing “studies” showing AI-only medical care is likely to be better than physician-alone or AI-physician hybrid care, Emanuel identifies five AI-superior areas: eliciting medically relevant information; establishing a differential diagnosis; specifying diagnostic testing; prescribing guideline-concordant treatment; managing chronic diseases.

But the devil is in the details.

First, none of the studies Emanuel cites meets the gold standard: a randomized, double-blind, multicenter, placebo-controlled trial with hard clinical end points. Instead, he relies largely on small observational studies, simulated clinical cases, and meta-analyses. Each has limitations that complicate any attempt to draw definitive clinical conclusions.

If anything, these studies raise more questions than answers. This is no problem if Emanuel’s assertion is that we need to perform more studies. However, when he repurposes his JAMA articles into a jaunty Atlantic Monthly essay, he insists that cautious medical minds are “ignor[ing] available evidence and could hold untold numbers of Americans back from better health.”

My question to Emanuel is, in light of his low-quality studies, what sound, available evidence?

Second, Emanuel seems enamored with algorithms. Established clinical pathways can provide valuable, evidence-based guidance for evaluating symptoms, treating disease, and determining the standard of care. But experienced physicians know that clinical judgment cannot be reduced to an algorithm.

Our patients and their problems are not simply algorithmic. Every day, physicians encounter complexities and confounders, curveballs, and exceptions. We need more than book knowledge and flowcharts. Open-mindedness, intuition, and common sense — all of which are born of experience.

Emanuel strikes me as one of the rationalists that stirred up philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s ire. The rationalists are those who worship at the altar of technical knowledge (knowledge of experts that can be written in a book), yet blithely dismiss indispensable practical knowledge (knowledge gained by life and experience). It seems good in theory, but it all falls apart in practice.

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Third, Emanuel has great confidence in consensus statements and practice guidelines. These are recommended diagnostic paths or treatment plans offered by august bodies of medical deliberation or the best available evidence. Sadly, most of this evidence is moderate to weak at best.

As Abba Eban once observed, “A consensus means that everyone agrees to say collectively what no one believes individually.” While AI draws from an immense fund of knowledge, physicians (while using AI) can add wisdom that asserts purifying qualifiers such as “it depends” or “up to a point.”

If Emanuel’s further criticism is that human beings are hampered by their propensity for error, is it not error-laden human knowledge that informs artificial intelligence? Inadvertently and ironically, the muddled human condition is baked into artificial intelligence.

Finally, Emanuel seemingly forgets about the human touch. Surely, as a capable oncologist, he recalls moments when he pushed away from the computer, took off his glasses, leaned forward, and truly engaged with the patient. At that moment of profound and unfettered intentionality, the luminous wonder of the physician-patient relationship came vibrantly alive.

Are we to be convinced that this relationship doesn’t matter? That it is simply an expendable byproduct in a life’s journey through sickness and health? The iconic 19th-century godfather of medicine, Dr. William Osler, would be aghast at such an assertion. “The good doctor treats the disease,” he once insisted. ‘The great doctor treats the patient who has the disease.”

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Perhaps the studies will come. Perhaps, at some point, artificial intelligence will demonstrably outperform physicians (or even physicians aided by AI), and we who practice will need to bow to our computerized overlords as they, like C-3PO, dispense medical wisdom with their soothing metallic voices and remarkable programmed empathy.

But I’m not convinced.

There is a story of a man openly weeping in a massive crowd upon hearing of the death of President Franklin Roosevelt in 1945. A nearby reporter approached him and asked if he personally knew the president. “No, I didn’t know President Roosevelt,” he answered. “But he knew me.”

When it comes to our best and worst moments in life, we will always want another person with us. Someone who can help us, who cares about us, and who knows us.

Artificial intelligence is a wondrous tool, but it doesn’t know us. Find a good physician who does.

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