Commentary Culture Investigations

We regret to inform you that the Elitist Media are at it again, singling out Tesla during reporting on a fatal auto accident. This time it was both ABC and CBS putting their Elon Derangement out on full display on their respective evening newscasts.Here’s how NBC Los Angeles reported the story:A woman is dead and four others were hurt Thursday after a driver crashed in the parking lot of a Trader Joe’s in Fairfax, the Los Angeles Fire Department said.The incident was reported at 1:21 p.m. at the grocery store on the 7900 block of 3rd Street. There, a driver hit a parked SUV and crashed into people who were walking into a parked van before colliding into the parking booth.The parking booth’s attendant and three pedestrians were injured, and a woman in her 30s died at the scene, according to the Los Angeles Police Department. Those hurt and the 91-year-old driver, who remained at the scene, were taken to the hospital with injuries that don’t appear to be life-threatening.The vehicle’s make was mentioned only at the very end of the report. The most important detail, specifics on the driver’s age, was clearly mentioned. Interestingly enough, the NBC Nightly News chose NOT to turn a local car crash into a national story. Good for them.The same cannot be said for ABC, which ran the story as brief filler on World News Tonight: ELON DERANGEMENT SYNDROME: Once again, @ABCWorldNews follows its longtime practice of naming @Tesla, and no other automotive brand, when reporting on fatal traffic accidents. pic.twitter.com/MuTBvz0rOb— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) September 3, 2026 ABC WORLD NEWS TONIGHT9/3/266:49 PMWHIT JOHNSON: Now to the deadly accident in a Trader Joe’s parking lot in Los Angeles. Four pedestrians were struck by a car, one fatally outside Trader Joe’s in L.A.’s Fairfax district. The Tesla coming to a stop after slamming into a security kiosk. Law enforcement officials say the driver, an elderly woman, was also injured. She was not arrested.ABC is known for their unrestricted Elon hate, and often mention Tesla when one is involved in an accident- especially if there are fatalities. All other brands, though, are given the courtesy of remaining anonymous during reporting on auto accidents. The same can be said for the CBS Evening News, which did not cover itself in glory here: CBS News is not New Newsmax, Exhibit 1457896: Here’s another instance of @Tesla named in a report on a deadly accident. No other vehicle brands are ever mentioned. pic.twitter.com/jOQ39H3TFc— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) September 4, 2026 CBS EVENING NEWS9/3/266:40 PMTONY DOKOUPIL: A Trader Joe’s parking lot in Los Angeles was the scene of a deadly crash today. A white Tesla slamming into a group of people, killing one and critically injuring four others including the driver. The cause is under investigation.So much for the Media Hall Monitors’ persistent assertion that Bari Weiss is somehow turning CBS into Newsmax 2.0. This is clearly not the case, no matter how much the Hall Monitors might scream otherwise.Local auto accidents are a longtime staple of the Elitist Media Evening News, along with nonlethal aviation mishaps and cute animal stories. These are the kinds of short filler stories that kill clock and prevent coverage of other, more pressing items. After watching the media’s coverage of Elon Musk during the 2024 campaign and early days of the Second Trump administration, it is no coincidence that they only ever mention one automotive brand when reporting on local accidents. It seems that Elon Derangement Syndrome is alive and well, his exit from government notwithstanding.

I have memorized Paradise Lost.
When I was a graduate student, one of my professors, the courtly and mild-mannered medievalist George Kane, who seems now to have come from a lost world, told us of a neighbor of his when he was growing up on his grandfather’s farm in Saskatchewan. The man would recite Paradise Lost while he was plowing his fields. That was in the 1920s, so he did not have radio music to distract him, supposing he could have strapped a radio to his ears. Indeed, what was there then to distract anyone, that is, to pull him apart, or to wrench one faculty of the mind from another, or the mind from the eyes and ears, or those from the world? The man had the advantage of the familiar sights and sounds of reality, or what Augustine identifies as peace, “the tranquility of order.”
This article is from The American Spectator’s summer 2026 print magazine. Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive the magazine.
Kane had that also in his personal and professional life. His most important scholarship focused on the deeply religious medieval poem Piers Plowman. Since the poet William Langland was an inveterate reviser and amplifier, we have three quite different principal texts, A, B, and C, with many variants, so that to come up with a strong edition the scholar must exercise meticulous care regarding scribal errors, the poet’s intentions, and so forth. But to do that, you must draw on your aesthetic sense and your intellectual insight into the breadth of the poet’s vision, his religious faith, and his artistic and theological order. It requires tact, touch, a virtue nearly forgotten in our current life and in higher education, where it ought to prevail. The opposing vices are celebrated instead: the shrill, the “bold” when boldness is but following along after a noisy fad, the exaggerated, the uncouth, what I call the upside-down pyramid, trying to found an entire reading of a work or an entire interpretation of an artist’s career on some tiny point, often false at that, taken to be all-determining. In the five years I studied under Dr. Kane, I observed this care always in play, born of his reverence for the literature he taught.
Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our summer 2026 print magazine.
I can imagine myself saying, “Professor, inspired by your neighbor in Saskatchewan, I have memorized Paradise Lost.” Then he would look at me with a crinkled smile, take off his spectacles, wipe them with his handkerchief, and say, with the lilt of a British accent he picked up from teaching in England, “Tony, that is remarkable. And what have you learned by it?”
That is the crucial question. I am not “obsessed” with Paradise Lost, as someone scornfully put it to me. I admire the poem; I think it is the greatest in English; its influence has been immeasurable. “Captain, have you ever read Milton?” the superman Khan asks Captain Kirk in the old Star Trek series. “I understand,” says Kirk. Shortly afterwards, Scotty the engineer says he’s embarrassed to admit it, but he’s not up on his Milton. Kirk explains that it is Satan, saying, “Better to rule in hell than serve in heaven.” The writers got the quote wrong; Satan’s verb is reign, not rule, and the difference, apparently slight, is significant. For Satan, Milton tells us, has desired “to set himself in glory above his peers.” He is an illegitimate monarch, retaining his position by strength of will and intellect, but also by flattery, veiled threats, insinuation, deceit, self-aggrandizement, and secrecy. What Star Trek’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, missed was that when Satan speaks in public, whether in heaven or hell or on earth, he is a liar, a “politician” as that word was understood in Milton’s time, suggesting someone for whom not truth or virtue but policy was the lever of power. I think of the lie Satan tells himself when he first sees the pure and breathtakingly beautiful Adam and Eve, as he tries to excuse the ruin he plans to visit upon them and their Paradise:
And should I at your harmless innocence
Melt, as I do, yet public reason just,
Honor and empire with revenge enlarged
By conquering this new world, compels me now
To do what else though damned I should abhor.
So spake the Fiend, and with necessity,
The tyrant’s plea, excused his devilish deeds.
The romantic view of Satan, which makes hash of the poem, did not begin with Star Trek; it dates at least from William Blake, who wrote in a slyly ironic voice that “Milton was of the Devil’s party, but knew it not.” From then on, Milton’s Satan has been a paradigm of the anti-hero, the rebel against a stifling order — an impossible reading unless you decide that the poem is emotionally and intellectually incoherent, you ignore the drama as Milton has fashioned it, you disregard the faith that animates him at every step, and you refuse to hear the Scripture that Milton’s audience would feel along the pulses of their hearts.
For what has made it possible for me to commit to memory those 10,565 lines of poetry are not the lines taken singly, but the order of the whole, the mutual relations among the parts, the dramatic speeches coherent in effect and authorial intent, the repetition with change that brings before our eyes the same kind of event but in a different form or with different players, and even the local effects that, though small and sometimes nearly invisible, reflect the work in its entirety. I have not memorized lines. I have taken into my heart and mind and aesthetic and dramatic judgment the flesh and bones and limbs and actions of an organic whole.
I trust it will not be controversial to say that poets no longer write with such architectonic care. Even critics of our time seem unaware that anyone has ever done so. But were Milton a slovenly writer, had he permitted himself sentimental digressions, or had he not always observed the rules of grammar and the promptings of rhetoric, I could not have done what I did. I will try to show, then, not only what Kane’s neighbor must have done, but what Kane himself did all through his career: to listen, to balance, to compare, to look at the smallest things with care, and to see how they fit in the whole.
I will give two examples, one small and easy to overlook, one prominent and demanding attention. They are related to one another, and they show, moreover, where we have gone badly wrong, not simply as poets and critics, but as human beings committed to “progress.” When the Son has created Adam, he tells him that he has given him to rule not only Eden but all the earth, and every creature in it,
In sign whereof each bird and beast behold
After their kinds; I bring them to receive
From thee their names, and pay thee fealty
With low subjection.
Note the slight reversal of syntax in the clause I bring them to receive / From thee their names. Not, obviously, the more natural “to receive their names from thee.” Reversals emphasize, and if you have any of the actor in you, as I do, since I commit these speeches to memory by performing them, you will lay a special stress on the pronoun thee, a stress seconded by the pronoun’s repetition in the same line. The force, however slight it may sound in utterance, is in concord with one of the poem’s consistent and most important themes. Man is made in the image of God. He is endowed / With sanctity of reason. He is not low, not “puny,” as Beelzebub scornfully imagines. Indeed, Satan, encased in an enormous serpent, seeks to find Eve alone, since he is afraid of Adam,
Whose higher intellectual more I shun,
And strength, of courage haughty, and of limb
Heroic built, though of terrestrial mould
Foe not informidable, exempt from wound.
But Eve is no simpleton. The queen of the earth cannot be. She too gives things names, and her beauty commands such awe, that Satan himself, as he draws near her, in an astonishing moment, temporarily loses all will, all power:
Such pleasure took the Serpent to behold
This flowery plat, the sweet recess of Eve
Thus early, thus alone; her heavenly form
Angelic, but more soft, and feminine,
Her graceful innocence, her every air
Of action or least gesture overawed
His malice, and with rapine sweet bereaved
His fierceness of the fierce intent it brought:
That space the evil one abstracted stood
From his own evil, and for the time remained
Stupidly good, of enmity disarmed,
Of guile, of hate, of envy, of revenge.
For the fall of man would not be so devastating, had Adam and Eve not been highly exalted. Here, for example, Adam walks forth to greet their divine visitor, the archangel Raphael come to warn them. He approaches
without more train
Accompanied than with his own complete
Perfections; in himself was all his state,
More solemn than the tedious pomp that waits
On princes.
Such is the royalty of the human person, taken singly; a royalty we have strangely forgotten as we subject ourselves more and more to our own machines. But what about Adam and Eve together? Here I turn to one of the poet’s most prominent motifs: the hand. When we first meet the happy couple, they are doing something you rarely see in our gray time:
So hand in hand they passed, the loveliest pair
That ever since in love’s embraces met.
It is not a mere sentimental touch. When they retire for the night, they walk toward their bower hand in hand, and when they arrive, they stand, they turn,
and under open sky adored
The God that made both sky, air, earth, and heaven
Which they beheld, the moon’s resplendent globe
And starry pole: Thou also mad’st the night,
Maker omnipotent, and thou the day,
Which we in our appointed work employed
Have finished happy in our mutual help
And mutual love, the crown of all our bliss
Ordained by thee.
Thus do they pray, hand in hand: and thus is their marital love enfolded by their worship of God who made man and woman each for the other. So did the first man catch the first woman by the hand, wooing her, as Eve pleasantly reminisces:
Thou following cried’st aloud: “Return, fair Eve,
Whom fliest thou? Whom thou fliest, of him thou art,
His flesh, his bone: to give thee being I lent
Out of my side to thee, nearest my heart,
Substantial life, to have thee by my side
Henceforth an individual solace dear;
Part of my soul I seek thee, and thee claim
My other half” — with that, thy gentle hand
Seized mine, I yielded, and from that time see
How beauty is excelled by manly grace,
And wisdom which alone is truly fair.
Each of them before the Fall is awestruck before the beauty and nobility of the other, and their marriage is well signified by their holding hands. But on the dread morning of the temptation, Eve persuades Adam that they might get more work done if they separate their labors, and after some disagreement over the wisdom of doing so, Adam yields, and Eve, promising to return by noon, says she will be on guard. All through their discussion they are holding hands:
So saying, from her husband’s hand her hand
Soft she withdrew.
An ominous moment. Milton’s camera lingers on the hands of a man and a woman together, meant to be joined in the mutual help and mutual love of marriage, the mutuality implicit in their sexual difference.
The Fall, in Milton, is most achingly expressed by alienation. Yes, Milton did argue for liberalization of laws regarding divorce, but he also saw that for us human beings, alienation from God, corrupting or obscuring his image in ourselves, will be found involved with corruption at the heart of marriage. A society of apostates is none at all; man loses hold on himself; affection may preserve marriages in individual cases, but on the whole, we get something like the guilty Adam and Eve before they have confessed their sin. God calls them in the garden from their hiding place:
He came, and with him Eve, more loth, though first
To offend, discountenanced both and discomposed;
Love was not in their looks, either to God
Or to each other, but apparent guilt,
And shame, and perturbation, and despair,
Anger and obstinacy and hate and guile.
What else should we expect? But if we accept the grace of God, we may walk as Adam and Eve do, at the end of the poem, leaving Eden behind, but going forth into an unknown world reconciled to God and to one another:
They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow
Through Eden took their solitary way.

I do not know what my old professor’s religious beliefs were. He was shy of talking about them. That he had a loving and fruitful marriage, I do know. That he would find our world disappointing, I have no doubt. So perhaps I would answer his imagined question thus: “Dr. Kane, I have done it because it brings me some of the tranquility of order.” I think he would approve.
Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our summer 2026 print magazine. 

Ukraine’s static war front has gone electronic. Even as news headlines focused on the dynamic U.S. air campaign over Iran, a threshold moment in military history was playing out in the frozen trenches of eastern Ukraine. For the first time, soldiers were surrendering to robots. 
Drone footage shows a group of Russian soldiers in white winter camouflage emerging from a trench with their arms raised, surrounded by explosive-laden, remotely operated mini-tanks bristling with machine guns and rocket launchers. Written messages, instructions, and signals — exchanged via drone-mounted surveillance cameras — direct the surrendering Russians to follow the beeping and pinging ground robots, rolling like R2-D2s toward Ukrainian positions.
The Russian surrender, along with thousands of daily drone and robotic operations, was directed from secret underground data battlefield command centers bunkered at various points along the rear of Ukraine’s 1,000-mile front. They were described by a recent BBC report as “high-tech caverns three to four stories below ground covered in computer screens from floor to ceiling.”
“[M]en in T-shirts and hoodies [are] hunched over joysticks and keyboards. They’re monitoring images streamed directly from the battlefield from drone pilots with names like KitKat and Antalya,” reads the account. They are the new field marshals in the chaotic front of thirty-mile kill zones where World War I meets The Terminator as Vladimir Putin’s yearslong campaign to conquer eastern Ukraine reaches the point of diminishing returns.
This article is from The American Spectator’s summer 2026 print magazine. Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive the magazine.
“Russia is stopped cold,” says former CIA director David Petraeus, who recently visited the front and describes the no-man’s-land of intermingled Ukrainian and Russian positions as “the most lethal front line in history.” He says that “maneuver has become impossible.” Regular combat aircraft “can’t get anywhere near” without being locked by the air defense radars of either Russia’s S-400 and Pantsir systems or Ukraine’s Patriot systems and National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System. This is where the classical “combined arms operations” of fast-moving tank columns covered by ground-attack jet fighters and helicopters, which has been the standard doctrine since World War II, comes to die.
Russian “advances” are limited to infiltrations by small squads that are immediately preyed on by the thousands of killer drones proliferating over the battlefield since last year and which Ukraine now operates in close synchronization with a growing corps of ground robots. A new generation of robotic drones programmed through AI with algorithms that distinguish, identify, and autonomously decide which targets to strike may soon dominate the front, according to Petraeus.
Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our summer 2026 print magazine.
Unmanned systems have become the main weapon for both sides. Drone strikes now account for over 96 percent of battlefield casualties, according to Ukrainian army chief General Oleksander Syrsky, who says that Ukraine has been innovating and adapting to robotic warfare faster than Russia, allowing his planners to develop an acutely calculated defensive strategy to turn Russia’s relentless offensives into futile meat grinders.
The numbers involved in Ukraine’s drone production and deployment blueprints are staggering. About 10,000 unmanned systems already operate daily, including naval drones that now dominate the Black Sea. Seven million drones of various types are being turned out by top-secret factories and assembly points. Russian ballistic missile strikes, averaging some thirty per day, seem unable to target these factories effectively.
Production of new systems through rolling new ventures with NATO arms contractors are expected to get further boosts from a $100 billion loan package just released by the EU. Ukrainian startup military technology companies, with continually flowing data from real-time battle-testing of drone and other systems, have become invaluable R&D partners. “Ukraine has tech we don’t have,” a former CIA station chief in Eastern Europe told The American Spectator. 
This year’s projected drone production more than doubles the 2025 volume of three million, exceeding Russia’s, according to some estimates. President Volodmyr Zelensky says that 25,000 ground robots are also on factory order and plans are underway for their mass battlefield deployment.
New models such as the Spider now operate through multiple communications channels, including Starlink satellite connections and fiber-optic systems, to work around the problems raised by standard radio links vulnerable to electronic jamming, land elevation changes, or even trees. 
“Spider offers flexibility and adaptability to battlefield conditions,” according to Ukraine’s National Association of Ukrainian Defense Industries, which presented the latest lethal component of its war machine at an event last month. Spider is armed with M2 Browning heavy machine guns, PKT 7.62mm machine guns, AGS-17 grenade launchers, and Mk19 grenade launchers, with ballistic calculators that autonomously decide which rounds to fire as changing targets register on automatic tracking systems. The weapon mount can be elevated to +70 degrees in order to engage aerial drones or helicopters.
Robots already perform about 100 percent of frontline logistical functions, such as evacuating wounded soldiers and delivering supplies and ammunition to advanced frontline positions, greatly diminishing Ukrainian casualty exposure to Russian drones, artillery, and sniper teams.
Russia’s casualties, on the other hand, have reached apocalyptic proportions and are expected to grow further. Dead and wounded now total more than 1.3 million. Russia has lost about 450 men for every square kilometer gained, according to Ukrainian estimates tallied from digitally confirmed drone kills. Russia’s daily casualty rate of over 1,300 in April is the highest of the war so far.
Intensified Russian ground attacks on Konstantinivka, which stands between the Russian-held sector of Donetsk and Kramatorsk, the main urban redoubt of Ukraine’s “fortress belt,” are hemorrhaging those Russian forces. Flanking maneuvers to encircle Konstantinivka have been beaten back, even as stepped-up artillery and air strikes using FAB-1000 and FAB-2000 glide bombs — launched by Su-34 fighters from safe distances — smash into buildings.
Ground forces might be easier targets in an urban environment. Loitering munitions on permanent aerial patrols above assigned city block perimeters can be directed down narrow streets when troop movements are detected, while Spider robots crawl into basements and move through rubble-strewn corridors to eliminate units taking cover. The ongoing two-year battle for the smaller city of Pokrovsk has cost 250,000 Russian casualties, almost 20 percent of the war’s total.
Syrsky expects Russian casualties to mount significantly in Russia’s predictable offensive operations this spring and summer, providing more plentiful and clearer targets for his drone systems. He is aiming to raise Russia’s casualty toll to 50,000 per month, which should exceed Moscow’s seemingly infinite capacity to replenish battlefield losses. Its much larger and more regimented population is one of the main advantages it has held over Ukraine.
Putin has already ordered raising monthly recruitment quotas to 80,000, offering greater salary incentives to attract urban university-age males as recruitment pools in the remote rural areas of Siberia, Central Asia, and the prisons — from where his army has drawn the bulk of human cannon fodder — start drying up.
While Western analysts may calculate that raised salaries put further strain on the Russian defense budget, this may be mitigated by high casualty tolls. The average survival time for a Russian soldier fighting on the front line is measured in days.
But beyond generating bets on the grim numbers game, Ukraine’s ever-increasing drone proficiency is also extracting a growing toll on Russian logistic and communications networks, air defenses, reserve formations, and command centers in what were until now considered relatively safe rear areas. According to a former commander of U.S. Army Europe, General Ben Hodges, almost 500 Russian infrastructure targets were struck in Ukrainian-occupied territory between June 2025 and March 2026, indicating a significant increase from previous months.
Hodges attributes the growing attrition of rear zones to a new Ukrainian tactic of loading “graphite bombs” onto specially modified FPV 1 and FPV 2 drones that target the electric grid. Microscopic graphite filaments released by the warheads short-circuit power systems, causing blackouts that blind radar and cut communications in rear sections where key air defense batteries, as well as command and control centers, are based.
Ukraine is the world’s fourth-largest producer of graphite, which its growing drone fleet can dump in unlimited quantities to paralyze the flow of orders, reinforcements, and supplies, thus downgrading Russian battlefield performance.
The graphite bombs also open holes in air defense radar networks, through which drones packed with 50- to 100-pound warheads can fly to hit missile installations and air bases. The Russians have no defense against graphite, which spreads and causes equal damage when the delivery platforms get hit on approaching a target.
Ukraine’s newly developed long-range drones, such as Beaver, A-22 Foxbat, and their P6, P7, and P9 models, are increasingly striking industrial targets 1,000 to 2,000 miles inside Russia, where they are swarming down in waves. Attacks have been recently concentrated on Russia’s crucial oil industry, which fuels and finances its war machine. 
According to figures from Ciala, a quantitative data agency focused on industrial and energy sector analytics, almost 40 percent of Russia’s refining capacity was halted last year by Ukrainian drone strikes.
In early May, Ukraine launched some of its most devastating series of strikes yet, destroying a major oil refining complex in Tuapse near the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk. Giant flames erupting into the sky could be seen from a hundred miles away, as massive clouds of black smoke covered the area, producing black rain that fell for days on what had been a pleasant resort town.
Less than 48 hours later, more drone swarms approaching from varied directions caused equal damage to another oil refining complex located 1,000 miles inside Russia, beyond what was considered the natural barrier of the Ural Mountains.
Putin is so scared of the ever deeper and ever more precise Ukrainian strikes closing in around his neighborhood that he banned tanks and missiles from participating in this year’s May 9 Victory Day parade on Red Square, fearing that they could have become sitting ducks for Ukraine’s Foxbats. He has ordered a tripling of air defense layers around Moscow, hauling in missile batteries and radar systems from the front so that Ukrainian drones don’t rain on his parade, even as his troop positions are left more exposed.
Russia had the technological edge in drone warfare earlier in the war, as it acquired mass quantities of Iranian Shaheds and perfected them at special factory complexes inside Russia. Turbo jet engines were added for Russia’s Geran-2 model. 
But by dissecting and studying downed Shaheds, Ukrainian weapon engineers have developed their own Shahed variants with added stealth features, faster engines, and heavier payloads. 
Battling daily swarms of Russian drones that mainly target cities, Ukraine has also developed highly advanced drone interceptor systems specifically designed to counter Shaheds through acoustic sensors that identify their distinctive sound. Ninety percent of Russian drones are now being intercepted by Ukraine’s anti-drone Sky Map system, which is now much in demand by Arab Gulf states facing Shaheds fired by Iran. 
President Zelensky has recently signed lucrative contracts with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait to install Sky Map networks and is sending some 200 Ukrainian technicians to build up robotic and electronic front lines that may yet transform another war.
Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our summer 2026 print magazine. 

Suffice it to say, no one will ever mistake President Trump’s ability to respond on point to way-off-base critics.
Take this latest headline from Fox News: “Trump blasts ‘treasonous’ munitions reports, says US has ‘far more than we could ever use.’”
Fox reports:
President Donald Trump declared Thursday that the U.S. has “virtually unlimited” ammunition and accused those reporting otherwise of being “treasonous,” pushing back against reports that the war with Iran has sharply depleted stockpiles of several critical weapons.
“The people and Media Outlets that keep harping on the fact that we have no ammunition (And they are 100% wrong!), are actually treasonous,” Trump wrote in a social media post. “They do it because they would rather see the United States LOSE a War that we’re easily WINNING, than see me WIN!”
Bingo!
Suffice it to say, to borrow from an old movie line, the president is “mad as hell” and isn’t going to take it anymore.
One can only ask, can anybody blame him?
But the problem here is a classic Washington “Swamp” problem. (RELATED: The Populists Were Not Always Wrong)
It works this way.
A resident — any president, pick one — sets a policy and then goes about the business of implementing said policy.
And then.
And then some bureaucrat deep inside the federal bureaucracy, who disagrees with the policy or dislikes the incumbent president (or both!), goes about quietly figuring out how to sabotage that policy. And then does what he or she can to do just that — sabotage the policy and the president. Anonymously, but of course.
This kind of thing has happened over and over again to previous presidents. Pick a policy — any policy. A partial list from over the years: Vietnam, Cuba, NATO, Nicaragua, or Panama. And on goes the list of this or that policy that has drawn Inside the Beltway critics from somewhere in the bureaucracy.
Then there are the presidents involved. In my lifetime (not to date myself!), but that includes presidents with names like Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan and… well, this is just part of the bipartisan presidential list that keeps on going right up to Trump.
The problem with this kind of political game-playing is that it never does anything other than work against the policy under discussion. Not to mention any Americans actually on the ground somewhere to act on the policy.
This latest go-round, centering on the amount of ammunition in U.S. government storage supplies, would surely be counted as a sensitive military issue in the middle of the war in Iran. Or, for that matter, any war. And the answer of some anonymous wizard somewhere in the federal bureaucracy is to tell the media, anonymously but of course, that the U.S. has “sharply depleted stockpiles of several critical weapons.”
And one wonders why President Trump has instantly called this game-playing “treasonous”?  Which is to say that, as noted, President Trump is right on the money when he says of the anonymous leakers: “They do it because they would rather see the United States LOSE a War that we’re easily WINNING, than see me WIN!”
Bingo.
And not good.
READ MORE from Jeffrey Lord:
Trump Negotiates ‘Biggest Oil Deal in World History’
The Washington Name Game
Lindsay Clancy and America’s Death Culture

The Department of Homeland Security announced 50,925 arrests of illegal aliens for August. The roundup amounts to the largest number of illegal aliens arrested in a single month in U.S. history. Those who headed for the exits included murderers, child molesters, and Milo Yiannopoulos.
Has a presidential administration ever fulfilled a campaign promise as thoroughly as the second Trump administration does on illegal immigration? (RELATED: Team Trump Is Touting Its Wins. As It Should.)
“The invasion at our southern border — we will stop it and we will stop it quickly,” Trump said at his acceptance speech at the 2024 Republican National Convention. “You heard Tom Homan yesterday. Tom Homan, put him in charge and just sit back and watch.”
The Biden administration logged more “got-aways” in April 2023 than the Trump administration noted in all of 2025. The U.S. foreign-born population shrank for the first time in about six decades in 2025, and the net migration fell to its lowest levels since the Great Depression. Data released Thursday shows this trend continuing. Illegal immigrants number 2.3 million fewer than when Trump took office, and legal immigrants number 600,000 fewer. (RELATED: In Defense of Mass Deportations)
Success engenders not gratitude but complacency. Failure galvanizes supporters.
Just a few years ago, the pictures on the southern border showed an endless caravan of Central Americans walking into our country without any attempt to stop them. They do not bother to come anymore.
Given that Americans told Gallup that immigration amounted to their number one concern as late as 2024, one might think that voters might credit the Trump administration for more or less solving this vexatious problem. Instead, the opposite phenomenon occurs. Donald Trump, according to NateSilver.com, endures a net approval rating of -19. In recent surveys, his approval rating ranges from 32 percent in a UMass-Amherst poll to 44 percent in both Rasmussen Reports and Harvard-Harris polls.
Remarkably, in the area where his administration counts remarkable triumphs, the president remains underwater. In an average of the various polls, 41 percent approve of his handling of immigration, and 54 percent disapprove.
One of the terrible ironies of politics sees rewards for programs that fail and punishment for ones that succeed.
Every year around this time, colleges and universities receive billions of dollars in federal subsidies, mostly indirectly, with students acting as the pass-through. Politicians justify, and their constituents demand, the aid because of ever-higher higher education costs. The more schools raise their prices, the greater the clamor for more aid. The smart people who run the universities understand how this works, so they charge — just like the person selling you a car or a house — as much as they can. The federal government allows them to charge even more as it rationalizes its aid as a way to keep education “affordable.” (RELATED: Five Quick Things: Rip-off U.)
On the flip side, Trump appointees to the U.S. Supreme Court playing a crucial role in striking down Roe v. Wade resulted in not a thankful right but an energized left. The political consequence of the sharp drop in murders and other serious crimes coincided with the elections of such soft-on-crime politicians as Zohran Mamdani in New York and Katie Wilson in Seattle. The related gargantuan decrease in illegal immigration similarly did little to bolster the popularity of the politician primarily responsible for it.
Success engenders not gratitude but complacency. Failure galvanizes supporters. Politics, unlike the business world from which Donald Trump hailed, overflows with perverse, reverse incentives.
Donald Trump hurt his popularity through the Iran debacle and missteps regarding Canada. But to a great degree, victories on immigration make him a victim of his own success.
READ MORE from Daniel J. Flynn:
Statuary Murder Moves From the Streets to the Courtroom
Why Democratic Socialists of America Cannot Win in a Democratic America
Kruger’s Korps: The Secret of Success for Conservative Novelists

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Filling in for Executive Editor Tim Graham, Associate Editor Nick Fondacaro and I first dove into the results of Graham’s new study about Politifact’s ongoing double standard when fact-checking conservatives vs. liberals. Spoiler alert: They only really try when they can make the right look bad.Graham tabulated all of Politifact’s checks between January 1 and August 2026, finding “the Democrats drew 37 “fact checks” and 14 were ‘Mostly False’ or worse (37.8 percent)” while the GOP received the same “‘Mostly False’ or worse” distinction “in 63 of 84 fact checks (75.0 percent).”Most notably, the number of GOP fact-checks in 84 to only 37 for Democrats belied the reality that these people only believe on political party could conceivably say things that are false.As part of this double standard, we also covered more incendiary, pants-on-fire rhetoric from far-left loon Jennifer Welch and then MS NOW host Katy Tur bizarrely going to the mat for Michigan socialist Abdul el-Sayed and misleading viewers about why Vice President JD Vance told el-Sayed to keep his wife’s name out of his mouth.Whether it’s Welch, Abdul el-Sayed, or your garden-variety MS NOW host, it must be great knowing you can say anything without fear of being fact-checked by the elitist media.Finally, we highlighted the picks for this week’s Worst Media Quote of the Week, which you can vote on through the weekend here.Listen to or watch the full show below, or wherever you like to find your favorite podcasts.

William Buckley, DC A bar in Michigan posted a statement apologizing for hosting an event endorsing Democrat Michigan Rep. Haley Stevens.

Jeff Wise, NY Why would a perfectly good plane go rogue? The answer grounded 6,000 aircraft.

It is not a secret weapon or a military tactic. It is a law — bureaucratic, dull, and devastatingly effective. Russia’s 2012 foreign agent legislation gave autocrats everywhere a template for dismantling civil society while keeping their hands seemingly clean.

The move follows years of legal harassment by government agencies and a wider, escalating crackdown on the Tunisian press.