Commentary Culture Investigations

Social media rewards euphoria and despair. All is not lost or gained in one election.

Jacqueline Sweet, Guardian The upcoming midterm elections will be the most expensive elections ever conducted in the US. And more of the money is “dark” than ever before, meaning it’s…

Long et al., WSJ A Wall Street Journal investigation found repeated compliance failures, fraud attacks and software glitches inside Polymarket, the highflying prediction market company.

Ramachandran et al., WSJ The risks of cognitive and emotional dependence, along with falling test scores, are fueling a backlash.

Woo et al., WSJ From “honey pots” to insider threats, Silicon Valley was on espionage alert even before the FBI’s arrest of an OpenAI employee.

Donald Trump implored voters to “pretend that I’m on the ballot.”
To that end, he held an unusual midterm Republican National Convention in Dallas dubbed Trumpapalooza in which he spoke on both nights and feverishly visited 29 campaign stops in the final month of the campaign. The electorate, despite seeing that much of the president, rejected his message and voted for his opponents. Democrats added five governorships, netted at least six and maybe as many as nine U.S. Senate seats, and added an estimated 35 seats in the House of Representatives. When, a day after the election, Mississippians await an answer to which party won its open U.S. Senate seat, then you know Republican endured a very rough night.
Did voters just not get enough Trump this election cycle? The “modest proposal” advanced here explores how Tuesday’s results might have been different if voters had gotten, to quote Andrea True, even “more, more, more” of Donald Trump.
Not Enough Memes
Did Americans get too few memes from the president? Trump, of course, gave us a meme of Michelle and Barack Obama as chimpanzees and a meme of himself depicted as Jesus Christ. What voters told us in Tuesday’s results is that they just did not get enough memes of the Obamas as dancing apes and not nearly enough memes that portrayed Donald J. Trump as Jesus H. Christ. Yes, he posted memes of himself as the greatest president in history. But why did he mostly limit himself to greatness in a mere mortal sense and then, when portraying himself as a god or prophet, limit himself to one conception of the deity and not also depict himself as Buddha, Muhammad, Vishnu, Yahweh, Brahma, Ahura Mazda, An, Horus, Osirus, Zeus, and Quetzalcōātl?
Not Enough Bribes
Did the president not promise enough money to voters to vote Republican? Recall that the president pledged $5,000 payments to every adult American if Republicans won. Americans perhaps saw this as opening offer — Art of the Deal and all — and only voted against the GOP because the president unwisely did not up the ante to $10,000 or even $25,000. The party of limited government needed greater giveaways.
Not Enough Time Spent on Renaming Things
Donald Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of America” and Lake Ontario “Lake America.” The Department of Defense became the Department of War. He issued an executive order that rechristened artificial intelligence “super intelligence.” He went too small. Shouldn’t his advisors have counseled him to change North America to, well, “America America” — and maybe rename the Sun as well?
Not Enough Attacks on Republican Donors
Trump’s outside-the-box thinking led him to call Elon Musk, the Republican Party’s biggest donor for the last two election cycles, “a big-time drug addict” and threaten to deport him. A reticent Trump declined to double down on this strategy. If only Trump had accused other donors of, say, “wife beating” and threatened to sic the IRS on them, then maybe Tuesday’s result would have been different.
Not Enough Interest Payments From Lenders to Borrowers
Donald Trump calls for the Fed to institute the lowest interest rate in the world. In the midst of vexing inflation, he advocates the cheapest money possible — a zero percent interest rate. Of course, some nations have gone cheaper and the idea of a negative interest rate appeals to the president. Maybe the Republicans lost because he did not demand that the banks pay the borrowers for taking their money.
Not Enough Making Celebrity Deaths About Him
Do you remember when the president responded to Rob Reiner’s death by saying the director died “reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness”? This was, of course, a moment of great statesmanship. Alas, he really misplayed matters when he refused to also inject himself into the deaths of Dolly Parton, Patrick Stewart, and Peabo Bryson.
Not Enough Attacks on Fellow Republicans
Donald Trump called his biggest cheerleader in Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a “traitor,” said Republican Senator Susan Collins “should never be elected to office again,” disinvited Senator Rand Paul, whom he called a “sick wacko,” from the annual congressional picnic at the White House, ran the most right-wing members of Congress, Bob Good and Thomas Massie, out of office, and publicly gave out Senator Tom Cotton’s personal cell number for the offense of opposing permanent Daylight Savings Time. Clearly, he did not attack enough Republicans for the strategy to pay dividends for Republicans.
Not Enough Attacks on Fox News
Speaking of attacks on allies, Donald Trump sued the Wall Street Journal, attacked Fox News host Shannon Bream as “beyond redemption,” said that Leonard Leo, the then head of the Federalist Society, was a “bad person” and a “sleazebag” who “probably hates America” because Federalist Society–approved judges did not rule his way on tariff edicts. Like the aforementioned attacks on Republican officeholders, Trump did not pursue this strategy to a degree that the GOP could reap the rewards.
Not Enough Buildings With Trump’s Name on Them
Donald Trump put his name on the Kennedy Center. What possessed him to stop there? Why did he not place the Trump name on Disneyland, Harvard University, Washington, D.C., and other places and institutions already named for other people?
Not Enough Foreign Countries Becoming U.S. States
Trump vowed to make Canada the “cherished 51st state.” This public dream to annex Canada deep-sixed Pierre Poilievre’s chances of becoming prime minister at the expense of possibly giving Democrats two extra members of the U.S. Senate. But Canada holding representation in the U.S. Congress equal to California (not to mention the inclusion of Greenland and Venezuela) would have allowed Trump to preside over the largest country in the world. And Republicans could then disprove the xenophobia charge by naturalizing more foreigners in one moment than the country did in the whole of the last century. Alas, Canada remains above us and not between California and Colorado in the alphabetical order of states.
Not Enough Debt
Donald Trump has presided over the greatest dollar-amount increase in the national debt of any president in U.S. history. But Franklin Roosevelt raised the debt the most as a percentage of the GDP. Maybe Trump lost because, although he presided over the largest federal government in U.S. history, his deficits and accumulated debts, at least as a percentage of GDP, still pale next to a few other presidents. Give the man two years and a Democratic Congress, and let’s see what he can accomplish.
Not Enough Wars
Donald Trump used the military to attack seven countries as he strangely campaigned for a Nobel Peace Prize. Maybe if he had attacked eight or nine countries, he might have received the prize from the committee rather than the mere medal from a Venezuelan woman pressured into an act of generosity. Yes, his military attacks on Iran, Nigeria, Venezuela, and points beyond, and rhetorical attacks on Norway for the Nobel Committee denying him the prize, made Trump look bigger. For the sake of the country and party, and not, of course, for selfish motives, Trump needed to attack more countries and demand more prizes (such as an NBA MVP award).
“If our people vote,” President Trump said on the eve of the election, “we win in a landslide.” The landslide buried the wrong party.
“For of all sad words of tongue or pen,” John Greenleaf Whittier wrote, “The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’”
What might have been if American voters had encountered more Donald Trump this election season? One can only guess. But I do know my Democratic neighbors who hate the president strangely want to see more of him stumping for Republicans in 2028.
This article was adapted from this installment of @RightWingWilderness on YouTube.

California’s progressive attorney general, Rob Bonta, quietly reinstated privileged charitable status to Arc of Justice, the serially tax-delinquent “charity” used by Code Pink benefactress Medea Benjamin to dole out millions to far-left activist groups, the Washington Free Beacon can reveal.
The charity’s reinstatement came just 13 days after it first requested the action, which was estimated to take up to nine months, “despite a record showing years of delinquent filings, missing audits, a revoked state tax exemption, and unanswered questions” about more than $54 million in assets, according to a new investigation by the watchdog group Intelligent Action Network shared exclusively with the Free Beacon.
California’s Franchise Tax Board first revoked Arc of Justice’s tax-exempt status in April 2024, after the charity stopped filing and paying any required penalties, the Free Beacon exclusively reported earlier this year. This left a sizable cloud of mystery around the foundation’s $54.6 million in total assets, which still remain unaccounted for. Benjamin’s charity also did not file a federal tax return in fiscal years 2021, 2023, 2024, and 2025—and reinstatement on the state level requires a petition that includes complete copies of the IRS Form 990-PF for each delinquent year. But Bonta’s Registry of Charities and Fundraisers pushed through Arc of Justice’s reinstatement in less than two weeks “without demanding a full accounting of what happened to its money during the period when it was suspended and later revoked,” IAN found.
Bonta’s preferential treatment of Benjamin’s charity is even more remarkable given that one day before his registry approved reinstatement, “the Franchise Tax Board certified that Arc of Justice was not in good standing and was not tax-exempt in California,” according to documents provided by IAN to the Free Beacon. While the Franchise Tax Board had informed Arc of Justice “that its application for reinstatement would take about nine months to process,” Bonta’s registry “did not wait for that process.” Rather, it “reinstated Arc of Justice, even though the Registry’s own rules provide for automatic suspension when a charity’s Franchise Tax Board exemption has been revoked.”
Bonta’s office did not respond to multiple Free Beacon requests for comment on the decision. Bonta, who won a second full term in Tuesday’s midterm elections, is also locked in a high-profile showdown with the Trump administration over efforts to stop non-citizens from voting. The attorney general has sought to position himself as one of the president’s top legal foes.
The tangled web surrounding Arc of Justice and its finances leaves many unanswered questions about a foundation that has served as the financial backbone for a network of radical advocacy groups tied to Benjamin and her Code Pink cofounder, Jodie Evans. Evans is married to Neville Roy Singham, a Maoist American tech mogul who funds far-left causes from his base in Shanghai and who is currently the subject of a Justice Department criminal probe.
Arc of Justice had not filed with California’s Registry of Charities and Fundraisers since 2018. Documents from that year and 2019 still “remain absent from the public file,” according to IAN. The organization’s 2021 federal tax return, which covers $17.3 million in revenue and $10.8 million in contributions, also “still does not appear in the IRS’s public filing records.”
Moreover, “in three of the Petition for Reinstatement’s five years, Arc of Justice reported more than $2 million in revenue but no independent audit, which the Registry’s own system flagged as required by California law. None of these issues prevented reinstatement.”
“This wasn’t oversight. It was a thirteen-day pass from Attorney General Bonta’s office for a $54.6 million foundation that still has its state tax exemption revoked, still has no IRS record of its 2021 or 2025 federal returns, and still hasn’t accounted for what it did with its money while the Registry barred it from spending it,” Susan George, IAN CEO and cofounder, told the Free Beacon. “California’s charity regulator waved it through without demanding an audit, an accounting, or a single serious answer. The only question left is why the hurry.”
Arc of Justice only moved to rectify the delinquent tax filings after IAN began investigating its finances and discovered that “no public document establishes what has happened to” $51,445,599 in outstanding assets, “where it is held, or whether any of it has moved.”
Arc of Justice, for its part, claimed its noncompliance stems from a mere “administrative misunderstanding,” in which the group thought it had effectively moved operations to Florida. That explanation, however, is lacking: Every federal tax return the foundation filed from 2017 through 2024 named California as the state to which it reports. The “Petition for Reinstatement” additionally failed to disclose that just “one day after IAN first publicly raised concerns about Benjamin’s foundation, its officers formed a new Florida corporation under the Arc of Justice name.”
The Florida-based entity was founded on May 8 of this year—seven days before the federal tax filing deadline passed—with the same organizational name and same officers as its California incorporation. The address provided for the group, in Miami’s downtrodden Little River neighborhood, is the same one “the California foundation used on its federal filings for years,” IAN separately reported earlier this year. Google Street View images of the address, dating back to 2022, show a small, colorful shack adorned with peace signs and other cheerful imagery.
“Nothing in the public record shows that Bonta’s Registry examined what role the Florida corporation was intended to play, whether it was operable, or whether any charitable assets had been transferred to it,” according to IAN’s findings.
But “most consequentially,” IAN notes, is the apparent lack of oversight by Bonta’s office: “The Registry of Charities and Fundraisers reinstated Arc of Justice without demanding a full accounting of what happened to its money during the period when it was suspended and later revoked. The Petition contains no 2025 financial statements, no accounting of assets following revocation, and no evidence addressing the $2.7 million in grants the foundation reported making in 2024, when the Registry’s own notice shows it was already suspended.”
In the face of these findings, Bonta’s registry still concluded on September 9—13 days after the petition for reinstatement was received—that Arc of Justice posed “no threat to the public or to charitable assets.” The letter was signed on Bonta’s behalf by Registrar David Eller.
Eller himself described the reinstatement process in 2024 as lengthy and complex, telling the California state legislature that resolving delinquency status  “involves a legal compliance review,” and that complex cases spanning multiple years “create a lot of extra time to do the full review.” Registry staff typically take anywhere from 30 to 90 days to review each renewal filing “for compliance and possible law violations.”
But in Arc of Justice’s case, “the foundation’s petition came with five years of overdue renewal filings” and “was granted in 13 days,” according to IAN.
“The Attorney General’s office had broad authority to slow the process down, demand additional records, require audits, order an accounting reaching back years, restrict access to charitable assets, or impose meaningful conditions before reinstatement,” IAN wrote. “It did none of those things. Instead, after years of noncompliance and five years of overdue renewal filings, Arc of Justice was restored to registered status in 13 days, while its California tax exemption remained revoked.”
Perhaps even more startling is the competing compliance notices from Bonta’s registry and California’s Franchise Tax Board. Arc of Justice’s reinstatement petition contained a Franchise Tax Board letter from Sept. 8, one day before Bonta’s registry approved the action, certifying that the foundation “is not in good standing” and, therefore, not tax-exempt. As of Sept. 29, the Franchise Tax Board’s own records still list the Foundation as “suspended” and “not exempt,” though the registry’s “order granting reinstatement does not mention” this finding. Arc of Justice’s status with the Franchise Tax Board remains unchanged as of this writing.
“By its own records, it took the Registry seventeen months to issue a revocation notice, and thirteen days to undo the revocation,” IAN found.
California’s Franchise Tax Board  told the Free Beacon that “information about whether an entity has taken steps to reinstate its tax-exemption is confidential taxpayer information.” Due to that policy, “we are very limited in terms of the information we can share publicly on such entities.” The agency was only able to direct the Free Beacon to its searchable “revoked exempt organization” webpage.
Benjamin and other Arc of Justice representatives did not respond to a Free Beacon request for comment on the matter.
The post Express Service: California AG Mysteriously Reinstates Deadbeat Charity Controlled by Code Pink Activist Medea Benjamin, Despite Missing $54 Million appeared first on .

After the carnage, Democrats currently sit at a 55-seat Senate majority.

Virginia is no longer for lovers.

President Trump’s tariffs, one of the largest peacetime tax increases in history, worsened inflation and just cost Republicans both houses of Congress.
Tariffs are terrible for the economy. They are regressive taxes paid by U.S. consumers and businesses that transfer money from the private sector to the government. President Trump claims his tariffs will raise $600 billion to $1 trillion in revenue annually. That is a huge transfer of money from American businesses, workers, farmers, and consumers to the federal government. President Trump’s tariffs are a shockingly ill-conceived program contrary to decades of Republican policy that remain a self-inflicted wound to his presidency. In striking down most of the 2025 tariffs through Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, the United States Supreme Court gave the president a way to save his second term. He did not take it.
As during his first term, many of President Trump’s policies have been wonderful for the economy — most notably deregulation, increasing government efficiency, and making permanent his 2017 tax cuts. Pro–fossil fuel policies have been particularly beneficial for the economy as pretty much every good and service has energy costs embedded in it. Prior to the Iran war, such policies were responsible for reducing inflation and spurring growth. To his great credit, President Trump was getting the government out of the way so that business could grow.
But President Trump’s tariffs have been a drag on the economy that has undercut what would otherwise have been booming growth driven by his other policies. President Trump’s tariffs are to blame for the lackluster performance of the past two years and “affordability” concerns.
Ninety percent of tariffs are passed directly to U.S. importers (Americans) who, in turn, pass at least some of them through to consumers. Tariffs inflate the costs of finished imported products. But tariffs also increase the costs of imported components, such as fertilizer and steel, which are used to grow or manufacture other products, and such cost increases are passed on to consumers. According to an Oct. 6, 2026, study published by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Trump’s tariffs directly increased the price of consumer goods (excluding oil) by 2.9 percent. The prices of such goods actually would have declined but for tariffs. Imagine how declining prices would have affected the election.
While tariffs and the “affordability” problems they spawned were a drag for Republican candidates nationwide, their effect was particularly damaging in areas with key Senate races. States with significant commerce with Canada such as Alaska, Maine, New Hampshire, Michigan, Ohio, and Texas were particularly hurt by the U.S.-Canada trade war. Regions whose economies depend on agriculture and manufacturing (such as Ohio and Michigan) were hurt by tariffs on fertilizer and metals, respectively. Those relying on exports (including many farm communities) suffered under retaliatory foreign tariffs. Moreover, the on-again/off-again tariffs created uncertainty for businesses and investors.
The failed promises of President Trump’s tariffs are readily apparent. The tariffs essentially had zero effect on the trade deficit in 2025, which saw a deficit of $901.5 billion, versus $903.5 billion deficit in 2024 (a difference of only 0.2 percent). While the 2026 year-to-date trade deficit is smaller than 2025, it is comparable to 2024 and greater than 2023.
Overall, in 2026 inflation outpaced wage growth. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that because wages rose more slowly than prices, average earners saw a reduction of 0.5 percent in their purchasing power in the run-up to election day. While Americans may be willing to pay higher prices in support of a worthy cause such as preventing Iran from developing a nuclear bomb, they are unwilling to pay higher prices for folly.
Tariffs have soured the American people on the Trump presidency. An Oct. 9-10, 2026, Fox News poll of registered voters revealed 70 percent disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy, 69 percent disapprove of his handling of tariffs, and 77 percent disapprove of his handling of inflation. Eighty-five percent of registered voters are “extremely” or “very” concerned about inflation and high prices — second only to concern about corruption in government; as opposed to 56 percent concerned about border security and 52 percent about voter fraud. Not surprisingly, 64 percent disapprove of the president’s performance, while only 36 percent approve.
Centralized government control of the economy will always fail as compared to the success of the private sector, whether it is done by a single government or by two countries through a trade deal involving tariffs. Getting into bed with China in a trade deal is no good. To give but one small example of the perils of centralized planning through tariffs: the Trump administration had to provide $12 billion in welfare payments to soybean farmers in 2025 to compensate them for the harm caused by tariffs. (China cut its U.S. soybean purchases from nearly 27 million tons in 2024 to almost none during the summer of 2025 in retaliation for President Trump’s tariffs.) The best tariff is no tariff on either side, and free trade.
For most of the 20th century and this century, Republicans have been the free-trade, anti-tariff party. As President Ronald Reagan famously explained: “You see, at first, when someone says, ‘Let’s impose tariffs on foreign imports,’ it looks like they’re doing the patriotic thing by protecting American products and jobs. And sometimes, for a short while, it works — but only for a short time. But over the long run, such trade barriers hurt every American worker and consumer. High tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation by foreign countries and the triggering of fierce trade wars. Then the worst happens: Markets shrink and collapse, businesses and industries shut down, and millions of people lose their jobs.”
The Republican Party platform from at least the early 1970s until 2016 was proudly free trade and anti-tariff; Republicans had learned the terrible lessons of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. The Republican Party platforms explicitly and correctly opposed tariffs as “detrimental to our economic well-being.”
Conservative pundits who rightfully would have been screaming bloody murder had Biden imposed Trump’s tariffs should be embarrassed by their silence if not complicity in the current tariff debacle.
Absent President Trump’s damaging tariffs, the economy would be humming like a top thanks to his other policies, and Republicans would have sailed to victory in the midterms. The Supreme Court threw the president a lifeline. Sadly, for the country, he failed to take it. Will he now have the wisdom to change course?
John B. Daukas served as principal deputy and acting U.S. assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, 2020-21, and as Chief Counsel for Civil Issues on the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2023.