Plus: Remembering a Hollywood great, Diane Keaton.
• Buckley would have killed that spider in Annie’s bathroom without so much fuss.
• Just over two years after the brutal October 7 attack that thrust Israel into a devastating war against Hamas—and exactly two years to the day on the Hebrew calendar—the remaining Israeli hostages were finally set free. President Donald Trump played a pivotal role in brokering peace between the Jewish state and the brutal terrorist organization, securing the release of 20 surviving hostages and the return of 28 bodies of the deceased held in Gaza. In the face of fierce and often hypocritical opposition from the morally adrift in the West, Israel prevailed, with America playing a decisive role in its success. “When others were weak, you were strong,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Trump in a historic and raucous speech before the Israeli Knesset. “When others were fearful, you were bold. When others abandoned us, you stood by our side.” Still, the conflict is not truly over. Hamas continues to refuse disarmament; adversaries across the Middle East, including Iran, remain threats to the survival of the democratic Jewish state. Yet through the use of overwhelming force and steadfast diplomacy in pursuit of victory, the right side prevailed. Terrorism lost. Fear died. Civilization won.
• John Bolton, a national security adviser during the first Trump administration who has become a vocal critic of the president, has been indicted by a federal grand jury in Maryland on charges of mishandling classified materials. According to reports, Bolton had been using a personal email account to send diary-style entries about his time in the White House, which would have been useful in the composition of his post-government memoir. Some of the notes allegedly contained sensitive national defense information that was later hacked by a foreign adversary’s intelligence services. The New York Times reports that the investigation into Bolton “gained momentum” under the Biden administration before accelerating even further after Trump took office in January, culminating in an FBI raid on Bolton’s home in August. The mishandling of classified material has been an unfortunate constant in American life, complete with accusations of political hypocrisy, selective prosecution, and selective leniency. As the facts come out, Americans will see if this is a case of presidential revenge or justice before the law.
• For years, China has held a dangerously dominant position in the market of rare earth materials. Currently, China mines 60 percent of the world’s rare earths. These minerals are critical to the functioning of smartphones, medical devices, and other advanced technology. They are indispensable elements in high-tech military equipment, from submarines to jets to guided missiles to satellites. Between 2019 and 2022, the U.S. imported more than 95 percent of the total rare earths we consumed, primarily from China. In a press conference this week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer announced that the Trump administration intends to challenge Beijing’s “global power grab.” This is long overdue. Ending our rare earth dependency on China will not be easy, but it’s in America’s best interest to proceed apace with restoring and expanding the rare earth sector. Judging by Bessent’s remarks, the administration is looking toward cooperation between the public and private sector to achieve this goal—a model that was vital to the success of Operation Warp Speed. Markets have already sensed an opportunity. Stocks in American rare earth companies have soared, and JPMorgan Chase has announced an up to $10 billion investment in industries including rare earths. The government, meanwhile, has a prime opportunity to overhaul permitting procedures for mines and domestic rare earth processing. All of this should have happened years ago. It must happen now.
• “Most of my constituency back in Texas doesn’t know the government is shut down, except for delays in air traffic,” Texas Senator John Cornyn (R.) told Semafor. As of this writing, we’re more than two weeks into a federal government shutdown, but the House of Representatives is not in session, and the two sides aren’t even meeting for negotiations. And yet, for large swaths of the country, the shutdown is barely noticeable. One of the issues most likely to spur a public outcry—paychecks for military personnel—has been at least temporarily resolved by an executive order diverting other already-appropriated Pentagon funds to pay for the troops. Senate Democrats are filibustering to block continuing resolutions that would reopen the government, convinced that the public will blame the Republicans for being obstinate. But polling is showing that if the Democrats are getting any advantage out of the shutdown, it’s a small one. An Associated Press poll released Thursday morning showed that 58 percent of respondents said Trump and congressional Republicans have “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of responsibility for the shutdown, while 54 percent say the same about congressional Democrats. Increasingly, it appears that embattled Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has taken a hostage that Trump and the Republicans aren’t all that motivated to rescue.
• For four decades, state legislatures have been whipsawed between courts telling them that considering race in drawing districts for Congress and state legislatures is unconstitutional and that it is mandatory under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. In fact, neither the Constitution nor the VRA has ever required race-conscious gerrymandering. Moreover, since the Supreme Court acknowledged in 2019 that partisan gerrymanders are beyond the remedial powers of federal courts, states have been able to admit what actually motivates their map-drawing. The Court, which by a 5–4 vote in 2023 avoided adjudicating the conflict between the Constitution and the VRA, heard arguments Wednesday in Louisiana v. Callais almost entirely for the benefit of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the swing vote in 2023 who is mulling whether racial gerrymandering as a remedy for old discriminations has some endpoint. He should count as a strike in favor of that view the fact that Congress never authorized it. Indeed, even in 2025, most arguments for VRA districts are based on long-ago injustices. Yet, VRA “minority-majority” districts are now a racial anomaly: Largely white political minorities such as Democrats in West Virginia or Iowa or Republicans in Connecticut or Massachusetts have no right to ask for the same set-aside districts as black Democrats in Alabama or Louisiana. The Court should say that nothing compels this unconstitutional tradition.
• Virtually every major media organization has rejected Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s new press rules, which would allow reporters access to the Pentagon only if they agree to not publish classified or other non-authorized information. Under the new rules, the Department of Defense would have to approve information for public release “even if it is unclassified.” Journalists who fail to uphold the rules could have their Pentagon access suspended, Hegseth said. Fox News, Hegseth’s former employer, issued a statement alongside ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, and CNN repudiating the new requirements, which the organizations said would “restrict journalists’ ability to keep the nation and the world informed of important national security issues.” Although Hegseth calls the new rules “commonsense,” press outfits ranging from the Daily Caller to the New York Times say the rules would handicap journalists and require them to report only on what the Trump administration deems appropriate. So far, the only news organization willing to relinquish control of its editorial judgment to the administration is the Trump-favorite One America News Network. While the Pentagon and its press corps have often had a testy relationship, Hegseth should remember that an independent press, at its best, is critical to holding government accountable.
• Eric Kaufmann, a professor of politics at the U.K.’s University of Buckingham, published new research that shows a sharp decline in the number of young Americans identifying as “trans” or “queer” since 2023. “This trend,” Kaufmann writes, “is especially marked in elite institutions.” At Brown University, 5 percent of students identified as non-binary as recently as 2023, but data from 2025 shows that share has dropped to just 2.6 percent. In 2023, at the elite prep school Andover Phillips Academy, 9.2 percent of students identified as neither male nor female. But “this year, that number crashed to just 3 percent.” Kaufmann’s analysis eliminates changes to social media consumption, religiosity, or “wokeness” as causal explanations. A decline in depression and mental-health problems among the young does seem to be having an effect in the post-pandemic years, but that’s not the whole story. This leads to Kaufmann’s obvious (and yet, to the left, heretical) explanation: The choice to adopt a “transgender identity” was a fad that rose and is now fading.
• A Telegram group chat maintained by the leaders of certain chapters of the Young Republicans has since become a scandal of their own making after Politico published its contents. In it, these self-anointed shapers of young minds on the right casually indulged in racial slurs and stereotypes, mused noxiously about the virtues of Hitlerite extermination programs, and may have even confessed to criminal wrongdoing. Many Republicans, including Vice President JD Vance, dismissed the concerns this chat raised as “pearl-clutching” over “kids” doing “stupid things.” (Many of these “kids” were in their thirties.) Democrats were quick to assert that the vile and impossibly stupid exchanges were indicative of a toxic culture that is especially pronounced on the youngish right, and they denounced the GOP lawmakers who had associated with these mid-level functionaries. Both sides accused the other of hypocrisy for sheltering their co-partisans from criticism while castigating their opponents for doing the same. And both sides have a point. But Republicans who must submit to the voters’ verdict this year showed none of Vance’s apathy. “Easy,” Virginia gubernatorial candidate Winsome Earle-Sears replied to a statement from Old Dominion Democrats demanding she call for the resignations of these Young Republican leaders. “They must absolutely step down,” Earle-Sears said. She then challenged her opponent, Democratic nominee Abigail Spanberger, to join her in calling for Virginia attorney general nominee Jay Jones to exit the race for having indulged in murder fantasies on a separate text thread. As of this writing, Spanberger has yet to take up the challenge.
• Since meeting Trump in Alaska, Vladimir Putin has made a mockery of the president’s attempts to broker a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. The Kremlin’s ground offensive grinds on, and its missile and drone attacks on Ukraine have sharply increased. Whether by adding Cubans (despite Havana’s denials) to its “foreign legion” or changing the law to give conscripts a “defensive only” role in Ukraine itself, Russia has signaled that it has the intent and—it believes—the capability to fight and win a war of attrition. Ominously, it has stepped up its shadow war in Europe, and it might well not stop there. The longer the Ukrainian conflict lasts, the greater the likelihood that the war will spread. This is why Trump is right to try to bring Putin to the negotiating table and right to recognize that it will take more than a red carpet to get him there. Trump has effectively told Russia that, in the absence of serious peace talks, the U.S. will supply Ukraine with Tomahawk cruise missiles, which have a range of 1,500 miles and can seriously threaten Russia’s oil production infrastructure. Putin should be given time to consider this warning, but not very much time.
• Argentina’s President Javier Milei has given his country its best chance in decades of reversing its long decline. He has also unambiguously realigned Argentina with the United States. Much of Milei’s ability to continue his remarkable progress will depend on how his party and its allies fare in legislative elections later this month. A convinced free marketeer, Milei has been propping up the country’s perennially battered currency in order to preserve inflation’s (more or less) downward trajectory—which some would call free-market heresy. After the opposition Peronists—as poisonous as ever—did much better than expected in local elections in Buenos Aires province, it triggered a crisis of confidence in the peso, which dollar-strapped Argentina does not have enough reserves to stem. This is why the United States Treasury has been intervening in the markets to support the peso and has agreed to set up swap lines with Argentina of up to $20 billion as an additional line of defense. The administration is also trying to corral private sector money to help out with another $20 billion. Argentina will be a strategically invaluable ally if Milei can weather the current storm and continue his reforms. This is a gamble worth taking, but a great deal is resting on those midterms.
• Actress Diane Keaton passed away on October 11 at age 79 from pneumonia. With her passing, we bid a further farewell to the stars and spirit of cinema’s second golden age, the rebellious era of the 1970s. Keaton—born Diane Hall, she took her mother’s maiden name as her stage name—carved her own unique path through an era of independent cinema with her first serious role as Kay Adams in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather and (especially) The Godfather, Part II. But she truly made her mark playing alongside and opposite Woody Allen during the mid- to late Seventies in movies such as Annie Hall and Manhattan—becoming a style icon in the bargain. The bien-pensants at the New York Times may prefer to focus on her turn as communist fellow traveler Louise Bryant in Warren Beatty’s Reds—and she is the sole bright spot in a film whose ideological sympathies are wildly misplaced. We, however, prefer to remember Keaton as an actress whose grace, lightness, and nuance shone throughout her entire career as she aged into adulthood. R.I.P to a Hollywood great.
Editor’s note: The Week has been updated to correct an error in the paragraph on Diane Keaton.