Plus: Russia’s peculiar plague scare.
• There may have been signs that Kimberly Guilfoyle has bad judgment.
• The U.S. rushed to evacuate its fleet of B-1 bombers from England’s Royal Air Force Fairford military base. According to the Wall Street Journal, the move was a necessary response to a “multifaceted Iranian plot to target the aircraft and kill personnel at RAF Fairford, including American pilots,” which could include a “complex drone attack ordered by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.” That the Islamic Republic could plausibly execute such an operation is alarming. If British soil isn’t safe for America’s most complex and sensitive weapons platforms, America’s deployments in Europe will have to be reconsidered. The evacuation came after the arrest of five masked individuals who were behaving suspiciously outside the base. The facts of that incident remain unclear. What’s certain, however, is that the U.K. must get its house in order. It has allowed its ability to project military power abroad to atrophy on the assumption that the United States will always be there to backstop its shortcomings. At the same time, it now apparently can’t even provide us with secure bases. NATO countries have legitimately complained about President Donald Trump’s tendency to unnecessarily strain alliances, but it shouldn’t be too much to expect basic competence on the part of our friends.
• Employment figures for September came in disappointing, though far from catastrophic. The U.S. economy added just 29,000 jobs, missing expectations and falling well short of August’s banner report. Yet the underlying labor market remains strong. Unemployment ticked up by a tenth of a percentage point, but that was mostly because of an increase in people coming off the sidelines to look for work. Total employment has stagnated in line with declining immigration and an aging labor force. That’s not something the Federal Reserve can do anything about. Its priority should be fighting inflation.
• Ken Paxton has problems. That’s not news by now. The Texas attorney general running for the Senate has trailed in the RealClearPolitics poll average since late July. Democrat James Talarico, a state senator, has led Paxton in 15 consecutive public polls since early August. Paxton has faced a lot of public second-guessing about his lackadaisical fundraising, especially when compared with that of the cash-flush Talarico. National Republicans have been forced to pour significant resources into the race to balance the scales. They have had to resort to getting Paxton’s estranged wife to appear in a party-unity ad and say that she’s “voting for the Republican ticket” because “it’s not as much about the individual players on the team”—whom she does not name. Leaked audio from fundraisers reveals Paxton complaining about the national political environment, while his allies are busy trying to blame Senate incumbent John Cornyn and the D.C. GOP for not raising even more money for him. The early excuse-making further reduces confidence in the candidate.
• For decades, the federal government’s byzantine and overlapping permitting regimes for infrastructure and energy projects have stymied construction. Getting a permit usually requires years of environmental reviews and judicial challenges. In the process, costs often balloon and many projects become infeasible. Thankfully, a bipartisan team of senators has released the first promising bill aimed at comprehensive permitting reform in a very long time. The goal, according to negotiator Mike Lee (R., Utah), is “to make it easier in America to build things.” Republican lawmakers have long sought to ease permitting for fossil fuel production, while Democrats have wished to do the same only for clean energy. This congressional deal would improve matters in both directions. That’s a rare compromise better than either party’s initial position. So long as clean energy isn’t subsidized by the government, there is no reason that wind and solar should face harsher permitting than oil and gas. The bill would also streamline environmental reviews and impose strict time limits on environmental lawsuits that challenge approvals. There are too many delays in building needed projects—and there has already been too much delay in passing this bill.
• For more than a century, the Jones Act has kept Americans from trading freely with one another to support a handful of inefficient shipyards. The law prohibits any ship from transporting goods between two American ports unless it is U.S.-built, owned, and crewed. Foreign ships are free to land here only when they arrive from other countries. No foreign vessel can move goods from the East Coast to the West Coast, or from any part of the country to Alaska, Hawaii, or Puerto Rico. By mandating a captive market for U.S. shipbuilders, the Jones Act was supposed to foster a thriving domestic industry. Instead, America, which was once a global shipbuilding leader, has produced barely any vessels since the law was passed. Only 92 oceangoing ships meet the Jones Act’s requirements today, and most are tankers for petroleum products rather than cargo vessels. Another 98 ships are U.S.-flagged but cannot participate in domestic trade because they were built abroad. That meager fleet is usually insufficient to meet shipping demand when an emergency tightens the supply of essential goods, which is why emergencies routinely lead to waivers of the act. Defenders of the Jones Act warn against repealing it without a sufficient replacement, but there’s no reason to “replace” a harmful policy.
• The Department of Justice is reportedly reviewing whether Richard Nixon was treated unfairly by prosecutors regarding Watergate. Two things to remember: First, unfair treatment does not imply lack of guilt. Second, the context for the Nixon rehabilitation is an attempted abandonment of Reaganite conservatism. Nixon, whom Noam Chomsky once called the “last liberal president,” wasn’t shy about using state power to shape public behavior and achieve political and social objectives: and the objectives, too, were frequently liberal ones. Self-described “post-liberals” on the right thrill at his enthusiasm for deploying government power and airbrush the actual record of the uses to which he put it. Nixon was a serious man who came into office facing very difficult circumstances. But Reagan’s legacy overshadows his for excellent reasons.
• A Justice Department investigation concluded that the law school of the University of California, Los Angeles, violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by discriminating against white and Asian applicants in its admissions process from 2023 to 2025. According to the DOJ, “Black applicants had approximately seven times the odds of admission” compared with “otherwise equivalent” white applicants, while Hispanic applicants had “approximately two times the odds of admission.” The Supreme Court’s rulings in the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard cases, like its rulings in the Brown v. Board of Education cases, vindicated colorblind law—and also like them have inspired massive resistance.
• Irkutsk, in Russia, is home to the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East. According to the Moscow Times, health authorities in the region “have placed nearly 200 people under medical observation after a laboratory worker died from plague.” In a brief statement, the Russian government’s equivalent of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention acknowledged that an employee of the research institute had been diagnosed with “pneumonia of unknown etiology.” That employee, age 28, died. Is it possible that this seemingly healthy woman dropped dead from an illness completely unrelated to her work? Yes, but it’s not particularly likely. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has urged the Russian government to provide more information. Six years after the Covid-19 pandemic began, we’re dealing with another contagious-disease-research facility in the middle of a crowded city and another autocratic regime that insists that there’s nothing to worry about. Regimes like these are a plague unto themselves.
• Violent protests are a French tradition. The latest round of rioting in the country, however, is proving to be unusually destructive. The rioters are supposedly animated by frustration with France’s underfunded schools. But burning down or attacking schools is an unorthodox way of improving them. Moreover, the disorder, which is being encouraged by leftist agitators who long ago left the classroom, threatens to spread further. Adding to the mess are rumblings of unease in the financial markets. France’s economy is burdened by debt and rampant spending. If it wishes to avoid greater difficulties, the government must restore order and then turn to its problematic budget. Yet France’s presidential candidates provide little cause for optimism. In a recent speech, one presidential hopeful, former Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, called for yet more economic integration with the EU. France’s alleged centrists remain incapable of addressing the disaster they have done so much to create.
• Spain’s far-left prime minister Pedro Sánchez has been trailing in the polls, not least because of his permissive immigration policy and persistent (and persistently denied) allegations of corruption against his inner circle. He used the uproar over the eviction of María del Carmen Abascal from her rented home to call a snap election in November that will be focused, he hopes, on Spain’s housing crisis. The 87-year-old’s landlords relented, but the old woman died before she could return home. The housing shortage is real enough, but it is in no small part due to the population increase brought about by immigration, a detail Sánchez must hope that voters will overlook. Sánchez may be calculating that increased support for the populist-right Vox party will scare off centrist voters and hand him a victory he does not deserve.
• Mass immigration in various European countries has added sectarian poison to their already toxic political situations. The left has long benefited from the votes of migrants and their descendants. It now appears increasingly willing to accept Islamists as well, as demonstrated by the U.K. Labour Party’s increasing hostility to Israel. This process has gone even further within Britain’s Greens. Once a small party of herbivores, it is now a party of the radical left that is well on the way to becoming a vehicle for Islamist voters. This grim degeneration was evident at this month’s party conference, where a motion was passed declaring the Greens’ opposition to Zionism and calling for the “establishment of a single democratic state throughout historic Palestine.” This has drawn protests within the party, but whether they will make any difference is unclear. Either way, Britain is on a dangerous route.
• In November 2023, United Airlines suspended a pilot, Ibrahim R. Mossallam, for social-media posts lauding the Hamas terrorists who perpetrated the October 7 attacks as “brave people” and celebrating the massacre as a display of “resistance” to the “Zionist regime.” He was reinstated six months later but has now, for unclear reasons, been suspended again. The airline should be cautious about putting him back in the air. If there’s a lesson to be learned from the recent attempted hijacking of a FlyDubai jet, it’s that people with Islamist sympathies should be kept as far away from cockpits as possible.
• Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery was finally completed after twelve states settled their antitrust lawsuit against the deal. After Warner Bros. put itself on the market, the Trump administration pressured shareholders to sell the company to Paramount rather than Netflix, implicitly threatening the latter suitor with a legal challenge. A coalition of Democratic attorneys general ended up suing Paramount instead. To clear the merger, Paramount promised California—the lead state in the suit and home to both studios—that it would invest $1.5 billion in domestic projects, meet a minimum quota of movie releases each year, and refrain from selling its historic studio lots. It’s unclear how any of these requirements relate to fair competition. More likely, blue states are picking up Trump’s habit of exploiting antitrust law to pursue an unconstrained industrial policy.
• Christa Pike was 18 in 1995 when she and her boyfriend tortured and murdered 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. The crime earned Pike the death penalty and, on September 30, 2026, the State of Tennessee tried to carry out her sentence. But the execution by lethal injection was twice unsuccessful, and Pike survived. She has since been receiving medical care, and her ordeal has reignited the national debate over the humaneness of capital punishment and the methods used to carry it out. In the days since the botched execution attempt, some have even talked about Pike as though she is a victim. Her mistreatment at the hands of the state and of the men who abused her when she was a child has featured prominently in that debate. These matters have, however, been considered and reconsidered by the justice system already. There are strong arguments on both sides of the death penalty debate. There is no argument for having a death penalty that cannot be imposed for decades, or competently.