Plus: France in flames.
• President Donald Trump’s rally comments about male candidates are getting more and more, er, specific. Maybe he’s listened to “YMCA” too many times?
• The aftershocks of Trump’s reprehensible diesel deal with the Kremlin continue to reverberate. Late last week, Starshield—the military version of SpaceX’s Starlink, which Elon Musk’s company provides for the Pentagon, and which Ukraine uses to coordinate its air defenses—went down for about 72 hours. During this outage, Russia conducted some of the most intensive aerial attacks against Ukrainian territory since the war began, killing and wounding dozens and shutting down power for 600,000. Trump and Musk each denied ordering restrictions on Starshield, but public reporting strongly suggests that Musk approached Trump with the idea in order to turn the heat up on Kyiv for objecting to Trump’s unilaterally declared “energy cease-fire.” As the furor over Starshield grew, on Wednesday the Kremlin released an imprisoned American, Stephen Hubbard of Michigan, whom the State Department says Russia had “wrongfully detained.” On social media, Trump crowed that Russia released its hostage “out of respect for”—well—Trump. He added that the United States “was not required to give anything in return.” But the president also later told reporters that Hubbard would not have been released if the sanctions had stayed. A bipartisan group of nine U.S. senators has demanded an inspector general investigation into the Starshield disruptions. But Congress should provide real oversight by holding public hearings and calling witnesses under oath to explain why its legislation sanctioning Russia—both a 2022 sanctions law and another one passed just weeks ago—was so directly undermined. It is good that an American has been brought home from captivity. But Trump ought to remember that paying the Danegeld invites more Danes.
• In three competitive Senate races—the ones in Maine, Michigan, and Minnesota—Democratic candidates have endorsed Medicare for All. The proposal would end the employer-provided health insurance on which most Americans rely: an issue the Republicans have barely raised. It would also abolish the private Medicare Advantage plans through which most seniors on Medicare have chosen to receive their benefits. But that point is not widely known. And even though between one-sixth and one-fifth of the voting-age populations of those states have enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan, the Republican candidates have not sought to make it any better known. These candidates have some heavy anchors on them. If they lose, however, it will be partly their own fault.
• The sanctity of life is on the ballot across the country. Virginia’s Amendment 1 would entrench in the state’s constitution a right to abortion (and to sex changes) regardless of age. Idaho’s Proposition 1 and Nevada’s Question 6 would ensure abortion on demand while preventing the legislature from establishing any guidelines on abortion or transgender “care”—even for minors. Only Missouri’s Amendment 3 provides hope for a saner outcome in the abortion battle. In 2024, against the backdrop of a law that prohibited abortion even in cases of rape or incest, its voters narrowly ratified a “constitutional right to reproductive freedom” similar in scope to the ones now proposed in other states. Pro-lifers are putting forward an amendment that prohibits abortion, with exceptions for “medical emergency, fetal anomaly, rape, or incest.” Transgender procedures are also essentially prohibited for minors. It would be better to govern abortion by legislative deliberation that allows for amendments and clarification rather than via misleadingly written slogans placed on ballots. Voters deserve better, and so do unborn children.
• On the campaign trail, Vice President JD Vance was asked to define socialism. He said, “I think in reality, what it actually means in the American context is that you want to replace American workers with foreign workers, and you want boys to play in girls’ sports.” It doesn’t, though, does it? Certainly, one can debate the merits of those policies, and, certainly, conservatives may come out against both. But socialism means now what it always has: the adoption of an economic and political system in which the means of production, distribution, and exchange are collectively, rather than privately, owned. If that perennial definition is inconvenient to Vance and his party, then, rather than redefine the word to their liking, they perhaps ought to rethink their platform.
• In Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy is struggling in his race to replace outgoing Republican Governor Mike DeWine. This is clear from his most recent campaign advertisement targeting his opponent, Democrat Amy Acton. Both Acton and her brother are estranged from their mother, Donna Arthur, who is credibly accused of allowing her husband to sexually abuse Acton from ages 10 to 12. This is a horrible story, and not properly the business of any campaign. Ramaswamy dug up Arthur and put her on camera to denounce her daughter as a liar and a cheat. He then publicly owned the disgrace, claiming it was justified by Acton’s refusal to debate him. On Truth Social, Trump, of course, brashly encouraged Ramaswamy to keep the ad up. He was just about the only Republican to do so. Vivek has always been tumescently ambitious, but ambition need not fall into dishonor.
• In March 2024, the cargo ship M/V Dali collided with the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore Harbor, triggering its collapse and killing six construction workers. In May of this year, Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown announced that the state had reached a final settlement of $2.25 billion with Grace Ocean Private Limited and Synergy Marine Pte Ltd., the owner and operator of the ship. The state is also preparing action against the builder of the ship, Hyundai Heavy Industries. However, Maryland’s deal with Grace Ocean and Synergy Marine guarantees that if there’s a payout of more than $50 million in the state’s expected lawsuit against Hyundai, half the money after the $50 million threshold goes to, remarkably, Grace Ocean and Synergy Marine. The same day that the state announced its deal, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted Synergy and Radhakrishnan Nair, the technical superintendent of the Dali, for “conspiracy, willfully failing to immediately inform the U.S. Coast Guard of a known hazardous condition, obstruction of an agency proceeding, and false statements.” The DOJ claims that critical systems on the Dali were negligently modified and that if the ship had used the proper fuel supply pumps, the vessel would have regained power in time to safely navigate under the Key Bridge. If the DOJ is right, the crash was primarily the fault of the operator and owner, not the shipbuilder—and now it’s been revealed that Maryland Governor Wes Moore approved a settlement giving the operator and owner a sweet deal.
• During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump pounded Kamala Harris for pledging to spend taxpayer money on transgender surgeries for prisoners. But such surgeries were already happening, and one of Trump’s Day One executive orders in 2025 told the Bureau of Prisons to put a stop to them. After a year, the BOP complied, passing new regulations that also extended to hormones and attire. The courts immediately blocked the regulations. D.C. federal district Judge Royce Lamberth and two judges of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals found the regulations arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act. The judges claimed that the BOP followed Trump’s order without adequately detailing its concerns about prison security. But this sort of APA review simply second-guesses matters that fall within executive discretion and is especially counterproductive in the context of prisons. In a one-line order that provided no explanation, a 7–2 Supreme Court declined to stay the preliminary injunction. Only Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented. We understand the Court’s exasperation with the constant stream of emergency applications that ask the justices to rule quickly on half-baked cases. But when district judges serve the executive branch their own undercooked orders, the Court should send them back.
• Trump rightly canceled Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s proposal to livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan, the former U.S. Army soldier and Islamist terrorist who, in 2009, murdered 14 people, including an unborn child, at Fort Hood in Texas. There is no question of Hasan’s guilt, but there is a difference between carrying out an execution and broadcasting it. Most countries ended public executions because they came to be viewed as cheap entertainment that coarsened the nation’s soul. Given the speed at which the very worst news is flippantly turned into memes these days, it seems clear how a livestreamed execution would be treated by many of its viewers. Others would simply regard it with disgust. Trump vacillates between pursuing wildly unpopular fringe projects and exhibiting an intuitive understanding of mainstream public opinion. On this occasion, his instincts were correct.
• For much of the last week, street riots have rocked France. Monuments have been defaced, shops have been looted, apartment buildings have been broken into, and the town hall of Limoges was incinerated. Similar chaos erupted in other European cities. Popular violence is a French republican tradition. Today’s mobs are partying like it’s 1789—or 1792, or 1830, or 1848, or 1871, or . . . Why the violence? Rioting is fun. Islamist radicals, who have helped turbocharge the rioting, hope, not entirely unrealistically, to transform France. A stagnant economy gives the young especially little to do; François Mitterrand pulled France hard into statism in 1981. If memories of today’s disorder help propel Marine Le Pen, the leader of the right-wing National Rally, to victory in next spring’s elections, it will be because the established conservative parties failed to control immigration. But to have a successful presidency, she would have to abandon the populist economic nostrums beloved of the new right in Europe, and here, to undo Mitterrand’s legacy. France is in for rough times, no matter who sits in the Élysée Palace. May the France of saints, scholars, and the ordinary devout bolster the nation.
• Britain is only one of several Western countries heading toward a financial crisis, and, as in those other cases, the size of the welfare state is a major reason why. A new report by the (right-leaning) Centre for Social Justice has highlighted not just the extent of the U.K.’s welfare burden but its corrosiveness. The amount spent on working-age benefits alone has soared by some 55 percent in inflation-adjusted terms since 2019, in no small part because of the expansion of what the report terms “medicalized worklessness,” with claimants moving “from conditional support to more generous benefits, which carry few or no expectations of future work.” This provides a strong disincentive to return to the workforce. In recent years, the U.K. has done an enormous amount to hobble its own economy through taxation, overregulation, mass immigration, and, of course, the drive to net-zero, but an out-of-control welfare state has played its part. “For many years,” the report’s authors write, “Britain has used welfare to anaesthetize the symptoms of economic failure.” What haven’t been anaesthetized: bond markets.
• A 16-year-old received a pump-action 12-gauge shotgun as a birthday gift from his mother. He approached Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, Ore., forced his way inside by shooting through the glass panes of a set of double doors, and entered a classroom, where he murdered a teacher and three children ages 5, 8, and 11. He also wounded a 7-year-old girl and a 54-year-old teacher. But then a bystander, 36-year-old Kaylub Giamanco, recognized the emergency, followed the perpetrator into the school, and shot him dead. Giamanco, who has two daughters at the school, is a strong contender for Father of the Year. Gun-control advocates argue that armed citizens stopping crimes is so rare that it is immaterial to the debate. Parents in Bend probably see things quite differently.
• Anthropic, the company that develops the artificial intelligence known as “Claude,” has announced that it intends to start banning users who routinely “bully” or “abuse” its chatbot. Given some of the recent statements made by Anthropic’s owners, the reasons for this are almost certainly absurd. (Whatever Anthropic might like to imply, “Claude” is not, in fact, conscious.) Nevertheless, the effect of these rules may be salutary. AI chatbots speak English, and thus resemble humans, even if they are not actually humans. If Americans become accustomed to treating those chatbots terribly, it is not too hard to imagine that bad habit spilling over into their offline interactions. The internet has already done enough to worsen how we engage with one another.
• More than half of the girls’ cross-country team at Camas High School in Washington State publicly protested a male athlete competing in a recent race. The girls ultimately forfeited the race after walking the first 50 meters with their arms linked. The boy competed in the female category in five recent races but participated in the proper division earlier this season. After switching to the girls’ team, he ranked among its fastest runners. Washington’s athletic association maintains a policy that allows students to compete according to their so-called gender identity. In November, however, Washingtonians will vote in a ballot initiative on whether to ban boys from girls’ K–12 sports. In this case, the cross-country girls rightfully decided that the playing field was too uneven to run on.
• A House Education Committee investigation into antisemitism in schools found notable examples of other forms of left-wing insanity being taught in classrooms from Berkeley to Philadelphia. In Berkeley’s “ethnic studies” curriculum—it’s Berkeley, what do you expect?—fifth-graders are taught to “critique empire and its relationship to white supremacy, racism, patriarchy, [and] cisheteropatriarchy.” Fourth-graders, meanwhile, are taught that the term “Founding Fathers” is “harmful because it does not acknowledge the indigenous communities who lived here before colonization.” In Philadelphia, ninth-graders learn that “the United States’ economic foundations are rooted in systems of exploitation, particularly through the extraction of land and labor from Indigenous, Black, immigrant, and working class communities.” Capitalism, the lesson plan argues, “has adapted to maintain inequality.” No wonder the probe also found that the National Education Association discouraged teachers from sharing these controversial lessons “directly with families.”