Dear Weekend Jolter,
Now that President Trump has backed down from momentarily threatening to toll the Strait of Hormuz, it’s worth emphasizing how crucial it is to sink the idea for good.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio was right when he warned last month that letting Iran or any other country treat international waterways as theirs to toll would create “chaos” and that “no country on earth has a right to charge for the use” of them. He warned that such a practice could catch on “like a contagion.”
Rather than put that principle in writing, Trump initially agreed to language in the original MOU that fell short of reaffirming freedom of navigation in the strait, as Rich Lowry recounts. The president then compounded that error by floating our own 20 percent fee on shipping, amid the collapse of the MOU in response to Iran’s attacks — only to reverse course, saying he’d strike trade and investment deals with Gulf nations instead.
Trump’s threat, to put it mildly, had no teeth. Andy McCarthy provides a reminder of “rudimentary constitutional facts” — as well as general U.S. recognition of free-transit principles in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea — that prohibited Trump from taking it any further. He cautions that were Trump to carry it out, this “would induce other nations to extort payments for transit through international waters and straits of importance to international trade where they are in a position to intimidate shippers”:
Free trade would break down, which would be a catastrophe for nations heavily engaged in international trade, such as our own.
The problem is that by even considering (or pretending to consider) a toll, Trump kept the precedent that Iran is trying to set on life support, when he should be pulling the plug — not only by using military and diplomatic force to compel Tehran to abandon the plan, but by affirming and operating according to the principle of freedom of navigation.
Indeed, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi taunted the U.S. in response by saying Trump is “right” that “whoever provides secure and safe passage of commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz should be compensated for this service,” that 20 percent is too much, and that “we will be fair.”
In other words, Iran maintains that strait-tolling is legitimate and hopes to exploit the Trump administration’s fee-flirtation to reinforce its position.
NR’s editorial urges Washington to adhere to and promote Rubio’s view, in part to attract allies in pursuit of the goal of free transit: “That is the argument the U.S. should be making — and enforcing.” As Leonardo Bernard, with the Australian National Centre for Ocean Resources and Security, recently wrote, allowing a fee-based precedent to be established would drive up consumer prices and destabilize waterways, though international resistance would likely remain strong and resulting increased shipping costs could incentivize alternative routes.
All the more reason for America — and all nations — to keep tollbooths confined to the turnpikes where they belong.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
New York’s governor plays into the hysteria: Hochul’s Silly War on Data Centers
The conspiracy theories are shattered: The Damning Case Against Tyler Robinson
The campaign theater begins: Ro Khanna’s Israel Stunt
On Graham: Lindsey Graham, R.I.P.
ARTICLES
John Gustavsson: The Illusion of European Prosperity
Jim Pettit: California’s DEI Bloat Clashes with Newsom’s Pivot to ‘Normal’
Wilfred Reilly: Africa’s Hypocritical Reparations Demand
Ryan Ellis: The Backdoor Property Tax You’ve Never Heard Of
Dan McLaughlin: The Last Interesting Man in Washington
Marjorie Dannenfelser: Lindsey Graham Was a Fierce Defender of the Pro-Life Cause
Jeffrey Blehar: Between Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell, Prepare for the Changing of the Guard
Brittany Bernstein: Celebrated Historian’s Book Knocking Abolitionists Got Rave Reviews. Now It’s Being Pulled from Shelves
Brittany Bernstein: Trump Alleges Sprawling Chinese Plot to Meddle in 2020 Election, Cover-Up by ‘Deep State’ Actors
Matthew X. Wilson: How Republicans Can ‘Raise’ Their Midterm Hopes
Michael Brendan Dougherty: College in America Needs an Overhaul
Corinne Cowan: School Administrators Have Stolen Hundreds of Millions by Defrauding Taxpayers, Damning New Report Finds
Abigail Anthony: The Faulty Premise of Dua Lipa’s ‘Banned’ Books Library
CAPITAL MATTERS
Johan Norberg & Christian Sandström, on the EU’s Green Deal: Why Europe’s Green Entrepreneurial State Went Bust
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Brian Allen digs into the recent report on “ideological capture” inside the Smithsonian: Every Day’s a Full Moon at the Smithsonian’s American History Museum
And on the movie event of the summer, here are a couple takes from . . .
Armond White: The Odyssey — the Twisted Epic We Deserve
Philip Klein: Where Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey Succeeds and Fails
FROM THE NEW, SEPTEMBER 2026 ISSUE OF NR
Dan McLaughlin: America’s Asylum System Is Broken
Andrew Stuttaford: Ukraine Shows Its Resilience
Daniel Foster: Something Is Going to Happen
Jack Crowe: ‘Murder in the Skies’
Dominic Green: Reading Is Not Dead
Charles C. W. Cooke & Luther Ray Abel: Charlie and Luther’s Hollerin’ Neon Dixieland Whizzbang Adventure
Mary Katharine Ham: Summer Is in the Bag
THE EXCERPTS WON’T READ THEMSELVES
The new issue of NR is out, and it’s got Platner, Ukraine, the border brawl, and a new installment from the Whizzbang road trippers. But first, Dominic Green writes about reading, and its future:
The big book of summer 2026 originated as a Bronze Age oral legend and became a 21st-century movie. The Odyssey was born in the long preliterate age. It is completing its conquest of the Western imagination at the dawn of the postliterate age. The word “literature” denotes reading, but that is only one means of transmitting information. Blind Homer needed only his ears, a good memory, and the ison drone note that underpinned his accompaniment on the lyre. We need only our eyes, an outsourced digital memory, and the false harmonies of skilled liars shouting in our phones. Claude, why can’t I hold a thought anymore?
Here’s a thought that is short enough to hold but still too hot to touch: “So what is happening to our children is, we’re watching them become third world.” Thus spake Marshall McLuhan in 1977. He meant that electronic media were replacing one model of making sense of the world, the linear sequences of print, with another: simultaneous oral and auditory impressions. This experience, McLuhan argued, returned media consumers from individualized, high-conscience rationality to a rapture of fragmentary sounds and images, a “holistic” experience of “tribal” and “collective” identities without any “individual conscience.”
This was exactly 30 years before the launch of the iPhone in 2007. The body politic is now stricken with the symptoms that McLuhan described, but the shift from linearity to simultaneity has not yet destroyed mass literacy so much as revalued its function. The age when American-driven visual media conquered the globe was also the age in which literacy rose to unprecedented levels. If we can believe a 2017 report from the third-worldists at UNESCO, by 2016 the global adult literacy rate had hit 86 percent and the youth literacy rate 91 percent. Nearly half (49 percent) of the world’s illiterates were in South Asia. A quarter (27 percent) were in sub-Saharan Africa. The rest were single-figure holdouts (4 percent in the Caribbean, for instance).
UNESCO claimed to have “no data” on literacy rates in the United States for 2016. But anyone with electronic media has the data in hand. While global literacy rose, American literacy declined. In 1979, almost 100 percent of Americans had “functional literacy” in English. Fourth-graders’ reading scores peaked in 2015, and eighth-graders’ in 2013. By 2024, the National Literacy Institute reported, 21 percent of Americans were illiterate. In 2025, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (the Nation’s Report Card) said twelfth-graders’ average reading scores were the lowest since 1992. Forty percent of students failed to reach basic proficiency.
This makes sense. Americans were the first people to be saturated by visual media: the movies in the 1920s, television in the 1950s, the internet in the 1990s, social media in the early 2000s. Yet Americans bought more books in 2025 than they did in 2019. Words are everywhere on our screens. What is happening to our children is more complex than a fork between mass literacy and mass illiteracy. It is a schism between functional literacy and cultural literacy. The concept of “functional literacy” was developed in the 1950s and affirmed in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. The goal was not what we now call “deep reading,” which is the self-directed internalization of complex thought, but socially directed competence at basic workplace and domestic tasks such as reading instructions and balancing a checkbook.
The function of literacy has changed. Reading was our master epistemology. It inculcated the critical and ethical values that stabilized the claims of competing epistemologies and established a canon of cultural literacy. But literacy has become ancillary to the new visual and auditory epistemologies that McLuhan described, and these are creating a new culture. On an Instagram reel, the spoken word runs as a chyron: text reinforces image and sound. This reversal of value crushes epistemes, which is how the Greeks described the building blocks of knowledge, into memes, a mere rubble of information. The teachers’ unions, which cannot see a standard without wanting to lower it, complete the vandalism by dancing among the ruins. But it would happen anyway; as McLuhan saw, the ways in which we formulate and transmit information have changed.
The authority of the written word is undergoing what social scientists call a “crisis of replication.” Our schools repeat the educational experiments of mass culture in the analog age, but the procedures no longer produce the old results. The dynamic epistemologies of the academy and the popular arts no longer transmit their dynamism. The university is a debt farm and indoctrination camp for Americans and a finishing school for foreign elites. Hollywood has never been less effective at recycling other nations’ plotlines. American popular music has shed its complexity along with its humanity. The American novel went into a coma around the time that David Foster Wallace combined a necktie with a headscarf. The book industry we knew has broken the spine of its economic model. But it’s not all bad news.
Kathy Hochul’s moratorium on data center construction does not compute. From NR’s editorial:
Why has Hochul taken this silly approach? Presumably, for the same reason that many other politicians have: because, over the last couple of years, tens of millions of people in the United States have been captured by a moral panic about “data centers” that is almost completely divorced from reality. The rise of artificial intelligence will certainly present some challenges, and we regret that its architects have sometimes been blasé about that or even played up potential disruptions. But data centers, which represent the building blocks of the internet as it exists right now, have been a mainstay of American life for nearly three decades. In many cases, the newer models are bigger. But the complaints that attend this are mostly myths. Data centers do consume large amounts of electricity, just as factories, steel mills, and aluminum smelters do, but utilities have long planned for the arrival of energy-intensive industries. They do not “produce nothing”; they provide the computing power that underpins banking, communications, streaming, cloud computing, e-commerce, and, increasingly, government. As for water? If this were the test, America’s irrigated farms, golf courses, and manicured suburban lawns would attract far more outrage than data centers. That they do not is telling.
True, not every place is ideally suited for building a data center — Manhattan or Brooklyn, for example. But Upstate and Western New York have plentiful water, lots of cheap land, and communities desperately in need of economic growth to hold off decades of declining population and prosperity. Hochul, who hails from Buffalo and presides in Albany, ought to remember that she is the governor of the state, not the mayor of New York City.
Ryan Ellis sheds light on an abusive government practice that may come as a shock to anybody who invests:
Walter Schramm did exactly what Americans have always been told to do: He invested in the stock market. In the 1990s, he bought about $6,000 of Amazon stock and left it alone. He wasn’t day trading or chasing the latest fad. He believed that patient investing builds wealth over time.
Twenty years later, he logged into his brokerage account expecting to find an investment worth roughly $100,000. Instead, the account was empty. Delaware had declared the account inactive, seized the shares, and sold them years earlier for about $8,000. The decades of appreciation he expected to find disappeared with them, and litigation is ongoing.
Most Americans have never heard the term “escheatment,” but they or their loved ones soon may. It’s a three-dollar word that means the government can take unclaimed property in trust until its rightful owners or heirs can be found.
Unclaimed-property laws began with a worthy objective. If someone genuinely forgot about a bank account, stock certificate, or dividend check, the state held the property until the owner or heirs reclaimed it. The idea was that the state was a safekeeper of valuables; however, some states have stretched that principle beyond recognition.
In the case of investment accounts, instead of asking whether property is truly abandoned, states increasingly ask whether an owner has interacted with an account in very specific and limited ways. A few years without logging into an online brokerage account can trigger the seizure and liquidation of appreciating investments, even when every statement reaches the customer’s address and every dividend is properly credited to the customer’s account. Buy-and-hold investing is maliciously twisted by state governments into accusations of abandonment.
Escheatment abuse by state governments turns prudent investing into a financial hazard.
A snippet from Dan McLaughlin’s tribute to Lindsey Graham:
Lindsey Graham was the last truly interesting man in Washington. Even when you knew where he wanted to go, you never quite knew how he was going to get there. The Senate will be a less vivid place without him. Fritz Hollings, with whom Graham served when he first reached the Senate, quipped when he retired, “We had . . . five, six drunks when I came here. [Now], there’s nobody drunk in the United States Senate. We don’t have time to be drunk.” Today’s senators are doing a lot less work and a lot more television, but the gray indistinguishability even of their outrages would have made Hollings cringe. Nobody ever accused Graham of being colorless.
A Faulknerian character of mischievous, impish wit, Graham first shot to national prominence as a boyish House impeachment manager in Bill Clinton’s Senate impeachment trial. He took over Strom Thurmond’s seat in the Senate. The two men could not have been more different, yet Graham’s priorities on foreign policy and the judiciary carried on the best parts of Thurmond’s own complex legacy without the baggage. A consummate, Talleyrandish political survivor even by the baroque standards of South Carolina politics, he saw generations of Republican coalitions and movements come and go, and he endured the brickbats of being simultaneously called a traitor to, and a craven pawn of, each of them. Instant obituarists who focus on one or another of these postures will miss the man.
More a McCain Republican at heart than a Gingrich, Bush, Tea Party, or Trump guy, Graham seemed to draw strength from infuriating friends and foes alike, whether he was mugging for the cameras against a backdrop of shrieking Democrats during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings or outlasting MAGA primary challenges.
CODA
The more you read to the end of this newsletter, the higher the chances you’ll eventually encounter a modern Euro-metal band, possibly Nordic, that leans progressive (the good kind). From Sweden, and in recognition of the month it currently is, this is Katatonia, with “July.”
No offense taken if that’s not your cup of tea, or plate of smørrebrød. Until next week.