Pun Salad

This is the second appearance of JD Vance's book, Communion, as the Amazon Eye Candy du Jour; the first was back in April, when I defended its cover (picturing a rural Virginia church) against some truly nothingburger media slurs.

But the book came out in June, people are actually reading it instead of staring at the cover, and there's a particularly problematic chapter near the end…

Our first critic is Ryan Bourne, who squeezed out two rebuttal posts at Cato about it. Number one: JD Vance’s Feared "Cult of Growth" Has Never Run America.

Ryan followed up with an even more devastating charge: JD Vance’s Problem Is with Your Choices, Not GDP.

Also piling on is Phil Magness at the Argument, playing off the title of JD's first book, Hillbilly Elegy: Hillbilly economics.

Phil goes on to discuss JD's "eccentric lesson" involving Japanese strawberries.

I've put JD's book on my get-at-library list. Might as well see if he's right about anything.

Also of note:

• I'm afraid Betteridge's Law of Headlines applies. Joseph C. Sternberg asks: Is Congress About to Reform Social Security? (WSJ gifted link)

  You may be surprised to hear that Congress is getting serious, after a fashion, about Social Security reform. You won’t be at all surprised to learn that this is taking the form of an attempt to pass the responsibility to someone else.

  As we know, current law calls for an approximate 22% cut in Social Security checks when its "trust fund" empties out, estimated to occur in 2032 or so. What to do? Trump is (of course) MIA. So some CongressCritters are reluctantly moving into "we gotta do something" mode.

  Cue the latest flurry of activity on Capitol Hill. The emerging consensus appears to be that lawmakers doubt their capacity to reach a consensus. They propose instead to form a study committee of some sort to tell them what to do.

  The Senate version would deputize the existing Social Security Advisory Board—a panel of technocratic experts that normally labors in obscurity producing reports on how to manage the programs more efficiently—to craft a wholesale reform of the entitlement. That panel would write a reform bill that Congress would have to consider on an expedited basis, although lawmakers would be free to amend it at will.

  The House iteration of the idea would involve the creation of a new, more overtly political panel with 13 members appointed by the president and House and Senate leaders. If at least nine of this board’s members could agree on a reform package, it would be fast-tracked to an up-or-down vote in Congress with no opportunities for amendments.

  But as foretold by the Law of Headlines:

  Alas for them, their plans are unlikely to work. The challenge confronting Social Security has been obvious for several decades. The program has become an unsustainable drag on public finances as lifespans extend, the demographic balance of the population tilts toward the elderly, baby boomers retire, and the design of the retirement program ratchets up benefit payouts.

  A quick check of the campaign websites for my local wannabe CongressCritters does not show anyone with a smidgen of interest in dealing with the issue. Vaguely reassuring platitudes are the norm.

• Just don't call them late for dinner. David Harsanyi also has a question, but it's not yes/no: If 'Woke 1' Was 'Crazy,' What Does AOC Call the DSA?

  Hey, remember that unhinged cultural revolution we launched a few years back? That was insane — amirite?

  That's essentially what Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) told ABC News host Jonathan Karl recently, quoting a New York City Council member who describes socialist Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong's past tweets about defunding the police and shuttering prisons.

  "Woke 1 was crazyyyy," she said with a laugh.\

  The revolution will be sanitized. But as I remember it, "Woke 1" was a high-tech progressive jihad that relied on intimidation, public shaming and economic ruin to dictate what words and ideas were permissible in the public square.

  For one thing, you were reviled for saying in public what Anthony Fauci admitted to his diary in private.

• You say "profoundly corrupt" as if it was a bad thing. Tosin Akintola covers the latest development in an ongoing scam: Trump Media is selling early access to the president's Truth Social posts for $100,000 a month.

  Trump Media & Technology Group—the company owned by President Donald Trump that operates Truth Social—is facing a lawsuit alleging that its plan to monetize access to the social media posts of the president and his closest advisers through its Truth API tool is unconstitutional.

  Announced in July and rolled out at the start of August, Trump Media describes its API as a data feed that "provides licensed, real-time access to posts from the highest-ranking Truth Social accounts." It does so at prices ranging from $60,000 to $100,000 per month, according to Trump Media CEO Kevin McGurn. Under the terms of the licensing agreement, Truth API subscribers will receive posts from the Trump administration delivered directly to their devices in "milliseconds," giving them an edge over regular users scrolling through their social feeds.

  Filed by The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation, the lawsuit states that the president's monetization of government information is "profoundly corrupt" and violates the First and Fifth Amendments. The groups argue they have a "right to access President Trump's public comments on equal terms with other members of the press and public," which is burdened by the president's Truth API "scheme." They say the plan to sell access to the posts burdens their First Amendment right "not to associate with Truth Social or subsidize its expressive activity" by conditioning "faster access" to government information on "subsidizing" government officials' activity on Truth Social.

  Given Trump's spotty attachment to economic reality, I'm not sure what financial advantage could be gleaned from early access to his Truth Social emissions. I assume the $60K-$100K bite per month is just simple bribery.

• History lesson du jour. John Fund reminds us: America Has Tried Socialism Before — and Quickly Abandoned It.

  The rise of the Democratic Socialists of America is nothing new, says historian Michael Barone, who for 40 years was the principal author of the magnificent Almanac of American Politics. Nor will he be surprised if the DSA suddenly declines.

  Barone acknowledges that key policies of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal — especially Social Security — are entrenched in American life. Our future challenge will be to build private-sector alternatives that allow people to save enough for their retirement and create jobs that reduce dependency on benefits.

  But before FDR, Barone notes that the Woodrow Wilson administration took maximum control of the private-sector economy, including the dissemination of news and opinion.

  … and also put Eugene Debs, presidential candidate of the Socialist Party of America in jail for a time. I guess Woody didn't care for the competition.

The Indispensable One mostly writes about Francesca Hong’s Bad Night. But I liked his lead-in anecdote:

Ladies and gentlemen, the New Hampshire Secretary of State has provided sample ballots for the state's primary election next month. In my case:

… the only contested races are for the big offices: Governor, US Senator, US House.

Let's take the easy one first. There are only three GOP candidates for Governor (with links to each campaign website): Kelly Ayotte, Shaun Fife, and Bob Wayne McClory.

Who's the craziest son of a bitch? Bob has a strong argument with his 6 Point Patriot page. He is not a fan of the 5-pointed stars on Old Glory. Instead, the "Timeline we should be on":

But Shaun counters with his "Free Energy Solutions":

[Yes, I pointed this out two years ago, Shaun's previous run for Guv. As in 2024, I can't find anything comparable on Kelly's website.]

I might look at the other contested races at some point. Stay tuned!

Also of note:

• Elon Musk can't make me buy a Tesla. David R. Henderson summarizes a recent lecture he gave at the Naval Postgraduate School, with a cogent observation: Hayek on Power.

  I noted Hayek’s statement that the government’s power “is a power which is newly created and which in a competitive society nobody possesses.” This is one of his most important insights and it’s often lost sight of, even by some libertarians. When government takes over, it’s not simply a redistribution of existing power. It’s a creation of power where it had not existed.

  Hayek makes another important point. The power a multimillionaire “who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer” has over him “is very much less than that which the smallest fonctionnaire possesses who wields the coercive power of the state and on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am to be allowed to live or to work.”

  If only one candidate for governor was crazy enough to quote Hayek!

• All things considered, I too would rather be in Hawaii. James Freeman's "Best of the Web" WSJ column is mostly about Minnesota’s Referendum on Woke 1. But he squeezes in this tidbit, quoted from a Los Angeles Times story:

  As public spending on homelessness has come under increasing scrutiny, a nonprofit that runs domestic violence shelters in Southern California has paid its CEO, who lives in Hawaii, more than $1.6 million in salary, vacation pay and other compensation for the last two years of tax filings, a sum that is several times larger than the compensation of executives running similar organizations.

  Not too shabby! But she has a way to go to catch up with the CEO of ("nonprofit") AARP Jo Ann Jenkins. The AARP's Form 990 filings report her compensation of

  • $2,746,855 in 2024
  • $2,384,335 in 2023
  • $1,444,575 in 2022
  • $2,575,415 in 2021
  • $1,335,714 in 2020
  • … and I'm tired of typing.

Mr. Ramirez knows:

"Interstate 0". Heh!

With the understanding that the Republicans are awful in their own stupid way, let's look at the amusing rhetorical gymnastics of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who's attempting to downplay past idiocy. Charles C.W. Cooke wonders: Will AOC Own Up to the Lunacy of Woke?.

At Reason, Robby Soave has advice for us all: Don't let AOC retcon her starring role in 'Woke 1'.

And at the NYPost, Karol Markowicz has a non-negotiable demand: Lefties like AOC need to answer some questions before we move on from 'Woke 1'.

We eagerly await those answers, anticipating more scrumptious servings of word salad.

Also of note:

• A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money. At Cato, Adam N. Michel has a related question: Who Will Pay for Democratic Socialism’s $200 Trillion Cost?

  The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) propose new spending that could more than triple federal outlays. They propose the government pay for health care, housing, higher education, and electricity. Jobs are government-guaranteed, retirement benefits are expanded, paid family leave is universal, fossil fuels are eliminated, and reparations are paid.

  The DSA platform claims that the bill for all this will be sent to “the richest individuals and corporations.” Tally up that bill, and it ballparks between $71 trillion and $212 trillion in new spending over the next decade. Confiscating every dollar of high-end wealth and corporate profits would cover only a fraction of those costs. The DSA agenda necessitates high taxes on middle-class Americans.

  Totaling up nine of the largest proposals in the DSA platform would mean new federal spending equivalent to between 18 percent and 53 percent of GDP.

  Adam has a table that prices out the goodies on the DSA shopping list, citing sources for "low" and "high" cost estimates.

  And we should not forget that that's money extracted from the private economy, which reflects what people actually want to buy and sell. That money instead goes to the government, which "gives" you what it thinks you should have. After skimming a hefty fraction off the top.

  Fun fact: This item's headline is based on a thousand-fold expansion of Senator Everett Dirksen's famous adage, "A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money". Only problem: he apparently never said that.

• Let's not even talk about "Grape Nuts". At the Daily Economy, Jacob Smith looks at truth in labeling. Maybe (for example) it shouldn't be called "Consumer Protection" When 'Consumer Protection' Protects Producers from Competition.

  Since 2024, seven states have made it a crime to sell lab-grown meat. Florida went first, in May of that year. Texas became the seventh to do so, with fines that can reach $25,000 a day. The meat in question is grown from cells in a bioreactor tank, and most of these states banned it before a single package reached a store. Meanwhile, in Washington, a bill called the DAIRY PRIDE Act would strip the word “milk” from the almond and oat cartons in your grocery cooler. Each measure comes wrapped in the same promise: it is here to protect you from confusion. And in each case, the people who asked for it are the ranchers and dairy farmers who sell the older product.

  This is the usual shape of a consumer-protection law. On the label it is a shield for you. In practice, though, it is a weapon for whoever already holds the market. I study how industries capture the rules meant to bind them, and the tell is almost always the same: the law does less to inform the buyer than to disarm a rival. It is also an old trick. A little over a century ago, a President of the United States had to sit down and rule on what the word “whiskey” means, because a fortune rode on the answer.

  I'm not a whiskey drinker, but … I've wondered how many adjectives you can legally stick in front of "beer" on your 12-pack. I'm looking at you, Coors Pure, you "organic light beer", you.

• Great minds think alike. And so do Jonah Goldberg's and mine: Vote, Just Not for Kooks. Skipping down to his advice (probably paywalled):

  Which brings me to my advice. I think that voters should be more interested in rewarding good behavior and good character than in ideological or partisan purity tests. That doesn’t mean ideology and partisanship are irrelevant. I think these things can be balanced.

  Take the Senate race in Texas. Democrat James Talarico is ideologically not my cup of tea, and he is quite far to the left for Texas. But his Republican opponent, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, is in my view a corrupt gargoyle simply unfit for any office. I’m not here to debate that opinion, because the people seeking my advice generally share it.

  So, if you’re a conservative who thinks Talarico is too left-wing and Paxton is bat-winged, don’t vote for either of them.

  But you should still vote.

  You can leave the Senate line blank while voting for other Republicans on the ballot (you can also select Libertarian candidate Ted Brown). Sending the message that your problem is Paxton, not Republicans, is one that Republicans and conservatives need to hear.

  As I (tediously) have pointed out: In 2024, given the choice between Trump, Kamala, Chad Oliver, and Jill Stein, I … blanked.

John McWharter looks at Jason Arday and Academia’s Self-Seeking Pursuit of Virtue for City Journal:

Fun fact from further on in the article: Arday's resignation letter "seems likely to have been generated by AI."

Also of note:

• Want Pun Salad to link to your content? Try using "bonkers" in your headline. Ars Technica has the latest: Trump signs bonkers order that cuts vaccines, promotes ones that don't exist.

  President Trump signed an executive order Monday that makes sweeping, unilateral changes to federal vaccine recommendations. The order aims to reduce the number of lifesaving vaccines all children are recommended to get—from 18 to 11—while also splitting them up and spacing them out over more time and more medical visits.

  The vaccine changes are not backed by evidence or spurred by new findings. Rather, they are based on false anti-vaccine fearmongering about harms, including the debunked claim that they cause autism, and misinformation that multiple vaccinations can “overwhelm” children’s immune systems. This false claim has also been repeatedly debunked and explained.

  The vaccines that "don't exist"? Trump recommends the "MMR" (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine (which he thinks is "quite lethal") be replaced by three different single-disease shots. Only problem is: such vaccines aren't available in the US, and would require the time-consuming and expensive FDA approval process.

  So, yeah, bonkers. I wonder if this was previewed to those early "Truth Social" providers so they could phone their brokers?

• Muh roads! What about muh roads?! Well, let's ask Cato's David Ditch (appaarently his real name). It appears that the New Highway Bill Has More Spending, Taxes, and Deficits.

  Congress is preparing to bail out the federal highway program once again without paying for it. According to a July 9 score by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the House Transportation Committee’s BUILD America 250 Act (BUILD) would add more than $147 billion (about $1,100 per household) to the already unsustainable national debt over five years, while violating the user-pays principle.

  BUILD is a five-year highway bill that authorizes $474 billion for roads, mass transit, and other surface transportation programs from the Highway Trust Fund (HTF) for fiscal years (FYs) 2027 through 2031.

  The highway fund was created as a “user pays, user benefits” system, with drivers paying a user fee (the federal gas tax) to finance building and improving the interstate highway system. Congress broke this model by expanding the trust fund far beyond interstate highways, adding diversions to fund transit systems and boondoggles such as streetcars.

  My own CongressCritter, Chris Pappas, is one of the members of the House Transportation Committee. Which passed the bill with a 62-2 vote. I doubt he was one of the two votes against.

• Podcast note. Jay Nordlinger has Kevin D. Williamson as his interviewee: And the ‘D’ Is for ‘Damn Right’. I listened to the Whole Thing (about an hour), and KDW made it through with not a single dirty word.

A clever Amazon Product du Jour: a mug that "disappears" certain sections of the Bill of Rights when you fill it with a hot beverage.

Not so amusing when you consider that a lot of candidates favor amending the Constitution to (partially, for now) erase the First Amendment. Usually phrased as "overturn Citizens United". Local examples: US Senate candidate (and my current CongressCritter) Chris Pappas; current NH2 Congresscriter Maggie Goodlander; NH1 congressional candidates Stefany Shaheen, Heath Howard, Christian Urrutia.

I try to be a "reasonable people can differ" kind of guy, but this is an issue that puts me more on the "what the hell is wrong with these people" side.

All that to introduce Bradley A. Smith's article: Campaign Speech Lies at Heart of First Amendment. (NR gifted link) A strong opening:

Shouldn't be, anyway. Bradley is currently litigating against a Maine law limiting contributions to super PACs.

Candidates who want to "overturn Citizens United" have lost my vote, and they should lose yours too.

Also of note:

• Usually including the one discussed above. J.D. Tuccille points out that The socialist surge revives failed and hateful ideas. Including one of the oldest and most dangerous:

  Michigan's El-Sayed says he believes the Israeli government is as evil as the terrorist group Hamas, which launched the October 7 attacks, and calls it guilty of "apartheid" and "genocide." The DSA last year adopted a resolution denouncing Zionism (the belief that Jews have the right to establish and maintain Israel) as "a racist, imperialist, settler-colonial project" and made belief that "Israel has a right to defend itself" an offense punishable by expulsion from the organization. Hasan Piker* claimed and repeated that Hamas is "a thousand times better" than Israel. Colorado congressional candidate Melat Kiros declined to label as antisemitic a deadly firebombing attack on a Jewish rally in Boulder.

  "As a Democratic member of Congress, I can attest that for a growing number of my colleagues, being anti-Israel has now become a nonnegotiable moral litmus test," warns Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D–N.J.) "History teaches us that antisemitism is never the endpoint of hatred."

  It's as if the rising tide of modern radicals set out to revive some of the worst ideas of the past—socialism, totalitarianism, and bigotry—and combine them in the burnished turd of a modern political program for those disappointed with their lot in life. The ideas the movement peddles are ridiculous, hateful, and have proven themselves dangerous time and again. Yet they continue to find an audience.

  I still see "Hate Has No Home Here" lawn signs in my local travels. I await the amended version, "exceptions made for billionaires and Jews".

• The last few shreds of their respectability? Megan McArdle describes What the professors lost by winning with El-Sayed. (WaPo gifted link)

  Was it a win for the American Association of University Professors? On July 30, the organization announced that it was endorsing a political candidate for the first time in its 110-year history. Abdul El-Sayed, a left-wing Michigan Democrat running for the Senate, got the nod a few days before the Democratic primary. Last Tuesday, El-Sayed eked out a win over moderate Rep. Haley Stevens.

  So was it also a win for the AAUP?

  Any number of critics have sprung up to say no, it was an own goal. They make the point that I’ve offered repeatedly in recent columns: The perceived politicization of academia has eroded public trust, making universities vulnerable to unprecedented Republican attacks on higher education. Universities desperately need to regain their credibility as neutral institutions, not publicly position themselves on the Democratic Party’s leftmost flank.

  I've commented on AAUPniks now and then over the years. Example: The AAUP regrets to inform you that you're a fascist. With my conclusion: "The AAUP tends to attract faculty who aspire to union thuggery." Their current leader, Todd Wolfson, seems to be taking that path.

• Fine. Do that, and then abolish yourself. The WSJ editorialists look at the latest antics from a department that should not exist: The FCC Tries to Save Broadcast TV. (WSJ gifted link)

  The Federal Communications Commission is trying to get with the digital times and on Thursday moved to scrap its antiquated nationwide broadcast ownership cap. This much-needed regulatory modernization could help save broadcast TV, though a better solution would be eliminating the FCC.

  The FCC ownership cap dates to the bunny-ears era when there was little competition in the airwaves. Congress in 1996 formally codified a 35% limit on the share of U.S. households that a broadcast owner’s stations could collectively reach, which lawmakers in 2004 raised to 39%. Imagine if Amazon couldn’t deliver to more than 39% of U.S. households.

  I wonder how many WSJ readers these days have even seen bunny ears?

JUST IN: WNBA Commissioner announces the league is meeting to review what a woman is, after multiple former NBA stars announced plans to join the league.

— Polymarket (@Polymarket) August 8, 2026

It turns out that ex-Celtic Enes Kanter Freedom has officially declared himself a WNBA "prospect" for their draft next year. Here's the Facebook Reel of his announcement.

Back in 2021, I endorsed Enes for President. I stand by that.

(OK, so he is technically ineligible, having been born in Switzerland.)

Also of note:

• With an earth-shattering kaboom. Noah Smith points out one little problem with an increasingly popular policy stance: Banning data centers would blow up the U.S. economy.

  So far, there has been no strong move toward a federal data center pause, and the bills that have been introduced in Congress are pretty mild stuff. That’s why as long as the movement to stop data centers stayed confined to blue states, it didn’t really matter much. It was just another instance of a very traditional story that we’ve all come to expect — states like New York basically ban new physical industries, so those industries go to places like Texas. The red states get the economic activity they want, the blue states get the stasis they want, and everyone is happy.

  Nor would a few state-level bans affect the progress of AI. AI is a creature of bits and bytes; it lives in the cloud, and it doesn’t care about the physical location of the data centers that represent the lobes of its vast, alien brain. Data centers in Texas would sustain AI progress and AI applications just as well as data centers in New York.

  Except now Texas is pausing data centers too. If almost all states ban data centers — or if the federal government gets involved in a major way — there could be major consequences for the U.S. economy. In the long run, I think limiting the physical resources devoted to AI would be a good thing; in the short run, it will simply clobber the already-wobbly U.S. economy. A movement against data centers has the seeds of something good and useful, but it has huge risks that most Americans seem not to realize yet.

  Noah actually thinks "data center limitations make sense in the long run". Unfortunately, his paywall kicks in before he describes where the line between "limitations" and "banning" should be drawn.

• They got worse. Greg Lukianoff describes What happened to the AAUP — and why viewpoint diversity matters.

  On July 30, the American Association of University Professors did something it has never done in its 111-year history: It endorsed a candidate for political office.

  And this was not a general-election endorsement against some uniquely terrible enemy of academic freedom. No, the national AAUP waded into a contested Democratic primary for Michigan’s U.S. Senate seat and backed Abdul El-Sayed, the unmistakable candidate of the party’s left. He had the backing of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, ran on Medicare for All, rejected corporate PAC money, and called for ending U.S. military aid to Israel.

  He was also the more controversial choice, especially because of his position that Israel’s war in Gaza constitutes genocide and his appearances with Hasan Piker. Academic freedom, by contrast, was not a defining issue of his campaign, although El-Sayed had been an AAUP member and was strongly backed by organized labor. The AAUP proudly advertised the decision as its “First-Ever National Political Endorsement.” Todd Wolfson, the AAUP’s president, said roughly 80 percent of the Michigan members who voted supported making an endorsement and 97 percent favored El-Sayed.

  Greg is pretty convincing that this is a bad look for the AAUP. It's easy to be disgusted, but Pun Salad tries to follow the Costello Guidance and search for amusement. Greg provides Todd Wolfson's "now-deleted tweet" responding to his critics:

  

  Did Prof Tod delete this because it was too ill-tempered, or was he embarrassed by misspelling "Chamberlain"?

• Yum! River Page tried it so you don't have to: I Made RFK Jr.’s Salmon Cakes. They Were Bad.

  Wednesday, 3 p.m. I was wandering aimlessly around a dingy South Bronx grocery store, desperately trying to find “nutritional yeast,” whatever that is. I looked down at the YouTube video that had been playing on my phone since I got here.

  “And there had been a war on saturated fats for almost 70 years,” Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. croaked through my AirPods. “The government had been lying to us and telling us that protein caused heart attacks.”

  Emblazoned onto Kennedy’s apron—and the apron of the man awkwardly standing beside him, celebrity chef Andrew Gruel—was the title of our government’s new cooking series, The Real Food Show. This was the inaugural episode, which came out last week.

  The aim of The Real Food Show, according to the HHS website, is “to make healthy eating practical, approachable, and affordable.” Every recipe is based on the new Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which were released last year, turning the food pyramid upside down. HHS says these recipes are meant to be “easy,” and “budget friendly” at less than $5 per serving “whenever possible.”

  The debut recipe? Crispy salmon cakes with an apple, white bean, and greens salad. All that for less than $5 a serving? In this economy?

  River wound up spending $98 for the ingredients. There are a lot of ingredients: not only that nutritional yeast, but avocado mayo, thyme, panko breadcrumbs, … (Recipe here)

  And the result: "It looked like cat vomit."

• Weekly Feature. Your TGIF excerpt from Nellie Bowles:

  → He’s gilding everything: The aging and patinated statues of D.C. are getting regilded. This pair of statues hadn’t been touched since the 1970s, and now they glow, which my Gen-Z translators tell me means shine. Seeing the results here, I’m actually surprised this wasn’t a term-one priority for Trump. By the time the man leaves office the Lincoln Memorial is going to be bedazzled. He is President Liberace, the first gay leader of this nation.

  And in the scam of the week, we have the team at Truth Social selling early access to market-moving White House announcements, calling it Truth API. See, Trump often makes presidential announcements on Truth Social, his social media platform, and now you can buy government announcements a tiny bit early to trade on it. If this sounds at all sketchy, then you probably don’t get what an API is, and that’s fine. This is what real men do for work, and you shouldn’t worry your little head about it, kitten.

  The statement from Trump Media and Technology Group interim CEO Kevin McGurn: “Markets already move on Truth Social posts. Truth API delivers a direct, licensed, real-time feed of the platform’s most market-moving Truths while advancing our strategy to monetize proprietary assets through a high-margin, recurring revenue stream.” The idea is to give algorithmic trading tools a few milliseconds of advantage to trade on whatever the latest Trump announcement is. And they’re spelling that out! Martha Stewart went to jail for a minor trade based on some tidbit her broker had allegedly gleaned (the original James Comey villain story), but anyway. Here we are. Explicitly selling presidential trading tips. Major banks are hesitant to subscribe right now, which means a new type of man is about to get really rich. Men who aren’t scared of a little political crime. I think they’ll have ponytails.

  "Market-moving Truths"! What a concept!

Americans now pay more in taxes than they spend on food, clothing, and shelter combined.

Think about that.

Government has become so big and bloated that taxes cost more than life's basic necessities. Every American taxpayer should be outraged. pic.twitter.com/c6HRMbJH9t

— Stephen Moore (@StephenMoore) August 5, 2026

And of course, it's not enough. Never is, never will be. The latest tactic is the pretense of fighting wealth inequality. At Cato, Paul Meany notes the actual motive: Redistributing Wealth Means Redistributing Power to the State.

I've been trotting out this quote ever since I reread Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty:

That a majority, merely because it is a majority, should be entitled to apply to a minority a rule which does not apply to itself is an infringement of a principle much more fundamental than democracy itself, a principle on which the justification of democracy rests.

David R. Henderson chimes in from the Hoover Institution: The Deadly Focus On Income And Wealth Inequality.

For DSA types, that's a secondary issue to plundering rich people, and ensuring that government has the power to expropriate anyone's wealth if the 'democratic socialists' find them unsatisfactory for some reason.

Also of note:

• Harsh. But fair and accurate. George Will lets loose: DSA socialism is Peter Pan politics for sandbox revolutionaries. (WaPo gifted link)

  Zohran Mamdani’s election helped to ignite 21st-century interest in socialism, a 19th-century doctrine that had a deflating 20th century. Socialism, New York’s mayor says, prioritizes the “working class.” But what is that? “I think,” he told the New York Times, “if you have to work to pay your bills, I think that that is one definition of being a part of the working class.” But if everyone with bills to pay — essentially, everyone — is socialism’s priority, what is not socialism?

  The Democratic Socialists of America, a political party, sort of, recently issued its “program,” which begins by urging readers to imagine “a future without capitalism.” You “control your own labor and see it going to good use. It’s not just a job to pay the bills”:

  “Speaking of bills: you don’t really have them anymore. You have no debt. You don’t need health insurance. You don’t pay a mortgage or have a landlord, because comfortable housing is a human right. Your retirement is publicly funded. Food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses; they are common goods and utilities … what if you were free to spend your time how you like without worrying about cost or dreading going back to work? What if you didn’t have to think about paying rent or loans at the end of the month, or saving for college, or affording groceries?”

  It's how they're selling it, but (honestly) if it were really about that, then they could do it without government: just set up a super-kibbutz, as they had in Israel's early days. A socialist Eden! And leave the rest of us be.

  That won't happen, of course. And not just because of their virulent anti-semitism.

• Maybe we just need a better label? James Freeman excerpts an anonymous reader's mail: ‘Abolish Capitalism. Viva Free Enterprise!’. (WSJ gifted link)

  In Reagan’s autobiography, he uses the word capitalism exactly zero times. Milton Friedman talked and wrote for decades about free enterprise. Meanwhile, in 2026, “freedom” polls exceptionally well across the political spectrum.

  When Louis Blanc used le capitalisme in 1850, it was to describe “the appropriation of capital by some to the exclusion of others.” When Karl Marx later railed against capitalists in Das Kapital, it was the label he gave to those he derided as corrupt and exploitative. Marxists have never meant this label as a neutral descriptor, let alone as a compliment.

  Free enterprise, in contrast, is plainly descriptive. With its French cognate entrepreneur, it connotes not a system but individual initiative. Those who would defend capitalism ought to be talking about “free enterprise” instead.

  I'm not convinced, but hey, maybe.

• And on the LFOD watch. It rang for the Detroit News report: Foo Fighters draw on 31 years of history for 35,000 fans at Ford Field. But stealing the show for us Granite Staters was…

  Queens of the Stone Age opened with an hour-long set of boogie metal, and frontman Josh Homme was in a mood. He alluded to someone backstage telling him he wasn't allowed to smoke in the building, which led him to rail against the tyranny of $60 parking and $45 beers throughout the band's set. (There was definitely $60 parking outside the stadium, but no signs of $45 beers.)

  "Don't let these corporate a--holes tell you what to do. Do whatever the f--- you want," Homme spat. "This is your f---ing night. Live free or die, motherf---ers." He then played a raging version of "Song for the Dead," the darkest, meanest and most beautiful song in the band's catalog. It was a perfect scene-setter for the night.

  I would not recommend editing your license plate to Josh's version. But (on the other hand) the Supreme Court long ago recognized the free speech issue for the motto.

Recently on the book blog:

Truly, writing about this is definitely picking the low-hanging piñata; everyone seems to be talking about $20 burritos. But I like Jack Butler at the WSJ's "Free Expression" newsletter; he writes of A Burrito Brouhaha. (WSJ gifted link)

My contribution is the Amazon Eye Candy above. It is, as I type, $18.23 for a half-dozen shelf-stable burrito bowls, a little over $3 each. Pick up some nice flour tortillas, maybe some queso or sour cream… Detailed instructions and suggestions are available (of course) on the web.

I must admit, I'm tempted to try it myself. But instead I'm splurging on a Taste of Inspirations Five Cheese Pizza, on which I'm putting an immoderate amount of Hormel Pepperoni with Jalapeno.

Also of note:

• I think Betteridge's Law of Headlines wins again. Noah Smith wonders Are the Democrats going to save us this time? After he recounts (accurately) the many ways the GOP has turned into a "bizarre Trump cult"…

  Let’s look at the type of candidates who are winning Democratic primaries. Francesca Hong, a DSA member who is all but certain to be the Democratic nominee for governor of Wisconsin, tweeted in 2020 that we should “cancel Thanksgiving”. When asked in a recent interview if she had recanted that position, Hong refused, talking about how Thanksgiving was “incredibly painful” for many people:

  As if that weren’t tone-deaf enough, she appeared to criticize herself for marrying a white man (saying “assimilation…took over”), and talked about having a half-white son as “proximity to whiteness”:

  Hong backtracked a couple of days later, declaring that Thanksgiving is her “favorite holiday”, but the damage appears to have been done — Bernie Sanders said he didn’t think he would endorse her, and prediction markets immediately began to discount Hong’s chances of beating her Republican opponent in the fall:

  (Tweets and graphic elided.)

  I'm not sure what I'll do if my November choices are between Trump idolaters and leftist moonbats. Leave the ballot unmarked, I suppose.

• Say it ain't so, Bryan! Ah, don't fret by Bryan Caplan's headline: I Stopped Being a Libertarian Because I Realized the Sky is Blue.

  When a thinker publicly changes his mind on major questions, neutral observers normally interpret it as a sign of courage and maturity. Almost no one enjoys admitting they were wrong — and “I changed my mind” is tantamount to “I was wrong.”

  On reflection, however, this favorable interpretation is premature. Yes, changing your mind because you discover surprising new evidence or arguments is courageous and mature. But what if you change your mind for purely emotional reasons, like “The idea that murderers shouldn’t be punished started to disgust me”? Or because you have a falling out with friends who share your views? “My girlfriend dumped me, so I left the church.”

  Neither of these intellectual paths even hints at courage or maturity.

  As I've mentioned (probably over-mentioned), my come-to-libertarian-Jesus moment was reading Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom as a youngster in the early 1960s.

• Yes, that makes me a boomer. So is Dave Barry, and his essay today is about us: Boomers. After some slapstick humor (which you should check out, it's hilarious):

  But enough slapstick humor. It’s time for today’s topic, which is an article I came across in the distinguished British publication The Economist. The headline is:

  Why people over the age of 55 are the new problem generation

  My immediate assumption when I saw this headline, was: Oh, great, yet another article about how we Baby Boomers are terrible because we’re hoarding all the wealth, and we’re draining the Social Security trust fund, and we refuse to vacate our houses so younger people can live in them, and we think that all popular music has sucked since roughly the Eagles, and we drone on and on about how back in our day we didn’t have mobile phones or GPS, as if that makes us courageous hardy pioneers instead of just old farts, and WHY DON’T WE JUST GO AHEAD AND DIE ALREADY.

  That’s what I assumed the article was going to say. But I was wrong. The article says that the problem with us Boomers is... We’re partying too hard. Seriously. The article states that our generation was too wild and crazy back in the day, and we’re STILL too wild and crazy, so that compared to younger generations we’re drinking more and using drugs more, and we’re going to wild retirement-community parties where sometimes we’re even — if you can imagine — having sex.

  Dave goes on to note that the Economist doesn't approve of all this canoodling, which … well, I can see their point. Old people are disgusting.

  And not that it matters, but I find my old Eagles CDs to be … not as good as I once thought they were.

• LFOD Appears in unexpected places. I don't read SCOTUSblog, and even if I did, their headline isn't that grabby: Tariff refunds reach $100 billion mark. Zzzz.

  Ah, but at the end of the article, they excerpt the oral argument transcript in United States v. Jones, a 2011 case dealing with the thorny issue of whether it was Constitutionally OK to attach a GPS tracker to a suspect's car without a warant.

  JUSTICE ALITO: “And what if it was put on the license place? Would that be a technical trespass? Is that the property of the driver?”

  MR. LECKAR: “Well, a license plate, as I understand it, is the property of the State, and driving is a privilege. But it's not a technical trespass in this particular case. Mr. Jones had the –”

  JUSTICE SCALIA: “Is that right? I don't own my license plate? I didn't know that. How do you know that?”

  (Laughter.)

  JUSTICE SCALIA: “How do you know that? I paid for my license plate.”

  (Laughter.)

  JUSTICE KENNEDY: “We don't need to get into it, but ‘Live Free or Die’ was spelled on the license plate.”

  Those crazy cutups! FWIW, I'm pretty sure Justice Scalia did not have a car registered in New Hampshire.

(Illustrated once again by my ChatGPT effort from last year.)

Veronique de Rugy notes Socialism in the Open and on the Right.

Meanwhile Chris Freiman is in compliance with Betteridge's Law of Headlines at his substack: Does Funding Research Give Government a Claim to Tech Firms?

Christopher goes on to demonstrate the fallacious thinking involved. It's almost as if Mazzucato worked backward from her desired conclusion, trying hard to find a semi-plausible argument to support it.

Also of note:

• With a hefty dose of Calvinball rules. Kevin D. Williamson notes the Democrat Primary electorate Playing for Twits and Giggles. (Dispatch gifted link)

  The left-wing goofball Democrats have nominated as their Senate candidate in Michigan has a bevy of enthusiastic cheerleaders, and it should surprise absolutely no one to learn that a great many of those cheerleaders are wearing stupid red hats.

  Republicans ought to be running scared, but Democrats are running Abdul El-Sayed, who has bested normie Democrat Haley Stevens in the Michigan primary.

  Michigan has lost more than 8,000 manufacturing jobs since Donald Trump announced his imbecilic “Liberation Day” tariffs. But many of the Michigan families that escaped the direct and intense economic pain of a lost paycheck are experiencing the pain of a diminished paycheck, a persistent if less intense economic discomfort resulting from continued high inflation, with high and rising fuel and food costs eating into family budgets. You’d think that Democrats would have chosen a candidate well positioned to keep that issue and similar “kitchen table” issues, if you’ll forgive the tedious cliché, front and center.

  On top of the tariff misadventures, Republicans in Congress are studiously gazing at their Florsheims and pretending that the United States is not currently engaged in an illegal—and losing—war in Iran, one that is playing hell with the economy here at home and abroad. The president wanders around talking like an untreated stroke victim while even such utterly supine and slavering sycophants as Jeanine Pirro are walking sideways away from the hypertensive, sneering face of the Republican Party. That’s a lot to work with. Trump and the economic failures associated with him are “like an anchor around Republicans,” says Michigan pollster Bernie Porn, whose name you should definitely never, ever Google.

  It's shaping up to be a real hold-my-nose-in-the-voting-booth election come November.

• Who had this on their "Articles of Impeachment" bingo card? Charles C.W. Cooke points out: Truth Social’s Early-Access Scheme Is Indefensible. (NR gifted link)

  On Saturday, the Trump Media & Technology Group launched a new commercial offering: A real-time feed on the Truth Social website that will give paying institutions early access to certain high-profile posts for between $60,000 and $100,000 per month.

  There is no credible defense of this. The only reason that anyone would want priority access to Truth Social is to gain priority access to President Trump’s pronouncements on that platform. And the only reason that anyone would want priority access to President Trump’s pronouncements on that platform is to act on them for pecuniary gain. Trump often uses Truth Social as the primary forum for his announcements — announcements that include changes to personnel, the imposition or rescission of tariffs, key foreign policy decisions, and more. These announcements are extremely useful to financial institutions, and, in the age of high-speed trading, the faster those financial institutions can obtain them, the more money those financial institutions can make. Facilitating this access is not a byproduct of Truth Social’s API offering; it is its core — perhaps its sole — purpose. Simply put: President Trump is charging Americans a fee — a fee that, in part, goes into his family’s pockets — for the privilege of receiving news about his official actions earlier than those who do not pay.

  I can't imagine that early access to Trump's unhinged diatribes on Truth Social would be a reliable way to guide your investment strategy. I would guess you would have better luck with perusing sheep entrails spread across a Ouija board.

  More credible explanation: simple bribery.

• Yeah, that'll be good. That'll work. At Reason, Tosin Akintola is skeptical: Senators Want To Claw Back Trump's Spending Power. They Should Just Pass a Real Budget Instead.

  You'd have an easier time hitting a fastball off Milwaukee Brewers phenom Jacob Misiorowski than getting Congress to take back wasteful spending it has appropriated, as the Trump administration is finding out.

  On Monday, the Senate passed a continuing resolution to fund parts of the federal government through December 11. The bill includes a provision that temporarily blocks the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) from implementing a rule change that would have given executive branch political appointees greater control over the disbursement of federal grants.

  Proposed by the OMB in May, the rule has garnered over 62,123 public comments, most of which are in opposition. It would require "senior appointees" to review grant proposals for consistency with "applicable law, federal agency priorities, and the national interest." It also says agencies must ensure that funding proposals "advance the president's policy priorities."

  The ban's inclusion in the funding bill appears to be a direct response from Sens. Patty Murray (D–Wash.) and Susan Collins (R–Maine), who didn't take kindly to the Trump administration's use of pocket rescissions last year. In her statement on the resolution, Collins said she was "pleased" that the bill "prevents" the OMB from implementing its proposed rule, which would "politicize grants" and "harm small, rural communities, families, and biomedical research." Murray was more direct, calling the rule a "corrupt policy that would allow [President Donald] Trump to hold even more federal grants hostage."

  Tosin's article links to the 2026 Congressional Pig Book issued by the Citizens Against Government Waste. Senator Susan Collins of that state just across the Salmon Falls River got a special mention for wangling "159 earmarks costing $431,571,000".

  Susie's campaign ads are rife on the streaming services I frequent. She is damned proud to let you know that she's steered a lot of taxpayer money to Maine.

• I'm pretty sure my patience would wear thin after just one. George Will recommends: Now the midterms begin in earnest. Ask candidates three questions. (WaPo gifted link)

  Political candidates greedy for power are often parsimonious with information about what they would do with it. And voters currently being exhorted to participate in electing a new Congress might reasonably wonder: Why bother? Presidents govern, Congress spectates. Nevertheless, here are three commitments voters might seek from those currently seeking House or Senate seats.

  First: When the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 was passed, the national debt was less than $500 billion. It is almost certain to reach 80 times that sum — $40 trillion — next month. It has become normal for the federal government to run nearly $2 trillion budget deficits even during full employment and steady economic growth.

  So, ask candidates about Warren Buffett’s five-minute solution: “I could end the deficit in five minutes. You just pass a law that says that anytime there’s a deficit of more than 3 percent of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for reelection.”

  It's fun to think about. But (as GFW admits) it would probably require a Constitutional Amendment. And those are tough to push through the ratification process.

  And if you had enough votes in Congress to pass an amendment, you would have way more than enough votes to just… pass a balanced budget. Why not just do that instead?

Recently on the book blog:

And don't go whining: "I was told there would be no math." Because I am telling you upfront: there's gonna be math.

So on to the burning question: Did Elon Musk sentence millions of people to death by dismantling USAID?. Going to the video, from Aaron Brown at Reason:

Fortunately, there's Reason.

Also of note:

• Hey, but what about the Reflecting Pool? Jim Geraghty is unhappy with two-thirds of Uncle Stupid's branches of government: The Semi-Retired President and the GOP Congress. Three paragraphs from a long article:

  Trump and his administration have no discernible interest in reducing this year’s deficit, currently at $1.36 trillion, $29 billion higher than at this point last year. The national debt is $39.7 trillion. (It was just under $20 trillion when Trump took office in his first term in 2017.)

  Social Security runs out of money in 2032, six years from now. Medicare Part A runs out of money one year later. Nobody’s interested in doing anything about that.

  Trump’s policy on Iran continues to bounce between hyperbolic threats and naïve credulity, as he fumes that the “Iranian Leadership is unbelievably duplicitous!” (If only someone had warned him.) U.S. Central Command has sent a message to military analysts “looking for new creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran.” (Nothing wrong with soliciting new ideas, but it’s a little unnerving to hear that five months into what was supposed to be a five-week war, we’re looking around for other options.) The war begun by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which Trump repeatedly pledged he could resolve in one day, has been raging for all 561 days of Trump’s presidency.

  "I alone can fix it." Remember? Good times.

• And as for that other branch… Romina Boccia describes How Congress Turned Budget Reconciliation Into a Tool for More Spending.

  Congress is pursuing another reconciliation bill before the midterm elections. It should demonstrate to Americans that their elected representatives are willing to make the difficult choices needed to put the nation’s finances on a sustainable path. Instead, it risks becoming yet another reminder that Congress continues to rely on shortcuts and shiny objects to distract from the structural entitlement reforms the budget requires.

  America’s debt crisis is a fiscal problem, and it is also a political one. Washington doesn’t lack ideas for reducing deficits. It lacks the political courage to enact them.

  I'm not a huge fan of mindless voting strategies, but "vote against incumbents" is … not a bad one!

• Geraghty again. I'm sorry, I try not to overfollow a single author, but this is pretty interesting: If You Want to Hurt Russia's Economy, the Graham Bill Is the Best Option on the Table.

  Last week, former Senator Lindsey Graham’s sanctions bill won overwhelming support in the U.S. Senate, with 84 senators voting in favor of a motion to proceed and just twelve voting against it.

  The opposition consisted of Republican Senator Rand Paul and ten Democrats: Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, Andy Kim of New Jersey, Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Jon Ossoff of Georgia, Alex Padilla of California, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Peter Welch of Vermont, Ron Wyden of Oregon, and “independent” Bernie Sanders (insert eye roll here) of Vermont who caucuses with the Democrats.

  Maggie tweeted her lame excuse:

  I stand with Ukraine – and against Russia – in its fight for freedom and have long supported increasing sanctions on Vladimir Putin and his oligarch enablers.
  
  But today's bill gives the President new authority to impose tariffs, even on our allies. I do not think tariffs, which…

  — Sen. Maggie Hassan (@SenatorHassan) July 29, 2026

  Well, it's not like I was going to vote for her anyway.

• It's not as if we're doing a great job with regulating the present… Veronique de Rugy points out The Problem With Regulating the Future. She's in favor of "permissionless innovation".

  History is full of technologies that looked dangerous before they transformed the world for the better. Automobiles, airplanes, the internet, smartphones, even electricity all generated fear. Had regulators insisted on solving every conceivable problem before allowing widespread adoption, many of these innovations would have been delayed by years, perhaps decades. Instead, we discovered the real problems – as opposed to the many imagined ones – through experience and developed solutions along the way.

  AI is the latest example. And as always, many people are worried and would like to limit future harm that could come from it. I take it to be the spirit of a recent public letter called We Must Act Now. The signers warn that AI could transform the economy over the next decade and, therefore, argues that “economists, policymakers and technology leaders must act now... to build the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society.”

  This is precisely where the letter loses me. It’s not that I believe that AI poses no risks. I am sure it does. But the extremely vague statement opens the door to the precautionary principal approach to regulating AI. It doesn’t come out and say it but I think that left in the hands of politicians and bureaucrats what we will get is an approach to acting now that treats the whole exercise as if we already know enough about those risks to begin designing the institutions and regulations that will govern them.

  I'm currently reading a book that favors "evidence-based" policies in numerous fields. And here, Vero advocates for "evidence-based governance."

Recently on the book blog:

Recently on the movie blog: