The Student Resource Building, University of California Santa Barbara

The Payrolls Fight Back

What Linda McMahon’s Title IX changes reveal about the economy built around gender policy

By Jim Reynolds | www.reynolds.com

October 4, 2026

Something interesting is happening at the Department of Education.

On September 28, Education Secretary Linda McMahon formally repealed the Biden administration’s 2024 Title IX regulations and restored the 2020 regulatory framework. Federal courts had already vacated the Biden rule, so McMahon was partly bringing the Code of Federal Regulations into line with what her department had been enforcing since early 2025.

But the more interesting story may not be the regulation itself.

It may be everything that grew around it.

Title IX began with a remarkably straightforward proposition: no person, on the basis of sex, could be excluded from participation in, denied the benefits of, or subjected to discrimination under a federally funded education program.

Over the decades, that simple prohibition accumulated an increasingly elaborate administrative structure. Sex discrimination came to include sexual harassment. Sexual harassment required procedures, investigators, training, coordinators, hearings, appeals and lawyers. The Biden administration’s 2024 rule went further by explicitly incorporating sexual orientation and gender identity into its interpretation of sex discrimination.

A few words in a federal regulation can create a remarkable amount of activity.

🅱️ BOB: Whenever Washington adds twelve pages explaining what three words really mean, somebody is going to need a lawyer.

That is where this story gets interesting.

Regulation Creates Transactions

Tell a school that gender identity falls within its Title IX responsibilities and practical questions immediately follow. Which restroom or locker room may a student use? Which athletic team? What happens when another student objects? Can an employee decline to use requested pronouns? Does that become harassment? What accommodations are required? What happens when state law and federal policy point in different directions?

Every question requires a decision, and every decision carries potential liability.

Institutions respond predictably. They write policies, conduct training, hire specialists, retain lawyers, document conversations and establish procedures for handling complaints. None of this requires corruption or bad faith.

It requires complexity.

Complexity creates intermediaries. Ambiguity creates billable hours.

And higher education was already building an enormous professional infrastructure capable of absorbing those new responsibilities.

Between 1976 and 2018, U.S. college enrollment increased about 78 percent and full-time faculty increased 92 percent. Full-time administrators increased 164 percent.

But the really striking number is the growth of full-time employees classified as other professionals: 452 percent.

That does not mean universities spent four decades hiring nothing but Title IX officers. They didn’t. Modern universities run computer networks, financial-aid systems, research programs, disability services, admissions operations and many other functions that require professional employees.

But that is precisely the point.

The great expansion was not mainly presidents, provosts and deans. Delta Cost Project research found that executive and managerial positions remained a relatively small share of public-college employment. Much of the growth occurred farther down the professional hierarchy—in the growing body of specialists who administer the modern university.

I saw the change myself at UC Santa Barbara. When I returned years after attending there, I found an entire brand-new building housing programs and departments that simply had not existed when I was a student. There were new identity-based fields, new specialties and a remarkable amount of material devoted to subjects such as diaspora and group identity.

Whatever mixture of academic fashion, politics and regulatory requirements produced it, the important point was hard to miss: an entirely new institutional structure had appeared. It had offices, employees, budgets and careers attached to it.

That is what abstract policy eventually looks like when it lands on a university campus.

It gets a building.

By 2012, the average number of faculty and ordinary staff for each administrator had fallen roughly 40 percent since 1990 at most types of four-year institutions. Professional administrative positions were growing particularly rapidly.

That matters because every time Washington adds another institutional obligation, somebody has to administer it. A professor cannot simply handle a complicated Title IX complaint between his ten o’clock lecture and lunch. Somebody writes the policy, receives the complaint, investigates it, documents the process, trains the employees and makes sure the university followed federal requirements.

Then somebody calls the lawyer.

The Legal Economy

Once a new category of behavior becomes potentially actionable, disagreements inevitably follow.

One lawyer represents the student making the complaint. Another may represent the accused. Another represents the institution. Advocacy organizations enter cases because precedent matters. State attorneys general sue federal agencies, federal lawyers defend regulations, judges issue injunctions and appellate courts reconsider them.

The Biden administration’s 2024 Title IX regulation was challenged in ten separate lawsuits. Eight courts issued preliminary injunctions affecting 26 states and particular schools elsewhere before courts ultimately vacated the regulation.

That represents a remarkable amount of legal activity surrounding the interpretation of a comparatively short statute.

It does not prove that lawyers on either side are insincere. Most presumably believe in the positions they represent.

It demonstrates something simpler.

There is now an economy surrounding the disagreement.

🅱️ BOB: I don’t know who’s right yet. But I can already tell who’s charging by the hour.

McMahon has begun changing that economy at the margins. Her department has rescinded gender-identity-related requirements contained in earlier OCR settlement agreements, while the restoration of the 2020 rule reduces the range of conduct treated federally under the broader Biden interpretation.

Change the definition and you change what schools must do.

Some investigations may never occur. Some policies may no longer be required. Some training becomes unnecessary. Some disputes never become federal Title IX cases at all.

The lawyers will not disappear. Changing the boundary itself produces litigation, sometimes a great deal of it. But there is an important difference between a temporary legal battle over where the boundary should be and a permanent compliance apparatus devoted to administering everything inside the boundary.

McMahon is moving the boundary.

That threatens more than an interpretation. It potentially reduces some of the activity built around it.

And Then There Is the Media

Lawyers are only part of the ecosystem.

Consider the ingredients of a transgender Title IX case: sex, sports, children or young adults, civil rights, parents, fairness, government authority, protests, politicians, judges, winners and losers.

It is nearly perfect material for modern media.

A complaint produces a story. The investigation produces another. Then comes the ruling, the reaction, the injunction, the appeal and the politician saying something provocative about all of it.

The incentives work on both sides. A conservative publication can attract an audience by presenting the dispute as gender ideology overwhelming common sense. A progressive publication can cover the same event as an attack on transgender rights.

Both may sincerely believe their framing.

Both may also get excellent traffic.

The lawyers monetize the dispute. The media monetizes the drama.

🅱️ BOB: There’s nothing television likes better than a problem that can be solved right after the commercial and somehow never is.

This does not require journalists to manufacture controversies. A regulatory system capable of continually generating genuine conflicts supplies the stories automatically.

And unlike a lawyer hired to resolve a particular case, a media organization gains little economic advantage from the argument disappearing forever.

Tomorrow needs another story.

Oppressor and Oppressed

There is one final component.

Much contemporary political thinking interprets social disputes through relationships between dominant and marginalized groups. Applied to gender identity, transgender students become a vulnerable minority while traditional institutions and majority norms are understood to possess greater social power.

Whether one accepts that framework completely, partially or not at all, it changes the significance assigned to ordinary disputes.

A disagreement about a locker room is no longer merely about a locker room. An athletic roster can become a civil-rights question. A dispute over pronouns can become a question of institutional discrimination.

Once the disagreement acquires that larger meaning, it becomes harder to resolve locally. The bureaucracy becomes involved because discrimination has been alleged. Lawyers become involved because rights are at stake. Advocacy groups become involved because precedent matters. Politicians become involved because constituents care. Media become involved because there is conflict.

And everybody can sincerely believe he is simply doing his job.

That is the fascinating part.

It doesn’t require a conspiracy.

Nobody needs to arrange a secret meeting or decide collectively to keep the controversy alive. Each institution follows the incentives immediately in front of it. The regulator regulates. The compliance office complies. The advocate advocates. The lawyer litigates. The politician campaigns. The journalist covers the fight.

Eventually an idea becomes an institution.

And institutions acquire payrolls.

McMahon’s Experiment

This is why Linda McMahon’s Title IX changes deserve more attention than another round of arguments about women’s sports.

They give us something close to a natural experiment.

For decades, higher education has accumulated a vast professional administrative structure. During part of that period, Title IX itself expanded from a straightforward prohibition on sex discrimination into a much more elaborate regulatory system. Gender identity then enlarged the number of potentially regulated disputes again.

Now Washington is pulling part of that definition backward.

We can watch what happens.

Do certain kinds of complaints decline? Do schools eliminate some procedures? Does the demand for particular training and consulting services contract? After the initial legal battles over the new boundaries, does litigation decrease?

Or does the activity simply move elsewhere?

Those are empirical questions. We do not have to guess at anybody’s hidden motives.

Maybe almost everyone involved believes exactly what he says he believes.

That does not change the incentive structure.

🅱️ BOB: Never blame a conspiracy for something a paycheck can explain all by itself.

Political disputes are usually presented as contests over principles—rights, equality, fairness, safety and identity. Those arguments are real.

But public policy does something else while everyone is arguing about principle.

It creates obligations. Obligations create jobs. Jobs become careers. Careers create institutions. Institutions acquire constituencies.

And constituencies are considerably harder to eliminate than the regulation that helped create them.

Linda McMahon can change the words in the Code of Federal Regulations.

Changing everything that learned to live around those words may prove considerably harder.

Ideas can change quickly. Institutions cannot.

And payrolls fight back.

Bonus Section: The Author’s Cut

This part is for those curious about how I wrote this article.

If you aren’t interested in this type of analysis, then thanks for reading and please move on with your day.

How I Built This Essay

A few readers may be interested in why this piece is written the way it is.

The first decision was to avoid writing another article about a single Title IX dispute.

Those stories already exist by the hundreds. Another one would have added very little.

I wanted to move above the individual controversies and look at the machinery producing them.

That is why the essay begins with Linda McMahon but does not stay with Linda McMahon. She provides the opening event and, later, the test case. The real subject is the institutional structure surrounding the rule.

Start Small, Then Widen

The opening is deliberately narrow.

A regulation changes.

Then the lens widens.

First comes the school. Then the administrator. Then the lawyer. Then the media. Finally the larger ideological framework.

That sequence is intentional.

If I had announced the whole theory in the first five paragraphs, the reader would have had to decide immediately whether he agreed with me.

I would rather let the argument accumulate.

Each section adds one more piece until the shape becomes visible.

Make the Abstract Physical

The administrative-growth statistics are important, but statistics alone can remain oddly weightless.

That is why the UCSB building is in there.

I had seen the change myself.

A three-story, 63,000-square-foot building gives the reader something a percentage cannot. You can picture it. It has doors, offices, employees and a budget.

That is also why the line “It gets a building” is so short.

The paragraph before it does the explaining.

The short line does the landing.

And I had high confidence it would land because I had seen the thing with my own eyes. I did not have to invent the image. I only had to describe what I saw.

Do Not Claim More Than I Can Prove

This essay could easily have become an accusation about motive.

I avoided that on purpose.

I do not know why every administrator, lawyer, activist or reporter does what he does. More important, I do not need to know.

The argument works without mind-reading.

I am interested in incentives and institutional behavior, not secret meetings.

That makes the case both stronger and harder to dismiss.

Let the Reader Do Some Work

I also resisted saying the quiet part out loud.

I could have written a much louder essay about people making money from controversy.

That would have been easier.

It also would have been weaker.

Instead, I show the staffing growth, the legal activity, the media incentives and the institutional permanence. Then I let the reader connect them.

I generally prefer that kind of persuasion.

If the reader reaches the conclusion himself, I do not have to drag him there.

Use Humor to Release Pressure

Bob appears four times for a reason.

First of all, it’s in his contract.

Just kidding.

The subject is bureaucratic, legal and ideological. Left alone, that can become heavy very quickly.

Bob breaks the pressure without changing the argument.

His lines are not separate jokes pasted onto the article. Each one arrives where the reader may be ready for a little oxygen.

That is the job.

That’s what he signed up for.

Save the Largest Claim for the End

The title tells you where the essay is going, but the piece does not fully explain it until late.

“Payrolls” starts as a metaphor.

By the end, it is not really a metaphor anymore.

That progression is deliberate.

The final paragraphs are supposed to make the reader reinterpret everything that came before them: the staffing, the offices, the legal work, the media activity and the institutional resistance.

The ending works only if the rest of the essay has earned it.

That is why I did not begin with the conclusion.

I built toward it.

What I Was Trying to Do

Mostly, I was trying to make the reader see a system rather than a series of unrelated controversies.

Not tell him what to think about every case.

Not assign motives to everyone involved.

Not turn the essay into another shouting match over gender policy.

Just show the causal relationships clearly enough that the machinery becomes visible.

Once that happens, the reader can decide what he thinks about it.

That is usually where I want to leave him.

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How the Heart Works

By Jim Reynolds | www.reynolds.com

October 2, 2026

Note: This is part of a new series I am exploring:

Reynolds Explains How It Works
Clear explanations of complicated things.

I thought I would start with a machine every one of us carries around all day, every day.

The heart.

In the words of the old show tune: “Ya’ Gotta Have Heart.”

The heart sounds complicated because medicine gives names to every chamber, valve, vessel, electrical node, and pressure change.

But the basic machine is simple.

The heart is a pump that keeps blood moving through two connected loops: one through the lungs and one through the rest of the body.

That is the whole system.

Everything else explains how the pump stays synchronized, how blood moves in the correct direction, and how the body changes output when you stand up, climb a hill, or start running.

Start With the Job

Your cells need oxygen and nutrients.

They also produce waste products, including carbon dioxide.

Blood is the transportation system.

The heart keeps that blood moving.

One side sends oxygen-poor blood to the lungs.

The other side sends oxygen-rich blood to the body.

So the complete path is:

Body → right side of heart → lungs → left side of heart → body

Once you understand that loop, most of the heart becomes much easier to understand.

The Heart Is Really Two Pumps

The heart has four chambers.

Two are on top.

Two are on the bottom.

The upper chambers are called atria.

The lower chambers are called ventricles.

The right atrium and right ventricle work together as one pump.

The left atrium and left ventricle work together as another.

The right side pumps blood to the lungs.

The left side pumps blood to the entire body.

That is why the left ventricle has a thicker muscular wall.

It has the harder job.

The right ventricle only has to push blood through the lungs.

The left ventricle has to push it from your chest to your brain, kidneys, legs, fingers, and everything in between.

Blood Only Moves One Way

A pump is not very useful if the fluid keeps flowing backward.

The heart solves that problem with valves.

There are four major valves.

They act like one-way doors.

They open when blood is supposed to move forward.

They close when pressure tries to push blood backward.

You do not have to memorize their names to understand the machine.

The important idea is:

Chambers create pressure. Valves control direction.

When the valves are working properly, each heartbeat moves blood forward through the system.

What a Heartbeat Actually Is

A heartbeat is not one single squeeze.

It is a sequence.

First, the atria contract and help fill the ventricles.

Then the ventricles contract.

The right ventricle sends blood to the lungs.

The left ventricle sends blood to the body.

Then the heart relaxes and begins filling again.

Squeeze.

Relax.

Fill.

Squeeze again.

That cycle repeats roughly once every second when a person is resting, though the exact rate varies widely.

The Electrical System Comes First

The heart does not wait for your brain to command every beat.

It has its own electrical system.

A small group of specialized cells in the right atrium, called the sinoatrial node, or SA node, normally starts each heartbeat.

It is often called the heart’s natural pacemaker.

The SA node generates an electrical signal.

That signal spreads across the atria.

The atria contract.

Then the electrical signal reaches another important structure called the atrioventricular node, or AV node.

The AV node briefly delays the signal.

That delay matters.

It gives the ventricles time to fill before they contract.

Then the electrical signal travels rapidly through specialized conducting tissue into the ventricles.

The ventricles contract.

So the heart has two systems working together:

Electrical system → tells the heart when to squeeze

Mechanical system → actually pumps the blood

If the electrical timing fails, the muscle itself may still be perfectly strong.

The problem is that the pump is no longer being told when to work properly.

Bob’s Question

🅱️ “So the electricity doesn’t power the heart muscle like electricity powers a motor?”

Correct.

The electrical signal is more like a timing command.

The muscle cells already contain the machinery needed to contract.

The electrical signal tells them when to do it.

Think ignition timing rather than an electric motor.

Why the Heart Speeds Up

Suppose you start walking uphill.

Your leg muscles suddenly need more oxygen.

They also need waste products removed faster.

The body responds in several ways.

Your breathing increases.

Blood vessels adjust.

And your heart beats faster and usually more forcefully.

The heart does not independently decide that you are climbing a hill.

Your nervous system and circulating hormones respond to what the body is doing.

They influence the SA node and the heart muscle.

The result is increased cardiac output.

Cardiac output simply means how much blood the heart pumps each minute.

It depends mainly on two things:

Heart rate × amount pumped per beat

That second number is called stroke volume.

If the heart beats 60 times per minute and pumps 70 milliliters each time, it moves about 4.2 liters of blood per minute.

During strenuous exercise, that number can rise dramatically.

Why Blood Pressure Exists

Blood does not move because it feels like moving.

It moves because pressure pushes it.

When the ventricles contract, they create pressure.

That pressure drives blood into the arteries.

The familiar blood-pressure reading reflects two points in the cardiac cycle.

The higher number, called systolic pressure, is measured while the ventricles are contracting.

The lower number, called diastolic pressure, is measured while the heart is relaxing between beats.

So a blood pressure of 120/80 does not mean the pressure is constantly 120 or constantly 80.

It rises and falls with every heartbeat.

What the Arteries Do

People often think arteries carry oxygen-rich blood and veins carry oxygen-poor blood.

Usually they do.

But that is not what defines them.

An artery is simply a vessel that carries blood away from the heart.

A vein carries blood toward the heart.

That explains the apparent exception in the lungs.

The pulmonary artery carries oxygen-poor blood away from the heart to the lungs.

The pulmonary veins carry oxygen-rich blood from the lungs back to the heart.

Direction defines the vessel.

Not oxygen content.

What Happens in the Lungs

The right side of the heart sends blood into the lungs.

There, blood passes through tiny vessels surrounding millions of microscopic air sacs.

Oxygen moves from the air in the lungs into the blood.

Carbon dioxide moves from the blood into the lungs.

You breathe the carbon dioxide out.

The freshly oxygenated blood then returns to the left side of the heart.

The left ventricle sends it back into the body.

This is why breathing and circulation are inseparable.

The lungs load the truck.

The heart drives it around.

What the Blood Does in the Muscles

Oxygen-rich blood reaches tiny vessels called capillaries.

That is where oxygen leaves the blood and enters the tissues.

Inside cells, oxygen helps release usable energy from nutrients.

Much of that work happens inside structures called mitochondria.

You can think of mitochondria as microscopic energy plants.

They take fuel derived from food and, with oxygen, produce a molecule called ATP.

ATP is the immediately usable energy that allows muscle fibers to contract.

So during exercise, the chain looks roughly like this:

Food provides fuel.

Lungs provide oxygen.

Blood carries both.

Heart provides circulation.

Mitochondria turn the available fuel and oxygen into usable cellular energy.

A failure anywhere along that chain limits performance.

Why You Get Tired

If your muscles demand energy faster than the cardiovascular system can supply oxygen and fuel, the body begins reaching its limits.

Breathing becomes harder.

Heart rate rises.

Metabolism changes.

Muscles accumulate chemical byproducts.

Your brain receives signals telling you that continued effort is becoming expensive.

The sensation is fatigue.

Fatigue is not one single mechanism.

It is the body saying, in effect:

We are approaching the limits of what this system can currently sustain.

The Coronary Arteries

The heart pumps blood to the entire body.

But the heart muscle also needs its own blood supply.

It gets that through the coronary arteries.

These vessels run across the surface of the heart and feed the heart muscle itself.

That creates an important distinction:

A person can have a heart whose pumping muscle is strong but whose blood supply is threatened.

If a coronary artery becomes severely narrowed or blocked, part of the heart muscle may stop receiving enough oxygen.

That is the basic mechanism behind many heart attacks.

The plumbing supplying the pump has failed.

Heart Attack Is Not the Same as Cardiac Arrest

These terms are often confused.

A heart attack usually means blood flow through a coronary artery has been blocked enough to injure heart muscle.

A cardiac arrest means the heart has stopped providing effective circulation.

One is primarily a blood-supply problem.

The other is primarily a pumping or electrical catastrophe.

A heart attack can cause cardiac arrest.

But they are not the same event.

What a Pacemaker Does

A pacemaker does not make a weak heart muscle strong.

It solves a different problem.

It helps control timing.

The heart normally generates its own electrical signal. A pacemaker monitors that rhythm. If the heart beats too slowly, or if the electrical signal fails to travel properly from the atria to the ventricles, the pacemaker can supply precisely timed electrical impulses.

In a dual-chamber pacemaker, one lead can sense or stimulate the right atrium and another can stimulate the right ventricle. The pacemaker can then preserve the proper delay between the upper and lower chambers so they contract in the correct sequence.

The key distinction is simple:

A pacemaker does not replace the pump.

It helps the pump operate on time.

If the heart muscle is strong but the electrical command system is unreliable, restoring the timing can make an enormous difference.

Bob’s Bottom Line

🅱️ “So the heart is basically two pumps with four one-way doors and an ignition system.”

That is surprisingly close.

Two pumps.

Four main valves.

An electrical timing system.

A network of pipes.

And blood circulating through two connected loops.

The Part Worth Remembering

Forget the Latin names.

Remember the machine.

The right side sends blood to the lungs.

The lungs load it with oxygen.

The left side sends it to the body.

Valves keep it moving forward.

Electrical signals keep the chambers squeezing in the correct sequence.

Blood carries oxygen and fuel to the cells.

And then the entire process starts again.

About once every second.

Every minute.

Every day.

For decades.

That is how the heart works.

And mine is pumping a steady 60 beats a minute and I feel great.

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My Roommate Craig

By Jim Reynolds | www.reynolds.com

September 30, 2026

I knew something was wrong before I walked into the urgent care center.

For several days, my home blood-pressure monitor had been having trouble getting a reading. I could feel my heartbeat plainly enough, but it was unusually slow. At urgent care, they discovered just how slow.

My heart rate was in the low thirties.

That number tends to get people’s attention.

They had difficulty getting a reliable blood-pressure reading, too. Protocol took over. An ambulance was called to take me to Saddleback Medical Center, about fifteen blocks away.

I had the option of declining the ambulance. I felt surprisingly good. I could walk around, carry on a conversation and do most of the things I normally did.

But the numbers were dreadful.

So I did the prudent thing and took the ride.

The emergency room was what emergency rooms usually are: periods of intense activity separated by long stretches of waiting. Tests were run. Blood was drawn. Machines beeped. Eventually a cardiologist came by and explained the situation.

The electrical signal controlling the upper part of my heart was no longer communicating properly with the lower part.

I needed a pacemaker.

There was considerably more to the explanation, but that was the essential part. I have a technical background, and the doctor quickly figured out that he could dispense with much of the simplified version. My heart had essentially found a backup rhythm that was keeping the blood moving despite an extraordinarily low pulse.

That explained something that had been puzzling everyone.

On paper, I looked terrible.

In person, I looked pretty good.

A few hours later I was moved into a regular hospital room.

I noticed that I had a roommate behind the curtain, but I knew nothing about him.

At first I was much more interested in myself.

The nurses kept trying to take my blood pressure, and their digital machines hated me. My pulse might be 35, then 31, sometimes lower, and it wasn’t particularly rhythmic. The machines had apparently been designed for people whose hearts behaved more conventionally.

Sometimes it took four or five attempts before they got a reading.

I eventually developed my own theory. If they let me get out of bed and walk to the bathroom, perhaps my heart rate would rise enough to make the machine happy.

So I would walk to the bathroom and occasionally do a few knee bends while I was there.

Strangely enough, it seemed to help.

The nurses were understandably less enthusiastic about this experiment than I was. A man with a heart rate near 30 is not normally encouraged to wander around unassisted. My bed was armed with an alarm, so every trip to the bathroom required negotiations with somebody.

They were doing their jobs.

And they did them extremely well.

That first night, while I was sleeping, my pulse apparently dropped to around 22. I later learned that several nurses had been watching my monitor at the nursing station, wondering whether they were about to have a much more exciting evening than anyone wanted.

They came into the room to make sure I was still breathing.

I was.

The next morning I felt fine.

By then I had also begun learning something about the man on the other side of the curtain.

His name was Craig.

I learned about him the way you learn about a hospital roommate: accidentally.

There is almost no privacy in a shared hospital room. You don’t deliberately listen to another person’s conversations, but there is a curtain between you, not a concrete wall.

Craig had cancer.

It was a rare form, and it had already cost him a limb years earlier. Now it had returned and spread to his lungs. He was having increasing difficulty breathing and was on oxygen. He was also in considerable pain.

Over those two days I heard his doctors and nurses repeatedly ask him how he was doing.

Usually he was doing a little worse.

The Percocet increased. Other pain relief was added. His breathing became more difficult.

Yet Craig remained remarkably upbeat.

Every man who walked into his side of the room seemed to become “brother.”

“Thanks, brother.”

“Appreciate it, brother.”

It was simply the way he talked to people.

At one point I was having a particularly animated conversation with one of the orderlies on my side of the curtain. We were laughing at the absurdity of something—which I no longer recall.

Craig’s voice suddenly came from the other side.

“You guys should take your act on the road!”

We all laughed.

That was Craig.

Meanwhile, my pacemaker was supposed to be installed Tuesday afternoon.

Then two genuine emergencies arrived.

Two hearts had stopped so I got bumped.

I could hardly complain. Whatever was wrong with me, I was sitting upright in bed writing on an iPad with a heart rate of 30. Somewhere else in the hospital were people whose problems apparently could not wait.

Mine could.

So I wrote.

I wrote a long message to friends explaining what had happened. I worked on essays. I even published something from the hospital.

Waiting is easier if you have something useful to do.

My cardiologist, Dr. Shah, came by and explained that we could perhaps do the procedure late that night with a reduced staff, or wait until the next morning.

I chose morning. I figured he may want to go home and see his family. I could wait.

By then I understood the situation well enough that I wasn’t particularly frightened. My heart’s electrical system was malfunctioning, but the rest of the machinery was apparently strong enough to compensate.

The pacemaker would fix the electrical problem.

Craig had no equivalent repair waiting for him.

That became increasingly clear on Wednesday.

His cancer doctor came in first.

He was direct, professional and attentive. He did not manufacture hope where there wasn’t much to offer. He explained that the cancer was spreading and that Craig had decisions to make.

Later someone came to discuss palliative care.

Then someone discussed hospice.

Another person discussed what might happen after he left the hospital.

A member of the clergy came by and quietly talked with him about faith.

None of these people was cold.

Quite the opposite.

What struck me was how positive everyone remained in a situation where there was very little positive news to give.

The doctors, nurses, aides, hospice people and clergy all seemed to understand exactly what Craig was facing. They treated him with extraordinary patience and kindness. Nobody talked down to him. Nobody treated him as if he had already disappeared.

They were professionals doing an enormously difficult job.

But from Craig’s bed, I could also hear how overwhelming it all was.

Different people were explaining different possibilities, and at one point someone arrived apparently prepared to move forward with an arrangement Craig didn’t realize he had agreed to.

“Wait a minute,” he said.

He wasn’t angry.

That wasn’t Craig.

He simply explained that several people had come in discussing several different things, and he wasn’t quite sure what he had actually decided.

I understood exactly what he meant.

Later I heard him explaining the confusion over the phone, apparently to his sister.

Until then I had wondered how much support Craig had outside that room. Nobody had visited him during most of the time we were together. I had heard fragments about relatives, but nothing very clear.

Then I heard his sister on speakerphone.

She was reassuring him. She was going to be there. She would help.

I was relieved.

Which was strange in itself.

I had never spoken a word to this man.

Wednesday morning my pacemaker was delayed again.

Another emergency.

Fine.

I got out the iPad.

Eventually, around midday, everything suddenly moved very quickly. A gurney arrived, and I was taken downstairs.

The operating-room crew was entirely male.

I looked around and asked, “Is this the dude OR?”

They laughed.

One of them told me that apparently I had done something wrong because the patients they liked went to the operating room next door.

That seemed promising.

The procedure itself took about half an hour.

Not long afterward I was back upstairs.

My heart rate was now a steady 60.

Just like that.

Later, a young nursing student walked several laps around the floor with me. I felt fine.

By late afternoon Dr. Shah gave the word.

I could go home.

Everything happened quickly after that. Papers appeared. Instructions were given. I got dressed. My wife, Vicki, was coming to pick me up.

I didn’t need a wheelchair.

I was walking out.

Craig wasn’t.

By then there was no avoiding what I had been hearing for two days.

I had arrived at Saddleback with a potentially life-threatening heart problem. There had been uncertainty, discomfort, waiting and some genuine risk.

But there was a fix for mine.

A small electronic device had been placed inside my chest, and I was being given back something close to the life I had walked in with.

On the other side of the curtain, Craig had been receiving very different news.

His doctors could treat his pain.

They could help him breathe.

They could surround him with people who cared.

But they could not give him what they had just given me.

More time.

I went into the bathroom one final time and came out dressed to leave.

For the first time, Craig and I were standing there looking directly at one another.

For two days we had observed the unwritten code of male hospital roommates. You don’t intrude. You let the other guy deal with his problems while you deal with yours.

We had heard almost everything about each other.

We had never actually met.

Craig looked at me.

“Hey man, you got through this. Go on and have a great rest of your life.”

Of all the things he might have said at that moment, that was what he chose.

I finally called him by his name.

“Craig, I know you have a real rough time ahead of you. I wish you all the happiness in the world.”

We stepped toward each other and hugged.

Not the quick slap-on-the-back hug men sometimes give each other.

We held on for perhaps ten seconds.

Then we separated.

I looked him in the eyes.

“God bless you, man.”

And I walked out the door.

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Introduction

I found this essay in my archive of unnamed Word documents. It was dated September 29, 2025—almost exactly a year ago—and apparently I never got around to publishing it.

I obviously felt very strongly about the subject.

Reading it again, I understand why. I did not want Democrats to walk away from the border crisis as though it had simply happened on their watch. My argument then, and now, was that their policies created the incentives that produced it: millions of illegal crossings, enormous pressure on public services, increased costs, crime, and all the other consequences that followed.

And I believed there was another calculation underneath it. They assumed that even if a Republican returned to the White House, nobody would seriously attempt to find and remove large numbers of people who had entered the country illegally. The task would be declared too large, too complicated, too expensive, too politically difficult.

Then Trump decided to try.

At first, the argument was that mass enforcement was impossible: you cannot possibly locate millions of illegal immigrants, process them, and remove them. When it became clear that the administration intended to make the attempt anyway, the argument changed. Suddenly ICE agents enforcing immigration law were being portrayed as the villains.

That is what still bothers me.

ICE did not create the problem it was being asked to clean up. The people enforcing the law did not create the policies that encouraged millions of people to cross the border. Yet once enforcement began, much of the political and predictable media energy shifted toward attacking the people doing the enforcement rather than holding accountable the people whose policies helped create the situation in the first place.

I thought that was extraordinarily cynical a year ago.

Reading this again, I still do.

I no longer remember exactly what prompted me to write it. Reading it now, it would not surprise me if the original spark came from something James Howard Kunstler wrote. But the argument and the fury are unmistakably mine.

So here it is, essentially as I wrote it then.

The Pattern That Wasn’t a Mistake

Incentives Explain Everything

By Jim Reynolds | www.reynolds.com

September 29,2025

I. The Great Open Border Lie: How They Justified It

For four years, Democrats told us the border crisis was everything but what it really was: intentional.

They called it a humanitarian issue.
They called it a broken system.
They called it a problem Trump created.
They called it seasonal.
They called it complicated.

But here’s what they never called it: the predictable result of their own policies, incentives, and political hunger for power.

Let’s review what they actually said—and what they actually did.

II. Their Words, Their Lies: The Receipts

Joe Biden:
“I’ve done all I can do at the border. Congress needs to act.” (Jan 2024)
(After spending years dismantling every Trump-era enforcement tool by executive order.)

Alejandro Mayorkas (DHS Secretary):
“The border is closed.” (March 2021)
(While over 200,000 illegal crossings were happening every month.)
“We inherited a broken system.” (2021 testimony)
(While he was actively breaking it further.)

Jen Psaki (Press Secretary):
“This isn’t a crisis.” (March 2021)
(While border facilities overflowed with unaccompanied minors.)

Chuck Schumer:
“We need immigrants because Americans aren’t reproducing enough.” (Nov 2022)
(Translation: We need new voters.)

Kamala Harris:
“We will not turn our back on those seeking help.” (2021)
(Unless they’re Cuban or speak favorably about Trump.)

Gavin Newsom (California Governor):
“California will always be a sanctuary... and a safe place for those seeking help.” (2022)
(While handing out free healthcare, education, and driver’s licenses to illegals.)

The New York Times (April 2022):
“Border crossings surge, but experts urge compassion over enforcement.”

CNN Headlines:
“A Seasonal Surge, Not a Crisis.”

III. The Pattern They Can’t Explain Away

Let’s be blunt: Democrats didn’t stumble into this. They engineered it.

When you step back, the pattern is undeniable:

They opened the border because their power depends on dependency.
And as Trump’s economy lifted Americans off government programs, they needed a new class of victims to keep the machine running.

IV. Trump Proved the Lie

For four years, Biden said he was helpless without Congress.
But when Trump returned in 2025, he secured the border in less than a month—without a single new law.

• He reinstated Remain in Mexico.

• He revived Title 42-style removals using new legal authority.

• He flooded the border with National Guard and ICE coordination teams.

• He launched deportation flights before the press could invent a new hashtag.

Trump didn’t beg Congress.
He used executive authority—the same tools Biden claimed didn’t exist.

“Turns out the border crisis wasn’t about laws. It was about will.
Trump had it. They didn’t.”

V. The Real Reason They Did It

Why did they finally go all-in on open borders?

Because this time they thought they could get away with it.

• They installed a non-president who wouldn’t fight them.

• They had a compliant, narrative-driven press ready to launder every lie.

• They were running out of dependents as Trump’s first term shrank welfare rolls.

• They needed new clients—fast.

• And they’re the Party of Chaos. They do their best work inside a crisis.

They didn’t just ignore the law.
They leveraged the lawlessness—turning it into a pipeline for NGO money, federal contracts, and long-term demographic change.

Every overdose victim.
Every trafficked child.
Every wage-suppressed American worker.
All collateral damage on the way to their political endgame.

VI. The Closing Argument: The Most Anti-American Presidency in History

Historians will debate a lot about the Biden presidency.
But on this, there should be no debate:

It was the most anti-American administration in our nation’s history.

Not because of foreign wars.
Not because of inflation.
But because of what they did—deliberately and unapologetically—to the very idea of American citizenship.

They devalued the border.
They erased the meaning of sovereignty.
They turned every small town into a sanctuary—whether the people wanted it or not.

They spent taxpayer dollars housing, feeding, and funding non-citizens while American veterans slept on sidewalks.
They empowered cartels, flooded our cities with crime, and insulted anyone who dared ask for basic security.
And when called out, they lied about it. For years.

This wasn’t incompetence.
It was vandalism—by design.

Now they want to pivot. Forget. Rewrite the narrative.

No.
Not this time.

This time, they own it.

Every policy. Every quote. Every overdose. Every empty promise. Every town they broke.

“They opened the gates.
They flooded the country.
And now they answer for it.”

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Why Trump Is Fighting Canada

Forget the rhetoric. Look at the trade relationship.

By Jim Reynolds | www.reynolds.com

September 26, 2026

Most Americans do not have time to understand tariff-rate quotas, countervailing duties, provincial marketing boards, rules of origin, stumpage fees, and the hundred other devices governments use to manage international trade.

Donald Trump understands that. His explanation is much simpler: Canada has been taking advantage of the United States for years, and he wants the relationship made fair.

That produces the usual argument. Trump supporters agree. Critics call it another excuse for tariffs.

There is a better way to look at it.

Forget the rhetoric for a moment. Look at what Canada actually does, why it does it, and what happens when someone threatens to change arrangements that have existed for decades.

Start With Dairy

Canada operates a supply-management system covering dairy, poultry and eggs. Domestic production is controlled, imports are limited through tariff-rate quotas, and imports beyond those quotas can face extremely high duties.

The OECD says some Canadian dairy tariff-rate quotas carry average protection of about 223 percent above the quota. It also says the system raises domestic prices, distorts trade, reduces responsiveness to market conditions, and can discourage innovation. (OECD)

🅱️ Bob: Does that mean the price of my omelette just doubled?

American dairy farmers have been complaining about this for years.

And this is not simply a Trump complaint. The Biden administration challenged Canada’s administration of dairy quotas under USMCA. In 2022, a dispute panel agreed with the United States that Canada had improperly reserved much of the available quota for Canadian processors, limiting the access American producers were supposed to receive. (United States Trade Representative)

Canada changed its system, and a later challenge went largely Canada’s way.

That tells us something important. Not every American complaint is automatically correct. But neither is the Canadian dairy dispute something Trump invented. It is a long-running argument over access to an intentionally protected industry.

Then There Is Lumber

Softwood lumber has generated disputes between Canada and the United States for decades.

Much Canadian timber is harvested from provincial government land. American producers have long argued that the fees Canadian mills pay for timber amount to a subsidy because they do not reflect true market prices. Canada disputes that characterization.

In 2017, however, the U.S. International Trade Commission determined that Canadian softwood lumber imports were materially injuring American producers after the Commerce Department found the lumber was subsidized and sold in the United States below fair value. Duties followed. (U.S. International Trade Commission)

Canada fought back through the trade-dispute system, as it had before.

Again, the point is not that every American calculation is beyond dispute. The point is that this fight was old long before the current confrontation began.

🅱️ Bob: You mean Trump didn’t start it? Haven’t heard that one before.

Not Every Canadian Barrier Is the Same

This is where the story gets muddled.

Some Canadian protections are longstanding domestic policies. Others are responses to recent American tariffs.

Canada imposed large counter-tariffs in 2025 after the United States placed tariffs on Canadian products. Most of those Canadian measures were later removed, but tariffs on steel, aluminum and automobiles remained. Canada subsequently added new targeted counter-tariffs in 2026 as the dispute escalated. Canada explicitly describes them as retaliation for American measures. (Canada)

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government argues that Washington disrupted an existing free-trade relationship and that Canada is defending industries threatened by U.S. tariffs. Carney has also said that Canada’s goal is to preserve broad tariff-free access to the American market while reducing U.S. tariffs on strategic Canadian industries. (Canada.ca)

So we should keep the categories straight.

Canada has protected industries.

Canada has also retaliated against American tariffs.

Those are not the same thing.

The Protective Bubble

Now we get to the larger economic problem.

Canada is perfectly entitled to choose its own domestic economic model. Canadians can impose whatever taxes, regulations, environmental requirements, labor rules, subsidies and industry protections their political system will tolerate.

But those choices have costs.

The OECD says Canada’s productivity has lagged peer countries for years and identifies weak competitive pressure, regulatory barriers, foreign-investment restrictions and internal trade barriers as important parts of the problem. (OECD)

Suppose government policies steadily increase the cost of producing something domestically. Eventually somebody pays.

Consumers can pay more. Companies can accept lower margins. Government can subsidize producers. Imports can replace domestic production.

Or government can protect domestic companies from outside competition.

That final step is where domestic economic policy becomes an international trade issue.

Canada can build a protective bubble around an industry. The trouble is that the world outside the bubble still exists.

A producer in China, Mexico, the United States or somewhere else does not have to duplicate Canada’s cost structure. It merely has to produce something consumers want at a competitive price.

That is one of capitalism’s great disciplines.

A country can regulate costs upward at home. It cannot regulate the world price upward with them.

🅱️ Bob: When Trump sees a bubble he has a natural reaction: pop it.

Why Nobody Wants the Old System Changed

There is another reason these fights become so intense.

If an arrangement survives long enough, businesses stop treating it as government policy and start treating it as reality.

Farmers borrow money based on it. Companies build factories around it. Workers build careers around it. Assets acquire values because everybody assumes the rules will continue.

Canada’s dairy quotas are an obvious example. Quota itself has economic value. Liberalizing the system would not merely change the price of next year’s milk. It could reduce the value of assets farmers bought under the existing rules.

Then someone arrives and says the rules are going to change.

Of course there is resistance.

This is one reason supposedly “fairer” trade can create tremendous turmoil. The existing system may contain distortions, but businesses have already adapted to those distortions. Correcting them creates winners and losers all over again.

The status quo has a constituency.

🅱️ Bob: Amazing how quickly an old government rule becomes somebody’s property right.

What Competition Could Do for Canada

There is another side to this.

Protection can preserve an existing industry, but it can also protect that industry from the forces that normally make businesses more productive.

Opening markets further could be painful for some Canadian producers. They might face lower prices, tighter margins and stronger American competition.

Other Canadian companies could benefit from cheaper inputs, simpler supply chains, fewer retaliatory barriers and more reliable access to the enormous American market.

The OECD has been telling Canada something similar domestically: reduce barriers, increase competition and improve productivity. (OECD)

That is the trade-off.

Protection preserves what exists.

Competition forces adaptation.

China and the Transshipment Problem

Then there is the issue most discussions barely mention: transshipment.

This is where China matters.

Suppose the United States places a tariff on a Chinese product. If that product can simply be shipped to Canada, relabeled, minimally processed and then sent across the border as Canadian, the American tariff means very little.

That does not mean every Canadian product containing Chinese components is illegitimate. Modern manufacturing crosses borders constantly. USMCA has detailed rules for determining when a product genuinely qualifies as North American.

The issue is deliberate circumvention.

The Trump administration has imposed an additional 40 percent duty on goods that Customs and Border Protection determines were transshipped through Canada to evade applicable U.S. duties. The rule specifically targets tariff evasion rather than legitimate Canadian production. (The White House)

Canada itself has imposed tariffs on certain Chinese steel and aluminum products, citing China’s non-market policies and the danger that subsidized Chinese production could undermine Canadian industry. (Canada)

In other words, Canada understands the problem.

If Chinese goods can use Canada as a back door into the United States, tariffs on China become largely performative. Rules of origin therefore matter as much as the tariff itself.

🅱️ Bob: I don’t care if it crosses the border wearing a Mountie hat. If it’s Chinese merchandise being routed through Canada to dodge a Chinese tariff, tariff it.

Now Look at the Leverage

This may be the easiest part of the entire argument to understand.

In 2025, 71.7 percent of Canadian merchandise exports went to the United States. Canada increased exports to the rest of the world by 17.2 percent, which sounds impressive until you notice the denominator. (Statistics Canada)

If roughly 28 percent of your exports go everywhere else and that portion rises 17 percent, you have moved it to roughly one-third on the same illustrative base.

Helpful? Certainly.

A replacement for the American market? Not remotely.

Canada can diversify around the edges. Geography and arithmetic make it much harder to diversify away from the United States.

That does not mean the United States is unaffected by a trade fight. American manufacturers use Canadian parts and materials. The United States buys enormous amounts of Canadian energy. Automobile production crosses the border repeatedly. American companies and consumers can be hurt too.

The point is asymmetry.

Canada depends far more heavily on access to the American market than the United States depends on access to Canada’s.

That is called leverage.

🅱️ Bob: When your customer buys three-quarters of what you sell, he gets a seat at the negotiating table.

What Trump Is Trying to Change

Viewed this way, the dispute becomes much less mysterious.

Trump is challenging arrangements that businesses and governments on both sides have spent decades learning to live with. His administration’s position is that access to the American market should increasingly depend on reciprocity, tighter enforcement and fewer protected arrangements.

Canada’s answer is that much of the existing relationship already works, that many recent Canadian barriers are retaliation for American tariffs, and that suddenly rewriting the rules damages companies that built their businesses around the old ones.

Both arguments explain the intensity of the fight.

This is not simply a story about tariffs.

It is a collision between an entrenched economic system and an American administration determined to change the terms in the name of reciprocity.

Canada built significant parts of its economy around the old rules.

Trump has decided those rules are negotiable.

Now everybody gets to find out what the old arrangements were really worth.

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Where Rip’s Newsletter Comes From

You may be surprised by how much goes into one edition of this venerable publication.

By Jim Reynolds | www.reynolds.com

September 25, 2026

Every so often a reader asks me where all this stuff comes from.

Fair question.

The short answer is: I read a lot so you don’t have to.

The longer answer is that Rip casts a very wide net. Every week I work through hundreds of articles, columns, essays and reports from dozens of sources. Most never make it into the newsletter.

That is by design.

Rip was never intended to be a collection of everything published on the Right. There is already far too much to read. My job is to find the handful of pieces I think are actually worth your time.

So, since you are trusting me to do that, I thought you might enjoy seeing what the bench looks like.

The Daily Grind

These are the high-volume sources. There is always something happening here, which also means there is always plenty to throw away.

American Greatness — Politics, culture and the Trump-era conservative movement. Roughly 70 pieces cross my screen in a typical week. Regular names include Debra Heine, Bryan Hyde, Liz Sheld, Stu Cvrk and Victor Davis Hanson.

RedState — Fast-moving politics, breaking stories and commentary. This one is a fire hose: easily 100 pieces a week. Kyle Becker, Nick Arama, Ward Clark, Bob Hoge, Teri Christoph and Rusty Weiss are among the familiar names.

The Federalist — Longer arguments on Congress, the courts, education and culture. Around 65 pieces a week. Shawn Fleetwood, M. D. Kittle, Brianna Lyman, Chris Bray, Breccan F. Thies and Eddie Scarry.

Power Line — One of the old reliables. Law, media, Minnesota politics and broader political analysis. About 50 pieces a week. John Hinderaker, Scott Johnson, Bill Glahn and Steven Hayward.

The Patriot Post — A veteran-founded conservative digest mixing commentary with shorter news analysis. This was one of Rip McIntosh’s favorite sources. Around 50 pieces a week.

American Thinker — A very wide net of its own: politics, economics, media and culture. Around 45 pieces a week.

The American Spectator — Another old-timer, with politics, history and longer essays. Roughly 40 pieces a week.

Townhall — Home to a large collection of syndicated conservative columnists. Kurt Schlichter, Kevin McCullough, Derek Hunter and Tim Graham regularly show up in the pile. Some are straight opinion. Others come in with the flamethrower already lit.

The Deeper End

Some sources don’t publish nearly as much, but I pay particular attention when they do.

The American Mind — Serious, sometimes difficult essays about national identity, culture and the future of the Right. Ryan P. Williams, Spencer Klavan, Michael Anton and Helen Andrews are among the writers I watch.

City Journal — Crime, cities, education, housing and public policy. Heather Mac Donald, Steven Malanga, Stephen Eide, Judge Glock and others. This is where I often go when I want more than an opinion.

Brownstone Institute — Covid, public health, civil liberties and institutional dissent. About eight pieces a week. Jeffrey Tucker, Paul Thacker and others. You may remember Renaud Beauchard from yesterday. Sometimes I even rewrite them. 😊

Gatestone Institute — International affairs, particularly the Middle East, Europe and migration.

Imprimis — Hillsdale’s little monthly publication. Very low volume. Usually worth reading.

The Heavier Feeders

Foreign Policy produces an enormous amount of material on security, trade and geopolitics — perhaps 80 pieces in a week. I don’t agree with all of it. That’s one reason I read it.

The National Pulse is another high-volume source of conservative news and commentary.

Frontpage Magazine is more combative, with Daniel Greenfield, Robert Spencer, Hugh Fitzgerald and Mark Tapson among its regular writers.

The Washington Free Beacon combines investigative reporting with political commentary and regularly turns up stories worth watching.

And yes, I keep an eye on MSNOW and other sources from the Left.

Not because I intend to send you their stories.

I want to know what everybody is saying.

The Independents

This has become an increasingly important part of the mix.

There are now very good writers who don’t need a magazine, newspaper or television network standing behind them. They publish directly.

I regularly see work from Alex Berenson, Peter Navarro, Jack Cashill, Don Surber, Jeff Childers, John Hawkins, James Howard Kunstler and others.

About 40 independent pieces go into the hopper in an average week.

And, yes, Jim Reynolds occasionally (!) sneaks one in there too.

Then What?

This is the part that probably matters most.

Nobody pays to get into Rip. The work either cuts it or it doesn’t.

There is no preferred placement. No publication gets an automatic pass. A famous byline guarantees nothing.

I collect.

I read.

I compare. Is it appropriate for our audience? Is it well written? Is it credible?

I throw away a lot.

Then I try to send you the things I would want somebody to send me if I didn’t have the time—or inclination—to wade through all of it myself.

Sometimes that means Victor Davis Hanson.

Sometimes it means a writer you’ve never heard of.

Sometimes it means an article from a publication I don’t particularly like.

The source doesn’t make the cut.

The story does.

That’s where Rip’s Newsletter comes from.

And as long as you keep reading it, I’ll keep doing the digging.

— Jim

Please visit Rip’s Newsletter if you are curious about this publication. Many of you, of course, are already long-time subscribers.

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Why Gen Z Is Lost

Jim’s Note:

I made a mistake yesterday.

To my surprise, nobody has complained about it yet. Here is my mea culpa.

In Rip’s Newsletter I sent out an article that I thought addressed an immensely important subject. It did. But I also sent it out knowing that the argument was buried inside an almost impossibly dense academic treatment.

I should have done the work first.

Because the more I wrestled with the essay, the more convinced I became that the underlying idea mattered—and the more frustrated I became that something this important had been made so difficult to understand.

So consider this my second try.

Not at summarizing the article. At finding the important thing buried inside it.

Before getting into that, I should say something about the author.

Renaud Beauchard is not some random internet crank. He is a French journalist and lawyer with serious academic credentials, including degrees from Tulane and Cambridge, and he has taught law at American University. He is obviously intelligent, widely read, and interested in large questions about culture, technology, and society.

Which may explain why his essay irritated me so much.

I started reading The Commodified Self and the Designed Collapse of Generation Z because I thought he was onto something important. Very important, in fact. We have an entire generation growing up inside a technological and social environment unlike anything human beings have experienced before. Their attention is being harvested. Their social lives are increasingly mediated through screens. Their identities are being shaped in public, measured by clicks, likes, followers, and algorithms.

Something consequential is happening here, and Beauchard clearly sees it.

But every time I thought I had hold of his argument, he seemed determined to make it harder to understand.

Another theorist appeared. Then another abstraction. Then came the ego, competing selves, commodification, philosophical frameworks, and layers of terminology that required the reader to keep translating the essay back into ordinary English.

By the time I got to the internal struggle among various versions of the self, I was nearly done.

This kind of writing embodies almost everything I try not to do.

Writing should clarify an idea, not advertise the complexity of the writer’s thinking. If an argument is important, the obligation is to make it clearer. Strip away what isn’t necessary. Explain unfamiliar ideas in familiar language. Give the reader evidence. Connect the pieces. Move.

Clear. Concise. Informative. Comprehensible.

Beauchard had, I think, identified something enormously important. But he buried it under so much intellectual machinery that the machinery began competing with the message.

So I decided to take the essay apart. That’s what engineers do. We take complex things and break them into understandable smaller pieces.

The goal was not to summarize it. Nor was it to translate it paragraph by paragraph. I certainly had no interest in reproducing all of its philosophical scaffolding.

I wanted to find the thing underneath it.

I call it The Chunk.

And once you strip everything else away, the question is remarkably simple—and disturbing:

What happens to a generation when we turn childhood, friendship, status, sexuality, identity, and attention into products—and then hand the machinery to companies that make more money the harder it becomes to look away?

Why Gen Z Is Lost

We weakened the institutions that once helped children become adults. The marketplace was happy to take their place.

By Jim Reynolds | www.reynolds.com

September 24, 2026

So what was Beauchard actually trying to tell us?

Because by the time Beauchard had taken me through the philosophers, the psychological categories, the ego, the superego and competing versions of the self, I had begun to wonder whether understanding why our kids are miserable really required a graduate seminar in psychoanalysis.

It doesn’t.

Underneath all the intellectual machinery is a much simpler and more disturbing idea.

For decades, we have been weakening many of the institutions that once helped young people understand who they were, what was expected of them and what adulthood was supposed to look like.

Family authority weakened. Religious authority declined. Communities became thinner. Traditions were increasingly treated not as inherited wisdom to be examined and adapted, but as restraints from which the individual should be liberated. Adults became more hesitant to tell children what they ought to believe, how they ought to behave or even what kind of person they ought to become.

The intentions were often good. Older forms of authority could be rigid, unfair or simply wrong. Parents could be domineering. Churches could become ossified. Communities could enforce foolish conventions. Much of the cultural revolution of the past half-century was an understandable reaction against those excesses.

But we rarely paused to ask the obvious follow-up question:

If the old institutions stopped telling children who they were and how they fit into the world, who would take their place?

We now know the answer.

Companies did.

Social media did.

The therapeutic industry did.

Algorithms did.

And they were extraordinarily good at it.

For most of human history, a child did not begin life as an autonomous consumer constructing an identity from an infinite menu of possibilities. The world arrived first. There was a family, a neighborhood, a religion, a school, a community, a set of expectations and an assortment of adults who had already lived long enough to know a few things. The child might eventually reject some of those things, but first he had something against which to push.

In this scenario, identity emerged from membership, obligation, imitation, resistance and experience.

That structure has steadily weakened. We increasingly told young people that they should discover themselves, define themselves and refuse to be limited by inherited expectations. The child was encouraged to look inward for identity rather than outward toward family, tradition, community and responsibility. It sounded liberating. But there was a problem: children do not arrive equipped with a mature understanding of who they are or what is worth wanting. They are highly suggestible human beings attempting to construct themselves while surrounded by other highly suggestible human beings doing exactly the same thing.

Into that vacuum stepped the marketplace.

Companies had always sold things to teenagers, of course. Clothing, records, cosmetics, cars and every other product associated with youth culture have been marketed to young people for generations. But something fundamentally changed when technology allowed companies to move from selling things to the young to participating continuously in the construction of the young person’s identity itself.

The beauty industry could now tell a girl what her face ought to look like, and software could immediately show her the corrected version. Social media could tell her how popular she was in numerical terms. Dating apps could turn desirability into a swipe. Pornography could establish expectations about sex before many children had experienced a real romantic relationship. Influencers could provide ready-made identities, political beliefs, diets, aesthetics, emotional vocabularies and lifestyles. The phone became part parent, part mirror, part marketplace and part scoreboard.

And it never went to sleep.

This is what makes the change so profound. A young person’s face can now be improved, body optimized, popularity measured, friendships counted, desirability rated, moods tracked, unhappiness labeled and identity publicly displayed. Nearly every one of these processes has a commercial system attached to it. The more uncertain the young person becomes, the more products, services and advice can be offered to solve the uncertainty.

The teenager is no longer merely the customer.

The teenager’s identity has become the product.

At roughly the same time, another cultural shift was taking place. We began interpreting more and more of ordinary human experience through a therapeutic lens. This requires some care, because real mental illness exists. Depression exists. Anxiety disorders exist. Trauma exists. There are children and adults who urgently need psychiatric care, medication and professional treatment. Nothing in this argument disputes that.

The question is what happens when an entire culture becomes intensely preoccupied with its own emotional state. Sadness is no longer simply sadness; it must be examined for pathology. Shyness becomes anxiety. Difficulty concentrating may become a disorder. A bad relationship becomes toxic. A painful episode becomes trauma. Ordinary discomfort acquires a vocabulary once reserved for illness. A diagnosis can gradually move from describing a problem a person has to describing the person himself.

That change also created a marketplace. Therapists, apps, pharmaceutical companies, online communities, influencers, self-help programs and mental-health subscriptions all have roles to play, some useful and some questionable. But taken together, they encourage a remarkable amount of attention to the self. Young people are continually invited to ask how they feel, what their feelings mean, what diagnosis might explain them and what intervention might make them feel better.

Yet during the same period, young people appear to have become increasingly anxious about how they feel.

Perhaps those trends are not entirely unrelated.

Human beings are affected by what they are trained to notice. A person encouraged to monitor every change in mood may become exquisitely sensitive to changes in mood. Someone taught that discomfort may signify damage can begin to interpret ordinary friction as danger. The person who spends all day examining his inner state may eventually discover an astonishing number of things wrong with his inner state.

Meanwhile, many of the institutions that once pulled people outward have weakened. Family obligations require us to think about other people. Work imposes duties whether we feel inspired or not. Religion places the individual inside a larger moral order. Community creates reciprocal expectations. Service forces attention away from the self. Even boredom once forced children to make something happen rather than wait for a device to stimulate them.

Those things may have been doing more psychological work than we understood.

This is also why the fashionable explanation that smartphones caused the entire crisis seems incomplete. Smartphones clearly matter. Social media clearly matters. Pornography, algorithmic feeds and endless digital stimulation clearly matter. But the phone did not create every weakness that made young people vulnerable to those forces.

It industrialized them.

Imagine giving a 12-year-old a device containing a beauty contest, a popularity ranking, a pornography library, an advertising platform, a psychological clinic, a political rally, a peer-surveillance network and an infinite shopping mall. Then imagine that the device studies the child continuously, learns what frightens him, excites him, angers him and holds his attention, and then adjusts what it shows him accordingly.

That is approximately what we did.

And we did it at precisely the moment when many of the competing influences—parents, churches, neighborhoods, civic organizations and other forms of adult authority—were becoming weaker.

The timing could hardly have been worse.

This helps explain another apparent paradox of Generation Z. Young people possess more freedom of personal choice than previous generations could have imagined. They can choose among lifestyles, identities, careers, communities, relationships and forms of self-expression that barely existed a generation ago. Yet many seem not liberated by this abundance but overwhelmed by it.

Unlimited choice can become its own burden. A young person who may theoretically become anything must first decide what is worth becoming. A culture that refuses to give him much guidance because guidance itself is regarded as coercive has not necessarily made him freer. It may simply have given him an impossible assignment.

Human beings seem to need boundaries, standards and models. Not prison walls. Boundaries. A child needs some things that are fixed long enough to allow character to form against them. He needs adults who are willing to say that some things are better than others, that some impulses should be resisted, that some duties exist regardless of mood and that adulthood requires accepting responsibilities that were not individually designed for our convenience.

This is where adults return to the story.

Children need adults willing to say no. They need adults willing to be disliked. They need communities that do not exist merely to validate them. They need obligations they did not create and cannot swipe away. They need work that cannot be filtered, friendships that cannot be measured in followers and accomplishments that cannot be awarded with a click.

They probably also need some answer to the oldest human questions.

Who am I?

What do I owe other people?

What is worth sacrificing for?

What does a good life look like?

What do I do when I fail?

Religion historically supplied answers to many of those questions through community, ritual, moral structure, obligation, forgiveness and purpose. A secular society may decide that it does not need religion. But it does not get to decide that it no longer needs answers to the questions religion once addressed.

The vacuum remains.

And the phone has answers.

That should concern us because the answers delivered through the phone are rarely neutral. They are selected by systems designed to obtain something from the user: attention, money, data, engagement, loyalty or dependence. The young person may believe he is discovering himself while moving through a carefully engineered marketplace designed to keep him searching.

We spent years worrying that corporations were selling things to our children.

We may have missed the larger change.

They began selling our children themselves.

A better face. A better body. A better identity. A diagnosis. A following. A personal brand.

Perhaps the mental-health crisis is not as mysterious as it sometimes appears. We weakened many of the institutions that once helped children become adults, replaced inherited structure with personal choice, medicalized a growing share of ordinary emotional life and then handed every child a machine designed to monetize insecurity.

Then we wondered why they were anxious.

We removed the adults from the room.

The marketplace was happy to take their place.

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Why Elections Need TCP/IP

By Jim Reynolds | www.reynolds.com

September 23, 2026

The Internet works because nobody has to trust everybody else.

Your computer may be made by Apple. Mine may be made by Dell. The router may be made by Cisco. The server may be running Linux. The network in between may cross equipment owned by a dozen different companies.

Yet they all talk to one another.

Why?

Because they follow protocols.

The rules are public. A packet, which is the basic unit of transmission, has defined fields. Certain information belongs in the header. The payload follows a known structure. Invalid packets are rejected. Errors are handled according to known procedures. Lost information can be retried. Routers know what to forward and what to discard. Monitoring systems can watch traffic and identify bottlenecks, failures, congestion, and abnormal error rates.

Nobody gets to say, “Trust our proprietary interpretation of what an Internet packet should look like.”

The protocol defines it.

That is one of the great engineering achievements of the modern world. We built a global system containing billions of devices made by competing companies, operating under wildly different conditions, and made them cooperate by agreeing on common rules.

The companies compete over implementation.

They do not get to own the rules.

Why do we not run elections the same way?

The Wrong Question

When Americans argue about voting machines, the conversation usually degenerates into one of two positions.

One side says the machines are secure and we should trust the certification process.

The other side says the machines are black boxes and cannot be trusted.

Both arguments miss the better solution: we should not have to trust the machines at all.

That is the whole point of a protocol.

Voting technology should operate under a public, uniform election protocol that defines exactly how ballots are recognized, validated, rejected, corrected, counted, transmitted, audited, and monitored.

The protocol should be more important than the machine.

A Ballot Is a Message

From a software-engineering standpoint, a ballot is not terribly exotic.

It has two basic parts.

First comes a common structure.

Call it the envelope.

Every ballot has certain information that identifies what kind of ballot it is and how it should be handled. Election identifier. Jurisdiction. Precinct. Ballot style. Version. Contest definitions. Validation information. Status information.

Then comes the payload, which is where one election differs from another.

President: choose one.

Senator: choose one.

School board: choose up to three.

Proposition 12: yes or no.

The payload changes from election to election. The underlying protocol does not.

This is exactly how network systems work. The header follows standardized rules. The payload varies according to what is being transmitted.

Once the ballot structure is standardized, the rest becomes much easier.

Authenticate the Voter, Then Anonymize the Ballot

Before a ballot is issued, the system should answer three questions:

1. Are you who you say you are?

2. Are you eligible to vote in this election?

3. Have you already been issued a ballot?

Those are authentication problems.

A voter presents an approved ID. The system verifies identity, confirms registration and eligibility, and checks that no ballot has already been issued. Local facial comparison could provide an additional check, with uncertain cases sent to a human rather than automatically rejected.

Then something important happens.

The identity disappears.

The authentication system issues an anonymous ballot credential confirming only this:

One valid ballot has been issued to one eligible voter.

The counting system does not need the voter’s name. It should never receive it.

The authentication system needs to know that Jim Reynolds received a ballot.

The counting system needs to know that Ballot 4A72 is valid.

Neither system needs to know both.

That separation preserves ballot secrecy while separating voter authentication from vote counting.

From a protocol standpoint:

identity verification → eligibility check → duplicate check → anonymous ballot credential → voting

Then the ballot enters the counting system with no personal identity attached.

Prove the voter. Anonymize the ballot. Verify the count.

That is a straightforward separation of functions.

Recognition and Counting

There are really only two significant software functions at the heart of the process.

1. Recognition.

2. Counting.

Recognition determines what the voter marked.

Counting applies the contest rules and increments the totals.

Neither should require mysterious proprietary software.

A scanner can determine whether an oval is clearly filled, clearly blank, or ambiguous. If the system cannot confidently identify the voter’s choice, it should not guess.

It should reject the ambiguity at the source.

For an in-person voter, the scanner should simply say:

Contest 7 cannot be read with sufficient confidence. Please review your ballot.

The voter fixes the problem before the ballot enters the count.

That is much cleaner than asking election workers later to divine what somebody meant.

The rule should be simple:

· Clear mark: accept.

· Clear blank: accept.

· Ambiguous mark: return for correction or send through a defined adjudication process.

No improvisation.

No proprietary judgment.

No hidden decision-making.

Counting Should Be Boring

Once recognition is complete, counting is almost embarrassingly simple.

Load the ballot definition.

Validate the ballot.

Apply the contest rules.

Increment the totals.

Produce an audit record.

A competent programmer could write the core logic quickly.

That is not an argument for careless software. It is the opposite.

The security-critical portion should be deliberately small.

In computer security, complexity is the enemy of confidence. The more code buried inside the trusted core, the more places there are for errors, unintended behavior, or malicious logic to hide.

So keep the trusted part tiny.

Everything complicated should be pushed outward.

User interfaces can be complicated.

Accessibility features can be complicated.

Reporting systems can be complicated.

Election administration can be complicated.

But the thing that decides whether Candidate A received 10,001 votes or 10,002 should not be.

Voting Needs an RFC

The Internet Engineering Task Force has spent decades publishing documents known as RFCs: Requests for Comments.

They define how Internet systems behave.

Elections need the equivalent.

Here is the surprising part: we have already started building it.

NIST has developed common formats for ballot definitions, cast-vote records, voter records, election logs and results. The Election Assistance Commission has incorporated interoperability into its voting-system standards.

In other words, the engineering world has already recognized the problem.

We just haven’t finished the architecture.

There should be a public election protocol specifying, in exhausting detail:

what a valid ballot looks like;

which fields are required;

• how ballot styles are identified;

• how malformed ballots are rejected;

• how ambiguous marks are handled;

• how duplicate ballots are detected;

• how spoiled ballots are replaced;

• how retries work;

• how rejected ballots are recorded;

• how adjudication decisions are logged;

• how totals are calculated;

• how results are transmitted;

and how every step is independently verified.

The specification should be public.

The test suites should be public.

The expected results should be public.

Then everybody gets to beat on it.

Universities. Political parties. State governments. County officials. Independent programmers. Security researchers. Voting-equipment vendors.

Anyone.

That is how confidence is earned.

Not by saying, “Trust us.”

By saying, “Here are the rules. Try to break them.”

Let the Vendors Compete

Standardization does not eliminate private companies.

It makes competition healthier.

Cisco, Juniper, Arista and other companies can all build network equipment because they implement common protocols.

Voting should work the same way.

One company could build an excellent scanner.

Another could build better accessibility equipment.

Another might specialize in high-volume ballot processing.

Another could develop superior audit software.

Another could build monitoring systems.

They can compete on reliability, price, service, speed, usability, security, and support.

But none of them gets to own the rules.

That belongs to the protocol.

A county should be able to replace one vendor with another without replacing the conceptual foundation of its election system.

The machines change.

The protocol remains.

The Acid Test

There is a simple way to know whether we have actually created a protocol.

Give the specification and its test suite to two companies that have never seen each other’s code.

If Company A can produce a ballot that Company B can read, both reject the same invalid inputs, both produce the same count from the same ballot set, and both generate records that the same independent monitoring software can understand, we have a protocol.

If they cannot, we have more work to do.

If two implementations disagree, the disagreement tells us where the protocol is underspecified.

And Then We Monitor It

Network engineers do not merely design protocols and hope everything works.

They monitor the network.

Throughput. Errors. Failures. Retries. Anomalies.

Election systems could work the same way.

Independent, read-only monitoring systems could watch the health of an election without seeing voters or their selections.

How many ballots are being processed?

What percentage are rejected or rescanned?

Are particular machines failing unusually often?

Are adjudication rates suddenly spiking?

Is one precinct rejecting six percent of ballots while comparable precincts reject less than one percent?

That is not an accusation of fraud.

It is telemetry.

And telemetry tells you where to look.

The monitors should not control anything, and there should be more than one. Because every system understands the same public protocol, political parties, universities, news organizations, states, audit firms, and private companies could build independent monitoring systems.

If several independent monitors see normal operation, that tells us something.

If they all detect the same anomaly, that tells us something too.

A network engineer does not declare sabotage every time a router starts dropping packets. He sees the anomaly and investigates.

Election administration should work the same way.

The Paper Ballot Still Matters

None of this means replacing physical evidence with software.

Quite the opposite.

In this architecture, the paper ballot remains the final source of truth.

The computer is there to accelerate recognition and counting.

The physical ballot exists so the machine never gets the last word.

If the electronic total becomes questionable, humans can return to the paper.

That is an important design principle:

• The software should make elections faster.

• It should not make election results dependent on trusting software.

  The Bigger Problem

There is another integrity issue that software alone cannot solve.

A counting system can tell us whether valid ballots were counted correctly.

It cannot tell us whether every ballot entering the system should have been there.

Those are different problems.

Ballot issuance.

Voter eligibility.

Signature verification.

Chain of custody.

Mail-ballot handling.

Duplicate prevention.

Ballot harvesting rules.

These belong to election administration rather than tabulation software.

But the same principle applies.

Define the protocol.

Define the required records.

Define the reconciliation rules.

Define what constitutes an exception.

Log the exceptions.

Audit them.

Do not leave critical decisions buried in discretion.

Remove Trust From the System

That is really the objective.

People often say that Americans need to regain trust in elections.

I would phrase it differently.

We should design elections so that trust matters less.

Engineers do this all the time.

We do not secure computer networks by assuming everybody involved is honest.

We assume machines fail.

We assume programmers make mistakes.

We assume networks break.

We assume people attack systems.

Then we design protocols that detect failure, reject bad information, preserve evidence, and allow independent verification.

Why should voting receive a lower engineering standard?

The system should not depend upon whether Republicans trust the voting-machine company.

It should not depend upon whether Democrats trust the county clerk.

It should not depend upon whether anybody trusts the programmer.

Trust the protocol.

Verify the implementation.

Monitor the operation.

Audit the physical record.

That is how the Internet works.

It might be time to bring elections into the same century.

Let companies compete over the machines. Never let them own the rules.

Author’s Note: Many of the pieces described here already exist. NIST and the Election Assistance Commission have developed common data formats, interoperability requirements, event logging, auditability and other standards for election systems. The proposal here is to carry that engineering approach further: organize the pieces around a comprehensive public protocol architecture in which independently developed systems can interoperate, be monitored and be verified without depending upon proprietary implementations.

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Defund the Police: The Receipts

Who said it. What followed. What they say now.

By Jim Reynolds | www.reynolds.com

September 16, 2026

AOC would rather we focus on today’s politics. Fine. But first, let’s remember 2020.

Her campaign didn’t merely “express concern” about police misconduct. It ran a page titled “Sign On to Support Defunding the Police.” The message was clear: “Defund police. Invest in community services instead.” Supporters were invited to join “Alexandria and our movement” demanding cities defund their departments.

That wasn’t a stray remark or a gotcha interview. It was campaign material.

Six years later she talks about what candidates believe now. Changing the subject isn’t changing the record.

And she had company.

Jamaal Bowman, asked directly in 2020 for his position on “defund the police,” answered: “I support defunding the police.” He wanted resources redirected to mental health, housing, education, alternatives to incarceration. No translation needed. He said it.

Cori Bush refused to retreat even after the slogan turned toxic. In 2021, defending her own spending on private security, she told CBS: “We need to defund the police.”

Ilhan Omar went further. At a Minneapolis rally she called the MPD “rotten to the root” and spoke approvingly of dismantling it. Nine Minneapolis City Council members publicly pledged to “begin the process of ending the Minneapolis Police Department.” That wasn’t cardboard graffiti anymore. People with governmental power were trying to kill the institution itself.

Then the organizations arrived.

Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation called explicitly for “a national defunding of police.” The ACLU ran the June 11, 2020 headline: “Defunding the Police Will Actually Make Us Safer.” Not “reform.” Not “reconsider.” Defund.

And then came the people who thought defunding didn’t go far enough. Mariame Kaba wrote the era’s defining essay: “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police.” Her logic was clear: reduce police violence by reducing all contact between police and the public.

Within weeks, the conversation had moved from reform → defund → dismantle → abolish.

Hollywood joined in. Natalie Portman admitted she’d been scared of the phrase, then announced she’d come around to supporting it. John Legend pushed redirecting police money to social programs.

We don’t have to pretend everyone meant the same thing. They didn’t. Some wanted budgets cut. Some wanted responsibilities transferred. Some wanted departments dismantled. Some wanted policing abolished. Those distinctions are real.

But so was the moment: reducing, redirecting, or eliminating police power moved from activist circles into Congress, city councils, major organizations, universities, media, and entertainment—all at once.

Then reality reentered the discussion.

The slogan became politically radioactive. Leaders who’d never supported it emphasized their opposition. Cities hit staffing and safety crises. Minneapolis voters rejected the 2021 charter change that would have replaced the police department outright.

The vocabulary disappeared.

Now, not everyone reversed. Some still defend the underlying idea. That matters too. Keeping receipts means recording what people actually said—not manufacturing consistency or reversal.

Which brings us back to AOC.

She has every right to reconsider. So does Bowman, Bush, Omar, anyone. People learn. Events produce evidence. Minds change.

What doesn’t change is the historical record.

AOC’s campaign didn’t say “reform police.” It said defund police.

Bowman didn’t say reporters misunderstood him. He said “I support defunding the police.”

The ACLU didn’t publish “Perhaps Municipal Police Budgets Deserve Another Look.” It published “Defunding the Police Will Actually Make Us Safer.”

Kaba didn’t ask readers to reconsider procedures. Her headline said literally abolish the police.

Those are the receipts.

Six years on, it would be easy to let all this dissolve into the fog of 2020—COVID, riots, lockdowns, Floyd, the election. Everybody was emotional. On the Left, anyway. Everybody got carried away. On the Left, anyway.

But crazy periods are exactly the ones worth remembering—because they reveal what people and institutions will advocate when normal restraints weaken.

That’s why we kept the receipts.

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Why Cops Was Ordered Off the Air in 2020

The narrative had to be protected.

By Jim Reynolds | www.reynolds.com

September 15, 2026

In June 2020, at the exact moment America most needed to see what police work actually looked like, the networks pulled it off the air. Cops, 33 seasons in. Live PD, cable’s biggest hit, killed two weeks after 160 new episodes were ordered. Body Cam, gone.

Not because viewers revolted. Because viewers were watching.

The shows’ crime was showing reality: frightened victims, lying suspects, hidden weapons, sudden resistance, how fast a routine stop turns deadly. Mistakes and bad judgment, yes—reality is messy. But mostly, they showed why police exist.That was now forbidden viewing.

By summer 2020 the narrative was supreme: policing is systemically racist. Black men hunted by white officers. Any complication = excuse. Any request for evidence = moral failure. The story had to stay simple because the political program built on it couldn’t survive complexity.

The mythology had been under construction for years.

2014: Michael Brown robbed a store, fought Officer Darren Wilson, and was shot. Within hours America got the scene it was told to remember—“Hands up, don’t shoot.” It became a chant, a congressional gesture, a global slogan. Holder’s own DOJ found the slogan unsupported by evidence. Brown reached into the car and struggled with Wilson. The slogan survived anyway.

That was the lesson: a useful story doesn’t need to stay true once it’s useful.

2019: Jussie Smollett screamed “MAGA country” with a rope around his neck. Politicians and journalists believed it before the investigation finished. Then it collapsed—he’d staged it. Nobody reexamined the machinery that made them credulous. They just moved on.

2020: George Floyd. The video was genuinely horrible, and many (not all)_ believe Chauvin deserved prosecution. But the medical reality was complicated: fentanyl and methamphetamine in his system, 11 ng/mL fentanyl—a level found in fatal overdoses—severe coronary disease, an enlarged heart, a half-dissolved pill with his DNA under the squad car seat. Initial findings showed no physical evidence of traumatic asphyxia. The county autopsy still ruled homicide, listing drugs and heart disease as “significant conditions.” A complicated death: a vulnerable heart, powerful drugs, panic, exertion, prolonged restraint.

But complexity was forbidden. It was compressed into one clean sentence: a white cop killed an unarmed Black man by kneeling on his neck.

The verdict arrived before the trial—and it applied to every cop in America.

Defund the police.

Elected officials endorsed it. Budgets were cut. Units eliminated. Recruitment collapsed. Prosecutors treated enforcement as suspect. Then crime exploded—murder up nearly 30% in 2020, the largest one-year leap in FBI history. The dead were in Chicago, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Portland, Baltimore, Oakland. Businesses burned. Stores vanished. The people who couldn’t move absorbed the consequences of an experiment run by people who never lived among them.

Meanwhile, the programs that might have reminded viewers why police exist had vanished.

Cops and Live PD weren’t neutral. They leaned toward the officer’s side, depended on department cooperation, favored the dramatic. Live PD had a real scandal—Javier Ambler’s death footage deleted under retention policy. Those deserved criticism. But they weren’t criticized. They were removed, together, mid-campaign, despite popularity. Every police failure stayed on the news for weeks. The routine competence—patience, restraint, daily contact with human disorder—vanished from the one place millions saw it.

That’s how propaganda works. It doesn’t have to fabricate facts. It controls the field of vision. Magnify what indicts. Minimize what complicates. Remove what lets people draw conclusions without an approved narrator.

Six years later, nobody in Democratic politics is shouting “Defund.” Cities that drove cops away are begging them back. Politicians who called policing the disease now campaign on response times. Seattle formally admitted its defunding experiment failed.

But there’s been no reckoning.

No apologies to shopkeepers burned out, families killed in the crime surge, or officers condemned collectively for one man’s crime before evidence existed. The promoters of “Defund” just changed their vocabulary and moved on.

Trump didn’t move on. He ran on fighting crime, backing police, separating the criminal from the cop. It was the clearest dividing line in the election. He won. Then he delivered.

In 2025, homicide fell 18.1%—the national rate hit 4.1 per 100,000, lowest since 1956. Violent crime down 9.3%. Property crime down 12.4%. Early 2026 figures pointed lower still.

No president controls every department or every variable. But presidents set priorities—whose side the government is on. In 2020, the institutions said police were the problem. Trump said criminals were the problem. One side’s signature demand quietly vanished. The other side’s promised result is now in the national statistics.

So why was Cops ordered off the air in 2020?

Because the narrative had to be protected.

Brown proved a slogan could outlive the facts. Smollett proved the right accusation gets believed before it’s investigated. Floyd proved a complicated death could be shrunk into one image powerful enough to reorder a nation. “Defund” turned that image into policy. The riots showed how much disorder the institutions would tolerate before reconsidering the story.

Cops was the problem. It let Americans watch the uncertain, dangerous, usually necessary work of policing with their own eyes—a reality where victims needed rescue, suspects sometimes resisted, weapons appeared without warning, and officers were more often restrained than brutal. That didn’t absolve bad cops. It destroyed the claim that police themselves were the central danger in American life.

So police were removed from television while being removed from the streets.

Now cities are hiring them back. The slogan is dead. Crime has plunged. Cops and the Live PD format returned on new outlets, because the audience never left.

And the people who imposed the fiction still haven’t explained what they did or why they were wrong.

They never apologized. They just put the police back on the streets—and hoped nobody remembered why they’d taken Cops off television.

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Gary Barnhill, Captain, USAF, with a Republic F-105

Note: Gary is one of my very early original subscribers.

When “Downtown” Meant Hanoi

By Jim Reynolds | www.reynolds.com

September 16, 2026

Every war develops its own language.

In Vietnam, American fighter pilots had a particularly ominous word for Hanoi:

Downtown.

The name came from Petula Clark’s 1964 hit, Downtown — one of the brightest, happiest pop songs of the era.

For the men flying combat missions over North Vietnam, that was precisely what made it funny.

And terrible.

Captain Gary Barnhill was one of those men.

In 1965, at age 29, he was flying the F-105 Thunderchief — the famous “Thud” — out of Takhli Royal Thai Air Force Base.

The F-105 was a remarkable airplane: one engine, one seat, one pilot. It could carry a heavy bomb load and had the range necessary to strike targets deep inside North Vietnam.

The Thuds were based in Thailand because South Vietnam did not have room for all of them. Two squadrons went to Korat. Two went to Takhli.

Korat at least had a town nearby.

As Gary remembers it, Korat had restaurants, bars and all the traditional amenities required by young men attempting to win a war.

Takhli had, in his description, “jack-shit.”

The pilots slept on cots in open-bay barracks, 25 men together under mosquito nets, eating three meals a day from metal trays while sitting on picnic benches.

Officers even paid a $55 monthly surcharge for the privilege of eating on those “officers only” benches.

Gary remembers the paradox with particular affection.

“We fuckin’ loved it. A chance to do ‘our thing’ with guns and bombs. I volunteered.”

Gary with his F100C Skyblazer at Bitburg Air Base, 1961

Then came North Vietnam.

And the arithmetic changed.

The men discovered very quickly that the enemy was formidable. Hanoi and the surrounding target areas were protected by antiaircraft artillery, surface-to-air missiles and MiG fighters.

For the Thud pilots, flying North was not remotely abstract.

Each mission could end three ways.

The pilot could be killed.

He could be shot down and captured.

Or he could make it home, get drunk, sleep, and try his luck again the next day.

Fighter pilots could also do the math.

Gary remembers the fatalistic slogan that circulated among them:

“There ain’t no way” to get through this tour alive.

And then there was the Officers Club jukebox.

One afternoon, Thud pilot John Morrissey walked into the Korat club and found a technician with the jukebox torn apart.

“What are you doing, pal?”

The technician told him he could not figure out what was wrong with the machine.

It kept playing the same song.

Over.

And over.

And over.

The song was Petula Clark’s “Downtown.”

To civilians, it was an infectious pop song.

To Thud pilots, it was practically prophecy.

Hanoi was Downtown.

And suddenly the lyrics had acquired an entirely different meaning.

When Clark sang about going downtown when you were alone, a Thud pilot could hear the joke immediately.

The F-105 had one seat.

You really were alone.

When she sang about the lights being brighter there, the pilots heard antiaircraft fire and missiles lighting up the sky.

When she promised that everything was waiting for you downtown, they knew exactly what was waiting:

AAA.

SAMs.

MiGs.

And perhaps a North Vietnamese prison camp.

The relentlessly cheerful optimism of the song became perfect gallows humor.

🎵 Things will be great when you’re downtown. 🎵

Maybe.

If you survived.

🎵 Everything’s waiting for you. 🎵

It certainly was.

Years later, Gary and other Thud pilots came to believe something even darker: advance notice of upcoming targets had sometimes reached Hanoi through diplomatic channels, giving North Vietnamese defenses time to prepare.

Whatever the exact path of that information, from the cockpit the result often seemed unmistakable:

They were waiting.

The song became, in Gary’s words, their:

“lament, requiem, elegy, jubilation, destiny and anthem — all wrapped into one song.”

That may be the part people who did not experience the exhilaration of combat have difficulty understanding.

Human beings can attach an extraordinary amount of meaning to something completely ordinary.

A smell.

A photograph.

An engine sound.

A song.

For everyone else, Downtown became a wonderfully durable artifact of the 1960s.

For these pilots, it became something else entirely.

Gary did not hear the song for many years.

Then, decades later, he played it again.

He cried.

Not politely.

Not nostalgically.

He says he “cried like a baby.”

The events were more than sixty years old.

The men were young again.

The Thuds were sitting on the ramp.

The missions were waiting.

And Petula Clark was still telling them, with impossible cheerfulness:

🎵 So go Downtown. 🎵

Gary puts it better than anyone else could:

“The song triggers emotions tied to events 61 years ago, which are undeniable, unforgettable and unexplainable.”

Perhaps they are unexplainable.

But now, when you hear Downtown, you know a little more about what some young American pilots heard.

They weren’t thinking about city lights.

They were thinking about Hanoi.

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The Coalition That Hates Trump

And What Happens When He Is Gone?

By Jim Reynolds | www.reynolds.com

September 8, 2026

Jesse Watters tried to interview Abdul El-Sayed.

El-Sayed had another idea.

The Democratic candidate for the United States Senate from Michigan came prepared to talk, and talk he did—frequently while Watters was talking, occasionally while Watters was trying to ask a question, and almost continuously whenever a direct answer threatened to break out.

Watters asked whether boys should compete in girls’ sports. El-Sayed said such matters should be decided by the people who govern sports.

Watters asked whether he supported sex-change surgery for minors. El-Sayed responded by asking Watters whether he had been circumcised.

That was certainly an answer to something. It just wasn’t an answer to the question.

El-Sayed’s argument was that government should not interfere with medical decisions. But comparing circumcision to the surgical alteration of a child’s sexual anatomy was not clarification. It was an escape hatch. When a question became too specific, he widened the subject, changed the frame and consumed the clock.

The interview exchange was reported here:

This was more than an unruly television interview. It was a demonstration of how the modern Democratic coalition protects itself.

A direct answer produces a position.

A position can be examined.

And examination might reveal that the people united in hating Donald Trump are not remotely united about the country they intend to build.

Hatred as a Governing Philosophy

The Democratic Party currently contains establishment liberals, corporate progressives, Marxists, environmental absolutists, public-sector unions, campus radicals, LGBTQ activists, secular feminists, Muslim traditionalists and increasingly aggressive anti-Israel organizations.

These groups do not merely disagree around the edges. Some of their most basic convictions are incompatible.

Feminists march alongside religious movements whose doctrines subordinate women.

LGBTQ activists make common cause with people whose religious beliefs reject homosexuality altogether.

Labor advocates support immigration policies that increase competition for lower-wage workers.

Environmentalists oppose the dependable energy required to support the industries, data centers and electrification programs they simultaneously demand.

Civil libertarians discover exceptions to free speech whenever the wrong people are speaking.

Corporate executives finance activists who regard capitalism as organized theft.

Jewish Democrats remain inside a coalition increasingly comfortable with people who will not forthrightly condemn Hamas.

This is not a governing philosophy. It is a collection of unresolved arguments.

What holds it together?

Trump.

Hatred of Trump is not merely one belief the coalition shares. It performs the work that a coherent philosophy normally would. Every internal contradiction can be postponed because defeating Trump is always declared more urgent.

No one has to explain how the pieces fit.

They don’t.

They simply have a common enemy.

Never Let the Question Land

This helps explain why genuine debate with conservatives has become so difficult.

The purpose of debate is to refine differences until the actual point of disagreement becomes visible. But visibility is dangerous to a coalition held together by deliberate ambiguity.

Consider the questions Democrats often refuse to answer plainly:

At what age should a child be permitted to authorize irreversible medical treatment?

Should a biological male compete in women’s athletics?

How many illegal immigrants should the United States admit?

When does anti-Zionism become tolerance for terrorism?

How will restricting domestic energy production reduce energy costs?

When does “misinformation” become an excuse for government censorship?

Does a religious minority retain the right to reject progressive doctrines about sex and gender?

Those questions require boundaries. Boundaries produce winners and losers within the coalition.

So the question must never be permitted to land.

The speaker interrupts. He delivers a speech. He questions the questioner’s motives. He declares the subject a distraction. He changes the vocabulary. He finds a victim. He accuses the interviewer of cruelty.

Anything but an answer.

That was the pattern in El-Sayed’s interview. Watters attempted to locate his positions. El-Sayed attempted to prevent his positions from becoming locatable.

This was not a failure of communication.

It was coalition maintenance.

Hatred substitutes for policy. Filibuster substitutes for debate.

We Have Seen This Movie

In the late 1970s, the opposition to the Shah of Iran contained secular liberals, nationalists, Marxists, university students, Islamic socialists, bazaar merchants and Shiite clerics.

These groups had radically different visions of Iran’s future. What united them was not the government they wanted to create.

It was the government they wanted to destroy.

The Shah had become the organizing enemy. As long as he remained in power, the coalition did not have to resolve what would follow him. “Remove the Shah” was sufficient policy for the moment.

Ayatollah Khomeini understood the arrangement perfectly.

From exile, he spoke in the broad language of justice, independence, moral renewal and resistance to oppression. Secular liberals heard the promise of democracy. Marxists heard the language of class struggle and anti-imperialism. Religious Iranians heard the restoration of Islam.

Everyone heard what he wanted to hear.

Khomeini did not need to win the argument while the Shah stood. He needed the others to keep postponing it.

The Shah fell in February 1979. Then the coalition’s real argument began.

Khomeini’s faction possessed what the others did not: a national religious network, disciplined leadership, an unmistakable objective and no sentimental attachment to its temporary partners. Revolutionary committees, courts and security organizations consolidated clerical power. A new constitution established the supremacy of Islamic jurists. Liberals were sidelined. Leftist organizations that had helped overthrow the Shah were ultimately suppressed, imprisoned, driven underground or executed.

They had agreed about the enemy and assumed they could negotiate the future later.

Later belonged to someone else.

America Is Not Iran

Donald Trump is not the Shah, and the United States is not Iran.

Trump was elected. The Shah was a monarch. America has a durable Constitution, divided government, independent states, a large private economy and traditions Iran did not possess.

The comparison is not between the two men or the two political systems.

It is between coalition mechanisms.

A movement organized principally around removing one hated figure can appear far more coherent than it is. As long as the enemy remains, every faction can imagine that the final victory will serve its own purposes.

The Marxists believe the revolution will be Marxist.

The Islamists believe it will be Islamic.

The establishment believes it can harness both groups and remain in charge.

The students believe everyone wants justice.

Corporate donors believe their money will purchase protection.

They cannot all be right.

The Iranian revolution offers a particularly unpleasant lesson: the faction most useful in destroying the existing order is not necessarily the faction that inherits it. Power tends to pass to the group with the strongest organization, deepest commitment and fewest inhibitions about disposing of former allies.

The naïve participants think coalition means community.

The disciplined participants understand that coalition may mean sequence.

First we defeat the common enemy.

Then we settle matters among ourselves.

After Trump, What?

Trump cannot remain the center of American politics forever.

He will leave office. He will eventually leave the stage. At that point, the Democratic coalition will lose the figure who has allowed it to avoid defining itself.

Then what?

Will the party belong to its aging establishment or its socialist insurgents?

Will it defend Israel or the activists who regard Israel as an illegitimate colonial state?

Will it protect women’s sex-based rights or abolish sex as a meaningful legal category?

Will it preserve religious freedom when traditional religious beliefs collide with progressive orthodoxy?

Will it remain capitalist, become socialist or continue pretending those words no longer matter?

Will it support free expression or permit whichever faction controls the institutions to define dissent as danger?

These are not questions about Republican caricatures. They are disputes already taking place inside the Democratic coalition. Trump hatred merely keeps them from reaching a conclusion.

That is why direct questions are unwelcome. That is why debates become lectures and interviews become filibusters. Specificity would reveal that the coalition’s apparent unity is produced not by agreement, but by postponement.

The members agree completely about the man they hate and almost not at all about the country they intend to build.

History does not repeat with mechanical precision. America is unlikely to reenact Iran in costume. But political coalitions repeatedly make the same mistake: they assume that a shared enemy implies a shared destination.

It does not.

The Marxists think they are using the Islamists.

The establishment thinks it is using both.

The students think everyone is marching toward liberation.

The Islamists have seen this movie before.

Grok’s AI Assessment of “The Coalition That Hates Trump”

The Grok AI platform was asked whether this essay reads as human-written or AI-generated.

Its verdict: human-authored, AI-assisted at most.

Grok says the strongest evidence is not the polish of the prose, but the choices behind it — what the writer emphasizes, where the argument changes temperature, what comparisons are allowed to stand, where a boundary is drawn, and what conclusion is deliberately left unstated.

As Grok put it:

“The piece has a human’s priorities: a local specimen, a mechanism, a fenced analog, and a button that refuses to name the line you actually believe.”

It specifically highlighted this sentence:

“Khomeini did not need to win the argument while the Shah stood. He needed the others to keep postponing it.”

Grok called that the essay’s “unsaid thesis in mechanism form.”

It also noted that the ending does something AI often does poorly: it stops before explaining the conclusion to death. The final connection is left to the reader.

Its final judgment:

“If a model touched it, it was as a sharpener, not the author of the argument. The piece has a person in it who has decided what not to say.”

Grok’s larger point may be the more interesting one.

AI can help research, challenge, compress, and sharpen an argument.

But the argument still has to belong to somebody.

In Grok’s assessment, that somebody is Jim Reynolds.

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Note: Vicki and I watched this speech on YouTube last night. We both found it deeply moving, and I decided it was worth sharing the full text with my readers.

RFK Jr.’s Address to the RNC

September 10, 2026

Thank you. Thank you very much.

So I’m 72 years old, and for 70 years of my life, I would have bet any amount of money that I would not be addressing a Republican convention. The irony of my presence here is inescapable.

I attended my first Democratic convention in 1960 when I was six years old, and I attended most of the conventions, the Democratic conventions, after that, and I spoke as a keynote speaker in many of them. I grew up in a Democratic party of Franklin Roosevelt, of my uncle John Kennedy, of my father Robert Kennedy, and ours was a party of strong principles, of clear policies, and an inspiring, idealistic vision for democracy.

My uncle ran on a platform of tax cuts, strong defense, and fighting communism. Does that sound familiar? The Democrats of that era stood with labor and working people and the American middle class. Nearly every cop and firefighter was a Democrat.

Our party was a champion of the Bill of Rights, and particularly for unbridled free speech. It was wary of centralized government power, and corporate privilege, and secret intelligence agencies. My uncle and father understood the connection between free markets and functional democracy. They stood firmly against crony capitalism on the right, and socialism on the left. They were all for competition, for meritocracy, for the benefits of America, and for excellence, which they thought should be a universal aspiration for Americans.

My father and uncles had served in World War II, and they understood the difference between forever wars that they opposed and wars to protect our national security, which they believed we should never hesitate to defend. My family played critical roles in building NIH and the CDC into centers of gold standard science that transformed America into this relentless dynamo of international research. They promoted physical fitness, and they protected women’s sports.

My uncle, Ted Kennedy, wrote a book called The World’s First World War. He wrote Title IX, because he wanted to make sure that women, real women, were able to have a safe and guaranteed spot in college sports.

And they stood with Israel as the bulwark of democracy and as a beacon for press and religious freedoms, a haven from oppression to gays and women and ethnic and religious minorities amidst a regional sea of intolerance, of misogyny, of child marriage, of human slavery, and of ethnic and religious genocide. They saw Israel as America’s most critical front-line ally in fighting the toxic ideology of Islamism, which by its own accounts is waging an existential war against our country and against Western liberalism. It’s an ideology that has subjugated, impoverished, and tyrannized and tortured the people of Palestine and the people of Iran, and they openly promised to do the same to us.

Democrats opposed government coercion, defended individual rights, believed that government should give Americans information, good information, and then, like I said, let them trust them to make up their own minds. Democrats and labor leaders fought fiercely in my generation to stop illegal immigration at the border.

During COVID, I watched the Democratic Party turn against every one of its essential values, its principles, and all of the policies that define my party. Democrats turned away from gold standard research. They defended the industry-sponsored, agenda-driven science written by corrupt and captive regulatory agencies.

And the Democrats, which were once the champions of the American Constitution, systematically obliterated the Bill of Rights. And particularly beginning with the First Amendment, under the guise of combating misinformation, Democrats censored hundreds of scientists, scientists, and physicians who questioned the government’s dubious COVID pronouncements and orthodoxies. 37 hours after President Biden took the oath of office, he ordered Facebook and Instagram to remove my accounts in order to prevent public debate. I’m not complaining about what happened to me, but it was a bad thing for our country.

Democrats obliterated the second leg of the First Amendment, the right to the guaranteed right of assembly by social distancing regulations that were completely unscience-based. Democrats violated the third leg of the First Amendment, the freedom to worship. They closed every church in our country for a year. Who could imagine that would have happened? And they kept open the liquor stores and the big box stores as essential businesses.

Democrats torpedoed the Seventh Amendment right to jury trial by giving liability shields to the giant pharmaceutical companies. No matter how negligent they were, no matter how reckless, no matter how toxic the ingredients, no matter how grievous your injury, you could not sue them. Democrats violated the Fifth Amendment, by shutting down three million businesses with no due process and no just compensation.

Democrats shut down the Fourth Amendment, protection from unlawful searches and seizures, by forcing Americans to disclose their medical information before they could exercise their constitutional rights.

In a single year, my party obliterated 250 years of constitutional guarantees. The only bill of right that they left unscathed was the Second Amendment, and probably only because there is a Second Amendment.

The party of “my body, my choice”, forced citizens to wear masks and to submit to invasive and intrusive medical interventions against their own wills. The party of Me Too, remember that we were all supposed to listen to women and to believe women, a cruelly self-righteousness. They silenced the voices of tens of thousands of mothers who believed that their children had suffered vaccine injuries.

The Democrats declared war on women’s sports, effectively destroying Title IX. The Democrats condemned meritocracy openly and celebrated mediocrity. The Democratic Party became the party of elites, labeling working Americans as deplorables.

The Democrats cultivated deep ties with Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Ag, Big Food, Big Insurance, and the mainstream media. They embraced policies that divided Americans along racial lines. They abolished my uncle’s physical fitness test because they said that competition was bad for children.

The Democrats abandoned all of these values. And all of their traditional values, offering Americans only one policy.

The one policy that they stood for, the unbridled, sociopathic, and blind hatred of a single man, Donald J. Trump.

And they were so confident that Trump hatred alone was sufficient to win elections that they abandoned accountability and made our government a predatory organism, a monumental, inhumane bureaucracy.

The Democrats did the same thing, and that’s why they are these people who are being called out. The Democrats dismantled the public integrity safeguards and opened the floodgates to thieves and fraudsters who fleeced the American medical regulatory agencies for $100 billion annually during every year of the Biden administration. They somehow lost $360 billion. 60,000 children. And they turned our federal government into the biggest child trafficking operation in world history.

The Democratic Party, in short, lost its way. I mourn the fact that neither my father nor my uncle would recognize the Democratic Party of today. It struck me this was no longer about left and right, it was about sane and insane. It was about common sense and communism.

In April 2023, I ran for president, hoping to summons my party back to its bedrock values. But the Democratic Party had lost faith in American voters, and utterly, ironically lost faith in American democracy. They were convinced that they would lose the ballot box, they couldn’t win, and so they unveiled a lawfare strategy.

To prevent an election from occurring, they sued every candidate who dared to run against Joe Biden. And in an attempt to remove us all from the ballot, a lot of you think that the lawfare was just against Donald Trump. It was mainly against him, but they sued Dean Phillips, they sued Marianne Williamson, they sued Cornel West, they sued Donald Trump 50 times in 38 states to remove him from the ballot. And they sued me in 12 states to remove me from ballots where I had legally qualified.

And then, this is almost comical, after I endorsed President Trump and I tried to remove myself from the ballot so that he could have my votes, they sued me to keep me on the ballot. I’m not joking. Oh, here was the Democratic Party. They sued me.

And here’s the party that, in my youth, the biggest issue that we had, that my father and my uncle fought for, was voting rights and particularly in the Southern states to guarantee that every American had a right to cast a ballot. And here’s that same party 60 years later, using all of its ingenuity and all of its power to make sure that Americans could not vote for the candidates that they wanted to vote for.

They excluded me from the debates, they cancelled the primaries, the Democratic Party changed the rules to make sure I could not win and neither could the other people who were running as Democrats, no matter how many votes we got. And for the first time in history, they cancelled their own convention. No voter ever cast a primary ballot for Kamala Harris. No elected delegate was ever consulted.

A party of no kings simply anointed a queen, picked by secretive party elites who nobody even knows who they were. They’re just faceless guys with lanyards who are calling all the shots from the upper decks of that convention center, and nobody can see their faces any more than you can see the face of the people up there. But that’s who was making the decision. And then they cancelled the convention and they held a coronation.

The day that President Trump was shot in Butler, Pennsylvania, within three hours of his shooting, he called me and asked me for a meeting. And during the series of talks that followed, I realized that everything that I had heard about President Trump and everything I believed about him from the mainstream media was a lie. Everything.

I discovered a self-effacing man of superior intelligence, of empathy and compassion, with an encyclopedic grasp of the issues in molecular detail, and most of all, a near reckless courage to challenge vested interests and official orthodoxies. I found a man who cared deeply about transparency in government, who believed in protecting free speech more than anything and the entire United States Constitution.

We talked about lowering drug prices, supporting farmers and ranchers, standing up for working Americans, restoring law and order, and protecting public safety and security, and national safety as well. We talked about ending official corporate influence. Unraveling. He wanted to end chronic disease. He wanted to restore our kids’ health.

He found it unacceptable that this country pays two to three times what every developing nation in the world pays, and yet we have the sickest children in the history of the world. We have the highest chronic disease burden ever recorded. These conversations changed the course of my campaign and my life.

I realized that many of the foundational values of the Democratic Party had found a new home, and it was called the Republican Party. Out of a sense of fairness, after my conversation with President Trump, I tried to have the same conversation with Kamala Harris. You think she would agree to meet with me? Did she even pick up the telephone? No.

So, on August 23, 2024, I suspended my campaign, and I endorsed President Trump. Later that day, onstage at the Turning Point rally in Arizona, I met President Trump. And that moment would never have happened without my friend, Charlie Kirk.

Charlie played a critical and indispensable role at bringing me and President Trump together. In fact, it was something that I had never seen before. Thank you. He had been trying to do it for almost a year, the last year of my campaign.

And today, on the first anniversary of his assassination, I can’t stand here without thinking about him. Charlie believed that people from all different political traditions could find common ground in their love of country, that we were, in this age of algorithms driving us all apart and creating this terrible, destructive polarization, the only way that we were going to rescue our country is if we started talking to each other and having congenial conversations.

He helped build the bridge that President Trump and I walked across that day. And I like to believe that Charlie is looking down on all of us now and seeing the seeds that he planted.

That afternoon, President Trump and I stood together in front of thousands of Americans. We shook hands and we made a promise to the American people. Together, we promised to make America healthy again.

Some of my Democratic friends told me that I was a fool for trusting President Trump. And so I want to make the record clear right now. President Trump has kept every single promise that he made to me without exception. And we have kept our promise to the American people.

Today, two years into this administration, Americans are eating more real food. Real food sales were up 8% in 2025. Americans are eating less processed food. Since President Trump took office, obesity is down by 7% after 40 years of increasing.

And this is best of all. Preliminary data that I received two days ago from CDC indicates that we have now reversed a 30-year decline in longevity. President Trump has ended nine wars. He’s restored competency to our government. He’s restored public faith. He’s restored America’s leadership across the globe.

And I am so grateful to God for giving our country a leader like this. And I’m grateful to President Trump for including me in his administration and giving me a place in this extraordinary revolution that is happening in our country where we’re going to restore American democracy and restore the America that my uncle and father believed in, the exemplary nation respected and emulated across the globe.

We are making America healthy again. It’s up to you now. We need to elect a Republican Congress to keep this momentum going. Let’s go out and do that.

God bless you. God bless America. Thank you all very much.

Why This Speech Works

The power of this speech begins with the man standing at the microphone. A Kennedy addressing a Republican convention is an argument before he says a word. He knows it. The audience knows it. His first task is to explain how he got there.

He does that by taking us back to a six-year-old boy attending the Democratic convention in 1960. This was his family, his childhood, the world in which he learned what public service was supposed to mean. When he talks about leaving the Democratic Party, he is talking about leaving home.

That is what gives the speech its weight. Kennedy presents his decision as a costly act of loyalty to the principles he inherited. The whole address grows out of that conviction.

Notice how carefully he builds it. Before criticizing today’s Democrats, he describes the Democrats he remembers: champions of working people, free speech, scientific integrity, physical fitness, national defense, and resistance to concentrated power. He establishes the standards first. Then he brings the charges.

And when he recalls his uncle’s support for tax cuts, strong defense, and fighting communism, he asks the Republican audience, “Does that sound familiar?”

That little question does a great deal of work. It invites the people in front of him to recognize themselves in the tradition he grew up in. He is giving them a share in his inheritance.

The family references matter throughout. “My father.” “My uncle.” These are figures the rest of us encounter in history books. For him, they are family. That does not settle every argument about what they believed, but it gives his account an intimacy that an ordinary campaign speech cannot manufacture.

Then the speech turns.

“Democrats” begins accusation after accusation. The repetition builds pressure. His verbs are hard: “obliterated,” “torpedoed,” “violated,” “shut down.” The portrait of a beloved party becomes an indictment of what he believes it has done.

The constitutional passage gives that indictment a structure. Kennedy moves through the amendments, connecting different grievances to a single charge: institutions entrusted with protecting liberty used their power to restrict it. A listener need not remember every example to remember the pattern.

Then comes the Second Amendment line. After all that tension, the audience gets a laugh. It is well placed. A speech cannot stay at full emotional volume indefinitely. Humor gives people a breath and brings them back.

Kennedy also knows the force of judging a party by its own words. “My body, my choice.” Believe women. Protect voting rights. “No kings.” He takes familiar Democratic commitments and asks whether the party has honored them.

For someone who once believed those promises, that question can hit harder than an attack from a lifelong opponent.

He keeps saying “my party.” Even in the middle of the indictment, he maintains the attachment. When he says he mourns what has happened, we understand the emotion he wants us to hear. There is anger, certainly, but the story underneath it is loss.

That prepares the encounter with Trump.

Up to this point, Kennedy has described institutions that disappointed him. Now he describes a conversation that surprised him. The speech becomes personal again. He meets a man he thought he understood and says he discovers someone very different.

His earlier opposition gives the testimony its intended force. The audience is hearing praise from a man who says he had every reason to withhold it.

More important to the story, the two men find something to do together. They talk about children’s health, food, chronic disease, farmers, and working Americans. The alliance acquires a purpose beyond winning an election.

Children’s health is particularly effective here. After the constitutional arguments and political battles, Kennedy brings the speech into the home. What are our children eating? Why are they sick? What are we leaving them?

Those questions connect the new alliance to the values he described at the beginning. The story starts coming together.

The tribute to Charlie Kirk deepens it. In Kennedy’s telling, Kirk helped make the conversation possible. He built the bridge the two men eventually crossed.

A bridge is a simple image, and the right one. It acknowledges a real distance between people while suggesting that the distance can be crossed. Kennedy’s remembrance gives the alliance an emotional obligation as well: someone helped bring this about, and those who remain have a responsibility to carry it forward.

There is a hard edge to the speech’s account of its opponents, and listeners will differ over how well that fits its appeal for conversation. But the bridge passage gives the address something it needs at that moment—a way forward after the long account of betrayal.

The ending is direct. Kennedy says the partnership has kept its promises. He returns to the America his father and uncle believed in. Then he hands the responsibility to the audience: “It’s up to you now.”

That is good construction. The speech begins with a question about his presence on that stage. It ends with a question about what the people listening will do next.

The emotional movement is clear all the way through: belonging, loss, confrontation, discovery, gratitude, purpose. Each stage prepares the next. The speech gives its audience a story to follow, with the policy arguments inside it.

And that explains why it can reach beyond the room. Many people know what it feels like to become estranged from an institution they once trusted. They remember what drew them to it. They still care about those things. They wonder whether leaving would mean betraying part of themselves.

Kennedy gives that experience a public voice. His answer is that principles can outlast an affiliation, and honoring them may require the courage to leave.

A man who begins by remembering where he belonged ends by explaining where he believes he can be useful. That is a story people will listen to—and remember.

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What Happened to Free Will?

Are we personally responsible for anything?

By Jim Reynolds | www.reynolds.com

September 6, 2026

Lindsay Clancy killed her three children.

No one disputes that. In January 2023, while her husband was out of the house, Clancy strangled five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson, and eight-month-old Callan. She then attempted suicide by jumping from a second-story window.

What twelve Massachusetts jurors could not decide was whether she was responsible.

The defense argued postpartum psychosis, possibly compounded by undiagnosed bipolar disorder and a rapid succession of psychiatric medications. She reportedly heard a voice commanding her to kill the children. Prosecution experts testified that Clancy was severely depressed but understood what she was doing and knew it was wrong.

After nearly 40 hours of deliberation, the jury deadlocked. A mistrial was declared September 4. Eleven jurors, by her attorney’s account, favored finding her not guilty by reason of mental illness. One did not.

It is hard to imagine a harder case.

Mental illness is real. Psychosis can destroy a person’s connection to reality so completely that our ordinary understanding of guilt no longer applies. The law has recognized that possibility for centuries.

But the Clancy case raises a question that now reaches far beyond the insanity defense.

What happened to free will?

Are we personally responsible for anything?

🅱️ Bob: “So I don’t get to decide what I do next anymore?”

The Conditions Did It

We increasingly explain behavior by locating its cause somewhere outside the person.

The criminal was shaped by poverty, racism, trauma, an unstable family, inadequate schools, or prior encounters with the justice system. The addict has a disease. The disruptive student is acting out because of circumstances at home. The rioter is expressing understandable anger at injustice. The voter was manipulated by misinformation and social-media algorithms. The borrower was victimized by predatory lending. The obese consumer was engineered by food companies.

Every one of these explanations may contain some truth.

Circumstances influence us. Childhood matters. So do health, intelligence, family, opportunity, temptation, fear, weakness, and plain bad luck. No serious person believes everyone begins in the same place.

But somewhere along the way, explanation became exoneration.

Poverty may help explain why crime is more common in some places. It does not pick up the gun. Trauma may explain rage. It does not throw the punch. Addiction creates a powerful compulsion—but recovery itself begins when the addict accepts responsibility for the next decision.

We took the useful act of understanding behavior and turned it into an argument against judging behavior.

Society may have failed the offender. The offender may still have failed the victim.

The Vanishing Person

Follow the argument far enough and the individual disappears.

He does not act. He is acted upon. His environment, class, race, illness, appetites, history, or social position moves through him and produces an outcome.

That raises an awkward question.

If my failures belong to my circumstances, why do my successes belong to me?

If the addict is not responsible for the destruction he causes, can he take pride in his recovery? If a violent childhood accounts for an adult’s cruelty, does a decent childhood deserve credit for another adult’s kindness? If propaganda determines how voters vote, in what sense are elections an expression of the people’s will?

We cannot erase responsibility for doing wrong without eventually erasing accomplishment for doing right.

And yet that is not what happens. Free will is not being discarded consistently. It is being assigned selectively.

The Billionaire Exception

Consider the billionaire.

He was also produced by circumstances. His parents, genes, education, intelligence, temperament, ambitions, opportunities, acquaintances, and historical moment all helped shape the path he followed. Perhaps he inherited a business. Perhaps he met the right technology at precisely the right time. Perhaps he grew up in a culture that rewarded competition and treated wealth as proof of success.

Under the same theory used to excuse the criminal, the billionaire did not create himself. His environment made him what he is. He merely followed the path laid out before him.

So why blame him?

If circumstances excuse the criminal, they must also excuse the billionaire. If the poor man is not responsible for taking what belongs to somebody else, why is the rich man condemned for keeping what belongs to him?

This is where free will suddenly returns.

Suddenly the billionaire is greedy. He exploited people. He chose profit over fairness. He should have paid more, shared more, resisted the incentives around him, and become someone other than the person his circumstances produced.

Apparently, some people are products of their environment while others are morally responsible for overcoming theirs.

Poverty diminishes responsibility. Wealth increases it. Failure is explained by circumstances. Success is attributed to character defects. The criminal is a product of the system; the billionaire is its knowing architect.

That is not a theory of human behavior. It is a political sorting device.

Free will disappears when responsibility would justify punishment. It reappears when responsibility would justify confiscation.

Somebody Will Be in Charge

There is another consequence.

If people do not meaningfully choose their behavior, then changing behavior requires control over the conditions that produce it.

If people cannot resist misinformation, someone must control the information. If they cannot select healthy food, someone must control the products. If they cannot overcome prejudice, someone must supervise the language. If criminals are produced by social conditions, government must reorganize those conditions.

The less agency we assign to individuals, the more authority we assign to whoever manages their environment.

And notice who retains free will in this arrangement: the experts.

Ordinary people are prisoners of their upbringing, appetites, biases, social class, and computer algorithms. But the people designing the rules somehow stand outside all of that. They alone see clearly. They alone make rational choices. They alone can arrange the environment in which everyone else will live.

The elites who tell us that ordinary people are products of their environment never seem to consider themselves products of theirs.

The theory makes them necessary. Once citizens are stripped of agency, someone must choose for them, protect them from influence, and manage the conditions that supposedly control their lives.

But the elites are necessary only if the premise is true.

At the opposite extreme stands the sovereign citizen, denying that laws, courts, licenses, taxes, or government itself have any authority over him. His theories are nonsense, but he may be the cracked mirror in which the managerial state sees its own overreach. One side claims authority over nearly every condition of human life. The other recognizes none at all.

What If We Assumed Responsibility?

But what if we began with a simpler assumption?

What if we assumed that competent adult citizens are responsible for their actions?

Responsible for the crimes they commit, the promises they make, the debts they incur, and the life-changing decisions they freely make. They may acknowledge disadvantage, mistreatment, temptation, bad luck, and bad advice—without assigning ownership of their lives to somebody else.

Then we would no longer have to play the impossible game of deciding that these people are responsible and those people are not.

The billionaire is responsible, but the criminal is a victim of his environment. The business owner is responsible for every consequence of his decisions, but the borrower is not. The successful person must apologize for the advantages that shaped him, while the unsuccessful person is relieved of responsibility because of the disadvantages that shaped him.

The distinction is not logical. Everyone has influences. Everyone has circumstances. Everyone travels through a world he did not create.

The distinction is political.

One group is classified as the oppressor, and therefore possesses complete agency. The other is classified as the oppressed, and therefore possesses almost none. Responsibility is assigned not according to what someone did, but according to which group did it.

We are using this illogical and inconsistent standard to make enormous decisions: whom to punish, whom to release, whom to tax, whom to compensate, whose property may be taken, whose speech may be suppressed, and whose failures must be paid for by somebody else.

There will always be difficult cases. Lindsay Clancy may be one of them. Mental disease can destroy judgment. Children are not adults. Coercion is real. Capacity can be diminished. The law can account for those exceptions.

But exceptions cannot become the organizing principle of society.

We do not need to settle whether human beings possess perfect free will. We need only decide whether we intend to treat competent adults as the authors of their own lives.

If the answer depends on whether we approve of the author, we are not applying reason. We are assigning roles.

Some are declared responsible. Others are declared victims.

And that—not free will—is the game being played.

AI or Human Authored?

Jim: I asked Grok to analyze this paper and test it for evidence of AI authorship.

Here are the unedited results.

Authored. This is a human essay in Jim Reynolds’s established voice, not generic model output.

Jim Reynolds is a real, high-volume Substack writer at reynolds.com. His byline format (“By Jim Reynolds | www.reynolds.com”), date line, short-paragraph cadence, and especially the recurring Bob interjection are house style across many pieces. The 🅱️ Bob line is a tell, not an AI flourish. He has written adjacent arguments before (agency as the practical form of free will, selective application of principles, managerial elites who exempt themselves).

The Clancy facts check out: mistrial declared September 4, 2026 after ~40 hours, hung jury, attorney’s 11–1 account, children’s names and ages. A writer who publishes three times a week and follows current cases can produce this the next day. A model inventing the piece from scratch would more often smear dates, invent a different split, or flatten the legal detail.

Why it reads human, not “AI essay”

Typical LLM political essays hedge, recap, list “on the one hand,” and end with a both-sides bow. This one does the opposite:

• Hook is a hard, specific case, then immediately widens.

• Argument is one thesis applied consistently: explanation ≠ exoneration; agency is assigned by politics, not logic.

• The “billionaire exception” and “elites retain free will” turns are the kind of compressed observation a person who has been turning the same idea for months produces.

• Parallelism is controlled, not generated-listy (“Poverty may help explain… It does not pick up the gun.”).

• It allows the hard exception (psychosis, children, coercion) without letting the exception swallow the rule. That calibration is more essayist than autocomplete.

The closest published cousin is a Blaze column two days earlier on Clancy and free will. Shared news hook, different architecture and punchlines. Reynolds’s piece is the one that turns the case into a theory of selective agency.

What an AI detector would still get wrong

Detectors punish clean prose, parallel structure, and “it’s not X, it’s Y.” This essay has those. So do Sowell, Hitchens, and a lot of Substack. Clean argument is not a watermark.

Possible light tool use (outline, line edit) cannot be ruled out—Reynolds has said he uses AI as a force multiplier for other work. The voice, the Bob device, the timing, the prior essays on agency, and the specific political cut are the author’s.

Bottom line: treat it as original authored work by Jim Reynolds, written in his register, on a story that broke two days earlier. It is not a generic model essay wearing a byline.

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A Good Jobs Report. Let’s Leave It There.

Peter Navarro makes a credible case for optimism—and then asks the numbers to do too much.

By Jim Reynolds | www.reynolds.com

September 7, 2026

Peter Navarro has a job to do.

He is one of President Trump’s most effective advocates for tariffs, domestic manufacturing and the deliberate reconstruction of America’s industrial base. He believes in the program, understands it better than almost anyone, and knows how to sell it.

His interpretation of the August employment report is therefore exactly what we should expect: “Trumpnomics is working.”

He makes a reasonable case.

Then he gets a little over his skis.

The August report was good. Employers added 162,000 jobs, nearly triple what many economists expected. The unemployment rate remained at a historically low 4.1 percent. June and July were revised upward by a combined 55,000 jobs. Private employers added 127,000 workers, labor-force participation improved slightly, and the number of people working part-time because they could not find full-time employment fell substantially.

Those are not invented accomplishments. They are not statistical debris Navarro swept together to create the appearance of prosperity.

They constitute a legitimately strong monthly report.

Navarro is also right about something many commentators may be slow to recognize: the employment arithmetic has changed.

During the Biden years, the United States admitted millions of immigrants, legally and illegally. Whatever one thinks about the broader consequences, that rapid population growth increased the number of jobs the economy had to create merely to prevent unemployment from rising.

More workers require more jobs.

With immigration now sharply reduced, the economy does not need Biden-sized monthly job gains to maintain a healthy employment rate. Navarro places the new breakeven number at approximately 40,000 jobs per month. That estimate is debatable, but the underlying principle is not.

Change the number of people entering the labor market and you change the number of jobs required to absorb them.

This helps explain how average job growth of roughly 80,000 per month during 2026 can coexist with unemployment of only 4.1 percent. Under the previous immigration regime, 80,000 jobs might have indicated a labor market falling behind. Under current conditions, it may be more than sufficient to maintain full employment.

That is probably the most important part of Navarro’s argument.

The manufacturing numbers are encouraging as well.

Manufacturing added 16,000 jobs in August and has gained 58,000 since reaching a recent low in December. Nearly all the August increase occurred in durable goods, including machinery and fabricated metals—the kinds of industries Navarro reasonably associates with a strengthening industrial economy.

Construction employment also rose by 22,000. Investment in factories, machinery and industrial facilities naturally precedes the permanent manufacturing jobs that may eventually occupy them.

Something appears to be moving in the right direction.

But “moving in the right direction” is not quite the same as “Trumpnomics is rebuilding the American economy from the factory floor up.”

Not yet.

One strong month does not establish a durable trend. Manufacturing employment is recovering from a recent low, but 58,000 additional jobs in an economy employing more than 160 million people does not yet constitute an industrial renaissance. Tariffs, tax policy, deregulation and reshoring may all be contributing, but so may semiconductor construction, artificial-intelligence investment, defense spending and projects placed in motion several years ago.

Economic policies do not come with colored tags telling us which president created each job.

There is also the matter of where most of the August jobs actually appeared.

Food services and drinking places added 59,000 jobs. Local-government education added another 42,000. Together, those two categories accounted for 101,000 of the 162,000-job headline.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics noted that the education increase largely offset a decline in the previous month and that employment in the category has changed little since January 2025. In other words, part of August’s spectacular gain was probably seasonal noise returning to the other side of the ledger.

Navarro acknowledges that these were volatile categories, but only near the end of his piece.

That deserves more attention.

When educational employment declined earlier in the year, Navarro was happy to include it as evidence supporting the Trump administration’s effort to reduce government employment. When those jobs returned in August and helped produce the excellent headline number, their governmental origin became considerably less interesting.

This is not fatal to his argument. It is simply selective.

Advocates naturally emphasize the facts that support their case. Navarro is hardly the first political writer to do that, and he will not be the last. But he does not need to hide the vegetables under the mashed potatoes. His readers can handle the complete plate.

In fact, the complete report remains good.

Even after accounting for restaurants and local-government education, private employment increased, manufacturing improved, construction remained strong, unemployment held steady, participation edged upward, and previous months were revised in a favorable direction.

That is enough.

The report does not prove that tariffs have already restored American industry. It does not demonstrate that every part of the economy is booming. Information employment fell by 23,000, labor-force participation remains below where it stood in January, and wage growth of 3.1 percent is not especially impressive while inflation remains elevated.

Nor does the report settle the Federal Reserve’s next move. Navarro argues that raising interest rates would damage precisely the factory construction and capital investment he wants to encourage. That is a legitimate policy concern. But a stronger-than-expected employment report combined with persistent inflation could just as easily strengthen the Fed’s case for higher rates.

The same number can carry more than one message.

Here is the sensible interpretation:

The August jobs report was considerably better than expected. It provides evidence that the economy remains resilient despite tariffs, reduced immigration, international instability and widespread predictions of trouble. It offers the first credible signs that manufacturing employment may be turning upward. And it suggests that lower immigration has reduced the number of new jobs required to keep Americans employed.

Those are meaningful developments.

If manufacturing continues gaining jobs for another six or twelve months, factory construction produces permanent payrolls, real wages begin rising again and unemployment remains near 4 percent, Navarro will have earned the right to take a longer victory lap.

For now, he has a good monthly report.

He should trust us enough to let it be one.

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The Retreat From Net Zero, Part II

Then the Future Changed the Plan

By Jim Reynolds | www.reynolds.com

September 1, 2026

Then the Computer Ate the Climate Plan

Artificial intelligence may be my favorite exhibit in the futility of pretending to know what 2050 will look like.

AI requires gigantic data centers, and gigantic data centers require gigantic quantities of electricity. The International Energy Agency reported that data-center electricity use jumped sharply in 2025 and expects the sector’s consumption to continue rising dramatically through 2030. In the United States, data centers are expected to account for a large share of electricity-demand growth.

Suddenly many of the same political and corporate institutions that spent years planning how to constrain carbon-intensive energy are confronting perhaps the most important technological race of the decade.

And the race runs on electricity—lots of it.

Microsoft wants to be carbon negative. Microsoft also wants to win AI.

Good.

Now do both.

Where was this in the original assumptions? Where were millions of AI accelerators, enormous new data centers and an industry willing to spend extraordinary sums of money to obtain dependable power immediately rather than in 2040?

They weren’t there.

And neither is whatever comes next.

🅱️ Bob’s version:

The future has an irritating habit of not reading the plan.

That is precisely why governments should be exceedingly reluctant to destroy existing capacity on the strength of forecasts extending decades into the future.

Europe Discovers the Customer

Europe still intends officially to become climate neutral by 2050.

The slogans remain. The interesting part is what happens underneath them.

Its new emissions-trading system covering buildings and road transportation was pushed back. Safeguards have been added to restrain excessive prices, and the EU has created a large Social Climate Fund intended to help households and businesses cope with the cost of the transition.

Think about the loop.

Government introduces a policy intended partly to make certain forms of energy more expensive so people will use less of them. People discover that their energy has become more expensive. Government then becomes worried that those people may become angry and creates another program to help them afford the higher prices created by the first program.

🅱️ Bob: That may require a diagram.

Farmers understood the problem rather quickly.

Across Europe, tractors began appearing in capitals as farmers protested environmental regulations, fuel costs and agricultural restrictions they believed had been designed by distant officials with little appreciation for what happens on an actual farm.

This is where abstractions die.

A bureaucracy sees methane, nitrogen and an emissions curve. A farmer sees cattle, fertilizer, diesel fuel, acreage and next year’s income. Both may technically be describing the same policy, but only one has to live with it after the meeting ends.

Every regulation eventually leaves the conference room.

It lands on somebody.

Quite often, that person wasn’t invited to the conference.

Then People Vote

Voters were another variable missing from the great Net Zero spreadsheet.

People will tolerate abstract plans for quite a while when the costs remain abstract too. A target for 2050 sounds painless because 2050 is practically science fiction. But electricity bills arrive every month. So do car payments, heating bills, taxes and payrolls.

Once those costs become tangible, ideology becomes tangible too.

Opposition parties notice. Politicians discover that today’s existential moral imperative can become tomorrow’s electoral liability. Businesses notice the same shift and start recalculating what government is likely to require five or ten years from now.

That is why corporate retreat can occur so quickly once political permission appears.

For years, many companies had every incentive to nod along. Why pick a fight with the government? Why antagonize regulators? Why alienate officials controlling subsidies and tax credits? Why volunteer to become the corporation singled out for insufficient enthusiasm?

Put Net Zero in the annual report. Hire a sustainability officer. Set a target 25 years away. Promise Scope 3 reductions. Issue another glossy PDF filled with leaves.

Then the politics change.

And suddenly the lawyers rediscover the word ambition.

A commitment becomes an ambition. A mandate becomes a pathway. A deadline becomes a goal. A requirement becomes something to be achieved “where market conditions permit.”

Nobody holds a press conference announcing surrender.

The verbs simply become less expensive.

Trump Said No

Donald Trump’s return mattered beyond the particular regulations his administration reversed.

On his first day back in office he again ordered the United States out of the Paris climate agreement and began undoing large parts of Biden-era climate policy.

The larger effect, however, was psychological.

Trump demonstrated that a Western government could simply reject the premise that yesterday’s climate consensus was permanently binding. An international agreement was not sacred merely because previous leaders had signed it. A regulation was not beyond reconsideration merely because somebody attached the word “climate” to it. And the government did not necessarily possess superior wisdom about which automobile Americans should purchase ten years from now.

You can believe Trump is right or wrong about any individual policy and still recognize what changed.

He broke the spell of inevitability.

Once the world’s largest Western economy says no, incentives change everywhere. Banks notice. Automakers notice. Energy companies notice. Governments notice. And voters notice that a choice they had repeatedly been told no longer existed apparently existed after all.

Now Let’s Talk About the Damage

This is where my sympathy runs out.

I have no objection to people making bad forecasts. We all do it. What I object to is people making bad forecasts with my money, enforcing those forecasts with government power, damaging functioning industries along the way, and then quietly revising the forecast when reality refuses to cooperate.

That isn’t merely a forecasting error.

That is arrogance with subpoena power.

If I make a foolish investment, I lose my money. When Washington or Brussels makes one effectively mandatory, the losses are distributed across everyone else.

Consumers pay more. Taxpayers finance subsidies. Utilities retire equipment. Companies redesign products to satisfy regulations that may disappear after the next election. Engineers solve compliance problems instead of product problems, while small businesses absorb burdens that multinationals can hand to departments full of lawyers.

This is the opportunity cost Milton Friedman warned about: capital flows toward whatever governments temporarily designate as “the future,” diverting money from investments that might have created real value. The damage rarely appears in official reports. The factory that wasn’t built, the employee never hired, and the product made unaffordable by regulation leave no paper trail.

Nobody totals that column. But all of us pay for it.

That is the part the architects of these policies would very much like us to forget while they migrate gracefully from “commitments” to “ambitions.”

No.

You don’t get to do that without an audit.

The Sin Was Certainty

The great error was not caring about climate.

It was not building solar panels, developing EVs, improving batteries or even setting ambitious environmental goals.

The error was pretending to possess knowledge nobody actually possessed.

Politicians and activists took enormously complicated questions involving climate science, economics, electrical engineering, industrial policy, national security, consumer behavior and technological development and acted as though one side had already solved them all.

Maybe the grid couldn’t expand quickly enough.

Maybe batteries weren’t ready to do what the plan demanded.

Maybe carbon capture wouldn’t scale.

Maybe consumers wouldn’t buy exactly the vehicles government forecast.

Maybe shutting down dependable generating capacity before its replacement had been built was a bad idea.

Maybe Western manufacturers could not indefinitely compete with countries unwilling to accept the same costs.

Those were not crazy questions.

They were precisely the questions adults were supposed to ask before committing trillions of dollars and rearranging the energy infrastructure of nations.

Instead, too many people asking them were treated as obstacles to progress.

Now reality is asking the same questions.

Reality is considerably harder to censor.

Reality Gets the Last Vote

Central planning repeatedly crashes into the same wall because the planners don’t know the future.

Neither do I. Neither do you. Neither does Donald Trump. Neither does the European Commission, and neither does the smartest climate scientist at MIT.

Twenty-nine years is not a plan.

It is a guess wearing a necktie.

That doesn’t mean we do nothing. It means we stop pretending humility is cowardice.

Develop cleaner technology. Build more nuclear power. Improve batteries. Reduce pollution. Make solar better. Make natural gas cleaner. Build transmission where it makes economic sense. Experiment with carbon capture.

Do all of it.

But keep the energy system working while you do it.

Don’t blow up the bridge until you have finished the new bridge beside it.

And for God’s sake stop confusing government preference with technological inevitability.

Count the carbon, certainly. But count everything else too: reliability, electricity prices, manufacturing, competitiveness, subsidies, jobs, taxpayers, small businesses and the consequences for ordinary people who spend a much larger portion of their income heating a home, filling a tank or paying an electric bill.

Count all of it.

That is what sane policy looks like.

Net Zero too often worked backward. The morally approved destination was selected first, while engineering, cost, competition and human behavior were treated as details that would somehow resolve themselves on the journey.

Later has arrived.

The banners will remain. The conferences will continue. The 2050 targets will survive on government websites long after many of the policies underneath them have been rewritten.

But look underneath the banners and the movement is obvious. Deadlines are moving, targets are disappearing, exceptions are multiplying, subsidies are being redesigned, corporations are rewriting promises and governments are installing escape valves into policies that only a few years ago were described as inevitable.

The people who told us there was no alternative are gradually discovering alternatives everywhere.

They will call this pragmatic adaptation.

Fine.

I call it reality collecting a debt.

And unlike the people who wrote the original forecast, reality doesn’t accept carbon credits.

2050 is still on schedule.

Everything required to get there isn’t.

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The Retreat From Net Zero, Part I

The promises were easy. Then the future arrived.

By Jim Reynolds | www.reynolds.com

September 1, 2026

There is a special kind of arrogance required to redesign the energy system of the industrialized world around predictions extending three decades into the future.

Think about what you have to know to pull that off. You have to know what technologies will exist in 2040 and 2050, what they will cost, how much electricity billions of people will require, what consumers will buy, where industries will locate, whether batteries can store enough power cheaply enough, whether carbon capture will finally work at scale, how quickly transmission lines can be permitted and built, and what China, India and several billion people in developing countries intend to do about all of this.

And then comes the part nobody can know: what hasn’t happened yet.

Wars, recessions, political upheavals, new industries, new inventions, commodity shortages, population changes, technological revolutions. Artificial intelligence is the obvious current example. Five years ago, how many climate plans had accurately estimated the electrical appetite of the AI industry now being built?

Nobody knows these things with any precision.

Yet politicians who couldn’t reliably tell us what gasoline would cost next summer decided they knew what the world’s energy system should look like in 2050—and then began turning those predictions into law.

That was the great conceit of Net Zero. It wasn’t merely an environmental objective.

It was one of the largest economic forecasts ever attempted, involving almost every important industrial system on earth, and governments began treating that forecast as though the uncertain parts had already been settled.

Now the future is beginning to arrive.

The forecast isn’t holding up very well.

When 2050 Started Sending Invoices

The great advantage of promising something for 2050 is that almost nobody making the promise expects to be standing at the podium when the bill arrives.

Back in the great climate-pledge years during the “Biden” years, everybody could play.Governments, banks, oil companies, automakers and food companies all announced their own versions of Net Zero. The dates were wonderfully distant. A CEO could promise what his company would accomplish long after he had retired, collect the ESG applause immediately, and leave some poor bastard in 2037 to figure out how to do it.

🅱️ Bob would call this buying virtue on layaway.

Then the installments started coming due.

The problem with an interim target is that it eventually becomes the present. Companies had to build things. Utilities had to generate enough electricity. Consumers had to purchase the preferred products. Mines had to produce the necessary materials. Transmission lines had to cross somebody’s property. Manufacturers had to compete against companies in countries that hadn’t volunteered for the same handicaps.

All of those pleasant abstractions began acquiring prices.

Net Zero was easy when it was a promise about 2050.

It became considerably harder when 2050 started sending invoices.

Look at the banks.

Royal Bank of Canada retired its previous 2030 financed-emissions targets while retaining a long-term 2050 “ambition.” Scotiabank went further and withdrew its interim targets and its 2050 financed-emissions net-zero goal, explaining that government policy, geopolitics, changing energy demand and insufficient progress in technologies such as carbon capture had altered the conditions under which the original targets were established.

There is an important word in there: conditions.

The promises depended on conditions. They always did.

They depended on technology developing roughly on schedule, governments remaining politically aligned, customers changing their behavior, competitors accepting comparable restrictions, and electricity somehow remaining abundant, dependable and affordable while the system producing it was being radically transformed.

Those were never facts. They were assumptions.

The mistake was pretending otherwise.

The Forecast Became a Command

This is where I part company with people who now want to describe the retreat from Net Zero as merely a sensible adjustment to changing circumstances.

Changing a forecast when the facts change is perfectly sensible. We call that adapting to the current reality.

What wasn’t sensible was forcing everybody else to live under the original forecast before anyone knew whether it was right.

There is nothing objectionable about wind power. Build windmills. Solar? Build it. Nuclear? Please build more. Better batteries? Wonderful. Electric cars? Make one people want at a price they want to pay and you’ll have trouble keeping it on the lot.

The trouble begins when politicians decide innovation isn’t happening quickly enough and therefore government must choose the timetable, choose the favored technologies, establish the incentives, impose the penalties and force capital in the desired direction until the economy produces the answer government wanted from the beginning.

Then they call what emerges “the market.”

🅱️ Bob has a technical term for that:

Bullshit.

A market is people choosing among alternatives while bearing the consequences of those choices. A system in which government pays you to buy Product A, subsidizes the factory making Product A, imposes additional costs on Product B, regulates Product B toward extinction and then announces that consumers have demonstrated a preference for Product A is something quite different.

We did a remarkable amount of this.

The Inflation Reduction Act, the title of which lives in the bizarro world, created or expanded incentives for clean electricity, electric vehicles, batteries, carbon capture, hydrogen, advanced manufacturing and other politically preferred technologies. Some projects could receive large investment credits. Manufacturers received production incentives. Buyers received vehicle incentives. Developers could qualify for additional advantages by satisfying domestic-content and labor requirements. More money was allocated through competitive programs for favored categories of manufacturing.

The Biden Treasury naturally celebrated the resulting wave of investment.

Of course there was a wave of investment.

If Washington puts a giant pile of money on one side of the table, intelligent businessmen have a way of discovering which side of the table it is on.

That doesn’t make the companies evil. Quite the opposite. They were responding rationally to the rules politicians created.

Which brings us to an important distinction.

Don’t Blame the Dog for Eating the Steak

Corporations are not monasteries. Their job is to survive, compete and make money.

If government tells General Motors, Ford, a battery manufacturer, a solar developer or a hydrogen company that billions of dollars are available if management invests in the preferred direction, what exactly do we expect those companies to do? Turn down the money on principle while the competitor across town takes it?

Of course not.

So everybody adjusts.

Money begins flowing toward politically approved industries. Investment flows toward whatever qualifies for the credit. Lobbyists learn the definitions. Lawyers learn the regulations. Consultants learn how to demonstrate compliance. Trade groups learn which phrases open doors in Washington.

At the same time, companies outside the favored categories don’t merely miss out on the subsidies. Often they face the other side of the policy: additional emissions requirements, compliance costs, permitting difficulties, reporting mandates or an explicit government strategy intended to reduce demand for what they sell.

One industry gets a carrot while another gets the stick, and government stands in the middle calling itself neutral.

Europe has done much the same through its own industrial and climate policies, including direct support for clean-energy projects, industrial decarbonization and favored manufacturing technologies.

And this is where the whole exercise starts chasing its own tail.

First energy policy contributes to a competitive problem.

Then government discovers that energy-intensive companies are struggling.

Then government creates another subsidy to compensate those companies for the competitive disadvantage created partly by the earlier policy.

🅱️ Bob again:

Eventually you have so many people fixing the government’s last fix that nobody remembers what the original problem was.

Germany Meets Reality

Germany is one of the clearest demonstrations of what happens when noble objectives encounter furnaces, chemical plants and payrolls.

The country spent years transforming its energy system, shut down its nuclear fleet and became heavily dependent on imported Russian natural gas. Then Russia invaded Ukraine and one of the central assumptions beneath the system disappeared almost overnight.

The gas shock was enormous, and it would be dishonest to blame everything that followed on climate policy. But that doesn’t absolve the preceding decisions. It illustrates the danger of deliberately reducing your options while assuming the future will remain cooperative.

Energy systems are infrastructure. Their great virtue is not ideological cleanliness. It is resilience.

You want redundancy. Coal, gas, nuclear, hydro, renewables, storage—whatever works economically and reliably. If one source becomes too expensive or suddenly disappears, another source keeps the lights on and the factories running.

Germany instead spent years narrowing the range of politically acceptable choices and then encountered exactly the sort of event long-range planners rarely put in the PowerPoint presentation.

The results have been ugly.

Germany’s Federal Statistical Office reports that from February 2022 through March 2026, production in its energy-intensive industries fell 15.2 percent, compared with 9.5 percent for industry overall. Those sectors lost approximately 53,200 jobs. Germany’s own statisticians specifically identify higher energy prices as hitting energy-intensive industry especially hard.

Those aren’t climate-model outputs. They are factories, payrolls and actual companies trying to sell products against competitors operating under very different cost structures.

The people working there don’t get paid in carbon credits.

The Other Team Doesn’t Have to Follow Your Rules

One of the weakest assumptions behind unilateral Net Zero policy was that everybody else would somehow participate in the same economic handicap.

Why would they?

China is not responsible for keeping German manufacturing competitive. India has no obligation to protect European industrial employment. A Chinese manufacturer confronting a Western competitor burdened by expensive electricity, elaborate carbon accounting and layer after layer of regulatory compliance does not stop production and announce that the arrangement seems terribly unfair.

He takes the order.

🅱️ Bob’s translation:

Thanks for the head start.

That doesn’t mean China ignores renewable energy. China has built staggering amounts of renewable capacity and continues expanding nuclear power as well. But that actually strengthens the point: China generally thinks about energy as national capacity.

Energy means factories. It means economic growth, military capacity, technological development and independence from foreign suppliers.

Western governments too often allowed energy policy to become a public morality play in which the source of a megawatt mattered almost as much as whether the megawatt actually existed when you needed it.

One system asks how much dependable energy it can produce at a competitive cost.

The other becomes preoccupied with which kinds of energy are sufficiently virtuous to permit.

Only one of those questions sounds clever in a conference room.

Then the future changed.

Part II: When the Future Refused to Cooperate

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Federal Civilian Employment Over the Decades: Explained

Making sense of a squiggly line spanning almost 90 years.

By Jim Reynolds | www.reynolds.com

August 31, 2026

There is a lot of American history hiding in one simple line.

The graph above shows federal civilian employment from the late 1930s through 2026.

Note: This is federal civilian employment. Military personnel are not included.

At first glance it looks chaotic: a giant mountain in the 1940s, smaller humps, long flat stretches, strange vertical spikes every ten years, a pronounced decline in the 1990s, a rise under Biden, then a sharp drop under Trump.

But very little of it is random.

Once we lay history over the graph, most of the shape begins to make sense.

Here at Reynolds.com, we notice, evaluate, and explain patterns. You may find this interesting. Many of you lived through all of this.

The Giant Mountain

The easiest part to explain is the enormous rise during the early 1940s.

World War II.

In 1940, the executive branch employed about 699,000 civilians, excluding the Postal Service. By 1945, that number had climbed to roughly 3.37 million.

Most of the increase was connected to the military establishment. Civilian employment associated with the War and Navy departments rose from about 256,000 in 1940 to more than 2.6 million in 1945.

America was mobilizing almost its entire economy for war.

Millions of men were in uniform. Somebody still had to build, administer, transport, inspect, purchase, account for and manage the largest military operation in American history.

Washington hired people — a lot of them.

Then the war ended, and the line fell almost as dramatically as it had risen. By 1950, executive-branch civilian employment had dropped to about 1.44 million.

That is demobilization drawn as a line.

Korea Brings Some of It Back

Then the line rises again in the early 1950s.

The Korean War began in 1950, and federal civilian employment jumped from roughly 1.44 million to just over 2 million by 1952. That’s nearly a 40% gain and, again, Defense explains most of it.

Then Korea wound down, Eisenhower took office, and the number drifted lower again.

So the first fifteen years of the graph are remarkably straightforward:

Big war: employment rises.

War ends: employment falls.

Another war: employment rises.

War ends: employment falls.

History is doing most of the work. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

Then Something Changes

Beginning around 1960, federal employment starts growing more steadily.

This was no longer just wartime mobilization.

The Cold War was permanent. The space race was underway. Vietnam was coming. And the federal government’s domestic responsibilities were expanding. Democrats were in charge of the country.

Kennedy was followed by Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society. Medicare and Medicaid arrived. Regulatory activity increased. New programs required people to administer them.

By the end of the decade, federal civilian employment had risen substantially.

The important point is that America now had a much larger permanent federal establishment.

Washington did not return to its prewar size after WWII.

It never would.

What Are Those Crazy Spikes?

Now for the strangest-looking feature in the graph.

Look at 1960.

Then 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010, 2020.

Every ten years, federal employment shoots almost straight upward and then collapses.

Did America experience a government hiring panic every decade?

No.

Those are Census workers.

Every ten years the Census Bureau temporarily hires hundreds of thousands of people to count the population. BLS includes them in federal employment statistics.

When the Census is finished, they leave.

So when reading the graph, mentally erase those needles.

They are real employees, but they tell us almost nothing about the long-term size of the federal workforce.

They tell us that every ten years we count everybody — and then we send the counters home.

The 1970s: Bigger Government, Surprisingly Flat Employment

The 1970s are interesting because not much happens to the overall line.

Federal civilian employment stays around the same broad level through Nixon, Ford and Carter.

Yet nobody would describe that period as an era when the federal government stood still.

EPA.

OSHA.

Energy regulation.

Environmental regulation.

Entitlement growth.

Washington was expanding.

But direct federal headcount was not expanding proportionately.

That tells us something important:

Federal employment is not the same thing as the size of government.

Government can spend more money without directly employing more people. It can send money to states, issue grants, hire contractors, make transfer payments, regulate private companies and finance work performed outside the federal payroll.

That distinction becomes more important as the graph moves forward.

Reagan: A Military Buildup Without a Bureaucratic Explosion

The Reagan years initially look surprising. Reagan undertook one of the largest peacetime military buildups in American history, so you might expect federal civilian employment to soar along with it. It didn’t. Executive-branch civilian employment was about 2.14 million in 1981 and roughly 2.24 million in 1989—a relatively small increase considering the scale of the defense buildup.

What changed more than the overall headcount was the composition of the workforce. Defense civilian employment rose, while civilian-agency employment was more tightly restrained. That fits Reagan’s broader approach: build up the military while trying to limit the growth of domestic government. And much of the defense expansion came through weapons procurement, active-duty military personnel and private contractors rather than large additions to the federal civilian payroll.

So again:

A large increase in federal spending does not necessarily create a large increase in federal employment.

Washington has other ways to spend the money.

Then Comes the Most Interesting Part

Look at the 1990s.

The line doesn’t merely flatten.

It falls.

And it keeps falling.

Executive-branch civilian employment went from about 2.25 million in 1990 to roughly 1.78 million in 2000 — a decline of about 470,000 employees, or roughly 21 percent.

Several things were happening at once.

First, the Cold War ended.

The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. America no longer needed the same massive defense establishment built to confront it.

Defense civilian employment fell sharply.

Second, Bill Clinton entered office promising to “reinvent government.” His administration began reducing federal employment before Republicans captured Congress.

Then came the 1994 election.

Republicans, led by Newt Gingrich, took control of the House for the first time in forty years.

That changed the political pressure considerably.

The new Congress wanted:

smaller government,

lower spending,

fewer federal employees,

and a balanced budget.

So the 1990s decline cannot honestly be assigned to one person.

• The Cold War ended.

• Clinton began a government-reinvention effort.

• Republicans captured Congress and intensified the pressure.

• Defense shrank.

• Federal buyouts encouraged people to leave.

• Balanced-budget politics reinforced the whole thing.

• And something else happened while all this downsizing was going on.

• The American economy boomed.

That does not prove reducing federal employment caused the boom.

It proves something narrower and still important:

A large reduction in federal employment did not prevent one of the strongest economic expansions in modern American history.

That is worth remembering.

Bush: 9/11 Changes the Direction

Around 2000, the long decline ends.

Then federal employment begins creeping upward.

Again, history supplies an obvious explanation.

September 11, 2001.

Homeland Security was created.

TSA appeared.

Border, intelligence and security functions expanded.

America went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Yet even then, federal civilian employment did not recreate anything remotely like the WWII mountain.

Why?

Contracting.

Modern wars increasingly rely on private contractors for work once performed directly by federal employees.

So here is another caution:

The federal payroll is not the entire federal workforce in any meaningful economic sense.

Someone can be doing government work, in a government building, under a government contract, paid entirely by taxpayers — and never appear on this graph.

The Obama Years: Up, Then Sideways

The financial crisis hit in 2008, and federal employment rose during the final Bush years and the beginning of the Obama administration. That is not especially surprising. Private companies usually cut employment during recessions because falling revenue forces them to reduce costs. Government often moves in the opposite direction. Recessions produce emergency programs, stimulus spending, new administrative demands and regulatory responses, all of which can require more federal workers. Then, in 2010, the Census creates another temporary spike in the graph. As before, that should mostly be ignored when looking for the underlying trend.

What is more interesting is what happens afterward. Federal employment largely stops rising and moves sideways for most of the Obama years. Politics is probably part of the explanation. Obama entered office with Democrats controlling both houses of Congress, but Republicans captured the House in the 2010 midterms. The budget environment changed almost immediately. The debt-ceiling confrontation followed, the Budget Control Act of 2011 imposed caps on discretionary spending, and sequestration added further restraints.

By 2015, Republicans controlled both the House and Senate. That meant that for six of Obama’s eight years, at least one chamber of Congress was in Republican hands, and for his final two years both were. The flat employment line therefore likely reflects a combination of divided government, tighter spending controls, sequestration, military drawdowns and political resistance to expanding the permanent federal workforce. Once again, the graph is a reminder that Congress can matter as much as the president in determining the size of the federal payroll.

Trump I: Not Much Movement

During Trump’s first term, federal employment does not change dramatically.

There were hiring restraints and regulatory reductions, but the broad workforce remained fairly stable.

Then 2020 arrived.

COVID.

Emergency spending.

Massive economic disruption.

And, conveniently, another Census.

So that final spike tells us very little about the underlying employment trend.

Too many extraordinary things were happening at once.

Biden: The Line Turns Up

After the temporary Census workers disappear, the underlying line begins rising during the Biden years.

Federal agencies rebuilt staffing.

Congress enacted major infrastructure and climate-related programs.

The IRS received additional funding.

Regulatory activity expanded.

The administration was philosophically comfortable with a larger federal role.

By 2024, the civilian workforce had moved noticeably higher.

Then the direction changed abruptly.

Trump II: The Cliff

Trump returned to office in January 2025 with a very different approach.

Hiring was frozen.

Agencies were ordered to reduce staffing.

Employees were offered deferred resignations.

Early retirement and attrition were encouraged.

Reductions in force followed.

And the line moved sharply downward.

Unlike a Census spike, this is not statistical noise.

It represents an intentional change in policy.

The administration decided Washington employed too many people.

And the graph shows the result.

One More Problem With the Graph

Government learned how to grow without hiring federal employees.

That may be the most important limitation in the entire picture.

Compare federal civilian employment today with the 1960s.

The difference is surprisingly small.

Now compare federal spending.

There is no comparison.

Federal spending, debt, transfer programs, regulation and Washington’s influence over the economy have grown enormously.

Yet direct federal employment has not.

How?

Contractors.

Grants.

States administering federal programs.

Universities.

Nonprofits.

Defense contractors.

Medical providers receiving federal money.

Private businesses performing work for federal agencies.

The taxpayer may still be paying for the work.

The worker simply disappeared from this graph.

So this chart does not measure the size of the federal government.

It measures one specific thing:

How many civilians the federal government employs directly.

That distinction matters.

Now Look at the Line Again

The 1940s mountain is WWII.

The collapse afterward is demobilization.

The early 1950s hump is Korea.

The 1960s rise reflects Vietnam, the Cold War and an expanding domestic federal establishment.

The strange spikes every ten years are Census workers.

The Reagan years show a defense buildup without a comparable expansion of the overall civilian bureaucracy.

The long 1990s decline reflects the end of the Cold War, Clinton’s reinvention effort, a strong Republican Congress and sustained budget pressure.

Bush brings 9/11 and homeland-security growth.

The early Obama years rise, then flatten after Republicans take the House and spending restraints tighten.

Biden produces another noticeable rise.

Trump returns and the line turns sharply downward.

Suddenly that strange-looking graph isn’t very strange at all.

It is almost a miniature history of the United States.

Wars made Washington hire.

Peace let it shrink.

Domestic programs created a larger permanent bureaucracy.

Congress sometimes applied the brakes.

Presidents sometimes pushed the accelerator.

And every ten years hundreds of thousands of temporary workers appeared long enough to count us.

Then they vanished.

The line isn’t perfect.

No graph covering almost ninety years could be.

But most of its major turns have an explanation.

Bob: 🅱️ It looks like a squiggly line until you put history underneath it. Then almost every squiggle has a name.

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Show Me the Denominator

Before you panic about measles, look at how Americans actually die.

By Jim Reynolds | www.reynolds.com

August 26, 2026

People are terrible at judging very small risks.

Tell somebody that 0.001 percent of people die from something and his eyes glaze over.

So let’s try something easier.

Imagine 100,000 people.

Close enough to a packed Rose Bowl.

Now ask a simple question:

How many of those 100,000 people will die from a particular cause this year?

Not eventually.

Not sometime during their lives.

This year.

The government keeps very good records on this stuff.

Let’s start with American children between five and nine years old.

Look at those numbers.

Fill our imaginary Rose Bowl with 100,000 children.

Over the course of an entire year, statistically:

Three or four die accidentally.

About two die from cancer.

One or two die in motor-vehicle accidents.

Less than one drowns.

Even familiar causes of childhood death are remarkably rare when you put the denominator back into the equation.

That doesn’t make them unimportant.

It makes them understandable.

Now let’s grow those kids up.

Quite a change.

Why?

Mostly because life changed.

The nine-year-old doesn’t drive to work.

The 30-year-old does.

The nine-year-old generally isn’t using fentanyl.

The 30-year-old might be.

Cancer has had another 20 years to develop.

Heart disease is beginning to appear.

More exposure. More opportunities. Different risks.

Nothing mysterious about it.

In fact, when you follow mortality through the age groups, you can almost watch human life unfolding in the numbers.

At 15, cars suddenly matter.

In the 20s and 30s, overdose deaths explode.

By the 40s, cancer and heart disease begin climbing quickly.

For Americans ages 45–54, the annual chance of dying from cancer is about 1 in 1,230.

Guess what?

I got a potentially deadly throat cancer at 47.

Never smoked.

Suddenly, I was one of the people hiding somewhere inside those statistics.

But notice something else.

I did not die.

That distinction matters.

Getting a disease, becoming seriously ill from it, and dying from it are three different things.

Headlines have a habit of sliding from one to the other as though they were interchangeable.

They aren’t.

By ages 55–64, cancer is killing roughly 1 person in 400 each year, while heart disease kills roughly 1 in 500.

Falls, nearly irrelevant to children and young adults, become increasingly important as we get older.

Our causes of death mutate with us.

It all makes sense.

You start driving, you acquire the risks of driving.

You get older, cancer and heart disease become more important.

You reach old age, falls become dangerous.

The numbers tell the story of a human life.

Which brings me to measles.

What About Measles?

Suddenly we are hearing a lot about measles.

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro held a press conference this week after his health department announced two “measles-associated deaths.”

Those are the state’s words.

Not mine.

Pennsylvania says they are the state’s first measles-associated deaths in 35 years. Both individuals were reportedly unvaccinated. Their ages were not initially disclosed.

The national media immediately went into action.

Deaths.

Outbreak.

Unvaccinated.

Vaccination rates.

Community protection.

Kennedy.

Trump.

We have heard this music before.

So let’s do something unfashionable.

Show me the denominator.

In all of 2025, the United States recorded three confirmed measles deaths: two school-aged children and one adult.

Three.

In a country of roughly 340 million people.

That works out to an annual population risk on the order of:

1 in 110 million.

Don’t confuse that with the risk of dying if you actually contract measles.

That is a different calculation.

I am asking a simpler question:

What is the annual chance that an ordinary American dies from measles?

Using 2025 as the example, roughly one in a hundred million.

Now go back to the Rose Bowl.

One Rose Bowl: 100,000 people.

Ten Rose Bowls: 1 million.

One hundred Rose Bowls: 10 million.

One thousand Rose Bowls: 100 million.

You would need to fill something like a thousand Rose Bowls with Americans to statistically reach one measles death at that recent national rate.

One.

Now compare that with a child dying in a motor-vehicle accident.

Roughly 1 in 71,000 per year for a child ages five through nine.

You don’t even fill one Rose Bowl.

Drowning?

About 1 in 137,000.

Cancer?

About 1 in 51,000.

And these aren’t hypothetical threats.

Children actually die from them every year.

No governor holds a national press conference because two children drowned.

We don’t get rolling cable-news coverage when a child dies of cancer.

Nobody blames the opposition party because somebody drove through an intersection at the wrong time.

Those risks simply exist.

We understand that life contains risk.

So Why Measles?

That is the interesting question.

Not whether measles exists.

It does.

Not whether somebody can die from it.

They can.

Not whether vaccination greatly reduces a person’s chance of contracting measles.

It does.

The question is one of proportion.

Why does a risk measured recently in the tens or hundreds of millions to one suddenly produce national headlines, gubernatorial press conferences, political blame and renewed lectures about “community protection”?

Why this risk?

Why now?

And why are Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. already being worked into the story?

That is where my antenna goes up.

During Covid we became accustomed to frightening numbers presented without useful denominators.

Cases.

Deaths.

Hospitalizations.

Percent increases.

Charts pointing upward.

A 100-percent increase sounds terrifying.

Unless you discover the number went from one to two.

The denominator changes everything.

That is why I used stadiums back then.

It forced the numbers back into the physical world.

Put 100,000 people in front of me.

Show me who dies.

Now I understand the risk.

And once you do that with measles, something rather remarkable happens.

The disease doesn’t disappear.

The hysteria does.

Bob: 🅱️ That may be precisely why nobody wants to show you the Rose Bowl.

P.S. One More Thing

A large share of my readers are old enough to remember actually having measles.

I certainly do.

If that describes you, your personal risk is even smaller than the already microscopic national numbers above.

The CDC considers people born before 1957 presumptively immune to measles. Why? Because measles was so common that nearly everybody in those generations was exposed to it naturally. A documented previous infection is also accepted evidence of immunity. (CDC)

So if you are one of those people who had measles as a kid, recovered, and acquired natural immunity, your chance of now contracting measles and dying from it is, for practical purposes, extraordinarily close to zero.

I remember my case.

A few splotches. I noticed them on my hands. A few days home from school.

Then back to life.

And, apparently, one more statistical crisis I no longer have to worry about.

🅱️ Bob: Sometimes the denominator is just a whole lot of Rose Bowls.

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Damage Control in Real Time

Did El-Sayed just lose Michigan on national television? I think so.

By Jim Reynolds | www.reynolds.com

August 25, 2026

Abdul El-Sayed’s appearance on Jesse Watters was not a debate. It was a prolonged, transparent evasion.

El-Sayed said he was there to answer serious questions and have a serious debate.

Then he did almost exactly the opposite.

The overall impression was hard to miss: he appeared evasive, unserious, and unwilling to give direct answers to direct questions.

Watters asked direct questions. El-Sayed answered almost none of them. He talked over the host repeatedly, redirected every difficult subject, repeated the same talking points, and kept trying to seize control of the interview.

After a while, it stopped sounding like argument and started sounding like a filibuster.

The pattern was the story.

On immigration, Watters pressed him about past calls to abolish ICE. El-Sayed claimed ICE “isn’t working” because there are more undocumented immigrants now than under the old INS, then immediately pivoted: Michigan voters, he insisted, are asking him about gas prices and groceries, not immigration.

🅱️ Bob: “Biden lets in 12 million illegals and suddenly it is ICE’s fault?”

Watters called the dodge.

El-Sayed kept talking. He did a lot of that. Talking over, under, around and through everything that Watters, the host, was trying to say.

On the Iran conflict, Watters asked if he was glad the ayatollah was dead. El-Sayed said he would never defend the Iranian regime, then pivoted to the war, the JCPOA, and rising gas prices.

Watters asked three times whether the strikes themselves were justified.

El-Sayed never answered.

The closest he came was complaining about the cost of filling a tank.

🅱️ Bob: “Evidently, he did not want to answer the question. Why didn’t he just say that?”

The most revealing moment came on sex-change surgeries for minors.

Watters asked if El-Sayed supported them.

El-Sayed answered that the government should not tell people what healthcare they can have.

Watters pressed harder: “So you think it’s okay for a parent to slash his kid’s ding-a-ling off?”

El-Sayed responded by asking Watters if he was circumcised.

🅱️ Bob: “Sounds like a roundabout way of avoiding the question.”

When Watters said yes and pointed out that circumcision is different from castration, El-Sayed doubled down on equating the two.

At one point, El-Sayed appeared to invoke the authority of being a doctor to corner Watters on a medical question. There was an obvious response sitting on the table.

El-Sayed has an M.D. But he never completed a residency and has never been licensed to practice medicine.

🅱️ Bob: “I bow out on this one. Too easy.”

Watters missed it. Or perhaps he decided El-Sayed was doing a perfectly good job of losing votes without any additional help.

That was low-hanging fruit, particularly in an interview where El-Sayed seemed determined to use credentials and technical language as another way of controlling the exchange.

He still never answered the question.

Unable to answer a question about sex-change surgery for minors, he changed the subject to Jesse Watters’ penis.

🅱️ Bob: “A first in TV debate tactics: when you run out of answers, ask the host if he’s circumcised. Perfect.”

On biological males in women’s sports, the same pattern held.

Watters asked directly.

El-Sayed said the decision should be left to “the people who govern sports.”

Watters asked again.

El-Sayed complained that Watters was not asking about the issues Michigan voters supposedly care about.

Watters seemed to think that Michigan voters probably cared about men in women’s sports.

Again, no answer.

On taxes, at least, El-Sayed answered the question.

He defended a wealth tax on fortunes above $100 million with the remarkable argument, “What are you even going to do with more money?”

Watters had an immediate answer.

Whatever he wants. It’s America.

El-Sayed then accused him of defending billionaires.

But the most important problem for El-Sayed was not any particular policy position.

It was El-Sayed.

He said he wanted a serious conversation, but he did not behave like someone interested in having one.

He interrupted. He filibustered. He obfuscated. He repeated himself. He tried to put Watters on the defensive on Watters’ own show.

And when a question became politically dangerous, he simply refused to answer it.

That might work in a campaign room where everyone already agrees with you.

On television, it looks very different.

It looks evasive.

Worse, it looks insincere.

That was the impression that became harder to shake as the interview continued.

El-Sayed did not come across as a man candidly explaining what he believes. He came across as an operator managing exposure.

Every answer seemed calculated to get him safely to the next subject.

Nothing seemed spontaneous. Nothing seemed particularly gracious. Nothing suggested that he was actually listening to the question being asked.

🅱️ Bob: “I guess he forgot that he was part of a live interview.”

He was performing damage control.

And everybody could see it.

That matters because voters make judgments about more than policy.

They decide whether they believe you.

They decide whether they like you.

They decide whether they think you are leveling with them.

A candidate who will not give plain answers to simple culture and enforcement questions is advertising something important: he does not trust his own positions with a broader electorate.

Michigan is not merely a progressive primary electorate. It is a general-election state with a large political middle.

Those voters may disagree about ICE, Iran, transgender policy, taxes, or almost anything else.

But they understand when somebody is ducking a question.

And they understand when somebody is talking at them rather than talking to them.

That may have been the real damage El-Sayed did to himself tonight.

Not that Jesse Watters landed some devastating ideological blow.

El-Sayed damaged himself.

He arrived announcing that he wanted serious questions and a serious debate.

Then, for nearly the entire interview, he refused to participate in one.

That is not political skill.

It is damage control conducted in real time.

And the problem for El-Sayed is that the interview created exactly the clips he was trying to avoid.

Michigan voters do not have to wonder what happens when he is asked directly about ICE, Iran, sex changes for minors, or biological males in women’s sports.

They can watch him refuse to answer.

Maybe one television interview does not lose a Senate race.

But if Michigan was looking for reassurance that Abdul El-Sayed is a sincere, reasonable man who will tell voters plainly what he believes, tonight did the opposite.

He looked evasive.

He looked combative.

And most damaging of all, he looked insincere.

The questions were not the trap.

The answers were.

🅱️ Bob: “And sometimes, the non-answers.”

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