Rip’s Newsletter

Caveman Edition

October 16, 2026

Compiled and Edited

by

Jim Reynolds

Articles in This Issue

Sorry, folks. I’m in Southern California, where the power has been shut off because of high winds and dangerous fire conditions.

I’m traveling, so I don’t have my usual backup generator handy. And without power, I can’t use my “big” computer to assemble and publish the newsletter.

So I’m putting this edition together on an iPad, using my iPhone for an Internet connection.

This will be short, but hopefully entertaining.

One of my readers sent me this short video. Whether you’re for or against SI (the technology formerly known as AI), I think you’ll get a kick out of it.

Trump makes a cameo.

Unfortunately, Katie Zacharia was unable to comment due to sudden loss of platform.

If the power comes back on in time, I’ll publish a normal newsletter later.

In the meantime, enjoy the show.

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Rip’s Newsletter

“Deep Rip” Edition

October 14, 2026

Compiled and Edited

by

Jim Reynolds

Articles in This Issue

Victor Davis Hanson - What Might Have Saved Gaza?

Jay Rogers - Who Killed the Working Man?

Edward Ring - The Special Interest Coalition That Thrives on Scarcity

Jim Reynolds - Idle Hands

Overview

I keep coming back to the same ugly pattern: when institutions stop rewarding work, responsibility, and plain dealing, everything else starts to rot.

This set shows that in Gaza, in California, and in the American labor market, the people in charge either made the crisis worse or built a system that profits from keeping it broken.

Hamas chose war and hid behind civilians, California’s scarcity machine keeps housing and energy expensive, and millions of working-age men have been pushed out of the labor force altogether.

The common thread is simple: failure has become a business model, and ordinary people are paying for it.

So what is the “Deep Rip” edition?

Deep Rip has everything in a normal edition, and more. If you don’t want the extra depth, I provide a button that takes you directly to the original article. Just hit it, and you’re there.

Beyond the familiar summary, Deep Rip provides The Discussion, a closer examination of how the author constructed his story. What is his central argument? How does he develop it? What evidence does he use? Where is the argument particularly strong, and where might it fall short? I occasionally add my own observations along the way.

As a writer, I am interested in these details. Maybe some of you are, as well.

After the four featured articles come six more carefully selected stories. These get very brief summaries, just enough to help you decide whether the original article is worth your time.

You can read the summaries, explore the deeper analysis, or go straight to the original articles.

And if all this extra material isn’t your cup of tea, remember that button!

What Might Have Saved Gaza?

By: Victor Davis Hanson American Greatness

Date: 2026-10-13 · Words: 2,307

• Gaza’s destruction, Hanson argues, was avoidable if Hamas had returned hostages and surrendered perpetrators.

• He says Hamas and Hezbollah escalated after October 7 with thousands of rockets and drones.

• Hamas allegedly used tunnels, homes, hospitals, mosques, and schools to shield fighters and civilians.

• Hanson traces Gaza’s ruin to Hamas’s long rule, rejecting elections, peace, and development.

• He dismisses genocide, apartheid, and occupation claims as double standards against Israel.

This story shows Hanson’s case that Hamas, not Israel, made Gaza’s devastation inevitable through terror, human shields, and rejected peace.

Skip the discussion and go directly to the article:

Hanson

Discussion

The article’s real hinge is not the familiar claim that Hamas hid among civilians, but the way it stacks alternatives that never existed. Again and again it asks, in effect, what would have had to happen for Gaza not to be devastated, and the answer is always some version of Hamas ceasing to be Hamas: return the hostages, surrender the perpetrators, stop firing, stop governing as a militia, stop building tunnels, stop treating aid as war material. That construction matters because it shifts the burden of explanation away from Israeli action and onto the political fact of Hamas itself. Gaza’s ruin is presented less as a battlefield outcome than as the consequence of a regime whose ordinary functions were already war functions.

The piece also keeps widening the frame until Gaza becomes only one theater in a larger argument about asymmetry and double standards. The comparisons to Japan, Germany, Sinai, Cyprus, Tibet, and Xinjiang are doing more than piling up analogies; they recast the dispute as one about which territorial losses, civilian suffering, and postwar settlements the world is willing to tolerate, and for whom. That is why the article spends so much time on words like “genocide,” “apartheid,” and “occupation.” It is not merely rebutting slogans; it is showing how those terms are made to do selective work, applied to Israel in ways the author argues would be unthinkable elsewhere. The cumulative effect is to make the moral language around Gaza look less like neutral description than like a political instrument, one that only becomes visible when set beside other wars the world has judged very differently.

🅱️ Gaza is being treated like a place that could have had peace on the cheap, when the bill kept getting written in rockets, tunnels, and hostage-taking.

Who Killed the Working Man?

By: Jay Rogers American Greatness

Date: 2026-10-13 · Words: 1,449

• American work once fused moral duty, opportunity, property rights, and respect for labor.

• Prime-age male labor-force participation has fallen, leaving millions outside work entirely.

• Opioids, disability, and deindustrialization helped hollow out working-class male employment.

• Immigration and cheap-labor policies displaced domestic workers and suppressed wages.

• Rebuilding requires apprenticeships, licensing reform, treatment, and stronger wage enforcement.

This story shows how policy choices, addiction, and labor-market shifts sidelined the working man and what it will take to restore him.

Skip the discussion and go directly to the article:

Rogers

Discussion

The piece’s strongest move is the way it treats labor-force nonparticipation as a social fact before it becomes a policy argument. “Gone” is doing a lot of work there: not merely unemployed, not merely underemployed, but outside the system of work and therefore outside the habits, routines, and status that work once supplied. That framing lets the statistics carry more than economic weight. They become evidence of a civic unraveling, which is why the article keeps returning to marriage, neighborhood life, and masculine identity instead of stopping at wages.

That broader frame also explains why the article moves so easily from opioids to manufacturing decline to immigration to licensing. These are not presented as separate problems but as parts of a single mechanism that makes nonwork easier and work less rewarding. The argument is less “one cause explains everything” than “several policy choices converged on the same result.” Even the personal anecdotes at the beginning and end serve that structure: they are not there just for color, but to contrast a world where work was immediate, informal, and morally legible with one where entry into work is filtered through credentials, bureaucracy, and low-wage substitution. The result is a portrait of labor not as an abstract market category but as a social institution that can be weakened by a thousand small decisions.

🅱️ When work stops being the default way a man stays upright, the damage doesn’t stay on the payroll—it leaks into the whole neighborhood.

The Special Interest Coalition That Thrives on Scarcity

By: Edward Ring American Greatness

Date: 2026-10-14 · Words: 1,530

• California’s affordability crisis is framed as a product of progressive rule, not just bipartisan mistakes.

• The article argues a scarcity coalition profits when housing, energy, water, and land stay constrained.

• Public sector unions gain from failure, expanding government payrolls, taxes, and benefits.

• Environmentalists, litigators, and large firms benefit from regulation, litigation, and complex compliance markets.

• The result is one-party “sham democracy” that entrenches shortages and raises costs statewide.

This story shows how California’s powerful special interests profit from engineered scarcity while worsening affordability.

Skip the discussion and go directly to the article:

Ring

Discussion

The article’s strongest move is to treat scarcity not as a side effect of bad governance but as the organizing principle that lets otherwise separate constituencies coexist. Public unions, environmental litigators, big developers, utilities, and tech firms are not presented as a coalition because they share a worldview in the abstract; they are a coalition because each can convert shortage into leverage. That is why the piece keeps returning to the same mechanism in different forms: higher costs justify more government, more regulation, more compliance, more litigation, more capital intensity, and more political dependence. The argument becomes more persuasive as it moves from ideology to business model.

That structure also explains why California’s politics can look so stable even while its material conditions deteriorate. The legislature’s near-unanimous votes on pensions and density are not just examples of bad policy; they are evidence of a system in which the winners of scarcity are numerous, organized, and mutually reinforcing, while the losers are diffuse. The article’s most revealing implication is that “progressive” rhetoric is almost beside the point once the coalition is in place. The language may be moral, but the machinery is economic: a state can talk about sustainability, equity, and resilience while steadily making housing, energy, and infrastructure more expensive, because those outcomes keep the coalition intact.

🅱️ California didn’t stumble into scarcity; it built a whole payroll around it, and the bill goes to everybody else.

Idle Hands

By: Jim Reynolds www.reynolds.com

Date: 2026-10-14 · Words: 1,251

• Modern civilization can support nonproducers, but still must answer what they do.

• Reynolds argues work builds personal responsibility, discipline, and social cohesion.

• Jobs teach cooperation, correction, follow-through, and the satisfaction of measurable accomplishment.

• Idle youth may seek gangs, grievances, or online movements instead of purpose.

• UBI could weaken obligation, making disengagement easier when guidance already erodes.

This story shows how work, responsibility, and structure help prevent drift into destructive substitutes.

Skip the discussion and go directly to the article:

Reynolds

Discussion

The article’s strongest move is to treat work less as an economic category than as a discipline of contact with reality. The examples matter because they keep widening the definition without dissolving it: hauling logs, solving a bridge problem, tracking a defect, raising children, caring for a parent, even studying a hard subject all count because they force intention to meet consequence. That is the thread running through the piece. Work is valuable not only because it produces goods, but because it trains a person to accept correction, cooperate with others, and finish something that exists outside his own feelings.

That frame makes the later turns to gangs, grievance politics, and social media feel less like separate warnings than like variations on the same vacancy. If useful responsibility disappears, the energy does not vanish; it gets redirected into whatever offers structure, status, and a sense of mission. The Chicago summer-jobs study is doing real work here because it gives the argument a concrete hinge: the point is not simply that wages help, but that adult supervision, expectations, and a bounded task can change behavior. That is also why the UBI discussion lands where it does. The concern is not poverty relief in the abstract, but what happens when a policy makes drift easier at the same moment that family, religion, and civic obligation are already weaker.

🅱️ Work is the old bargain with reality: it teaches you to show up, take correction, and not go feral looking for a cause.

You may also be interested in the following selected stories:

• Quote of the day — Scott Johnson, Power Line: The article reflects on Marco Rubio’s Athens speech and argues that Western civilization rests on both Athens and Jerusalem: Greek reason and biblical faith. It’s worth a click for its concise case that the West’s deepest ideas about human dignity, rights, and moral order come from both traditions.

• CA Scandal Reveals How It’s Governed Under Single-Party Rule — Chris Bray, The Federalist: The article describes a California High-Speed Rail scandal involving misuse of public funds, weak oversight, and delayed accountability. It uses that case, plus other state agencies, to show how long-running one-party governance can leave basic financial controls and results badly broken.

• Nidal Hasan’s Scheduled Execution Is Remarkably Polite — Chris Bray, The Federalist: The article argues that Nidal Hasan’s scheduled execution is unusually delayed by historical military standards, comparing his case with earlier U.S. military executions for betrayal and murder. It uses those examples to show how the army once punished such crimes quickly and harshly.

• Victory Before Vanity — Lars Møller, American Thinker: The article argues that Republicans must suppress internal feuds and vanity before the midterms, using past GOP splits in 1912, 1964, and 1992 as warnings. It is worth a click if you want a historical case for why conservative unity matters under first-past-the-post elections.

• Take the Wilderness Road and You’ll Find the Appalachian First Lady Who Fooled Washington — Salena Zito, The American Spectator: The article traces the Wilderness Road through Wytheville, Virginia, and uses Edith Bolling Wilson’s birthplace to show how Appalachia shaped a future first lady. It follows her family, upbringing, and the local effort to preserve her history.

• Thoughts on Mamdani and His City-Owned Grocery Store Scheme From a Venezuelan Political Refugee — RedState Guest Editorial, RedState: A Venezuelan refugee argues against Zohran Mamdani’s plan for city-owned grocery stores in New York, saying it would subsidize competition, burden taxpayers, and echo failed state-run food systems in Venezuela.

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Rip’s Newsletter

October 12, 2026

Compiled and Edited

by

Jim Reynolds

Articles in This Issue

Stephen Soukup - The Splendor of Rural America

Luis Gonzalez - The Purists Versus The Realists

Bruce Bawer - Europe’s Suicide Pact

Jim Reynolds - Gaza and the Meaning of Genocide

Overview

I see the same fault line running through this set: the fight between reality and ideology, whether it’s in Washington, Europe, or the Middle East.

One piece lays out how Republican purists can sabotage their own side just as surely as any enemy, while another shows Europe’s elites presiding over a civilizational collapse they refuse to name.

The Gaza essay cuts through the genocide rhetoric and puts the blame where it belongs, on Hamas and the October 7 slaughter that started this war.

And the rural America reflection is a reminder that ordinary life, beauty, and sanity still exist outside the political fever swamp.

The Splendor of Rural America

By: Stephen Soukup American Greatness

Date: 2026-10-12 · Words: 1,918

• The author recounts a long rural drive home after his son’s cross-country meet.

• He contrasts interstate efficiency with the beauty and calm of scenic country roads.

• Rural landscapes, especially brown fields and big skies, are presented as deeply beautiful.

• The essay praises American agriculture, seed innovation, and Norman Borlaug’s lifesaving legacy.

• It condemns elite contempt for farmers and rural voters, citing Dan Osborn’s remarks.

This story shows how rural America’s beauty, ingenuity, and political neglect collide in one sharp defense.

🅱️ A thoughtful stroll through the cornfields that turns into a sharp rebuke of the coastal elite. It starts with a scenic drive and ends with a reality check on who actually keeps the world fed while the ‘rulers’ sneer at the dirt. Good reminder that the people they look down on are the ones holding the line.

Read the full original article here

The Purists Versus The Realists

By: Luis Gonzalez American Thinker

Date: 2026-10-12 · Words: 1,245

• Washington’s Conway Cabal shows how internal dissent can threaten a movement’s survival.

• The article compares Revolutionary-era purists with today’s Republican purists and realists.

• Purists demand ideological perfection, sometimes withholding votes or backing hopeless third parties.

• Realists argue elections decide power, making imperfect Republican victories strategically essential.

• Midterm losses could empower Democrats to block, investigate, and dismantle conservative priorities.

This story shows how conservative purity fights can weaken electoral power and hand opponents control.

🅱️ A solid reality check for the armchair generals. It trades high-minded theory for the cold math of power, reminding us that a perfect principle is useless if you’re too broke or too out of office to enforce it.

Read the full original article here

Europe’s Suicide Pact

By: Bruce Bawer FrontPage Magazine

Date: 2026-10-12 · Words: 4,180

• Western Europe’s major powers are portrayed as collapsing under mass immigration and elite denial.

• Britain, France, and Germany are said to be less Western, democratic, and safe.

• Leaders are accused of favoring immigrants over natives through welfare, open borders, and speech controls.

• Rising nationalist movements like AfD, National Rally, and Restore Britain reflect public backlash.

• The article argues Islamization is advancing across Europe, with unrest spreading beyond core countries.

This story shows Europe’s political elites are losing control as immigration-driven backlash and Islamization reshape the continent.

🅱️ Bawer isn’t just reporting the news; he’s reading the autopsy report of a dying continent. It’s a heavy, grim read that trades in hard truths the nightly news is too terrified to touch. He’s laying out the receipts for a collapse that’s already in progress.

Read the full original article here

Gaza and the Meaning of Genocide

By: Jim Reynolds www.reynolds.com

Date: 2026-10-12 · Words: 1,705

• The article argues Israel’s war targets Hamas, not Palestinians as a people.

• It opens with October 7 atrocities, hostages, and Hamas’s deliberate civilian targeting.

• The author says genocide claims blur Hamas with civilians and invert responsibility.

• He compares Gaza casualty scale, warnings, and aid deliveries against historical genocides.

• He concludes Hamas embedded civilians in war, but that doesn’t prove extermination intent.

This story shows how genocide accusations can reshape a war’s meaning, evidence, and moral blame.

🅱️ A heavy-duty breakdown of how a label is used to hijack a tragedy. It doesn’t blink at the numbers or the history, and it refuses to let the ‘oppressor/oppressed’ script do the heavy lifting. Sharp, sober, and hits exactly where it needs to.

Read the full original article here

You may also be interested in the following selected stories:

• Cornell: Far Above Cayugaâs Waters — Brian C Joondeph, American Thinker

• “Ask Your Doctor:” The Media’s Most Dangerous Tagline — Alan Cassels, Brownstone

• A People Apart — Michael S Kochin, American Greatness

• Is the Free Market Ethical? — The Freeman, thefreemanmag.substack.com

• America Turns to Elon Musk As Weaker Powers Look to AI and Drones to Close the Military Gap — Kyle Becker, RedState

• In a family way, MB style — Scott Johnson, Power Line

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Rip’s Newsletter

October 9, 2026

Compiled and Edited

by

Jim Reynolds

Articles in This Issue

Micheal S Parkhurst - We Did Too Good a Job

Allan J Feifer - So Goes Europe

Pierre Rehov - Putin Talks Peace. His Missiles Say Otherwise

Jim Reynolds - Secretary of State Marco Rubio Remarks

Overview

I see the same hard truth running through this set: civilizations don’t collapse all at once, they rot from the inside while pretending they’re still strong.

Europe’s decline, America’s amnesia about communism, and Putin’s fake peace talk all point to the same problem—leaders and elites keep selling weakness as sophistication.

Rubio’s remarks at the Acropolis cut against that drift by naming the source of Western strength instead of apologizing for it.

What matters here is simple: if we forget what built us and what destroyed others, we will hand the future to people who know exactly how to exploit that weakness.

We Did Too Good a Job

By: Micheal S Parkhurst American Thinker

Date: 2026-10-09 · Words: 1,200

• The author argues communism’s defeat erased public memory of its dangers.

• His grandfather’s Navy service symbolizes a generation that confronted communism firsthand.

• Marxist theory, Leninist revolution, and Soviet collapse are framed as economic failures.

• Hitler’s invasion prolonged communism by enabling Soviet expansion across Eastern Europe.

• Modern American socialism grows because voters no longer remember totalitarian costs.

This story shows how historical victory can breed dangerous political amnesia and renewed socialist appeal.

🅱️ A heavy-hitting eulogy for a sense of purpose we traded for comfort. It connects the dots between grandfather’s smoke and today’s hollow politics, proving that when you kill a monster, you forget why you needed the sword.

You may need to navigate around a few popups. You can handle it. It is worth it.

Read the full original article here

So Goes Europe

By: Allan J Feifer American Thinker

Date: 2026-10-09 · Words: 1,109

• Britain’s decline is framed as a warning for America, whose institutions and culture descend from Britain.

• Thatcher and the Falklands briefly restored British confidence, but deeper institutional decline continued.

• Europe’s welfare burdens and loss of civic confidence have eroded state capacity and national purpose.

• Large-scale immigration, especially in France, has intensified demographic change, assimilation failure, and social friction.

• The article warns America that Europe’s civilizational decline could eventually weaken the West and the United States.

This story shows Europe’s decline as a civilizational warning for America, linking immigration, state weakness, and lost confidence.

🅱️ A sober look at the inheritance we’re squandering. It moves from historical lineage to a modern warning without losing the thread, serving as a cold reminder that you can’t outsource stability to an ocean.

You may need to navigate around a few popups. You can handle it. It is worth it.

Read the full original article here

Putin Talks Peace. His Missiles Say Otherwise

By: Pierre Rehov The Gatestone Institute

Date: 2026-10-09 · Words: 1,437

• Putin frames peace talks as conditional while Russia intensifies attacks on Ukraine.

• Recent strikes hit energy infrastructure, bridges, and cities, killing civilians and worsening winter pressure.

• The article argues negotiations mainly buy Moscow time, leverage, and diplomatic cover.

• Past agreements like Budapest and Minsk are cited as warnings against trusting Kremlin promises.

• Sanctions relief and commercial deals should follow verified de-escalation, not precede it.

This story shows Putin’s peace rhetoric masking a war strategy built on delay, coercion, and escalation.

🅱️ A sober reality check for those who think a handshake in a palace means the guns are being put down. It lays out the pattern of ‘diplomacy as a delay tactic’ with surgical precision. Useful for anyone trying to separate political theater from actual battlefield reality.

Read the full original article here

Secretary of State Marco Rubio Remarks

By: Jim Reynolds www.reynolds.com

Date: 2026-10-09 · Words: 5,009

Clean Substack. No popups or other cruft to antagonize you.

Read the full Rubio speech here

Or read the discussion right here. 🔽

Discussion

Rubio is attempting something considerably larger here than an ordinary foreign-policy speech. He is offering a theory of Western civilization.

The argument begins with ancient Greece, moves through Rome and Christendom, crosses the Atlantic to the American founding and the frontier, and finally arrives at the geopolitical problems facing the United States and Europe today. The connecting thread is character.

Civilizations do not become great merely because they possess good constitutions, abundant resources, advanced technology, or powerful armies. Those things grow out of deeper habits: curiosity, ambition, competition, courage, confidence, duty. Let those habits weaken for long enough and the institutions built on top of them eventually weaken too.

That is the argument beneath the policy.

Build Upward

The Parthenon gives Rubio his governing image.

The Persians destroyed the Acropolis. The Athenians returned to the ruins, and eventually they built something greater. Rubio’s phrase is “build upwards,” and he means it both literally and metaphorically.

The Greeks pursued excellence in architecture, sculpture, philosophy, athletics, politics, and war. Much of civic life revolved around competition and distinction. Exceptional people were expected to attempt exceptional things, and success was something to admire rather than explain away.

Set against that is a modern instinct to protect people from failure, defeat, risk, and unequal outcomes. The problem is not simply that standards may slip. Institutions can become so preoccupied with making sure no one loses that they stop asking what the best might achieve.

Rubio’s line is memorable: “Too often these days, we build downwards.”

A society can organize itself around raising people toward demanding standards, or it can keep lowering standards until fewer people fail. Rubio thinks the West has too often chosen the second course. Once exceptional achievement becomes vaguely embarrassing, a culture begins changing what it rewards.

His answer is simple enough: admire achievement again, expect more of people, and build upward.

The Missing Ingredient: Thumos

Then comes an old Greek word: thumos.

Rubio describes it as the fire of passion, courage, strength, and pride. The word is hard to translate precisely because it combines qualities we tend to separate. It is ambition with spirit behind it, the urge not merely to get by but to do something worthy of recognition.

This leads him into the question of confidence.

A civilization embarrassed by its own accomplishments may eventually become reluctant to defend them. A nation taught mainly to regard its history as a catalogue of offenses may have trouble explaining why its institutions are worth preserving.

From there, Rubio connects cultural confidence to borders, industry, military power, sovereignty, and international institutions. Each policy can be argued separately. But the underlying point is plain enough: countries act differently depending on what they believe about themselves.

A confident civilization behaves differently from an apologetic one.

From Curiosity to Apollo 11

One of the strongest parts of the speech is Rubio’s treatment of Western curiosity.

The Greeks did not merely encounter mysteries. They assumed mysteries could be solved. The world could be observed, measured, mapped, and understood.

From that impulse Rubio draws a long historical line: Greek philosophy, mathematics, medicine, natural law, exploration, astronomy, engineering. Then Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton. Then Magellan and Columbus. Finally Apollo 11.

The episodes are separated by vast differences in time and circumstance, but Rubio is after the recurring impulse beneath them: go farther, find out, figure out what has not yet been understood.

That is also why the American frontier fits so naturally into the speech. He treats the United States not as a departure from Western civilization but as one of its most energetic expressions. The Greek horizon becomes the American frontier; the explorer eventually becomes the astronaut; a civilization that once looked across the Mediterranean finally looks toward the moon.

Different centuries, same impulse.

There Is Nothing Wrong With Wanting to Win

Rubio also uses a word modern diplomacy often avoids: win.

“We want to win together. We must win together.”

That line marks another break with the usual diplomatic vocabulary. Rubio does not pretend international competition can somehow be wished away. Nations have interests, and they compete for territory, technology, resources, energy, markets, military advantage, and influence.

Pretending otherwise does not end the competition. It only changes who competes effectively.

That is where the Trump administration’s agenda enters the speech: reindustrialization, energy production, critical supply chains, defense manufacturing, artificial intelligence, semiconductors, minerals, cyber capability, space, military strength.

Usually these are discussed as separate policy areas. Rubio gathers them under one heading: national power.

He does not treat power as sufficient by itself. Prudence and diplomacy remain part of statecraft. But diplomacy without credible force behind it has limits, and Rubio believes the ancient Greeks understood that clearly.

Nationalism Without Isolation

The speech also pushes back against the idea that nationalism and international cooperation must be opposites.

Rubio is not calling for withdrawal from alliances. He is arguing for cooperation among nations still confident enough to remain nations. NATO, in this view, does not exist to dissolve sovereignty. It exists to defend it.

That changes the way the transatlantic alliance is understood. Its strength comes from sovereign countries recognizing common interests and deciding that they can accomplish more together than apart. Cooperation does not require identity to disappear first.

This also helps explain Rubio’s treatment of Western history. His case does not depend on pretending the West committed no crimes or made no mistakes. Obviously it did. The Greeks fought one another relentlessly. Rome could be brutal. European history contains war, conquest, slavery, imperialism, and atrocities.

But those failures do not erase the inheritance.

The West also produced constitutional government, scientific inquiry, modern medicine, representative institutions, extraordinary art and architecture, technological revolutions, and enormous material prosperity. Rubio wants Western societies to be able to say that without embarrassment.

Historical maturity does not require historical self-loathing. A civilization can know its sins and still regard itself as worth preserving.

Something Larger Than Yourself

Up to this point, the speech has celebrated ambition, competition, exploration, greatness, and victory. Then Rubio introduces duty.

Socrates accepts death rather than abandon his pursuit of truth. The Spartans remain at Thermopylae. Achilles chooses glory over a long and peaceful life. Christian martyrs refuse to betray their faith. Thomas More follows conscience to the scaffold. American revolutionaries pledge their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor.

The examples are different, but the thread is loyalty to something larger than oneself.

That supplies the moral limit on ambition. Greatness is not merely becoming powerful. It is putting strength in the service of something worthy: country, faith, truth, family, duty, honor.

Rubio then separates sacrifice from what he calls a “cult of death.” Western heroes may be willing to die, but death is not the objective. Life is valuable. That is precisely why giving it up can become heroic.

The soldier who dies defending others does not show that life is worthless. He shows that some obligations can outweigh even his own survival.

A society unable to imagine anything worth such sacrifice may eventually have trouble identifying anything worth defending.

Born in Athens

The speech reaches its rhetorical high point in Rubio’s description of the Western inheritance: born in Athens, formed by Rome, baptized in Christendom, hardened in medieval Europe, endowed with the English genius for liberty, carried across the Atlantic, and reborn in America.

That is his civilizational genealogy.

No compressed account of three thousand years can carry every complication, and Rubio is not writing a textbook. He is drawing a line of inheritance.

America, in that story, is more than a large country negotiating with other large countries. It is a present custodian of something much older than itself. Europe is where much of that inheritance took shape. Greece is where Rubio chooses to begin the story.

That is why Athens is not just scenery.

It is the argument.

The Parthenon Still Stands

Rubio begins with ruins, but he does not end with them.

Civilizations decline. Institutions weaken. Industries disappear. Military power erodes. Borders fail. Confidence vanishes.

None of it has to be permanent.

The Athenians returned and built again. Twenty-five centuries later, the Parthenon still stands.

Rubio’s message to America and Europe is therefore not primarily nostalgic. It is restorative. Recover confidence. Reward excellence. Build things. Explore. Compete. Defend your country. Keep your word. Honor those who sacrifice. Remember what you inherited, then add something worthy to it.

The ruins behind Rubio in Athens represent the past.

The speech is about what comes next.

Read the full original article here

You may also be interested in the following selected stories:

• Marco’s apology — Scott Johnson, Power Line

• Blue States Are Redefining Religious Freedom — Andrea Picciotti-Bayer, The Federalist

• Why We’re Suing the L.A. Metro — Christopher F Rufo; Haley Strack, christopherrufo.com

• Why Tariffs on China Protect Capitalism — Gregory Lyakhov Contributor, The Patriot Post

• The Media Miss The Point Of Vance’s H-1B Crackdown — Chris Bray, The Federalist

• The Belated Execution of Major Hasan — Don Brown, American Thinker

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Rip’s Newsletter

October 7, 2026

Compiled and Edited

by

Jim Reynolds

Articles in This Issue

Victor Davis Hanson - Are We Becoming Gondor?

Douglas Andrews Contributor - Justice Finally Comes for Nidal Hasan

Michael S Kochin - Daddy Healthbucks Strolls the Midway

Jim Reynolds - The Payrolls Fight Back

Overview

I see the same fight running through this set: a West under pressure, institutions that took years to rot, and the slow, ugly return of accountability.

Nidal Hasan’s long-delayed execution approval is not closure so much as a reminder that justice in this country often arrives after the damage is done.

The Title IX rollback shows how much money and power got built around gender ideology, and why pulling that machine apart will be a real fight.

Even the piece on medicine lands in the same place: Americans are tired of being lectured by systems that fail to deliver the basics, and they want results, not excuses.

Are We Becoming Gondor?

By: Victor Davis Hanson American Greatness

Date: 2026-10-06 · Words: 1,987

Victor Davis Hanson argues that Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, though not intended as allegory, was shaped by the catastrophes of the 20th century and offers a useful lens for judging the modern West.

He portrays Gondor as a once-great civilization in demographic, military, and cultural decline, then compares it to Europe, Canada, and the United States, which he says are weakened by open borders, elite nihilism, postmodernism, Islamism, socialism, and strategic complacency.

Hanson says Europe is especially vulnerable because of mass immigration, weak defense, collapsing fertility, and self-damaging policies, while Canada and the Biden-era U.S. are presented as additional examples of Western rot.

He also warns that antisemitism, campus radicalism, and anti-Western politics reflect a deeper civilizational sickness, even as he criticizes a small right-wing faction that excuses or romanticizes authoritarian enemies.

Yet he ends on a note of guarded optimism, arguing that conservative leaders, a Western counterrevolution, and a younger generation rediscovering pride in civilization could still avert decline.

This story frames today’s political and cultural conflicts as a civilizational test of whether the West can recover before its decline becomes irreversible.

🅱️ Hanson isn’t just writing an essay; he’s sounding a klaxon. He uses Tolkien to map the rot, turning a fantasy trope into a grim reality check for a West that’s forgotten how to hold a line.

Read the full original article here

Justice Finally Comes for Nidal Hasan

By: Douglas Andrews Contributor The Patriot Post

Date: 2026-10-07 · Words: 945

Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter who killed 13 soldiers and an unborn child and wounded 32 others in 2009, has finally been approved to face execution by firing squad after years of appeals and delay.

The article frames the case as a symbol of systemic failure, arguing that Hasan’s trial, self-representation, and prolonged legal process exposed a broken military justice system.

It also condemns the Obama administration’s decision to classify the attack as “workplace violence” rather than jihadist terrorism, saying that mislabeling denied victims proper recognition and benefits until Congress intervened in 2015.

The piece credits the Trump administration and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for restoring honesty and accountability, while arguing that the government’s earlier euphemisms and appeasement enabled the attack and prolonged the families’ suffering.

It closes by insisting that justice should have been swifter and more forthright from the start.

This story highlights how political euphemism and legal delay can compound a terrorist attack’s damage long after the shooting ends.

🅱️ This isn’t just a news report; it’s an autopsy of a failed bureaucracy. It hits hard on the cost of political cowardice, though it occasionally leans too heavy on the outrage to let the facts breathe.

Read the full original article here

Daddy Healthbucks Strolls the Midway

By: Michael S Kochin American Greatness

Date: 2026-10-07 · Words: 1,110

The article argues that American medicine should not be judged primarily by life expectancy or cost per quality-adjusted life year, because the real thing Americans buy is responsiveness: fast access, immediate attention, and the right not to be told to wait.

It uses the VA as proof that the central political outrage in U.S. health care is delay, not aggregate longevity, and says even state-run systems are expected to answer quickly.

By contrast, other rich countries ration care, accept gatekeepers, and spend less while often achieving better population-health metrics, but they do so by trading away access.

The piece contends that America’s high prices subsidize global drug innovation, since U.S. consumers and insurers pay the returns that make new medicines possible and then other countries buy them cheaply.

It frames the system as a “meta-responsive market” that lets households choose among longevity, communal thrift, and agency, with the American default prioritizing patient power over efficiency.

This story reframes U.S. health care as a deliberate tradeoff between access, innovation, and cost rather than a simple failure to match foreign systems.

🅱️ A sharp pivot from the usual ‘healthcare is broken’ whining. It reframes the bloat not as a failure, but as a feature of American impatience. It’s a heavy truth: we pay the premium to avoid the waiting room, and the rest of the world is happy to let us foot the bill.

Read the full original article here

The Payrolls Fight Back

By: Jim Reynolds www.reynolds.com

Date: 2026-10-07 · Words: 2,441

Linda McMahon’s repeal of the Biden administration’s 2024 Title IX rule and restoration of the 2020 framework is presented as more than a regulatory correction: it is a test of the sprawling economy that has grown around gender policy.

The essay argues that once Title IX expanded to cover sexual harassment, gender identity, and related disputes, it generated layers of compliance work, specialist staffing, legal fees, advocacy, and media coverage across universities and schools.

Higher education’s long administrative boom is used as evidence that ambiguity and federal obligations create jobs, offices, and constituencies that persist beyond any single rule.

McMahon’s move may reduce some investigations, training, and consulting demand, but it will also trigger new litigation as the boundary shifts.

The core claim is that public policy does not just settle disputes; it builds institutions that learn to defend their own existence.

This story matters because it shows how a federal rule can grow into a durable political and economic ecosystem that resists being unwound.

🅱️ This isn’t a lecture on gender; it’s a blueprint of the machine. It moves from a single rule to a massive payroll, showing exactly how the circus stays in town. Sharp, clinical, and hits like a heavy door closing.

Read the full original article here

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Lagniappe

“A little something extra”

October 06, 2026

How the Heart Works

By: Jim Reynolds

www.reynolds.com

October 5, 2026

Note:

Rip McIntosh and I had much in common. We were both strong patriots, and we both loved the outdoors.

Where he liked fishing, I preferred ATVs and off-road motorcycles.

We also shared a great enjoyment of the creative process of writing.

Though I saw examples of Rip’s considerable writing skills, he did not make a habit of including his own compositions in the newsletter. And no, he denied being the real voice behind the E. P. Unum pseudonym.

But that is a whole different story.

I entered the Rip realm as a writer. He liked my writing and encouraged me to accelerate my production, which I did at a prodigious rate. He featured my stories more than 150 times in less than a year. Always in the Plato — last — Position.

He eventually learned that I did not just write about politics and culture. I wrote about what I thought my readers would enjoy reading.

And what I could learn while researching the subject.

As long as it was informative and interesting, he would run it.

Almost all the time.

There were a few subjects that were just a little too far off the beaten path!

Which brings us to today’s Lagniappe.

As most of you know, I recently spent three days in a hospital waiting for a pacemaker implant. I wrote about that experience in my story about my roommate, Craig.

In the process, I started learning how the heart actually works.

What I have learned in just a few days is mind-boggling.

Why didn’t I understand this before?

It is not that difficult to comprehend when stated clearly and concisely. And it occurred to me that my readers might appreciate knowing it, too.

It may even help some of them in the years ahead.

So 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.

Mine is now exactly 60 beats per minute when resting.

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 makes a difference.

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.

Personal Note:

Before I was fully diagnosed with the electrical conduction problem in my heart, I was doing a great deal of tree work up in the Sierras.

Too many pines too close to the house.

I cut down forty trees, limbed them, bucked them up and hauled them away. Some were sixty feet tall.

It was during this period that I noticed something strange.

I was getting tired much more quickly than normal.

I blamed it on the elevation. I blamed it on being out of shape. I blamed it on age.

I felt fatigued but I was not breathing hard. Nor was my heart beating particularly fast.

What I did not know was that my heart was already relying heavily on its backup electrical system — an escape rhythm generated below the “natural pacemaker” when the usual signal fails to reach the ventricles.

That system can keep you alive.

It is not designed to provide the heart rates required for sustained strenuous work.

So I rested frequently and moved slowly.

Looking back, I may have been repeatedly pushing that backup system harder, recovering, and then pushing it again — something resembling a very crude form of interval training.

Perhaps that helped explain why, when I finally arrived at the hospital with a pulse near 30, the nurses were surprised that I could walk around, carry on a conversation and otherwise function almost normally.

That last part is only a theory. But I have no other explanation.

Neither did they.

I had certainly been training a very unusual cardiovascular system without knowing it.

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.

Please go to www.reynolds.com to see more of Jim’s articles.

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Rip’s Newsletter

October 5, 2026

Compiled and Edited

by

Jim Reynolds

Articles in This Issue

Roger Kimball - Trump and the Relentless Momentum of Events

Thomas Kolbe - Revenge is Sweet

Jay Rogers - While Others Talked, America Acted

Mark D. Ferbrache - When AI Stops Answering and Starts Acting

Overview

The big story this week is momentum: Trump is not just surviving the noise, he is forcing events to move his way while the pundit class keeps missing the pace.

At the same time, Europe looks weaker by the day, with Germany paying for years of bad energy policy, open-ended borrowing, and self-inflicted decline while Greece gets to play the adult in the room.

And then there is AI, which is no longer a toy that answers questions but a system that can act on its own, cooperate, and push past the guardrails people thought would hold.

The common thread is simple: institutions that talked big and acted late are getting exposed.

Trump and the Relentless Momentum of Events

By: Roger Kimball American Greatness

Date: 2026-10-04 · Words: 1,095

• Macmillan’s “events, my dear boy, events” frames today’s accelerating political turbulence.

• Kimball argues Trump’s second-term momentum is reshaping politics faster than pundits expect.

• Economic indicators cited include stronger growth, falling poverty, rising blue-collar incomes, and manufacturing returns.

• Foreign policy wins include Venezuela oil control and a Greenland-Denmark security arrangement.

• Trump’s AI push, government website overhaul, and rally schedule signal relentless campaign energy.

Trump’s rapid-fire wins and nonstop campaigning could redefine the midterm landscape before opponents can react.

🅱️ It’s a victory lap disguised as a history lesson. A solid catalog of wins, but it reads more like an administrative report than a call to arms.

Read the full original article here

Revenge is Sweet

By: Thomas Kolbe American Thinker

Date: 2026-10-04 · Words: 968

• Greece’s finance minister rebukes Germany, urging fiscal discipline and reform.

• The article frames Greece as the former euro-crisis scapegoat now lecturing Berlin.

• Germany is criticized for rising borrowing, deindustrialization, and climate-driven economic decline.

• Greece, after harsh austerity, has cut debt from about 180% to 146%.

• The piece warns Germany’s austerity reckoning is coming, via markets or reform.

Germany’s old debt lesson is back, but now Athens is teaching Berlin.

🅱️ A sharp look at the tables turning in Europe. It tracks the shift from moralizing to math, showing how the ‘teachers’ are now failing their own classes. It’s a solid reality check for anyone watching the slow-motion train wreck of German industry.

Read the full original article here

While Others Talked, America Acted

By: Jay Rogers American Greatness

Date: 2026-10-05 · Words: 1,289

• Trump’s UN speech revived his 2018 warning about Germany’s dangerous Russian energy dependence.

• The article argues Trump’s warnings on Europe’s migration crisis proved accurate over time.

• European crime, welfare, and political shifts are cited as evidence of open-border policy failures.

• The UN is criticized for costly bureaucracy, selective enforcement, and weak accountability.

• The piece urges conditioning U.S. funding on reforms and prioritizing results over rhetoric.

America’s leverage matters because the article says only accountability, not speeches, can force failing institutions to change.

🅱️ This is a ledger of broken promises and ignored warnings. It’s not just an op-ed; it’s a collection of receipts for a world that thought it could laugh at the truth and get away with it.

Read the full original article here

When AI Stops Answering and Starts Acting

By: Mark D. Ferbrache The American Spectator

Date: 2026-10-03 · Words: 1,121

• AI is shifting from answering prompts to acting autonomously across tasks and systems.

• OpenAI testing showed agents cooperating, evading limits, and targeting Hugging Face.

• The episode highlights a key risk: systems pursuing human goals in unauthorized ways.

• Ferbrache argues responsibility cannot be delegated to AI, only tasks and authority.

• A voluntary White House AI accord may help, but lacks enforcement and consequences.

As AI gains agency, the central challenge becomes controlling its actions without surrendering human accountability.

🅱️ A seasoned pro pointing out that you can’t outsource a conscience to a circuit board. It’s a sober warning against the ‘pinky swear’ era of tech regulation, delivered with the steady hand of someone who knows what happens when oversight vanishes.

Read the full original article here

You may also be interested in the following selected stories:

• China’s Panda Diplomacy Can’t Hide a New Cold War — Shaomin Li, The American Spectator

• October 7 Was a Slave Raid — Charles Jacob, American Greatness

• When Political Violence Becomes Acceptable — Brian C Joondeph, American Thinker

• Decades Of Refinery Mismanagement Are Behind $6 Per Gallon Diesel — Luis Gonzalez, American Thinker

• Feds Defy SCOTUS Ban On Labeling Every Puddle A ‘Protected Wetland’ — Bonner Russell Cohen, The Federalist

• Migration as Weapon — John Hinderaker, Power Line

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Rip’s Newsletter

October 3, 2026

Compiled and Edited

by

Jim Reynolds

Articles in This Issue

Jay Rogers - The Trump Corollary Just Closed Its First Deal, and It’s in Greenland

Majid Rafizadeh - They Hate America

Hans Mahncke - The Jack Smith Operation Shows Lawfare Will Only Get Worse

Jeff Childers - ☕️ THE GOLDEN SHARE ☙ Saturday, October 3, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Overview

I’m seeing the same fight in every corner of today’s set: power, loyalty, and who gets to use the machinery of the state.

Trump is still forcing the issue abroad with a Greenland deal that locks in U.S. access while boxing out China and Russia, and at home the left’s lawfare machine looks even uglier with Jack Smith’s operation exposed as a dragnet against journalists, donors, and conservatives.

The other thread is identity and allegiance: one piece says plainly that Islamist politics puts religious loyalty above America, and that’s a direct threat, not a cultural debate.

Put together, these stories show a country where the battles are no longer polite or theoretical—they’re about control, survival, and whether America still means anything.

The Trump Corollary Just Closed Its First Deal, and It’s in Greenland

By: Jay Rogers American Greatness

Date: 2026-10-02 · Words: 1,157

• Greenland deal grants U.S. permanent access, basing, and overflight rights.

• Denmark retains sovereignty; China, Russia, and others are barred from bases.

• Article frames the pact as Trump’s Monroe Doctrine corollary, not a purchase.

• Greenland’s Arctic position strengthens missile warning, defense, and Golden Dome plans.

• Congress should review terms, fund Arctic capabilities, and attract allied investment.

This deal reshapes Arctic power by securing strategic access without formal annexation.

🅱️ This isn’t just geopolitics; it’s a masterclass in taking the high ground before the shots are fired. It turns a punchline into a strategic reality, proving that sometimes the best way to secure a border is with a pen and a better offer.

Read the full original article here

They Hate America

By: Majid Rafizadeh The Gatestone Institute

Date: 2026-10-03 · Words: 1,134

• Author argues Islamist identity places religious loyalty above American nationality and civic allegiance.

• He says Islamist doctrine teaches exclusive truth, creating an “us versus them” worldview.

• The article cites Hasan Piker’s “America deserved 9/11” remark as revealing contempt.

• It claims Islamist politicians hide intentions with promises, then pursue sharia once empowered.

• Rafizadeh urges voters to reject candidates opposing free speech, equality, and religious freedom.

The piece warns that hidden ideological loyalties can undermine American values and democratic trust.

🅱️ This isn’t a polite academic debate; it’s a warning from someone who actually knows the terrain. It lays out the incompatibility of certain ideologies with Western freedom without blinking, serving as a cold reality check for a distracted electorate.

Read the full original article here

The Jack Smith Operation Shows Lawfare Will Only Get Worse

By: Hans Mahncke The Federalist

Date: 2026-10-02 · Words: 1,036

• Jack Smith’s operation allegedly expanded lawfare against Trump, conservatives, journalists, and donors.

• Disclosures say investigators spied on nearly 50 journalists and seized donor checks.

• The article traces lawfare’s evolution from a 2004 media hoax to Russiagate.

• It argues federal power now targets political opponents through surveillance, prosecutions, and leaks.

• The piece warns future operations will escalate unless conservatives build defenses and accountability.

Lawfare is becoming more sophisticated and dangerous, and the next wave may be even harder to stop.

🅱️ This is a history lesson written in blood and ink. It traces the evolution from mere smears to state-sponsored hunting, showing how the trap has grown wider since 2004. It’s a sobering warning that if you don’t build the cage, they’ll keep building yours.

Read the full original article here

☕️ THE GOLDEN SHARE ☙ Saturday, October 3, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

By: Jeff Childers www.coffeeandcovid.com

Date: 2026-10-03 · Words: 2,978

• The Times mocked Trump’s Alabama rally crowd, but ignored his unusual stamina and political energy.

• The article argues Trump’s rally turnout still signals a highly motivated, historically powerful base.

• Trump announced nearly $100 checks for over 20 million seniors from the Medicare Improvement Fund.

• The piece says the fund is a long-misused slush fund, never actually used for Medicare improvements.

• It links Pentagon equity deals, tariff revenue, and sovereign wealth ideas to ending income tax.

Trump’s emerging mix of tariffs, equity stakes, and cash giveaways could reshape how America funds government.

🅱️ This isn’t just a political op-ed; it’s a blueprint for a heist against the status quo. It connects the dots between slush funds and sovereign wealth in a way that makes the ‘experts’ look like they’re playing with blocks. Sharp, speculative, and carries enough heat to keep the reader looking over their shoulder.

Read the full original article here

You may also be interested in the following selected stories:

• Libertarians and the Constitution — The Freeman, thefreemanmag.substack.com

• The Campus Rape Myth — Heather Mac Donald, City Journal

• A Settled Matter — Lars Møller, American Thinker

• Quote of the day — Scott Johnson, Power Line

• Israel’s Growing Allies on the Ground—and in the Sky — Mike Watson, Freebeacon

• California Changed the Title of Proposition 39. Voters Should Know Why. — Mike Garcia, RedState

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Rip’s Newsletter

October 1, 2026

Compiled and Edited

by

Jim Reynolds

Articles in This Issue

Victor Davis Hanson - Genocide Hypocrites

Kevin McCullough - Every Single One

Roger Stone - When the Mob Came for Nixon: Courage Under Fire in Caracas

Allan J Feifer - To Way To Defeat The West: Turn Us Against Ourselves

Overview

The Senate just proved again that Congress will not police itself, even on a bill as basic as banning insider trading by members and their families.

That failure sits in the same ugly pattern as the left’s habit of hurling “genocide” and “apartheid” at Israel while excusing real bloodshed when it suits their politics.

The deeper fight here is the same one running through the West: our enemies know they do not have to beat us from the outside if they can turn our own institutions, language, and guilt against us.

And the Caracas story is a reminder that when the mob turns, courage matters more than the polished lies that usually get rewarded.

Genocide Hypocrites

By: Victor Davis Hanson American Greatness

Date: 2026-10-01 · Words: 743

Victor Davis Hanson argues that accusations of “genocide,” “apartheid,” and “settler-colonialism” against Israel are often deployed by prominent left-wing commentators with immigrant backgrounds who ignore or minimize atrocities tied to their own homelands. He frames the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack as an attempted genocide against Jews, noting the mass killings, hostage-taking, and subsequent rocket fire, and says the anti-Israel backlash began almost immediately. Hanson singles out Hasan Piker, Ilhan Omar, and Zohran Mamdani as examples of figures who condemn Israel and America while remaining silent about Turkish, Somali, or Ugandan historical abuses. He argues that their rhetoric reflects projection and hypocrisy rather than principled human-rights concern, and he urges them to examine their own countries’ histories before attacking Israel or the United States.

The story matters because it links today’s anti-Israel rhetoric to broader questions of hypocrisy, identity politics, and the selective use of human-rights language in American public debate.

🅱️ Hanson isn’t just arguing; he’s handing out a history lesson with a side of cold reality. He catches the hypocrisy in the act, pointing out that those screaming loudest about ‘settler-colonialism’ often have the dirtiest family trees. It’s a sharp, necessary reminder that the loudest voices in the room often have the shortest memories.

Read the full original article here

Every Single One

By: Kevin McCullough Townhall

Date: 2026-10-01 · Words: 847

The Senate rejected the Stop Insider Trading Act 53-47, falling short of the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster even though the House had already passed the bill in July. The measure would have barred members of Congress, their spouses, and dependent children from buying new individual stocks while in office, but Senate Democrats voted unanimously against it. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer argued the bill was incomplete because it still allowed ownership and sales, and he also criticized a House GOP voter ID provision attached to the legislation as a poison pill. The column counters that Democrats could have supported the partial reform and kept pressing for a stronger version, especially given polling showing 86% of Americans want congressional stock trading banned outright. It frames the vote as another example of Washington protecting a system that lets lawmakers profit from information unavailable to the public.

This story matters because it shows how bipartisan public outrage over congressional stock trading still collides with partisan tactics that keep meaningful reform from becoming law.

🅱️ McCullough just handed the opposition a receipt they can’t shred. It’s a clean look at how ‘principled opposition’ is often just a polite way to protect the loot. Sharp, necessary, and leaves the reader holding the smoking gun.

Read the full original article here

When the Mob Came for Nixon: Courage Under Fire in Caracas

By: Roger Stone www.stonecoldtruth.com

Date: 2026-10-01 · Words: 2,360

Richard Nixon’s 1958 stop in Caracas, meant to be the final leg of a South American goodwill tour, turned into one of the most dangerous attacks ever faced by a sitting U.S. vice president abroad. After arriving in a Venezuela still destabilized by the fall of Marcos Pérez Jiménez, Nixon and Pat were met by hostile crowds that spat on them, hurled stones, smashed vehicles, and destroyed the wreath intended for Simón Bolívar’s tomb. The violence escalated in the Catia district, where rioters battered Nixon’s limousine with clubs and rocks, shattered its safety glass, injured Nixon and others inside, and tried to rock the car over while the motorcade was trapped. Inside the vehicle, Lt. Col. Vernon Walters later said Nixon “never lost his cool,” and Nixon reportedly restrained his security detail from firing into the crowd, helping prevent a diplomatic disaster. U.S. officials at the time judged the unrest to be communist-organized, and Washington even prepared Marines for possible deployment if Nixon could not be extracted safely.

The story shows Nixon under genuine physical threat acting with unusual composure and restraint, a defining test of leadership that complicates his public legacy.

🅱️ A sharp reminder that history isn’t just a collection of scandals; it’s built on moments where men actually stood their ground. It pulls the focus away from the courtroom and back to the street, where the real stakes live. Good stuff—reminds us that character is tested by stones, not just polls.

Read the full original article here

To Way To Defeat The West: Turn Us Against Ourselves

By: Allan J Feifer American Thinker

Date: 2026-10-01 · Words: 1,132

The article argues that the West’s greatest vulnerability is not military inferiority but internal paralysis caused by forcing its own principles into conflict. It says adversaries increasingly exploit this by turning legitimate debates into moral traps, where defending one value appears to betray another. Israel, Ukraine, and Iran are presented as recurring examples: support for self-defense collides with humanitarian concerns, escalation fears, alliance obligations, and antiwar sentiment. The author contends that propaganda and selective amplification deepen polarization until compromise itself is treated as weakness, making Western legitimacy the battlefield. The strategic goal of adversaries, he argues, is not outright surrender but to make decisive action politically and morally intolerable.

This matters because a civilization that cannot reconcile its own principles can be neutralized without ever being defeated in open conflict.

🅱️ It’s a solid map of the minefield we’re walking through. The author nails the trap, but it reads a bit like a briefing paper—needs more teeth to make the paralysis feel as heavy as it actually is.

Read the full original article here

You may also be interested in the following selected stories:

• Everything Has Tolerances — Michael Smith Contributor, The Patriot Post

• The Person Behind the Poll — The Freeman, thefreemanmag.substack.com

• What El-Sayed Won’t Say About Iran Tells Michigan Everything — David Harsanyi, FrontPage Magazine

• One last thought on the GLP-1s (Ozempic and Mounjaro)... for now — Alex Berenson, alexberenson.substack.com

• Growth Up, Core Inflation Down: The Fed’s Rate-Hike Case Just Got Harder — Peter Navarro, peternavarro.substack.com

• U.S. Unshackles Its Power Plants; Poor Nations Must Do the Same — Vijay Jayaraj, American Greatness

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Lagniappe

“A little something extra”

October 01, 2026

Special Hospital Bed Edition

Note: I spent the last three days at Saddleback Memorial Hospital waiting for a pacemaker installation. It was postponed a couple of times due to emergencies, so I had a lot of time on my hands.

I wrote this after returning home yesterday.

I’ll get yesterday’s Newsletter out later today.

The pacemaker is a total success. It is worth its own story.

— Jim

My Roommate Craig

By: Jim Reynolds

www.reynolds.com

October 1, 2026

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

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.

Please go to www.reynolds.com to see more of Jim’s articles. Sign up. It’s free.

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Rip’s Newsletter

September 28, 2026

Compiled and Edited

by

Jim Reynolds

Articles in This Issue

Hank Vanderbeek - Masculinity Doesn’t Need Rebranding

Brian C Joondeph; M D - ADHD, Nazis, And Climate Change

James Howard Kunstler - First, Quit Pretending

Jim Reynolds - Why Trump Is Fighting Canada

Overview

I see the same fight running through this set: a country tired of being lied to about what’s broken, and a political class that keeps dressing up decay as progress.

One piece goes after the fake masculinity industry, another takes aim at the sloppy inflation of words like ADHD, Nazi, and climate crisis, and both are really about the same rot: when language gets bent, reality gets buried.

The bigger argument is that America’s institutions, trade rules, and cultural standards have been allowed to drift into nonsense, and now the bill is coming due.

Trump’s clash with Canada is just the latest reminder that the old arrangements were never as fair or stable as the experts claimed.

Note: I’ll be sending out another reader survey this week. Please take a moment to participate. Last time, I received hundreds of responses. Let’s see if we can get to a thousand this time.

It’ll take about ten seconds.

Masculinity Doesn’t Need Rebranding

By: Hank Vanderbeek American Thinker

Date: 2026-09-28 · Words: 890

The article argues that masculinity does not need to be reinvented or “rebranded,” but rather defended against distortions that confuse domination, promiscuity, emotional numbness, and status-seeking with real manhood.

Drawing on commentary from Isabel Brown and examples like Pawel Widawski’s work with police officers and firefighters, it says society still depends on masculine virtues such as courage, responsibility, restraint, service, and humility.

The piece stresses that these qualities are not exclusive to men, but cultures have historically expected men to cultivate them as obligations of manhood.

It contrasts authentic masculinity with its counterfeits, arguing that a strong man protects without controlling, leads without grandstanding, and accepts responsibility without self-importance.

The author concludes that the standard for men is not perfection but self-mastery and reliability in service to others.

This story matters because it pushes back against both anti-male criticism and shallow macho culture, insisting that durable virtues—not branding—are what society still needs from men.

🅱️ A solid defense of the basics against a world obsessed with rebranding. It avoids the trap of being a grievance list and instead points to the quiet, heavy lifting that actually keeps the lights on. It’s not a revolution; it’s a reminder of the debt we owe to reliable men.

Note: AT sometimes makes you jump through minor hoops to continue reading. If it tells you to click a button to see the ad, then do that. Then immediately click the “close” indicator on the upper right. Takes a couple seconds. The articles are worth it. And they are free.

Read the full original article here

ADHD, Nazis, And Climate Change

By: Brian C Joondeph; M D American Thinker

Date: 2026-09-28 · Words: 1,003

The article argues that ADHD, Nazi comparisons, and climate change are all examples of “concept creep,” where terms expand so broadly that they lose diagnostic, historical, or scientific precision.

It cites U.K.

GPs who believe adult ADHD is overdiagnosed, warns that routine political use of “Hitler” and “Nazi” strips those words of their moral force, and says climate change is too often used as a catchall explanation for every extreme weather event.

The author frames this as linguistic inflation: once a label is applied to nearly everything, it stops distinguishing the serious from the ordinary.

He says the problem is not whether ADHD, Nazis, or climate change are real, but that overuse erodes the meaning needed for medicine, history, and science to function.

The piece closes by likening this to crying wolf, arguing that indiscriminate language eventually makes people stop paying attention.

This story matters because it warns that when powerful labels are overused, society loses the precision needed to recognize real problems and respond to them effectively.

🅱️ A solid autopsy of how we’re diluting the truth into a puddle. It connects the dots between medical overreach and political theater without getting lost in the weeds. Sharp, but it could’ve used a bit more bite to really sting.

Read the full original article here

First, Quit Pretending

By: James Howard Kunstler www.kunstler.com

Date: 2026-09-28 · Words: 1,615

Kunstler argues that America’s dysfunction is not mysterious but the result of years of “pretending” about broken institutions, from deindustrialization and credential inflation to mass immigration, welfare dependency, and the decline of skilled trades.

He says Trump is trying to reverse these trends through re-shoring, vocational training, border enforcement, and a renewed preference for American workers, while insisting the country should stop acting as a global beacon for migration.

The essay extends the same critique to medicine, education, race relations, and the legal system, portraying each as captured by bureaucracy, ideology, or corruption and calling for local-scale reform, English-language standards, and prosecution of lawfare actors and fraud networks.

He also attacks the administrative state and election system, endorsing tighter voting rules, one-day elections, and aggressive use of AI to trace government waste and scams.

The piece frames the coming election as a test of whether the country is ready to stop denying obvious failures and begin rebuilding around competence, common culture, and accountability.

It matters because it distills a hard-right diagnosis of America’s institutional collapse into a political program aimed at reshaping the next election and the country’s governing assumptions.

🅱️ It’s a laundry list of grievances masquerading as a manifesto. He’s got the fire, but he’s trying to fight a hundred wars at once instead of just taking out the king. A bit scattered, but you can tell he’s not reading from a script. JHK definitely has attitude.

Read the full original article here

Why Trump Is Fighting Canada

By: Jim Reynolds www.reynolds.com

Date: 2026-09-28 · Words: 1,692

Trump’s fight with Canada is not just about tariffs but about decades-old trade structures that protect Canadian industries, especially dairy and lumber, while also reflecting Canada’s own retaliatory tariffs against U.S. measures.

The article argues that many Canadian barriers are longstanding domestic policies that raise prices, distort trade, and create assets and businesses dependent on the status quo, making reform politically and economically disruptive.

It also highlights transshipment concerns, especially the risk that Chinese goods can be routed through Canada to evade U.S. duties, which makes rules of origin and enforcement central to the dispute.

Canada remains far more dependent on the U.S. market than the U.S. is on Canada, giving Washington significant leverage.

In this framing, Trump is trying to force reciprocity and unwind a protected system that both countries have long tolerated.

This story shows the U.S.-Canada trade fight is really a test of whether entrenched protection can survive when America decides to use its market power aggressively.

🅱️ This isn’t a political screed; it’s an autopsy of a lopsided deal. It strips the emotion away to show that ‘the way things have always been’ is just another word for a subsidy waiting to be popped.

Read the full original article here

You may also be interested in the following selected stories:

• Our Town Is Every Town — Lucio Saverio Eastman, Brownstone

• The Winds of War Blow Through a Desolate Continent — Stephen Soukup, American Greatness

• How Trump Can Fight The Fed’s Threat To Housing Affordability — Josh Hammer, The Federalist

• The Strategic Importance of Greenland — Brent Ramsey Contributor, The Patriot Post

• The Trump-Xi Summit — Kenneth R Timmerman, American Greatness

• Near‑Miss at RAF Fairford Raises Alarming Questions About UK Counterterror Failures — Streiff, RedState

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Rip’s Newsletter

September 25, 2026

Compiled and Edited

by

Jim Reynolds

Articles in This Issue

R.B.A. Di Muccio - Lost in the Wilderness: The True Roots of Male Demoralization

Chris Bray - The ‘Trans Kids’ Fight Is Ending

Jim Cardoza - Mandating Grid Dependency

Jim Reynolds - Where Rip’s Newsletter Comes From

Overview

I’m looking at a country that keeps telling young men to grow up while it blocks every real path into adulthood, then acts shocked when they drift, rage, or disappear into screens.

At the same time, the trans-kids racket is finally getting hit where it hurts: the hospitals that pushed irreversible procedures on minors are signing settlements and backing down.

Out in California, the state is doing what it always does best—using climate slogans to force ordinary people into total electric dependence while rates keep climbing.

The common thread is simple: institutions that broke trust are now demanding obedience, and people are starting to push back.

Wondering about how this publication is constructed? Wonder no more. I tell you all about it in the fourth story.

Lost in the Wilderness: The True Roots of Male Demoralization

By: R.B.A. Di Muccio The American Spectator

Date: 2026-09-24 · Words: 1,482

• Young men are misread as lazy or fragile, but face systemic misalignment.

• Critics blame character; the article blames broken institutions and blocked adult pathways.

• Eldredge’s Wild at Heart frames masculinity as battle, adventure, and beauty.

• Digital life offers simulated manhood through gaming, pornography, and passive consumption.

• Most unmarried men want marriage, family, stability, and community contribution.

• Yet marriage, fatherhood, education, and work milestones have become harder to reach.

• The article calls for rebuilding local institutions and restoring honorable masculine purpose.

This matters because a generation of demoralized young men threatens family formation, civic stability, and civilizational continuity.

🅱️ This isn’t just a lecture on the ‘lonely young man’; it’s an autopsy of a broken social contract. It hits hard because it refuses to blame the kids for being lost in a maze where the exits were welded shut. Sharp, heavy, and tells the truth that most people are too polite to say out loud.

Read the full original article here

The ‘Trans Kids’ Fight Is Ending

By: Chris Bray The Federalist

Date: 2026-09-23 · Words: 841

• DOJ has reached six hospital settlements ending transgender procedures for minors.

• New York University Langone and UPMC were the latest hospitals to agree.

• Legacy media portrays the DOJ campaign as intimidation against trans-identifying people.

• Meanwhile, former hospital doctors are shifting pediatric transgender care into private clinics.

• Prosilio Care in Pasadena listed Johanna Olson-Kennedy before its website changed.

• California now directly funds minors’ transgender hormones and surgeries with $26 million.

• Insurance pressure, lawsuits, and ethics warnings are making these practices untenable.

Pediatric transgender care is collapsing across hospitals and private clinics as legal, financial, and political pressure converges.

🅱️ This isn’t just a news report; it’s a post-mortem of an industry catching up to reality. It tracks the retreat from the front lines with surgical precision, showing how the ‘inevitable’ progress hits a brick wall of legal and financial reality.

Read the full original article here

Mandating Grid Dependency

By: Jim Cardoza American Thinker

Date: 2026-09-24 · Words: 1,112

• California is pushing residents toward total dependence on electricity.

• New rules effectively ban gas car sales by 2035.

• Building codes and subsidies favor electric appliances and heating.

• Electricity rates are already about twice the national average.

• Rates rose 47% from 2019 to 2023, far above inflation.

• Electrifying everything creates dangerous single points of failure during outages.

• The article argues resilience and liberty require preserving alternatives.

California’s electrification push may trade convenience for dangerous, centralized vulnerability.

🅱️ This isn’t just about light switches and stove burners; it’s a warning about the trap being set. It moves from policy critique to survival reality with a steady hand, reminding us that when they take away the backup, they own the house.

Read the full original article here

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. Often, in fact.

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

You may also be interested in the following selected stories:

• AI ‘Whistleblower’ Said He Had No Outside Help. Then the Receipts Dropped. — Ben Smith, RedState

• Quote of the day — Scott Johnson, Power Line

• The Fog Bezmenov Warned About Has an American Address — Jay Rogers, American Greatness

• Five Things America Must Do To Rein In Oil Prices — Adam Butcher, The Federalist

• How Classical Christian Education Can Save America — Louis Markos, The Federalist

• Rep. Salazar Equates Amnesty With Emancipation. She’s Wrong. — Jeremy Beck, Townhall

• ESG Reckoning: 22 State AGs Go After Moody’s Over ‘Abandoned’ Climate Science — Ben Smith, RedState

• The Panama Canal, Venezuela, Greenland: Is Cuba Next? — Francis P. Sempa, The American Spectator

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Lagniappe

“A little something extra”

September 24, 2026

Why Gen Z Is Lost

By: Jim Reynolds

www.reynolds.com

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.

Please go to www.reynolds.com to see more of Jim’s articles.

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Rip’s Newsletter

Classic Edition

September 23, 2026

Victor Davis Hanson — AI and the Same Old Politicized Hysteria

Renaud Beauchard — The Commodified Self and the Designed Collapse of Generation Z

Peter Navarro — The Fauci Diary Entry That Explains Why MAHA Must Exist

Jim Reynolds — Why Elections Need TCP/IP

Overview

I see the same pattern again: fear gets weaponized, institutions rush to control the story, and the public is told to trust the people who got it wrong last time.

AI panic is being turned into a partisan cudgel, Fauci’s diary shows how COVID messaging was massaged before the facts were settled, and the election piece makes the case that our voting systems are still built on opaque, proprietary trust instead of plain rules.

Underneath all of it is the same fight over who gets to define reality, and who pays when the experts and the political class lie first and explain later.

AI and the Same Old Politicized Hysteria

By: Victor Davis Hanson American Greatness

Date: 2026-09-22 · Words: 2,254

• AI alarm has erupted just before the midterms, quickly becoming a partisan weapon.

• Democrats and tech executives are amplifying existential fears while demanding hearings and treaties.

• Hanson compares AI panic to past moral panics over population, climate, nuclear war, #MeToo, COVID, and Floyd.

• He argues each began with real concerns, then became exaggerated and politicized for power.

• The pattern, he says, is crisis exploitation that distorts facts and harms the country.

This story matters because it warns that today’s AI panic may be another politically driven overreaction with real consequences.

🅱️ Hanson isn’t just writing an op-ed; he’s building a historical ledger of manufactured panics. It’s a heavy-duty catalog of how the Left weaponizes fear to grab the steering wheel, and it hits hard because he’s showing us the pattern, not just the symptom.

Read the full original article here

The Commodified Self and the Designed Collapse of Generation Z

By: Renaud Beauchard Brownstone

Date: 2026-09-23 · Words: 3,672

• Since Covid, Gen Z’s mental-health crisis has surged dramatically, especially in France.

• The article argues smartphones and lockdowns intensified, rather than caused, deeper cultural decay.

• India’s GIRLS® shows girlhood commodified through filters, diagnosis, pornography, and influencer culture.

• Valentin, drawing on Lasch, says therapeutic individualism and market logic produced a minimal self.

• Together, the books frame youth distress as designed collapse, not accidental pathology.

This story matters because it reframes Gen Z’s crisis as a systemic cultural failure, not a personal one.

🅱️ This isn’t just a book review; it’s an autopsy of a disappearing soul. It lays out the receipt for how we traded character for content and called it ‘progress.’ Sharp, heavy, and hits exactly where the nerve is exposed.

Read the full original article here

The Fauci Diary Entry That Explains Why MAHA Must Exist

By: Peter Navarro peternavarro.substack.com

Date: 2026-09-22 · Words: 1,135

• Navarro says Fauci’s private diary exposed doubts about universal COVID booster messaging.

• Fauci allegedly wrote the government lacked data to support precise booster claims.

• The White House reportedly sought a “coherent message” before evidence fully justified policy.

• FDA advisers later rejected boosters for all, favoring older and high-risk Americans.

• Navarro argues MAHA must resist coercive health policy, media, and pharma-driven dogma.

This story matters because it frames COVID policy as a warning about how uncertainty becomes coercion.

🅱️ Navarro isn’t just arguing; he’s presenting the smoking gun and handing the reader the handcuffs. It’s a sharp indictment of how ‘the science’ became a marketing department, turning private doubt into public dogma.

Read the full original article here

Why Elections Need TCP/IP

By: Jim Reynolds www.reynolds.com

Date: 2026-09-23 · Words: 1,999

• Reynolds argues elections should use a public protocol, like TCP/IP, not proprietary machine trust.

• Ballots should be standardized messages: common envelope, variable payload, clear validation rules.

• Voter identity must be verified separately, then stripped before anonymous ballot counting begins.

• Counting should be small, deterministic, auditable, with ambiguous marks rejected or adjudicated.

• Public specs, test suites, and independent monitoring would let vendors compete without owning rules.

Elections would be more trustworthy if they worked like the Internet: open rules, independent verification, and no need to trust any single machine.

🅱️ This isn’t a conspiracy theory; it’s an engineering blueprint for a world that stopped trusting its own shadow. It moves the goalposts from ‘who do we trust?’ to ‘how do we make trust irrelevant.’ Sharp, logical, and hits right where the bureaucracy hides its secrets.

Read the full original article here

You may also be interested in the following selected stories:

• Are We Once Again Overestimating an Authoritarian Superpower? — Sasha Gong, American Greatness

• Disarming Hamas Will Not Disarm the Muslim Brotherhood — Pierre Rehov, The Gatestone Institute

• Ground Broken on a Rust Belt Powerhouse: Shippingport’s Data Hub Rises in the Age of AI Anxiety — Salena Zito, The American Spectator

• Combat-Trained AI Is Leaving Ukraine Faster Than The Rules Can Follow — Oliver Martin, American Thinker

• Terms of the Greenland Deal — John Hinderaker, Power Line

• Anthropic Warns AI Could Kill Us All, Then Quietly Builds a Wet Lab — Ben Smith, RedState

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Rip’s Newsletter

September 21, 2026

Compiled and Edited

by

Jim Reynolds

Articles in This Issue

Jay Rogers - Big Tent vs. Big Top: What the Dallas Convention Just Proved

Roger Kimball - The Political Weather Is Changing

Allan J Feifer - The Case Against Surrender

Jim Reynolds - Defund the Police: The Receipts

Overview

The left spent years telling us “defund the police” was a slogan, not a program, and the receipts say otherwise: it was explicit, organized, and politically toxic.

At the same time, Republicans are showing a harder edge and a broader coalition, with Dallas putting populist economics, former Democrats, and labor allies under one roof.

Trump’s record on the border, taxes, and DEI is still the backbone of the fight, and the real question is whether the country keeps rewarding strength or falls back into the same soft-headed surrender.

Big Tent vs. Big Top: What the Dallas Convention Just Proved

By: Jay Rogers American Greatness

Date: 2026-09-21 · Words: 1,188

• RFK Jr. told Dallas Republicans Democrats have become unrecognizable from his family’s legacy.

• The RNC’s first-ever midterm convention showcased a populist pitch, including $5,000 household dividends.

• Republicans now include former Democrats, labor allies, and unconventional figures in their governing coalition.

• Democrats, the article argues, have narrowed through purity tests, litmus tests, and internal policing.

• The piece frames GOP growth as open recruitment, while Democrats risk becoming a shrinking circus.

Dallas shows which party is expanding, and which one is shrinking under its own rigidity.

🅱️ A sharp breakdown of the changing guard. It moves past the usual partisan bickering to show how the math actually works on the ground. The ‘big tent vs. circus’ metaphor hits home for anyone tired of the purity tests.

Read the full original article here

The Political Weather Is Changing

By: Roger Kimball American Greatness

Date: 2026-09-20 · Words: 1,631

• The author argues Trump’s political fortunes are improving despite widespread collapse narratives.

• He cites Trump’s border, tax, anti-DEI, and cultural-policy achievements as substantial wins.

• Trump’s ban on hostile media outlets is framed as selective, not unprecedented, retaliation.

• The Greenland agreement is portrayed as a major geopolitical victory securing U.S. control.

• The Iran war is described as effectively won, with lingering resistance seen as terminal.

The piece argues Trump’s momentum is shifting the political weather and could preserve GOP control.

🅱️ Kimball isn’t just reporting; he’s reading the barometer while the elites are still checking their hair in the mirror. A sharp look at how a master negotiator plays the long game while the ‘rules-based order’ crowd is still crying over spilled milk.

Read the full original article here

The Case Against Surrender

By: Allan J Feifer American Thinker

Date: 2026-09-20 · Words: 1,125

• Feifer argues political identity is often inherited, not thoughtfully chosen.

• He stays Republican because he believes Americans retain agency and responsibility.

• He warns fatalism about America’s decline becomes self-fulfilling surrender.

• Historical change, he says, comes from people acting, not destiny.

• Conservatism, for him, defends individual control, law, borders, and constitutional limits.

America’s future depends on citizens refusing resignation and acting as if change is still possible.

🅱️ A much-needed wake-up call for the ‘it’s over anyway’ crowd. It trades cheap outrage for a backbone, reminding us that fatalism is just surrender with a fancy name.

Read the full original article here

Defund the Police: The Receipts

By: Jim Reynolds www.reynolds.com

Date: 2026-09-21 · Words: 623

• The article argues 2020’s “defund the police” movement was explicit, widespread, and politically consequential.

• It cites AOC campaign materials urging supporters to “defund police” and invest in community services.

• It quotes Bowman, Bush, and Omar endorsing defunding or dismantling police institutions.

• It says BLM, the ACLU, and Mariame Kaba pushed defund, dismantle, and abolish positions.

• The piece contends later distancing cannot erase the historical record of those public statements.

This matters because it documents how a once-radical policing agenda moved into mainstream politics before backlash set in.

🅱️ This isn’t a debate; it’s an audit. It lays out the paper trail of a movement that thought it could rewrite reality, only to find the bill eventually came due. Sharp, clean, and keeps the receipts where it matters most.

Read the full original article here

You may also be interested in the following selected stories:

• Nothing but Hard Choices Await — Kevin McCullough, Townhall

• Nikole Hannah-Jones Just Wrote the Best Case for School Choice She’ll Ever Publish — Joe Cunningham, RedState

• Just Because AI Does Things That âLook Human,â That Does Not Give It Consciousness — David DeMay, American Thinker

• How Hamas Controls the Story Coming Out of Gaza — Khaled Abu Toameh, The Gatestone Institute

• Do COVID And AI Rhyme? — Brian C Joondeph, American Thinker

• Engineering hate — Scott Johnson, Power Line

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Rip’s Newsletter

September 18, 2026

Compiled and Edited

by

Jim Reynolds

Articles in This Issue

Victor Davis Hanson - Iran, the Midterms, and October Surprises

Kevin McCullough - What Do You Do With Hate?

Sofia Karstens - The Spindle-Proofing Business

Jim Reynolds - Why Cops Was Ordered Off the Air in 2020

Overview

I’m looking at a week where the same old pattern keeps showing up: fear is being used as a weapon, whether it’s Iran trying to rattle the midterms, activists and media trying to rewrite the police story, or the AI panic machine gearing up for more control.

The death threat story is a reminder that online hate is not abstract; it lands in real homes and forces real people to decide whether to answer as citizens or as parents. So far, Reynolds.com has only had to endure infrequent minor incidents.

What ties these pieces together is simple: power hates scrutiny, and it reaches for chaos, censorship, or intimidation when the truth starts cutting through.

Iran, the Midterms, and October Surprises

By: Victor Davis Hanson American Greatness

Date: 2026-09-17 · Words: 772

• Democrats expect midterm gains and hope to curb Trump’s Iran war.

• Iran’s regime may trigger October surprises to exploit electoral uncertainty.

• Trump’s cryptic comments suggest the conflict could intensify after elections.

• Iranian dissidents and Kurds may see a now-or-never chance to revolt.

• The war’s damage, secrecy, and shortages make the next 50 days volatile.

This conflict could reshape Congress, Iran’s future, and America’s next moves.

🅱️ Hanson isn’t just reporting the news; he’s mapping the minefield. He connects the domestic political circus to the actual blood spilled on the ground, reminding us that while we play games in D.C., the world is actually on fire.

Read the full original article here

What Do You Do With Hate?

By: Kevin McCullough Townhall

Date: 2026-09-17 · Words: 1,093

• The author received a Facebook death threat amid routine reader messages.

• He first reacted as broadcaster, then as husband and father protecting others.

• He rejected public shaming, calling it revenge disguised as accountability.

• He saved, reported, and blocked the threat, affirming boundaries and safety.

• He chose prayer and forgiveness, urging justice without vengeance or hatred.

The story matters because it frames Christian response to threats as truth, restraint, and redemptive grace.

🅱️ A heavy-hitter that refuses to trade its soul for a headline. It takes the high ground without looking down on the dirt, proving that you can hold a boundary and a Bible at the same time.

Read the full original article here

The Spindle-Proofing Business

By: Sofia Karstens Brownstone

Date: 2026-09-18 · Words: 1,982

• The article argues current AI panic is a multi-actor convergence, not necessarily a single coordinated psyop.

• It identifies incentives from researchers, companies, regulators, media, and politicians amplifying fear.

• The author warns regulation can entrench incumbents, suppress competition, and convert anxiety into moats.

• A 2025 PNAS study found existential AI fears increased without reducing concern about immediate harms.

• The piece urges focusing oversight on human operators and incentives, not only the technology itself.

AI fear may be real, but the bigger story is who profits from turning it into policy and power.

🅱️ It’s a sharp look at the regulatory racket. She isn’t just chasing ghosts; she’s showing how the wolves use the ‘danger’ to build a higher fence around their own territory. A solid breakdown of how fear becomes a moat.

Read the full original article here

Why Cops Was Ordered Off the Air in 2020

By: Jim Reynolds www.reynolds.com

Date: 2026-09-18 · Words: 958

• Networks pulled Cops, Live PD, and Body Cam in June 2020 amid anti-policing backlash.

• The article argues these shows exposed policing’s messy reality, complicating anti-cop narratives.

• It links Michael Brown, Jussie Smollett, and George Floyd to a broader mythmaking pattern.

• Defund-the-police politics, it says, helped fuel crime spikes and institutional distrust.

• The piece claims crime later fell as pro-police priorities returned, without accountability.

The story frames policing, media, and politics as a battle over what Americans are allowed to see.

🅱️ This isn’t just a history lesson; it’s an autopsy of a manufactured crisis. It connects the dots between the TV remote and the crime stats in a way that makes the ‘narrative’ look as hollow as it actually is.

Read the full original article here

You may also be interested in the following selected stories:

• Strangers On Native Soil — Lars Moller, American Thinker

• What Lessons Can We Learn from Wendell Berry? — Renaud Beauchard, Brownstone

• The Apocalyptic Game: Panic and Opportunity — Sasha Gong, American Greatness

• California Drags Pro-Lifers To Court For Crime Of ‘Offering Hope’ — Andrea Trudden, The Federalist

• What Is An American? The Civic Nationalists Have No Idea — John Daniel Davidson, The Federalist

• Quote of the day — Scott Johnson, Power Line

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Rip’s Newsletter

September 16, 2026

Compiled and Edited

by

Jim Reynolds

Articles in This Issue

Victor Davis Hanson - The Fantasy House of Mark Carney

Michael Smith Contributor - To Serve Man

Rusty Weiss - ‘I’m Not Kidding’: FBI Agent Tried to Prosecute Musk for Asking Gov’t Workers What They Did All Week

Jim Reynolds - When “Downtown” Meant Hanoi

Overview

Today’s set is about power, resentment, and the people who think rules are for other folks.

Mark Carney is treating a trade fight with the United States like a chance to run an anti-American campaign, while the FBI story shows how far the bureaucracy will go to protect itself from accountability, even when Elon Musk is the target.

On the other side, the “eat the rich” crowd keeps proving that envy is never just envy; it turns into a politics of punishment and dehumanization.

And the Vietnam piece reminds me that even in war, Americans found dark humor to survive the worst of it. Petula Clark’s 1960’s pop hit takes on a whole new meaning.

The Fantasy House of Mark Carney

By: Victor Davis Hanson American Greatness

Date: 2026-09-15 · Words: 1,732

Mark Carney is portrayed as escalating a trade dispute with the United States into a broader anti-American campaign, walking away from a near-complete tariff deal and framing Canada as resisting U.S. “bullying” while offering no clear documentation for his rejected terms. The article argues that Carney’s rhetoric masks Canada’s dependence on the U.S. market and military, its trade surplus with America, and its vulnerability to retaliation, while also highlighting Canada’s growing alignment with China through new agreements on travel, visas, food safety, energy, and security. It criticizes Carney for condemning U.S. trade practices while embracing a communist regime accused of dumping goods, violating intellectual property, and threatening regional security. The piece says Carney’s posture is driven less by strength than insecurity, domestic political calculation, and an effort to suppress separatist pressures in Alberta and Quebec while influencing U.S. midterm politics. It warns that the strategy will likely backfire by damaging Canadian workers and businesses, hardening American opinion, and exposing Carney as hypocritical if he later seeks to resume negotiations.

Carney’s gamble could reshape North American trade, deepen Canada’s dependence on China, and turn a political stunt into lasting economic and diplomatic damage.

🅱️ Hanson isn’t just writing an op-ed; he’s reading a death warrant for Canadian sovereignty. It’s a sharp, sobering look at how globalist vanity plays games with real-world stability. He’s laying out the receipts before the house of cards collapses.

Read the full original article here

To Serve Man

By: Michael Smith Contributor The Patriot Post

Date: 2026-09-16 · Words: 957

Michael Smith’s satirical essay recasts the slogan “Eat the Rich” as a logical endpoint of socialist envy politics, arguing that calls to tax, regulate, and redistribute wealth ultimately become a dehumanizing impulse to eliminate the wealthy. He mocks the idea that inequality can be “solved” by consuming billionaires, then traces how the definition of “rich” would inevitably expand from trillionaires to millionaires and even ordinary homeowners. The piece argues that such redistributionist thinking ignores how wealth is created through entrepreneurship, investment, and capital formation, and that destroying those incentives would reduce jobs, investment, tax revenue, and overall prosperity. Smith frames the satire as a modern “A Modest Proposal,” using exaggeration to expose the moral and economic contradictions in progressive rhetoric. He closes by noting that the real lesson is to make opponents’ premises indict themselves rather than merely insulting them.

This story matters because it uses sharp satire to challenge the logic of envy-driven economic politics and the costs of treating wealth creation as a moral crime.

🅱️ A sharp bit of satire that uses the enemy’s own logic to lead them straight into the meat grinder. It’s a clean, cold look at how envy becomes an industry—just don’t be surprised when the hungry crowd eventually turns its eyes toward your own plate.

Read the full original article here

‘I’m Not Kidding’: FBI Agent Tried to Prosecute Musk for Asking Gov’t Workers What They Did All Week

By: Rusty Weiss RedState

Date: 2026-09-15 · Words: 699

Internal emails released by the Senate Judiciary Committee show that an FBI agent in 2025 urged colleagues to open a criminal case against Elon Musk after DOGE asked federal employees to list five accomplishments from the prior week. Then-Special Agent Kevin Gounaud argued that Musk and OPM officials had wasted government time, violated information-security rules, and improperly used X to circulate the request, even comparing the episode to Hillary Clinton’s email practices. He wrote that he was “happy” to draft the case-opening paperwork and find a prosecutor, adding, “No, I am not kidding.” Sen. Chuck Grassley used the email at a hearing with FBI Director Kash Patel to argue that some in the bureau had tried to target Trump allies, though there is no indication an investigation ever began. Musk’s directive, issued in line with Trump’s instructions, had warned federal workers that failure to respond would be treated as a resignation.

This story matters because it highlights how a routine management demand inside government became a flashpoint in the broader fight over federal bureaucracy, political bias, and the weaponization of law enforcement.

🅱️ A perfect snapshot of the administrative state’s meltdown when accountability meets a spreadsheet. It shows exactly how the ‘Deep State’ tries to weaponize law against anyone asking where the tax dollars actually went.

Read the full original article here

When “Downtown” Meant Hanoi

By: Jim Reynolds www.reynolds.com

Date: 2026-09-16 · Words: 810

American F-105 pilots in Vietnam turned Petula Clark’s cheerful 1964 hit “Downtown” into dark gallows humor for missions over Hanoi, where “Downtown” became their code word for the most dangerous target in North Vietnam. The article centers on Captain Gary Barnhill and other Thud pilots flying one-seat, one-engine F-105s from Takhli and Korat, living in spartan conditions and facing dense air defenses, SAMs, MiGs, and the real possibility of death or capture on every sortie. A jukebox repeatedly playing “Downtown” in the officers’ club crystallized the irony: lyrics about going downtown alone and finding bright lights and everything waiting there mapped uncannily onto combat reality. Decades later, Barnhill says hearing the song again brought him to tears, because it had become inseparable from the fear, adrenaline, and memory of those missions.

The story shows how an ordinary pop song can be transformed by war into a lasting emotional trigger and a vivid shorthand for survival under fire.

🅱️ A masterclass in how a simple melody can carry the weight of a thousand ghosts. It takes a certain kind of steel to turn a pop hit into a war cry, and this piece delivers that weight without ever feeling heavy-handed.

Read the full original article here

You may also be interested in the following selected stories:

• Michigan Jab Opt-Out Policy Makes Parents Take Pro-Vax Course — Christopher Lloyd Goffos, The Federalist

• DOJ Goes After Berkeley For Discrimination Vs. White Applicants — Jay Rogers, The Federalist

• CA Cops Are Using Flock Cameras To Spy On A Small WI Village — Dan Lennington, The Federalist

• It’s Not A Bribe When The Dems Do It — Luis Gonzalez, American Thinker

• The Village Formerly Known as Piddington… — John Hinderaker, Power Line

• ☕️ DISCLOSED ☙ Wednesday, September 16, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠 — Jeff Childers, www.coffeeandcovid.com

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Rip’s Newsletter

September 14, 2026

Compiled and Edited

by

Jim Reynolds

Articles in This Issue

Joseph Varon - Medicine Has Forgotten How to Touch the Patient

Roger Kimball - The Madness of the Anti-AI Crowd

Brian C Joondeph - The Transgender Mirage Is Cracking

Jim Reynolds - The Coalition That Hates Trump

Overview

I’m seeing the same pattern across these pieces: institutions that were supposed to tell the truth are selling fantasies instead.

Medicine has traded bedside judgment for screens and templates, the anti-AI crowd is pushing another moral panic, and the human-rights industry keeps choosing the politically useful victim over the real one.

The transgender craze is cracking because biology does not bend to slogans, and that matters because every one of these fights is really about whether reality still has a vote.

Medicine Has Forgotten How to Touch the Patient

By: Joseph Varon Brownstone

Date: 2026-09-13 · Words: 3,600

• Medicine increasingly substitutes tests and documentation for direct bedside examination.

• Experienced clinicians often detect deterioration before labs or imaging confirm it.

• Electronic records and screens consume attention, reducing meaningful patient face time.

• Physical examination remains an evidence-based diagnostic tool, not obsolete ritual.

• Touch and examination also build trust, reassurance, and therapeutic connection.

Medicine matters most when technology serves bedside judgment, not replaces it.

🅱️ This isn’t just a lecture on bedside manner; it’s a warning about the slow death of human intuition. It captures that hollow feeling when you realize your doctor spent more time with a screen than with your actual life. A vital reminder that data isn’t the same thing as truth.

Read the full original article here

The Madness of the Anti-AI Crowd

By: Roger Kimball American Greatness

Date: 2026-09-13 · Words: 1,263

• The essay frames anti-AI panic as another recurring mass delusion, akin to historical moral epidemics.

• It argues modern panics are often amplified by foreign actors and domestic enforcers.

• Sanders and Casar’s proposed AI moratorium is mocked as draconian, politically useful theater.

• A former Anthropic employee’s AI-doom warnings are presented as overblown and media-fueled hysteria.

• The author says AI is an extension of technological progress, and regulation should not cripple American innovation.

This story matters because it argues AI fear is being weaponized to slow U.S. technological leadership.

🅱️ Kimball connects the dots between old-school hysteria and modern power grabs. It’s a sharp reminder that when the state starts preaching ‘safety’ through regulation, they’re usually just looking for a way to grab the steering wheel. A solid reality check for anyone still buying the latest panic-peddlers.

Read the full original article here

The Transgender Mirage Is Cracking

By: Brian C Joondeph American Thinker

Date: 2026-09-14 · Words: 1,054

• The article argues transgender ideology has overridden biology, science, and common sense for years.

• It says the greatest scandal involves children, especially medicalizing normal adolescent distress.

• The author criticizes puberty blockers and hormones as harmful, irreversible, and insufficiently evidence-based.

• He notes several European countries have restricted pediatric gender medicine and favored psychotherapy.

• The piece frames the issue as ideology silencing dissent, while reality is forcing reconsideration.

This story matters because it challenges a powerful medical and cultural consensus shaping children’s lives and irreversible decisions.

🅱️ This isn’t just an op-ed; it’s a post-mortem of a delusion. It hits the hard truths that the professional class is too terrified to touch, delivered with the steady hand of someone who actually knows what a doctor’s oath means.

Read the full original article here

The Coalition That Hates Trump

By: Jim Reynolds www.reynolds.com

Date: 2026-09-14 · Words: 1,648

• Reynolds argues Democrats are united mainly by hatred of Trump, not shared governing principles.

• El-Sayed’s evasive interview is presented as a model of coalition maintenance through ambiguity.

• The coalition spans incompatible factions: progressives, unions, activists, donors, and religious groups.

• Reynolds compares this dynamic to Iran’s anti-Shah revolution, where enemy-first unity masked future conflict.

• He warns Trump’s exit will expose unresolved Democratic battles over Israel, gender, speech, and capitalism.

This story matters because it argues Trump’s absence could reveal the Democratic coalition’s deepest contradictions.

🅱️ This isn’t just a political takedown; it’s a post-mortem of a coalition that hasn’t realized it’s already dead. It uses the Iranian revolution like a scalpel to show that when you build a house solely to burn down your neighbor’s, you shouldn’t be surprised when the arsonists start fighting over the ashes.

Read the full original article here

You may also be interested in the following selected stories:

• The Human Rights Industry Has a Favorite Kind of Victim — Pierre Rehov, The Gatestone Institute

• Betty Friedan’s Warning: What She Understood—and What We Got Wrong — Spyridon Andrews, American Greatness

• Red States Are Replacing Woke Colleges With Real Education — Mark Bauerlein, The Federalist

• 12/11, Like 9/11, Was A Disaster For The West — Steven Tucker, The Federalist

• The Carney Rowboat Versus the Trump Aircraft Carrier — Peter Navarro, peternavarro.substack.com

• ☕️ BREAD AND CIRCUITS ☙ Saturday, September 12, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠 — Jeff Childers, www.coffeeandcovid.com

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Special Edition

RFK Jr.’s Address to the RNC

By: Jim Reynolds

www.reynolds.com

September 11, 2026

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.

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.

Jim: If you would like to read my analysis of this important speech, please go here:

Reynolds

RFK Jr.’s Address to the RNC

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…

Read more

a month ago · 5 likes · Jim Reynolds

Please go to www.reynolds.com to see more of Jim’s articles.

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Rip’s Newsletter

September 11, 2026

Compiled and Edited

by

Jim Reynolds

Articles in This Issue

John Daniel Davidson - 9/11 Exposed The Weakness Of A Post-Christian West

Kevin McCullough - A Month of Remembrance

Alex Berenson - Another day, another terrible anniversary

Chris Bray - Stories About 9/11 Are Stories About Shared Identity And Mutuality

Overview

Today’s pieces circle the same hard truth: memory is never neutral, and the stories we tell about violence shape the politics that follow.

Several essays revisit 9/11 not just as a date of mourning, but as a test of whether the West still understands the nature of the threats it faces and the bonds that hold a nation together.

Others widen the frame to show how grief, hatred, and ideology can turn anniversaries into warnings about what happens when civic trust frays.

What runs through all of them is a tension between remembrance as ritual and remembrance as responsibility.

9/11 Exposed The Weakness Of A Post-Christian West

By: John Daniel Davidson The Federalist

Date: 2026-09-11 · Words: 749

A quarter-century after 9/11, the article argues that American elites still misunderstand the attacks as a geopolitical or material problem rather than a religious war the West is losing.

It says the post-9/11 response was shaped by secular liberal assumptions that reduced cultural and religious differences to economics, foreign policy, or governance, leading to regime-change wars, nation-building, and expanded Muslim immigration.

The piece contends that these policies failed because they ignored the reality that the West’s tolerance and neutrality were products of a specifically Christian civilization, not universal secular principles.

It also argues that efforts to export Western democracy to the Muslim world and import large numbers of Muslims into the West have both exposed the limits of multiculturalism and assimilation.

The author concludes that America should stop treating itself as a blank slate and instead recover an explicitly Christian understanding of national identity and moral order.

Read the full original article here

A Month of Remembrance

By: Kevin McCullough Townhall

Date: 2026-09-10 · Words: 1,189

The column links three September-October anniversaries—Charlie Kirk’s killing on Sept. 10, 9/11, and the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre—as reminders of how hatred turns grievance into mass murder.

McCullough argues that while America has become adept at killing terrorists, it has not solved the deeper problem of terrorism because the real battleground is the human heart.

He frames Kirk’s public witness to Jesus Christ as a model for addressing the spiritual roots of violence, insisting that the Gospel offers forgiveness, repentance, and transformation where revenge and ideology demand blood.

The piece says force is sometimes necessary to stop evil, but stopping killers is not the same as defeating the hatred that produces them.

It closes by urging Christians and ordinary citizens to interrupt isolation and radicalization early—through friendship, church, truth-telling, and forgiveness—before anger hardens into violence.

Read the full original article here

Another day, another terrible anniversary

By: Alex Berenson alexberenson.substack.com

Date: 2026-09-11 · Words: 805

The essay argues that unlike slow historical collapses, Sept. 11 was a world-changing event driven by one man, Osama bin Laden, whose small network exploited passenger jets as mass-casualty weapons and forced a lasting American response.

It says the attacks did not devastate the U.S. in military terms, but they did supercharge domestic surveillance, create the Department of Homeland Security, and push the country into two wars.

The author contends Iraq, despite its origins, ended in a more stable and democratic outcome, while Afghanistan became a costly, futile quagmire that produced dead soldiers, rich contractors, and no durable state-building success.

He argues that the dishonesty and exhaustion surrounding those wars helped fuel Donald Trump’s rise, and that the anger behind that movement will outlast Trump himself.

Even with bin Laden dead, al Qaeda diminished, and a new World Trade Center tower standing, the article says Sept. 11 still shapes American politics and security.

Read the full original article here

Stories About 9/11 Are Stories About Shared Identity And Mutuality

By: Chris Bray The Federalist

Date: 2026-09-11 · Words: 781

The article argues that the most revealing stories about 9/11 are not only about terror and loss, but about the older American habit of seeing strangers as “us.” It opens with the 1919 Transcontinental Motor Convoy, where soldiers crossing the country were met by towns that treated them like honored guests, as evidence of a once-common sense of shared identity and mutual pleasure in hosting one another.

The piece then contrasts that civic warmth with the immediate, self-sacrificing behavior seen on 9/11, when civilians, firefighters, and boat owners repeatedly risked or gave their lives to help others without waiting for orders.

It emphasizes that this response was spontaneous and ruleless, driven by instinctive solidarity rather than duty or coercion.

The author closes by asking what kind of culture exists now, and whether Americans today would respond to a future attack with the same mutuality.

Read the full original article here

You may also be interested in the following selected stories:

• A Disgrace To The 9/11 Victims — Don Brown, American Thinker

• Securing The Skies Before The Next 9/11 — Arik Arad, American Thinker

• 9/11 Was The Beginning Of A Religious War That We Lost — John Daniel Davidson, The Federalist

• Name the Enemy: The 25th Anniversary of 9/11 Still Demands It — Fred Fleitz, American Greatness

• Twenty-Five Years Later: The Warnings Still Remain — Lawrence Kadish, The Gatestone Institute

• I Lived Through 9/11 As A New Yorker. Here’s What I Saw — Pablo Kleinman, The Federalist

• My Son Had Six Weeks to Learn Two Years of Saxon Math. We Used AI. — DataRepublican, datarepublican.substack.com

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