Rip’s Newsletter

August 28, 2026

Compiled and Edited

Jim Reynolds

Articles in This Issue

Victor Davis Hanson - The New WWE—Women’s Wrestling Entertainment

Joseph Varon - America’s Drug Shortage Is a National Security Crisis

Josh Hammer - Clarence Thomas Played the Long Game. He Won.

Jim Reynolds - The Case

Overview

I’m struck by how this set keeps circling the same fault lines: power, scarcity, and the cost of institutional failure.

One piece looks at the culture-war spectacle around women’s sports, another treats drug shortages as a national security problem, and a third revisits Clarence Thomas as a study in patience, resilience, and political vindication.

Tying it together is a broader argument about who gets protected, who gets ignored, and which systems are still working when the pressure is on.

Note: Yet another way to present the articles. Here I let the author introduce the article in his own words. Let me know what you think. Personally, I like each of the variations: bullets, paragraph summary, separate sentences, and author intro.

The New WWE—Women’s Wrestling Entertainment

By: Victor Davis Hanson American Greatness

Date: 2026-08-27 · Words: 868

A better name for the current Women’s National Basketball League (WNBA) might be Women’s Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), given the growing performance-art violence that is now endemic in the league. Prior to the 2024 arrival of then-22-year-old Iowa superstar Caitlin Clark, very few people watched the WNBA. Team franchises were worth less than $20 million. The league ran chronic deficits and was subsidized by the men’s professional basketball league, the National Basketball Association (NBA).

An unspoken subtext of the WNBA was that the owners and coaches were left-wing and made little effort to hide their political biases. Despite talk of diversity, the league was—and remains—about 83 percent nonwhite and about 70 percent black. Some media outlets have suggested that about 50 percent of the players are gay.

By Clark’s third year, her level of play had revolutionized the WNBA—or rather, saved it from financial collapse and cultural obscurity. Economists have concluded that she has already infused $1 billion into the league through increased attendance, new media contracts, endorsements and sponsorships, and sports tourism. Once-obscure players are now pampered and highly compensated. Team franchises are now more than 20 times as valuable. In Caitlin Clark’s mere three years, the average team market …

Read the full original article HERE

America’s Drug Shortage Is a National Security Crisis

By: Joseph Varon Brownstone

Date: 2026-08-28 · Words: 3,361

There is a phrase that no physician wants to hear when walking into an intensive care unit: “Doctor, we don’t have it.” I have heard variations of that phrase more times than I care to remember. Sometimes it is an antibiotic. Sometimes it is an intravenous medication that we use routinely. Sometimes pharmacy is conserving a drug because supplies are running dangerously low. In perhaps one of the most absurd examples of modern American medicine, sometimes the scarce commodity is not an exotic monoclonal antibody, an experimental cancer therapy, or a complicated biologic agent. It is a simple intravenous fluid.

Think about what that means. We practice medicine in a country capable of replacing heart valves through catheters, sequencing a human genome, performing robotic surgery, supporting failing lungs with extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, and developing entirely new classes of medications within a few years. Yet I can walk into an American intensive care unit caring for critically ill patients and discover that a basic medicine or fluid I have used for decades is unavailable.

The nurses know the drill, and the pharmacists know it even better. A message comes from pharmacy telling us to conserve a medication, use a different concentration, …

Read the full original article HERE

Clarence Thomas Played the Long Game. He Won.

By: Josh Hammer The American Spectator

Date: 2026-08-28 · Words: 816

An important new book by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Going Further, calls attention anew to the life and career of the single greatest living American, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

For many years after Thomas arrived on the court in the early 1990s, his conservative, originalist views were relegated to dissenting opinions. Three and a half decades later, Thomas, now the second-longest-serving justice in the court’s history, regularly finds himself in the majority.

Thomas, in short, has won the long game. But how? Thirty-five years ago, mainstream legal training and judicial practice suggested the proper way to interpret a legal document is to probe for nebulous concepts such as legislative history and legislative intent. It’s now hard to believe, but the commonsense notion that one should begin the interpretive exercise with a document’s text and plain meaning was pretty much unheard of.

Thomas … galvanized an intellectual revolution in American legal and judicial practice. Thomas, along with his then-colleagues Justice Antonin Scalia and Chief Justice William Rehnquist, galvanized an intellectual revolution in American legal and judicial practice. Today, law schools instruct students to begin the interpretive exercise with the text. In fact, this is hardly controversial. As the liberal Justice …

Read the full original article HERE

The Case

By: Jim Reynolds www.reynolds.com

Date: 2026-08-24 · Words: 845

Over the past 24-hour news cycle, the New York Times, Washington Post, and Guardian covered the same cluster of events—Iran sanctions, the Canada trade breakdown, border wall construction, ICE enforcement, and related political moves.

None of them simply reported what happened. Each systematically selected verbs, subjects, and angles that cast Trump administration actions as the primary source of danger, disruption, or moral failure.

The result is not information. It is persuasion.

Once you know what to look for—loaded verbs, selective humanization, diagnostic framing, and moral escalation—the pattern becomes unmistakable.

Here is the proof.

New York Times

The Times favors elegant pathos. It turns policy into individual misfortune and softens institutional language just enough to appear restrained.

In Building His Border Wall, Trump May Bring Down a 110-Year-Old Church — Start with the victim. Security policy comes second.

U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln Sailor Says Father Was Arrested by Border Patrol — A national enforcement policy becomes a deployed sailor’s family tragedy.

Trump Threatens Even Higher Tariffs on Canadian Exports After Talks Unravel — “Threatens” supplies the aggression. “Unravel” supplies the failure. …

Read the full original article HERE

You may also be interested in the following selected stories:

Opposition To Data Centers Isn’t What The Tech Right Thinks It Is — John Daniel Davidson, The Federalist
Patience Isn’t Just a Virtue. It’s a Business Model Washington Wants to Outlaw. — Jay Rogers, American Greatness
The Mohammunist ManifestoâPunishment of Apostasy and Defection — Milli Sands, American Thinker
The Cost of Belonging — Michael Mellette, American Thinker
Even the good news in American medicine comes with asterisks — Alex Berenson, alexberenson.substack.com
America’s New Scam?: Hamas Elections by Another Name is Still Hamas — Khaled Abu Toameh, The Gatestone Institute

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