If, as Shakespeare observed, “all the world is a stage, and all its men and women merely players,” no place is that truer than the modern American university.
In the first study of its kind, 88 percent of Northwestern and University of Michigan students admitted they “have pretended to hold more progressive views than [they] truly endorse to succeed socially or academically.” While the phenomenon of college students pretending to be more liberal than they actually are to make life easier for them as they attend these hotbeds of radicalism is not surprising, the true scale of it is.
But how have we got here? If you’re looking for a single explanation, I’m sorry to disappoint you. The modern college environment is a perfect storm of several factors working together.
Faculty and student demographics deserve some blame. It’s no secret that university professors across the country are overwhelmingly progressive. Student demographics are no better. Female enrollment at universities has reached record highs and 71 percent of female students at top American universities identify as liberal.
It’s hard enough to be your authentic self when that means risking either your social or your academic status. But for many conservatives on campus, it means risking both. We shouldn’t be surprised that conservative students keep their heads down and try to blend in. This also applies to students who are liberal – but not that liberal. After all, if a student supports a centralized economy, that does not logically require her to support gender ideology. But if all her friends claim to support gender theory, and if her professor does, she may find herself labeled an “outsider” merely for defending biological reality.
Social media makes this problem much worse. College students today navigate campus politics along with Instagram, TikTok, and online “cancel culture.” Cameras are everywhere, and everyone has social media followings. Going viral for all the wrong reasons is a nightmare.
Twenty years ago, a student could make a mistake or do something controversial without the whole campus knowing about it. And even if the whole campus knew, the whole country did not. But today, students who behave controversially often risk internet infamy in the process. Scandalous news spreads far and wide, and it often comes with a picture or video. Getting “canceled” today often means enduring threats, abuse and harassment from people who don’t attend your school and who never will.
You probably don’t know the name Marcus Stokes. But you probably should.
In 2022, Marcus Stokes was a white Florida high school senior and four-star quarterback prospect. He’d recently accepted a scholarship offer from the University of Florida. That changed when Stokes posted a video of himself singing a popular rap song that included a racial slur. The slur wasn’t directed at any individual; Stokes was just singing a rap song. But because the clip was only a few seconds long, it was devoid of context. Stokes obviously made a poor decision, but it did not justify what happened next.
Social media went ballistic, and sparked news stories from national outlets like Sports Illustrated, CBS and TMZ. Stokes briefly became a national villain whose face was plastered across the internet because he dared to sing a popular rap song. Predictably, Stokes immediately lost his scholarship to Florida.
Two months later, Stokes received a new scholarship offer from Albany State, a historically black university. That should have been the end of things. Instead, the internet browbeat Albany State’s football program for four straight days. Finally, Albany State’s head coach publicly apologized for recruiting Stokes and he revoked Stokes’s scholarship offer.
Now, you may think that Stokes deserved what he got. But even if that’s the case, Mary Kate Cornett certainly didn’t. Cornett is a 19-year-old student at the University of Mississippi. Cornett became an unwilling internet celebrity this year when she was accused of sleeping with her boyfriend’s dad. The story absolutely blew up on social media. There was just one problem: the story was completely false.
The Cornett rumor came from YikYak, an app that lets users anonymously circulate gossip. But the rumor’s shaky foundation didn’t stop millions of internet users, including national talk shows, from spreading it. Think about that for a second. An anonymous internet rumor with zero evidence destroyed a 19-year-old girl’s reputation in a matter of days. If you’re a college student, do you really want to risk angering the wrong person by challenging their beliefs?
While these rumors merely destroy reputations, getting “canceled” for political reasons often involves physical threats. At the University of Texas, for example, a liberal student group threatened and attempted to doxx incoming UT freshman who supported Trump. These threats are not empty, either. Earlier this year, masked protestors disrupted a TPUSA event at UC Berkeley, assaulted the conservative students and destroyed their tent. It’s hard for a student to own their beliefs when they don’t feel safe doing so.
That brings me to the third problem: weak administrators. Romm and Waldman conducted their study between 2023 and 2024. During that period, pro-Palestine students at Northwestern and Michigan engaged in protests that were often contentious, violent and downright riotous. Both universities indulged these protests for weeks or even months. At Michigan, for example, the university allowed a “pro-Palestine encampment” to exist for almost a month. The university stood by while the protests “descended into violence” and the protestors led “assault[s] on law enforcement officers” (Those are University of Michigan President Santa Ono’s words, not mine). The university finally broke up the encampment because it violated Michigan’s fire code.
Northwestern indulged a similar encampment and sent faculty members to negotiate with the protestors rather than involve the police. The university’s Dean of Students “attended an anti-Israel protest… targeting Hillel, the school’s Jewish student community center.” And some Northwestern professors dispensed with class attendance requirements and offered make up classes. The University responded merely by “convey[ing] with departments and programs that this is not appropriate.” Northwestern behaved so badly that the Department of Education opened an investigation against the university, citing “widespread antisemitic harassment.”
When you combine all three elements, you give college students the following message: Your professors and peers all hold certain beliefs. If you challenge those beliefs, then your academic, personal, and professional life may suffer. In fact, you may wake up and find national television hosts discussing horrible (and fake) rumors about you. Your fellow students may even physically assault you. After all, 33 percent of Northwestern students believe violence is justified “to stop a campus speech.” And throughout all of this, the administration will probably sit on its hands.
Put yourself in a 18-year old student’s shoes. How often would you speak up?
Category: Politics
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The students bullied into being woke
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Stop the Medicaid ambulance grift
With Congress back in their districts for the August recess, GOP members will undoubtedly be bragging to their base about the Medicaid abuses they stopped by passing President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. These reforms include enrollment reductions and new work requirements for enrollees.
However, many Members are hoping that no one calls them out for failing to address an intergovernmental transfer grift. This little-known accounting trick has turned this basic entitlement program into a bloated scam that enriches public agencies while squeezing out private providers.
In theory, many of the services Medicaid covers, such as emergency ambulance rides, officially known as Ground Emergency Medical Transport (GEMT), should be straightforward. Someone calls 911, an ambulance arrives and someone gets paid. It should be a clean transaction, one that reflects the actual cost of service. But that is not what happens.
The problem starts when public ambulance agencies file inflated cost reports to state Medicaid offices, claiming that a single ride costs as much as $1,600. In reality, private providers perform the same service for about $339. The state uses the inflated figure to extract extra federal funding, then hands the surplus to local governments. None of it improves care. It is a rigged operation that rewards false accounting, punishes honest providers and burns through taxpayer dollars.
Many of these public entities do not even operate ambulances. They subcontract the work to private companies, then skim the excess funding for unrelated local spending.
Private providers do not have access to this scheme. They bill Medicaid based on fixed rates and get paid for services rendered. They cannot inflate their books or use transfers to game reimbursements.
This is not an accident. It’s collusion. Public agencies have formed a closed loop with state Medicaid offices. They submit inflated costs, receive enhanced reimbursements and funnel the money wherever they choose.
Private ambulance companies, meanwhile, are left to survive in a distorted market. To stay afloat, they cut wages, reduce staff and extend equipment usage longer than necessary. Service quality drops. Morale declines. Lawsuits follow. Plaintiff attorneys pounce. Insurance costs surge. States respond with half-measures, such as tort reform, but nothing changes because the core distortion remains untouched.
That is what the One Big Beautiful Bill ignored. Worse, it may have expanded the imbalance, creating even more favorable reimbursement schemes for the government’s preferred players.This is not market failure. It is a government-manufactured failure. The GEMT scheme is one example (likely out of tens of thousands) that shows how federal programs, once hijacked by local actors, produce outcomes that defy logic and destroy market discipline. It reveals how dysfunction is tolerated, even protected, in the name of political favoritism and cronyism. And it proves that despite all the media noise about oligarchy, it is bureaucracy that is bleeding the system dry.
The irony is that the media rarely touch it. Activists rail against corporate greed and so-called late-stage capitalism, yet here is a textbook case of bureaucratic capture. Public entities use private contractors, overcharge taxpayers and hide behind paperwork.
California is a prime example. The state aggressively uses the Intergovernmental Transfer (IGT) scheme to draw down massive reimbursements from Washington. While the Biden administration claimed to support tax relief for private providers, it gave California approval to collect more than ten times the IGT payments of any other state. In the private sector, a scheme like this would land you in prison.
There is a fix: reimbursement parity. If an ambulance ride costs $339, then every provider, public or private, should be paid $339. Or tie the rate to a regional wage index. But stop allowing inflated reports. Stop allowing backdoor subsidies. Require transparent cost reporting. State governments should not be allowed to overpay themselves so blatantly with federal funds or curry favor through these schemes while punishing the providers who actually deliver the care.Medicaid is already the largest line item in many state budgets. Members should tout their success in the OBB, but they can’t pretend like the job is done.
The GEMT program is budget laundering masquerading as healthcare. It erodes trust, wastes resources, and drives out the most efficient players. Congress should make fixing it a priority when they return to DC. -
US ‘covert ops’ in Greenland
A crack has developed in the NATO alliance, but surprisingly it has nothing to do with Ukraine. On Wednesday, the Danish foreign minister summoned the American envoy to answer for allegations that US citizens were carrying out covert influence operations in Greenland. According to reports, the men were seeking to incept a Greenlandic liberation movement meant to “pave the way for a US takeover” of the world’s largest island. They compiled lists of potential secessionist recruits who would support becoming part of the United States, going so far as to cultivate contacts during repeat visits to Greenland. Research was also done into those on the island who may fervently oppose such an alteration of the status quo, a far less routine action. Additionally, the men trolled for stories from locals that paint Danish control in a negative light, hoping to promote division and discord.
Although the men were not named in the thoroughly-sourced Danish media report, other outlets have since made guesses as to their identities. Interestingly enough, the two most-named men both have ties to the Trump administration. One, businessman Tom Dans, was an Arctic advisor during the first Trump term and runs a nonprofit promoting closer ties with Greenland. The other, Drew Horn, was a Republican advisor and now leads a rare earth minerals company. Each have made visits to Greenland since January, when Trump was inaugurated. Both America and Denmark agree that the men in question were acting as private citizens, but Washington has not denied their informal connections to the administration nor disavowed their purported mission. Instead, the president’s press team has told the Danes to “calm down” and not overreact to the incident.
This controversy comes after months of back-and-forth over the future of the semi-autonomous Danish possession, with the Trump administration desiring American control of Greenland for economic and security purposes. As is becoming fairly commonplace with this president, this is a good idea, but sorely lacks in execution.
Greenland’s geographic location makes it a key cog in America’s defense architecture, controlling access into the Atlantic from the north or the Arctic from the south. It sits astride the most likely path for Russian nuclear missiles heading toward the continental United States and already hosts an important American military presence at Pituffik Space Base. It is rife with unexploited fossil fuel reserves and hosts one of the biggest rare earth mineral deposits on the planet. As Arctic shipping becomes more cost-effective, Greenland will be primed to exploit it. It is sparsely populated and lightly defended by a Danish government that sits thousands of miles away. And it is rapidly becoming a geopolitical battleground.
Both China and Russia have significantly grown their Arctic presence in the past few years, seeking avenues for economic growth, power projection, and militarization. Behind Canada, Russia hosts the longest Arctic coastline and has traditionally been the power most engaged in the region, especially for military purposes. China has no Arctic connection to speak of, but this has not stopped Beijing from building icebreakers and conducting suspect “research” trips in the region, usually near American territory. China has also encroached into Greenland, seeking mining rights, economic concessions, and political influence. Denmark, as a small European nation, is simply unprepared to deal with these rising threats.
The Danes have recognized this reality, signing new agreements with the US on Greenlandic defense. But this is not enough. American security in a newfound era of great power conflict relies in part on Greenland. It can either serve as the Western Hemisphere’s soft underbelly or it can become an unsinkable aircraft carrier and bulwark against enemy belligerence.
American policymakers should prefer the latter. The US is better positioned to bring Greenland into the 21st-century economic and security architecture; it has more money to spend on defense, it is more implicated by an unstable Greenland, it has greater ability to extract resources, and it can do more to improve the lives of Greenlanders. By ramping up Washington’s military presence, including stationing ballistic missile defenses therein, the security of both Greenland and America will be greatly enhanced.
Hosting troops is no guarantee of future cooperation or integration, as the US recently found out vis a vis the critical Diego Garcia airbase in the Chagos Archipelago, which the UK unnecessarily transferred to Mauritian sovereignty – a nation heavily infiltrated by Beijing. Denmark does not seem to be on this path, but politics can change in an instant. A greater degree of US control is required to avoid that outcome.
America has a long history of peaceful territorial expansion. Indeed, there have been multiple attempts to purchase Greenland itself, notably by Harry Truman in 1946. But American objectives do not necessitate annexation. Greater influence could be found with a joint US-Denmark condominium over the island, a permanent lease agreement, or a Compact of Free Association with an independent Greenland, similar to those Washington has with a variety of Pacific islands. All would be challenging for Copenhagen to accept, but there is potential here.
Denmark could retain mineral royalties, earning millions annually on exploration that US companies carry out. It could allow the Danes to focus on Europe and become a leader in NATO’s continental defense. And it would save Danish taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in annual subsidies paid to Greenland. For Greenlanders, greater US influence would vastly improve their standard of living, including through direct annual payments, interest in resource exploitation, and the power of the American passport.
This would be a win-win outcome. And yet the Trump team has seemingly found a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Denmark is a solid NATO ally. It should be treated as such, even if America desires something that Copenhagen may be hesitant to provide. If the president really does want America to expand its Greenlandic presence – and he should – his tactics need updating. As the old adage says, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.
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Is RFK Jr. Trump’s Achilles’ heel?
Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s quest to prove himself President Donald Trump’s most destructive Cabinet member continues apace.
On Wednesday, the Department of Health and Human Services abruptly announced that “Susan Monarez is no longer director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.” She had been nominated to the key post in March, and actually served in it for less than a month. Shortly after that, Monarez’s lawyers issued a fiery statement asserting that she had neither been fired, nor resigned, and was being targeted by Kennedy for refusing to “rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives,” and help him weaponize “public health for political gain.”
Shortly after that, the White House announced that Monarez had officially been relieved of her duties. Several other top CDC officials – including its chief medical officer – subsequently resigned in protest.
The proximate cause of the Kennedy-Monarez showdown was reportedly the latter’s refusal to support the former’s push to rescind approvals for coronavirus vaccines. According to The Washington Post, Kennedy and his team grilled the short-lived director on Monday over her alignment – or lack thereof – with his effort “to change vaccine policy.”
That is, of course, quite the euphemism. Kennedy has spent decades advancing a novel’s worth of anti-vaccine conspiracy theories. The founder and former leader of “Children’s Health Defense,” the organization behind the instant classic Vaxxed III: Authorized to Kill, Kennedy once boasted that, “I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, ‘Better not get them vaccinated.’”
Samoan authorities blame him for a 2019 measles outbreak that claimed the lives of more than 80 people. As the families of the victims picked up the pieces, Kennedy suggested that a “defective vaccine” may have been to blame.
To win a fraught confirmation fight earlier this year, Kennedy adopted a simple, time-honored strategy: he lied.
“All of my kids are vaccinated, I’ve written many books on vaccines, my first book in 2014, the first line of it is ‘I am not anti-vaccine’ and the last line is ‘I am not anti-vaccine,’” he insisted at the outset of his hearing before the Senate Finance Committee. The missing context is that he had said he would “do anything” and “pay anything” to go back in time and change his own kids’ vaccination status. Asked about his incendiary past claims about the CDC, he denied having ever compared the agency’s actions to “Nazi death camps” and the Catholic Church’s “pedophile scandal.” It’s public record that he did exactly that.
The Kennedy now running the federal government’s largest Cabinet department has – surprise, surprise – better resembled the kook who walked into his confirmation hearing rather than the moderate victim of a smear campaign he portrayed himself as during it. Despite the empty promise to Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), a medical doctor and stalwart vaccine advocate, during the confirmation process, Kennedy has worked tirelessly to undermine public trust in vaccines during his short tenure at the top of HHS. In June, he fired every member of the federal Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, decrying the federal panel as a “rubber stamp” for vaccines, and announced that the administration would deny Gavi, an international vaccine agency, funding. Then, earlier this month, Kennedy announced that the second Trump administration would either cancel or alter all of its existing mRNA vaccine projects. The first Trump administration, of course, championed Operation Warp Speed, the expedited research and approval process that led to the development of several safe and effective coronavirus vaccines in a matter of only a few months. Trump himself hailed that effort as “one of the greatest achievements ever” only a few days ago.
By now, Kennedy’s playbook is no mystery. Surely, if not so slowly, Kennedy is purging HHS of those who would forthrightly push back on his anti-vaccine agenda. He complains of rubber stamps for vaccines, but demands a rubber stamp for his every effort to undermine them.
The president and his allies ought to be alarmed. While Trump has cornered the Democrats on any number of issues – crime, gender ideology, immigration, etc. – by presenting himself as the moderate alternative to a party with ideas so extreme that they’re unrecognizable to most Americans, Kennedy’s actions put his boss in danger of being on the opposite end of this equation.
Trump lost the 2020 presidential election in large part because of the perception that he was not taking the Covid-19 pandemic seriously enough. Imagine the fallout if any significant number of American children die in an outbreak that could be reasonably attributed to Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism. Or the pandemonium that would ensue if Kennedy greeted another pandemic with inaction and a refusal to pursue a vaccine. Besides costing some untold number of lives, it would utterly destroy Trump’s presidency – and his legacy.
Kennedy’s appointment was a reward for his endorsement of the president last year. Trump rewards loyalty above all else, and views Kennedy as a dependable ally. But if he must suffer the embarrassment that is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on his team, he must not allow him free rein to continue to wreak havoc. To do so is to court a disaster so great as to dwarf every other controversy, mistake, and scandal Trump has survived to date. -
Kamala doesn’t deserve Secret Service detail
I served nearly a decade on Secret Service protective details. That included guarding the lives of President Bush and Obama as well as former presidents Clinton, Ford and Carter. From that vantage point, President Trump’s decision to end protection for former Vice President Kamala Harris is notable but not shocking. It returns her status to what the law sets as the default and reflects how the protective mission is managed in practice.
Federal law provides former vice presidents with Secret Service protection for six months after they leave office. After that window, the Secretary of Homeland Security can authorize temporary protection if conditions warrant it. That is the baseline professionals in the field plan around.
In Harris’s case, coverage continued beyond six months because it had been extended. The new directive ends that extra period on September 1, 2025, which brings her back to the legal default rather than cutting short a statutory entitlement. That distinction matters when judging the decision.
In recent years, the Secret Service has faced mounting strain as the number of protectees has grown well beyond historical norms. Political polarization, heightened threats against public officials and extended protection for family members have all expanded the agency’s protective footprint. This increase has stretched manpower, required more overtime and limited resources available for investigative and training functions. Agents are often diverted from traditional missions such as financial crimes or cyber investigations, underscoring how expanded protection has reshaped the Service’s overall capacity.
What the headlines rarely capture is the operational math. Each protectee requires advance teams, site surveys, command posts, communications, motorcades and constant coordination with local police. Resources are not unlimited. Returning to the statutory baseline is one way leaders preserve depth on the missions that matter most.
Extension decisions are always situational. Threat environment, travel profile and public visibility all factor in. I have seen extensions granted when the indicators supported it and I have seen details ramp down when risk normalized. The goal is not politics. It is matching coverage to credible risk while meeting other mandates.
Ending federal coverage does not mean someone is unprotected. Private security teams can deliver close protection, advance work, and threat monitoring scaled to a private citizen’s life. The best of these firms coordinate with local law enforcement and follow many of the same protective principles we used in government. It is not identical to a federal detail, but it can be highly effective.
One other point from inside the system. If a threat picture changes, the statute allows temporary protection to resume. That backstop exists so the government can surge again if the indicators justify it. The Service and DHS track those indicators even when a formal detail is not in place.
So how should readers interpret this moment? Harris received more than the baseline. The decision to end that extra period falls within established authority and longstanding practice. It may be contentious in the political arena, but from a protective operations standpoint it is a defensible call grounded in statute, precedent and resource stewardship.
The guidance is simple. Keep a professional security team in place, keep the threat assessment current, and keep communication lines open with local partners. That is how you stay both safe and practical once the federal detail steps back. -
Robin Westman and the unstoppable tide of ‘slop violence’
On Wednesday, doing my laundry, I decided to turn on the TV for the first time in decades. Breaking news: a school shooting in Minnesota. It’s been years since a story like this made me cry. How could you cry at every mention of gun violence when you live in a place like the Midwest? I have been aware of gun violence in schools since I was a child myself.
I remember first hearing about a school shooting when I was six years old. A little boy had shot his sister. I cried and cried and cried – I cried for the child that died, and I cried for the child who’d killed her. It remains one of my most traumatizing memories. The last shooting that made me cry was Sandy Hook. I was at dinner when a friend showed me Adam Lanza’s photo on his phone. Twenty first-graders dead.
I can still feel the way my stomach dropped to this day. I couldn’t imagine something so depraved, so impossibly evil. I have written many times before that I was certain Sandy Hook would be an inflection point. The whole country was. And yet, it wasn’t. The violence escalated, became more frequent, more perverse.
Inevitably, I grew numb to it.
But on Wednesday – on the first crisp fall day in Chicago – something in me broke. I cried until I threw up, the washing machine shaking.
Robin Westman, a 23-year-old, opened fire through the windows of Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Children as young as six and parishioners in their eighties were injured. It was a Mass celebrating the first day of the school year. An eight-year-old and a ten-year-old died where they sat in the pews. I would later learn that in long, rambling journals – written in English but transliterated into Cyrillic alphabet – Westman had quoted Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook killer.
“I’m scared and I don’t want to be here,” a child is heard saying on one of the Sandy Hook recordings.
“Well, you’re here,” Lanza answers, before the sound of gunfire.
On one of Westman’s guns, the same quotes appears: Well, you’re here.
This will be the last piece about school shootings I write. I don’t want to be part of this news cycle anymore. There is nothing left to learn. In 2022, I wrote that our violence problem is a nihilism problem – not only do I still believe this, I believe it’s accelerated, it’s warping under its own weight.
Shooters such as Eric Harris and Adam Lanza straightforwardly opposed civilization, life, the very concept of values itself. Yet murderers like Robert Crimo III, Natalie Rupnow, Solomon Henderson and now Robin Westman commit acts of what I can only call “slop violence.” It remains directed against life – against meaning – but it’s unfocused, chaotic, incoherent. They leave behind a pastiche of contradictory symbols and ideologies. They are radicalized, but in no particular direction. Their identities fragment across cyberspace. They worship school shooters and harbor deep existential fears about being forgotten. Westman’s manifesto was littered with this existential worry. There are teachers whose names I can’t remember, he wrote, but everyone remembers Adam Lanza.
Early rumor mill grist said that Westman may have been part of a domestic terrorism network called 764, a decentralized group known for targeting minors online, encouraging self-harm, and creating child sexual abuse material while promoting violence. One person claimed to have found a forum profile page linked to Westman suggesting involvement a loose collective of online trolls that floods comment sections with shock content, often using children’s media characters to spread disturbing material, like gore and CSAM (child sexual abuse material). Within 24 hours, this claim was debunked. But Westman represents the same cultural rot these groups embody: online spaces that operate on escalating transgression, recruiting through irony and memes, slowly desensitizing participants to violence and sexual abuse while encouraging them to document and share increasingly extreme content.
The response to these shootings has become as ritualized as the shootings themselves. Everyone descends like vultures to mine the tragedy for meaning or clout. On Wednesday at 11:41 a.m. CT, an editor sent me Westman’s YouTube page. By 11:42, it had been taken down. The first to archive the manifesto, to decode the symbols, to place the shooter within their taxonomies of violence – these become proud markers of insider knowledge. Within hours of the crime, self-proclaimed “researchers” – there was a time where I was one myself – compete to preserve what the platforms rush to erase. It’s a grotesque dance. The researchers treat each shooting like a new episode to analyze, transforming murder into content while bodies are still being counted.
“It’s a conspiracy,” some say – it’s the CIA. It’s Mossad. It’s Russian interference. People flood my messages every time something like this has happened, desperate for categories: “What subculture produced this?”
Did Westman kill because of gender identity issues? Because of exposure to gore? Pornography? Was it SSRIs? Religion or its absence? I don’t know. We are a sick country and I am disgusted. We confront something so fundamentally wrong that language fails. This isn’t random violence; it’s a darkness that stalks joy, that takes deliberate aim at the bonds between student and teacher, parent and child, neighbor and friend. There is a powerful impulse in our culture toward the desecration of innocence.
It manifests across a disturbing spectrum. On one end, you have the casual cruelty endemic to online spaces – the deliberate spoiling of wholesome media with slurs, violence and pornographic content, the reflexive cynicism greeting any genuine emotion. Move along the spectrum and you encounter the transformation of every space meant for happiness and entertainment into an ideological battlefield, the mockery of sacred traditions, the compulsive sexualization of childhood.
These aren’t isolated phenomena but symptoms of a deeper pathology: the inability to let anything remain unexploited. We view innocence not as something to protect but as a provocation to corrupt. At furthest end of this spectrum, where the logic of desecration reaches its ultimate expression, you have the murder of children at prayer.
I think about those children in the church on Wednesday morning. The first week of school – a time that should be filled with excitement about new teachers, new friends, new possibilities. Instead, they huddled under pews while bullets shattered the windows above them. They learned that there is no ground that violence won’t violate.
One student would go on to tell reporters, “We practice [what to do during a school shooting] every month, but not in church, only in the school.” Never at church.
The students at Annunciation Church learned what I learned at six, what every American child eventually learns: that they inhabit a world where darkness flourishes, again and again. The monster under your bed, the shadow person in your closet. Not because we lack the means to stop it, but because we lack the will.
Robin Westman will be studied, categorized and ultimately forgotten by most – just another entry in the database of American mass shooters. Maybe he’ll persist as a “saint” to online perverts and become anime fan art decorated with hearts and glitter, his crime abstracted into aesthetic objects divorced from the reality of children bleeding out on a church floor on the first day of school.
Amateur investigators will continue to trace connections, map influences, produce reports about radicalization pathways. Politicians will sound somber. Activists will say it’s the guns, it’s transgenderism, it’s small government, it’s big government. The media will move on within days. Robin Westman wanted to be remembered. He won’t be. He’ll be forgotten, absorbed into the statistical noise of American violence. The children he killed, though – their absence will echo forever in the lives of those who loved them. That’s the only memory that matters, the only truth worth preserving: not the names of killers, but the magnitude of what our culture has stolen from us, again and again, while we stand by and watch, and document, and dissect and post.
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Trump’s big Bolivia opportunity
After nearly two decades of reign over Bolivia, the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party was banished at the ballot box on August 17. Its fall is a dramatic political realignment to the right for Bolivians, and a rare opportunity for the United States to reform relations with a geopolitically critical nation. As one expert, Leonardo Coutinho, told us, “The Trump administration can not only contribute to the restoration of democracy but also play a central role in dismantling a fully functioning narco-state.”
Despite its 25 percent inflation rate and a 93 percent debt-to-GDP ratio, Bolivia is rich in natural resources, boasting some of the world’s largest lithium reserves, making it an attractive target for both American and Chinese grand strategies. Until now, the incumbent socialists aligned Bolivia with the anti-US alliance of China and Venezuela and created a lawless environment for cartels and criminal gangs to prosper. President Trump can reverse this to secure US supply chains and wound anti-American influence in a heavily contested theater.
Mining developments have stalled under MAS mismanagement and red tape. Backed by Beijing and its broader strategy to dominate technology-critical supply chains, Chinese firms greased the palms of MAS legislators to secure privileged access to more than a billion dollars’ worth of lithium. Regulations restrict American investors, forcing them to form joint ventures with state-owned firms, strangling American-capital inflows. Hypercentralized China, meanwhile, with its ability to deploy large sums of capital with little regard to short-term costs, has constantly secured billionaire investments. Competition for mining bids long shaped Bolivia’s political system, encouraging mass corruption in a nation reliant on mining for income. This has empowered China and stalled US growth.
Bolivia’s ousted socialist government had also long extended its hand to Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela. Worse yet, Venezuelan criminal elements have infiltrated Bolivia’s weak borders, turning it into a transit center for illicit activity, which has empowered the presence of Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang that the US Department of State rightly designated a foreign terrorist organization this year. Evo Morales and Luis Arce also transformed Bolivia into a hub of cocaine production by enacting laws that expanded coca cultivation. The resulting drug trade has not only fueled smuggling into the United States but has also undermined stability in Brazil, Argentina, and across the continent at large.
America First Policy Institute’s Melissa Ford Maldonado, who served as an electoral observer during the Bolivian election, told The Spectator that “This moment is not unique to Bolivia, but a part of a larger shift across our hemisphere.” She went on: “From Argentina to Ecuador, and now Bolivia, with elections ahead in Chile, Honduras, Costa Rica, Colombia, Brazil and beyond, people are turning away from the false promises of socialism and authoritarianism, and demanding real sovereignty, accountability, and change. The fight for democracy in the Americas may not be easy, but it is winnable, and it’s already happening.”
Leonardo Coutinho, the executive director of the western hemisphere-focused Center for a Secure Free Society adds that the US has the unique opportunity “to support Bolivia in a process of institutional reconstruction that frees it both from the ideological legacy of Bolivarianism and from the capture exercised by narcotrafficking across different dimensions of national life, ranging from the illicit economy to the presidency itself.” Coutinho warned, however, that the MAS leader Evo Morales “remains a relevant political force.”
To seize this opportunity, Trump must prepare a trade deal with Bolivia. In such a deal, Trump can leverage a current 15 percent reciprocal tariff, American development financing and access to the US market in exchange for US firms being allowed to acquire and operate mines in Bolivia.
Both viable MAS alternatives – Quiroga and Paz Pereira – appear open to this path. The task for Trump is simply to extend his hand while exerting the pressure needed to make it real. Coupled with this effort, the Trump administration can encourage renewed investigations into China’s lithium deals – leveraging the Bolivian case in its wider competition with the most formidable competitor the US has had in history.
The US’s diplomatic offensive, for which we still need a Senate-approved ambassador, should also push for renewed security partnerships to fight transnational terrorist organizations. Here, Trump can enlist the support of Argentine president Javier Milei, also the president of a once-leftist country leading a US realignment.
Such an approach would strengthen US credibility across South America and anchor Bolivia within a broader network of partners – providing a much-needed counterweight to the region’s socialist bloc.
Trump has the chance to pull Bolivia back into America’s orbit and set the stage for shared prosperity. With decisive action, he can lock down lithium supply chains, break the grip of cartels and open a new chapter for the region – one in which the US proves it can lead not only by putting itself first, but also by lifting its neighborhood with it.
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How Democrats failed Minneapolis
What happens after an unspeakable tragedy? One that comes on an idyllic late August day in Minneapolis that signaled the end of a barefoot summer and the beginning of back-to-school activities, reacquainting with friends, and easing back into a school schedule? For two families, it is the end of any normal life they had known. For countless other families whose children attended Annunciation Catholic School in a peaceful, leafy-treed neighborhood of the city, it marks a new life of contradiction: of being blessed that they are reunited with their loved ones and overwhelming grief at an inhuman, violent targeting of innocent life at its most sacred – within the walls of a church while at prayer.
It’s been difficult seeing the place where you were born, raised and now have a family of your own appear in the news time and again because of terrible events. I live a stone’s throw from the home I grew up in – where my parents still live, close to the high school from which my husband and I graduated, near the ball fields and ice-cream shops, and the little library that still retains its distinct 1970 aura I take my kids to now. But despite halcyon thinking that a place can maintain its natural cohesiveness and unchanging innocence, events like the horror at Annunciation jar you into reality.
The reality is that over the course of a few decades, the state has decided to pick sides, playing favorites in a game of politics, public policy and, now, life itself.
You see, somewhere along the way to actual governance in a judicious, fair-minded, and properly normal, rational process, Minnesota’s ruling hammer – the Twin Cities – decided it is more important to honor the empathetic feelings of a certain white, progressive, eminent class over the basic standards of law and order, equality and sanity.
With the slimmest of legislative margins (34-33 after the 2022 elections), a blowhard governor and a feckless opposition party, the Democrats passed a series of radical policies that stifled any semblance of normalcy – from legalizing abortion up to birth, to being a “Trans refuge” state (with full support from Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan), and allowing illegal aliens in the state to acquire a driver’s license.
When you’re a hammer, everything that doesn’t go along with your radical agenda is a nail – including safety for school kids not attending one of the state’s failing public schools. And now we’re seeing the tragic consequences. A 2023 letter to the Walz administration, signed by Tim Benz of MINNDEPENDENT and Jason Adkins of the Minnesota Catholic Conference, pleading for funding expansion to nonpublic schools for safety measures went unanswered, even in the midst of a nearly $18 billion state budget surplus. This despite his campaigning on a “One Minnesota” message and making the state, “The best state in the nation for kids to grow up in. Today, we’re turning that vision into reality.” What Walz envisioned is now a nightmare for the families of Annunciation, especially those of the eight- and 10-year-old children who a transgender-identifying individual murdered.
The failure becomes painfully clear when Minneapolis’ Mayor Jacob Frey admonishes those who bear the weight of the sufferers by praying. “Don’t just say this is about thoughts and prayers right now. These kids were literally praying,” Frey said. The one thing that someone feeling helpless in a hopeless situation can take on is an appeal to love over fear and good over evil.
Frey used his appearance on CNN to double down from an earlier press conference to make sure the murderer’s “identity” wasn’t a target of attack. “Anybody that is going to use this as an opportunity to villainize our trans community or any community, has lost touch with a common humanity…We need to be standing up for every community, our Catholic community too, by the way.” Frey told interviewer Erin Burnett. It’s so generous of the mayor to think of the victims as an afterthought while minimizing the pattern of destructive violence from the person who has special protection in the state according to his identity.
As a lifelong Minnesotan and one who has passed over career opportunities, better cost-of-living standards and certainly better weather to stay in a state where my family is rooted, it is difficult to bear these constant struggles with tragedy being excused by civic leaders who have no interest in making this place – especially the Twin Cities – a home for families who don’t want to be scolded for their religious practices, politics or way of life. We can no longer afford to believe our government will afford the same protection for us as it does for its political agenda. This is the reality of Minneapolis and the wider metro area, much as it is in many blue cities across the nation: it is up to us to keep alive the ideals of the past in a radically progressive era. Know your neighbors, keep your children close, and do not rely on the promises or rhetoric of politicians who unabashedly choose winners and losers based on political or ideological dogma. Listen to what they say; they’ve been telling us all along who they really are. Life is too precious to ignore them.
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Muriel Bowser’s praise for Donald Trump
Mayor Muriel Bowser has found herself in the middle of a political tightrope – and it’s one that many Democrats may soon have to walk. In response to rising crime and public unease, the Washington, DC Mayor acknowledged something few in her party dare to admit: that Donald Trump’s federal “surge” of law enforcement officers actually made the city safer.
“This federal surge has had a significant impact on crime in Washington, DC, and we greatly appreciate the surge of officers that enhance what MPD has been able to do in this city,” Bowser said at a press conference yesterday.
That single sentence captures the dilemma of the modern Democratic party. At a time when progressive leaders downplay crime concerns as either exaggerated or rooted in right-wing fear-mongering, Bowser’s comments cut against the grain. She gave credit where it was due – to Trump – while at the same time rejecting his proposal to send in the National Guard. It’s an approach that shows both independence and restraint, and it highlights the broader challenge facing Democrats: how to be tough enough on crime to reassure the public without conceding the narrative to their opponents.
The political class often gets stuck in a numbers game. In recent years, experts have pointed out that violent crime in DC has ebbed and flowed but is still lower than its early-1990s peak. Statistically, they’re right. But residents don’t live by long-term averages; they live by what they see on their block. In 2015, homicides in DC spiked by more than 50 percent compared to the year before. Robberies and assaults were also on the rise. You didn’t have to be a policy wonk to notice that the streets felt less safe.
Bowser recognized that reality. Her acknowledgment that the federal surge “had a significant impact” shows she understands that people want to feel safe – when they walk home from the Metro, when their kids play outside, when they close up shop at night. Leaders who dismiss those fears as paranoia are telling voters, in effect, not to trust their own eyes. That is a losing strategy.
At the same time, Bowser resisted Trump’s more heavy-handed solution: sending in the National Guard. On this point, she was absolutely right. Crime prevention is fundamentally a local responsibility. Residents expect their city officials and police department to take the lead, not the Pentagon. While a temporary boost from federal officers can help, relying on military deployment to patrol American streets sets a dangerous precedent. Conservatives, too, should be wary of normalizing that kind of federal overreach.
Bowser’s willingness to draw a line here is noteworthy. She didn’t fall into the trap of reflexive partisanship – she praised what worked, rejected what didn’t and staked out a nuanced position. That’s leadership, whether you agree with her politics or not.
Still, Bowser’s balancing act comes with risks. If residents continue to feel unsafe, they will credit Trump’s surge, not the mayor’s steady hand. Political perception mirrors public perception: voters reward whoever they believe made them safer, whether or not the data backs it up.
That means Bowser could find herself outflanked from both sides. Progressives may accuse her of caving to Trump, while conservatives will argue she only validated what they’ve been saying all along. But if she manages to keep crime under control without ceding local authority, she may point the way forward for Democrats in other cities who face the same dilemma.
The broader lesson is this: Democrats cannot afford to dismiss crime concerns as a manufactured talking point. Ordinary people don’t experience crime as an abstraction; they experience it as a daily reality that shapes their neighborhoods and their choices. If voters perceive that their leaders aren’t listening, they will turn to anyone who promises action – even if it’s a president they otherwise distrust.
Bowser deserves credit for not joining the reflexive chorus of her party that insists crime concerns are invented. She recognized both the value of additional officers and the danger of military overreach. In doing so, she threaded a needle that her fellow Democrats may eventually need to follow. -
Murder of the innocents in Minneapolis
For the second time in two years, a deranged assassin has committed a mass shooting at a Christian school in America. Like Audrey Hale, Robin Westman identified as transgender and once attended the school he attacked. In Minneapolis on Wednesday, Westman murdered two children and injured seventeen more people in a terrifying attack on the Annunciation Catholic School. Westman chose to target the children’s morning mass before turning a weapon on himself to commit suicide.
Before his attack on the children of Annunciation Catholic School, Westman posted YouTube videos showcasing firearms, ammunition, and a manifesto. Weapons bore handwritten messages reading “Kill Donald Trump,” “Where is your God?,” “For the children,” and anti-Israel posts. A journal posted on a video references mass school shootings and gunman. The video depicts a person, apparently Westman, saying, “I’m sorry to my family, but not the children. F— the children.” A person believed to be Westman displays a portrait of Jesus Christ placed atop a bullet-ridden target. Westman allegedly recorded another video showing off hand-drawn diagrams of the interior of Annunciation Catholic church in a spiral bound journal, which he then forcefully stabs with a knife.
In the face of this compelling evidence of Westman’s anti-Christian and anti-Semitic hatred, Minneapolis officials claimed they were still seeking the killer’s motive. Mayor Jacob Frey chose the aftermath of the shooting to mock the faith, fuming, “Don’t just say this is about thoughts and prayers right now.”
And yet, despite the disappointing deflections of leadership, everyday heroes emerged from the wreckage Westman left behind. Young people, really just children themselves, used their own bodies to shield their friends from Westman’s incoming gunfire. First responders rushed to the church in courage and treated the traumatized with compassion. Total strangers ran to, not from, the scene to provide aid and support in the immediate aftermath of the crisis.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 409, speaks to the nature of the evil from which the Twin Cities is still reeling at this moment:
The whole of man’s history has been the story of dour combat with the powers of evil, stretching, so our Lord tells us, from the very dawn of history until the last day. Finding himself in the midst of the battlefield man has to struggle to do what is right, and it is at great cost to himself, and aided by God’s grace, that he succeeds in achieving his own inner integrity.
In a world that often seems to be descending ever deeper into darkness, Christians would be the first to assert that prayer is the lifeline to the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe. Even when, for reasons we cannot understand, evil has its day, people of faith are deeply convicted that we serve a God who has entered into our suffering, weeps with us, and calls us to demand justice for the fallen. Our response in tragedy is to seek opportunities for kindness, truth, and inner integrity.
Time and again, Americans have risen to this challenge. When white supremacist Dylann Roof shot and killed nine African-American members of the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, the oldest black church in the south, he fervently desired to incite a race war. Instead, his 2015 act of domestic terrorism finally brought down the rebel flag in South Carolina and eventually across the old Confederacy. The dignity and faith of the victims’ families stood in stark contrast to Roof’s venomous assault against men, women, and children who had extended to him the right hand of fellowship.
In this moment, Minneapolis must unearth and expose the truth of Robin Westman’s hate crime against the most vulnerable among us. Christians should and will continue to hope and pray that God grants us the grace to do what is right, even at great personal cost.