“Rep. Kevin Kiley, a former Republican who is facing an uphill reelection battle after losing most of his district due to redistricting, said he won’t caucus with his former party if he wins in November. The announcement came Wednesday during a forum hosted by Semafor, where Kiley doubled down on his move to abandon his party if reelected. He said that would include him losing access to agenda-setting decisions with the Republican Party and mean he would lose his seat on key committees. Kiley said he’s trying to change those rules so independents aren’t automatically blocked. … Kiley, who is 41 and has served two House terms, captured national attention in March when he announced that he was leaving the Republican Party and was instead running as an independent,after Californians overwhelmingly passed Proposition 50.” (09/18/26)
“More than six months after Trump started the war, and nearly three months after he signed an agreement that would supposedly end it and normalize shipping, the U.S. and Iran are still fighting over the Strait of Hormuz. The damage keeps growing, and the Trump White House is both unable to fix it and unwilling to admit it.” (09/18/26)
“President Trump said Friday he is banning CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House ‘effective immediately,’ escalating his long-running battles with news organizations. Trump is seeking to use White House access against news outlets whose coverage he objects to, while threatening to target additional organizations. Trump’s Truth Social post called the three outlets ‘Fake News’ and accused them of reporting ‘FICTION and LIES,’ before threatening to also ban other ‘Fake News Media Outlets.'” (09/18/26)
“Rich and Riley discuss recent activist wins in NH court, leaning on your established support system, and this HEADLINE: There’s No Market Failure in Choosing to Stay Home. So Why Subsidize It?” (09/18/26)
“A psyop is never just one thing. It’s a wilderness of mirrors. A single mirror shows you one reflection you can identify and correct for. A wilderness of them means every angle you check reflects another angle, with no clean vantage point outside the hall to verify against, which is functionally what a multi-actor convergence produces, even without any one person orchestrating it. You don’t need an overlord director standing behind the glass for the hall of mirrors to work. And that’s the unsettling part: a single coordinated psyop presumably has an off switch, in principle, if you ever find the operator. A wilderness of independently-incentivized mirrors doesn’t.” (09/18/26)
“Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said Friday they struck an oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz, according to state news agency IRNA, as a British maritime agency also reported an attack. Iran has maintained its stranglehold on the strategic strait as Washington continues pressing its counter-blockade of Iranian ports during the Middle East war. Iran wants to charge ships for passage, attacking vessels it accuses of attempting to circumvent its preferred route.” (09/18/26)
“[A]s Gideon J. Tucker wrote in 1866, ‘no man’s life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session.’ … [Speaker of the House Mike] Johnson seems to have found a way to turn Tucker’s aphorism on its head, frequently using the absence of Congress to protect existing depredations, rather than the presence of Congress to drum up new ones. ‘The House has now canceled at least 63 scheduled voting days this Congress, including nine days this month alone,’ notes US Representative Ralph Norman (R-SC). When Johnson thinks he’s going to lose a vote — with ‘lose’ defined as upsetting or defying president Donald Trump — he just sends everyone home until he can whip a few more House members into line, or at least until the loss might come at a slightly less embarrassing point in the news cycle.” (09/17/26)
“Are we racing toward an AI-powered golden age—or building something we won’t be able to control? Justin Robert Young joins to explore the emerging philosophical divide over artificial intelligence: accelerate innovation and reap potentially enormous benefits, or slow down before we unleash risks we don’t understand. We discuss OpenAI and Anthropic, the politics of AI regulation, competition with China, whether the AI boom is a bubble, the strongest case for the AI doomers, and the possibility that advances in AI could transform medicine, work, and even human aging. Plus: Justin explains why the best way to prepare for the AI revolution is surprisingly simple—start asking it dumb questions.” (09/17/26)
“Russians on Friday began three days of voting in the country’s first wartime parliamentary election, which features virtually no opposition and is all but certain to secure the Kremlin’s political dominance. Authorities spread the election over the weekend in a bid to boost turnout among the 111 million eligible voters and even allowed electronic balloting. Polls opened Friday and will close Sunday. The Kremlin wants the parliamentary election — the first since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 — to underline public support for the war and give a veneer of legitimacy to its action. … The liberal Yabloko party, the only registered political entity that dared to criticize the war, was removed from the ballot last month by Russia’s Supreme Court, and only has a few dozen candidates in the single-constituency races. Additionally, some anti-war politicians have been imprisoned or forced to flee abroad ahead of the campaign.” (09/18/26)
