“Bolivia is beginning a new chapter. For nearly two decades, my country was governed by the Movement Toward Socialism. That period reshaped Bolivia’s economy, institutions, and relationship with the United States. Today, my government is taking a different direction: rebuilding confidence, strengthening institutions, opening the economy to investment, and creating more room for private enterprise and entrepreneurship. When I took office, Bolivia’s Central Bank had only $51 million in reserves. Ten months later, reserves had risen to close to $1.2 billion, and our objective is to continue rebuilding them. Inflation remains high, fuel shortages have tested our people, and the work ahead is difficult. But the direction is clear: Bolivia is putting its economic house in order. ” (09/26/26)
“Karl Marx believed that ‘Democracy is the road to socialism’. Socialists seem to have found a generation of dupes to buy their ahistorical, fanciful pitch. A new poll shows 43% now have a positive view of socialism. An astonishing 65% of Democrats have a positive view. Socialism is now the rage on the left. Like clothing styles, if you wait long enough, socialism tends to come back into style with generations with no memory of past failures. However, it is an astonishing trend in one of the most prosperous nations on Earth that outlasted a history cluttered with the broken failures of socialist and communist systems. A new slick packaging of socialism has emerged with leaders such as Zohran Mamdani offering to teach people of the ‘warmth of collectivism’. The Democratic Socialists of America are enticing voters with narratives like ‘Imagine the end of capitalism’.” (09/25/26)
“American troops at bases across the Middle East have tragically been killed by Iranian strikes, as the military is forced to ration the remaining stockpile of defensive weapons. Just days into the war, America’s client-states in the Gulf were said to have depleted years worth of munitions. In the months of conflict that followed these dire reports, the effects of what [Pat] Buchanan called ‘imperial overstretch’ were being felt. Bases faced an onslaught of Iranian missiles and drones. Damage was so severe that many will likely not be returned to by the U.S. military. A chaotic withdrawal, of sorts. The American regional order in the Middle East is collapsing in real time.” (09/25/26)
“Pulitzer Prize winning war correspondent Azmat Khan says the Pentagon still obfuscates, lies, and manipulates the truth about civilian deaths in war.” (09/25/26)
“For good or ill, individuals differ in all sorts of ways, many of them relevant to their ability to please us, the consumers. No need to stop the presses—we all know this. Yet many intellectuals want a social system premised on the principle that people are ‘equal’ not as a moral/legal presumption, but equal in intelligence, talent, energy, time preference, conscientiousness, cooperativeness, etc.—and therefore deserving of more or less equal incomes, outcomes, and opportunities. Anything short of their ideal (‘disparate outcomes’), the egalitarians tell us, must be chalked up to past or present injustice (racism, for example) and privilege, requiring coercive government intervention. That’s wokeism. People who are honest with themselves know those intellectuals are worse than wrong and that the record of their ideal in practice has been bloody beyond belief.” (09/25/26)
“On Monday, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals further confounded Missouri’s ongoing mid-decade redistricting debacle. The three-member federal panel sided with a lower federal court and directed the state to use a new map gerrymandered in 2025 and specially designed to propel Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver into retirement—part of President Trump’s effort to secure the largest possible advantages for Republicans in the midterm elections. In early September, the Missouri Supreme Court had unanimously ruled that the 2025 map could not be used without first being approved in a voter referendum, especially since People Not Politicians, the Missouri referendum advocacy group backing the map question, had met all of the constitutional requirements to secure a slot on the ballot.” (09/25/26)
Source: The American Conservative
by Luke Nicastro
“When J.D. Vance was elected to the Senate from Ohio in 2022, he won his race by a healthy 6-point margin. Four years later, his successor in that seat—Sen. John Husted (R-OH)—is down by between 4 and 8 points, depending on the poll. Midterms are always hard for the party in power, and GOP candidates this year face a number of headwinds. But let’s be honest: It’s the war, stupid. Voters in Ohio, like voters across the country, are furious at paying more for gas (and everything else) because the president got us into an unwinnable Mideast conflict at the behest of a foreign country. They’re tired of bearing the costs, and they’re tired of being lied to. So Husted has sought to distance himself from this debacle.” (09/25/26)
“How could anyone possibly object to this image? You want immigrants to work hard and play by the rules? These guys managed to get into the flagship campus of the University of Texas. You want them to assimilate to American culture? These guys are all wearing their school colors, roaring their excitement at their football team’s amazing victory. Several are wearing cowboy hats. If you asked an A.I. for an image that would reinforce the view that South Asian immigration is nothing to worry about, this would be the image it would create. Yet this is the image Bo French used to argue that ‘the problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined,’ said problem being ‘Americans’ being displaced by ‘foreigners.'” (09/24/26)
“Since the early days of the American Republic, political parties have been vehicles through which people of modest means can participate effectively in politics. Like churches, families, associations, and corporations, parties are mediating organizations between the individual and government. And like other mediating organizations, parties have come under fierce attack from the left. One form of attack has been promotion of state election laws allowing non-party members to vote for party nominees. But on June 30, the Supreme Court issued a case that brought it one step closer to ruling that such laws violate the Constitution’s First Amendment, as incorporated against the states by the Fourteenth.” (09/24/26)
“All year we’ve heard predictions of a ‘blue wave’ in the midterms, with Democrats taking majorities in both houses of Congress. As of this writing, most forecasts I’ve consulted say that there’s a good chance of a Democratic House come January, but that the Republicans will likely hang on to the Senate. My own forecast is ‘don’t get your hopes up for substantial change no matter how the midterms turn out.’ That’s just not how American government works. Or at least that’s not how American government USUALLY works.” (09/24/26)
