Category: Update

On Thursday and Friday, Paul Jacob addressed two elements of the Charlie Kirk assassination. But much more has happened, especially since writing these two Common Sense commentaries.

First, Mr. Kirk’s wife, Erika, addressed the public:

Good evening. My name is Erika Kirk. Charlie Kirk is my husband. I first want to thank the local, state, and federal law enforcement who worked tirelessly to capture my husband’s assassin so that he can be brought to justice.

I want to thank the first responders who struggled heroically to save Charles’ life, and the police who acted bravely to make sure that there were no other victims on that terrible afternoon. I want to thank the officers who have protected our Turning Point USA family these past two days, and I want to thank the Turning Point USA board, the COO, Justin Streiff, and my husband’s chief of staff, the amazing Mikey McCoy, for all their work in these terrible days to be the stability for our family, and for the wider Turning Point USA family as well.

My heart is with every one of my husband’s employees who lost a friend and a mentor. I want to thank the staffers of his amazing Charlie Kirk show, who helped him broadcast from this studio, this chair. Every day, he loved it. He loved what he did.

I want to thank the millions of people who have shown their love for Charlie here in Phoenix, across America, and worldwide. I want to thank my husband’s dear friend, Vice President Vance, and his phenomenal wife, Usha, for their love and support. You guys honored my husband so well, bringing him home. You both are tremendous.

I want to thank President Trump and his incredible family for the same. Mr. President, my husband loved you, and he knew that you loved him too.

Transcript: “Mrs. Erika Kirk Delivers Public Address: ‘His Movement Will Go On,’” The Single Post (September 13, 2025).

One of the more prominent commenters on X, horror writer Stephen King, apologized and retracted his egregious comment on Kirk and his assassination: “I apologize for saying Charlie Kirk advocated stoning gays. What he actually demonstrated was how some people cherry-pick Biblical passages,” tweeted Mr. King. Uh, OK.

The apparent assassin, a 22-year-old Utah native, has been the subject of much speculation and inquiry. “His father sells granite kitchen countertops, his mother is a healthcare provider for handicapped people — and they are members of the Mormon church, but inactive,” reports KTen News.

According to NPR News, “The arrest of Tyler Robinson sent shockwaves through the small community where his family lives. Washington, a city of around 30,000, sits next to St. George in Utah’s southwest corner. It’s a 3 ½-hour drive from the Utah Valley University campus” where the shooting occurred.

The 22-year-old is the suspect in the killing of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk during a Wednesday event at the campus in Orem. After a 33-hour manhunt, Robinson’s family helped turn him in the following day.

On Friday morning, after law enforcement released Robinson’s name, officers from the Washington City Police and Washington County Sheriff’s Office patrolled a quiet street, preventing onlookers from approaching the family’s two-story gray stucco home.

But it is hard to forget that many news sources’ tilted coverage against the victim. The Guardian’s coverage is typical: “Charlie Kirk in his own words: ‘prowling Blacks’ and ‘the great replacement strategy,’” runs the headline; the blurb is perhaps worse: “The far-right commentator didn’t pull his punches when discussing his bigoted views on current events.”

“‘I love the smell of deportations in the morning,’ reads the caption for the meme Trump shared on his Truth Social platform,” an Epoch Times article informs us.

“The caption was superimposed over an image of Trump in a military-style uniform, squatting in front of a fiery backdrop, with a series of helicopters flying past a city skyline.

“‘Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,’ the meme caption continues.”

Uh, what?

It turns out that the president, in defiance of the Constitution and Posse Comitatus, aims to use the military to round up criminals (illegal aliens).

And he now insists upon calling the “Department of Defense” the “Department of War” again!

The social media post also comes a day after the president signed an executive order to refer to the Department of Defense as the Department of War, and to the position of the Secretary of Defense as the Secretary of War. A full renaming of the department and its Cabinet secretary will require an act of Congress but Trump has said the rebranding has “a stronger sound” and evokes a focus on winning wars.

President Trump, once again, is proving himself to be an old-fashioned brand management expert.

He likes the kick-assedness of “Department of War.” Secretary Hegseth appears to be gung ho on Trump’s side regarding the name preference. The date of Trump’s Executive Order is September 5, 2025, and its title is “Restoring the United States Department of War.”

The original shift to “Department of Defense” occurred in 1949 as an act of Congress, and was part of a major post-World War II reorganization to create a unified, modern military structure amid the emerging Cold War. It appeared to emphasize national security, deterrence, and efficiency over aggressive “war-making,” thus conforming to global efforts (such as the UN Charter’s ban on wars of aggression) to promote peace through strength rather than overt belligerence.

Amusingly, under the aegis of the Department of Defense, the U.S. has been at war almost uninterrupted since the name change.

Arguably, the 1949 name change was a euphemism. Also arguably, Trump’s reversal is a dysphemism.

Trump’s meme (see above) riffs on Francis Ford Coppola’s classic 1979 film, Apocalypse Now.

On Wednesday, Paul Jacob discussed the cultural erasure involved in the Cracker Barrel re-branding effort. One of the curious elements to the story is that previous icon branding erasures all focused on what might be called “icons of color,” Paul mentioning Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and Mia the Land O’Lakes maiden. All gone now. They were “stereotypical” and thus somehow “racist.”

It is pretty obvious, however, that icons must be stereotypical — that is how they succeed as icons!

But this time a white — not to say “cracker” — icon was slated for erasure.

First they came for the icons of color (IoCs) and then for white icons. Why?

Paul suggested that cultural erasure may be the real point. A people without history or shared culture are easier to rule. Orwell was not alone to teach us that.

Thankfully, the issue was explored humorously by The Babylon Bee:

And even more thankfully, Uncle Herschel was spared, remaining on the logo.

“Define woke as erasure in the name of non-erasure,” Paul suggested. The Cracker Barrel erasure attempt wasn’t woke, obviously. It was a misguided erasure for the sake of modernization, of trying to … what? 

The general trend in corporate (and perhaps the general) culture is to dispense with the past and its associations. As if that is the way to make money.

The announcement of the new logo on August 19, 2025, led to a significant drop in Cracker Barrel’s stock, shares falling over 12 percent in two days, and an additional 7 points by the 26th. After the reversal, the stock recovered quickly — the title at The Street was “Cracker Barrel Hasn’t Gone Woke Nor Has It Gone Broke.”

Branding experts were generally negative on the whole fiasco.

Cultural critics were all over the map. The Atlantic’s critique argued that Cracker Barrel’s brand has always been a “simulacrum of rural life” rather than authentic Americana — obvious enough. The backlash was misguided, the piece went on, because the corporate chain was founded to sell gas along highways, contributing to the erosion of genuine local culture by replacing it with a homogenized, nostalgic aesthetic; the new logo’s blandness was not “woke” but a continuation of this corporate sanding-down of regional identity. That doesn’t seem quite right, though. The earlier corporate branding served to entice rural Americans away from authenticity, sure, but with an appeal to traditional Americana style. The rebranding betrayed that, and if Americans objected, in a culture war way, they had a point.

But it wasn’t woke, true. It was too cynical and stupid for that. 

Most of the critiques from the intelligentsia, including Paul’s foil David French, regarded the “political” reactions as “overdone” and “exaggerated.” But that is hardly up for them to decide. If consumers feel betrayed, their outrage is surely more sincere than the critics’ sniping.

Meanwhile, it might surprise most readers to learn that “Uncle Herschel” was an actual person with an actual connection to the company: Herschel Cawthon McCartney, uncle of Cracker Barrel’s founder, Dan Evins.

Our solar system’s third identified interstellar intruder, 3I/ATLAS, continues its course past the planets more-or-less within the plane of the ecliptic, and continues to surprise.

The least surprising thing is that it has finally developed a tail pointing away from the Sun:

On August 27, 2025, deep imaging of the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS by the Gemini South 8.2-meter telescope — aided by the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS), revealed a weak tail with a teardrop shape in the anti-Sun direction (reported here). At that time, 3I/ATLAS was at a distance from Earth of 2.59 times the Earth-Sun separation. The Gemini South Observatory is located on a mountain called Cerro Pachón in the Chilean Andes.

Avi Loeb, “Detection of an Anti-Solar Tail for 3I/ATLAS,” Medium (August 30, 2025).

Earlier observations had not seen the usual tail forming away from the point of origination of the solar winds, like a normal comet. Instead, the “coma” of dust or ice or gas or whatnot surrounding the object extended in advance of its trajectory — as if it were throwing out flak to take out dangerous objects ahead of it!

Yes, from the beginning the oddities of this intruder were being considered as possible indications of an artificial object.

While this is heartening for those who itch to relegate 3I/ATLAS to “mere” comet status (it’s already proved to be one weird comet, it comet it truly be), Abraham Loeb notes the accumulating oddities, too, which don’t fit the standard “nothing [challenging] to see here, folks” debunkers’ designations: “Recent spectroscopic data from the Very Large Telescope in Chile (accessible here), reported the surprising detection of cyanide and nickel without iron in the plume of gas around 3I/ATLAS with steeply increasing rates as the object approaches the Sun. Nickel without iron is a signature of industrial production of nickel alloys. Natural comets generically show iron and nickel simultaneously, as both elements are produced simultaneously in supernova explosions.”

And as Loeb just noted, measuring the nucleus of the object remains extremely difficult and uncertain.

Further, though detection of CO2 in the object’s coma (surrounding matter) is indeed what one would expect of a comet, the absence of water and carbon monoxide is . . . peculiar.

Everyone should fear a lawless president. But complaining about President Trump’s allegedly illegal actions while not having complained about Biden’s and Obama’s smacks of partisanship.

But the one magazine in America that should not be open to this criticism has to be Reason, right? This magazine of “free minds and free markets” has been critical of every president. Hasn’t it?

So when it reports on Trumpian oversteps, missteps, and outright tyrannical acts of “the imperial presidency,” we should certainly not dismiss the cases out of hand.

“President Donald Trump overstepped the limits of executive authority when he used emergency powers to levy tariffs,” wrote Eric Boehm, “a federal appeals court ruled on Friday.

Trump administration used IEEPA in February to slap tariffs on imports from Canada, China, and Mexico. The Trump administration again invoked IEEPA to impose its so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs in early April, which included a universal 10 percent tariff on all imports and higher, country-specific tariffs, some of which went into effect in August after being delayed several times.

As seemed evident during oral arguments, the court’s majority was deeply skeptical of the government’s claim to broad powers that are not spelled out in the IEEPA law, which notably does not contain the word “tariff.”

If the government’s interpretation of the IEEPA statute is correct, the court ruled, that would create “a functionally limitless delegation of Congressional taxation authority.” Elsewhere in the ruling, the court said that such a delegation of taxation power would be unconstitutional, even if that were what Congress intended to do.

In short, the Trump administration’s argument for using emergency powers to impose tariffs fails on multiple fronts.

Eric Boehm, “Why Is Trump’s Border Patrol Arresting Firefighters During a Wildfire?” Reason (August 29, 2025).

But the court lifted all injunctions on the tariffs, throwing the whole issue into chaos. Boehm not unreasonably calls upon Congress to settle the matter. Setting tax rates is the constitutional duty of Congress, after all.

On the same day, however, Joe Lancaster tells us of another ICE arrest, in “Why Is Trump’s Border Patrol Arresting Firefighters During a Wildfire?” Fighting summer fires in the Olympic National Forest were two illegal aliens, it seems. So they were nabbed. We are supposed to be incensed by this. “The arrest was a reversal of federal policy under two presidents. ‘Absent exigent circumstances, immigration enforcement will not be conducted at locations where disaster and emergency response and relief is being provided,’ the Department of Homeland Security announced in 2021, during Joe Biden’s presidency.”

This is mildly interesting. But resting a case against Truman border enforcement on Biden era border control policy seems too tendentious by half, for the Biden let open the borders. And going against past protocols is hardly a case of an Imperial President Threatening All. While we know that Reason folks lean heavily to the radical open borders position, anyone who is at all alarmed at the millions of illegal aliens wandering out in America will hardly be impressed with this particular coverage.

“Arresting firefighters during a wildfire simply over their immigration status undercuts the president’s rhetoric on both immigration and public safety,” Mr. Lancaster argues — not very convincingly. It would be very easy to argue, on the contrary, that the one place that one should not expect to find illegal alien workers is in government employment. And that finding them there uncovers something of an emergency in and of itself.

The current stretch of history dominated by Trump, war, a reverse in fortunes in the culture war, and AI, have the Greta Thunberg brigades champing at the bit to bring back “climate change” as the main driver of conversation and policy.

So gird up your loins and remember the real big picture in climate change: the regularity of the cycle of glaciation/deglaciation in our current era, the current interglacial of the Ice Age.

And of course there is always John Stossel to throw some cold water on global warming:

South America’s 21st century boom in socialist politics is going bust all over the continent. The latest case? Bolivia. See the terrific article in Reason:

Argentina’s libertarian president, Javier Milei, has turned fiscal shock therapy into a political calling card, and the payoff is visible as inflation cools, poverty falls, and growth returns. In Ecuador, Daniel Noboa secured a second term by blending tough security policies at home with pragmatic economic partnerships abroad, striking new deals with China while maintaining close ties to the U.S. Colombia is poised to move sharply to the right in next year’s election, with one leading contender, the conservative journalist Vicky Dávila, sounding a lot like Milei.

The most recent reversal is happening in Bolivia, where voters just rejected democratic socialism by a lopsided margin. The results mark a sharp turn away from the policies of former President Evo Morales, which have brought immense suffering to the country. In last week’s election, the once-dominant Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) barely cleared 3 percent of the vote.

César Báez, “Socialism Just Imploded in Bolivia,” Reason (August 21, 2025).

Socialism is inherently unstable, contra all the leftists in first world countries who apologize for it. Why is it unstable? Well, the key argument was developed by Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek: complex systems like large societies gain much by distributing responsibility widely, so that diverse knowledge from all sources can be leveraged with minimum of coercion and maximum of efficiency; the industrial society that tries to provide a wide array of consumer goods must fail, because the central planners cannot calculate value without markets in production goods.

Socialism as a universal mode of production is impracticable because it is impossible to make economic calculations within a socialist system. The choice for mankind is not between two economic systems. It is between capitalism and chaos.

Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and the Total War (1944).

There are many other arguments as well. Ayn Rand famously said that though one can vote oneself into socialism, one must shoot one’s way out. That appears to be the case in Venezuela, but not, thankfully, Bolivia. “The socialist project ‘imploded by itself,’ Bolivian policy analyst Rolando Schrupp” explained, according to the Reason article, “citing public exhaustion after nearly two decades of rule.”

This is the problem with democratic socialism, as Irving Kristol noted: “Every social-democratic party, once in power, soon finds itself choosing, at one point after another, between the socialist society it aspires to and the liberal society that lathered it.”

Thankfully, Bolivians are choosing democracy by voting out the socialists.

The tale is repeated every day. A skeptic of the federal government questions a purported fact and is told he is an awful person for believing “alternative facts” or “denying reality.” But how much of our social reality is curated for us? How much is fake? How much of official, government-stamped and -indexed reality is false?

Take crime. President Trump has federal forces taking over the Dysfunction of Columbia — that is, placed the National Guard on the streets, to cut down on crime. Crime in the imperial city is an embarrassment, Trump says — and many agree: visitor and resident and neighbor alike. But the newspapers and news readers on TV say that “Akshually, crime has been down for two years!”

But has it? Really? And if it is down, isn’t it too high? Can we trust the stats?

For example, one way to get lower crime stats is to disengage the police from actual crime, or even effectively de-criminalize crimes against property, as in many cities around the country.

The question of reliability of statistics came up in a recent Trump firing:

Donald Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erika McEntarfer, after she reported weaker-than-expected job growth figures, which he claimed were “rigged” for political purposes. This action raised concerns about the integrity and credibility of U.S. economic data.

Duck.ai ”Search Assist,” August 16, 2025.

We saw a similar response from newspaper headline writers, saying that it is Trump himself who is engendering bad statistics: “Trump firing of statistics chief puts US data credibility at risk, experts warn,” as an early August article in The Guardian put it.

When two sides call each other the same bad thing, it makes it hard to judge. But sometimes we can make good guesses.

There is no small amount of evidence, after all, that much of our social reality has been faked to some degree. Tim Pool suggests that the hit USAID took from DOGE did in progressive media; reputations fell as bots were liquidated and dark money sources evaporated:

As has been discussed by Paul Jacob in these pages, USAID played a vast shell game, distributing fortunes to NGOs and other “non-government” institutions without requiring any accounting. And all that money could indeed have been used to support a dying cause — and radicalizing a minority of moonbats in the process.

Note to comedians: there’s a rich vein here.

As Paul Jacob discussed on August 5th, Texas’s bold redistricting plan is causing a furor among Democrats. The latest is especially funny, but we’ll let you supply the jokes:

On Aug. 14, California Gov. Gavin Newsom called for his state to hold a referendum to redraw the state’s congressional maps, marking an escalation in the ongoing, nationwide districting battles between Republicans and Democrats.

“We’re putting the maps on the ballot, and we’re giving the power to the people,” Newsom announced at an event in Los Angeles, saying that the vote would be held on Nov. 4.

The referendum would be a vote to approve a map to more heavily favor Democrats in California. Given Democrats’ political dominance in the Golden State, it’s likely to pass.

Joseph Lord, “Newsom Calls Special Election to Redistrict California Congress Seats—What to Know,” The Epoch Times (August 15, 2025).

For a historical perspective, consult Brion McClanahan:

This historian understands the comic element here.

As Donald Trump tries to negotiate a peace in Ukraine — with the beleaguered country’s president balking at the current favored option of Putin and Trump (ceding thr Donbas to Russia) — an older Russia story is receiving updates. Russia Collusion!

Paul Jacob last covered the story late last month, in “One Dares Call It Collusion,” with Tulsi Gabbard releasing the intel data on “Russiagate” to the public. Now we are seeing a lot more of the evidence, with testimony of key figures.

Not Clapper or Brennan or Comey, mind you — they confess to nothing.

But the evidence against these past directors of the NSA, CIA, and FBI (respectively) appears to be mounting, and one bit of testimony, at least, is worth considering: “Two days after the election in 2016, I was called up on the NSA phone. The person said I had to be on the intelligence community assessment that was assembling to finalize the Russia narrative, because we were going to prove that Trump was a Russian asset, and we were going to delay or block the inauguration of Donald J. Trump for the first term.”

Also worth considering? This very same Col. John Mills’ perspective on Chinese (well, CCP) influence: “How the CCP and Its Proxies Created a ‘World on Fire’.”