Editor’s Note: I’ve worked on this for weeks. Yes, it is long. I beg you to read it all. I’ve kept it as easy to understand as I can. Please read it. You guys always ask me to “name names.” Challenge accepted.

A group of white guys have subtly inserted themselves into conservative institutions and church organizations. They all embrace racial grievances. To varying degrees, they embrace white nationalism, antisemitism, and even Nazi sympathies. They are getting added to conservative institutional boards, attempting to purge churches, and are desperate to indoctrinate young conservatives into fascist ideology. They even surround the Vice President of the United States. Some of them believe the United States is at a tipping point, and they want to push it over the edge and rebuild it in their image. You might think it does not affect you, but, in time, you will see their efforts in your church pews, in your kids’ brains, and in your politicians’ mouths. It begins with shampoo.

Charles Haywood made his fortune selling shampoo. He sold his Indianapolis hair care company in 2020, and he has spent the years since writing out, at length and under his own name, what he would like to do with your country. Rod Dreher, who is no man of the left, read Haywood’s online ramblings and described Haywood as pouring out vile from “deep in his Midwestern Führerbunker”.

In a document he calls the Foundationalist Manifesto, Haywood explained that his preferred government “will not be democratic.” The state “will have unlimited means,” because “properly viewed, the state is not constrained externally.” Women “will not be permitted to choose career over family.” Men “will not be permitted to choose not to have a family.” The state will seize the assets of “any citizen who views himself as a global citizen.”

That is not my characterization of his politics. Those are his words, from the manifesto that earned him a friendly sit-down with Tucker Carlson in September 2022.

Elsewhere he has speculated about serving as a “warlord” at the head of an “armed patronage network,” a model he says he drew from the groups of white settler farmers formed in southern African countries and colonies while black Africans were fighting for majority rule. Reviewing a biography of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, he wrote that his already favorable impression of the Spanish dictator had become positively glowing. He is not alone in that fixation. MAGA gadfly Jack Posobiec wrote a book called Unhumans, which Vice President JD Vance blurbed and which claims Franco and Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet are models for handling the American left. Josh Abbotoy, the executive director of American Reformer, has written that America is going to need a Protestant Franco. It is not a coincidence, but an attempt to shift the Overton window toward dictatorship.

A crank with a blog is a crank with a blog. The problem is that Charles Haywood is not on the outside of the conservative movement. He has used his wealth to get inside it and reshape longtime institutions that build the future of the right, pushing those institutions toward his vision of pushing our constitutional republic to its breaking point so they can rebuild it the way they want.

Jason Hart has documented that Haywood’s personal foundation has given the Claremont Institute $390,500 since 2022, and the foundation’s filings are public. Haywood sits on the publication committee of Claremont’s American Mind, one of four men who do. Claremont let Haywood’s fraternal order get itself incorporated under Claremont’s own nonprofit status. That order is the Society for American Civic Renewal, and Claremont’s president Ryan Williams confirmed he serves on that group’s board. Claremont’s Scott Yenor has been one of the group’s organizational leaders. Hart reports that the president of Claremont, the chief executive of New Founding, and the chief marketing officer of the Blaze are all members.

Membership records obtained by reporters show the order is open only to heterosexual men who are trinitarian Christians. In March 2024, getting ahead of a reporter he expected to write about the group, Nate Fischer published its internal mission statement himself. That document describes the members as “un-hyphenated Americans” who hold a Christianity unblurred by modernist philosophy, and it says they intend to make that inheritance permanently dominant in American political and social life. Its stated objectives are explicit: preferential treatment for members in business, coordinated action on hiring, contracts, and leadership succession, and a standing list of men ready to be appointed and hired once a friendly regime exists. The religious qualifications are a stand-alone clause in the document. The hyphen is there to screen for lineage, and it tells you the racial mindset of the organization. Haywood himself has repeatedly used a slur for Indians on social media, has argued that the Allies, not the Nazis, were the genuinely barbaric power in World War II, has insisted the war was not much motivated by the horrors of Nazi aggression, and gushed that Tucker Carlson and Darryl Cooper “boil down all my political plans.” Cooper argues that Churchill, not Hitler, was the villain of World War II. When a critic pointed out Haywood’s casual use of an ethnic slur, a senior aide to the chairman of Claremont’s board bragged that nobody cares.

Much of the right waves off groups like Patriot Front, the uniformed outfit whose leader marched at Charlottesville and thirty-one of whose members were arrested out of a U-Haul outside a pride event in Coeur d’Alene, as a federal setup or a Democrat dirty trick. Haywood, instead, praises the Patriot Front’s leader. On July 6 of this year, he shared a video of Rousseau delivering an Independence Day speech and told his followers, “This speech is very good. And this guy is very impressive.” Haywood is widely credited with originating the phrase “no enemies to the right,” which its adherents shorten to NETTR. In a 2023 debate that Christopher Rufo hosted to argue over it, Haywood raised the hypothetical of a real white nationalist with real political power, and answered that you should cooperate with that person in order to destroy the power of the left. Pressed in the same conversation about right-wing authoritarianism, he said of Franco, Pinochet, and the Portuguese dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar that they had killed people justly and unjustly, and that they saved more people than they killed. Rod Dreher had noticed Haywood’s radicalism a year earlier, observing that Haywood’s loathing of the left ran deep enough that he welcomed a Nazi sympathizer to his side. The street-level version and the lodge-and-foundation version are not strangers to one another, but one of them has the money.

Haywood’s debate partner in the Rufo debate was Nate Fischer, the chief executive of New Founding. Fischer has acknowledged his own membership in Haywood’s order. He is a Claremont Lincoln Fellow — and, more consequentially, the co-founder and chairman of American Reformer, an outfit whose stated purpose is to recapture existing Christian institutions and which Haywood’s foundation has funded with $20,000 in each of the last 2 reporting years. American Reformer in turn backs the Center for Baptist Leadership, run by William Wolfe, who calls himself a Christian nationalist and whose project is replacing the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention with men further to his right. Matthew Peterson helped Fischer start New Founding before moving on to Blaze Media. (Matthew Peterson reached out and said the underlying article citing him has him confused with a different Matthew Peterson. Striking that sentence)

Back in 2023, Christian writer Jake Meador of Mere Orthodoxy documented the business dealings Fischer and Abbotoy had with the writer then known only as Raw Egg Nationalist and called the man a Nazi pornographer. That description is accurate. His magazine runs pornography alongside fiction about murdering one’s girlfriend, and his books and his magazine’s annuals are published by Antelope Hill, a white nationalist publisher with ties to neo-Nazis. Meador noted in the same piece that the Protestant Franco line had originated with Abbotoy, and that Abbotoy had amplified a post about fixing the country with limitless authority and a rough mentality. My own denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America, barred American Reformer from its annual meeting, and it was right to do so. These are not five separate movements with a coincidental overlap. They are a small group of men, funded by a smaller group of donors, working through think tanks, a venture fund, and denominational conventions, with people at The Blaze amplifying their views.

Nearly all of this traces back to one man. Carl Schmitt was a German legal theorist who presided over the Association of National Socialist German Jurists and edited the Third Reich’s newspaper for lawyers, and who, unlike the German intellectuals who later pleaded ignorance, never repudiated Nazism. Schmitt taught that politics consists in the sorting of men into friends and enemies, and the enemy is defined by the genuine possibility of killing him. Christians have an obvious objection to this: Christ commanded us to love our enemies. Schmitt, working from the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible, argued Jesus separated private adversaries from public adversaries, and we were to love the private adversary, not the public one. In other words, the command to love your enemies says nothing about the people you fight in politics.

Haywood has embraced Schmitt’s perversion of Scripture. In his own treatment of Schmitt, he conceded he could find nothing from the early church fathers about our duties toward public enemies, and decided the silence existed because the distinction was too obvious to need stating. John Ehrett, writing in the Protestant journal Ad Fontes, dismantled the argument, pointing out that the New Testament was written in Greek rather than Latin, and the Greek word for enemy is used throughout Scripture for precisely the political enemies Schmitt insisted it excluded. Zechariah uses it of Israel’s enemies. Christ uses it to describe a king’s rebellious subjects. Peter commanded the church to honor the emperor, and Paul commanded prayers for kings, in the years when Nero was burning Christians to light the streets of Rome. Schmitt, in a fit of eisegesis, twisted Scripture to support his argument instead of realizing his argument is rejected by Scripture, and Haywood built on it anyway. The reasoning has spread outward to infect individuals and entities.

American Reformer has published the argument that Christians can no longer answer politics by quoting “love your enemies” and must instead set out to defeat those enemies. Claremont’s American Mind has published the argument that conservatives must now be willing to commit violence of their own. Andrew Isker, who has partnered on projects with Abbotoy and Fischer, wrote a book teaching that Christendom cannot return until Christians learn to hate the world, and that fathers must raise their children to hate what they hate.

Ehrett correctly notes that to carve out a zone of political life where violence governs and Christian obligation does not reach is to rebuild the logic of secularism inside the church. These men say they exist to tear that logic down. They have instead baptized it, and it has given them a permission structure for cruelty that their faith was supposed to forbid.

Haywood’s NETTR formulation has crept out of his writings and into the ordinary operations of the right

Over the weekend, Bo French, the Republican nominee for the Texas Railroad Commission, posted a photograph of college students who, though American citizens, were of Indian ethnicity, celebrating the comeback against Ohio State and wrote that the problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined. Those kids assimilated exactly the way the critics of immigration always demanded that immigrants assimilate. They put on their school colors and stetsons and went to the game. One of them, born in Texas to an American father and an Indian mother, told a local station that the post misrepresented what was in fact a mixed crowd.

French did not retreat an inch. In the hours after John Cornyn objected, he doubled down and called the senator a RINO. Jack Posobiec — whose book the vice president blurbed — turned his fire on the Republicans who had objected and announced that the party now knew who its undercover enemies were. Posobiec was not a stranger riding to the rescue. When French chaired the Tarrant County Republican Party, it hosted Posobiec as a guest. Benny Johnson said he saw nothing hateful in any of it. The NETTR gang of the right, poisoned by Haywood’s arguments, rallied to Bo French and attacked any and all on the right who called him out.

Running alongside all of this, from a different direction and with different money, is Nick Fuentes. He has never been coy about his ambitions. “There’s groypers everywhere,” he told his audience. “There’s groypers in the administration. There’s groypers at Turning Point USA. There’s groypers at Fox News, at Daily Wire.” He has instructed his followers to infiltrate the Republican Party and Turning Point and change them from the inside, and he has boasted that his people are working their way into the highest ranks of that leadership. In 2023 he wrote that his “White Identitarian, race realist, ‘Jewish aware,’ counter-Zionist” views, once radioactive, were now pounding on the door of the mainstream.

I do not think Haywood, his compatriots, and Fuentes are coordinating. I think something worse is true. These are two separate projects, with separate donors and separate audiences, converging on the same destination, and the institutions of the right are absorbing both without resistance. One works by throwing money around to shape boards, publication committees, and institutions. The other works by radicalizing 19-year-olds on livestreams and then placing them in field offices. They arrive at the same place, which is a country where your ancestry determines your standing, and the state decides what your family is for.

Vice President Vance has refused to distance himself from the groyper movement and will not forcefully denounce the antisemites. Rod Dreher, who had been his friend and an early champion of his memoir, went to him last fall and urged him to draw that line. Dreher says Vance cut him off and the friendship is over. Unfortunately, the Vice President keeps all of it within arm’s reach. Haywood’s foundation is a recurring funder of American Moment, the staffing pipeline founded in 2021 with Vance’s support, which exists to place young conservatives in administration jobs. Vance has identified himself with the postliberal right on a stage with Patrick Deneen and Kevin Roberts, and told that audience there is no meaningful distinction between the public and the private sector in the American regime. That is not a slip of the tongue. He believes it.

Conservatives spent sixty years arguing that the family and the local community, not the state, should decide what the good life looks like. The socialist left rejected that because it loves the collective. The postliberal right now rejects it because it is certain it knows better than your household does. Haywood has written down what the second position requires and funded the intellectual enforcers to bully and silence dissent on the right. These men and their groups’ ambitions require a state with unlimited means that can seize a man’s property for thinking the wrong thoughts about his own country.

This is ultimately a spiritual problem rather than a political one. Inside the church, Satan spreads kinism, racism, and ethno-nationalism, and he does it by telling frightened men that their blood is their birthright. The groups Haywood funds and their related entities are spreading this malignancy in churches. Too few leaders on the right have been willing to condemn the rhetoric, and the ones who scrub a donation page when a reporter shows up are not among them.

Scripture says that on the last day God will separate the sheep from the goats. In the here and now, some of the goats have empowered themselves to separate neighbor from neighbor, Christian from Christian, and people from their own families, all to advance a perverted utopia where they can rule in their own image. They are as weird and malcontented as the AI freaks and their effective altruism. A shampoo fortune has bought funding for small conservative and Christian advocacy groups, which in turn comes with compliance, invitations, acceptance, advancement, and a great deal of acquiescence and silence. But it does not buy it all.

Eric Erickson

The publication, Schede per conoscere l’Islam (“Sheets for Understanding Islam”), was prepared by the CEI and the Pontifical Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies (PISAI). It comprises 11 teaching sheets intended for use in Catholic religious instruction in Italian schools. They were presented at Palazzo Borromeo in Rome on October 21, at an event attended by Cardinal Matteo Zuppi.

Sheet 2 describes Muhammad as “chosen by God to carry His message and to establish and guide the new community of believers.” It also presents him as an ideal believer whose life became a model for Muslims.

Sheet 4 bears the title “The Quran: The Revealed Word of God.”

Its text states: “The Word of God, unknowable in itself, becomes accessible to human beings through the oral recitation and written reading of the Quran.”

It continues: “In time and space, God makes himself present through the attribute of the Word, embodied in the sacred text.”

Sheet 9 states: “The Quran and the Bible represent the Word of God.” It also describes the Quran as “the direct Word of God,” preserved in heaven on guarded tablets and revealed to Muhammad.

Sheet 11 reproduces a passage from the 2019 Abu Dhabi declaration, stating that the different religions are God’s wise will.

Gloria TV

Bad actors should be prosecuted to the limit of the law and regulators should require banks to publicly disclose the reason for debanking.

A few days ago, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency issued a report confirming that the nine largest banks in the country engaged in debanking thousands of people based on their political or religious beliefs. This is at best outrageous, and at worst, illegal — and clearly it needs to be addressed quickly and firmly.

For about a five-year period, these large banks engaged in debanking (closing customers’ account and preventing them from access to bank services) for “other than business reasons.” These individuals and entities just so happened to be Christian, conservative, or both.

The debanking created incredible disruption and difficulty for the victims. Imagine waking up one day and finding out that all of your checking and savings accounts were frozen for “hate, violence, racial intolerance … or items or activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others regarding the same” and having absolutely no idea why it happened. It would be devastating, which was the intention.

This is especially triggering for those of us old enough to remember the shenanigans of the Lois Lerner Internal Revenue Service during the Obama administration. A single example of such a bad actor can be enough to destroy faith in government institutions for a generation.

The debanking was a focused effort, spearheaded by pressure from the now criminally indicted Southern Poverty Law Center and other radical leftist organizations, and encouraged by members of the Biden administration.

Avoiding Unintended Consequences

Admittedly, as infuriating as this is, and as much as banks deserve blanket sanctions, there is a very thin line between punishing authentically bad actors who enthusiastically assisted the Biden administration with its vendetta against conservative citizens and creating a situation where the unintended consequence of the action is a different violation of civil rights.

For example, we should be reluctant to force banks to do business with everyone for the same reason we are reluctant to force a baker to make a cake for an event he finds personally objectionable. Now, if the baker refused to bake the cake because of pressure from a government entity who wanted to punish a political opponent, this is a different matter. At the same time, it’s imperative to ensure that the individual rights of citizens aren’t violated. It’s also sensible to keep in mind that any new enforcement tool will likely be perverted the moment Democrats regain power.

How to Address the Problem

So what can be done? Obviously, if there is enough evidence at the grand jury level to go forward with indictments, bad actors (both in government as well as the private sector) should be prosecuted to the limit of the law. Additionally, victims of discrimination should be permitted to waive arbitration and litigate against malfeasant institutions.

Since sunlight is the best disinfectant, at the request of the debanked customer, regulators could require banks to publicly disclose the reason for debanking so that the public can judge whether to continue to employ an institution based on how it treats its customers.

Another option would be to require banks to fund annual examinations of their debanked customers to ensure no political or religious bias was exercised and then publish the results of the examination.

It would be prudent to make the statute of limitations on the findings of these examinations at least 12 years to allow for different administrations to consider the infractions objectively.

Fines

Also, regulators could make fines for this activity material enough that it deters the activity, and make the punishment fit the market cap of the institution, not the infraction. The latter is key, because to deter corporate leadership from accepting bad behavior, they need to be fearful, and the best way to frighten bankers is to threaten them with financial impairment to their corporations’ balance sheet that would lead to a loss of their personal compensation.

A punitive fine has to be so large that the company has to borrow money to pay for it and as a result the market should take its shares to the woodshed. Otherwise it’s a cost of doing business.

If a bank acts out with enough frequency, it would be possible to suspend it from participating as a primary dealer in government securities or even deny it access to the various federal financing windows it uses to supplement its own operations.

Prosecuting Officials

Additionally, we should prosecute people within the administration for violating the rights of the debanked customers. There is still time to look into doing precisely that for members of the Biden administration on a statutory basis. It is clear at this point that the Democrat Party is enthusiastically using every tool it has — up to and including banks and the Internal Revenue Service — to crush its political opposition. The only remedy for this is to legally make officials sincerely regret breaking laws and regulations. These entities also need to be held to higher ethical standards.

There should be no tolerance whatsoever for this type of behavior either in the public or private sector. The freedom to enjoy political and religious views without the fear of prosecution for them is elemental to the American experience. With a few nuanced steps we can greatly reduce the risk that bad actors like those in the Biden administration are able to do are able to weaponize the financial system ever again.

Mark Mazman, The Federalist

Parents of teenagers sometimes tell me that they don’t feel appreciated by their kids. “Look at all I’ve done for them,” they say. “Why can’t they show gratitude?” As reasonable as this may seem, it contains a huge error. Gratitude is an emotion one feels when somebody does something you wanted them to do. For example, I needed the door held for me, and you held the door. I feel gratitude. I asked you to be truthful and you were truthful. I feel gratitude. You got me a discount on a new car. I feel gratitude. All of these are things I wanted, and you delivered.

As shocking as it may seem, the same does not apply to a child. Yes, you brought them into existence, you endured their infancy, fed them, clothed them, and worked hard to ensure their education. Though these are big things, you child asked for none of them. Put bluntly, your child did not ask to be born.

Nobody likes to help anybody who feels righteously entitled. Yet, your child is entitled to your care. And entitlement in this context is indeed valid. The parent chooses to give him life, and with that comes the responsibility of helping him into adulthood.

Some parents go to the opposite extreme. Instead of resenting their child for feeling entitled, they actually assume she’s entitled to everything – forever. You’d be surprised at how often I see parents of twenty- or thirty-somethings pouring money and resources into that adult. They rationalize: “It’s my child. And I love him or her.” But does that love make you their slave in perpetuity? Sometimes I’ll ask such parents if their son or daughter deserves that help. The question rarely occurs to them, and sometimes they even resent it.

Some help is deserved and some isn’t. And this doesn’t change just because you gave life to that person and cared for him when he was helpless. Many parents of grown children resent the help they feel they’re expected to give when they find these grown children mooching off of them. And in spite of that, they feel guilty! “How can I resent my own child?” Well, the “child” is no longer helpless. You can’t throw a two-year-old or a fifteen-year-old out on her own, but that doesn’t mean you can never throw a grownup out. Resentful parents can’t have it both ways. They can’t righteously announce, “I’ll never throw my (adult) child out, no matter how much he mooches or brings his problems upon himself,” and then feel resentful about it. Your grown child is just responding to the message you’re clearly sending: He or she is free to live off of you forever.

A parent has to be prepared to let a grown-up child go – even if it means throwing him out. Set a deadline, and stick to it. Anything less conveys the very unloving message that, “You can’t survive alone. I don’t have confidence in you, and I know you have to rely on me.”

Though childhood is a temporary state of helplessness, by adolescence a healthy young adult is capable of abstract thinking and a significant measure of responsibility and freedom. An adult child is no more helpless than you are. As fellow adults, you may be able and willing to help each other out; but short of an obvious accident or illness, nobody is helpless.

The challenge for parents is to keep things in perspective. When your kids are young, don’t resent them for the fact that while they might enjoy being alive, they didn’t ask to be born. They cannot help that they require your help to survive. But grown children are not helpless. They’re adults, and the responsibilities you once had don’t convey into their adulthood.

Michael J. Hurd, Life’s a Beach

Applications for U.S. unemployment benefits fell by 6,000 to 194,000 in the week ended Oct. 17, according to Labor Department data released Thursday.

The reading came in below the consensus forecast of 200,000. The prior week’s level was revised up by 1,000 to 200,000.

Initial claims are a proxy for layoffs. The latest figure was the lowest since July, when claims fell to 189,000 — the lowest single weekly reading since 1969.

Claims have remained low for most of this year. The January–October average is the lowest for the first ten months of any year since 1969, when the U.S. workforce was roughly half the size it is today.

Continuing claims rose by 25,000 to 1.73 million in the previous week, a six-week high.

You have to understand: Leftists and their media consider record employment a BAD thing. Not because it happened due to Trump’s policies. They actually consider employment BAD. They want us barefoot and pregnant. That way, they can rule us.

America is the most prosperous society in history BY FAR. Prosperity makes people less dependent on government. That independence is precisely what socialists wish to destroy. People trotting off in early voting to support socialism are taking the gun and pointing it at all our heads.

It’s truly madness to watch and to experience these times.

The historic stretch of low layoffs in the U.S. economy continued last week.

Applications for U.S. unemployment benefits fell by 6,000 to 194,000 in the week ended Oct. 17, according to Labor Department data released Thursday.

The reading came in below the consensus forecast of 200,000. The prior week’s level was revised up by 1,000 to 200,000.

Initial claims are a proxy for layoffs. The latest figure was the lowest since July, when claims fell to 189,000 — the lowest single weekly reading since 1969.

Claims have remained low for most of this year. The January–October average is the lowest for the first ten months of any year since 1969, when the U.S. workforce was roughly half the size it is today.

Continuing claims rose by 25,000 to 1.73 million in the previous week, a six-week high.

You have to understand: Leftists and their media consider record employment a BAD thing. Not because it happened due to Trump’s policies. They actually consider employment BAD. They want us barefoot and pregnant. That way, they can rule us.

America is the most prosperous society in history BY FAR. Prosperity makes people less dependent on government. That independence is precisely what socialists wish to destroy. People trotting off in early voting to support socialism are taking the gun and pointing it at all our heads.

It’s truly madness to watch and to experience these times.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Two foreign nationals have been detained for the burning of Star Link antennas at a secret facility near Sofia, Bulgaria in what authorities are investigating as a terrorist attack, Faktor.bg reported, citing Prosecutor’s Office sources.

The two men were arrested on Monday on suspicion of intentionally setting fire to antennas supporting Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite communications system. They hold German passports but are not ethnic Germans, and entered Bulgaria legally through the Kulata border checkpoint.Find Embassies

The incident occurred overnight between October 9 and 10, when masked individuals set fire to 11 antennas, destroying them completely. Security cameras recorded the suspects. Only seven of the facility’s 18 high-frequency antennas remained intact after the blaze.

The site is located near the village of Plana, outside Sofia, and supports the SpaceX communications system. The Interior Ministry and security services initially did not disclose the incident. The attack was made public by Ivaylo Mirchev, leader of the “Yes, Bulgaria” party.

The arrests in Bulgaria come as Germany detained two Turkish citizens suspected of setting fire to a Starlink ground station in Poland. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced the arrests, saying the suspects would be brought before Polish justice

Novanite

Is the backlash growing teeth?

J.R. Dunn | October 24, 2026

We got a perfect example of the biter-gets-bit scenario late this week featuring the larger-than-life crusader against fascism Elissa Slotkin. We’re told that Slotkin served as an analyst for the CIA, which means that this case is a twofer, informing us what’s wrong with the Senate today and what’s been wrong with the CIA for the past twenty years.

Slotkin, as readers will know, made the news earlier this week with the release of a clip showing her at some sort of University of Chicago conclave threatening legal persecution for young people who took jobs in the Trump administration: “I want young people coming out of school to say, ‘Should I work for the Trump administration? Like, that sounds fun. I might get an opportunity… I want them to be like, ‘Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want.’ I want that deterrence message sent.”

A few days later, in the face of a massive backlash, she doubled down on the threat and attempted to flip it into an accusation of Trump. “Fear is the point. Intimidation is the point. And if the president can do this to me, he can do it to anyone.”

It happens that U of Chicago undergrad Michael Bicksel was present for Slotkin’s remarks. He took them as a personal threat. “I don’t think there’s any other way to take it.” In response, he filed a complaint with the Senate Select Committee on Ethics.

“Senator Slotkin proposed a course of legislative action to weaponize the legal system in order to terrorize college students into forgoing public service,” Bicksel told the committee.

He noted that the discussion went on to suggestions that “Young people who want to serve the Trump administration be made pariahs, socially, politically, and even legally.”

Bicksel stated that he wanted a full ethics investigation into Slotkin, the kind that would certainly follow any such remarks by a GOP politician. “I could see Chuck Schumer racing down to the Senate floor to demand a censure, expulsion, or at the very least an ethics investigation. That’s what I’m asking for right now.”

Michael Bicksel is associated with the nobly named Chicago Thinker, a U of Chicago conservative student paper founded to hold campus leftists to their own standards. He is extremely personable and well-spoken, and should do well in politics if that’s the route he chooses.

While little may come of his complaint, it should serve as a warning to Slotkin – among many others – that, senator or no, she can’t simply mouth off and walk. Not in the political environment of 2026. When you kick open a door, you have to accept whatever comes through. The next door she kicks may not have an ethics panel behind it, but something more like the DoJ or Homeland Security.

J. R. Dunn, American Thinker

Strikes and blockades by truckers in Southern Italy this week have left many supermarket shelves bare. Those strikes and blockades in the south were matched by protests, which turned to riots in the north. Both movements were protesting the same issue: affordability. In the north, students marched against low wages, high taxes, and quickly rising grocery and fuel costs. In the south, farmers and truckers have blockaded ports and highways in protest of those same high fuel costs.

The high costs are associated with fuel shortages stemming from the war in Iran, and, on Thursday, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government announced the equivalent of $200 million to cover gas prices. Meloni’s government has already spent the equivalent of $3 billion to lower or offset gas prices this year.

But Italy’s protest movement is only part of the global story. Protests in France have resulted in major government intervention. Albanian students are protesting governmental corruption and the high cost of living. Bolivia has seen longstanding protests against rising fuel costs as well. Around the world, protest movements are heating up largely due to governmental corruption in conjunction to rising fuel and food costs associated with the war in Iran.

Sam Stone, Bon Appitit

US President Donald Trump renewed calls for a change in Ukraine’s leadership on Monday as his war of words with Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy continued to intensify. “I think it’s time for somebody else to negotiate on behalf of Ukraine,” Trump stated in Washington DC following criticism from Zelenskyy over the US leader’s decision to ease sanctions pressure on Russia.

These latest comments followed on from Trump’s recent accusation that Zelenskyy “doesn’t want to end this war,” and his suggestion that Ukraine should get a new president “who can make a deal.” Many of Trump’s most prominent supporters have backed his hardening stance toward the Ukrainian leader. “And so the slaughter continues. Time for Zelenskyy to go,” Elon Musk wrote on October 15.

The US President’s attacks on Zelenskyy closely mirror Russia’s own position. Speaking last week in Moscow, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Russia was “in complete agreement” with Trump regarding the Ukrainian head of state. Days later, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov declared that Zelenskyy “obviously has no desire even to move towards reaching an agreement.”

This is nothing new. Since the early stages of the invasion, Moscow has consistently sought to position Zelenskyy as an obstacle to peace, with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin repeatedly questioning the legitimacy of the Ukrainian president and pointing to the absence of democratic elections in wartime Ukraine. “You can negotiate with anyone, but because of his illegitimacy, Zelenskyy has no right to sign anything,” Putin stated last year. Stay updated As the world watches the Russian invasion of Ukraine unfold, UkraineAlert delivers the best Atlantic Council expert insight and analysis on Ukraine twice a week directly to your inbox.

It is not difficult to debunk portrayals of Zelenskyy as the main obstacle to peace. In reality, the Ukrainian leader has agreed to every single ceasefire proposal put forward by the American side, while Moscow has rejected them all. Crucially, he has offered major territorial concessions that would allow Russia to retain control over almost a quarter of Ukraine. Zelenskyy has also repeatedly declared his readiness to meet face-to-face with Putin anywhere in the world to negotiate an end to the war, only for the Russian ruler to firmly decline. It should be clear to any objective observer that Ukraine’s wartime leader is actively seeking pathways to peace.

Trump and Putin’s over-emphasis on Zelenskyy’s personal role in the Ukrainian war effort reveals a fundamental failure to grasp what Ukrainians are actually fighting for. Many in the White House and the Kremlin appear to believe that the removal of Zelenskyy would somehow pave the way for a Russia-friendly peace. This is delusional. Ukrainians are not fighting for Volodymyr Zelenskyy. They are fighting for national survival.

Recent polling indicates strong Ukrainian public support for Zelenskyy, suggesting that he would be very likely to win a wartime election. But even if Zelenskyy was ousted, it is virtually impossible to imagine any replacement emerging with a mandate to make peace on Russian terms. While most Ukrainians favor a negotiated settlement of some kind, surveys indicate strong opposition to any peace deal that fails to provide Ukraine with long-term security or potentially sets the stage for further Russian aggression.

This uncompromising stance reflects widespread Ukrainian perceptions of the current war as an existential struggle that will determine whether Ukraine continues to exist as a state and as a nation. Most Ukrainians are in no doubt that Putin ultimately intends to destroy their country, and regard Western talk of limited Russian territorial ambitions as hopelessly naive. They have grown accustomed to the genocidal anti-Ukrainian messaging that dominates wartime Russia’s public discourse, and take it for granted that the Kremlin’s end goal is a Ukraine without Ukrainians. Eurasia Center events

Online Event Wed, October 21, 2026 • 9:00 am ET How is Europe responding to hybrid warfare? Europe Europe & Eurasia Politics & Diplomacy Security & Defense

Ukrainians have reached this chilling conclusion based on years of bitter experience. Long before Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine with the 2014 seizure of Crimea, he was already notorious for insisting that Ukrainians were in fact Russians (“one people”). Since the outbreak of hostilities, Putin’s rhetoric has grown ever more extreme. On the eve of the full-scale invasion, he published a 5,000 word history essay that read like a declaration of war against Ukrainian statehood. He routinely describes the occupied regions of Ukraine as “historically Russian lands,” and boasted last year that “all of Ukraine is ours.”

Putin’s obsession with the destruction of Ukraine has set the tone for the entire invasion. Wherever Russian troops have established control, the occupation authorities have sought to erase all traces of Ukrainian language, history, culture, and identity. For the past two years, international human rights watchdog Freedom House has ranked Russian-occupied Ukraine as “the least free place on earth.”

Throughout the occupied regions, thousands of Ukrainian civilians have been detained and imprisoned in a campaign of mass arrests that UN officials have classified as a crime against humanity. Those who remain face ruthless russification in every sphere of daily life and are forced to accept Russian citizenship. Meanwhile, a whole generation of Ukrainian schoolchildren living under occupation are being stripped of their nationality and indoctrinated to celebrate the invasion of their own country.

Ukrainians know what is happening in the occupied territories and are under no illusions about the fate that awaits them if Russia is not stopped. Twenty percent of Ukraine is already being subjected to a form of brutal national identity erasure that may qualify as genocide. If Putin is able to extinguish Ukrainian independence and install a puppet regime in Kyiv, there is every reason to assume that the Kremlin’s actions in the remaining 80 percent of the country will be just as severe.

This understanding of Russia’s genocidal intentions is one of the key factors driving Ukraine’s much-hyped resilience. Ukrainians are not superheroes with special powers of endurance. They are ordinary people who recognize that they are facing an extraordinary threat.

After almost five years of staggering sacrifice and unimaginable trauma, most Ukrainians are utterly exhausted. And yet somehow they fight on. Putin’s well-documented determination to wipe Ukraine off the map leaves them with no real choice but to keep resisting until the Russian dictator is finally forced to acknowledge the impossibility of conquering their country.

Trump and Putin are deeply mistaken if they think replacing Zelenskyy would change anything. Ukraine’s struggle for national survival reflects the will of millions and does not depend on any one man. This struggle will continue, regardless of who holds the office of the presidency.

Peter Dickinson, Atlantic Council

The number of Americans dining out just hit a new low.

In the early days of the pandemic, restaurants went into survival mode to stay afloat. It may be safe to grab a bite to eat out of the house these days, but with fewer Americans able to afford the luxury of eating out, business is drying up again.

The percentage of Americans who say they dine out at least once a week slid almost 10% between 2022 and 2026, according to a new Gallup poll. In 2019, just prior to the pandemic, more than half of people surveyed reported eating out at a restaurant at least one time per week. By 2021, that percentage dipped 10%, to 43%, before perking up to 47% in 2022. In the 2026 version of the same poll, Gallup found that only 39% of people dine out weekly—fewer than in the first year following the COVID outbreak.

“Weekly dining out fell during the pandemic, partly recovered by 2022, and has since dropped to a new low, with the latest decline concentrated among middle- and upper-income Americans,” Gallup wrote in its new report. The analytics company cited the “cumulative effect of price increases over the past four years” as the main driver that’s keeping people at home.

They aren’t just staying in and ordering takeout, either. The number of Americans who say they get takeout weekly slipped to 31% in 2026, down from 26% in 2022 and 39% in 2021—a strong sign that the affordability crisis is behind the shifting trends. That percentage of Americans ordering takeout in 2026 is now even with what it was pre-pandemic in 2018.

Dining out across income levels

Unsurprisingly, people in different income brackets have different habits when it comes to eating out. Americans in upper-income households dine out much more often than those making less money, an intuitive finding given that higher costs don’t sting nearly as much when you’ve got more financial padding.

Just prior to the pandemic, Gallup found that 40% of people in a lower-income group dined out on a weekly basis, compared with 54% in a middle-income group and 65% in an upper-income group. By 2021, weekly dining rates had dropped across the board, but they began to rise again in 2022—but only for higher-income Americans. Now, weekly dining is sliding again, this time falling for middle- and upper-income adults, with 38% and 48% of people in those categories eating out at least once a week, respectively. For lower-income Americans, the percentage stayed stable at 32%.

“For restaurants, the challenge is less that Americans have stopped eating out than that they are doing so less often,” Gallup wrote in the report. “And with restaurant takeout falling from its pandemic-era high, weekly takeout or delivery does not appear to be making up the difference.”

Food safety worries

The current Gallup survey was conducted in July of this year, drawing on data from a random sample of 1,200 adults across all 50 states. The company does note that its polling coincided with the cyclosporiasis outbreak that had Americans skittish about lettuce this summer, as the food safety scare may have impacted eating habits, too.

The outbreak—traced to iceberg lettuce recalled by food supplier Taylor Farms—officially ended in September, but not before it sickened almost 13,000 people and sent 579 to the hospital. In a separate survey, Gallup found that Americans distrust the federal government on food more than ever, with only 47% feeling confident about food safety protocols.

With more people holed up at home with their groceries, restaurants have been forced to improvise. Some, like fast-casual pillars Noodles & Company and Chipotle, are getting creative with innovative menu items to bring diners back into the fold. Others, like McDonald’s, opted to make fast food feel cheap again with a $5 meal deal. But local restaurants and fine dining options don’t have as much breathing room as their corporate peers, with many folding to a lethal combination of higher ingredient prices and shrinking customer budgets—and little relief in sight.

Fast Company Magazine Staff