Politics

It’s a time, as a great Republican once announced, for choosing. Elon or the Donald? After they seemed to reach a détente, open hostilities have now resumed. This isn’t a cold war but a hot one that could go nuclear at any moment. To borrow from Trump’s own comment about Israel and Iran, we basically have two guys that "have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the fuck they're doing." Will it jeopardize Trump’s chances for a Nobel Peace Prize? Are foreign mediators necessary to create a new ceasefire? Musk is threatening to launch and fund a new political party, much in the spirit of Nigel Farage’s Reform party, that could crater Republican political fortunes in the midterm elections. If anyone could succeed, it would be Musk.

The US Department of Agriculture rescinded the 2001 Roadless Rule last week, a regulation that restricted road building and timber extraction in about 30 percent of land managed by the National Forest System. Judging the pushback from environmentalists, you might think that President Trump was selling Yosemite to a logging company. But the red-tape cutting actually increases public recreation access and opens neglected forests to fire-mitigation projects. Conservationists should be celebrating. On paper, the Roadless Rule preserved America’s most beautiful landscapes. In practice, the regulation proved burdensome and ecologically counterproductive. For instance, some 2,400 Tinglit Native Alaskans reside on islands in the Tongass National Forest.

Within weeks of launching his campaign to be mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani declared that he was also running to be the first South Asian mayor. He began aggressively courting this demographic, which accounts for around five percent of the city’s population, as well as the seizable total Asian population of almost 15 percent. Mamdani reached out to the desi community with the help of the Indian subcontinent’s great unifier, Bollywood. The Hindi film industry that even those who don’t speak the language in South Asia can relate to. He used a 1980 Bollywood song "Meri Umar Ke Naujawano", roughly translating to "my fellow youngsters", to explain the NYC’s ranked choice voting system using popular desi drink, the lassi, as prop.

Washington, DC Reason magazine staffers Jacob Sullum and Billy Binion walked away from the Reason Versus debate in Howard Theater, Tuesday night, with victory candy cigarettes in hand. Their feat? Convincing a little over half their audience that the federal government should legalize all drugs. Their opponents from City Journal, Charles Fain Lehman and Rafael A. Mangual, started off in the lead with 43 percent of the debate's attendees opposed to legalization. By the end, they lost 4 percent, while Reason gained 13. So what pushed these young, suit-wearing voters to change their conservative-leaning minds toward libertarianism? Sullum, 59, and Binion, 33, argued that prohibition makes the black market more dangerous for drug users.

The Supreme Court has reined in the authority of district court judges by ruling unconstitutional the ever more common practice of universal injunctions, an abuse of Article III power that cried out for the Court’s intervention. Trump v. Casa is a long overdue vindication of the limits of constitutional power. Sadly, yet increasingly predictably, some progressives claimed the end was nigh… again. In dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s words fairly smoldered from the page: “It is not difficult to predict how this all ends. Eventually, executive power will become completely uncontainable, and our beloved constitutional Republic will be no more.” She further lambasted her colleagues’ 6-3 majority decision as “an existential threat to the rule of law.

With Iran’s nuclear sites “obliterated” and the 12 DAY WAR in the rear-view, the Trump administration can now turn attention back to its core mission: defeating the Enemy Within. Buried within all the war and New York election hubbub this week was the news that the US had arrested 11 Iranian nationals who were in the country illegally, including, according to the New York Post, “a former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps member with suspected ties to Hezbollah, an ex Iranian army sniper and a terror watchlist suspect.” The administration, not without reason, is concerned that Iran will activate “sleeper cells” in the US.

As I write, the time is 10 p.m. in New York City and the temperature is hovering somewhere around unbearable. It’s a nice respite from the 100 degrees the city hit on Tuesday afternoon, as voters flocked to the polls to cast their ballots in an unusually heated mayoral primary. Polls closed at 9 p.m., and a town famed for its impatience was given the gift of a clear front-runner. Improbably, against all odds, all common wisdom, the vast majority of polls and even the betting markets, the night ended with Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old state assemblyman and proud “Muslim democratic socialist” as the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor. “I’m very proud of the campaign that we ran,” Cuomo told his supporters as Mamdani’s lead proved insurmountable.