A fourth Trump indictment. This time Georgia has jumped into the action, throwing peaches at a bunch of the former president’s advisors besides. Democrats are committed to seeing how much stress the phrase “election interference” can take. As I wrote in my own column this week, they might not like the bed they’re making; as Andrew Kloster wrote in a legal analysis yesterday, the lesson to be learned is that “prosecutorial resources in a single county (even in purple states) can be commandeered to gain national media and can empty the public fisc to drain the campaign coffers of enemy politicians.” That is a circus red prosecutors can master almost as easily as blue.

Illegal immigration increased significantly last month, according to the latest U.S. Customs and Border Protection report, with law enforcement catching roughly 130,000 border crossers. As managing editor Jude Russo observed in his column this week, “A population the size of New Haven’s, give or take, is coming over the border every month. Over the course of a year, that’s two Wyomings.” Those are numbers that are hard to grasp, as has been the crisis on the southern border. The mostly peaceful invasion—like 2020s mostly peaceful protests—has become old news, a new normal, that is far too easy to ignore.

But we can’t afford to ignore it, for — as Jason Richwine of the Center for Immigration Studies reminded us in a Wednesday essay — a country’s character is determined in large part by the people who make it up. Culture matters. Demographics, along with geography, are their own sort of destiny. “Politicians often speak of immigrants purely in economic terms—as workers in the labor market, or contributors to entitlement programs—but a country’s people define its culture,” Richwine wrote. “The U.S. has been relatively free and prosperous not because of random luck, but because it was settled by people whose culture is conducive to prosperity.”

Best,
Micah Meadowcroft
Web Editor

―John Henry Newman

The Hallowing Out of the Academy

Casey Chalk