◼ Abdul El-Sayed narrowly won Michigan’s Senate Democratic primary. He defeated Congresswoman Haley Stevens, the favored candidate of the Democratic establishment. Stevens, though thoroughly progressive, is a moderate compared with El-Sayed, whose win is an enormous victory for the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Although El-Sayed claims that he is not a member of the DSA, he has embraced the group’s radical politics. He supports “Medicare for All” and packing the Supreme Court, and he wishes to abolish the Senate filibuster, the Electoral College, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He is also obsessively anti-Israel, opposing even the sale of defensive arms to the country. El-Sayed now stands more than a reasonable chance of becoming the most anti-American senator ever elected. Republicans have not won a Senate race in Michigan since 1994, and President Donald Trump is unpopular in the state. The rise of El-Sayed is an ominous sign, and his victory in November would be a terrible development not just for Michiganders.

◼ Also among Tuesday night’s results: The Michigan GOP’s strong statewide ticket will be headed by Representative John James, a twice unsuccessful Senate candidate now running for governor against Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson. In the state’s swing seventh House district, a three-way Democratic race split the establishment vote, allowing DSA activist William Lawrence to become the nominee. In the eighth district, retired engineer Thomas Smith—who had withdrawn from the race and spent almost no money on his campaign—beat Trump-endorsed Amir Hassan by 17 points. In the 13th district, Democratic Representative Shri Thanedar lost to DSA member Donovan McKinney, becoming the ninth incumbent representative toppled thus far. Kansas State Senator Ty Masterson—who, like James, is endorsed by Trump—won his state’s GOP gubernatorial primary. In Missouri, Representative Wesley Bell held off a comeback attempt by scandal-plagued radical Cori Bush, whom he had defeated in 2024 and who focused her opposition on Bell’s support for Israel. Two setbacks for Republicans: Voters defeated two proposals that would have made the liberal Kansas Supreme Court an elective office and restricted the initiative process in Missouri.

◼ According to recent polling for Wisconsin’s gubernatorial race, Francesca Hong is poised to win the Democratic nomination. Elected to the state assembly in 2020, Hong has gleefully endorsed anti-Israel rhetoric, defunding the police, and eliminating school choice. She’s a card-carrying member of the DSA who fraternizes with the likes of Hasan Piker. The GOP hopes that Hong will win the nomination because she appears to be the easiest candidate to defeat. But that strategy could backfire. Hong seems to have found a bipartisan lane with her push for a moratorium on the construction of data centers. Blue and red enclaves along the shores of Lake Michigan have loudly denounced data centers for their perceived threat to farmland and the fresh water of the Great Lakes. Moreover, state-level Republicans, other than Ron Johnson, have yet to prove that they can win statewide races in this decade. If this race bounces the wrong way, sewer socialism may once again stink up Wisconsin.

◼ A regrettably familiar sequence of events has played out in the streets of Madison, Wis., over the last two weeks. In late July, a police officer attempted to arrest 22-year-old Corey Ruiz when the suspect reportedly lunged at him with a knife. The officer fatally shot Ruiz. The local press fixated on race—the officer and his superiors are white, while Ruiz was identified as black or Latino in court documents—as protesters took over parts of the city. The “Corey Ruiz Autonomous Zone” emerged from this milieu, and it bore all the terrible hallmarks of the “CHAZ” enclave that blighted Seattle in the summer of 2020. Madison’s city officials only briefly tolerated the anarchic squalor of this separatist preserve. With comparatively little warning, they swooped in this week to bulldoze the site. But having experienced no other consequences for their lawlessness beyond rousting, the occupiers will likely return.

◼ One low point of the Biden years was the use of the “greedflation” bogeyman (and threats of legal investigation) to bully companies into either cutting prices or holding back on price increases. Trump’s recent complaint that ExxonMobil and Chevron were making “too much” money and should “give some of that back to the public” is an attempt to deflect attention from the reason that prices have risen at the gas pump: the Iran war, as even its supporters should be willing to admit.

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◼ The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has been plagued by bad plumbing, leaks, and algae blooms since it was built a century ago. Trump made a show of cleaning it up before America’s 250th anniversary celebration. On the pretext that the imminent anniversary was an “emergency,” Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum flouted the normal procurement rules to award an inflated, no-bid contract to a firm that had done pool work for Trump’s golf club in Virginia. When the repair worked proved incompetent, Trump blamed vandals. Jeanine Pirro, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., therefore indicted former Olympic canoer David Hearn, among others, for allegedly ripping a piece of the sealant. Facing the likely implosion of the case in court, which could have come with exposure of Department of Justice misconduct, Pirro has now moved to dismiss the indictment. In an astonishing court filing, Pirro related that Burgum’s department had withheld significant evidence from the DOJ that the overhaul was plagued by construction problems from the start. Burgum is pushing back at Pirro, and Trump is fuming at her. All three should be angry with one another, and themselves.

◼ Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.) reintroduced his bill to expand the Supreme Court and limit the terms of justices. The Court would have a maximum of 18 justices, with presidents appointing new justices in the first and third years of their terms without there being vacancies. Aiming to hasten the end of the current conservative majority, the bill would sideline the most senior justices (Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and John Roberts) from ruling on most of the Court’s docket, effectively stripping them of the powers that every justice since 1790 has exercised. Aside from undermining judicial independence, it would create two classes of justices with different powers. In turn, it would make a mockery of Articles II and III of the Constitution, which treat the justices other than the chief as holding a single “Office.” The bill is an unprecedented assault on 236 years of American constitutional tradition.

◼ Before Congress’s August recess, Senate leaders are rushing to pass the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, which would create a unified regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies. The crypto industry strongly supports the bill on the basis that it would resolve legal uncertainty around this unique digital asset class, which several federal agencies have laid claim to. It could still be hobbled by the banking lobby, however, as traditional financial institutions want to strangle crypto in the crib. In particular, banks seek to fortify protectionist provisions in existing law to prevent stablecoins—cryptocurrencies backed by safe reserves to hold a constant value—from offering consumers yields as deposit accounts do. If anything, lawmakers should take the opportunity to scrap those restrictions and let Americans put their money where they please.

◼ The Democratic Party of California endorsed a ballot measure to confiscate 5 percent of billionaires’ net worth through a supposedly onetime levy. Governor Gavin Newsom had been campaigning against the initiative, recognizing that it would drive away the state’s most productive residents. California’s largest health-care union is pushing the tax because 90 percent of the proceeds would be earmarked for Medicaid, while the teachers’ and firefighters’ unions oppose it because, in the long term, it would jeopardize more revenue than it promises to raise. But punishing wealth is all the rage in blue jurisdictions. Even Newsom feels compelled to get with the program ahead of his potential presidential run, as he now supports a wealth tax at the national level. The governor was right the first time.

◼ With Ukraine’s drones having reduced Russia’s advance in the east to a crawl and more or less paralyzed its Black Sea Fleet, the Kremlin has turned to its ballistic missiles to regain the initiative. This is already taking a heavy toll. Ukraine is well equipped to shoot down drones and cruise missiles. But to down ballistic missiles takes Patriot interceptors, and Ukraine’s stock of interceptors has run very low. As an intensification of Russian ballistic missile strikes in recent weeks shows, Moscow intends to press home the advantage. In July, Ukrainian civilian casualties were the highest they’ve been since the earliest months of the war. As Russia moves its war of attrition to the sky, the West should resupply Ukraine so long as it can safely afford to. But with Patriots taking as much as two years to manufacture, trouble lies ahead.

◼ A massive incursion of about 70,000 illegal migrants from Morocco afflicted Ceuta, a Spanish city of 80,000 people on the North African coast. Earlier this year, Spain’s far-left prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, forced through an amnesty for illegal immigrants. About 1 million people applied. Eventually, family reunification provisions might increase the total admitted or regularized to, on some estimates, between 2 million and 3 million. Not surprisingly, the news of this amnesty horrified many members of the European Union. The Spanish government’s response has ranged from denial to the somewhat more credible position that it was given no warning of the size of any incursion. Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, is calling for tighter external border controls. These would, however, have done nothing to stop Sánchez’s amnesty. We recommend offering EU member states a choice. If they want to preserve their prerogative to unilaterally pass such measures as Spain’s amnesty, they should agree to withdraw from the EU’s border-free Schengen Area. It’s doubtful that this will happen, however. More likely is that Schengen will limp on until it collapses.

◼ Climate activists are using Europe’s wave of wildfires to justify their futile and counterproductive campaign to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. A major part of the problem has been inadequate fire prevention and, more specifically, the buildup of too much undergrowth: kindling in waiting. This has been exacerbated by rural abandonment as traditional farming declines, and possibly by faddish “rewilding.” We may be able to mitigate climate change one day. But for now, humanity should deal with a changing climate as it has over the millennia: by adaptation. Like resistance to air-conditioning, the extent of the current fires is evidence that Europeans have forgotten that lesson.

◼ In 2023, at age 37, Jason Arday became the youngest black professor in the history of Cambridge University—and that may be the only verifiably true claim about his life. His work demonstrates clear evidence of plagiarism. His résumé is filled with dubious assertions about his professional history. His biographical claims seem equally fantastical: He says that he assisted with “installing water points” in South America and West Africa through the international nonprofit WaterAid, but the organization does not send volunteers abroad. Nevertheless, the Good Law Project, a nonprofit in the United Kingdom, issued a statement that was signed by University of Cambridge affiliates, members of Parliament, leaders of the Green Party, and others claiming that racism is behind the questions about Arday’s truthfulness. This is rank intellectual corruption. There is no justification for keeping a supposed researcher whose research is largely, if not wholly, bogus. Cambridge announced that it is investigating Arday, who in the meantime resigned. Good. The university should never have disgraced itself with this charade.