◼ An artificial intelligence researcher sparked panic when he resigned from Anthropic, claiming that developers are advancing their models too quickly and ignoring the risk of their spiraling out of human control. He’s not the first to voice anxiety. Elon Musk, head of the company SpaceXAI, has estimated a 10 to 20 percent chance that the technology will result in human annihilation. The chief executives of Anthropic and OpenAI have echoed this catastrophism, which they present as cause for sweeping regulation. Industry leaders may be genuinely unnerved by their own creations, and many are now promising to tap the brakes. They might also wish the government would erect barriers to open competition. Imagine if internet companies had been subject to a licensing regime in 2001. AOL might still reign supreme. To the AI incumbents, losing their lead might be even scarier than the end of the world.

◼ According to the RealClearPolitics average of polls since mid-March, more than 55 percent of the public disapproves of President Donald Trump’s job performance. His unpopularity, combined in some cases with poor-quality candidates, is endangering Republicans in some surprising places. The Senate seat in North Carolina, from which Trump chased the incumbent Republican, looks lost. Republicans also face real races in Iowa, Alaska, Ohio, and maybe Kansas. Even in Texas, their candidate, Ken Paxton, saddled by his own corruption, is behind in the polls. Some of the Republicans’ travails are the price of holding the White House. Even when times are good, the president’s party turns complacent and the opposition angry during midterm elections. Trump has seemingly contrived to make the backlash worse. Inflation was the primary reason he won in 2024. But he has raised prices with tariffs, leaned on the Federal Reserve to do less to fight inflation, repeatedly dismissed concerns about the cost of living, and spent his time on issues that matter much more to him—such as renovating the White House—than to most voters. The military conflict with Iran has raised prices, too, and Trump made no attempt to win public support for the sacrifices it would entail before launching it. Responding to the party’s grim prospects, Trump is promising a $5,000 check to each American if Republicans win. Even if this were a good idea, it would make people wonder why Republicans don’t just send them now. Compounding the puzzlement, Trump says he can send them without Congress. Desperate times don’t call for harebrained measures.

◼ Democrats, meanwhile, are partying like it’s 2019. Back then, the party’s presidential candidates lined up to embrace a government takeover of health insurance that they branded “Medicare for All.” That enthusiasm faded when Joe Biden became the party’s presidential nominee. Now, however, Medicare for All has reemerged. Democrats have nominated a number of candidates who support the idea, including Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and Troy Jackson in Maine. The American Action Forum estimates that Medicare for All would increase federal spending by $47.4 trillion over ten years. In 2019, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated that such spending would require all income tax rates to double. Moreover, Medicare for All would eliminate private health insurance, which would prevent the 161 million Americans who obtain insurance through their employers, the 36 million seniors who have chosen Medicare Advantage plans, and even the 19 million Americans with Obamacare exchange plans from keeping their coverage. Republicans hoping to gain ground in the midterm elections should consider informing voters of these facts.

◼ The Federal Reserve’s governing committee voted unanimously to raise benchmark interest rates by a quarter percentage point, up to 4 percent. The decision was necessary and overdue. Inflation has run well above the Fed’s 2 percent target for 66 consecutive months, while employment and economic growth have chugged along. A tightening of monetary policy was the only proper response. The Fed should never have cut rates before inflation was fully tamed, and it ought to have hiked them sooner when inflation proved persistent, but the central bank is now finally on track to restore price stability. This time, it must follow through and finish the job.

◼ Bo French is the Republican nominee for Texas railroad commissioner, a position whose jurisdiction over energy policy makes it more important than it sounds. He tweeted a photo of several students of South Asian descent cheering amid the crowd at a University of Texas at Austin football game, saying, “The problem is now far worse than anyone imagined.” Other Republican politicians criticized him, some vigorously and some gingerly. His online defenders kicked up dust, saying that he had raised valid concerns about the university’s over-catering to foreigners (although he didn’t know the nationality or citizenship of any of those young men), its supposedly unfair admissions standards (which reasonably favor Texans but do not favor those of Indian ancestry), or an overly generous immigration policy (which has real downsides, none of them illustrated in his chosen picture). His dumb and ugly outburst advanced no good cause, and neither have the sophistic defenses of it.

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◼ Street violence in Seattle culminated with a shoot-out between what local news described as “known drug dealers” and “bounty hunters.” A billboard north of the city center, bought by a local military veteran, reads: “Would the last taxpayer to leave the Emerald City change the name to ‘The Blue Tarp City of thieves, druggies, and shooters?’” It’s no wonder that Katie Wilson, Seattle’s democratic socialist mayor, has seen her approval rating collapse by 20 points since she assumed office in January. Some residents want Wilson to repair the $1.7 million hole in the city’s police budget. Others want her out of office altogether. “We’re continuing to stay the course that I laid out earlier this year,” the mayor insisted. Seattle’s citizens should have known what they were voting for.

◼ The Department of Justice is suing the public school district of Kansas City, Kan., over a policy that allegedly directs staff to develop and implement gender-transition plans without notifying parents or obtaining their consent. The lawsuit comes months after the Supreme Court ruled in an emergency-docket case that similar policies in California likely violated parents’ rights to direct their children’s upbringing and education. There is similarly encouraging news in Texas. James Talarico, the Democratic Party’s candidate in the Lone Star State’s Senate election, once declared that there are six biological sexes and that “God is non-binary.” Now, he has walked back those statements. He has also endorsed both a national ban on gender-transition surgeries for minors and rules to protect fairness and safety for female student-athletes. Sanity may yet prevail in the battle over gender ideology.

◼ A joint investigation by the Justice Department and the Department of Education found that the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law discriminated against white and Asian applicants while favoring black applicants. Black applicants were allegedly 5.8 times more likely to be admitted than similarly situated white applicants in 2025. Moreover, the DOJ found that the median LSAT score for admitted black students was roughly five points lower than that of admitted white and Asian students in each year between 2021 and 2025. Hopefully, America’s universities will soon learn that compliance with the law is not optional.

◼ Trump’s executive order on mail-in ballots was intended to stop noncitizens from voting. It sought to deter state election officials from allowing ballots cast by noncitizens and to use the U.S. Postal Service to interdict such ballots. But Congress never gave the president the legal authority to do these things, and the Constitution gives him none in the absence of a statute. To survive a round of Supreme Court review, the administration narrowed the executive order to directing prosecutorial priorities, advising the states about who is and isn’t a citizen, and directing the USPS to issue regulations within existing powers. As a result, these new rules were limited in effect to new ballot-envelope designs to aid in tracking mailed ballots. But these scaled-back rules arrived too late to be implemented in 2026. The Court therefore let stand an injunction against them. Justice Samuel Alito, in dissent, raised valid questions about the courts’ jurisdiction to review the regulations, but his colleagues weren’t persuaded that the need for a new envelope design was urgent enough to justify the disruption its implementation would entail. The president reacted with fury, especially at his own appointees to the Court, but the practical effect of the decision will be small.

◼ The U.K.’s Parliament wisely rejected the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill. The bill would have allowed medical professionals to administer assisted suicide to patients with a prognosis of six months or less. It passed the House of Commons in 2025 by a vote of 314 to 291. The House of Lords debated it, and opponents of the bill proposed nearly 1,300 amendments. The bill ran out of parliamentary time in April and was reintroduced in June. But this time, the bill failed in the Commons 286–270. One of the most staggering interventions was from West Lancashire’s Labour MP Ashley Dalton, who said that she had sat through previous debates with a secret: her terminal cancer diagnosis. She castigated the bill for relying on notoriously unreliable prognoses. She criticized those who, by describing highly unlikely scenarios of gross and terrible agony, sought to frighten ill people, particularly those already struggling with depression, into supporting the bill. The march of the culture of death was halted in one of the most venerable democratic institutions on earth.

◼ The return of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle to the sceptered isle has not been greeted with unalloyed joy by King Charles, Prince William, their wives, or the British people. According to a YouGov poll, one-third of Brits believe that the duke and duchess should have stayed in California, 45 percent are undecided, and only 21 percent are pleased to see them back. The duo’s behavior has been an exercise in reputational self-immolation. Prior to his marriage, naughty Harry—war veteran, cheeky chappie, and to his great credit, the founder of the Invictus Games, a project to help wounded members of the military—was one of the most popular members of the royal family. When Meghan arrived, she was greeted with great enthusiasm. Times have changed. King Charles has stressed that Harry and Meghan are just “private citizens,” but this is clearly not how they intend to behave. Prince William, meanwhile, looks on icily, contemplating an annoyance he had thought an ocean away. Once upon a time, Shakespeare would have already reached for his quill. We will have to make do with the tabloids.

◼ What led Gloria Steinem to “begin her life” as a feminist activist, as she later interestingly put it, was covering “an abortion speak-out” as a reporter and then starting to talk about her own abortion. Brains, savvy, and good looks made her an ideal champion for 1970s feminism. Her obituaries hailed the triumph of the revolution she led, and even conservatives paid tribute to her patriotism. But the movement’s success has been more equivocal than generally appreciated. That’s in part because its radicalism has been airbrushed out of the picture. Forgotten was Steinem’s advocacy for “comparable worth” regulations on the pay rates for occupations dominated by women and those dominated by men: central planning with a feminist’s face. As feminism became an established political force, Steinem proved that the ladies could be just as Machiavellian as the gents: She defended Bill Clinton on the ground that he had never beaten up Hillary. While only a razor-thin majority of American women consider themselves feminists, it can’t be denied that feminism achieved its central ambition of weakening the cultural script that led young people to marriage. Polling also finds that American women have grown less happy in recent decades. Surely a coincidence. Dead at 92. R.I.P.

◼ Jon Kyl’s three-decade career in Republican politics was defined by substance rather than spectacle. He represented Arizona for eight years in the House and nearly 20 in the Senate, serving for more than five years as the second-ranking Republican senator. Conservatives owe him a particular debt for his final act of public service. After retiring from the Senate in 2013, Kyl briefly returned in 2018 to fill John McCain’s seat until a special election could be held. In that time, he helped cement a conservative majority on the Supreme Court by guiding the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh through a uniquely contentious process. Kyl was a master of consequential if sometimes arcane subjects: water rights, tax law, the federal judiciary. He became a leading authority on nuclear deterrence and national security. He understood that America’s strength abroad was inseparable from its stability at home. “Probably a lot of my better achievements were in preventing bad things from happening [rather] than forcing good things to happen,” Kyl once said. A modest summary of his work—and a characteristically conservative one. Dead at 84. R.I.P.