Below is my column in The Hill on the latest spin from the left to convince Americans to abandon core constitutional institutions and values as part of a radical agenda in the upcoming elections. Those who defend our traditions, on the 250th anniversary of our Republic, are now being accused of being “nostalgic” rather than progressive. It is a nostalgia that will take on a truly tragic element if professors, pundits and politicians are successful in this effort.
It appears that the Madisonian democracy has joined shackets and combat boots as embarrassingly outdated for many on the left. In calling for radical changes to our constitutional system, leading Democrats are now calling the lingering loyalty to our traditions as mere “nostalgia.” To be nostalgic in today’s parlance is to be a dupe of the oligarchs and an enemy to reform.
“Nostalgia” has become the new coded term for reactionaries among Democratic figures, who are trying to convince Americans to accept radical changes to our republic after 250 years.
Kamala Harris recently insisted that opposition to ideas like packing the Supreme Court is mere “nostalgia” for a system that is no longer working. “I would caution us against talking about rebuilding with any sense of nostalgia about how things work, because even before, they weren’t working so well for a lot of folks,” she said. That “nostalgia,” according to Harris, is preventing us from doing things like packing the Supreme Court with an instant liberal majority.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) last week also declared that “nostalgia is not working” and, while refusing to embrace socialism, added that “capitalism as we know it doesn’t work.”
Morris Katz, a political strategist for Zohran Mamdani, spoke to CNN’s Dana Bash about looking beyond the label of democratic socialism and instead simply to accept that “our government does not work.” They are joining socialists who have long promised revolutionary changes without “introspection, nostalgia or regret.”
It is an all-too-familiar pitch. Sixty years ago, a call to break free of “old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits” revolutionized a nation. That call was heard in a Chinese paper that would help lay the foundation for Mao Zedong’s bloody Cultural Revolution. Marxists had long rejected calls to preserve institutions and citizens’ rights as “nostalgia” and “sentimentality,” standing in the way of needed progress.
For the Democratic Socialist of America organization, nostalgia stands in the way of getting rid of the Senate, presidency, and the Supreme Court to fundamentally change the republic.
That is not an easy task for a people who have benefited from the oldest and most prosperous democracy for 250 years. They have to be very angry or very afraid to take such a radical course.
The Soviets understood that about the U.S. After Yuri Bezmenov, a KGB agent working in the media, defected in 1970, he revealed the four stages by which the Soviets hoped to bring about revolutionary change in the U.S. It began with undermining our institutions and values, with the help of journalists and academics.
With establishment figures lining up behind radical changes, including packing the Supreme Court, the public is hearing a constant drumbeat of how our system is broken.
Even Democratic judges are joining the chorus. Indeed, some appear to be auditioning for the slots promised by Democratic leaders to take over the court with a reliable liberal majority.
This week, the Hawaii Supreme Court issued an unhinged diatribe against the U.S. Supreme Court that abandoned any semblance of judicial restraint or decorum. It declared the majority as effectively racists, saying that “The Roberts Court sees only white.” It portrayed the court as a rogue institution that “overrides what Congress passed. It overrides what the people chose. All to serve its own ends.”
It is an opinion that would make an MS NOW host blush. But it follows a pattern on the left to get people to turn against our institutions and even against the Constitution itself.
Others are telling the public that they are being repressed by the Constitution, which must be scrapped. In a New York Times op-ed — “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed” — law professors Ryan Doerfler of Harvard and Samuel Moyn of Yale called for the nation to “reclaim America from constitutionalism.”
In yet another New York Times editorial, Jennifer Szalai denounced “Constitution worship” and claimed that “Americans have long assumed that the Constitution could save us. A growing chorus now wonders whether we need to be saved from it.”
Berkeley Dean Erwin Chemerinsky insists that it is time to trash the Constitution in favor of “radical changes.”
These voices are seeking to remove all of the moderating elements of our system —the safety features that have produced the world’s most successful and stable republic. They are the very constitutional elements protecting us from the tyranny of the majority, protecting us from ourselves.
Without those protections, we will unleash the self-destructive forces that have been tearing apart other democratic systems since Athens. It is our constitution that spared us from that fate. As James Madison observed, “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”
Of course, history has shown that such radical proposals ultimately produce not democracy, but what the Framers called mobocracy. If we let that happen, many Americans will indeed look back at the last 250 years with a tragic sense of nostalgia.
Federal Prosecutors Probe Guggenheim, Billionaire Dem Donor Walter’s Insurers
Federal investigators are taking a closer look at billionaire Mark Walter’s financial empire, with criminal and regulatory inquiries now spanning Guggenheim Partners and two life insurance companies under his control, according to Bloomberg.
The investigation, which began last year, initially focused on Guggenheim’s $362 billion asset management business before expanding to Delaware Life Insurance Co. and Clear Spring Life and Annuity Co., according to people familiar with the matter.
Bloomberg writes that both insurers revealed in recent regulatory filings that they were served with grand jury subpoenas in February.
Prosecutors are examining whether the companies properly disclosed private credit investments tied to affiliated businesses within Walter’s network. The companies also said the Justice Department’s investigation is proceeding alongside a separate SEC probe.
People familiar with the matter said the FBI seized at least one mobile phone under a search warrant last September, although it isn’t clear which part of the broader investigation the device was connected to. No allegations have been filed, and investigations of this type can conclude without criminal charges or civil enforcement.
Following the subpoenas, the insurers launched an internal review that identified financial reporting “errors.” Delaware Life subsequently revised its disclosures, revealing roughly $16 billion in additional affiliated private credit investments. The change increased related-party holdings to at least $17 billion, representing about 39% of invested assets, versus roughly $1.4 billion, or 3%, previously reported.
The disclosure led S&P Global Ratings to revise Delaware Life’s outlook from stable to negative, while leaving its A- financial strength rating unchanged.
“TWG is aware of and cooperating with the investigation,” the company said. Group 1001, the parent of Delaware Life and Clear Spring, also said:
“Our capital position and liquidity remain strong, and our financial strength ratings are unchanged.”
Finally, we note that Walter has historically supported Democratic candidates and causes through his campaign contributions. Walter’s personal contributions include supportto the Democratic National Committee and to Barack Obama’s reelection campaign in 2011.
President Donald Trump has ordered federal officials to review conduct related to climate guidance included in a scientific reference manual for federal judges, which he described as politically biased and based on discredited science.
“These Manuals have been totally discredited,” Trump said in a June 19 post on Truth Social.
He was referring to a February decision by the U.S. federal judiciary to withdraw the climate science chapter of the newest edition of its “Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence.”
The manual is published by the judiciary’s research arm, the Federal Judicial Center, in cooperation with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, which includes the National Academy of Sciences. The National Academy of Sciences is an independent nonprofit organization chartered by Congress in 1863 that receives federal funding to provide scientific advice to the government.
The manual, in its fourth edition, was released in December.
Judges rely on the manual “in identifying issues commonly in dispute and to help judges reach an informed and reasoned assessment of those issues based on expert evidence that is faithful to the law and within the boundaries of scientifically sound knowledge,” according to the Federal Judicial Center’s website.
The guidance is not binding but can help federal judges and others in handling complex scientific and technical evidence.
“Our Nation’s Federal Judges deserve Facts and Science, not Political Fraud and False Science on Climate,” Trump wrote. “Our Taxpayers should not be funding Climate Fraud, and Judges should never have relied upon it.”
The president said the manual would be reviewed by federal suspension and agency debarment officials for political bias.
Political Bias
The decision to withdraw the chapter titled “Reference Guide on Climate Science” was in response to complaints by 27 Republican state attorneys general, who argued the guidance was not “independent” or “impartial” as it declared that “only one preferred view is ‘within the boundaries of scientifically sound knowledge.'”
In their Jan. 29 letter, the attorneys general – led by West Virginia Attorney General JB McCuskey – argued the chapter “places the judiciary firmly on one side of some of the most hotly disputed questions in current litigation: climate-related science and ‘attribution.'”
They said the authors, Jessica Wentz and Radley Horton, limited their expert consultations to those who aligned with their conception of consensus, citing experts from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) but not experts from the U.S. Department of Energy.
“By predetermining scientific underpinnings, the Manual effectively prejudges federalism questions that should be resolved through litigation. That sounds nothing like a ‘dispassionate guide,'” they said.
“If the Center can predetermine scientific questions in climate cases, what prevents it from doing the same for pharmaceutical liability, election disputes, or Second Amendment cases? The precedent is dangerous regardless of one’s views on climate change.”
They also said that the section was “rife with methodology issues,” that the authors and Columbia University were supportive of climate-related litigation, and that the chapter “seems intended to ensure that the judiciary will continue to accept their views uncritically.”
Trump said in his post that the manuals “were used by Judges to decide massive ‘Climate Change’ Cases, and have created huge losses across our Country.”
Wentz and Horton told the federal judiciary in a Feb. 25 letter defending their chapter: “The anthropogenic origin of climate change is the only scientific finding on climate change that the chapter presents as a ‘settled’ fact. The chapter does not suggest that other aspects of climate science have been ‘unequivocally’ established.”
They said the chapter acknowledges that there are varying degrees of “scientific uncertainty and confidence with regards to the detection attribution, and projection of different types of climate impacts.”
It does not “take a position as to whether specific impacts or injuries (of the sort that would be at issue in a lawsuit) are definitively attributable climate change,” they added.
The manual “explains scientific approaches and explores scientific uncertainties and limits,” Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan wrote in the foreword. “It aids in assessing the uses – and the misuses – of scientific and other technical evidence. … Yet case in and case out, the instruction that the manual offers in scientific principles and methods can improve the quality of judicial decision making.”
The National Academy of Sciences did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Trump’s statements and the announced review.
A federal judge ruled on Friday that a former FEMA chief financial officer was illegally fired by the Trump administration over what it claimed were millions spent by the agency on luxury hotels for illegal immigrants in New York City.
Mary Comans’s termination in February 2025 amidd allegations of misused funds had been amplified by then-head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Elon Musk and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Biden-appointed District Judge Michael Nachmanoff decided she is entitled to a name-clearing hearing over the issue.
Nachmanoff, of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, ordered that lawyers for Comans and the Trump administration confer and within 14 days submit a joint proposal outlining a process for the hearing.
The judge indicated that discovery and a full evidentiary hearing before a federal magistrate judge would be appropriate to address previous statements made by Musk, the Trump administration, and Comans’s allegations of her politically motivated termination without due process.
Lawyers from the progressive nonprofit Democracy Defenders Fund and four other firms who represent Comans called Nachmanoff’s ruling a “landmark” win in a statement.
“Mary Comans is a career public servant who had the courage to challenge the Trump regime’s unlawful termination,” attorney Craig Becker of Democracy Defenders Fund said. “Today’s decision is a resounding victory for the rule of law and our vital civil service. It sends a clear message that no administration is above the law, no public servant should be punished for doing their job with integrity, and no president can erase decades of civil service protections.”
Comans and her attorneys argued she was fired without due process, in violation of the Constitution, depriving her of both property and liberty.
They alleged that her notice of termination stated no official reason and was also in violation of the Civil Service Reform Act, which provides protection for federal employees.
“This is a reminder that our federal courts remain an essential check on executive abuse of power, and we will continue our fight to remedy the full scope of the harm that the president has done to our civil service,” Becker said.
President Donald Trump has fired many government employees during his second term in office. The administration has said Trump’s constitutional ability to fire federal workers cannot be constrained.
In Comans’s firing, the Trump administration said it was allowed to terminate her employment with FEMA under Article II of the Constitution, which endows a president with executive power.
DHS accused Comans and three other FEMA officials of authorizing a $59 million payment to fund housing for illegal immigrants in luxury hotels in New York City.
Homeland Security said the former CFO and others circumvented “leadership to unilaterally make egregious payments.”
The nearly $60 million payment was uncovered by DOGE.
“That money is meant for American disaster relief and instead is being spent on high-end hotels for illegals!” Musk wrote on X at the time.
The Supreme Court ruled last month on the president’s firing power. It could play a role in the upcoming hearing between Comans and the Trump administration.
The justices on June 29 both expanded and limited Trump’s ability to fire heads of federal agencies.
One case before the high court was a victory for Trump, with the justices allowing him to fire a member of the Federal Trade Commission. But in another case, the Supreme Court blocked the president’s firing of a Federal Reserve board member, sending the issue back to lower courts.
FEMA is an agency within Homeland Security, which falls under the executive branch of the federal government.
Neither the Department of Justice, FEMA, nor DHS responded to requests for comment before publication.
The average weekly rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage is at its highest level in nearly a year, contributing to elevated housing costs and dampening buyer interest.
For the most recent week, the mortgage rate was at 6.55 percent, according to a July 16 statement by Freddie Mac. This is the highest level since the week ending Aug. 27, 2025, when the rate was at 6.56 percent. Since mid-May, rates have consistently hovered around 6.5 percent.
Rates have risen consecutively over the past two weeks, from 6.43 percent for the week ending July 1 to 6.55 percent currently.
Meanwhile, pending home sales in the country declined 2.2 percent for the four weeks ending July 12 compared to the four-week period ending July 5, according to a statement from real estate brokerage Redfin.
First-time homebuyers are facing a “tough time” breaking into the housing market, Christine Kooiker, a Redfin Premier agent in Grand Rapids, Michigan, said in the statement.
“High mortgage rates mean that even homes in the most affordable price point – under $350,000 in the Grand Rapids area – are a stretch for a lot of buyers, and they’re hard to find and competitive,” Kooiker said.
Many buyers are “sitting on the sidelines, too, because they’re locked into low mortgage rates or can’t find a new home they love.”
Similar findings were made by the National Association of Realtors (NAR), which, in a July 16 statement, reported a 5.4 percent month-over-month dip in pending sales in June.
The decrease was most pronounced in the Midwest, followed by the West, South, and Northeast.
“The highest mortgage rates in nearly a year and the record-high national median home price together are contributing to a tepid housing market that is especially difficult for first-time homebuyers,” NAR Chief Economist Dr. Lawrence Yun said in the statement.
Housing Affordability
Lawmakers have taken action to ease the burdens on prospective homebuyers and make housing more affordable for Americans.
On July 11, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law. The legislation aims to ensure housing affordability through various measures, such as rolling back permits and regulations, and offering financial support to homebuyers, builders, and state and local governments.
The bill was passed by the House and Senate last month. However, President Donald Trump refused to sign the bill until the election integrity bill, the SAVE America Act, was passed by Congress.
According to Article I of the U.S. Constitution, if a bill is not returned by the president within 10 days after being presented, it shall become law. Trump’s deadline to veto the bill was July 10.
The bill “will cut red tape, lower costs, and boost the supply of housing,” Rep. Sam Liccardo (D-Calif.) said in a July 13 statement.
“We need to build on this momentum and keep rolling up our sleeves to tackle the housing crisis confronting far too many American families.”
Meanwhile, builder confidence in the market for newly built single-family homes declined in July from the previous month, according to a July 16 statement from the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB).
The NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index was at 36 in July, the 15th straight month it has remained below the 40 level. This is the longest stretch of monthly values below 40 since 2012.
NAHB chief economist Robert Dietz cited housing affordability as the “primary challenge” facing the home building industry.
NAHB chairman Bill Owens said that many potential buyers continue to hesitate to purchase homes as they wait for mortgage rates to come down and for more clarity on inflation and the economic outlook.
While the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act has some important provisions addressing obstacles faced by buyers and builders, “these reforms will take time to implement,” Owens said.
Assholes who wear Vineyard Vines all summer on Wall Street have once again put those Wharton PhD’s to good use by again “discovering” that assets so toxic and illiquid they make drinking cement taste like Fiji water apparently become safe when you rearrange them, rename them, and place an insurance company between the losses and the people buying them. Sound familiar?
According to Bloomberg, UBS and other firms have been exploring structures that package stakes in private-credit funds into bonds. Because perpetual private-credit vehicles do not fit neatly into conventional ratings models, bankers are looking to add insurance “wrappers” that allow portions of the deals to inherit the insurer’s stronger credit profile. The resulting paper can then be marketed as investment grade, even though the assets underneath remain opaque, illiquid private-market investments.
This is apparently considered innovation. I just hear Anthony Bourdain explaining CDOs during The Big Short over and over again.
An insurer guarantees a tranche against losses, the tranche receives a better rating, and other insurers can buy it while setting aside dramatically less capital. In the example described, an A2-rated tranche could require less than 1% in regulatory capital, compared with a charge that could reach 30% for a direct investment in a private-credit fund.
Nothing says “rock-solid asset” quite like needing several lawyers, a ratings agency, an insurance guarantee and a regulatory-capital loophole to explain why it is safe.
The comparison with 2008 is not merely rhetorical. Before the financial crisis, Wall Street packaged mortgages into residential mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations. Those securities were divided into tranches, and ratings agencies assigned extremely high grades to senior portions based on assumptions that nationwide housing losses would remain limited and geographically dispersed.
Then Wall Street added another layer of genius: credit-default swaps.
Insurer AIG’s Financial Products division sold enormous amounts of CDS protection on mortgage-related securities. These contracts operated much like insurance, promising payment if the protected securities suffered specified credit losses. AIG collected fees up front and initially posted little collateral because everyone treated the company’s high credit rating as a substitute for cash.
The crucial clarification is that AIG’s traditional state-regulated insurance subsidiaries were not simply writing ordinary homeowners policies and accidentally destroying civilization. The catastrophe grew largely inside AIG Financial Products, an inadequately regulated derivatives business that used the broader AIG organization’s pristine rating to guarantee complex financial bets.
But that rating was the magic wand.
As mortgage values deteriorated and AIG was downgraded, its counterparties demanded tens of billions of dollars in collateral. AIG did not have enough readily available cash to meet those calls. Suddenly, the institution that had promised to insure everyone else’s balance sheet needed the federal government to insure its own. The same rating that had made the contracts appear safe became the trigger for the liquidity crisis once it disappeared.
On September 16, 2008, the Federal Reserve authorized an initial loan of up to $85 billion to keep AIG from collapsing. The government received a 79.9% equity interest in exchange. The support was later expanded and restructured through Treasury investments, additional facilities and special vehicles created to remove mortgage securities and CDO exposures from AIG’s balance sheet.
Total commitments commonly associated with the rescue eventually reached roughly $180 billion. The CFTC later described the intervention as about $600 for every American alive at the time.
AIG had more than $1 trillion in consolidated assets in mid-2008 and sat at the center of a sprawling network involving major banks, retirement plans, commercial-paper markets, municipalities and other insurers. Federal Reserve officials concluded that a disorderly failure could have caused severe losses across financial institutions and further reduced the availability of credit to households and businesses.
In other words, AIG did not merely make bad investments. It sold protection so broadly that its own failure threatened to detonate the institutions that believed they were protected. The insurer had become the bomb.
And now, less than two decades later, Wall Street is again using insurance guarantees to turn difficult-to-rate credit exposure into highly rated securities.
What could possibly go wrong besides the exact thing that already went wrong?
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The modern structures are not identical to AIG’s CDS book. Today’s private-credit wrappers may be smaller, more collateralized and subject to different contractual and regulatory safeguards. There is no evidence that the current market has already created an AIG-sized hole.
But the rhyme is deafening. The underlying private credit assets are dogshit, as I’ve written about on this blog non-stop. The engineering is complicated. Ratings play a central role. Capital requirements become lighter after the transaction is rearranged. Risk migrates from the original lender to insurers, annuity providers, pensions and other institutions promising money to ordinary people decades from now.
The fund-finance market is estimated at somewhere between $1 trillion and $1.75 trillion, up from only a few hundred billion roughly a decade ago. That puts its expansion in the same broad neighborhood as the pre-2008 boom in structured subprime finance.
Private-credit managers need liquidity because exits have slowed, old investments remain stuck, and some borrowers are repaying existing loans with still more debt. Meanwhile, insurers and annuity companies are hungry for yield and attracted to structures that turn higher-risk fund exposure into favorably treated investment-grade paper.
It is a beautiful ecosystem. Private funds need money. Insurers need yield. Banks need fees. Ratings agencies need business. Regulators need to remain comatose. Everyone gets exactly what they want until the whole thing winds up bending over the average taxpayer, saver or retail investor somehow.
One particularly obvious danger is concentration. When an insurer wraps multiple securities, every buyer begins relying on the same corporate balance sheet. A downgrade of that insurer could cause many wrapped tranches to be downgraded simultaneously, potentially triggering forced selling across portfolios at precisely the moment markets are least able to absorb it. It’s like a high school test where everyone copies off of the same person who fails the test, causing the rest of the class to.
The structures also make it increasingly difficult for regulators to trace where the final losses reside. Researchers have warned that repackaging risk adds “structural complexity and opacity” and can amplify contagion when one link fails, as the Bloomberg report notes.
Once again, Wall Street is not eliminating risk. It is relocating it, obscuring it and reducing the amount of capital held against it. And once again, the entire arrangement is encouraged by the understanding that the Federal Reserve will respond to a sufficiently large accident with emergency lending, asset purchases, liquidity facilities and whatever alphabet soup is necessary to keep asset prices from discovering consequences.
This is the lesson Wall Street learned from 2008: not that leverage and opacity are dangerous, but that they should be spread widely enough to qualify for federal protection.
Make a reckless bet by yourself and you go bankrupt. Make the same bet through enough banks, insurers, pensions and retirement accounts and you become systemically important.
The Fed has spent years turning moral hazard from an embarrassing side effect into a rational business model. Every rescue lowers the perceived cost of the next gamble. Every emergency facility teaches markets that liquidity risk is temporary. Every rapid intervention tells executives that the real objective is not avoiding catastrophe, but making sure a catastrophe would be too politically expensive to tolerate.
So the structures get larger. The collateral gets murkier. The ratings get friendlier. The capital cushions get thinner. The chains of counterparties get longer.
Then everyone acts stunned when one downgrade causes twelve institutions to discover they were all holding the same risk.
We are not preventing the next crash. We are steadily assembling the mother of all crashes while congratulating ourselves for distributing the explosives more efficiently. And when it finally happens, the people who designed it will explain that nobody could possibly have seen it coming.
Except, of course, anyone who remembers 2008…or who is unlucky enough to sit next to me at an airport bar when I have 3 hours to kill and feel talkative.
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Judge Slaps A 14-Day Timeout On Paramount-Warner Bros. Mega-Merger
A federal judge just threw a wrench into one of the biggest media shake-ups in years. On Monday, U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin (Biden) temporarily blocked Paramount Skydance’s $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, giving a coalition of 12 state attorneys general a short-term win in their fight to kill the deal.
The temporary restraining order lasts 14 days – half the 28 days the states had requested – and prevents Paramount from closing the transaction that would combine two historic Hollywood studios, two major streaming services (Paramount+ and Max), and significant news assets under David Ellison, son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta, leading the charge, argues the merger would “extinguish competition” in key areas: wide theatrical film releases, big blockbuster distribution, and the market for basic cable channels. The states put numbers on it, alleging the combined company would control 27 percent of wide-release theatrical distribution, 30 percent of anticipated blockbusters, and 27 percent of the basic cable bundle. In plain terms, they say it would mean higher prices, lower quality, and less choice for theaters, cable providers, and viewers everywhere. The states claim it violates Section 7 of the Clayton Antitrust Act, the classic law aimed at stopping deals that substantially lessen competition. All 12 attorneys general are Democrats.
Paramount is firing back hard. The company calls the lawsuit one of the weakest merger challenges in modern antitrust history, notes it already has DOJ clearance plus approvals from places like Australia and China, and vows to fight vigorously. They argue the states are ignoring the brutal competitive realities of today’s media landscape, where streaming giants, tech platforms, and cord-cutting have upended everything.
The DOJ signoff came after its antitrust division closed an eight-month review that examined more than two million documents – concluding the deal could strengthen competition across streaming, traditional television, and theatrical distribution. State attorneys general retain independent authority to sue regardless.
There’s real urgency for Paramount: they’re on the hook for a “ticking fee” of 25 cents per Warner Bros. share every quarter if the deal doesn’t close by September 30. That works out to roughly $7 million a day, or more than $600 million per quarter – serious money.
Paramount side: 114-year-old studio, Paramount+, CBS, MTV, Nickelodeon, and more.
Warner side: 116-year-old studio, HBO, CNN, plus iconic franchises like Batman and Superman.
If it goes through, David Ellison would control an entertainment behemoth spanning film, TV, streaming, and news.
This state lawsuit is the biggest threat so far, but it’s not the only one. The EU is reviewing it, the UK culture secretary is considering intervention over media concentration worries, the Writers Guild has its own antitrust suit over wages and jobs, and consumers have challenged the streaming combination (though that effort was denied an injunction).
There’s also a political undercurrent. Larry Ellison has been an ally of President Trump, who has publicly pushed for new ownership of CNN and recently praised the family. David Ellison has already started shaking things up at CBS News, bringing in Bari Weiss to revamp “60 Minutes” and the evening broadcast.
For now, the merger is in limbo.Expect intense legal wrangling over the next couple of weeks as Paramount pushes to get it back on track and the states try to build their case for a longer block. In an industry already disrupted by streaming wars and cord-cutting, this battle is about who gets to dominate the next era of Hollywood and media.
RNC Sues To Stop Non-Residents From Voting In Six States
While it seems like common sense that living in a state should be a prerequisite to voting there, the Republican National Committee is suing six states to stop them from doing so.
Fresh off a court win in North Carolina, the RNC has filed lawsuits against Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, New Jersey, Virginia, and Nebraska, each targeting a version of the same loophole. In these states, a person who has never set foot as a resident within their borders can still cast an absentee ballot there, often because a parent or legal guardian once lived in the state decades ago.
“If you’ve never lived in a state, you shouldn’t be voting in its elections,” RNC Chairman Joe Gruterstold the Daily Signal.
“The RNC already put a stop to this unconstitutional loophole in North Carolina, and we’re taking Nebraska, Colorado, Nevada, and New Jersey to court to do the same,” Gruters added,
“We’ll keep fighting to ensure elections are only decided by legal residents.”
The mechanism behind this quirk traces back to federal guidance for overseas voting. According to the Federal Voting Assistance Program website, “In some states, U.S. citizens who were born abroad—and have never resided in the United States—are eligible to vote absentee.” Several states extended that logic further than Congress likely intended, allowing people who were born overseas and never lived stateside at all to vote based on a parent’s old address.
The RNC is not coming after military voters or diplomats. The committee says it firmly supports the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA), the decades-old law that lets service members and foreign service officers vote from wherever the government has stationed them. To secure legal standing in each state, the RNC is partnering with the relevant state party, a candidate, or both.
The North Carolina case set the template. In June, the Wake County Superior Court struck down a state law permitting people born overseas who had never lived in North Carolina to vote there anyway, handing the RNC a win over the state elections board and establishing that these arrangements are vulnerable to a straightforward constitutional challenge.
Nevada is shaping up as the marquee fight of the current round. The RNC has joined the state Republican Party and Republican secretary of state nominee Jim Marchant in challenging a law that allows people who never lived in Nevada, and in some cases never lived in the United States at all, to vote there based solely on a parent’s or guardian’s past residency. The plaintiffs argue the arrangement violates Nevada’s constitution, which requires voters to have “actually, as opposed to constructively” resided in the state. Constructive residency is a fittingly bureaucratic term for a system built on the honor of an ancestor’s zip code.
Despite the commonsense nature of the lawsuit, Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar, a Democrat, called it “an attack on the voting rights of eligible U.S. citizens living abroad” and warned that unwinding the law could hurt military families, even though the RNC made it clear that’s not who their lawsuit is about. “They risk everything to defend our freedoms, including the fundamental right to vote, and Nevada has a responsibility to protect their access to the ballot and the rights of the families who serve alongside them,” he added.
“Children born overseas should not be punished because their parents served, worked, or were stationed outside the United States,” Aguilar continued, saying, “Nevada will not turn its back on military families simply because their service took them away from home.”
Despite Aguilar’s claims, the lawsuits actually target civilians with no service record and no residency claim beyond a relative’s former mailing address, not the men and women stationed abroad under UOCAVA.
“People should have full faith and confidence in the system,” RNC Chairman Joe Gruters said last week. “What we want is to have elections be safe and secure. We want everybody who’s eligible to vote to be able to vote. But I don’t know why it’s so hard. The question is, why do we have 150 lawsuits trying to make sure we protect democracy and try to make sure these elections are safe and secure? It’s because the other side knows they’ll do everything in their ability to hold on to power and control.”
Gruters added, “And that’s why they’re allowing tens of millions of illegals into the country, they want them to be able to eventually have voting rights, and so we’ve stopped, you know, non-citizens from voting. Some of our biggest wins is knocking them off the voting rules. But the work never ends.”
Democrats will do ANYTHING to gain power, including cheating.
That’s why the RNC is fighting on the ground and in the courts across the country to secure our elections. pic.twitter.com/AuF7LR7HoC
— Chairman Joe Gruters (@ChairmanGruters) July 16, 2026
The cost of living has become absolutely suffocating for millions of Americans. For years, the bureaucrats in Washington have been feeding us numbers that show that the rate of inflation is low, but it is obvious to everyone that what they are telling us is simply not true. Many of the items that I regularly purchase at the grocery store have more than doubled in price over the past decade. Some have more than tripled in price. When I get to the register to check out, I feel like asking the cashier which organ I should donate to pay for my groceries.
We have reached a stage where grocery prices are causing extreme financial stress for families all over America. One man recently caused quite a stir on social media when he revealed that a grocery order from Target that cost $64.50 in 2020 is now $158.30 in 2026…
This post has already been viewed a million times.
The reason why it is so popular is because it instantly resonates with people.
Everyone knows that grocery prices have risen to absurd levels, and yet the statisticians in Washington keep assuring us that everything is fine.
I don’t believe them.
Do you?
The Washington Post just conducted a poll that found that 66 percent of Americans consider the cost of groceries to be unaffordable.
That figure has risen by 21 percent just since February…
Americans are feeling worse about the price of groceries than they were before the war with Iran began, a Washington Post-Ipsos poll finds.
About two-thirds, or 66 percent, of Americans say they would describe the cost of groceries as unaffordable, up sharply from the 45 percent who said the same thing in February before the conflict started.
Partisanship continues to play a big role in perceptions, with half of Republicans saying groceries are affordable in the latest poll, compared with about one-quarter of independents and Democrats.
With a landmark housing affordability bill in political limbo, U.S. home prices have hit an all-time high.
The median price of existing homes in June was $440,660, up 1.8% from $432,700 a year ago, according to new data from the National Association of Realtors (NAR). Home prices have risen for 36 straight months.
“Housing affordability remains low under slowing wage growth and stronger home price growth,” Ershang Liang, an economist with PNC Economics Research, said in a report.
Who can afford to pay that much for a house?
Rental prices have also gone through the roof.
If you can believe it, the average rent on a one bedroom apartment in Manhattan is now a whopping $5,408 a month…
The city’s housing crisis has hit “DefCon 1” — with average rents for a one-bedroom in Manhattan hitting an all-time high of nearly $5,500 last month, and Brooklyn following suit, according to new data and critics.
“We need bold action. This is a crisis,’’ New York City Comptroller Mark Levine posted on X over the weekend, along with a link to the latest figures from the inhabit blog by real-estate giant Corcoran Group.
The dismal June stats reveal that renters paid an average of $5,408 for a one-bedroom in Manhattan, with studio prices not far behind at $4,014.
It isn’t a mystery why most Americans are struggling in this sort of an environment.
Many American families are struggling to make ends meet on their incomes alone and have resorted to credit cards, payday loans, and Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) options for groceries, according to nonprofit research center Urban Institute.
The findings are based on a survey of 18-to 64-year-old working-age adults conducted in December 2025. About 8.7 percent of adults said they used a credit card for groceries and were unable to make the minimum payment, up from 7.1 percent in 2023, the Urban Institute said in a July 13 report. This suggests “worsening financial distress” among families.
Almost one in 10 used BNPL to pay for groceries, out of which more than a third missed a timely repayment last year.
Unfortunately, when you keep piling up debt a day of reckoning eventually arrives.
And the number of foreclosures in the U.S. is way above the highly elevated pace that we witnessed last year…
Foreclosures across the U.S. ballooned in the first half of the year, a sign of the increasing financial strain facing the nation’s homeowners.
Foreclosure filings reached nearly 228,000 from January to June, up 21% from a year ago and 28% from two years ago, according to data released Thursday from real estate data company ATTOM.
Rising foreclosure rates indicate that more homeowners are in financial distress, Rob Barber, CEO of ATTOM, said in a statement. Homes go into foreclosure when the owner falls behind on mortgage payments, often due to extenuating life circumstances such as a job loss. ATTOM defines foreclosures as default notices, scheduled auctions or bank repossessions.
This reminds me so much of the conditions that we experienced just before the financial crisis of 2008.
Unfortunately, the cost of living is only going to go higher.
The cost of energy directly affects the cost of everything else, and it appears that the Strait of Hormuz is going to be closed for an extended period of time.
The average price of a gallon of gasoline in the U.S. has nearly reached four dollars again, and the average price of a gallon of diesel has already risen above the five dollar mark…
US gas prices have rocketed higher during the on-again, off-again war with Iran.
After a brief respite, the average price for gas has surged 15 cents in a week to $3.94 a gallon and appears headed north of $4 again. Diesel, which shows up in customers’ shipping costs, topped $5 a gallon again Thursday for the first time in 3 weeks, according to AAA.
It serves as a painful reminder of how the military conflict in the Persian Gulf has a direct effect on your wallet.
Of even greater importance is what the closure of the Strait of Hormuz means for the global fertilizer market.
As Mike Adams has pointed out, without sufficient quantities of nitrogen fertilizer we won’t even come close to producing enough food for everyone…
Admittedly, I have failed to explain the stakes clearly enough. For months, I have written about fertilizer supply chains, the Haber-Bosch process, and the vulnerability of the Strait of Hormuz. But the gravity of this crisis has not sunk in for most people. Let me put it as plainly as I can: The global population of more than 8 billion people depends on a fragile web of natural gas, oil, and downstream chemistry that took 60+ years to build on this planet. If we lose 25 percent of these critical substances, we lose 25 percent of the population. That is 2 billion people. Here is why that math is inescapable.
As I documented in my article “The Haber-Bosch House of Cards,” the single chemical reaction that fixes nitrogen from the air into fertilizer is responsible for feeding roughly half of humanity [1]. That process requires vast quantities of natural gas. The Persian Gulf region, especially Qatar and Iran, supplies much of that gas. When the Trump administration launched its war on Iran in February 2026 and the Strait of Hormuz was effectively closed, the global fertilizer supply chain began to collapse. This is not a prediction of future famine. The famine is already baked in. But it could still get a whole lot worse depending on how things go from here.
We could be facing multiple years when global food production is at depressed levels.
That means that food prices will go even higher in wealthy countries, and in poor countries there will be shortages.
The number of automobile owners trading in vehicles with negative equity continues to rise, with 29.6 percent of trade-ins in the second quarter showing more money owed on existing auto loans than the vehicles were worth, according to automotive insights platform Edmunds’s July 16 vehicle transaction report.
Negative equity also pushed average monthly payments on “underwater” trade-ins to $944 in the quarter, the highest figure on record, the report said.
That’s $167 more per month than trade-ins without negative equity considerations, and those higher loans are expected to account for an additional $16,270 in interest paid over the loan term—another record high that’s nearly $6,500 more than the average new-vehicle loan issued during the quarter.
“Consumers are incurring more debt than ever when trading in vehicles that are underwater,” said Jessica Caldwell, head of insights at Edmunds.
“Buyers who financed at 2022’s peak prices are starting to come back to trade in, and they’re bringing thousands of dollars in old debt with them. With interest rates still elevated, this is creating a costly snowball effect for consumers.”
It’s the highest number of underwater trade-ins recorded in the second quarter since 2020, Edmunds researchers noted. Trade-ins with negative equity eased slightly from the first quarter, when they tallied 30.9 percent, but they were up 3 percent from the second quarter of 2025.
The average amount of negative equity—$6,884—was a record high for the second quarter of any year, though it pulled back from the $7,183 notched in the first quarter, Edmunds researchers noted.
As buyers roll over negative equity into new auto loans, the principal amount owed on their new vehicles swells, Caldwell added. Buyers often rely on longer-term loans to lower their monthly payments, but that coping mechanism only results in a larger total interest paid over the life of the loan.
Paying down negative equity also lengthens the time it takes for automobile owners to reach positive equity in their vehicles, or the financial position where their car is worth more than the principal amount owed, the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) consumer advice portal noted.
It’s important for consumers to know their equity position in a vehicle before trading it in, the FTC added. Equally important, the FTC said, is to closely examine new automobile contracts for the amount of negative equity that may be rolled into new loans before signing documents at dealerships.
Negative equity positions have been on the rise since 2022, Edmunds said, when high used-vehicle prices caused by a global shortage of computer chips buffered consumers from rolling over debt from one vehicle to the next.
However, as vehicle prices normalized, more vehicle owners found themselves underwater on their loans as they attempted to upgrade their cars through new-vehicle purchases.
Vehicles with model years 2020 or newer showing the most negative equity include Toyota Tundra (-$8,929), GMC Sierra 1500 (-$8,566), Chevrolet Silverado 1500 (-$8,516), and Ram 1500 (-$,8347). However, Edmunds also lists a handful of sedans and sport utility vehicles with negative equity of $5,000 or more, including the Kia Sportage, Honda Accord, Toyota RAV4, Jeep Grand Cherokee, Nissan Rogue, and many others.
Often, negative equity is more about onerous financing structures than vehicle depreciation, said Ivan Drury, director of insights at Edmunds.
“Some of the biggest dollar losses we’re seeing are on trucks and sedans that traditionally hold their value better than most,” Drury said.
“When historically safe residual value bets are showing up underwater, it’s clear this is a financing problem, not always a vehicle choice problem. These examples are a harsh reminder that a great vehicle choice can still be completely undermined by a punishing loan structure.”
