Think More: Tuesday, June 23, 2026
Anti-tech terrorism, our socialist fellow citizens, the founding ideals neither party owns, noncitizen voting in Los Angeles, ICE in Houston, how China overtook America, a quantum counteroffensive, and more.
Lead · The Politics of Punishment
The Real Violence Behind ‘Words Are Violence’
In Indianapolis a man fired 13 rounds into a councilman’s front door, his young son asleep inside, and left a note reading “No Data Centers.” Allum Bokhari, writing in The Spectator, catalogs a season of anti-tech violence: torched Tesla chargers, a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s home, and a doomsday cult tied to six deaths. The well, he argues, was poisoned upstream.
The Politics of Punishment
A Republic Half Socialist, Half Free
John Hinderaker of Power Line argues the distance between the parties has grown unbridgeable, with Democrats now embracing socialism outright. He reaches for the only precedent he finds adequate, the slavery crisis that produced the Civil War, and wonders whether a republic can endure half socialist and half free. A grim verdict, soberly delivered.
The Meaning of Citizenship
Neither Party Owns the Founding, Voters Say
Scott Rasmussen | Napolitan News Service
A new Napolitan News Service survey finds 77% of voters agree America was founded on freedom, equality, and self-governance, yet neither party commands a majority seen as faithful to those ideals: 49% say Republicans honor them, 47% Democrats. Just 39% now say the president does, a new low, down nine points since February.
Los Angeles Moves to Unmoor the Vote From Citizenship
By a 10-5 vote, the Los Angeles City Council placed a charter amendment on the November 3 ballot that would let it extend municipal and school-board voting to noncitizens, as the New York Post opinion section notes. Eligibility remains undefined: backers point to legal residents, critics to the principle itself.
ICE Houston Removes Hundreds With Violent Records
Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Houston field office reports arresting 735 criminal illegal aliens in May, a group carrying 1,711 criminal convictions among them, nearly 1,200 of those for violent offenses including homicide, aggravated assault, and the sexual assault of children. Field director Bret Bradford frames the work as restoring a deterrent that had gone missing.
ICE Houston’s May arrests, by the record
735
Criminal aliens arrested
1,711
Criminal convictions
~1,200
Violent offenses
Lawyers vs. Engineers
We Taught China to Build, Then Forgot How
Emmet Penney | Claremont Review of Books
In the Claremont Review of Books, Emmet Penney traces how offshoring handed China both our factories and our know-how: Apple poured more into the country, in today’s dollars, than twice the Marshall Plan, then watched Huawei eclipse it. America became a nation of process and litigation, he writes, “masters of obstruction” rather than production.
Fifteen Years On, Still Hostage to Chinese Minerals
Farrell Gregory | Foundation for American Innovation
Writing for the Foundation for American Innovation, Farrell Gregory tallies the bill: 15 years, tens of billions of dollars, and countless executive orders, yet American supply chains remain tangled in China. Beijing’s escalating export controls, on gallium, germanium, graphite, antimony, and rare earths, have spiked prices and idled production, with shortages lingering still.
Trump’s Quantum Order Targets the Next Frontier
The White House | whitehouse.gov
President Trump’s new executive order, number 14411, commits the federal government to a coordinated quantum strategy: a flagship machine bound for an Energy Department lab, at least three next-generation sensors fielded by 2028, an expanded counterintelligence team, and tighter export coordination with allies to keep the technology from adversaries. The race, the order warns, is on.
Campus and Classroom
States Wrote Activism Into Teacher Licensing
Dana Stangel-Plowe | City Journal
As reading scores sink to lows unseen since 1990, Dana Stangel-Plowe reports in City Journal that many states have embedded “culturally responsive education” into teacher licensing and program approval, training instructors to read every institution through an oppressor-oppressed lens. Her proposed fix: make competence at teaching contested questions fairly a condition of the license.
A Third of Berkeley Law Now Claims a Disability
Roughly a third of University of California, Berkeley, law students, some 378, now receive disability accommodations, The College Fix reports, with 98% citing ADHD, anxiety, or depression, up from 3% of the university’s graduate students in 2021. Reviewing the data, a recent graduate notes there are now more disabled law students than male ones.
The Justice Department Ledger
Justice Charges 455 in $6.5 Billion Fraud Sweep
The Justice Department has charged 455 defendants across 45 states in healthcare-fraud schemes totaling more than $6.5 billion in false claims, the Wall Street Journal reports, the largest such action this year. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche called it a beginning; FBI Director Kash Patel said fraud would no longer be tolerated.
The DEA That Let a Million Fentanyl Pills Walk
Katherine Pugh | Just the News
A 14-year DEA agent has evidence that his agency and federal prosecutors in New Mexico deliberately let more than one million fentanyl pills reach the streets during the Biden years to build a bigger case, then sidelined him for objecting, Just the News reports. “We poisoned our community to make cases,” he says.
