Think More: Friday, June 26, 2026
The DSA sweep of New York, $6.3B in unpaid federal taxes, Beijing in the heartland, Wikipedia's banned co-founder, and more.
Lead · The Socialist Surge
The Democratic Socialists of America
Mayor Zohran Mamdani endorsed three fellow socialists in New York’s Democratic congressional primaries, and all three won, John Fund reports. Brad Lander unseated Dan Goldman; Darializa Avila Chevalier, a Columbia Apartheid Divest founder who calls all deportations wrong, beat Hispanic Caucus chair Adriano Espaillat. Seven of eight DSA state-legislature candidates also won. CNN’s Harry Enten notes the DSA now out-polls congressional Democrats among Democrats.
The Socialist Surge
How the Press Makes the Radical Left Respectable
Chris Bray | Tell Me How This Ends
Chris Bray dissects the media’s “permission structures”: cues that brand Trump as dangerously extreme while casting socialist abolitionists as warm and reasonable. Chevalier, who would abolish police and prisons, is treated as mainstream, even as restoring a vandalized reflecting pool is framed as a threat to democracy. The cues persist long after they stopped making sense.
Steube Floats an Oath Test to Bar Socialists
Representative Greg Steube says he will file an amendment to the House rules package barring any member-elect who won’t swear the constitutional oath. His target is the new class of DSA winners, including Chevalier, whose Columbia group called for the “eradication of Western civilization.” The biennial rules package, he notes, is where the requirement belongs.
The Government Against Itself
The Intelligence Watchdog That Can’t Investigate
Steven Richards | Just the News
Intelligence Community Inspector General Christopher Fox told the House intelligence committee his office cannot directly investigate wrongdoing or compel testimony, leaving misconduct unaddressed for months. In one case, an employee who bought illegal firearm parts from a Chinese company kept his clearance for 19 months. Fox blames “agentic tribalism” and backs a Crawford-Grassley bill granting real enforcement power.
Comer Targets the Federal Workforce’s Unpaid Taxes
House Oversight Committee | oversight.house.gov
Chairman James Comer opened an investigation into tax delinquency in the federal workforce, pressing the IRS on enforcement. A Treasury watchdog found more than 571,000 current and retired federal employees owed roughly $6.3 billion as of 2024, with delinquents up 43% since 2021. After 427,000 IRS notices last summer, just 4,700 paid in full.
Federal employees’ unpaid taxes, per the Treasury watchdog
571,000
delinquent federal employees
$6.3B
owed as of 2024
43%
rise in delinquents since 2021
Beijing in the Heartland
Moolenaar Maps Beijing’s Reach Into States and Cities
House Select Committee on the CCP | chinaselectcommittee.house.gov
Opening a Select Committee hearing, Chairman John Moolenaar warned that the Chinese Communist Party’s espionage and influence operations increasingly target the subnational level: state legislatures, city halls, school boards, and universities, often through United Front Work. He cited Eileen Wang, the former Arcadia, California mayor who pleaded guilty to acting as an unregistered Chinese agent and is now imprisoned.
Missouri State’s Pipeline for China’s Defense Elite
Strategy Risks | strategyrisks.com
A Strategy Risks report says Missouri State University has run a little-known MBA pipeline for over two decades, training Chinese state-enterprise executives, officials, and defense contractors, some of whom later took senior roles at AVIC, a sanctioned Chinese defense conglomerate. The program, the firm adds, may have drawn tens of millions in U.S. taxpayer support.
The Information Wars
Wikipedia’s Co-Founder, Banned From Wikipedia
A quarter-century after co-founding Wikipedia, Larry Sanger says the site indefinitely banned him this week. He argues the encyclopedia, once built on open debate, was captured by ideologues who turned it toward propaganda and pushed him out when he tried to reform it. The ban, he writes, shows how independent thinking is now treated as a threat.
An AI Fact-Checker With a Thumb on the Scale
Aaron Sibarium | Washington Free Beacon
NewsGuard, a ratings firm that grades outlets and sells data to AI companies, launched a chatbot it calls a “personal fact-checker.” A Free Beacon analysis found it leans heavily on liberal sources: asked how many sexes exist, it questioned the two-sex framework and cited a list of 72 gender identities, while hallucinating basic names and dates.
Washington’s Quiet Licensing of Frontier AI
Dean W. Ball | Hyperdimensional
Dean Ball argues June’s AI executive order has become a de facto licensing regime: regulators, he says, curbed public access to Anthropic’s newest model and limited OpenAI’s, with no published standard for approval. Rather than police models one by one, he urges independent bodies to audit the frontier labs, certified by government but run outside it.
The American Idea
The Three Discriminations the 14th Amendment Forbids
David R. Upham | The American Mind
Law professor David R. Upham argues the 14th Amendment’s force lies in the Privileges or Immunities Clause, the provision courts have sidelined in favor of Equal Protection. Reading the founders’ debates, he finds they treated only three grounds as illegitimate for burdening a citizen: heredity, geography, and creed. The implication, he suggests, reaches today’s racial preferences.
AI Lets Oklahomans Spell Out the American Dream
Scott Rasmussen | Napolitan News Service
The Napolitan Institute, with Google’s Jigsaw and the state of Oklahoma, used AI-assisted polling to gather over 250,000 words from more than 1,000 residents about the American Dream. Instead of multiple choice, the tool drew out long, conversational answers. Across party lines, Oklahomans described a shared bedrock: economic opportunity, sound public services, and a government focused on constituents over partisanship.
A Case for Regulating Homes Like Highways
Writing for Lyceum, BOXABL co-CEO Paolo Tiramani argues Washington should regulate housing under the Commerce Clause, as it does interstate highways, to clear a five-million-unit shortfall. He proposes one national factory certification, engineer-issued permits for compliant projects, and a slim performance-based code replacing the 3,000-page status quo. He projects home costs could fall by half.
