Think More: Friday, May 22, 2026
Riley measures the new tech barons against the founders, the CCP runs fraud as statecraft, the data clears Kash Patel, Dreher reads a killer's manifesto, and on Memorial Day weekend, T.R. at Gettysburg.
What Would Jefferson and Madison Make of Musk and Altman?
Jason L. Riley • Manhattan Institute
Concentrated private power with public consequences is not a 21st-century novelty. Riley argues the founders already built the vocabulary for judging it: faction, interest, the danger of unaccountable influence. The men reshaping speech and the economy are best understood not through panic but through the categories Madison gave us.
China’s $10 Billion Scam-Center Economy
Select Committee on the CCP • U.S. House
A bipartisan investigation from Chairman Moolenaar and Rep. Khanna exposes a sprawling network of China-linked fraud operations bilking Americans of billions. The findings describe an enterprise tolerated, and effectively shielded, from the top. This is fraud as statecraft: a deniable revenue stream pointed directly at American households.
Kash Patel Vindicated by Crime Data
The campaign to discredit the FBI director rested on the claim that he was unserious about crime. The numbers say otherwise. Margolis walks through the figures that undercut the indictment built against Patel, and the awkward silence from those who insisted his confirmation would be a catastrophe.
Governments Pay to Jail and Censor the People Who Share Memes
Censorship is getting expensive. Hawaii owes the Babylon Bee roughly $118,000 after its deepfake law fell as unconstitutional. A Tennessee county paid $835,000 to a retired officer jailed 37 days over a political meme. The First Amendment keeps winning; taxpayers keep paying for the officials who forgot it.
I Kiss the Ground
Christopher Flannery • TomKlingenstein.com
In 1903 an illiterate Sicilian carried his six-year-old up to a ship’s deck and pointed at the Statue of Liberty: “the light of freedom.” That boy became Frank Capra. Flannery’s annual essay closes on Capra’s own words decades later, a fitting meditation for the weekend we honor what was defended.
Boomers vs. Doomers
Jeffery Degner • Law & Liberty
Consumer sentiment hit its lowest reading ever recorded in April 2026, and the gloom is reshaping the young. Degner ties collective pessimism to delayed marriage and falling fertility, and identifies an underrated culprit: expected inflation. Bad economic policy does not just shrink wallets. It demoralizes a generation.
In Florida, Extremists Hide Behind Nonprofits
Jay Collins et al. • City Journal
A Network Contagion Research Institute report, co-authored by Florida’s lieutenant governor, maps state nonprofits with overlapping leadership and funding tied to figures convicted of terror offenses or sanctioned over Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Iran-aligned operations. The 501(c)(3) framework, they argue, has become cover. The structure was built in plain sight.
What the San Diego Mosque Shooters Believed
The two teenagers who killed three men at the Islamic Center of San Diego left a 75-page manifesto branding themselves “National Socialist Ecofascists” and hating nearly everyone, Jews and Muslims alike. Dreher reads it as the product of minds marinated in online rage, and a warning about where that derangement leads.
Theodore Roosevelt at Gettysburg, 1904
Theodore Roosevelt • The American Presidency Project
On Memorial Day at the battlefield, Roosevelt argued that the freedom worth keeping is self-government, not anarchy: liberty earned through self-restraint and honest effort. A reminder, fitting for the weekend ahead, that the men buried in those trenches secured a republic only those willing to govern themselves can keep.
