Think More: Tuesday, May 19, 2026
Eastman on Justice Thomas's defense of natural-law constitutionalism, the Federalist on how the CCP manufactures American citizens, the Justice Department exposes a twenty-year California voter registration scheme, and five more pieces worth reading.
Eastman on Justice Thomas’s Defense of Natural-Law Constitutionalism
John C. Eastman • The American Mind
Eastman, founding director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, reads Justice Clarence Thomas’s recent University of Texas speech as a statesmanlike meditation on the American republic. Thomas grounded constitutionalism in the natural-right principles of the Declaration of Independence. He invoked civic courage. He warned against the subordination of constitutional limits to ideological expediency. The lineage runs through Harry Jaffa to Lincoln.
How the CCP Manufactures American Citizens
Adam Johnston • The Federalist
Eileen Wang, the former mayor of Arcadia, California, pleaded guilty to acting as an unregistered Chinese Communist Party agent. Guojun Xuan, also of Arcadia, ran a “surrogacy command center” for CCP clients. Seventy percent of newborns on the American territory of Saipan are children of Chinese birth tourists. Johnston reads the pattern through Peter Schweizer’s The Invisible Coup and calls for closing the Fourteenth Amendment loophole.
DOJ Exposes a Twenty-Year California Voter Registration Scheme
Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong, sixty-four, of Marina del Rey, California, pleaded guilty to a twenty-year scheme of paying people, including homeless individuals on Skid Row in Los Angeles, between two and three dollars per signature to fill out California voter registration forms and ballot initiative petitions. The federal case is the latest in Civil Rights Division Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon’s effort to obtain blue-state voter rolls.
Minnesota Officials Buried the Feeding Our Future Warnings
Jeffrey Meitrodt • Minnesota Star Tribune
Jenny Butcher, a twenty-five-year veteran of the Minnesota Department of Education, told the Federal Bureau of Investigation in May 2022 that fraud in the Feeding Our Future meals program was an “open secret” at her agency. Her supervisors stopped her from visiting suspicious sites. Three state employees said leadership feared accusations of racism from the East African-led nonprofit. Sixty-five of seventy-nine defendants have been convicted.
Hinderaker on the Face of Evil
In polling conducted shortly after Luigi Mangione murdered UnitedHealthcare Chief Executive Brian Thompson, sixty-eight percent of liberals expressed at least some sympathy for Mangione and thirty-five percent supported his decision to murder Thompson. Fourteen percent described themselves as “very supportive” of the killing. Hinderaker concludes there may be little basis for shared citizenship between Americans who can answer such a poll and Americans who cannot.
The Pipeline Problem Medical Schools Don’t Want to Discuss
Jukka Savolainen and April Bleske-Rechek • City Journal
Black students make up roughly fourteen percent of American high school students but only about five percent of Advanced Placement Chemistry examinees. Among those examinees, only two percent earn the highest possible score of five, against roughly twenty percent of Asian examinees. Savolainen of Wayne State and Bleske-Rechek of the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire argue that DEI manipulation at the end of the pipeline obscures the problem rather than fixing it.
Penn State Law Makes Antiracism a Core Mission
The College Fix • The College Fix
Penn State Dickinson Law School’s five-year strategic plan, uncovered by the Washington Free Beacon, commits the school to “antiracism and anti-oppression,” antiracist critical pedagogy, and expanding employment opportunities for underrepresented candidates. Dean Danielle Conway also serves as president of the American Association of Law Schools. The American Bar Association Council voted last week to repeal Standard 206, its diversity accreditation requirement.
Bray on Santa Monica’s Harm-Reduction Body Count
Chris Bray • Tell Me How This Ends
Bray reports that within a half-square-mile of Christine Emerson Reed Park in Santa Monica, where Los Angeles County’s harm-reduction program distributes free needles and naloxone, eight homeless people have been found dead in the past four weeks. He also flags Friday’s ten-million-dollar Texas Children’s Hospital settlement, which requires the firing of five doctors and the funding of a detransition clinic for children injured by transgender medical procedures.
