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Authored by Brad Todd via The What For Substack,

We bought our house in the same year I discovered Piemonte, and that was fortuitous. The house came with a walk-in wine cellar and the family-owned vineyards strewn across the rolling Italian hills from LaMorra to Serralunga D'Alba provided a learnable collection of producers to fill it up. It is a good thing I have enjoyed the chore of curating this wine because I will not get to enjoy drinking it.

This afternoon, maybe even as you read this, I will be in a long surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital to remove a nasty high-grade malignant tumor from my ethmoid sinus. It is a distant cousin of the cancer blob I had cut out in 2020, after an unnecessary Covid test speared loose a hunk of tumor I did not know was there. The pandemic saved my life once, and it put me in contact with the crackerjack medical team at the world's best otolaryngology unit that will save it again.

Sinus tumors are rare - though I prefer the term "exceptional" as only hundreds of people a year battle these bastards. After what will be a rough post-surgery recovery, I will get radiation and maybe a lagniappe of chemotherapy. But I will not be savoring my amazing Italian wine collection. After my 2020 surgery, I lost my sense of smell for about six months, and my taste overall for a little less than that. My olfactory receptors were removed from my left nostril, but I started with a bloodhound's nose so half of that was plenty to keep. Wine was still complex and wonderful as soon as I recovered from that surgery's trauma. But not this time, not with this surgical plan.

The question I am asking, and also suggesting for you, is what other wine did I store and not drink?

What other wine can I drink when this is all done?

Before I knew cancer was back, I had a conversation last month with someone about getting over it the first time. I told her, as I have often said, "you cannot un-hear that your body is trying to kill you." She immediately asked me: "what did you change?"

I gave two answers, one applied to work and one to home.

First, I said cancer made me adopt a professional policy of only giving the same good advice twice. The younger version of me would lay awake at night grinding on how I might get clients over the hump on a strategic decision they were resisting. Cancer in 2020 made me a more disciplined advisor. Sen. Dave McCormick, whose winning campaign I helped guide in 2024, often says he is glad he "got the post-cancer Brad." As a former CEO and Army officer who has made a career of perfecting leadership, he could see that I had developed perspective on how to sit on a running horse, in jockey terms, and dig in my heels only, and exactly, when it was critical.

On the personal side, I told my friend that enduring cancer in 2020 made me put my kids' big moments at the top of my priority list. The first time I left the house after surgery, too early of course, was to coach my daughter's rec softball team. It was excruciating and exhilarating at the same time. Then, over her four years in high school, I missed exactly one re-scheduled, rained-out prep game to my knowledge, and I have yet to miss my son playing football - though this Friday night's scrimmage is in doubt. There was one freshman baseball game, with one at-bat, up Interstate 270 at rush-hour that I could not reach. I made it to the recitals, the voice contests, the awards ceremonies, the parent chapels and school plays. I made them all, save one where she had just four lines. I skipped work meetings that were billed as essential. I rebooked CNN hits. I even ducked out on TV commercial shoots when I could not schedule them around the ball games and plays. I kept the main thing the main thing, and still do. Thank goodness cancer found me right before my kids hit the high school phase of important activities instead of finding me afterward, because I could have easily screwed this up based on my prior professional trajectory.

But I did still store up the wine.

My collection is mostly Barolo, the King of Italian wine, though there are some Barbaresco bottles, some California strays, and a handful of cheap but complicated Sagrantino vintages from Umbria that few Americans have discovered yet. I got hooked on single-cru wines, meaning they are made with grapes grown on the same small patch of ground, with the same sunlight. Over time I have listed toward the steeper crus that surround the village of Serralunga D'Alba, deciding that the Prapo cru is the best, though the higher-elevation Monvigliero cru is also a charm and Lazzarito a treat.

I have long-ish Barolo verticals by G.D. Vajra, my favorite producer, in the delicate Bricco Delle Viole and the easy-drinking Ravera crus, bottles of which I bought my surgeon and his assistant the week after my 2020 tumor resection, with a promise we would all drink them simultaneously when I hit the five-year-all-clear mark that cancer patients universally point toward.

That celebration happened last fall, and statistically speaking, I should not be fighting the same tumor in Year Six. But tumors do not keep calendars. Now I must undergo a medical path that will certainly obliterate my ability to savor Italian wine but save my life in the process. It is a fair trade that I am willing to make.

The imminent loss of my ability to appreciate this stored asset is making me contemplate what else I under-savored over the last six years.

One thing is vacations. Our family did not take one this year; we just did not carve out the time. My wife and I also punted our 25th Anniversary trip for the third year in a row. We now intend to take it in December after radiation, paired up with a speech I am giving. But I am a little ticked off we have not done it three times, instead of skipping it three times. Early in our marriage we took a great anniversary weekend every year and they are life highlights for me; we are highly compatible in travel habits and those trips bring out our beautiful integration. We fly by the seat of our pants, having the same high tolerance for uncertainty. We once went to Europe with exactly nothing planned for the last half of our itinerary until after we were on the continent. The resulting spontaneous side trip to Chamonix, hiking and then sitting poolside staring up at Mont Blanc with no agenda, was the unexpected dead-stop recharge we needed.

After this current crap is over, she and I will take more trips. Spending time with her, doing whatever she wants, has to be elevated as an aspiration on my post-cancer agenda. We have spent 19 years doing a darn good job of child-rearing together and I think the post-parenting phase of "us" also will rock.

I also intend to read more books. Substack has been a great addition to my life because it took over some of my X doom scrolling, but it also has been a parasite sucking away time I formerly devoted to literature. That needs to be rectified, as I am only halfway through Cormac McCarthy's library and that is unacceptable progress for a 56-year-old East Tennessean. Reading books overall has cratered in our society, so I am not alone in that, but I can do my part.

I volunteered more after cancer for charity and church initiatives I care about - but some of that may be attributable to aging as much as surviving. All of us should inventory our give-back quotient as we hit our peak executive years when we can do the most good. Stacking cans at the food bank is great but coming up with a plan to get weekly milk deliveries is more impactful.

Showing up has always been a good trait of mine - friends' funerals, moving days, performances have always hit my calendar - but I will probably up my percentage closer to 100 after this. Church services in general have been a bigger deal in my life since 2020 - my faith did not need an accelerant, but my worship discipline did. I recommend it. Cancer probably made me a little bolder in publicly professing my own faith - or a little less self-conscious about acknowledging it, even if it was live on CNN. I recommend that, too, and I predict I will be even more uninhibited now.

Live music is something I probably did not expect to elevate based on a medical diagnosis, but it will happen this time. Some of the highlights of my middle age have been great concerts. A show on a New York City rooftop this summer with my wife and kids and the Turnpike Troubadours, my favorite band, was the single best two hours of 2026 for me. The next Turnpike show in Richmond in October should coincide with commencement of my radiation and I hope to make that happen. Since my musical daughter loves shows too, and my son and I share a genre taste, I will pro-actively put big shows in concrete on the calendar, even if we must travel to get there.

The next few days will be a rough ride after at least seven hours of surgery - followed by a couple miserable weeks on the couch with my face full of surgical packing as I taper pain meds. I will binge shows on all the streaming platforms and grumble that college football is not yet here while staring down my fat but snuggly dog. Together, he and I will make a longer mental list of things I intend to do with the next, hopefully long, tranche of borrowed time God has given me.

You can make that kind of list, too, without the anesthesia and face-packing I will get, as all of us are on borrowed tranches of God-given time whether we learn that from a radiologist or not.

Drink the wine.

Make the game.

See the show.

Tell the people you love that you love them, out loud.

Pray a little more - and throw in a prayer for your favorite columnist.

An obvious pattern is emerging.  Multiple Democrat officials have been arrested and charged with fraud or related federal crimes over the past two years and the trend seems to be growing.  Democrat politicians and DNC members are over-represented when it comes to fraud and it's starting to look like the entire party has been pilfering the cookie jar for quite some time.

In the latest incident, Lawrence, MA Mayor Brian DePeña faces federal charges for allegedly using Covid-19 relief money meant for his tire business to fund his political campaign and pay personal debts, according to court documents.  His charges include: Wire fraud; aiding and abetting, and unlawful monetary transactions; aiding and abetting.

Records indicate that an arrest warrant was issued Thursday. City Council President Jeovanny Rodriguez confirmed DePeña was arrested Friday.  Neighbors described FBI agents shouting through a bullhorn outside the mayor's home early in the morning and using a battering ram to force open his door. 

This incident has developed right as another official, Former New Mexico Democrat House leader Sheryl Williams Stapleton, has just been convicted of 31 felony charges for diverting millions of dollars of school funds to her friend’s company while receiving kickbacks.

After the exposure of migrant fraud in Wisconsin and California linked to Democrat and left-wing NGO operations, it surprises no one that politics is one big criminal enterprise, for Democrats in particular.  Republican officials are not free from such charges; a handful of mostly low profile cases have occurred since 2024.  That said, when Democrats go for fraud, they go big, and many of these cases involve the misappropriation of covid relief funds.

In other words, the pandemic was a money-making bonanza for Dems, and a lot of this money was used to pay for campaign operations.

U.S. Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (Democrat, Florida) was arrested in November of last year and charged with 15 federal counts, including theft of government funds related to allegedly stealing approximately $5 million in FEMA disaster relief for the Covid crisis. 

Prosecutors say the money had been overpaid to her family’s health-care company (Trinity Healthcare Services), which held a contract to register people for Covid-19 vaccinations. Within two months of receiving the funds, more than $100,000 was allegedly spent on personal items, including a diamond ring for the congresswoman.  She also allegedly pumped millions into her own campaign operations.

It's not unfair to suggest that Democrats may have believed they were going to retain political power for years to come (many Americans view the covid event as an engineered coup).  Unfortunately for them, the Biden regime did not stay in office or destroy conservative opposition, so now they are under a microscope.  And, under the light of scrutiny, the ugly deeds of 2021-2024 are being exposed.

Authored by Nikolai G. Wenzel via The Daily Economy,

Fusionism, a new book by Stephanie Slade, a Senior Editor at Reason, attempts to make sense of the seemingly incoherent New Right. Although Slade proposes a renewal of fusionism as a remedy to conservatism's drift and the challenges facing a divided Republic, the book's greatest strength lies in its analysis of the trends to date.

The Republican Party, for all its faults, was supposed to understand (instinctively, if not always intellectually) limited government, rule of law, and the basics of economics. From its elected leaders, though, we have gotten tariffs, increased public debt, dodgy respect for habeas corpus in immigration enforcement, and the Saturday Night Live tragicomedy of DOGE (a virtue-signaling, clumsy, and cruel flash in the pan destined to die on the vine when it removed entitlements from the chopping block). The coalition that constitutes the New Right has abandoned conservatism, and instead sells its own form of populist interventionism.

Slade starts by painting a rather glum sketch of the contemporary scene. Within the convoluted and heterogeneous mess she labels "the Dissident Right," she identifies three major strains:

1. the predominant national conservatives, who are eager to use the coercive power of the modern administrative state to advance (allegedly) conservative causes and push for national primacy;
2. the theocons, who dream of "immanentizing the eschaton" by creating a state theocracy to impose (their understanding of) a transcendent moral order;
3. the neoreactionaries, the Pajama-Boy Nitzscheans who have been given legitimacy to spew their blend of vitriol and conspiracy.

The NatCons have turned their back on the basics of markets and skepticism about administrative power (how sad in this 250th anniversary year of The Wealth of Nations!). The theocons would repoliticize salvation after three centuries of religious tolerance within Christendom. And, beneath all that, the country's baser instincts toward power and suppression are flourishing within the neoreactionary right. On the other side, the interventionist excesses of American socialism, with DEI, cancel culture, and continued growth of the administrative-welfare state, are equally horrifying. To paraphrase Richard Nixon, we are all interventionists now.

The titular Fusionism is shorthand for the collaboration of old-school conservatives and libertarians that held in America from 1945 to 1989, or thereabouts. Members of that alliance disagreed on details, but shared a horror for the rise of collectivism, the welfare-administrative state, and the existential threat of communism.

Slade's personal history of the movement is a rich and readable complement to some of the deeper treatments of the ideas (notably George Carey's magisterial compendium, Freedom and Virtue: The Conservative/Libertarian Debate, and my own work with Nathan Schlueter of Hillsdale College, Selfish Libertarians and Socialist Conservatives? The Foundations of the Libertarian-Conservative Debate). Slade's arguments are clean and incisive, and the prose is a pleasure to read, even if Slade occasionally indulges in the journalist's déformation professionnelle of descriptive wordiness.

Slade points to several explanations for the rise of the Dissident Right: the failed gamble of China's accession to the WTO without subsequent human rights improvements, the post-2007 bank bailouts, the costly debacle of attempted nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan, immigration, those left behind by globalization, and the authoritarianism of DEI.

These are all plausible. But I suspect that Slade is a bit too kind: the American administrative-welfare state is the real villain in this story. First, because it caused most of the problems that have energized the Dissident Right (crowding out of civil society, a culture of dependence, and erosion of the family). Second, because income inequality in the US is associated with cronyism replacing genuine economic activity - a problem exacerbated by the gutting of K-12 and college education standards by educrats, along with the rise of regressive regulation, including job licensing. Third, because the Dissident Right doesn't see the irony: its proposed use of the state is exactly what generated the outcomes it decries.

In just half a century, the US shifted from teaching Latin and calculus in high school to teaching basic English and algebra in college. It took a mere generation for discourse to collapse from Ronald Reagan's gentlemanly and beautiful oratory to Donald Trump's boorish grade-school-level word salad. What happened, in discourse and substance, between 1989 and 2016? Slade points to the populist conservative Pat Buchanan, but we could also mention Dick Cheney; the vice president was more refined, but also a lot more effective at pushing the power of the unitary executive and expanding the administrative state. There have always been "proto-Dissident Right" voices in America, Slade argues, but they were once kept in check by a loose coalition of libertarians, decent folk, fusionist conservatives, and the communist threat. The pre-1968 Dixiecrat segregationists, the Evangelical Christian Right under Reagan, Pat Buchanan, Dick Cheney and the more radical neocons under George W. Bush were always there. But there was always accountability, restraint, and public decency.

President Trump is tapping into real ills and soul sicknesses in American society and the American economy; but he is doing so in an ugly way that appeals to the lowest common denominator. Even FDR, Huey Long, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, for all their interventionist instincts and actions and their loose interpretations of the Constitution, operated under a veneer of respectability, and showed some shame when they got caught with their pants down.

Slade proposes a renaissance of fusionism as an antidote to the Dissident Right, in a bid to save both the Republic and the Spirit of '76. She reminds us that political analysis will require new language. In a similar spirit, I have long argued that the left-right taxonomy once made sense - in post-1789 France, where the left represented the Jacobin radicals like Robespierre, the centrists were today's classical liberals, and the right favored a return of the monarchy. But the Dissident Right is a misnomer. This modern movement Slade names does not align with the American conservative tradition, and is thus not clearly of "the Right." Even if it seeks nativist or religious or other allegedly conservative goals, it does so by promoting an increasingly intrusive and muscular central government.

How little we have progressed since 1944, when F.A. Hayek dedicated The Road to Serfdom to "the socialists of all parties."

Today's classical liberals are, indeed, alone in a two-front war. The paternalistic Left and the Dissident Right both aggressively push for social and economic control. Liberty, limited government, and free markets have few defenders. Fusionism is an appealing alliance, as Slade proposes it. But who will be the fusionist warriors for individual liberty? Where are the moderates to defend private property? Where have all the pro-business, small-government, free-trade conservatives gone? We can hope that there is a Nockian Remnant out there, biding its time while the dissident storm passes. In the meantime, the libertarian wing of fusionism stands alone, as core agreements have largely been abandoned by those who still call themselves conservatives, but now need hyphenations to distinguish conservatism from their preferred flavor of interventionism.

Nikolai G. Wenzel is Professor of Economics at Universidad de las Hespérides and Associate Research Faculty Member of the American Institute for Economic Research. He is a research fellow of the Institut Economique Molinari (Paris, France) and a member of the Mont Pelerin Society.

An illegal immigrant found not guilty by reason of insanity in a 2019 killing managed to flee the United States on a one-way flight to his native Tajikistan while on an approved 48-hour pass from a state mental health facility.

Now a Soros-backed prosecutor is under fire for his pattern of pursuing insanity pleas for violent offenders who are illegal immigrants.

Steve Descano, commonwealth's attorney for Fairfax County, Va., speaks at an event at the Center for American Progress about Virginia’s newly elected progressive prosecutors. (Getty Images)

In 2022, a court committed Abdulloi Toshpulodzoda after finding him not guilty by reason of insanity in the 2019 killing of his landlord, Mohammad Hemmatian, in Vienna, Virginia. Officers who reached the scene found him covered in Hemmatian's blood. He told them, "I am guilty.” Investigators believed Islam-inspired attitudes drove the violence.

Toshpulodzoda left the Northern Virginia Mental Health Institute (NVMHI) in Falls Church on July 6 under an unaccompanied 48-hour pass, a privilege allowed under Virginia law for certain committed patients. Instead of returning, boarded a Turkish Airlines flight at Washington’s Dulles International Airport to Istanbul, and continued to Dushanbe, Tajikistan, according to airline records attached to court filings.

The escape came mere days after a Fairfax County judge ruled that Toshpulodzoda still needed hospitalization. "On June 29, 2026, this Court found that the Acquittee remained mentally ill and in need of inpatient hospitalization," court documents state. 

This was not the first time authorities let Toshpulodzoda move outside a locked ward without an escort. He traveled to Washington, D.C., in 2024 to obtain a passport, and the Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office, led by Steve Descano, supported the trip. 

NVMHI placed Toshpulodzoda on escape status once he missed the deadline, revoked his pass, and issued a facility warrant. Virginia State Police, federal authorities, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection all received notice of the case, and CBP issued an alert in case he tries to reenter the country. 

"Abdulloi Toshpulodzoda was found by clinicians to be insane at the time he killed Mohammad Hemmatian – a legal finding that means the Commonwealth would be unable to secure a conviction at trial,” the Fairfax County Commonwealth's Attorney's office said in a statement. The office said prosecutors have opposed his release at every annual review hearing, including in June, and that a bench warrant went out the moment they learned he had escaped custody, adding that he "will be arrested and brought to Virginia" if he reenters the country. The Fairfax County Commonwealth's Attorney's office, NVMHI, and Turkish Airlines did not respond to requests for comment.

Descano has been in office since 2020. His campaign received funding from left-wing megadonor George Soros. His office has pursued insanity agreements for 13 accused murderers claiming they were unfit for trial, and Descano himself has managed to survive two recall efforts over his criminal justice record.

 Toshpulodzoda's case fits a pattern the group has flagged for years: violent defendants, including illegal immigrants, funneled toward insanity findings that keep them off the felony docket and, evidently, sometimes off the continent entirely. The group posted on social media Monday, "Across Virginia, ONLY 50 killers got insanity pleas nowhere else gave more than two." Virginians for Safe Communities said of Descano, "They aren't crazy, he's just lazy."

A spokesperson for Descano's office told the Washington Examiner that independent evaluators declared Toshpulodzoda mentally ill and left prosecutors no legal path to a conviction, an explanation the office has given in prior cases. "To be found legally insane, both a defense expert and a separate, independent expert for the prosecution evaluate the defendant," the spokesperson said. "If the Commonwealth's expert finds the defendant to be legally insane, there is functionally no way to get a conviction at trial." The spokesperson said a prosecutor's role narrows to annual review hearings once such a finding is entered, and noted that, in Toshpulodzoda’s case specifically, prosecutors repeatedly asked that he remain confined due to community safety concerns, including as recently as June.

Toshpulodzoda's disappearance is not an outlier for Descano's office. Seven months earlier, a Fairfax County court declared another accused killer, Joshua Danehower, legally insane under an agreement with Descano's team. Danehower fatally shot a charity CEO in his own home in 2022 after he grew obsessed with the CEO's wife and drafted written plans to break into the house, according to police. 

Descano's poor prosecutorial discretion record has attracted the attention of the Justice Department, which announced an investigation in May into whether Descano gives "preferential treatment" to illegal immigrants in prosecutorial decisions.

Hakeem Jeffries has developed a habit of saying out loud what his party once preferred to keep vague.

Speaking at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Atlanta, the House minority leader told the audience that Democrats see "[a] variety of different options that are on the table, and I think we can't foreclose on any single one of them" when it comes to the Supreme Court. The options under discussion include adding justices and imposing 18-year term limits on the ones already seated. The man floating them runs the House Democratic caucus and stands one election away from the speaker's gavel.

Jeffries also described the Court, in the same appearance, as "a subsidiary of the MAGA Republican Party."

For years, Democrats have been more cautious about openly discussing expanding the Supreme Court, but now they're not even hiding their intentions. Speaking at the National Urban League Conference in Nashville earlier this month, former Vice President Kamala Harris endorsed expanding the court to thirteen justices.

"We need to revisit the point of expanding the court to 13 justices like we have 13 District Courts," she said.

There are 94 federal district courts. There are 13 circuit courts. If the number of justices is supposed to match the number of lower courts, Harris picked the wrong number - or the wrong argument.

NBC's Kristen Welker put the question to Jeffries on Meet the Press on Sunday, noting Harris's comments on the issue. Jeffries declined to say yes, and he declined to say no. "What I support is dramatic reform, and what that looks like, to begin with, is making sure that the Supreme Court actually has an ethical code of conduct so that they're not able to simply conduct themselves in ways that are inconsistent with the notion in this country that no one is above the law," he said.

Then he named names. "We've seen right-wing justices like Thomas and Alito engage in behavior that is ethically questionable at best," Jeffries said. "That has to change, because the American people should have confidence in the highest court in the land." The ethics talk served as the on-ramp. He went on to describe reforms needed to deliver a court "functioning like a separate and coequal branch of government," and pointed to the Callais decision, where, according to Jeffries, "the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in ways that do the bidding of extreme MAGA Republicans who turned around in the deep south and unleashed these Jim Crow-like tactics, yes, I have a problem with that. It's inconsistent with the law and with the Constitution."

The same Court has ruled against Trump on birthright citizenship and on his tariff agenda, and he has won a lopsided share of the cases he has brought before it. Jeffries has not explained how a subsidiary rules against its parent.

What will those "reforms" look like? Jeffries wouldn't say, but told Welker, "Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, and other Judiciary Committee Dems are going to take the lead on what dramatic reform of the Supreme Court looks like," Jeffries said. A caucus assigns committee leads for legislation it intends to write, and such legislation exists to change who wins cases.

A group of Senate Democrats introduced a bill last month establishing 18-year terms and creating a Supreme Court appointment every two years.

The math, of course, is a problem for this. Any such bill needs 60 votes in the Senate, and, as president, Trump can still veto anything the Democrats might pass. Democrats understand both facts, which makes the quieter half of Jeffries' message worth a closer read. He endorsed major changes to Senate rules so a bare majority can pass legislation, and he invoked the last attempt, when Democrats held Congress and the White House under Joe Biden, and tried to nuke the filibuster for their election reform bills. The only thing that stopped that from happening was Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), who refused to go along with the scheme, but neither is in the Senate anymore, and the party is much more unified today.

This is why Trump, who has seen the same math, has been warned that a Democratic majority will kill the filibuster to remake the court as a left-wing institution, and has urged Republicans to beat them to the punch, nuke the filibuster and help accelerate his agenda while they can. Trump has separately demanded that Jeffries apologize for calling the Court illegitimate.

Jeffries' comments make clear that Democrats have no qualms about gutting longstanding institutions to make them work more for their party and its agenda, which means what's at stake in the upcoming midterms and the 2028 election is bigger than just who controls Congress or the White House, it might very well change how our government works.