In the crowded Democratic field running to replace Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, there’s a surprising frontrunner for a battleground state: a democratic-socialist line cook who has called to abolish the police.
Francesca Hong, a 37-year-old restaurant owner and single mother who became the state’s first Asian-American assembly member in 2021, has surged to the lead in several early polls after launching a long-shot bid on a deeply progressive platform
Hong is part of an array of lefty candidates with working-class credentials running in competitive states and districts up and down the ballot in this year’s midterm elections — a crop emboldened by the popularity of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and a turn toward economic populism amid widespread cost-of-living concerns.
Abdul El-Sayed is running from the left of Haley Stevens and Mallory McMorrow in the competitive Michigan Senate primary. Zach Wahls, who is backed by Elizabeth Warren, is locked in a tight contest against the Chuck Schumer-supported Josh Turek for Iowa’s Senate nomination. In Colorado’s 8th District, where Dems see a flip opportunity, Manny Rutinel is running against the more moderate Shannon Bird. And last month, Graham Platner got a boost when Schumer-endorsed Maine Gov. Janet Mills dropped out of the race to oust GOP Sen. Susan Collins.
Establishment Democrats worry that these figures — whose platforms play well among primary voters but could bite them in a general election — might spoil the midterms at a time when the party has the wind at its back, desperate to claw its way out of the wilderness and still weary of the “woke” allegations that Republicans effectively wielded against Kamala Harris. “If Democrats hope to beat Republican incumbents in red and purple districts, then they cannot run candidates who are far outside the mainstream of their district,” the center-left think tank Third Way wrote in a memo published last month.
Hong says the party establishment just lacks imagination.
“I think they’re underestimating voters,” Hong said in an interview. “I think that has always been a problem for the Democratic Party — that we are not listening to how they are feeling.”
Her platform includes free child care, a $20 minimum wage and a full moratorium on data center construction. She is an outspoken critic of the Israeli government and helped lead Wisconsin’s “uninstructed” pressure campaign on the Biden administration’s posture toward Gaza. She’s faced backlash for past calls to “abolish” the police. And she has suggested as governor she would call the state National Guard to arrest federal ICE agents.
But Hong doesn’t think her far-left politics would pose a risk in a general election. “The liability is having someone who is the establishment and wants to maintain the status quo,” she said
Wisconsin has a deep history of socialism, including three socialist mayors of Milwaukee between 1910 and 1960. The state boasts one of the Senate’s most conservative members, Sen. Ron Johnson, but also one of its most progressive, Sen. Tammy Baldwin. And progressive Democrats in Wisconsin are quick to point out that Sanders, the country’s democratic-socialist standard-bearer, won 71 out of Wisconsin’s 72 counties in 2016.
Hong isn’t just running on a different platform than her competitors — she is also running “the most non-traditional race,” said Gordon Hintz, who served in the Wisconsin state assembly with Hong when he was Democratic minority leader. While other candidates have been more reserved so far, Hong spent — and surged — early on to boost her name recognition. Hong’s campaign says it has about 3,000 active volunteers and has already organized 250 events across the state, with an additional 230 planned for the coming months.
“She has shown up, she’s the only candidate currently who has built any infrastructure down in Rock County,” said Jim White, who leads Rock County Democrats. “She’s the only person who has active canvassers, has people showing up at events, at meetings, she’s the only one who seems to have increasing infrastructure to do outreach to voters, and that’s been something that I think we’ve all really noticed.”
But it’s still an uphill battle for Hong — especially in the fundraising fight. Mandela Barnes, the former lieutenant governor and failed Senate nominee is polling in second place and has raised more than $2 million. Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley has brought in more than $850,000. Hong has raised about $635,000, according to Wisconsin campaign finance records.
Hong said she is focusing on turning one-time donors into recurring donors and has leaned on nontraditional fundraising tactics, like streaming. She has appeared with the progressive Twitch streamer Mike from PA and with Mercury Stardust, a TikToker with more than 2.6 million followers who describes herself as “The Trans Handy Ma’am.” Next month, Hong is planning to stream a DJ set and a cooking demo on Twitch, according to her campaign.
Both White and Hintz noted they still have not decided who they’ll vote for in the primary. But they both guessed part of Hong’s appeal to voters — particularly those who are young and politically disengaged — was because she is “fun.” Hong is, for example, known to host fundraisers at karaoke bars.
China buys up the bullion, the relevance of paper markets on Comex (and London) is shrinking. Liquidity and relevance of paper gold and silver relative to bullion are diminishing.
This market report analyses why open interest on Comex has declined to multi-year lows and the consequences. Clearly, liquidity has been drained from western paper markets by the continual drift of bullion into firm Asian hands. We present evidence of the strains on market makers on Comex who have limited capital resources and we debate the consequences.
Open interest is now at multi-year lows
This week saw open interest in the Comex gold contract drop to under 350,000 contracts. This is the lowest it has been in at least thirteen years.
is the clearest indication of a near total absence of speculative interest on Comex, and because Comex arbitrages with London, it will be true of that market as well. This is even more remarkable given the price rise since 2023 would normally lead to greater speculative interest, but it has collapsed instead, particularly after December 2024.
We see the same trend in Comex’s silver contract, which is next:
Open interest is also the lowest for thirteen years by far, and its collapse is firmly tied to a silver price which rose sharply from mid-October last. This links the collapse in speculative interest to the extreme liquidity problem in London when silver’s lease rate rose to a stunning 40% on 9th October.
So, liquidity in futures and forwards is the problem. Higher prices must be stretching the position limits of market makers and bullion bank traders, collectively the swaps category on Comex, which traditionally takes the short side. This is evidenced in our next chart of the dollar-value of the swap category’s shorts:
For many years, this category contained its collective shorts to less than $30 billion shown by the lower pecked line. That then doubled to about $60 billion and today having peaked at double that again, the current price consolidation coupled with a drop in open interest still has it at an uncomfortable $90 billion. Average individual swap short exposure is $3.75 billion having been close to $5bn when gold peaked.
Besides the obvious strain on capital resources and the increase in systemic risk, we arrive at an important conclusion: London and New York lack the capacity to deal with higher bullion prices. In other words, as a means of diverting gold and silver demand into paper contracts and thereby containing prices, after decades of success it is now failing.
The reason is that demand for physical liquidity is now driving prices. This is the consequence of Asian selling of dollars for gold. It is reflected in Comex warehouse statistics for gold and silver which continue to be drained despite the fall in prices over the last four months. These are illustrated next:
As well as continuing demand for gold from central banks, China’s commercial banks are big buyers. They offer their customers gold accumulation accounts, which they have been forced to suspend or restrict due to lack of available bullion. They have used a falling price in the London and New York as an opportunity to replenish their stocks.
But only yesterday, it was announced that the facility was becoming available again. This was from a Chinese newspaper:
Meanwhile spot prices in London have failed to properly reflect demand for bullion, being essentially a “local” price — local that is to western capital markets. A similar situation is seen in oil, where Asian prices on the ground are significantly higher than US and European prices. Gold and silver are not the only markets bifurcating both regionally and between paper contracts and physical reality.
In London and Comex, gold and silver prices reflect a short-termism which denies actual consequences. Oil prices rise, and gold and silver get marked down. Bond yields rise, and gold and silver get marked down. In Asia the view is diametrically opposed. Oil prices rise and the dollar’s value is threatened. Bond yields rise because the dollar’s purchasing power is falling.
All reasons in Asia to sell the dollar for gold. A consequence is that when speculative interest returns to western capital markets, the lack of liquidity can be expected to see gold and silver prices squeezed significantly higher than their end-January peaks. That in itself will raise awkward questions over the future of the fiat dollar.
Since Florida launched its immigration enforcement effort, Operation Tidal Wave, in February, nearly 25,000 arrests have been made statewide.
“Florida will continue to use every available resource to identify dangerous individuals, support federal immigration enforcement and keep our citizens safe,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said. “No state has moved faster or done more to combat illegal immigration than Florida, and we will continue to lead the charge in protecting our communities.”
Operation Tidal Wave was launched as Florida leads the country with the most 287(g) U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agreements of any state, The Center Square reported. The program is named after a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1996 and authorizes ICE to delegate to state and local law enforcement officers the authority to perform specified immigration functions under its supervision.
The Trump administration expanded the program to include three models: the Jail Enforcement Model (JEM), Task Force Model (TFM) and Warrant Service Officer (WSO) model, The Center Square reported. Florida is the only state to have all of its sheriffs participating in 287(g), with most participating in the TFM and or all three models. Nearly 200 police departments, 12 state agencies and 15 state universities and colleges, as well as county commissioner detention facilities and correctional facilities, are participating in 287(g). No other state has as many agencies participating in 287(g), and primarily in the TFM, as Florida does, according to ICE data.
During the first week of Operation Tidal Wave, Florida law enforcement arrested more than 1,100 criminal illegal foreign nationals, a record for Florida. The only state with more arrests in a single week is in Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star is underway. While these arrests are not solely through 287(g) partnerships, Texas law enforcement through OLS have made more than half a million arrests over the last five years, The Center Square reported. OLS is ongoing.
Key 287(g) partnership arrests were made in Florida through three recent multi-agency immigration enforcement operations: Operation Sandhill Sentinel, Operation LOCATE and Operation Criminal Return.
In south Florida, Operation Sandhill Sentinel led to the arrest of 250 illegal foreign nationals, including those with extensive criminal histories ranging from domestic violence to drug offenses, DUI and assault, among other violent crimes. Those arrested also had final orders of removal and repeat immigration violations, ICE found.
The Florida Highway Patrol (FDLE), Broward Sheriff’s Office, ICE, U.S. Border Patrol, Homeland Security Investigations, Florida National Guard and Florida State Guard were involved in the operation.
Another key arrest earlier this month was of a Honduran national and known MS-13 gang member illegally residing in Palm Beach County. A multi-agency operation led to the arrest of Luis Merary Peralta-Sevilla, who illegally entered the country in 2013 in Texas. He was never deported until the second Trump administration, which also designated MS-13 as a foreign terrorist organization. MS-13 members are also being prosecuted nationwide.
In Operation Criminal Return, FDLE and ICE sought to identify criminal foreign nationals who are registered sex offenders and sexual predators. In a 10-day targeted operation they arrested 230 people statewide, including sexual predators and sex offenders, convicted felons, a convicted drug trafficker, and convicted murderers, according to FDLE and ICE.
In Operation LOCATE, the FDLE partnered with Homeland Security in an intelligence-led initiative focused on identifying and locating unaccompanied alien children (UACs).
They located more than 400 UACs statewide and outside of Florida, verifying their safety and living conditions “while uncovering cases involving trafficking concerns, missing children, and other high-risk situations,” the governor’s office said.
UACs are foreign national children under age 18 who arrive in the U.S. without their parents or family members. They are primarily smuggled into the country and once in the U.S., the federal government doesn’t deport them but sends them to live with so-called sponsors. Florida has historically received the most UACs behind Texas and California, The Center Square reported.
As the border crisis worsened under the Biden administration, sponsors in 29 counties in Florida received more than 10,000 UACs, The Center Square reported.
In response to reports of abuse and neglect of UACs in Florida, DeSantis called for a state grand jury to launch an investigation. It found “horrible atrocities inflicted on immigrant children in Florida” including allegations of human trafficking and child abuse. It also found that the federal government lost track of more than 20,000 children in Florida and performed no background checks on the sponsors the UACs were sent to, among other issues, The Center Square reported.
Last year, the Trump administration launched an initiative to conduct welfare checks on UACs after President Donald Trump’s border czar Tom Homan said more than 350,000 UACs were unaccounted for.
“G” was born into a Maronite Christian family in southern Lebanon, part of a community that traces its roots to the ancient Phoenicians. His early childhood unfolded in a quiet Christian village just 15 kilometers from the Israeli border, surrounded by rolling hills, farmland, and deeply rooted family traditions. Like many Lebanese Christians in southern Lebanon, his family lived modestly, valuing faith, community, and inner peace in a region increasingly consumed by conflict.
While Lebanon was embattled in a civil war from 1975-1990, and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 to drive out the PLO had left its scars, “G” remembers a childhood centered around family. There were visits to grandparents, swimming in the Litani River, and helping his grandfather work the land. His memories are not political at first; they are human. Lebanon, in his mind, was once a place of warmth and beauty – a country his family deeply loved and considered worth fighting for.
But southern Lebanon during “G’s” childhood was also shaped by external forces far beyond village life from before he was born.
Lebanon’s descent into chaos began after the arrival of Palestinian Arab terrorists expelled from Jordan following Black September in 1970. The country, once celebrated as the “Paris of the Middle East,” increasingly became a battleground. Militias formed, sectarian tensions exploded, and civil war engulfed Lebanon from 1975 onward.
For many Christians in southern Lebanon, the war was not ideological but existential. Their villages became trapped between PLO terrorists, regional powers, and the growing influence of armed Islamist groups. “G’s” community viewed itself as caught in a struggle it never chose.
Eventually, local Christian militias aligned with Israel in what became the South Lebanon Army (SLA), fighting alongside the Israeli military against militant organizations operating in the south. Then came Hezbollah.
Founded in the early 1980s with Iranian backing, Hezbollah emerged as one of the dominant armed forces in Lebanon. To many Lebanese Christians in the south, Hezbollah represented not liberation but another wave of control and intimidation. “G” grew up hearing how SLA fighters and Christian families became targets. Hezbollah’s rise fundamentally altered life in southern Lebanon, creating fear among those who opposed its ideology or cooperation with Israel.
Exile from a homeland in collapse
On May 24, 2000, when Israel abruptly withdrew from the Security Zone in southern Lebanon, everything changed overnight for “G’s” family.
He was only six years old when his father entered the house and told the family to pack immediately. Within moments, “G,” his four brothers, and his parents were in a car heading south with only a few bags and mattresses strapped to the roof. Confused and frightened, they joined thousands fleeing toward the border fence as Hezbollah forces rapidly advanced into former SLA-controlled areas.
The scene at the border remains etched in “G’s” memory: panic, uncertainty, and a feeling of abandonment. Despite SLA fighting alongside Israel, the hasty evacuation felt ill-planned and mired in bureaucracy that initially left the SLA families stuck between the advancing Shi’ite terrorists and the Israeli border they sought to cross.
Given the years of fighting terrorists side by side, it was not Israel’s finest moment as its SLA allies – who fought risking their lives for their country – feared for their lives by staying in the country. As Hezbollah pursued retreating families toward the border, for two days many waited before Israel finally allowed them entry under international pressure. In a single moment, they became refugees. But they were alive.
Arrival in Israel did not bring immediate belonging. “G’s” family, like thousands of others connected to the SLA, was first housed in military bases before being relocated to northern Israel. Their status was complicated. In Lebanon, they were labeled traitors for collaborating with Israel. Among some Arab Israelis, they were viewed with suspicion. Among many Israeli Jews, they were simply seen as Arabs with no awareness of being allies.
For a six-year-old child, those labels became wounds. “G” entered second grade in a Jewish school without understanding Hebrew. He sat through lessons staring silently at the walls, unable to follow the teacher. At recess, he hid his Lebanese identity. He was ashamed to take out the laffa with labaneh his mother packed for lunch because he feared ridicule. His struggle to fit in was more complicated than merely being an immigrant. Instead, he threw the sandwiches away.
Children in the neighborhood bullied him and called him “Arab,” a term he had come to associate with accusation and hostility. The irony was painful: His family had fled Lebanon because of Hezbollah and militant violence, yet in Israel he often felt reduced to the same stereotypes associated with the enemies his family had fought against.
The psychological toll ran deep. “G” remembers being embarrassed when his parents spoke Arabic in public. He felt caught between worlds – neither fully Lebanese anymore nor fully Israeli. Even as a child, he carried the burden of explaining a story nobody around him seemed to understand.
Yet, over time, survival transformed into adaptation. Social integration came slowly. “G” eventually connected with other marginalized children and learned how to build friendships despite cultural barriers. That ability to connect with people, he says, became one of the defining traits of his life. Gradually, he embraced both his Lebanese heritage and his new Israeli reality.
Religion presented another challenge. As a Christian in a predominantly Jewish environment, maintaining faith required effort and improvisation. There were few churches nearby and no stable clergy for the displaced community at first. Religious milestones were delayed, traditions fragmented. “G” underwent an important Christian coming-of-age ceremony years later than expected because there was no organized community structure initially in place.
Despite the hardships, “G’s” story is ultimately not one of victimhood but transformation. He slowly reclaimed pride in his identity. The food he once hid became a symbol of acceptance. He began researching the history of Lebanese Christians, the SLA, and the complex relationship between Lebanon and Israel. The shame he once carried evolved into purpose. Pride.
At the center of his journey lies a deeper understanding of displacement. Hezbollah’s rise had uprooted his family from Lebanon, but the shadow of that conflict followed them into Israel as well. Rockets from Lebanon, border tensions, and recurring wars constantly reminded northern Israeli communities – including displaced Lebanese Christians – that the conflict was never truly over.
“G” grew up living on both sides of that trauma: first as a child fleeing Hezbollah’s dominance in Lebanon, and later as a resident of northern Israel living under the continuing threat emanating from the Lebanese border.
Yet instead of embracing bitterness, he chose dialogue, resilience, and bridge-building. His childhood became a lesson in identity, perseverance, and the painful complexity of belonging between two nations still divided by war.■
A new Texas law allows companies with SAE Level 4 or higher autonomous vehicles to offer commercial driverless transportation.
Tesla wasted no time in self-certifying their vehicles. On the same day the law went into effect, Tesla officially self-certified their FSD software on their robotaxi vehicles as Level 4 compliant.
For years, Tesla’s Autopilot and FSD software, even in Texas, has navigated the consumer market under the constraints imposed by a Level 2 driver-assist system. And while Tesla now operates in Texas as a level-4 system, this does not change the level-2 designation for consumer vehicles. Taking Responsibility
While many of Tesla’s robotaxi rides in Austin were already driverless, there’s an important distinction in level 4 autonomy.
By certifying its software as Level 4 for commercial operations, Tesla is willfully absorbing a substantial portion of the operational liability. It’s legally stating that its vehicles can operate themselves without any human supervision or intervention under certain conditions.
These conditions are typically based on weather, region (geofense), or speed.
This willingness to take on legal accountability is a major turning point for Tesla, as it is the first time the company has been certified as a level 4 system.
SAE International defines a Level-4 autonomous vehicle as:
Entire dynamic driving task (DDT): The system does all steering, braking, accelerating, lane changes, signaling, and monitoring of the driving environment.
Dynamic driving task fallback: If something goes wrong (sensor failure, road closure, etc.), the system itself must handle the situation and achieve a safe outcome. It cannot depend on a human taking over.
Operational Design Domain (ODD): The specific conditions under which the system is designed to operate (certain roads, cities, weather conditions, speeds, etc.).
Consumer Vehicles Still Level 2
This new ruling for Tesla only covers its Robotaxi vehicles. Regular consumer cars, although they use a similar FSD version, are still considered Level 2 by law, and drivers will be fully held responsible.
Vehicles in Austin have advantages over consumer vehicles, even when they run the same FSD software. In addition to being geofenced, these areas have also received additional FSD training, which has improved FSD performance.
Tesla also offers remote assistance to help these vehicles when they encounter situations where their confidence threshold is low.
Ultimately, this is another milestone for Tesla and its Robotaxi network, but it won’t affect consumer vehicles, at least not yet.
The U.S. national debt has crossed an ominous threshold, rising above 100 percent of national gross domestic product, or GDP. This is the first time since World War II that debt has been so high a percentage of national economic output.
That is a big problem because the federal debt undermines the value of the U.S. dollar and diverts investment from the wealth-creating private sector. The rising debt and its pressure on the nation’s economy will force the federal government and Federal Reserve, the latter led by newly confirmed chair Kevin Warsh, to make hard decisions they have put off for decades.
Many among the public will suffer as a result, especially the elderly, who rely on Social Security and Medicare.
GDP is the total amount of spending in the nation’s economy. At the end of March, federal debt held by the public was $31.265 trillion, and GDP in 2025 was $31.216 trillion.
The rise of debt-to-GDP is accelerating because the federal budget is structurally unsound. The government “is spending $1.33 for every dollar it collects in revenue, and the budget deficit this year is projected at $1.9 trillion,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
Over the past two decades, the annual federal budget deficit has expanded far beyond what was normal from 1950 to 2007, which was about 25-45 percent. The federal debt quadrupled from 1970 to 1990, tripled from 1990 to 2000, and has doubled in each decade throughout this century.
Federal revenue has continued to increase. The problem is that spending is rising much more rapidly, pushing the annual budget deficit up to almost 6 percent of GDP, accelerating the increase in the national debt. As a result, the debt-rise trendline is becoming much steeper.
This is the first time the nation’s debt-to-GDP ratio has been so high without a major crisis such as a war or pandemic. There is no excuse for the recent increases in the federal debt. The federal deficit decreased by 63 percent between 2020 and 2022, erasing all the pandemic increase. Discretionary spending hikes have pushed the deficit up since then.
The numbers show that the federal government has spent the period since 1974 borrowing enormous amounts of money to spend on vote-buying with ever-greater income-transfer payments.
This politically motivated overspending has eroded the value of the U.S. dollar through inflation, which reached a crisis in 2021 through 2023 when the Congress and President Joe Biden expanded spending rapidly while greatly tightening federal regulation of the economy. Economic growth has slowed.
As government deficit spending diminishes economic growth, it pushes the nation’s economic output, the GDP, well below its potential, which further increases the deficit and debt as a percentage of GDP. The only thing that can stop such a fiscal whirlpool is a major cut in spending. That is as true for governments as it is for any household or business.
To be sure, the debt-to-GDP ratio is not some sort of magic number. GDP measures economic activity, not wealth, and net worth is the real measure of the capacity to carry debt. The United States remains the world’s wealthiest nation by far, holding 35 percent of the world’s net worth. Other than China at 19 percent, no other country has even five percent of global wealth.
The U.S. federal debt amounts to 5 percent of the nation’s total assets, according to economist John Rutledge. Although that is far, far more debt than is either advisable or justifiable, it is a little less than half the average American household’s debt, which Rutledge calculates at 10.2 percent. As Rutledge notes, “the future of our economy will be determined by the stability of our enormous balance sheet.”
That is true. Free people can create wealth by using limited natural resources and unlimited human ingenuity. The United States has an abundance of both.
Government, by contrast, can only take from what the people build, and every government extraction or regulatory impediment reduces that output. Rutledge believes that we are “about due” for a credit crisis, as do I. Americans, however, always find a way through these government-imposed predicaments as people readjust their priorities to realign with reality.
The real crisis that lies ahead is not bankruptcy of the American people but an insolvent federal government.
That is good news. If the federal government loses its ability to borrow money ever-more frenetically as massive sovereign debt pushes up interest rates, the government’s ability to borrow will collapse a few years from now, at most.
The ensuing choice between repudiation of national debt (directly or through very high inflation) or huge spending cuts will disrupt the economy badly and diminish people’s reliance on the national government.
The American people, however, can and will survive and thrive, probably with a much smaller government on the other side of the commotion. That last part sounds beautiful.
We could avert a fiscal crisis by cutting spending and regulation. We will not do so, however, because presidents and members of Congress cannot bear the idea of being held responsible for tens of millions of Americans’ loss of freebies paid for by other taxpayers. No number of dire warnings and symbolic thresholds will change that.
There are several reasons to think we won’t see a blue wave in this year’s midterm elections. A basic one is that the Democratic party simply isn’t very popular. In late May, Donald Trump’s approval ratings in the RealClear polling aggregate stood around 40 percent, which sounds bad. Yet Trump is more popular than his party – approval of the Republican brand was in the vicinity of 38 percent. And the Democrats’ ratings were even worse – standing, or one might say wilting, at about 36 percent.
Those figures are not to be confused with “generic ballot” polling, which asks voters which party they would prefer in the forthcoming election. Democrats have lately enjoyed a lead of some seven points over the GOP in that category. Normally a number like that would portend enormous gains for the Democrats in November.
But normal isn’t what it used to be. Four years ago, Joe Biden’s approval ratings were low, prices in the supermarket were high, and Republicans had the edge in the generic ballot. They expected to do very well – but didn’t. The GOP lost a seat in the Senate and won only a thin majority in the House. Republicans had relied on economic conditions to do their campaigning for them.
Democrats misread their own good fortune, however. They assumed it augured well for 2024, which is one reason they were in no hurry to dispose of an already-deteriorating Biden. They were utterly unprepared for Trump’s electoral resurrection.
This year, the Democrats are following the playbook that disappointed Republicans in 2022. Rather than making a case for themselves, they’re hoping Trump’s lackluster approval ratings and the economic impact of the Iran war will defeat the GOP by default. Yet it’s not only the 2022 midterms that suggest these calculations are wrong. In 2020 – not a good year for Trump, to say the least – Republicans actually gained more than a dozen seats in the House. In 2020 and 2022 alike, House races proved less sensitive to the prevailing winds than experts had imagined.
There were no dramatic changes in 2024, either: Republicans lost two House seats, despite Trump’s success in winning every battleground state and a popular-vote plurality. This year, whatever losses the GOP might be set to suffer will be blunted by the mid-decade redistricting that’s added about ten seats to the red column.
Democrats are praying November midterms follow the pattern of 2018’s, which did produce a wave for their party. Their strategy is the same: make the election a referendum on Trump. Democrats may have no strong proposals of their own, and they may enjoy even less public approval than Trump does. But as long as the focus is on him, not them, their own deficiencies will go unnoticed. The party can succeed merely by defining itself as anti-Trump.
Yet that’s not a safe bet, either. The grand narrative that Trump’s opponents don’t think to question assumes that the President’s coalition is splintered and weakened, while anti-Trumpism inspires more passion than ever. Even as Trump-endorsed candidates won primary after primary this spring, his enemies insisted on interpreting the results as signs of weakness rather than strength.
Every victory supposedly meant the MAGA movement was shrinking, as if fewer factions inside a party were obviously a bad thing. This isn’t the tale that’s told whenever any faction the media doesn’t sympathize with gains ground in the Democratic party – or in the GOP, for that matter. And if Trump’s candidates had lost their races, wouldn’t the narrative have been that the President’s grip on his party is slipping and every defeat makes him weaker? The more natural read on Trump’s endorsements is that they are exactly what they appear to be – indications of party unity and party-building success.
On the flipside, however, what about anti-Trump sentiment? Does it seem as passionate as it did in 2018, when the Washington Post was blazoned with the slogan “Democracy dies in darkness”? The Post hasn’t had a change of ownership, but its owner has had a change of heart, or at least judgment: Jeff Bezos has chosen not to define his newspaper as simply anti-Trump. He tried the anti-Trump experiment and found it to be a dead end.
While Bezos may be an unrepresentative figure in many respects, sheer fear and hatred of Trump no longer seem to be the animating forces they were eight years ago, for nearly anyone. The fire just isn’t there –it’s been replaced by acceptance. Trumpism isn’t going away, and anti-Trumpism has become rote rather than fervent. Graham Platner, the Democratic nominee for the Senate in Maine, is a perfect illustration of this.
Platner has many of the qualities the President’s critics claim to find objectionable about him – though Trump, unlike Platner, has never had to alter a purported Nazi tattoo. Platner has, at one time or another, said something to offend almost every group that might consider voting for a Democrat. Yet his outrageousness has not made him a pariah within his party. The Democrats have shifted from trying to present Trump’s words and behavior as politically unacceptable to accepting someone who is far more offensive. They’ve given up – instead of trying to police Trumpism, they’re now trying to ape what they once found highly objectionable.
The Democrats are unpopular, ill-defined and divided. At some point in the not-too-distant future, a culturally leftist variation on populism will probably reshape the party and reorder its priorities as drastically as Trump has changed the GOP. The Republicans certainly are heading into the midterms under conditions highly unfavorable to them. But the party, remade in the image of MAGA, is better adapted to the landscape of the 21st century than the Democrats are.
If Republicans suffer a setback in November, they’ll recover quickly, much as Trump bounced back from the 2020 election. Democrats shouldn’t expect a wave – they should worry about being swept away by the tide.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion have gotten a lot of attention over the past decade. In these pages, we’ve often lamented that universities’ focus on superficial measures of diversity undermines merit and overlooks viewpoint diversity.
A new book by Duke professor Adrian Bejan, Diversity Through Freedom, emphasizes a different kind of diversity: the organic, inevitable, and beneficial diversity found in nature. He calls it “a phenomenon that has a mind of its own” that can’t be “shoehorned into a few distinct (antagonistic) classes.”
The Martin Center sat down with Professor Bejan to discuss his book and its implications for higher education. This transcription has been edited for clarity and length.
Martin Center: Let me start by asking you about the core argument of your book. You say diversity comes from freedom, not from top-down efforts to engineer it. What does that mean in plain terms, especially for universities?
Bejan: To let people be free to come up with ideas and gather voluntarily around ideas that are better. And then if you want to admire the association, you’ll be admiring natural diversity. The engineered diversity is not to be confused with the natural diversity. Engineered diversity is something that is a very old practice in human society. It goes by many names. The most common is the class struggle in which the different things are two: oppressed versus oppressor or proletarian versus factory worker, or underrepresented and overrepresented, minority versus majority. It’s always two antagonistic groups. And yes, if you want to make a mixture of, for example, milk and coffee, you would go for mixing two things. But nature has a mind of its own. It’s basically the constant evolving movie of anything goes. And amazingly, the diversity that happens naturally is impossible to measure.
It is so enormous and constantly changing. And if you want to pay attention to that constantly or permanently, [it’s] surprising how relentless the change really is. And I like to say that, in fact, this whole thing began with the activity of design, which, even without education, is the act of striving toward perfection. Well, perfection, you can imagine it, but it never comes. What comes is the unexpected, which is the diversity of imperfect things that approach the performance of the perfect, but they’re good enough to be kept, adopted, and used as stepping stones or trampolines to new and even more promising ideas.
People make careers out of proclaiming that the world is evolving toward greater and greater complexity.Diversity, on the other hand, you cannot imagine it, but it always comes. That’s why everything that surrounds us is so diverse that people make careers out of proclaiming that the world is evolving toward greater and greater complexity, which is a statement of admitting defeat because you cannot make a drawing of something complex. Complex means twisted together in its origin. Again, the discovery that led to this book is the physics of diversity, natural diversity, which is what happens when something good, meaning a good promise called perfection, is put in front of people. And that comes from one idea, from one individual, and then, those who are attracted, they come with. They are capable of approach[ing] that sort of design. But they necessarily miss the mark, just like in target shooting, nobody hits one point. Everybody hits an area which is small, but it’s an area, and everybody gets top marks for hitting a disc, not a point. And all of them together are the diversity of winners. It is why, at the end of every competition in the Olympics, you see new faces on the podium, even though their records are essentially unchanged from the previous edition. That is diversity, natural diversity. The diversity in athletics is in this particular book; the diversity of universities in the so-called rankings is also there, it’s predictable.
Humility in the face of nature comes from realizing that your ability to predict something exactly is a pipe dream.Everything that moves, obviously, is driven by the natural tendency toward the easier movement and more economical and farther, longer-lasting meaning, longer lifespan. All these things make nature itself act as a flow, trying to elbow its way in front of others. I grew up on the Danube. I’ve seen this growing up. I got a feel for the fact that the so-called inanimate has a mind of its own. If you do not respect that you’re swept away by the waters, especially in springtime. So humility in the face of nature comes from realizing that your ability to predict something exactly is a pipe dream, but just like nature, the individual is well advised to go with what works and move on. And that way, you get ahead, because you save time. You save time to cook up a better idea and to surprise even yourself with the fact that you did not think outside the box. You actually thought inside the box. And you found things that most people have been overlooking for decades.
Martin Center: When you look at higher education right now, where do you think institutions are getting this wrong?
They’re getting it wrong because the idea of the class struggle is Karl Marx 100 percent.Bejan: Well, they’re getting it wrong because the idea of the class struggle is Karl Marx 100 percent. It is attractive to the ignorant. And of course, the students are easy prey for people who preach that failed philosophy. How many hundreds of millions of victims of communism do you need in human history to alert people to the importance of saying, “Never again. Never again”? It is a pipe dream, and the results are well-documented in history. In fact, they don’t need history. [You just] have to look around and talk to people who came from somewhere else, and they’ll tell you what happened to their grandparents, to their parents, to themselves, actually, which is why they emigrated. What happened to the house they built? What happened to the little shop that they built on the corner of the street? Expropriation, dehumanizing effects, getting fired from jobs, being sent to the labor camp to die, not to come back.
All these things are very well documented. And the numbers are enormous. Stalin is famous for joking that one death is a tragedy. 1 million is a statistic. People don’t even shrug their shoulders when they hear about the 100,000 dead or a million dead. But the family and the descendants, they know. They feel the pain forever. But the important thing is, for those who have had contact with the tragedies of this kind, they are well advised to stop being quiet and to talk about it. In my own environment, academia, I know professors who know what I’m talking about, but most of them are keeping quiet. I decided that the time has come to express not an opinion, but the physics of it, and the physics is this: that what is not useful is destined to fade away or to die, and yes, if you are stupid enough to try communism again, be sure that you’ll fail, because soon enough, that dictatorship will be overthrown. It will be. In fact, the writing is on the wall. Today, every dictatorship is a police state. Without the police state, it would not exist.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion have gotten a lot of attention over the past decade. In these pages, we’ve often lamented that universities’ focus on superficial measures of diversity undermines merit and overlooks viewpoint diversity.
A new book by Duke professor Adrian Bejan, Diversity Through Freedom, emphasizes a different kind of diversity: the organic, inevitable, and beneficial diversity found in nature. He calls it “a phenomenon that has a mind of its own” that can’t be “shoehorned into a few distinct (antagonistic) classes.”
The Martin Center sat down with Professor Bejan to discuss his book and its implications for higher education. This transcription has been edited for clarity and length.
Martin Center: Let me start by asking you about the core argument of your book. You say diversity comes from freedom, not from top-down efforts to engineer it. What does that mean in plain terms, especially for universities?
Bejan: To let people be free to come up with ideas and gather voluntarily around ideas that are better. And then if you want to admire the association, you’ll be admiring natural diversity. The engineered diversity is not to be confused with the natural diversity. Engineered diversity is something that is a very old practice in human society. It goes by many names. The most common is the class struggle in which the different things are two: oppressed versus oppressor or proletarian versus factory worker, or underrepresented and overrepresented, minority versus majority. It’s always two antagonistic groups. And yes, if you want to make a mixture of, for example, milk and coffee, you would go for mixing two things. But nature has a mind of its own. It’s basically the constant evolving movie of anything goes. And amazingly, the diversity that happens naturally is impossible to measure.
It is so enormous and constantly changing. And if you want to pay attention to that constantly or permanently, [it’s] surprising how relentless the change really is. And I like to say that, in fact, this whole thing began with the activity of design, which, even without education, is the act of striving toward perfection. Well, perfection, you can imagine it, but it never comes. What comes is the unexpected, which is the diversity of imperfect things that approach the performance of the perfect, but they’re good enough to be kept, adopted, and used as stepping stones or trampolines to new and even more promising ideas.
People make careers out of proclaiming that the world is evolving toward greater and greater complexity.Diversity, on the other hand, you cannot imagine it, but it always comes. That’s why everything that surrounds us is so diverse that people make careers out of proclaiming that the world is evolving toward greater and greater complexity, which is a statement of admitting defeat because you cannot make a drawing of something complex. Complex means twisted together in its origin. Again, the discovery that led to this book is the physics of diversity, natural diversity, which is what happens when something good, meaning a good promise called perfection, is put in front of people. And that comes from one idea, from one individual, and then, those who are attracted, they come with. They are capable of approach[ing] that sort of design. But they necessarily miss the mark, just like in target shooting, nobody hits one point. Everybody hits an area which is small, but it’s an area, and everybody gets top marks for hitting a disc, not a point. And all of them together are the diversity of winners. It is why, at the end of every competition in the Olympics, you see new faces on the podium, even though their records are essentially unchanged from the previous edition. That is diversity, natural diversity. The diversity in athletics is in this particular book; the diversity of universities in the so-called rankings is also there, it’s predictable.
Humility in the face of nature comes from realizing that your ability to predict something exactly is a pipe dream.Everything that moves, obviously, is driven by the natural tendency toward the easier movement and more economical and farther, longer-lasting meaning, longer lifespan. All these things make nature itself act as a flow, trying to elbow its way in front of others. I grew up on the Danube. I’ve seen this growing up. I got a feel for the fact that the so-called inanimate has a mind of its own. If you do not respect that you’re swept away by the waters, especially in springtime. So humility in the face of nature comes from realizing that your ability to predict something exactly is a pipe dream, but just like nature, the individual is well advised to go with what works and move on. And that way, you get ahead, because you save time. You save time to cook up a better idea and to surprise even yourself with the fact that you did not think outside the box. You actually thought inside the box. And you found things that most people have been overlooking for decades.
Martin Center: When you look at higher education right now, where do you think institutions are getting this wrong?
They’re getting it wrong because the idea of the class struggle is Karl Marx 100 percent.Bejan: Well, they’re getting it wrong because the idea of the class struggle is Karl Marx 100 percent. It is attractive to the ignorant. And of course, the students are easy prey for people who preach that failed philosophy. How many hundreds of millions of victims of communism do you need in human history to alert people to the importance of saying, “Never again. Never again”? It is a pipe dream, and the results are well-documented in history. In fact, they don’t need history. [You just] have to look around and talk to people who came from somewhere else, and they’ll tell you what happened to their grandparents, to their parents, to themselves, actually, which is why they emigrated. What happened to the house they built? What happened to the little shop that they built on the corner of the street? Expropriation, dehumanizing effects, getting fired from jobs, being sent to the labor camp to die, not to come back.
All these things are very well documented. And the numbers are enormous. Stalin is famous for joking that one death is a tragedy. 1 million is a statistic. People don’t even shrug their shoulders when they hear about the 100,000 dead or a million dead. But the family and the descendants, they know. They feel the pain forever. But the important thing is, for those who have had contact with the tragedies of this kind, they are well advised to stop being quiet and to talk about it. In my own environment, academia, I know professors who know what I’m talking about, but most of them are keeping quiet. I decided that the time has come to express not an opinion, but the physics of it, and the physics is this: that what is not useful is destined to fade away or to die, and yes, if you are stupid enough to try communism again, be sure that you’ll fail, because soon enough, that dictatorship will be overthrown. It will be. In fact, the writing is on the wall. Today, every dictatorship is a police state. Without the police state, it would not exist.
Martin Center: In your book, you make a strong case for both merit and hierarchy as natural features of thriving systems. How should universities think about merit today, given all the debates? Merit gets a bad name. How should universities approach this?
Bejan: Well, it’s ironic, actually, it’s funny. The word “merit” is not spoken, yet the university wants to achieve a higher ranking. But the people who engage in this kind of narrative don’t think it’s funny. They think that they’re preaching to the choir. The fact is that we’re all different. And that is why society is a very impressive living body. It has powers and abilities and ideas that one individual does not have, and that is why the society outlives the individual, and yes, the society can take one idea and move it to greater heights. And this is all pretty well documented. And one university, with its merit and fame, is perceived by others as being better than other universities. And that is the mother and father of the rankings that are obvious to most people who pay attention.The word “merit” is not spoken, yet the university wants to achieve a higher ranking.
It’s about ideas, and the ideas do not come uniformly from the members of the university. Some members are individuals to whom ideas occur more frequently, even better, meaning, even more different. There are some individuals whose ideas arrive in not only greater diversity, but greater audacity. Audacity or ability to shake the boat. And it is those ideas that put the university on the map. People ask, “Where was Richard Feynman professor? Where was Einstein a researcher [when] in the States?” They talk about time and place, not only one name or one group. This is what people remember, and this is why, to this day, regardless of the news of the day, Harvard University is famous. MIT is famous. It is for this reason that it attracted and protected, meaning it housed and cared for gifted individuals who came up with ideas, many ideas, not just science and other things. Impressive characters such as Aldrin, who was the second man on the moon, is an MIT PhD. Things, meaning behavior and achievement, belong to valuable players, like on a football team. The value of the player and the play is not distributed uniformly, because those are individuals with a built-in notion that they’re on earth to make a contribution and not to be sheep. That’s the reality. And if a student today does not resonate with what I just said, well, that’s his fault. He will end up not being a producer of things that change the world. What I’m telling you is particularly valuable in engineering, because engineering is the science and the profession of making things that did not exist before. So, the engineer is the creator. And if you are not able to dribble the ball, then you’re not part of the game.They’re on earth to make a contribution and not to be sheep.
Martin Center: You’ve been very critical of what you call artificial diversity. How do you see that showing up at universities? Do you think it’s showing up at all in the growth of administrative offices and all of these programs we have on campus?
Bejan: Yeah, that’s right. So, the evolution to which you refer is of an older vintage. It began right after Sputnik in the late 50s. That is when the government in this race for outer space became very busy in getting involved in shaping the research activity in the university, and decade after decade, the monies that came from the government ballooned the administration, the administering of that flow also became a university of its own at all levels, from government all the way down to the university. So we have here people who handle the money, we have in Washington, people who distribute the money, but the people who are making the decisions at all levels are failed academics. They’re not the ones doing the research. I’ve seen them, and it is mind-boggling that, say, Adrian is required to convince people who basically are not players. But they do the deciding, and they decide the initiatives or categories of projects that should be sponsored, as opposed to other categories, such as free thinking, that I think are more valuable, meaning the least expected idea should be encouraged. All of that is just foreign to research based on planning. Well, that is the USSR: research based on planning. And remember, I grew up in communist Romania, so I know what I’m talking about.I grew up in communist Romania, so I know what I’m talking about.
Before I left the university where I got my start for the first two years, there was a directive that arrived from the Ministry of Education that a professor, an honest person, shared with people in the classroom. Can you believe here’s this document from the Ministry of Education, telling us the 20 inventions that need to be made. Yes, I read them to you. They are listed, 20 inventions to be made. That is planned, not planned economies, but planned scientific research, which is, of course, nonsense. If you know the question, the ball game is over, you know, because getting the answers is child’s play, and so that is what’s going on. And then the ones who come up with ideas while not being sponsored by the government are very few, but they are the free people who still exist. At a recent conference in my domain, which is called constructal law of design in nature, a participant a little bit older than me, said, “Now in retirement, I’m doing the kind of thinking that I knew that I was capable of doing. I can actually write what is important without looking over my shoulder.” And I said, “Well, I think you know that the challenge that I face is to behave like you, even though I’m not retired.” Science at this rate is doomed. Science, my field, for example, thermodynamics, is in trouble because of nothing new, and then an invasion of bowing and scraping. These are the copycats. They keep repeating things that, as I said, failed academics have the power to support.Thermodynamics is in trouble because of nothing new, and then an invasion of bowing and scraping.
Martin Center: You answered my next question before I even asked it, which was going to be about freedom and creativity. It sounds like you think faculty today are not very free to pursue ideas.
Bejan: They may be free in their own bedrooms, but in public, they’re joiners. They form big groups because the government favors collective proposals, with 10 or more co-authors, in the belief that size makes better ideas, which is the complete opposite of what collectivization has demonstrated in history. It began with the collectivization of agriculture in the USSR in the late 1920s, and it spread all the way to 1989—the fall of communism. It created everything: poverty, of course, but also hunger, and the exodus of the few capable farmers. Farmers from the village, they left. They ran. They ran for a better life in the city as laborers, meaning unqualified laborers. I’ve seen them. They left the countryside vacant and rotting. That’s the effect of collectivization.
There’s a cacophony of publishing where everybody writes, and nobody reads.In research, for example, there is research going on with extremely low ROI, return on investment. You have large groups that are getting paid. They publish papers, research articles with 20 or 30 or more co-authors. You don’t know who did what in that particular report, but everybody got paid. And by the way, nobody reads the article that’s published. Today in science, there’s a cacophony of publishing where everybody writes, and nobody reads. Not long ago, it took effort to write something by hand, then to have it typed, then to put it in a yellow envelope and lick a stamp and mail it to a publisher, and then in return, you got the three envelopes with the reviews mailed the same way with stamps, and that was an activity that made everybody honest, and it kept the numbers of participants small. It was reduced to a small number of real players in this kind of flow of ideas. Machine writing, machine publishing, all of this has created this Tower of Babel of Science, where, as I said, everybody writes and publishes, but nobody reads. By the way, this is where you come in. They watch a few podcasts or episodes on YouTube. And so, yes, that’s very important, the work that you do, which is why I jumped at the opportunity to contribute and to be heard. But writing a book is one way to stick to the old game, which is harder work because it takes a lot of effort to publish a book these days.All of this has created this Tower of Babel of Science.
Martin Center: I will ask you one last question, and that is, if you were speaking directly to students or to young faculty watching this video, what would you tell them to focus on if they want to do meaningful, creative work?
Bejan: I just finished my lecture, and I told them exactly what you’re fishing for. I tell them to value and protect their individuality and to think, first of all, to recognize that every moment of the day, things surprise them, that it is their duty to question them, to connect the dots, and to come up with a good question, which is their question. The ball game, meaning the opportunity to score, is not in finding an answer; it is in discovering a new question, and that is your baby. And then you also immediately know the answer, if not right away, you’ll know it tomorrow morning when you wake up, because that is when the better ideas that took shape during the night occurred to you. [You should] value those images and do justice to them, and never lose sight of the fact that there’s only one like you. You’re an individual. And I also told them, “Do not join. Just stay true to your own thinking and your own imagination.” And I know that they like me, but this kind of message is best transmitted with the personal example, with an unrestrained book like this one, “Diversity through Freedom,” and with other books of that kind that I published in the recent past. They all come from this attitude that I’m on earth to make a contribution, not to be a copycat, and certainly not to be a plagiarist or a thief or a sheep.
Jenna Robinson is president of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.
I recently heard from a friend that Talarico’s leftist church – the St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas — told its parishioners to throw away their Bibles and purchase the “Inclusive Bible” by the Priests for Equality, which was quite an odd translation of the Bible.
I then looked up that “bible” and whoa, is it weird:
I flipped through it just briefly:
Adam is an “it” the “first creature” until Eve is created, the first human.
Marriage is not between a “man and woman” but between “two persons”.
God is seldom “the Father” but “your Parent”.
Well, except for garbage like this:
“It is God the only Child, who is close to the bosom of the Father-Mother…” (“~John” 1:18) (or in the later version “bosom of Abba”) “Abba” literally means “daddy” in Aramaic/Hebrew, but I guess it’s OK to use non-English words to hide that. They probably think it’s kinky.
Proverbs, which is largely about young men’s proper behavior, is so gutted and weakened I can’t make heads or tales of it.
The Holy Spirit (which is technically an “it” in the Greek, so any gendered English translation has issues) is a “she” throughout the Gospel of John. I guess that’s no less accurate than “he”, but that’s the female gender bias throughout.
And this female-centric bend continues throughout. Women are generally listed before men in genealogies, for example.
Or like this in “~Genesis 1:27” the phrase “male and female” becomes “female and male”. It doesn’t matter, I suppose. But why the change from the original Hebrew? Equality? Or because women are better?
In fact, women are generally elevated over men throughout the translation. It’s not “inclusive”. It’s misandrist. For example, Paul address in letters is changed to “sisters and brothers”.
And men are generally erased:
“Son of Man” becomes “the Human One”.
“Son of God” becomes “the Chosen One”.
“Don’t call anyone on earth your ‘Mother’ or ‘Father.’ You have only one Parent—our loving God in heaven. (The original text says “Father”.)
Ephesians had this gem “to those of you in a committed relationship” and erases both male and female. (It’s supposed to be about marriage. My only surprise is it didn’t say “top” and “bottom”.)
I can’t even figure out what 1 Peter instructions for a household says. I think it says “the woman is the boss”.
The “Whore of Babylon” is, well, go read it (or not) yourself.
TLDR: Talrico’s preferred Bible does its best to erase men or sex. Promotes women over men. And is super gay and weird. It’s like if Disney under Kathleen Kennedy wrote the Bible: “put a chick in it and make it gay and lame.”
In 1955, a British historian named C. Northcote Parkinson published a short, sardonic essay in The Economistabout why government departments keep growing regardless of how much work they actually have. It was meant as satire.
The idea was this: work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Seventy years later, I’d say this observation has never been more relevant.
I can confirm it, personally. Not in some abstract, applies-to-everyone sense. I mean it in the specific sense that the day I give myself eight hours to do four hours of work is, reliably, the day that takes eight hours or more.
I am a freelance writer who works mostly from home and coffee shops. Nobody tells me when to stop. And remote work, for all its obvious advantages, has a hidden cost: the flexibility is the trap.
Perhaps, in an office, it’s easier. In an office, you have signals. Colleagues put on their coats. The building empties. The commute home functions as a hard boundary between work and the rest of the day.
When you work remotely, none of that exists. The day just continues. There is always one more thing to read, one more sentence to tighten, one more tab to open. Work finds the space you give it.
The counterintuitive thing is that remote workers often tell themselves the opposite. All that flexibility, the thinking goes, means I can be more efficient. I can fit work around my life rather than the other way around. And this is partly true — but only if you impose some structure on it. Without the structure, you don’t work less. You just work differently, and you work more, but not necessarily better.
I have about three hours a day of writing that is actually worth anything before quality slips. The remaining hours are not wasted — there is research, correspondence, editing — but they are not the core work. They are fill. And without a hard stop, fill expands.
Here’s how to give work less room:
Set a hard stop — and set it before you start
Most advice about hard stops gets the timing wrong. People say: pick a time to stop. And they mean it as something you decide during the day — at three in the afternoon you resolve to wrap up by six. But by three in the afternoon, Parkinson’s Law is already running. You have committed the time. Work has expanded to fill it.
The hard stop has to be decided before you open the laptop. Not as a calendar event you might reschedule, but as a genuine boundary — the end of the working day is already fixed, and the only question is what gets done before it arrives.
The blocks don’t need to be elaborate. They need to be specific: this task, this window, this end point. When the block is over, you move on — whether the task feels finished or not. Most of the time, it is. And if it isn’t, you know exactly how much more it actually needs.
Parkinson’s Law is not a productivity hack. It is a description of something that happens on its own when you are not paying attention. Work fills the space you give it. It always has.
The only move as far as I can see is to make the space smaller.
Mal James
Mal James is a writer at Space Daily covering self-development, productivity, relationships, and the psychology of work. He is also an entrepreneur and former teacher, and brings both perspectives into his writing on the Mind & Meaning pillar. Mal’s pieces focus on the practical — how people change behavior, build better habits, and navigate the parts of life that don’t come with instructions.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 