Bookmarks for 2025-12-30T01:45:24.322Z

• Concerto in C Major, RV 444: I. Allegro Molto - YouTube Music Added: Dec 29, 2025

  Concerto in C Major, RV 444: I. Allegro Molto - YouTube Music

  Site: YouTube Music

  Provided to YouTube by Kontor New Media GmbH Concerto in C Major, RV 444: I. Allegro Molto · Francesco Guggiola · Ensemble dell'Orchestra Farnesiana Vivald...

  

• Matthew Schmitz on X: "Jacob Savage joins @againstthepod to discuss his viral essay on the fate of white millennial men under DEI. https://t.co/ThkwoYuBmq" / X Added: Dec 29, 2025

  Site: X (formerly Twitter)

  

• Matthew Schmitz on X: "“The one exception I found to the general exclusion of white males had begun life as a female.” Harvard professor James Hankins explains why he’s leaving: https://t.co/wtaDUR46nl https://t.co/RshP0QUM2O" / X Added: Dec 29, 2025

  Site: X (formerly Twitter)

  

• Why I’m Leaving Harvard | Compact Added: Dec 29, 2025

  Why I’m Leaving Harvard

  Site: Compact

  Two weeks ago I gave my last lecture at Harvard, where I have been a history professor for forty years.

  

• Against the Grain on X: "“As a white Jewish man, I feel about the Democratic Party the way I think a black person reasonably felt about the Republican Party in the 1980s, which is: no matter what they say, they would be much more comfortable if my interests didn’t exist within society.” Jacob Savage on https://t.co/i64hhwytkc" / X Added: Dec 29, 2025

  Site: X (formerly Twitter)

  

• What ever happened to '60 Minutes?' Added: Dec 29, 2025

  ‘60 Minutes’ staff bristles at basic editorial standards

  Site: The Hill

  If there is one rule that modern journalists love to break, it’s the one about making the story about themselves.

  If you’re a normal, well-adjusted adult with family and friends, chances are you’ve heard nothing about the umpteenth mutiny at "60 Minutes." But if you’re just now recovering from the holiday and checking the trending news headlines, you might find it interesting that CBS News’s flagship program has devolved somehow into a fiefdom subject to petty turf-wars. Efforts by the new management to enforce even modest editorial standards are being met with cries to heaven of the sort unheard since Herod received his first Christmas greeting. Whatever you've heard lately about "60 Minutes" and a supposed attack on the free press, know that the truth is simple: CBS staffers are upset because the network’s editor in chief, Bari Weiss, held a story until final touches could be added. That’s it. That’s the whole so-called crisis, brought to you by "60 Minutes," which lately breaks very little news unless it's about "60 Minutes." Weiss explained in an internal memo on Dec. 21 that a segment by CBS reporter Sharyn Alfonsi lacked several key elements — among other things, an original response from the Trump administration. The segment, titled “Inside CECOT,” investigates the deportation of illegal aliens from the U.S. to an infamous maximum-security prison in El Salvador. “What we have is [White House press secretary] Karoline Leavitt’s soundbite claiming [the deported illegal immigrants] are evildoers in America,” Weiss told staffers. “But isn’t there much more to ask in light of the torture we’re revealing? Tom Homan and Stephen Miller don’t tend to be shy. I realize we’ve emailed the DHS [spokesperson], but we need to push much harder to get these principals on the record.” Good journalists understand that this is a common request good editors make. Good reporting includes both sides of the story, and simply emailing a request for comment at 4:59 p.m. on a Friday, or the recycling of an already-public statement, is usually insufficient. A thorough reporter wants something exclusive — usually an on-the-record comment, especially when competing news outlets have already covered much of the same ground. This leads us to the actual media scandal hidden in plain sight. In the "60 Minutes" segment that Weiss paused for further reporting, Alfonsi, known for shoddy and biased work in the past, explicitly stated that “the Department of Homeland Security declined our request for an interview.” However, even this statement was highly misleading. Homeland Security had provided an original, on-the-record comment for the story. So had the White House and the State Department. These comments, as well as their very existence, were left out of Alfonsi’s report, suggesting that the administration deliberately chose to remain silent in response to allegations of torture. Note also that it might be valuable from a journalistic perspective to get a quote from someone like the outspoken Stephen Miller attempting to justify torture of prisoners. If Weiss wants to let the White House explain itself, it's certainly not because the outcome is guaranteed to favor Trump. This lack of effort, and the gap between reality and CBS’s reporting would be sufficient justification to pause the story on its own, but there’s more. Weiss also expressed concerns about the segment’s claim that nearly half of the deported illegal immigrants lack criminal histories. This glosses over the reality that half do have histories, and it also hides the ball about precisely what counts as a "criminal history." According to the segment, for example, only eight of 252 Venezuelans sent to CECOT had been sentenced for crimes in the U.S. But how many have convictions of any sort? How many were deported while facing charges in U.S. courts? How many were wanted abroad? "My point," Weiss wrote, "is that we should include as much as we can possibly know and understand about these individuals." These entirely reasonable editorial requests for more reported context prompted someone at CBS (likely Alfonsi) to leak to the media that Weiss had “spiked” the CECOT story, that network staffers are facing “corporate censorship” to appease the Trump White House, and that their First Amendment freedoms are under attack. "Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices," Alfonsi wrote. But that's not necessarily an endorsement. Both CBS attorneys and the Standards and Practices desk screened and cleared Alfonsi’s botched 2021 hit-piece claiming Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) had engaged in a pay-to-play scheme with Publix, rewarding the grocery chain with exclusive access to COVID-19 vaccines as payback for political donations. The report was a farce, in the end condemned even by Florida Democrats. CBS never explained how it got the story so wrong, and Alfonsi has never bothered to explain why she falsely claimed DeSantis wouldn’t answer her questions about the alleged scheme. In fact, footage of an exchange between her and the governor himself showed that he had addressed the claims directly. But his response was not included — which may sound familiar. Additional exculpatory facts and statements about Florida’s vaccine program were also left out of CBS’s report, including on-the-record statements by Democrats in the state. CBS never corrected or apologized for that 2021 segment, instead issuing only a weak statement defending Alfonsi and the decision to omit DeSantis’s response. In short, we have a news program run by journalists whose lack of professionalism does not end with their aversion to being told what to do by superiors. This keeps happening — this may in fact be the third or fourth news cycle about something supposedly horrible happening at "60 Minutes." Again and again, we are told to drop everything and take a supposed assault on the free press very seriously. But it's hard to sympathize when the threat of imposing routine editorial standards is framed as the biggest threat to freedom of the press since Abe Lincoln imprisoned dissenting editors and closed their newsrooms. Ignore all the big headlines about the First Amendment, the billionaire class buying media, the loss of journalistic independence, and so on. Ignore Dan Rather's claim that "60 Minutes" is slipping into an “increasingly irretrievable and dark place.” This Weiss-CECOT business is nothing more than a workplace dispute involving oversensitive and self-important activists. Because if there is one rule that modern journalists love to break, it’s the one about making the story about themselves. Becket Adams is a journalist and media critic in Washington.

  

• Elon Musk on X: "Yeah, and the scheme was working too" / X Added: Dec 29, 2025

  Site: X (formerly Twitter)

  

• Clandestine on X: "It’s not just the Somalis in Minnesota. The Dems opened up our nation to anyone who would come here and vote for them, in exchange for our tax dollars. They use shell companies to funnel public money to the immigrants, meaning we are slaves that fund the people replacing us. https://t.co/XMWwyvl1aF" / X Added: Dec 29, 2025

  Site: X (formerly Twitter)

  

• David Sacks on X: "After blindly funding the Left for years, Silicon Valley is finally realizing what time it is. Dinner time. And they’re on the menu." / X Added: Dec 29, 2025

  Site: X (formerly Twitter)

  

• jay plemons on X: "Scott Adams breaks down everything that had to happen at the same time for us to finally understand the world: • Trump exposing fake news + winning 2024 • @elonmusk buying Twitter → turning it into X • DOGE + @MikeBenzCyber revealing NGO/USAID distortions, censorship https://t.co/PgTCtJCq2B" / X Added: Dec 29, 2025

  Site: X (formerly Twitter)

  

• American Debunk on X: "All laws and norms are tribal. That’s why it’s insane to think all the Somali migrants would come to America and follow our norms and laws. That the Somali migrants are committing massive fraud is the least shocking thing ever when you think about it. It’d be more shocking if" / X Added: Dec 29, 2025

  Site: X (formerly Twitter)

  

• DAIR.AI on X: "Interesting research from Google. Research has shown that neural networks don't just memorize facts. They build internal maps of how those facts relate to each other. The view of how transformers store knowledge is associative: co-occurring entities get stored in a weight https://t.co/W8qVbsZvRY" / X Added: Dec 29, 2025

  Site: X (formerly Twitter)

  

• Cube Inside of a Sphere - The Bussard Fusion Ramjet / X Added: Dec 29, 2025

  Site: X (formerly Twitter)

  

• Gideon Miller on X: "@JimmyJ4thewin Either this boy’s lying about being Jewish or the people who say Jews are intelligent are lying" / X Added: Dec 29, 2025

  Site: X (formerly Twitter)

  

• ISS astronaut snaps stunning nighttime photo of Florida and Cuba photo of the day for Dec. 29, 2025 | Space Added: Dec 29, 2025

  ISS astronaut snaps stunning nighttime photo of Florida and Cuba | Space photo of the day for Dec. 29, 2025

  Site: Space

  The image offers a rare look at how Earth's surface and atmosphere interact after sunset.

  

• New Book Explores Never Trump Movement | National Review Added: Dec 29, 2025

  New Book Explores Never Trump Movement | National Review

  

• Never Trump After 2024 - Claremont Review of Books Added: Dec 29, 2025

  Never Trump After 2024 - Claremont Review of Books

  Site: Claremont Review of Books

  Never Trump After 2024

  

• Varad Mehta on X: "“To rework an expression that David Brooks has employed in several contexts (though not the 2024 election), The Bulwark has made clear its intention to say all the same things after November 2024 that it said before, only louder.” Superb essay on NT’s fatal contradictions." / X Added: Dec 29, 2025

  Site: X (formerly Twitter)

  

• Varad Mehta on X: "Media yesterday: "MTG is the twisted, bizarre apotheosis of MAGA, more MAGA than even Trump himself." MTG: "Trump said if I named names from the Epstein files it would hurt his friends." Media today: "MTG is a truth-telling American hero who is standing up to Trump." GMAFB." / X Added: Dec 29, 2025

  Site: X (formerly Twitter)

  

• Victor Davis Hanson: If the Rich Liberals Want to Pay More Taxes, Why Don’t They? - YouTube Added: Dec 29, 2025

  Victor Davis Hanson: Why Elite ‘Tax Me More’ Virtue Signaling Is a Lie

  Site: YouTube

  U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, a former Republican presidential candidate, penned an opinion piece titled “Tax the Rich, Like Me” in The New York Times last ...

  

• Are We Using the Wrong Kind Of Electricity? - YouTube Added: Dec 29, 2025

  Are We Using the Wrong Kind Of Electricity?

  Site: YouTube

  Get a special 35% discount* on an annual digital subscription to The Economist at https://www.economist.com/Sabine *20% in the UK, Latin America, and India.W...

  

• New Experiment Sees Order Emerge from Chaos - YouTube Added: Dec 29, 2025

  New Experiment Sees Order Emerge from Chaos

  Site: YouTube

  🌏 Get NordVPN 2Y plan + 4 months extra here ➼ https://NordVPN.com/sabine It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✌Physicists have theorized ...

  

• Do Black Holes Exist? Some Physicists Don’t Think So - YouTube Added: Dec 29, 2025

  Do Black Holes Exist? Some Physicists Don’t Think So

  Site: YouTube

  Check out courses in your favorite subjects on Brilliant! Start learning for free at https://brilliant.org/sabine/ and get 20% off a premium subscription, wh...

  

• Crazy: Scientists Compute With Human Brain Cells - YouTube Added: Dec 29, 2025

  Crazy: Scientists Compute With Human Brain Cells

  Site: YouTube

  Go to https://ground.news/sabine to get 40% off the Vantage plan and see through sensationalized reporting. Stay fully informed on events around the world wi...

  

• Never hand your phone to someone without using this hidden security trick Added: Dec 29, 2025

  Never hand your phone to someone without using this hidden security trick

  Site: MUO

  Android makes it easy and secure to temporarily let someone use your phone

  

• White House defends Christmas as Christian holiday after WaPo criticism | Fox News Added: Dec 29, 2025

  White House defends Christmas as Christian holiday after WaPo criticism | Fox News

  

• A new study on dairy products reveals an unexpected difference in the gut that almost no one imagines Added: Dec 29, 2025

  A new study on dairy products reveals an unexpected difference in the gut that almost no one imagines

  Site: ECOticias.com

  Milk vs cheese: new study hints dairy may reshape your gut microbiome in ways nobody expected.

  

• Social media follower counts have never mattered less, creator economy execs say | TechCrunch Added: Dec 29, 2025

  Social media follower counts have never mattered less, creator economy execs say | TechCrunch

  Site: TechCrunch

  “I think that 2025 was the year where the algorithm completely took over, so followings stopped mattering entirely,” LTK CEO Amber Venz Box said.

  

• Ilhan Omar’s Somalia stance draws scrutiny as Minnesota fraud scandal grows | Fox News Added: Dec 29, 2025

  Ilhan Omar’s Somalia stance draws scrutiny as Minnesota fraud scandal grows | Fox News

  

• JWST Looked Closer at a 'Dead Rock' Planet, What It Found Was a Lava-Filled Inferno Added: Dec 29, 2025

  JWST Looked Closer at a 'Dead Rock' Planet, What It Found Was a Lava-Filled Inferno

  Site: The Daily Galaxy - Great Discoveries Channel

  For years, scientists thought they had this planet figured out, small, rocky, and utterly inhospitable. But a closer look has flipped that assumption on its head.

  

• Google Gemini 3 Tips : Tone Presets & Added Files for Faster Tasks - Geeky Gadgets Added: Dec 29, 2025

  Gemini 3 Tips : Make Responses Sharper, Faster & More Personal

  Site: Geeky Gadgets

  Get more from Google Gemini by turning on personalized instructions across chats, so replies match your goals and save you typing time.

  

• The 3 fastest ways to capture (and retrieve) ideas on your Android phone Added: Dec 29, 2025

  The 3 fastest ways to capture ideas on your Android phone (and actually find them later)

  Site: How-To Geek

  Your Android is an idea-capture machine. You just haven't unlocked it yet.

  

• A Water Reservoir Big Enough to Fill Trillions of Earth Oceans Discovered Orbiting a Black Hole Added: Dec 29, 2025

  A Water Reservoir Big Enough to Fill Trillions of Earth Oceans Discovered Orbiting a Black Hole

  Site: The Daily Galaxy - Great Discoveries Channel

  Astronomers have uncovered something massive and unexpected lurking near a distant black hole, something that rewrites what we thought we knew about the early universe.

  

• Elon Musk on X: "Just stop caring whether they call you racist or not. They do that to scare away inquiries. Doing so used to work, but not any more. Fraud is fraud and it doesn’t matter what race someone is." / X Added: Dec 29, 2025

  Site: X (formerly Twitter)

  

• I switched to COSMIC Linux desktop, and I can't wait for the future Added: Dec 29, 2025

  I switched to the COSMIC Linux desktop, and I can't wait for the future

  Site: XDA

  COSMIC is out of this world, even with its flaws

  

• cosmic Linux desktop - X11 or Wayland? - Google Search Added: Dec 29, 2025

  Google Search

• Trypophobia: Why The Surinam Toad Is Pure Nightmare Fuel For A Lot Of People | IFLScience Added: Dec 29, 2025

  A Common Condition Makes The Surinam Toad Pure Nightmare Fuel For Some People

  Site: IFLScience

  Seems like a normal toad, and then the babies emerge.

  The Surinam toad ( Pipa pipa ) doesn’t look like much. Flattened and brownish, you’d be forgiven for mistaking it for a squashed overripe fruit, but something remarkable happens when the time comes to reproduce. Something a lot of people find pretty horrifying. Male Surinam toads will lure in females by clicking their hyoid bone, creating a metallic sound she finds irresistible. Once in reach, he’ll grasp her in amplexus (something these amphibians are famously unselective about ) and they’ll both swell up until their cloacas are touching. The fertilized eggs are then implanted into the female’s back, and this is where things get nasty. Surinam toad birth The offspring develop into tadpoles within the mother’s back, but they don’t emerge. That doesn’t occur until they are fully developed toadlets, at which point they will push their way out of her skin, creating a mosaic of honeycomb-like pockets across her back. Feeling intense disgust or fear? You could have trypophobia. Image credit: Endeneon via Wikimedia Commons ( CC BY 3.0 ) If the above image doesn’t have your shoulders by your ears, then congratulations. It seems you are immune to a common condition that makes the Surinam toad pure nightmare fuel for a lot of people. Trypophobia: fear, or reaction? The aversion taps into what’s known as trypophobia : a pathological dislike of clusters of holes, or things that look like holes. The symptoms and severity vary, but it generally brings on an intense sense of disgust or fear when faced with anything that has lots of holes in it. Lotus roots, sponges, honeycomb, or – yes – the pockmarked back of a water-dwelling toad are all it takes to trigger a person with trypophobia. Despite the name, it's considered a reaction rather than a fear. It’s thought to affect around 10 to 18 percent of people, and could be an adaptive response to avoid parasites. The spotted back of a female Surinam toad may trigger a kind of ectoparasite defense in humans. Image credit: Dein Freund der Baum via Wikimedia Commons ( CC BY-SA 3.0 ) “In addition to aversions towards harmless clusters such as bubbles, individuals with trypophobia typically report strong aversion to clusters resembling parasites and infectious disease, such as a cluster of ticks, suggesting that the condition might be an overgeneralized response to cues to the presence of ectoparasites and infectious disease,” wrote the authors of a 2018 study into human ectoparasite defense. “Recent research showed that, in contrast to most phobias—which predominantly involve fear—the aversion towards clusters predominantly involves disgust.” “Moreover, although many individuals described prototypical disgust feelings such as nausea, the most commonly described feelings were skin sensations including itching, crawling and the feeling as if ‘bugs’ were on the skin[…] Although these sensations resemble those of delusional parasitosis, individuals with trypophobia do not believe that they are infested, but rather feel as if they are infested when they encounter cluster patterns.” So, it’s possible that for some people, just looking at the gaping holes on the back of the Surinam toad is enough to make them feel like they are infected with some kind of skin-crawling parasite. This could be a beneficial response in making you less likely to touch things that could get under your skin, but it doesn’t affect us all. Just check out this account from one brave scientist who volunteered to be parasitized by 50 hookworms for science.

  

• Why printf is superior to echo in Linux scripts Added: Dec 29, 2025

  You’ve been using the wrong command for years: Why printf beats echo in your Linux scripts

  Site: How-To Geek

  Times when just 'echo'ing stuff into the terminal isn't enough.

  

• This fresh new text editor is the nano replacement I've been waiting for | ZDNET Added: Dec 29, 2025

  This fresh new text editor is the nano replacement I've been waiting for

  Site: ZDNET

  For Linux and MacOS, Fresh is the best of both worlds - a terminal text editor with GUI-like options. I'm all for it.

  

• PIRATES ARE BACK, New Bill Looks To Create American Pirates To Fight Cartels - YouTube Added: Dec 30, 2025

  PIRATES ARE BACK, New Bill Looks To Create American Pirates To Fight Cartels

  Site: YouTube

  MyPillow.com/Tim OR mypillow.com Promocode Tim for up to 80% OFF And FREE SHIPPINGSUPPORT THE SHOW BUY CAST BREW COFFEE NOW - https://castbrew.com/Join - htt...

  

• Victor Davis Hanson: California Bureaucrats Threaten the Water of 600K - YouTube Added: Dec 30, 2025

  Victor Davis Hanson: Environmentalist Dam Removal Could Leave 600,000 People Without Water

  Site: YouTube

  This content was recorded by Victor Davis Hanson prior to his Dec. 30 medical operation.600,000 people could soon be without water because Pacific Gas & Elec...

  

• Gemini in Gmail is what finally convinced me to pay for Google’s AI Added: Dec 30, 2025

  Gemini in Gmail is what finally convinced me to pay for Google’s AI

  Site: Android Authority

  I used to be skeptical about paying for Google's AI, but Gemini’s Gmail integration has completely changed that.

  

• Exclusive | Outraged journos to urge David Ellison to protect CBS News' 'independence' after Bari Weiss pulled '60 Minutes' report | New York Post Added: Dec 30, 2025

  Exclusive | Outraged journos to urge David Ellison to protect CBS News’ ‘independence’ after Bari Weiss pulled ‘60 Minutes’ report

  Site: New York Post

  The “Inside CECOT” episode included correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi’s interviews with deportees who suffered “brutal and tortuous” conditions at the infamous prison after being sent there by the Trump…

  

• China Is Building a New Kind of Supercomputer Above Earth Added: Dec 30, 2025

  China Is Building a New Kind of Supercomputer Above Earth

  Site: Popular Mechanics

  The US and China both want to be the first to launch a powerful AI data center beyond Earth, but the latter has seemingly jumped into the lead.

  

• Fungus disarms bark beetle chemical shields by converting their plant-derived toxins Added: Dec 30, 2025

  Fungus disarms bark beetle chemical shields by converting their plant-derived toxins

  Spruce bark is rich in phenolic compounds that protect trees from pathogenic fungi. A research team at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena has investigated how these plant defenses function within the food web, particularly in spruce bark beetles (Ips typographus), which ingest the compounds through their diet. Could the beetles use substances from the spruce's defenses to protect themselves against pathogenic fungi?

  

• George Clooney Says Bari Weiss Is Destroying CBS News Added: Dec 30, 2025

  George Clooney: ‘Bari Weiss Is Dismantling CBS News as We Speak’

  Site: Variety

  George Clooney says Bari Weiss is "dismantling" CBS News and more broadcast news networks need to oppose Donald Trump.

  When George Clooney was preparing to make his Broadway debut appearing as CBS news correspondent Edward R. Murrow in “Good Night, and Good Luck,” he invited “60 Minutes” to sit in on rehearsals. As the cast gathered for their first read through, Clooney talked about the story’s prescience — though it’s set during McCarthyism in […]

  

• Victor Davis Hanson Faces Major Surgery After Rare Health Battle / X Added: Dec 30, 2025

  Site: X (formerly Twitter)

  

• Unused SpongeBob Music: Moorea Hula - YouTube Added: Dec 30, 2025

  Unused SpongeBob Music: Moorea Hula

  Site: YouTube

  Nick Carr has a file for this track, but it hasn't been used in SpongeBob yet

  

• Gad Saad on “owning the libs” on X - YouTube Added: Dec 30, 2025

  Gad Saad on “owning the libs” on X

  Site: YouTube

  Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

  

• The double standard on executive power is impossible to ignore Added: Dec 30, 2025

  The double standard on executive power is impossible to ignore

  Site: The Hill

  The presidency itself is subject not to the written Constitution, but to the preferences of the political class.

  For more than two centuries, presidents of both parties exercised wide executive latitude across war, trade, and immigration. The Constitution grants the president authority as commander-in-chief, and presidents have routinely used that power to initiate military action without formal declarations of war.  President Harry Truman sent troops to Korea in 1950 without a declaration from Congress, establishing what scholars call the “Korean precedent” for unilateral presidential action in armed conflicts. President Bill Clinton initiated military operations in Kosovo in 1999 without congressional authorization.  President Barack Obama ordered military intervention in Libya in 2011 without a congressional vote, relying solely on executive authority and the War Powers Resolution framework. Presidents have also long used unilateral authority in trade. The Constitution assigns control of tariffs to Congress (Article I, Section 8), but Congress delegated broad tariff power to the executive branch through laws passed and signed in the 1960s and 1970s. These laws enabled President Ronald Reagan to raise tariffs on Japanese electronics in the 1980s, President George W. Bush to impose steel tariffs in 2002, and President Barack Obama to enact tire tariffs against China in 2009. Immigration authority has followed the same pattern. The Immigration and Nationality Act grants presidents sweeping discretion over deportation priorities and entry restrictions. President Obama created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in 2012 without congressional involvement. President Jimmy Carter suspended entry of Iranians during the 1979 hostage crisis. Clinton used parole authority and deferred enforced departure for various groups throughout the 1990s. These actions were controversial, but they were accepted as part of the presidency’s discretionary authority under the INA. That longstanding acceptance changed abruptly — and not because of an act of Congress, a constitutional amendment, or a Supreme Court overhaul. It shifted because the political class prefers to narrow the powers of the presidency depending on who occupies the office. The moment President Trump took office, executive actions that had been tolerated for decades under previous administrations were suddenly treated as legally questionable, illegitimate, or even unprecedented. Love Trump or hate him, you cannot miss that powers exercised by presidents from Truman to Obama were completely reinterpreted the moment they were used by a president outside the establishment’s favor. This is not how a constitutional government is supposed to function. Presidential authority should rise or fall through lawmaking by Congress or by constitutional amendment — not through selective enforcement by bureaucratic institutions, political actors, or unelected gatekeepers. If executive authority becomes contingent on elite approval rather than statutory or constitutional boundaries, then the structure of the republic has already begun to weaken. The result is an emerging norm in which the presidency itself is subject not to the written Constitution, but to the preferences of the political class. Historically accepted powers, military initiative, tariff authority, and immigration discretion have become negotiable, depending on which faction holds cultural or institutional influence. That is the real crisis. If Americans allow this to stand simply because some dislike the personality of the current president, then future presidents of both parties will inherit an office diminished by precedent and constrained by actors who were never elected to wield that authority. The presidency is either a constitutional office, or it is a permission slip. And if it becomes the latter, the republic will not be far behind. Erick Chomskis is a civilian employee of the War Department. His views do not necessarily reflect those of any government department or agency.