February 2026

THANKFULLY, HE eNDED hISTORY:

February 21, 2026

We Live Like Royalty and Don’t Know It (Charles C. Mann, Winter 2025, New Atlantis)

Jefferson was one of the richest men in the new United States. He had a 5,000-acre plantation worked by hundreds of slaves, a splendid mansion in Virginia that he had designed himself, one of the biggest wine collections in America, and one of the greatest private libraries in the world — it became the foundation of the Library of Congress. But despite his wealth and status his home was so cold in winter that the ink in his pen sometimes froze, making it difficult for him to write to complain about the chill.

Jefferson was rich and sophisticated, but his life was closer to the lives of people in the Iron Age than it was to ours. This is true literally, in that modern forms of steel and other metal alloys hadn’t been invented. But it is most true in the staggering fact that everyone at the rehearsal dinner was born and raised in luxury unimaginable in Jefferson’s time.

The young people at my table were anxious about money: starter-job salaries, high rents, student loans. But they never worried about freezing in their home. They could go to the sink and get a glass of clean water without fear of getting sick. Most of all, they were alive. In 1800, when Jefferson was elected president, more than one out of four children died before the age of five. Today, it is a shocking tragedy if a child dies. To Jefferson, these circumstances would have represented wealth and power beyond the dreams of avarice. The young people at my table had debts, but they were the debts of kings.

Jefferson lived in a world of horse-drawn carriages, blazing fireplaces, and yellow fever. But what most separates our day from his is not our automobiles, airplanes, and high-rise apartments — it is that today vast systems provide abundant food, water, energy, and health to most people, including everyone at the rehearsal dinner. In Jefferson’s time, not even the president of the United States had what we have. But few of us are aware of that, or of what it means.

Law/Crime

The Supreme Court’s Tariff Ruling Shows Conservativism at Work: Chief Justice John Roberts’s long campaign against unilateral executive control of the economy continues—regardless of who’s in the White House. (Judge Glock, Feb 20 2026, City Journal)

For the past year, the liberal commentariat has decried the Supreme Court for being just an adjunct of the Trump administration. The Brennan Center for Justice argued that, despite the nation’s “democratic backsliding” under Trump, the Court “keeps ruling in Trump’s favor.” Noted legal scholar Kate Shaw said on a New York Times podcast that the Court’s conservatives “really are just partisan justices in support of Donald Trump.” Shaw and others on the Left have advocated for radical court reform, which for some included court-packing, to force it to support their version of American democracy.

The argument that the Supreme Court kowtowed to whatever President Trump wanted was foolish before, and became insupportable after, Friday’s announcement of the decision in Learning Resources v. Trump, which overturned the most important part of Trump’s tariffs policy.

Law/Crime Republican Liberty

RESTORING SEPARATION:

February 20, 2026

LEARNING RESOURCES, INC., et al., PETITIONERS (February 20, 2026)

Justice Gorsuch, concurring.

For those who think it important for the Nation to impose more tariffs, I understand that today’s decision will be disappointing. All I can offer them is that most major decisions affecting the rights and responsibilities of the American people (including the duty to pay taxes and tariffs) are funneled through the legislative process for a reason. Yes, legislating can be hard and take time. And, yes, it can be tempting to bypass Congress when some pressing problem arises. But the deliberative nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design. Through that process, the Nation can tap the combined wisdom of the people’s elected representatives, not just that of one faction or man. There, deliberation tempers impulse, and compromise hammers disagreements into workable solutions. And because laws must earn such broad support to survive the legislative process, they tend to endure, allowing ordinary people to plan their lives in ways they cannot when the rules shift from day to day. In all, the legislative process helps ensure each of us has a stake in the laws that govern us and in the Nation’s future. For some today, the weight of those virtues is apparent. For others, it may not seem so obvious. But if history is any guide, the tables will turn and the day will come when those disappointed by today’s result will appreciate the legislative process for the bulwark of liberty it is.

Identitarianism Just So Stories

APPLIED DARWINISM:

February 20, 2026

Why Team Trump Talking About ‘Lethalitymaxxing’ Should Alarm You: Trendy internet slang meets eugenics, the manosphere, and neo-Nazis. (Ilyse Hogue, Feb 20, 2026, The Bulwark)

The fitness-to-radicalization pipeline works like this: A young man who feels defeated by external factors finds power and community in spaces within his control. One of those places is the gym, where self-discipline is celebrated.1 This is not inherently sinister. The desire to be strong, healthy, and competent is deeply human. But if you go deeper into some parts of fitness culture, the message shifts almost imperceptibly from your value is determined by your body to some bodies—and therefore some people—are simply worth more than others.

RFK Jr.’s ‘concern’ about vaccines was never purely about what was in the syringe. He was always alluding to a logic familiar to those within eugenics movements: that strong, healthy, naturally resilient bodies don’t need pharmaceutical intervention, and that those who do are, in some fundamental sense, weaker. It’s no coincidence that Kennedy is now secretary of health and human services, and that Make America Healthy Again is the mainstream-laundered expression of that same ideology, only operating from inside the federal government.

Now, the Department of Defense is getting in on the game. The term “maxxing” comes from the looksmaxxing subculture—a bleak corner of the internet rooted in incel forums and built around the obsessive desire to optimize physical appearance. Where red-pill fitness and MAHA offered self-improvement as aspiration, looksmaxxing suggests natural remedy is not sufficient. Here, the ideology is even more explicit: Human worth is a function not just of genetics but how you can build on it. Your jawline, your clavicle width, your bone structure—these aren’t just aesthetic qualities. They are destiny. To improve them is to improve your social rank, your sexual prospects, and ultimately your value as a human being.

The “looksmaxxing” world grades men on a scale that ranges from “subhuman” to “Chad.” They trade techniques ranging from aggressive fitness regimens to hormone injections to “bonesmashing,” i.e., hitting your own face with a hammer to reshape your cheekbones. The movement’s newest star, a 20-year-old known as Clavicular, has injected his teenage girlfriend with fat-dissolving acid on livestream to reshape her jaw. He says he typically earns between $80,000 and $100,000 a month from streaming.

The looksmaxxing world is, as the Atlantic recently described it, “narcissistic, cruel, racist, shot through with social Darwinism, and proudly anti-compassion.”

Robotics/AI

AS LABOR COSTS TEND TOWARDS ZERO:

February 19, 2026

The A.I. Disruption Is Actually Here, and It’s Not Terrible (Paul Ford, 2/16/26, NY Times)

November was, for me and many others in tech, a great surprise. Before, A.I. coding tools were often useful, but halting and clumsy. Now, the bot can run for a full hour and make whole, designed websites and apps that may be flawed, but credible. I spent an entire session of therapy talking about it.

The tech industry is a global culture — an identity based on craft and skill. Software development has been a solid middle-class job for a long time. But that may be slipping away. What might the future look like if 100 million, or a billion, people can make any software they desire? Could this be a moment of unparalleled growth and opportunity as people gain access to tech industry power for themselves?

According to the market, the answer is no. Recently, software stocks — Monday.com, Salesforce, Adobe and many others — plummeted all at once; the Nasdaq 100 lost half a trillion dollars in two days. Legal software company stocks slumped recently because Anthropic released tools to automate some legal work. Financial services firms and real estate services — the market keeps devaluing them because traders expect there to be less need for humans at desks in an A.I.-automated future. Why will anyone need all that legacy software when A.I. can code anything up for you in two shakes of a robotic lamb’s tail?

Personally this all feels premature, but markets aren’t subtle thinkers. And I get it. When you watch a large language model slice through some horrible, expensive problem — like migrating data from an old platform to a modern one — you feel the earth shifting. I was the chief executive of a software services firm, which made me a professional software cost estimator. When I rebooted my messy personal website a few weeks ago, I realized: I would have paid $25,000 for someone else to do this. When a friend asked me to convert a large, thorny data set, I downloaded it, cleaned it up and made it pretty and easy to explore. In the past I would have charged $350,000.

The revolution is always ten years away… until you realize it already happened.

Dragon Has No Teeth

SMAUG DIES IN THE END:

February 19, 2026

The rising risk of China turning Japanese: Beijing’s stimulus push may delay crisis, but without deeper reform, China risks a slower version of Japan’s long stagnation (Ronny P Sasmita, February 18, 2026, Asia Times)

Whether acknowledged or not, what is unfolding in China today bears a striking resemblance to Japan in 1989.

China’s property sector, which served as the primary engine of growth for two decades, has become a heavy drag on the economy. Developer giants such as Evergrande are not merely failed corporations; they symbolize the bursting of an asset bubble far larger than anything Japan experienced.

China is also beginning to show symptoms of Richard Koo’s balance sheet recession, this time at the household level. Middle-class families, with roughly 70% of their wealth tied to property, feel poorer as housing prices fall. Consumption slows accordingly.

At the same time, deflationary pressures are intensifying across the economy. Should China slide into a deflationary spiral of the kind Krugman describes, massive private and local government debts will become even more burdensome as the real value of debt rises while prices fall.

Robotics/AI

THE FUTURE ALREADY HAPPENED…AGAIN:

February 19, 2026

AI is the future of warfare and US is in the lead (Stephen Bryen, February 17, 2026, Asia Times)

Recently AI has played an important role in several conflicts: the Gaza war (Operation Gideon’s Chariots); US-Israel operations against Iran (Operation Rising Lion); the capture of Nicolas Maduro and his wife in Venezuela (Operation Absolute Resolve); operations to locate and stop “rogue” oil tankers; and the Ukraine war, where AI is playing a major role.

If the US and Israel take action against Iran in the coming days, planning and operations would likely be supported by AI.

Energy

AS EVERYONE KNEW BUT HIM AND THE LEFT:

February 19, 2026

Why Big Oil wants no part of Trump-seized Venezuela (Damian Tobin, February 19, 2026, Asia Times)

After the US captured Venezuela’s president at the start of 2026, Donald Trump promised to “unleash” the country’s oil supply. He wanted companies to invest US$100 billion to get hold of it.

Big Oil though, seems less than keen on that idea, appearing to consider Venezuela too expensive or risky.

Identitarianism

NO ONE HATES JUST MUSLIMS:

February 18, 2026

NatCon Chief’s Muddled Brief: Yoram Hazony’s confused attempt to sort out the problem of right-wing antisemitism. (Gabriel Schoenfeld, Feb 18, 2026, The Bulwark)

As Hazony acknowledges, the Republican party is itself at risk for becoming infected by “relentless anti-Jewish messaging.” What he has in mind is not merely arguments about Israeli policy toward Gaza, but “the explicit and savage targeting” by rightwing podcasters “of Jews, Judaism, and Zionism.” Is this the future, he asks, of the Republican party?

The party, in Hazony’s description, is today divided into three distinct factions. A “liberal wing” led by figures such as Lindsey Graham, Mike Pompeo, and Ted Cruz was once dominant, but in the Trump era, it has been in decline and probably represents no more than “25 percent of the party’s primary voters today.”

Then there is a nationalist wing, represented by Trump himself, as well as JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth. Hazony estimates that it makes up about 65 percent of the party and is distinguished “by its support for an industrial policy to restore America’s manufacturing capabilities, its outspoken rejection of compromise on immigration issues, and its skepticism of long foreign wars.”

Finally, there’s the alt-right, “which was mostly a fringe phenomenon until 2023, when big-name media figures Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens moved into this space.” Today, Hazony says, its voters comprise perhaps 10 percent of the Republican party.

But of course, the distinction Hazony is drawing between liberal and nationalist Republicans is completely contrived and even nonsensical. In what ways, fundamental or otherwise, do such “liberal” Republicans as Graham, Pompeo, and Cruz—all of them Trump sycophants—differ from Vance, Rubio, and Hegseth—all of them also Trump sycophants?

Once you unleash the Identitarian monster, you can’t get it to hate just one “Identity”

Environment

FEEDING THE FERAL GODS:

February 18, 2026

When Grief Came for the Gravedigger: In pursuit of an interesting life, he came face to face with death. (Will Bahr, d Feb. 11, 2026, NY Times Magazine)

Under Alison, it became commonplace at the sanctuary to invite the bereaved to dig graves and bury their dead themselves. We would still assist, of course, and ensure that no one showed up to dig wearing Crocs. But oftentimes the sanctuary staff was very much in the background. People leaped at the opportunity to take agency in this, their last act of service. Anyone who has borne grief’s leaden weight knows how physical a process it is — that phantom anvil perched on the shoulders, the chest; that lump unswallowable in the throat. Digging a grave yourself is an exceedingly rare opportunity for catharsis. Filling one in is closure, literalized. And so I found myself digging and filling graves beside mothers, sons, dear bereft friends. I came to know the dead through their people, who thanked us for the opportunity nearly to a name.

I wondered sometimes what kind of toll the work was taking on me. Physically, it was clear enough. My shoulders ached, my hands grew calloused and dirt-caked and torn by blackberry thorns (though I mostly loved this part). Mentally, the ledger was more vague. I was well acquainted with personal grief coming into the job, but here I felt like a tourist. I watched as a widow howled in animal anguish, kneeling in black by her lover’s graveside. I watched as a whole dynasty stiffly buried its matriarch, hands jammed in pockets, words unsaid hanging humidity-thick overhead. Most days, it felt like any other job — rote, obligatory. Others, I wept for total strangers.

One evening in late September 2024, it started raining. Then it started raining hard. News of a coming storm crept into our news feeds. We had a burial scheduled for the midst of the squall; Alison and I texted “As I Lay Dying” references back and forth.

“I’ll bring the covered wagon,” I said, “you bring Anse’s teeth.”

“I haven’t read it since high school,” she admitted, “but I’ll take your word for it.”

This sense of ha-ha doomsdayism permeated Asheville. How bad, in western North Carolina, could a hurricane possibly get?

THANKFULLY, HE eNDED hISTORY:

REGARDLESS:

RESTORING SEPARATION:

APPLIED DARWINISM:

AS LABOR COSTS TEND TOWARDS ZERO:

SMAUG DIES IN THE END:

THE FUTURE ALREADY HAPPENED…AGAIN:

AS EVERYONE KNEW BUT HIM AND THE LEFT:

NO ONE HATES JUST MUSLIMS:

FEEDING THE FERAL GODS:

You Missed

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATIONARY PRESSURES:

IT IS THE UNIVERSALISM INHERENT IN LIBERTY…:

ECONOMICS TRUMPS IDEOLOGY:

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST: