Audio Version:The Wolf at the Door, The Safe Room, and the Building CodeNotes from the Israeli frontier, part oneIsraeli building code has required a reinforced concrete room in every new residence since 1992. It is called a mamad. Steel door, blast shutter, filtered air, poured walls. Americans pay extra for this and call it a storm shelter. Israelis get it standard, the way we get a smoke detector in the hallway.The mamad was designed for rockets. Rockets give you fifteen seconds, and then the danger passes. Nothing in that threat model calls for a lock or a barricade on the inside, so most units have neither. The handle is held by hand, or it is not held at all.On the morning of October 7, 2023, families in the kibbutzim of Be’eri, Kfar Aza, and Nir Oz held those handles while heavily armed terrorists on the other side pulled. Some held for six hours. Some held while the house burned around them. When pulling failed, the murderers fired through the door at the handle, working to destroy the hands holding it. After the parents died, so did the twin five-year-old girls of smoke inhalation - as they had been tucked away in the safe room. Only the family dog survived. Once painted white, the black walls tell the tale of death and destruction.Jill and I went to Nir Oz in Israel and stood in one of those doorways and that safe room this week. The steel around the handle is riddled with bullet holes. They were shooting at hands.When the door held, they burned the house. Fire is what defeated the mamad. A room built to keep you alive for fifteen seconds becomes an oven once the building around it is alight, and its air filter was designed for a chemical agent rather than for smoke. The attackers carried accelerant and threw Molotov cocktails through windows, using fire to drive families out of shelters they could not otherwise breach. More than seventy percent of the homes at Nir Oz burned. Six houses in the entire kibbutz were left untouched. Elderly residents who could not walk died in their beds.A wealthy and technically superb country wrote one threat into its building code. A different threat arrived.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareWhat a raiding economy isFor roughly a century and a half, the southwestern plains of North America ran on a raiding and captive economy. Hämäläinen (2008) makes the case that Comanchería, that is, the vast region of the Southwestern United States occupied by the Comanche people before the 1860s, functioned as an imperial system rather than a collection of war parties, and that raiding was its productive sector. Brooks (2002) documents the captive exchange in the Southwest borderlands as a working market with prices, brokers, and repeat participants.The arithmetic comes first. A raider chooses the time and place. A defender must guard them all. No amount of virtue, vigilance, or wealth changes that equation.No amount of virtue or vigilance changes that ratio, and wealth does not improve it. A frontier settlement in 1840 and a kibbutz in 2023 faced the same problem, except that the kibbutz faced it on a shorter clock, because the raid arrived by paraglider.The strategy, tactics, and economics of captives were also remarkably similar. Comanche raiders killed adult men and took women and children. The selection was deliberate, and both sides knew it. Ransom followed, funded on the Spanish and Mexican side through the rescate system and by the Church.A reliable buyer creates a standing bid, and a standing bid raises the expected return on acquisition. Every individual redemption was a mercy. The aggregate of those mercies was a price signal that manufactured more captives. Any reader who understands why price controls produce shortages already understands why organized ransom produces abductions.Terror belonged to the same system. Deliberate atrocity and the display of bodies by native populations in the southwest made pursuit unattractive and resistance more expensive than accommodation. It also emptied territory.Through the 1830s and 1840s, Comanche and Kiowa raiding hollowed out the northern Mexican states, and whole districts were abandoned. Raiding by the light of the full moon became a calendar of dread that Texans later called the Comanche Moon. DeLay (2008) argues that this depopulation created the conditions for the American conquest of northern Mexico in 1846. Thethousand desertsof his title are those abandoned settlements. The haunting images of deserted Southwestern churches and settlements so often portrayed in popular films have their basis in this history. I was struck by how much the burned-out, bullet-riddled kibbutzim along the Gaza border resembled those cinematic archetypes.Terror was the production technology for Comanche and Kiowa raiders. A defender who will not pursue is cheaper to raid next season.Carl Menger founded the Austrian School of Economics in 1871 by explaining where prices come from. Value is not a property inherent in a good. It is imputed by the people who desire it, and the resulting price tells producers what to make more of. Pay above the market rate for something, and you have effectively placed an order for more of it.The rabbis arrived at the same insight seventeen centuries earlier, without the formal economics. Redemption of captives,pidyon shvuyim, ranks in Maimonides as the highest form of charity a Jew can perform. YetMishnah Gittin4:6 immediately places a limit on it: captives are not to be redeemed for more than their worth,mipnei tikkun ha’olam, “for the good order of the world.” A tradition that elevated redeeming captives to a supreme obligation also imposed a ceiling on the price, because the sages understood what an unlimited bid does to supply.The ceiling has not held. In 1985, Israel exchanged roughly 1,150 prisoners for three Israeli soldiers. In 2011, it traded 1,027 prisoners for a single soldier, Gilad Shalit. Among those released was Yahya Sinwar, who would later mastermind the October 7 attack. The market cleared. The price was published. The buyer came back.On October 7, Hamas took 251 hostages. Securing their return consumed Israeli politics for the next two years, as the country wrestled with the same dilemma its sages had recognized nearly two millennia ago: how to save the captives without ensuring there would be more captives to save.Americans had their own version in 1676. Raiders struck the frontier town of Lancaster, Massachusetts, at dawn on February 10 during King Philip’s War. They killed more than a dozen settlers and carried off twenty-four, among them Mary Rowlandson, the wife of the town’s minister, and her three children. Joseph Rowlandson was in Boston that morning, petitioning the colonial government for troops to defend Lancaster. He did not get them.Her six-year-old daughter, Sarah, was wounded during the attack and died in her mother’s arms nine days later. Rowlandson walked more than 150 miles over eleven weeks and five days, moving between camps in what she called “removes.” When her captors opened negotiations, they asked her to name her own price, and she set it at twenty pounds in goods. They released her on May 2, 1676. Lancaster had been burned, and there was nothing to return to.She published her account six years later under the titleThe Soveraignty and Goodness of God. It is generally regarded as the first American bestseller and established the captivity narrative as a genre that endured for the next two centuries. Colonists who would never have read a casualty report read Rowlandson, because readers identify with a captive in a way that a body count never can.Israel built the modern version of that in a city plaza. Within days of the attack, the open space outside the Tel Aviv Museum of Art becameKikar HaHatufim: Hostages Square. Families of the captives moved in, and some slept in tents there for weeks at a time. Survivors from the attacked kibbutzim staffed booths and told visitors about their missing neighbors. A digital clock counted every second since the morning of October 7. On Friday evenings, crowds gathered for Kabbalat Shabbat, many dressed in yellow.The last twenty living hostages came home in October 2025, a year after the attack. The body of Ran Gvili, a police officer killed that morning, was returned on January 26, 2026, and the clock went dark the following evening after 843 days, 12 hours, and 6 minutes. The Hostages and Missing Families Forum held its final Shabbat service that Friday, marking the first Sabbath since July 2014 with no Israeli held in Gaza. Most of the installations have since been removed, and the municipality is now deciding what the plaza should become.Rowlandson’s readers and the people who stood in that square were doing the same work, separated by three and a half centuries. A society can absorb casualties. It cannot absorb its people being held captive.Who came through the fenceThe attack came in three waves.It began with a massive barrage of rockets across Israel, announcing the assault.The Nukhba came first, Hamas’s elite assault force. Roughly 1,500 fighters crossed in the opening hours against assigned objectives, including the Gaza Division headquarters, the surrounding communities, and the Nova music festival near Re’im. They carried mission orders, and those orders included taking captives alive.Behind them came Hamas’s broader military wing and other armed factions, including Palestinian Islamic Jihad, moving through breaches the Nukhba had already opened.Then the fence stood open, and civilians walked through it. These people had no formal orders and no assigned objectives. Looting was widespread. Some killed. Some took captives.Although the massacre is remembered as a border attack, it was not confined to the immediate frontier. Hamas and allied forces fought across more than forty locations and penetrated as far as roughly thirty kilometers into Israel before the attack was finally contained.Hamas and its allies killed roughly 1,200 people in this attack, including more than 800 civilians and over 300 members of Israel's security forces, while taking 251 hostages into Gaza.I heard two seemingly contradictory explanations for the hostage-taking. One described abduction for profit. The other insisted it was an act of terror with no commercial motive. Both were correct. They were describing different layers of the same morning.Hamas’s leadership had political objectives. They wanted a large pool of captives to force another exchange like the one in 2011, which had secured Sinwar’s own release. They also wanted to shatter Israel’s deterrence, derail the Saudi normalization process, and ignite a wider regional conflict. Money appears nowhere on that list of objectives.Ransom in the Israeli case is not monetary. Israel does not pay cash for hostages. The currency has long been prisoner releases, negotiated between a state and an armed organization. A Gazan civilian holding a captive therefore had no direct counterparty in Israel and no practical way to sell that captive to the party seeking their return. What he held was an asset with exactly one buyer. Only Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad could convert a captive into prisoner releases. The primary market created a derived demand, and that derived demand created a spot market inside Gaza among people who had never been part of the original plan.Brooks (2002) describes the same structure on the Rio Grande. Therescatesystem did not merely fund the redemption of captives already taken. It established what a captive was worth, and people with no connection to the original raiding economy began taking captives because a buyer existed.Released hostages have described being held in family homes rather than by organized units, which supports the civilian-captor account. The mechanism by which captives were transferred to Hamas is less well documented.The parallel breaks at the audience. Comanche terror spoke to the local defender about his own conduct: abandon the district and stop pursuing us. October 7 spoke to people thousands of miles away. The attackers filmed the atrocities and broadcast them, in some cases through the victims’ own phones and social media accounts, so that families watched in real time. No nineteenth-century raider could do that, and it changed the purpose of terror itself. The target was not only the communities of the Negev, but Israeli domestic politics and Western public opinion. On the second count, it worked.The economics are ancient. The distribution is new. That is what makes this version more dangerous than the one that emptied northern Mexico.How a superb intelligence service went blindIsrael spent roughly a billion dollars on the Gaza barrier, completing it in 2021. It combined sophisticated sensors, remote weapon stations, and an underground wall designed to block tunnels. As confidence in the barrier grew, however, the manpower behind it thinned, and military units were redeployed to the West Bank.Hamas studied the system and struck the cameras first. The barrier was breached in roughly thirty places within the first hour.The failure began long before the concrete. Israeli intelligence possessed a Hamas planning document, later reported asJericho Wall, describing an operation remarkably similar in scale and method to the one that unfolded. Senior officers judged it to be aspirational. Young women serving as border observers, thetatzpitaniyot, repeatedly reported rehearsals at mock Israeli compounds and drone reconnaissance along the fence. They were told to stop filing the reports.Hayek (1945) named the problem. Knowledge relevant to a decision exists in dispersed, local, and particular form, held by people on the spot who cannot fully articulate what they know. A central authority cannot simply aggregate that knowledge, because compressing it for transmission destroys the part that mattered. The women at the observation posts possessed that kind of knowledge. The officers reading their reports possessed a model instead, and they trusted the model.Israelis call itHaConceptzia, the Conception. Hamas had been deterred. Hamas had become a governing authority with something to lose. Both propositions were defensible when they were first formulated. Over time, they hardened into filters that dismissed contradictory evidence as noise.Israel had done this before. In 1973, the Conception held that Egypt would not attack without the ability to strike Israeli airfields deep inside the country, and that Syria would not attack without Egypt. Egyptian divisions massed along the Suez Canal, and the model absorbed the warning. The Agranat Commission diagnosed the failure in 1974 and prescribed institutional dissent, including a permanent devil’s advocate office within military intelligence whose job was to produce the opposing assessment.That office still existed on October 7, 2023. I would put that fact before anyone who believes a well-designed process can substitute for judgment. The reform survived on paper for half a century, yet it did not prevent the same failure when it mattered most. Wohlstetter (1962) reached a similar conclusion in her study of Pearl Harbor. Betts (1978) went further, arguing that intelligence failures persist because the real constraint is not information but the decision maker’s willingness to hear unwelcome conclusions, something no procedural reform can guarantee.There is a colder lesson here for anyone who keeps a bag packed.A threat that is present every night eventually stops seeming exceptional; it becomes normalized. Constant hostility erodes the ability to recognize the one night the wolf actually comes. Any human system living under permanent low-grade alarm does this. Readiness decays fastest in the places that need it most.Eight hoursSderot lies eight miles from Gaza. Before October 7, its residents were generally not eligible for a private firearms license. Eligibility in Israel is determined by locality, and the licensing map reflected the same threat assessment that guided Israeli intelligence.Where communities had armed civilians, those civilians became the first line of defense. Thekitat konenut, the local ready squad, is a chartered volunteer unit that maintains weapons for precisely this contingency. The squads at Be’eri and Kfar Aza fought through the opening hours. Off-duty soldiers drove south on their own initiative, and police units improvised as they could. The Gaza Division headquarters at Re’im was itself overrun, leaving divisional command largely nonfunctional for most of the day.Nir Oz sits under two miles from the Gaza border, with no military outpost between it and Gaza. Between 400 and 500 attackers entered a community of 385 people that morning. The IDF’s own investigation found that the first security forces reached the kibbutz forty minutes after the last of the attackers had already walked back into Gaza. About a quarter of its people were murdered or taken.Israeli law at the time permitted civilians to hold handguns but not rifles. The ready squads met men with assault rifles and RPGs while carrying pistols. Afterward, the state purchased rifles and issued them to rural squads, then expanded the squads into municipal areas. Ben Gvir’s ministry claimed roughly 700 new civilian security teams within weeks.Storage decided more of that morning than firepower did. Squad weapons belonged to the state, and the state kept them in a communal armory rather than in the members’ homes. Northern squads had generally moved their rifles home. Most southern squads had not. A man in Be’eri or Nir Oz woke to gunfire and had to cross open ground to reach a locked room before he could fight at all. In several communities, he never reached it.Nir Oz fielded nine ready squad members that morning, according to an IDF report aired by Kan. Four were killed. Irit Pauker, who walked us through the devastation of Nir Oz, knew every one of them and told us their stories. It was almost impossible not to be moved by their courage. They faced an estimated 450 attackers. The kibbutz lost 69 people and had another 76 taken into Gaza.Israel had licensed those men, trained them, and issued them rifles. It had not trusted them with the keys to the room where the rifles were kept. That is the difference between an armed population and a ready one, and it likely cost more lives on October 7 than any limit on ammunition ever could. In December 2025, the IDF began allowing thousands of reservists to keep their rifles at home, explicitly citing the delays that morning and the ready squads that could not reach their weapons.People often repeat the saying that when seconds count, the police are only minutes away. On October 7, the answer was closer to eight hours. This happened in a country the size of New Jersey, with universal conscription and one of the finest militaries on earth. The gap between a raid and the arrival of the state is a matter of geometry before it is a matter of competence.Sixty-nine is a number. Gideon Pauker was one of them.Pauker was seventy-nine, a week short of his eightieth birthday, and one of the founders of Nir Oz. Late in life, he planted a vineyard on the kibbutz and brought in its first harvest in 2008.We stood among those vines this week. You can see the Gaza border from them. He made the wine with three lifelong friends who had helped found the kibbutz: Gadi Mozes, Chaim Peri, and Yoram Metzger. Together they produced about a thousand bottles each year, giving nearly all of them to family and neighbors. The 2022 vintage was aging in the kibbutz’s underground shelter, built during the Yom Kippur War.The seventeenth harvest came in just days before the attack.On the morning of October 7, Pauker and his wife, Orna, were inside their safe room when the gunmen reached their home. They fired through the door and killed him. His daughter told us he bled to death. Mozes, Peri, and Metzger were all taken alive into Gaza. Only Mozes came home, after 480 days, at the age of eighty. When he returned, he learned that Gideon was dead. The other two were murdered in captivity.At the funeral three weeks later, someone placed a bottle of his wine on the coffin.His daughter, Irit Pauker, told us about him and his dream of making wine, as she calmly poured glasses from the vines he had planted and tended. She had grown up on that kibbutz among the people whose names now appear on its casualty list. She walked us through Nir Oz house by house, remembering the children she had played with, then telling us how many died defending their families and neighbors, and how many were taken. She did not need to embellish the story. The empty homes did that for her.Most Israelis are not armedI was told repeatedly on this trip that most Israelis now carry a sidearm. That is not true, and anyone repeating it will be dismantled by the first hostile fact-checker who looks.The Small Arms Survey estimated Israel at 6.7 civilian firearms per 100 people in 2017, compared with 120.5 in the United States. Israel had 147,248 active firearms licenses in early 2023, below its 2009 peak. Since October 7, Israelis have submitted more than 403,000 new applications, and the National Security Ministry says it had issued more than 240,000 additional licenses by March 2026. Add those to the existing base, and you arrive at roughly 400,000 licensed carriers in a country of ten million. About four percent, in a nation at war, after three years of the most aggressive firearms licensing liberalization in its history.What looks like general armament to a visitor is mostly conscription. The rifles you see on buses are issued service weapons carried by soldiers who are required to keep them. The guards at every mall entrance are a separately licensed occupational category. Eligibility also varies by residence, so Jerusalem, the border communities, and the settlements have far higher rates of licensed carry than the national average. A delegation itinerary samples the top of that distribution and mistakes it for the middle.Israeli law draws no distinction between open and concealed carry because there is no distinction for it to attach to. There is no ownership license with a separate carry permit layered on top. The private firearms license is a carry license. It covers one handgun, requires periodic range qualification, and says nothing about how it must be carried.Then there is the ammunition. A private firearms license originally allowed possession of just fifty rounds. Fifty in total, and most American readers will assume that number is a misprint. New licensees were allowed one hundred rounds after the war began, while those already licensed remained capped at fifty until January 2025, when the ministry finally doubled the allowance across the board. An official in the Firearms Division explained the change as a direct lesson from October 7, citing civilians who fought with a single magazine and exhausted their ammunition.Nor is firearm ownership treated as a right. An applicant must satisfy a residence criterion, pass background checks, and submit a physician’s declaration of physical and mental fitness. The state grants permission for security reasons and may deny it. No natural-rights doctrine underlies the system, and no constitutional guarantee of self-defense stands between the citizen and the government.Israelis embraced much of the practice we say we want but never adopted the principle. Americans enshrined the principle and, across much of the country, increasingly neglect the practice. Neither side has much reason for self-congratulation.The deeper reason Israel resists anything resembling an American Second Amendment tradition lies in 1948, and it has little to do with squeamishness. The Yishuv (the organized Jewish community residing in Palestine prior to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948)included competing armed factions under independent commands. Ben-Gurion ordered the shelling of theAltalenaoff Tel Aviv in June 1948 rather than allow the Irgun (National Military Organization in the Land of Israel) to land arms it alone would control, and five months later he dissolved the Palmach (the main paramilitary organization of the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine). Israel’s commitment to a single chain of command was forged at the cost of Jews shooting Jews within weeks of independence. A country founded that way hears the wordmilitiaand thinks of Beirut, not Lexington. That history deserves more from us than a lecture.The man at the gateMy wife, Jill, and I sat with two men at the Nova music festival massacre site on Thursday. One of them ran five miles across open ground on October 7. The other lied to save his life, and the lives of everyone hiding beneath his house.Shalev Biton, a musician and recent member of the IDF who had completed his tour of duty, was twenty-five and at the Nova music festival near Re’im, trying to sleep in his tent when the rockets began. Three hundred sixty-four people were murdered there, and forty were carried into Gaza. Biton escaped with a friend and ran east into the fields. Others joined them as they fled. One young woman had lost her shoes and arrived with her feet bleeding.Five miles away, they found a farm worked by twenty-four Thai laborers and managed by a Bedouin Israeli named Yunis Alkarnawi. They hesitated at first. Men in head coverings standing in a field that morning could have been anything. Alkarnawi waved them in, gave them food and water, let them charge their phones, and told them to rest.The Thai workers saw the motorcycles first. Alkarnawi quietly told everyone to hide as best they could, then walked alone towards the gate, taking refuge behind a John Deere tractor. While he spoke to the gunmen in Arabic, everyone slipped out of the dining room and crawled beneath the house, which stood just high enough off the ground to conceal them.He told the gunmen there were no Jews on his farm. The man at the gate argued with him, consulted three others positioned behind the house, and eventually rode away. Eight festivalgoers and twenty-four Thai workers lay beneath the floorboards for hours, listening to a conversation in a language none of them understood, knowing their lives depended on its outcome.Other Arab citizens of Israel tried talking to Hamas that day and were murdered anyway. When asked why he survived, Alkarnawi simply points to the sky.Like most Bedouin Israelis, Yunis Alkarnawi is an Israeli citizen and part of the fabric of the country. Many Arabic-speaking Bedouin Israelis serve in the Israel Defense Forces.Hold that against the claim that Israel is a colonial project and all its citizens are settlers. A Muslim Bedouin farmer hid Jewish young people and Thai migrant workers beneath his kitchen floor, then lied to armed Hamas gunmen in his own language to keep them alive. That story has no place in the framework. It cannot process the sentence.It complicates my argument too. I have written about ready squads, firearms licensing, and where the rifles were kept, and all of those things mattered on October 7. But the man who saved thirty-two lives near Re’im that morning was unarmed. All he had was Arabic, extraordinary courage, and the determination to save his fellow human beings.What this has to do with the argument you are having onlineThe people who hate Jews have upgraded their vocabulary. The old themes about international finance and dual loyalty still circulate. Today they often arrive dressed as anticolonial analysis, or as a “knowing” snide anonymous remark about who really wanted the last war. They circulate on parts of the American right as well as the left, and pretending otherwise helps no one.Every version of that narrative, built on foundations laid by decades of Soviet propaganda and, before that, Nazi propaganda, requires the Israeli to remain an abstraction: a settler, a colonizer, an outpost of somebody else’s empire. It works by reducing individuals to a category. The abstraction collapses the moment the Israeli becomes a specific person doing a specific thing, because the specific thing is almost always holding a safe-room door shut to protect a family while terrorists try to shoot their way through it.You cannot stand in Be’eri, count the bullet holes around a safe-room handle, and still retain the abstraction. That is why Jill and I went. It is why I am writing this down.Americans who think seriously about self-reliance keep discovering that Israelis have been living the subject we merely study. Local knowledge lost to centralized assumptions. Ransom markets created incentives for more captives. Sophisticated intelligence and one of the world’s finest militaries failed to recognize the threat and respond in time. In community after community, a handful of lightly armed civilians with limited ammunition faced hundreds of attackers carrying automatic weapons, rocket-propelled grenades, and ample ammunition.For Israelis, the wolf is always at the door.Their enemies have been explicit. Hamas’s charter and repeated public statements have left little doubt about its objective: the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews.And yet.This week, we sat with Lieutenant Colonel Eyal Dror, who founded and commanded Operation Good Neighbor, the IDF program that carried wounded Syrians across the Golan border from 2016 until Assad’s forces reestablished control in 2018. Over those years, Israel treated roughly 4,900 Syrians in its hospitals, about 1,300 of them children. It helped establish a maternity ward inside Syria where more than a thousand babies were delivered. It also sent some 1,500 tons of food, fuel, medicine, and infant formula to people in a country that remained formally at war with it.We also met the leadership of Save a Child’s Heart, which has operated from Wolfson Medical Center in Holon since 1995. My friends Drs. Kirk and Kimberly Milhoan have both volunteered there. Kirk later served as chair of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Save a Child’s Heart has brought more than 8,000 children from seventy-five countries to Israel for life-saving cardiac surgery, including many from countries that do not recognize the State of Israel. More than 3,000 of those patients have been Palestinian children from Gaza and the West Bank, seen through a weekly clinic. The organization is now training a Palestinian surgeon who intends to return home as the first fully qualified Palestinian pediatric cardiac surgeon and establish a department in Ramallah.Israel is a nation with every reason to harden its heart. Yet it has repeatedly found ways to value the lives of its neighbors alongside its own.  As I look into my own heart, I do not know if I would retain my humanity under the same conditions.They have already run the experiment. We should pay attention to the results before conducting our own.Radical Islamist movements will either be contained or neutralized, or they will expand and threaten all of western civilization including the United States. The key questions are where, when, by whom, and at what cost. The terrible alternative is that of Scipio Aemilianus, who commanded the final destruction of Carthage in 146 BC.  Those are the options.RWM/JGMSome of you will disagree with this essay. A few may even unsubscribe because of it.That’s your right, and I hold no ill will toward anyone who reaches a different conclusion.But Malone News has never existed to tell people what they already believe. It exists to follow evidence, ask uncomfortable questions, travel to places where the story is more complicated than the headlines suggest, and report what we actually find.That kind of work takes time, travel, and the willingness to risk being wrong in public. It also depends entirely on readers who value independent reporting enough to support it.Subscribe nowIf you believe journalism should still involve seeing things firsthand instead of commenting from a thousand miles away, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. You’re not just supporting this essay. You’re making the next one possible.ReferencesBetts, Richard K. 1978. “Analysis, War, and Decision: Why Intelligence Failures Are Inevitable.”World Politics31 (1): 61 to 89.Brooks, James F. 2002.Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.DeLay, Brian. 2008.War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War. New Haven: Yale University Press.Hämäläinen, Pekka. 2008.The Comanche Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press.Hayek, F. A. 1945. “The Use of Knowledge in Society.”American Economic Review35 (4): 519 to 530.The Jerusalem Post. 2026. “Nir Oz volunteers train to defend Israel’s frontlines after Oct. 7.” May 30.Jewish Insider. 2025. “Parents of Nova survivor meet their son’s savior, a Bedouin Israeli, for first time.” January 27.The Jewish Press. 2025. “Ben Gvir Doubles Ammunition Allowance for Licensed Gun Owners.” January 12.Maimonides.Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Matnot Aniyim 8:10.Menger, Carl. 1871.Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre. Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller.Mishnah Gittin4:6.Rowlandson, Mary. 1682.The Soveraignty and Goodness of God, Together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. Cambridge, MA: Samuel Green.Save a Child’s Heart. 2026. “Our Impact.” Holon, Israel.Small Arms Survey. 2018.Estimating Global Civilian-Held Firearms Numbers. Geneva: Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies.State of Israel. 1974.Agranat Commission of Inquiry, Interim Report. Jerusalem.The Times of Israel. 2018. “As war nears end, IDF shutters ‘Good Neighbor’ Syrian aid program.” September 13.The Times of Israel. 2025. “To life: Grandson revives wines of vintner killed October 7 in Kibbutz Nir Oz.” July 2.The Times of Israel. 2025. “Residents of 5 more localities to be eligible for gun permits, Ben Gvir announces.” September 1.The Times of Israel. 2026. “After 843 days, 12 hours, 6 minutes, Hostages Square clock goes dark with Ran Gvili’s return.” January 27.The Times of Israel. 2026. “Ben Gvir significantly widens gun license eligibility for Jewish Jerusalemites.” March 9.Wohlstetter, Roberta. 1962.Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Ynet. 2025. “’40 minutes too late’: IDF report details Hamas’ attack on Nir Oz and systematic failures.” March 14.Ynet. 2025. “IDF to allow thousands of reservists to keep rifles at home after October 7 failures.” December 21.


Fauci Under Oath: Where the Risk Actually LivesRand Paul has set the date. Anthony Fauci testifies on July 29 before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (The Hill 2026). Most coverage frames this as a reckoning for what he did during the pandemic. That framing misses the mechanics. The pardon and the expired statute of limitations have already closed the door on his past conduct. The only conduct still exposed is what he says in the chair.Biden pardoned Fauci for any federal offense from 2014 through January 2025 (CNN 2026). Paul concedes the statute of limitations on the gain-of-function testimony has run (Everett 2026). Past perjury, if it happened, cannot be charged. A new false statement can. Pardons do not reach future crimes. That single fact defines the entire hearing.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareThe Fifth Amendment cuts against himThe instinct is to assume Fauci can take the Fifth and end the problem. The pardon makes that harder, not easier. The privilege against self-incrimination protects a witness from answers usable in a prosecution. Remove the prosecution and the privilege dissolves for that subject. The Supreme Court settled this in Brown v. Walker. A witness who cannot be charged cannot refuse to answer on self-incrimination grounds.For conduct inside the pardon window, Fauci is likely compellable. He cannot decline on the ground that a truthful answer would incriminate him. He also cannot lie. A false statement on July 29 is a fresh offense, unpardoned and prosecutable. The shield built to protect him now pushes him toward the one place he remains exposed.The residual room is narrow. He keeps the privilege where a truthful answer would expose him to something outside the pardon. Post-2025 conduct qualifies. State offenses qualify. A skilled lawyer will hunt for that hook. Absent it, the pardon operates as a compulsion to speak.What the pardon does not reachThe pardon closes federal criminal exposure. It closes nothing else. It reaches offenses against the United States and stops there. State crime and civil liability sit outside it. Both are already moving.Seventeen state attorneys general, led by South Carolina’s Alan Wilson, asserted in February 2025 that the pardon does not preclude state-level investigations or proceedings (South Carolina Attorney General 2025). They asked Congress for evidence usable at the state level. Idaho’s legislature resolved that the pardon confers no immunity from state crimes. The threshold claim is correct. A federal pardon cannot bar a state prosecution.The obstacle is Supremacy Clause immunity. The Constitution makes federal law supreme over state law. A state cannot punish a federal officer for doing his federal job. The Supreme Court settled this in In re Neagle in 1890. A federal marshal, assigned to guard a Justice, killed a man who lunged at him. California charged the marshal with murder. The Court threw the charge out. An officer acting within his federal duty answers to federal law, not to a state prosecutor.That doctrine shields Fauci’s official conduct. His grant decisions and his statements as a federal official are the core of the job he held. A state that charged him over them would not keep the case. Federal law lets a federal officer move such a prosecution into federal court, where the immunity is decided (28 U.S.C. 1442). Finding a state crime that survives is harder still. Testimony to Congress is federal. Grant administration is federal. The conduct has no natural home in a state penal code. The state track is leverage and an evidence operation. It is not a likely conviction path for official acts.Civil liability is different. The pardon never touched it. Clemency erases criminal liability alone. A civil suit seeks money, not prison, and it proves its case by a lower standard. It also opens discovery, which can pry loose documents a closed criminal file never would. Plaintiffs find that route attractive for exactly those reasons.Federal officials still carry heavy civil armor for official acts. Three layers do the work. The Westfall Act, passed in 1988, is the first. When a federal employee is sued for a wrong committed on the job, the United States steps in and takes his place as defendant. The employee drops out of the case. The claim then proceeds, if at all, against the government under its own restrictive rules. The second layer is the Bivens doctrine. A 1971 Supreme Court case once let citizens sue federal officers in person for violating their constitutional rights. The Court has since narrowed that route almost to nothing (Egbert v. Boule 2022). The third layer is qualified immunity. It protects an official from personal liability unless he broke a clearly established legal rule. Together these make personal damages against Fauci for official pandemic conduct hard to win.Every layer turns on one hinge. Scope of employment. The armor covers acts done within the job and only those. Show that Fauci acted outside his official role and the Westfall substitution falls away. He then stands in court as a private man. This is the seam plaintiffs aim at. The April 2026 indictment of David Morens, Fauci’s senior adviser, for concealing records is the wedge. So is the alleged instruction to delete an email that Paul surfaced. Both are offered to argue that Fauci stepped outside his lawful duties into a private scheme. That link is unproven.The largest numbers rest on a further theory. Civil conspiracy with joint and several liability. Under it, every member of a proven conspiracy can be charged with the entire harm, not merely his own share. Stack the claimed pandemic damages across fifty states and the figure reaches into the trillions. No court has come near that number against a single person. It is a ceiling lawyers prepare against, not a verdict anyone has won.State exposure reopens the Fifth Amendment. The privilege protects against any prosecution, state included. It applies wherever a truthful answer could be a link in the chain. Seventeen attorneys general are openly seeking state-law theories. That gives Fauci a genuine basis to invoke the Fifth on July 29. The campaign meant to increase his jeopardy hands him his strongest reason to say nothing.The civil risk runs through the record, not through a new claim. His 2022 Murthy v. Missouri deposition is already permanent, cross-usable evidence. Every answer on July 29 joins it. It becomes impeachment material and admission evidence in any case where he is a party or witness. It is usable against co-actors and institutions even where he is not liable. The hearing’s largest civil consequence is the sworn record it locks in. That record survives every immunity he holds.Gain of function and the regulatory linePaul’s loudest charge is his weakest legal ground. The federal definition of gain-of-function research runs through the P3CO Framework, adopted by HHS in December 2017 (HHS 2017). It regulates a narrow category. The pathogen must be a potential pandemic pathogen, meaning plausibly transmissible and virulent in humans. Enhancement of such a pathogen triggers review. Nothing else does.The EcoHealth grant funded chimeric work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Researchers placed bat coronavirus spike proteins on a WIV1 backbone and tested binding to human ACE2 in engineered mice. The chimeras replicated at 1,000 to 10,000 times the level of WIV1 (PolitiFact 2021). NIH ruled the work outside P3CO. Its stated reason was that the bat viruses had not been shown to infect humans, so they were never potential pandemic pathogens (FactCheck.org 2021). The Tabak letter never uses the phrase gain of function.That reading holds on the text. It is also the definition of playing semantics. The grant carried a clause requiring EcoHealth to report enhanced growth beyond a set threshold. The chimeras cleared it by orders of magnitude. The clause existed because someone anticipated this result. Independent scholars reject NIH’s narrow application. David Relman of Stanford and Marc Lipsitch of Harvard, neither a Paul ally, have said an enhanced-replication result is exactly what oversight should capture.The legal consequence inverts the political heat. House investigators concluded Fauci’s testimony was, at a minimum, misleading (Moffit 2026). Misleading is not perjury. A no defended under the regulatory definition survives cross-examination. On gain of function, the exposure is reputational, not criminal.The 2024 testimony is softer than advertisedThe claim that Fauci already perjured himself in 2024 rests on six words. Asked whether he spoke to intelligence agencies about COVID, he said, Not to my knowledge about Covid (CNN 2026). Gabbard’s team isolated that line. The rest of the same hearing complicates it. Under questioning from Chairman Comer minutes later, Fauci corrected the record and affirmed he was briefed by the intelligence community multiple times (U.S. House 2024).He did not deny contact. He conceded it. A perjury theory cannot rest on a denial he never made. CNN, no friend of the lab-leak thesis, found the isolated answer did not clearly amount to a lie. The pardon covers it regardless. There is no clean past offense here for Paul to ratify on July 29.Erdman closes the ambiguityThe dangerous strand is the one with dates. James Erdman III, a CIA operations officer, testified on May 13, 2026 under subpoena and against his agency’s wishes (Fox News 2026). He served on Gabbard’s Director’s Initiatives Group reviewing COVID origins. His claim is specific. Fauci inserted himself into intelligence deliberations twice, on February 3, 2020 and June 4, 2021, to push a natural-origins narrative (New York Post 2026). Fauci supplied a curated list of experts mirroring the Proximal Origin authors. Six of seven technical experts favored a lab leak. Management changed the analytic line.Erdman is a contested witness. He carries advocacy ties from the vaccine-mandate fights. The CIA rejected his framing and called the hearing political theater (New York Post 2026). That same CIA assessed in 2025 that a lab leak is the most likely origin. Erdman’s charge concerns the corruption of the historical process, not the agency’s current position. The leap from recommending experts to orchestrating a cover-up is what remains disputed.None of that rescues Fauci on the narrow question. Dated meetings are not fundamentally ambiguous. A yes-or-no about a June 4, 2021 discussion cannot hide behind the definitional fog that shelters him on gain of function. This is where the vise closes.Fauci’s choiceFauci’s two risks pull in opposite directions. Concede and reframe, and he is legally safe. I offered scientific input when the intelligence community asked is defensible and probably true. It also abandons the passive-recipient posture his public account has leaned on. Protect the narrative, insist he was only briefed and never steered, and he stays consistent with his reputation. If the documents and Erdman contradict that, the minimization becomes a new false statement. The trap is not any single question. It is that the safe answer and the consistent answer are not the same answer. Erdman forces the choice.Objective reporting or propaganda?Press framing is part of this story. The Hill’s report on the subpoena inserted two judgments in the reporter’s own voice. It called Paul’s claims unsupported by hard evidence, applied to the whole bundle rather than the unresolved origins question alone (The Hill 2026). It stated Fauci is blamed for tens of millions of deaths, a figure reachable only under the broadest excess-mortality modeling and far above the confirmed count. Both cut one direction. Both sit in the outlet’s voice, not in a quote.That is bias, and it is demonstrable from the text. Intent is not. The same output follows from house habit, from a newsroom that codes lab-leak claims as fringe and never updated as the CIA, FBI, and Department of Energy shifted. Why the spin was designed this way cannot be read off a page. The honest charge stays with what is printed. The Hill slanted its own reporting in Fauci’s favor. The background, purpose, and intent of that bias is unprovable and beside the point.AccountabilityThe hearing will not resolve the origin of SARS-CoV-2. The pardon still stands. The record of what Fauci did is largely fixed. One variable is open. Whether Fauci, under oath, repeats a denial that the record can now falsify. His federal criminal exposure is closed. State prosecutors and civil plaintiffs are still building, and every sworn answer feeds them. His words are the last variable he controls. Accountability, if it comes, will come from his own mouth.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.ReferencesBivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents. 1971. 403 U.S. 388.CNN. 2026. “Why the Covid-19 Documents Gabbard Released Don’t Prove Her Claims About Fauci.” June 23. https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/23/politics/covid-19-gabbard-fauci-claims.Egbert v. Boule. 2022. 596 U.S. 482.Everett, Burgess. 2026. “Why Rand Paul Subpoenaed Fauci.” Semafor, June 23. https://www.semafor.com/article/06/23/2026/why-rand-paul-subpoenaed-fauci.FactCheck.org. 2021. “Republicans Spin NIH Letter About Coronavirus Gain-of-Function Research.” October. https://www.factcheck.org/2021/10/scicheck-republicans-spin-nih-letter-about-coronavirus-gain-of-function-research/.Federal Employees Liability Reform and Tort Compensation Act of 1988 (Westfall Act). Pub. L. No. 100-694, 102 Stat. 4563.Fox News. 2026. “Who Is James Erdman III? CIA Whistleblower Who Went from COVID Mandate Fights to Senate Spotlight.” May 13. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/who-james-erdman-iii-cia-whistleblower-who-went-from-covid-mandate-fights-senate-spotlight.HHS (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services). 2017. Framework for Guiding Funding Decisions About Proposed Research Involving Enhanced Potential Pandemic Pathogens. December. https://aspr.hhs.gov/S3/Pages/Enhanced-Potential-Pandemic-Pathogen-Oversight-Framework.aspx.In re Neagle. 1890. 135 U.S. 1.Moffit, Robert. 2026. “Fauci Will Testify, but the CIA Needs More Scrutiny.” Daily Signal, June 25. https://www.dailysignal.com/2026/06/25/fauci-testify-senate-cia/.New York Post. 2026. “CIA Whistleblower James Erdman Reveals Anthony Fauci ‘Influenced’ COVID Origins Intel Probe as Part of Lab Leak ‘Cover-Up.’” May 13. https://www.aol.com/news/cia-whistleblower-james-erdman-reveals-160502741.html.PolitiFact. 2021. “Ask PolitiFact: What Does an NIH Letter Say About Gain-of-Function Research, What Fauci Knew?” October 28. https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/oct/28/ask-politifact-what-does-nih-letter-say-about-gain/.South Carolina Attorney General. 2025. “Attorney General Alan Wilson Leads Coalition of AGs Investigating Dr. Anthony Fauci’s COVID-19 Response.” February 5. https://www.scag.gov/about-the-office/news/attorney-general-alan-wilson-leads-coalition-of-ags-investigating-dr-anthony-fauci-s-covid-19-response/.The Hill. 2026. “Rand Paul Issues Subpoena for Anthony Fauci.” June 23. https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5936032-rand-paul-subpoena-anthony-fauci-covid-19/.U.S. House. 2024. “A Hearing with Dr. Anthony Fauci.” Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, June 3. https://www.congress.gov/event/118th-congress/house-event/LC72977/text.U.S. Senate. 2026. “Written Testimony of James E. Erdman III Before the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.” May 13. https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/letter-and-testimomy.pdf.


The Cost of Convenience

Jessica’s essay below is a gentle reminder that the greatest things in life are rarely the most efficient. A machine can organize our calendars, answer our questions, and even mimic our words, but it cannot replace the quiet satisfaction of learning a skill with our own hands, the wisdom gained through struggle, or the love that grows from caring for another person. In our pursuit of convenience, we risk surrendering the very experiences that shape character, purpose, and joy. Humanity was never meant to be optimized like a factory floor.We were made to wonder, to create, to fail, to forgive, and to grow. The challenge before us is not whether we can automate more of our lives, but whether we will still choose the beautifully imperfect path of being fully human. Whether society, or at least a portion of it, can recognize that greater ambition and more money to create more automation do not necessarily equate to a fulfilling or happy life.Jessica’s essay is ultimately a hopeful one. It reminds us that while technology may become ever more capable, our humanity remains a choice, one renewed every day in the simple acts of thinking for ourselves, making something with our own hands, sharing a meal, tending a garden, comforting a friend, and choosing presence over convenience.JGMAudio Version:Has Automation Stolen What It Means to Be Human?By Jessica RoseI want to begin this article by reminding everyone reading it of the old parable of the man fishing alone on a beach. It goes something like this, more or less.There’s a man fishing alone on a beach with a single, simple fishing pole. Another man walks up to him and asks him why he doesn’t buy a boat to fish because then, he could catch more fish. The fisherman responds by saying: “Then what?” The passer-by then says in a matter-of-fact way: “Well then, you could buy an even bigger boat and catch even more fish with the money from selling all of that fish!”. The fisherman responds by saying: “Then what?” The passer-by confounded that the fisherman does not seem to understand what he is telling him balks: “Then you could retire and hire others to do the fishing for you!” The fisherman responds by saying: “Then what?” Even more confounded, the passer-by says: “Then you could have more time to spend doing what you love!”The fisherman looks at him. And waits. For understanding. The passer-by then comprehends perhaps for the first time in his life that the long and often exploitative path to simplicity is pointless. The fisherman, even with all of the money in the world would be doing precisely what he already was doing.Here’s a more “well-known” version if you like.One day, a wealthy businessman (or investment banker, in some tellings) was vacationing in a small coastal village in Mexico. He watched as a lone fisherman rowed his little boat back to shore with just a few large fish. The businessman complimented the fisherman on the quality of the catch and asked,“How long did it take you to catch those?”“Only a little while,” the fisherman replied.“Why didn’t you stay out longer and catch more?” the businessman asked.“I caught enough for my family’s needs today,” the fisherman said.The businessman pressed on:“But what do you do with the rest of your time?”The fisherman smiled and answered, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siestas with my wife, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life.”The businessman scoffed. “I’m a Harvard MBA – I can help you. You should spend more time fishing. With the extra money, buy a bigger boat. With the bigger boat, catch even more fish, then buy several boats and build a fleet. Cut out the middleman, sell directly to processors, open your own cannery. Control production, processing, and distribution. You’d eventually move to the city, expand to other locations, run a growing enterprise.”The fisherman listened patiently, then asked, “And how long would all that take?”“Fifteen, maybe twenty years,” the businessman replied.“And then what?” the fisherman asked.The businessman laughed. “That’s the best part! When the time is right, you announce an IPO, sell your company stock to the public, make millions – become very rich!”“Millions… and then what?” the fisherman repeated.“Then,” the businessman said triumphantly, “you could retire! Move to a small coastal village where you could sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings to sip wine and play guitar with your friends.”The fisherman looked at him quietly for a moment, then smiled and said, “But that’s exactly what I’m already doing.”The businessman stood there, speechless, as the simple truth sank in: the fisherman was already living the very life the ambitious man dreamed of achieving – after decades of grinding pursuit…I was walking today and knew that I had to write up some of the thoughts I had about automation being the key to the demise of what it means to be human.To be connected. To work hard. To truly earn. To truly learn.It got me thinking about one of the first examples of automation that was actually a really neat idea: the water wheel. Water wheels and similar devices appeared as early as the 1st century BC (or possibly earlier in rudimentary forms) among the Greeks and Romans, used for grinding grain. These harnessed flowing water to drive machinery continuously without constant human input, representing early power automation in industry. Similar water-powered trip-hammers existed in ancient China over 2,000 years ago.The most commonly cited earliest true example of automated control – a self-regulating feedback mechanism – is the improved water clock (clepsydra– comes from Ancient Greek meaning to pipette…) invented by the Greek engineer Ctesibius around 270–250 BC in Ptolemaic Egypt (Alexandria)…Automatic devices can be divided into subdivisions based on function. Some devices help and are “non-invasive” in terms of imposing on the human part of humanity. Some devices are quite “invasive” in this same way.Many – if not all – devices made in the last century fall into the latter subdivision. I think of these as inflictions upon humanity masquerading as “convenience”, as opposed to devices that make our human lives better. Many examples exist and play a daily role in our human lives today.(Some examples)Single-serve pod coffee makers: Ah yes! The promise of instant coffee without that brewing hassle! Only problem is what you actually get is mediocre taste, generation massive plastic waste, ingestion of microplastics and likely forever chemicals, high cost per cup relative to traditional methods, and most importantly, the removal of the simple ritual of making coffee that many find relaxing orsocial.Smartphones: How many times a day does someone on one of these dumb devices almost bump into you? How many people do you see on a daily basis who are literally in phone-land – more akin to zombies – than engaged with nature or others? With constant notifications and app ecosystems, they automate communication, information access, navigation, and entertainment into one device for seamless convenience! The only catch is that they contribute to addiction, reduced attention spans,social isolation, anxiety, poorer sleep, and less presence in real-life andsocialinteractions.Robotic vacuum cleaners: Why vacuum or sweep when you can off-shore that duty to a robot! They handle floor cleaning autonomously so you “don’t have to”. But guess what? They require more setup/maintenance than promised, miss spots, create noise/annoyance, and don’t replace the satisfaction or light exercise of manual vacuuming, perhaps even as a family activity, eliminating yet anothersocialinteraction. But hey, you get yet another gadget to charge and repair.Microwave ovens: Ah yes. Where would we all be without being able to speed up heating of forever plastic/endocrine disrupting nightmares that are TV dinners? But hey, isn’t that the ultimate convenience? Guess again! This encouragement of ingesting ultra-processed ready meals to save you time also reduces home cooking skills/pleasure, altersocialfamily meal rituals, and shift food prep away from shared or mindful preparation toward solitary, rushed eating. Not very social or human-like behavior.And now we get to the real winners in our list.Smart home devices and always-on assistants: Oh man, where do I start with these? Automation of climate control, lighting, music, shopping lists, etc., for effortless living! Why wouldn’t you want to not take the time to get up off your ass and turn the thermostat yourself when a computer can do it for you! I am being sarcastic, of course, because all of these so-called smart devices foster dependency, privacy erosion (constant listening), increased screen time fragmentation, and a subtle loss of basic self-reliance or analog comforts. Loss ofself-reliance. Isolation. Loss ofsocialstructure.Automatic/self-checkout kiosks and app-based ordering: Welcome to the new world where all you have to be able to do is use your index finger to have all of your shopping needs fulfilled! No more actually having to walk to the grocery store or market! No more talking to other people at the market! No need to go slow! Ingest! Ingest! Ingest! Consume! Consume! Consume! They’re so awesome, aren’t they? Speeding up transactions by removing cashiers andhuman interaction.Stupid humans: so error-prone and slow! But hey, guess what? These apps and self-checkouts also increase frustration (computers never make mistakes – wait, is the printer not printing again?),reducejobs/social contact, and turn routine errands into impersonal, glitch-prone experiences that feel more alienating, than efficient.I could go on… but these examples are sufficient for now.Notice how in every single example, there is an inherent de-socialization component baked in. Hmm. Is this to ensure that our lives are made more convenient, or is this something more insidious? Having said that, I want to stress how deeply disturbed I am every single day that these things are beingdemandedby humans.No demand; no supply.Why are we demanding these things? Do people really and truly believe that these idiotic things make their lives easier/better? Where does the line get drawn between convenience and relinquishing self-sovereignty? Does this line get drawn? Have we not opted into slavery?Why are supply chains even a thing? The only supply chain that any human used to need is the line from their own goat to fresh cheese.This automation of human work, to me, poses a real existential crisis that is the root reason why we are “where we are”today as a society.Giving up these wonderful ritualistic habits that translate to being able to eat that day, or being with our loved ones, or sleeping well after a day of hard work, has led us nowhere butisolatedanddependent.I want to end this short pokey piece on a positive and inspiring note. I would love it if everyone would watch Maynard J. Keenan’s 4-part mini-movie series called: The Art of Work. It speaks deeply to what I am writing about here…I simply hope that this article is shared profusely and that perhaps, even one person will wake up from their digital slumber as a result of reading it.Notice that I didn’t even touch on AI or human-replacing robots: the ultimate automation enforcing a permanent vacation from human-ation.Be like the man alone fishing on the shore and never succumb to the lie that the act of DOING is something that needs to be sped up or removed from the human equation.DOING is not far from BEING.Love and light.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so please share it.ShareThe essay above was lightly abbreviated. The full essay was was first published onJessica’sSubstackand then republished at theBrownstone Institute.  Republished here via a creative commons license.To Conclude, by JGM:The older I get, the more convinced I am that the richest parts of life cannot be outsourced. They are found in the work of our own hands and hearts: domestic chores, tending a garden, caring for animals, sharing a meal with family, comforting a friend, reading a good book, or simply sitting quietly with our thoughts.These moments are not interruptions to life; they are our lives. Technology can save us time, but it cannot tell us how to spend it well. In the end, our humanity is not defined by what we produce, but by what we nurture, what we create, and the love we invest in the people and places entrusted to our care.The more our world races toward automation, the more precious these simple acts become. They remind us that being human has never been about doing everything faster. It has always been about living our lives as to the fullest.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.


The New World Order Nobody Expected

Audio Version:The New World Order Nobody ExpectedFornearly three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world’s political and economic elites believed they knew where history was headed. The nation-state would gradually give way to international institutions. Markets would become global. Borders would matter less. International courts would become more influential. Decisions once made in national capitals would increasingly be made by multinational organizations, trade bodies, international courts, and public-private partnerships. Ironically, the new world order that is emerging bears little resemblance to the one so confidently predicted after the Cold War.This was the great post-Cold War consensus, apost-war internationalist vision that holds that many of humanity's greatest challenges transcend national borders and therefore require international cooperation, shared institutions, and expert-informed policymaking.Whether one called it globalization, global governance, the rules-based international order, stakeholder capitalism, or even the New World Order, the philosophy was remarkably consistent.The underlying assumption was that nations would prosper by surrendering a measure of sovereignty to a growing network of international institutions designed to manage an increasingly interconnected world. They even gave this future a name. Heck, their leaders even wrote books about how the COVID-19 pandemic would rewrite world politics to reflect a one world government based on socialist principles.  A new, more woke ethos would become the norm.Stakeholder capitalism envisioned governments, multinational corporations, financial institutions, and international organizations working in increasingly close partnership to achieve common economic, environmental, and social objectives. This blurred the distinction between public authority and corporate power while diminishing democratic accountability. Stakeholder capitalism  incorporated DEI positions favoring mass immigration of people from poorer countries into wealthier ones - to stop population decline, open borders, centralized vaccination campaigns, world trade agreements, etc.What many people forget is that this represented a dramatic departure from the international system that had governed relations between nations for nearly four centuries. Beginning with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, nation-states became the organizing principle of international affairs. The assumption was straightforward: governments exist first to govern their own people. Cooperation between nations was encouraged, but sovereignty remained paramount.The post-Cold War consensus challenged that premise by arguing that many decisions could be better made above the level of the nation-state.The European Union became its most ambitious political experiment.The World Trade Organization would regulate international commerce.The International Criminal Court would expand universal jurisdiction.The World Health Organization would coordinate global public health.The World Economic Forum became the annual gathering place where political leaders, multinational corporations, financial institutions, and international organizations discussed the future of global governance. In 2016, the WEF said the quiet part out loud, even declared in a video that soon people would “own nothing and be happy.” Yep, the Great Reset was a thing.Many of us questioned this direction long before it became fashionable to do so. Not because international cooperation is undesirable. Nations will always cooperate where their interests align.ShareBut cooperation is fundamentally different from governance.The assumption underlying the post-Cold War consensus was that what benefits “the world” necessarily benefits individual nations. Experience has demonstrated that this is often not the case. The promise was that transnational governance would make everyone wealthier, in fact - the opposite is true.Starting under President Clinton in the 1990s, U.S. trade policy increasingly prioritized global economic efficiency over the resilience of domestic manufacturing. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), signed into law in 1993, accelerated the relocation of manufacturing to Mexico, where companies could take advantage of lower labor costs and a less burdensome regulatory environment. Estimates of the resulting job losses vary widely, from roughly 40,000 to more than 700,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs. But few dispute that entire manufacturing communities were hollowed out as factories closed or moved overseas.The creation of the World Trade Organization in 1995, followed by China’s admission in 2001, accelerated those trends. International trade expanded, and consumers enjoyed lower prices on many imported goods. But those savings came at a cost. Millions of American manufacturing jobs left the United States over the following decades, supply chains migrated overseas, and many once-thriving industrial towns experienced long-term economic decline.Prosperity depends on far more than what consumers pay at the checkout counter. It also depends on good-paying jobs, stable employment, affordable housing, accessible healthcare, educational opportunity, and the resilience of local communities. The post-1990 trade agreements improved the first while undermining the others.The promise was that global supply chains would create unprecedented efficiency. Instead, Americans discovered during the COVID-19 pandemic that we no longer manufactured many of the medicines, medical supplies, semiconductors, and other strategic products upon which our lives depended. Efficiency had come at the expense of resilience.The same philosophy reshaped our food system. We were told that feeding the world represented both humanitarian leadership and sound economic policy. In practice, those policies favored multinational agribusinesses capable of producing vast quantities of globally traded commodity crops while undermining traditional agriculture in developing nations, as well as domestically. Here at home, American farming became increasingly optimized for export markets, processed foods, and industrial efficiency rather than the nutritional quality, food security, and resilience of our own food supply. Shelf-stable, ultra-processed foods formulated with roughly 10,000 food additives and chemicals, many introduced through the GRAS process based largely on manufacturer-submitted evidence, became the norm because they could be produced cheaply, and shipped anywhere. Convenience and global commerce prevailed, at the expense of America’s health.These developments unquestionably created winners.Large multinational corporations benefited.Global financial institutions benefited.International consulting firms benefited.Nations that the United States traded with benefited.But the question every sovereign government should ask is not whether globalization created aggregate wealth. The question is whether it fulfilled its first responsibility to its own citizens.That is the central idea behind America First, which the globalists frequently mock as isolationism. It is nothing of the sort.Every nation has not only the right but the obligation to place the welfare of its own citizens at the center of public policy. In fact, many thriving nations do place their own citizens first. Japan, India, China, Israel, and increasingly many European nations all pursue policies they believe advance their own national interests. The United States should be no different. Virtually every successful nation pursues policies designed to advance its own strategic interests.Trump Changed the ConversationWhat is fascinating is that the institutions built upon the post-Cold War consensus now appear to recognize that the world has changed.The World Trade Organization increasingly finds itself unable to enforce the rules that once governed international commerce. By blocking appointments to the WTO’s Appellate Body, the United States effectively disabled the organization’s final dispute-settlement mechanism, restoring greater freedom for sovereign nations to pursue their own trade policies rather than submit to supranational adjudication. President Trump’s embrace of tariffs, bilateral negotiations, and economic statecraft reflects a broader shift away from rules-based globalization and toward the primacy of national interests.The International Criminal Court now faces an even more direct challenge. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has announced a diplomatic campaign to isolate and ultimately dismantle the Court, arguing that no international tribunal should claim authority over American citizens or officials. Together, these developments signal more than a change in policy. They represent a deliberate reassertion of national sovereignty over institutions that once appeared destined to govern an increasingly globalized world.The World Economic Forum itself has begun speaking less about transnational governance as an inevitable destination and more about resilience, strategic competition, industrial policy, critical minerals, and supply-chain security. Davos now acknowledges that the world is entering what it calls an "Age of Competition."The institution that once symbolized globalization now openly discusses fragmentation, economic security, and geopolitical rivalry as defining features of the emerging international order. At the same time, the Forum's ongoing leadership transition and governance reforms appear to reflect a growing emphasis on business leadership and organizational restructuring over the climate-centric agenda that dominated much of the previous decade.These institutional changes represent an intellectual surrender of the assumptions that dominated international politics from roughly 1990 through 2024. The organizing principle is no longer transnational governance. It is sovereignty.International cooperation, trade, and scientific collaboration remain valuable. None, however, should supersede the primary obligation of elected governments to serve and protect their own citizens.The irony is unmistakable. For years, critics warned that a “new world order” would emerge in which international institutions gradually displaced national sovereignty. Instead, a very different new world order appears to be taking shape.Not one governed from Brussels or coordinated from Davos or even adjudicated in The Hague. Instead, we are returning to something far older and, arguably, far more stable.A world of independent nations cooperating where their interests align, competing where they do not, and accepting that no international institution can permanently substitute for the judgment and accountability of self-governing peoples.The post-Cold War consensus may have reached its end. What appears to be returning is something much older: the Westphalian principle that sovereign governments exist first to serve their own people. In the case of the United States, establishing a constitutional republic and representative democracy has proven to be an extraordinary success.  This is something to be cherished and it is time to return to those principles.Ultimately, good governments derive their legitimacy not from international organizations, multinational corporations, or global summits. They derive it from the consent of the governed. That was the genius of the Westphalian tradition, and later of the American constitutional republic. Governments exist to serve their own citizens. International cooperation can be beneficial, but it must always remain subordinate to that first obligation, to serve and protect their own citizens.The New World Order envisioned by its proponents never lived up to the hype that it was better for the world to harmonize as one, frictionless business venue. Instead, the world leaders and its citizens appear to be returning to a much older idea: each nation is accountable to their own people, cooperating where their interests align and competing where they do not.President Trump’s presidency has accelerated this paradigm and given political voice to millions of Americans who believe their government had forgotten its first responsibility: serving its own people.If you found this essay thought-provoking, I hope you’ll consider becoming a subscriber.Independent voices survive only because readers choose to support them. We don’t have corporate sponsors, government grants, or billionaire backers shaping what we write. We rely on people like you who value independent analysis, historical perspective, and a willingness to question prevailing narratives.Your subscription allows us to continue researching, writing, traveling, speaking, and tackling the difficult topics that too many others avoid.If this work has informed, challenged, or encouraged you, please consider subscribing and sharing it with friends and colleagues. Every subscription helps ensure that independent journalism and thoughtful debate remain alive and well.Subscribe nowThank you for reading, and for being part of this community.JGM/RWM

Summary: Cooperation is fundamentally different from governance.