Drive through almost any American town this month and you'll see it. Porches lined with red, white and blue. Pickup trucks flying flags off the tailgate. Front yards turned into little tributes to the country's 250th birthday. To most people, that's just called patriotism. But according to a run of recent news stories, a growing number of Americans now find that same sight unsettling.

A Presbyterian minister stood before her denomination's highest governing body this summer and argued the church should not be allowed to require its own clergy to be monogamous. She called it "bad polity." She said defining love that narrowly was a wall the Spirit had already moved past. Her side won.

Trump Accounts are now live. A thousand dollars, seeded directly by the federal government, deposited into a real investment account for every eligible newborn in America. Not a monthly welfare check. Not a coupon that expires at the end of the year. A genuine stake in the American economy, invested in a low-cost stock index fund, quietly compounding for nearly two decades before that child ever earns a paycheck or files a tax return of their own.

History remembers Benedict Arnold with a distinction no one desires. His name has become synonymous with treason. Yet what makes Arnold's story so compelling is not simply that he betrayed America—it is that he was once one of America's greatest heroes.

In June 2023, the city council of Hamtramck, Michigan voted unanimously to ban the Pride flag from public property. Every council member was Muslim. The city had recently become the first in America to seat an all Muslim local government, a milestone progressive organizations had celebrated for years as proof of multicultural success. Then that same council told Pride organizers "No."

When the Supreme Court agreed to hear Watson v. Republican National Committee earlier this year, election integrity advocates had reason for cautious optimism. The case presented a clean legal question: does the federal law establishing Election Day require ballots to be received by that date, or merely cast? On Monday, in a 5-4 decision authored by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the Court answered that question in a way few conservatives anticipated—and the consequences will extend well beyond Mississippi.

The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued a ruling this week that should have been unnecessary to obtain in the first place. In a 2-1 decision handed down Tuesday, the court restored the Trump administration's authority to apply expedited removal to undocumented immigrants anywhere in the country, not merely near the border, reversing a lower-court injunction that had blocked the policy for months. The ruling is a legal victory, and it is the right outcome, but the fact that the federal government had to fight its way through multiple layers of litigation simply to enforce a statute that Congress passed in 1996 tells you a great deal about how far the judiciary has drifted from its proper role.

The crowd at 99 Scott Studio in East Williamsburg did not cheer the candidate's name when the race was called Tuesday night. They chanted something else entirely. "Free Palestine. Free Palestine." Over and over, filling a cavernous Brooklyn venue as Claire Valdez, the newly nominated Democratic candidate for New York's 7th Congressional District, took the stage to declare that her movement was "durable" and "growing" and would not stop "until working people run the table."