Gavin Newsom went on Axios this week and did what Gavin Newsom does best: talk down to a man who has actually built something. The California governor accused Elon Musk of "turning his back" on the state that supposedly made him rich. "Regulation in California created the conditions that allowed him to take the risk to become the multi-billionaire, maybe trillionaire, that he's become," Newsom said. "Now he's turning his back on the state that promoted him."

Standing beside Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Trump told reporters that Italy, Germany, and France had all declined to stand with the United States when it mattered most, during American operations against Iran. "In a way, I was testing people," he said. Most of Europe failed the test. This is not a firebrand moment. It is a reckoning seventy years in the making.

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.