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Recently appointed College Republicans of America political director Kai Schwemmer—an open supporter of white supremacist commentator Nick Fuentes—can envision a world in which slavery is legal.The Guardian discovered a paywalled video from July 2025 of Schwemmer debating on the Modern Day Debate streaming channel with another right-winger by the name of Shell Shock. They were asked whether they prefer a world where “abortion is banned and slavery is legal” or one where “slavery is banned and abortion is legal.” Shell Shock chose the former. Schwemmer agreed.In that same call, he said that a 15-year-old who was sexually assaulted by her uncle should still deliver the baby and that he was against gay marriage, and he questioned women’s right to vote. “I believe they currently have the right to vote. But I’m in favor of probably like a family voting thing,” Schwemmer said, referring to a right-wing proposal to have male heads of households vote for the whole family.This is just the tip of the iceberg for the current Brigham Young University student who will now potentially become the most important youth outreach operative in the country.“Appointing Kai Schwemmer, a longtime ally of white supremacist Nick Fuentes, as political director signals the College Republicans of America is normalizing antisemitism and white supremacy, full stop,” often embattled American Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said last week. “Schwemmer has appeared at Fuentes’ conferences, streams on his platform and has spread conspiracy theories about ‘Zionists’ in America.”

Republicans are eyeing massive cuts to health care spending in order to scrounge up $200 billion for Donald Trump’s reckless war in Iran. Top Republicans are looking for ways to offset the massive price tag the Pentagon has requested in order to pass the additional funding for U.S. military operations in Iran through a budget reconciliation bill, Axios reported Monday. House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington is looking to revive cost-sharing reductions, programs that can assist low-income Americans in paying high deductibles, that were passed as part of Trump’s behemoth budget bill in July. The Congressional Budget Office previously estimated that funding these reductions would save the federal government $30 billion but would increase out-of-pocket premium costs and drive up the number of people without health insurance by 300,000 through 2034. Arrington is selling the move as “fraud prevention.” The discussions over cuts are in the early stages, but are likely to face opposition from moderate Republicans, who won’t support health care spending cuts in an election year. Arrington suggested that the budget reconciliation bill would target fraud across a range of means-tested programs that assist low-income families, Roll Call reported. He pointed to the earned income tax credit, a refundable tax credit that boosts the income of low-income, working parents who claim a child. Arrington claimed that one of the most popular tax credits “loses 30 cents on the dollar.”“You’ve got low-income housing tax credits, for example, another sort of welfare program within the tax code that doesn’t prohibit illegals from siphoning money off that and jeopardizing the sustainability of that program,” he said.The reconciliation effort should target “widespread fraud, there is a boatload of waste and fraud,” Arrington said in the House.Republicans seemed content to make struggling Americans suffer in the service of Trump’s increasingly expensive vanity war that has no clear objectives.

No one learned anything new at a glitzy event in Miami, but US-Saudi ties were reinforced.

The Dow and Nasdaq indexes both closed Friday in correction territory—a market dip of 10 percent from the last peak—and the S&P 500 wasn’t far behind. We’re now likely headed into a bear market, which is a dip of 20 percent. Probably we’d be there already if the market didn’t build into its calculations that President Donald Trump will reverse himself on Iran to prop up stock prices, a doctrine known as TACO (for “Trump always chickens out”). Before we proceed, a disclaimer. I am not a stock market expert. My views on the market are entirely second-hand—a distillation of what the business press is saying at any given moment. I believed last October that a stock market crash was imminent. That was obviously wrong (as my broker has lately been reminding me). But the signposts haven’t exactly got better since then. Warren Buffett has an indicator for stock overvaluation: market capitalization divided by gross domestic product. Buffett says that when his indicator nears 200 percent, which is to say when stock prices are twice as great as the economy, investors are “playing with fire.” The Buffett indicator was 218 percent when I wrote last fall. It’s 213 percent now. Then there’s the more intangible cockroach index. Speaking in mid-October about signs of instability in private credit and private equity, a sector that goes largely unregulated, JPMorganChase’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, said: “When you see one cockroach, there are probably more.” Five months later, private credit’s exposure to software companies vulnerable to AI advances is prompting what Bloomberg calls “a sudden investor exodus.” It’s cockroaches all the way down.Some Wall Street commentators, including everybody in the Trump administration, are saying that the surge in oil prices and consequent financial disruption are only temporary. “The backdrop is very strong fundamentals,” said David Dietze, chief investment strategist of Dietze Wealth Management Group, last week, citing corporate earnings up 16 percent last year. But that was (a) last year and (b) driven by an AI bubble. Last year’s more relevant fundamental, as I’ve noted previously, is that growth in GDP slowed to 0.7 percent during the last quarter of 2026. This year’s most attention-getting fundamental is that the economy lost 92,000 jobs in February.As for the war in Iran, I don’t disagree that Trump tends to lose his nerve when anything he does spooks the stock market. But as Yale’s CEO-whisperer Jeffrey Sonenfeld noted last week, Trump’s TACO reversals to calm markets are only temporary; once the markets calm down, “Trump is prone to nudging back toward his original inflammatory position until he hits the breaking point.” He goes on the wagon, then he falls off the wagon. Thus, for instance, “with financial markets soothed from Trump putting out smoke about a potential peace deal, counterintuitively, that has the opposite effect of buying Trump much more time on the clock and much more room to escalate militarily.” Trump seems to want very much to end the Iran war. But what he’s discovering—and what any non-sycophant could have told him, if he’d had any on the White House payroll—is that wars are very difficult to end, especially against a pathologically violent regime like Iran’s. Trump wants to declare victory and go home, but that won’t open the Strait of Hormuz. As the stalemate continues, the likelihood increases that Trump will commit to the ground invasion he felt sure he could avoid. Even if troops were able quickly to overthrow Ayatollah Khamenei fils and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, it likely wouldn’t happen quickly enough to rescue the global economy. And how would we prevent the theocracy’s reinstatement after we withdrew, as occurred in Afghanistan? In Venezuela, we didn’t even try to change the Chavismo regime we purported to oppose. In an interview published Sunday night by the Financial Times, Trump floated the line that he’s achieved “regime change” already in Iran, adding, “The people we’re dealing with are a totally different group of people.… [They] are very professional.” Yeah, that’s the ticket! But Trump also said that he’d like to “take the oil in Iran” (he always wants to take the oil) and that he might “take Kharg Island,” Iran’s main oil export hub, but that if he did “it would also mean we had to be there for a while.”What would be the effect of sustained high oil prices? It’s interesting to observe the shifting perspective of the oil market analyst Daniel Yergin, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning 1991 book The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power. Six days into the war, Yergin wrote in the Financial Times: “This crisis is unfolding in a world in which the global oil and gas system is more resilient and diversified than it has been for decades.” Twenty-three days later, Yergin said Sunday on Fox News: “If it’s a couple more weeks, this crisis is manageable; if it goes longer, it really is a big hit to the global economy, including here in the United States.” Marko Papic, chief strategist at the investment research firm BCA Research, told CNBC Saturday that through April 19 the world will have lost 5 percent of global supply, but after that the loss will be more like 10 percent as the U.S. strategic petroleum reserve empties out and the Russian and Iranian tankers we exempted (preposterously) from sanctions unload their oil. The presumption that oil prices will fall to previous levels as soon as the Strait of Hormuz is open appears to be a fantasy. Sheikh Nawaf al-Sabah, CEO of Kuwait Petroleum Corp., said at an energy conference Yergin’s firm S&P Global hosted last week that it would take Kuwait “and everybody else in the Gulf a few months to reach our full production capacity because we have had to shut in wells.” He guessed three or four months. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, observed to The New York Times’ Tony Romm and Rebecca F. Elliot last week that oil prices “rise like a rocket, fall like a feather.” All this suggests that, except perhaps for oil stocks, the bear market is practically here already. Even if Trump chickens out, he won’t be able to do it fast enough. TACO is dead. It got eaten by a bear.

The Trump administration used untested weapons in a strike in Iran that hit a school and sports hall on February 28.The New York Times reports that the United States launched a newly designed ballistic missile at a school in the city of Lamerd on the first day of the war—the same day that the U.S. bombed a girls’ school in Minab, hundreds of miles away. The strike and others nearby in Lamerd killed 21 people, according to the Times, which cited Iranian media.Times analysts concluded the strike involved a Precision Strike Missile, or PrSM, a short-range ballistic missile that detonates just above its target and blasts tungsten pellets outward. A local video from Lamerd showed one strike about 900 feet away from the sports hall with the weapon exploding in a midair fireball.Another video captured from a security camera across from the school and sports hall shows the structure being hit, with an explosion directly above it. Photos from both sites after the strikes show dozens of tiny holes apparently made by the tungsten pellets. At the school and sports hall, footage shows scorch marks, a partially collapsed roof, blown-out windows, fire damage, and blood spatters.The PrSM only completed prototype testing last year, an Army press release from July states, but had been untested in combat until the strikes. U.S. Central Command posted a video on March 1 capturing a PrSM strike from the first day of the war. The leader of CENTCOM, Admiral Brad Cooper, said days later that the PrSM was used in combat for the first time during the war, and another post from CENTCOM on March 4 touted the system.It’s not clear whether the strike was deliberate. The school and sports hall are close to an IRGC military compound but have been walled off from the compound for at least 15 years. The sports hall is identified as a facility for civilians on public map platforms including Apple Maps, Wikimapia, and Google Maps. An Instagram account linked to the school shows children regularly using the site, and Iran’s representative to the United Nations Amir Saeid Iravani said the sports hall was being used by a women’s volleyball team at the time of the strike.The strike occurred on the same day as a U.S. attack on a girls’ school in Minab, which killed 175 people, an apparent war crime. Using an untested weapon on an elementary school and sports hall, without clear knowledge of its effects, would seem to fit the bill of a war crime, as well. Does that matter to the Trump administration?

In an interview with NBC News, Usha said she wouldn't share their disagreements because that's "the privilege of marriage." But we have some educated guesses.