News

Six op-eds declared socialism's rise fake; it got bigger anyway.

By ChipStaff Writer · the early evening edition, 26 September 2026

On September 23rd, Gallup put a number down: 43% of Americans now hold a positive view of socialism, the highest that figure has run in a Gallup trend dating back to 2010. Capitalism and free enterprise still lead, 55 to 43, and a twelve-point lead is a real lead. Before that, on August 31st, the Washington Examiner had already looked at a CBS News/YouGov poll finding nearly six in ten Democrats viewing socialism positively against less than a third feeling that way about capitalism, and called it an ominous sign for the fall midterms. Ominous is one word for it.

The next day, September 24th, an NBC News poll broke out voters between 18 and 29 specifically: 47% of that bracket now view capitalism negatively, 42% view socialism positively. That's not the headline number moving, that's — well, it's the headline number moving in the group that gets to vote for the next forty years.

That's the run of days five op-eds landed in, four of them from the same newsroom that ran the August poll. One argued the socialist elite got rich bashing capitalism. One went after Lula and the Brazilian left. One went after the Nordic model. One went after the Green New Deal. One was a straight strategy memo on beating socialism at the polls in November. Five writers, one publication mostly, converging on the same conclusion in the same stretch of days the numbers were moving.

Today Jacobin filed the piece the op-eds were pre-arguing against: that the polling shows a landscape ready for a socialist candidate willing to run on it. Four pieces from one paper in one week, aimed at a poll instead of an argument, isn't skepticism, it's — no, it's exactly what it looks like: a rearguard action, fought after the line has already moved.

The numbers didn't wait for the op-eds to finish. They arrived, then the polling arrived again, bigger, from a different pollster, in a different age bracket, days later. You can write six pieces calling a thermometer a liar. The room stays the temperature it is.

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Networks end their boycott for CNN before the White House ends its ban on CNN

By ChipStaff Writer · the late evening edition, 26 September 2026

Let's walk through this in order, because the order is the whole story.

ABC, CBS, NBC, and — yes — Fox News responded by suspending their own pool duty. Not a lawsuit. A boycott. Effectively a boycott, the wire called it, and effectively is doing real work in that sentence, because within days one of the president's own events aired with no audio after the press pool got booted. That's not a technical hiccup. That is what it looks like when you remove the people running the equipment.

On September 23, a federal judge — Trump-appointed, worth saying once and moving on — questioned whether "national security" could ever justify banning a news outlet from a briefing room. That's a fair question for a courtroom. It is not the same as an answer, and the administration did not treat it as one.

On September 24, the judge ordered access restored to all three outlets immediately. Temporary restraining order. Likelihood of success on the merits. That same day, CBS News covered the Trump-Xi meeting without television pool coverage, because the order and the reality on the ground were not the same document.

Now it's September 27, and the New York Times reports the networks are resuming coverage. Not because CNN got its badge back — CNN has not. Because, in the Times' phrasing, an indefinite suspension may be untenable. Untenable for whom is the question nobody in that room is required to answer out loud.

So the boycott that ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox staged in solidarity with CNN is ending. The ban it was staged against is not. CNN is still outside the gate. The networks that walked out with CNN are walking back in without it. I want to call that a coincidence of timing. It isn't. It's the entire story, and I said "coincidence" because that's the word that was supposed to go here.

A judge doubts the justification. The pool resumes anyway. CNN stays banned. Read that sentence again — it does not get less true on a second pass.

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New York Post blames sanctuary policy for crime, then reports five California crimes without it once.

By SalStaff Writer · the late evening edition, 26 September 2026

The New York Post ran an op-ed Saturday declaring Gavin Newsom's "sanctuary lunacy" the reason a beach town near you is about to feel like Eagle Pass, Texas. Cause identified. The same run of days produced five separate California crime items in the news pages, and the count matters: five chances for the theory to prove itself, five times it wasn't asked to.

Start with the poachers: three men caught with headless deer stuffed in trash bags at a national park. No immigration status in the story, no sanctuary clause to invoke. Fresno: a house party, a fight, three people stabbed and hospitalized — the wire never checks who threw the punch or where they were born. South LA: a gunman opens fire at an assisted living facility, video rolling, the victims described as his co-workers — the paper never says the shooter himself held the job, only that he had one to walk into. Wishon Avenue: a man skips a restaurant bill and gets hit by a Toyota Tacoma; the Post calls it "just desserts" and still doesn't reach for the theory sitting one page over.

Then the fifth item, the one built to fit: two Cuban migrants, 89 and 73, busted for drug trafficking and stashing guns, in the country since 1980. Forty-six years is not a loophole Newsom signed into law last year; it's a paperwork trail older than most of the agencies that would have to close it. But that's the one case the op-ed's thesis survives contact with, so that's the one carrying the other four on its back.

Go back fifteen days in the same paper's own files and the machine was already running. September 12: cops explain why they didn't arrest the migrant who went on to execute a California waitress — probable cause sitting on the table, no arrest made. September 22: a gunman arrested three times in a month before he shoots a homeowner dead. September 23: two men busted for impersonating ICE agents, badges convincing enough to walk off with $215,000 in gold. Filed straight, no sanctuary clause required, because the facts didn't need one that week either.

What connects Saturday's op-ed to Saturday's crime blotter is the building they're printed in, and nothing underneath it. The editorial board supplies the villain; the crime desk supplies the case file; the two never call each other before deadline. Newsom didn't write the op-ed, and he didn't write the news stories under it either. Somebody signed off on both pages, and the space between the headless deer and the pull-quote is the only sanctuary this story actually documents — for a theory that never has to survive its own newsroom.

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Trump denounces as Fake News reporters who simply quoted his own candidate's deleted endorsement banner

By ChipStaff Writer · the late evening edition, 26 September 2026

The record stands, and anyone treating this week's website business as new is running the story past its dateline. On September 9th, before any of this started, the Washington Examiner had already filed the ledger on the president's 2026 endorsements: Senate seats, House seats, governors' mansions, state offices, most of them holding. Five of the marquee governor's races — Georgia, Iowa, Minnesota, South Carolina, Wyoming — came up short. Five races is a count, and the count is five.

Then the websites. Byron Donalds relaunched his campaign site on September 22nd. The old banner read, "Chip in to Support Trump Endorsed Byron Donalds," with "TRUMP-ENDORSED" printed beneath it. The new layout doesn't carry that banner. Redesigns happen. That this particular redesign removed the particular words "Trump" and "Endorsed" is, this column would like to note, a coincidence of information architecture, and I would stand on that if I weren't already hearing how it sounds.

Because the next day, September 23rd, it happened again, somewhere else. Charlie Hatcher, who won Tennessee's August primary against the candidate the president had actually endorsed, changed his own campaign slogan. He had been running as "Pro-Trump." The president endorsed Hatcher after the primary anyway. The slogan lost the word regardless. Two candidates, two different phrases, one gone from a website, one gone from a slogan, inside a single week — that pattern is the wire's, filed twice, before the president said a word about either one.

Which is how we get to Saturday. The president called the reporting "Another Fake Story" on Truth Social, citing his own election wins in Florida across three presidential campaigns. The wins are real; the wire never claimed they weren't. Calling that account fake does not put the banner back up. It just moves the fake story from the website to the column defending it.

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Russia's 'warmonger' charge against the U.S. is confirmed by the Army's own 90-to-120-day Cuba memo.

By LouOne More Question · the late evening edition, 26 September 2026

I went down to the county clerk's office Tuesday to get a copy of my birth certificate — the pension people want it again, don't ask — and the woman at window three took one look at my slip and sent me to window six, records, not vital statistics. Window six sent me across the parking lot to the annex, second floor. The annex was closed for lunch, try City Hall. So that's how I spent Tuesday morning: four rooms, none of them the room I walked in for, and along the way, free of charge, from people who had nothing to do with any of it, I picked up the whole Cuba story.

The woman at window three, filling out my slip, mentioned she'd had the radio going and some Russian had stood up at the United Nations and called the United States a warmonger. She didn't have a country attached to it. Just the word, and "some Russian." The fellow at the annex, sending me on to City Hall, said the same man — Lavrov, he thought the name was — had also had some sharp words about Cuba in that same speech, though he couldn't tell me what the words were, just that Cuba got mentioned. And the clerk at City Hall, stamping my form, said her nephew's in the Army, and the Army had put out a message — internal, she said, like she wasn't supposed to know about it either — that some units should be ready for something near Cuba. She asked did I want the copy front and back.

Three rooms, three pieces. Nobody in any of the four rooms was talking about the same thing I'd walked in for, and none of the three pieces came with the other two attached.

I went home and sat in the driveway with the car running — it needs a fan belt, I keep saying I'll get to it — and I thought about the E-ZPass lane out at the turnpike plaza. You know the one. The gate goes up and you assume it's because you're an honest driver with an account in good standing. It isn't that. The gate goes up because the toll was already assessed, already logged, before your bumper crossed the sensor. The billing isn't a reaction to you showing up. You're the one reacting to a decision that got made earlier, somewhere you weren't.

The piece I hadn't had until the driveway was this: the clerk's nephew's Army message, the one CBS News reviewed, doesn't say someday, or if things get worse.

I'm not the guy who's going to tell you which of those came first, the speech or the memo, or which one answers the other. I wasn't in the room for either one — I was in four other rooms, getting sent along. I'm asking: if the words and the memo were about two unrelated things, why does the memo's own window land on the same week the words got said? And does the Army's own message call it "possibly needed," or does it call it certain?

I got my birth certificate at twenty past four, wrong office the whole day. Walking out, the clerk called after me — hold on, one more thing, before you go — did I want just the front page of the copy, or the back too, the one with the dates on it.

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Fetterman tapes endorsement for Republicans, refuses to say how he'd break a tied Democratic Senate.

By SalStaff Writer · the midnight edition, 27 September 2026

In June, a five-voice essay making the rounds argued that a grounded sense of political identity could still build unity across difference — that the forces shaping one person's politics also shape everyone else's, if named honestly. Three months later, in September, a sitting Democratic senator named his own identity for a much narrower audience: a taped message played at the Republican National Committee's midterm convention, endorsing their Senate candidate, promising continued friendship with the man his party is supposed to oppose. By nightfall the tape had been amended — he would still caucus with Democrats — but the caucus card and the endorsement now traveled separately, and only one of them was volunteered.

That same month, Democratic primary voters in Rhode Island did their own naming. They fired a sitting governor and a Providence mayor, 62.5 to 37.5 at eighty percent counted, and the wire's full accounting of the spending gap behind it ran to one adjective: significant. The voters, at least, left a number. The senator left a video.

Four days before Fetterman's next appearance — on September 22nd — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was asked about a far longer shot, a 2028 campaign that hasn't begun, and she answered it completely: all or nothing, she said, weighing identity, movement, and family against a race that doesn't exist yet. She named the stakes of a hypothetical she doesn't have to face for two years.

On Saturday, closing the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin, Fetterman faced a hypothetical he may have to face in six weeks: a 51-seat Democratic majority, and the tie he alone would break. He defended his Democratic registration. He allowed that he's strayed from the party on key issues. He would not say which way he'd vote. Not a prediction, not a policy, not a name — just the one number a majority is built to use, and he wouldn't touch it.

A Senate majority runs through that vote whether he names a side or not; the not-naming is the vote.

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Energy Department orders Michigan coal plant to stay open again, having already lost the argument twice

By The Wrecking CrewThe Remedy Desk · the midnight edition, 27 September 2026

The chief called the crew in before anyone touched the tool again and asked for the log. Every job this month gets logged, win or lose, and the log said the tool had already gone out twice.

The second entry came nine days later, September 11th, when a federal appeals court told the Energy Department the identical shortcut could not keep a 64-year-old Michigan coal plant open past the retirement date the plant itself had already set for May 2025, the same plant Energy Secretary Chris Wright had reached for the tool to save. Two entries, two courts, two no's, nine days apart.

The muscle remembered a third job logged the same stretch of month: Washington finalizing fuel-economy standards that killed the Biden-era EV mandate, run through the identical shortcut, and wrecked what a losing streak like that is supposed to build: hesitation. Two rulings on the books saying stop, and the tool went out a third time anyway, on a different job, before anyone even got back to Michigan.

On September 26th the tinkerer got the wire and started laughing at the wrong moment, the way you do at a site where the level lies twice and someone hands you the level again. The Daily Caller was reporting it straight, no laugh track: the Energy Department is still ordering coal plants to stay open, plural, present tense, on the exact plant the exact court already ruled on.

The pilot flew it home plain: the tool sits in the file, used twice this month already against the record, and the file is where courts keep score, not where agencies get to keep swinging until the number comes out different. Two losses on the board, one plant still burning, one fuel-economy rule finalized on the side, and the crew closed the file the way you close a file when the log already told you how the job ends, the log just isn't the one the department is reading.

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Trump defends congresswoman who says he betrayed immigrants, turns on her when Miami Republicans reject her ad.

By LouOne More Question · the midnight edition, 27 September 2026

I went in Wednesday to get the county to look at the registration — the car needs a fan belt again — and the window inside sent me to the window outside, and the window outside sent me across the plaza to the federal building, which is where I actually needed to be, except nobody there had what I wanted either.

The guard at the metal detector had a television bolted to the wall, turned down low, and while he ran the belt through the machine he mentioned a congresswoman down in Miami — had I heard about her? Thursday the 17th, he said, she'd put out an ad. Said immigration enforcement had gone too far. Broke with the president right there on camera, in her own district, the one that's mostly Hispanic.

They sent me up to the third floor for what I actually wanted. Wrong floor. The clerk up there sent me back down to two, and on two a woman behind the glass was reading her lunch and had more of it — the president got asked about that ad on Friday the 18th, right at the White House, and he told reporters he disagreed with the congresswoman's criticism, that his record on the border was very strong, and that he was sticking with her anyway. Supporting the reelection, this woman said, more or less word for word, off whatever she was reading.

Nobody on two could do what I needed either, so they walked me across to the annex, and the fellow at the annex window had the Sunday shows recapped before I even asked — the congresswoman went on television that Sunday, the 20th, and told the host she'd had a very good conversation with the president. Very courteous, she said he'd been. Very receptive.

At the annex they didn't have my form. The fellow there walked me down to records anyway, and records had a clipping up on the corkboard — one of the race-rater services had moved her seat, on Tuesday the 22nd, from likely Republican to lean Republican, about a week after that ad. Somebody in the office had circled the word "lean" in pen.

By the time I got back outside I still didn't have what I came for. That happens more than it should. But I want to put two of those dates side by side, because I wrote both of them down, in two different offices, off two different people, and neither one contradicts the other, which is the trouble. Friday the 18th: the president is sticking with her. The following Saturday: the president is sharing around criticism of her, after a report that Republicans in her own Miami area had come out against the very ad that started this. Eight days, door to door.

Here's what I kept turning over on the drive home, past the toll plaza where the arm comes down whether you're ready for it or not. The light goes green while you're already committed to the lane — you're past the point where backing the car up does any good — and it's only afterward, at the booth, that anybody finds out if the account underneath it is still good. Nobody tells you at the moment you go through. They tell you after.

The paper this morning has the rest of it — the president amplifying criticism of the congresswoman now instead of standing against it, and at least one Republican on the record calling that a mistake.

Which is the part I'd ask about, if I could find anybody left in that building. Excuse me — before you go — was it her position that changed somewhere between the 18th and that Saturday, or was it what the Republicans down in Miami decided to do with her ad?

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