Carol H Tucker

Elon Musk has spent more money on American elections in the last two years than George Soros has in his entire life.

The most important thing today is that Starlink and Starshield operations have been restored to the speeds we had before the restrictions. The speeds are now where they need to be. The restoration began overnight, and by this morning, speeds were already sufficient. This matters: for our frontline logistics, for defending Ukraine against jet-powered “shaheds.” I thank all Americans and all our partners who took this seriously and truly helped – members of Congress, senators, all the media, the State Department, and the President. Protecting lives matters.

In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond studied a dozen societies across thousands of years, from the Maya to the Vikings, to answer one question: why do great civilizations fall? What he found wasn't drought, war or bad luck. None of those were ever enough on their own. The one thing present in every collapse was how the people at the top responded to what was happening below them. The warning sign he found again and again was leaders who were completely insulated from the pain of ordinary people. When the powerful never feel the consequences, they stop seeing the problem, and when they stop seeing it, they stop fixing it. The Maya kings kept enriching themselves and building monuments while the farmers who fed them went hungry. Their civilization didn't fall because of one bad year. It fell because the people in charge had stopped living in the same world as everyone else. Diamond called them "distant managers." They are the people in power who live so far from the damage that they are the last to understand how bad it has gotten. By the time they notice, the fields are already empty. His most important finding was that collapse is a choice. Every society that fell had leaders who could have changed course and chose not to. The question for us is whether we will keep letting people who can't see us make that choice for us. Because we are there folks.