October 22, 2026

Photo credit: NurPhoto / Contributor / NurPhoto via Getty Images

Nearly 20 years ago, California voted to fund a high-speed rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Today, more than $15 billion later, not a single mile of track has been laid. During his time as lieutenant governor, Gavin Newsom said the project likely would not “materialize in our lifetime.”

Blame environmental regulations and poor oversight, Christopher Rufo and Kenneth Schrupp write. They had multiple AI systems scan reports on the California High-Speed Rail Authority’s website, identifying more than 130,000 pages of environmental-review materials. “Some of the bullet-train reports include ridiculous measures,” note Rufo and Schrupp. “One proposed that biologists count bumblebees, one by one. Another outlined when a contractor was allowed to break down woodrat stick huts.” Some of these measures have led to costly orders. Contractors have requested $480,000 “to dig small burrows for mammals by hand” and $352,490 for lizard surveys and reports.

Meantime, a 2018 state audit found that the rail authority had granted a contractor a $3 million amendment without documenting that it had verified the contractor’s claims.

“Who benefits from all this? Politicians and contractors,” Rufo and Schrupp observe. “The scheme is straightforward: the contractors back the bullet-train boondoggle and shuffle money to politicians, and California directs millions of dollars to the firms to perform endless environmental reviews.”

Read more.

Socialists have a larger presence on the Chicago City Council than on that of any other city. With an ally in the mayor’s office backed by the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), this grassroots political movement is increasingly becoming a new “machine.” In City Journal’s autumn issue, Aidan Grogan charts the rise, fall, and resurgence of socialism in Chicago, from the Socialist Labor Party of the 1870s to today’s Democratic Socialist Caucus, CTU, and Chicago Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) chapter.

He details how the Daleys upheld a moderate, patronage-driven status quo in the post–World War II era that, despite its flaws and corruption, kept socialism at bay. That began to change in 2015, when “a socialist was elected to the Chicago City Council for the first time since the ‘Black Sox’ threw the World Series 96 years earlier.”

“In Chicago, resurgent socialists and their like-minded allies are building a new political machine to steer the city toward collectivism and away from the more pragmatic Democratic governance that long marked its politics,” Grogan writes. 

Read more here.

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Suncor v. County Commissioners of Boulder. Boulder, Colorado, alleges that energy companies, including Suncor, misled the public by downplaying the effects of their operations on climate change. “Yet Boulder’s complaint fails to specify when the alleged misrepresentations were made, by whom, or to whom,” Richard Epstein explains. “Nor does it identify the content of the misstatements or allege any particular duty owed by the defendants or other fossil-fuel companies.”

Further, as Chief Justice John Roberts noted, Boulder’s complaint could open the floodgates to tens of thousands of similar claims. “The combined weight of these suits could bankrupt every fossil-fuel company doing business in the United States,” warns Epstein.

Read more about the case.