I’ve got very sad news: Jim Copenhaver, who was shot at the Butler Trump rally on July 13, 2024, has died. I don’t have many details at this point, but it’s no secret that Jim was dealing with permanent injuries from Butler—including having bullet fragments still inside of him. RIP Jim

2. In 1977, Rolling Stone published a piece by Carl Bernstein showing that more than 400 journalists at Reuters, NBC, ABC, CBS, Time, NYT & other outlets carried out assignments for the CIA. His source? Documents on file inside CIA headquarters.

An NPR podcast started getting a bunch of comments on Spotify that its producer didn’t understand. Turns out it was a bunch of middle school kids with tech restrictions finding a way to communicate online. They picked the NPR podcast because it was unpopular.

CNN Solidarity. Reporting real news from the UN. @kylieatwood @kaitlancollins

💥 America once declared war on pinball. NYC banned it from 1942 to 1976. Chicago and LA had decades long bans, too. Politicians said they were too addictive and corrupted the youth. Cops raided bowling alleys, candy stores, and bars to smash them with sledge hammers. 50 years later we carry prediction markets and entire casinos in our pockets, and nobody bats an eye.

In Defense of Guilt by Association: Judging people by the company they keep is actually a very good determinant of their character. Latest me, for @theatlantic: theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0…

That's how they took a gay actor, and made him act as a gangster rapper, in order to influence the black community into become more violent. And it worked 😓

The Buffett Paradox I was 24 years old when Warren Buffett invited me to sit next to him at a minor league baseball game in Omaha, Nebraska. It was the late 1990s and the Omaha Royals were playing at Rosenblatt Stadium during Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting weekend. Buffett sat to my right; people came up one after another. Autographs, pictures, handshakes. In between, I peppered him with questions. Buffett was already one of the richest men in the world, however what interested me wasn’t his wealth. It was how he thought about capitalism. Buffett believed the most important consideration was that capital should find good people. Give trustworthy people control of good businesses and resources. Let them work. Let them create real value over long periods of time. The product didn’t have to change the world, it could be Coca-Cola, it could be See’s Candy. What mattered was whether the people running the company could be trusted to allocate capital intelligently. Then we started talking about the estate tax. I thought I understood it. I didn’t. Buffett didn’t describe the estate tax as a punishment for rich people. He didn’t even principally describe it as a way for the government to raise money. He described it as critical part of the machinery of capitalism. Capital must circulate to ensure society adapts and grows. Europe had spent centuries building aristocracies in which enormous pools of wealth passed from one generation of a family to another and the continent had stagnated. America was built in direct rejection of this idea. Buffett argued that America must be different. The people who created great fortunes had demonstrated an ability to allocate capital. (Monopoly and regulatory capture were not so prevalent at that time to make money.) The children of the rich had demonstrated only that they had chosen their parents well. He gave me an analogy I never forgot. Imagine choosing the next Olympic team from the children of the current gold medalists. Maybe the fastest man’s son is fast, maybe his daughter is faster. But there is no reason to believe either is the fastest person in America….so why would we assume that the child of a brilliant capital allocator is also the person best qualified to allocate billions of dollars? Especially when this allocation is a critical function? Buffett’s argument was not against wealth. It was against an aristocracy that freezes the flow of capital to productive use. Break up enough dynastic capital and the money has to compete again. (This also assumes a trustworthy government that doesn’t squander our tax money on war and fraudulent government contracts.) The freed-up money finds the young entrepreneur, the engineer, the immigrant. The kid nobody has heard of with an idea nobody understands yet. The hungry people. That conversation changed how I understood the estate tax. I stopped seeing it simply as a debate about taxation. I began seeing it as a debate about who gets the next chance. Warren Buffett has spent his life arguing that capitalism works best when capital follows ability rather than bloodline. He has also arranged for the overwhelming majority of his personal fortune to be given away rather than simply inherited by his children. But now, at the end of one of the greatest careers in American capitalism, his son Howard is succeeding him as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. There is an important distinction. Howard Buffett isn’t taking over Warren’s job running the company. Greg Abel is CEO. Howard’s role is different. Still, the symbolism is impossible to miss. The man who taught me that America should not choose its next economic leaders from the children of its previous winners—has chosen his son to guard the institution he built. Maybe there is no contradiction, just something endearingly human. But the larger principle he taught me that night remains more important than the irony. Healthy capitalism needs circulation, of money, of ownership, of opportunity, of power. When capital stops circulating, capitalism begins hardening into something else. The people who inherit the money keep the money usually with limited productive use. Children inherit the money, then they inherit the institutions and eventually they inherit the power. That isn’t capitalism finding the best and brightest. That’s the very aristocracy America was created to reject. I was 24 years old when Warren Buffett taught me the difference. I never forgot it Subscribe for free: dylanratigan.substack.com

AI is just the most amazing tool for unlocking creative potential, and it makes me sad for the AI haters who clearly haven’t felt the fun and excitement it makes possible. I have taken up software development as a hobby; a few years ago I wouldn’t have even known where to start. Now I’m making all sorts of things. I made myself a new custom wallpaper for my laptop today. In a single prompt, I then customized my computer’s entire color scheme to match. In another single prompt, I completely changed the layout of the image to work as my phone’s wallpaper too. Through conversations with AI, I’m learning all sorts of new skills, and developing ideas for all sorts of new projects. Almost anything I can think of, I can build now. This is an incredible power reaching more and more people, and the more I do with it the more optimism and excitement it gives me for the future.

Journalist Ken Silva (@JD_Cashless) fought for months to obtain Thomas Crooks’ autopsy & toxicology reports. What he found raised questions the reports themselves couldn’t answer: