The Donald: A Yale Researcher Says Revenge Is a Drug. Here’s What That Predicts About the Next Six Months.

The mechanism isn't anger. It's tolerance–and tolerance is why this doesn't stop on its own.

The Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter #1,022: Friday, September 11th, 2026

I’m going to tell you something about addicts that anyone who’s ever lived with one already knows in their bones.

The dose goes up.

It always goes up. It has to. That’s not a moral failure, that’s chemistry. The same amount that got you there last month…doesn’t get you there today…so you take more. And more. And…you keep taking more until something outside of you stops it…because nothing inside of you will.

Hold that thought. We’re coming back to it…and when we do…I think the next six months are going to look considerably less mysterious to you.

The Study That Took Twenty Years to Confirm

James Kimmel, Jr. is a lecturer in psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine.

Before that he spent twenty years as a litigator…which he now calls being in the business of revenge.

He didn’t come to this academically. As a teenager, after a group of local kids killed his dog and blew up his family’s mailbox…he took a loaded revolver out of his father’s nightstand…and went looking for them.

He’s written that he came close to committing a mass shooting. He’s spent his career since…trying to understand what was happening in his own head that night.

Here’s what he found.

A neuroscience study in 2004 showed that revenge activates the same region of the brain as substance use disorders. It took another twenty years of research to confirm it, and Kimmel’s conclusion is blunt: your brain on revenge looks like your brain on drugs. That’s what the scans show.

His book, The Science of Revenge, came out in May 2025. The New York Times summarized it this way: the book presents revenge-seeking as an addiction, and Trump as a probable addict in that regard.

That’s not me editorializing. Kimmel wrote the Politico piece himself…titled What the Science of Addiction Tells Us About Donald Trump. He’s the one making the claim…on the record…under his own name and his own credentials.

My job here is to show you what it predicts.

The Part That Explains Everything

Kimmel’s second finding is the one nobody wants to hear.

Perpetrators almost always see themselves as victims seeking justice.

Read it again. From vicious tweets to road rage to mass shootings to armed insurrection…the person doing the damage is…in his own mind…the one who was wronged. Nobody thinks they’re the aggressor. Everybody thinks they’re evening a score.

And here’s the kicker: it works on imagined grievances exactly as well as real ones. The brain doesn’t audit. A believed injury lights the same circuit as an actual one.

Which is why arguing with the facts…never cools anybody down. You’re not debating a conclusion. You’re interrupting a dose.

Now Look at the Record

Forget theory. Look at what’s been documented.

By April, Axios had tallied the targets: former CIA Director John Brennan and Obama-era intelligence officials. Fed chair Jerome Powell and governor Lisa Cook. Senators Schiff, Kelly and Slotkin. Representatives Swalwell, Goodlander, Crow, Houlahan and DeLuzio. Former special counsel Jack Smith. Christopher Krebs. General Mark Milley. The Southern Poverty Law Center…indicted on fraud charges.

And this line, which is the whole thing in one sentence:

No target has been convicted. The tangible product has been the punishment of the process itself; legal fees and reputational damage.

Now…apply the model.

If this were about justice…the absence of convictions would be a failure. The program would end. Instead it expands…because under the addiction frame…the conviction was never the payload. The process is the dose. The indictment. The raid. The headline. The other guy’s bad week.

That’s why it doesn’t stop when it doesn’t work. It was working the whole time. Just not at what it claimed to be doing.

That is not the sentence of a man pursuing a case.

That’s a man…waiting on a delivery.

What the Model Predicts Between Now and November

Escalation, not restraint.

Tolerance is the engine. Whatever satisfied in April won’t satisfy in October…so…expect bigger targets…faster timelines…and less patience with anyone slow-walking it.

Staff churn.

You saw it yesterday. Joe diGenova…a Trump loyalist handed the “grand conspiracy” investigation in Florida…abruptly resigned amid reported frustrations. Expect more of that.

The people executing this have to produce something that holds up in court. The model…says the demand isn’t for something that holds up. It’s for something that lands. Those two jobs are incompatible…and the person in the chair takes the blame for the gap.

Grievance as the closing message.

In 2024 he closed by calling Democrats “the enemy from within.” That’s not a strategy choice. It’s the product being sold.

And After the Midterms–Both Ways

Here’s where most commentary gets it wrong, because people assume one outcome is the dangerous one.

If Republicans hold:

Read it as a license. Vindication is the strongest possible supply signal…and there’s no longer an election between him and whatever’s next.

If Republicans lose:

Worse, and it’s not close.

Because a loss is a fresh grievance. It’s new supply. And…a man whose brand is retribution…who has just been personally wronged by the electorate…has both the motive and…until January 2029…the machinery.

The model does not offer you a comfortable outcome. It offers you a fork where both paths escalate. That’s what addiction looks like from the outside.

The Part I Don’t Enjoy Writing

Kimmel doesn’t let my side off.

His argument is that this is a contagion. Every target and every supporter of a target feels aggrieved and wants to retaliate too. That’s the vicious cycle. That’s how it spreads.

And…he says roughly one in five people become compulsively vengeful.

So here’s his actual warning…and I’d ask you to sit with it rather than skip past it:

More people need to become savvy about how…why…and for whose benefit they are being made to feel aggrieved…and decide to stop dealing in the drug of their own destruction.

For whose benefit.

That one stings, and it’s supposed to. Somebody is making money off your outrage right now. Possibly several somebodies. There are people in this business whose entire model is keeping you at a low simmer, and they are not all on the other side.

Watch what’s coming. Name it accurately.

But don’t let anybody hand you the same drug in a different bottle and tell you it’s medicine because this time you’re the one who was wronged.

That’s exactly what the other guy thinks too.

That’s the whole problem.

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Back soon.

-Jack

Jack Hopkins

P.S. The single most useful sentence in Kimmel’s research isn’t about Trump at all. It’s that perpetrators almost always see themselves as victims seeking justice. Every time you’re about to argue with somebody about who started it…remember that they are running the identical program you are…with the roles reversed…and both of you are certain. That’s not a debate. That’s two people holding the same wire.

P.P.S. Kimmel nearly shot people as a teenager over a dead dog and a blown-up mailbox. He didn’t. He became a Yale researcher who spent thirty years figuring out why he wanted to. If a man can walk back from a loaded revolver in his father’s nightstand…the rest of us can probably manage to put down a phone. The neuroscience says the off-ramp exists. It just doesn’t take itself.

Sources

James Kimmel, Jr., The Science of Revenge: Understanding the World’s Deadliest Addiction — and How to Overcome It(Random House, May 2025): https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/739999/the-science-of-revenge-by-james-kimmel-jr-jd/

NPR, Michel Martin interviews Kimmel, June 3, 2025 — the 2004 study, the revolver, the Politico piece: https://www.npr.org/2025/06/03/nx-s1-5332124/yale-school-of-medicines-james-kimmel-jr-discusses-the-science-of-revenge

Kimmel’s own press page, with links to his Politico piece on Trump and the NYT interview with Thomas Edsall: https://www.jameskimmeljr.com/press

Axios, “Red-meat retribution: Trump escalates campaign against MAGA foes,” April 29, 2026 — the target list and the “punishment of the process” finding: https://www.axios.com/2026/04/29/trump-investigations-maga-red-meat

Associated Press via Fortune, on the public pressure campaign directed at the attorney general, Sept. 21, 2025: https://fortune.com/2025/09/21/trump-retribution-campaign-attorney-general-pam-bondi-letitia-james-comey

NBC News, on the expanding list of investigated political opponents and Judge Luttig’s assessment: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/growing-number-trump-political-foes-investigated-justice-department-rcna255049

Protect Democracy’s retaliatory action tracker, updated continuously: https://protectdemocracy.org/work/retaliatory-action-tracker/

Raw Story, on Joe diGenova’s resignation from the “grand conspiracy” investigation, Sept. 10, 2026: https://rawstory.com/trump-revenge-investigation

The Most Valuable Thing Fetterman Gave Republicans Wasn’t His Praise

It was the word “Democrat” next to his name.

The Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter #1,021: Thursday, September 10th, 2026

There’s a reason an advertisement showing a satisfied customer can sell more than an advertisement showing the owner.

You expect the owner to praise the product.

The customer makes you lean in.

And when the customer used to buy from the competition?

Now you’ve got something.

Keep that in mind when you watch what John Fetterman just did.

A Short Message. A Considerable Political Gift.

On Wednesday, September 9, Pennsylvania’s Democratic senator appeared by recorded video at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas.

He introduced Republican Sen. Dave McCormick, calling him “a great American,” and rejected “the extremes and socialism and that anti-American way of life.”

Republicans can praise Republicans all night long. Nobody watching needs to rearrange a single thought.

But…put a Democratic senator on that screen…delivering language that fits the Republican campaign…and the message acquires something money alone can’t purchase:

The appearance of confirmation from the other side.

That is the value Fetterman supplied.

And Democrats need to understand it…before they spend another week arguing over whether he’s officially leaving the party.

“I’m Still a Democrat” Leaves a Question Unanswered

Fetterman says he isn’t switching parties.

After the appearance, he reaffirmed that he remains a Democrat and would support a Democratic Senate majority if his party wins control. That belongs in any honest account of this episode. Take him at his word.

Then…examine what happened anyway.

A politician can remain in one party while providing useful campaign material to another.

The registration and the contribution are separate questions.

Here’s an ordinary example.

Imagine you own a hardware store. You’ve got employees…loyal customers…and a competitor across town working hard to take your business.

Your manager appears in that competitor’s commercial.

He praises the owner. Talks about the importance of honest service. Says he rejects the sort of irresponsible practices everybody watching associates with the argument that competitor has been making about your store.

Then…he comes back to work.

“Relax,” he says. “I’m still on your payroll.”

Fine.

That answers where he works.

It leaves a fairly substantial question about the commercial.

The Setting Did Half the Selling

Fetterman can be friends with McCormick.

He can work with him. He can negotiate with Trump over steel jobs, which he also discussed in the video. Senators should pursue useful results for their constituents across party lines.

But…cooperation has an identifiable public purpose.

You negotiate a provision. Secure funding. Solve a problem. Explain what people will receive.

A campaign convention has an identifiable purpose, too.

It helps a party win elections.

That purpose doesn’t disappear because a visiting speaker describes himself as independent-minded.

Nor does it require anyone to read his mind.

We don’t need a secret text message…explaining Fetterman’s intentions. We can evaluate the public appearance he chose to make…and the political use that appearance offers.

And the usefulness is obvious.

Republicans can point to a Democratic senator appearing at their event and let the audience finish the argument:

Even he sees it.

That’s how a testimonial works. The speaker doesn’t have to deliver the entire sales pitch. His presence does part of the selling.

An Accusation That Ought to Come With Specifics

Now consider the language.

“Anti-American” is a serious accusation.

It ought to come attached to something a reader can inspect: a statement…a policy…a proposal…a specific act.

Fetterman did not name a Democratic politician in that passage.

That matters. Claiming he explicitly called every Democrat anti-American would go beyond what he said.

But…leaving the target unnamed…also leaves the audience room to supply one.

And…at a Republican election rally…that room has political value.

Democrats should demand specificity.

Which position is he condemning?

Who holds it?

What alternative does he support?

Those are reasonable questions for any elected official making sweeping accusations…regardless of party.

They also produce…a much more useful response…than an endless discussion about whether somebody has hurt the party’s feelings.

Voters have enough demands on their attention. They don’t owe politicians an audience for a family argument.

Give them something they can judge.

Make the Case in Daylight

If Fetterman believes a Democratic policy hurts steelworkers, name the policy and explain the damage.

If he believes a Republican proposal helps Pennsylvania…then, damnit…describe the benefit and defend the trade-offs.

Make the case in daylight.

That is how disagreement becomes useful.

The Democratic response should meet the same standard.

No speculation about his health. Save that for social media. No amateur diagnosis. No demands that every senator recite the same approved paragraph.

His public choices provide plenty to discuss.

Explain why this appearance helped the Republican campaign. Challenge the language. Ask what concrete benefit Pennsylvanians received from that particular contribution.

Then…get back to making an affirmative argument for Democratic candidates.

Leave Your Identity Vague, and Somebody Else Will Define It

There is another lesson here, and it is uncomfortable.

A party that leaves its identity vague makes it easier for somebody else to define it.

Democrats need to say what they intend to deliver…who benefits…how they will pay for it…and…what they will fight to protect.

Plainly.

Repeatedly.

With enough conviction that a voter can repeat the argument at the kitchen table.

Fetterman’s party affiliation may remain exactly where it is.

The question raised by that video remains, too:

When Republicans needed help selling their campaign…why did a Democratic senator agree to appear in the pitch?

Now, What I…Jack Hopkins…Personally Think About John Fetterman

Everything above is analysis. Here’s the other thing.

I never really bought it.

Not from the beginning. I wanted to be wrong about him…and…I wanted him to do great things for the Democratic Party.

The hoodie. The gym shorts on the floor of the United States Senate. The studied… cultivated sloppiness…of a man who wanted…very badly…for you to notice how little he cared what you thought.

Understand what actually offended me about it, because it wasn’t fashion.

A suit is not about looking nice. A suit is a statement that the room you’re standing in is more important than you are. That’s all it’s ever been. You put it on to say: this office is bigger than the man temporarily occupying it…and I’m not going to embarrass it.

He wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t do it for the Senate…he wouldn’t do it for Pennsylvania…and he made a point of everybody knowing he wouldn’t.

They called it authenticity.

I called it a costume. Because that’s what it was. Nobody accidentally becomes the guy in shorts. That took work. That took a communications staff. Somebody sat in a meeting and decided the shorts were an asset.

And here’s the part I want you to sit with.

A man who builds his entire identity around refusing to dress for the room…is a man who has told you…out loud…that he’ll do whatever suits him.

So nobody should be shocked by what happened Wednesday.

He showed up on a screen at a Republican convention and said this:

“The extremes and socialism and that anti-American way of life.”

Now. Look at that sentence.

Where’s Braddock? Where’s the guy who doesn’t do scripts? Where’s the plain talk?

That line was built in a lab. Run past a panel. Polished. And…then handed to a speaker who could carry it; and the only reason it was worth handing to him is the letter after his name.

That’s the whole transaction. Not friendship. Not bipartisanship. The letter.

Twenty years constructing a persona..and he rented it out in one recorded video.

Turns out the man who wouldn’t wear a suit for the Senate…will read prepared copy for the other party’s convention.

Now the word itself.

“Anti-American.”

You do not get to be the plain-spoken man of the people and then reach for the vaguest…ugliest…most conveniently unfalsifiable accusation in American politics.

That word has been aimed at labor organizers. Civil rights workers. War protesters. Immigrants. Roughly half the people who ever built anything in this country worth keeping.

And…a man from Braddock, Pennsylvania…knows precisely whose grandfathers got called that…and why.

If he has a specific policy in mind…he’s a United States senator with a microphone…a staff…and a standing invitation from every program in America. He can name it any hour of any day.

He chose not to.

That wasn’t carelessness. The vagueness was the product. Precision doesn’t travel. Vague accusation travels beautifully…because every person watching…gets to fill in whoever they were already angry at.

He knows that. Whatever else anybody says about the man…he has always been very good at knowing exactly how a thing will land.

So what did Pennsylvania get?

That’s my real question and I’d like an answer.

He mentioned steel. Fine. Name the jobs. Show me the provision. Put a number on the table.

Because…from here…it looks like a man traded a testimonial for a working relationship…and sent the bill to his own voters.

And…when it landed exactly the way anyone could have predicted…the answer was: I’m still a Democrat.

Which is a fine answer to a question nobody asked.

It’s the political equivalent of a man carefully explaining that he’s still married…while sitting in somebody else’s kitchen…at eleven o’clock at night…wearing somebody else’s robe.

Nobody asked about the registration. We asked about the commercial.

And here’s what I keep coming back to.

He knew.

He knew what that video was for. He knew who’d cut it into fifteen-second pieces. He knew which markets it would run in and roughly what it would cost to run it there. He knew a Pennsylvania voter…half-watching…would see a Democratic senator standing inside a Republican pitch and would not spend one second parsing the nuance.

That’s not a man who wandered into something. That’s a man who read the room correctly…and walked in anyway.

Same as the shorts.

He’s always known exactly what he was doing. That was never the question.

These, again…are simply my personal opinions of the man. Take them for what you will.

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Back soon.

-Jack
Jack Hopkins

P.S. Watch the tape one more time and notice where he’s standing. In front of a steel mill. That’s not where a man happens to be. Somebody scouted it, somebody set up the shot, and somebody decided the mill said what the words alone wouldn’t. Nobody stumbles into a location. Which tells you everything about how much thought went into the rest of it.

P.P.S. The second the video ended, McCormick took the stage and said, “How great is John Fetterman? Thank you, Senator Fetterman, for your friendship. Thank you for your courage.” That’s the receipt. Fetterman says he was just introducing a friend. His friend immediately converted it into applause for a Republican campaign in front of a Republican audience. One of those two men understood exactly what the transaction was. I’d argue both did.

Sources

Associated Press, Jonathan J. Cooper, “Democratic Sen. Fetterman speaks at a GOP midterm convention, fueling party-switch fears,” Sept. 9, 2026. Via Spotlight PA: https://www.spotlightpa.org/news/2026/09/fetterman-gop-convention-speech-democrats-federal-government

The same AP report via Yahoo News (no paywall): https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/democratic-sen-fetterman-speaks-gop-001125613.html

The Washington Post’s run of the AP story: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/09/09/john-fetterman-gop-republican-convention-video/3ebc0f7c-acac-11f1-b498-8697f35a6743_story.html

FOX 29 Philadelphia, “Fetterman makes surprise appearance at Republican Convention, vows to ‘work with Trump,’” Sept. 9, 2026: https://www.fox29.com/news/fetterman-makes-surprise-appearance-republican-convention-vows-work-trump

An Anthropic Researcher Quit Over AI Extinction Risk. His Safety Chief Publicly Agreed.

The resignation went viral. The endorsement from inside the building is the part that matters–and the reason this may be more fixable than the Cold War ever was.

The Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter #1,020: Wednesday, September 9th, 2026

Yesterday evening, a 27-year-old man named Jacob Coxon posted seven paragraphs to X and blew a hole in the side of the AI industry.

He’d spent three years doing pretraining research. First at OpenAI. Then at Anthropic. Pretraining is the deep end–it’s where these systems actually get built, not where they get marketed.

His first line:

“I resigned from Anthropic today. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”

104 million views. The Wall Street Journal ran it within hours.

Now here’s the part that should stop you cold.

Nobody at Anthropic denied it.

Evan Hubinger–who leads Alignment Science at the company Coxon just walked out of–posted publicly that Coxon is correct.

That they really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans.

That he personally puts it above 10% within the next decade. And that Anthropic does not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and is not clearly on track to.

Samuel Marks, who works on oversight at the same company, backed him too.

Read that again…slowly.

The safety chief…agreed with the guy…who quit over safety.

Why This Beats The Bomb

I lived through the Cold War. I remember the drills. And…I’m telling you this is worse, for three specific reasons.

Nuclear weapons need a human being to say yes.

Every warhead ever built sits inert until a person turns a key. The failure mode requires intent…or, at minimum…catastrophic error by an identifiable someone.

What Coxon is describing needs no one’s permission. He’s warning about systems that improve themselves. Nobody has to decide anything.

Nuclear weapons don’t get smarter.

A 1962 warhead and a 2026 warhead do roughly the same thing. The technology sat still for sixty years while we built treaties around it.

Coxon says he doesn’t have sixty years. He told the Journal it could be out of control by the end of next year. He says his colleagues have started using the words “crunch time” and “endgame” in ordinary conversation.

Nuclear weapons were never a business.

Nobody had a quarterly earnings call about Minuteman deployment. There was no market pressure to enrich uranium faster than a competitor.

Coxon’s most damning line is the one about how the race actually works: the people at Anthropic understand the stakes perfectly well, and race anyway, because they believe nobody else will act responsibly…so they have to get there first.

That’s not villainy. That’s worse than villainy. That’s a trap with smart…sincere people caught inside it…each one racing…because the others are racing.

He called it a hubristic gamble that should not be launched from a private company’s Slack.

I’ve read that sentence twenty times.

Now The Part Nobody Tells You

Here’s where I diverge from every doomsayer you’ve read this week.

This is more solvable than nuclear war ever was. Considerably more.

I’m not being cute. Look at the actual structure of the problem.

Nuclear proliferation was a geopolitical problem. It required Moscow and Washington to trust each other during a period when both had rehearsed each other’s annihilation. It required inspectors on foreign soil. It required adversaries who genuinely wanted each other dead to sit at a table and agree.

This is not that.

The frontier of AI development sits inside a small number of American companies. They speak the same language. They share a labor pool. Their researchers went to the same schools and post on the same website. Coxon himself says he’s optimistic about coordination…that pacing agreements between U.S. labs have become more viable.

And…here’s the thing that makes it winnable.

The workforce is defecting in public.

Coxon didn’t post a quiet LinkedIn update. He named names and torched his career on a Tuesday night. And…instead of being isolated…he got publicly backed by senior people still inside the building.

That is not what a stable industry looks like. That’s what an industry looks like right before it gets regulated…or reforms itself to avoid it.

Nobody ever asked a Soviet missile engineer that question and expected an answer.

What You Do

Not much, alone.

But this is the rare civilizational risk…where public opinion is genuinely upstream of the outcome…because the constraint isn’t physics or geography. It’s whether a few thousand people decide the current arrangement is unacceptable…and whether the public…makes that decision cheap for them.

That’s leverage. Not a lot. But…real, and available now…which is more than the Cold War ever offered anybody.

There’s going to be a great deal of noise about this over the coming months…and most of it will be built to exhaust you rather than inform you. That’s not an accident. An exhausted public is a manageable public.

So I’ll ask you for one thing:

Don’t file this away as another scary headline you survived. Pay attention to what the labs do next…and to whether anyone in Washington treats this as the emergency their own safety people are calling it.

This is the rare one where watching actually counts.

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Back soon.

-Jack
Jack Hopkins

P.S. The single most important fact in this story isn’t the resignation. It’s that the safety lead at the company he left publicly put extinction risk above 10% and said there’s no plan yet. A researcher quitting is a story. His boss agreeing on the way out is something else entirely.

Sources

Jacob Coxon’s resignation thread (primary source):

Mediaite, “Ex-Anthropic Researcher’s Apocalyptic Warning That AI May ‘Kill Us All’ Sends Chills Across the Internet,” Sept. 9, 2026: https://www.mediaite.com/online/ex-anthropic-researchers-apocalyptic-warning-that-ai-may-kill-us-all-sends-chills-across-the-internet/

Deadline, “Anthropic Researcher Jacob Coxon Resigns, Warns AI Industry Is ‘Gambling With Our Lives,’” Sept. 9, 2026: https://deadline.com/2026/09/anthropic-jacob-coxon-resignation-artificial-intelligence-1237072134/

CoinDesk, “Anthropic Researcher Quits With a Warning on AI,” Sept. 9, 2026: https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/09/09/anthropic-researcher-quits-with-a-warning-on-ai-that-echoes-the-terminator-script

Brave New Coin, on the responses from Evan Hubinger and Samuel Marks: https://bravenewcoin.com/insights/openai-anthropic-ai-researcher-resigns-warns-reckless-superintelligence-race-could-threaten-humanity

The Wall Street Journal reported the story the same day, including Coxon’s age, his decision to leave the industry entirely, and his comment that things could be “out of control” by the end of next year.

Author’s Note

Before anything else, the disclosure.

This is a sales pitch. At the bottom there’s a button, and I want you to press it, and it costs $227 a year.

I’m putting that at the top instead of the bottom for a specific reason. This piece is about how interpretation gets slipped into your head after an event, and how you usually don’t notice it happening. I can’t make that case honestly while running the same play on you.

So…read the rest knowing exactly what I want from you. If it still lands…it lands for the right reason. And…if you’d rather not be sold to today…close it now…with my blessing. I’d rather lose the sale than get it sideways. Either way, you’re about to learn something that’s critically important.

Everything You Believe About Stress Is Backwards

Here’s a study most people have never heard of, and it’s going to reorganize your understanding of the last few years.

University College London. Researchers hooked people up and told them they might get an electric shock. They didn’t ask how stressed anybody felt…people lie about that, mostly to themselves. They measured it directly. Pupils. Sweat. The body doesn’t have a PR department.

Stress did not max out when the odds of getting shocked hit 100%.

It maxed out at 50%.

Let that sit there a second.

The people who knew for a fact they were about to get hurt were calmer than the people who didn’t know.

Not a little calmer. Measurably calmer. Physiologically calmer.

Certainty about something bad was easier on the human nervous system than not knowing.

Which means…and pay attention here…because this is the whole ballgame…

The thing grinding you down is not the news. It’s the fog.

Forty Open Tabs

You pick up your phone. Something happened. And you have no idea whether it’s noise or whether it’s the thing.

Again. Third time this week.

And that question doesn’t close. It doesn’t resolve. It just sits there running in the background…eating processing power.

A researcher named Zeigarnik proved this back in the 1920s with restaurant waiters. They remembered unpaid orders perfectly…and forgot them the instant the check cleared. Unfinished business occupies the mind. Finished business doesn’t.

Every unresolved headline is an unpaid check.

You’re not exhausted from the news. You’re exhausted from carrying forty tabs of I don’t know what that meant.

Now Here’s The Part That Should Genuinely Bother You

Elizabeth Loftus spent forty years proving something people hate hearing.

Your memory is not a recording. It’s a reconstruction. And it can be edited after the fact.

Her famous experiment: show people footage of a car wreck. Ask one group how fast the cars were going when they hit. Ask another group how fast when they smashed.

The “smashed” group gave higher speeds. And…a week later…they were more likely to remember broken glass at the scene.

There was no broken glass.

One word. Delivered after the event. Changed what people remembered seeing.

She called it the misinformation effect and demonstrated it every way you can think of.

Now…apply it to your own life.

Something happens. Within ninety seconds…somebody tells you what it meant. A push alert. A headline written by a stranger optimizing for your thumb. Some guy on your feed with a take and a grievance.

And…that framing doesn’t sit politely on top of the facts. It goes into the file. It edits what you remember happening.

So understand your actual situation:

You are not choosing between “informed” and “uninformed.” Something is going to frame every event for you. That…is not optional.

The only question on the table…is whether you picked who does it…or…whether it got picked for you by whoever’s algorithm got there first.

And since Loftus applies to me too…let me put my cards up: I frame things. I have a point of view. Every writer does. The ones who swear they don’t are the ones you should watch hardest.

Difference is, I just told you.

Why Smart People Cut Exactly The Wrong Thing

Two behavioral economists, Mullainathan and Shafir, studied what pressure does to thinking.

Their finding: scarcity hijacks your attention whether you like it or not. It narrows the beam. They call it tunneling.

And tunneling isn’t random. It has a direction.

Under pressure…your attention collapses onto what’s urgent…and drops what’s important.

Read it again: “…and drops what’s important.”

Which is precisely why…when money gets tight…people cancel the thing that would have helped them…and keep the thing that comforts them Tuesday night.

Not because they’re dumb. Because that’s what a loaded-up mind does. Every time. Predictably.

Then stack Kahneman and Tversky on top: losses feel roughly twice as heavy as equivalent gains. So $227 leaving your account lands about twice as hard as $227 of value arriving.

Your math isn’t broken. Your weighting is. And…it’s broken in one specific direction that has nothing whatsoever to do with whether the thing is worth the money.

That’s not a character defect. That’s a factory setting. But you can only correct for a setting you know is running.

Now Let Me Say What Nobody Else Selling You Anything Will Say

Cut.

Cut hard. Cut this week. I’m serious.

Software you never open. Subscriptions you scroll past. Memberships that have produced exactly nothing you can point at. Kill all of it. Today. Before you finish this page if you want.

I am not going to stand here and tell you that trimming expenses is bad for you. It isn’t. That’s a lie…and you’d be right to distrust anyone who tells it to you. Having slack in your finances is one of the most reliable things we know about how people actually feel about money.

But there’s a difference between cutting with a knife…and cutting with a lawnmower.

The lawnmower is what wrecks you. And here’s the mechanism.

Your Nervous System Is Watching You

When you cut everything indiscriminately, you’re not deciding. You’re bracing.

And you’re watching yourself do it.

Daryl Bem demonstrated in the 1960s that people infer their beliefs from their behavior…not the reverse. You watch yourself act and you reason backward: I guess I’m the kind of person who thinks this.

Behave like someone with no moves left…and you will conclude you have no moves left. The passivity quits being a response to the situation and becomes the situation.

Cutting three things to fund one thing is the opposite signal entirely.

That’s judgment. And judgment…means your hands are still on the wheel.

The Study Whose Own Authors Reversed It

Seligman and Maier ran the original learned helplessness experiments in the sixties.

You know the summary: expose a creature to stress it can’t control…and it stops trying.

What almost nobody knows is that in 2016…after fifty years and a pile of neuroscience, they went back and reversed their own conclusion.

Giving up isn’t learned.

Giving up is the default.

What has to be learned is control. And they found the wiring: your prefrontal cortex scans for evidence…that your actions change outcomes. When it finds that evidence…it reaches down and shuts off the stress response at the brainstem.

Read that one more time.

Your brain does not calm down when things get better. Your brain calms down…when it detects that what you do matters.

So Here’s What You’re Actually Buying

Every few days something happens that you have to make sense of by yourself.

A ruling. A firing. A norm breaking quietly while everybody’s arguing about something else.

And…you’ve got about four seconds…the length of a scroll…to decide whether it’s noise or whether it’s the thing.

Jack Hopkins Now is what turns that guess into a read.

That’s the product. That’s all of it.

I’m not going to tell you what’s coming. Nobody honest can…and anybody claiming otherwise is selling you certainty out of an empty warehouse.

What I’ll tell you is what you’re looking at.

James Pennebaker spent his career showing that putting coherent structure on a difficult experience measurably reduces distress, and does it…even when the experience itself doesn’t change one inch. Naming a thing accurately is regulating…all by itself.

That’s the job. Several times a week. Calm, clear, and without the adrenaline surcharge every other outlet is quietly billing you for.

$227 A Year

Sixty-two cents a day.

I’m not going to insult you with the coffee comparison. You’re an adult, and you can do division.

The Only Question That Matters

Do not ask yourself whether you can afford it.

That’s the tunneling talking…and Mullainathan and Shafir will tell you that question answers itself before you’ve finished asking it.

Ask this instead:

Over the next twelve months…do I want to be making sense of all this by myself…or not?

If the answer is by yourself…close the tab. I mean it. I’d rather lose the sale than take money from somebody who’s going to resent it every month.

But if you’ve been hauling around forty open tabs of I don’t know what that meant…and you’re tired…and you’d like somebody to close a few of them every week without screaming at you first…

You already know what to do with the sixty-two cents.

No hard sell. You’ve got the facts and the button.

-Jack

Jack Hopkins

P.S. If you scrolled straight down here, the short version: research on stress shows uncertainty is harder on your nervous system than bad news. That's why you're tired. This newsletter closes the gap between something happening and you knowing what it was, several times a week. $199 for the year. Fifty-five cents a day.

P.P.S. If you're hesitating, it probably isn't the money. It's that you've subscribed to things before and never read them. Fair. So here's my actual promise: I'm not going to fill your inbox to justify the price. You'll get pieces worth your time, and nothing else. If that's not how it goes, you know where the cancel button is, and I won't make you hunt for it.

Sources

de Berker, A. O., et al. (2016). “Computations of uncertainty mediate acute stress responses in humans.” Nature Communications, 7, 10996. https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms10996 (free, full text)

Loftus, E. F., & Palmer, J. C. (1974). “Reconstruction of automobile destruction: An example of the interaction between language and memory.” Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 13, 585–589. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5371(74)80011-3

Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk.” Econometrica, 47(2), 263–291. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1914185 — free copy on Kahneman’s Princeton page: https://kahneman.scholar.princeton.edu/document/11

Maier, S. F., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2016). “Learned helplessness at fifty: Insights from neuroscience.” Psychological Review, 123(4), 349–367. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000033 — also listed at Penn’s Positive Psychology Center: https://ppc.sas.upenn.edu/research/learned-helplessness

Mullainathan, S., & Shafir, E. (2013). Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. Times Books.

Zeigarnik, B. (1927). “Das Behalten erledigter und unerledigter Handlungen.” Psychologische Forschung, 9, 1–85.

Bem, D. J. (1967). “Self-perception: An alternative interpretation of cognitive dissonance phenomena.” Psychological Review, 74(3), 183–200.

Pennebaker, J. W. Expressive writing and health outcomes; see Opening Up by Writing It Down (Pennebaker & Smyth, 3rd ed., 2016) for the accessible summary of this body of work.

The Story He Cannot Stop Telling

Two firemen. No names. No record. Twenty-five years.

The Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter #1,019: Tuesday, September 8th, 2026.

This morning, on the Ellipse, at an event honoring first responders three days before the twenty-fifth anniversary, the President of the United States told a story about himself.

He said he brought his whole construction crew downtown right after the attacks. He said the U.S. Steel Building was creaking, and everyone thought it was going to come down.

And then…he said this. Two firemen…big strong guys…grabbed him under the arms. Told him they had to get out of there. Lifted him up off the ground and ran with him.

I want to be careful here…so…let me get the honest part out of the way before I go any further.

What I Cannot Tell You

I cannot tell you this didn’t happen.

Nobody can. That was the most chaotic scene in modern American history, and a thousand things happened downtown that week that nobody wrote down.

I’ll go further. Outlets are already calling this a brand new claim…and that’s wrong. He told a version at a rally in 2016 and again to Newsmax in 2021. If you write that he invented it this morning…you’ll be corrected…and you’ll deserve it.

He was also, verifiably, downtown. Television crews interviewed him near the site on September 13th.

So…here’s the whole evidentiary picture. He has told this for at least ten years. He has never named the two firemen. There is no photograph, no video, no emergency record, and no first responder who has ever come forward to say he was one of the two.

Not proof of a lie. Just a decade-old story…nobody has ever been able to stand up.

What Concerns Me Isn’t The Lie

And I want to be plain about this, because the mockery is already everywhere and…for JHN…I don’t think the mockery is the point.

What concerns me is the shape of it.

Think about what you’d have to be…on the inside…to stand at a memorial for first responders and reach for a story where the responders’ courage got spent on you.

There were people actually pulled out of that rubble. Real ones. Some are still alive. There were men who died going in after them…and their widows and children are still alive too…and a lot of them…will be standing somewhere on Friday morning.

That’s whose day it is. That’s whose story the podium was built for.

He took a piece of it. Not much. Just enough for two firemen and a running start.

A memorial is one of the few places left where the whole point is that it isn’t about you. That’s the entire function. And he…cannot do it.

And It’s Growing

Here’s the part that keeps me up…thinking.

This story isn’t fading the way false memories usually do. It’s hardening. 2016. 2021. This morning. Each time with a little more detail…a little more certainty in the delivery.

That’s not how an embellishment behaves. Embellishments get quietly dropped when nobody bites. This one…is being rehearsed.

And…look at what surrounds it. On the day itself, in 2001…his documented reaction was to observe that his building…was now the tallest in downtown Manhattan.

That’s the bookend. The tallest building on the day. Carried out of the rubble twenty-five years later.

Same instinct, both times. Find the place in the disaster where he’s the subject of the sentence.

What This Actually Means

Some of you will say this is small.

A man tells a flattering story about himself. Politicians do it constantly.

But…a person who cannot leave a memorial alone…is a person who cannot subordinate himself to anything. Not to grief. Not to three hundred forty-three dead men. Not to one afternoon…that was supposed to belong to somebody else.

And a person like that…behaves the same way about a court order. About an election result. About…a war.

Same muscle. You’re just watching it work on something small enough…to see clearly.

One Thing I’m Asking

On Friday, do this.

Go find one name. Just one, out of the three hundred forty-three. Read what they did that morning…and how old they were…and who they left behind.

Then…say that name out loud, once…wherever you happen to be standing.

That’s not a gesture. That’s the correction. Every minute we spend on his story is a minute not spent on theirs…and I think he’d be perfectly happy with that trade.

Let’s not give it to him.

Subscribe now

#HoldFast

-Jack

Jack Hopkins

P.S. Ten years of telling it, and he has never named the two men. Sit with that. If two firefighters had carried a future President out of danger on the worst day of their lives…we would know their names.

Their houses would know. Their families would have told it at every Thanksgiving for twenty-five years. There’s no version of this world where those two men stay quiet. That isn’t proof of anything. It’s just the loudest silence in the whole story.

Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff, and Russian presidential envoy Kirill Dmitriev.

The Kremlin Announced It. We Called It A Rumor.

What Moscow said out loud last Saturday night

The Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter #1,018: Monday, September 7th, 2026.

Let’s be adults about this for eight minutes.

You have been trained by fifty years of American political scandal to wait for the reveal. The tape. The memo. The whistleblower. Some brave soul walks out of a building with a folder and everything changes.

That instinct is now…a liability. It is the single most effective thing working against you.

Because nobody is hiding this. And a thing that isn’t hidden can’t be exposed.

Here’s what happened last Saturday…and I want you to notice who told us.

The Russians Announced It

September 5th. Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner land at Vnukovo airport in Moscow.

Waiting for them is Kirill Dmitriev, head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund and Putin’s special envoy for economic affairs.

Dmitriev posts video of the arrival on X with the caption “Welcome to Moscow, peacemakers.”

The three of them…then sit down to a business lunch…that runs about three and a half hours. Then Witkoff and Kushner go to the Kremlin and spend another three hours with Putin.

Read that again. The Kremlin volunteered that. Nobody pried it out of anybody.

(Go ahead…tell me which favorite news host/anchor you’ve heard this story from. I’ll wait. It seems no one wants to connect the dots on stories like this.)

And…one more detail that almost every outlet who at least wrote about it… buried in paragraph nine: the American delegation included officials from Treasury.

Treasury does not attend ceasefire talks to discuss lines on a map. Treasury attends to discuss sanctions.

So…there’s your negotiation, announced by both sides…in public…within hours. Peace terms on one side of the table. Money…on the other.

Now, The Caveats, Up Front

Once again…I’m not going to bury these where nobody reads them.

Real things happened.

Putin ordered a three-day halt on strikes against Kyiv. Ukraine reciprocated. Robert Gilman came home from Russian custody last month. Those are not nothing…and…if you can’t say so…you’re not analyzing…you’re rooting.

Back channels are normal.

Kissinger built a career on private conversations with people Americans despised. The existence of a channel is not the scandal.

And I have no evidence of a specific deal.

None. I’m not going to tell you Kushner sat in that room and cut terms for his own fund….because…I can’t demonstrate it…and…right now, neither can anybody else.

The kompromat theory has been kicking around for a decade without producing a document. So, for newsletter/article purposes…I’m leaving both of those alone.

The problem, however… is worse than either, and it’s fully disclosed.

The Man In The Room Is A Fund Manager

Jared Kushner runs Affinity Partners. Roughly $6.16 billion under management.

Approximately 99 percent of it foreign money. Two billion dollars from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund…plus fees from Qatar and the UAE.

He never divested. He is collecting management fees from foreign governments…while negotiating American foreign policy with a foreign government.

He also promised, in December 2024…that he’d preemptively avoid conflicts and wouldn’t raise capital during his father-in-law’s term. He did both anyway.

Robert Garcia and Ron Wyden sent Affinity a demand letter in March raising Foreign Agents Registration Act questions.

Those letters are on House committee servers right now. You can download them.

The old scandals required concealment…because concealment implied shame…and shame…implied a rule. Stop hiding…and you retire the rule.

Yeah…go ahead. Sit with that one for a minute. Now…here’s something even more mind-jarring.

Why Open Works Better Than Hidden

This is the part I actually want you to take away…and it’s a marketing lesson before it’s a political one.

Concealment is expensive. It requires operational security…loyal people…and the permanent risk…that one of them gets a conscience. Every hidden thing carries a detonation date.

Disclosure costs nothing. And…it comes with a defense…so effective…it’s almost unfair:

“That’s already been reported.”

Try running a story about a $6 billion fund with 99 percent foreign backing and see how far it gets. An editor will tell you it’s from March. A cable producer will tell you it’s priced in.

The accusation lands with the impact of a weather report…because news requires novelty…and novelty requires a secret.

(Write the last half of the last sentence down. Or, at least sear it into your memory. It will serve as a useful guide the rest of your life. I promise: because news requires novelty…and novelty requires a secret.)

That’s the machinery. Not a cover-up. The opposite of a cover-up, used as a cover-up.

Dmitriev understands it perfectly. That’s why he posted the video himself. He isn’t leaking. He’s advertising.

Five Things To Watch, And They’re All Checkable

Stop waiting for the reveal. Start keeping score.

When the package gets announced in the coming weeks…here is what tells you what actually happened in that room.

One.

Is sanctions relief conditioned on verified Russian compliance…or does it come first?

Two.

Does RDIF, Dmitriev’s own sanctioned fund…get delisted?

Three.

What happens to the roughly $300 billion in frozen Russian sovereign assets? Toward Ukrainian reconstruction…or back toward Moscow?

Four.

Does Ukraine get enforceable security guarantees…which Zelensky has insisted on…or just a pause in the shooting?

Five.

Over the next eighteen months, does Affinity…or any of its portfolio companies…touch Russian-linked capital?

Every one of those is verifiable from public filings and public announcements. No folder required. No brave soul walking out of a building.

One Thing I’m Asking

Pick number two.

Bookmark the Treasury Department’s OFAC sanctions list. When the deal gets announced…check whether the Russian Direct Investment Fund is still on it.

That’s it. One list…one name.

If RDIF comes off, you will know what was traded, and you will know it before any newsroom writes the sentence.

#HoldFast

Back soon.

-Jack

Jack Hopkins

P.S. Notice what the Kremlin has never once done in this whole affair. Deny anything. Ushakov didn’t dodge the economic question…he answered it. Dmitriev didn’t avoid the cameras…he brought his own.

When your adversary stops bothering to lie to you… that is not a sign that things are improving. It’s a sign that he no longer believes lying is necessary.

P.P.S. Here’s the test I’d apply to anything you read about this…including what I just wrote. If a claim requires a document nobody has…set it down. If it requires only a filing anybody can pull…pick it up.

Almost everything that matters here is in the second category…which means the reporting is already done…and the arguing is what’s left. Don’t let anyone convince you…that you need a secret to be certain.

Sources

The Moscow meeting

• Kremlin.ru — official transcript of Putin’s meeting with Witkoff and Kushner, Sept. 5, 2026 — the primary source, published by the Russian government

• NPR — “Witkoff and Kushner call Kyiv talks ‘substantive’ after Moscow Putin meeting” — Ushakov’s comments on economic ventures

• Kyiv Independent — “US envoys Witkoff, Kushner conclude over 3-hour talks with Putin” — the Dmitriev airport greeting, the business lunch, and the “coming weeks” statement

• ABC News — “Witkoff, Kushner meet with Putin to discuss Ukraine war” — confirms NSC, State and Treasury officials in the delegation

• CBS News — “Trump’s envoys Witkoff and Kushner visit Moscow” — the three-day pause on strikes against the capitals

• Washington Post — “U.S. envoys meet Putin in Moscow, pressing Russia-Ukraine peace talks” — context on the eight-month freeze in negotiations

The conflicts of interest

• Rep. Raskin’s April 16, 2026 letter to Kushner (PDF) — the primary document, including the December 2024 pledge

• House Judiciary Democrats — “Raskin Opens Sweeping Investigation into Jared Kushner’s Foreign Entanglements” — the $6.16 billion figure and the 99 percent foreign funding

• Garcia and Wyden letter to Affinity Partners, March 19, 2026 (PDF) — the FARA questions

• SEC — A Fin Management LLC Form ADV filing — Affinity’s own registration disclosures

Dmitriev and the economic channel

• Kyiv Independent — “How a trio of power brokers turned Putin’s US strategy into a quiet turf war” — Dmitriev’s mandate to trade joint ventures for a favorable peace deal

• U.S. Treasury — OFAC Specially Designated Nationals list — check RDIF here when the deal is announced

Another Problem With Billionaires: Nobody In Texas Is Funding Ken Paxton

Except the richest man in the world

The Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter #1,017: Sunday, September 6th, 2026

I want to walk you through a sequence of events. Take them in order, because the order is the whole thing.

November 20, 2023. Media Matters publishes a report saying ads for major brands were showing up next to pro-Nazi content on X. Advertisers start walking. Apple. Disney. IBM.

That same day, Elon Musk sues them.

And within hours, the Attorney General of Texas announces an investigation into the same organization.

Not into X. Into the group that wrote about X.

Ken Paxton called them a radical anti-free speech organization…and said he’d look at whether they’d defrauded consumers. Musk applauded the probe publicly.

In May 2025…a federal appeals court panel upheld an injunction blocking that investigation. The panel described the evidence that Paxton had retaliated against the group for its reporting as uncontested.

Uncontested. That’s a court’s word…not mine.

Now…here’s the part from this week.

Ken Paxton is the Republican nominee for United States Senate in Texas. And…Elon Musk’s America PAC just spent about $248,000 on his race. Roughly $125,000 boosting Paxton…about $123,000 attacking his opponent, James Talarico.

It was America PAC’s first spending of the entire year. Texas got the largest share of any state in the country.

Let Me Argue Against Myself First

I’m not going to pretend this is simpler than it is.

Talarico has more money.

A lot more. He’s raised roughly $72 million this cycle to Paxton’s $16.8 million. If your objection is that too much money is flooding this race… the larger pile is currently on the Democratic side.

The amount is small.

A quarter million dollars is a rounding error in a Texas Senate race. Musk spends that on lunch. This isn’t the story because of the sum.

And…Paxton has never been convicted of anything.

The Texas House impeached him in 2023. The Texas Senate acquitted him. His decade-old securities fraud charges were resolved through a pretrial diversion agreement…and dismissed. He is entitled to every bit of that, and I’m not going to write around it.

So…why does this matter?

Because Of What The Money Is Doing

Here’s the number that tells you everything.

As of August 20, Talarico’s campaign had spent more than $25 million on advertising since the general election began.

Paxton’s campaign had spent $119,000.

Read that again. Not $119 million. Not $11.9 million. One hundred nineteen thousand dollars, in Texas…in a Senate race…over roughly three months.

Ken Paxton is not being funded by Texas Republicans. He raised $16.8 million in the second-largest state in the country as the sitting Attorney General…with the President’s endorsement. In modern Senate terms…that’s nothing.

His own side looked at him and mostly kept their wallets closed. That’s a signal. It’s the clearest signal a party’s donors can send.

And…Musk’s money exists to cancel it.

Billionaire money doesn’t just amplify a candidate. It overrides the verdict everybody else already reached.

That’s the part people miss when they argue about campaign finance. We talk about it… like it’s a volume knob…like rich donors make loud candidates…louder. That’s not what’s happening here.

What’s happening here…is that a man his own party wouldn’t finance…gets kept upright by an outside checkbook. The market spoke. One guy….has enough money to buy the market a new opinion.

Musk reportedly authorized his PAC to spend north of $100 million this cycle. He met with Speaker Mike Johnson on Monday. The $248,000 isn’t the investment. It’s the receipt…for the first shipment.

Now The Paxton Part

Set the money aside and look at the man being purchased into a Senate seat.

Paxton’s impeachment wasn’t brought by Democrats. The Texas House that impeached him…was controlled by Republicans…and it voted overwhelmingly.

The whistleblowers weren’t opposition researchers. They were eight…of his own senior deputies…who went to the FBI about their boss.

He was acquitted. Fine. But…understand what his own people believed about him strongly enough…to torch their careers over.

And then look at the Media Matters episode again…because that’s the one that actually matters for a Senate seat.

That wasn’t corruption in the ordinary sense. Nobody handed him a bag of cash. It was something more useful to a billionaire: a public official who pointed the legal machinery of a state government…at somebody who wrote an unflattering story about a company he liked.

That is the qualification. Not the scandal. The qualification.

Now…move that man from Attorney General of one state…to United States Senator…where he gets confirmation votes on federal judges…subpoena power…and a seat at the table on every regulatory question that touches Tesla…SpaceX and X…all three of which are headquartered in Texas.

The relationship doesn’t end when he changes offices. It gets a bigger jurisdiction.

One Thing I’m Asking

Don’t share the outrage. Share the two numbers.

Twenty-five million dollars versus one hundred nineteen thousand dollars. That’s what a candidate’s own supporters were willing to spend on him…against what his opponent’s were.

Send that to somebody in Texas. Not a political junkie. Somebody who votes and doesn’t follow this closely, and who might assume Paxton has broad support because he’s on their television constantly this month.

He doesn’t. He has one donor…with a lot of money…and a specific interest in who becomes senator.

That’s a very different thing…and most people…don’t know it yet.

Subscribe now

#HoldFast

Back soon.

-Jack
Jack Hopkins

P.S. Notice where the money went. All of America PAC’s disclosed spending was earmarked for printing. Mailers…yard signs…flyers. Not television. Printing doesn’t move a poll in a state of thirty million people. Printing tests logistics…builds lists…and proves out a distribution operation. Nobody spends a quarter million dollars on flyers as the finish. You spend it as the rehearsal.

Sources

The spending

• Texas Tribune — “Elon Musk’s super PAC starts spending to boost Ken Paxton in Texas” — the $248,000 figure, the “printing” earmark, the fundraising totals, and the polling note

• CNBC — “Elon Musk starts spending his midterm election millions, revealing his key Senate targets” — the $800,475 total, the 90%-to-Senate breakdown, the AdImpact ad-spending comparison, and the Mike Johnson meeting

• Fox News — “Musk picks his first GOP warriors as a 2026 money surge takes shape” — the Aug. 19–31 window and the $125,000 / $123,000 support-versus-oppose split

• Federal Election Commission — America PAC independent expenditure filings — the primary source; search independent expenditures for the underlying line items

The Media Matters investigation

• Texas Tribune — “Ken Paxton announces investigation of Media Matters following Elon Musk’s lawsuit” — the same-day timeline and Paxton’s statement

• NBC News — “Media Matters sues Texas attorney general over response to Elon Musk dispute” — the First Amendment retaliation claim and Musk’s public response to the probe

• Courthouse News — “DC Circuit shuts down Texas probe over Media Matters roast of Elon Musk” — the May 2025 panel decision and the “uncontested evidence” finding

Paxton’s record

• Texas House Committee on General Investigating — articles of impeachment — the official record of the May 2023 impeachment; the Texas Legislature Online archive carries the roll call

• Texas Tribune — Ken Paxton topic archive — the whistleblower complaint, the impeachment trial and acquittal, and the securities fraud resolution, in one place.

The Other Epstein Investigation

Elite task force, five years, not one indictment

The Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter #1,016: Friday, September 4th, 2026

There is a 69-page document sitting on a Justice Depa…

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Someone Has to Go First

BEDROCK–Friday, September 4th, 2026. We close the week strong. And I give you the secret that makes your one small brave act matter more than you can see.

Seven weeks. Let me give you the secret I saved for the end of this one.

All week we’ve talked about courage…how it’s not the absence of fear…how you build it one rung at a time. And…I know the quiet voice some of you have been carrying: even if I find some courage, I’m just one person. What does my one brave act actually change?

Today I answer that. And the answer might be the most important thing I’ve told you all season.

Your courage is not just for you.

Read more

Pam Bondi’s Three Simple Steps

The third request had nothing to do with immigration

The Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter #1,015: Thursday, September 3rd, 2026

Hold two facts in your head. Just two.

On Saturda…

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The Ladder: How to Build Courage One Rung at a Time

BEDROCK–Wednesday, September 2nd, 2026. The standalone cornerstone. Free for everyone–read it, use it, and send it to someone who keeps talking themselves out of it.

On Monday I told you the truth that changes everything: courage isn’t the absence of fear. It’s action in the presence of it. And it isn’t a trait you were born with or without…it’s a muscle.

Today I hand you the way to build it.

Because here’s the good news about a muscle: anyone can build one. You don’t have to be born strong. You start where you are…and you add a little weight over time. Courage works exactly the same way. I call it the Ladder.

Read more

The Cabal Isn’t Secret. And That’s the Part That Should Bother You.

Everybody wants a smoke-filled room. Nobody wants to read the disclosure form.

The Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter #1,014: Wednesday, Sep…

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Sen.Richard Blumenthal.

Authors Note:

A note before we start. If you get near the end of this and think you’ve read it before…the same list, the same four steps…the same drive to the same drop box…you …

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Brave Was Never a Feeling

BEDROCK–Monday, August 31st, 2026. We set the foundation for the week. And we correct the belief that’s been keeping you quiet.

Last week we did something big. We took the body back. You learned to calm the fear; breathe it down…move it through…reset the whole nervous system.

So this week…the natural next question. And…I have to be straight with you about it:

You are never going to make fear disappear completely. And you shouldn’t even want to.

Let me show you why that’s good news.

Read more

Read more

U.S. Strategic Command’s Command and Control Facility at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska–the nerve center of America’s nuclear command system. U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Ian Hoachlander/DVIDS…

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Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon.

The Canary in Wyoming

What the reddest state just told us about November

The Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter #1,011: Friday, August 28th, 2026

The smallest election story of the…

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The Ground You Stand On

BEDROCK–Friday, August 28th, 2026. We close the week strong. And we take apart the guilt that keeps you from caring for the one thing everything depends on.

Six weeks in. Let me tell you what this week was really about.

All week we talked about the body. Breath. Movement. Sleep. The nervous system. The physical foundation sitting underneath everything else we’ve built.

And…I know that…for some of you…a voice pushed back the whole time. A voice that said: with everything happening in the world…I should be doing more important things than breathing exercises and getting to bed on time. Taking care of myself right now feels selfish.

Today…I want to take that voice apart. Because it has things exactly…completely backwards.

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Pay CLOSE Attention: They Don’t Reject Your Ballot. They Reject The Pallet.

What happened this week, explained the way somebody would explain it on a loading dock

The Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter #1,010…

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