OUR PICKSThe H-1B Visa Fiasco Is Accelerating America’s Decline | “SIM Farms” Are a Spam Plague | Reforming Radiation Standards to Unlock Nuclear Energy’s Full Potential, and more

The H-1B Visa Fiasco Is Accelerating America’s Decline  (Howard W. French, Foreign Policy)
Trump’s new $100,000 fee for high-skilled workers is another nail in the coffin for U.S. prosperity.

Nick Fuentes’ Plan to Conquer America  (David Gilbert, Wired)
For years, influencer Nick Fuentes was too extreme even for MAGA. Now he’s working his way into the mainstream—and has a plan for his secret followers to seize the levers of power.

Trump Turns Biden’s TikTok Law into a Big Win  (Drew Harwell and Eva Dou, Washington Post)
When President Joe Biden signed a law last year forcing the sale of TikTok, top Democrats and China hawks heralded it as a triumph. Four years earlier, Donald Trump tried and failed during his first term in the White House to push through a similar measure, but the Biden administration worked aggressively with Congress to craft a law officials said would sever all risks of political influence from China, where TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, is based.
Now, some critics of an extraordinary deal to spin off a U.S. version of TikTok say that effort has backfired. The app’s recommendation algorithm will remain in ByteDance’s hands under the proposal, undermining one of the Biden team’s central justifications for the law. TikTok’s new owners are likely to include corporate interests tied to some of Trump’s most prominent backers, including Larry Ellison, Jeff Yass and Rupert Murdoch, who some fear could exert their own political influence. China even eked out its own kind of win in the process, hitching the company to broader negotiations with the United States regarding concessions on tariffs and trade.

“SIM Farms” Are a Spam Plague. A Giant One in New York Threatened US Infrastructure, Feds Say  (Andy Greenberg, Lily Hay Newman, and Matt Burgess, Wired)
The agency says it found a network of some 300 servers and 100,000 SIM cards—enough to knock out cell service in the NYC area. Experts say it mirrors facilities typically used for cybercrime.

Trump, Kimmel and the Upside of Ignoring Big-Government Coercion  (George F. Will, Washington Post)
The Trump administration is exuberantly public about its censorship aspirations. They are connected only to its ambitious agenda to curate American culture to the liking of the president and his epigones.
Fortunately, Brendan Carr, President Donald Trump’s choice to chair the Federal Communications Commission, is a person of helpful coarseness. The law empowering the FCC to require that broadcasters operate in “the public interest” assumes two things that Carr demonstrates cannot be assumed:
That vague terms such as “the public interest,” allowing vast discretion to those construing them, will not be twisted for partisan purposes. And that the Senate will not confirm presidential toadies to positions where they can infuse unintended meanings into statutory language. If someday some defibrillator restores Congress’s heartbeat, the legislators might legislate about this.

Reforming Radiation Standards to Unlock Nuclear Energy’s Full Potential  (Nick Loris, National Interest)
Outdated radiation standards drive costs and public fear, stalling nuclear innovation. Science-based reforms could unlock advanced reactors and secure US energy leadership.