The Maria Bartiromo Flap

NEW: The Maria Bartiromo backstory, per multiple sources familiar....

Maria Bartiromo wanted to pursue a story related to China and 2020 election voting conspiracies... a major sensitivity for the network given its Dominion and Smartmatic lawsuits.

A Fox Business executive sent…

— Dylan Byers (@DylanByers) September 3, 2026

One of the sponsors to Bruce Rivers's often-hilarious Criminal Lawyer Reacts YouTube Channel is Askalawyer.com. For $50 a month, you can get an AI answer, assisted by a real attorney, to your legal questions, and depending on your business, it could be a real bargain. But Rivers often plugs it when discussing some bizarre arrests and convictions, saying "For $50 a month, he could have used Askalawyer.com to find out if it's OK to rob a bank." Somehow, I get this feeling about Maria Bartiromo.

I don't subscribe to Askalawyer.com -- I'm married to a retired attorney who can just as easily explain why I shouldn't rob a bank -- but I did ask Chrome AI mode, "I want to release a text I got from my boss without going through corporate PR. Is there a potentisal downside?" It answered,

Yes, releasing a text from your boss without going through corporate PR carries massive potential downsides, including immediate termination, legal exposure, and long-term career damage. Going rogue and bypassing your company’s established communication channels means losing the protection of the organization and exposing yourself to personal liability.

According to AOL,

Bartiromo, fifty-eight years old, has since retained Bryan Freedman. Bryan is a Hollywood attorney who has represented the likes of Tucker Carlson, Don Lemon, and Megyn Kelly following their own exits from major media employers.

For $50 a month, she could have asked Askalawyer.com if it was a good idea to send a copy of rhe message from her boss to the White House and avoided the need to pay millions to Bryan Freedman. I think we can be pretty sure that a non-disclosure and non-disparagement clause were both in her contract -- again, for $50 a month, she could have asked Askalawyer.com if either was a good idea. Now she's gotta pay Bryan Freedman to try to fix this.

Here's another reaction:

Maria Bartiromo has learned a lesson that others at Fox News have learned over the years: the patience of the Murdochs is not unlimited, and while they may be conservative and align with Trump in many areas, their ultimate loyalty is only to themselves and their own interests.… pic.twitter.com/x04YfdZG6E

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) September 4, 2026

Sundance at Conservative Treehouse has another insightful reaction:

Maria Bartiromo became increasingly popular amid the MAGA base during the research and revelations surrounding the ‘Spygate’ and ‘Russiagate’ storyline. Bartiromo often had several guests on her Sunday Morning Futures program that highlighted evidence of the corruption in the DOJ, FBI and U.S Intelligence Community. However, it also became more visible that Bartiromo was navigating between sensitive topics that often ran counter to the professional republican class interests in Washington DC.

Over the past few years Bartiromo softened her focus toward corrupt endeavors and began staying away from the most controversial aspects of how the structures of government operate. In a time when nearly all U.S. institutional credibility has crumbled, Bartiromo found herself in that awkward spot where you try to act like you’re not noticing the moment in the show when the marionette strings become visible.

. . . There is always that moment of choice, that time when your influence and affluence no longer run in alignment with uncomfortable truth. It’s a strange dynamic to watch unfold and even more strange when your proximity to the person gives you a different perspective than the average.

Bartiromo did as much as she could, until she couldn’t.

The problem I see is that like it or not, she's voluntarily gotten into the same boat as Tucker Carlson, Don Lemon, and Megyn Kelly, which is to say that her ego may have taken over. We didn't normally think of her in that same media-narcissist ctegory, but maybe we just didn't know her well enough. The problem for anyone in her income bracket -- the AOL link estimates her net worth at $50 million and her annual salary at Fox at $10 million -- is that she's being paid to be a team player. If she no longer wants to be on the team, she really ought to keep her mouth shut and be grateful for what she's had.

Sometimes well-known journalists with reputations for integrity, like Catherine Herridge, find themselves in personnel actions that may raise questions about the reasons for their leaving a network, although Herridge left Foz simply because her contract expired, and she left CBS as part of a larger downsizing. Maria Bartiromo doesn't seem to be quite in Herridge's league, and like Tucker Carlson, Don Lemon, and Megyn Kelly, she'd gotten rich as a team player before her eventual high-profile departure.

The Foreign Policy Establishmen Looks At Canada, Comes Up Short

After I made yesterday's post, I was still left with the question of what the US alternatives would be if Canada made some sort of move toward a military alliance with Russia or China. The closest I came to anything like an answer was this paper from last June at the Stimson Institute, When Formal Alliances Stop Doing Political Work: The Canada-US Alliance in Crisis. Reading it, I found the usual gas clouds of conventionial wisdom, so I asked the AI oracle, "Is the Stimson Center part of the foreign policy establishment?" It replied,

Yes, the Stimson Center is widely considered part of the Washington foreign policy establishment. Founded in 1989 and named after the legendary bipartisan statesman Henry L. Stimson, the Stimson Center operates at the core of mainstream international relations. It is routinely ranked among the top think tanks in the United States, actively advising government agencies, educating Congress, and shaping conventional wisdom on global security. [emphasis mine]

Apparently conventional wisdom is regarded as a good thing within the foreign policy establishment. Here's basically what the piece says:

By 2014, Ottawa was devoting roughly one percent of GDP to defense, half the NATO obligation it reaffirmed that same year at the Wales Summit. As recently as 2024, Justin Trudeau was dismissing the two-percent target as a “crass mathematical calculation” that missed the point of what Canada contributed. It was a defensible argument, made indefensible by the fact that Canada wasn’t contributing much of anything to compensate.

Mark Carney changed that fast. His government hit two percent in fiscal 2025-26 — the first time since the Cold War ended — with a spending surge his government called the largest since the Korean War, and committed to NATO’s new five-percent target by 2035. More than the numbers, he changed the language, telling Canadians the country could no longer assume the United States would defend it and had to invest in its own capacity to “control its own destiny.”

. . . Then Carney traveled to Beijing in January 2026, and this is where the trouble compounded. During his visit, Carney announced what his government called a “new strategic partnership” with Xi Jinping — the first such meeting between Canadian and Chinese heads of state in eight years.

. . . So, to recap: Canada did everything Washington had demanded for years on spending and then announced a partnership with America’s principal competitor. And, on top of that, Canada’s leader gave a speech Washington read as filing the United States under hegemonic threat alongside China. The suspension of the Permanent Joint Board on Defense followed. Whether or not the reading was fair, it is the one that mattered, and it drained what was left of Washington’s trust in the compact.

Here the limit of Canada’s skating room becomes the point. Carney can describe Canada as a middle power maneuvering between larger ones. But, in addition to drawing on a certain nostalgia for a bygone era when Canada claimed to be a “middle power” that routinely punched above its weight in global affairs, this vocabulary is borrowed from states whose geography lets them use it.

. . . The UAE, for example, practices that kind of multi-alignment — leaning on Washington for security while deepening economic ties to Beijing — because no treaty binds Abu Dhabi to the United States. Canada does not realistically have that option. It can argue with Washington, but it cannot behave as though it stands outside the continental defense system it helps operate. That is what distinguishes Ottawa from Abu Dhabi and Mexico City, and what will ultimately make the middle-power rhetoric impossible for the Carney government and its successors to translate into meaningful defense policy.

So on one hand, the piece concludes that at least as far as Carney articulates it, the Canadian strategy is meaningless. But how, precisely?

One important fact gets lost in the day-to-day friction between the White House and the Prime Minster’s Office. Canada has not had a genuine strategic alternative to the United States since the Second World War, and geography alone makes that true. There is no escaping the American relationship, whatever a prime minister says in Davos. Washington knows it, and some U.S. officials seem to have concluded that Canadian dependence allows for unlimited pressure.

But the authors are talking defense strategy, and that's so plain that it's beside the point. The problem is that Canada is also dependent economically, but the authors are basically saying that's not fair or something.

Washington should stop treating continental defense as a collection point for unrelated economic grievances; coercion aimed at a partner with nowhere else to go buys compliance now and resentment later.

But the current exchanges between Ottawa and Washington, as far as I've been able to see, haven't mentioned defense at all. As of a week ago,

US President Donald Trump has said Canada wants "the benefits of being a state, without being one" after trade talks between the two countries collapsed late on Friday.

The breakdown of negotiations triggered new 50% US tariffs on a range of Canadian goods. Trump also said American farmers had been charged "massive amounts of Tariffs" for years.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney called the fresh tariffs a "miscalculation" designed to "hurt and divide us".

The issue basically boils down to whether Canada should get favorable tariff treatment so that it can maintain certain industries like autos at prices it can export to the US market. If it were a state, it would be in the same position as Michigan. If it were a state, it would also have the full protection of the US military, but that's not currently under discussion -- nevertheless, it's relevant to the overall question of whether Canada has a free ride. I don't think you can split the questions in two.

But even under defense alone, the authors neglect the question they do raise: if Carney's "middle power" strategy is meaningless, nevertheless, what happens if he's delusional enough to cogitate a defense alliance with China? I betcha both the US State and Defense Departments have contingency plans for such a thing. Why not bring that up? I asked the oracle, "What prevents Canada from making a defense alliance with Russia or China?" It answered, in part,

Canada shares the world’s longest undefended border with the United States. Geographically, Canada has no choice but to be integrated into North American security. A Canadian military alliance with Russia or China would be viewed by Washington as an existential national security threat, making it practically impossible.

I followed up with the oracle, "What would be the potential US response if Canada signed a military alliance with China?" It gave a remarkably clear-headed reply:

If Canada were to sign a formal military alliance with China, the U.S. response would be an immediate, severe, and existential national security crisis, fundamentally altering North American geopolitics. Given the current 2026 climate—characterized by intense economic friction between Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government and President Donald Trump, including crippling tariffs and Canada's strategic economic pivots toward Beijing—a military alliance would cross Washington's ultimate red line.The potential U.S. response would unfold across economic, military, and political dimension.

For over two centuries, the U.S.-Canada border has been the longest undefended border in the world. A military alliance with China would force the U.S. to immediately deploy the U.S. Armed Forces, National Guard, and massive surveillance infrastructure along the 5,525-mile northern border.

The U.S. would treat the alliance as an intolerable violation of the Monroe Doctrine, which opposes foreign military intervention in the Western Hemisphere. The U.S. military would likely establish a strict naval blockade or airspace restriction to prevent the transport of Chinese military assets, personnel, or advanced weaponry into Canadian territory.

. . . High-level political rhetoric regarding the annexation or forced subjugation of Canada—already a point of systemic friction in contemporary political discourse—would materialize into active operational planning. If Chinese troops or military installations were actively being deployed to Canadian soil, the U.S. would highly consider a preemptive military invasion to neutralize the threat before Chinese forces could establish a permanent foothold.

The problem of "Canadian sovereignty" is neither exclusively military nor economic, but it is in fact existential to both countries. It's worth asking whether Carney is in fact delusional over both the economic and military factors underlying any belief that Canada has much freedom of action in these areas at all -- but he's certainly talking as though it does. They make their own weather, after all.

The foreign policy establishment is pushing the idea that everyone can sit down and talk this out. But if Carney is delusional, can we really?

“When The Americans Stop Doing Memes. . ."

Remarks from Prime Minister Carney to reporters yesterday suggest things aren't going as he'd expected:

OTTAWA — Prime Minister Mark Carney still sees a path to a mutually beneficial trade deal with the U.S. — once Washington stops playing games.

Carney said any deal with the U.S. “must” recognize Canadian sovereignty, which includes respecting the French language and Quebec culture.

“When the Americans stop doing memes, stop throwing shade, stop trying to be tough and start being serious about having those discussions — we can have those discussions,” Carney said to reporters on Tuesday.

The problem is that last Friday, Carney was the one who ended negotiations, and the US currently sees no reason to try to reopen them.

Negotiations between Canada and the U.S. have stopped completely. Both sides remain far apart after Carney walked away from a deal that he said “asked too much and offered too little.”

Speaking to POLITICO on Monday night, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said “there’s not like a better deal out there available for the Canadians.”

What fascinates me is that there's no shortage of individual Canadians who understand quite clearly the futility of Carney's position, like the commentator in the video embedded above. At 21:59, she replies to a question, "Is Canada getting itself into a fight it cannot win?"

Yes, it is. It goes back to what I aaid earlier, that you can't have a war between two massively unequal partners like this. It's like flick a flea off the arm of the United States to have this going on. He will retaliate, and they should know this. They should be understanding this just by his previous behavior. . . . He would love nothing more than to completely repatriate the auto industry to the United States. So if they think this is smart, then we really have a serious problem in Canada, and Canadian people, the auto worklers and the people that make a living off the auto industry, and I'm talking about the restaurants, the grocery stores, the 7-Elevens, and the Circle Ks, and all the other entities that live because the auto industry is a thriving industry in their area, they should be screaming to the hills not to allow this to happen.

She goes on to say Carney will eventually be forcrd to back down. The thing that puzzles me is that the great majority of Canadian voices I see, at least on YouTube, appear to be sane and recognize that US tariff policy could in fact break the Canadian economy, but there deosn't seem to be any equivalent opinion from the Canadian opposition parties.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre swung through Southwestern Ontario on Saturday, telling supporters here that Canada should continue fighting for tariff-free trade as the U.S. imposed new ones on Canadian goods.

Poilievre spoke at a public event held here by Oxford MP Arpan Khanna, hours after Prime Minister Mark Carney announced Canada walked away from trade talks with the Americans, setting the stage for President Donald Trump to slap an additional 50 per cent tariff on roughly $28 billion in Canadian exports, including electronics, alcohol and dairy.

“Conservatives are determined to put our country first in this trade dispute. We’re fighting every day and every way for tariff-free trade,” Poilievre told supporters at the Woodstock event, the second of four London-area stops planned for the weekend.

I would say that Justin Trudeau's reported remarks to Trump at Mar-a-Lago over the 2024 holidays, that a punitive tariff tweak by the US would be "the end of Canada" were insightfuil aNd correct, and Carney likely understands this just as clearly. But Canada has backed itself into a difficult corner: its military could resist a US invasion for about two days. Carney speaks hopefully of aligning Canada with other "middle powers", mostly in NATO, who have collectively offloaded military preparedness to the US and would be no more capable of military action against the US than Canada itself.

But any attempt by Canada to align itself militarily with either Russia or China would likely provoke economic retaliation from the US even worse than what's now likely. On one hand, Carney is correct: sovereignty is in fact what's ultimately on the line, but the existential question is actually a lot closer than he wants to pretend. Trump's point has been that Canada wants to be treated like a US state, at least as far as having no US tariffs on its exports to the US, but it wants to impose tariffs on imported US goods. Trump says that's no longer possible, and it hasn't been for some time.

Trump is only half-jokingly proposing that Canada become a US state to solve that problem. But there's also the problem of defense: Canada has no serious armed forces, but if it were to pursue an alliance with Russia or China, it would almost immediately be annexed as a territory by the US purely via economic pressure. But that level of pressure is already being applied. I don't think many Canadians are waking up to this reality.

Syracuse And The Bigger Problems Of Higher Ed

Syracuse University has been in the news lately, starting last spring:

Syracuse University will eliminate 93 academic programs identified as having low or no enrollment, the private New York institution announced Wednesday.

But unlike many colleges making cuts, Syracuse is not doing so out of financial necessity, according to Lois Agnew, the university’s provost and chief academic officer.

But according to the Wall Street Journal, the cuts are in fact due to financial necessity:

This school year, which began Aug. 24, enrollment fell short, sending the school into a 1.5% budget shortfall.

Syracuse also added nearly half a billion in debt to build desperately needed new dorms, which brought on a bond market reprimand. And it recently cut programs it said weren’t popular.

A national brand-name institution with a $2.5 billion endowment and a storied 150-year tradition is suddenly beginning to flail.

But the problems aren't unique to Syracuse:

Fewer young people are enrolling in college, as the country reconsiders the value of a university education. Tuition that has outpaced inflation for decades has saddled students with high debt and yielded uneven returns on careers. The current tough job market, squeezed by the rise of artificial intelligence, has added to the anxiety.

There could be even fewer students in the future—as the birthrate falls, the number of 18- to 24-year-olds in the U.S. is set to decline.

The first institutions to feel these headwinds have been lesser-known colleges with nominal endowments. That has led to a surge of mergers and closings among small private schools. But the cracks in the business model of higher education are now prompting a realignment much further up the food chain.

. . . At the same time, the Trump administration’s disruption of billions of dollars in federal research grants has thrown a question mark over Syracuse’s nearly $200 million research budget. And Trump’s continued pressure on student visas is disincentivizing international enrollment—a revenue stream on which Syracuse depends.

Left unmentioned is the questionable value of the product itself, leaving aside whether it carries with it the assurance of a white-collar career. I've discussed here the stories about the high percentages of students who cheat on exams and papers with AI, but this deflects attention from the pre-digital age of analog plagiarism from sources like Cliff's Notes, where the percentages were just as high -- and this in turn leaves aside the problem of professors wno plagiarize, often highly prestigious ones.

On the other hand, the Journal does bring up another issue I've noted here, the increasing luxury of student accommodations, which by the way increases the cost of college overall:

Through the 1990s and early 2000s, universities spent billions upgrading facilities in an arms race to attract affluent students who carefully weighed where to enroll based on the quality of dorms and amenities, such as lazy rivers and climbing walls.

Syracuse fell behind. It hasn’t opened a new dorm since 2009, and years of reviews showed students wanted more housing near the main campus. The school outlined a plan to modernize student-housing a decade ago when finances were stable.

In 2025, it borrowed $458 million to build new dorms near its main campus. The risk was exacerbated because the school has a relatively small endowment for a university of its size.

In fact, universities are competing for the most affluent market share, which includes the foreign students who pay full freight:

Northeastern, BU and NYU have seen application numbers surge and the percentage of applicants admitted plummet—a measure of selectivity that boosts a school’s prestige and ability to draw more students willing and able to pay full sticker price.

The three enroll 40% or more of undergraduates paying the full price, compared with just 21% at Syracuse, according to 2023-24 data from the National Center for Education Statistics, the most recent available.

As a result, Syracuse’s competitors can concentrate their financial-aid budgets on a smaller percentage of students, while Syracuse has to spread its allotment over a broader pool. That means that for students who get some sort of financial aid, Syracuse costs thousands more than its competitors.

Wait a moment. The schools that gain in prestige can be more selective, which means they can admit more students wealthy enough to pay full fare, and they can attract these students with luxury accommodations -- but they insist on being able to implement DEI? Isn't this incongruous? But here's another data point I ran across in preparing tbis post:

First, before you dive into it, take a guess about the percentage of adults in the US, aged 35-54 with a bachelor's degree or higher. Got a guess? If you have a college degree, you probably said something like fifty or sixty percent, based on my sampling of twenty people or so. If you didn't, your guess is probably much lower, usually ten or fifteen percent. There's a lesson there, in itself.

The answer: 38%. You're probably surprised, either way.

Now, what was it in 1940? Got an guess in your head? The answer: Just under 5%. Yes. You read that right.

What is higher ed supposed to be doing, and is it doing it? If my wife and I had children or grandchildren, from our current perspective, I think a better use of household education money would be to put the kids in Catholic K-12 schools and let college more or less take care of itself.