Ann interviews Jacob Heilbrunn, editor of The National Interest. If you don’t know him already, you should. Here, they discuss the disaster of the Iran “incursion,” what made Trump do it, what JD Vance should do, and Reagan’s legacy — among other issues of vital interest to me. And also pretty important for the country.

Brief Bio: Heilbrunn writes prolifically for The UK Spectator, The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Reuters, Washington Monthly, etc. etc.

He also was an Arthur F. Burns Fellow, a winner of the George F. Kennan Award, a senior editor at the New Republic and an editorial writer for the Los Angeles Times.

There is no one better to discuss voter fraud than Kris Kobach. As Kansas’s Secretary of State, he was sued by the ACLU and denounced by Hillary Clinton for trying to enforce voter ID laws.

He was one of the first prominent Republicans to endorse Donald Trump in 2016, which he did because of Trump’s strong position on immigration. Kobach drafted Arizona’s fabulous SB 1070, derogatorily referred to as the “Papers Please” law — which is the one part upheld by the Supreme Court. Justice Scalia would have upheld the entire law.

Kobach in the news:

• Kansas, Arizona laws requiring voters to prove citizenship upheld
• Man jailed in Florida for alleged election fraud in Kansas
• Kansas becomes 2nd state to deputize law enforcement to enforce immigration policies
• Kansas Mayor Faces Voter Fraud Charges Following USCIS Assistance

He graduated first in his department at Harvard (summa cum laude,) where he studied under the famous Samuel P. Huntington, author of Who Are We: The Challenges to America’s National Identity; was a Marshall Scholar; and graduated from Yale Law, where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal,and published two books before graduating.

Your Five Stories of the Week (with a bonus!)

• Vote Fraud: Another 'Science Is Settled' Issue
• Medical schools under the microscope
• Dr. Marvel leaves NASA
• What are Blue States getting for their money?
• Wacko female cop gets off

Ann's Five Stories of the Week:

• Projecting Trump into the future
• The Spectator declares "The End of Trumpism"
• End the TSA!
• Fox News gets its talking points 
• Record number of migrant deaths in Europe

The Dallas Express's star investigative reporter exposes how easy it is for employers to replace Americans with H-1B visa workers.

His latest reports in the Dallas Express: 

• Top H-1B Employers In Texas Revealed By New Federal Data

Rank Employer ApprovalsRank Employer Approvals

1. Cognizant Technology Solutions* 50,6662
2. Infosys Limited 45,3233
3. Oracle America Inc 11,6034
4. Tesla Inc 5,307
5. KPMG LLP 2,677

• FOIA Exclusive: HUD Still Giving Out FHA Insured Loans to Non-Citizens

HUD officially does not give FHA loans to H-1B workers, but a FOIA request reveals that they don’t track the citizenship status of who gets these loans.

• Epstein Used H-1B Visas to Import his Girls

Ghislaine Maxwell, among others, first obtained long-term U.S. status through an H-1B sponsorship tied to Epstein in the early 1990s.

• Texas A&M University has spent over $3.25 million getting H-1B foreign workers

The overwhelming majority of Texas A&M’s filings in 2025 were for lower-level instructional roles.

Your stories of the week:

• A Texas man faces more jail time for cheating at a bass tournament than some do for murder
• Speaking of getting away with murder... It's good to be a Democrat
• NYT economist on "affordablity"
• A bad week for the Jews?

Ann interviews the author on her new book, A Better Life (released February 10, 2026).

A brilliant and hilarious. novel about the state of immigration in our country. Despite being eminently fair to both sides, most liberal reviewers are kvetching because they only wanted to hear one side.

From The Atlantic (of all places): [Shriver] has a wry observational intelligence that propels her well beyond her personal orbit. She is also adept at unpacking psychological states and analyzing relationships with almost clinical incisiveness. Her writing is witty, and startlingly precise.

• Author of 18 books, including: We Need to Talk About Kevin
• Mania
• The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047

Your Five Stories of the Week starts with the first State of the Union speech from Trump 2.0

Your Five Stories for the Week:

• Weepy details and the Ann's "Stew Exemption" for Illegal Aliens
• Thomas Friedman on the politics of Middle East policy
• The New York Times and the Epstein Files
• The Prince formally known as Andrew arrested
• The winners of the Times' Teen Narrative Contest

Jonathan Leaf is a playwright, screenwriter, author and journalist, who’s won a slew of awards, has been compared to Saul Bellow for his “literacy and seriousness,” has written a half-dozen books, and also written for The New Yorker, The New York Post, The New York Daily News, The American, National Review, The New Partisan, The New York Press, The Weekly Standard and The New York Sun.

His latest book, The Primate Myth, upends the common knowledge that humans are a subspecies of ape. Primatologists Jane Goodall and Frans de Waal were completely wrong. If anything, we are a subspecies of dog. Modern technology proves it, and, by giving us an accurate portrait of human nature, explains our penchant for sports, fashion, war, altruism, financial bubbles, suicide and homosexuality, among many other things.