An Insidious New Morality Is Giving License to Kill

By Tal Fortgang

Thursday, November 20, 2025

 

A deranged man walked into a Manhattan skyscraper on July 28 and murdered four people before turning the gun on himself. His motivations are unknown and will probably remain so forever. For the first few hours after the shooting, social media reflected the somber mood that properly follows hearing news of a tragedy. When it became clear that one of the murdered was a police officer — a husband and father of two young children, with a third on the way — some of us worried we would see celebrations from the anti-police crowd. But that didn’t materialize.

 

It turns out we were right to worry about grotesque celebrations of random violence, though. The first indication came in an X post from leftist podcaster Sean McCarthy: “New York City is so evil that if you walk into a random big building to do a mass shooting there’s decent odds you’ll hit the person in charge of buying up single family homes for blackstone [sic].” He was referring to Wesley LePatner, an executive at the asset management firm, a lay leader at her synagogue, and the mother of two children. To McCarthy, she was nothing more than an avatar for the evils of capitalism.

 

When Blackstone put up posts mourning LePatner, revolting messages piled up among the replies. Anonymous accounts, often featuring symbols of leftist politics, expressed their contempt for LePatner and glee at her untimely death because she was wealthy, white, and responsible (in their eyes) for contributing to high housing costs and other economic ills.

 

My Manhattan Institute colleague Jesse Arm calls this sort of reaction “Luigism,” after Luigi Mangione, who still enjoys cult status in some quarters for allegedly killing health insurance executive Brian Thompson. Luigism, Arm writes, is “the idea that violence is a legitimate response to the perceived injustices of capitalism.” There is a system of reasoning that leads Luigists to conclude that celebration is the proper response to Thompson’s and LePatner’s murders. It continued to show itself, unsurprisingly, in gleeful reactions to the horrific assassination of Charlie Kirk in September. It has insinuated itself into American culture, especially among young leftists, vying to replace a mode of moral reasoning that most Americans don’t even realize they subscribe to.

 

The moral reasoning that has undergirded American culture since Europeans settled this land is the system developed by the Hebrew Bible. Christianity, which began as a Jewish sect, spread that system throughout the West and universalized it. The basic moral system Jews applied internally would apply to all under a religion that recognized “neither Jew nor Greek.” Our moral assumptions have long been deeply Judeo-Christian, no matter how unfashionable that phrase has become. We have taken it for granted to the point that it now seems strange to articulate. The new, menacing moral reasoning is so foreign to us, it seems impossible that it could be grounded in any system. But in fact, lurking unarticulated beneath Luigism is a system that is very old; it is prebiblical. And if biblical morality seemed harsh, the pagan view it aimed to supplant was far worse. As its resurgent manifestations suggest, it is incompatible with sustaining a civilization.

 

Mangione and his cult following signaled the rise of the new morality. Fundraising for Mangione’s legal defense and sales of “Free Luigi” apparel went gangbusters not because anyone thought he was innocent, but because some contingent thought he was guilty — and worthy of being honored for his crime. To Mangione’s fans, Thompson deserved death because he symbolized exploitation, though hardly anyone knew who he was before Mangione allegedly shot him in the back, much less what, if anything, he had personally done wrong.

 

Mangione’s vigilantism thus transformed into self-defense. “I think for anyone who is confused or shocked or appalled” by Mangione’s celebrity, explained Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, “they need to understand that people interpret and feel and experience denied [health insurance] claims as an act of violence.” That doesn’t personally implicate Thompson in wrongdoing. For all anyone knows, he could have been agitating internally for a no-denials policy, just as LePatner could have been a champion of progressivism within Blackstone. Those who do anything but condemn their murders do not care, clearly. They believe, quite passionately, that sacrificing some executives to the gods of justice for an industry’s sins is right and proper.

 

A similar set of justifications greeted the grotesque news that Charlie Kirk had been murdered for being an outspoken political conservative. Using phrasing familiar to Luigists, some public figures made it clear that they thought Kirk’s murder was fine, even good: “Hope the bullet’s okay after touching Charlie Kirk,” was one refrain. Kirk was not a person, a husband and father of two young children, but an avatar of conservative revanchism. To many, he was just “hate” personified.

 

Virginia even elected an attorney general, Jay Jones, who had fantasized about killing his political opponents. “I will go to their funerals to piss on their graves,” he wrote of his Republican colleagues in the state legislature, drawing on the same phrasing Luigists use to celebrate capitalists’ deaths. “I mean do I think Todd and Jennifer,” Jones’s opponent and his wife, “are evil? And that they’re breeding little fascists? Yes.” After wishing gruesome death on those “little fascists,” Jones revealed his adherence to the new morality: “Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy.” Violence against people (even children) is justified — even good — to strike a blow against the forces of political evil. The dignity of every individual person could not be farther from the equation.

 

Most telling, though, is that this line of reasoning even extended to LePatner’s murder, where, unlike the other two cases of actual murder, the shooter’s motivations were irrelevant. All that had occurred, and all that mattered, was that a “bad” woman had been murdered in cold blood. A meme quickly emerged among those celebrating that featured a word stamped across her picture: “LUIGI’D.” The Free Press quoted one adherent of the new morality explaining his glee: “I don’t know this woman, so I have to view her as a symbol.”

 

He doesn’t have to. He chooses to subscribe to a moral system that conceives of human beings not as individuals made in the image of God but as representations of abstractions. This is the pagan view of humanity: People are not really individuals; they do not really have agency, as they are merely manifestations of great systems of power reflecting the wars of the gods; human beings are not infinitely complex but simply symbolic. Where the Hebraic tradition teaches that one who quells a single life has destroyed an entire world, the pagan view is that what happens on earth merely mirrors what happens in some other realm. With that view comes a pagan view of justice, which occurs at the cosmic level when the good ism triumphs over the bad.

 

Our neo-pagan morality marries the ancient human tendency to find order in the simplicity of a world run by exogenous forces to our obsession with power, power dynamics, and power disparities. For years now, we have heard sophisticated people insist that social interactions are determined by systems of power designed to privilege certain groups over others. “Antiracist” celebrity Robin DiAngelo took this view to its extreme, embodied in her infamous quote, “The question is not ‘did racism take place?’ but rather ‘how did racism manifest in that situation?’” Racism, the abstract power beyond human control, has agency of its own. It is one of the forces that run the world, in a pantheon alongside imperialism, sexism, and their inverses: anti-racism, anti-imperialism, feminism, and so on. People can align themselves with good powers or bad, but they have no ability to free themselves of the “system” as a whole.

 

More dangerously, the sophisticated view of justice is now that we ought to calculate innocence and guilt, or what we might call desert, by analyzing the characteristics of those involved. According to this view, individuals are to be judged on the basis not of their actions but of what groups they are aligned with and how much power they accordingly have. It therefore holds that justice — the great moral guide — is achieved when power is redistributed. That is supposed to even out the injustices that brought us to the current day. It may not be fair to you as an individual, but it does justice across time and space.

 

The new morality asserts itself in obvious ways, such as race-adjusted sentencing in Canada. It is less obvious, but still present, when people deny the unfairness of race-preference schemes that discriminate against whites and Asians. It can be projected onto geopolitics and frequently serves as shorthand for why Western leftists should support Palestinians against rich and powerful Israel — and even support Hamas as a “progressive force.” The history of the region is genuinely irrelevant to the new morality; Israel’s success is complete proof that it is cosmically guilty. Some true believers in the new morality hold that members of powerless groups can literally do no wrong to members of powerful ones.

 

This is all diametrically opposed to the biblical notion of guilt and innocence. Because man is created in God’s image, the locus of desert in the Bible is the individual. The Bible repeatedly enjoins its adherents not to punish parents for their children’s wrongdoing, or vice versa. Rather, “each person for his own sin shall die.” As Tomer Persico explains in his book In God’s Image, this is an emphatic rejection of the idea that a human being is fundamentally an extension of a system greater than himself and therefore can deserve reward or punishment for another person’s actions. Prebiblical legal codes held that if a man harmed another’s son, that man’s son shall himself be harmed. Punishment accrued to the system, not the choosing individual. The new morality revives this idea, considering it just to harm the system that Thompson and LePatner represent, even as the murdered individuals chose to do nothing wrong. Who they were — where they stood, literally and figuratively — was enough.

 

There is a reason why biblical society spread and flourished while pagan morality suffered a long dormancy. Biblical morality undergirds a system that allows cooperation and social trust. Its rules about desert provide certainty about what you — a thinking, choosing person with agency — have to do to stay out of trouble. Going to a job and doing legitimate work, even if it’s unpopular, is not going to land you in prison or under attack. You can control what you do and count on the rules to tell you when you’re putting yourself at risk. Society will judge you based on what you did.

 

That view is losing ground to a competitor, in which certain individuals are simply classified as unprotected for representing the wrong deity, as it were. While the legal system will still prosecute Mangione (and would do the same to the high-rise shooter had he survived), popular morality inevitably shapes law over time. Meanwhile, the social and psychological barriers to committing violence erode when perpetrators expect to become folk heroes with crowdfunded legal defenses. The cost-benefit calculation of turning to violence is shifting in a dangerous direction because the boundaries of the new morality — whom it will protect and whom it will condemn without prior warning — are undefined.

 

But the real reason to sound the alarm is that the new morality is totally incompatible with social life. What would you do if you were a law-abiding person who suspected that you lived among a critical mass of Mangiones, or the people who desecrate LePatner’s name? You wouldn’t just watch your back. You would go back to social distancing, avoiding interactions with strangers at all costs. You would take your family, your business, your ability to cooperate with others as far away as you could. You would cut off the social bonds required to build, develop, and invest in anything. And you would be perfectly reasonable to do so. If there is reason to believe that your neighbors would try to justify your murder because you have come to symbolize something they detest, finding new neighbors is urgent and imperative. This is no way to build a community, an economy, or a polity. Just the opposite: it’s fatal to the cooperation we need in order to flourish. The new morality is not safe for human consumption.

 

We are witnessing the practical consequences of a culture losing its ability to defend or even articulate its moral basis. As biblical literacy declines and appreciation for the Bible as a foundational American text becomes passé, the Bible’s once-radical moral injunctions go from being taken for granted to being usurped without so much as public disputation. That people are individuals was once so obvious that we didn’t have to say so — until suddenly we lost sight of how precious that basic truth is.

 

Meanwhile, the pagan instinct to reject the notion of individual agency and dignity — indeed, to deny that each person is an individual — does not die easily, and never permanently. When it rears its head, it does so not merely as incantations and abstractions but as a prefabricated justification for bloodlust, dehumanization, and social breakdown. Even if just a small fraction of the population is tempted by the new morality, which in truth is a very old morality, we would have a major problem on our hands. And it doesn’t seem like such a small fraction anymore.

 

This Might Be the Worst Argument I’ve Ever Read

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, December 04, 2025

 

Yesterday, Charlie published a satirical post attributing his own skepticism toward the Trump administration’s claims that the legal and strategic rationale for the ongoing military campaign against Venezuelan “drug boats” to his own thinly veiled admiration for drug traffickers. The point of that cutting exercise was to illustrate the absurdity of the tactics deployed by those who would answer legal arguments with hollow grandstanding and toothless moral blackmail.

 

Within hours, the Trump administration’s chief spokesperson, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, would prove Charlie prescient:

 

 

As polemics go, this is one of the worst I’ve ever read.

 

Authored by Shane Harris and published by the Association of Mature American Citizens (AMAC), the very first words of this maladroit intimidation tactic dressed up as an argument are “Trump Derangement Syndrome” — yes, as a proper noun. It doesn’t get more sophisticated from there.

 

The skeptics of Trump’s Venezuela campaign — which polls indicate includes not just most of the country but most Republicans — are, to an individual, the “Never-Trump crowd.” And they’ve reached a “new low” by “defending narcoterrorists” in deference only to “their reactionary opposition to everything Trump does.”

 

The piece might have ended there. The author had already made the only point he was going to make. But Harris used all the rope that AMAC handed him.

 

The author alleges that Trump has all the legal authority he needs to ignore the American laws that render terrorism and drug trafficking distinct offenses. After all, he designated Venezuela’s cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations. What more do you need?

 

What’s more, the results of the campaign speak for themselves. “To any American with even a modicum of decency and common sense,” Harris wrote, the strikes that have killed at least 80 alleged drug couriers are “good news.” After all, drug addiction represents an imminent threat to U.S. national security, the author alleges — perhaps more than any conventional terrorist threat.

 

The most abhorrent passage that is likely to offend those with any admiration for logic followed that assertion:

 

Does someone have to be running around with a gun or a bomb to be considered a “threat” to the American people? The narcoterrorists in the Caribbean pose at least as serious a threat — and likely a more tangible threat — to the American people as do the Islamist terrorists that the military spent the last 20 years chasing around the Middle East.

 

How callous. Try telling that to the survivors of victims of political terrorism, whose loved ones were torn apart by a nail bomb while eating lunch or shot to death for no other reason than to send a message to the American political class, that their suffering pales in comparison to the plight endured by those whose loved ones willingly put illicit substances into their bodies. Try telling American military planners that the threat to U.S. interests abroad posed by Islamist radicalism or state-sponsored violence has fewer implications for American national security than the ancient narcotics trade.

 

Terrorism has a legal definition. Drug trafficking has a legal definition. Making a portmanteau of the words “narco” and “terrorist” doesn’t magically erase these distinctions.

 

If this campaign is of such vital national interest that it merits this level of high dudgeon, it really shouldn’t be hard to field an argument in its favor predicated on a neutral principle. But Harris’s piece fails even to gesture in the direction of an argument that would persuade those who believe the president has not made the objectives of his Venezuela campaign clear, has not sought legal or political authority for his actions, and is jeopardizing long-standing U.S. interests in the process.

 

It’s not as though the administration doesn’t have a case to make. I’ve made it. Dan McLaughlin has made it. Joshua Treviño and Melissa Ford have made it. This administration’s principals could, too, if they were so inclined. But they’re not.

 

Rather than give their supporters something rational on which they might hang their hats, the Trump administration is applying muscle to opponents and supporters alike. If you raise even academic objections to the administration’s failure to do this campaign properly — by seeking public support and congressional authorization for it, thereby making American voters and their representatives stakeholders in this shared national project — you are a moral monster who, like Charlie, must secretly harbor some affection for drug traffickers.

 

To call this style of argumentation childish is an insult to children. It is not an argument at all. It’s a brushback pitch designed to shut their critics up. But brushback pitches only work if they approach their target. This one is so wildly off the mark, so comically bad, that it’s more likely to inspire the administration’s critics than silence them. After all, if this is all they’ve got, they don’t have much.

The Global Climate Movement’s Real Elephant in the Room

By Philip Rossetti

Thursday, December 04, 2025

 

The annual United Nations climate negotiation meeting, the Conference of the Parties (COP), ended last month. Unsurprisingly, the event was widely summarized as disappointing. In a particularly apt metaphor for the U.N.’s dysfunction, a pavilion at the event caught fire. But what caught my eye was the inevitable post-summit blame directed at Republicans for global climate inaction. A Politico piece about the COP stated (emphasis added), “U.S. President Donald Trump is the most obvious avatar for the geopolitical shifts confronting the talks.” Dear me, an avatar for the geopolitical shifts?

 

Hyperbole aside, there is plenty to dislike about Trump’s climate posture. But it’s not the reason for the COP’s many shortcomings. The global climate movement’s real weakness stems from negotiators’ desire to foist climate burdens on the United States while offering nothing in return. While Politico noted that the absence of a U.S. delegation at the COP was an “elephant in the room,” the real elephant in the room is China’s surging emissions. Since 2005, the U.S. has cut greenhouse gas emissions more than any other nation, and if COP delegates want to deal seriously with Washington, they must reckon with the need for burden sharing.

 

As my fellow Dispatch Energy contributor Roger Pielke Jr. recently highlighted, the U.N. and media outlets alike often incorrectly credit the Paris Agreement for a massive cut in projected emissions. The truth, Pielke explains, is that the initial emissions projections were wildly off-base, and the Paris Agreement has likely had almost no impact on the actual trajectory of emissions.

 

Similarly, data reveals a big disconnect between what is said at the COP and what is happening on the global stage. While Democrats, foreign governments, and academics have criticized the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, the truth is that from 2005 to 2019, we cut carbon dioxide emissions more than every other developed nation combined. Even amid Trump’s purge of climate regulations during his first administration, strong evidence shows that competitive energy markets in the U.S. continue to drive greenhouse gas abatement.

 

This is in part because economic growth yields efficiency that in turn lowers emissions. So while climate-focused policies may lower emissions, they may do so at an economic cost, which forgoes the emission reductions that naturally come from a more energy-efficient economy. A good example of this phenomenon is the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan. The limits on carbon pollution from power plants never took effect due to a Supreme Court ruling, but the U.S. nevertheless beat its emission targets a decade early primarily thanks to more efficient natural gas production. These results were delivered by the free market, not regulation, but had the framework been implemented, Democrats would have inevitably credited it.

 

Meanwhile, the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, China, has significantly increased its carbon footprint. From 2005 to 2019, for every metric ton of emission decline in the United States, China increased its own emissions by 3.74 metric tons.

 

Chart via Joe Schueller.

 

China accounts for more than half of the world’s coal use. And while Beijing’s construction of renewable-energy power plants and electric vehicles is often praised in the media, China has also been rapidly building new coal power plants, hitting a 10-year high for new coal plant construction last year. Call me crazy, but I’m doubtful China is investing billions of dollars into new coal projects just to retire them soon. (Though some on the left argue that their coal plants are better than ours, so we shouldn’t worry about their massive share of emissions.) Ultimately, blaming Republicans for climate woes while praising China stands at odds with observable truth.

 

Given this context, Republican frustration with the dynamics of global climate policy is understandable. In a normal world, the nations making the most progress toward resolving a collective action problem would be praised while those falling behind would be chastised. But the dynamic is inverted for climate issues, and a reluctance to acknowledge the necessity of burden sharing is off-putting to many Republican policymakers.

 

The climate strategy of making demands of the United States and the West while giving the rest of the world a pass is not a new phenomenon—before the Paris Agreement, there was the 1997 Kyoto Protocol (KP). The KP was the first major international climate treaty, and unlike the Paris Agreement, it set out firm targets for participants to meet. But the protocol did not seek equal commitments from all participants; instead, it divided the world into wealthy industrialized nations and poorer developing ones. Only the wealthy nations, like the United States, had to meet certain obligations, while other countries, like China, had none. Emission targets were pegged to 1990 levels, so former Soviet states met them by default due to the Soviet Union’s industrial collapse. The KP, put simply, asked Western nations to commit to climate action while exempting U.S. rivals. Unsurprisingly, the Senate never ratified the protocol, and when President George W. Bush later declined to participate, the Guardian featured the headline: “Bush kills global warming treaty.”

 

The Paris Agreement was supposed to rectify these problems by asking nations to set their own voluntary targets. One might think this could have been an opportunity for the U.S. to negotiate directly with other big emitters for a reciprocal agreement. Yet what President Barack Obama revealed in a 2015 joint statement with China was that the United States would cut emissions by 26 to 28 percent, and China would agree to “peak” emissions by 2030. This deal amounted to “I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today,” but at the time was praised as groundbreaking.

 

Recognizing that this deal would never pass muster with the then-Republican-held Senate, the Paris Agreement was crafted so the administration could claim that it did not require ratification. Some legal scholars even argued that the international provision in the Clean Air Act gave Obama all the authority he needed to set any target he wanted under the Paris Agreement and regulate to meet it, circumventing Congress entirely. Unsurprisingly, fear of that regulatory tactic was what prompted Republicans to announce plans to withdraw from the Paris Agreement the first time back in 2017.

 

This U-turn should have taught future presidents that they need to win over the public if they want international climate accords to have staying power. Yet when it was President Joe Biden’s turn in 2021, he largely pursued the same approach as Obama, making big promises while getting nothing in return from other global emitters. My own analysis of his administration’s target under the Paris Agreement found that of all the promised cuts from new pledges that year, 71 percent of the reduced emissions would have come only from the United States.

 

In short, it is foolish to expect Republicans who were sidelined from climate negotiations and policymaking under two administrations to uphold Democrat-championed climate deals. But it’s particularly so given those administrations’ reluctance to push other countries to share in their ambitious emissions reduction goals.

 

To be clear, I have defended the Paris Agreement. It has potential as a negotiating tool that can circumvent the conventional barriers to global climate treaties and secure agreements that advance the interests of the United States. But the “elephant in the room” is not the reluctance of a large share of Americans to blindly support poorly negotiated emissions targets. It’s that nations like China, Russia, and India are given a pass for their dismal climate performance.

 

It wasn’t long ago that even climate hawks like John Kerry expressed frustration with the COP’s direction when it started focusing less on emissions abatement and more on ideas like “climate reparations.” And while Beijing is being praised for potentially peaking its emissions “early,” China’s projected 2025 emissions are about 20 percent higher than when it made the joint statement with Obama. Simply put, if COP delegates want more climate action from the United States, they must reckon with the need for reciprocity.

 

I applaud the intent of the COP, and I’ve defended the United States’ continued involvement in it. But climate hawks should be honest with themselves: Trump’s climate denial is not the source of the COP’s failures.

Inaccurate Complaints from Halfway Around the World

By Jim Geraghty

Thursday, December 04, 2025

 

Somebody in India didn’t like my coverage while I was there and accuses me of “launder[ing] the [Rashtriya Swayamsevak] Sangh’s violent history” and “carrying forward many of the RSS’s oft-repeated lies.”

 

Once again, somebody criticizes what I wrote without linking to what I wrote, ensuring that his readers cannot click on through and check for themselves. This is not hard. It’s HTML, not alchemy. Criticism of me without linking to what I wrote happens fairly regularly, and when it does, it is a surefire signal that what I’ve written is about to be egregiously misconstrued or inaccurately described by the person criticizing me.

 

I’ve written three major pieces about India since I returned: a Morning Jolt focusing on India’s wary perspective on China, a Washington Post column focusing on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or RSS organization, and a magazine piece covering a variety of topics, from serious to lighthearted. I also discussed the highs and lows of the trip with my Three Martini Lunch podcast co-host Greg Corombos.

 

This latest guy’s gripe is with the Post column. He writes, “The article depicted the RSS in exactly the manner the Hindutva militia would have desired.”

 

Yeah, that’s some bullcrap, pal, and I’m not just saying that because some RSS fans were less than thrilled with certain aspects of the column. (The fact that both sides are criticizing you is not a guarantee that you got it right, but it is a sign that you weren’t particularly one-sided in your coverage.)

 

Let’s start with the headline: “The RSS is a warning to all nations where populism is spiking.” Does that sound all that bright and cheery to you? That’s “exactly the manner that the RSS would want to be depicted,” huh?

 

From my column:

 

The RSS, not surprisingly, has its share of critics who see ominous implications in its power.

 

In 1948, Mohandas Gandhi was assassinated by Nathuram Godse, who had been a member of the RSS. Shortly thereafter, the organization was banned for about a year and a half, with the government declaring that “members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh have indulged in acts of violence involving arson, robbery, dacoity, and murder and have collected illicit arms and ammunitions.” Historian Andrew Robinson has written, “Modi exerted a populist spell over Hindus reminiscent of past fascist leaders such as Benito Mussolini, whose regime undoubtedly inspired the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in the 1920s and 1930s, which later strongly influenced the youthful Modi.”

 

Hey, do you think everybody over in the RSS was doing cartwheels about my quoting a critic who compared them to Mussolini’s regime?

 

If I’m “launder[ing] the RSS’s violent history,” why am I mentioning all this?

 

My big conclusion:

 

For those recruited into this movement, it’s easy to see the group’s appeal — instilling India’s men with pride and a sense of duty. If you’re not in the RSS or one of its affiliated organizations, and don’t fit into its vision of what India ought to be, the group’s rise to power and close ties to Modi are unnerving at best and potentially terrifying. Their influence is seemingly everywhere, and their centenary demonstrates they’re built to last. Nationalism is a powerful and volatile force, easily turned against minority groups that are easy to scapegoat.

 

This guy’s further evidence that I’m some RSS-reputation launderer is that I, along with the other U.S. journalists on the trip, stood up and waved when my name was called by the announcer welcoming guests.

 

“They all seemed happy sitting on the stage,” a reporter covering the event for an international news agency told me. “When their names were announced, they appeared more than willing to stand up and get introduced.”

 

What was I supposed to do, pal, fold my arms and refuse to stand? Scowl? Storm out?

 

The writer’s previous publications make clear he can’t stand the RSS. You want to criticize that organization? Go right ahead. But don’t hallucinate a tone to my coverage completely different from the one that was actually there.

The Four Schmucks of the Apocalypse

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, December 01, 2025

 

The Trump administration is always good for a curveball: It put out a peace plan that was originally written in Russian when I was expecting one that was originally written in crayon.

 

Talk about “the soft bigotry of low expectations”! You couldn’t see my expectations from the third sub-basement of Challenger Deep right about now.

 

“The matter is delicate,” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said of European engagement with the United States on the Ukraine matter, “because nobody wants to discourage the Americans and President Trump from ensuring that the United States remains on our side.”

 

What kind of wild-eyed optimist thinks President Trump is on the Europeans’ side now? He sure as hell is not on the Ukrainians’ side.

 

More to the point: What kind of wild-eyed optimist thinks President Trump is on the American side? The conspiracy-theory corner is chock-full of amusing little notions about why it is that Donald Trump so energetically and self-abasingly serves the interests of Vladimir Putin: sex tapes of a nature as to embarrass even such a man as Trump, who has appeared in no fewer than three pornographic films; dirt relating to his Slovenian-born wife’s dodgy family or to his sons’ personal and financial shenanigans; possibly some heavy off-the-books loans from state-controlled Russian banks or the Russian mob. All fun parlor-game stuff, but, as far as I can tell, all of the available hard evidence points toward my pet theory of the case, i.e. that Donald Trump is a punk and a coward who, like most weaklings of his kind, instinctively takes on the subordinate role in relationships with hard men such as Putin. I enjoyed The Manchurian Candidate, but, in a sense, it does not matter whether Donald Trump is some kind of a Russian asset under the influence of kompromat—he would not be doing anything different if he were.

 

Russia has launched a war of aggression against a European democracy, and the president of the United States of America is on Moscow’s side: All pretense and political window-dressing to one side, that’s how it is. Trump means to give Putin what Putin wants. Fortunately for the cause of the Free World, Donald Trump does not run U.S. foreign policy. Unfortunately, some combination of Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance, Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner does—freedom is in the greasy paws of a quadrumvirate of self-serving grifters, phonies, cowards, and imbeciles.

 

(You guys know which is which.)

 

Someone connected to the Trump administration’s scheming, possibly a Russian contact, leaked a 28-point plan for helping the Kremlin achieve its near-term goals in Ukraine—do not call it a “peace plan,” except in that it would mean requiescat in pace for Ukraine as a sovereign nation. Not only does the document read as though it were originally written in Russian, it seems to be the case that parts of it were literally originally written in Russian, part of a Kremlin wish list. (NB: Christmas is supposed to come late in Russia, not early.) The Trump administration has since been on every conceivable side of the plan, which either is or is not its opening bid, depending on where the big hand is on the clock when you ask. Witkoff had been consulting with Putin advisers Yuri Ushakov and Kirill Dmitriev, and it shows. As the Wall Street Journal reports, the 28-point plan was cooked up by Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and go-to errand boy, following secret meetings with a Russian collaborator in Miami. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, apparently had no idea what was going on until he read about it in the newspaper. The proposal was “fleshed out in Miami over cocktails,” according to the Los Angeles Times, and, as every stripper and coke dealer in south Florida knows, starting off with a good buzz in Miami always leads to smart ideas. Rubio, after learning what these idiots were up to, engaged in what the pundits like to call a “frenzy of diplomacy,” during which he insisted—simultaneously—that the plan was and was not a U.S.-authored proposal. Rubio’s current plan, it seems, is to be somewhere else when the diplomacy hits the fan, planning to skip out on a NATO meeting where he had been expected. I hear Cuba is nice this time of year. Or, at least, that was the consensus the last time I was dreaming up big plans over cocktails in Miami. 

 

What is Trump’s own position? Trump is a weathervane, blown by the shifting winds in turn toward each of the four cardinal points on the schmuck compass: Vance, Rubio, Witkoff, Kushner. Vance is the guy with the clearest policy outlook: “I don't really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” in his own words. Rubio has the clearest agenda: He thinks he can be president in 2029 if he keeps the MAGA element on board while he tries to remind people of what the Republican Party used to look like back when it was just stupid and lazy instead of stupid, lazy, and morally corrupt. Witkoff is the guy who gets paid by the Trump administration to advise Putin while snuffling around like a truffle-hunting hog for ways to enrich his family. Kushner—the son of a felon pardoned by Trump and currently serving as U.S. ambassador to France and Monaco—is a Saudi-funded private-equity nepo-schmuck who swans around talking about the grandly named “Abraham Accords,” a Middle East ... peace program or something ... that has been ratified by no major power in the Arab world other than the United Arab Emirates, if you can call that air-conditioned authoritarian shopping mall a major power. Kushner’s father-in-law thinks it was a big deal, but, then, his father-in-law is an idiot.

 

Vance, Rubio, Witkoff, Kushner: This coalition of the shilling produced a proposal that includes some ridiculous and indefensible stuff, i.e., handing over to Putin a sprawling selection of Ukrainian territory that the Russian army has, so far, not been able to win in battle in spite of conducting a ruthless campaign of torture, murder, and rape. But incredible as it is to write, that is not the worst part, at least from the point of view of U.S. interests—which, as I keep trying to remind people, is the consideration that should be guiding U.S. policy here.

 

The Trump proposal would formally obligate NATO to abandon any thought of someday taking in Ukraine as a member. Further, it would take NATO expansion off the board categorically. It would also forbid the presence of NATO troops in Ukraine after the war to enforce the Russian promise to forgo another brutal invasion and occupation of Ukraine. One way of looking at that is that it gives Moscow a veto over Ukraine’s foreign policy—but that is the wrong way to look at it: Much more to the point, the provision would give Moscow a veto over American foreign policy.

 

NATO is an American-founded and American-led organization—there is a reason the chief military commander in NATO is, and always has been, an American military officer. NATO, led by the United States, decides who will and will not join NATO. NATO, led by the United States, sets the terms of its own defensive alliances and obligations. NATO, led by the United States, decides for itself how to go about securing the collective security of its members. To give that power to Moscow is to lop off the right hand of American sovereignty and hand it to Putin with the left hand. It is an act of sabotage. It is a direct attack on the sovereignty of the United States—an attack being conducted not by the Russian president but by the American one and by the gaggle of sycophants and chiselers that make up his administration.

 

The Europeans were apparently entirely cut out of all these developments—again. The Trump administration wanted to avoid the problem of having “too many cooks,” according to Daniel P. Driscoll, secretary of the army. I suppose the four who are working on this particular stew are quite enough.

 

Vance, Rubio, Witkoff, Kushner: Of course U.S. policy toward Russia is incoherent, corrupted by private financial interests, and instinctively favorable toward the authoritarian regime rather than the liberal-democratic one. Of course Donald Trump, who knows nothing and believes nothing, is still playing the part of Lord Feather-Pillow, always bearing the imprint of the last ass to have sat on him. History gave Washington a rare opportunity, a free and clear shot at a major national goal, when Putin marched into Ukraine without understanding that it was a war he could not win at an acceptable cost. If the United States had had halfway competent leadership under Trump or Biden—it is worth remembering that Russia began (re-)escalating its aggression toward Ukraine in earnest in 2018, during the first Trump administration, with the Kerch Strait incident—it could have laid Russia low in a matter of a few months rather than diddle along with half-measures while permitting our rudderless European allies to simultaneously shriek at Russian aggression and subsidize it with their fuel purchases. Instead, we’ve got Vance, Rubio, Witkoff, Kushner—the Mount Rushmore of schmucks—each trying to go his own way for his own advantage while that doddering, senescent clown in the orange makeup practices his Mussolini face in the Oval Office’s new gilt mirrors.

Europe Has Made Itself an Afterthought

By Rich Lowry

Friday, November 28, 2025

 

In the contention over the U.S. peace plan for Ukraine, the Europeans are in their accustomed role — carping from the sidelines.

 

Not only can the once-great European powers no longer dictate the fate of far-flung parts of the world, they can’t even dictate the end of a war involving a European country whose fate they deem crucial to their own future.

 

We’re a long way from the British controlling about a quarter of the globe’s territory in the early 20th century; a long way from British and French diplomats, Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, drawing the lines in 1916 to divide up the Ottoman Empire; a long way from Napoleon sitting with Tsar Alexander in Tilsit in 1807 and rearranging the map of Europe.

 

France was once so diplomatically central that there are dozens of Treaties of Paris, whether in 1259 (between King Louis IX of France and King Henry III of England) or in 1951 (setting up the European Coal and Steel Community).

 

Now, France scurries around with its European counterparts to react to whatever the American president is doing.

 

It’s gotten so bad that some European analysts speak of a potential “scramble for Europe,” or attempts by richer, more powerful outside countries to influence the course of Europe.

 

The late conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer maintained of the U.S., “Decline is a choice.”

 

This isn’t quite right with regard to Europe, whose great powers were kneecapped by the cataclysms of the early 20th century. France bore the brunt of World War I, suffering 1.4 million dead and 4.3 million wounded and a ruinous economic cost.

 

As for Britain, stretched to the max, it got steadily eclipsed in power and influence by the United States as World War II progressed.

 

The less said about Germany’s role in all this, of course, the better.

 

And then the European colonial empires inevitably dissolved.

 

So, Europe was going to be diminished compared to its glory days. Its current fecklessness, though, has indeed been a choice, born of strategic fantasy and economic incompetence.

 

Strong militaries were deemed a thing of the past, or something unnecessary as long as Uncle Sam was around. The Brits, for instance, are hard-pressed to maintain a 73,000-strong military, and the size of their once-storied surface fleet is at a historic low.

 

Europe imagined itself “a diplomatic superpower” but has learned to its regret that “soft power” not backed up by hard power is of limited utility. Both the Nobel Committee and Amnesty International have considerable soft power, too, but no one pays attention to them regarding high-level geopolitical questions.

 

Economically, the EU “regulatory superpower” has hobbled growth — over the last 30 years Western European labor productivity declined from 95 percent of the U.S. level to 80 percent — while Europe’s commitment to “net zero” greenhouse emissions has driven insane energy priorities.

 

Years into the Ukraine war, Europe is still dependent on gas imports from Russia.

 

None of this means that the U.S. should go out of its way to give Europe the back of its hand. Whatever its other failings, Europe has collectively given Ukraine more aid than the United States has and was justifiably furious at the initial 28-point Ukraine proposal. That plan had the embattled country handing over to Moscow strategically important territory that is still in Ukrainian hands; agreeing to a limit on the size of its military; and the U.S. taking currently frozen Russian assets in Europe to rebuild Ukraine (getting 50 percent of any profits) and to pursue joint investment projects with Russia.

 

Negotiations with the Ukrainians have reportedly produced a more reasonable version, but it is Washington and Moscow that matter most here.

 

The analyst Robert Kagan famously wrote years ago that, in their divergent approaches to the world, “Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus.” Having long outsourced power politics to Mars, it turns out that Venus has limited influence even in her own backyard.

Saying Something Is ‘Legal’ Doesn’t Make It So

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, December 03, 2025

 

Since September of this year, the United States military has been blowing up boats allegedly trafficking drugs in the Caribbean.

 

Whether these attacks are legal is hotly debated. Congress hasn’t declared war or even authorized the use of force against “narco-terrorists” or against Venezuela, the apparent real target of a massive U.S. military buildup off its coast.

 

The Trump administration has simply unilaterally designated various—alleged—drug traffickers as “terrorists” or members of “terrorist organizations,” and then waged war upon them. The administration’s internal legal finding supporting all of this hasn’t been publicly released. But whatever their case in private is, it was sufficiently weak that the British government announced in early November it would no longer share intelligence with the U.S. relevant to the Caribbean operation over concerns about its lawfulness.

 

On Friday, the Washington Post dropped a bombshell report about the first of these operations back in September. During the strike, the Navy not only took out a suspected drug-trafficking boat—as had been reported previously—but when survivors were spotted clinging to the wreckage, the Special Operations commander overseeing the operation ordered a second strike on the survivors to comply with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s order to kill everyone involved.

 

“Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation,” the Post reported. “‘The order was to kill everybody,’ one of them said.”

 

Whatever you think about the broader Caribbean operation, it is a simple fact that shooting survivors at sea is a war crime, under American and international law. Of course, as some suggest, since this operation is not a legal war, maybe it’s not a war crime, just a crime-crime.

 

Later Friday, in a lengthy social media post, Hegseth attacked the Washington Post’s report as an instance of the “fake news … delivering more fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting.”

 

What Hegseth didn’t do was directly deny the report. Instead, he insisted that, “We’ve said from the beginning, and in every statement, these highly effective strikes are specifically intended to be ‘lethal, kinetic strikes.’”

 

Declaring your intent was to kill everybody on the first try isn’t a legal excuse to finish off unarmed survivors.

 

Hegseth offered follow-up posts that were boastful or childish, but did not deny the charge.

 

With even Republican members of Congress expressing grave concerns, the official story changed from “fake news” to an actual denial. Trump said that Hegseth told the president that he did not give any such illegal order, “and I believe him, 100 percent,” adding that he “wouldn’t have wanted that. Not a second strike.”

 

So it now appears the White House has confirmed there was a second strike on the survivors, and conceded that it would at least be against the president’s policy. Whether the White House will concede the strike was unlawful remains to be seen. Indeed, exactly what happened remains murky. It surely seems like someone gave an order for a second strike. And if it wasn’t Hegseth, whoever that person was could be looking at a court-martial—or given who the commander in chief is, a pardon.

 

But I don’t want to get ahead of the news.

 

Instead, I’ll make a few points.

 

First, a minor gripe: This administration and its defenders need to be more selective in their use of the term “fake news.” I have no problem calling a false story “fake news.” But if you know that a story isn’t false, calling it “fake news” just sets you up to look like even more of a liar or hypocrite down the road when you end up admitting the truth and defending actions you once pretended were slanderous.

 

More importantly, the whole Caribbean strategy is constitutionally and legally dubious. As a matter of foreign policy, it looks more and more like a pretext for some kind of regime change gambit in Venezuela. If the administration has evidence that justifies its actions, they should share it with Congress and ask for permission to wage war.

 

Even more important: Illegal orders cannot be justified. When a half-dozen Democratic members of Congress released a video saying that the military shouldn’t follow “illegal orders,” the president and many of his defenders became hysterical. Trump lamented that America has become so “soft” that such “seditious behavior” isn’t punished by death anymore. 

 

More sober critics of the Democrats complained that the video sowed confusion in the ranks and hurt morale. I’m actually sympathetic to that argument.

 

But you know what else sows confusion and hurts morale? Issuing illegal orders—or even appearing to do so.