The Road to Smurfdom

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, June 30, 2025

 

One of the most important documents in the annals of the American presidency is a handwritten note by Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, then still some years away from the presidency, a few sentences of which were not made public until years after they were written. The note explains in a few brief words that the invasion of France we now call “D-Day”—the beginning of Europe’s liberation from the Nazis—has failed and that the surviving troops had been withdrawn.

 

The note concludes:

 

The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.

 

Eisenhower could give a political speech with as much rhetorical flair as the next (Midwesternly repressed) guy, and there is a bit of high-flown language in his corpus. But even his special-occasion rhetoric had the quality of directness to it—“all that bravery and devotion to duty could do” is an epitaph worthy of a hero—and he was allergic to bombast.

 

Imagine yourself there, with him, on the evening before the invasion. The intelligence is good but uncertain at points, no one knows exactly what the forces of Adolf Hitler know about the planned invasion, the weather looks like it might turn against American plans. Eisenhower spends the afternoon before the invasion visiting with Normandy-bound paratroopers from the 101^st Airborne. He is sending at least some of them to their death. He knows this—he has been a soldier all of his adult life, including 16 frustrating years as a major without being promoted. He also knows that an invasion of Europe is necessary and that plenty of young American men are going to die in the best-case scenario. But the grandly named Operation Overlord may fail, and if it does, he will be remembered ignominiously as the incompetent who sent those boys to their deaths for a botched job. Clouds on the horizon, threatening storms. No mortal man has ever truly had the fate of the world on his back, but Eisenhower probably comes a lot closer at this moment than almost anybody has in a long time. Darkness rising. He comes to a decision, which he announces with these words:

 

“Okay. Let’s go.”

 

Imagine being Pete Hegseth—possibly sober and an idiot, but a Princeton- and Harvard-educated possibly sober idiot—standing there insisting that the recent attack on Iranian nuclear facilities was “the most complex and secretive military operation in history.”

 

Eisenhower liberated Europe, Hannibal crossed the Alps, and, in Anno Domini 2025, some airplanes took off from Missouri, dropped some massive bombs on an effectively undefended military installation, and then flew home without so much as a bolt-action .22 rifle being popped off in their general direction. None of that is to sneer at the Iran operation, the skill and courage of the professionals who carried it out, the inherent danger of such undertakings, or the marvelous technological sophistication of the U.S. military—my admiration for them is deep. (And the better part of two days straight in a B-2? I don’t like flying coach.) But “Midnight Hammer” (also grandly named) wasn’t the most complex or secretive military operation of the past ten months—surely that laurel goes to the Israelis and the “Grim Beeper” caper—much less the whole of human history.

 

It is not universally true that there is an inverse relationship between the greatness of the man and the greatness of his manner—Winston Churchill did not exactly evince paralyzing insecurity—but there is something to the notion. That something ought to be even more pronounced in an American president, who is, after all, the chief executive officer of one branch of the federal government—not a king, not a god-emperor, not even a king’s prime minister, as Churchill was. There is a direct relationship between the existential smallness of the man and how small he tries to make others feel, which is why Donald Trump has spent his entire life on the road to Smurfdom, destined to forever feel, however secretly, small and blue.

 

But, my goodness, these people talk like cretins. Trump himself is, of course, all superlatives all the time, the sort of man who was born to sell fake Rolexes out of the trunk of a Nissan Altima and would be a tedious barstool blowhard if only he had the decency to drink. When a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst suggested that the Iran mission may have amounted to less than we all hoped, Karoline Leavitt—who is the White House press secretary in large part because she lacks the intellectual sophistication to turn the letters around on “Wheel of Fortune”—raged that the report was the work of a “loser.” Nobody bothered to ask her why it is that Donald Trump, supposedly an executive for the ages, has had so many losers working under him, often in senior security and intelligence roles: John Bolton, Rex Tillerson, Gen. John Kelly, Gen. Mark Milley, Gen. James Mattis, Gen. H.R. McMaster, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, etc.

 

(Perhaps this is what the moral philosopher Raylan Givens was talking about when he observed: “If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole.”)

 

Trump is out there insisting that he is the greatest president since George Washington—and maybe greater than Washington, too. Eisenhower, who at the apex of his military career outranked George Washington (Washington died a three-star general; his posthumous promotion to his current statutorily unsurpassable rank came in 1976), knew that he would lie in state after his death and insisted that he did so in his regular army uniform, in an $80 standard-issue soldier’s coffin, with a minimum of decoration rather than the full Nork-style fruit salad. (Specifically, only his Army and Navy distinguished-service medals and the Legion of Merit.) Who doubts that Donald Trump will be entombed in whatever Tutankhamun would have dreamed up if he’d had Liberace to consult?

 

And don’t think I’m off my rocker in looking to the ancient world. Trump recently described his ally, Benjamin Netanyahu, as a “warrior … like no other warrior in the history of Israel.” Well. We know that Trump is not much of a Bible-reader, though he is a Bible salesman. “Saul has struck down his thousands, and David his tens of thousands. But Bibi, so much winning.”

 

Okay, let’s go.

 

And While I’m At It …

 

We hold these truths to be … awfully inconvenient.

 

We are coming up on Independence Day, when those of us dumb enough to be innocently going around in public places across these fruited plains are going to be treated to the ghastly spectacle of a great many Donald Trump sycophants in dopey red caps reading aloud from the Declaration of Independence.

 

And I am going to throw up in my mouth a little bit.

 

The founding generation more or less ignored the Declaration, for reasons that are easy to understand (no sense waving around a manifesto for revolution while you’re trying to set up a new state), but the Trump cultists approach that inspired document the way certain superstitious ignoramuses treat the Bible, i.e., venerating the object itself as a kind of magical totem while ignoring, inverting, or perverting what the text actually has to say. As they do with the Constitution, they treat the Declaration of Independence the way the German composer Max Reger treated hostile assessments of his musical works: “I am sitting in the smallest room of my house,” he wrote to one unimpressed critic. “I have your review before me. In a moment it will be behind me.”

 

The people who most loudly proclaim themselves “patriots” are, in point of fact, adherents of a politics that is fundamentally opposed to the principles spelled out in the Declaration, hewing to a vaguely articulated ideology that is not only illiberal but anti-liberal, autocratically personalist to a degree that would have made poor old King George puke from anxiety, and entirely hostile to the revolutionary document’s universalism. Above all, they reject its theology, operating from the assumption that liberty is not an endowment from the Creator but the gift from patron to client, from the powerful man to his abject petitioners.

 

It is a Caesarist politics, not an American politics. It is gross, low, and atavistic.

 

Whom do I mean? There is in our politics at the moment something that calls itself the “new right” or MAGA or “national conservatism,” and one name is as good as another for a movement that does not quite exist: In practice, there is only Donald Trump and his concentric circles of sycophancy, and everything else is intellectual pretense.

 

But even pretense can be revealing: The Trump world’s leading intellectual (“tallest building in Wichita”) is probably Patrick Deneen, author of Why Liberalism Failed and Regime Change: Towards a Postliberal Future, and the school of thought (“thought”) associated with him is sometimes called “postliberalism.” Deneen castigates the pantheon of classical liberal thinkers from Adam Smith to John Locke, whose prose Thomas Jefferson freely plagiarized when writing the Declaration: “Long train of abuses”? “More disposed to suffer … than right themselves”? All that jazz? Quotations from Locke, the grand poohbah of Anglo-American liberalism. Locke’s famous list of basic rights—“life, liberty, and property” became “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” under the editorial quill of Thomas Jefferson, relying on George Mason’s earlier adaptation. But the mark of Lockean liberalism cannot be missed.

 

It is not only a few phrases here and there that marks the Declaration as a quintessentially liberal document. Mike Huckabee and the other Elmer Gantry-type figures of the Evangelical world talk of Trump as divinely appointed in approximately the same way European kings understood themselves to be selected by God with His favor; the Declaration rejects that monarchical pretense: “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Trump treats the powers of the presidency as a kind of personal fief, handing out financial favors and pardons to friends and donors while using the awesome powers of the national state to target political enemies ranging from Harvard to the City of Los Angeles, a personalist and might-makes-right approach that cannot be squared with the notions that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” American liberalism, as attested to by the Declaration of Independence, is founded on the notion that rights reside in the individual—not in the nation as a whole, in the race, in a class, or in a caste or a guild—and that these rights are both inherent and non-negotiable rather than subject to ad hoc revision as demanded by the vagaries of political reality or the national situation. Trumpism is all ad–hoc-ism all the time.

 

The thing that calls itself the “new right” rejects liberalism partly out of illiterate linguistic habit (in U.S. political jargon, liberal long meant the left wing of the Democratic Party rather than the British liberty tradition, George McGovern rather than Adam Smith) but also, in its more intelligent (and, hence, more blameworthy) quarters in full knowledge of what is being rejected—which is the American proposition itself as expressed most famously in the Declaration of Independence. Free trade, a liberal immigration policy, due process—these are not mere policy preferences appended to some Völkisch ethno-nationalist uprising in New England, but the foundation of the thing itself.

 

Everybody knows the preamble. But have you dug lately into the specific complaints the Founders catalogued? If Mark Twain was correct that history doesn’t repeat but rhymes, then there’s a whole sonnet lurking in the text of the Declaration for anybody who will bother to read it.

 

“To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.”

 

King George was faulted for setting aside duly enacted laws and frustrating their intents; Donald Trump simply refuses to enforce the law when it doesn’t suit him, as in the matter of the TikTok ban, laws that remain effectively “suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained.” Trump may not have “called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository,” but who can deny that he has usurped congressional power at every turn, from unilaterally enacting tariffs with no legal authorization to creating new executive “departments” such as DOGE ex nihilo (“he has erected a multitude of new offices”) with no legal power to do so, gutting legally authorized programs, abusing “acting” appointments to avoid confirmation hearings, etc.? The colonists condemned King George for going to great lengths to prevent immigration and for seeking to make “judges dependent on his will alone for the tenure of their offices,” etc. The Founders blamed the English king “for cutting off our trade with all parts of the world, for imposing taxes on us without our consent,” which is Trump’s go-to economic policy. For now, it is mostly only immigrants that Trump is engaged in “transporting … beyond seas, to be tried for pretended offenses,” but give him time.

 

What else did the Founders say about rotten, batty old George? “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us.” Well, there’s that, sure. And they proclaimed that a national leader “whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

 

Indeed—well said.

 

With the Declaration of Independence, the American Founders elevated themselves from a lower state—that of subjects—to a higher state: that of citizens. Americans in our time—too many Americans—have devolved from citizens to subjects and then all the way down to beggars: “Please, Mr. President, may we have your permission to buy some lumber from the Canadians to build our houses? Without incurring ruinous taxes that have no legal basis? Pretty please?”

 

When they write the history of the Trump years, it will be “a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these States.” The tyrannical project will fail, not because we are such firm and unwavering patriots but because Donald Trump is too lazy and stupid to make himself into a Napoleon, and the worst of those around him mainly care about making a little easy money and playing big shots on social media rather than becoming a proper junta.

 

Our hope is not in our virtues but in their vices.

 

The Founders set down their objections to the king in writing out of a “decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” Never mind the whole of mankind: We cannot even muster the self-respect to tell ourselves the truth about our situation.

 

Economics for English Majors

 

When I write about socialism—and about the general lack of it in places such as Denmark and Sweden for many decades now—I often hear complaints that I am overlooking the high taxes in those countries, their government-dominated health-care systems, their suffocating regulation, etc. “How high do the taxes have to be before it is socialism? Because 59 percent is pretty high!”

 

As I alluded to in my piece on the Democrats’ callow young nominee for mayor of New York City, many on the right use “socialist” just to mean “bad” or “I don’t like this.” Many of the European welfare states U.S. conservatives sneer at are, in my view, well-governed and reasonably happy places. But there are aspects of their systems that are dysfunctional and in need of reform. And, here’s the thing: There is more than one model of statist, high-tax, high-intervention, overbearing economic management. Not every bad government or program based on certain assumptions we associate with American progressives is socialism. Socialism is socialism.

 

Thomas Jefferson once quipped that given a choice between government without newspapers or newspapers without government, he’d choose the latter. (Forget anarcho-capitalism—bring on the anarcho-journalism!) I suspect that Jefferson was being something less than entirely serious, but Jefferson could be pretty flakey, too, so maybe he meant it.

 

Thinking about choices based on real-world situations can be illuminating.

 

Consider Singapore, for example. Singapore is a very, very capitalistic country. It has low taxes and a pretty small state, with government spending accounting for only about 14 percent of GDP, as opposed to almost 38 percent (all-in, from federal to municipal) in the United States. But it is a real country with a real history, which means there are going to be quirks: Singapore has almost no private ownership of land, for example, with the government owning virtually all land in the country and owners of buildings holding 99-year leases or similar instruments in lieu of actual ownership. Government-owned hospitals are a prominent feature of its healthcare system; while government-owned, those public hospitals are largely independent, compete with one another, and have a reputation for being at least as good as the better kind of private hospital in the United States. And to Jefferson’s concern, Singapore also practices both formal and informal censorship that would strike most Americans as very heavy-handed.

 

People and societies are not blank slates or machines that can be tinkered with, disassembled and reassembled and improved like so many Honda hatchbacks being souped up by tuners. But: Would you rather have Singapore’s smaller overall government footprint and more robustly capitalist economy even with its quirks, or would you prefer the messy and increasingly expensive American version in which you get to keep your land title (provided you stay up on the taxes!) and say what you want and enjoy our sometimes amazing, sometimes idiotic healthcare system?

 

Would you rather pay painfully high taxes to a well-run, reasonably efficient, and trustworthy government such as Denmark’s or pay relatively low U.S. taxes to a dysfunctional and increasingly corrupt federal government, and, in many cases, to state and municipal governments that are no better and often worse? Would you rather have your freewheeling U.S. culture or Iceland’s extraordinarily safe streets? European capitals are full of intelligent and enlightened men and women who wish that their countries had something like the U.S. system of higher education, its venture capital industry, and its Silicon Valley-dominated start-up ecosystem (things too many Americans, especially on the right, take for granted or hold in contempt), but they don’t know how to get them without also importing the rest of the culture that created these.

 

Real life isn’t a Chinese menu, and we don’t get to pick and choose one from column A and one from column B. That isn’t how it works. But it is worth considering the tradeoffs other people and other governments have made over the years with an eye toward the underlying values that are being addressed. Singapore is Singapore for a reason—Denmark, too.

 

It is useful to understand ideas such as socialism and nationalism, and it is necessary to understand our own traditions of constitutional liberty, free enterprise, democracy, innovation, etc. But there is a place for history and specificity and particularity, too—and often these will be at odds with what we would expect from the headline political principles and stated fundamental ideas of a country. Which is a long way of saying that the key to understanding life in Denmark is not where the Danish model falls on some imaginary capitalism-to-socialist spectrum, but understanding the facts of Danish life.

 

Words About Words

 

A headline from National Review: “Bunker Busters Delivered Destruction, but More Importantly, Deterrence.” My friends over at NR are celebrating the centennial of William F. Buckley Jr., who did sometimes say things importantly but is mainly remembered for saying things that were important. Deterrence is more important than destruction, not more importantly than destruction.

 

The location of the modifier in relation to the verb confuses us sometimes when it comes to important and importantly, but what’s being said is: “The bombs did this other thing that was more important” or “more important is the fact that” etc. Bombs do important things; the people who order the bombings sometimes—often—do things importantly. In fact, the ladies and gentlemen in Washington are remarkable for how often they do unimportant things importantly.

 

And Furthermore

 

Do read Michael Tanner on the tricky business of marriage and poverty:

 

Any strategy for reducing poverty in America has to consider the “success sequence,” which posits that if someone finishes high school, gets a job, gets married, and only then has a child, they are unlikely to live in poverty. There is a strong circumstantial case to support the success sequence. Few Americans who finish school, work, and delay childbearing until they are married live in poverty. In fact, as Richard Reeves writes for the Brookings Institution, 73 percent of poor whites and 59 percent of poor African Americans who follow the sequence not only escape poverty but actually reach the middle class.

 

However, not all components of the success sequence carry the same weight or can be linked directly to outcomes. For instance, work seems obviously linked to avoiding poverty.

 

Just four percent of full-time workers are poor, though even part-time work makes a measurable difference. Only 10 percent of part-time workers are poor compared to nearly 30 percent of those who do not work at all. Education’s impact is less direct, but linked with employability and other opportunities. Among people 25 and older, almost one-quarter of those without a high school degree are poor, nearly double the percentage for high school graduates. Marriage, though, may be the most tenuous and contentious aspect of the success sequence.

 

Tanner offers a cool and intelligent evaluation of the evidence in a debate that too often sees people getting carried away by their priors.

 

In Closing

 

Those of you who were young in the ’90s may remember these immortal lines from Cracker:

 

I don’t know what the world may need

But a V-8 engine’s a good start for me.

Think I’ll drive and find a place

To be surly.

 

That song is almost universally known as “What the World Needs Now,” though its actual title is “Teen Angst.”

 

I don’t know what the world may need, but Mercedes-Benz does. A headline from Car and Driver: “Report: Mercedes-AMG to Drop Four-Cylinder for Inline-Sixes and V-8s.”

 

Automakers, especially at the high end, have been dialing back the green stuff for a few years now, as customers continue to make it clear that they do not want as many electric cars as their betters want them to want, and that while hybrids such as the wonderful Toyota Prius Plug-in Hybrid have their place, people paying very large bucks for products from AMG (Mercedes’ performance line) want big honkin’ V-8 engines that produce speed and a terrific noise. Car and Driver:

 

Mercedes-AMG is transitioning away from the four-cylinder plug-in hybrid powertrain and back towards the inline-six and V-8 powertrains more traditionally associated with the brand. That isn’t to say that AMG had a change of heart concerning the merits of the four-cylinder powertrain, but rather that the automaker is responding to customer criticisms. “Technically, the four-cylinder is one of the most advanced drivetrains available in a production car. It’s also right up there on performance. But despite this, it failed to resonate with our traditional customers. We’ve recognized that,” a source at Mercedes told Autocar.

 

Whether it is sippier cars from Mercedes, Nike lecturing people about watching women’s sports, or all of the “pride” stuff in June, businesses are starting to be reminded that for executives not named Anna Wintour, the main job is to give people what they want, not to tell them what they want. (Wintour is stepping down as editor at Vogue, but she’ll still be telling people what they should desire in her role as a senior executive.) I happen to like Mercedes’ beastly four-bangers (the AMG GLA is super fun), I’m happy for people to watch women’s sports (and I personally watch almost exactly as much women’s sports as I do men’s sports—none), and I wish the best to my gay friends (and endless consternation to my gay enemies!) even if I am not inclined to concede to them the entire rainbow for the month of June. I don’t feel like I need a lot of moral direction from Reebok or Apple or Levi’s or Kroger or, you know, Germans.

 

What the world needs now is another corporate social-justice campaign, like I need a hole in my head.

 

Postscript

 

Which reminds me, all praise to Michael Rosenwald of the New York Times for this utterly deadpan sentence: “She had a number of love affairs with men who also drilled small holes in their heads.”

Trump Ends the Folly of De-escalation

By H. R. McMaster

Monday, June 30, 2025

 

In my first year at West Point, I was part of a cordon of cheering cadets who lined Thayer Road to welcome back to American soil 52 people who had been held hostage by the Iranian regime for 444 days. We saluted as six green-and-white Army buses took them through the scenic campus on the way to a three-day respite with their families at the Hotel Thayer. The hostage crisis was just the beginning of what would become a four-decades-long “twilight war” that the Islamic Republic of Iran has waged against the United States, Israel, and its Arab neighbors. The U.S. response, across seven different administrations, has suffered from a failure to consider adequately how historical memory, emotion, and ideology drive and constrain the theocratic dictatorship in Tehran.

 

The exception has been President Donald Trump, who from 2017 to 2021 implemented a strategy of maximum pressure on Iran and in January 2020 decided to kill the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Quds Force, Qassem Suleimani, and his Iraqi militia puppet, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, in Baghdad. Trump recognized that the Iranian regime cannot be conciliated and that efforts to de-escalate confrontations with Iran had allowed it to escalate on its own terms with impunity. Early in his second term, Trump has reversed the self-defeating policies of the Biden administration, restored maximum pressure on Iran, and, most notably, ordered U.S. strikes on three facilities related to its nuclear program.

 

The wisdom of Trump’s approach—forcing Iran to choose between continued isolation and ending its hostility to Israel, the United States, and its Arab neighbors—became apparent to many only after President Joe Biden resurrected a hapless effort to appease Iran that started during the Obama administration. President Biden, in an attempt to restore the flawed Iran nuclear deal from which Trump withdrew in 2018, relaxed enforcement of the Trump administration’s economic sanctions—and as cash flow to Tehran increased, so did Iranian leaders’ confidence that they could use their terrorist proxies to get away with murder. With few exceptions, Iranian proxy attacks against U.S. facilities and personnel went unanswered.

 

Then, on October 7, 2023, the Iranian-supported terrorist organization Hamas lit the “ring of fire” Tehran had built around Israel with heinous acts of mass murder, torture, rape, and kidnapping. Hezbollah entered the war against Israel the next day as Iran mobilized proxies in Syria, the West Bank, and Yemen. Yet even as Israel fought this multifront war, the Biden administration stuck with its de-escalation mantra, with the president himself reportedly suggesting in April 2024 that Israel “take the win” after Israel, the United States, and other nations successfully defended against the massive, direct attack launched on Israel from Iranian soil. After another direct attack by Iran on Israel in October 2024, the Biden White House pressed Jerusalem not to strike Iran’s nuclear sites or energy-production facilities.

 

President Trump prefers peace deals to the use of military force, and he reportedly delayed Israel’s plans to attack Iran earlier this spring and destroy—or at least degrade—the country’s nuclear and missile capabilities. But after the first few days of Israel’s highly successful air, intelligence, and cyber offensive in mid-June, Trump did not urge de-escalation. “[Iran] had bad intentions,” he told reporters. “For 40 years they’ve been saying death to America, death to Israel, death to anybody else they didn’t like. They were schoolyard bullies. And now they’re not bullies anymore.” Trump’s comment reflected his belief that, since the Jimmy Carter administration, U.S. Iran policy produced disappointing results because decision-makers failed to understand the ideology that drives and constrains Iran’s theocratic dictatorship.

 

Carter himself did not realize how deeply anti-Western sentiment drove the revolutionaries in Iran. Hoping to develop a relationship with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and preserve Iran as a Cold War bulwark against the Soviet Union, officials in his administration closed their ears to the anti-American cheers of the revolution and averted their eyes from the reign of terror that Khomeini was inflicting on his people. While visiting Algiers on November 1, 1979, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski sought out Iranian Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan at a reception to tell him that the United States was open to a relationship with the new Islamic Republic. After Iranian newspapers published photos of the two men shaking hands, the Iranians in Algiers immediately ended the talks as outraged students in Tehran seized the U.S. Embassy and took 52 Americans hostage, setting off a long, painful crisis that would dominate the rest of Carter’s presidency. The Iranian government released the hostages on January 20, 1981—minutes after Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president—supposedly as a conciliatory action of goodwill. But the ideology that animated the regime was hardening.

 

The destructive war with Iraq from 1980 to 1988—which cost Iran more than a million casualties and nearly $645 billion—convinced Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini, the clerical order, and leaders of the IRGC Quds Force (the element that directs unconventional warfare and intelligence activities) that protecting the “purity of the revolution” also required exporting its ideology and pursuing hegemonic influence across the Middle East. Although Iranian strategy is often described as “forward defense,” it is better understood as a revanchist offensive to drive the United States out of the region and weaken Arab states (particularly Saudi Arabia) as precursors to the ultimate objective: the destruction of Israel and the restoration of the regional influence the Persian Empire lost to Alexander the Great more than 2,300 years ago.

 

Consider a short highlight reel from Iran’s proxy war against the United States between the 1979-80 hostage crisis and the October 7 Hamas assault on Israel. In April 1983, a truck bombing at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut killed 63 people, including 17 Americans. Six months later, Iranian-trained terrorists killed 241 servicemen in a Marine barracks and 58 French paratroopers in their headquarters. Across the 1980s and early 1990s, Iranian-sponsored terrorists kidnapped 100 foreigners and tortured to death a CIA station chief and a Marine colonel. In Saudi Arabia in 1996, a Hezbollah truck bomb outside Khobar Towers killed 19 American airmen. In Iraq from 2004 to 2011, Iranian-backed militias killed more than 600 American servicemen and women with bombs manufactured in Iran. In Iraq and across the Persian Gulf from 2019 to 2023, Iranian forces and proxies blew up oil tankers, fired missiles into neighboring countries, attacked Saudi oil facilities with a swarm of drones, shot down a U.S. drone, attacked the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, and rocketed U.S. bases in Iraq.

 

Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden tended to view each of these attacks in isolation, rather than episodes in a long-term campaign of aggression grounded in the Islamic Republic’s foundational anti-American and anti-Israeli ideology. Iranian leaders reinforced U.S. presidents’ reluctance to confront Iranian aggression with false narratives about “moderates” within the government who could counterbalance the hostility of the “revolutionaries” if only U.S. leaders would open the door to conciliation. But these so-called “moderates” were no such thing.

 

The ruse worked. Clinton decided not to retaliate against Iran for the bombing of the Khobar Towers in part because a new Iranian president, former librarian Mohammed Khatami, held out hope for reform in Iran. In a 1998 interview, Khatami spoke of an internal political competition in which “one political tendency firmly believes in the prevalence of logic and the rule of law” and “another tendency believes it is entitled to go beyond the law.” He even called for a “dialogue between civilizations.” But the proxy war went on—and so did Iran’s nuclear program and the mounting danger to Israel.

 

In December 2001, former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the man who had served as the vessel for Western dreams of Iranian moderation prior to Khatami, spoke from the podium at Tehran University to deliver the government’s official weekly sermon. “If one day, the Islamic world is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now,” he declared, “then the imperialists’ strategy will reach a standstill because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything.” The Iranian bomb was meant to be the ultimate weapon in the Islamic Republic’s sustained campaign to push the United States out of the Middle East, dominate its Arab neighbors, and destroy Israel.

 

The Obama administration doubled down on the conciliatory approach of its predecessors. The administration scaled back initiatives to constrain Iran’s aggression, as Treasury official Katherine Bauer recalled, “for fear of rocking the boat with Iran and jeopardizing the nuclear deal.” And once the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action took effect, the Obama administration avoided any confrontation that might undo the agreement. Money flowed into Iran, and Iranian oil exports soared, as did funding for terrorist organizations and IRGC operations across the Middle East.

 

The nuclear deal emboldened Iran. Just prior to Iran signing the agreement in the summer of 2015, the U.S. State Department flew pallets of euros and Swiss francs into Geneva, where trams loaded them on Iranian cargo planes headed for Tehran. That same day, Iran released four Americans who had been, in effect, hostages. The operation was reminiscent of the arms-for-hostages arrangement under the Reagan administration.

 

The Obama administration’s lie that the cash payment and the hostage release were disconnected encouraged Iran’s long practice of using hostages for coercion and allowed the revolutionaries in Tehran to portray the ransom payment as an admission of American guilt and weakness. Hossein Nejat, deputy intelligence director of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, stated that ransom payments demonstrated that “the Americans themselves say they have no power to attack Iran.” In the months that followed the payoff, the regime launched multiple missile strikes, boasted about its nuclear stockpiles, awarded a medal to an IRGC commander with American blood on his hands, seized two U.S. Navy vessels, and arrested 10 sailors and paraded them in front of cameras before releasing them 15 hours later. The Iranians continued to take new hostages, detaining Princeton graduate student Xiyue Wang in 2016 while he was conducting research on the Qajar empire and learning Farsi for a Ph.D. in Eurasian history. As in the past, goodwill did not beget goodwill, and conciliation led to Iranian escalation, not moderation.

 

From 2017 to 2020, the Trump administration constrained Iran’s ability to wage its proxy wars, sanctioning approximately 1,000 Iranian individuals and organizations. In 2018, Iran’s rial declined fourfold against major currencies, and oil exports, which generate most of the regime’s income, dropped to 1 million barrels a day from a high of 2.5 million. Sanctions, a decline in gross domestic product, and high inflation led to a 10 percent reduction in military spending. Hezbollah’s stipend was halved, and Iran was having trouble meeting payroll for its proxy army in Syria. But the Islamic Republic’s leaders had been conditioned to believe that the United States would not act militarily against Tehran.

 

Just prior to the U.S. strike on Suleimani and al-Muhandis in Baghdad on January 3, 2020, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, referring to the prospect of U.S. retaliation for Iranian proxy attacks on U.S. bases and the U.S. Embassy in Iraq, taunted President Donald Trump, saying: “You can’t do anything.” Trump showed him otherwise.

 

Khamenei dusted off that infamous barb from his predecessor, Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini, once again earlier this month, arguing amid nuclear deal negotiations that the United States “can’t do a damn thing about” Tehran’s nuclear program.

 

Trump’s decision to strike Iranian nuclear facilities earlier this month was incredibly consequential, degrading and delaying a hostile regime’s path to the most destructive weapon on earth, as well as the missiles designed to deliver it. Those strikes—and Israel’s campaign that preceded them—also decapitated leaders who had blood on their hands from Iran’s proxy wars.

 

But even more importantly, the Israeli and U.S. military operations directly against the Islamic Republic and its warmaking apparatus reminded officials in Tehran that they cannot antagonize their adversaries in the region with impunity—and reminded officials in Washington that Iran’s theocratic dictatorship cannot be conciliated. “De-escalation” was never a path to peace—it was an approach that perpetuated war on the Iranians’ terms.

The Liberal Misinformation Bubble About Youth Gender Medicine

By Helen Lewis

Sunday, June 29, 2025

 

Allow children to transition, or they will kill themselves. For more than a decade, this has been the strongest argument in favor of youth gender medicine—a scenario so awful that it stifled any doubts or questions about puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.

 

“We often ask parents, ‘Would you rather have a dead son than a live daughter?’” Johanna Olson-Kennedy of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles once explained to ABC News. Variations on the phrase crop up in innumerable media articles and public statements by influencers, activists, and LGBTQ groups. The same idea—that the choice is transition or death—appeared in the arguments made by Elizabeth Prelogar, the Biden administration’s solicitor general, before the Supreme Court last year. Tennessee’s law prohibiting the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to treat minors with gender dysphoria would, she said, “increase the risk of suicide.”

 

But there is a huge problem with this emotive formulation: It isn’t true. When Justice Samuel Alito challenged the ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio on such claims during oral arguments, Strangio made a startling admission. He conceded that there is no evidence to support the idea that medical transition reduces adolescent suicide rates.

 

At first, Strangio dodged the question, saying that research shows that blockers and hormones reduce “depression, anxiety, and suicidality”—that is, suicidal thoughts. (Even that is debatable, according to reviews of the research literature.) But when Alito referenced a systematic review conducted for the Cass report in England, Strangio conceded the point. “There is no evidence in some—in the studies that this treatment reduces completed suicide,” he said. “And the reason for that is completed suicide, thankfully and admittedly, is rare, and we’re talking about a very small population of individuals with studies that don’t necessarily have completed suicides within them.”

 

Here was the trans-rights movement’s greatest legal brain, speaking in front of the nation’s highest court. And what he was saying was that the strongest argument for a hotly debated treatment was, in fact, not supported by the evidence.

 

Even then, his admission did not register with the liberal justices. When the court voted 6–3 to uphold the Tennessee law, Sonia Sotomayor claimed in her dissent that “access to care can be a question of life or death.” If she meant any kind of therapeutic support, that might be defensible. But claiming that this is true of medical transition specifically—the type of care being debated in the Skrmetti case—is not supported by the current research.

 

Advocates of the open-science movement often talk about “zombie facts”—popular sound bites that persist in public debate, even when they have been repeatedly discredited. Many common political claims made in defense of puberty blockers and hormones for gender-dysphoric minors meet this definition. These zombie facts have been flatly contradicted not just by conservatives but also by prominent advocates and practitioners of the treatment—at least when they’re speaking candidly. Many liberals are unaware of this, however, because they are stuck in media bubbles in which well-meaning commentators make confident assertions for youth gender medicine—claims from which its elite advocates have long since retreated.

 

Perhaps the existence of this bubble shouldn’t be surprising. Many of the most fervent advocates of youth transition are also on record disparaging the idea that it should be debated at all. Strangio—who works for the country’s best-known free-speech organization—once tweeted that he would like to scuttle Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage, a skeptical treatment of youth gender medicine. Strangio declared, “Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.” Marci Bowers, the former head of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the most prominent organization for gender-medicine providers, has likened skepticism of child gender medicine to Holocaust denial. “There are not two sides to this issue,” she once said, according to a recent episode of The Protocol, a New York Times podcast.

 

Boasting about your unwillingness to listen to your opponents probably plays well in some crowds. But it left Strangio badly exposed in front of the Supreme Court, where it became clear that the conservative justices had read the most convincing critiques of hormones and blockers—and had some questions as a result.

 

***

 

Trans-rights activists like to accuse skeptics of youth gender medicine—and publications that dare to report their views—of fomenting a “moral panic.” But the movement has spent the past decade telling gender-nonconforming children that anyone who tries to restrict access to puberty blockers and hormones is, effectively, trying to kill them. This was false, as Strangio’s answer tacitly conceded. It was also irresponsible.

 

After England restricted the use of puberty blockers in 2020, the government asked an expert psychologist, Louis Appleby, to investigate whether the suicide rate for patients at the country’s youth gender clinic rose dramatically as a result. It did not: In fact, he did not find any increase in suicides at all, despite the lurid claims made online. “The way that this issue has been discussed on social media has been insensitive, distressing and dangerous, and goes against guidance on safe reporting of suicide,” Appleby reported. “One risk is that young people and their families will be terrified by predictions of suicide as inevitable without puberty blockers.”

 

When red-state bans are discussed, you will also hear liberals say that conservative fears about the medical-transition pathway are overwrought—because all children get extensive, personalized assessments before being prescribed blockers or hormones. This, too, is untrue. Although the official standards of care recommend thorough assessment over several months, many American clinics say they will prescribe blockers on a first visit.

 

This isn’t just a matter of U.S. health providers skimping on talk therapy to keep costs down; some practitioners view long evaluations as unnecessary and even patronizing. “I don’t send someone to a therapist when I’m going to start them on insulin,” Olson-Kennedy told The Atlantic in 2018. Her published research shows that she has referred girls as young as 13 for double mastectomies. And what if these children later regret their decision? “Adolescents actually have the capacity to make a reasoned logical decision,” she once told an industry seminar, adding: “If you want breasts at a later point in your life, you can go and get them.”

 

***

 

Perhaps the greatest piece of misinformation believed by liberals, however, is that the American standards of care in this area are strongly evidence-based. In fact, at this point, the fairest thing to say about the evidence surrounding medical transition for adolescents—the so-called Dutch protocol, as opposed to talk therapy and other support—is that it is weak and inconclusive. (A further complication is that American child gender medicine has deviated significantly from this original protocol, in terms of length of assessments and the number and demographics of minors being treated.) Yes, as activists are keen to point out, most major American medical associations support the Dutch protocol. But consensus is not the same as evidence. And that consensus is politically influenced.

 

Rachel Levine, President Joe Biden’s assistant secretary for health and human services, successfully lobbied to have age minimums removed for most surgeries from the standards of care drawn up by WPATH. That was a deeply political decision—Levine, according to emails from her office reviewed by the Times, believed that listing any specific limits under age 18 would give opponents of youth transition hard targets to exploit.

 

More recently, another court case over banning blockers and hormones, this time in Alabama, has revealed that WPATH members themselves had doubts about their own guidelines.

 

In 2022, Alabama passed a law criminalizing the prescription of hormones and blockers to patients under 19. After the Biden administration sued to block the law, the state’s Republican attorney general subpoenaed documents showing that WPATH has known for some time that the evidence base for adolescent transition is thin. “All of us are painfully aware that there are many gaps in research to back up our recommendations,” Eli Coleman, the psychologist who chaired the team revising the standards of care, wrote to his colleagues in 2023. Yet the organization did not make this clear in public. Laura Edwards-Leeper—who helped bring the Dutch protocol to the U.S. but has since criticized in a Washington Post op-ed the unquestioningly gender-affirmative model—has said that the specter of red-state bans made her and her op-ed co-author reluctant to break ranks.

 

The Alabama litigation also confirmed that WPATH had commissioned systematic reviews of the evidence for the Dutch protocol. However, close to publication, the Johns Hopkins University researcher involved was told that her findings needed to be “scrutinized and reviewed to ensure that publication does not negatively affect the provision of transgender health care.” This is not how evidence-based medicine is supposed to work. You don’t start with a treatment and then ensure that only studies that support that treatment are published. In a legal filing in the Alabama case, Coleman insisted “it is not true” that the WPATH guidelines “turned on any ideological or political considerations” and that the group’s dispute with the Johns Hopkins researcher concerned only the timing of publication. Yet the Times has reported that at least one manuscript she sought to publish “never saw the light of day.”

 

The Alabama disclosures are not the only example of this reluctance to acknowledge contrary evidence. Last year, Olson-Kennedy said that she had not published her own broad study on mental-health outcomes for youth with gender dysphoria, because she worried about its results being “weaponized.” That raised suspicions that she had found only sketchy evidence to support the treatments that she has been prescribing—and publicly advocating for—over many years.

 

Last month, her study finally appeared as a preprint, a form of scientific publication where the evidence has not yet been peer-reviewed or finalized. Its participants “demonstrated no significant changes in reported anxious/depressed, withdrawn/depressed, somatic complaints, social problems, thought problems, attention problems, aggressive behavior, internalizing problems or externalizing problems” in the two years after starting puberty blockers. (I have requested comment from Olson-Kennedy via Children’s Hospital Los Angeles but have not yet heard back.)

 

The reliance on elite consensus over evidence helps make sense of WPATH’s flatly hostile response to the Cass report in England, which commissioned systematic reviews and recommended extreme caution over the use of blockers and hormones. The review was a direct challenge to WPATH’s ability to position itself as the final arbiter of these treatments—something that became more obvious when the conservative justices referenced the British document in their questions and opinions in Skrmetti. One of WPATH’s main charges against Hilary Cass, the senior pediatrician who led the review, was that she was not a gender specialist—in other words, that she was not part of the charmed circle who already agreed that these treatments were beneficial.

 

Because of WPATH’s hostility, many on the American left now believe that the Cass review has been discredited. “Upon first reading, especially to a person with limited knowledge of the history of transgender health care, much of the report might seem reasonable,” Lydia Polgreen wrote in the Times last August. However, after “poring over the document” and “interviewing experts in gender-affirming care,” Polgreen realized that the Cass review was “fundamentally a subjective, political document.”

 

Advocates of youth gender medicine have reacted furiously to articles in the Times and elsewhere that take Cass’s conclusions seriously. Indeed, some people inside the information bubble appear to believe that if respectable publications would stop writing about this story, all the doubts and questions—and Republican attempts to capitalize on them electorally—would simply disappear. Whenever the Times has published a less-than-cheerleading article about youth transition, supporters of gender medicine have accused the newspaper of manufacturing a debate that otherwise would not exist. After the Skrmetti decision, Strangio was still describing media coverage of the issue as “insidious,” adding: “The New York Times, especially, has been fixated on casting the medical care as being of an insufficient quality.”

 

***

 

Can this misinformation bubble ever be burst? On the left, support for youth transition has been rolled together with other issues—such as police reform and climate activism—as a kind of super-saver combo deal of correct opinions. The 33-year-old democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani has made funding gender transition, including for minors, part of his pitch to be New York’s mayor. But complicated issues deserve to be treated individually: You can criticize Israel, object to the militarization of America’s police forces, and believe that climate change is real, and yet still not support irreversible, experimental, and unproven medical treatments for children.

 

The polarization of this issue in America has been deeply unhelpful for getting liberals to accept the sketchiness of the evidence base. When Vice President J. D. Vance wanted to troll the left, he joined Bluesky—where skeptics of youth gender medicine are among the most blocked users—and immediately started talking about the Skrmetti judgment. Actions like that turn accepting the evidence base into a humiliating climbdown.

 

Acknowledging the evidence does not mean that you also have to support banning these treatments—or reject the idea that some people will be happier if they transition. Cass believes that some youngsters may indeed benefit from the medical pathway. “Whilst some young people may feel an urgency to transition, young adults looking back at their younger selves would often advise slowing down,” her report concludes. “For some, the best outcome will be transition, whereas others may resolve their distress in other ways.”

 

I have always argued against straightforward bans on medical transition for adolescents. In practice, the way these have been enacted in red states has been uncaring and punitive. Parents are threatened with child-abuse investigations for pursuing treatments that medical professionals have assured them are safe. Children with severe mental-health troubles suddenly lose therapeutic support. Clinics nationwide, including Olson-Kennedy’s, are now abruptly closing because of the political atmosphere. Writing about the subject in 2023, I argued that the only way out of the culture war was for the American medical associations to commission reviews and carefully consider the evidence.

 

However, the revelations from Skrmetti and the Alabama case have made me more sympathetic to commentators such as Leor Sapir, of the conservative Manhattan Institute, who supports the bans because American medicine cannot be trusted to police itself. “Are these bans the perfect solution? Probably not,” he told me in 2023. “But at the end of the day, if it’s between banning gender-affirming care and leaving it unregulated, I think we can minimize the amount of harm by banning it.” Once you know that WPATH wanted to publish a review only if it came to the group’s preferred conclusion, Sapir’s case becomes more compelling.

 

Despite the concerted efforts to suppress the evidence, however, the picture on youth gender medicine has become clearer over the past decade. It’s no humiliation to update our beliefs as a result: I regularly used to write that medical transition was “lifesaving,” before I saw how limited the evidence on suicide was. And it took another court case, brought by the British detransitioner Keira Bell, for me to realize fully that puberty blockers were not what they were sold as—a “safe and reversible” treatment that gave patients “time to think”—but instead a one-way ticket to full transition, with physical changes that cannot be undone.

 

Some advocates for the Dutch protocol, as it’s applied in the United States, have staked their entire career and reputation on its safety and effectiveness. They have strong incentives not to concede the weakness of the evidence. In 2023, the advocacy group GLAAD drove a truck around the offices of The New York Times to declare that the “science is settled.” Doctors such as Olson-Kennedy and activists such as Strangio are unlikely to revise their opinions.

 

For everyone else, however, the choice is still open. We can support civil-rights protections for transgender people without having to endorse an experimental and unproven set of medical treatments—or having to repeat emotionally manipulative and now discredited claims about suicide.

 

I am not a fan of the American way of settling political disputes, by kicking them over to an escalating series of judges. But in the case of youth gender medicine, the legal system has provided clarity and disclosure that might otherwise not exist. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s oral questioning in Skrmetti and the discovery process in Alabama, we now have a clearer picture of how youth gender medicine has really been operating in the United States, and an uncomfortable insight into how advocacy groups and medical associations have tamped down their own concerns about its evidence base. Those of us who have been urging caution now know that many of our ostensible opponents had the same concerns. They just smothered them, for political reasons.

Logic Trips Up the Trans Movement

By Jesse Singal

Thursday, June 26, 2025

 

The American LGBT movement has had a devastating couple of weeks when it comes to both its goals and its reputation. The first blow concerned United States v. Skrmetti, a case challenging the constitutionality of a Tennessee law, SB1, which outlawed anyone under 18 from receiving puberty blockers, hormones, or surgery to help them transition their sex.

 

While the case was brought by three minor plaintiffs and their families, the Biden administration and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) joined early on. Between the high-profile nature of the participants and the stakes—the very fate of youth gender medicine in red states—this was a blockbuster case. And in an unsurprising result, the conservative majority upheld the law, 6-3, in a decision released on June 18.

 

The next day, the New York Times Magazine published a truly damning exposé arguing that this loss was at least partially self-inflicted by the LGBT movement. The article, written by Nicholas Confessore, was headlined “How the Transgender Rights Movement Bet on the Supreme Court and Lost,” and it painted a picture of a movement that has, at least in recent years, done an exceptionally poor job of making persuasive arguments and sound tactical decisions.

 

He writes:

 

In private meetings of L.G.B.T.Q. legal-advocacy groups, many lawyers expected a loss almost from the moment the court agreed to hear the case, according to one person briefed on the conversations. On the outside, I heard rising criticism of the strategic and political judgments animating the A.C.L.U.’s litigation — muted by fear that voicing those criticisms more openly, amid the depredations of Trump’s second term, would only give the right more ammunition. “There are a lot of conversations happening right now,” said Dana Beyer, a physician and longtime trans activist in Maryland. “People know the movement is stuck. They know we’ve gone too far. They know we’ve lost the thread.”

 

I’ve been reporting on the youth gender medicine debate off and on for almost a decade, writing about it for major outlets (including this one). Confessore’s reporting tracks with my own experiences. In recent years, I’ve found, the activist groups and journalists advocating for youth gender medicine and for trans rights more broadly have exhibited a marked inability to make cogent arguments, a penchant for alienating allies, and a general level of dysfunction and divorce from political reality that is hard to fully grasp (even if Confessore’s article marks an excellent start).

 

Before I go any further, I should note that I’m a bit biased here; I’m writing about groups that have, in some cases, called me out for my own alleged transphobia, and I am still listed on a GLAAD website because of that supposed transphobia. I’m also biased because I’ve been extremely frustrated, most recently, at how groups like GLAAD have treated other journalists; the organization orchestrated a genuinely calumnious campaign against a group of Times reporters who have done truly excellent, careful, compassionate work on this subject.

 

The ACLU, for its part, has reflexively adopted the maximalist position of full self-ID (your sex is what you say it is) on all sorts of issues—not just on youth gender medicine, but also on trans women in sports, prison, and locker rooms—that require sensitivity and compromise, not self-righteous dogmatism. And it has both litigated and advocated for positions on these matters that are well out of line with the average American’s views.

 

At the national level, none of this has worked: none of the browbeating, none of the language policing, none of the attempts to “re-educate” the public about sex and gender. If you’re one of the small number of Americans in favor of full self-ID, you should be asking whether your cause would be in a better position if GLAAD and the ACLU had simply taken its last decade worth of donations and thrown the money into a pit somewhere, rather than do what they’ve been doing. These cascading failures are a clear example of what happens when activist groups get high on their own supply and stop trying to convince the public, and when their members succumb to the so-called “iron law of institutions”—a tendency to act in a manner that promotes their own own in-group status rather than their group’s external goals.

 

***

 

It wasn’t always this way.

 

Confessore’s article explores a “profound generational and political transformation within the L.G.B.T.Q. movement.” In the run-up to and wake of the 2015 Obergefell decision that legalized gay marriage nationwide—a profound victory for LGBT activists—“movement leaders faced pressure to shift their focus to trans people, long the coalition’s junior partners,” Confessore wrote. This ushered in the present age of LGBT activism, which is focused almost entirely on trans rights, and which—as Confessore notes—has pushed the aforementioned maximalist approach, premised on the idea of a core human right to define one’s sex for oneself, and to have society respect that definition.

 

The differences between these two iterations of the LGBT movement are hard to miss. I came of age politically during the fight over gay marriage. It was the first domestic cause I felt strongly about, and the logic behind it seemed airtight. The ask being made by the LGBT community was, in effect, for gay men and women who wanted to marry one another to simply be left alone. To mount meaningful moral arguments against this was to enter into strange territory, such as to argue that “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” (irrelevant if you believe in the separation of church and state) or to conjure slippery slopes involving marriages not between man and man, but between man and beast. There was very little substance to these counterarguments, and this fact can partly account for Obergefell: Outside of religious settings, there is not a great deal of moral complexity when it comes to gay marriage; it does not involve deep discussions about ethical tradeoffs and the value of human life in the way that, say, abortion or medical assistance in dying do.

 

The LGBT movement isn’t any one thing; like any other big-tent group, it has always had its internecine disputes. At one end are conservative integrationists like Andrew Sullivan (that’s the term he prefers), and at the other are radical types who, as Confessore puts it, have “sought to deconstruct assumptions about what was normal—to dismantle bourgeois institutions, not seek inclusion in them.” And I would argue that the LGBT movement won its recent victories in part due to the power of the integrationist camp.

 

But now, the radical types have surged to the forefront. One of them is the main character in Confessore’s piece: Chase Strangio, the star ACLU attorney who made history during Skrmetti by becoming the first openly trans person to argue before the Supreme Court. Strangio, who identifies as a male, “doesn’t believe in the Constitution,” describes marriage as a “fundamentally violent institution,” and doesn’t think there’s such a thing as a “male” or “female” body in the first place.

 

Strangio reached such a perch because the present iteration of the mainstream LGBT movement, perhaps emboldened by its successes with gay marriage, has lately come to favor this sort of boundary-pushing. “In the wider culture,” Confessore reported, “concepts of gender were becoming dizzyingly capacious, even confused. Challenging the idea of a rigid male-female binary, academic theorists detached gender from sex entirely, then reimagined it as an infinite spectrum.” It would be one thing if this stuff stayed on campuses or online. But there ended up being very little daylight between the weirdest claims about sex and gender on TikTok or Bluesky, the demands of major activist groups, and in some cases, the policies of certain blue-state governments themselves.

 

If LGBT activists were ever going to convince the American public that 13-year-old children should have near-unquestioned medical autonomy, that male rapists who have not fully transitioned should be housed in women’s prisons, that males should compete against females in competitive sports from high school on, and that human sex isn’t straightforwardly binary, it was going to take some strong and genuine efforts at persuasion. Humans tend to have very strong and deeply felt intuitions about biological sex, simply because every adult is keenly aware of its ramifications. Even a social conservative who has some level of disgust for homosexuality can understand, and maybe eventually accept, a libertarian argument for gay marriage. But the arguments the contemporary LGBT movement has chosen to stake its political capital on represent not an attempt to move the ball 10 or 15 more yards down the field, but to play an entirely different sport, with an entirely different set of (rather byzantine) rules. And all too often, what passes for discourse among LGBT activists and their allies amounts to yelling at the spectators for not understanding the rules rather than explaining the new sport and making an affirmative case for why it should be played.

 

I’d go back to the campaign against the Times reporters as a prime example: Katie J. M. Baker, Azeen Ghorayshi, and Emily Bazelon all published careful, in-depth work that examined the new claims being made by LGBT rights groups, presented the different sides of the arguments, and treated trans people themselves with the utmost respect. They were met not with “Thank you for taking this seriously—here’s some stuff we disagree with” by groups like GLAAD, but with the sort of reputational napalming one would normally reserve for an outright Nazi. GLAAD famously even parked a truck, emblazoned with the phrase “Stop questioning trans people’s right to exist & access to medical care” outside the Times building. (“The science is settled,” a laughably false claim, was on the truck as well.)

 

The trans rights movement needed an Andrew Sullivan type, and instead it got Chase Strangio. Whether or not you agree with Sullivan, it’s undeniable that the average American can read one of his columns, understand it, and rarely feel like Sullivan is making wild leaps of logic or accusing them of bigotry for not accepting his arguments. The same is not true of figures like Strangio.

 

In the absence of a Sullivanesque figure, the LGBT movement could only offer bizarre mantras, pretzel-like logic, and, frankly, lies in defense of an agenda that became genuinely radical. (I say that as someone who thinks the term “radical” is chronically overused, such as when it is applied to politicians like Barack Obama or policies like, well, gay marriage.) The example that always stuck with me—because it was so silly—concerned the sports question and went something like this: “Who said sports are fair? LeBron James has a competitive advantage over less athletic basketball players, but we don’t ban him.” This, of course, misses the entire point of why we have a women’s category in the first place.

 

Silly as these arguments were, anyone embedded in liberal professional or social circles who questioned them was going to have a very bad time. Within liberal communities, a culture of pluralistic ignorance set in, obscuring the fact that even many Democrats are opposed to the positions held by mainstream liberal institutions and, in some cases, pushed by the most recent Democratic administration. In polling published this past January, for example, Ipsos and the Times found that, among those who identify as Democratic or Democratic-leaning, 67 percent believed trans girls and women should be banned from female sports, and 54 percent believed no one under 18 should have access to youth gender medicine. Only 19 percent of respondents believed 10 was old enough for kids to go on puberty blockers.

 

Still, one of the movement’s extremely silly arguments got all the way to SCOTUS. I’ll leave the details to The Dispatch’s in-house experts, but to win the case, the plaintiffs in Skrmetti first had to convince the court that Tennessee was engaging in sex discrimination: that the law treated kids differently based on whether they were male or female. The thinking went that under SB1, male children might be allowed to take testosterone for delayed puberty, but female ones might not be allowed to do the same to go through a partial male puberty of their own—and this therefore amounted to discrimination on the basis of sex.

 

The conservative majority swatted this argument away rather effortlessly. The governing variable in this case was not treatment on the basis of sex, argued Chief Justice John Roberts, but rather treatment on the basis of medical condition. That is, under SB1 in Tennessee, male and female minors are similarly barred from receiving endocrinological interventions to treat gender dysphoria, and equally allowed to receive them to treat other conditions, like early puberty, late puberty, or hirsutism.

 

Whether or not you agree with the outcome, the sex discrimination claim—a mainstay of activists on X and Bluesky, I would add—was very unlikely to fly, because it just didn’t map neatly onto reality or the legislative text being scrutinized. Throw a conservative majority into the mix, and it’s hard to disagree with the assessment of Confessore’s sources that this case was always a doomed enterprise for the ACLU and Biden administration.

 

In fact, the case was something of a buffet of failed but viral claims bouncing off the conservative justices, reality, or both. For example, LGBT activists have endlessly claimed, without anything resembling solid evidence, that youth gender medicine saves lives by preventing adolescent suicides. This claim not only found its way into top medical journals, but was also disseminated by the Biden administration itself via Rachel Levine, a trans woman who served as assistant secretary for health and the White House’s chief cheerleader for these treatments.

 

As Confessore writes:

 

In March 2022, as Alabama’s ban was winding through the Legislature, Levine’s office issued a fact sheet asserting that the treatments had proven clinical benefits for children and adolescents. That April, in a speech urging doctors to fight the bans, Levine seemed to go further, claiming that gender-affirming care broadly was “suicide-prevention care. It improves quality of life, and it saves lives. It is based on decades of study. It is a well-established medical practice.”

 

But because there has never been anything substantive to these claims, Strangio was forced to concede during oral arguments that “there is no evidence that this treatment reduces completed suicide.” You can repeat false claims over and over on social media and in other contexts where there’s no one around to meaningfully rebut you. But it’s a lot harder to do that in front of a panel of mostly skeptical Supreme Court justices. Maybe there’s a lesson there about effective arguments?

 

***

 

The good news is that treating trans people with respect and dignity does not require adopting the most radical claims of the contemporary trans movement. While polling of trans people is scarce, I’ve found in my reporting that trans people are themselves rather divided about issues like full-blown self-ID and youth gender medicine, and I’ve spoken with plenty who believe that the mainstream movement has lost the plot. (On average, I would wager that older and younger trans people have different views on these issues, as do those who have versus haven’t sought major medical interventions. For understandable reasons, these arguments are often kept out of public view.)

 

Gender dysphoria is real and causes real distress; anyone who experiences it deserves the utmost compassion (not to mention the best available science). But this issue is more complex than the LGBT fights of yesteryear; it does necessarily entail tradeoffs and fraught discussions. While there is plenty of room for conversation, education, and compromise, activists will continue to hit dead ends unless they can make their case to the public in a clear, coherent way that doesn’t require adopting complex, academic notions of sex, gender, and gender identity that come across as strange—or simply false—to many people.

 

It will be very interesting to see what the ACLU, GLAAD, and the other groups do in response to their recent failures. Part of what’s vexing about all this is that the Strangios of the world seem to be rewarded for their failures—Strangio has been the subject of multiple glowing profiles and interviews, a hagiographic-looking documentary, and the other perks of stardom. By presenting as a member of the radical, burn-down-the-old-order vanguard, he enjoys immense perks.

 

But does this stance actually help Strangio’s movement win? It certainly doesn’t seem like it.