The Ethos of the Left Is Fracturing Friendships

By Itxu Díaz

Sunday, August 31, 2025

 

The great paradox of the communications age is that we are more connected and yet lonelier than ever. (No, ChatGPT, Netflix, or @SexyKitten84 don’t count as “friends.”)

 

The share of Americans with no close friends has quadrupled since 1990, reaching 12 percent, according to a survey conducted shortly after the pandemic. Meanwhile, the number of people who reported having ten or more good friends has dropped to a third of what it was 20 years ago. To blame this trend on a single cause would be simplistic, but there’s a common thread that connects these warning signs of a social crisis: progressive ideas.

 

And we shouldn’t be surprised. In the left’s most ambitious experiment, the Soviet Union, the regime promoted “friendship” as an ideological tool of fraternity among socialist peoples, and valued camaraderie in struggle and at work, but distrusted private friendship between individuals outside supervision, seeing it as a breeding ground for conspiracy.

 

Today’s progressivism is even more corrosive to friendships. Traditional values that the left despises: loyalty, fidelity, rootedness, ideological tolerance, sacrifice, and reciprocity. Postmodern values that animate the left: freedom from commitments, moral relativism, rootlessness, fluidity, globalism, cancel culture, self-affirmation, and sentimentality.

 

The postmodern left dissolves the individual into a soup of identities and communities, erases him as a person, dehumanizes him, and in doing so makes sincere bonds impossible — because only individuals can have friends. No matter what Stalin said, a “collective” is about as capable of friendship as my ironing board, which I’d be very surprised to find having a late-night chat with the dishwasher.

 

You can get furious with a close friend — probably because he or she matters to you. As a kid, I once got into a fight with my best friend, and we didn’t speak for six months. We passed practical messages through go-betweens: “Do you have yesterday’s math notes?” “Are we going to the party on Saturday?” He’d reply, “I’ll give them to your mom,” or, “Okay, you sit in the back and I’ll be at the bar up front.” One day we tried to talk it out, only to realize that we couldn’t even remember what had caused the fight. Since then, our friendship has been as solid as that ridiculous childhood quarrel.

 

The late sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argued that today our relationships are liquid — our bonds, our anger, and our goodbyes are liquid. He also noted that the technologies that keep us connected to people who are far away also make it easier for them to stay far away. I suppose that if what happened with my friend had happened today, he would’ve blocked me on Instagram, and I would’ve trolled him from a burner Twitter account.

 

The fear of commitment isn’t just a plague on love. It poisons friendship and work, too. “In a liquid modern life there are no permanent bonds,” Bauman wrote, “and any that we take up for a time must be tied loosely so that they can be untied again, as quickly and as effortlessly as possible, when circumstances change — as they surely will in our liquid modern society, over and over again.”

 

Much has been written about how progressives have undermined family, marriage, and relationships, but little about how they’ve also damaged friendships. The erosion of traditional values, secularization, and relativism share blame. Empty souls quickly try to fill their loneliness with technology and the illusion of social connection, dulling the pain of isolation.

 

Without wanting to scare off the TikTok generation, I think that one of the best analyses of friendship is found in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. The philosopher identifies three kinds: friendships of utility, common but fragile; friendships of pleasure, in which enjoyment matters most; and friendships of virtue, the ideal form, grounded in loyalty and trust. I would add a fourth type: political friendship, which can be summed up in one word — nonexistent.

 

What once sustained friendship was a code of honor. Today, relativism erodes honor and commitment because it claims that there are as many truths as there are people and circumstances. What one person sees as betrayal, another may not. The corollary: When everyone has his own truth, you can kiss friendship goodbye.

 

Ties to people and places once shaped social bonds. Today, progressive ideas distrust roots, encourage vague globalism, and promote dynamic identities that are often imaginary. The secularization of society has created a more hedonistic culture that prevents selfless friendship, while the breakdown of old codes of civility has eroded even common courtesy: Small gestures for others, though ornamental, once smoothed everyday life. Instead, we’ve inherited from progressive psychology a flood of self-help books and therapies that tell people to “empower” themselves, convincing them that the world owes them and that they can treat human relationships like supermarket goods: If it doesn’t add value, take it off the shelf. If only we could do the same with politicians.

 

Of all the poisonous ideas in the coffee-mug self-help literature, perhaps the vilest is the concept of “toxic people.” Toxic would be to drink bleach or swallow your phone battery. Your brother-in-law Charles may be an idiot, and maybe you should steer clear of him, but he’s not “toxic.” This cheap philosophy dehumanizes people, leaves them more vulnerable to loneliness, and makes them forget the real value of close friends. Suffering alongside a friend has become unthinkable in an age when people drop friends who are struggling because, for example, as I once heard an “influencer” say, “they give off bad energy and that could hurt my skin.” In the end, when all her troublesome friends are discarded, I hope that girl has a loyal cat to turn to for advice about loneliness.

Israel Shows Some Diplomatic Spine

By Seth Mandel

Thursday, August 28, 2025

 

Israel is responding aggressively and appropriately to two recent public relations challenges, suggesting Jerusalem understands the gravity of its situation as well as the fact that it is in the right on both.

 

The first is the “famine” libel. Israel is asking the IPC, the multinational monitor, to retract its debunked report on Gaza City. According to Reuters, the Israeli Foreign Ministry is warning that “if a new report were not presented within two weeks, Israel would continue to challenge the assessment and would ask the IPC’s donors to halt their financial support.”

 

Good. Israel can no longer afford to simply be correct on the merits. If corrupt global agencies are going to insert themselves as partisans into this war then they’ll learn to take a (metaphorical) punch.

 

As a reminder, Israel first meticulously proved the report false based on the IPC’s own data, which suggests the agency is not merely incompetent but corrupt and compromised.

 

Indeed, it’s clear the report was released as a preemptive attack on Israel’s new operation in Gaza City. The IPC simply declared famine in the one place in Gaza that the IDF was looking to enter, which was also the one place in Gaza relatively untouched by the war. Still, it’s important to have the numbers on your side, and Israel did (all emphasis in the original):

 

The report relied on only half of the data actually collected in July — five sub-samples covering 7,519 children, described on pages 49–50 of the FRC report, with a combined average of roughly 16% — just above the threshold.

 

By contrast, a Nutrition Cluster presentation released on August 8 — a week before the August 15 cut-off date — reported the full July sample of 15,749 children. Those results showed unweighted and weighted GAM rates of 13.5% and 12.2%, respectively — both well below the famine threshold.

 

So the data were clear: no famine. That the IPC chose to manipulate the data for political purposes suggests the agency has forfeited its legitimacy. Additionally:

 

The IPC itself acknowledged that available data on non-trauma mortality were nowhere near the famine threshold of 2 deaths per 10,000 people per day. Based on its own population estimate for Gaza Governorate — about 937,600 people — this threshold would correspond to roughly 188 non-trauma deaths per day. By contrast, the Hamas-run Ministry of Health reported that as of 15 August the five-day moving average across all of Gaza was just six ‘malnutrition-related deaths’ per day.

 

Even if every one of these had occurred in Gaza City and were actual malnutrition-related excess deaths, the non-trauma death rate would still be an order of magnitude lower than the famine threshold.

 

It didn’t have the numbers on its side, so the IPC made them up, claiming that the difference was made up of unreported (imaginary) cases.

 

Again, Israel seems to understand the gravity of the IPC’s corrupt interference on behalf of a terrorist organization. There is no reason for Israel to let up on the agency, and so far, it isn’t.

 

Then there is the lingering question of how to respond to the impending recognition of a Palestinian state by France and others joining the bandwagon. As I argued previously, this is a unilateral move by the Palestinians and their supporters, and so it must be parried with a unilateral move by Israel.

 

As France continues to up the ante, so must Israel. France suggested—then claimed it was an error when Yigal Carmon caught it—that it would support a Palestinian “right of return,” a euphemism for the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. So Israeli leaders know France is at least considering such a move. Paris is also contemplating opening an embassy in Ramallah.

 

What to do? Amit Segal points to an interesting piece by Yoram Ettinger (in Hebrew) on a meeting of Benjamin Netanyahu’s inner circle about whether, how, and where to apply sovereignty to parts of Judea and Samaria. Certainly this is under consideration apart from the French declaration of Palestinian statehood, but apparently the Israeli government is considering making such action a direct response to unilateral measures by European states, France included.

 

This makes sense: Unilateral moves that chip away at Israeli sovereignty will be met with unilateral moves that reclaim Israeli sovereignty. At the same time, it’s a highly controversial step that will no doubt earn passionate denunciations and maybe more. Israel has to decide whether the reward is worth the risk, and will likely at least wait to see what happens at the UN General Assembly next month.

 

But here’s a key quote Ettinger supplies from an unnamed participant in the meeting with Netanyahu: “It is not enough to close a French consulate in the face of recognition of a Palestinian state.” The logic is clear: recognition of a Palestinian state on disputed land would contravene the Oslo Accords and all that followed directly from that track. If France—or anybody else—is going to take a lighter to three decades of diplomacy and compromise, they’re going to get burned.

A Decade After Merkel’s Refugee Gamble

By Justin Roy

Sunday, August 31, 2025

 

On August 31, 2015, Europe was on the verge of a refugee crisis unlike any seen since the end of World War II. Growing numbers of refugees were heading toward Northern Europe along the “Balkan route,” and there was no consensus on how to deal with the situation. It was into this void, and on this day, that German Chancellor Angela Merkel gave a speech that would help define her political career. Speaking to the German people, she uttered a phrase that was a call to action: “Wir haben so vieles geschafft — wir schaffen das.”

 

These words, which translate into English as “We have done so much — we can do this,” epitomized the chancellor’s hope that Germany, and possibly the European Union, could rise to the occasion and provide shelter to a growing number of asylum seekers. Within a matter of days, tens of thousands of refugees would begin arriving in Europe every day. This mass migration would disrupt the politics of the EU and would rapidly give Merkel’s words a life of their own on a rapidly polarizing continent.

 

The signs of political discord were there from the beginning. The chancellor’s speech came a couple of days after her visit to a refugee center in the city of Dresden. This visit was preceded by violent clashes in the state of Saxony as demonstrators and the police scuffled in the streets. She was heckled at the camp by locals: “Politicians, lowlifes,” they cried, and, “There’s money for everything, but not for your own people.” In her autobiography published years later, she claimed to have barely registered the deafening noise coming from protesters.

 

What occupied her mind, blotting out the noise, was the unfolding humanitarian crisis. The number of arrivals continued to grow, and amid the political unrest, she was struck by the humanity of the refugees she met in Dresden. Her thoughts deepened the next day, when 71 migrants were discovered dead in Austria after smugglers packed them into the cargo space of an airtight truck. In her autobiography, she would later write, “This message made it shockingly clear that we were not talking about numbers, but about real people and their fates.” Questions of policy and humanity circled in her mind. Was it not a right enshrined in the German constitution that victims of political persecution or civil war should be able to claim asylum? These events and thoughts were louder than the hecklers in Dresden and eventually led to her speech.

 

What followed was, at the time, the largest mass migration in Europe since the Second World War. The International Office for Migration recorded over 800,000 arrivals to Greece in 2015 alone. Of these new arrivals, the top three nationalities were Syrian, Afghan, and Iraqi. They crossed over into Greece from Turkey via the Aegean Sea. Landing on the Greek islands, they made their way to the mainland and traveled northward through the Balkans to Germany, Austria, Sweden, or Finland.

 

The situation on the ground was pandemonium. I was a humanitarian worker in Greece, and it was normal for the island where I served, home to only 50,000 residents, to receive more than a thousand migrants in a single day. The local authorities struggled to manage the situation in coordination with volunteers, EU officials, and the United Nations staff. Meanwhile, the European Union, riven by national interest and competing visions on immigration, was incapable of developing a coherent policy to address the crisis. Hungary closed its borders and threw up fences. Germany clashed with Eastern Europe and France over how to distribute the new arrivals. The Balkan nations allowed migrants to pass northward so long as Northern Europe wanted them. Each country was largely left to deal with the crisis on its own.

 

This mass migration would rapidly divide politics and society within Germany and the EU. Many embraced the spirit of Willkommenskultur, or welcoming culture, and from Greece to Scandinavia, citizens took extraordinary steps to try to help the new arrivals. However, as time went on, a growing number of people expressed concern and started to push back against the chancellor’s position. At first, the naysayers, even the unmalicious ones, were met with scorn. After visiting the refugee center in Dresden, Merkel told reporters, “We have no tolerance towards those who are not willing to help.”

 

But within a short time, the welcoming narrative shifted. The political chaos and seemingly unending wave of migrants became a political liability. The dam finally broke in March 2016 when the Balkan nations rapidly closed their borders. A few weeks later, the EU-Turkey Deal was announced. This agreement allowed for the return of migrants to Turkey and dramatically lowered the number of new arrivals. Europe’s leaders hoped that these efforts would stabilize the situation.

 

However, while the number of arrivals in Greece and the Balkans dropped sharply, the damage was already done. Tens of thousands of refugees were stranded in Balkan countries that lacked resources and often the political will to help them. Additionally, the refugee crisis triggered political upheaval across Germany and the EU. Merkel’s ruling coalition nearly collapsed after a political standoff with its Bavarian coalition partner over refugee policy. Additionally, it helped to feed the rise of Germany’s alt-right party Alternative für Deutschland and helped drive the growth of populist parties across Europe.

 

So, ten years later, was wir schaffen das true?

 

In one sense, yes. Europe has not collapsed despite the strain. Germany absorbed hundreds of thousands of refugees, and many built new lives. Acts of extraordinary generosity, from ordinary citizens to churches and nongovernmental organizations, proved that compassion was more than a slogan. Merkel’s instinct to show mercy was a justified reaction.

 

But in terms of managing the situation, the answer was no. The way the crisis unfolded was detrimental, for the EU and for the refugees themselves. By opening the borders and allowing uncontrolled migration, Merkel and others invited a humanitarian crisis they were unprepared for, and one rife with abuse and exploitation. Additionally, high-profile incidents, including terrorist attacks by migrants, became flashpoints in public debate. Broader difficulties in integration— such as language acquisition, access to housing, and finding stable employment — also fueled domestic tensions. These, in turn, contributed to a documented rise in anti-immigrant violence.

 

Merkel herself would later reflect: “Should I really not say that we can do this because those words could be misconstrued as implying that I want to bring all the world’s refugees to Germany? That thought would never have crossed my mind.” Yet many within Europe interpreted the ensuing chaos as exactly that, a blanket invitation. By the end of 2016, Merkel conceded that her administration had lost control during the peak of the crisis.

 

A decade on, migration remains a political fault line across Europe. The crisis fractured coalitions, fueled anti-immigrant populism, and was weaponized by hostile states. Camps in Greece are still overcrowded and squalid, as more migrants continue to arrive. Questions about European sovereignty, integration, and values remain unanswered.

 

The truth lies in that tension. Wir schaffen das was neither entirely true nor entirely false. Europe has endured the crisis thus far, but it has not yet resolved it. For those of us who stood on the shores, who saw human faces behind the headlines and broke bread with them, the question lingers not just in politics, but in humanity itself.

‘Gaza’ As An Ideology

By Seth Mandel

Wednesday, August 27, 2025

 

The events at the Democratic National Committee meeting this week have an increasing number of people asking why party officials are so obsessed with the conflict in Gaza at the expense of the pressing issues they believe are affecting their voters right here at home.

 

This was raised, in fact, at the meeting itself. “I truly hope that, as a party, we can move beyond this issue,” said one DNC member. “Our country is falling apart.”

 

The fact that such questions came from DNC members at the meeting hints at the answer.

 

Democrats—that is, regular Americans who tend to vote for Democrats—aren’t actually obsessed with Israel and Gaza. Instead, party activists have orchestrated a situation in which “Gaza,” as a stand-in for anti-Israel sentiment, is a genuine litmus test.

 

This began well before the current war, so it is not a reaction to the current expression of Israeli self-defense. To progressives, “Gaza” is not a place but an ideology. And commitment to that ideology is the price of admission in left-wing political activism. As evidenced by yesterday’s debacle, in which DNC chair Ken Martin withdrew his own Israel-related resolution after it passed because it angered anti-Israel activists, those activists have managed to mostly erase the distinction between themselves and certified officers of the national party.

 

This is the reason the campaign against Israel is one of intimidation, not persuasion. Put on a mask, follow the grad student wearing the keffiyeh, and under no circumstances are you to speak to the press. Repeat the genocidal chants and the prayer-like pleas to Abu Obeida. Assault the opposition. Physically prevent Jews from accessing public spaces. March aggressively on people’s homes. Encourage random acts of violence against Jews anywhere and everywhere. Close educational opportunities to dissenters. Take hostages if necessary. Destroy people’s property. Seek to force Jewish businesses to close, even temporarily. Ruin careers.

 

Forget being on the other side from this crew, politically. What is the effect on aspiring Democratic activists? If you are told to ban the Star of David from the Dyke March, you are made to understand that you will not be considered an ally of LGBT unless you first shed any sign of Jewishness.

 

If your climate-change priestess wears a keffiyeh and demands you menace a Jewish performer, then that’s what you’ll do. If your public-gardening co-op requires a pledge of anti-Zionism before you can water the flowers, well, can’t let the flowers die.

 

These are actual real-life cases, and as far as the Gaza ideologists are concerned, the sillier the better. The reason your astronomy TA at Columbia instructs you to think of Gaza when you gaze at the night stars is because you’re being trained to think of Gaza before you think.

 

So is everyone in the Democratic Party orbit really obsessed with Gaza? No. Whether that’s the good news or the bad news depends on the party’s commitment to asserting its own authority and keeping its own gates. If the progressive activist wing of the party succeeds in making “Gaza” a blood oath to get in the door, then it doesn’t matter if the individual members are passionate about it. They might be passionate about climate change or paid family leave, but if they can’t join those clubs without professing loyalty to Gaza, then Gaza becomes the most important issue by default.

 

This is also the reason behind one of the pro-Israel world’s great frustrations. Every few years, Hamas starts a new war. And each time, there is a whole new cast of useful idiots in the West that appear to have been born yesterday. Somehow, both traditional media and social media are filled with Hamas windup toys. I don’t mean the bots—I mean the people who might as well be bots. The talking points are the same; the mindless receptacles are different.

 

Where is this lemming farm? How is it that the enemies of the West always appear to be buying in bulk?

 

The answer has something to do with the DNC’s gatekeeping problem. Those who feel strongly about Gaza don’t want everyone else to care about Gaza nearly as much. They just want everyone to be required to say they care. They want pliancy, not passion. That’s how their numbers balloon. And it’s up to people like Ken Martin to stop the anti-Zionist inflation over which he is currently presiding.

Self-Deportation Is Real

National Review Online

Sunday, August 31, 2025

 

Anew tally by Pew Research indicates that as many as 1.5 million immigrants have left the U.S. so far this year. This is the first time the overall immigrant population has declined.

 

According to Axios, there are anecdotal reports of labor shortages in industries that are notorious for employing illegal labor: caregiving, agriculture, and meatpacking. Immigrants are declining as a share of the labor force — from 20 percent last year to 19 percent this June, a decrease of 750,000 workers.

 

Some of this number is due to deportations, but an enormous share are illegal immigrants who are reading the writing on the wall: namely, that the law is being enforced, and they are making the decision to return to a country in which they have legal residence. The Center for Immigration Studies shows that this phenomenon is not about cooking the books or alarmism but reflects real trends in migration.

 

In its own analysis drawn from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Current Population Survey, CIS arrives at an even more dramatic figure, showing 2.2 million foreign-born people have exited the country, with a preliminary estimate that the illegal immigrant population of the United States has fallen by 1.6 million in just the last six months.

 

Axios portrays this phenomenon as a threat to the economy. In fact, the opposite is the case. Much of the job growth in the United States under the Biden administration reflected the illegal immigrant surge. Achieving growth this way has deleterious effects on the wages of low-skilled native workers, and deranging political effects. Illegal labor is in effect a different pool of labor, one less likely to call the cops about illegal work conditions. The derangement doesn’t end with the labor market but extends to other aspects of life. ICE comes in behind to check status. Chaos and lawlessness aren’t a good economic strategy. The numbers we are seeing now, with a growing share of the labor force being made up of native workers, are better signs of political and economic health.

 

We have faith that markets work and don’t require the government to neglect the law to create certain conditions, like an abundance of cheap labor. Employers who are denied illegal labor are more likely to raise wages or invest in productivity-enhancing automation that actually translates into long-term lower prices and standard-of-living increases for the rest of us. Respect for the law is good for legal immigrants and native workers, and in the long run it will be better for our economy.

 

The phenomenon of self-deportation, just like the phenomenon of mass illegal migration under Biden, shows us that attitudes toward the law are contagious. Trump’s vigorous enforcement is inspiring hundreds of thousands of people who broke our laws to suddenly change course and, of their own accord, obey them. For that, we should be thankful.

The Risk in Trump’s Ukraine War Exertions

By Andrew C. McCarthy

Saturday, August 30, 2025

 

I’m chagrined — but who could be surprised? — by indications that President Trump’s high-profile exertions regarding the war in Ukraine are a Nobel Peace Prize vanity project. The Dispatch even reports (based on a Norwegian press outlet) that the president cold-called Norway’s finance minister to discuss the award (on the pretext of talking tariffs). Ever since the late Yasser Arafat was honored with the “peace” prize — in between intifadas — it has puzzled me why anyone actually worth giving it to would want it. Alas, I suppose mainstream journos still crave the Pulitzer Prize nearly a century after it was presented to Walter Duranty for lionizing Stalin. And while I have no idea if Trump cares that a master terrorist won the Nobel in 1994, he obviously cares deeply that Barack Obama won it in 2009.

 

Sixteen years later, Obama’s prize is mainly a punch line thanks to the consensus (even among honest admirers of the former president) that he did nothing to earn it. In Trump’s case, like Obama’s, doing nothing would be infinitely better than seeking praise for his admirable intentions rather than serving America’s interests.

 

On that score, my position hasn’t changed: The vital American interest is not that the war in Ukraine end and the killing stop, as the president insists. In this, I part company with our recent editorials (here and here) on the subject. I don’t agree, for example, that “Trump’s efforts to come to a deal are welcome” when the deal he’s talking about would accept Russia’s annexation of a fifth of Ukraine, including some territory that Moscow, despite its barbaric tactics, has not been able to conquer in battle. Not when Ukraine wants to keep fighting. Not when, in refusing to accept defeat, Ukraine is inflicting horrific damage on Russia’s armed forces.

 

It seems to me that we have accepted (or at least chosen not to contest) Trump’s bien-pensant premise, which is that the war — being a war, and therefore being catastrophic in its human toll — must be the worst possible thing. Hence, the thinking goes, a stable cessation of the war at this moment is such a laudable goal that it ought to be pursued. Therefore, we should cheer Trump’s desire and maneuverings to end the fighting, regardless of what America’s interests might be, to say nothing of Ukraine’s. It matters not whether the president is motivated by legacy-building and a craving for transnational-progressive plaudits, or by his gut disdain for wasteful slaughter — which Trump can’t help but see as anything but wasteful because, as I’ve contended in other contexts, uses of force catalyzed by ideology or patriotism seem irrational to someone of his “transactional” nature, although “might makes right” certainly does resonate with him.

 

I also sense that we have become inured to the president’s flawed calculus of the war, to wit: Because it currently seems unlikely that Ukraine will materially reverse its losses, much less get all of its territory back, we are, practically speaking, negotiating the terms of its defeat anyway, so what’s the point of pouring more American resources into it? Why enable Ukraine to keep fighting for its current and future existence if we can orchestrate a seemingly honorable conclusion?

 

And that conclusion? A mirage of “Article 5-like” security guarantees that, in about a nanosecond of serious scrutiny, is revealed as a coup for Russia?

 

I can’t agree with that.

 

As readers may recall, I am not a delirious admirer of Ukraine. It’s grown some on me through its grit in combating a monstrous neighbor, and I’m convinced that most of it wants to be part of the West. Still, Ukraine has a history of being both deeply corrupt and home to a robust pro-Russia faction (especially the farther east of Kyiv you get). Viktor Yanukovych, the Moscow-friendly president driven out in a 2013–14 coup encouraged by the Obama administration, didn’t spontaneously appear in office in 2010. He was democratically elected with support from about half of voters (and that, after having notoriously tried to steal the election in 2004).

 

Ukraine also has a neo-Nazi problem. I’m not going to condemn another country for its radicals, antisemites included, when we have our share, too (and when Ukrainians, it bears noting, have elected as president Zelensky, a Jew who ran as an anti-corruption reformer and has led with valor throughout the war). But when we’re giving mega-aid to a country, knowing who the recipients are is not a trivial matter. That’s a lesson we need to remember from the Carter- and Reagan-era aid to the anti-Soviet mujahideen in Afghanistan. That was a worthy effort, but because we were insufficiently careful, anti-American jihadists were aid beneficiaries, and they proceeded to torment us in the decades that followed.

 

I don’t mention Afghanistan for that reason alone. It’s also the aid model I far prefer to Trump’s shifting approaches to Russia and the war. There are clear differences, of course. The ongoing war is in Europe, where our interests, alliances, and the scale of support are all greater; and today’s Russia is a pipsqueak compared to the Soviet Union (more on that momentarily). But the bottom line is that we supported the mujahideen as long as they were willing to fight the Red Army, turning their Afghan jihad into the Soviets’ Vietnam (which, in conjunction with the Reagan military buildup, the Evil Empire was too hollow to endure). Over ten years beginning in 1979, for a modest amount of support and with no American boots on the ground, the Afghans bled the Russians dry. Here’s a hypothetical: If Reagan, à la Trump, had decided in 1983 that the killing was just too much to abide and that the ragtag tribal jihadists had no chance against one of the world’s two superpowers, would the Red Army have pulled out in ignominious defeat six years later? Would the Soviet decline have accelerated to the point of collapse in a heap two years after that?

 

I know, counterfactuals may have too many imponderables. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

 

In any event, our Ukraine policy ought to be based on vital American interests, not Trump’s personal goal of an end to the fighting at all costs. Our interests are that territorial aggression not be given international recognition; that the armed forces of Vladimir Putin’s murderous anti-American regime continue to be degraded; and that our main geopolitical rivals (most notably China, Russia, and Iran) grasp that we draw sharp distinctions between war criminals, such as Putin, and their prey — so that Xi Jinping doesn’t get the notion that we’re apt to tell Taiwan it “doesn’t have the cards” to resist a Chinese invasion.

 

It is not our place to tell Ukrainians to stand down just because our president thinks there has been too much killing. We should instead arm them to the extent that doing so is consistent with our national interests. That extent is not limitless given our other security vulnerabilities and $37 trillion national debt; but it should be high, nevertheless, since the Russian forces that Ukraine is killing could otherwise be arrayed against the U.S. and our allies in future conflicts — a prohibitively expensive proposition in blood and treasure. And since, for those more worried about China than Russia (I’m one of you), nothing will embolden Beijing more than delusional American indulgence of Putin.

 

If Ukraine at some point decides that the slaughter is too much and that it must accept a settlement that, at least de facto, concedes Putin’s conquest to some degree, we can deal with that when it happens. And I’m not saying territorial concessions are out of the question. For example, in a Wall Street Journal interview, Stephen Kotkin, the peerless historian of Russia, makes a strong case that the goal of retaking Crimea is not merely unattainable (“Crimea is going back to Ukraine the day after Texas goes back to Mexico”); the peninsula’s 2 million ethnic Russians and, thus, the prospects of insurgency and reinvasion by Moscow could render reacquisition of Crimea counterproductive if Ukraine is to “win the peace in the long term” — i.e., become a stable, militarily capable nation integrated in Europe. Russia, however, should be made to earn such concessions, rather than be treated as if it were a hyperpower that can dictate terms.

 

For now, the Ukrainians remain highly motivated to fight. Our interest is to take the gloves off so they can do just that. So halting are Trump’s moves in that direction, he might as well be Biden — doing just enough to keep the Ukrainians in the ring, but tying their haymaker hand behind their back.

 

In fact, we learned just this week (from the Wall Street Journal) that the Trump Defense Department has blocked Ukraine from using ATACMS — Army Tactical Missile Systems supplied by the U.S. — to conduct long-range strikes inside Russia, even as Putin pounds Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure. In so doing, Trump not only prevents Kyiv from recouping its losses while fortifying Moscow’s refusal to make concessions; he also reverses the Biden administration’s belated, grudging acknowledgment that Ukraine had to be able to play offense.

 

The reluctance of Trump and Biden officials in this latter regard illustrates that neither administration has valued America’s interest in undermining Putin’s military capabilities and political support. It is remarkable that Trump, who has been so effective in reversing decades of wayward U.S. strategy on Iran — strategy that treated Iranian territory as sacrosanct no matter how many Americans the regime’s proxies attacked — can’t see that Russia’s aggression won’t stop unless it feels at home the kind of pain it inflicts against its neighbors.

 

To repeat what I’ve said before, Russia is a sickly, shrinking, basket-case country with an economy smaller than Brazil’s — an economy one-fifteenth the size of ours — run by a mafia regime that has robbed its country blind. As AEI’s Russia expert Leon Aron recently put it in the Wall Street Journal:

 

Time isn’t on Russia’s side. This fact collapses Mr. Putin’s strategy of outlasting the West. What used to look like a marathon is turning into a sprint. . . . Russia is losing soldiers. Some 30,000 of them get killed or seriously wounded every month. These are huge numbers — about a million since February 2022. Mr. Putin is giving out sign-up bonuses that are higher than the average national annual salary, but the number of first-time volunteers might be dipping below the replacement. An estimated 200,000 criminals have been “persuaded” to “volunteer.” Mr. Putin broke his promise not to send raw draftees into combat. Eighteen-year-old Russians were killed or taken prisoner or went missing after Ukraine’s incursion in the Kursk region last year.

 

Amid Russia’s economic straits, the war, as Aron elaborates, is costing it $300 million a day, consuming 40 percent of government spending and up to 8 percent of GDP. Revenues for energy, Moscow’s core business, are plunging, even as annual government expenditures surge 20 percent year-over-year. The “National Welfare Fund” in which Putin has been stashing oil profits as a hedge against Western opposition since 2008 (i.e., since his annexation of the Georgian territories Abkhazia and South Ossetia) is down to $35 million (from $117 billion) and could disappear in a few months if global oil prices continue their downward trajectory.

 

A demonstration to Moscow that it is in for a long slog could change the endgame in Ukraine. President Trump would have to exhibit both the will to walk away from the table and awareness that Putin is an enemy (maddeningly, such awareness often seems too much to ask, the mountain of evidence notwithstanding). Serious, lethal, timely matériel support for Ukraine, coupled with secondary sanctions that have real bite against Russia’s business partners (and not just India) and the confiscation of $300 billion in Russian assets deposited in European banks, would be consequential. While Gazprombank, which underwrites Russia’s war machine, has been sanctioned by our Treasury Department, Professor Kotkin observes that it has not yet been removed from the SWIFT banking system that makes global commerce and finance go. I wrote about the Biden administration’s reluctance to press the advantage of SWIFT (the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) at the beginning of the war. But much has changed now: The U.S. has cut off energy imports from Russia, more dependent Europe has dramatically reduced them, and Russia’s other exports have been slashed. At this point, a SWIFT cutoff of Moscow’s key financial institution would create significant hurdles for collecting revenue and financing combat operations.

 

Note that these measures, which would hammer Russia at a critical moment, would cost the United States very little. Even the military aid, mainly provided by NATO countries, redounds to the benefit of American defense manufacturers while providing our commanders with vital intelligence about how the weapons perform in combat against one of our major geopolitical adversaries.

 

A final point. Earlier, I belittled the talk of “Article 5-like” guarantees as a coup for Russia. That is because they are illusory. Article 5 is the NATO commitment that an attack on one member country is an attack on all; it triggers the obligation to take action, including potential military operations, against the aggressor. NATO is the reason there are formidable, interoperative armed forces and arsenals arrayed in opposition to Russia. That force infrastructure exists because there is a treaty, a binding legal foundation, in place since 1949. Any expansion of NATO, whether it is admission of new countries or assumption of new military commitments, requires an amendment of the agreement and ratification through each country’s legal process — in our case, consent by the Senate and ratification by the president.

 

Without a binding treaty, you have nothing. Just ask former President Obama how his Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (the Iran nuclear deal) is doing these days. Ask Ukraine what became of the Budapest Memorandum, under which it supposedly got security guarantees from the United States, the United Kingdom, and . . . yes . . . Russia. For all the fanfare and rhetorical assurances (accompanied in the case of the JCPOA by a United Nations Security Council resolution, part of Obama’s machinations to end-run the Constitution’s treaty clause), these were unenforceable executive agreements, not binding treaties. When it got down to brass tacks, they weren’t worth much more than the ink spilt at the vaunted signing ceremonies.

 

When you hear the term “Article 5-like,” understand that like is the head-fake. Ukraine is not going to be in NATO, the treaty terms for which deny membership to countries that are — like Ukraine — engaged in armed conflict or territorial disputes. And with Ukraine outside the NATO tent, the treaty is not going to be amended to treat it as if it were inside.

 

Consequently, as Russia (the Budapest signatory) well knows, the United States and its allies are not going to make legally binding commitments to come to Ukraine’s aid if it is attacked. If the conflict were ended now, and everyone stood down under the fiction that it had been brought to a stable conclusion, Kyiv’s rational expectations would be that (a) Russia will invade again once it refortifies, and (b) Ukraine will get no more, and probably less, than the level of support it has been getting to this point. Having taken the measure of the paper tiger that NATO would be absent a strong American commitment to aid Ukraine in resisting Russia’s aggression, Putin appears convinced that he can win a slow, ugly victory.

 

President Trump cannot alter Putin’s calculations unless he alters Putin’s expectations about the here and now. A stand-down by the West under the guise of “Article 5-like” security guarantees for Ukraine is exactly what Putin expects.

Our Own Lysenko

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, August 28, 2025

 

Last fall’s electorate can be divided into three groups.

 

The first hoped Donald Trump would turn America into a third-world country. We call them populists.

 

The second feared he would turn America into a third-world country. We call them liberals.

 

The third doubted he would turn America into a third-world country. We call them imbeciles.

 

The imbeciles were the swing group.

 

The swing voters gambled their children’s future on the assumption that Trump 2.0 would resemble Trump 1.0—wacky, exhausting, deeply embarrassing, but not catastrophic. (Not until the “mismanaging a pandemic/attempting a coup” stage, at least.) The president wouldn’t act on his worst impulses if elected, they told themselves, and if he tried, the Serious People around him would save him from himself.

 

We classical liberals in the second group warned them that there would be no Serious People this time around, that the whole point of another Trump presidency was to remove impediments to him following his stupidest and most dangerous instincts. They scoffed, mumbled something about “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” and placed their bet. They lost.

 

Ten months later, daily news in the U.S. is a single story with a thousand chapters. Politically, legally, economically, and even scientifically, America is transitioning from a first-world country into a third-world one.

 

To gauge the speed of America’s third-world-ization, economist Noah Smith pointed out, consider just the past few weeks. Generalissimo Trump deployed troops to the capital, moved to seize power over setting interest rates, partially nationalized another American corporation, purged a few more high-ranking military and intelligence officials, issued a decree purporting to ban flag burning (sort of), and watched the FBI he commands search the home of one of his political nemeses for reasons that may or may not turn out to be justified.

 

He also put a henchman on the federal bench, instigated an irregular redistricting push to weaken the opposition’s chances of reclaiming power, and fired the federal bureaucrat in charge of calculating employment numbers because the July data made him look bad. His choice to replace her is exactly the type of person you’d expect.

 

Those are things that happen routinely in “sh-thole countries,” to borrow the president’s preferred terminology. Draw your own conclusion about America in 2025 from the fact that they’re happening here.

 

Still, despite his and his team’s best efforts, superpowers don’t turn into sh-tholes overnight. Our courts still enjoy some authority and our elections remain scheduled. The imbecile faction persists, for now, in denial about the magnitude of its error last November because we haven’t yet fully arrived at a third-world political culture. We’re still transitioning.

 

That was also true of the CDC until Wednesday night, when it took a quantum leap toward sh-thole status.

 

Lysenkoism.

 

For the same reason that swing voters supported Donald Trump at the ballot box, wary Senate Republicans supported Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. They didn’t believe he’d act on his worst impulses when handed the awesome responsibility of power over life and death.

 

Admittedly, that wasn’t the only reason. It took an immense amount of political cowardice for senators to sell out American public health to a God-tier anti-vax creep because they feared the president would primary them in their next race if they didn’t.

 

But I do think the Republicans who gave Kennedy the benefit of the doubt earnestly believed he could and would be restrained. Bill Cassidy, a medical doctor and thus the most notorious GOP vote in favor of confirming RFK, said as much in a floor speech in which he pledged to do the restraining himself if necessary:

 

I will use my authority as Chairman of the Senate Committee with oversight of HHS to rebuff any attempts to remove the public’s access to life-saving vaccines without ironclad, causational scientific evidence that can be defended before the mainstream scientific community and before Congress. I will carefully watch for any effort to wrongfully sow public fear about vaccines between confusing references of coincidence and anecdote.

 

To this day, I have no idea what he meant by that. Trump’s administration operates on the principle that, once the votes are counted, it’s no longer accountable to anyone. True to form, Kennedy seemed to stop caring about Bill Cassidy’s opinion the moment the tally on his confirmation was announced in the Senate.

 

Again and again and again since February, despite the senator’s warnings, RFK has targeted the public’s faith in and/or access to vaccines. The only thing Cassidy has done to stop him is derail the confirmation of Dave Weldon, another vaccine skeptic, to lead the CDC. Weldon’s more credible replacement, Susan Monarez, was confirmed last month, nicely illustrating my point about America’s current transition stage: Her boss, Kennedy, may be a third-world witch doctor, but she’s a first-world scientific bureaucrat.

 

Or was. On Wednesday night, 28 days into her tenure, she was fired. (Sort of.)

 

According to sources who spoke to the Washington Post, Monarez “was pressed for days by Kennedy, administration lawyers and other officials over whether she would support rescinding certain approvals for coronavirus vaccines.” I won’t do it without consulting my advisers, she told him. He replied by questioning her loyalty to the Trump agenda and demanding her resignation, prompting her to pick up the phone and call … Bill Cassidy.

 

Cassidy, the great restrainer, then called the secretary to complain. Not only did Kennedy not back off, he allegedly grew angrier at Monarez for involving the senator in their dispute. By nightfall she was gone—as were four other department chiefs at the agency, all of whom resigned in protest. One cited the “intentional eroding of trust in low-risk vaccines,” adding of Kennedy’s anti-vax efforts that he had “never experienced such radical non-transparency, nor have I seen such unskilled manipulation of data to achieve a political end rather than the good of the American people."

 

Like the imbecile swing voters of America, Bill Cassidy gambled that a second Trump administration would be a lot of sound and fury that ultimately signified nothing, or at least not much. Kennedy would be a figurehead prone to babbling irresponsibly yet ineffectively in interviews about vaccination, the senator likely imagined, with hard-nosed policy decisions about vaccines left to the Serious People at the CDC.

 

He placed his bet and lost, realizing too late that being a Serious Person is disqualifying in this administration.

 

And so a first-world public health agency, the most well-known of its kind on Earth, is about to become a third-world soapbox for voodoo and superstition. The day before Monarez was fired, Kennedy said at a Cabinet meeting that his department would soon have an announcement about unnamed “interventions” that are “clearly almost certainly causing autism,” which sounds suspenseful but is exactly the opposite. He arrived at the conclusion he wanted to reach on that subject long ago and is working backward to support it, enlisting “researchers” who he knows will tell him what he wants to hear.

 

As for the Serious People who would supposedly guarantee our access to vaccines, a few hours before Monarez was canned, RFK’s FDA released its recommendations for COVID-19 immunizations this fall. The shot should no longer be authorized for adults under 65 unless they suffer from some underlying health condition, it said, which would mean those in that group who want to protect themselves will need to find a doctor willing to prescribe it off-label and perhaps have to pay full freight for the privilege. As a result, “access will be greatly reduced, thus so will demand,” virologist Angela Rasmussen explained. “In the years to come, vaccine manufacturers may withdraw from the U.S. market altogether.”

 

Which has been the plan from the start, of course.

 

America at last has its own Trofim Lysenko, a crank whose screwy ideas about science gained influence over policy not because of their methodological rigor but because their contrarianism reflected the prejudices of a feral populist revolutionary movement. (Socialism without socialism!) You tell me: Is a country that’s transitioning from relying on vaccines to prevent disease—including brain cancer, perhaps—to relying on Ivermectin and beef tallow more or less of a sh-thole than it used to be?

 

The only good news is that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is unlikely to rack up a body count as large as his Soviet predecessor. But he’s sure gonna try.

 

The resignation dilemma.

 

And so we return to an old and recurring moral dilemma: Did Monarez’s deputies do the right thing by resigning?

 

I think they did. Although, for reasons I’ve explained before, that would have been a harder question during the president’s first administration.

 

The excuse for Trump voters the first time around was that they didn’t know what they were getting into. They didn’t want to be governed by Hillary Clinton, so they rolled the dice on the new guy, not knowing what he was capable of. We all make mistakes, and it’s cruel to let someone suffer terribly for a mistake when you might be able to prevent it.

 

So the Serious People stuck around in his first term, doing their noble best to contain the damage he caused and accidentally convincing voters in the process that reelecting him wouldn’t be risky. Health bureaucrats in particular might have felt obliged at the time to grit their teeth and endure whatever chaos and indignity he visited upon them, particularly during a pandemic: To a great extent, the point of medicine is to rescue human beings from their own poor decisions.

 

But it’s harder to make that argument in Trump’s second term.

 

You can still make it. Today at The Bulwark, Jonathan Last foresaw the terrible consequences to public health from the U.S. transitioning fully to a third-world model. “The U.S. government will no longer be a reliable vector for information about medical science,” he wrote. “Real scientists will leave the country. Research will move to Europe and China. Innovation will happen elsewhere as one more American industry succumbs to the poisonous effects of corruption. Oh, and Americans will get sick.” A conscientious CDC deputy might consider all of that and resolve to stay on and fight Lysenkoism for the sake of the public good.

 

But saving Americans from their own terrible choices again, after they doubled down on the president last year, feels a bit like restarting a dying patient’s heart only to have him immediately light up a cigarette. At some point, you’re under no further obligation to restrain someone who’s bent on destroying himself from doing so.

 

Voters didn’t make a “mistake” this time by electing Trump. They watched him mismanage the pandemic and plot a coup in broad daylight, and they chose to bring him back. Nor were they blindsided when Kennedy, one of his most prominent surrogates on the trail, landed in the administration. The president’s campaign was quite enthusiastic about RFK’s program and how it might be implemented.

 

Populists wanted Lysenkoism, and imbeciles were willing to tolerate it as a trade-off for cheaper groceries. So what’s left to talk about? The Serious People should resign and give Americans what they voted for. Let them learn their lesson the hard way.

 

“But children will be harmed,” you might say. Yes, and that’s a strong argument against bureaucrats resigning. Kids are in the line of fire here. Just explain to me how a well-meaning health official who resolves to stay on the job to protect children from Lysenkoism is supposed to succeed.

 

In Trump’s first term, a deputy stood a fair chance of changing the president’s mind about a horrible decision he was planning. He had enough Serious People around him that a consensus in favor of reversal might plausibly form among advisers, pressuring him to relent. In his second term, nearly all of the Serious People have been excluded to facilitate zealotry in policymaking. If Kennedy is willing to have Trump fire the new CDC chief after 28 days for refusing to launder his anti-vax propaganda, why would anyone else at the agency think they’ll get through to him?

 

Kennedy has been at this for decades. Just yesterday he stood at a microphone and babbled about his supposed ability to diagnose “mitochondrial challenges” in the faces of children when he passes them in the airport. He’s a bona fide nut. Neither he nor the president is going to listen to reason. The political project they’re part of has been designed to make listening to reason as difficult as possible.

 

Despite their best efforts, the Serious People will not protect kids from this insanity. They’ll be fired in due course if they try, as Monarez was. The most productive thing they can do if they’re employed by this administration is resign noisily rather than lend the credence of their profession to witch-doctoring that will eventually lead thousands of parents to let their children die of preventable diseases. If every credible scientist in Trump’s government bailed out, the spectacle of their departure might help discredit the forthcoming voodoo about vaccines supposedly causing autism.

 

The best-case scenario for public health until 2029 is that no one except the populists pays the slightest bit of attention to the federal government’s medical recommendations. Mass resignations would encourage that.

 

But if that’s not enough, I think resigning is also compelled by basic dignity. Refusing to participate in a corrupt enterprise is a mark of good character and an act of moral hygiene. What Trump and Kennedy are doing is indecent, and decent people being involved in it both obscures that fact and subjects those people to temptations to behave indecently themselves. Ask Marco Rubio or Mike Lee.

 

If Bill Cassidy had any dignity left, he would resign from the Senate, admit that the president and RFK had made a schmuck out of him, and devote himself to rebutting the administration’s vaccine disinformation over the next several years. Yes, the person who replaces him in the Senate would be a MAGA zombie, but so what? Cassidy voted like a MAGA zombie when he confirmed Kennedy. A senator who bows to the president reluctantly rather than enthusiastically is still bowing.

 

Instead, I assume he’ll slog on to his Senate race next fall and vote to confirm whichever Weldon-ish kook Trump nominates to replace Monarez at the CDC. Having already done his part to accelerate America’s transition into a third-world country, there’s really no point in him holding things up any further.

Another Boring, Straightforward Ruling that the President Does Not Have Unilateral Power to Tariff Anything from Anywhere at Any Rate

By Dominic Pino

Friday, August 29, 2025

 

The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has affirmed the Court of International Trade’s judgment that President Trump’s tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) are illegal. Contrary to Trump’s description of the court as “highly partisan,” the dissenting opinion supporting his position was written by an Obama appointee. The majority was calm and treated the case exactly as it should be treated: As a boring, straightforward, separation-of-powers case.

 

The case was argued before eleven judges. The per curiam opinion of the court, joined by seven judges, said that the specific tariffs Trump imposed under IEEPA were illegal. Four of them wrote a separate opinion arguing that IEEPA does not give any president the power to impose any tariffs at all. The remaining four judges joined a dissenting opinion saying that Trump’s tariffs are legal.

 

The opinion of the court is restrained and textualist. It notes that IEEPA does not include the word “tariff” or any equivalent word found in other laws or the Constitution. The government’s case rested on the law’s inclusion of the phrase “regulate . . . importation,” arguing that that was sufficient to allow tariffs. The court noted that the power to regulate is different from the power to tax, citing several other cases and laws to back that up.

 

There are plenty of other laws that Congress has passed that do delegate power to the president to impose tariffs. Trump knows about them; he used them during his first term. Such delegations have been upheld by courts over the years because they include limits. Trump didn’t use those laws because he didn’t want to be constrained by their limits, which include things such as periodic reviews, deadlines, and public comment periods.

 

The court all but says to use those laws instead. “We are not addressing whether the President’s actions should have been taken as a matter of policy,” the court said. That’s exactly the right approach. Judges aren’t economists, and they shouldn’t be judging whether tariffs are smart. They should be judging whether they are legal, which in this case, they are not.

 

To determine that, they use the major questions doctrine, which is a favorite of the originalist justices on the Supreme Court. They cite West Virginia v. EPA, the 2022 case that used the doctrine to strike down an Obama air regulation, and Biden v. Nebraska, the 2023 case that struck down Biden’s student-loan “forgiveness” plan. The majority opinion in both those cases was written by Chief Justice John Roberts.

 

The court explicitly compared the Trump administration’s behavior to the Biden administration’s in the student-loan case:

 

In this respect, the Government’s argument resembles the argument expressly rejected by the Supreme Court in Nebraska, where the Court concluded that Congress’s authorization to the Secretary of Education to “waive or modify” laws and regulations governing student debt did not encompass student debt relief. . . . The Court explained that “[h]owever broad the meaning of ‘waive or modify,’ that language cannot authorize the kind of exhaustive rewriting of the statute that has taken place here.” . . . The same is true of the statutory language (“regulate . . . importation”) at issue in this case.

 

The government tried to defend the tariffs as a national security measure, and the court didn’t buy it. “While the President of course has independent constitutional authority in [foreign affairs and national security], the power of the purse (including the power to tax) belongs to Congress,” the court said. “Absent a valid delegation by Congress, the President has no authority to impose taxes.”

 

The judge who wrote the dissent in favor of much of the Trump administration’s position was Richard Taranto, who was appointed by . . . Barack Obama in 2013. It should come as no surprise that an Obama-appointed judge could find something to like in executive overreach.

 

The majority could have written the kind of biased, screeching, left-wing, anti-Trump opinion that some federal judges have written over the years. Instead, it wrote a boring, measured opinion that used conservative judicial principles to get to its result.

 

Obviously, clearly, plainly, and without a doubt, the president does not have unilateral authority to levy tariffs on any good from any country at any rate for any length of time. That was the Trump administration’s claim here. And one of the supporting arguments was that without this power that nobody imagined existed until this year, the United States would fail as a country and be plunged into another Great Depression. Seriously, the solicitor general said that. It was good to see a second federal court realize this argument for what it is, and one hopes the Supreme Court will do the same soon enough.

Word Magic

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, August 29, 2025

 

Like the river rafting guy told me when he said I couldn’t bring my full-size refrigerator on our trip, let’s keep this light.

 

Speaking of keeping things light, have you seen Meghan Trainor? She’s the singer best known for two things: her song that is the unofficial anthem of our two “great” political parties, “All About That Base” (though she spelled it “bass”), and being that moderately successful singer who is what Hannibal Lecter would describe as “big through the hips, roomy.”

 

But that’s the thing. She’s now quite svelte. I say good for her.

 

And good for Jonah Hill, Mike Pompeo, Kathy Bates, John Goodman, and everyone else who has shown remarkable weight loss in recent years. I think it’s great when people can achieve the weight or other health goals they set for themselves. One of these days maybe I’ll try that again myself.

 

But I don’t think it’s great for the idea of “body positivity.” Up until a few years ago, the body positivity movement was making remarkable strides. While the agenda came with a good deal of nonsense (an example of that in a moment), there are some very sound arguments behind the effort as well. The Body Mass Index Police declared that lots of superstar athletes were “obese,” while people who looked like skeletons covered in thin pizza dough were healthy.

 

The photoshopped supermodels in magazines convey an unhealthy conception of healthiness—particularly to young girls—and a problematic notion of desirability to boys.

 

I’m not going to go down a rabbit hole on the evolving and globally diverse definitions of beauty—go walk around the Louvre and you’ll see that pasty-white, full-figured gals were once the Margot Robbies of their day. Calling a woman Rubenesque, after all, was once more of a compliment than it has become. Personally, I was always a little envious of the Asian cultures that held that a beer gut—sorry, “sake belly”—was a sign of status and prosperity. But I do think there’s a sound moral principle behind non-judgmentalism when it comes to the rich mosaic of body types and notions of beauty.

 

That said, I did promise examples of nonsense.

 

I’ve mentioned this article before, but I think about it more than I should. A few years ago, the Philadelphia Inquirer ran an article titled “To end fatphobia, we need to dismantle Western civilization, says Philly therapist Sonalee Rashatwar.”

 

We are told that “Rashatwar traces contemporary fatphobia to colonial brutality and how enslaved people were treated. Citing researcher-advocate Caleb Luna, Rashatwar said curing anti-fatness would mean dismantling society’s foundation: ‘I love to talk about undoing Western civilization because it’s just so romantic to me.’”

 

Call me a defender of structural fatphobia if you must, but burning down the village of Western Civilization to save the self-esteem of people who shop at Big and Tall shops seems like a pretty steep price. “I sure do miss the rule of law, property rights, Judeo-Christian morality,  and free speech, but man it’s nice to say goodbye to my Spanx.”

 

The reason this current slimming trend is bad for “body positivity” is that the best role models for it are opting to lose weight rather than lean into their role model status. Imagine if there were some sort of procedure by which black people could just become white and everyone from Denzel Washington to Spike Lee took advantage of it. I think that would be terrible and not for any weird racist reasons, but man, the controversy would be wild to behold.

 

That brings to mind Eddie Murphy’s legendary “White Like Me” sketch on Saturday Night Live.

 

My real problem with body positivity is that it’s part of this ancient tradition of thinking that if you just re-label things that have negative connotations—real or alleged—you can change reality.

 

Some of you may be old enough to have been raised by TV like I was. And if so, you might recall “The Adventures of Letterman” (“Faster than a rolling ‘O.’ Stronger than silent ‘E.’ Capable of leaping capital ‘T’ in a single bound!”) on a PBS children’s show called The Electric Company. In every episode, Letterman and his nemesis Spell Binder would remove letters from words to change reality. Spell Binder would visit a kid washing his hands for dinner at the sink and change “sink” to “ink.” Oh no, he’s a mess! But then Letterman appears, pulls an “S” from his jersey and transmogrifies “ink” back into a sink! If that sounds too trippy to be real, watch for yourself.

 

The activist word warriors think they can change reality in the same way, not with letter legerdemain but pretty similar lexicological wardrobe changes. Call trial lawyers “community protection attorneys” and boom, everybody will love them!

 

The thing is, people aren’t stupid. If you make everybody call feces “Shinola,” pretty soon people are going to say, “Damn. A bird Shinola’d on my windshield” and “Peter Navarro is so full of Shinola.”

 

There’s a great scene in the television series The Boys in which some marketing executives are touting a new superhero to join the team (it’s too complicated to explain the backstory, so just stay with me). One of the execs says something like “She’s great. She hits all the demos … she’s body positive but still doable.”

 

You don’t have to be as neurodivergent as a fox to get the joke.

 

Speaking of neurodivergence, I recently had Emmet Rensin on The Remnant to talk about his fantastic piece for us about insanity, a subject he has much personal experience with. One of the really refreshing things about how he—as a man of the left—talks about the issue is that he doesn’t shy away from words like “lunatic,” “crazy,” or “insane.”

 

I think there’s room for terms like neurodivergent, but one of the problems with this addiction to word magic is that the connotations people want to make disappear are there for a reason. If you ban the use of all words with negative connotations and replace them with new ones, the negative connotation will simply follow the new word, like an exorcised demon inhabiting a new host.

 

When I was a kid on the subway in New York City, we might see some dude muttering to himself about the CIA or the Brady Bunch and eating Cheetos out of a sneaker. My dad would say, “Stay away from that guy, he’s crazy.” If you banned the word “crazy” he’d have said, “Stay away from that guy, he’s neurodivergent.” 

 

And if you tell people that they’re bigots for being nervous about such people, they’re not going to abandon all common sense and agree, they’re going to come to the commonsensical assumption that the people calling them bigots are themselves neurodivergent. It turns out that it’s counterproductive to use weird, highly politicized, and impenetrably ideological language and then sanctimoniously impose it on people.

 

Indeed, one cause for optimism about our politics these days is that the left is baby-stepping its way toward this realization. The center-left think tank Third Way recently came up with a list of words they think progressives should stop using. I celebrate the effort.

 

But I have quibbles about some of their rationales for why progressives should stop using “chest feeding,” “birthing person,” “Latinx” etc.

 

For instance, I think “birthing person” isn’t just incandescently stupid politically, it’s kind of bigoted on progressive terms. I mean, I was told by my feminist professors that reducing women solely to their role or—shudder—function as persons who give birth is profoundly sexist. I mean it’s like The Handmaid’s Tale when you think about it.

 

Just the other week, CNN profiled Christian nationalist pastor Doug Wilson’s church (which our defense secretary reportedly has attended). Wilson told CNN’s Pam Brown that women are simply “the kind of people that people come out of” and that fact determines their place in society. That is why they are not allowed to have leadership roles in his church and why he thinks women shouldn’t be allowed to vote.

 

Take the debate(s) about transgenderism out of it, and the “birthing person” peddlers share with the Christian nationalists a very similar view of people who give birth.

 

But given Third Way’s audience, I have considerable sympathy because that group is not talking to me. It’s talking to progressives. And asking people who have invested their careers in the deployment of these terms—in some cases literally monetizing their use of these euphemisms and shibboleths—to abandon them is like asking a samurai to abandon his sword or telling Art Laffer to never speak of tax cuts again.

 

I’ll be honest—the lazy pundit in me partly wants them to fail, if for no other reason than that this stuff is such easy column fodder. I feel a bit like Jerry Seinfeld when he made a whole HBO special out of having a funeral for his most cherished, but ultimately played-out, jokes.

 

But I think it would be great if Third Way’s project succeeded. Yes, the left would become more effective and persuasive, but it would also become less neurodivergent in the process. A decline in left-wing lunacy might—just might—result in a decline of right-wing batshittery. Imagine the bowel-stewing panic of, say, Jesse Watters’ producers if the left started talking like liberals in the mold of Hubert Humphrey, Scoop Jackson, or even Bill Clinton again. They’d stare blankly at the screen trying to figure out how to make sense of serious arguments. “What are we supposed to do with this?”