A Time for Choosing on Antisemitism

National Review Online

Thursday, October 30, 2025

 

Tucker Carlson, knee-deep already, has taken another step into the muck with a friendly interview with Nick Fuentes.

 

The issue isn’t merely that Carlson “platformed” a white-nationalist influencer.

 

This framing allows Carlson and his defenders to portray the interview and others like it as an effort at open debate, as a good-faith attempt at engagement with alternative views.

 

The deeper problem is that Carlson didn’t actually challenge any of Fuentes’s noxious views that he has spelled out quite clearly over the years. Fuentes has engaged in Holocaust denial, called Adolf Hitler “really f***ing cool,” and said that if his movement gained power, it would execute “perfidious Jews.”

 

Carlson didn’t even need to go back through old clips to find objectionable statements. In his appearance, Fuentes stated that the “big challenge” to unifying the country against tribal interests was “organized Jewry in America,” and he expressed admiration for Soviet butcher Joseph Stalin. He did not receive any pushback from Carlson.

 

It also can’t be said that Carlson’s interviewing style is simply to let his guests speak. In June, Carlson held a combative interview with Senator Ted Cruz that descended into an extended shouting match. Why would Carlson choose to take an oppositional tack to a senator who has been fighting for conservatism for decades, but not to a podcaster who praises Stalin? The obvious answer is that Fuentes is an avowed Jew-hater while Cruz is a staunch supporter of Israel.

 

Carlson stated during his interview that he thinks Cruz, Mike Huckabee, and other figures who are Christian and support Israel have been infected by a “brain virus.” About these “Christian Zionists,” he said: “I dislike them more than anybody. Because it’s Christian heresy, and I’m offended by that as a Christian.”

 

His contempt presumably extends to a swath of Evangelical Christians, the vast majority of whom are strongly pro-Israel.

 

It would be easy to dismiss Carlson, and his now-extensive history of promoting antisemitism, as the handiwork of another personality desperate for attention in the online economy. But Carlson is one of the nation’s most prominent and influential commentators. After the death of Charlie Kirk, Carlson has become a leading speaker for the organization that Kirk founded, Turning Point USA. When Vice President JD Vance subbed in as a host on Kirk’s podcast after the assassination, Carlson was his guest.

 

Carlson’s sway, though, is currently limited by the fact that President Trump — who happens to like Jews and who has been the strongest supporter of Israel of any U.S. president in history — is in charge of the Republican Party and ultimately defines MAGA.

 

In June, Trump ignored Carlson and joined Israel’s effort to take out Iran’s nuclear program, which was successful in neutralizing a threat that had been looming over the Middle East for decades without any U.S. casualties. Carlson had predicted that it would trigger World War III and that it could kill thousands of Americans within a week. Trump dismissed him as “kooky Tucker Carlson.”

 

Trump won’t be around forever, though. Which is one reason that Carlson, Fuentes, Candace Owens, and other online influencers are pushing so hard to try and remake the Republican Party and the conservative movement into one that is hostile toward Israel and the Jewish people.

 

The idea that it should be seen as the America First position to oppose Israel and American Jewry is not only a moral abomination; it makes no sense. Israel is a technologically innovative, staunchly pro-American nation in the heart of a strategically important region. Over the past several years, with U.S. support, Israeli actions have weakened the anti-American terrorist group the Houthis; neutered Hezbollah (the terrorist group that slaughtered 241 U.S. servicemembers in the 1983 Marine Barracks bombing); and crippled the nuclear program of a nation that has for decades vowed “Death to America.” It isn’t pro-Israel protesters in the U.S. who are burning American flags and calling for the “total eradication of Western civilization” — it is the so-called pro-Palestine movement. It wasn’t Israelis who handed out candy to celebrate the September 11 attacks — that was Palestinians.

 

George Washington, in a famous letter to a Jewish congregation in Newport, R.I., in 1790, wrote, “May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants.” American Jews have enjoyed more security and freedom here than at any place in world history and rewarded that welcome by making positive contributions to the nation in just about every field imaginable. A version of America that is no longer safe for Jews to live in securely, and that is overtaken by anti-Israel zealots, is not an America that any conservative should want to live in.

 

 

Heritage’s Shaky Foundation

By Jim Geraghty

Friday, October 31, 2025

 

“Christian Zionists, I dislike them more than anybody.” — Tucker Carlson, in his interview with the Holocaust-denying, Hitler-praising, Stalin-praising Nick Fuentes.

 

Really?

 

We already knew that Carlson had warm and fuzzy feelings toward Russian dictator and warmonger Vladimir Putin. (Everybody who keeps insisting they just want peace always has these happy, smiling meetings with Russian officials full of warm handshakes, big bouquets of flowers, and gift exchanges, and then they turn around and furiously blame the war on folks like our old friend Jay Nordlinger. They can never seem to get around to mustering any anger at the guys shooting drones into kindergartens.)

 

And we already knew that Carlson got along surprisingly well with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, because we’ve seen him ask tough questions and challenge his interview subjects — and when Carlson traveled to Tehran (!) to interview the Iranian president, the former Fox News Channel host was downright deferential:

 

In Sana’a or Beirut, Pezeshkian’s appearance on American media becomes proof of regime legitimacy. Screenshots quickly circulate through WhatsApp groups and Telegram channels as the interviewer moves on to the next question, having just handed Tehran a propaganda victory that would otherwise cost millions of dollars in conventional influence operations.

 

The problem, again, wasn’t the subjects Carlson broached; it was the complete lack of sincere follow-ups to Pezeshkian canned responses. In order to be a critical media consumer, it’s important to be able to tell the difference. When the Iranian president claimed religious edicts forbid nuclear weapons, Tucker could have asked which clerics issued these fatwas or whether they could be reversed. When Pezeshkian asserted that Iran “hasn’t invaded another country in 200 years,” a serious journalist might have asked about Iranian-backed proxies that have destabilized the entire region. He could have also asked why it is that Iranian officialdom calls Israel the “temporary entity.”The Iranian leader’s flat denials about sleeper cells demanded a reference to Jamshid Sharmahd, the American permanent resident who was kidnapped from Dubai, shipped to Oman, and executed after a show trial in Iran. Or Masih Alinijad, the Iranian-born US citizen and journalist whom Perzeshkian’s regime tried to murder on American soil. From Tucker Carlson, nothing.

 

If you watch the interview, you’ll notice the glaring power imbalance: Carlson poses each question with the tentative air of a schoolboy addressing his teacher: “Mr. President, thank you very much for doing this.” Or “With respect, can you tell us. . . .” When Pezeshkian offers the baffling explanation that “death to America” means death to policies, not people, Carlson simply moves on. No challenge. No demand for evidence.

 

So, we already knew Carlson’s got a soft spot for dictators in Moscow and Tehran.

 

But of all the people in the world to dislike more than anybody else, Carlson dislikes . . . Christian Zionists?

 

More than, say, the Taliban? Or more than what’s left of al-Qaeda? Or what’s left of ISIS? The Houthis? The “Rapid Support Forces” massacring civilians and committing ethnic cleansing in Sudan?

 

More than North Korea’s Kim Jong-un? Xi Jinping and the thugs of the regime in Beijing? The junta in Myanmar?

 

More than Nicolás Maduro and his thugs down in Venezuela?

 

More than MS-13? Tren de Aragua?  The Sinaloa Cartel? More than the Jalisco Cartel New Generation? (Aren’t you glad you read this newsletter so you can keep up to speed on all the violent and brutal cartels that just don’t get the recognition they deserve?)

 

More than Antifa? More than “Rachel Corrie’s Ghost Brigade”? More than “Trantifa”? More than everybody who cheered the assassination of Charlie Kirk?

 

More than the Luigi Mangione fan club? More than the Black Lives Matter grifters?

 

More than Sean “P. Diddy” Combs? I mean, whatever your beef with Christian Zionists is, I’m pretty sure what Diddy was doing at his parties was worse.

 

Andrew Tate? No, wait, we know Carlson called Tate “really smart” and contended all of the sex trafficking charges against Tate were a set-up. Tate and his brother Tristan face ongoing investigations and charges including human trafficking, rape, and forming an organized crime group to sexually exploit women.

 

More than the Biden administration? More than President Biden’s autopen? More than the Obama administration? More than Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass or Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson or any of the other mayors failing their cities? More than Zohran Mamdani?

 

More than the Kardashians? Megan Markle? Prince Harry?

 

More than Red Sox fans? More than Dallas Cowboys fans?

 

More than Maryland drivers? More than Florida drivers? More than drivers who are looking down at their phones when the traffic light turns green? More than people who take up two parking spaces with one car?

 

More than Kathleen Kennedy over at Lucasfilm?

 

More than history’s greatest monster, Adam Gase?

 

More than atheists, vegetarians, or Crossfitters?

 

More than telemarketers?

 

There are more than 8 billion people on this earth, divided into so many different groups, factions, belief systems, schools of thought, philosophies . . . and the one that Tucker Carlson dislikes more than any other is Christian Zionists?

 

I mean, it’s a free country, dislike whoever you want. But if that’s the group that you’ve determined is the most repellent and repulsive, over all others . . . I don’t know, man, it seems like you’ve got some sort of irrational, all-consuming hatred driving your worldview. Carlson rattles off some specific names of who he dislikes the most, and the biggest threat to American security on his list is John Bolton.

 

You can see the difference between, say, National Review and the Heritage Foundation in their respective responses to Carlson’s interview of Fuentes.

 

Here’s what the editors of NR had to say:

 

The issue isn’t merely that Carlson “platformed” a white-nationalist influencer.

 

This framing allows Carlson and his defenders to portray the interview and others like it as an effort at open debate, as a good-faith attempt at engagement with alternative views.

 

The deeper problem is that Carlson didn’t actually challenge any of Fuentes’s noxious views that he has spelled out quite clearly over the years. Fuentes has engaged in Holocaust denial, called Adolf Hitler “really f***ing cool,” and said that if his movement gained power, it would execute “perfidious Jews.”

 

Carlson didn’t even need to go back through old clips to find objectionable statements. In his appearance, Fuentes stated that the “big challenge” to unifying the country against tribal interests was “organized Jewry in America,” and he expressed admiration for Soviet butcher Joseph Stalin. He did not receive any pushback from Carlson.

 

It also can’t be said that Carlson’s interviewing style is simply to let his guests speak. In June, Carlson held a combative interview with Senator Ted Cruz that descended into an extended shouting match. Why would Carlson choose to take an oppositional tack to a senator who has been fighting for conservatism for decades, but not to a podcaster who praises Stalin? The obvious answer is that Fuentes is an avowed Jew-hater while Cruz is a staunch supporter of Israel.

 

And here’s what Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts had to say:

 

“When it serves the interests of the United States to cooperate with Israel and other allies, we should do so, with partnerships on security, intelligence and technology. But when it doesn’t, conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class or from their mouthpieces in Washington.

 

The Heritage Foundation didn’t become the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement by cancelling our own people or policing the consciences of Christians, and we won’t start doing that now. . . .

 

We will always defend truth, we will always defend America and we will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda. That includes Tucker Carlson, who remains, and, as I have said before, always will be, a close friend of the Heritage Foundation.

 

The venomous coalition attacking him are sowing division. Their attempt to cancel him will fail. Most importantly, the American people expect us to be focusing on our political adversaries on the left, not attacking our friends on the right.

 

I disagree with, and even abhor, things that Nick Fuentes says, but canceling him is not the answer, either. When we disagree with a person’s thoughts and opinions, we challenge those ideas and debate.

 

Okay, I’d like to challenge Fuentes’s “idea” that for those who worship “false gods,”

 

When we take power, they need to be given the death penalty, straight up. I’m far more concerned about that than non-White people or mass migration. These people that are meeting with demons and engaging in this sort of witchcraft and stuff, and these people that suppressing the name Christ and suppressing Christianity, they must be absolutely annihilated when we take power. . . . We need to put up a crucifix in every home, in every room, in every school and every government office to signal Christ’s reign over our country. . . . This is God’s country. This is Jesus’s country. This is not the domain of atheists or devil worshipers or perfidious Jews. . . . No, you must be a Christian. And you must submit to Christianity.

 

Now, listen here, you little schmuck. This country has run on religious freedom from the start, including separation of church and state, and the moment you start strong-arming people and forcing them to follow Christ or face bodily harm, the first guy who will tell you to knock it off is Jesus Christ!

 

Really, Kevin Roberts? You think this twerp is somebody that serious thinkers of the modern right should spend a lot of time engaging with? You don’t see any issue with putting the spotlight on this guy and giving him more than two hours to spew his bullcrap with no pushback?

 

I’m sure the Venn diagram of my worldview and Rod Dreher’s worldview overlaps quite a bit, with some distinct disagreements on topics like the government of Viktor Orbán and its hellbent desire to cuddle with every odious America-hating regime in the world.

 

Dreher wrote about an event at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton — a great place, they invite the best speakers! — and alluded to his discussion with Ben Shapiro:

 

So, eventually Ben showed up, and while I’m not going to say what we talked about privately, I’m fairly confident it’s nothing he hasn’t said publicly. We did agree that our friend J.D. Vance, who we both want to be POTUS one day, at some rapidly approaching point, has to take a firm, clear public stand against the Groypers (followers of Nick Fuentes). This evil is not going to burn out on its own; it must be stopped . . . if it can be, at this point.

 

As we left the Green Room headed to the stage, we saw on our phones that Tucker had hosted Fuentes on his show. For me, this was a bright red line that I was hoping Tucker would not cross. But cross it he did. Here’s a link to the show, which went for over two hours. Total softball interview, entirely sympathetic. Shockingly so.

 

For example, Fuentes shocks Tucker at this point in the interview by mentioning as an aside that he is “a fan” of Stalin, and “always an admirer.” He doesn’t explain. “We’ll circle back,” says Tucker, but doesn’t.

 

More than once in his essay, Dreher implores his old friend JD Vance to stand up to all this:

 

Donald Trump and J.D. Vance could go a long way in stifling the growth of this evil by forthrightly denouncing it. J.D. is a sincere Christian; I believe that eventually — and I hope soon — he will see what a threat these people are to the faith, and to the kind of America he wants to lead. That day cannot come soon enough.

 

And:

 

J.D. Vance needs to make a clear, unambiguous, definitive denunciation of these people, these weirdos from the fringe who are rapidly moving towards respectability (and there’s nothing that could have done more to make that happen than Tucker bringing Fuentes onto his show, and presenting him as a normal figure). Many of us on the Right have wondered for years why decent liberals in authority kept their mouths shut about the left-wing anti-white bigots. And then the crazies took over the party. It’s happening to the Right now. I don’t know where this is going, but it’s nowhere good — and it’s getting there with accelerating speed.

 

Now, I’d like to see that, too. I think a lot of conservatives would like to see the vice president loudly and proudly standing up against the reprehensible antisemitism and other hatreds in the fever swamps of the far right. I think a whole lot of Americans, left, right, and center, would applaud it.

 

But I’m not holding my breath, you know?

 

ADDENDUM: When I write columns for the Washington Post, I put a lot of effort into getting all the little details right. Corrections or clarifications are embarrassing, and I think we’ve had to run one in the three years or so I’ve been writing over there, which is still one too many to me. I haven’t written for the New York Times, but I know conservatives who have, and they say everything they submit gets reviewed with a fine-toothed comb with the fact-checkers. You can’t make any unproven assertion or uncited claim; every little detail must be verified and proven.

 

And then, over in USA Today, you can be a liberal columnist and write, “Republicans’ refusal to fund SNAP will hurt their own voters most. They don’t care,” and everybody’s just fine with that, apparently.

Donald Trump Isn’t Helping

By Noah Rothman

Friday, October 31, 2025

 

Nearly a month into the government shutdown they sought and initiated but have refused to take ownership of, Senate Democrats are starting to buckle.

 

“There’s a sense within the Senate Democratic caucus that next week will bring significant movement toward ending the government shutdown,” Axios’s Stephen Neukam reported on Thursday.

 

In the Democratic Party’s search for a post hoc rationale for the shutdown, the primary purpose of which was to communicate Senator Chuck Schumer’s resolve to do something, they settled on arguing that the compromise they hammered out with their fellow Democrats to pass the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022 should be reversed. That compromise with moderates like former Senator Joe Manchin sunset Obamacare subsidies, and Democrats want to extend the sunset. But Democrats “know it’s incredibly unlikely any extension passes the House,” Neukam added. Negotiators are establishing “off-ramps” so that both parties can climb down from their aggressive postures and save face.

 

Enter President Donald Trump:

 

 

What timing. Just as Democrats are on the brink of suing for peace, Trump bursts through the wall like the Kool-Aid Man and insists that the GOP should lend credence to the primary talking point Democrats have promulgated throughout the shutdown. Democrats do want to do something: They want to throw more taxpayer dollars into Obamacare’s insatiable maw. It’s the GOP that has said that issue, like every other ancillary subject Democrats raise to avoid talking about why they actually shut the government down, will be resolved when the government re-opens. On that, the GOP presented a united front — until last night.

 

But that’s not all:

 

 

Once again, Trump would be throwing Democrats into the briar patch if the GOP heeded his call to nuke the legislative filibuster. Trump has long advocated the curtailment of minority privileges in the Senate — he wants what he wants when he wants it. It’s the GOP’s institutionalists, not the Democratic Party, that have rejected his appeals. They are well aware that it’s the Democratic Party that seeks to transform the Senate into a majoritarian body, similar to the House. They know that the filibuster is a weapon the GOP has used skillfully during its periods in political exile. They know that ceding to Trump’s demand would offer them only pyrrhic victories.

 

Hopefully, the president’s ungainly intervention in the conflict in Congress doesn’t restore the Democratic Party’s resolve to hold out, seeing the president’s unwitting support for their own program as evidence that he will pressure Republicans to cave. But it might. If it does, it will needlessly prolong the shutdown.

That Head of Gold

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, October 31, 2025

 

Even Julius Caesar knew better.

 

“You all did see that on the Lupercal, I thrice presented him a kingly crown, which he did thrice refuse,” Mark Antony says in his famous funeral oration in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Caesar made a show of refusing—when it became clear that the crowd would not support his taking it. Smart politics, maybe, but Caesar was nonetheless put to death for his kingly ambitions—and rightly: Dante was wrong to put Brutus and Cassius at the lowest point in Hell, alongside Judas Iscariot, in the very maw of Satan.

 

The people of the Commonwealth of Virginia were wiser than Dante. The state seal of Virginia depicts, with mythological stylization, the killing of Caesar: the goddess Virtue standing in for Brutus, the allegorical figure of slain Tyranny standing in for Caesar, robed in purple, his crown knocked off, illuminated by the slogan John Wilkes Booth stole from Brutus: “Sic semper tyrannis.” The seal, probably largely designed by George Wythe, was adopted in 1776 after Virginia’s declaration of independence and was presented to the legislature by George Mason.

 

A century and some before the American Revolution, the English republican Henry Haggar had argued: “If the God of heaven did in that age take away the Kingdom and Dominion of the whole earth from Nebuchadnezzar, that head of gold, and turn him out a-grazing among the Oxen, and give his kingdom to whomsoever he pleased; then let not men in this generation think it strange, though God Almighty hath taken away the kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland (which are but a small part of the earth) from Charles Stuart, and given them to the honorable Parliament.” That argument appeared in a pamphlet titled No King but Jesus. (It bore the wonderfully cumbrous subtitle: “Or, The Walls of tyrannie razed and the foundations of unjust monarchy discovered to the view of all that desire to see it wherein is undeniably proved that no king is the Lords anointed but Jesus.”) Looking back to such spiritual forebears, Americans have held crowns in contempt since before we were Americans.

 

Not so Donald Trump, who enjoys portraying himself wearing a crown and encourages others to do the same. He has for years tried to associate himself and his family with the British royal family, and it is not for nothing that his youngest son bears the name “Barron,” a pseudo-title of nobility borrowed from “John Barron,” the imaginary friend Donald Trump invented to lie to the New York Post about his sex life.

 

Visiting South Korea, Trump was presented with a gold medal announcing him as a newly minted member of the Grand Order of Mugunghwa, which sounds like something out of a half-assed parody but is a real thing. Mugunghwa in English is the common hibiscus, which, like Trump’s parasitic brand of politics, is native to some parts of Asia but considered an invasive species in the United States. He also was presented with a golden crown, which clearly delighted him. I am surprised he is not wearing it, though I suppose it is possible that the scaffolding that keeps his hair in place might create complications.

 

An American president presented with a golden crown can do one thing and one thing only: Smile, thank his hosts for their spirit of generosity, and then hand the damned thing back, explaining that he is the president of a self-governing republic of free men and women, and that, in that republic, there is no place for a crown.

 

It is possible to refuse a gift. GQ writer John Jeremiah Sullivan once showed up late for an interview with the designer Rick Owens, who, as the writer relates, was obviously, if quietly, annoyed:

 

I remembered I’d brought a present for him, a red wooden fountain pen made by a company called Lamy. Owens is married to the famous art- and fashion-world figure Michèle Lamy—the couple have been at the heart of avant-garde Paris for more than a decade, ever since they arrived here from Los Angeles. I figured they’d both be delighted by the coincidence of the name. “Yeah,” he said, not smirking but sort of politely half smiling, “this is the first thing that comes up when you type that name into Google.” He handed the pen back to me. He actually handed it back to me.

 

Now, it is true that Rick Owens has sources of confidence denied to poor Donald Trump: Owens, for example, is good at his job, and he has had a much better run of it than Trump in the expensive-sneakers business. But Trump, who holds a job once held by Abraham Lincoln, ought to be able to say, “No, thank you.”

 

The problem is that Trump, perhaps owing to his nouveau riche background and the carefully wrought deformity of his soul, has a taste for the trappings of aristocracy—a princely estate as imagined by a trust-fund dork from Queens. You can see it in his enthusiasm for ghastly imperial furnishings, in his love of monarchical pomp, and even in his sometimes evident desire to pass something of his political position along to the sons he obviously despises. (As a father, Trump is like what Henry II would have been like if he had had three Johns and no Richard the Lionheart in the brood.) But what is most objectionably kingly about Trump is not his Caligula-by-way-of-Liberace bad taste but his personalist posture, e.g., treating the White House as though it were his personal property, to be knocked down and rebuilt at his whim, treating the Department of Justice as though it were his personal goon squad, treating judges as though they were his personal servants and factota, etc. Trump talks about “my generals” and unilaterally raised tariffs on Canadian goods because someone in Ontario hurt his personal feelings.

 

L’État, c’est moi—it is not only gilt moldings that Trump has taken from Louis XIV.

 

The king spoke, and said, “Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for the house of the kingdom by the might of my power, and for the honor of my majesty?”

 

While the word was in the king’s mouth, there fell a voice from heaven, saying, Oh, king Nebuchadnezzar, to thee it is spoken; The kingdom is departed from thee.

 

Nebuchadnezzar had to learn things the hard way. Julius Caesar, too. Why should Americans be any different?

Kevin Roberts’s Bad Faith Arguments

By Noah Rothman

Friday, October 31, 2025

 

Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts wrapped his arms around Tucker Carlson, and the alternative media host’s friendly interview with avowed racist Nick Fuentes, in a video message yesterday that managed to satisfy no one. Nor should it have. The arguments he made in his and his institution’s defense were evasive at best.

 

“I’ll have more to say on this in the coming days, but I want to be clear about one thing,” Roberts began. “Christians can critique the state of Israel without being antisemitic. And of course, antisemitism should be condemned.”

 

So far, this is an unobjectionable non sequitur; a statement of elementary fact to which few could object because it relates to nothing in particular.

 

“My loyalty as a Christian and as an American is to Christ first and to America always,” Heritage’s president continued. “When it serves the United States to cooperate with Israel and other allies, we should do so with partnerships on security, intelligence, and technology. But when it doesn’t, conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class or from their mouthpieces in Washington.”

 

This is a strawman — and a familiar one, at that. It gets a beating whenever rank Jew hatred encounters even the mildest dissent, allowing purveyors of the world’s oldest hate to retreat into a more defensible posture. We were only critiquing the geopolitical entity of Israel, and your obsession with one of many nation-states marks YOU as the monomaniac here! The notion that those who object to anti-Jewish slurs insist upon “reflexive” — read, thoughtless and tribalistic — support for the Israeli government’s every act is false.

 

What’s more, obviously, Israel’s policies did not inspire Roberts’s missive. Carlson’s generous efforts to elevate the profile of an unapologetic racist and antisemite who made the news to which Roberts is responding by praising Stalin, denouncing “organized Jewry in America,” and attacking the Christians who support the Jewish State as turncoats — that is the issue at hand.

 

Roberts attempted to evade direct engagement with the subject he pretended to address by swearing off “cancelling our own people or policing the consciences of Christians, and we won’t stop doing that now.”

 

Presumably, he’s referring to Carlson as his “own people,” not Fuentes. But Carlson is ushering Fuentes into Heritage’s circle of trust, and Roberts seems not to object to that.

 

Some may hear in Roberts’s appeal to the consciences of devoted Christians a sectarian signal. Others may hear only an effort to attribute his own freely chosen irresponsibility to his faith. Regardless, he’s arguing against a point no one made.

 

“This is the robust debate we invite, with our colleagues, our movement friends, our members, and the American public,” Roberts continued. “We will always defend truth. We will always defend America, and we will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda.”

 

Here is a subtle accusation that those who object to the mainstreaming of overt antisemitism are serving “someone else’s agenda.” Where do their loyalties lie, hmm?

 

“That includes Tucker Carlson,” Roberts added. “The venomous coalition attacking him are sowing division.” Are they? Is this “venomous” claque really the party guilty of “sowing division” here? Not Carlson, who claimed he “disliked” Christian supporters of Israel “more than anybody?”

 

Roberts continued, “Most importantly, the American people expect us to be focusing on our political adversaries on the left, not attacking our friends on the right.” This is also absurd. It’s hard to remember the last time Carlson got attention for attacking the left. His political project is all but exclusively directed at the right. It is an attempt to hijack and co-opt it, and Roberts’s institution has supported that effort. Roberts is not objecting to the policing of his side — the American right, writ large. He’s doing that himself in this very video, but he’s policing only one side of this internecine conflict.

 

“I disagree with, and even abhor, things that Nick Fuentes says. But cancelling him is not the answer either,” Roberts concluded. “When we disagree with a person’s thoughts and opinions, we challenge those ideas in debate.”

 

This, too, is preposterous. As our editorial detailed, Carlson conspicuously declined to challenge Fuentes’s ideas on any substantive level — in much the same way he deferred to Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, although he denied a similar dispensation to Republican Senator Ted Cruz.

 

Roberts favorably name-checked Vice President JD Vance, who notably side-stepped a question at Ole Miss fraught with bigoted anti-Israel tropes, for the proposition that he is not “okay” with “any country coming before the interests of American citizens.” Indeed, Roberts added, “It is important for all of us, assuming we are American citizens, to put the interest of our own country first.” The implication is that the nebulous targets of Roberts’s critique don’t share his “allegiance” to the United States.

 

In short, Roberts’s remarks have nothing to do with defending the right or Donald Trump. Carlson and the president have had a frosty relationship of late, and Fuentes campaigned against the president in 2024. This wasn’t a noncommittal declaration of noncombatant status in an internal conversation on the right. It was an intervention in that conflict on one faction’s behalf. As we wrote, amid the rise of right-wing antisemitism, it is “a time for choosing.” This video suggests Roberts is making his choice.

Nuking the Filibuster Would Be Political Folly

By Fred Bauer

Wednesday, October 22, 2025

 

Over the past day or so, the so-called nuclear option for the legislative filibuster has enjoyed yet another boomlet in coverage. Some Republicans have mused about detonating the option to break a Democratic filibuster and “reopen” the federal government. However, nuking the filibuster to reopen the government — with just a simple majority in the Senate — would be a self-imposed strategic debacle for Republicans. By doing away with the filibuster here, Republican senators would be surrendering their own powers in perpetuity while giving Democrats their preferred off-ramp for the current government shutdown.

 

This isn’t eight-dimensional chess. For weeks now, progressive influencers have been calling on Republicans to nuke the filibuster and end the government shutdown. They want that to happen for a variety of reasons. In 2021 and 2022, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema took the heat for blocking the nuclear option. That spared those Democratic senators with some institutionalist impulses (such as Delaware Senator Chris Coons) from having to disappoint progressive activists by opposing the nuclear option themselves. In a future Democratic Senate majority, the Manchin–Sinema heat shield would be gone. Maine independent Angus King would probably very much like not to be the deciding vote on nuking the filibuster. If Republicans nuke the filibuster now and create that precedent, they end up sparing the Democratic caucus from facing that uncomfortable discussion. A post-nuclear Senate would toss the keys to “the groups.” If there’s any uncertainty about whether every Senate Democrat is really on board with that agenda, it’s far better from progressive activists’ perspectives that Republicans nuke the Senate for them. (And, as Joe Manchin recognized years ago, there is no such thing as a limited “carve-out” via the nuclear option — any “carve-out” puts the whole bird on the table.)

 

Further, Republicans’ nuking of the filibuster would also be a tactical win for Senate Democrats. Right now, the government remains shut down until enough Senate Democrats come to the table to negotiate. However, the activist base of the party does not want any negotiations with Republicans; they want full-spectrum opposition. This puts Senate Democrats in a tough position: Either keep the government shut down (and thus give the White House increased leverage in determining federal spending), or frustrate the inflatable-clad legions. Seen in that light, the nuclear option on the filibuster would allow Democrats to have their cake and eat it, too. They would get to both engage in performative opposition to Republican governance and see the government reopen.

 

Nor is it at all clear that the present shutdown has been a drag on President Trump, whose net approval rating has edged up since the beginning of the month. His administration has often prioritized flexing the muscles of executive power, and this shutdown has given Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought even more latitude in trimming the federal bureaucracy. Trump has often portrayed himself as a disruptor against a sclerotic Washington establishment, and a Democratic-led shutdown only reinforces that message.

 

There are, of course, sound constitutional reasons for preferring the survival of the legislative filibuster (as well as regular order in the Senate more generally). The filibuster helps ensure congressional independence from the executive. By frustrating the absolute rule of narrow majorities, the filibuster helps preserve federalism and prevents a centralization of power that could imperil American political stability. But constitutional prudence often needs partisan interest to give it force. In the case of the government shutdown, Republicans also have many political incentives to keep their fingers far away from the shiny red button.

Michael Mann Finally Goes Away

National Review Online

Friday, October 31, 2025

 

More than a decade ago, the climate scientist Michael Mann wrote us a threatening letter demanding that we take down a blog post about his sketchy research by Mark Steyn.

 

We told him to get lost. We let him know we would never take down the post, since it was First Amendment–protected speech, and a lawsuit against us would inevitably fail.

 

Sure enough, Mann has finally dropped any claims against us after wasting God knows how much money from his (presumed) financial backers, and Mark Steyn’s post on how Mann’s famous hockey stick graph is intellectually bogus and wrong is still right here for your reading pleasure.

 

Mann boasted that he would destroy us, and we are still here, alive and thriving, while he is slinking away in humiliation.

 

Ah, the First Amendment is so inconvenient isn’t it, Mr. Mann?

 

Now, it is true that Mann’s suit against us, thanks to dilatory and irresponsible judges, dragged on for an ungodly twelve years and drained us of time and resources. Mann also, shamefully, got judgments against Steyn and Rand Simberg (who posted a critique of Mann that Steyn quoted) from a friendly D.C. jury. A series of legal reverses for Mann since then, though, suggest that this purported victory will wash away under scrutiny from more objective authorities.

 

As gratifying as the legal outcome in this case is the fact that Mann and his ilk are now losing the climate debate. All you need to know about how that is going can be found by reading Mann’s whinging about Bill Gates and the billionaire’s shockingly sensible new stance on climate change.

 

We will continue, as we have throughout this suit, to push back forcefully against Michael Mann–style hysteria on the climate, which seeks to do so much harm to our economy and society.

 

Meantime, we want to thank all of you, our readers, for doing so much to support us in fighting this meritless and harassing legal assault. We deeply appreciate your donations and your well-wishes.

 

We are grateful to our counsel, Anthony Dick, for his wisdom and perseverance, and for the work of his predecessors on the case, our friends Michael Carvin, Shannen Coffin, and the late David Rivkin.

 

And we appreciate all our friends on the right — and the occasional principled supporter of free speech on the left — who have publicly made the case for us during this suit.

 

We wish we could thank the American legal system, but it failed by letting this outrage continue for so long, and Steyn and Simberg are yet to have their free-speech rights vindicated, although, again, we believe that day is coming.

 

As for Michael Mann, he’s belatedly taken our very good advice from so many years ago, and gotten lost.

The Strangest War

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, October 30, 2025

 

The most dystopian developments of the second Trump presidency weren’t merely predictable, they were predicted. Exasperated doomsayers like me have spent the last nine months and will spend the next 39 repeatedly asking variations of the same question: What did you think would happen?

 

Well, I sure didn’t think a war with Venezuela would happen.

 

Our looming adventure in South America is shaping up to be the strangest U.S. military conflict of my lifetime. Every other major war we’ve fought had some plausible-ish casus belli—containing communism in the Far East, destroying the terrorist outfit that perpetrated 9/11, preventing Saddam Hussein from gobbling up parts of the Middle East, and later, from building nuclear weapons. Bombing campaigns in Serbia and Libya were also supported by credible humanitarian rationales.

 

An attack on Venezuela would be the first time in my memory that the U.S. government hasn’t at least tried to make a compelling case for war before moving forward.

 

The ostensible reason for targeting Nicolás Maduro’s regime is to halt drug trafficking into the United States, but numerous media outlets, including The Dispatch, have already debunked that. Venezuela just isn’t much of a player in the international drug trade and has nothing to do with the plague of fentanyl overdoses that’s killed so many Americans over the past decade.

 

There isn’t some hot dispute here à la Iraq over whether the government’s argument for military intervention is backed by the evidence. “Drug trafficking” is obviously a pretext and the White House isn’t aggressively insisting otherwise. When Maduro accuses it of “fabricating a new war,” he has a point.

 

The other strange aspect of this exceedingly strange war is how sharply it contradicts the foreign policy of the administration that’s preparing to wage it. Not since George W. Bush went from opposing nation-building in 2000 to invading Iraq three years later has a president betrayed his own vision of foreign relations as completely as Donald Trump seems poised to, and Dubya had the excuse that the war on terror required a more proactive approach to threats from the Middle East.

 

Trump’s excuse for trying to take out Maduro is … what, exactly?

 

His “America First” foreign policy is a rebuke to Bush’s, as he reminded his buddies in Saudi Arabia a few months ago. He gained traction as a Republican candidate in 2015 by criticizing the Iraq war and eventually spun that into an indictment of both parties’ utopian fantasies about exporting democracy at gunpoint. No longer would the United States spend blood and treasure on trying to improve sh-thole countries by forcibly removing their leaders, he vowed. Instead he would make America great again by “ending endless wars” and improving our own people’s lives.

 

If doing so required him to partner with cretins like Vladimir Putin or Nayib Bukele or, say, Nicolás Maduro, he’d do so unapologetically. America first.

 

Now here he is, less than a year into his second term, about to out-Bush Bush by bombing his way to regime change in Venezuela for reasons no one can convincingly articulate. Surreally, Donald “Peace Prize” Trump seems set on waging a war that plainly wouldn’t have happened had the supposedly warmongering Kamala Harris been elected president instead.

 

Although maybe that shouldn’t feel as surprising as it does. Trump spent the campaign screeching about socialism before turning around and governing like a socialist. Why wouldn’t he pull the same trick with neoconservatism?

 

Even so, I can’t understand what he thinks he’s going to accomplish. For the president and his most ambitious deputies, there’s far more potential downside than upside in attacking Venezuela.

 

Owning it.

 

Start here: What would a good outcome in this standoff with Maduro look like? Gil Guerra tried to answer that question elsewhere on the site today and came away stumped.

 

The best-case scenario would involve Maduro fleeing in terror of Uncle Sam or being deposed by his own terrified henchmen, clearing the way for opposition leader Maria Corina Machado or president-in-exile Edmundo González to take power. The country would then come together peacefully in a big kumbaya moment behind its new leader, who would herald Trump as the savior of Latin American democracy and strike a big, beautiful deal with the White House granting the United States a share of the country’s natural resources.

 

In fairness to the president, he does appear to be trying to engineer that outcome. His military build-up in the Caribbean feels like a smokescreen for more clandestine efforts to target Maduro (and perhaps a few top flunkies) specifically. The plan, I think, is to remove the Venezuelan leader with little bloodshed except his own and hope that the show of force at sea convinces Maduro loyalists in the government to embrace the new political reality—or else.

 

But it probably won’t work. Per Guerra, Maduro’s anti-American patrons in Cuba, Russia, and China won’t want him to hand Trump an easy win by leaving without a fuss. And removing him forcibly is apt to create “a power vacuum where various armed factions—regime remnants, criminal networks, potentially even external actors through proxies—compete for control while the opposition leadership remains vulnerable and reliant on the U.S. for military support and security.” The country’s disintegration could plausibly create a massive refugee crisis that reaches America’s southern border, upending the argument that removing Maduro might make would-be Venezuelan migrants to the U.S. feel more comfortable staying put.

 

If chaos ensues, Trump would be forced to choose between pulling back and letting Venezuela collapse or sending in the troops to try to restore order, which means putting U.S. servicemen in harm’s way. The first option would make him responsible for creating a destabilizing humanitarian mess in South America; the second would leave him on the hook for sacrificing American soldiers’ lives in another inscrutable “war of choice.” Not great, either way.

 

And unlike Bush after the Iraq war went south, there’ll be no one to share blame with. Not only has he not sought Congress’ approval for war with Venezuela, he hasn’t even included the opposition party in classified briefings on one of the pretexts for the mission. This is all Trump. He’ll own it entirely.

 

Bamboozled.

 

It’s the rare sort of major mistake that might realistically crack his base of support.

 

After all, plenty of moderates voted for him last year believing that his political instincts were closer to their own than Harris’ were. He wanted to deport illegal immigrants en masse but he also wanted to prioritize targeting the violent criminals among them. He promised “strength” abroad but he also chastised his predecessors for being too willing to put troops at risk in missions that weren’t clearly in the national interest.

 

He misled those moderates on immigration and soon, it appears, he’ll have misled them on his views of war. At some point they’re going to realize they’ve been bamboozled. And they’re going to be mad about it.

 

Although not as mad as “America First”-ers will be.

 

One can take the Steve Bannons and Tucker Carlsons of the right only so seriously after they warned Trump not to attack Iran, were ignored, and then clammed up in short order afterward so as not to antagonize their audiences. They had good reason to do so: Most Republicans might nod along to jeremiads about “endless wars” but they instinctively relish seeing their favorite president bomb a longtime nemesis into nuclear disarmament. Ditto for their views on aiding Ukraine, which shifted in a blink from skepticism to support once Trump finally gave up on trying to negotiate with Putin.

 

The Lindberghian isolationists of right-wing infotainment realize that they won’t win a battle against the president for the loyalty of their audiences. All they can do when he starts acting like Lindsey Graham is grumble a little and move on.

 

But a war of choice with Maduro will test their restraint, especially after the New York Times revealed earlier this month that the Venezuelan strongman was willing to ransom his country’s wealth to America in return for Trump’s support for his regime—only to be rebuffed. A deal like that would have been a crowning achievement of MAGA realpolitik, proof that the U.S. government can materially improve the lives of its people if only it stops turning its nose up at corrupt, tyrannical scumbags and starts working with them.

 

Instead, the Bannons and Carlsons are watching a Dick Cheney-esque regime-change fantasy play out in real time under the Trumpian banner. If war erupts, they’ll be privately incensed—at their own lack of influence over the president, at the way he’s re-normalizing interventionism on the right, and at the fact that an election-stealing authoritarian has been cast as the villain in America’s latest drama abroad. The point of postliberal foreign policy is to convince Americans to stop hating guys like Maduro and Putin and to start wanting their leaders to act like them. So why is Donald Trump, a would-be election-stealing authoritarian himself, backing Machado and Volodymyr Zelensky?

 

They’ll never admit it but the “America First” faction will be rooting quietly for an unholy military fiasco to unfold in Venezuela, a debacle that will supposedly disabuse the modern right once and for all of the idea that foreign despots are natural enemies instead of friends we haven’t made yet. If the mission goes badly, the right’s doves will turn it into a major front in the Republican civil war of 2028. Only by nominating a stridently dogmatic isolationist, they’ll say, can the GOP avoid being seduced into another foolish war of choice like the one against Maduro.

 

But they won’t be able to blame Trump publicly for that choice. So whom will they blame?

 

Scapegoats.

 

They’ll blame Marco Rubio, of course—and maybe, if he isn’t careful, J.D. Vance.

 

Various reports have alleged that the secretary of state is the driving force behind the effort to oust Maduro, undoing the détente brokered earlier this year by O.G. Trumpist Ric Grenell. Grenell coveted Rubio’s job after Trump was reelected but was named a special presidential envoy instead, and wasted no time making his mark in the role: He visited Maduro in January of this year and struck a handshake deal in which the two countries agreed to swap detainees.

 

That put the U.S. and Venezuela on track for better relations and portended the same sort of amoral transactional arrangement with Caracas that the White House has cultivated with banana-republic dictators like Bukele. But Rubio wasn’t having it. As an old-school Reaganite hawk, the son of refugees from Castro’s Cuba, and a native of South Florida, despising left-wing Latin American tyrants is in his marrow. He wanted Maduro out and set about convincing the president of his position.

 

He couldn’t make the argument forthrightly, however, as liberating people from oppression is not a MAGA priority, to put it mildly. So he cleverly and disingenuously made an “America First” case for regime change instead. Maduro is flooding our country with drugs. (Again, not true.) He’s directing a vicious gang of illegal immigrants, Tren de Aragua, to terrorize our cities. (Also not true.) His downfall would ease immigration from Venezuela and install a friendly government that’s willing to accept more deportees from the United States

.

That last one might be true, assuming Maduro’s ouster doesn’t lead to the sort of refugee supernova that I mentioned earlier. But if the White House wants an agreeable government in Venezuela, it doesn’t need to go to the trouble of a war; it could simply choose to work with the very agreeable Nicolás Maduro. I bet Grenell could have him on the phone in five minutes—maybe sooner, given those U.S. warships off the country’s coast.

 

It’s hard to arrive at any conclusion other than that Rubio wants Maduro out because it offends him ideologically to have Castroist socialist dictators in Latin America still pushing people around in 2025. It’s a noble impulse, but it’s also about as far from “America First” as a member of this administration can be. And the Bannons and Carlsons of the world are going to crucify him for it if the war goes sideways.

 

All of the goodwill that Rubio has carefully cultivated among MAGA populists will go up in flames unless the Venezuela adventure ends up a cakewalk. Postliberals have never fully trusted him, remembering his one-time support for comprehensive immigration reform, his criticism of Trumpism in 2016, and his history of foreign-policy hawkishness as a senator. His ethnicity also surely does him no favors among the least savory elements of the right’s current coalition. The likelier it becomes that he’ll be on the Republican ticket in 2028, the more eager “America First”-ers will be to find grievances against him to keep him off of it.

 

They’re about to be handed a big opportunity. The worse the war goes, the more intensely aggrieved at him they’ll be.

 

Which brings us to the vice president, who’s in no-man’s land here—and not for the first time.

 

J.D. Vance is the purest “America First”-er in the White House, a guy who said during his campaign for Senate in 2022 on the eve of Russia’s invasion that he frankly didn’t care what happened to Ukraine. That kind of talk made him the “it girl” of authoritarianism for figures like Bannon and Carlson, which in turn made him a senator, which in turn made him vice president, and which in turn has made him acceptable as a potential 2028 nominee to the nationalist chuds of the new right.

 

But Vance has a problem. As Trump’s No. 2, knowing that his chances at the nomination depend on keeping the president happy, he’s been stuck defending one foreign intervention after another this year.

 

He went to bat for Trump’s missile strikes against the Houthis, then for the bombing run on Iran’s nuclear program, then for continuing to sell arms to Europe for use by those Ukrainians he doesn’t care about. Very soon he’ll be forced to go to bat for attacking Venezuela on pretexts so flimsy that he and the MAGA right would have dined out on them for months had any other administration, Democratic or Republican, dared use them to justify a war of choice.

 

Maybe it won’t be held against him. The “America First” wing understands the political predicament Vance is in, after all, and can tell themselves that he’ll act differently as president once he’s no longer beholden to Trump. But certain elements of the new right bear Vance a grudge and doubtless suspect that, once safely elected, he won’t be the strident postliberal warrior in office that he seems to be. Can a guy who once worried that Trump might become “America’s Hitler” really be trusted to stand up to the hawkish foreign-policy “blob” that rules Washington, especially after getting so much practice defending its interventionist preferences since January?

 

If Vance faces an insurgent primary challenger in 2028 from the far right (or “even further right,” I guess), the fact that he was only rolling over on war with Venezuela because Trump told him to will not absolve him.

 

Motives.

 

And so we’re left with the question we began with: What does Trump hope to accomplish by ousting Maduro? Assuming he hasn’t taken Rubio’s “something something drugs” rationale to heart, what’s the strategic benefit of this war in his mind?

 

My best guess is that he’s executing on his “spheres of influence” view of foreign policy by picking a comparatively soft target in America’s backyard and sending a message by threatening to rough him up. Ousting Maduro is a matter of unfinished business for Trump, remember: His first administration recognized then-opposition leader Juan Guaido as the rightful leader of Venezuela in 2019, but Maduro resisted that effort to depose him and outlasted Trump’s own presidency.

 

Coming back for round two might be the president’s way of showing other nations in America’s “sphere” that if you don’t do what he wants, he’ll punish you for it eventually. No matter how long it takes.

 

Beating up Maduro serves another purpose: scaring actual drug traffickers around the region about what might await them if they don’t cut their operations in the United States. Attacking fentanyl cartels in Mexico would be fraught for all sorts of reasons, from poisoning relations with the Mexican government to risking a swell of migrants at the southern border who are desperate to escape the line of fire. One way to scare the cartels straight, potentially, without actually laying a glove on them is to make an example of Maduro instead.

 

Which makes sense—unless war with Venezuela proves more challenging than expected. If that happens, the conflict might have the opposite effect by turning American public opinion decidedly against using the military to fight drug trafficking. Mexican cartels currently wondering whether Trump might target them will gain confidence that he won’t: Why, he wouldn’t dare after instigating a public backlash to his presidency by attacking Caracas.

 

Simply put, the odds of things going wrong here are greater than the odds of things going right. With war, as with Trump, they usually are.

In Defense of ‘Impostor Syndrome’

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, October 29, 2025

 

If the grade-inflation scandal isn’t enough to eradicate whatever vestiges remain of Harvard University’s reputation as an institution dedicated to academic excellence, I don’t know what will.

 

In a 25-page report released on Monday, Harvard’s Office of Undergraduate Education revealed that a staggering 60 percent of the grades handed to undergraduates were As. Ten years ago, it was just 40 percent. Twenty years ago, fewer than 25 percent of undergraduates earned As.

 

The Harvard report’s findings dovetail with those uncovered by the New York Times in October. Harvard students often don’t bother to show up for class, the Times noted. When they do, “they are focused on their devices” and are “reluctant to speak out” lest they encourage dissent from their peers and professors. They have often “not read enough of the homework to make a meaningful contribution” anyway. And yet, students “coast through” with great grades. The result is a student body “stuck in ideological bubbles, unwilling or unable to engage with challenging ideas.”

 

As ever, the road to perdition is paved with good intentions.

 

Not only is this campaign of grade inflation an effort by faculty to ensure that their courses are well attended, thereby justifying their roles, it is also an outgrowth of concern for students’ mental well-being. “Administrators have also told professors to consider students who struggle with ‘imposter syndrome’ or personal hardships when evaluating performance,” the New York Post reported. If that’s true, Harvard has compounded this scandal with tragedy.

 

“Imposter syndrome” is the name that therapy culture has given to the unremarkable sensation of discomfort one experiences when one perceives oneself to be in rarified company. It’s the self-consciousness that accompanies genuine esteem for one’s associates and the institutions to which they are in proximity.

 

It can manifest in unhealthy ways, but it’s not something to be ashamed of, much less mitigated by the relaxation of the standards to which “imposter syndrome” sufferers know they must aspire. It can be a driving force, a motivating factor that compels the afflicted to redouble their efforts and match their peers’ capabilities. That effort alone contributes to students’ sense of earned success. It is the only remedy to the sense of inadequacy this “syndrome” describes. And, in the aggregate, that remedy — struggle and perseverance in pursuit of a goal — contributes to innovation, achievement, productivity, and, ultimately, economic growth.

 

To lower standards only to shield students from the modest self-doubt they associate with being surrounded by high achievers robs them of the chance to earn their position — not only in the minds of their fellow students and instructors but in their own estimation of themselves. If the “misalignment between the grades awarded and the quality of student work,” according to the Harvard report, is designed to protect students’ fragile egos, it will have the opposite effect. The “impostor syndrome” that dogged them in Harvard will now follow them through the rest of their lives as they navigate the world with an asterisk next to their undergraduate degrees.

 

Discomfort in lofty, exclusive settings makes the discomforted into strivers. Either those who encounter it will rise to the challenge, or they will conclude with all requisite evidence that they should take another path. Taking that experience away from students robs them of the inputs they would otherwise use to make informed decisions about the trajectory their lives should take. Filing down life’s sharp edges does them no favors. And calling it “imposter syndrome” doesn’t help matters, either. Maybe if we called it what it was — embarrassment — our highly therapeutic culture would recognize that it is not an affliction, and those who experience it cannot and should not be spared from it.

The Coming Civil War of Climate Hysterics

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, October 29, 2025

 

The Maldive Islands used up all their fresh drinking water in 1992 and are expected to retreat beneath the rising sea levels within the next 20 years. The Gaza Strip, already burdened by the war its terrorist government inaugurated, became ecologically uninhabitable in 2020. In 1985, air pollution halved the amount of sunlight reaching the planet’s surface. Children stopped remembering what snow even was sometime in the last decade. In 2013, the Arctic became irrevocably ice-free. The “world is going to end” before this decade is out, and every last human being will be dead by the end of next year.

 

To say that these predicted scenarios of imminent climatological catastrophe have become forgettable background radiation is too charitable. At least background radiation is actually harmful. Climate change, by contrast, is a manageable phenomenon that does not present an existential threat to humanity’s survival. At least, not according to Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates.

 

“Although climate change will have serious consequences — particularly for people in the poorest countries — it will not lead to humanity’s demise,” Gates wrote in an essay published this week ahead of the COP30 climate summit. Indeed, he observed, the eschatology to which climate change activists are inclined has contributed to negative outcomes, especially in the developing world.

 

“This is a chance to refocus on the metric that should count even more than emissions and temperature change: improving lives,” Gates added. He stressed the need for philanthropic endeavors to prioritize mitigating the effects of hunger, poverty, and disease over their myopic fixation with reducing heat-trapping emissions. “Our chief goal should be to prevent suffering,” Gates continued, “particularly for those in the toughest conditions who live in the world’s poorest countries.”

 

“People will be able to live and thrive on Earth for the foreseeable future,” Gates conceded, even in a “warming world.” This bit of apostasy from someone who was — or, at least, posed as — a true believer in the cataclysmic future that runaway climate change held in store for us has shaken the industry around environmental activism to its foundation. The memo sets the stage for a pivotal internecine conflict over the future of climate activism.

 

There has long been a debate within the climate change activist camp to which outsiders were not supposed to be privy. On the one hand, there are activists who emphasize meliorism. They believed that human activity caused climate change, but they also concede that human activity can stave off the worst of its effects and reduce the severity of its impact on individual lives. While dogmatic, their worldview is anthropocentric, and they seek to maximize outcomes for the greatest number of people.

 

On the other hand, there are the misanthropes. Those are the climate activists who struggle to see any redeemable features in modernity and humanity’s contributions to our present conundrum. They emphasize what they call “degrowth” — what the rest of us refer to as “deindustrialization.” Our path to salvation, with all its quasi-religious overtones, rests in our capacity to unshackle us from our machines, to return to a more organic relationship with our environment, to become smaller and less numerous.

 

If Gates’s memo proves significant, it will be in how it initiates a mad scramble over the cash that the donor class is willing to contribute to climate-related initiatives. That will put pressure on the individual components of this undifferentiated blob to distinguish themselves and accentuate their respective core competencies.

 

For much of this century, it was simply best practice for charitable groups to graft climate change onto their statements of purpose, irrespective of what that purpose happened to be. You name it: Save the Children, United Way, the Salvation Army, World Vision International — even the weepy-eyed house pets that Sarah McLachlan cradled for the ASPCA — have had to take a bite from the climate change apple. If they were to stay in their lanes, they would risk ceding precious donor funds to groups with a keener focus on the cause du jour. Gates’s admission threatens to upend this undesirable dynamic.

 

If Microsoft’s leader emeritus, himself a prolific donor, has signaled that it isn’t just blinkered but unscrupulous to pound the table with dire and baseless predictions of an imminent climatological reckoning, many more donors and organizations will take his lead. Indeed, Gates’s COP30 memo may just represent the permission structure they felt they needed to back away from doomsday predictions that have sapped so many climate-obsessed outfits of credibility.

 

That will put substantial financial pressure on the organizations that have crafted an identity for themselves as the most uncompromising and fatalistic within the climate catastrophism clique. Not all will survive the coming bout of natural selection. And perhaps not all will want to survive.

 

Those in the activist community who have been genuinely taken in and are possessed of a sincere, albeit faith-based, conviction that mankind is living on borrowed time will not follow Gates’s lead. They will argue that his betrayal is only a sop to the capital managers who are poisoning the planet. They will insist that he is a steward of an intolerable status quo, a peddler of the fiction that human productivity can progress apace without inviting horrible consequences. They will attack his motives and impugn his interests. At the very least, they will insist that those who take Gates’s admonition at face value don’t comprehend his full meaning, much less the nature of the climate threat. Indeed, they already are.

 

Gates’s memo establishes what the New York Times called a “false dichotomy,” according to Princeton University geosciences professor Michael Oppenheimer — one that is “usually propagated by climate skeptics.” If Gates himself is not betraying the movement, “his words are bound to be misused by those who would like nothing more than to destroy efforts to deal with climate change.”

 

In short, those who are desperate to preserve their access to capital will accuse those who fail to propagate climate-change apocalypticism of seeking only access to capital. It will be psychological projection of the highest order, but it’s the understandable sort. Those who retail that face-saving line are steeling themselves for a fight not with their critics but within their own movement. And a fight is coming. It will determine whether climate change millenarianism remains the altar to which all left-of-center activist groups must genuflect, or whether that preoccupation will be relegated to the fringes as the worlds of charity and philanthropy retreat back into their respective lanes.

 

The stakes are high, as that mournful shriek you hear just off in the distance suggests. The gravy train is screeching to an abrupt halt. A scramble to loot it for all its remaining worth comes next.