The Four Schmucks of the Apocalypse

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, December 01, 2025

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

(You guys know which is which.)

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Europe Has Made Itself an Afterthought

By Rich Lowry

Friday, November 28, 2025

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

And then the European colonial empires inevitably dissolved.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, December 03, 2025

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Instead, I’ll make a few points.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

I Love Drug Traffickers

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Wednesday, December 03, 2025

 

Were you aware that I love foreign drug traffickers? Love ’em. Yes, sir. Every morning, I wake up, prayerfully close my eyes, and hope, as devoutly as I’ve ever hoped for anything, that somewhere in the Caribbean there is a foreign drug trafficker heading toward the United States.

 

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been asked why, despite being a vocally patriotic sort, I have held steadfastly to the conviction that the federal government possesses no freestanding authority to launch rockets at vessels that it suspects might be engaged in the movement of narcotics. In response, I have had to repeatedly explain that, quite obviously, it is because I’m an unreconstructed enthusiast for the global cocaine trade.

 

Why else, after all, would I hold such a prudish opinion? Sure, there are obvious constitutional problems with the practice — problems such as that the executive branch has not secured a declaration of war, or an authorization of military force, or any other statutory permission to attack non-combatant shipping on the open seas. And, yes, there are practical issues — such as that, in every documented case, it would have been possible for the U.S. military to stop, board, and search the boats that it suspected were being used to traffic illicit substances, rather than to blow them up without investigation. But fixating on objections such as those is for wusses and pansies. Real men just come out and say it: I want Pedro and Javier to succeed in their dastardly aims.

 

My colleague Andy McCarthy suggested recently in these pages that the Trump administration is dealing here “with an activity — cocaine trafficking — that is not an act of war, is not terrorism, is not killing thousands of Americans (that’s fentanyl), and is traditionally handled in the United States by criminal prosecution under an extensive, decades-old set of laws.” Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. I hope Andy won’t mind me relating that, while he says things like this publicly, it’s all a cover for his real agenda, which is to make the world safe for international criminals. Like me, Andy adores international criminals. If, this year, I were to get Andy a Christmas gift, it would be a drug dealer — preferably with his own Narco-Submarine.

 

Go back in time and look at any objection that I have ever hurled at the federal government, and you will find that it is easily explained by my preference for outlaws. In 2013, I argued that the Obama administration did not have the authority to take military action in Syria. This was because I was infatuated with Bashar al-Assad. Earlier this year, I contended that the Trump administration needed congressional authorization before striking Iran’s nuclear facilities. That was because I was desperate for the mullahs to develop a nuclear weapon, which I hoped would be used against Israel. A few of the people who nominally agreed with me in these cases made performative references to Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, or to the Federalist Papers, but this was just a rhetorical feint. The success of our favorite dictators and theocracies was at stake, and we were not going to fumble that ball.

 

This rule does not solely apply to matters of war and peace. All of my proceduralism is advanced with a similar goal in mind. I favor jury trials, mens rea prerequisites, and the presumption of innocence because I want the guilty to walk free. I advocate separation of powers because I have a deep-seated hatred for the poor. I defend federalism to ensure that there remain as many pockets of bigotry as is geographically possible. Heck, my reflexive inclination toward the very concept of written law — which, naturally, I couple with an originalist bent — is a mere smokescreen for my misanthropy. I say that it’s about stability and good governance, but it’s not really. I just hate the self-evidently virtuous schemes that would automatically improve everyone’s lives.

 

So it is on the oceans. As far as I’m concerned, there are just two sorts of people in this equation: the honorable drug-peddlers who are filling our country with white gold, and the sinful American military officials who are trying to stop them. By litigating meaningless, lily-livered, near-traitorous questions, such as, “What war, exactly?” and “What makes a cocaine-trader a ‘terrorist’?” and “How do we know they were guilty if we exploded them from a distance?” I am doing my part to help. I love those guys. There can be no other cause of my discomfort.

Threats of Violence Are Bad. Actual Violence Is Worse

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, November 02, 2025

 

Without question, the threats that are reportedly being directed at Indiana’s Republican lawmakers are a big story. Indeed, they’re part of a larger story — one that the coverage of that ongoing national disgrace is missing.

 

“At least 11 elected Republicans in Indiana have been the targets of swatting attacks and other threats in the weeks since President Donald Trump publicly pressured state lawmakers to approve a new congressional map that would benefit Republicans,” NBC News reported Monday.

 

The harassment campaign has taken many forms, from prank pizza orders delivered to lawmakers’ homes (which is unnerving enough, insofar as the pranksters know where these lawmakers live) to bomb threats:

 

 

NBC News’ dispatch pins the blame for the Indian GOP’s torment on the president. Senator Chuck Schumer did the same on Monday when his office published a statement alerting the public to threats to his office in emails with the “subject line ‘MAGA’ and from an email address alleging the ‘2020 election was rigged.’”

 

The threats against lawmakers, appointed officials, judges, and other representatives of the state have increased markedly in recent years. Congressman Jared Golden cited those threats as one of the conditions that forced him out of politics. So, too, did Marjorie Taylor Greene in explaining her resignation from Congress. The threat environment surely has other effects on the psychology of lawmakers, some of whom have reportedly confessed to colleagues that they were successfully cowed by the mob into doing its bidding.

 

At least now, the press is attuned to the challenge posed by threats of violence — or, rather, they are when those threats are believed to come from right-wing lunatics. If only we could say we were a long way off from the summer of 2022, when an advanced attempt on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s life prompted Politico’s Michael Schaffer to call the thwarted attack “not especially hair-raising.” After all, threats against judges and lawmakers had increased by orders of magnitude in this decade, forcing the attempted assassination of Justice Kavanaugh to “elbow for space in our mental list of near-misses.”

 

The parts of this equation that the press and their Democratic allies continue to miss — perhaps because they’re professionally obligated to miss it — are the ongoing acts of violence that have made the present threat environment so unnerving.

 

You’ll struggle to find coverage of the firebombing attack on a Los Angeles federal building on Monday outside of Fox News. The potentially deadly assault was described by its perpetrator as a “terrorist attack.” His targets were fortunate that the Molotov cocktails he threw into the building failed to produce much damage, although the attacker had additional incendiary devices in his possession at the time of his apprehension.

 

The attacker’s motives are not hard to divine:

 

Federal investigators said the man appeared to be motivated by his anger at the federal government over immigration enforcement activities. After his arrest, the suspect allegedly told federal agents they were “separating families” and added, “this is a terrorist attack anyways,” and, “I attacked your b—- a–.”

 

The disparity between the coverage of potential right-wing violence and active episodes of left-wing political terrorism is hard to ignore. That disparity features prominently in my forthcoming book, Blood and Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America (available now for pre-order wherever fine books are sold).

 

The practitioners of political violence take inspiration both from their comrades in arms and the provocations of their opponents — especially when it seems that their opponents enjoy the support or, at least, the deference of governmental and institutional stakeholders. The history of political terrorism in America is replete with violent actors who convinced themselves that the state had already gone to war with them. Retaliation, therefore, isn’t even preemptive; it’s proportional.

 

The threats against lawmakers are real, condemnable, and a threat to the good working order of the republic. Actual acts of violence are all those things and more. But amid this current wave of left-wing violence, the left’s allies have no incentive to observe consistency. This asymmetry is as much an environmental contributor to a potentially violent psychology as any other inducement.

Josh Shapiro Finally Unloads on Kamala Harris

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, December 03, 2025

 

There is a lot to pore over in Tim Alberta’s typically meaty profile of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, in The Atlantic. It is worth a read in its entirety. There was, however, one particularly salacious passage that requires some unpacking.

 

Shapiro succumbed to an unguarded moment when Alberta reflected on Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign and the prospect of her choosing the governor as her running mate. When the nod went to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the Harris campaign floated a variety of self-serving rationales for the move that cast Shapiro in an unflattering light. In Alberta’s formulation, the campaign characterized Shapiro as “selfish, petty, and monomaniacally ambitious.” The whole experience has duly embittered Shapiro.

 

One of the many competing claims the Harris campaign made to explain its otherwise inexplicable decision to take a pass on the talented and popular swing-state governor in favor of a lummox from a state that hasn’t voted for a GOP presidential candidate in over 50 years was that Shapiro wanted to decorate the Naval Observatory with works by Pennsylvania artists. The cad!

 

The banality of the alleged offense notwithstanding, Shapiro seemed genuinely stunned. “She wrote that in her book?” he asked incredulously. “That’s complete and utter bulls***.”

 

“I can tell you that her accounts are just blatant lies,” he continued:

 

“I mean, she’s trying to sell books and cover her ass,” Shapiro snapped. The governor stared past me now, shaking his head. As I began to ask a different question, he held up a hand. He looked disgusted. With me? With Harris? No, I began to realize: He was disgusted with himself.

 

“I shouldn’t say ‘cover her ass.’ I think that’s not appropriate,” Shapiro said. His tone was suddenly collected. “She’s trying to sell books. Period.”

 

She is, and Shapiro knows why — although he caught himself before the indiscretion escaped his mouth.

 

Shapiro’s bid was tanked by the vaguely antisemitic whisper campaign his Democratic opponents mounted in the effort to prevent anyone other than a progressive from joining the already progressive Harris ticket. The Harris camp made no secret of its efforts to ingratiate itself with the violent and menacing anti-Israel rabble in the streets, and Shapiro’s elevation would have undermined that lunatic project.

 

One bizarre effort by the Harris campaign to obscure its true motives apparently rang true to NBC News reporter Yamiche Alcindor. “Josh Shapiro was seen as not someone who could deliver the state of Pennsylvania based on internal polling,” she wrote in August 2024 of a governor who had won a statewide race by 15 points two years earlier. “The source also said Harris’ team was unconvinced that any one person could guaranteed [sic] any of the battleground states for the ticket.”

 

If no one could guarantee their own state as a part of the Harris ticket, that says a lot more about the campaign’s principal than about her prospective running mates.

 

Another theory posited by Harris’s allies undermines that explanation entirely. Harris was “looking for ‘more of a governing partner’ than an electoral boost,” NOTUS reported. The Wall Street Journal’s sources in Harris’s orbit confirmed the degree to which Shapiro intimidated their candidate: “Some Democrats also privately questioned whether Shapiro would be well-suited to serve in a supporting role.” The fact that much of the remainder of that article is dedicated to the Democratic activist class’s discomfort with Shapiro’s Jewish identity tells the tale.

 

The Keystone State governor has earned his consternation with the Harris campaign. He was cravenly defamed by an operation that could not admit that it was bending over backward to accommodate bigots. In the end, however, Shapiro dodged a bullet. The governor stands a good chance of running on a national Democratic ballot one day. Kamala Harris never will again.

What About the Poor?

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, November 26, 2025

 

The comedian John Mulaney tells a funny—and terrible—story about trying to cure himself of his cocaine addiction by instructing his financial manager to keep cash out of his hands. No cash, no coke—I guess his dealer didn’t take Venmo. What happened next was a predictable series of shenanigans in which the comedian thought up ways to, in effect, embezzle from himself, e.g., buying a $12,000 watch and selling it for $6,000 on the same day. Mulaney’s story of desperate addiction offers a good example of one of the common mistakes we make in our current econo-political debate: trying to use economic means to solve non-economic problems. Mulaney’s problem was not economic: He has been very, very successful and probably could blow $6,000 a day for a very long time without endangering the mortgage payment. His problem was that he loved cocaine.

 

There are a great many modern pathologies and problems that often are described as results of capitalism or as aspects of capitalism—of “late capitalism,” as the pseudointellectuals sometimes put it. For example, as formerly poor and hungry countries have become more prosperous and better-fed, they have seen an increase in obesity and diabetes, and, in some cases, they have seen higher levels of alcohol and tobacco use as increased private incomes enable the consumption of what had been unobtainable luxuries. Use of some other drugs has increased, in some places, with wealth: You need a little bit of money to have John Mulaney’s former bad habits. There are increased environmental pressures and externalities associated with increasing wealth, too, as the newly affluent consume more energy, food, and petroleum products (plastics, chemicals, pharmaceuticals—the list is long) than they had. When poor people leave farming villages for higher-paying jobs in urban environments, there are new pressures put on everything from utilities to transportation networks to housing.

 

Capitalism becomes a go-to bogeyman, the witch behind every contemporary malady: “Blame capitalism for men’s loneliness,” etc.

 

There surely are some social evils that are the work of capitalists—as Willi Schlamm famously put it, the problem with capitalism is capitalists (but the problem with socialism is socialism). But greed, dishonesty, and short-sightedness are human qualities present in men and women under every economic arrangement. Socialists steal, lie, and exploit, too.

 

In the same way, nearly all of the problems attributed to capitalism are (or were) present in much more intense forms in non-capitalist economies than in capitalist economies: See, for example, the environmental record of Communist China or the results of forced industrialization in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Nutrition and health outcomes are not great in North Korea or Venezuela. Municipal services in Cuba are ... also not great. 

 

It is not that the medical or environmental or cultural problems of the rich capitalist world are not real or that they are unimportant—it is that these are problems that are mainly non-economic in origin and unlikely to be much improved by economic means. And where economic means are employed, they often are simply a stalking horse for old-fashioned state coercion, as in Barack Obama’s promise to “bankrupt” coal-based businesses—a prohibition disguised as a fine or a tax is still a prohibition. People who propose putting a $1,000 tax on a box of ammunition are not actually engaged in tax policy. They are like John Mulaney trying to treat a psychiatric problem through cash flow management.

 

But what about all that economic inequality we hear about? Surely that is a problem that is economic in origin? That is, at most, half right: economic—yes; a problem—no, not really.

 

An extraordinary thing has happened with the incomes and total wealth of the tippy-top of the distribution since the 1990s and the emergence of the internet and that vaguely defined collection of international phenomena we call, for lack of a better word, globalization. The fortunes acquired by such tech titans as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are indeed remarkable. They have almost nothing to do with the economic situation of the poor or the middle class, and they are not, in the main, the result of public policy. That is not to say that public policy could not diminish those fortunes (for instance, by simply seizing them, as many of my leftist friends desire), but Amazon and Apple and such have not exploded in value the way they have mainly because of government favoritism or political steering, though, the world being a fallen place, these exist and are factors. (Critics here will point to the subsidies enjoyed by Musk’s constellation of rent-collecting enterprises, and they are not wrong to do so. But even with these subsidies in mind, the broader point stands, for reasons that I hope the following lines will make clear.) What has made Bezos’ splendid fortune is the growth and integration of markets: If you have the most successful car dealership in Plainview, Texas, then you probably do pretty well—but you do a lot better if you have the most successful car dealership in Los Angeles. Same business, bigger market, hence, bigger returns to small improvements in margins.

 

If Jeff Bezos were the most successful shopkeeper in New York City, he’d be wealthier than if he were the most successful shopkeeper in Little Rock or Indiana—as it happens, he is the most successful shopkeeper in the world, serving hundreds of millions of users in more than 100 countries. Where markets are very large, returns to profitable innovation, efficiency, investment margins, excellence in corporate management—or luck!—also are very large. When Saks & Company was just a shop on Fifth Avenue, there was no way for its owners to make the kind of profits that a large, international chain of department stores could—to say nothing of the kind of profits Amazon can generate. But these profits are not, vulgar class-war rhetoric notwithstanding, deductions from the common good or from the share of wealth available for distribution—they are the result of wealth created, not merely wealth distributed.

 

The poor are not poor because the rich are rich. The poor are less poor because of the same economic factors that have made some of our rich guys so shockingly rich. Creating wealth makes societies—and the world—wealthier. Even with the returns going lopsidedly to a relatively small number of investors, wealth creation of the kind that makes billionaires also produces tons of economic benefits and secondary activity, tax revenue, etc. The thing about richer societies is, they’re richer.

 

But, strangely, when my progressive friends talk about economic inequality, they invariably talk about the incomes of the very wealthy—and almost never about the poor. And there is a reason for that: The story of the economic situation of the world’s poor does not offer very much rhetorical fodder for the enterprising anticapitalist.

 

Most of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty in 1800—about 80 percent of the human race. By 1980, that share was down to about 43 percent—a substantial improvement. By 2015, that number was down to around 9 percent, and today it is a little less than that. (NB: Estimates vary among sources, of course, but every credible account has the share of the world population living in extreme poverty radically reduced, by about the same proportion in the same years.) By historical standards, very few people live in extreme poverty today, and they are concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, which accounts for about two-thirds of the population living in extreme poverty.

 

A little capitalism goes a long way. When the government of Narasimha Rao began its program of economic reform in India, the average citizen of that republic died before age 60; today, the typical Indian lives past 70. Left-wing anticapitalism is not the only kind of anticapitalism, and right-wing anticapitalism has predictable results: In 1960, South Korea was under a military dictatorship with its boot heel on a very regimented economy, and the average life expectancy was 53.8 years; a steady program of liberalization saw South Korean life expectancy grow from about 63 years in the 1970s to 73 years in the 1990s to more than 83 years today. North Korea, on the other hand, saw its average life expectancy decline by a decade in the 1990s. 

 

From the United States to the United Kingdom to Europe to India to South Korea, the story is the same: Capitalism is good for people, and it is very good for the poorest people. The reasons for that are obvious enough: Relatively poor societies do not have very much to share with the neediest among them, nor do they have the kind of resources that allow adequate investment in big infrastructure projects that improve sanitation and access to clean water, which are key to improving public health and life expectancy. Often, these are a matter of public works rather than a matter of market goods provided by for-profit entities. The thing to understand is not the libertarian cliché that “free markets will take care of it,” maybe with an assist from private charity, which is often true but not always.

 

Rather, the thing to understand is something that even Karl Marx appreciated: Capitalism produces the level of economic development and wealth that is necessary in order for a society to have adequate resources to direct at such age-old problems as profound poverty, preventable diseases, or the provision of public goods. Marx thought that the wealth of capitalism would provide the fertile ground into which to plant the seed of socialism, but he was not quite right: Socialism, for reasons having more to do with the use of knowledge in society than with industrial production techniques or financial incentives, always and everywhere fails on its own terms. What has instead grown out of the rich soil of capitalism is ... more capitalism, more complex capitalism, more global capitalism, more productive capitalism, together with a variety of approaches to the design and implementation of social welfare programs, which liberal-democratic countries (and some less than liberal and not quite democratic) have adapted to their own local conditions with varying degrees of success: Even within the richest nations of Europe, there are radically different models of social welfare (e.g., Sweden vs. Switzerland), while peoples rooted in different cultures have come up with reasonably effective—sometimes extraordinarily effective—alternatives of their own, as in Singapore and South Korea. But what Sweden and Switzerland and Singapore and South Korea have in common is capitalism. What North Korea and Venezuela and South Sudan have in common is the absence of capitalism. North Korea and Venezuela offer two distinct flavors of socialist backwater, while in South Sudan the state-run oil enterprise is something close to the entire economy.

 

Capitalism is one part of the magic formula—it goes along with liberalism and democracy, and, just as there are different versions of capitalism appropriate to different cultures, there are different versions of liberalism and democracy. Swiss democracy is not very much like American democracy, and American liberalism is not precisely the same as the liberalism of Germany or that of Singapore. The rich world is not an Erector set with standardized parts. It is more like a cake recipe with ingredients that may vary in both their composition and their relative proportions, according to taste: democracy, political accountability, the rule of law, independent courts, a free press, etc. The capitalism bit of that comprises property rights, freedom of exchange, freedom of contract, trade, a stable money supply, etc. These things together have produced remarkable results in everything from poverty to education to food production to health to occupational safety to peace to every other factor my friends over at Human Progress track.

 

In 1800, most of the world was desperately poor. In 1980, nearly half the world was desperately poor. Today, something like 9 percent of the world is desperately poor—and what most of that 9 percent most desperately needs is access to capitalism, to its tools and opportunities. That progress did not happen by accident, and it was not the result of some committee of experts thinking deep thoughts in Washington or Brussels or Davos. (Much less Beijing or Moscow.) And while I am sympathetic to a lot of that all-the-way libertarian stuff, you don’t have to pretend that this is some kind of anarcho-capitalist fairy tale in which government plays no role, inasmuch as conventional modern capitalism expects—and counts on—government to play some role: Property has to be protected, contract disputes have to be litigated, public goods need to be provided. Sometimes private actors and market-based players can get a lot of that done, and that’s great. But, in the modern, developed-world experience, capitalism works best with competent government based on liberal democratic traditions.

 

There is nothing more nonsensical than hearing some ingrate—Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, J.D. Vance, Sohrab Ahmari—insist that we need to reimagine capitalism or revamp it or remake it from the inside out. Capitalism works just fine—let that golden goose be. What we should be talking about is much more in-the-weeds and much less grand: What kinds of real-world reforms are needed in our tax system and public finances? What should we do about the persistent lack of price transparency in health care? Why do we get such poor results from our public schools even as we spend more and more money on education? How should we go about preventing financial disaster in the public pension systems? How do we honor democratic norms and local political accountability while getting rid of the political sclerosis that has arrested so much infrastructure development and housing construction? Those are real questions. None of them requires “reinventing capitalism” or whatever dumb catchphrase the politicians are using this year.

 

Capitalism—the thing that happens when property rights are protected and the freedom to exchange is honored—not only has a record of raising people out of poverty, it is the only economic system with a record of doing so. Even in regimented and autocratic systems such as that of China, it is the zones of relative liberalism that have produced the wealth that has relieved extraordinary poverty. That China remains an autocratic police state is not an indictment of capitalism—it is another example of the fact that economic policies solve economic problems but generally are not much good for non-economic problems. John Mulaney could not cure his cocaine addiction by managing his money—though surely it is the case that his considerable wealth provided him with resources to support his efforts at cleaning up his life when he worked up the will to do so. That approximates the role of capitalism in a complex society: Capitalism does not cause or cure diabetes or obesity or environmental degradation or urban dysfunction—but it does provide us with resources that give us the ability to make better choices, once we have worked up the will, under conditions that are much more favorable than those we would endure if we had a Cuban economy or a Venezuelan economy or a North Korean economy. The proverb attributed to Deng Xiaoping is true but not the whole truth: “It is glorious to get rich.”

 

If you doubt that, ask someone who used to be poor.

The Problem with the Republican Party? All the Democrats

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, December 02, 2025

 

All the talk about the degree to which Donald Trump’s presidency was suffering from early onset lame duck syndrome led researchers at the Manhattan Institute to examine the proposition. In a survey designed to test the tensile strength of Trump’s “multi-ethnic, working-class” coalition, the think tank polled almost 3,000 voters — oversampling minorities to avoid the errors that can occur when drawing big conclusions from small populations.

 

There is a lot that can be written about this survey, but it’s worthwhile first to dwell on a distinction its authors regularly make: the difference between the Republican Party’s stalwarts and its “new entrants.”

 

Overall, the Manhattan Institute found that the Republican coalition is still primarily composed of longstanding Republicans who have consistently backed the party’s nominees even before 2016. But around 30 percent of modern Republican voters are either recent converts or were too young to vote before 2020. That would be a remarkable feat of electoral engineering on the part of Donald Trump’s GOP if, à la Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party, these voters were in the process of being converted into conservatives. Instead, it seems the Republican Party’s newbies are colonizing Trump’s GOP.

 

If the current iteration of the Republican Party seems a little more paranoid than the one you recall from your youth, there’s a reason for that. As the Manhattan Institute’s Jesse Arm observed, roughly 18 percent of Republican voters believe in at least one of five unproven suppositions of varying degrees of implausibility. Most “long-standing Republicans” reject those conspiracy theories, including the notion that 9/11 was an inside job and the Holocaust “did not happen as historians describe.” But that’s not true of the “new entrants.”

 

Over one-third of Trump-era converts believe all or most of those theories — or, at least, they tell pollsters they do. And most of those paranoiacs were Democratic voters not that long ago. “Put another way,” Arm wrote, “63% of the highest-conspiracy believers previously voted for Obama, Clinton, or Biden at least once since 2008.”

 

Maybe you think the GOP has gotten a little prickly in the Trump years — exhibiting a touch more racial and creedal anxiety than in decades past. Well, most old school Republicans reject racist and sectarian appeals. By a two to one margin, Republicans want the GOP to eject antisemitism and its promoters from the coalition. That’s particularly true among Republicans over the age of 50, among whom just 4 percent say they either express or welcome racist or antisemitic views. That’s not the case among Republicans under 50, among whom one in three are tolerant of racism and one-quarter indulge antisemitism. “New Entrant Republicans are far more likely to fall into the ‘tolerator’ category,” Arm observed. Nearly one-third of newcomers “say they openly express racist views,” even though they are “more liberal than non-tolerators on a wide range of issues — DEI, taxes, traditional values, and transgender surgeries.” Indeed, a staggering 78 percent of “new entrants” are as wedded to their “liberal policy positions” as they are to paranoia and ethnic apprehension.

 

Perhaps you’ve noticed a general air of menace about the current version of the Republican Party. You would have if you were one of the Indiana lawmakers who has been inundated with threats after rejecting Donald Trump’s appeal to redistrict the state ahead of the 2026 midterms, or the members of Congress who were similarly harassed in the run up to the January 6 riots. Well, it might not surprise you by now to learn that eight in ten legacy Republican voters reject political violence outright. By contrast, a majority (57 percent) of new entrants say political violence has some value. Again, age plays a role. While just 13 percent of GOP voters over 50 entertain violent remedies to political challenges, a staggering 57 percent of Republicans under 50 claim they disagree.

 

You can see where this is going. “One in three in the Current GOP who believe that political violence can be justified are 2020 Biden voters (34%),” Arm observed. “And six in ten (60%) supporters of political violence previously voted for Obama, Clinton, or Biden, compared with 32% who have never voted for a Democrat.”

 

Politics is a game of addition. Winning coalitions are, almost by definition, unwieldy and unstable things. But the goal of any political party isn’t just to win over new voters. It’s also to mold them into stalwarts themselves. The Republican Party under Trump has taken a different approach. It and its proselytizers on the online equivalent of street corners have spent a decade insisting that the Republican Party’s majority must bend and flex to accommodate the newcomers’ views. Nothing is expected of the new entrants; everything is demanded of their hosts, including the command that they sacrifice their first principles. It is the political equivalent of implementing bilingual education — an expression of existential insecurity so deep that it compels stakeholders to give up on assimilation as though it were an ignoble enterprise.

 

If the Republican Party insists on being the Republican Party, it should summon the gumption to persuade the converts to the Trump movement of the virtues of Republicanism. Instead, an effort is underway to make the GOP look a lot more like the Obama-era Democratic Party. We can question the political value of redefining the GOP’s base as composed of big-government paranoiacs who vote only once every four years. We should not debate the political merits of implying that George W. Bush is implicated in the 2001 terrorist attacks, that the Jews are exaggerating the Holocaust, and that one’s accidents of birth determine who is American and who is not.

 

If Republicans don’t have the stomach to stand up for themselves and the overwhelming majority of their longtime voters, they don’t deserve to keep the party they’ve built. Regardless, they are well on their way to losing it.

‘Ceasefire Now!’ Was a Lie All Along

By Charlotte Lawson

Monday, December 01, 2025

 

On November 19, some 200 masked and keffiyeh-clad protesters gathered outside Manhattan’s Park East Synagogue to chant, “From New York to Gaza, globalize the intifada,” and “Resistance, you make us proud. Take another settler out.” Some shouted anti-Jewish slurs at people attempting to enter the house of worship, while one demonstrator repeatedly yelled, “We need to make them scared!”

 

The open calls for violence rattled Jewish communities across one of the world’s most Jewish cities. But perhaps equally concerning was the response from New York City’s own mayor-elect. In a statement provided to several news outlets, a spokeswoman for Zohran Mamdani, a vocal anti-Zionist, said that he “has discouraged the language” used at the protest before offering a soft defense of its participants: “He believes every New Yorker should be free to enter a house of worship without intimidation, and that these sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law.”

 

What violation of international law, you ask? The night of the demonstrations, the synagogue was hosting an informational event held by Nefesh B’Nefesh, a nonprofit organization that helps Jews immigrate to Israel, but, contrary to the protest organizers’ claims, does not sell “stolen land” in violation of international law. Mamdani’s deference to those demonstrators sent a clear message to Jewish New Yorkers: You’re welcome here, provided that you don’t support the state of Israel.

 

That’s a tough standard. Eight in 10 Jewish Americans say that caring about Israel is an “essential or important” part of their identity. Nearly half of the world’s Jewry lives in Israel. Virtually all religiously observant Jews pray in the direction of Jerusalem. But Mamdani’s attempt to whitewash antisemitic harassment on the basis of alleged international law violations also has roots in a familiar historical pattern on both left and right: We don’t hate the Jews, we hate their Marxist ideology. We don’t hate the Jews, we hate their support for the capitalist West. We don’t hate the Jews, we hate their embodiment of the progressive agenda. We don’t hate the Jews, we hate their lone state.

 

In many ways, Israel has emerged from two years of war stronger than before. Yet internationally, October 7 and the war that followed unleashed a wave of antisemitism unmatched in most of our lifetimes, with the Anti-Defamation League recording a 140 percent spike in antisemitic incidents in the U.S. between 2022 and 2023. The figures speak for themselves, but so too do high-profile acts of violence against Jews and Israelis, including the arson attack on Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s home, the murders of two employees of the Israeli Embassy outside of the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., and the deadly firebombing of demonstrators marching on behalf of Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado.

 

That resurgent antisemitism coincided with the longest war in Israel’s history is no mistake. Nor is it simply a reflection of outrage at the prosecution of that war. A shaky, U.S.-brokered truce has held since early October, yet efforts to delegitimize Israel and its inhabitants continue, exposing much of the “ceasefire now” movement for what it is—a thinly-veiled call for the destruction of the Jewish state. This phenomenon masquerades on the left as peace-minded advocacy and on the right as “just asking questions,” but both iterations are part of a decades-long conspiracy theory: the idea that peace will elude the Middle East as long as the Jewish people govern themselves, itself an offshoot of a much older, equally sinister tradition. As Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur often notes, antisemitism isn’t merely anti-Jewish bigotry—it’s the notion that the Jews are what stands between your society and redemption.

 

***

 

The surge of anti-Jewish hostility is particularly concerning in light of what sparked it: meticulously planned pogroms in Southern Israel on October 7, 2023, followed by the abduction of hundreds of innocents. The hostages were condemned to terrorist captivity, where they endured physical and psychological torture for the crime of being born Israeli. Each of their stories has left an enduring wound on the nation’s psyche, just as their captors knew they would. Hamas broadcast its crimes during the initial attack and continued to do so throughout the war, releasing hostage videos in a concerted effort to break the spirit of the Israeli people.

 

In Judaism, preserving human life is a principle held above all others. This idea, known as pikuach nefesh, is as lived as it is theoretical in Israel. The nation that once supported the release of 1,027 Palestinian prisoners to free one Israeli soldier (perhaps misguidedly, as hindsight shows) embodies this ideal of individual sacrifice for the collective in smaller ways each day. During my two years in the country, I saw this ethos in the outpouring of volunteerism in support of the more than 200,000 residents of Northern and Southern Israel displaced from their homes over the course of the war, as well as in the readiness of hundreds of thousands of protesters to drop everything each Saturday night to demand that the government prioritize securing the hostages’ release.

 

So, when a deal to bring home the abductees was announced, the outpouring of joy on the streets of Israel that followed came as no surprise to me. What did was the muted response from the most outspoken critics of Israel, who for the first time were forced to confront an uncomfortable truth: Most Israelis meant it when they said the war was about bringing their people home. The posters of hostages adorning benches and buildings across the country were not moral cover, but rather an urgent reminder of those in peril. Hundreds of soldiers gave their lives for that cause, not for the far-right vision of annexation and ethnic cleansing so often treated as representative of the broader Israeli public.

 

And they did so on one of the most challenging battlefields of the 21^st century. For more than a decade, Hamas devoted its resources to building an elaborate underground network beneath Gaza in preparation for just such a war. The dense urbanity of the Strip, sprawled atop layered networks of tunnels and subterranean bunkers, protected terrorist operatives while leaving Gazan civilians exposed. Unable to beat its opponent in a conventional war, Hamas relied on a strategy of maximizing international pressure to weaken and isolate Israel.

 

The result was a deadly and destructive war. Each and every innocent death over the last two years is a tragedy deserving of the name. Yet very rarely has blame for those tragedies fallen on their main orchestrator: Hamas. Nor has the world’s outrage over the scale of human suffering in Gaza been extended to devastating conflicts elsewhere, such as in Sudan, where a campaign of ethnically motivated violence has left hundreds of thousands of civilians dead since April 2023.

 

While Hamas’ strategy of generating international pressure on Israel partially worked, culminating in arms embargoes and the decision by several U.S. allies to recognize a Palestinian state, it also served to prolong the war. With each surge of anti-Israel protests in capitals and on college campuses across the West, Hamas negotiators grew more intransigent in their demands for any eventual ceasefire. Only regional and U.S. pressure, together with a looming Israeli siege of Gaza City, finally forced the group to come to the table in a meaningful way.

 

But even though the war has ceased, anti-Israel sentiment has not. “This is not the world of the Zionist, this is not the world of Netanyahu, this is not the world of Trump, this is not the world of the Western Empire. October 7 told us this is our world, it is the people’s world,” a speaker at a Seattle rally proclaimed on the second anniversary of the Hamas-led attack, amid reports of the forthcoming truce. “We can’t ever, until liberation, adopt an attitude of defeat and hopelessness.” The anti-Israel advocacy group Samidoun, despite hailing the ceasefire as a victory for the “resistance,” insisted that the fight for liberation is not over: “This is our moment to escalate, and to make clear, that we will become a strong bulwark of support for the Resistance as it continues the struggle, as we stand for nothing less than … the complete international isolation and dismantling of Zionism and the Zionist entity.”

 

Have the “ceasefire now!” champions abandoned their guiding slogan? Or do many of these purported human rights activists share Hamas’ belief that the armed struggle is not over until Israel ceases to exist—from the river to the sea?

 

***

 

The latter theory grows more convincing by the day, but the writing has been on the wall since October 7.

 

The growing international popularity of this eliminationist goal should’ve been evident in the outbreak of anti-Israel protests in cities across the West after October 7, featuring chants of “gas the Jews” outside the Sydney Opera House before the besieged southern kibbutzim had even finished collecting their dead.

 

And it should’ve been evident in the rapid rise of Holocaust inversion and an accompanying upsurge in Holocaust denial. The two phenomena are incompatible: The former claims that the Jews are doing to the Palestinians what was done to them, while the latter posits that the Shoah was either exaggerated or wholly fabricated. But their simultaneous prevalence demonstrates the lack of a coherent logic guiding the anti-Israel movement.

 

Today, it’s now mainstream to identify as an anti-Zionist, particularly among young people. In a Harvard Harris poll conducted in August, 60 percent of respondents aged 18 to 24 said they supported Hamas over Israel in the war. In other words, the majority of Gen Z Americans have sided with a terrorist group that espouses an explicitly genocidal ideology—and acts on it. Indeed, in its 1988 founding charter, Hamas said judgment day will not come until Muslims “fight the Jews and kill them.”

 

Opposition to Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition isn’t antisemitism, nor should it be treated as such. But it’s well past time to confront anti-Zionism for what it is—not measured political criticism, but a call for the annihilation of the country that represents a sanctuary to the world’s most persecuted religious minority. The rising tide of anti-Israel sentiment has spillover effects for Jews in diaspora not because the war in Gaza inspires antisemitism, but because anti-Zionism is often antisemitism’s more immediately palatable outgrowth. And its biggest purveyors on the American far left and far right have found a convenient opportunity to plunge into the mainstream, buoyed by an array of malicious state actors.

 

In October, left-wing journalist Mehdi Hasan, an outspoken critic of Israel, noted his surprise at finding himself in agreement with Candace Owens, perhaps the right’s most outspoken peddler of antisemitic conspiracy theories (among them, her description of Judaism as a “pedophile-centric religion that believes in demons … [and] child sacrifice”). Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson recently hosted white nationalist Nick Fuentes on his online talk show to discuss the threats posed by “these Zionist Jews” (prompting Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts to come to Carlson’s defense against the so-called “venomous coalition” daring to criticize Carlson’s softball interview with an open Hitlerite).

 

The growing legitimacy of figures like Owens and Fuentes has consequences for Jews in diaspora and in Israel. Jewish communities in Western countries long considered “safe” are now confronting ever more threats of violence. And Israel, which relies heavily on the U.S. for diplomatic and military support, must reckon with the likely possibility that future American leaders—driven by souring public opinion toward Jerusalem—will be less inclined than Donald Trump and Joe Biden to stand by its side through another long war.

 

In a recent sketch by Eretz Nehederet, a satirical Israeli comedy show, an American woman and an Israeli man meet by chance at Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion Airport. Suitcases in hand, they both appear to be fleeing somewhere: “You know us Jews, if history has taught us anything, it’s knowing when it’s time to leave,” the American remarks. The Israeli agrees, before realizing that his acquaintance is not leaving Israel but arriving there from New York—his destination. “Wait a second,” he says, “you’re telling me you’re coming to Israel? Now? Are you crazy?” They part ways, each muttering about the absurdity of the other’s decision.

 

To many people, the war and its international reverberations underscored the necessity of a Jewish state. To others, they underscored Israel’s unique vulnerability. May it continue to thrive despite the rearing of history’s oldest hatred.

The Fall Guy

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, December 02, 2025

 

If I were Pete Hegseth, I—

 

There are a lot of ways a sentence that begins that way could go, huh?

 

If I were Pete Hegseth, I’d be yammering aimlessly right now about “lethality” and “warfighters.” Or I’d be doing push-ups with the Marines to show how butch I am. Or I’d be making a video for Instagram.

 

Or, more likely, all three.

 

But here’s what I was going to say. If I were Pete Hegseth, I’d take full responsibility for the almost certainly illegal “double tap” strike on suspected drug smugglers in the Caribbean on September 2. His problem is that his deputies don’t respect him; an obvious way to earn their respect is to declare that the buck for that operation stops with him, not with the officers who carried it out.

 

I’m not Pete Hegseth, though.

 

On Monday the real Hegseth gave what might be described as a MAGA version of a buck-stops-here statement. “Admiral Mitch Bradley is an American hero, a true professional, and has my 100% support,” he said of the officer who ordered the strike on the two shipwrecked survivors of a Navy attack. “I stand by him and the combat decisions he has made—on the September 2 mission and all others since. America is fortunate to have such men protecting us. When this [Department of War] says we have the back of our warriors—we mean it.”

 

The combat decisions he has made. The buck doesn’t stop with Pete Hegseth, apparently, it stops with Adm. Bradley. But the secretary sure is grateful for his service!

 

Needless to say, Pentagon staff are reportedly mortified by the White House’s effort to shift blame for the incident to uniformed personnel. (“This is ‘protect Pete’ bulls---,” one officer complained to the Washington Post.) The most one can say in Hegseth’s defense is that his “kill everybody” order to Bradley on September 2 before the operation began was ambiguous; allegedly he gave no instructions about what to do if anyone was left alive after the first strike on the targeted boat.

 

But he also said nothing to restrain Bradley as the incident unfolded despite watching it live via remote feed, per the New York Times. Nor is there any evidence that he’s disciplined Bradley or anyone else for the second strike in the months since it happened. Why would he? Hegseth has devoted himself as defense secretary to building a military culture that valorizes war crimes as evidence of bravado. Go figure that Bradley would respond in such a way to the incentives the secretary created.

 

And go figure that Hegseth, despite plainly yearning for the esteem of the men he leads, would  resort instinctively to blame-shifting when under political fire. That’s the M.O. of his boss and the ethos of the movement of which he’s a loud-and-proud member: From the deep state to the fake news to the Democrats and RINOs to Adm. Mitch Bradley, there’s always a fall guy to be found when scandal makes trouble for the president or MAGA.
Buck-passing is a core pathology of Trumpism, so of course there would be some of it here. As commentator Charlie Sykes aptly and memorably put it in discussing the September 2 boat strike yesterday, “War crimes are Trumpism in full.”

 

Trumpism in full.

 

One hallmark of Trumpism in full is gratuitous ruthlessness. For example: “I really do kind of not only want to see them killed in the water, whether they’re on the boat or in the water, but I’d really like to see them suffer. I would like Trump and Hegseth to make it last a long time so that they lose a limb and bleed out a little.”

 

That quote comes from Megyn Kelly, who’s followed the Tucker Carlson path from semirespectable former Fox News host to cartoonishly “based” podcast chud. Whether Kelly honestly believes the things she says nowadays or says them because she’s a particularly unscrupulous panderer is as unclear, and ultimately as uninteresting, as it is with Carlson. Either way, she knows her audience—and with a Trumpist audience, you can never be too cruel to an enemy. Cruelty in service to the cause is a sign of virtue.

 

And so insofar as law, especially the law of war, is designed to restrain cruelty, it’s a natural irritant to Trumpism. Populists behave as if all social problems are failures of will, typified by the “woke” left’s reluctance to warehouse miscreants who really do pose a threat to public safety. They overcorrect for it by endorsing unrestrained brutality to deter the bad guys, which leads them to prefer extrajudicial violence. In the Trumpist view, law is an impediment to maintaining order. War crimes aren’t merely incidental to effective deterrence, they’re practically necessary.

 

Another hallmark of Trumpism is a preference for indiscriminate punishment. You won’t get anywhere toward building a safer society by targeting individual miscreants. If you want to maximize deterrence, you need to target groups—the more haphazardly, the better.

 

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem showed how it’s done on Monday. “I am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies,” she said, declining to specify. “Our forefathers built this nation on blood, sweat, and the unyielding love of freedom—not for foreign invaders to slaughter our heroes, suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars, or snatch the benefits owed to AMERICANS. WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.”

 

She was referring (I think) to Afghans and Somalis. An Afghan national shot two National Guard members in Washington last week, killing one; inevitably, the White House has now frozen the entire Special Immigrant Visa program for Afghans who assisted U.S. personnel during the occupation of their country. Trump reacted similarly to a fraud scandal in Minnesota involving some Somalis, suspending temporary legal protections for Somali refugees and launching a new ICE operation aimed specifically at illegal Somali immigrants in Minneapolis.

 

There’s no sense in using a sharp object when a blunt one is available. That was also the logic of suspending due process for accused Venezuelan gang members before deporting them to El Salvador earlier this year: Why go to the trouble of figuring out who’s a criminal and who’s not when you could send a strong message about zero tolerance by shipping the guilty and innocent off en masse? Ditto for bombing, rather than interdicting, supposed drug smugglers in the Caribbean. What’s more likely to deter trafficking—arresting and trying individual smugglers, or blowing up survivors of wrecked vessels whose activity looked “suspicious” from a thousand miles away?

 

A third hallmark of Trumpism in the September 2 incident is the damage it will do to respect for yet another government institution.

 

For various reasons, the president seems more reluctant to demonize the military than most other arms of the federal leviathan. (Publicly, at least.) Maybe he fears antagonizing Americans, who admire the armed forces on balance. Or maybe he fears antagonizing the military itself at a moment when he’s lobbying them to get excited to fight “the enemy within” on his behalf. Probably, though, his reticence is a function of his authoritarian disposition. Someone who’s obsessed with strength and prone to threatening others to get his way won’t want to alienate the most intimidating “muscle” in his gang.

 

And so the military is a rare example of an institution he’s not trying to diminish in hopes of transferring Americans’ loyalties from that institution to him. Yet he’s having that effect, isn’t he? He put a clown like Hegseth in charge; he banished the mainstream press from the Pentagon and replaced them with prostrate MAGA propagandists; he’s massing troops for an attack on Venezuela that Americans don’t understand and broadly oppose; and now he has Navy SEAL Team 6 committing what looks an awful lot like murder of seemingly unarmed people in the Caribbean.

 

Eventually that will spoil public opinion about the military the same way the White House’s transformation of ICE into a secret police force has spoiled opinion about that agency or its enlistment of the FCC to threaten critics has turned voters against that outfit. Teaching Americans to fear those who are tasked with protecting them: That’s Trumpism in full.

 

Kids these days.

 

The deeper truth in Sykes’ point is that Trumpism is a fundamentally juvenile mindset of transgression, more attitude than ideology, which is why its solutions to problems like the drug epidemic tend to reduce to bumper-sticker stuff like, “What if we blew up drug dealers instead of arresting them?” It’s mismatched with serious business like running a government (“What if we replaced the income tax with tariffs?”) and really mismatched with deadly serious business like attacking manned vessels in compliance with the laws and norms of war. Transgressive mindsets tend not to be sticklers about rule-following, by definition.

 

“War crimes are Trumpism in full” is just another way of saying, “What did you think would happen when you put a group of unusually boorish teenagers in charge of the military?” Pete Hegseth’s defiant tweet on Sunday reducing the “double tap” controversy to a joke involving a cartoon turtle illustrated the point perfectly. It’s precisely how we’d expect a bratty adolescent eager to show how “based” he is to react to complaints that he’d sent defenseless men to their deaths.

 

“He runs around on a stage like he’s a 12-year-old playing army,” Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly said on Monday of the defense secretary (an opinion the White House might quietly share given how it’s cut Hegseth out of major decisions like the attack on Iran and negotiations with Ukraine). Adults explain themselves. Kids snarl and meme.

 

Kids are also less accountable for their actions than adults are, and while the president hasn’t yet pardoned anyone involved in the September 2 incident, it’s a cinch that he will. It’d be a scandal if he didn’t, frankly: Imagine if he dished out clemency to cretins like these while hanging a decorated officer like Mitch Bradley out to dry. War crimes are the ne plus ultra of offenses that Trump should want to immunize, one would think, since the act of pardoning might induce other soldiers to behave ruthlessly on his orders in the same way that pardoning the January 6 goons should induce future coup-enablers to help keep him in office in 2028 if he sets his mind to that.

 

That is, Trumpism in full is less a matter of unaccountability than anti-accountability. It’s not about absolving the crimes of the past, it’s about encouraging the crimes of the future by assuring those tempted to commit them that they won’t be punished for doing so. That’s why, I suspect, congressional Republicans were surprisingly quick to say that they’ll investigate the “double tap” strike: America might be transitioning from a first-world society to a third-world one but anti-accountability in matters of war is waaaaay too typical of the latter for the comparatively normal adults of the House and Senate to feel entirely comfortable with it. Yet.

 

There’s one more way in which “war crimes are Trumpism in full.” Despite the fact that atrocities dishonor the generally admirable legacy of the U.S. military, Americans almost certainly don’t give a fig about them in the abstract.

 

Americans give a fig about the economy and are willing to let a president slide on damned near everything else if they have reason to believe he’ll fatten their wallets. That’s the great shining lesson of last year’s election and a lesser takeaway of last month’s off-year results. Voters thought Trump would restore the cost of living circa 2019 and were willing to forgive him everything toward that end—a coup plot, a months-long national security breach at Mar-a-Lago, four criminal indictments, various personality disorders. There’s no reason to believe there’d be an outcry right now over war crimes, especially among Republicans in Congress, if the president were rocking a 53 percent approval rating and inflation was on ice.

 

“Trumpism in full” is the idea, now confirmed by two presidential elections, that America is not so exceptional a country that its people will punish leaders who commit or endorse civic travesties. As such, it was perfectly reasonable for the White House to assume that the public would tolerate its wildly dubious undeclared “war” in the Caribbean and even more dubious summary executions of sailors for maybe possibly allegedly smuggling drugs.

 

But it became much less reasonable after a lengthy government shutdown, ongoing inflation that’s sent Trump’s rating on the issue into the toilet, and a job approval that’s turned downright ugly in some polls. He’s no longer keeping up his end of the devil’s bargain he made with voters—a strong economy for you in exchange for civic unaccountability for me—and so, perhaps, they’re growing less inclined to keep up their end of it as well. War crimes are acceptable when beef is cheap. When it isn’t, they aren’t.

 

In the end, maybe that’s Pete Hegseth’s best defense: Americans voted for this. They knew what they were getting into. If some Trump voters are momentarily miffed that they haven’t been properly compensated for entrusting the constitutional order to a group of morally challenged adolescent edgelords, well, you know how the old joke goes. We’ve already established what you are, madam. Now we’re merely haggling over the price.