Maine Shows Antisemitism Is a Shortcut to Success in the Modern Democratic Party

By Philip Klein

Thursday, April 30, 2026

 

Governor Janet Mills on Thursday announced that she was dropping out of the Maine Senate race, with polls showing her way behind Graham Platner, who is now presumed to be the Democrat who will go up against Senator Susan Collins in one of the most hotly contested races of the year.

 

Platner was largely unknown at this point last year and yet managed to drive a sitting governor out of the primary before a single vote was cast. But he had one thing going for him, which is that he gained attention for his antisemitism. That is a ticket to success in the modern Democratic Party.

 

Platner had a tattoo with a Nazi symbol on his chest for nearly 20 years before covering it up when called out for it during his Senate campaign. On another occasion, he promoted a social media post from the neo-Nazi Holocaust denier Stew Peters, and he also sat for a lengthy interview with antisemitic conspiracy theorist Nate Cornacchia, claiming he was a longtime fan. He has also described the U.S.-Israel relationship as “shameful” and praised a violent Hamas attack on Israel in 2014.

 

Any of this would have once been a political death sentence, but just as Zohran Mamdani proved in New York City, engaging in antisemitism and unhinged hatred of Israel has become a way for upstart candidates to soar to the top of the Democratic Party by convincing the progressive base that they are the real deal. It isn’t just a matter of the contempt the base holds for Jews and Israel, but also the idea that if somebody is willing to hold firm on this issue, they are more likely to hold firm on economic issues and other issues of importance.

 

Now we’ll have to listen for months to arguments that it is our moral duty to support the Nazi tattoo guy over the threat posed by centrist Republican Senator Susan Collins, because Trump.

The Proving Ground

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, April 30, 2026

 

The governor of Maine entered her state’s Senate primary six months ago with universal name recognition, the support of the national Democratic establishment, and gold-plated electability cred.

 

She quit the race this morning, short on funds and behind—way behind—in the polls. In the end, she was no match for an upstart progressive chud roughly half her age who’s known outside Maine mostly for having once gotten a Nazi tattoo.

 

Seems significant! And depressing. And familiar.

 

It’s impossible to absorb the political demise of Gov. Janet Mills in Maine without thinking of the Tea Party circa 2010. Furious at a president they despised and convinced that the electorate was with them all the way, Republicans nominated several take-no-prisoners right-wing firebrands for Senate that year in states not known for electing Barry Goldwater types.

 

They paid for it. Sharron Angle lost a winnable race to Harry Reid in purplish Nevada. And Christine “I’m not a witch” O’Donnell was annihilated in deep-blue Delaware after upsetting centrist Republican Rep. Mike Castle in the GOP primary.

 

More than 15 years later, O’Donnell’s victory over Castle remains an infamous cautionary tale of primary voters getting high on their own supply and choosing an unelectable candidate they love over an electable one they can tolerate. If Republican Susan Collins defeats Graham Platner, the aforementioned chud, in Maine’s general election this fall, every narrative about the outcome will accuse Democratic primary voters of having failed to learn that lesson.

 

“They let their hatred of Trump blind them to political reality,” the pundits will say. “Maine leans blue, but not so blue that an outspoken leftist ever could have beaten a trusted centrist like Collins.” The Collins-Platner race is destined to be treated as a sort of proving ground for whether a progressive can win in a purple state.

 

But is it?

 

Is Mills really more electable than Platner in a national environment like the current one? And was it actually a progressive Tea Party that foiled her or did she falter due to more mundane political problems?

 

Tea time?

 

Although it didn’t become clear until 2016, the populist conservatism that dominated the right during Barack Obama’s presidency was 95 percent populism and 5 percent conservatism.

 

Tea Party Republicans happily ditched Reaganite dogma once they encountered an authoritarian demagogue willing to stroke their political id. Donald Trump’s populism was mostly pugilism: He promised to confront the right’s cultural enemies aggressively and unapologetically, without the timid politesse practiced by the establishment stiffs who ran the party. He was offering Republican voters a fight; with a few exceptions, his policies were mostly beside the point.

 

What just happened in Maine does remind me of the Tea Party in that sense. I think Democrats’ preference for Platner over Mills can be explained almost entirely in terms of pugilistic populism, not ideology.

 

After all, few electorates in America know better than Democratic primary voters in Maine that moderation tends to win elections. They’ve lost to the centrist Collins five times, most painfully in 2020 when their candidate led comfortably in nearly every poll only to lose badly on Election Day. They need to peel away some of Collins’ supporters; a centrist nominee seems more likely to do that than an ersatz Bernie Sanders with the remnants of a Totenkopf on his chest.

 

So I seriously doubt that Democrats there preferred Platner because they believe he’s more electable. Nor do I have reason to believe they’ve moved radically further left since Collins’ last reelection bid. Platner KO’d Mills, I think, because he goosed liberals’ political id. They want to punch the Trump-era GOP in the face, and he’s a far more obvious instrument for that desire than Janet Mills is.

 

He’s offering them a fight.

 

Start with age. Mills is 78, which would have made her the oldest senator elected to a first term in American history. Platner is 41 and served in the Marines. If you’re a liberal spoiling for energetic confrontation with the right—especially after the horror of watching geriatric Joe Biden space out during a debate with Trump—who seems more likely to deliver?

 

Platner has wisely showcased his energy by barnstorming the state, holding more than 50 town hall events so far. That’s a populist tactic, meeting the people face-to-face where they are, but it has the added benefit of demonstrating the sort of determined indefatigability that Resistance Democrats crave. His political persona matches the moment too—brash, charismatic, exciting. Mills is soft-spoken by comparison and unsurprisingly drew smaller crowds.

 

Even her entry into the race was lethargic. Platner jumped in last August but not until two months later did Mills follow suit, ceding the spotlight to the upstart in the interim. He used the time to introduce himself to, and impress, Democratic voters. That mistake was deadly, per elections analyst Jacob Rubashkin: “A universe in which Mills gets in the race in June, is the only candidate against Collins for months and has all the attention and Democratic donor enthusiasm to herself by the time Platner jumps in is a Mills much more competitive than the one who trailed wire to wire.”

 

More competitive, sure—but still maybe not victorious. That’s because Mills was the establishment candidate in the race at a moment when Chuck Schumer, the de facto head of that establishment, is the least popular major politician in the country. To many Democrats, he’s become an avatar of the party’s complacency during a civic emergency. His endorsement and continued support effectively slapped a neon “business as usual” sign on Mills, a horrible stigma for a Democratic candidate to bear right now.

 

But Mills also dug her own hole. As recently as last September, weeks before she entered the race, she defended Collins when asked whether the senator had done enough to push back on lousy Trump policies like tariffs. “She’s in a tough position,” the governor said of her potential Senate opponent. “I appreciate everything she is doing.” There’s no worse answer that a Democratic candidate could have given in this environment. It telegraphed that Mills lacked the killer instinct that pugilistic populism demands.

 

And insofar as she did demonstrate that instinct, it was at Platner’s expense. She ran ads attacking him for an old Reddit comment he made about sexual assault in which he said women should “take some responsibility for themselves and not get so f—ked up they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to.” That’s fair game for a political attack—but coupled with Mills’ cordiality toward Collins, it appeared to confirm the eternal grassroots suspicion that the elites in both parties like each other more than they do the uncouth rank-and-file on their own side.

 

Mills “ran into every single post-Biden backlash possible—age, Dem leadership, civility, process moderation, etc,” Vox’s Benjy Sarlin wrote this morning. Absent those backlashes, and without her late start on the campaign, would Platner’s comparative progressivism still have carried him to victory in a primary? I’m skeptical.

 

Electability?

 

I’m also skeptical of the claim that Platner is unelectable, or even meaningfully less electable than Mills would have been.

 

I didn’t used to be. Six months ago, I thought she had the advantage on that count—and why wouldn’t I? With few exceptions, progressives have fallen short in marquee statewide races in recent years. Stacey Abrams, a darling of the left, ran for governor twice in Georgia and lost both times. Beto O’Rourke electrified progressives in 2018 as a Senate candidate in Texas but couldn’t ride the national blue wave that year to victory over Ted Cruz. Four years later he ran for governor and got blown out.

 

The great exception was John Fetterman, who trounced a more moderate opponent in Pennsylvania’s 2022 Democratic Senate primary before winning the general election. But Fetterman lucked out by drawing TV quack Dr. Mehmet Oz, a man with no political experience and questionable ties to the state, as his Republican opponent. And Fetterman “coded” as right-wing culturally despite his left-wing politics due to his shaved head, burly frame, and taste for hoodies. Swing voters who might otherwise find progressives fringe, weird, and/or effete could relate to him.

 

That’s one reason I’ve come to think Platner might be underestimated. Like Fetterman, he “codes” redder than the typical leftist such that the average joe is likely to find him less culturally foreign. He’s an oysterman, a veteran, and given to political incorrectness that would make a wokester blanch. An undecided voter might look at him and plausibly conclude that Platner can’t be that progressive at heart—even though, in all the worst ways, he is.

 

It’s not just his common touch as a candidate that makes me think I underrated his chances of beating Collins, though. Three things have happened since I last wrote about him that arguably make pugilistic populism more electable than Mills-style moderation.

 

One is that the affordability crisis has deepened, which plays into progressives’ hands. Despite the notoriety he’s received for his cultural transgressions, Platner hasn’t campaigned as a “there are 18 genders” culture warrior. He’s running on economic populism with single-payer health care as the centerpiece of his platform. That’s a timely message at a moment when gas prices have gone haywire and our ballroom-obsessed leader is scoring the lowest job approval on handling inflation in modern American history. Yes, worse than even Jimmy Carter.

 

The economic shocks of the Iran war are eating Trump’s presidency alive, earning him 22-69 splits when voters are asked how he’s doing on reducing the cost of living and handing Democrats their first polling lead on managing the economy since 2010. It’s not hard to believe that the young, relatable blue-collar-seeming guy will be a more effective messenger on affordability than the elderly professional politician Janet Mills would have been.

 

The second thing that’s happened is it has become clearer how many Americans really dislike Democrats.

 

The party does lead Republicans on the generic ballot, as you’d expect in a midterm cycle. But apart from the occasional outlier poll, the margin isn’t nearly as gaudy as we might imagine with Trump’s approval dropping into the mid- or low 30s in some surveys. “Democrats should actually be doing a lot better,” data analyst Lakshya Jain worried on Wednesday, noting that the party’s generic ballot lead hasn’t grown at all in two months despite the president’s approval falling by 7 net points over the same period.

 

A YouGov survey released on Tuesday backed Jain up. Republicans in Congress are viewed unfavorably by an abysmal 28 net points but trail by just 5 on the generic ballot because congressional Democrats are nearly as unpopular. The Democratic generic-ballot advantage has actually shrunk by a point in the same poll since early February, before the Iran war began. And that’s a comparatively good poll for the left: Some data shows that the GOP, despite having to tote Trump’s immense baggage, remains the more popular of the two parties.

 

Under those circumstances, it may well be that a first-time candidate whom the national Democratic leadership dislikes is more electable than a tired establishmentarian like Janet Mills. Graham Platner, the proverbial “outsider,” will face Collins with less donkey-stink on him than the governor would have.

 

The last thing that’s happened—I think—is that Democratic voters have begun to care less about civic norms.

 

I say “I think” because there’s no way to quantify it. But look around. In the last month alone, Democrats in Virginia approved a measure to redistrict their state along ruthlessly partisan lines while mainstream liberal media outlets have stopped other-izing Hamas-slobberer Hasan Piker. A poll released two days ago found that nearly half of the current Democratic coalition believes the 2024 assassination attempt on Trump was staged, and conspiracy theories about last Saturday’s attack are growing like mold on social media.

 

So-called “dark woke” is ascending.

 

I worried about that when I wrote about Platner last year, wondering whether liberal anger at the president’s heedless norm-busting would whet their appetite for norm-busters of their own. If so, I thought, the populist oysterman’s most boorish and antisemitic episodes would damage him less with voters than we would hope: “Once the public decides that ‘authenticity’ is more important than propriety, any impropriety that might be justified as a form of authenticity becomes defensible and non-disqualifying.”

 

Republicans embraced that logic in 2016. Ten years later, a salt-of-the-earth leftist whom Hasan Piker recently praised for being “pro-Hamas” will become the Democratic Senate nominee in Maine, all but immune—so far—to the many justifiable criticisms of his character.

 

And he’s not the only Piker-approved progressive who’s leading in a swing-state Senate primary, do note.

 

If you want to believe that “dark woke” can’t beat Susan Collins, feel free. But that’s not what the polls say right now, and it’s not what the logic of this political era points to. “How scummy should left-wing nominees be allowed to be in a party that’s desperate to broaden its appeal to an increasingly scummy America?” I asked last October in assessing Platner’s chances. We have our answer.

The Absurd Rise of Graham Platner

By Jim Geraghty

Friday, May 01, 2026

 

The fact that the guy with the Nazi tattoo has now effectively won Maine’s Democratic Senate primary before the voting even started prompted a great deal of dark humor from me yesterday in the Corner, on X, and in yesterday’s Three Martini Lunch episode.

 

But as my colleague Phil Klein reminds us, Graham Platner’s de facto primary win is dark, depressing, and sad. You can make a compelling argument that antisemitism was actually Platner’s biggest strength in the short-lived Democratic Senate primary:

 

On another occasion, he promoted a social media post from the neo-Nazi Holocaust denier Stew Peters, and he also sat for a lengthy interview with antisemitic conspiracy theorist Nate Cornacchia, claiming he was a longtime fan. He has also described the U.S.-Israel relationship as “shameful” and praised a violent Hamas attack on Israel in 2014.

 

Two years ago, nobody had ever heard of this guy. He’s not remarkably accomplished. (As the new NRSC ad illustrates, he actually comes from a privileged background; his dad bought him a house.) In his early appearances, it was clear he didn’t know how the Senate appropriations process works. Out of nowhere, seemingly apolitical magazines like Bon Appetit started publishing glowing soft-focus profiles about this guy.

 

But there’s also something absurd about the rapid rise of Platner after the revelation in October that he had a death’s-head tattoo of the Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS) on his chest for 18 years.

 

“It was not until I started hearing from reporters and D.C. insiders that I realized this tattoo resembled a Nazi symbol,” Platner said when the controversy emerged. “I absolutely would not have gone through life having this on my chest if I knew that — and to insinuate that I did is disgusting.” That is not how all of Platner’s old acquaintances remember it, and his former political director said he had told her he had a “problematic” tattoo in the summer of last year.

 

A glowing New Yorker profile of Platner described the candidate as “a precocious reader, Graham devoured books on military history, especially the American Civil War, and watched Ken Burn’s documentary series about the conflict on television.” It would seem a bit odd that a military history buff would look in the mirror for 18 years and never recognize the symbol of the SS — recognizable to anyone who’s watched any World War II movie, or the hilarious “are we the baddies” British comedy sketch.

 

(This situation does remind me of the scene from Succession, where Tom Wambsgans asks news anchor Mark Ravenhead about his curious and very particular interests in World War II history and keeps getting answers that never quite reassure him.)

 

Back in October, Luke Winkie of Slate offered the kind of recoiling shock that ideally would manifest all across the political spectrum — not just at Platner, but at other political figures such as Paul Ingrassia, President Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel, who, in his own words, declared that he had a “Nazi streak.”

 

Winkie:

 

Even the most charitable reading of the sequence of events — an idiot accidentally signs up for a Nazi tattoo, and celebrates its edginess for years before having a change of heart — is tough to swallow. It’s the kind of baggage that poisons every aspect of one’s political project. Are you really going to reprimand Trump’s fascist leanings with a totenkopf on your chest? Do you really think you’re the one to advocate for more humane treatment of Palestinians? There is an attitude, among Democrats, that we must be more amenable to voices that don’t fit neatly within the confines of the platform. That we need to be less preachy, and administer fewer purity tests. Where do we draw the line of who gets invited into the big tent? I’ve got an idea. How about we draw the line at Nazi tattoos? I think we can all agree on that.

 

Amen, man.

 

But you will not see — hey, I didn’t even intend that one — left-of-center voices express anything like Winkie’s words above between now and Election Day. It’s become verboten. (I did it again!) Every other interest must be sublimated to the ultimate goal of defeating those menacing extremist Republicans, who many Democrats would insist are the real fascists, including, in this particular case . . . Susan Collins. (Her lifetime ACU rating, 43 out of 100.)

 

From Barry Goldwater to today, Democratic officials and their allies have unfairly called Republicans Nazis with metronomic regularity, usually spurred by routine political differences. Former President George W. Bush was compared to Hitler by progressive activists, middle school teachers, The Nation magazine, CounterPunch, Los Angeles Times columnist Rosa Brooks, former Al Gore adviser Naomi Wolf and others.

 

Sadly, yes, some idiots on the right did the same for Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Historian Gavriel D. Rosenfeld wrote, “Everyone seems to have become Hitler.” Comparing a mainstream Democratic Party figure to Hitler is wrong, historically illiterate, and does damage to our public discourse. It’s not like a Democratic president would ever round up members of a particular ethnic group and put them into camps. . . . I mean, it’s not like a Democratic president would ever round up members of a particular ethnic group and put them into camps again.

 

Besides, everyone knows you’re supposed to compare mainstream Democratic Party figures to Josef Stalin. I kid, I kid! The only person seriously calling Graham Platner a communist around here is . . . (checks notes) himself. But that was a long time ago, in . . . 2021. It was an immature, youthful indiscretion at age 37.

 

(Somebody out there who thinks he’s clever is going to ask, “So, which one is it, Jim? Are you saying that Platner is a closet Nazi, or a secret communist?” Ask the Polish whether the Nazis and communists have ever worked together towards common goals.)

 

The notion that any Republican pro-Israel advocate for limited government is hard to distinguish from history’s greatest antisemitic totalitarian authoritarian monster is, if not quite mainstream thought in the Democratic Party, not all that rare, either.

 

But along comes Platner, and suddenly Democrats will line up to go on record and insist that there’s no reason to believe the guy with the SS Totenkopf tattoo could ever have past or current sympathies to the Nazis.

 

For a while there, the “okay” hand gesture was listed as a “symbol of hate” and something that could put you under suspicion of being a closeted white nationalist, but getting a tattoo of a symbol of the SS on your chest is now allegedly no reason for suspicion. It illuminates the degree to which many players on our political scene use the term “Nazi” as a synonym for “someone I disagree with at the moment.”

 

But there’s another side of yesterday’s development. The Washington Post’s Liz Goodwin and Patrick Marley remember that there was a time, less than two years ago, when Mills was considered the bold new voice of Democratic resistance.

 

She was thinking of walking out of the bipartisan gathering of governors when Trump abruptly asked her whether she would comply with his recent executive order banning transgender female athletes from participating on girls’ and women’s sports teams.

 

“I’m complying with state and federal law,” she answered.

 

“We are the federal law,” Trump retorted, in a line that Mills thought sounded more like a king than a president. “You better comply because otherwise you’re not getting any federal funding.”

 

Mills replied calmly: “See you in court.”

 

A first-time Senate candidate in her late 70s was never going to be an easy sell, and it was made even more difficult after the disastrous end of Biden’s presidency. But what’s intriguing is how quickly Maine’s Democratic primary voters — at least those answering the phone for pollsters and making donations to candidates — concluded Mills was unacceptable because they associated her with “lawyerly restraint” and with not being a bomb-thrower. Mills’s reputation went from being the exciting new favorite of the anti-Trump Democratic grassroots — and a favorite target of Trump’s anger — to an allegedly milquetoast compromiser within a span of about eleven months or so.

 

But Mills didn’t change that much. (Septuagenarians don’t change much at all, I find.) What changed in that span was the Maine Democratic grassroots’ sense of what a “fighter” ought to be.

 

Michelle Goldberg, writing in the New York Times today, about Maine Democrats’ enthusiastic support for Platner:

 

There’s a widespread hunger in the country for populists and outsiders, and ordinary people don’t always think in the same ideological terms as pundits. As America slips deeper into social and economic crisis — likely to be exacerbated by the job-killing effects of artificial intelligence — the electorate might gravitate toward leaders offering far-reaching solutions.

 

I don’t know about you, but I really don’t like hearing the term “far-reaching solution” when discussing a guy with a Nazi tattoo.

 

Progressive columnist Will Bunch, writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer, back on April 14:

 

If anything, the furor* over the “Nazi tattoo” probably helps Platner in a weird way, as voters are rebelling against those despised elites trying to police what’s acceptable and telling them whom they can vote for. He has only risen in the polls since the first report about the Totenkopf.

 

Yeah, that reflexive, unthinking attitude toward any criticism of an outsider candidate is stupid. If saying that you shouldn’t vote for a guy who has a Nazi tattoo and an implausible story about how he “accidentally” got it and somehow never noticed it makes me one of those “despised elites trying to police what’s acceptable and telling them whom they can vote for,” then fine, I guess I’m a despised elite.

 

*See, Bunch is doing it too!

 

ADDENDUM: Maryland Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin, February 3, 2023: “This is obviously a profoundly gerrymandered and jerry-rigged Supreme Court.”

 

Raskin, March 5, 2024: “We don’t expect much more from a right-wing court that’s been structured and gerrymandered to give precisely these kinds of rulings.”

 

Raskin, last night: “The Supreme Court has been gerrymandered, itself.”

 

I’m going to assume that Raskin knows what gerrymandering is, and how it is the redrawing of district lines to maximize an advantage in legislative elections. You can’t “gerrymander” the Supreme Court because the judges are not picked based upon geographic divisions; each one is appointed by the president, must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate, and once on the Supreme Court, makes decisions that affect the whole country.

 

What Raskin means is that he doesn’t like the decisions from the six conservative/strict constructionist/originalist Supreme Court justices, and he wishes to persuade the public that they are illegitimate. All of the current justices were properly and legally nominated and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. Raskin knows that his target audience thinks “gerrymandering” is bad, and if he tells people that the Court is “gerrymandered,” people might believe that it is somehow illegitimate.

 

This is the level of discourse we have in this country.

Why ‘Meritocracy’ Enrages the Left

By Giorgia Meloni

Friday, May 01, 2026

 

Fairy tales aren’t real life. There are no fairies that can make you beautiful by waving a magic wand, nor are there princes who rouse you from sleep with a kiss. In real life, you have to pull yourself out of your own circumstances. That’s what I’ve always believed and that’s what I’ve always done — with the same determination I now bring to delivering what I promised Italians. And I owe it to them — because they’re the ones who made it happen, not me. You see, when I became prime minister, I wasn’t struck by the fact that many people were happy, but that they got so emotional. “Why are you all crying?” I asked with a mix of surprise and embarrassment. I even joked, “I haven’t even started yet and you’re already crying?”

 

But then I understood. My story breaks the taboos of a country at a standstill, of decisions over people’s lives being made behind closed doors, the shattering of thresholds that we believe we are excluded from, of the idea that certain opportunities are beyond our reach. It wasn’t just the political moment, the return of the center-right to government, it was a government formed by the direct expression of a popular vote, after a decade of power games and governments chosen by the establishment.

 

And there was something else in those strong emotions. I understood it completely when a very important person, sitting right here in the early hours of my term, explained his tearfulness in just a few words: “Giorgia, this wasn’t supposed to happen.” It’s true. It may seem like a fairy tale, but it isn’t. It’s determination and sacrifice. Study, discipline — and obviously a good amount of luck. Though I’m not sure lucky is the right way to describe finding yourself governing Italy in this economic situation. But knowing that what seems impossible or like a fairy tale is actually within our reach can completely change people’s way of thinking. All too often, I’ve heard people who didn’t have everything they wanted say, “It’s the government’s fault,” or “politics’ fault,” or “the fault of where I started.” Sure, those things matter, and it’s my job to work on that. But are we sure that’s the only thing? What I mean to say, or ask is, “Are you sure you did everything you could to achieve the goals you set for yourself?” As I see it — and based on my personal experience — I’m certain that fate depends on what we are willing to do, on how much we’re willing to work, on how much we’re willing to sacrifice. Our fate depends on us. And if I can get this message across — while at the same time guaranteeing that everyone starts with the same conditions and the same opportunity to try — then we can change everything.

 

The moment the left heard the word “meritocracy,” it flew into a rage. And do you know why? Because meritocracy dismantles the concept of the boss-state. It’s what sets us free. You can’t control it, you can’t steer it. It doesn’t need party affiliations or circuits that promote you based on your political loyalties — or rather, those you claim to have whenever it’s convenient. Meritocracy is the opposite of real socialism and the Five Star Movement’s principle that “one is equal to one.” Because that’s nonsense — no ifs, ands, or buts. It’s been dragging us down since 1968. It pushed the idea that there’s no point in giving it your all because everyone will get the same result anyway — even those who decide to do nothing. It’s a shrewd way to move your friends up the line. One is not equal to one. One has to be equal to one when it comes to opportunities, not results, which instead depend on that one’s subjectivity.

 

Decline is not a fate; it is a choice. That’s the same principle I’ve been trying to explain all along, applied to an entire country. If someone who came from nothing can end up governing Italy, then maybe all of us can accomplish things once thought impossible. And if we can do it — and we are Italy — then this country, too, can reach goals we never imagined possible.

Hatred of Data Centers Is Irrational and Self-Defeating

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Wednesday, April 29, 2026

 

I noticed a peculiar combination of sentences in a recent post by Jim Geraghty. In one, Jim related that “Maine’s Democratic Governor Janet Mills [had] vetoed legislation that would have placed a moratorium on the construction of new data centers in the state.” In the other, he concluded that this decision “may be seen as a de facto surrender to her rival in the Democratic U.S. Senate primary.” Got that? Mills has refused to completely reject a source of massive investment in the state she runs, and, as a result, she has accepted that she will lose ground electorally. How bizarre our politics can be.

 

Jim’s analysis is correct, of course. Over the last couple of years, data centers have become so unpopular in almost all parts of this country that to embrace them openly is now likely to damage one’s political fortunes. Thanks to a steady supply of propaganda and superstition, voters have come to regard the prospect of a local server farm in much the same way as they might an abattoir or a prison. The word is spat out — “data center” — as would be an expletive, the unspoken assumption being that everyone agrees that these facilities are an imposition, and that the only remaining question is how best to prevent their spread.

 

Well, you can count me out from all that guff. In its fervor, the sudden disdain toward “data centers” reminds me of nothing more than the recent freakout over 5G, which was inexplicable at the time and remains steadfastly so today. For those who are unfamiliar, 5G technology uses radio waves that sit within the non-ionizing portion of the electromagnetic spectrum — a fact that is also true of 4G and 3G and 2G and over-the-air television and the old wooden radio on your great-grandmother’s side table. Scientifically, there was nothing whatsoever about iteration number five that made it a better candidate for panic and for conspiracy theories than the other developments that had been deployed since the time of Guglielmo Marconi. And yet, for some reason, tens of millions of people have come to throw the term around as if it were meaningfully distinct from its predecessors. There’s an old Victor Borge bit from the 1980s, in which he describes his grandfather’s attempts to develop a popular drink. He started with “3-Up,” the joke goes, but that failed, so, undeterred, he tried 4-Up, 5-Up, and 6-Up, before finally giving up and dying. “Little did he know,” Borge says, “how close he came.” Why 7-Up? Good question. Why 5G?

 

And why “data centers”? Currently, there are around 5,000 data centers across the United States, with tens of millions of servers running inside of them, using hundreds of megawatts of power. And how could it be otherwise, when, as a society, we are so enthusiastic about the results? The introduction of AI is likely to lead to the production of around 1,300 new data centers — many of them at hyperscale. But this is an expansion of the status quo, not a shift. What, I wonder, do the newfound enemies of these projects believe that the current internet runs on? There is, as ought to be obvious, no such thing as “the cloud”; there are just computers, in racks, inside enormous buildings that were constructed for the purpose of holding computers in racks. You are reading this piece because of packets that were transmitted from a data center. Your email works the same way. So do Netflix, Amazon, Spotify, your bank, your kids’ school’s website, the text messages you send your brother, and your annual Fantasy Football league. We already live in a data center world. We have for at least 30 years.

 

Even stranger is the opposition to data centers from those who lament the “deindustrialization” of the United States, and the supposed lack of well-paying jobs. I am a conservative, and so, to some extent, I understand the pull of nostalgia. But, in 2026, this is what “building things” looks like. The federal government can impose as many tariffs and industrial policies as it wishes, but it will not be able to halt the passage of time. Alas, the textile mills and cereal factories are not coming back. But computers — the great technology of our era? That is a different story. This year, American companies are set to spend three quarters of a trillion dollars on new data centers, much of it in exactly the sort of areas that are constantly described as having been left behind. At present, the median salary for an electrician who works in data center construction is $120,000. For HVAC technicians, that number is $90,000; for mechanical engineers, it is $100,000; and for site engineers, it is $135,000. Personally, I do not understand why it is considered by some to be more noble to work in a cannery than in a data center, but, regardless, only one of those jobs is currently on offer. What is to be gained by railing against that fact?

Why Has the UAE Left OPEC?

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, May 01, 2026

 

Why has the United Arab Emirates abandoned OPEC? I can think of 50 billion to 70 billion reasons—a year.

 

As the Baker Institute runs the numbers, membership in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries—the cartel that has for decades tried to manage global oil prices—costs the UAE at least $50 billion a year in forgone revenue—and maybe as much as $70 billion.

 

There are only about 1.44 million UAE citizens, so that lost revenue is far from trivial on a per capita basis: just under $50,000 per Emirati at the high end of the Baker Institute estimate. As one of the more efficient producers in a cartel that limits production to keep prices up, the UAE’s membership in OPEC represented a net economic loss.

 

There was a time when OPEC seemed to have the world by the short and curlies. OPEC members produced the majority of the world’s crude oil in 1973, when Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal organized the infamous Arab oil embargo to punish the United States and its allies for backing Israel in the Yom Kippur War, a conflict launched by the Arab powers in a sneak attack on the Jewish holy day. Owing to its commanding position in the world petroleum market, OPEC had real clout, and Faisal’s “oil weapon” went off like a geoeconomic bomb: Oil prices nearly quadrupled, practically overnight. The oil shock is estimated to have reduced U.S. GDP by 2.5 percent, simultaneously driving up both unemployment and inflation and contributing to a recession that did not abate until 1975. Americans were subjected to gasoline rationing, with the long lines of cars at gas stations sometimes stretching for blocks.

 

But the 1973 embargo also sent a signal to markets. The United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom all had vast petroleum reserves that were not being fully exploited, with the powers that be in the rich countries all too happy to leave the dirty work of pulling crude out of the ground to faraway workers under the bootheel of sundry Arab despots. (To this day, a great part of U.S. refining capacity is optimized for relatively “sour” imported oil rather than the “sweet” stuff produced domestically.) The high prices created by the embargo put some money into the pockets of Western producers—and created powerful incentives to invest that money in production outside of OPEC’s control. Hydraulic fracturing took off in the North Sea off the U.K. coast in the late 1970s, and by the 1980s legendary American oilman George P. Mitchell had just about perfected the combination of hydraulic fracturing with horizontal drilling in shale deposits to produce “fracking” in its modern form. In 1981, Sandia Laboratory in Albuquerque introduced its first commercially available digital micro-seismic monitoring equipment, beginning the transformation of the world of wildcatters and roughnecks into the high-tech industry it is today. These things do not happen overnight, but the 1973 crisis helped to awaken the sleeping American energy giant.

 

One result of that is that the OPEC cartel from which the UAE has just divorced itself no longer produces the majority of the world’s oil—it produced only about 36 percent of the commodity in 2025, a number that presumably will be a bit lower this year with the UAE’s exit. OPEC has tried to bolster its position over the years with arrangements such as “OPEC Plus,” meaning an alliance of the cartel with Russia and other oil-producing countries, but OPEC’s ability to set the world’s petroleum agenda is much diminished.

 

The UAE’s exit was driven in part by political factors, including the fact that it is no longer as aligned with Saudi Arabia as it once was, and by one big economic factor: The UAE can produce oil much more cheaply than Saudi Arabia and many other OPEC members.

 

The UAE simply doesn’t need high oil prices the way Saudi Arabia does. One of the metrics oil-dependent countries consider is the “fiscal break-even price,” meaning the oil price at which exports will allow the government to cover all its spending without a deficit. UAE’s fiscal break-even price for oil in 2025 was less than $50 a barrel; Saudi Arabia needs it to be more like $90 or more for Riyadh to balance the budget. The UAE has a more diversified economy than Saudi Arabia, with oil accounting for only about 23 percent of GDP, according to UAE data, compared to about 40 percent for Saudi Arabia. The UAE has an advantage in relatively low-cost and low-carbon production—and the country now expects to add more than 1 million barrels of production per day, liberated from OPEC constraints.

 

Cartels face two great problems, one internal and one external. The internal problem is that it is difficult, at times impossible, to ensure that all cartel members have well-aligned interests. The external problem is that by creating artificially high profits (which is, after all, the point of most cartels), a cartel also creates incentives for innovative non-cartel players to enter the market, where they can pursue business strategies that are free from cartel constraints.

 

OPEC, which once looked invincible, is now a little smaller. Even though it may take a while, basic economics usually wins out in the end.