Why Mamdani Tries To Erase the Crimes of October 7

By Seth Mandel

Wednesday, July 22, 2026

 

The escalation of Zohran Mamdani’s campaign of incitement we witnessed yesterday may have set a record for the number of lies within a two-minute statement. It was an intifada lightning round.

 

But today is a new day, and a thus a new Mamdani attempt to draw anti-Semitic disorder out of the populace before Benjamin Netanyahu’s September visit to the UN General Assembly.

 

To recap yesterday’s incident: The mayor of New York City staged a brief Passion Play—the kind of deceitful retelling of evil Jewish behavior intended to make the audience believe that the Jews pose an existential threat to their way of life. Complete with somber background music, the mayor admitted that he did not have the power to arrest the Israeli prime minister but claimed Bibi deserved to be on trial for various crimes. He wrongly accused Netanyahu of being a genocidaire and a baby killer, closely following the historical blood-libel playbook.

 

He did not mention the October 7 Palestinian invasion and brutal slaughter of over a thousand Israelis that launched the war of Hamas’s choice.

 

Today, when asked why he didn’t mention October 7, Mamdani shrugged off the question. Then when asked if October 7 was a genocidal act—Hamas has made its genocidal intent explicit—Mamdani rejected the characterization, saying only that the attacks “should be deeply opposed with every single fiber of our being.”

 

It has been a 24-hour period of unprecedented and slickly produced taxpayer-funded Hamas propaganda and anti-Jewish incitement from the elected leader of the most Jewish American city. And his comments attempting to separate October 7 from the war that followed are just as dangerous as last night’s Jew-baiting.

 

That’s because there are two kinds of lies Mamdani leveled in his Two Minutes Hate. One includes the provably false accusations of specific behavior—for example, the long-debunked calumny that Israel engaged in the “targeting of neonatal hospitals and maternity care centers” and deliberately starved Palestinians.

 

The other category is of overall intent: that the Jewish state’s leaders intended to eradicate the Arab population of Gaza. The course of the war, in which the IDF was discovered to have caused among the lowest civilian-to-combatant casualty ratios in the history of urban warfare, demolishes such nonsense. But so do the events of October 7, which is why Mamdani leaves them out.

 

Israel was invaded, Gaza refused to surrender the war it started, and Hamas refused to return the hostages it took on that day. “Genocide” requires that there be only one reasonable interpretation of intent: ethnic eradication for its own sake. But what actually happened was that Gaza took hundreds of hostages and Israel went in to Gaza to get them back, then ended hostilities when the hostages (or their bodies) were returned. Since then, there has been no plausible way to argue that what Israel did was a genocide.

 

But what if you erased the invasion and the hostages? Well, then you have a tougher time explaining why the war happened, don’t you? You’ve still got the problem of Israel’s unprecedented care to avoid civilian casualties, but if you pretend there were no hostages and no Palestinian invasion and declaration of war on Israel, you can portray the Israelis in pretty harsh light.

 

That is why Mamdani erases October 7 from the picture.

 

Now, Mamdani happens to be a major figure in the progressive anti-Zionist movement that is filled with people who approve of October 7. This highlights one of the tensions of Mamdani’s position.

 

Being an elected American political executive, he can’t say “raping Jewish girls and lighting Israeli children on fire is good,” even if his followers and supporters believe that to be true. But Mamdani can suggest, as he has over the past 24 hours, that such rape and murder of Jews is immaterial to the actions of the Jewish state.

 

In doing so, Mamdani has dropped morality on its head. The truth is, no matter what you think Israel is guilty of, assaulting someone because they have a yarmulke on their head is indefensible. Mamdani turns it around: No matter what is done to Jews, the efforts of the Jews to continue existing are indefensible.

 

Anyone who wants to keep civilization from falling into this death-cult void must put October 7 at the center of every conversation about the war. The alternative is an unthinkable descent into societal self-degradation.

For the Left, the ‘Genocide’ Lie Does All the Heavy Lifting

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, July 22, 2026

 

Even the left’s own house organs acknowledge that accusing Israel of “genocide” has become a “litmus test” within the Democratic Party — a pass/fail quiz that, more than anything else these days, determines a candidate’s progressive bona fides. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani passed that test, even if he failed on the terms he’d set for himself.

 

In a sour-faced statement to the city, Mamdani called on the federal government to make good its commitments to an international treaty that America doesn’t observe and enforce an International Criminal Court warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that even Joe Biden’s administration rejected on both procedural and moral grounds. That’s some goofy stuff, but the left seems persuaded that Mamdani acquitted himself well. After all, he called Netanyahu a “war criminal” and “the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people.”

 

Even if Mamdani effectively conceded his critics’ contention that he could not order the NYPD to arrest a foreign head of state, as he’d so often promised he could, at least he is “setting the standard for 2028 Democratic presidential candidates,” as the Nazi-curious left-wing podcaster Emma Vigeland exclaimed.

 

Vigeland may be a cheap date on this one, but at least she’s consistent. She has long argued that the “genocide” charge is both a means to an end and an end in itself. “It’s powerful to use the word and to democratize its power,” she once wrote. Many progressives now share her outlook. In fact, the demand that Democrats accuse Israel of executing the most incompetent genocide in history has only grown louder since major combat operations in Gaza ended in October of last year with a deal that left Hamas the de facto authority in roughly one-third of the Gaza Strip.

 

The progressives’ flippant approach to this issue calls their seriousness into question. “It is now routine for candidates to be asked to raise their hand if they think Israel committed genocide,” MS NOW contributor Jay Michaelson observed. That’s a box-checking exercise, not a weighty statement of commitment to righting a grave, historic wrong. Before she was shunted aside in favor of the genuine article, Michigan Senate candidate Mallory McMorrow did her best to neutralize the issue by professing her fealty to the “genocide” faith but only to urge her constituents to move on from it. She didn’t convince anyone, perhaps because she herself was unpersuaded by her own logic.

 

McMorrow’s fate is, however, illustrative of the consequences in store for those who don’t demonstrate a convincing level of devotion to this popular but baseless allegation. The knives are out for Democrats who refuse to toe the line.

 

For the American left, the incantation of “genocide” papers over the incompatible marriage of convenience between center-left liberals and revolutionary socialists. For the international left, the “genocide” claim is just as valuable. It allows anti-Israel fanatics to accuse Jerusalem of unspeakable perfidy without having to go into the details.

 

Today, 285 days after high-tempo combat operations in Gaza ceased, it is claimed that the Israeli “genocide” persists but in barely perceptible forms. The alleged extermination campaign against Palestinians now manifests in an “unprecedented” rise in miscarriages inside the strip, according to the ever-reliable Gaza Health Ministry. It’s a “reproductive genocide that Western feminists can’t be allowed to ignore,” the author Kylie Cheung declared.

 

The “genocide” is also said to be responsible for rising rates of Palestinian joblessness. Al Jazeera called the plight of young Palestinians who are locked out of the job market a “generational catastrophe,” describing the baleful experience of Gaza residents for whom the primary conduits through which they could sell their labor were Egypt and Israel. The unstated implication is that it’s Israel’s fault that the Gazans’ access to Israel has been circumscribed. If only we knew why those closures happened in the first place.

 

Perhaps the most insidious recent charge that attempts to establish Israel’s genocidal intent is the classically antisemitic claim that Israeli Jews are systematically murdering children. You’d think such a ghoulish campaign would result in more hardship than, as one doctor alleged, that Israel has “destroyed” the “essence of childhood.” Fortunately, the child-murder claim is yet another fabrication.

 

“These are among the most serious charges in international law,” wrote  Jonathan Sacerdoti in The Spectator of a United Nations report alleging that Israel “deliberately targeted” Palestinian children. “So, you would expect, at minimum, one clearly documented case: a soldier who identified a child as a child and killed that child for no reason other than that they were a child. After 94 pages, the Commission cannot produce one.”

 

It’s not hard to prove genocide. If the evidence that supposedly supports the accusation spoke for itself, we’d be privy to a lot less table-pounding from those on the left who demand only fealty to the “genocide” shibboleth. And why wouldn’t they demand it? The lie is doing a lot of work for the anti-Israel left — cowing dissenters within Democratic ranks into submission and paving the way for the socialist takeover of the Democratic Party.

The ‘Blank Check’ Myth

By Seth Mandel

Monday, July 20, 2026

 

Opponents of aid to Israel like to claim that the Jewish state gets a “blank check” from the U.S., and that this must be reformed. The falsity of this talking point is about more than just rhetorical or semantic games. Rather, it points to a key part of the U.S.-Israel dynamic that many people seem not to be aware of or understand.

 

But first, just to demonstrate the popularity of the “blank check” phrasing: Democrats Katherine Clark, Betty McCollum, Seth Magaziner, Gabe Amo, Jesus Garcia, Chrissy Houlahan, Veronica Escobar, and Salud Carbajal all used it when explaining their vote to end aid to Israel last week.

 

The reason this false talking point is so popular among politicians is because it makes it sound as though supporting the aid, in its current form, is absurd. But even granting that it is an exaggerated figure of speech used to suggest that America simply doesn’t restrain Israel, it’s still wrong in ways that must be corrected.

 

First, the obvious ways it’s false: the U.S. requires Israel aid to be spent on the domestic U.S. manufacturing sector. “Blank check” is a very silly way to describe such an arrangement.

 

Then there is the fact that Israel does find itself restrained by the U.S. during wartime. Donald Trump tells Israel when air force planes must turn around mid-flight, and Israel obeys. Joe Biden withheld weapons and even prolonged the war in Gaza by forcing Israel to delay each major offensive. The Second Lebanon War ended in a month because George W. Bush sent Condoleezza Rice to Israel to say so. And so on.

 

But the lesser-known problems with the “blank check” falsehood have to do with the way the U.S. has conditioned its aid to Israel by placing wider restrictions on Israeli weapons and technology deals, strategically isolating the main benefits of Israeli technological development to the United States. This made sense in light of the modern aid structure. But if that is to be reconsidered, it should be understood that the strings attached to past decades of aid have left Israel in a difficult spot.

 

Two somewhat related examples make the case. The first was the Phalcon.

 

In 1996, Israel struck a billion-dollar deal with China to outfit four Russian-made aircraft with a cutting edge radar system. China would not have been the first country to get the Phalcon, but the Clinton administration worried it would upset the balance of power in the Pacific, weakening Taiwan vis-à-vis Beijing.

 

The Phalcon did not, by all accounts, contain American-made technology, which meant Israel didn’t need Washington’s sign-off. But Clinton was unhappy and for a few years his team mostly grumbled in private. By 2000, the row was public and Clinton was looking for ways to stop the transfer of the Phalcon. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak worried about Israel’s credibility—a deal is a deal, and it’s easy for a superpower like the U.S. to tell Israel to go back on its word to China but less easy for a country like Israel to recover its reputation. So in addition to increased diplomatic pressure, the U.S. threatened to withhold part of its aid to Israel if the deal was completed.

 

In the end, Israel relented. It had to compensate China for the deal and was left looking like a client state of the U.S. That, ironically, took some of the heat off of Israel, because China made clear it knew that the Americans forced Israel to cancel the deal. But the whole spectacle was humiliating because it signaled to other countries that if you wanted a deal with Israel you had to ask Uncle Sam first.

 

As the Arms Control Association noted, “Clinton announced July 27 that the United States would conduct a ‘comprehensive review’ to improve U.S.-Israeli relations, including the maintenance of Israel’s ‘qualitative edge’ and the modernization of the Israeli military.”

 

In other words, if the U.S. was going to tie Israel’s hands on the global market, it was at least going to ensure some kind of durable aid system that wouldn’t leave Israel weaker for its alliance with the U.S.

 

The second incident came soon after that. Israel had supplied China with unmanned aerial vehicles called Harpys. As part of the deal, Israel agreed up front to provide maintenance and spare parts as needed. But the U.S. soon objected even to that. During the first George W. Bush term, Yitzhak Shichor wrote, “Israel acceded to a U.S. request by suspending all negotiations to export weapons and military equipment to China in January 2003.” The administration soon made it clear that this suspension included upgrades and maintenance.

 

From that moment on, Shichor predicted, “it would be very difficult — if not impossible — for Israel to sell China any kind of arms or technology of defense industrial origin.”

 

And indeed, defense exports to China took a nosedive. Israel worked to replace the Chinese market with a European one.

 

The lesson of all this was that the modern incarnation of the U.S.-Israel relationship, especially as structured around military aid to Israel, put limits on Israel’s ability to diversify exports even when those exports were technological and not necessarily military.

 

So not only does the U.S. restrict Israel’s use of its aid money to American vendors, but the U.S. also restricts Israel’s own export economy. Israel was (mostly) satisfied with this status quo, but it absolutely put all sorts of strings and conditions on Israeli economic and military behavior far greater than any restrictions on, say, our European allies.

 

The “blank check” talking point is meant to deceive the public and keep voters ignorant of a wealth of details about the U.S.-Israel relationship. When a politician invokes the phrase, the public should wonder what else they are being deceived about.

Anti-Anti-Proliferation

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, July 22, 2026

 

Trumpism is a politics of spite, by which I mean that its strategic impulses often seem driven by nothing more complicated than “if the traditional liberal establishment believes X, then surely Not X must be better.”

 

That’s how we ended up in our current mess in Iran. In 2018 the president exited the hated nuclear deal that Barack Obama had negotiated with the regime; the Iranians responded by resuming their enrichment of uranium, eventually amassing a stockpile of 22,000 pounds. That eventually led to last year’s joint U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities and ultimately to this year’s stalemate in the Strait of Hormuz.

 

The nominal strategic logic for leaving the nuclear deal was that putting “maximum pressure” on Iran would be more likely to get it to denuclearize than friendly diplomacy would. (Donald Trump seemed to think better of that belatedly, per last month’s now-defunct peace agreement.) But in all probability, it wasn’t strategic logic that made the president abandon the Obama nuclear deal. It was its provenance.

 

The late Lindsey Graham once shared the secret of his influence over Trump with political reporter Mark Leibovich. “If he had a goal of getting Trump to do something, especially if it involved foreign affairs, Graham would just tell the president that his then-predecessor, Barack Obama, would do something that was 180 degrees different,” Leibovich recently recalled. That approach was reliably effective, the senator claimed, because “Obama drives him nuts.”

 

If the traditional liberal establishment typified by Obama believed that negotiating with Iran was good, then surely not negotiating with Iran—“180 degrees different,” as Graham put it—must be better.

 

That impulse animates lots of Trumpist policies. There are ideological rationales for postliberal hostility toward NATO and the Pax Americana, toward “soft power” federal agencies like USAID, toward domestic diversity initiatives and LGBTQ rights, and toward college education and women in the workplace. But postliberalism is a revolutionary project, and at base that project is driven by contrarian rejectionism toward the postwar liberal order in its entirety. As such, in literally any situation, knowing that liberalism favors X will cause postliberals to at least strongly consider Not X, if not to embrace it outright.

 

No matter how stupid or pernicious Not X might be.

 

I thought of that this morning upon discovering that the president evidently now thinks nuclear proliferation in the Middle East might be a good idea.

 

Last night the Wall Street Journal reported that the White House has signed an agreement with Saudi Arabia that “will provide the country with a civilian nuclear program and potentially open the door to uranium enrichment in the kingdom’s territory.” Joe Biden’s administration had considered a similar deal but conditioned its support on the Saudis agreeing to normalize relations with Israel. Trump’s administration is making no such demand.

 

Nor is it insisting on the sort of safeguards that the U.S. imposed on the United Arab Emirates when it struck a nuclear deal with that country in 2009. Supposedly, per the Journal, any enrichment facility that America constructs for the Saudis will be built “under a secretive ‘black box’ arrangement that would preclude the transfer of sensitive enrichment technology to Riyadh.” But, according to the New York Times:

 

To get the deal done with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the country’s 40-year-old de facto leader, Mr. Trump had to agree to terms that may limit international inspectors from going to any sites in the country that they think could be a pathway to diverting fuel to weapons projects.

 

And he agreed that, after a joint study with Saudi Arabia on the economics of producing nuclear fuel, the Saudis may be allowed to enrich uranium or reprocess plutonium on their soil.

 

If the Saudis don’t intend to convert this supposed nuclear energy program into a weapons program, it’s weird that they’d drive a hard bargain about permitting homegrown enrichment and limiting inspections, no?

 

For 80 years, the traditional liberal establishment believed that the risks of international nuclear proliferation waaaaaaaay outweighed the deterrent benefits. It appears that postliberalism has arrived at the Not X stage with respect to that too.

 

Tit for tat.

 

As always with Trump, it’s possible that helping the Saudis build a nuclear program had nothing to do with strategic logic.

 

Maybe it’s a thank-you to the Saudi royals for being such generous benefactors of Trump family businesses. If so, it’s not the only story on the wires today in which a Middle Eastern government that rained cash on Trump Inc. has received a benefit that threatens long-term U.S. national security. How any of that squares with the idea of “America First” is hard to say, although I suppose that’s why the president has reserved the right to define that term however he likes.

 

Maybe it’s a simpler matter of Trump taking his usual “friends/enemies” approach to politics. The Saudis are trusted cronies and so they’re naturally exempt from the usual arm’s-length strategic considerations that might normally guide decisions like “Should we make this sharia desert backwater a nuclear power?” Rules, laws, and norms like anti-proliferation apply only to enemies, never to friends. That’s Postliberalism 101.

 

It could also be that the Saudis appealed to Trump’s insatiable thirst for oil, which drove his coup in Venezuela and is clearly on his mind in Iran. Per the Journal, Riyadh has argued for years that a nuclear program will help it meet its domestic energy needs, which “would free up more of its oil production for export and boost revenues.” No matter that most of the planet is headed toward electric vehicles and green energy, particularly in China. To the president, a creature of the 1970s and 1980s, cheaper gas in the distant future continues to hold talismanic appeal.

 

Or perhaps green-lighting a nuclear program is Trump’s way of trying to make it up to the Saudis for having sabotaged their oil industry by starting a foolish war in Iran. Our Gulf allies learned a painful lesson this year about the limits of America’s ability to protect them from the local Shiite menace. The president might be trying to atone for that by boosting their native ability to defend themselves. With, er, a nuclear deterrent.

 

Wherever you land in all of this, it goes without saying that a U.S. government led by Trump can’t be counted on to stop the Saudis from converting their nuclear energy program into a nuclear weapons program, no matter what sort of formal “black box” guarantees might be built into the relationship. Relying on postliberal America for oversight of Riyadh is like relying on one mafia family to police another with which it’s in business.

 

I do think there could be some bona fide strategic logic to Trump’s Saudi nuclear gambit, though. Pure and simple: Tit for tat.

 

He was once asked during his first presidential campaign what his favorite Bible verse was and, instead of replying disingenuously with some crowd-pleaser from the Gospels like “love thy neighbor,” he responded candidly with “an eye for an eye.” Tit for tat: If someone wounds you, you wound them. And when you do, you make it painful enough that they’ll never think of wounding you again.

 

“Tit for tat” is about as sophisticated as his strategic acumen gets, I’m afraid. Certainly, it captures his thinking on how to free the Strait of Hormuz from Iranian control. Tit for tat: They shoot at a passing tanker, we bomb a few targets along the coast, and then the cycle repeats—never mind that U.S. intelligence has warned the White House that tit for tat won’t work here, which means we’re burning through dwindling weapons stockpiles to no obvious effect.

 

This morning Trump went as far as to make the strategy official military policy. “From this point forward,” he announced, “any time the Islamic Republic of Iran shoots at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, whether it be by Missile, Rocket, Drone, or any other device or weapon, the United States will bomb and destroy ONE BRIDGE OR POWER PLANT, including those located next to, or in, the Capital City of Tehran.” They hit a ship, we hit a bridge. They block the strait, we block the strait. Tit for tat.

 

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, but if tit for tat is all you know, you’re destined to keep doing it even after it fails. So is it any surprise that the president might have reasoned that the proper countermeasure to a nuclear threat by Shiite fanatics … is to create a nuclear threat by Sunni fanatics?

 

Let’s see if we can identify any strategic problems with the idea of a Saudi nuclear program that might override the otherwise compelling logic of “If the Iranians get the power to blow up the world, it’s only fair that the Saudis should have it too.”

 

A strategic disaster.

 

In the first place, although it’s hard to remember now, the initial case for war with Iran rested on the belief that a regime as radical as the Islamic Republic had to be deterred from developing nuclear weapons by any means necessary.

 

If that’s so, why the hell would we want to further incentivize them to build nukes by agreeing to help their bitter sectarian rivals in Riyadh create a nuclear program of their own?

 

“Saudi enrichment would put immense pressure on Iran to get the bomb,” Middle East expert Rosemary Kelanic observed. “Is Trump TRYING to provoke Iran into weaponizing?” Remember that, during last month’s brief rapprochement, the president actually defended Iran’s need for ballistic missiles by reasoning that its enemy Saudi Arabia has missiles too. If he grasps how conventional deterrence works, why doesn’t he grasp that nuclear deterrence will work the same way?

 

It’s particularly stupid given that the silver lining in the dark cloud hanging over Hormuz is that the Iranians have discovered they don’t need a bomb to work their will on the region and the West. Maybe, in a post-war world, they would have pivoted away from nuclear terrorism and toward commercial terrorism—but not if, thanks to Trump, the Saudis now stand a chance of outgunning them. And they do: Mohammed bin Salman promised years ago to build nuclear weapons if Iran does, giving Tehran that much more reason not to fall behind.

 

Another problem: This is an awfully weird decision for “the most pro-Israel president in history” to make, no?

 

Israeli leaders are understandably mortified by news of a Saudi nuclear program. Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett called it “a grave strategic failure that endangers our security. Allowing uranium enrichment on Saudi soil could trigger a regional nuclear arms race and lead to a highly dangerous loss of control.” Former Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, head of the hawkish Yisrael Beiteinu party, echoed the point in urging Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to oppose the program “with all our might,” predicting that “Saudi Arabia’s civilian nuclear program will end in nuclear weapons and lead to a mad arms race across the entire Middle East.”

 

No one doubts it, do they? “Whither goes Saudi Arabia, so goes the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Egypt,” one nonproliferation expert warned the Journal. (America might have some oversight over Saudi Arabia’s program, but what about when Turkey and Egypt go nuclear?) The Biden administration’s imperfect solution to Israel’s anxiety was to demand that the Saudis at least sign a peace deal with Jerusalem before receiving nuclear help. Trump, by comparison, is giving the Israelis nothing.

 

Which means we’re all teed up for war in the distant, or possibly not-so-distant, future. Maybe Israel will feel obliged to reprise its raid on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor by targeting the new Saudi nuclear program, destroying any chance of peace with Riyadh. Or maybe Iran will touch off a regional war by attacking the Saudi facilities itself, as Lieberman fears.

 

Or maybe some future American administration will do it.

 

That’s another scenario that the president evidently hasn’t considered—that the chumminess between the United States and Saudi Arabia won’t last forever. A country that famously produced 15 of the 9/11 hijackers and whose government has been suspected for ages of funding jihadists abroad to keep them away from the kingdom is a bad long-term bet to remain stable and pro-Western. Today’s Mohammed bin Salman nuclear energy program is tomorrow’s Salafist nuclear weapons program.

 

And once it is, the United States will be in precisely the same place with respect to Saudi Arabia that it is right now with respect to Iran. Only this time, we’ll have built their nuclear infrastructure ourselves.

 

The Saudi royal family will doubtless use that scenario to extort future presidents for continued U.S. support in whatever nutty authoritarian things it wants to do. Once the regime’s survival becomes necessary to prevent nuclear know-how from falling into terrorists’ hands, the world will have no choice but to prop it up. If the day comes when the Saudis need American military help to defeat some homegrown ISIS-style outfit, how could we possibly refuse?

 

Even if the royals maintain their grip on the country, the risk of an atomic disaster will rise meaningfully once Saudi Arabia gains nuclear capabilities. Many officials in the kingdom’s bureaucracy sympathize with jihadist outfits like Hamas and al-Qaeda, I’m sure; if any one of them is willing and able to chisel a radioactive material from the national supply, they could potentially arm those groups with so-called dirty bombs.

 

Cleanup.

 

The long and short of it is that the president and his team are poised to re-create the very elements of Iran’s nuclear program that make it so dangerous—domestic uranium enrichment without international inspections under the control of an austere Islamist regime. In theory, this nuclear version of tit for tat will force the Saudis and Iranians to resolve their differences rationally and diplomatically, the way the U.S. and Soviet Union had to, to avoid annihilation.

 

But in practice, with messianic sectarian fundamentalists on both sides this time, who knows?

 

The easiest prediction in the world is that some hapless successor to Trump will be forced to clean up this foreseeable mess and will lack good options. Perhaps President J.D. Vance will choose to stop supervising the Saudi program altogether, washing his hands of all foreign business on “America First” grounds and leaving the Middle East to solve its own problems—however hairy that might get.

 

Or perhaps some future Democratic president will consider intervening to block the Saudis’ path to a bomb, only to back off when he’s extorted by the royals in the manner I described before and attacked by Republicans for supposedly siding with Iran in the region’s nascent nuclear conflict. If and when a rough equilibrium in atomic deterrence is achieved, how could any administration dare risk disturbing it in the name of nonproliferation?

 

These are the dilemmas you force upon yourself when you choose someone to command the military whose grasp of strategy runs not much deeper than tit for tat, gassy rhetoric about “strength,” and casualty comparisons as a yardstick for whether a military operation was successful. For all its failures, the traditional liberal establishment did a solid job of keeping the nuclear genie in its bottle. But here too, it appears, Not X will win again.

The End of ‘El Mayo’ Is Only the Beginning

By Joshua S. Treviño

Thursday, July 23, 2026

 

‘Violence should stop in Mexico,” said the tired old man. “Too many lives are lost. It destroys families. It thrusts youths into a life without future. Nobody will win this war.”

 

Then, having spoken, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada García, one of the most fearsome cartel bosses in all of Mexican history, went silent to await his sentencing. The sentence was handed down on Monday: life in prison without the possibility of parole. As an end for a man who moved drugs and people across America’s southern border for decades, and who was directly and indirectly responsible for uncounted deaths and lives destroyed at the hands of his Sinaloa Cartel, the sentence was arguably somewhat less than he deserved. But the death penalty had been taken off the table some time ago, and Zambada García is reported to have been spared the worst possible federal lockup in ADX Florence, where his erstwhile Sinaloa partner Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán now permanently resides.

 

The question is why he was granted these mercies, small as they are. The Department of Justice knows, but — likely for good reasons — isn’t talking. The conspiratorial hypothesizing that seems to attach to nearly every element of Mexican civics rushes in with explanations, many of them genuinely plausible.

 

One theory is that the circumstances of El Mayo’s rendition to the United States are sufficiently radioactive that the DOJ has a positive interest in keeping them unknown, and therefore in keeping the prisoner from disclosing them. To be sure, the known facts of the case raise significant questions. On July 25, 2024, a small aircraft from Mexico arrived at the grandiosely named Doña Ana County International Jetport, a modest airport in Santa Teresa, N.M., just across the Texas state line. On board were El Mayo and a Chapito — one of El Chapo’s sons, in this case Joaquin “El Güero” Guzmán Lopez. The Mexican authorities had no knowledge of the flight or the passengers, but American authorities clearly did, as both men were arrested by federal agents upon arrival.

 

The tales of the two prisoners, both eminences within the Sinaloa Cartel, swiftly diverged. The Chapito was quickly charged — not by the Americans, but by the Mexicans, whose Fiscalía General de la República (FGR), their DOJ equivalent, indicted El Güero for treason. Tellingly, the Mexican authorities chose to immediately credit at face value Zambada García’s assertion, issued through his lawyer, that he was kidnapped by the Chapito and hustled onto the plane after being lured to a meeting at which Sinaloa Governor Ruben Rocha Moya was supposed to be present. (Rocha Moya is, of course, now at the center of the DOJ’s April 2026 indictments of Mexican senior officeholders.) The story eventually turned out to be true — or was at least accepted by U.S. authorities as a presentable narrative — when El Güero admitted to the kidnapping in his guilty plea last December.

 

El Güero was charged by the Americans, too — along with his brother Ovidio “El Raton” Guzmán Lopez, who had been arrested and extradited more conventionally the preceding year — for his own role in the Sinaloa Cartel’s leadership. Yet something curious then happened in the Familia Guzmán Lopez, come May 2025: That month, 17 Guzmán Lopez relatives voluntarily crossed from Mexico into the United States, hauling their luggage and a reported $70,000 in cash across the San Ysidro border crossing from Tijuana to San Diego — all under the watchful eyes of American agents and at least one U.S.-side sniper. Again, the Mexican authorities were kept in the dark: The story was broken by the intrepid crime journalist Luis Chaparro and picked up in the U.S. press by the Los Angeles Times. As for El Raton, his sentencing has been deferred to October 2026. El Güero has not yet had a sentencing date set. So much for the Chapitos.

 

The ambit of Mexican governance has responded poorly to this entire sequence of events. The abrupt removal of El Mayo and two of the Chapitos from the Sinaloan chessboard sparked a sanguinary war of succession that continues to wrack the erstwhile territories of that cartel. Those territories extend not just across Sinaloa proper, but in various forms across much of Mexico. Having long tolerated one species of violence in the reign of its Sinaloa-cartel (probable) allies, the ruling Morena regime now blames the Americans for incepting a different phase of killing. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has asked, pointedly, why — if the Sinaloa Cartel is a U.S.-designated Foreign Terror Organization — that same United States is apparently making deals with some of its leadership. Sheinbaum’s claim is a rich bit of turnabout: Having been a de facto ally of the Sinaloans for years, the Morena hierarchy now gets to accuse the Americans of the same.

 

Yet it is this probable Mexican state–cartel alliance that leads to another theory about the small mercies extended to El Mayo. The old cartel lord has been in the business for a very long time; he has worked alongside infamous traffickers including El Chapo, Felix Gallardo, El Señor de los Cielos, Beltran Leyva, and even the Colombians of the Medellin and Cali heydays. He was venerable and senior when, in 2006, what would become Morena’s original political core allegedly first formed its alliance with the Sinaloa Cartel. El Mayo was not removed from that activity: His own younger brother, Jesús Reynaldo “El Rey” Zambada García, has testified twice at trial in the U.S. that Sinaloa provided funding to Morena that year. The Chapitos aren’t the only ones who can be candid, for transactional purposes, with American prosecutors. Could the comparative leniency accorded to El Mayo — who is easily as malevolent in record and character as El Chapo — be a signal that he will share what he knows about Mexico’s corrupted political class? His lawyer is insisting it is not so, but to paraphrase Mandy Rice-Davies, he would say that.

 

The prospect clearly has Morena rattled, which is why Sheinbaum has tried to preempt the narrative by ordering the FGR to reopen the case about El Mayo’s removal from Mexico, and further accusing former U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar of having lied about the episode. Already stricken with a quiet panic over the American indictments of the Sinaloa governor and one of the state’s federal senators, among others, they (probably correctly) suspect it to be both a result of the Chapito and El Mayo’s cooperation — and a harbinger of things to come. For his part, Salazar (who as ambassador was regarded by much of the Biden White House as far too close to Morena) has stated that the whatever took El Mayo and El Güero to American soil was “not our plane, not our pilot, and not our operation.”

 

Yet the plane is on public display in a small museum at the very same Doña Ana County International Jetport at which the drug lords passed into the custody of the United States, courtesy of the FBI’s El Paso field office. “Nobody will win this war,” said El Mayo — but though crime will always be with us, there is a side that is presently winning. Sinaloa’s cartel is decapitated and has collapsed into civil war. Sinaloa’s political leadership is hiding and under American indictment. The Mexican political class that has profited for so long from cartel partnerships is wondering what’s next — and scrambling to cut deals to save itself.

 

The sentencing of the old jefe de narco is not an end. It is merely part of the beginning. Known and unknown, public and secret, there are more deals to come in the unfolding American war upon Mexico’s narco estado.

New Jersey’s Damning Admission on Illegal Voting

National Review Online

Thursday, July 23, 2026

 

For years, critics of anti-voter-fraud measures such as voter identification have denied that any problem exists. The casting and counting of illegal votes is so vanishingly rare, they tell us, that no safeguards are needed.

 

So much for that. New Jersey has now admitted what critics long denied. There are thousands of noncitizens on its voter rolls, and hundreds of them are believed to have voted in the past three years. We can only wonder how many such registrations and voters exist in other states.

 

Governor Mikie Sherrill announced Tuesday that “a serious software error in New Jersey’s Motor Vehicle System led to the registration of roughly 6,600 people who indicated that they were not U.S. citizens between June 2023 and June 2024,” when fellow Democrat Phil Murphy was governor. A “preliminary analysis,” says Sherrill, “shows fewer than 400 individuals who were newly registered for the first time because of the error voted.” So far.

 

If Sherrill’s account of the registration SNAFU is believed, these were voters who made no attempt to conceal their noncitizen status when registering, and the problem was one of computer error rather than deliberate fraud. That said, the fact that this went undetected for two to three years shows why periodic reviews of voter rolls are essential. Moreover, if voters had to show proof of citizenship to a human being when registering, it is less likely that they could be registered without some entry in the system clearly classifying them as ineligible to vote.

 

Moreover, the fact that hundreds of these people may have voted shows why safeguards are needed: We can’t just rely on everyone, even people who admit to being noncitizens, to obey prohibitions against voting if they can get away with it.

 

These are real problems, and they require practical solutions. Fortunately, many of the available measures, such as voter ID and allowing states to check for citizenship when registering voters, could address them. Given the comparatively small numbers of votes involved, we have disagreed with those who would require these solutions to be packaged in a one-size-fits-all federal voter ID standard that overrides traditional state powers over elections. But many states have taken unfair and demagogic criticism for adopting commonsense election security laws, and we see now how right they were to ignore the hysterics. More states should follow suit.

 

Critics have now shifted to another tack, arguing that the discovery of a few hundred noncitizen voters in a single state is a far cry from broader claims made by Donald Trump in his never-ending quest to delegitimize the 2020 election. We agree that Trump’s exaggerations and lies have been unhelpful and damaging. But the fact that Trump exaggerates a problem doesn’t mean that we should ignore the scandalous reality that actually exists.

 

It’s extraordinarily rare that a presidential election would turn on just a few hundred votes; the four states that decided the 2020 election, for example, were won by Joe Biden by margins ranging from 10,457 votes in Arizona to 82,166 votes in Pennsylvania. Democratic theories of theft of the 2004 election focused on Ohio, which was decided by 118,601 votes. But rare is not impossible: The 2000 election, of course, was decided by a 537-vote margin in Florida. That prompted the Sunshine State to overhaul its system to become perhaps the best in the country.

 

American democracy is about a lot more than just the presidency. Primary and general elections are held every year for thousands of federal, state, and local offices. Congressional races can and do turn on hundreds of votes, and state legislative races can be even closer — in each case, potentially swinging control of a chamber based upon handfuls of votes. In New Jersey in 2023, one Republican state assembly incumbent lost reelection by 252 votes, and both parties had assembly primaries decided by fewer than 100 votes. Just last week, a New York Assembly primary election was decided by seven votes, after a recount widened the initial margin from two votes. In 2024, control of the Minnesota House hung on 14 missing ballots in one race.

 

Nearly two dozen American elections have been invalidated by courts in the past three decades, 15 of them since 2015. While our election system may never be perfect, power in our democratic system depends upon correctly counting the legal votes. There is no excuse for failing to take reasonable steps to get those outcomes right.

 

 

 

 

Christopher Nolan Took Some Artistic License. By Zeus’ Beard!

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, July 23, 2026

 

“See how they are wasting the estate, and doing dishonour to the wife, of one who is certain to return some day, and that, too, not long hence. Nay, he will be here soon; may heaven send you home quietly first that you may not meet with him in the day of his coming, for once he is here the suitors and he will not part bloodlessly.”

 

-The Odyssey, as translated by Samuel Butler

 

I confess that I am perplexed by the various casting controversies surrounding Christopher Nolan’s excellent and moving The Odyssey, a film inspired by Homer’s poem of that title. It is true that Nolan cast a black woman, Lupita Nyong’o, in the role of Helen of Troy, a Spartan queen who is not described as black (aithiopes, “burnt-faced,” from which the English Ethiopian is derived) in the original Greek and whom it would be implausible to present as black, given what we know of ancient Sparta’s citizenship laws, and whose blackness probably would have been noted by the Greeks, whose art and literature attest that they did notice that kind of thing. It also is true that a transgender actor is cast in the role of Sinon, the Greek soldier who plays a critical role in the affair of the Trojan horse. The whiny little men who complain about these things for a living have made a few other minor objections. Slate, that eternal arbiter of verisimilitude, commissioned one of those authority-asserting “I’m a military historian” essays, the author of which finds psychological value in the film but concedes: “On the matter of historical accuracy, the detractors are right. … When it comes to accurately depicting how the Greeks of the period armed themselves and fought, Nolan isn’t even trying.”

 

Well, raise my rent. Christopher Nolan evidently has taken some artistic license in telling a story about men and women who never actually lived and the war they never actually fought as related by an ancient oral tradition attributed to Homer, a poet who (probably) did not exist. I am not at all sure that a military historian is the person I would consult to evaluate a story about sea monsters and one-eyed giants and witches who (3,000-year-old spoiler alert!) turn men into pigs. In a mythological milieu in which the Greeks’ chief lightning guy turns himself into a swan to rape an entirely different Spartan queen (queen of Sparta is one of the toughest jobs in mythology), you’re telling me that the actor formerly known as Ellen Page cannot play the role of a scrawny Greek redshirt who gets left behind on the beach to take one for the team? If you’re going to complain about Sinon, maybe start with the fact that the character does not appear in the original Odyssey at all—he is imported from the Aeneid.

 

But why complain?

 

The acting is almost uniformly good and often excellent. The only casting reservation I would have is Benny Safdie in the role of Agamemnon: Safdie is himself a serious filmmaker (he and his brother are responsible for Uncut Gems, an outstanding piece of work), but his broad, open face and prep-school affect are far removed from bloody-minded Agamemnon, even if Nolan gives him very little to do other than stand there in a big black helmet and armor, lurking outside the gates of Troy looking more than a little like Darth Vader in that famous introductory scene.

 

If not Darth Vader, then, perhaps, Batman. There is more to the association than a cowl.

 

Nolan obviously has political ideas on his mind and has had for some time. The Dark Knight trilogy is full of political references, from considerations of ancient political questions (such as the ethics of using deceit in the public interest) to allusions to contemporary events, with much of The Dark Knight Rises deliberately echoing Doctor Zhivago. This version of the Odyssey concludes with the hero, universally lionized, coming to understand that, by violating the norms and taboos of his time in pursuit of a temporary victory that was to serve very little purpose beyond finally ending the decade-long siege and allowing the Greeks to go home, he has set in motion a series of conflicts of escalating barbarism that, the fragile bonds of civilization having been broken, will lead all of Greece into an age of darkness. The people sing his praises, but he ruefully acknowledges that his song will only be sung: “Songs will be all that they have to remember those of us who could write.”

 

Having visited Hades—what we see of it is filthy in Nolan’s vision—Odysseus knows what probably awaits him in eternity, and it isn’t the Elysian Fields. But it is this life and its troubles that command his attention. This is a secular Odysseus and a largely secular Odyssey—all we see of the gods is Odysseus’ private visions of Athena, which are, the film very strongly suggests, only delusion. Odysseus complains to Athena that the gods refuse to speak to men in a way that is plain and understandable, and she retorts that it is easy to understand thunder, blood, or pain. And that explains the metaphysics of the film in brief.

 

The Greeks, having been terrified by tales of the possibly mythical “people from the sea,” come to realize that these menaces are none other than their own lost heroes, desperately pillaging and foraging in support of their own bare survival, lurching blindly from shore to shore in their doomed attempt to find their way home. Odysseus is famously clever, but he is a clever monster even if he retains some religion and enough of a functional conscience—personified by Zendaya as Athena—to torment him. Beyond his sins, he is a monster in the most ancient sense of the word: a harbinger of things to come.

 

As a matter of history, as far as we know it, there was no Trojan War, at least as described in the Odyssey, though extended warfare leading to the collapse of Mediterranean trade did in fact announce a general collapse of Bronze Age Greek civilization, a catastrophe so complete that Greek writing (the system scholars call Linear B) did, in fact, disappear along with the political and economic conditions that had sustained it. The later collapse of Roman civilization would follow a similar pattern, with the vanishing of trade, the decline of the money economy and central administration, etc., leading to the Dark Ages. Things that were known became things that were forgotten—and it is easy to forget that the basic things can be forgotten. (But try asking an 18-year-old to write a paragraph in longhand.) Nolan’s script presents the Trojan War as fundamentally a matter of economic competition, with the abduction of Helen providing a pretext for a preemptive war to establish control of trade routes. Escalating rounds of political-religious norm-breaking driven in no small part by opportunism and by resentments related to trade: One need not be an esoteric Straussian to read between those lines.

 

Nolan’s references to contemporary political anguish are not put forward in the clumsy and stupid way of, say, the Star Wars prequels; Nolan here is, if anything, both more direct and more deft than he is in handling the political themes of his Batman movies. There is, I suspect, a perverse reason for that: Movie-going Americans know their mythology, provided that mythology comes from comic books, and Nolan could play with Batman’s characters and situations only so much without taking audiences out of Gotham and into the insipidity of our current political contests. But Greek mythology? Nolan can get away with a great deal where that is concerned—who is going to nitpick, other than a few irrelevant weird race obsessives who are irritated, or pretend to be irritated, by the presence of Lupita Nyong’o? And maybe a few people who remember their childhood reading of Edith Hamilton.

 

The Odyssey is in that sense not exactly a blank canvas but a reasonably open field of play for Nolan. The field is so open and so inviting, in fact, that the film’s few slightly laborious moments are those in which Nolan is servicing the literature majors: He might have combined the scene with Polyphemus (the cyclops) and the Laestrygonians (the armored, cannibal giants) into a single episode and achieved much the same effect, perhaps a more powerful and concentrated effect, without imposing on audiences yet another scene of Odysseus and his men running away screaming. I know that part of the effect he is going for is the agony of attrition, but there is maybe a bit more of it than there needs to be. It is not that the film is too long—though it is long—but if it wants anything, it is a bit more variety and richness in color. But perhaps there is a point in the repetition, too: “There will be killing until the score is paid,” Homer promises.

 

Odysseus, like Jacob, is a deceiver, but he was the father of no nation, and instead dies at the hand of one of his own sons, if the account in the lost sequel poem is to be believed. (“Believed.”) The old French kings claimed to be descended from Priam of Troy through the Trojan refugees, and Aeneas was the great ancestor of Rome. Poor old Odysseus has only Lisbon (Olisipo) to his credit. But, Hollywood being Hollywood and entertainment—our tawdry little modern mythologies—having largely subsumed real life, having Matt Damon play you in the movie is a kind of afterlife, and more pleasant than the one Nolan imagines.