With Friends Like These

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, September 04, 2026

 

I can’t believe I wrote an entire newsletter comparing J.D. Vance’s relationship with Tucker Carlson to Abdul El-Sayed’s relationship with Hasan Piker without ever flagging an obvious irony.

 

Namely, that Carlson assuredly prefers the far-left Democrat El-Sayed to the hawkish Republican, Mike Rogers, in this year’s Michigan Senate race.

 

It’s basic horseshoe logic. At both ends of the horseshoe, populists have made Israel an exemplary scapegoat in their case that the U.S. government has been captured by special interests and no longer prioritizes the welfare of Americans. Carlson has been pulling that thread for years, and El-Sayed spun it into a Senate nomination. In a decadent country like ours, their alliance was kismet.

 

I’m kicking myself for having missed my opportunity to make that point in Tuesday’s column because, as chance would have it, it was only a day later that Carlson did, sort of, endorse El-Sayed. Tucker *hearts* Abdul, it turns out—which means, given that Abdul *hearts* Hasan and of course J.D. *hearts* Tucker, we’re now this close to a full-blown postliberal political polycule.

 

The quasi-endorsement came during Carlson’s interview with nationalist podcaster Saagar Enjeti. “I watch his campaign now, it’s America First,” Enjeti said of El-Sayed. “When he talks about Israel, he says, ‘Israel is committing a genocide, but ultimately I want to make sure that you don’t pay more for healthcare. I don’t want your tax dollars going abroad to fund this barbaric military.’ He stands in front of a giant American flag. It’s almost Trumpian in terms of a lot of those problems.”

 

“Well, it is literally Trumpian,” Tucker affirmed. He told his audience that he “wouldn’t vote for Mike Rogers at gunpoint,” alleging that the Republican is “basically a tool of Israel and the intelligence agencies” and declared that “no one … should be farther from a position of power.”

 

No one? It’s true that Rogers is unfit for office, but I can think of a few people whose exclusion from power is more important to America’s civic health.

 

Watching Carlson endorse El-Sayed by implication, I had two thoughts. One was that it’s just deserts for grassroots “America First” suckers, who cheered Donald Trump for wanting to bar Muslims from entering the United States in 2015 and are now asked to cheer an ultra-left Muslim in Michigan because he shares Tucker’s antipathy to Israel. When you organize your politics around tribal prejudices, don’t be surprised by how radically those prejudices might need to shift to accommodate the tribe’s shifting enemy-of-my-enemy alliances.

 

I look forward to the day when we’re told that “making America great again” requires embracing Sharia law. The Trump-loving good ol’ boys in Appalachia already have the beards.

 

My other thought was that Carlson’s fondness for the left’s man in Michigan would complicate his bromance with the vice president, who recently described El-Sayed as nothing less than “very, very evil.” Vance is obliged to support Rogers in that race, if only as a matter of professional duty: You can’t be the Republican Party’s presidential nominee-in-waiting and go around endorsing Democrats.

 

I was half-right, it turns out. The VP delivered the White House press briefing on Thursday and confirmed that he’s backing Rogers—although for the notably lesser-of-two-evils reason that El-Sayed, as he put it, is a “crazy person” and Rogers is not. But when reporters gave him a chance to break up with Carlson, Vance declined.

 

He allowed that some of Tucker’s criticism of the president over the Iran war has been “wrong,” another case of professional duty dictating his response. The polycule, however, remains intact. “Tucker is a friend of mine,” Vance stressed. “Tucker is a friend, despite the fact that we disagree on a number of things. And I’m not going to play the game where I throw friends under the bus because I have political disagreements with them.”

 

“Friend” is an interesting word. “Political” is more interesting.

 

Excuses, excuses.

 

I’ve written before (many times!) about why the vice president will never break with Carlson, no matter how deep into the Coughlin-esque muck Tucker sinks. To understand how reluctant Vance is to do so, consider the variety of excuses he’s used to rationalize sticking by his “friend.”

 

One is ye olde “no enemies to the right” logic. “President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless, self-defeating purity tests,” the VP said last year at a Turning Point USA event, alluding to Ben Shapiro’s criticism of Tucker at the same conference. “We have far more important work to do than canceling each other,” he stressed later.

 

Whining about “cancellation” is a tactic El-Sayed has also used to deflect criticism of his chumminess with Piker, not coincidentally. And, not coincidentally, Vance has never directed his objection to right-wing infighting at his two patrons, Trump and Carlson, despite the fact that they’re the two most notorious practitioners of right-on-right demagoguery in American politics.

 

Another excuse involves appealing to Tucker’s supposed ideological bona fides. “The idea that Tucker Carlson—who has one of the largest podcasts in the world, who has millions of listeners, who supported Donald Trump in the 2024 election, who supported me in the 2024 election—the idea that his views are somehow completely anathema to conservatism, that he has no place in the conservative movement, is frankly absurd,” Vance declared last year.

 

But that’s begging the question. Without detouring into navel-gazing about what “conservative” means in 2026, the issue isn’t whether Carlson represents a wing of it. The issue is whether J.D. Vance should be using his political influence to marginalize that wing rather than mainstream it.

 

A third excuse is “dialogue,” surely something no reasonable person could oppose. “I recognize a lot of people in this room may disagree with things that Tucker Carlson or Megyn Kelly or Joe Rogan have said,” Vance told a gathering of Jewish Republicans last week. “I think it’s a mistake to sort of say we’re going to write Joe Rogan off because he said something that we don’t like. I think the best approach is to actually go in there and talk to him and make the argument as best as you can.”

 

Okay—but in the same breath, the VP conceded that Rogan and white supremacist livestreamer Nick Fuentes are “two very, very different categories of people,” implying that dialogue with one is appropriate while dialogue with the other wouldn’t be. Why place Carlson with Rogan in the “kooky but well-meaning” category of those worth debating instead of with Fuentes in the “malevolent Jew-baiter” category of those to ignore, particularly given that Carlson platformed Fuentes on his show?

 

Frankly, if dialogue is the “best approach,” why make an exception for Fuentes at all? If anyone on the right urgently needs to hear an argument against antisemitism from J.D. Vance, it’s Fuentes’ groyper base. When should we expect the vice president to sit down with him and make it?

 

Waiting on a ‘friend.’

 

The common thread in all three excuses is the idea that Carlson’s brand of postliberalism is a legitimate strain of right-wing thought that neither can be, nor should be, ghettoized. In the same way that Vance positioned himself as a “reasonable moderate” on U.S. support for Israel earlier this summer, he’s positioned himself as a “reasonable moderate” on whether conspiratorial antisemitism with a side dish of Putin-bootlicking should be welcome in the GOP.

 

He’ll concede that Tucker says things that are “wrong”—while being verrrrry coy about which things, specifically, those might be—but not so wrong that Carlson shouldn’t be welcome inside a Republican tent that’s grown so big that it no longer seems to have a moral perimeter of any kind. Essentially, Vance is offering right-wingers of all stripes a compromise: I won’t endorse Tucker’s ugliest stuff, but neither will I confront him over it.

 

That’s what makes Vance’s use of the term “political disagreements” at yesterday’s White House briefing significant. Political disagreements, traditionally, have involved things like tax rates, not whether the Holocaust happened or whether Israel was responsible for 9/11. The vice president has reframed a moral objection to Carlsonian postliberalism as a mundane policy dispute, normalizing it in the process.

 

And everyone knows why. It was Fuentes, ironically, who put his finger on it in an interview with the New York Times. “J.D. Vance panders to the far right but simply doesn’t want the baggage of associating with the far right,” he told the paper. “If he has a problem with ‘antisemites,’ then he should start by disavowing his best friend Tucker Carlson.”

 

Correct on both counts. The vice president is forever straining to triangulate between being “based” enough to avoid a primary challenge from Tuckerite America First-ers in 2028 and mainstream enough to win over swing voters in that year’s general election. His solution has been to invent some imaginary distinction between Carlson and Fuentes and use it to justify hugging one while stiff-arming the other.

 

The problem is that Tucker’s antisemitism sounds more like Fuentes’ every day. As he grows more morally depraved, Vance’s shtick about a mere “political disagreement” with him will wear thin and start to look even to normie voters like the expedient cynicism that it is.

 

That’s why the VP resorted to citing friendship during yesterday’s briefing to explain why he won’t throw Carlson “under the bus,” I think. Friendship is a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency retort to an accusation of immorality.

 

“Friends will help you move,” as the saying goes, “but true friends will help you move a body.” All of us overlook moral failings in friends that we wouldn’t overlook in strangers, and occasionally even abet those failings out of loyalty and affection. Vance is asking Americans to give him a pass on the obvious question that his relationship with Carlson presents—why do you persist in supporting this cretin?—on those grounds, hoping that they’ll find his friendly loyalty to be virtuous on balance, relatable, and therefore excusable.

 

Heritage Foundation chief Kevin Roberts stooped to the same tactic when he had to answer for his organization’s own alliance with Carlson last year. Like Vance, he drew a vague distinction between Tucker and Fuentes to rationalize supporting the former but not the latter. And like Vance, he broke the proverbial glass to cope with his PR emergency. “We will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda,” he said at the time. “That includes Tucker Carlson, who remains—and, as I have said before, always will be—a close friend of the Heritage Foundation.”

 

An America in which the next leader of the Republican Party is buddies with a guy who perpetually sounds like he’s on the verge of saying “the 14 words” or an America where friends stab each other in the back: Surely the second is worse than the first, no?

 

The price of friendship.

 

The thing about Vance’s friendship with Carlson is that it isn’t really a friendship.

 

They might be friendly. I can imagine them sharing a belly laugh, for instance, at the VP denouncing ethnic tribalism to pander to swing voters after he spent the 2024 campaign pushing thinly veiled racist smears about Haitian migrants kidnapping and eating their neighbors’ pets.

 

But it’s not as if the two met in a fantasy football league. Their “friendship” was born out of postliberal ideological kinship, and so one can’t help but suspect that it’s that kinship, not personal loyalty or affection, that’s led Vance to stick by Tucker. He wants Americans to believe his allegiance to Carlson is in spite of the latter’s demagoguery when the origin of that allegiance suggests it’s because of it.

 

It also isn’t a real friendship insofar as real friendships aren’t coerced.

 

If you want to be very charitable to J.D. Vance and assume that he’s privately disgusted by Carlson, you’re left with an uncomfortable question about why he doesn’t speak up and an even more uncomfortable answer—because, if he did, Tucker might retaliate by spoiling Vance’s coronation in 2028. No one feels very confident that the depraved Republican primary electorate would choose the vice president over a much more charismatic demagogue if the two went head to head.

 

The VP needs to stay “friends” with Carlson for the same reason Kevin Roberts does, because Carlson has enough juice with grassroots America First-ers to make both of their lives miserable if he were to become their enemy. “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize,” as the (white nationalist) saying goes: It speaks volumes that Vance behaves as though he’s not “allowed” to criticize Tucker.

 

There’s a third way in which it isn’t a real friendship. Most real friendships aren’t this one-sided, are they?

 

To all appearances, Carlson cares not a whit that his transformation into the Joker of Zionist-obsessed postliberalism might be damaging Vance’s presidential prospects by association. Perhaps that’s by design, as the less viable the vice president becomes as a candidate, the less reason Tucker has not to enter the 2028 primary himself. I think simple callousness is a likelier explanation, though. Probably Carlson believes that, as the partner in this friendship who “rules over” the other, it should be incumbent on Vance to adjust his behavior to accommodate Tucker’s rather than vice versa.

 

But there’s a cost to that, and not just in 2028. If it’s not fair to impute Carlson’s beliefs to Vance because of their ideological kinship-turned-friendship, why is it fair for Mike Rogers and the GOP to try to do the same to Abdul El-Sayed because of his own ideological kinship-turned-friendship with Hasan Piker? How long will it be before El-Sayed starts dismissing questions about Piker with “I’ll disavow him as soon as J.D. disavows Tucker”?

 

Upright, decent, and principled.

 

There’s one more point to be made about the Vance-Carlson friendship. It continues to exist only because the vice president believes it’s a net asset to him in a GOP presidential primary. If Vance thought being associated with modern Coughlin-ism would cost him right-wing votes on balance, he’d have pulled the plug on Tucker already.

 

Their friendship will be used against him in 2028 by one or more Republican challengers, and he knows it. Sen. Ted Cruz has all but declared his candidacy already and sounds poised to make antisemitism, and in particular the VP’s relationship with Carlson, key lines of attack. Not so long ago, a charge as grave as that would have been considered disqualifying if substantiated.

 

But the vice president’s supporters aren’t worried. “Unfortunately for [Cruz], has-beens polling at 1 percent won’t be part of that conversation” in 2028, one chuckled to Semafor.

 

I share that person’s skepticism. It’s not just that Cruz, a famously cynical politician, is poorly positioned to prosecute a case against Vance for political cynicism. It’s that the case against antisemitism is a moral one, and the Republican Party long ago had its moral wiring torn out by the handful.

 

Ten years of Trump has conditioned the grassroots right to believe that any moral critique of populism made from the left—that is, based on traditional liberal political morality—is evidence of weakness and a reluctance to “fight.” It’s not that the right is broadly antisemitic (although part of it sure is) as much as that it resents, and will continue to resent, seeing postliberals like Carlson lectured for falling short of its liberal enemies’ moral expectations. Cruz might very well end up doing himself more harm politically by making the antisemitism charge than he’ll do to Vance, especially as Vance hones his triangulation game.

 

The unhappy truth is that only a moral critique from the right—that is, based on postliberal political morality—stands to gain traction in a Republican primary. Ted Cruz needling Vance for his friendship with an antisemitic podcaster won’t do much. But Tucker Carlson needling Vance over Trump selling out Americans for another Middle Eastern “forever war” supposedly masterminded by Israel might.

 

“Tucker Carlson has become a litmus test of sorts. If you’re a rational, upright, decent, and principled person, you have nothing but contempt for him and what he represents,” Cruz ally Mark Levin tweeted yesterday. That’s true, but it’s precisely that sort of attack on Vance that will fail miserably in the next primary, I expect. “Rational, upright, decent, and principled” have been curse words in a party demented by Trumpism for years now; pro-Israel conservatives like Cruz and Levin who reconciled themselves to a movement of face-eating nihilist leopards, expecting that they understood its appetites, should have worried about that nihilism before their own faces started being gnawed on.

 

The time to care about a rational, upright, decent, and principled right was 10 years ago, then after the 2020 election, then again in 2024. It’s too late now. And because it is, come 2028, Reaganites will almost certainly be forced to choose between quitting the Republican tribe in disgust at its choice of nominee and making “friends” with the many new unsavory figures that now populate it thanks to leaders like Vance and Carlson. Given their track record, I have no doubt what they’ll do.

Apocalypse Not: The World Is Not Going to End, Again

By Wilfred Reilly

Saturday, September 05, 2026

 

The world is not coming to an end — again.

 

In October 2025, Microsoft’s Bill Gates — long the worst sort of climate doomsayer — published a lengthy memo explaining that, while global climate change is real, “it will not lead to humanity’s demise.” According to Gates, the “doomsday view of climate change” that says it “will decimate civilization . . . is wrong. . . . People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.”

 

The desktop baron argues for reevaluating temperature targets, writing that strict focus on near-term temperature and emissions goals is an imperfect measure of progress. Most important, he now advocates a policy shift toward maximizing “human welfare” and human flourishing — shifting much of the absurdly inflated climate budget toward projects fighting disease, famine, and poverty itself. In summary, the climate problem exists, but the cutting-edge view today is that it is fairly minor in comparison with other issues and can best be combated by human initiative.

 

Gates’s memo had a familiar ring to it. As I note in my upcoming Broadside/HarperCollins book Confidently Wrong, one of the defining features of upper-middle-class life during the past 50–60 years has been scientists, activists, and public intellectuals making the most horrifying kind of doomsday predictions — which invariably fail to come true. Remember the Club of Rome and the Limits to Growth report?

 

Back in 1972, a group of top academics used then-advanced regression analysis to argue that the planet at some point must run out of key resources. Quite specific dates were provided for this global near-apocalypse. And then not one of the predictions came true. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Mark Perry noted 40 years later, in his teasingly titled “Time Has Not Been Kind to the Limits to Growth,” the report “got it so wrong because its authors overlooked the greatest resource of all: our own resourcefulness.”

 

Because of the so-called Green Revolution in agriculture and horticulture, humanity’s food supplies have not collapsed. In fact, Perry reports, “malnourishment has dropped by more than half,” from well over 30 percent of the world population to about 15 percent. “Nor are we choking on pollution,” as electric, hybrid, and even hydrogen vehicles have replaced many of the high-dollar gas hogs of the past. In fact, the annual risk of pollution-caused death has shrunk from one in 500 to one in many thousands since 1900. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given their think tank’s focus, the AEI boys argue that the real solution to environmental problems is innovation, driven by “economic growth.”

 

This same lesson — that resources are obviously not infinite but new supplies of them can be found or even grown if we turn to human ingenuity — applies in the case of “peak oil,” perhaps the ultimate recurring boondoggle prediction. As every commodities investor knows, Very Serious People have predicted, on a dozen separate occasions, that the earth is going to run dry of key fossil fuels in the near future. As Forbes notes, peak oil is at some level “grounded in reality.” Oil is “a finite natural resource, produced over a geological timespan, whereas demand continues to climb.” However, given different computer models and continuing exploration by the oil companies, “nobody can quite agree on when we will reach the point of Peak Oil or even what will cause it.”

 

At present, as noted in Forbes, glacier-tapping Norwegian energy giant Equinor predicts a deadline year of 2028. American consulting giant McKinsey, running what strikes me as a better model, guesses 2035 or so. Not until “approximately 2040,” says OPEC. Per British Petroleum (BP), “peak oil [will] not hit until 2050 based on known oil resources with the application of today’s technology. For good measure, the contrarian Saudis — who perhaps look down on new North American resource fields — argue that peak oil has already occurred, as far back as 2006. Meanwhile, new drilling projects, now assisted by AI and vastly better machine technology, launch annually.

 

A piece of this kind could go on almost forever, documenting similar blooper projections huge and small. In the first category, we can recall Paul Ehrlich, whose best-selling The Population Bomb argued, among other things, that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over” and “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death” during the 1970s and 1980s. Entire nations, such as England and India, “would not exist . . . in the year 2000.” Even the United States would experience “water rationing by 1974 and food rationing by 1980,” with perhaps 65 million Yanks starving to death. Of course, none of this happened: Among other things, Ehrlich — a professional quantitative analyst — failed to predict the Green Revolution, feminism and female birth control, anti-natalism, and global mass migration. Oops.

 

Among smaller-scale hysterias, we might place global cooling, “killer bees” and the Great Northerly Migration of invasive species, acid rain, the ozone hole(s), and the “Hammer and the Dance”-era Covid-19 numbers. And, let us never forget one that absolutely terrified me and my girlfriend in high school — the idea that tens of millions of American heterosexuals were in very serious danger of contracting AIDS, from R-rated hook-ups or even peripatetic mosquitoes. Michael Fumento, author of The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, truly did God’s work by helping dispel this last largely false panic.

 

Quite a list. So: How, explicitly and exactly, did all of these proposed past apocalypses come to not end the world?

 

Well, in many cases, the initial numbers involved were simply wrong. Scientists (for example) rashly included a worst-case-scenario doomsday prediction in a serious paper, reporters focused on that one model when drawing up the headlines for major stories (“If it bleeds, it leads!”), and society wound up down-road with someone like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez saying that old Mum Earth has just “twelve years left.” This was likely the Club of Rome’s problem: Bad inputs or regressions inevitably produce bad outputs. GIGO, as they say in IT.

 

The other possibility is equally common and in fact more hopeful: human beings came together to fairly easily solve a real-enough problem. This is what happened with the ozone hole — R.I.P. to effective “CFC” hairspray and the big-haired ladies of the 1980s and 1990s — and what archetypally happened to resolve the “Y2K” problem. In 1999, “some Americans stocked up on food, water, and guns in anticipation of a computer-induced apocalypse.” But “years of behind-the-scenes work” by computer programmers and other wonks had already changed 99 percent of all potentially dangerous code, and nothing of note occurred . . . again.

 

Something very close to this latter scenario will almost certainly happen with climate change. More than a dozen U.S. companies manufacture excellent seawalls, some of them miles long. If global saltwater levels really do begin to rise, the leaders of beach-front cities are not just going to stare dully at the incoming waves until they drown.

 

You are not going to die (from some epic disaster). Start living like it.

Welcome to the ‘Imperial Populist Oligarchy’

Paul D. Miller

Tuesday, September 01, 2026

 

The 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence this summer offered an occasion to reflect with gratitude on the American achievement: an experiment in ordered liberty that has not just persisted but improved, a nation that became an inspiration for equality and liberty the world over, a republic that has tried to balance the people’s voice with the wisdom of history.

 

But the anniversary is also an occasion for us to reflect on our current moment and its challenges. We live in a fraught time, and it is no longer clear that the things we have admired—our persistence, our inspiration, or our republic—will endure.

 

In fact, the American republic has declined in ways that may be hard for Americans to see, as the decline involves institutional changes, not hot-button issues of race or religion. The American regime has become less republican, more democratic; less federalist, more nationalized; less citizen-owned, more executive-led; less aristocratic, more oligarchic.

 

In short, the American regime today is not a republic so much as an imperial populist oligarchy.

 

A republic, if you can keep it.

 

It has become a cliché to insist that the American founders built a republic, not a democracy. The cliché is true: James Madison, the drafter of the Constitution, clearly identified the new government as a republic throughout The Federalist, repeatedly distinguished it from a democracy, and spoke of “the pleasure and pride we feel in being republicans” in Federalist 10.^⁠ Article IV, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution guarantees “to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government,” which presumes the Constitution’s self-understanding as a republican document.

 

The Constitution did not establish an Athenian direct democracy in which every citizen could gather in person to legislate, judge, and oversee public affairs, which would have been both impractical and a recipe for mob rule. Rather, the Constitution established a representative regime among coequal citizens in which the people elected delegates who formed only one part of an elaborate architecture of offices designed to operate under the rule of law and protect their natural rights.

 

It was this combination—popular sovereignty and coequal citizenship exercised through representation; the division of government into distinct branches, each with checks and balances on the others; all governed and limited by a constitution, the rule of law, and natural rights—that made the new government a republic, not a pure democracy. Alexander Hamilton argued that these modern institutions would guard the American republic against the tumult and upheaval of the ancient experiments in liberty. He wrote in Federalist 9 that they are “powerful means, by which the excellencies of republican government may be retained.”

 

Populism.

 

We do not live in that republic anymore. Consider the ways the United States has grown less republican and more purely democratic, even populist, since the early 20^th century.

 

The 17^th Amendment (ratified in 1913) made senators directly elected by the people rather than by state legislators, turning the Senate into a second House. The Senate’s apportionment of two senators per state, regardless of population, went from being a safeguard of states’ rights to an easy target for anyone—like the Democratic Socialists of America—who wants to complain that the Senate is antidemocratic.

 

At the same time, the political parties instituted party primaries rather than party caucuses (i.e., smoke-filled back rooms) to select nominees for office—for statewide office by the early 20^th century and for the presidency in the 1970s. That empowered individual politicians at the parties’ expense, fragmenting party cohesion and undermining their mediating influence.

 

And since the early 20^th century, most states have adopted citizen initiatives and referenda, bringing American democracy much closer to direct, Athenian-style participatory democracy but without the face-to-face relationships of a city-state. While initiatives and referendums improve state governments’ responsiveness to voters, they also make laws without the benefit of legislative compromise and, often, without legal expertise.

 

As the American regime has grown more democratic, it has also become, as the founders would have warned, more volatile, more prone to extremism, more dominated by the passion of the masses and the politicians who would manipulate them. Much of our polarization and division today likely stems from the ways our regime has become more democratic and less republican.

 

The imperial executive.

 

Over the same time frame, the U.S. government has seen a decisive shift in power, both formally and informally, from the legislature to the executive.

 

Informally, the presidency has assumed the cultural authority to set the agenda, from Teddy Roosevelt’s “bully pulpit” to Barack Obama’s “pen and phone.” The work of the American government orbits around the president’s wishes, either for or against, in a way that would have been foreign and scandalous to the presidents of the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

 

Formally, presidents have accreted extraordinary powers. They rule the executive branch by decree, and with a vast array of departments and agencies at their disposal, and they exercise considerable market power within the American economy. In short, the executive branch has become the single largest, richest, and most powerful institution ever created in the history of mankind, creating a concentration of power in its chief executive officer that should alarm any republican.

 

Add to that the president’s emergency and national security powers, under which Congress has granted the president wide latitude and discretionary authority (there are 51 declared national “emergencies” in 2026, the oldest dating to 1979). Congress reined in some of the “imperial presidency” after Richard Nixon’s flagrant abuses of power and criminality, but Donald Trump has pushed the boundaries back out again. He has relied on “acting” appointees without Senate confirmation, centralized control over independent agencies, unilaterally reorganized and shrunk executive agencies without congressional authorization, and broken norms against leveraging the presidency for private business deals. In 2024 the Supreme Court formally staked out a doctrine of presidential immunity protecting presidents from prosecution for official acts.

 

And the president’s war powers, always the area in which he has had the greatest latitude, are slipping away from Congress’ lone attempt to rein them in. The 1973 War Powers Resolution tried to set reasonable timetables by which presidents must receive congressional authorization for military operations. Every president rejected the constitutionality of the WPR but obeyed it anyway—until Obama’s war in Libya and Trump’s war in Iran. We now have a commander in chief who can wage war unilaterally, indefinitely, with little oversight or accountability.

 

Oligarchy.

 

Thomas Jefferson hoped the new government would be led by a “natural aristocracy,” men of recognized “virtue and talents.” The founders hoped their republican machinery would screen out demagogues and select natural aristocrats for leadership. That was their hope for the House, the Senate, and the Electoral College.

 

Madison wrote in Federalist 10 that electing representatives to the House would “refine and enlarge the public views” by entrusting the government to those “whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country,” men of superior “patriotism and love of justice.”

 

Similarly, during the Constitutional Convention, he anticipated the Senate would be composed of “enlightened citizens, whose limited number, and firmness might seasonably interpose [against] impetuous councils.” The Senate would be the body “sufficiently respectable for its wisdom & virtue” to be a bulwark against the dangers of populism and democracy.

 

And Hamilton hoped the Electoral College, as a small, dedicated body, would be more likely “to possess the information and discernment requisite” for choosing a president, as he explained in The Federalist. This body would be directly accountable to the people but, unlike them, would be able to act “under circumstances favorable to deliberation.” Such a process would avoid the “tumult and disorder” of a national plebiscite. The Electoral College would protect the process from the “talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity” and instead elevate men “preeminent for ability and virtue,” he wrote in Federalist 68.

 

I hope it is not too controversial for me to assert that the U.S. Congress today is not a bastion of the “natural aristocracy” of merit. Most members are millionaires, and all are beholden to the fundraisers and donors who keep their perpetual campaigns afloat. The problem of money in politics is not new, but we have shifted the center of gravity from the elected officials themselves—where at least we have some transparency and diffusion—to donors and super PACs increasingly dominated by a very small elite of exceptionally wealthy individuals. Instead of an aristocracy of virtue, we have Elon Musk.

 

Regime change.

 

Every change in American politics has increased concentrations of power—in the mob, the presidency, the oligarchy, the federal bureaucracy—at the expense of mediating republican institutions (Congress, the states, and political parties). The American regime today is not a mixed constitution with elements of benevolent monarchy, aristocracy, and republicanism; it is becoming a mixed constitution of imperial populist oligarchy.

 

I mean that in a very precise sense. The founders were self-consciously following the political archetypes laid out in antiquity. As they knew, Aristotle had developed a typology of regimes: rule by the one, few, or many; and regimes that govern for the common good or private good. That yields six regime types. Regimes that govern for the common good include monarchies, aristocracies, and republics (the one, the few, and the many, respectively); and those that govern for private gain include tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy.

 

The political thinkers of the ancient world, like Aristotle, Polybius, and Cicero, counseled a mixed constitution as the best regime. The American founders deliberately created a mixed regime that included elements of the one (the presidency), the few (the Senate), and the many (the House). They hoped to capitalize on the benefits of monarchy, aristocracy, and republicanism while using each regime type to offset the dangers of the others.

 

Much of the story of the past century is the deterioration of each part into its degenerate counterpart. The executive is not monarchal but increasingly imperial. Our leading citizens are not true aristocrats (leaders in virtue) but oligarchs, a mere cabal of wealthy tech bros. And whatever republic we had threatens to turn into mob rule. The result is an extraordinarily strong executive office that rotates among oligarchs who compete for demagogic sway over the mob that elects them. This is not the republicanism that Cicero or Jefferson envisioned.

 

The upshot is that we continue to ape the forms of American democracy, to go through the motions, while everyone knows they have been hollowed out and are approaching meaninglessness. Trump is not the cause of everything, but unlike most past American statesmen, he saw our degeneration not as a threat but as an opportunity. His success has set a precedent others will follow in ways that bode ill for the future. Americans continue to have extraordinary personal freedom, but dangerously little sense of citizenship.

Our Culture Needs a Return to Biological Realism

By Christine Rosen

Saturday, September 05, 2026

 

Several recent stories might not, at first glance, seem connected: Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted videos of herself injecting fertility drugs into her stomach and, later, having her eggs harvested to freeze them; technology entrepreneur Bryan “Never Die” Johnson doubled down on his extreme health and longevity project despite being diagnosed with an autoimmune condition; and former NBA players Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White announced their intention to register for the Women’s NBA draft in 2027 as a protest against the league’s absurd stance on gender.

 

These stories suggest our culture needs a return to biological realism — that is, a sensible acknowledgement of human limits and biological realities. The normalization of extreme claims about humans’ ability to push past or ignore those realities has only increased in recent years, to the detriment of our common culture and common sense.

 

Consider Ocasio-Cortez’s unpaid advertisement for the fertility industry. Whatever her personal reasons for deciding, at age 36, to freeze her eggs, she chose to make it a public performance, saying she hoped to “normalize” the process of delaying the decision to have a child.

 

This is where a biological realist might point out that while there are numerous understandable reasons beyond personal preference for a woman to freeze her eggs (including to preserve them while undergoing cancer treatment), it remains a harsh biological reality that most women experience a significant decline in fertility after the age of 35, and the women most likely to achieve successful pregnancies using their previously frozen eggs are those who froze a lot of them before 35. If Ocasio-Cortez were intent on educating women of her generation about preserving their fertility (rather than turning her personal choices into yet another Instagram-enabled political stunt), she would have noted these biological realities. She might also have acknowledged that the largely unregulated fertility industry raises many ethical and legal questions and has been implicated in cases of abuse and fraud.

 

It is not only eggs that deniers of biological reality hope to freeze; it is themselves, in perpetuity. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly paid a Canadian company, Nectome, a deposit of $10,000 to secure a spot on its waiting list to one day freeze his brain, with the expectation that the company will scan it and grant him some form of digitized immortality. “I assume my brain will be uploaded to the cloud,” he said. Altman is one of many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs on a quest for life extension and immortality. Transhumanist Ray Kurzweil has long predicted that humans, nanobots, and artificial intelligence will eventually merge to form a new species, while others in the AI successionism movement want AI to replace humanity.

 

Bryan Johnson, champion of the “Don’t Die” movement who is tracking and monitoring every possible bodily function he has while taking extreme measures to prolong his life, describes his journey as follows: “Conquering death will be humanity’s greatest achievement.” Talking to Ross Douthat on the Interesting Times podcast, Johnson described himself not as a man, but as “the first Don’t Die Homo sapien prototype.” Comparing himself to a self-driving car, he noted, “I’m building a self-driving body so it just automatically takes care of itself.”

 

The denial of biological limits is perhaps most prominent among transgender activists, who insist that biological men can become women and that those men should be allowed access to women-only spaces, including in women’s sports. Just as a child had to point out that the emperor wore no clothes, former NBA players Kanter and White highlighted the absurdities of men in women’s sports by declaring their intention to play on women’s teams. Their stunt was in part a response to criticism of professional athletes like WNBA player Sophie Cunningham for simply stating the obvious: Significant biological differences between the sexes make it unfair to allow men to compete against women. The overwhelming majority of Americans agree with her, and when Cunningham told reporters her position was “common sense,” she was correct.

 

Common sense does not fare well when pitted against the ideological zeal of an extremely small minority — especially when that minority controls the levers of power in institutions. During a press conference, WNBA Minnesota Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve hemmed and hawed but stuck to the ideological script, saying, “We need to protect trans kids.” Some WNBA players, like Golden State Valkyries player Gabby Williams, went so far as to claim she would “welcome a trans athlete on my team or against my team, anytime.” Even though the U.S. Supreme Court upheld states’ right to ban men from playing on women’s teams, the mainstream media and trans activists continue to push the message that biological men should be allowed to take spots on teams from women.

 

Kanter and White are forcing the ideologues to be honest: If they allow men to play in a professional women’s league, then the word woman has no meaning, and biological reality will have been jettisoned in favor of ideological conformity. It’s not a coincidence that the transhumanist and transgender projects share a prefix (trans means “across” or “beyond”). Acolytes of both seek to cross beyond the limits of biology; both movements are also characterized by a rigorous enforcement of groupthink.

 

Most people can’t afford to freeze their eggs like Ocasio-Cortez or meticulously track the duration of their nighttime erections like Bryan Johnson, and most will never play professional sports like the women of the WNBA. But when advocates of transgenderism, transhumanism, extreme longevity, and extreme fertility treatments promote the message that there is no biological limit that cannot eventually be overcome by medicine or technology, they normalize something that is harmful to a flourishing society: denying the reality of human limits.

 

Embracing biological realism does not mean artificially stunting the remarkable advances of technology and science or fetishizing the challenges of aging or conception for its own sake. It simply rejects the conceit of those who would claim the power to ignore biological realities. Their hubris is a reminder that the conditions that allow for innovation and scientific advances and prosperity do not always produce morally sound people.

Vance’s Scoreboard

By Daniel Foster

Friday, September 04, 2026

 

At his much commented upon White House presser, the vice president said: “America has fought a lot of wars since I’ve been alive. Forty-two years. And we have won almost none of them until Donald J. Trump became the president of the United States.”

 

By my accounting, since 1984:

 

·         Operation Praying Mantis (Iran), 1988 — Clear U.S. victory. Iranian ships and platforms destroyed, U.S. objectives achieved.

 

·         Operation Just Cause (Panama) 1989–90 — Clear U.S. victory. Noriega removed and captured.

 

·         Persian Gulf War/Desert Storm (Iraq) 1990-1991 — Decisive U.S. victory. Kuwait liberated, Iraqi forces expelled and routed.

 

·         Operation Deliberate Force (Bosnia) 1995 — U.S. victory. NATO air campaign helped force Bosnian Serbs into Dayton settlement.

 

·         Operation Desert Fox (Iraq) 1998 U.S. victory in its limited objectives.

 

·         Operation Allied Force (Kosovo) 1999 — U.S. victory in its stated objectives. Serbian forces withdrew from Kosovo after NATO bombing.

 

·         Destruction of ISIS, (Iraq, Syria etc.) 2014–2019 — Unambiguous U.S. victory. Trump shares credit with Obama.

 

Even though it was a mistake to start it, I’d put the Iraq War in the U.S. victory column. Iraq today is not Switzerland, but it is a functioning state with an elected government, regular transfers of power, and security forces capable of keeping nonstate threats manageable. It has also held up in the face of the war on Iran, not a small thing for a state full of Shia and Kurds.

 

There are failures (though not strictly speaking losses) in the column as well. Somalia, Libya. Afghanistan was having a rough go of it when we pulled up stakes and quit.

 

In any event, it’s not clear to me that Vance’s statement is especially supportable.

Why Keir Starmer Should Never Run NATO

By John Gustavsson

Friday, September 04, 2026

 

On Monday, Keir Starmer announced his resignation as a member of British Parliament for the Holborn and St. Pancras constituency. In his statement, Starmer said he wished to “focus on other issues” including international affairs and defense. While he did not specifically name NATO, many believe Starmer wishes to succeed Mark Rutte as secretary-general when the role is up in 2028. If that’s indeed where his sights are set, America should not let that happen.

 

Why might Starmer think he has what it takes to be secretary-general? The truth is that for European politicians, NATO has become something of a retirement gig. Former secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg got the position after losing reelection in Norway, as did Mark Rutte after his last government imploded in the Netherlands. The same can be said for the EU: Ursula von der Leyen was a moderately successful politician back in Germany before she was elevated to the position as president of the European Commission. Neil Kinnock, who lost two general elections as Labour leader, was later appointed as Britain’s European commissioner.

 

For those failed politicians who don’t enjoy moules-frites, there’s always the U.N.: After losing the general election of 2010, Gordon Brown became U.N. special envoy for global education. His predecessor Tony Blair, meanwhile, was appointed Quartet envoy for the Middle East on the very same day he resigned.

 

There are several reasons why Secretary-General Keir Starmer would be bad news for the United States. First, while Starmer’s failures in domestic policy have dominated his political obituaries, he was arguably an even worse disaster on foreign policy. He attempted to give away the Chagos Islands to Mauritius — a country that never even controlled them — and pay Mauritius for the privilege. Only an intervention by the U.S. stalled the deal so that the handover couldn’t take place before Starmer was forced out.

 

The Chagos handover highlights how Starmer is, at heart, still the same human rights lawyer he was before entering politics, unable to distinguish between legal legitimacy and strategic necessity. The decolonialist, third-worldist mindset and submissiveness toward the U.N. that characterizes Keir Starmer would render NATO absolutely impotent. At a time when Americans’ trust in NATO has eroded, the worst thing that could happen would be for NATO to be led by a secretary-general who may seriously suggest the U.S. should give up control of Guam or Puerto Rico.

 

Second, there is Starmer’s stance on Israel. While he did support Israel after October 7, this support quickly waned as his party began to worry about losing Muslim and far-left voters to the Green Party. Starmer, who had started his tenure as Labour leader strong by expelling former leader Jeremy Corbyn and other extremists from the party, came to gradually embrace the fringe. Starmer and his government went on to recognize Palestinian statehood and also suspended certain arms sales to Israel, viewing the country through the lens of humanitarian, international law rather than as an ally. Though Israel is not a NATO member, it is a major non-NATO ally with cooperation ranging from counterterrorism to civil emergencies preparedness.

 

Third and related to this, Keir Starmer not only refused to back the U.S. war on Iran but also refused to let the U.S. use British bases like the joint British-American Diego Garcia base on the Chagos Islands to carry out attacks, though he later changed his mind and allowed limited “defensive” use.

 

Finally, and speaking of changing one’s mind, Starmer’s record in government is one of an unprecedented number of U-turns. Keir Starmer broke promises or reversed stance on everything from welfare reform to grooming gangs and digital ID. Though mostly not related to foreign policy, the constant U-turns reveal Starmer as someone who, even when backed by a massive parliamentary majority, cannot hold firm against pressure — an essential characteristic of any NATO secretary-general, especially in turbulent times like these.

 

In the short term, Andy Burnham’s problem will be to retain Starmer’s seat in the upcoming by-election. Though on paper a safe Labour seat, it is also a London seat — a poor match for Burnham, who has spent years railing against London and the London-centric government. Green Party leader Zack Polanski has announced his intention to run for the seat, and many in the local constituency Labour party are Starmer loyalists who may feel demoralized by his exit. While Labour is likely to win, even a close race would send shivers down the spines of the other 58 London Labour MPs, abruptly ending Burnham’s honeymoon.

 

Beyond that, however, Andy Burnham is all but certain to make a push for Starmer to be appointed secretary-general in 2028, if this is indeed Starmer’s goal. With the election coming up in 2029, Burnham will want to have Starmer safely stored out of his way and out of Britain, to prevent the former PM from causing any ruckus during the campaign.

 

In the past, failed British policymakers and aristocrats were routinely exiled to the country’s distant colonies, being “promoted” to positions with fancy titles that ensured they would never again set foot in London. Though the empire is long gone, Britain does still control the island of St. Helena in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, to which Napoleon was exiled and where he died. As the governor of St. Helena is appointed rather than elected, this position may be a more suitable retirement gig for Keir Starmer — as long as Andy Burnham makes it clear he’s not allowed to give the island away.

Socialism: The Newest Old Idea That Won’t Work

By Matthew Mitchell & Steven Globerman

Friday, September 04, 2026

 

“It is characteristic of the unlearned,” observed Calvin Coolidge in 1919, “that they are forever proposing something which is old, and because it has recently come to their own attention, supposing it to be new.”

 

“I think what is so unique and refreshing about Donald Trump’s economic policies,” says Vice President J.D. Vance in 2026, “is that it is not the same old economic ideas that you would have heard 30, 40 years ago.”

 

Vance is right to a point. It’s hard to imagine Bill Clinton directing the federal government to take ownership stakes—totaling $26.7 billion—in 30 private companies. Or Ronald Reagan hiking the average U.S. tariff rate to Sudanese levels, thereby imposing thousands of dollars of additional taxes on American families. George H.W. Bush would have never claimed a “golden share” in U.S. Steel, gaining a say in a private company’s board membership, factory locations, capital investment, employment, worker pay, and naming rights. And, it is safe to say that no past president would direct the Pentagon to go into the oil business with an accused money launderer and an unelected Venezuelan socialist.

 

Thirty years ago, the consensus in Washington (they actually called it the “Washington Consensus”) was that governments should not direct private economic activity.

 

But forget about past Washington leaders. Thirty years ago, Moscow’s leaders like Boris Yeltsin had already rejected state control of the economy. Having pressed a third of the planet into their experiment in central planning, public ownership of the means of production, and suppression of private economic choice, even the socialists had to admit it didn’t turn out well.  

 

While Trump has positioned himself as an anti-socialist, he’s perfectly content to use socialist tools—including ownership of the means of production, price controls, and central planning—to direct the U.S. economy.

 

But Trump isn’t the only American politician to dust off socialist central planning and think he has found something shiny and new. In the Democratic Party, a new crop of self-described socialists, from mayors Zohran Mamdani in New York and Katie Wilson in Seattle to state representatives Chris Rabb in Pennsylvania and Donavan McKinney in Michigan, have shown surprising electoral strength.

 

At the annual gathering of the Democratic Socialists of America in Chicago, co-chair Ashik Siddique captured the excitement, declaring: “I never thought this would be possible in my lifetime.”

 

The avowed socialists’ plans are in some ways less radical than Trump’s. Mamdani is trying to freeze rents on New York City’s roughly 960,000 rent-stabilized apartments. He wants a $30-per-hour minimum wage. He wants five city-owned grocery stores that would be exempt from rent and property taxes, fare-free city buses, and universal childcare for children up to 5 years old. And he wants to pay for all of this by raising the city’s business tax rate, adding a 2 percent surtax on the top 1 percent of income earners, and imposing an annual luxury property tax targeting wealthy, part-time residents.

 

Neither Trump nor his DSA comrades are trying to turn the U.S. into Mao’s China or Stalin’s USSR. But both seem oblivious to the dangers of blurring public and private interests.

 

Mamdani’s grocery stores and Trump’s government-backed firms will compete with private firms for customers, capital, and labor. They will enjoy extraordinary advantages, including financial subsidies that draw on the government’s power to coerce money from taxpayers and preferential regulations that raise their rivals’ costs and limit honest competition.  

 

The private firms that will compete with these ventures are understandably unhappy. As Ed Hirs, an energy economist at the University of Houston told the Wall Street Journal about Trump’s Venezuela venture: “Why is the U.S. subsidizing and building a major competitor to the U.S. oil patch?” In New York, hundreds of minority business owners who run bodegas and grocery stores are suing to stop Mamdani’s city stores. As their lawyer, Mark Jaffe put it, “You cannot expect hard-working small business owners to compete with a supermarket that isn’t going to pay rent, won’t have to pay an electric bill and won’t have to buy their products at full price.”

 

Unlike truly private firms, government-backed firms profit from their connections to government officials, rather than by earning customers. With the government having a vested interest in their survival, they have less incentive to economize on their use of inputs to improve efficiency.

 

And like modern bureaucrats, their managers are incentivized to grow the bureaucracies they oversee. Investors will not have to be convinced that their plans are sound, since taxpayers will be dragooned into investing whether they like it or not. Meanwhile, this favoritism will encourage other firms to expend scarce resources to obtain their own favorable treatment from government.

 

Unfortunately, the costs of government intervention in markets are often hidden. Rent control keeps rent low but it also reduces the quantity and quality of rentable units, exacerbating the housing crisis. Predictably, the public typically blames landlords rather than politicians for this outcome. Tariffs do little to eliminate bilateral trade deficits (a non-problem to begin with), but they invariably raise the cost of living. And when they do, tariff men blame the retailers and not their own tariffs.   

 

Government-backed firms can appear to turn a profit for years, even decades. They are often aided by private creditors willing to lend to them on good terms given their government backing. But this apparent success can be deceiving. One reason is that privileged firms tend to be less productive than non-privileged firms. More subtly, privileged firms draw resources away from more innovative and productive firms, making an entire economy more sclerotic over time.

 

A flourishing economy, as the Nobel Laureate Edmund Phelps explained in his 2013 book Mass Flourishing, “is an economy with a considerable degree of dynamism—that is, the will and the capacity and aspiration to innovate.” It is this dynamic competition that made the U.S. economy the envy of the world. But as open and competitive markets give way to hand-picked, taxpayer- and regulator-supported winners, Americans will end up with less innovation, slower growth, and ultimately a lower standard of living. To see how this might turn out, Phelps suggests we look to the stagnating corporatist economies of southern Europe.  

 

There are cultural and political consequences to these government-granted privileges, too. The more the government picks winners and losers, the less it can claim to serve the general welfare of all. And the more firms, industries, and products succeed on the basis of government favor, the easier it will be for future politicians to say, “You didn’t build that.”

 

None of what the DSA or Trump is offering is refreshing; it’s stale. It would be truly refreshing if policymakers recognized the difference between public and private interests and moved to disentangle them.