The Professional Fact-Check Is Dead

By Becket Adams

Sunday, September 06, 2026

 

The dedicated “fact-check” outfit is dead; it just doesn’t know it yet.

 

The crisis of professional “fact-checking” is not new. For more than 15 years, observers have watched with alarm as the genre degraded itself to serve partisan politics.

 

Yet little has been written about the discipline in its present state. Its original raison d’être long discarded, it lingers now as a zombie, ambling aimlessly in pursuit of mindless satiation.

 

Take Snopes, that relic of the early web that once existed to dismantle viral myths and spare the public from conspiracies, humorous hoaxes, and harmful falsehoods. Recently, it sought to calm concerns that the late Dolly Parton might have done something nice for Jews.

 

“Did Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library donate books to children in Israel?” asked a Snopes headline. The subhead reassured readers: “PJ Library, which provides free books to Jewish children, was inspired by Parton’s organization. But the two have no formal relationship.”

 

Phew! That was close! (This episode is funnier when one discovers that the article’s author, Nur Ibrahim, “started her career as an associate producer with Al Jazeera English” — because of course she did.)

 

One might ask: “What’s the problem? There was an online rumor, and Snopes disproved it. Isn’t that its function?”

 

As my friend Noam Blum explained, “‘Dolly Parton donated books to Israel’ would only be a statement worth debunking if its untruth was somehow harmful. The framing of ‘don’t worry, folks, she didn’t do it, and you can keep loving her’ is the problem.”

 

No one would feel compelled to correct the assertion that Dolly Parton prefers spring over autumn. Fact-checkers, especially of the Snopes variety, usually address the wild, the fantastical, or the defamatory. But for the modern-day Snopes, the claim that Parton’s foundation might have benefited Jewish children occupies the same moral universe as allegations that Katy Perry has a “penchant for cannibalism.”

 

The point is: Modern fact-checking groups exist largely to peddle this sort of junk, addressing mostly institutional interests or personal bugaboos, but rarely serving the public good.

 

Snopes is hardly unique; examples abound.

 

PolitiFact, which has been a mess for years, awarded its “Pants on Fire” rating to the hypothesis that Covid-19 was “not from nature” but “a man-made virus created in the lab.” (It later retracted its rating.)

 

By contrast, the outfit declined to penalize either Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) or then–Senator Kamala Harris when both repeated the objective lie that a police officer “murdered” Michael Brown.

 

PolitiFact also published a piece asserting: “Joe Biden didn’t name Kamala Harris ‘border czar.’”

 

Is that so?

 

“He tasked her with addressing the issues driving migration from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala,” the ruling explained. “U.S. Border security is the Homeland Security Secretary’s responsibility.”

 

Got it. Harris was not the “border czar”; she was merely tasked with overseeing the administration’s response to the immigration crisis.

 

By the way, it’s impossible not to notice that these fact-checks all point in one direction.

 

Speaking of which, FactCheck.org similarly insisted that the official overseeing the border situation was no “czar,” though she filled the role and commentators routinely applied the title until it turned politically toxic.

 

FactCheck.org likewise dismissed the Wuhan lab-leak theory as a “baseless conspiracy theory.”

 

Next, a personal favorite: The Washington Free Beacon reported in 2022 that the Biden administration was “set to fund the distribution of crack pipes to drug addicts as part of its plan to advance ‘racial equity.’” The reporting was accurate; a solid piece of shoe-leather journalism.

 

Yet FactCheck.org dismissed it as misinformation, presumably to spare the administration from embarrassment.

 

Then there are the in-house fact-checking divisions within major media outlets, which are somehow more inept than the standalone sites.

 

During and after the second 2024 presidential debate, fact-checkers dogpiled on Donald Trump for accusing Harris of supporting late-term abortion as well as taxpayer-funded sex-reassignment surgeries for detained immigrants.

 

On both counts, Trump was right; the fact-checkers were wrong.

 

Consider, too, when the Washington Post ran the headline: “Trump keeps claiming that the most dangerous cities in America are all run by Democrats. They aren’t.”

 

The critique hinged entirely on the fact that only 29 of the 32 cities with the highest violent crime rates had Democratic leadership.

 

Consider also when USA Today rated “true” the claim that Trump campaign apparel featured an “imperial eagle, a Nazi symbol.” The newspaper later added a clarification noting that “the eagle is a longtime U.S. symbol, too,” before changing the rating to “inconclusive.”

 

Don’t forget when the press fact-checkers collectively agreed that secret government surveillance is not “spying.”

 

Finally, consider Trump’s State of the Union address this year when he declared: “The revolution that began in 1776 has not ended. It still continues because the flame of liberty and independence still burns in the heart of every American patriot, and our future will be bigger, better, brighter, bolder, and more glorious than ever before.”

 

Not so fast, countered an Associated Press fact-check: “The American Revolution started the previous year, on April 19, 1775. . . . The colonies declared independence in 1776. It ended Sept. 3, 1783.”

 

The recurring theme across these examples is clear: The modern fact-checker exists less to inform the public than to score political points and protect partisan interests.

 

Few incidents illustrate this better than an August 2024 episode involving Taylor Lorenz, then a Washington Post technology reporter specializing in online “disinformation.” Lorenz posted a photo labeling President Biden a “war criminal.” When screenshots circulated, she panicked and claimed they were digital counterfeits fabricated by nameless enemies. She admitted later the photo was genuine, but only after the internet collectively rejected her saboteur theory.

 

Despite Lorenz’s blatantly fabricating a falsehood and spreading — ahem — online “disinformation,” NBC News “disinformation” reporter Brandy Zadrozny rushed to her defense, insisting that the true villains were those who exposed the conduct.

 

Forget asking “who watches the watchers?” What purpose do these “watchers” even serve?

 

If it were not already clear that media fact-checking has descended into a sort of rent-a-cop “public safety” gimmick that serves only niche political interests, the Washington Post’s decision to shutter its presidential lie tracker just in time for the Biden presidency should have settled the matter. If it’s not going to maintain a lie tracker for the guy who implied cannibals ate his uncle during World War II, then what’s the point? And if the shuttering of the lie tracker didn’t sell you on the ineffectuality and one-sidedness of modern-day fact-checking, consider CNN’s keeping its Canadian fact-checker locked in a cabinet, releasing him only to scrutinize Trump speeches.

 

All of which goes to the main idea: By allowing itself to be turned into a partisan attack dog, mainstream fact-checking has surrendered its credibility, thus rendering itself obsolete. If the discipline is defunct in major newsrooms, independent operations such as Snopes are equally doomed, and the Dolly Parton piece is a particularly pitiful reminder.

 

What purpose do these institutions serve today, when public trust in the media has cratered? What good are they when platforms such as X and Facebook already operate Community Notes and similar fact-check functions? Professional fact-checking is not merely in crisis; it is a propped-up corpse, maintained only to settle internal partisan squabbles and advance self-serving agendas.

 

Fact-check: Zero Pinocchios.

Bernie’s Total and Complete Shutdown of Everything

By Noah Rothman

Friday, September 04, 2026

 

No sooner did OpenAI announce that its agent, GPT-6 Astra, had won the industry-wide race to develop something approximating artificial general intelligence than Senator Bernie Sanders announced a plan to ban it.

 

“We need an immediate PAUSE on advanced AI development, and a permanent BAN on superintelligence,” the socialist senator from Vermont wrote, “an artificial mind smarter than any human, capable of operating independently beyond our control.” It would be “irresponsible for society to allow them to move forward and make these products even more advanced,” he cautioned. The “future of humanity” is in the balance.

 

Of course, Sanders was only using the news of OpenAI’s achievement as a hook to popularize his preexisting hostility toward AI. He and the far-left Representative Greg Casar co-sponsored the “Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act,” which would “permanently ban” proficient artificial intelligence while also expanding the government — indeed, creating a new cabinet-level federal agency — to suppress the development of AI products.

 

This latest push is a more direct assault on AI than his roundabout effort to cripple the industry by depriving it of the infrastructure on which it relies. “This process is moving very, very quickly, and we need to slow it down,” Sanders said late last year. That’s why he supported a national moratorium on the construction of data centers — to “give democracy a chance to catch up.”

 

When he and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sponsored a bill that would do just that, the two progressives argued that data centers and their construction “inflate electric bills in communities across the country.” Perhaps their haste was an attempt to outrun the data. Today, the preponderance of evidence indicates that, on net, data centers reduce consumer power bills.

 

That’s what one study of electricity prices between 2015 and 2024 found. “For every 10 percent increase in data center capacity, average household electricity prices fell by about 0.4 percent,” read one analysis of the study. “Between 2019 and 2024, the average household customer lived in a state where data center capacity grew by 160 percent. That lowered their electricity price by 6 percent.”

 

That’s not terribly surprising given the degree to which modern data centers are required to pay the costs that they generate, and local jurisdictions use “cost‑causation principles to prevent residential customers from subsidizing industrial load,” as one industry insider explained.

 

If America had listened to Sanders and AOC, Americans would have handcuffed themselves amid a global competition to be the first to realize the civilizational promise that AI holds for the future. Maybe that’s the whole point.

 

If that sounds uncharitable, survey Sanders’s record. He is congenitally hostile to the latest innovation, and a consistent proponent of the most naïve and outlandish claims against it.

 

“Any proposal to avert the climate crisis must include a full fracking ban on public and private lands,” Sanders argued in 2019. “Fracking is a danger to our water supply. It’s a danger to the air we breathe. It causes earthquakes. It’s highly explosive. Safe fracking is, like clean coal, pure fiction.”

 

This logic culminated in a 2020 bill Sanders sponsored alongside AOC and Senator Jeff Merkley: the “Ban Fracking Act.” Had it become law, the bill would have cost millions of jobs, increased consumer energy costs, and deprived the U.S. of the geostrategic benefits it now derives from its role as the world’s foremost exporter of liquefied natural gas.

 

Sanders’s arguments in favor of the bill were, of course, nonsense. Fracking doesn’t make your faucets explode or contaminate the water table, which is situated well above the deposits that horizontal drilling targets. It can produce tremors, not earthquakes, which are, at best, a nuisance. It’s not clear how fracking pollutes the air, unless he’s arguing against the combustion of fossil fuels.

 

Of course, he was. The Sanders-Merkley “Keep It in the Ground Act” would have performed exactly as advertised. As a law, it would have blocked “all future leases” for oil, gas, shale, and tar sands exploration on federal lands, offshore deposits, and in the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans. The bill was designed to codify his opportunistic call for “no new offshore drilling” — “not now, not ever” — amid the panic on the left inspired by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. After all, unless it’s a renewable energy technology, “it’s not good enough to be 99 percent safe.”

 

The following year, Sanders attempted to similarly exploit the disastrous earthquake and tsunami that contributed to Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster. The only proper response to that event, the senator insisted, was a “moratorium on all licensing and re-licensing” for new and existing nuclear reactors, repealing the law that shields the nuclear industry from frivolous lawsuits, and the withdrawal of funds earmarked for “more nuclear power plants.”

 

Fortunately, the country had the good sense to ignore Bernie. If the country had succumbed to his emotionally manipulative arguments, which almost always either exploit uncertainty around a new technology or anxiety over the prospect of exceedingly rare engineering failures, the country would have less technology and less power.

 

And they have the temerity to call this “progress.”

Revolutionary Bloodlust, Ghoulish Satisfaction

By Noah Rothman

Friday, September 04, 2026

 

I had the opportunity to sit down with Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade today to discuss the ghoulish satisfaction that one prominent filmmaker took from the entirely senseless murder of a young mother by a killer who was obviously in psychological distress.

 

There was nothing political about that murder, but some have tried to retroactively condition the random killing of a middle manager at the Bank of America into a bold strike against capitalism and Zionism.

 

The episode struck me as vividly similar to an incident I wrote about in my latest book, Blood & Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America, in which a depraved chorus took perverse delight in the murder of the real-estate-trust executive Wesley LePatner by an addled killer who thought he was meting out vengeance against the NFL.

 

From Blood & Progress:

 

“I’m shocked that it’s not more common,” one said of the slaughter. “Rest in Piss,” read a common refrain. “Worse things have happened to better people,” someone wrote of the deceased. Many who participated in this ghoulish frenzy were anonymous, but not all. “She worked for BlackRock, a company so evil it has been tied to the rising cost of real estate prices and rising homelessness,” said thirty-one-year-old salesman Ashton Deroy. “Wesley LePatner was a part of a decaying elite and a crumbling society. And we will remember her as a terrible person.” At one point, Deroy said only that LePatner had been “Luigi’d.”

 

“All they needed to know was that she was a symbol of the capitalist enterprise,” I wrote, “and her death brings us one step closer to the Revolution in which the rest of us will get our due comeuppance.”

 

The pattern is as terrifying as it is hard to miss.

 

Check out the segment here:

 

Is There Any Capitalist’s Murder That Isn’t Justified?

By James Lileks

Sunday, September 06, 2026

 

The stabbing death of a New York mother and Bank of America vice president by a mentally unstable woman has brought out the absolute finest in revolutionary commentary. From a Palestinian-American filmmaker who tweeted out a bat signal with Luigi Mangione’s face instead of America’s favorite gravel-voiced vigilante, to various commie-kids on X justifying the murder because the victim was involved in (waves hands) all the capitalism, we see how ethically wretched political systems corrupt the humanity of people who believe them.

 

The fact that she was a VP at a bank was reason enough to spit on the corpse, because her job surely consisted of meeting with poor hopeful people who sat across the desk twisting their caps in their calloused hands, begging the bank not to foreclose on their lean-to. She looked at them with a glacial expression and said no and then refused to validate parking for their pack mule. She did this all day. Her job title was probably Vice President in Charge of Maintaining Structural Poverty, so yes, those are precisely the people whose demise Luigi would have nodded with Che-like sagacity. Also, the Bank of America has ties to Israel, which means that when you deposit your check there, it’s instantly converted into a bomb designed to strew tetanus-infected nails in a Gaza preschool. Also, Bank of AMERICA. Say no more.

 

If we are to have societally sanctioned executions of the kulak class, it would be nice to have some definitions, so we aren’t surprised when we get shot or stabbed in the street by an agent of change. Let’s ask a young DSA woman who lives in a $1.7 million townhouse who does, and does not, deserve punishment:

 

Q. Can I work for a bank at all?

 

A. Only if you are oppressed by your position. If you are a janitor, you will be allowed to live, even though you are upholding white-supremacist notions of cleanliness, which use industrial poisons to disinfect instead of using indigenous ways of combatting bathroom tile scum. You are small and interchangeable, and hence a victim. Note: This does not apply to janitorial managers, who interface with bank management, and hence engage in validation of the capitalist system.

 

Q. What if I am promoted to shift manager? If I subvert the system from the inside by appropriating bathroom tissue and selling it to underserved communities, can I live?

 

A. Yes, but you will have to explain this — quickly — to the person who has come to stab you, and you cannot make a profit over $5 per day. If you make between $2.50 and $4.99, they will be permitted to stab you in a non-vital location.

 

Q. I am a teller at a bank, and I hate the Zionist occupation entity. Will I be permitted to be un-stabbed?

 

A. You are not high-priority, but if stabbed, it will be noted that you were working for a Zionist-supporting capitalist structure when you could’ve quit and spent your days engaged in meaningful change, such as dashing quarts of red paint on the bank’s windows.

 

Q. I am the senior manager of the New Rochelle branch of the bank. Can you guarantee that I will not be shot in the head in front of my small children?

 

A. No. If you did not want to be executed in front of your family, you wouldn’t be a banker at all but would be organizing a theatrical group in New Rochelle to protest capitalism through the prism of Queer Drag Polycule Pan-racial Struggles. It’s quite telling that you hold up the idea of “family” as a shield against revolutionary direct action. Your very participation in cis-normative nuclear-family formation delegitimizes your insistence on perpetuating your own existence.

 

Q. No, seriously, I just don’t want my kids to see me get shot in the head.

 

A. Well, I want a pony. Actually, I don’t, since the relationship between man and horse has been historically exploitative, the exception being indigenous adaptation of symbiotic co-existence with the Equine Community to struggle against 19th-century settler-colonialism. But if I am allocated a pony after the revolution, the relationship will be grounded in an acknowledgment of this historical injustice, the oats will be sourced from co-ops, and the groomers and stablehands who take care of my pony will be repositioned former employees of right-wing think tanks. As a lesson to all who think they can change their views without being held accountable for past opinions, Bill Kristol will be in charge of removing manure.

 

Q. No, please, I will buy you a pony. I just don’t want my kids to see me get shot in the head.

 

A. You should have thought of that when I was a young girl at camp and all the other girls were good at dressage and I wasn’t, because my parents could only afford to send me to riding lessons on rented horses instead of getting me one of my own. That’s when I learned how deep the systematic injustices truly are.

 

Hope this helps.

El-Sayed and the Anti-Anti-Discrimination Democrats

By Seth Mandel

Friday, September 04, 2026

 

JNS reports on a forthcoming Cardozo Law Review paper on the developing “anti-Zionist” exception to civil-rights law. The attempts to extend civil-rights protections to Jews on campus have been undercut by a loophole: Some courts have decided that if you just say “Zionist” instead of “Jew”—or even in addition to it—you can discriminate against Jews by claiming you are merely against Jews’ “political” opinions.

 

Jon Michaels of UCLA and Matthew Segal of Tufts will be publishing the paper next year. Their case study is Torres v. Carlson, in which Columbia University employees sued after having been taken hostage in a university building by pro-Hamas activists. The activists allegedly called Torres and Wilson “Jew-lover,” “Jew-worker” and “Zionists.”

 

A federal judge dismissed the suit, JNS notes, “reasoning in part that anti-Zionism could not establish anti-Jewish discrimination, because Jews disagree about Zionism and because anti-Zionist rhetoric constitutes political speech.”

 

The case highlights just how absurd the legal movement to withhold rights from Jews has become: Call someone a “Jew-worker,” and successfully claim you were just being “anti-Zionist.”

 

Even without the “Jew-worker” taunts, this legal blind spot was always silly. It’s usually used to keep Israelis out of various campus clubs and classes. But “Israeli” is a national origin, and civil-rights law prohibits discrimination by “national origin.” Excluding Israelis because you want their country to cease to exist is a clear violation of the statute. You don’t have to convince anyone that the bigot is an anti-Semite because they are already admitting discrimination according to national origin. And if national origin discrimination can be protected by claiming it is political, then that part of the law is a dead letter.

 

Some libertarians might oppose antidiscrimination law on principle, but the campus activists aren’t among them. These bigots want civil-rights law to remain airtight except for Jews. They believe the protections should still apply to all non-Jews.

 

That is where Abdul El-Sayed falls as well on this issue. This week, the House passed a bill, written by Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer and Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx, that builds on existing U.S. antidiscrimination law. This bill prohibits federal funding of colleges that discriminate against academic partnerships with Israeli institutions, though it does not penalize speech or expression. It is similar to previous legislation that enforces federal antidiscrimination law among federal contractors.

 

Most Democrats voted against it anyway. El-Sayed (who is running for the Senate, not House) commented on the bill with the following incoherent assembly of words:

 

“Today, rather than focus on the price of gas, the price of groceries, ending the war, or stopping the trade war, Congress spent its time declaring this. ‘Dear colleges that receive American taxpayer money: We will take away that American taxpayer money if you decide to keep it from going to Israel.’ Aside from being blatantly unconstitutional, it’s wild. Why is it wrong to want our taxpayer money spent here to provide for schools here instead of being sent somewhere else?”

 

Because there is no bill in existence that matches El-Sayed’s description, one can safely assume he is not a principled libertarian opponent of antidiscrimination law. He is an opponent of saying things that are true.

 

Of course this bill doesn’t force anyone to send taxpayer money to Israel, as El-Sayed alleges. But it does prohibit the use of federal dollars to discriminate against Jews as part of an anti-Semitic campaign orchestrated by foreign Arab governments. Specifically, much of this precedent is built on decades-old prohibitions against forcing American companies to abide by an Arab League boycott.

 

U.S. laws have been countering this violation of American sovereignty for half a century. One would think El-Sayed and his fellow America Firsters on either side of the aisle would support U.S. companies under attack from authoritarian states. One would be wrong. Because just as with the “anti-Zionism” exception, these politicians and activists believe they have a right to violate the rights of other Americans.

The Great Appeaser

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, September 04, 2026

 

If I release a rabid monkey on a leash into a museum, and it smashes vases, bites tourists, and flings poo at the Mona Lisa, I can’t claim I’m not responsible when I choose not to tug on the monkey’s chain—especially when I tell the monkey lovers: “A vote for the monkey is a vote for me and my party.”

 

Let me explain.

 

The other day, CNN’s Manu Raju asked House Speaker Mike Johnson whether voters should hold Johnson partly responsible for the Iran war dragging on.

 

“On Iran, you said repeatedly that this war was going to be over soon. You said that this would be a temporary blip on gas prices,” Raju said. Six months later “[p]eople are getting hurt still at the pump. Should the American people not also judge you on your projections here that were clearly off base?”

 

Johnson replied: “Manu, that is one of the stupidest questions you’ve ever asked.”

 

“Why is that stupid?” Raju asked.

 

“I have nothing to do with the prosecution of the war across the globe,” Johnson insisted.

 

After some crosstalk, Raju replied, “You are—you are selling this to the American public, are you not?”

 

“So, should the House speaker be held responsible for the duration of a military conflict around the globe?” Johnson responded. “You answer that question.”

 

Raju didn’t, but I’ll take a stab.

 

There are a couple of ways to come at this. Let’s start with the constitutional stuff.

 

The official—congressionally authorized—Constitution Annotated has a section called “Overview of Congressional War Powers.”

 

The mere fact that the Constitution grants war powers is kind of inconvenient for Johnson, but we’ll get back to that. Among the powers granted to Congress are the powers to declare war, raise and support armies, provide a navy, make rules governing the armed forces, regulate captures, and—most consequentially in the modern era—appropriate or withhold the money necessary to continue wars. I’m open to some nuance at the margins, but broadly speaking, these powers are solely granted to Congress.

 

Now, it’s certainly true that Congress has been delegating a lot of its authorities to the executive branch for a very long time. But Johnson is very, very fond of touting himself as not just an expert on the Constitution, but a faithful servant of it. “My background is in interpretation of the Constitution, and I am a textualist,” he told The New Yorker in 2020. “We all should have an interest in these very specific clauses of the Constitution being followed.”

 

As part of his explanation for why Joe Biden was “the worst president in American history,” he complained that as speaker, he was denied access to the president to consult on national security.

 

“I became speaker in October 2023, and there were all sorts of big national security concerns going on,” he told Bari Weiss in 2025. “I started requesting a meeting with the president because, you know, I’m kind of old school. I’m a constitutional law guy. The speaker of the House should be able to talk to the president, especially in times of great national interest and calamity.”

 

The “Rule of Law” section on Johnson’s official website says, “Each branch of government must adhere to the Constitution … Congress must faithfully perform its constitutional responsibility of oversight.”

 

So much for his own stated views of his responsibilities. And I think we’ve covered the text of the Constitution well enough. Let’s move on to history and tradition, as the “old constitutional law nerds” might say.

 

Henry Clay was one of the greatest statesmen of the 19^th century: He served as a senator, representative, secretary of state, and speaker of the House. He helped create both the Whig and Republican parties. He was so respected that he was elected straight to the speakership, despite being a freshman. He was only 34. As speaker, he—at least as much as President James Madison—drove the public effort to declare war on the British. He seeded the relevant committees with fellow war hawks, and under his leadership Congress declared war for the first time.

 

Fast forward to 1847, the now elder statesman Clay was opposed and horrified by President James Polk’s war with Mexico. He explained that while the War of 1812 had been “a War of National defence, required for the vindication of the National rights and honor, and demanded by the indignant voice of the people. … How totally variant is the present War! This is no War of Defence, but one unnecessary and of offensive aggression.” Sound familiar?

 

Now, Polk did get a declaration of war (of sorts) from Congress, but what offended Clay and many others was that Polk had, in their view, started a war and then got Congress to ratify a fait accompli.

 

Clay argued that it didn’t really matter how we got into the war; Congress still had a lot of say about how the war should be conducted, what the war aims should be, and how it would be paid for. Alas, that doesn’t sound very familiar.

 

“Either Congress, or the President, must have the right of determining upon the objects for which a War shall be prosecuted,” Clay said. “There is no other alternative. If the president possess it and may prosecute it for objects against the will of Congress, where is the difference between our Free Government and that of any other nation which may be governed by an absolute Czar, Emperor, or King?” (Emphasis added.)

 

He continued:

 

…in expounding the constitution, we ought to keep constantly in view the nature and structure of our free Government, and especially the great object of the Convention in taking the war-making power out of the hands of a single man and placing it in the safer custody of the representatives of the whole nation. The desirable reconciliation between the two powers is effected by attributing to Congress the right to declare what shall be the objects of war, and to the President the duty of endeavoring to obtain those objects by the direction of the national force and by diplomacy.

 

…

 

I conclude, therefore, Mr. President and fellow-citizens, with entire confidence, that Congress has the right, either at the beginning or during the prosecution of any War, to decide the objects and purposes for which it was proclaimed, or for which it ought to be continued. And, I think it is the duty of Congress by some deliberate and authentic act, to declare for what objects the present War shall no longer be prosecuted.

 

History and tradition don’t begin and end with Clay, of course.

 

In 1983, Speaker Tip O’Neill personally negotiated with President Ronald Reagan on the size and duration of a Marine deployment to Lebanon. O’Neill had told Reagan, “No way, no way, will I give you a blank check.” In 1991, Speaker Tom Foley insisted that President George H.W. Bush had to come to Congress and ask permission for the first Gulf War, and Bush agreed. In 2002, Speaker Dennis Hastert and Minority Leader Dick Gephardt sponsored the authorization of the use of force in Iraq again.

 

The Spanish-American war is a fun exception to the point I’ve been making, but not in a way that helps Johnson. The Constitution, after all, doesn’t grant the war powers of Congress to the speaker, it grants them to Congress. Speaker Thomas Brackett Reed—dubbed “Czar Reed” for his tight control of the House—was opposed to war with Spain. The problem? The actual Congress wasn’t. He—and the president—were ultimately forced to follow Congress’ lead.

 

Let’s just say that Johnson’s incredulity is not credible coming out of the mouth of a “textualist” Constitution-thumper.

 

So let’s offer a political answer to Johnson’s question. Recently, the speaker was plugging next week’s “midterm convention”: “The president’s going to look right in the camera and say, ‘I am on the ballot,’ okay, because even though his name isn’t, right, his administration, his legacy, the American First agenda is, we’ve got to get people to turn out.”

 

So, which is it? Is the president’s conduct of the war—and everything else—the standard by which voters should hold Congress accountable or not? If the speaker and the House shouldn’t be “held responsible” for the war and its economic consequences, why say that this congressional election is a referendum on Trump?

 

If Johnson and the Republicans have turned themselves into a rubber stamp for whatever Trump does, then they are politically responsible for what Trump does. They can’t have it both ways. They can’t refuse to use even the slightest bit of their constitutional authority—which is another way of describing a clear refusal to live up to their constitutional obligations—and then say they have no accountability for what the president lawlessly or unconstitutionally does.

 

Johnson the “constitutionalist” is simply a fraud, and Johnson the politician is simply a coward. He wants Republicans to be a mere extension of Trump’s Caesarian authority when it comes to MAGA voters, and he wants to be exonerated wholly from the consequences of that choice in the eyes of every other voter.

 

Clay was known as “the Great Compromiser” because he expertly used his power and knowledge of the Constitution to defuse sectional crises. Johnson should go down in history as the Great Appeaser, because no speaker in history has so self-gelded the job and institution.

 

I really wanted to work in some wordplay about how we’ve gone from the statesmanlike “feats of Clay,” to Johnson’s “feet of clay.” The problem is that “feet of clay” comes from the Bible and is supposed to mean “a hidden, serious weakness or character flaw in someone who is greatly admired, respected, or powerful.” And that’s the hitch. Not only is Johnson not greatly admired or respected, his weaknesses and character flaws are not a concealed bug. They are the defining feature of his speakership.

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.