How to Destroy a Lesbian Bar

By Helen Lewis

Friday, September 25, 2026

 

Way back in the wilds of 2013, I organized an event on feminism at a public venue in London. I was then the online editor of a left-wing magazine, and we had some of the best feminist columnists around. What a chance to show them off! A warm and supportive evening to celebrate a social movement that was then having a resurgence! Can you guess where this is going?!

 

I remembered that event as I read The Boston Globe’s extraordinarily viral account this week of a meltdown at the Last Ditch Bar and Arts Venue in Greenfield, Massachusetts. The lesbian bar strayed from the path of righteousness—brace yourselves—by announcing late last month that it would go mask-optional on Saturday nights. (“Greenfield hasn’t reported any COVID cases in more than two months,” the Globe’s Annalisa Quinn notes.) The bar was deluged with complaints that it was engaged in a “mass disabling event” that would kill its patrons, and was “no better than a fascist.” Even worse, some people involved were probably white women. One Instagram user, an artist who goes by Soe Noire, accused the owners of flirting with eugenics and “putting profit over people.”

 

Now, my event didn’t quite generate that level of take-me-to-the-fainting-couch backlash. But we were besieged online by a squadron of nitpickers, who started from the position that they hated the event and worked backwards to find out why. Deviously, I had foiled them by ensuring that the panel was racially mixed, and by including a transgender woman, foreclosing the promising “cis white bitches” line of attack then popular in feminist circles. The hall was wheelchair-accessible and had a hearing loop for deaf attendees, Gaza had not yet emerged as a purity test, and COVID was not even a twinkle in a diseased bat’s eye. Conceding that the event had passed every intersectional test, the detractors fell back on the great constant: capitalism. Although all of the panelists had waived their speaking fee, we were charging £5 (about $6.50) a ticket, to cover the room rental. Was I not aware, one tweeter asked, that £5 was the cost of a meal to a single mother? Checkmate. The crime had been found, and I was guilty of being a privileged idiot, rolling around in my feminist loot like Scrooge McDuck.

 

The event went ahead, but you never knew when one person’s gripe would derail everything; what we had envisioned as a warm, community-focused discussion instead felt like volunteering for a sprint through a minefield. (In the end, none of the haters turned up, and it was a pleasant evening.) This was the moment when I realized that social media had empowered drive-by whinings by sociopaths, and that progressive politics had allowed them to cloak themselves in righteousness. What might once have been recognized as narcissism, jealousy, the result of a personality disorder—or just plain boredom—was now transfigured into “calling out” those who had erred. The people pointing fingers usually did nothing themselves, apart from complaining, which had the happy side effect that they could never be accused of committing an impure act.

 

***

 

My experience pales beside that of Jackie Matellian, the 26-year-old proprietor of the Last Ditch, who, according to the Globe, had run up $50,000 in debt and had been sleeping in her truck as a result of the business’s troubles. She tried to do everything right: The bar was declared to be a safe space for the unhoused, and a no-go zone for police. She and her former co-owners (one of whom uses it/its pronouns) waived the cover charge for anyone who couldn’t pay; more and more patrons took advantage. After the backlash to the change in the mask policy, the bar apologized, explaining that the mask-optional night would help members of the queer community who needed to lip-read. None of this appeased the critics, one of whom felt the bar was insufficiently devoted to “revolutionary praxis,” which is like normal praxis but the discussions you have about it go around and around forever. “How are we supposed to be ‘connected in the revolution’ if we are spreading disease to one another? Nah,” Soe Noire posted.

 

At this point, Matellian should have realized that you can’t negotiate with terrorists, even ones with long COVID. Instead, though, she optimistically subjected herself to a struggle session—sorry, a mediation-and-accountability process—so that everyone could air their grievances.

 

The podcast Blocked and Reported, which broke the story of the Last Ditch earlier this month, obtained audio recordings of this meeting, in which pronoun declarations were required. As Katie Herzog, a co-host of the podcast, observed, the participants included “two people named after plants” (Sage and Moss; a third was named Yams). Those attending on Zoom were relentlessly hostile, demanding to know the mediator’s race and whether they would be institutionalized for disclosing any mental-health conditions to her. One of the Last Ditch volunteers told the meeting that the bar was $3,900 in debt and needed to pay within days, but Soe Noire—a self-declared lesbian using he/him pronouns—changed the subject to how the policy change made him feel unsafe. The Last Ditch had failed to uphold “COVID-cautious principles, anti-racism, or revolution,” Noire said. (Reminder: This is a bar. You know, the place where you go to drink beer.)

 

Most people might be surprised that arguments over masking are still so febrile years after even cautious blue-state schools resumed in-person teaching. But across the United States, some small subcultures live as though it’s still April 2020. That’s because pandemic protections and mitigations quickly became left-coded, to the extent that Donald Trump now has to pretend he didn’t oversee the successful vaccine program. In this context, perma-masking is every bit as much a political symbol as wearing a MAGA hat or a keffiyeh.

 

Anxiety and depression rates spiked during the pandemic, and some vulnerable people have never really recovered from the effects of physical isolation and the sense of oppressive dread they felt during months when thousands of Americans died. On the right, these emotions drive people toward conspiracism about Chinese bioweapons and false flags and “mass formation psychosis,” the idea that gullible populations were hypnotized into accepting shutdown measures. On the left, these anxieties coincide with a political critique—that Americans and their predatory private-health-care system do not care about disabled people. Masking is a visible symbol of resistance to this injustice, as well as a practical measure against the spread of disease. Notably, too, self-reported long COVID is disproportionately high among trans and bi Americans. Unless science uncovers measurable respiratory differences between bisexuals and the rest of the population, one explanation is that more LGBTQ Americans live in social contexts in which vague, unpleasant symptoms such as brain fog are interpreted as long COVID.

 

The political division helps explain why masking is portrayed in certain progressive enclaves as a way of resisting eugenics. But it doesn’t quite explain the boiling fury of the people demanding masks at the Last Ditch. At this point, let me also bring in the word mimophant. This is a term for someone who has the hide of an elephant when criticizing others, but the delicate skin of a mimosa flower when criticized themselves. At the mediation meeting, Soe Noire, who had previously performed at the bar but was otherwise not deeply involved with it, was extremely attentive to his own feelings of pain. He also groused that while other speakers were limited to two minutes apiece, Matellian—who had faced sniping from all sides for more than an hour—chose to “go overtime and cry for three minutes.”

 

Anyone who has spent time in dysfunctional activist spaces will be familiar with this dynamic: The designated target is expected to soak up endless criticism in silence, or even express gratitude for the correction. If the target gets upset, they can be accused of “centering their own pain” at the expense of the marginalized. Robin DiAngelo’s best-selling White Fragility has a whole section about the tendency of certain women to weep in such circumstances, a phenomenon she dismisses as “white tears.” The overall effect of this approach is like when a school bully slams someone into the lockers and then taunts them for crying. Oh, the widdle baby got hurt, did they? This is sadism disguised as activism.

 

The audio reveals that Noire followed up on his complaint by explaining that “as a trans person, there’s a lot of emotional and physical labor that goes into this.” (The physical labor of—whining?) Returning for another meeting would expose Noire to “harm.” In the second round of complaints, Noire demanded a complete change of leadership in the bar’s management team, and concluded: “Pay me.”

 

***

 

What followed my own feminist-event drama was a political education. Gradually, my friendship group began to pass around articles that made sense of the patterns we were seeing. In a 2012 blog post, the writer Matt Bruenig described what he called “purity leftism.” “When purity leftists do actions and organizing, their interest is not in reducing oppression as much as it is in reducing their own participation in it,” he wrote. “Above all else, they want to be able to say that they are not oppressing, not that oppression has ended.” Such people were prone, Bruenig said, to “self-marginalizing lifestyles and costumes.” A year later, he offered another useful phrase: identitarian deference, or the presumption that “privileged individuals should defer to the opinions and views of oppressed individuals.”

 

Since then, I have become alert to all of the red flags of purity leftism: complaints about “white tears,” the sadism of the get-up-so-I-can-hit-you-again tendency, the use of jargon such as praxis while fretting that the conversation is dominated by the privileged, and the hyperbolic assertions of nebulous “harm.” (Rhetorical inflation has gotten so bad that everything is a genocide.)

 

These gambits work because accommodating the oppressed and less fortunate is a social good. Public venues should have wheelchair ramps, and you shouldn’t go to the children’s cancer ward with a terrible head cold. What the purity leftists exploit is a reluctance to say how much accommodation is enough. If masking was desirable at the height of the COVID pandemic, it must still be appropriate now—and anyone who says otherwise doesn’t care about the disabled. If respecting people with gender dysphoria is a sign of tolerance, then no one should question whether calling a human being “it” is reasonable or progressive. Communities that talk like this are very attached to the concept of “mutual aid,” but some people suck up a lot of care and support without ever putting a shift in to help others. Good-natured herbivorous lefties are easy marks for narcissists and mimophants.

 

It’s noteworthy that the Last Ditch meltdown was caused, ultimately, by the pandemic of 2020. The coronavirus and wokeness were two novel pathogens. Our physical immune system didn’t know how to react to COVID, while our social immune system adapted slowly to the speed with which activists organized on social media. Several of the cancellations I covered in that period would not have played out the same way without Slack groups, Zoom meetings, and Twitter threads—forums that allowed bad actors to dominate the discussion, and prevented the broad mass of reasonable people from realizing that they were in the majority. I’ve lost count of the number of times a small clique of whiners so hijacked a left-wing event that the organizers eventually conceded defeat: One fond memory is of the fat-positive club that was forced to apologize for playing the song “Spice Up Your Life” because one of the lyrics refers to a “yellow man in Timbuktu.” The situation at the Last Ditch is very similar. Soe Noire rampaged through Greenfield’s LGBTQ community like a dose of the clap.

 

The most interesting aspect of the Last Ditch saga has been the reaction. The story drove 1,000 subscriptions to the Globe, and generated more traffic than any other article the paper had published this year, according to Semafor’s Max Tani. Even on Bluesky, the spiritual home of perma-masking, the response settled somewhere around “the pandemic broke people’s brains,” with the occasional interjection that queer communities should not air their grievances in public, for the sake of the movement. Soe Noire alone is unrepentant, posting on Instagram that “the antimaskers and randos coming in to give their useless two cents, you might wanna read a book.”

 

In the 13 years since I got mobbed for charging £5 to attend an event, and the six years since the beginning of the pandemic, our social immune system has learned to adapt. Even the 83-year-old Democratic ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, Rosa DeLauro, has been joking online about taking a tour group to the bar. The Last Ditch’s future might be precarious, but so is the future of the social-justice protection racket.

Check Your Palestine Privilege

By Seth Mandel

Wednesday, September 23, 2026

 

There is a moment in the lifespan of every cause célèbre when the hard truth must be faced: The privileged place to be is in the shoes of the underprivileged.

 

Call it the Dolezal Moment.

 

Rachel Dolezal, you’ll remember, was the white woman who was exposed as having pretended to be black so she could run an NAACP chapter, work her way up the academic-administrative ladder, and benefit from minority hiring practices.

 

It was a cultural moment precisely because it brought to public attention the fact that in certain important institutional pipelines, it was better for white people to claim to be black.

 

Well, I give you Hannah Gann. From the Philadelphia Inquirer:

 

A Philadelphia teacher is being called the ‘Palestinian Rachel Dolezal’ after being caught lying about her background — a deception that has stirred strong emotions in education and racial justice organizing circles.

 

Hannah Gann, a veteran Philadelphia School District educator, has claimed at times to be Palestinian and Black, and was so outspoken a mobile billboard once parked outside her school calling her ‘Philadelphia’s Leading Antisemite.’

 

The problem: “Gann, it turns out, is white and Jewish, and lied about her identity for years.”

 

Palestinian identity is the golden ticket in the West at the moment. Palestine is the omnicause—the one issue everyone must dedicate themselves to at the expense of all others. In the Democratic Party, the Palestinian omnicause is the only litmus test for political participation.

 

Culturally, Palestinian clout is just as strong. Want relevance in the music world? Say “free Palestine” until you’re blue in the face while wrapped in a keffiyeh. Want more acting jobs? Javier Bardem says the answer is a single-minded public obsession with smearing Israel as a genocidal state and, of course, wearing the keffiyeh.

 

If you want a Pulitzer, write pro-Palestinian essays. If you want an Academy Award, make a pro-Palestinian film. Want the Special Jury Prize in Venice? Make a piece of easily debunked agitprop about Israelis killing Palestinians. Want a book deal? Write a novel about Being Palestinian Today. Want fame in the art world? You know the drill.

 

And, hey, want tenure? How quickly can you erase Israel from a map and a syllabus?

 

Plus, it’s a get-out-of-jail-free card in many jurisdictions. Want those charges dropped? Say you did it “for Palestine.” In the U.S., you can still get away with a whole assortment of crimes, though if you kill a Jew in broad daylight while yelling about Palestine you might have to spend a year in the slammer.

 

It’s true, none of this actually frees Palestine. But in America, only when one is “for Palestine” can one be truly free.

 

And so Hannah Gann was living the new American dream:

 

Gann, who teaches at the Workshop School, a project-based Philadelphia School District high school, was front and center in education activism work after the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel.

 

In 2024, for instance, Gann participated in a West Philadelphia ‘teach-in’ on ‘scholasticide’ — the destruction of educational infrastructure — in Gaza. Her biography for that event identified her as a Palestinian American…

 

According to a document compiled by the Philly Palestine Coalition and obtained by The Inquirer, Gann has made frequent references to Palestinian family, including a Palestinian-born grandfather whom the PPC found was actually born in Baltimore, citing historical draft records and her great-grandfather’s U.S. naturalization papers. Her family abroad live in Israel, according to the group’s extensive, footnoted research.

 

In fairness, who doesn’t have a Palestinian grandfather these days? Forget the coalminer grandfather or the mailman father, if you want to run for office get yourself a nakba backstory.

 

Just make sure you cover your tracks. Hannah Gann didn’t, and when her Palestinian and Palestinian-adjacent friends and colleagues investigated her, the story quickly unraveled. The Racial Justice Organizing Committee and Philly Educators for Palestine asked Gann to “publicly acknowledge that she is a white woman of Jewish heritage and an Israeli settler family,” which she promptly did on social media.

 

Now she must atone for her sins. But can you blame her for trying? She went to an Ivy League university, where presumably she learned the hard way that being “white and Jewish” is no way to go through life. She wanted a taste of real privilege. Such is what it means to be a victim in America today: Suddenly, all the doors are open to you.

 

 

Is Iran’s War Coming to the West?

By Mike Nelson

Monday, September 28, 2026

 

Early Sunday morning, five men were arrested in England as they were preparing to attack RAF Fairford, a British military base that hosts several hundred U.S. military personnel and aircraft—notably some of the B-1 and B-52 bombers that have conducted strikes on Iran. The specifics of the planned attack are not yet known, in large part because the quick reaction of British counterterrorism police—who intercepted and arrested the men before they could carry out the attack—meant that the explosives-laden vans the men were driving never got to their intended destinations.

 

The public does not yet know the identities of the suspects, the content of any statements they’ve made to police, and what materials may have been recovered from the suspects’ vehicles and residences, but British police are said to be investigating Iranian involvement in the foiled attack. And we should not be surprised if the evidence, when it is available, does point toward Iran. As military and economic pressures increase on the Iranian regime, and as fewer options present themselves to attack U.S. forces in the Middle East, Iran is likely to expand the war—in terms of target types, geographic location, and means of attack. These kinds of external operations are also in keeping with Iran’s long history of gray-zone, asymmetric, and terror attacks against Iran’s adversaries all over the globe.

 

Throughout the 1980s and ‘90s, Iran conducted assassinations throughout Europe, killing dozens of dissidents and opponents of the revolutionary regime across France, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, and Austria. In 1980, Iran even successfully assassinated a target within the United States, killing Iranian exile Ali Akbar Tabatabaei outside his home in Bethesda, Maryland. More recently, in 2011, Iran recruited conspirators and agents in the United States to conduct an attack targeting the then-Saudi ambassador to the U.S., Adel al-Jubeir. The plot involved attempts to recruit a member of a Mexican drug gang to place a bomb in a Washington, D.C., restaurant, which would be detonated when al-Jubeir dined there. The plot was ultimately foiled when the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration intercepted Iran’s efforts to recruit a Mexican gang member. Iran has also not given up on its desire to assassinate President Donald Trump and several other members of his first presidential administration for their roles in ordering the killing of Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard’s elite Quds Force.

 

The specifics of the attack on RAF Fairford are not yet known, meaning its intended purpose is unclear. This could have been a largely symbolic attack intended to further drive down popularity for an already unpopular war in advance of the U.S. midterm elections. It could have also been specifically targeted to destroy or degrade a critical portion of America’s integrated offensive capabilities. The act of dropping bombs on Iranian targets is the end result of an incredibly complex, global chain of military power that integrates not only the aircrews and airframes dropping the bombs, but everything from the intelligence analysts and collection assets that identify and develop the targets to the logisticians who move the fuel and ordnance required for the attacks and the cooks and medics who provide life support. Targeting any part of the vast, interconnected chain of capabilities could disrupt the U.S. military’s ability to meet our planned operational efforts. This attack could have been targeted toward the aircraft, fuel depots, ammunition storage facilities, or even aircrews themselves—all of which are essential to the American military’s capacity to project air power over Iran.

 

This attack also highlights another topic that has been front of mind in the war. If the attack had been successful, not only would it likely have destroyed American assets and taken American lives, but it likely would have killed British military personnel or civilians. Even with the attack intercepted, 85 British homes in the vicinity of the vehicles have been evacuated as a precaution. In other words, even if our allies do not decide to actively join the fight against Iran, Iran has shown that it is willing to target countries that merely host U.S. forces engaged in the conflict. Iran has displayed this inclination consistently throughout the conflict, launching attacks against Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. This attack would seem to be a continuation of that targeting methodology, wherein Iran views the locations from which U.S. forces launch as legitimate targets. In this light, it is understandable that Italy and Spain may have been reluctant to allow access, basing, and overflight authority for U.S. forces conducting offensive operations out of fear that doing so could have opened them to Iranian attacks.

 

The Trump administration has become mired in this conflict in part because of a lack of planning and clarity on both the things that we can control, such as our goals and reasoning for the conflict, and the things we cannot, such as the action of the enemy. But while Iranian responses may be outside American control, they should not be outside of American imagination, anticipation, and preparation. Iran’s disruption of maritime traffic in the Strait of Hormuz was fully predictable prior to a conflict, yet the president claims to have been taken off guard by the Iranian response. We may now be facing another round of Iranian escalation, the targets, means, and locations of which are less easy to anticipate and, therefore, require the vigilance and preparation the administration has been uninterested in providing to date.

 

The president and his administration must begin to communicate more earnestly and effectively about what is going on in the war against Iran, what the U.S. military is doing, and what we are hoping to achieve as the conflict stretches on. If Iran does conduct successful attacks against Americans outside the Middle East—be they kinetic or cyber, aimed at military targets or civilians—the administration will need to answer difficult questions about how such an attack could happen in a conflict in which the president has already declared victory dozens of times.

 

Regardless of the Trump administration’s statements otherwise, we are still very much at war—a war that has not been resolved through overwhelming military force or through diplomatic maneuvering. Until the conflict is resolved, Americans should not be surprised when Iran seeks to harm the U.S. and its interests. The administration was correct in characterizing the Iranian regime as an evil supporter of terrorism across the globe. It would do well to start believing its own perspective and preparing accordingly.

Republicans Facing the High Political Cost of Tariffs

National Review Online

Monday, September 28, 2026

 

As Republican prospects in this fall’s midterms deteriorate, the pre-criminations have already started. Many are eager to blame President Trump’s decision to launch a war on Iran, and indeed, the increase in diesel and gas prices has been politically brutal. But another piece of the puzzle is the incredible political damage done by President Trump’s sweeping unilateral tariffs.

 

Trump completed a stunning comeback in 2024 in large part because soaring inflation during Joe Biden’s presidency led the majority of Americans to conclude they were better off economically during Trump’s first term. While federal government intervention rarely works to bring down prices, it can certainly make things more expensive. And in raising tariffs, Trump took an action that, by design, made many goods more expensive for consumers.

 

A major part of the case for tariffs was that for decades, our dependence on buying goods abroad has shrunk the industrial base at home, hollowing out towns and moving people away from stable factory jobs to the uncertainty of a gig economy. The thesis was that by raising the cost of foreign goods, the government could reverse this process, convincing businesses to manufacture more goods domestically.

 

We have always been skeptical of these claims. But even if the protectionists were right on all points, the transformation of the economy they sought was bound to take more than one election cycle. Businesses make decisions such as where to manufacture products years in advance. Moving manufacturing from overseas back to the U.S. requires planning, building, and a massive investment. Businesses were never going to make decisions like this in reaction to a policy that not only could change with the next president but has also wildly vacillated during this presidency. Trump, often on social media, spent the early months of his presidency arbitrarily announcing he was raising or lowering tariffs, with his policies often fluctuating based on which foreign leader he was feuding with on a given day. He triggered an unnecessary rupture with Canada, which is rich in natural resources and has long been a key partner. He also imposed tariffs with shoddy legal reasoning that the Supreme Court rejected.

 

The result of this erratic policy is that Americans have felt the pinch from tariffs, which have led them to trust Republicans less on their handling of cost-of-living issues. President Trump’s repeated insistence that foreigners pay the full burden of tariffs and that affordability issues are a “hoax” has understandably fallen on deaf ears. And this sticker shock has not been offset by benefits from increased American manufacturing. The manufacturing sectors that are doing the best tend to be the ones least protected by tariffs.

 

Additionally, many states with competitive House and Senate races have been hit by tariffs that hurt consumers and businesses dependent on overseas parts and materials, as well as by retaliatory tariffs limiting their export businesses. Ohio, Michigan, Texas, North Carolina, and Iowa are all examples, and tariffs have played a prominent role in those races as well as close House races.

 

Aside from being bad economic policy and a political own goal, all of this is yet another reminder of the wisdom of the Founders, who believed that major changes needed to be approved first by the people, through the House, and then by the states, in the Senate. Trump couldn’t be bothered to try to win the approval of either, so he acted on his own whim, and Republicans increasingly look like they will pay a hefty political price.

What the ‘Anti-Woke’ Crowd Gets Wrong

By Abigail Anthony

Monday, September 28, 2026

 

I had the pleasure of attending a retreat last weekend for young conservative professionals. “Varieties of conservatism” was the organizing theme of the seminars, and National Review’s 1955 mission statement was included in the readings. Someone mentioned during the class that Buckley was opposing moral relativism. That’s true, but it misses the more important point.

 

The justification for establishing a forum like National Review was that a dangerous illiberalism, animated by hostility to truth and reason, had already conquered virtually every major institution. My verb tense matters: Buckley et al. were not worried that such a dubious philosophy might eventually capture a few prestigious establishments that failed to engage in an ideological battle. Rather, NR’s founders astutely detected that the radicals had already seized control everywhere it mattered. The publication’s purpose was not merely to argue against an existing ideology but to disrupt its monopolistic power, hence the mission statement’s phrases such as “liberal orthodoxy” and “liberal world” appearing in 1955. The diagnosis was explicit: “And since ideas rule the world, the ideologues, having won over the intellectual class, simply walked in and started to run things. Run just about everything. There never was an age of conformity quite like this one, or a camaraderie quite like the Liberals’.”

 

Such an assessment is so germane that it could have been written today; the founding editorial is one among many artifacts confirming Buckley’s prophetic wisdom. But the mission statement also identifies precisely the problems that supposedly “reasonable” liberals, allegedly friendly to the conservative movement, discovered only in 2016 or 2020 during the “Woke Era” — and those “dissidents” positioned themselves as insightful heretics for observing what NR described over 70 years ago.

 

The broadly “anti-woke” crowd, exempting self-described “conservatives” and “right-wing” individuals, suffers from the delusion that elite institutions were ideologically captured in roughly the past decade. Such liberals think that the New York Times was an exemplar of fair and rigorous journalism until 2016, but then, it was suddenly corrupted by a virulent opposition to MAGA; the ideological tilt was only obvious when an editor resigned in response to outrage over an opinion piece by Senator Tom Cotton. They’ll tell you that NPR was a fantastic source of insightful nonpartisan discourse until 2020, when the radio hosts and writers all suddenly suffered from Rapid Onset Wokeness. They’ll claim the media were neutral and accurate, then unpredictably shifted to call the BLM riots “peaceful.” They’ll say universities were environments for open discourse, deep learning, and character formation until there was some overblown debacle at Yale University over appropriately sensible Halloween costumes. Experts in government, doctors, and medical associations were entirely apolitical prior to Covid, or perhaps just until they endorsed performing “gender-affirming” surgeries on minors, per the devoted readers of The Atlantic. The people who own a New Yorker tote bag and wear lanyards at work think corporations never engaged in left-wing social activism until grocery stores issued statements endorsing Black Lives Matter.

 

But that is all wrong, and our mission statement proves it. National Review detected the intelligentsia’s hegemony, and further denounced their falsehoods, decades ago. “Conservatives in this country . . . are non-licensed nonconformists; and this is dangerous business in a Liberal world, as every editor of this magazine can readily show by pointing to his scars,” we attested in 1955. However, since we still live in “a Liberal world,” this statement was only considered potentially true once the former conformists — “intellectual dark web” members, former Times staffers, harassed professors — who are licensed by Ivy League diplomas said it in the past few years.

 

Make no mistake: The “canceled” class of podcasters acknowledge the “liberal orthodoxy,” but these “dissidents” of the 2020 era are not genuine allies to conservatives. The left’s expats today — the people who criticized “woke ideology” when fleeing their employer’s building without actually interrogating, let alone abandoning, their own views — only disapprove of which progressives are in charge. We see a problem with the ideas, whereas they have a problem with the personnel.

 

The woke movement’s rejected celebrities don’t actually have any defensible principles, despite claiming otherwise. Hillary-supporting liberals who attended cocktail parties weekly with embroidered fabric napkins wondered aloud in 2019 if maybe they should be able to say that not all men can suddenly become women just because, in theory, an unusually bad guy might take advantage of flexible bathroom policies — but in general, they assured everyone, “trans” adults are broadly acceptable, and we should honor their “preferred pronouns.” Dress however you like, engage in whatever consensual sex you want, and I’ll happily use whichever pronouns you like, but just don’t punish a woman for not doing so, said the supposedly reasonable feminists demanding female-only spaces after spending decades destroying male-only associations. The articles in mainstream media nervously suggesting “gender-inclusive” policies are potentially troublesome still deferred to a deluded subject’s wrong pronouns. Every columnist or podcast interviewee who suggested “gender-affirming care” is bad for minors danced around the central claim that “being trans” is a farce. “You see, children can’t consent to surgically removing their reproductive organs or receiving hormone injections,” argued the left-wing critics of gender nonsense. “But adults can . . . it’s a free society! Be sure to enforce policies for single-sex facilities, though.”

 

None of the “centrists” pushing against the extreme progressives were actually willing to state the true premises — and that’s because they refuse to believe those premises for the sake of continued social acceptance. The “anti-woke” subtle resistance to totalitarianism claimed, ever so cautiously, that democracy (or some other sacred value) means we should allow at least some widely held views a teeny bit of airtime occasionally. (These people were paid thousands, even tens of thousands, to declare this on the campuses where conservatives still may not tread.) Yet these Free-Thinking Liberals do not claim, let alone defend, that men can never be women, “transphobia” be damned. Why not? The “open-minded” lefties all have a gay best friend, or they are gay, or their distant cousin is in a polycule, or their nephew is going by “they/them” now, or their amazing hairdresser (who charges upwards of $500 for blonde highlights) is gay. Ideological trespassing subverts the left’s chief virtue of appearing polite, so anything more aggressive than tepid disagreement would mean losing friends, and more tragically, invites to soirees. (They eventually started their own parties for the outcasts who have “forbidden ideas,” and those dangerous thoughts were things like “don’t cut off a teenage girl’s breasts” or “maybe affirmative action results in less-qualified students.” Rather mysteriously, the invites for people like Charles Murray got lost in the mail.)

 

Worse than the “anti-tribal” leftists who retreated while wearing an “I’M SO BRAVE FOR LEAVING” shirt are those who remained within their elite institutions, caved, and are now doing minimal damage control. “Forget the woke things we sanctimoniously shouted even though we condemned you, ridiculed you, and fired you for not saying them” is the unsaid message. (An actual apology will never come.) Given the gaping wounds to the public reputation of progressivism in light of 2020-era absurdity, and the growing resentment confirmed by Trump’s 2024 popular vote victory, supposedly self-aware editors at mainstream publications reluctantly publish an opinion piece every few weeks that mildly suggests a particularly bad progressive policy might have some consequences; defending even modestly conservative or right-wing opinions would be too far. “Conservative columnists” who recently joined high-profile outlets obtained good enough social standing by signaling that Trump is a bad guy. The tolerable principled conservatives, according to the “canceled” progressives, are those whose most important principle is reflexively opposing Trump. Anything that any major institution has done in the past few years that vaguely resembles a concession to conservatives is nothing more than attempted image rehabilitation. There has not been a single instance of restructuring of an organization, publication, or university in the past decade or so that actually removed the left’s chokehold by introducing a critical mass of conservatives.

 

Everyone agrees with a modern application of National Review’s initial evaluation: Yes, there is a “liberal orthodoxy.” The problem, then, as now, is that all liberals want that orthodoxy. They reject NR’s 1955 declaration that “the largest cultural menace in America is the conformity of the intellectual cliques.” Today, there’s just an internal leftist Struggle Session at every institution with a recognizable acronym or logo. The unapologetically radical activists (usually identifiable by a keffiyeh, an N-95 mask, or an assortment of small tattooed doodles schizophrenically placed all over the arms depicting random household objects like buttons or toast) will actually admit as much and openly defend keeping out “fascists,” defined as “everyone we dislike.” The other liberals (distinguished from the others by decent outfits, sometimes tailored) are simply moderating their views and occasionally posing with an anti-Trump conservative to maintain, or regain, control. For the sake of optics, these cultural curators will proudly announce a new token staff member who voted Republican once. To regain credibility, a single event will be organized each year at universities with a panel featuring someone who doesn’t totally love abortion so that the leadership can claim, “Look at the intellectual diversity thriving in our culture of academic freedom!” when it is time to solicit donations. A publication will boast, “Yes, we have political disagreements on our editorial board. There are both Kamala and Bernie supporters. And there’s someone who wrote in a name last election who writes for us about why capitalism might be okay!”

 

In the mind of the supposed Self-Sacrificing Dissident Elite who participated in no fewer than ten interviews about their own “cancellation” and published an essay titled “WHY I LEFT THE LEFT,” desired reform is simply restoring the culture to its 2010ish norms — an environment that would let them sit again at a long table in a meeting room, but wouldn’t leave a chair for anyone actually conservative or right-wing. The aim of the “moderate” Democrat is not to cultivate the conditions where every view can be debated but, rather, to ensure their own views are restored to prominence. National Review has long fought against moral relativism and illiberalism, whereas the leftists who decried “groupthink” only whined after being booted out of the group; they could not even briefly endure the treatment that had previously been reserved for conservatives.

 

What’s the justification for refusing to seriously engage with conservative or right-wing thinkers, and continuing to ostracize us? Liberals with a Wikipedia page, who are usually now on their second marriage, think with absolute certainty that they are superior to us — politically, morally, spiritually, and so on ad infinitum. As proof that their views are better and therefore correct, they cite public polling figures that were cultivated through their own media outlets by strategically avoiding discussion of any alternative views to coerce a consensus. “Look, we really just can’t run an article presenting concerns about IVF technology because most people are totally fine with IVF,” is a slight paraphrase of what I was told by an editor at a left-leaning outlet. (Notably, the article also had pro-IVF perspectives.) Only occasionally does a conservative argument gain enough traction that it must be acknowledged, but in those cases, it must be “balanced” with the Democrat-approved alternative. When I contributed to a different left-leaning paper that masqueraded as “unbiased,” an opinion piece about the pro-life movement around the time of the March for Life had to be published adjacent to a pro-abortion article for the sake of “presenting both sides.” The standard disappeared when an article about a large pro-abortion rally occurred months later.

 

When introducing itself to the public in 1955, National Review explained that “we begin publishing, then, with a considerable stock of experience with the irresponsible Right, and a despair of the intransigence of the Liberals, who run this country; and all this in a world dominated by the jubilant single-mindedness of the practicing Communist, with his inside track to History.” As it was in the beginning, it is now. But through tireless work through National Review and other avenues, there’s no reason it ever shall be a liberal world without end.

The Bosnian War and Negative Peace

By Kimberly Mazzocco Hart

Monday, September 28, 2026

 

The end of August brought several high-profile deaths. Two of them I have mourned along with what feels like the entire world. Dolly Parton, in particular, drew loving words from around the globe. And in more particular circles, the writer, poet, and essayist Wendell Berry has been celebrated as a man of great love and wisdom. Their legacies of good will be long remembered.

 

Neither of them wanted to be “political” figures. Dolly, in particular, spent decades masterfully deflecting attempts to assign her a political label. In a 2020 interview for USA Today’s Women of the Century series, she said, “I am not political, and I refuse to get caught up in political things.” In that same interview, she chastised the political leadership of the day, saying, “They need to think more about the people instead of about the party.”

 

Wendell Berry was less circumspect. He wrote on political issues. He held strong convictions and wrote freely of his opinions. Yet he, too, rejected the labeling of politics. In 2013, Berry was awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, an award given in recognition of Richard C. Holbrooke’s admonition not to forget the power of words in achieving peace. Berry implicitly rejected the vaunted label “peacemaker” to say that he won an award “for having said a few words in favor of peace.” It was the same rejection of the reductionism of labels that prompted him to lament in an essay that same year that “How you vote is who you are.”

 

Yet, in the days after the death of Dolly Parton and of Wendell Berry days later, online space was crowded with those seeking to lay claim to one or the other. Not merely social media, but news, op-eds, and essays built arguments asserting why Dolly or Berry belonged to a particular political “side,” even as they praised their careful neutrality. I can only assume both of them would be appalled.

 

It might be tempting to view this modern online land-grab of our cultural icons as harmless acclamation. But history warns us that the road to dehumanization begins with the quiet subsuming of the individual into an ideological category. The danger of such claiming—labeling—is real.

 

Another man died in those final days of August. Ratko Mladić was a Bosnian Serbian general in the 1990s wars in the Balkans. After nearly two decades of hiding, sometimes in plain sight, he was at last tried and finally convicted of war crimes in 2017 in The Hague, and he spent his final years in U.N. detention for those crimes. He became known in the media as the Butcher of Bosnia, and it was a well-earned accolade. Born in what is now known as Bosnia and Herzegovina, he was the leader of the Serbian army in Bosnia when Croatia broke away from the former Yugoslavia in 1991. As the war escalated in Croatia, Mladić emphasized his Serbian identity and the intent of the Serbian army to protect ethnic Serbs throughout the region. When Bosnia and Herzegovina declared its independence in 1992, the Republika Srpska region declared its own independence and laid siege to Sarajevo—with Mladić at the head of the Serbian military.

 

War is ugly. People die. It’s violent and messy and cruel and sometimes things happen that should not. But Ratko Mladić didn’t just kill as deemed necessary in the course of a war. He ordered the systematic slaughter of more than 8,000 men and boys in Srebrenica—a U.N. “safe zone” for refugees of the ongoing conflict. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia determined this slaughter to be a genocide.

 

He was also the man responsible for the four-year siege of Sarajevo. Siege feels an inadequate descriptor for the terror, destruction, and carnage of that city and its civilians. As many as 1,500 children alone died there in those four years, out of several thousand civilians. Civilians shouldn’t be targets, yet Mladić never renounced his decisions and orders that caused those deaths.

 

Bosnia and Herzegovina was—and is—at peace. But even now, it’s not the peace of reconciliation and restoration. It’s a negative peace, a state of nonviolence. The tension, fear, and anger remain. With a significant city such as Mostar lacking even mayoral elections for over 10 years, the polarization evident in lead-up to next month’s general elections is drawing warnings from across the U.N. and EU.

 

I visited Sarajevo in 2005, 10 years after the Bosnian War ended. I went for work, meeting with the local office of an international NGO, visiting humanitarian development projects, listening to stories, taking notes. The primary concern then was discrimination and economic disadvantages within Roma communities, with a somewhat forced belief in the “peace” imposed by the Dayton Accords obscuring ongoing ethnic tension and conflict among Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs. My daughter, then a young toddler, traveled with me on that Balkans trip, with Bosnia as our final stop. She went out to dinner with us one night—our U.S. staff and Bosnian staff together—in a restaurant in downtown Sarajevo.

 

We’d spent time in Kosovo and in Albania, gathering stories of economic struggle, cultural reclamation, fear, and hope. But in no place were those paradoxical stories more obvious than in Bosnia. Three peoples, three government entities, one country. Peace was a word, a state of nonviolence—but it was not the peace of shalom, the peace of reconciliation. Yet in that restaurant were the seeds of that peace. While I ate with colleagues, the manager (or was he the owner?) came and helpfully whisked my daughter away to another corner—to the “writers’ group,” our waitstaff told me. The writers were never known to me—just faces and deep voices and a haze of smoke above a table of glasses—but I was told that the restaurant was a place of gathering for those who sought more than the negative peace of the end of war, who didn’t fear the hard work of honest and painful reconciliation.

 

We are linked to our homes, to our language and religion, our food, our accent, our clothing and history, but for the people of the former Yugoslavia those roots were tangled, blended and knotted—and then torn apart. The Balkans have been subjugated to the cultures—the religions, the food, the names even—of many other cultures for centuries untold. Always another empire, another great power playing tug-of-war with the land and the people, until the fabric of their shared identity began to shred. What made you Croatian and not Serbian when the language, the food, and the place seemed the same, yet not quite?

 

I can’t answer if war was inevitable in the former Yugoslavia. I would hope, with the magic of hindsight, that it didn’t have to be, that if wise voices had prevailed, that acknowledged and uplifted the identities of all Balkan peoples, maybe they could have recognized the dignity and worth of one another and found a different solution. All we know now is that they did not. And out of that disintegration and fear and anger and desperate resolve to reclaim themselves arose men like Ratko Mladić, who used the scraps of identity not to weave a new and stronger regional identity, but to patch and fill the remembered glory of Serbia—and only Serbia. But it was not only Serbia that fell prey to such men. Mladić was Serbian but not all who were accused of war crimes were Serbs. While we rightfully condemn Srebrenica, do we forget the victims of Operation Storm, which was waged by the Croatian military against ethnic Serbs?

 

When Yugoslavia found itself free of the authoritarian fist of the revolutionary Josip Broz Tito in 1980, its people began a decade of pulling apart the tangled roots of their various identities. Were they Slovenes or Croats, Slavic or Albanian, Muslim, Orthodox, or Catholic? How did one determine who was who? Leaders arose that exploited that search for identity, and the rise of nationalism led to war. One was not just Serbian—one was also not Croatian or Bosniak. To be one, you must necessarily not be the other.

 

And then the other became more than just not you. The other became the one preventing you from being you. They were the ones subjugating you, preventing you from … something. Labels became hatred. And not you, the Other, became less than. Those others didn’t necessarily deserve to be treated with dignity. They were bad, they were your enemy, they didn’t deserve the same as you. People were encouraged to label. And then encouraged to hate.

 

But hate gradually becomes more than individual action. Hate allows us to accept that some deserve violence—even state violence. Maybe I would never hurt the Other, but if the State determines the Other is some sort of threat to me, then of course the State can act against them. The State can enact the violence that I cannot.

 

In Srebrenica, Mladić ordered the deaths of every man and boy. They were rounded up, removed from buses taking families to safety, herded into the woods, and murdered. Nura Muminović died in 2005 without ever having the chance to bury her sons, Suljo, 16, and Saudin, 13. I have sons who are 16 and 13. The younger one sometimes startles me with a deep man’s voice, but then I turn around and, though he’s taller than me now, I see the long skinny arms and legs and face of a little boy. The long thin legs that hang off the end of the sofa are attached to the boy reading a fantasy book, the same boy who giggles when his sister teases him. A boy should never have to be part of a war.

 

But Suljo, who was found fleeing in the woods with his father, and Saudin, pulled from the bus that was meant to bring him to safety with his mother, were the Other to Mladić, a problem to be eliminated for the sake of the State he served. He had the right to eliminate that problem because the State was supported by people who didn’t call Nura or Suljo or Saudin by name. They were reduced to the label of Bosniak—enemy of the Serb.

 

Since Mladić’s death, he’s been hailed as a hero by some. In the shadow of a war over labels,, he’s given many—to some, he’s the Butcher of Bosnia; to others, Gen. Mladić, defender of Serbia. Do the ones who acclaim him the latter recognize him in the former? Do they hear that in calling him their hero, they diminish the pain of those who lived through his terrorizing of Srebrenica, Sarajevo, and others? Do they know they deny the grief of Sarajevo—Bosniak Muslim, Croat, and Serb alike? Do they mean to condone the rape of girls and old women, the murder of children? I think most do not.

 

And that’s the danger of reducing one another to labels. Whether butcher or defender, Ratko Mladić was not, in the end, a label. He should be mourned by those who knew him and loved him—as a man worthy of the dignity belonging to us all. And it is part of the grief of the Serbian people that they have worn the label of aggressor and of evil, but they, too, have been grieving their dead for 30 years. They, too, have been mourning the loss of culture and of unity over centuries of occupation and oppression.

 

Who won the wars of the 1990s? Who wins today if we persist in making categories, assigning labels, and claiming the “good guys” for “our side”? We are a very long way from Srebrenica here in the United States in 2026, but my heart gets a little heavier, my fear a little louder, with every post I read assigning Dolly Parton to a political party with glee or asserting Wendell Berry would never be one of them. I have loved Dolly Parton since I was a child and wanted to grow up to be as sassy as she was. I have devoured Wendell Berry’s words on rootedness, the land, peace, and the importance of the particular. I have never been the slightest bit concerned with their political party. If Dolly were found to be a liberal Democrat, does that mean she couldn’t be a country star? If Wendell were claimed by conservatives, would he no longer stand for care of the environment and the absence of violence?

 

It may seem insignificant, this assigning of parties to celebrities who cannot confirm or deny them, but in this I see a disintegration of cultural unity, the sort that emboldens those who divide by race or religion or ethnicity. We divide ourselves into our respective “teams,” and then, like children choosing players in gym class, we call on the best and most beloved public figures to play for us. From the safety of our team, we have the platform to justify racism or antisemitism or Islamaphobia. We see that in the growing fight over Israel and Palestine, with labels of antisemite, Islamophobe, or Zionist hurled across a divide very few seem to be trying to bridge.

 

If we label someone, we reduce them to that label. And once they are merely a label, they can be assigned all the characteristics we’ve added to that label. All X are Y. You are your label. And labels can be hated. Labels can be evil. And labels can be crushed by a state that is defending itself or its people.

 

In Life is a Miracle, written in 2000, Wendell Berry teaches us that: “Affection requires us to break out of the abstractions, the categories. …To defend what we love, we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.” We can’t know a label. For a label is merely an abstraction.

 

Dolly put it another way. In a 2023 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, she said she looked for the “God-light” in everyone. And me? I’m simply who I am—not a label, not a category. And I should be loved for that particularity.

 

Let Mladić’s family mourn the particular man he was. Let Serbians mourn a war that cost them, mourn a label of violence that reduces them to a nation of Mladićs. Let the mothers, sisters, daughters, and wives of Srebrenica mourn their dead. And let Serbians, Bosniaks, and Croats find a way to peel off their labels and find in one another a positive peace.

Against the Wall

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, September 25, 2026

 

A provocative take from economist Noah Smith: “The GOP had a golden opportunity to become a multiracial majority party and destroy the left for two generations, and instead they turned things over to the Claremont Nazis.”

 

I disagree. Mostly.

 

Faulting a party led by Donald Trump for “turning things over” to fascists would be like faulting a party led by Bernie Sanders for “turning things over” to socialists. There was no bait and switch; fascism was always the plan.

 

Postliberals care only about empowering postliberalism, and of course Trump cares only about empowering Trump. Neither gives a rip about empowering the party to which they belong simply because they belong to it. What would they gain by destroying the left for two generations if doing so required them to subordinate their own priorities?

 

Ask the “Claremonsters” privately whether they’d prefer to be governed by Democrats or by Republicans who have disowned postliberalism, and they’ll take the Democrats every time, I suspect. After all, the worse the centrist wing of the right fares at the polls, the more willing Republican voters should be to give right-wing authoritarians a fresh hearing.

 

That was the lesson of the 2016 presidential primary. And it’s been the point of the GOP “hostage crisis,” in which postliberals threaten to boycott their party if they don’t get to call the tune on policy, ever since.

 

Smith is wrong in a second way. For all their faults, and there are many, postliberals aren’t chiefly to blame for the GOP squandering its shot at a durable majority. The war in Iran and its ruinous effect on oil prices are the main culprits in the looming Republican wipeout, and it ain’t the Tucker Carlson wing of the right that egged that on.

 

In fact, at last check, Tucker was calling on the president’s Cabinet to seize power from him under the 25^th Amendment, alleging that Trump’s threats of a nuclear attack on Iran are evidence that he’s non compos mentis. Given how unpopular Trump and his war have become, I’d guess that a multiracial majority agrees with Carlson about that.

 

I do agree with Smith in a sense, though. There’s an important area of policy in which Republicans held an electoral advantage in 2024, could have maintained that advantage by simply sticking with their traditional position, and have now seen that advantage squandered by postliberal fanaticism.

 

It’s not trade. The president’s tariffs have assuredly cost the GOP votes, but Trump-style protectionism isn’t the traditional Republican position.

 

It’s not intervening militarily overseas. That is a traditional Republican position, but it sure isn’t advantageous at the polls in a post-Iraq, post-Afghanistan world. Plus, as I said, the only thing arguably fanatical about the postliberal position on war with Iran is the vehemence with which they oppose it.

 

It’s not fiscal responsibility either. That too is a traditional GOP position and Trump has done everything possible to destroy voters’ trust in Republicans over it, but it’s hard to pin his profligacy on postliberalism. Despite J.D. Vance’s best efforts to get people excited about paying moms not to work, the Trumpist base has always been animated by culture war issues, not right-wing socialism.

 

Besides, some of the president’s most notorious spending moves don’t jibe with the postliberal agenda. Cutting Medicaid from working-class whites under the One Big Beautiful Bill while demanding a mind-boggling $1.5 trillion budget for the Pentagon is not the stuff of which America First dreams are made.

 

The issue where postliberals have blown it for the GOP is immigration.

 

The albatross.

 

Paul LePage served two terms as governor of Maine and is running for a House seat in that state this year. Sometimes described as “Trump before Trump,” he proved that loose-cannon right-wing populism could win at the polls before you-know-who entered politics. Like any politician in that vein, he has made illegal immigration one of his favorite targets—although he could be slippery on the subject in the past as his electoral needs required.

 

This week he had a new complaint about immigrants. He thinks we’re deporting the wrong ones.

 

“My son’s wife’s dad is here legally,” he said during a press conference. “But he’s being deported because he came from a country that’s not liked by certain people in Washington. That’s not right.” Noting that his in-law has a work permit, LePage couldn’t understand why removing him is a higher priority than removing “people in the gangs and criminals.” Of all the cases of leopards eating people’s faces since January 2025, few faces have deserved to be eaten more than his.

 

Reading that, you might wonder whether LePage’s electoral needs are once again making him slippery on immigration. He’s a blue-state Republican running in a tough environment, so he’s moderating opportunistically on a key issue before an election, right? It’s not just LePage, though: Some red-state Republicans have also begun pivoting to the center on immigration.

 

The most buzzworthy example is Florida Rep. María Elvira Salazar, who cut an ad last week in which she addressed Trump directly and said, “Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far. … The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.” Trump took 57 percent of the vote in her district two years ago.

 

He won the same share statewide in Kansas, yet both of that state’s Republican senators complained publicly a few days ago about ICE executing warrants in southwest Kansas without coordinating with local law enforcement. One of them, Jerry Moran, relayed reassurances from the Trump administration that only “individuals who have been charged with criminal activities” have been targeted.

 

Moran isn’t on the ballot in November, but his colleague, Roger Marshall, is. The latest major poll of the state has him trailing his Democratic opponent by 2 points. In Kansas.

 

God only knows what sort of internal polls he and Salazar are seeing that have moved them to distance themselves from ICE. But if the GOP drowns in a blue wave in November, particularly in normally red states with large Hispanic populations like Florida and Texas, a major subplot in the aftermath will be the political damage done by Trump’s “mass deportation” campaign. The script writes itself: Postliberals wanted nonwhite immigrants expelled indiscriminately, they sacrificed rudimentary professional standards to get their wish, and their reward was a Democratic wipeout.

 

The White House knows the issue has become a liability, too. Lately, ICE has largely—but by no means entirely—avoided the sort of goon-squad muscle-flexing that it demonstrated earlier this year in Minneapolis, when I warned that its tactics were going to discredit immigration enforcement. But it’s too late. Whereas 53 percent of Americans trusted Trump on immigration in November 2024 versus 46 percent who didn’t, by July that split had turned to 41-58. A Politico poll taken in August found nearly a quarter of Trump’s own voters believe the “mass deportation” effort has been too aggressive. Among those who described themselves as “non-MAGA,” 31 percent said so.

 

It’s true that Trump campaigned on “mass deportation,” not on deporting the criminals first. It’s also true that most Americans nonetheless support deporting the criminals first, or even deporting only the criminals, despite the president’s preferences. Immigration is like tariffs in that regard: Trump was candid with the electorate about his intentions, they voted for him anyway, and now they’ve discovered that his intentions are stupid or malicious. They’ll have a chance in six weeks to do something about it. They look poised to take it.

 

And so we might refine Noah Smith’s point this way: The GOP had a golden opportunity to establish itself as the “responsible” party on immigration for two generations, and instead it turned things over to Stephen Miller. The icing on the cake will come if and when Trump deputizes ICE to harass Hispanics at the polls in November. That ought to finish off whatever benefit of the doubt persuadable voters have been giving him and his party about the virtues of beefed-up border enforcement.

 

What now?

 

Compromise?

 

My editor reminded me this morning that we’ve seen this movie before. The GOP wins a momentous victory on a divisive issue, as Trump did by besting Democrats on immigration in 2024; Republicans blow their advantage by acting waaaaay too aggressively in the aftermath; and voters punish them for it by spanking them at the polls.

 

That’s the story of abortion, of course. Restricting abortion finally became legally feasible in 2022 when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Despite strong public opposition to that decision, a number of red states turned around and passed strict bans instead of meeting the majority where it was with more modest regulations. Voters reacted by turning out in force to defeat state referendums aimed at limiting abortion, then squelched the expected Republican midterm wave by holding the GOP to a measly nine-seat pickup in the House and a one-seat loss in the Senate.

 

A funny thing has happened since then, though. The two parties have, sort of, compromised on the issue.

 

It’s the coldest of cold peaces, but the leadership on both sides appears sufficiently satisfied with the status quo on abortion that neither wants to disturb it. Trump was plainly spooked by the 2022 backlash and has steered away from any federal crackdown; not only has the FDA not moved to ban “abortion pills” like mifepristone from the market, it approved a generic version of the drug last year. The easy availability of the pills and the rise of “telemedicine” have made it simple for women to dodge state bans. The result, per best estimates, is that abortions in the U.S. have increased slightly since the end of Roe.

 

Republicans don’t want to poke the bear by revisiting the issue. And Democrats seemingly see little need to take it up, as issues like affordability and the war are more fruitful electoral targets. If women remain largely free to terminate their pregnancies at home and GOP lawmakers are comfortable with that, there’s little reason for their opponents to pick a fight.

 

Might we reach a similar compromise on immigration if the blue wave crashes down on the GOP this fall?

 

The political stars would seem to have aligned. Democrats lost the trust of voters in 2024 by being too soft on enforcement, and Republicans appear to have lost the trust of voters in 2026 by being too hard on it. The obvious consensus that would serve both parties is that aggressive efforts should be made to deport criminals; restricting illegal entries at the border should remain a high priority while removing noncriminal illegal immigrants should be a low one; and ICE should be radically reformed to reprofessionalize the force. In short, the left gives up on “open borders” and the right gives up on “mass deportation.”

 

If nothing else, the emergence of Hispanics as a crucial swing bloc in 2024 and 2026 might incentivize the two sides to move toward the middle. Democrats discovered to their dismay two years ago that a Republican could come within 5 points of winning that group despite running on the strictest anti-immigrant platform in modern American history. Republicans are about to discover to their own dismay that those gains can be incinerated in the span of one election cycle. One would think the sensible play, then, is for the parties to align their immigration platforms as much as possible with the preferences of Hispanics. Per one recent poll of that group, “76 percent preferred a candidate position calling for a bipartisan path to permanent legal status and immigration reform, compared with 24 percent who preferred a deportation-focused position.”

 

Easy peasy, no? Well….

 

Polarization.

 

One problem with my argument is that it’s perilous to assume that Hispanics weigh immigration more in deciding how to vote than other demographics do. (Although Trump’s version of ICE has certainly given them reason to do so.) When Mitt Romney was clobbered by Barack Obama among that demographic in 2012, one of the key “lessons” GOP party officials took from the drubbing was that Republicans would forever struggle with Latinos unless they moderated on immigration. Even Sean Hannity got the memo.

 

Four years later, Trump barged into politics vowing to build the wall and won his party’s nomination and the presidency. Eight years after that, campaigning on “mass deportation,” he nearly won Hispanics outright against Kamala Harris. Amnesty for illegal immigrants wasn’t the secret to winning Latino votes after all, it appeared. The apparent secret, very simply, is that Latinos are largely working-class and will be receptive to candidates who appeal to that constituency. In 2012 that was Obama, not the country-clubber Romney. In 2024 it was Trump, running against the high inflation of the Biden presidency. And in 2026 it’s Democrats, running against Trump’s failed promises on affordability.

 

Neither party needs to moderate on immigration to win Latino votes, in other words. (Although it might help!) Just convince them that you have better ideas for helping them stay ahead of the cost of living and you’re in the game.

 

The other problem with an immigration compromise is that partisan polarization will complicate the effort, as it always, always does. In many ways the two parties’ respective ideological vanguards have never been closer on the proverbial horseshoe than they are right now, but immigration is an exception. Abolishing ICE will be a priority for progressive Democrats for years to come, partly because they believe the agency has been deprofessionalized beyond repair and partly because its postliberal chud-ification is Trump’s most singular administrative legacy. The left wants to burn down the agency in the same way that it wants to burn down the White House ballroom.

 

And for the opposite reasons, the right will refuse. Rank-and-file Republicans will resist out of pure spite, to deny Democrats a key concession after their midterm victory and to protect the steep political costs Trump sunk into building the immigration force of his dreams. Committed postliberals will have a more ideological basis for resisting: Agreeing to abolish ICE and replace it with some kinder, gentler deportation squad would amount to capitulating on their most cherished priority, ejecting nonwhite undesirables from the United States.

 

Bad enough that their opponents would ask them to renounce “mass deportation” and admit that wielding state power ruthlessly against their cultural enemies was a mistake. But outright abolition of the goon squad is tantamount to asking them to repudiate postliberalism itself.

 

They won’t do it, and they won’t tolerate Republican lawmakers doing it. To repeat my point from earlier, postliberals don’t care a fig for their party’s fortunes relative to their own cultural priorities. They’ll happily punish GOP lawmakers for moving toward the middle on immigration by primarying them and/or boycotting general elections, even if that produces the sort of Democratic landslide that, ironically, would make liberal immigration policies more feasible. Radicals play the long game: If the only way to convince the wider electorate that they’re right is to let their enemy win and wait for a public backlash to that enemy’s policies, they’ll do that.

 

But this is all pie in the sky. Trump surely won’t be so chastened by a midterm drubbing that he’ll agree to compromise with Democrats on immigration, especially if doing so would require him to admit error on ICE. J.D. Vance, the party’s presumptive nominee, seems even less likely to support doing so given that he’s a postliberal ideologue himself and is palpably anxious about keeping that faction in his corner in the next primary. And if Vance did feel moved to compromise, that’s the sort of thing that might finally bring Tucker Carlson off the sidelines to provide a “real” America First option in the 2028 race.

 

In scolding Republicans for not maneuvering on policy to consolidate the coalition they built in 2024, Noah Smith is treating a kulturkampf as politics as usual. To the “Claremont Nazis,” there’s no point in having a democratic majority if holding it means having to give up on Nazism. On the contrary, as we saw on January 6 and are likely to see again before long, they’ll give up on democracy first.