Anti-Zionism and the End of Empathy

By Seth Mandel

Tuesday, June 30, 2026

 

Planned anti-Hamas protests in Gaza fizzled out over the weekend. Those who participated despite Hamas’s threats and suppression took a brave stand made braver by the fact that Western media largely ignored them. The fact that this abandonment was fully expected highlights the difference between “supporting Palestine” and “supporting Palestinians.” That same distinction can be understood not as a failure of empathy but a complete lack of it.

 

Anti-Zionism is, by its very definition, a worldview of opposition to the existence of something or someone, in this case sovereign Jews. The entirety of the “Free Palestine” movement in the West is organized along the same principle: It is not for anyone; it is merely against the Jewish state. Advocating for Palestinians would look much different than advocating for a “Free Palestine,” because such a movement would seek first and foremost to improve the lives of Arabs living in Palestinian-governed enclaves in the Middle East.

 

There is no such movement in the United States.

 

Anti-Hamas Palestinians—that is, Palestinians who want to be free—are seen as a grave threat by anti-Zionist activists. Like their heroes in the “resistance,” anti-Zionist activists use Palestinians as human shields.

 

The question becomes, then: Why don’t Western activists want to see Palestinians freed from their oppressors?

 

This is where the concept of empathy and its Orwellian manipulation enter the conversation. On paper, the activist left would appear to have an organizing principle of aiding the weak against the strong. But that is only true within the fantasy framework of “anti-colonialism.” Which, again, is a movement organized against something, not for something.

 

The suffering of the oppressed is of no interest to this industry. What we are told is motivated by empathy is actually motivated by something else entirely: malice.

 

When Zohran Mamdani raged against Jewish donors as “monsters,” even his erstwhile defenders were uncomfortable with the level of malice he was demonstrating. But his lack of empathy is visible too. When Rep. Dan Goldman’s daughter needed to use a coffee shop’s bathroom, the congressman bought a beverage to show his appreciation. In return, the owner of the coffee shop gave Goldman an anti-Semitic tarring and feathering on social media.

 

Mamdani, the mayor of New York City, should have been incensed. But he, too, wanted Goldman to lose his primary challenge to a Mamdani-backed candidate, and so he refused to denounce the anti-Jewish vigilantism that was done on his chosen candidate’s behalf. This is not a person who has empathy for some and not for others; he is a man devoid of empathy. One does not demonize Jews and encourage anti-Semitic vigilantism out of concern for the Palestinians. The Palestinians are absent from Mamdani’s thought process. He is only thinking about the Jews.

 

Since then, another crazy coffee shop incident has come to light, and this one arguably demonstrates the point better than the previous example. On Facebook, the owner of a Portland, Oregon, café called Heretic Coffee, Josh White, announced that he was rejecting a grant check he received from the Jewish Federation: “Jewish Federation, we ripped up your grant check and it’s in the trash. We want none of your blood money.” The Jewish Federation of Greater Portland was, naturally, inundated with calls.

 

What happened here? Judah Ari Gross, editor at eJewishPhilanthropy, got the full story:

 

The check that the coffee shop had received did not, in fact, come from Portland’s Jewish federation. It came from the Jewish Federation Bay Area, and it was not a grant in the common understanding of the word. The funds came from the holder of a donor-advised fund that the San Francisco federation operates. (As White bills himself as a journalist, these answers should not have been too hard to find.)

 

The purpose of the gift? “According to the Bay Area federation, the DAF holder, whose name has not been released, had learned of Heretic Coffee’s work providing food to those in need and wanted to support it.”

 

Again, think what you might about the war in Gaza and the wider conflict, but this is completely insane behavior—and it is spreading. Fueling these and other such incidents, which happen routinely now in America, is not empathy. A person with empathy does not reject charity to feed the poor from a Jew in California who directed the gift through his local Jewish Federation.

 

To the anti-Zionist movement in the West, Palestinians do not exist. Only Jews exist. And they are the object of nothing but pure malice from these supposed humanitarians.

Mamdani Is Ignoring 40 Centuries of Economic Lessons

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, July 01, 2026

 

Last week, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a citywide freeze on rents.

 

The response from economists can be summarized as “oy.”  

 

Economists are famous for arguing “on one hand” this and “on the other hand” that. This is why President Truman famously wanted to hire a one-handed economist. Nonetheless, there are few issues that enjoy a broader consensus among economists than the conclusion that rent control is counterproductive. Surveys of leading economists going back nearly four decades confirm this. A 1990 poll of 464 economists found that 93 percent of American respondents agreed that “a ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available”—95 percent of Canadian economists had a similar opinion. And another survey in 2012 had a similar result.

 

As Jason Furman, who chaired President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, put it, “Rent control has been about as disgraced as any economic policy in the tool kit.” The Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck—a socialist, mind you—was pithier: “In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing.”

 

In response to the controversy over Mamdani’s rent control scheme, which applies to roughly 1 million of the city’s rent stabilized apartments, progressive writer Jill Filipovic posted on X, “Am I the only person who has no strong feeling about the rent freeze other than ‘cool to try out a policy like this on a short-term basis so we can test if it actually works?’ My only hope is we all learn some important information from this experiment and are honest about the results, whatever it brings.”

 

But I don’t really want to write about rent control, a provably dumb policy that has been around for more than a century. The bigger issue is this attitude, which is running wild within the Democratic Party and on the increasingly confident hard left. Specifically, the idea that anything the democratic socialist insurgency is proposing is new.

 

“Together, we will usher in a generation of change,” Mamdani declared upon being elected last November as the new democratic socialist mayor of New York City. He vowed to take a “brave new course” and “chart a new path.” His rent freeze is seen as a fulfillment of his pledge.

 

That’s fair enough. But virtually everything on their agenda was old before anyone reading this was born. Take price controls. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, along with numerous other progressive politicians (and a few Republican ones), respond to every price hike and inflation report by arguing for price controls of one kind or another.

 

Price controls are older than Christianity.

 

If you don’t believe me, pick up a copy of Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls by Robert Schuettinger and Eamonn Butler. Hammurabi set prices 4,000 years ago. Diocletian issued his Edict on Maximum Prices in A.D. 301. President Nixon did it to disastrous effect in 1971.

 

Price controls are lies, fueling corruption and hiding economic reality. Prices reveal where supply and demand are, even when we cannot know all of the things that inform supply or demand. Prices, in the words of economist Alex Tabarrok, are “a signal wrapped up in an incentive.” Mask the signal and you remove the incentive. Controls on rent, food, gas, pharmaceuticals, etc. don’t just conceal the real costs of a good or service, they pass those costs elsewhere. Unable to recoup on the investment in housing, crops, oil development, medicine, there is less—or no—investment.

 

Oil-rich Venezuela became an economic basket case because the government fixed the price of fuel to a political benchmark. Its vast oil industry couldn’t afford to maintain itself and collapsed.

 

Some progressives, like Sen. Sanders, at least admit their ideas are old—how could he do otherwise, given that he hasn’t had a new idea since the Pleistocene? But they point to Scandinavian countries that abandoned command-and-control economic planning decades ago.

 

In other words, they point to “new ideas” from the old world that are now considered old over there.

 

Speaking of old, the new hotness on the left is wealth taxes. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has endorsed the idea of a national wealth tax to catch up with the cool kids. This, too, is a very old idea that began in prehistory as mere plunder. It’s also a failed idea, which is why most of the countries that adopt them end up repealing them.

 

Much has been written—including by me—about how Trump appeals to low-information voters who don’t know the history or facts behind a given policy (like, say, tariffs). That’s fine. But the most ardent opponents of Trump, the ones promising a bold and fresh alternative agenda, are appealing to the same kinds of voters—and journalists.

The Lasting Consequences of Bad Climate Science

By Roger Pielke Jr.

Tuesday, June 30, 2026

 

Major energy and climate decisions of the past 15 years—what infrastructure to build, what risks financial regulators require banks to stress test against, how the projected costs associated with the emissions of a ton of carbon dioxide inform regulations—rested on a foundation that is now officially obsolete. Scenarios shape nearly everything in climate policy. But very few people outside a small technical community understand why they matter or who controls them.

 

A reference scenario—also known as a baseline or business as usual—is used to project where the world is headed unless we choose to change course. Other scenarios build off the baseline to illustrate how the world might look if decision-makers implement policies that alter that expected trajectory. The differences between the baseline and the policy scenarios are typically used to assess the costs and benefits of alternative courses of action.

 

In April, the only three officially recognized baseline scenarios in international climate research—RCP8.5, SSP5-8.5, and SSP3-7.0—were judged by the international scientific committee that selects and prioritizes scenarios to be “implausible” due to their overprojection of future emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. While the fact that our expectations for future emissions have come down is welcome news, the consequences of the scenarios’ retirement will be profound, and that is the focus of today’s column.

 

A climate scenario does not forecast the future. It is a structured “what if” exercise: explicit, internally consistent assumptions about variables like population growth, economic development, how we produce and use energy, and the extent to which greenhouse gas emissions and other outcomes result from human and natural factors. The results of that exercise are inputs into earth system models, which project how temperatures, sea levels, and extreme weather might change in the future. Policymakers, regulators, and courts then act on those projections and the policy and economics work that builds from them.

 

A small network of researchers, operating under the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP)—an initiative of the World Climate Research Programme—decides which scenarios the modeling groups use and how they are prioritized in research. Once a scenario is developed and prioritized, it is then used in almost all projection-based research that is analyzed by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). National climate assessments, central bank stress tests, lawsuits, and infrastructure design standards can depend to a significant degree on this research and the IPCC findings.

 

But everything changed in April, when the CMIP published a new scenario framework, known as CMIP7, for the next IPCC assessment report. RCP8.5, SSP5-8.5, and SSP3-7.0—the three scenarios that served as the body’s official reference scenarios across two IPCC assessment cycles spanning almost two decades—are gone, having been judged to be no longer consistent with the real world, especially in their energy technology assumptions. Here are five of the most significant implications.

 

Climate projections need recalibration.

 

National climate assessments in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Australia, Japan, and the Netherlands all used either RCP8.5 (Representative Concentration Pathways) or SSP5-8.5 (Shared Socioeconomic Pathways) as their reference scenario. So did the World Bank’s Climate Change Knowledge Portal, which supplies climate projections to more than 100 client countries. The reference scenarios were the basis for more than a decade of climate impact projections; those projections informed planning assumptions embedded in national energy and infrastructure policy.

 

The primary driver of the overprojection was a coal assumption. RCP8.5 assumed a five-fold expansion of global coal use—more coal than the planet’s proven reserves contain—and assumed commercial deployment of coal-to-liquid technology to replace oil at a scale never achieved anywhere on Earth. The now-retired reference scenarios projected about 5 degrees Celsius global temperature increase by 2100.

 

Initial projections of the new medium scenario suggest about 2.5 to 2.7 degrees Celsius of warming by the late century. That gap between 2.5 and what we previously expected—about 5 degrees Celsius of warming—is huge. Recalibrating national assessments to reflect actual trajectories will be both important and difficult.

 

Scenarios used in policy need explicit plausibility evaluations.

 

The retirement of the implausible reference scenarios exposes a structural problem in climate research intended to inform policy: For 15 years, the scientific community ran climate projections against scenarios whose energy assumptions failed a basic plausibility test, with no systematic process to catch or correct what we have known is a major flaw in scenario design.

 

The committee attributes the retirement to “trends in the costs of renewables, the emergence of climate policy and recent emission trends,” framing implausibility as something that developed over time. That framing reverses the actual history, which was well documented by Justin Ritchie and Hadi Dowlatabadi almost a decade ago.

 

Reasonable people can disagree about where to set a high-end stress test scenario to explore the robustness of policies and infrastructure in the event of low-probability, high-impact outcomes. Different scenario users will have different risk tolerances and other perspectives on how to create a “worst-case” scenario. However, the CMIP7 high scenario—an exploratory scenario at the top of their scenario set—still assumes a massive increase in coal consumption, which may once again be implausible. Whether anyone checks the scenarios for plausibility remains as opaque as ever.

 

The economics of climate impacts need to be reconsidered.

 

The longtime reference scenarios’ retirement forces a reconsideration of the projected impacts of climate change. Damage projections rely on warming projections, which are built upon reference scenarios.

 

Projected damages will necessarily be substantially lower under realistic scenarios, all else equal—a world warming by 2.7 degrees Celsius will produce a different outcome than one rising by 5 degrees Celsius. The quantity of emissions that require mitigation is also much lower than the old baselines assumed, with corresponding implications for the projected costs of deep decarbonization from the projected baselines. Similarly, social cost of carbon estimates embedded in federal regulation and damage functions in financial risk frameworks need revision.

 

The Paris Agreement targets should be revisited.

 

Another consequence of the new set of CMIP7 scenarios is the elimination of the scenario consistent with the Paris Agreement’s stretch goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial values by 2100. The World Climate Research Programme confirmed last month that its new, low-emissions scenario no longer keeps warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

 

More actionable targets exist. For instance, I’ve long argued that a global coal phase-out agreement—including specific dates, verification mechanisms, and real enforcement—holds greater promise for climate policy progress than an aspirational temperature target. Coal accounts for more than 40 percent of all energy sector carbon dioxide emissions. As of 2023, 84 countries had plans to move away from coal, but together they accounted for only about 30 percent of current coal-fired generation. A framework built around coal elimination would be verifiable, negotiable across countries with very different coal dependencies, and directly tied to the emissions reductions that actually move the temperature numbers.

 

Regardless of what new targets are ultimately agreed upon, it is now clear that the world needs new goals in international climate policy.

 

Expect legal challenges.

 

The reference scenarios may have been initially created with scientific research in mind, but they quickly took on important roles in many policy settings. The Network for Greening the Financial System, an international coalition that coordinates climate stress-testing for more than 140 central banks, originally built its “Hot House World” physical risk scenario to be consistent with RCP8.5. That scenario has been used in stress testing at the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the Bank of France, and the U.S. Federal Reserve.

 

Any regulation, court judgment, or law grounded in the now-retired scenarios is vulnerable to a court challenge, and that challenge has a basis in mainstream, consensus science.

 

The larger lesson.

 

Policies that hold up across a range of futures make more sense than policies optimized or even based upon a single scenario. Robust decision-making does not require alarming or extreme projections. Prediction is a hard business, but durable energy policy can account for what we do not know. And holding tight to implausible scenarios risks compromising not just scientific integrity but also the trust in scientific institutions that durable climate policy requires if it is to survive over the many decades needed to achieve deep decarbonization.

 

The CMIP made the right call in helping the world to move past implausible scenarios. The difficult work of adjusting projections, renegotiating targets, and working through legal and regulatory consequences now falls to everyone else.

How Much More Evidence Do We Need?

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, July 01, 2026

 

Fifteen-term Representative Diana DeGette was ousted by her Democratic constituents last night in favor of the 29-year-old Democratic Socialist Melat Kiros — a candidate who made national headlines by refusing to call the firebombing of Jewish anti-Hamas protesters antisemitic and appeared to endorse Osama bin Laden’s rationale for the 9/11 attacks.

 

Progressives might say there is more you need to know about Kiros to understand her appeal, but I wouldn’t.

 

“We will not wait to reject corporate PACs like AIPAC,” Kiros exclaimed in her victory speech. “No, we will not wait to end the genocide in Palestine.” But there is no genocide in Palestine. AIPAC is not a collection of “monsters,” as Zohran Mamdani slandered them, but Americans engaged in nothing more than lobbying their government. Israel and the Americans who support it dominate progressive thinking today because it represents an elaborate, abstract, and often highly literary metaphor for what Democratic voters are really getting at: their hostility toward modern America.

 

That obsession isn’t exclusive to the DSA.

 

“Nearly all House Democrats voted for a Lebanon war powers resolution on Tuesday that aimed to block U.S. support for Israeli operations against Hezbollah, though the legislation failed to secure a House majority,” Jewish Insider reported on Tuesday. Just 22 House Democrats objected to a measure designed to upend a productive diplomatic process restoring Lebanon’s sovereignty over a region controlled by an Iranian terrorist proxy and to handcuff Israel in its fight with a group that has killed Americans.

 

I have no idea what that has to do with “genocide” or AIPAC or whatever other talisman the left latches onto to justify their myopia. This crusade to handcuff America’s ally in their conflict with a shared adversary makes little sense unless it is understood as an expression of the notion that America is an evil actor on the world stage.

 

Democrats who appear befuddled by the rise of the militant socialist fringe should look in the mirror. It’s they who have legitimized the madness that is now consuming their party.

 

It’s not as though DeGette was some contemptible moderate. She “had the backing of a prominent progressive, Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, the former chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus,” the Wall Street Journal reported. She supported a host of left-wing policies even as she maintained relationships with stakeholders in the major American industries she sought to regulate. But, as DeGette said as she was being berated by one anti-Israel activist, “If the only issue that you care about is this issue, then you should not vote for me.” They didn’t.

 

In a paroxysmal post, Axios reporter Avery Lotz accused the GOP of reviving the “Red Scare” as a campaign tactic. She invoked the specter of McCarthyism, scoffed at Republican “red-baiting,” and quoted a variety of Democratic Socialists who are deeply wounded by the charge. But the GOP is right.

 

Citing a 2025 survey conducted by one New Jersey chapter of the Democratic Socialists, New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall noted that the movement is as white as it is red. “Nearly four out of 10 (39.3 percent) identified as anarchists, followed by Marxists at 35.7 percent and 10.7 percent as democratic socialists,” Edsall wrote. The survey’s authors were deeply disturbed by the lack of ethnic diversity in their movement. They were, apparently, unperturbed by the uniform ideological fanaticism they had encouraged.

 

We don’t have to pretend that anarchism and Marxism are just another flavor of progressivism. They’re not. Nor are we obliged to take seriously the mainstream Democrats who insist that the radical left is nothing to worry about. They said it was just a New York thing, just a Netanyahu thing, just a populist thing. It’s none of those things. It is an anti-American thing.

The Optimists

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, June 30, 2026

 

I think it was George Will who said that five of the most beautiful words in the English language are Congress shall make no law.

 

Any classical liberal would agree. Freedom requires restraints on authority: That’s the Founding vision, as you might expect from colonists who’d just deposed a monarch. That the people might flourish, America’s new government would be barred from wielding monarchical powers itself. With respect to cherished rights, Congress shall make no law.

 

The problem, as America stumbles toward its 250^th birthday, is that that phrase has become as descriptive as it is prescriptive. A legislature hyperpolarized by partisanship and teeming with cowards, performance artists, and radicals doesn’t do much anymore except pass last-minute shutdown-averting omnibus spending bills. Pick any subject (almost) that’s crying out for a policy solution and you may rest assured: Congress shall make no law.

 

This morning’s Supreme Court ruling on birthright citizenship was a surprise, taking a more prescriptive approach to federal power on that issue. I thought the court would rule that the executive has no power to restrict natural-born citizenship, but that the legislature might under Section 5 of the 14^th Amendment. Nope: According to the majority, being born on American soil means you’re a U.S. citizen under the 14^th Amendment, and that’s that.

 

Congress shall make no law to the contrary, and neither shall the wannabe monarch in the White House.

 

But most of the recent landmark court rulings that have roiled the left and right weren’t so aggressive. They were based on interpretations of statutes, not the Constitution. If Americans don’t like those rulings, all they have to do to overturn them is have their representatives amend the relevant statutes.

 

Our own Sarah Isgur made that point yesterday to (mostly Democratic) partisans whining about recent holdings that didn’t go their way. “Once again, nearly all of these SCOTUS decisions can be changed by Congress: late-arriving mail ballots, partisan gerrymandering, student-loan debt forgiveness, asylum at the southern border, [Temporary Protected Status] designations, tariffs …” she wrote on X. (My links, not hers.) “If you don’t like the decision: LOBBY CONGRESS!”

 

Simple, straightforward, classically liberal.

 

But here’s where we run into the descriptive problem. In an era of hyperpolarized negative partisanship, in which the filibuster routinely paralyzes the Senate except in rare cases of supermajority consensus, in which members of the ruling party fearfully forfeit their authority over matters like war to an autocratic president, and in which Americans themselves have lost nearly all confidence in their legislature, of what use is it really to tell people to “LOBBY CONGRESS”?

 

Congress shall make no law in 2026. Congress barely exists in a meaningful sense. What’s the point of lobbying it?

 

And if lobbying it is pointless, what then?

 

A dilemma.

 

The misfortune of the Roberts court is having to preside at a time when every other player in the constitutional order has abdicated its civic duty. The president wants to be king; Congress, under Republican leadership, has done its realistic best to accommodate him; and the American people don’t much care.

 

Case in point: As I write this, reports of no fewer than three new presidential scandals are circulating. The construction of Trump’s new ballroom was apparently commissioned under a no-bid contract, “an unusual arrangement that sidestepped typical contracting procedures designed to control costs,” and not the first such case recently in which the White House has been involved. Meanwhile, the president’s sons—and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s—are getting rich(er) by coincidentally partnering with firms tied to a billion-dollar mining deal that Trump and Lutnick negotiated on behalf of the United States with Kazakhstan.

 

And the pardon racket around the West Wing has somehow grown more brazen than it used to be, allegedly, with federal clemency now essentially for sale. “It is general knowledge in our practice that for $2 million, you can have a pardon,” one white-collar lawyer told The Atlantic. “The clients come to us and tell us, I’ve been told I need to go hire this specific person, and [then] I will get a pardon.” Some attorneys have reportedly stopped advising clients in such matters for fear that the next Democratic administration will pursue them criminally over it.

 

Outrageous, preposterous, almost literally unbelievable corruption—and Congress won’t do a thing about it as long as it remains under GOP control. Even under Democratic control, with impeachment a dead letter, Trump will suffer no consequences beyond the embarrassment of oversight hearings. Nor is there any great public outcry spurring lawmakers on to stop the sleaze: The president is unpopular, sure, but we all know that has more to do with the price of beef and gasoline than with him turning the White House into a fascist Tammany Hall.

 

And so we arrive at the dilemma for the court: If other constitutional checks on executive power have collapsed, what duty does the judiciary have to pick up the slack by scrutinizing executive power more skeptically? If judges are the only civic actors left who are willing and able to prevent authority from accumulating in a renegade presidency, should that influence how they interpret law?

 

“Absolutely not,” conservatives would say.

 

A judge who reads statutes by reasoning backward from the outcome he or she desires isn’t “judging” in any meaningful sense, and certainly isn’t doing so impartially. If the law grants the president power to end temporary protected status for Haitian refugees, whether the president in question is George Washington or Donald Trump doesn’t matter. The Supreme Court should be all but indifferent to the practical effect of its rulings; its civic duty consists of nothing more than saying, in good faith and without bias against either party, what it believes a constitutional provision or statute to mean.

 

A court that begins fiddling with its jurisprudence to “correct” for perversions of the constitutional order by other branches will inevitably create perversions of its own. Imagine how hamstrung some future, more civic-minded president might be if the justices began ruling reflexively against every claim of executive authority by Trump, meritorious or not, in the name of checking him.

 

The liberal response.

 

To all of that, I suspect liberals would say this: It’s one thing for a court to strive for impartiality and to faithfully apply precedent when weighing presidential power, even when the president in question is a churlish authoritarian who’s barely in touch with reality.

 

But it’s another thing entirely for that court to expand presidential power under those circumstances, with Trump guaranteed to abuse every ounce of new authority it grants him.

 

That’s what the Roberts court did in 2024 in its horrendous decision granting presidents criminal immunity when exercising their “core” powers, knowing how the Republican nominee that year would exploit the ruling if he returned to the White House. (I refer you once again to the pardon bazaar currently being run out of the Oval Office.) And it’s what they did again yesterday, albeit this time for more defensible constitutional reasons, in overturning longstanding precedent to rule that the president can fire officials at most “independent” agencies for any reason, even if Congress stipulates that termination can only be for cause.

 

If you believe, as most conservatives do, that there’s no such thing as an “independent” administrative agency in a government in which power is shared among three and only three branches, it makes sense that officials at those agencies should be removable by the head of the branch in which they serve. But there’s no way around the fact that Trump will take this decision as license to replace conscientious bureaucrats with the most lowbrow, incompetent, slavishly loyal postliberal chuds he can find. It’s a green light from SCOTUS to build out the kakistocracy.

 

As of yesterday, “independent” officials are now accountable to an executive who revels in his own unaccountability.

 

Expanding presidential power at the very moment that the presidency is occupied by the most malevolent, corrupt cretin to ever hold the office feels less like an outcome remorselessly dictated by jurisprudential logic than, well, a choice. Rather than revisit the merits of the “unitary executive theory” in light of Trump’s abuses or at least delay developing the doctrine until he’s out of office, the court has plowed ahead unbothered. If you want a judiciary that’s indifferent to outcomes, including outcomes that will clearly accelerate America’s transformation into a third-world country, boy howdy have you got one.

 

Of course, in the court’s defense, they’ve also plowed ahead in restoring power to Congress in important contexts—the tariff decision, for instance, or striking down Joe Biden’s student debt forgiveness order. Each branch is supreme in its own sphere! It’s just that when the president is promiscuous in exercising his power while the legislature seems terrified to exercise its own, one of those branches is destined to be more supreme in practice than the other.

 

To make matters worse, “LOBBY CONGRESS” doesn’t work in this case.

 

As with its ruling on presidential immunity (and today’s ruling on birthright citizenship), the court’s decision on Trump’s authority to fire “independent” bureaucrats was based on its understanding of the Constitution, not on a federal statute. His power can therefore only be limited by a constitutional amendment or by a future court overturning the ruling, neither of which will happen before 2028.

 

And liberals know it, and are adapting accordingly. “The only allowable constitutional path conservative legal theorists have given me to being protected from a vengeful president abusing his authority is to lobby Congress to pack the court,” Democratic data guru David Shor wrote yesterday of the decision on independent agencies. I despise court-packing but it is, assuredly, the most feasible route available to the left to overturn novel forms of presidential authority granted by the Roberts Court under the unitary executive theory.

 

That’s what I mean when I say that the court is caught in an endless dilemma: By remaining indifferent to how Trump might abuse its rulings (except with respect to the Federal Reserve!), SCOTUS is creating the political conditions for radical reform that will lead to a court full of partisan hacks who are dramatically more outcome-focused than the current justices are.

 

Optimists and pessimists.

 

There’s a tacit faith in the wisdom of Americans running through the Supreme Court’s approach to Trump that I find equal parts touching and idiotic.

 

The court isn’t indifferent in principle to presidential abuses, surely. What it believes, I suspect, is that those abuses should—and will—be punished in time by more appropriate constitutional authorities. Congress will eventually act. The people will eventually work their will. The judiciary doesn’t need to do it for them.

 

If the public dislikes seeing law-abiding Haitians deported en masse to suffer immiseration back home, they’ll take Sarah Isgur’s advice and lobby their representatives to do something. If the public dislikes seeing Trump set well-connected criminals loose on the streets or having him staff the federal bureaucracy with the crowd at a MAGA rally, it will rally behind restrictions to limit those powers.

 

The court seems to think that there’s no civic problem that can’t be addressed through conventional democratic mechanisms provided by the constitutional order, however onerous that might be in some cases. And so the court itself is under no special obligation to approach presidential authority differently in this very different era. Majoritarian elements of the republic can and will do that on their own schedule, as they have during periods of reform in the past.

 

This strikes me as a very optimistic view of an America poisoned by apocalyptic partisanship and increasingly seduced on both sides by postliberal attitudes toward power. We’re far more likely to see tit-for-tat abuses of executive authority by the parties post-Trump, I think, than we are to see a serious good-government reform movement dedicated to rolling back that authority gain traction.

 

Lobbying Congress to enact reforms will remain futile as House majorities stay narrow, frozen mostly in place by the reality of a 50-50 country in which ruthless partisan gerrymandering has gone mainstream. Even if one party gains the numbers to pass reforms, its members will convince themselves that they should exploit expansions in presidential authority under their predecessors rather than try to overturn them. They can put that power to good use! Plus, giving their enemies a taste of it will deter them from abusing it again when they’re back in charge—supposedly.

 

As the presidency grows even more domineering and influential, policy will begin to ping-pong more sharply between conflicting ideological visions whenever the White House changes hands. That starts with the bureaucracy: The winning party in each presidential election will now seek to remake the federal government as comprehensively as possible, purging independent agencies en masse under this week’s Supreme Court precedent and stocking them with less qualified, and likely less scrupulous, stooges.

 

Fear of ping-ponging is precisely why conservatives value the Senate filibuster, incidentally. The 60-vote threshold in the upper chamber prevents jolting turnabouts in federal law after a left-wing government replaces a right-wing one and vice versa. We’re going to get that sort of chaos now at the administrative level on “unitary executive” grounds, which will itself throw a jolt into policymaking.

 

Eventually the filibuster itself will go, and when it does I expect Democrats will follow Shor’s lead by concluding that conventional mechanisms aren’t up to the task of undoing Supreme Court decisions they dislike. An unconventional one, namely court-packing, will be needed. With America’s actual legislature reduced to a forum for cable-news-friendly grandstanding, the packed court will become a de facto super-legislature where matters like whether Haitians keep or lose their temporary protected status effectively get decided.

 

Congress shall make no law. That’ll be SCOTUS’s job.

 

The majoritarian elements of the constitutional order aren’t going to solve the Trump problem, I’m afraid. But I also don’t blame the Supreme Court for washing their hands of it and trusting Americans to clean up the mess they’ve made.

 

The rise of Trumpism stranded principled conservative jurists caught between two outcome-focused approaches to law, the “living constitutionalism” of the left and the “ends justifies the means” nihilism of the postliberal right. It’s understandable that besieged justices like John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett might redouble their faith in liberal process under those circumstances: As long as the people retain their ability to change things about the system they don’t like, the court has no reason to do it for them. They’ll do it themselves when they’re good and ready.

 

We’re not going to like where that leads, but that’s a problem with Americans, not with Roberts and Barrett. All of our country’s problems ultimately are.

The Birthright Citizenship Debate Is About to Get Worse

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, July 01, 2026

 

Here’s what I believe to be true: It’s entirely reasonable to oppose America’s system of birthright citizenship. Many prosperous and democratic countries do not have such a policy. We don’t think they’re all “nativist” or anti-immigrant.

 

The argument that the drafters of the 14^th Amendment did not intend for it to allow for blanket birthright citizenship for (nearly) any person born on our soil is not unreasonable, even if you find it unpersuasive.

 

Even if you think the birthright citizenship system we’ve had for more than a century is constitutionally required and has generally served us well, that doesn’t mean you can’t change your mind about the system’s desirability, given massive changes in transportation technology, the growth of the welfare state, changes to the economy, or other considerations. The 14^th Amendment didn’t foresee jet travel. Nor did it anticipate the staggering wealth inequalities between the U.S. and nations with billions of desperately poor people who even more desperately would like to live here. If those factors change your view of the desirability of the birthright citizenship system, that’s fine. When the facts change, you’re allowed to change your mind with them.

 

But, lest you think I am making a “living Constitution” argument, just because you changed your mind about a policy doesn’t mean the Constitution’s meaning changed, too. If you believe the Constitution requires birthright citizenship, jet planes and modern global poverty don’t change the meaning of the Constitution. If the Constitution says X and X is no longer in America’s interest, the remedy is to amend the Constitution.

 

I thought Donald Trump’s executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship was flatly unconstitutional. But I had an open mind about whether Congress could tweak birthright citizenship rules via rewriting current law. The relevant statutes echo an 1898 Supreme Court case—United States v. Wong Kim Ark—which says the “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” language in the 14^th Amendment applies to (nearly) everyone born on American soil. Justice Brett Kavanagh explains in his opinion (which concurred with the judgment but dissented with the majority opinion in part), “In 1940 and 1952, Congress employed the exact language from the Fourteenth Amendment—‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’—in comprehensive new immigration and naturalization laws that provided for birthright citizenship.” He adds that if Congress disagreed with the reasoning in Wong Kim Ark, it would have said so. It didn’t.

 

Congress could have included, at least in theory, further qualifications about what “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” means and who the 14^th Amendment applies to. According to the statute(s), for example, children of diplomats aren’t automatically U.S. citizens. I think it’s fine if Congress wanted to say that children of, say, Chinese billionaire tourists can’t automatically become citizens because a private jet was parked on an American tarmac long enough for a surrogate to give birth. Yes, you’d have to clean up the language, but you get the point.

 

That’s why, if I had my druthers, the Supreme Court would have simply invalidated the executive order and left the rest an open political and constitutional question. As I understand it, the court went further than that. It settled the meaning of the 14th Amendment as a constitutional matter, making it hard or impossible for Congress to tweak how it’s enforced, in effect making the amendment process the only way to reform birthright citizenship. The other possibility, of course, is for Congress to try to write a new rule and test it at the Supreme Court hoping the court significantly revises its ruling or overturns it. That, of course, would require Congress to step up, do its job, forgo having an easy issue to demagogue, and take responsibility on a controversial issue. Yeah, stop laughing.

 

My position is not that dissenting Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch are right on the constitutional question and the historical narrative they invoke. Nor is it that they are wrong. I haven’t answered the question to my own satisfaction. My position is simply that it would have been better to let Congress try to write legislation that dealt with the problems—real or perceived—with the current system. If lawmakers overreached, the court could still invalidate the law. Indeed, it could still reach the same conclusion it reached today.

 

But the debate would have been worthwhile, even though it would surely be ugly at times.

 

But the court’s decision has not spared us an ugly debate over birthright citizenship any more than Roe v. Wade spared America an ugly debate over abortion. Indeed, I suspect the debate will be uglier now, precisely because modest, incremental, legislative reforms have been put out of reach of the conventional political process. Instead, there will likely now be a fight for a(nother) constitutional amendment. Moreover, as with abortion, members of Congress can now take extreme positions precisely because they have been stripped of power and democratic accountability on the issue. The parties polarized over abortion for the same reason: There was no price to be paid for taking a zero-sum position on abortion.

 

I suspect we’ll see something similar as controversial edge cases come to define the issue. The Chinese billionaire passport holder and the pregnant illegal immigrant border jumper will become the equivalent of late-term or partial birth abortion. That doesn’t make such edge cases trivial or illegitimate. Late-term abortions were—and are—rare, but that doesn’t mean they are not morally significant. Unlawful killings by ICE agents are rare. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be a cause for outrage. Abuses of birthright citizenship are comparatively rare, but that doesn’t make objections to them invalid.          

 

One last point. Contrary to a lot of instant hysteria and fearmongering on social media, nothing has really changed with this decision. Trump’s executive order was never implemented. So, the birthright citizenship regime, in practical terms, is the same one we’ve had for more than a century. And pretty much every would-be exploiter of our system already knew of the policy yesterday. Instead of changing anything, this has ratified the status quo. And let us take notice of an important fact: Under this interpretation of the 14^th Amendment, America became the most prosperous and powerful country in the world. That’s not to attribute causation; it’s simply an observation that this has been the way we did things when the nostalgists of today thought America was great.

 

This is important to point out for several reasons. First, the catastrophism we will hear from the White House and its supporters is political theater intended for partisan mobilization. Second, it illustrates that what the Supreme Court did today is what it has done throughout the Trump era: ruled without undue consideration of the president’s political desires and interests. I am not saying it always ruled correctly. For instance, I think the 2024 presidential immunity case was wrongly decided. But claims that this court has been a “rubber stamp” for Trump cannot be easily squared with this ruling (or its Monday ruling on counting ballots after election day). The narrative that the court advances Trump’s political desires and interests has a contradiction built into it: Trump’s desires are not always in his political interest, and his political interests are not always foremost in his desires. The court’s decision today surely disappointed Trump (and adviser Stephen Miller), but it gave him a useful political issue in the same way Roe gave the abortion issue to a generation of politicians and activists on the right and left.  

 

Which brings me to my last point. What the court did today wasn’t just an extension of the status quo with regard to birthright citizenship. It was an extension of the tendency of the Supreme Court to spare Congress the burden of doing the hard work it was elected to do. Rather than settle an issue, it more than likely turbocharged it.

Stop Being Funny

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, July 01, 2026

 

Speaking Sunday night at the Trump Kennedy Center, where he was receiving the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, Bill Maher offered an excellent bit of advice for politicians who do not wish to be mocked:

 

“Stop being funny.”

 

It is a simple thing, and a not-so-simple thing.

 

When politicians are being ridiculous, Maher said, “I put them in jokes—jokes that work.” Jokes that work is the key thing. It is axiomatic in comedy that the way to kill a joke is to explain it, but it is worth thinking about why and how Maher’s jokes, and other jokes about politicians, work. If politicians are to stop being funny, then they will need to answer the question: When are politicians funny?

 

For one, politicians are funny when they are needy—especially when they show themselves to be in desperate need of attention and adulation. Pete Hegseth’s risible workout videos are an example of this. Bill Clinton’s general neediness was both pitiable and funny as he tried to fill whatever awful vacancy is at the center of him with junk food and junk sex. Donald Trump’s pharaonic megalomania is both disturbing and hilarious, even if the scolds insist that there is nothing to laugh about in such times as these. Jill Biden’s insistence upon calling herself “Dr. Biden” is funny. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s need to swan around at the Met Gala while pretending to be an in-the-trenches class warrior is funny. European Central Bank boss Christine Lagarde’s constant sophomoric LinkedIn posting, which makes her look like she is desperately seeking employment, is eminently mockable.

 

Beyond neediness, politicians—and media figures and activists—also are funny when they are unreasonable. Ross Perot’s mania was a gift to Saturday Night Live’s Dana Carvey and other satirists. There is a reason everybody makes fun of vegans, Bible-thumpers, libertarians, and the fading memory of Greta Thunberg. Humor is one of the ways we try to keep politics inside the 40-yard lines—extremists are inviting targets for satire. About half of The Blues Brothers is an extended riff on the ridiculousness of George Lincoln Rockwell and his American Nazi Party.

 

Politicians also are funny when they are transparent. The late Rev. Jesse Jackson has a complicated legacy, but he understood himself as a performer and understood that others knew his preacherly cadence and soaring, moralistic rhetoric were a device, something he could turn on and off—which is why he himself sometimes had a good laugh about it, for example in his famous reading of Green Eggs and Ham. That Jackson also was a moral hypocrite was understood without a literal nod and wink. Similarly, the jaw-clenching patrician William Weld could laugh at himself, informing critics who insisted that he was pampered and out of touch that “the Welds arrived in 1630 with only the shirts on their backs and 2,000 pounds of gold.” William F. Buckley’s mayoral campaign was a publicity stunt. Everybody knew it, and Buckley himself acknowledged it when he declared that, if he won, he would immediately “demand a recount.” Bob Dole did not try very hard to hide his bitterness about losing the presidency to such a specimen as Bill Clinton: “I want children to know that, in America, anybody can grow up to be president. Except me.” It was, as Maher would say, a joke that works. Like the man who affects a humorously curmudgeonly persona to mask the more profound misanthropy of his actual character, figures such as Jackson and Weld put forward gentler versions of their vicious tendencies as a kind of psychological and moral vaccine.

 

Politicians also can be mocked, at times, for their virtues, usually when they manifest themselves as too much of a good thing. In real life, George H.W. Bush was the kind of badass that dorks such as Pete Hegseth pretend to be. If you were a Japanese soldier in 1944, you didn’t want to see Bush coming—but by 1992 his excruciatingly self-effacing WASP style was an anachronism, and it was easy to mock him as wishy-washy, as a “wimp.” Mitt Romney’s let’s-not-get-carried-away-with-ourselves conversational style—I have heard him pronounce the sentence “I love data” with no self-consciousness at all—makes him seem as though he lacks the true politician’s obligatory passion, which, God bless him, he probably does. It also makes him seem like a man whose brain is running a software update in the background. For my own part, I could stand a bit more of that old Bush-era Ivy League leadership style, with its modesty, moderation, and genuine sense of duty, just as I could make room for a lot more unexciting and unexcitable politicians such as Romney. But I also recognize that the humor directed at these men points to the vices that attend their virtues: The old country club Republicans may have had a genuine sense of civic responsibility, but they also had a genuine sense of entitlement to political power; the data-driven pragmatism associated with Romney’s style of politics also is very often associated with a certain excessive plasticity of principles.

 

Naked dishonesty in politicians is funny. So is incompetence. So is howling demagoguery. Quiet, unshowy competence is not very funny. A program of prudent and gradual reform is not usually very easy to satirize. Being quietly good at your job—that is very, very difficult to mock.

 

Bill Maher is right. Politicians should stop being funny.