America Alone

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, April 09, 2026

 

The war in Iran may not be the last war that America wages during this presidency, but it will almost certainly be the last challenging war.

 

Whether that’s good or bad depends on how you look at it.

 

Having painted himself into a corner in the Persian Gulf, the president won’t risk another conflict in which he stands a meaningful chance of looking weak, I suspect. From here on out, we’re fighting tomato cans only. And that’s good news: A strongman who’s learned the limits of his strength will be less likely going forward to put American service members in harm’s way.

 

But it’s bad news if you believe U.S. military power is the only thing limiting the global reach of Chinese totalitarians.

 

There’s no liberal kinship binding Donald Trump to Taiwan—or Japan or South Korea, for that matter. If Xi Jinping dares the president to test his mettle against the People’s Liberation Army, my guess is the commander in chief will decide that letting China control its own “sphere of influence” is preferable to rolling the dice on a war that could shatter perceptions of American (i.e. his) might.

 

Never mind that ducking a fight with Beijing would itself go a long way toward doing that.

 

I could be wrong about all of that, as I’ve underestimated Trump’s appetite for war before. A strategic defeat in Iran might lead him to behave more aggressively toward China, not less, by leaving him feeling that he has something to prove.

 

But probably not. A bully who’s met unexpected resistance in the schoolyard will instinctively want to push smaller kids around to reestablish his dominance, not pick another fight with someone his own size. Just because I couldn’t wedgie Iran into crying uncle doesn’t mean I can’t do it to you.

 

If I’m right, America will spend the next 33 months preying on nations that can’t fight back while straining to avoid conflict with powers like China and Russia as they go about preying on our own allies.

 

How many dependable partners will a country like that still have when Trump leaves office in 2029?

 

No allies.

 

Israel?

 

Doubtful. The Israelis may want their alliance with America to continue in its current form, but Americans do not. One of the most sobering polls I’ve seen this year was this Pew Research survey published on Tuesday gauging U.S. opinion about the Jewish state. Majorities in both parties between the ages of 18 and 49 now view Israel unfavorably. (Yes, Republicans too.) Democrats 50 and older also hold an overwhelmingly unfavorable opinion.

 

Only among Republicans 50 and older—Donald Trump’s demographic—is negative sentiment toward Israel still a minority view. If the next president is J.D. Vance, it’s a cinch that Washington’s longstanding alliance with Tel Aviv will be radically more ambivalent than it’s been for most of my life. If the next president is a Democrat, the alliance might exist mostly in name only. There’ll still be intelligence-sharing, I assume (or hope), but Benjamin Netanyahu’s de facto political union with Trump has finished off whatever meager affection the American left still had for his country.

 

The Gulf states?

 

A good outcome to the Iran war might have cemented that alliance, but the window for a good outcome has closed. America’s Arab partners have been battered by Iranian missile and drone strikes, with Uncle Sam unable to fully protect them, while the bottleneck in the Strait of Hormuz continues to strangle their core industry. “The U.S. and Israel went into the war and didn’t take Gulf interests into account, so we ended up as collateral damage,” one Kuwaiti academic complained to the Wall Street Journal. “The fear is that being collateral damage in the war extends into peace, and this is something we wouldn’t accept and need to work against.”

 

If the conflict ends with Iran’s terror-supporting regime still in place, as is all but certain, Gulf nations will need to weigh their relationship with the U.S. against the risk of further antagonizing that regime. Forced to live cheek by jowl with Shiite fanatics who’ve proved their ability to take the region’s energy sector hostage, Sunni powers like Saudi Arabia and the UAE might conclude that triangulating between Iran and America is the safer long-term play. Having a friend in Washington is nice, but not as nice as not having to worry about Iran blowing up your oil fields.

 

Needless to say, the Gulf states will also pay a steep political price with the next Democratic administration for their corrupt courtship of Trump. Although maybe they’d prefer that anyway: At least a Democratic president would know better than to insult the most powerful Arab leader in the world by accusing him publicly of “kissing my ass.”

 

Japan?

 

Tokyo is probably America’s best bet for an ally who’ll still be there after the smoke from the Trump conflagration clears, but I wouldn’t bet heavily on that either. For starters, the Iran war is hitting the Japanese economy much harder than ours, as Japan gets no less than 93 percent of its crude oil via the Strait of Hormuz. Having that tap suddenly turned off has wreaked all of the havoc you might expect—a market dip, declining consumer confidence, and a rising risk of inflation. If our war saddles them with a recession, Japanese voters might understandably hold a grudge.

 

Skillful diplomacy could avert that, perhaps, but Americans opted out of skillful diplomacy when they chose a kakistocracy to govern them in 2024. Trump has responded to Japan’s economic pain by throwing a jab about Pearl Harbor during a visit by the Japanese prime minister to the White House last month and then browbeating the government for not helping him clean up the mess he made in Iran.

 

If he does anything in the Far East over the next 33 months to signal that his commitment to containing China isn’t ironclad (and there have already been rumblings to that effect), Japan will find itself in a position similar to the Gulf states. They can resolve to fight the regional menace that threatens them or they can move to appease it in hopes that it’ll leave them alone. But either way, they won’t be able to count on America to do anything meaningful about it.

 

Which brings us to Europe.

 

Enemies, a love story.

 

Our alliances with Israel, Japan, and the Gulf states will still exist nominally in 2029 even if there’s little substance to them. I’m not sure our European alliances will.

 

“NATO WASN’T THERE WHEN WE NEEDED THEM, AND THEY WON’T BE THERE IF WE NEED THEM AGAIN. REMEMBER GREENLAND, THAT BIG, POORLY RUN, PIECE OF ICE!!!” That was the president’s message yesterday after meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. Hours earlier, his press secretary conceded that he was considering leaving the alliance, something he has no legal power to do but which no longer matters in autocratic America.

 

“It all began with, if you want to know the truth, Greenland,” Trump himself told reporters on Monday when asked why he was so angry at Europe for not joining his war. “We want Greenland. They don’t want to give it to us. And I said, ‘bye, bye.’” It is very stupid politically to pair those two grievances, as one of them explains the other: If you want to know why Europeans haven’t behaved like allies lately, consider what sort of allyship the president showed them when he spent the first month of this year trying to extort them into coughing up territory.

 

That’s what NATO is up against. Trump expects Europe to comply with his individual demands, not necessarily because those demands are reasonable but because that’s what vassals do. Whether it’s helping in the Strait of Hormuz or forking over Greenland, European leaders are supposed to subordinate their national interests—and the will of their voters—to ours when the president asks them to do so. Because he’s not asking.

 

I don’t know how an alliance as poisoned as that survives even nominally for another 33 months. Without a doubt, Trump will continue to alienate NATO members and Europe by alternately insulting them, shaking them down, and making toxic demands of them. I expect him to take another run at muscling them over Greenland too (he might be preparing to do so already), possibly using the current war as a pretext. “Europe wouldn’t let us use their bases to attack Iran so we can’t trust that Denmark will always let us use Greenland,” the president could say.

 

Simply dwell on this fact: Since January 2025, multiple NATO members have been forced to plan their response to a potential U.S. military attack. Say what you want about Vladimir Putin, at least he doesn’t make Europeans glad-hand him when they’re not busy wargaming against his army.

 

A simpler way to put all of that is that the Trump-led U.S. government isn’t hostile to Israel, Japan, or the Gulf states, but it is, plainly, ideologically hostile to Europe—to the point that its hostility is now official national security policy. In fact, while Trump was meeting with Rutte yesterday, J.D. Vance was wrapping up a two-day trip to Budapest, where he attacked the “bureaucrats in Brussels” on behalf of a corrupt Putin toady whose government has become a sort of Russian catspaw within the European Union.

 

Without hyperbole, the White House is momentarily aligned with the Kremlin in trying to rescue an unpopular Hungarian strongman because his politics are their mutual best chance of ending liberalism in the West. You tell me how something like that gets papered over and we end up in January 2029 without the U.S. and Europe in a sort of Cold War.

 

Even Ukraine, America’s greatest remaining point of leverage over Europe, might not bind the rest of NATO to us for much longer. Necessity has led to ingenuity in Kyiv: From drones to missiles to air defense, the Ukrainians have developed formidable native capabilities. The less they’re forced to rely on weapons purchased from America, the less leverage Trump will have to extort Ukraine’s allies into doing his bidding by threatening to cut those weapons off.

 

Although, ironically, the president’s desire for leverage might be the last, best hope of preserving the alliance.

 

Prestige.

 

I don’t think it would bother Trump as an ideological matter if America ended up without meaningful allies in 2029. (I doubt very much that he cares what happens to the country one way or another once it no longer answers to him.) He might actually prefer it.

 

Like his boyfriend Kim Jong Un, Trump is an autark at heart. Our mercantilist leader would be perfectly content, I think, if America subsisted entirely on homegrown food and domestic goods and exported whatever’s left over. Self-reliance is the essence of Trump juche, and self-reliant nations don’t need allies.

 

Nor, I suspect, does the president discern any reason why a nation with the greatest military in history should desire partners. That’s the mafioso in him: If you can impose your will on others (except Iran, I guess), there’s no need to court them. Eventually they’ll come begging for something they need, creating an opportunity to extort them, or you’ll take what you want from them when your own need arises.

 

“America alone” is an acceptable outcome to him in principle. But he’d miss all of the bowing and scraping allied leaders have learned to do to try to satisfy his bottomless need for flattery.

 

That’s the real risk to him in alienating partners. The president doesn’t care for NATO in the abstract, but I’m sure he finds it deeply pleasurable when a figure like Mark Rutte feels obliged to call him “daddy.” If he keeps threatening Europe, at some point that will stop. The leverage he enjoys over global elites dissipates every time he forces them anew to question whether they’re still getting more out of maintaining close ties to the United States than they’re losing.

 

“Nobody can understand what America actually is today. It seems governed by some kind of mad emperor who keeps saying whatever comes to his mind, something we haven’t witnessed since Caligula or Nero,” an Italian senator told the Wall Street Journal this week. “The one thing the Europeans have understood is that we are dealing with a bully. You can give him everything he wants, you can pretend you don’t hear his insults, but he will keep trying to bully us, and so at a certain point we must stop him.”

 

Even the Euroweenies can be pushed only so far. Eventually the president will threaten for the umpteenth time to quit NATO and they’ll reply with an exasperated “go ahead.” (Iran’s behavior this week should have taught Trump a lesson about scare tactics losing their potency.) Then he’ll be alone in the Oval Office, a global pariah with 36 percent job approval, forced to dial up Delcy Rodríguez to chat with a world leader who still respects him.

 

Or pretends to respect him, I should say.

 

That would be grim for him, which may explain why the “punishment” the White House is reportedly preparing for NATO over the Iran war doesn’t seem so punitive. From the Wall Street Journal:

 

The proposal would involve moving U.S. troops out of North Atlantic Treaty Organization member countries deemed unhelpful to the Iran war effort and stationing them in countries that were more supportive.

 

…

 

Countries that could benefit because they are viewed as supportive include Poland, Romania, Lithuania and Greece, the officials said. The Eastern European countries have some of the highest defense-spending rates in the alliance and were some of the first to signal they would support an international coalition to monitor the Strait of Hormuz. After war broke out, Romania quickly approved U.S. requests to allow its bases to be used by the U.S. Air Force.

 

Moving U.S. troops from western Europe to eastern Europe isn’t punishment for NATO, it’s simply good strategic sense. If Russia comes for the alliance, it’s not going to do so via the Atlantic, with an amphibious landing in Galicia. Pulling troops from Spain or Germany might be a minor economic blow to those countries but it won’t weaken NATO’s defense if those troops end up in the Baltics. On the contrary.

 

The thought of America alone—of an America with little remaining international prestige—may ultimately be too unpalatable for a leader who really, really revels in that prestige. If our alliances with NATO and its members somehow endure until 2029, that’ll probably be why.

 

But I’d still bet on America ending up more or less alone. With the possible exception of Russia, I can’t imagine any government on Earth living through this period of chaotic, brain-damaged gangster insanity and ever again wanting to invest heavily in a relationship with the United States. I’ve made this point many times but it can’t be overstated: A people capable of electing Donald Trump twice, especially after January 6, is a people that can never again be trusted to lead the world even after he’s gone.

 

So they won’t be. Our alliances post-Trump, insofar as they exist, will be of a qualitatively different and less deferential nature than they were for most of our lifetimes. “Still somewhat better than being dominated by Chinese communists” is the most one can say for the Pax Americana anymore. And already, after just 15 months, things are so bleak that some are unwilling to say it.

States Are Learning the Wrong Lesson From the ‘Mississippi Miracle’

By Rachel Canter

Thursday, April 09, 2026

 

No story has caught the imagination of education reformers this decade quite like the “Mississippi miracle.” From 1998 to 2024, fourth-grade reading and math scores in my home state—the nation’s poorest—rose from among the worst in the country to among the best. When adjusting for demographic factors such as poverty, we’re in first place.

 

Other states are now trying to emulate what Mississippi did. Those efforts largely revolve around adopting what’s known as the “science of reading”— a set of principles and teaching techniques, including phonics, that are grounded in decades of empirical research. Last fall, for example, the Wall Street Journal editorial board marveled that “even California is now following Mississippi’s lead by returning to phonics” as Governor Gavin Newsom prepared to sign a major new reading bill into law. But what many outsiders fail to understand is that Mississippi changed far more than just how reading is taught. They therefore miss why and how our literacy approach succeeded.

 

As I detail in a new report for the Progressive Policy Institute, Mississippi’s transformation depended on holding students, educators, and even policy makers accountable for better student performance. Imposing real accountability in education is politically onerous, which is why such policies have fallen out of favor over the past decade. But reforms that try to copy only Mississippi’s commitment to reading science without accountability will not deliver the intended results. Fixing education is never that simple. If states really want to replicate our success, they need to understand that what Mississippi did wasn’t a miracle at all.

 

***

 

For decades, education policy in Mississippi was driven mostly by a desperate desire to avoid ranking last in the country. Aiming higher wasn’t on the agenda, because state and local leaders believed that Mississippi kids were too poor to make real progress. In practice, this meant that the state set abysmally low standards for what students should learn to advance and graduate.

 

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Mississippi was pulled onto the path of reform by federal legislation, most notably George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which required states to ensure that students met challenging learning standards on standardized tests and established consequences for schools that failed to do so. Our performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the Nation’s Report Card, improved substantially from 1998 to 2009. But because the whole country was improving, too, Mississippi’s gains were not enough to move the state up in the rankings. We needed to improve much, much faster than everyone else if we ever hoped to catch the national average.

 

In the ensuing years, the country saw a broad backlash to the ideas embodied in No Child Left Behind and its successor, Race to the Top. Mississippi, however, took the lessons it had learned about higher expectations and built on them. The process that would later be called a miracle began in 2008, when the state decided to confront the problem of chronically underperforming schools. In 2009, the legislature passed a law giving the state robust new powers to take over districts rated as “failing” for two consecutive years. The law allowed the state to abolish these districts’ local school board and remove the local superintendent in favor of a state appointee who would report directly to the state board of education. A later amendment provided that removed local-school-board members would be barred from serving in that capacity again.

 

These remedies were intense—and yet the state set such a low bar for academic success that it was unlikely to affect more than a handful of Mississippi’s school districts. Only in 2012 did the legislature set about toughening up the accountability regime. Schools and districts began earning a letter grade from A to F, just as children did in school, based on the share of students hitting outcomes including achieving grade-level learning, showing a year’s worth of growth in a year’s time, passing career and technical courses, and graduating with a standard diploma after four years of high school. By this point, the state was nearly three years into implementing new, challenging learning standards and had plans to administer a new assessment that was designed to reflect a national bar for student performance, rather than the measly Mississippi bar we had always set. The letter grades would reflect whether schools had successfully made the transition to the higher expectations, and do so in a way that the public would more easily understand.

 

This commitment to high standards was the context in which Mississippi passed our now-famous literacy law in 2013. Under the Literacy-Based Promotion Act, Mississippi students who cannot read sufficiently by third grade are held back a year—“retained,” in education-policy parlance. Importantly, the law allows only very narrow exemptions, such that the overwhelming majority of children promoted to fourth grade must pass the state reading assessment in their first three tries. It also requires schools to screen students through state-approved assessments three times a year and send parents a letter reporting their child’s progress. These two accountability requirements made sure that everyone in the system would be in a hellfire hurry to teach children to read. No one wanted children to fail.

 

The second reason for our success seems obvious now but wasn’t at the time: The state’s bureaucracy worked hard to implement reforms effectively. The shift to higher expectations, in other words, did not apply only to children and schools; it required a new attitude at the Mississippi Department of Education. Until 2012, the details of how an education law or policy would be implemented, and its success measured, were mostly left to individual school districts. The state education department focused primarily on compliance with such black-and-white requirements as class size, air conditioners, and funding restrictions.

 

This had clearly not worked, if the goal was student achievement. So, in 2013, the legislature tried a new tack: articulating clearer expectations in law and giving the state more involvement in implementation. For example, the legislature created a special-purpose oversight body called the Reading Panel to help the Department of Education with literacy implementation and gave two of the panel’s six seats to its own education-committee chairs, and a third to a governor’s appointee. Education officials were immediately on notice that if they didn’t collaborate, there would be consequences. The department, aided by the hiring of a new state superintendent in November 2013, began to take a more active role than in the past in marshaling resources, support, and administrative authority to make sure the changes embodied in law actually filtered down to students in the classroom.

 

***

 

As the founder of the education nonprofit Mississippi First, I spent 17 years, alongside many other advocates, pushing for the reforms whose results are now grabbing national attention. I’m ecstatic that other states are recognizing and seeking to emulate our work. Unfortunately, the policies they have rushed to adopt look less like pages from the Mississippi playbook and more like elaborate paper snowflakes, with many of the most important pieces snipped out. As Idrees Kahloon wrote for The Atlantic in October, states across the country are considering and passing literacy reforms at a time when they have otherwise abandoned the foundation of standards and accountability. Few have committed to the sorts of accountability measures, such as parental notification and strict performance-based retention, that built the conditions for Mississippi’s reading initiative to succeed.

 

This mentality plays out in statehouses and departments of education in quietly pernicious ways. In Michigan, for example, lawmakers are considering their second revamp of a 2016 literacy law that failed to raise student outcomes, and they still seem torn on holding students to high standards. The original law included a third-grade retention policy that granted several broad exemptions, including allowing parents to opt their children out of being held back. The policy proved both unpopular and ineffective and was repealed in 2023. Lawmakers are now thinking of resurrecting it without fixing its flaws.

 

Georgia adopted two big reading bills in 2023 that attempted to copy many of Mississippi’s strategies. Almost immediately, implementation went sideways, in part because the state failed to carefully select the tests that screen children for reading skills and difficulties. The original list adopted by the Georgia Department of Education contained 16 options of widely varying quality, prompting a 2024 bill to try to limit those approved. Education advocates in Georgia have told me that although the law declares that the science of reading shall become the standard in Georgia, the state education department is reluctant to force school districts to change their practices. The good news is that members of the Georgia legislature have caught on. In March, in the final few days of the 2026 legislative session, they passed cleanup legislation to try to more tightly control implementation.

 

And then there is California, which passed a “landmark” bill in 2025, framed as the fruits of a yearslong effort to help more children learn to read. The state budget also funds science-of-reading training grants and some literacy coaches statewide.

 

But a lack of accountability presages failure for California’s big reform. The law encourages school districts to select science-of-reading curricula from a state-approved list—but it also allows them to self-certify that their materials meet state standards. California has also begun screening students in kindergarten through second grade for literacy difficulties but generally does not require parental notification of student scores. It has no statewide retention policy at all.

 

My fear is that poor implementation and, above all, a failure to take accountability seriously will end up discrediting good ideas. If these legislative reforms don’t work, some states might conclude that the science of reading is ineffective and move on to the next education-policy fad. For exactly this reason, a silent compact has emerged in Mississippi lately to refrain from calling what happened a “miracle.” The word diminishes the very real human effort required to change education for the children of our state. We’ve instead started calling our success the “Mississippi marathon.” A marathon is always 26.2 miles, no matter when or where it’s held. There are no shortcuts. Finishing is a human marvel, but not miraculous. Mississippi took every step, no matter how exhausting, to fix education. Other states will have to do the same.

Trans Issues Are No Conspiracy

By Jesse Singal

Thursday, 09, 2026

 

There’s been an undeniable backlash against the trans rights movement. In February, the liberal outlet The Argument reported on the results of a survey it had commissioned of 3,000 registered voters. The problem wasn’t just that the mainstream trans advocacy position was underwater on genuinely fraught issues like sports and youth gender medicine, but that even a seemingly settled issue—bathrooms—also now polled poorly for trans people.

 

This is a remarkable turnaround. After all, in 2016 it was Republicans who caught a wave of nationwide backlash after the North Carolina GOP passed a “bathroom bill” preventing trans people from using facilities in line with their gender identities. During polling conducted around that time, notes Lakshya Jain in The Argument, a small majority of Americans said trans people should be allowed to use the bathrooms congruent with their gender identities. While it’s fraught to compare different polls taken at different times using different wording, now a small majority of registered voters favor “a national law that would require transgender people to use public restrooms corresponding with their birth sex.” Factoring in the “not sures,” only a third of voters said they were opposed to this (rather radical) policy proposal.

 

Why has this shift occurred? Some progressives have settled on a very self-satisfying answer: some sort of conspiracy that has polluted the minds of easily bamboozled voters. Take, for example, Maine Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner’s recent appearance on the popular podcast “Death, Sex, and Money.” Host Anna Sale asked Plattner how he would talk about the issue of trans women competing in female sports categories with a Maine voter. Platner responded not by answering Sale’s question, but by pointing to what he called an “anti-trans campaign.”

 

This whole campaign … is funded by an out-of-state billionaire to make sure that we have this discussion and we don’t talk about raising his taxes. That’s why [this conversation] exists. I think there are, like, two trans kids that compete in high school sports in Maine. There are 40,000 Mainers who are going to lose health care because of the lack of the ACA extension. I’m sorry—one of those things seems very important and real to me and one of them seems like an invented culture war scare to keep people divided.

 

Platner’s response was met with widespread praise in online progressive spaces. “Graham Platner EXPOSES billionaire for pushing anti-trans campaign,” went the title of a video posted by progressive commentator Brian Tyler Cohen. A couple weeks later, the leftist writer Dave Roberts made a similar argument as part of a longer series of Bluesky posts about (what he sees as) the complete right-wing takeover of media:

 

I know I’ve said this a trillion times but I have to say it periodically to keep from going insane: The right ran a huge, well-funded, & ultimately successful campaign to completely take over political media & the infosphere more generally. This is by far the most important political development of that last half-century, upstream of virtually any other problem that you can identify, and yet in mainst[r]eam political discourse we *never talk about it*. It’s the biggest, most salient political fact of all, just sitting there, looming, and no one f-cking speaks it aloud. Every day, I talk to earnest liberals who describe to me, in great detail, problems that have resulted from this ... but they won’t name the cause! “Turns out, all the sudden the public is obsessed with trans girls trying to play sports.” Oh? Any thoughts about why? Any at all? No? No thoughts?

 

The basic idea, then, is that there’s nothing substantive to talk about here. These aren’t real issues, but rather issues that voters and consumers of media are tricked into thinking are real issues.

 

There’s another version of this conspiracy theory you’ll often find in lefty spaces. It blames not conservatives, per se, but rather center-left outlets like The Atlantic and the New York Times. The basic idea is that the center-left—or “reactionary centrists,” to use near-meaningless jargon popular in these communities—has, via relentless disingenuous “just asking questions” coverage of trans issues, significantly swayed public opinion toward skepticism of trans rights. It’s not “out-of-state billionaires” who have fooled impressionable voters into confusing a non-issue for a real issue; it’s the editors and reporters at elite media outlets.

 

I should admit to some bias here—I have sometimes been accused of being one of those “reactionary centrists” as a result of my reporting on the youth gender medicine debate. Still, it’s pretty silly to land on this explanation given the existence of a much simpler one: Trans advocacy has, in recent years, adopted radical and unpopular positions that Americans don’t like and aren’t warming up to, and as trans advocacy and trans people have become more salient, so too has the divide between elite orthodoxy on these issues and how most Americans view them.

 

The counterexample is gay marriage. Over time, the more people heard about gay marriage, the more they favored it. The reasons for this sea change in public opinion are hotly debated, and no one knows for sure how much of it is due to activism, media representation, the mere fact of more people coming out to their families, and so on—let alone how these different factors intersect. But the fact of the matter is that marriage equality won as an idea, both in terms of public opinion and the landmark 2015 Obergefell decision.

 

While trans rights activists have their own important SCOTUS decision—the 2020 Bostock decision enshrined important protections vis-a-vis gender identity—after about a decade in the spotlight, they can’t point to any policy priority on which they’ve made meaningful public opinion headway. In most areas, things have gone backward. While Americans remain broadly in favor of basic civil rights protections for trans people—there is not some surge of populist revolt calling for them to be kicked out of their homes or jobs—the specific arguments trans advocates and progressive politicians have chosen to embrace simply don’t appear to have worked at all.

 

That’s largely because they center on a maximalist version of self-ID, or the notion that someone’s sex is what they say it is. Blue states have passed laws extending this logic to areas like locker rooms and prisons, and these are wildly unpopular positions for obvious reasons: Most people don’t think biological males should be able to enter female spaces with no questions asked.

 

These policies have led to some terrible outcomes. In 2021, California began implementing the “Transgender Respect, Agency, and Dignity Act” which mandated that any inmate “who is transgender, nonbinary, or intersex, regardless of anatomy,” shall “Be housed at a correctional facility designated for men or women based on the individual’s preference.” One of the justifications for the law was that it would protect transgender women (that is, natal males who later identify as women) from rape in male prisons.

 

The law was challenged, and in a 2022 press release the ACLU of Southern California featured a quote from an inmate named Tremayne Carroll. “If these plaintiffs get what they want, I’ll be sent back to a men’s prison, where I would face relentless sexual harassment and the constant threat of rape,” Carroll said. “That was my reality for years, and I am terrified to go back. I am a woman, and I don’t belong in a men’s prison.”

 

Carroll is a disturbed individual who had spent decades in jail and who was charged with forced oral copulation as a teenager before pleading down to other charges. There does not appear to be any evidence Carroll identified as trans until the 2021 law was passed, at which point they sought and were granted housing in a female unit. In 2024, Carroll was charged with raping two female inmates and transferred back to a male prison. Carroll has claimed that one of his victims climbed on top of him and forced him to have sex with her, threatening him with a false rape accusation if he didn’t.

 

The trial is set to finally begin in August, said Madera County Deputy District Attorney Eric Dutemple in an email, after numerous delays stemming in part from multiple attorneys of Carroll’s having withdrawn from the case. A judge has ordered that during the trial and pretrial hearings, everyone involved, including Carroll’s alleged victims, must refer to Carroll as “she.” Dutemple’s team appealed this order, but two higher courts declined to take up their appeal. A pretrial motion to at least exempt Carroll’s alleged victims is still pending, according to Dutemple.

 

The average American, upon hearing a story like this, is going to have a pretty simple response: Why was a violent male being housed with female inmates? And the courts are really going to force everyone to call the male alleged rapist she? The progressive intelligentsia has done an astonishingly poor job coming up with answers to basic questions like these; the focus has mostly been on freshman-level philosophical and linguistic games, as though calling the alleged rapist assigned male rather than male changes anything about the case.

 

In fact, for about a decade, the ACLU, GLAAD, and many progressive politicians have adopted the “strategy”—if you can call it that—of pretending that anyone who raises these concerns is a bigot, of pretending that there are no legitimate arguments for sex-based segregation that aren’t rooted in bigotry. This no-debate, no-discussion “strategy” appears to have been a profound failure, as even some in the movement are quietly acknowledging—Jeremy Peters has some good details in a New York Times story from 2024.

 

Because the groups most responsible for dictating the trans-rights policy agenda seem to have convinced themselves that only bigots could disagree with any aspect of this agenda, it’s left them completely unprepared to meaningfully address the natural consequences of their preferred policies.

 

It’s not that there is some massive number of alleged prison rapes connected to self-ID policies like California’s, or or that most girls’ high school sports champions are now trans. Still, the argument that these issues only affect a small number of individuals is politically naive at best, because the number of these alleged incidents has risen, as has their political salience. Democrats should know better than anyone that voters don’t think in such terms; there was a giant, nationwide reckoning over the police shooting of unarmed black men—an event which, while horrific, is statistically quite rare! 

 

This argument also falls flat because until 30 seconds ago, the liberal establishment was doing everything possible to raise the salience of this issue. For much of the last decade, trans rights have been treated as an exceptionally vital civil rights struggle, the stuff of White House events and day-one executive orders and endless sympathetic news coverage. It doesn’t make sense, then, to ask why anyone is paying so much attention to trans issues—you were trying to get people to pay attention.

 

Another important factor in explaining the backlash: As the sociologist Rogers Brubaker argues in a must-read article on the recent history of the concept of “gender identity,” many of the recent changes to law and policy and institutional norms occurred in a bit of a behind-the-scenes manner. “Gender identity was embedded in professional practices, organizational routines, and institutionalized procedures not only without public debate, but without much public attention of any kind,” Brubaker writes.

 

This happened in different ways in different places, ranging from Obama-era dictates about the interpretation of Title IX to major scientific organizations’ decisions to replace “sex” with “gender identity” in public health databases. It is too long a story to do justice to here—you really should read Brubaker’s work. But consider what all these behind-the-scenes changes meant in practice for one very politically active group: parents. Many parents who might not have previously thought much about trans issues suddenly found out that their kids were being taught questionable and highly politicized theories about “gender identity” in public schools; that some of those same schools had instituted controversial no-questions-asked policies pertaining to social transition as young as kindergarten; that their districts no longer had sex-segregated sports in the traditional sense; and on and on and on. (Disclosure: Brubaker is turning this paper into a book that’ll be out this summer, and his publisher asked if I would provide a blurb. I gladly agreed.)

 

This fundamentally changes the meaning of trans advocacy. If trans issues concern a small group of put-upon, suffering people, and if the policy proposals involve fair-seeming compromises and tolerance on matters of housing, employment, and bathrooms, that’s one thing. But when the leading figures and institutions in trans advocacy are calling for self-ID in prisons, for the effective abolition of female sports as most people understand it, and for 6-year-olds to be granted deference with regard to gender identities when they can’t even go on a field trip without parental consent … how could that not change Americans’ understanding of what “trans rights” means in the first place? On issue after issue, the progressive establishment has decided to stake out stances on sex and gender that genuinely sound like right-wing caricatures—and to then complain when people respond negatively to this.

 

With a very tiny number of exceptions, gay marriage did not, in fact, impose anything other than hurt feelings and offense on its opponents. But the ACLU and groups of its ilk have directly advocated, and blue states have passed, laws that force businesses and individuals to adhere to the maximalist version of self-ID. In California, if you say you are a woman, you are a woman and need to be granted access to women’s spaces—so brags the ACLU of Southern California. You can’t push for laws that force people to act contrary to deeply-held beliefs about of sex and biology and then act surprised when this generates backlash.

 

It could be that this issue just goes away. It could be that President Donald Trump is so noxious and will drive so many people to the polls in 2026 and 2028 to vote for anti-MAGA candidates that any reference to trans issues will be laughed off as attempted distractions. But whether or not that’s the case, shouldn’t everyone involved actually grapple with what’s happened, rather than embrace self-serving fantasies, especially if you believe that trans people do deserve dignity, happiness, and the sorts of civil rights protections laid out in Bostock? Should we lend any trust or authority to politicians and consultants who make strong, assertive, clear arguments about the moral exigency of an issue in 2020, and who then roll their eyes at you when you ask about those same issues in 2026?

Mamdani Hopes Racial Agitation Succeeds Where ‘Affordability’ Has Failed

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, April 09, 2026

 

Zohran Mamdani wouldn’t be the first mayor of New York City to harbor contempt for the municipality and its residents. He may, however, be the first to commodify that scorn and sell it back to the public.

 

“New York’s history has been one of colonization, exploitation, and racial oppression,” read the document that outlines Mamdani’s “preliminary citywide racial equity plan.” The mayor’s chief equity officer, the “racial justice strategist” Afua Atta-Mensah, explained that the “plan was born from when New Yorkers were in the streets calling for justice.” By that, she presumably means the riotous mania that overtook the United States in the demonic year 2020. Given the details of the plan, its inauspicious provenance makes perfect sense.

 

The New York Post provides some bullet points:

 

·         Increasing the number of city teachers who “receive professional learning in implicit bias and culturally relevant pedagogy.”

 

·         Calls for a public-school curriculum that reflects “the diversity of the families and communities.”

 

·         Demanding “anti-racism training for City government staff” to help workers “combat racial discrimination in the workplace.”

 

·         Requiring the Department of Housing Preservation and Development to “ensure racial equity is considered in evaluating 100 percent of new proposals” for construction projects.

 

According to the New York Times, the Mamdani administration went so far as to scrub any reference to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) from the initiative to avoid triggering Trump administration officials. Somehow, this ingenious act of deception failed.

 

But that’s not the only obfuscatory aspect of Mamdani’s ploy. “The True Cost of Living Measure offers an honest account of what it actually costs to live in this city — and who is being left behind,” the mayor said last week. “We cannot tackle systemic racial inequity without confronting the affordability crisis head-on, and we cannot solve the cost-of-living crisis without dismantling systemic racial inequity.”

 

Ah. So, we’re to believe that Mamdani’s “affordability” agenda has been frustrated by the pervasive racial hostilities that supposedly persist in New York City. The full flowering of the human condition cannot be achieved in his or any other municipality before city officials manage to extirpate racial hatreds from the hearts of city residents and break down the vestigial prejudices that serve to keep the city’s minorities down.

 

It’s convenient for the mayor that this initiative has taken center stage just as Mamdani’s constituents have become increasingly discouraged by the administration’s abandonment of one campaign trail promise after another.

 

The city is broke, Mamdani explained earlier this year. That condition could, he warned, imperil his most expensive priorities. Among them, implementing free child-care services, a $30-per-hour minimum wage, and city-run grocery stores. “I’m absolutely committed to making buses fast and free,” Mamdani assured Politico reporters in an interview published Wednesday. But that’s not going to happen in 2026. That walk back comes as Mamdani supporters fume over the mayor’s abandonment of his pledges to mandate a reduction in the size of public-school classes and to expand access to city-funded housing vouchers.

 

Mamdani’s sudden encounter with the city’s fiscal realities has taken the campaign trail shine off his erstwhile profligacy, but his pullback from some of these initiatives is by no means undesirable. Likewise, balancing the interests of his radical constituents against the political capital reserved by the NYPD seems to have convinced the mayor to put his anti-policing initiatives on the back burner. Good! And yet, the progressives to whom Mamdani is beholden need something to keep them active. The enduring scourge of racism and its insidious capacity to derail even the most commendable reforms will have to do.

 

Most New Yorkers aren’t so easily distracted. A new Emerson College Polling/PIX11 survey of city residents found that the new mayor has a mere 43 percent job approval rating. Even fewer New Yorkers (41 percent) say the city is on the “right track.” Nearly 60 percent disagree. On the issues, Mamdani enjoys the support of a majority of New Yorkers on “childcare” alone. When it comes to the city’s budget — Mamdani’s biggest liability in this poll — most New Yorkers back additional taxes on the wealthy, but they object to Mamdani using the means at his disposal (like rising property taxes) to extract their wealth. New Yorkers want to see Albany squeeze the rest of the state to pay for the city’s priorities. After all, that’s what Mamdani told them he would deliver.

 

As it happens, he can’t. New Yorkers will have to seek solace in the notion that their hopelessly racist neighbors and their city’s legacy of bigotry and hatred have thwarted all their wildest dreams. That may be cold comfort, given the mayor’s sky-high promises. But it’s the best he can do.

The Peacemonger

By Abe Greenwald

Thursday, April 09, 2026

 

Despite the bold U.S. military campaigns Donald Trump has authorized in his second presidency, I think it’s still fair to say that he has a strong aversion to war. He thought it necessary to send seven B-2 bombers to blow up three Iranian nuclear sites in June. The American military had prepared such a strike for years, and the IDF had ensured that U.S. planes would meet no Iranian air defenses. The whole thing took less than 48 hours.

 

Trump was okay with a quick and clean operation to extract Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela in January. That was even shorter, and the U.S. military had spent months putting all its assets in place. Additionally, the use of an undisclosed new weapons technology meant that Venezuelans wouldn’t know what hit them. Apparently, they didn’t.

 

When Trump decided to go ahead with Operation Epic Fury on February 28, he had predetermined that it would be a time-limited war conducted without ground troops. And, once again, the preparation and coordination involved were impeccable.

 

In other words, Trump will use force in a narrowly defined context if he determines that the conditions for success are optimal. This, in itself, is a good thing.

 

What Trump really likes, however, is peace. Don’t laugh—it’s true.

 

I’m not talking about peace in the hippie, “can’t we all get along” sense. He doesn’t believe that fighting parties just need to get in touch with their inner love for all living things. Rather, Trump thinks that everyone is as transactional as he is, and there’s always a practical way to induce enemies to lay down their arms.

 

He also enjoys thinking of himself as the greatest peacemaker the world has ever seen. Trump is what you might call a peacemonger, looking to declare and preside over peace agreements at every opportunity.

 

Trump’s peace fetish, ironically, is one of his greatest foreign-policy shortcomings. Because when he can’t claim genuine progress toward peace, he’ll settle for fake progress instead. And when Trump announces pretend progress, it just means there’s a war that he’s not sufficiently dealing with.

 

He’s done this for over a year with Russia’s war on Ukraine, announcing diplomatic progress week after week, while the fighting rages on. He’s done it to some extent regarding Hamas, which remains armed despite Trump’s self-touted peace agreement requiring them to put away their guns. And Trump frequently pretends that lesser matters, such as his fight with Europe over Greenland, have been perfectly resolved to America’s benefit.

 

It’s starting to look as if the “cease-fire” with Iran is the mother of all Trump’s pretend bids for peace. Not only has Iran continued to fire on Israel and its regional Arab neighbors and inhibit shipping in the Strait of Hormuz since the cease-fire was announced Tuesday night—but virtually every one of its demands is a nonstarter for the U.S., and our terms are just as anathematic to the Iranian regime. What’s more, the regime has been so degraded by the war that Iranian leadership is bent on flaunting its obstinacy to the U.S. as a sign of strength.

 

There is no peace, no plan, and no legitimate starting point for either one.

 

Trump can afford to pretend he’s getting somewhere with Russia and Hamas because they’re not in a direct fight with the U.S. Iran is, which means make-believe progress isn’t going to cut it. The word for pretending to be at peace with a regime that’s at war with you is “surrender.” Neither Trump nor the United States can afford that.

 

Loath as the president is to wage war a moment longer than planned, I don’t see much of a choice this time.

Radical Islam Is the Wedge Issue in Michigan’s Democratic Senate Primary

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, April 09, 2026

 

CNN asks this morning whether Democrats are ready to embrace a “moderate” with a track record of “winning in Trump country,” like Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin. It’s a good question. But if Slotkin’s own pandering is any indication, the answer is no:

 

 

If there’s one thing that really jazzes Republican voters in “Trump country,” it’s buying into Iran’s portrayal of Hezbollah terrorists as indistinguishable from the legitimate government of Lebanon (despite even the Lebanese government’s objections).

 

The Islamic Republic is trying to make the ongoing destruction of Hezbollah by Israeli forces a feature of the unrelated cease-fire between the U.S. and Iran. Slotkin’s attempt to advance that effort is a sop to Michigan’s small but disproportionately influential Muslim population, the representatives of whom appear to have a lot of time for radical Islam.

 

Don’t take my word for it. “I’m just gonna go straight to pedophilia, frankly,” said far-left Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in leaked audio in which he struggled to figure out how to handle the elimination of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at the outset of the war. He settled on accusing Trump of going to war to distract from the Epstein files, thereby avoiding any deep reflection on the death of a figure who has directed operations in which Americans were targeted and killed. But why? Because, as he reminded his campaign staffers, “there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad today.” It’s therefore best to avoid “comment on Khamenei at all,” El-Sayed insisted.

 

The radical Senate candidate’s fear of offending his constituents who might be “sad” over the death of an anti-American Islamist despot has become a scandal in the race to replace outgoing Democratic Senator Gary Peters. And it’s not Republicans who are making El-Sayed’s suspect affinities into a wedge issue. Rather, it’s one of his fellow Democrats in the race: Mallory McMorrow, a Michigan state senator, and Representative Haley Stevens. And that fight is unfolding via a proxy battle over the political utility, or lack thereof, of the left-wing podcasters who cosplay as communist cadres.

 

In an attempt to ingratiate himself with the most radical elements in progressive politics, El-Sayed has leaned heavily into his relationship with the incendiary left-wing podcaster Hasan Piker. His opponents are attempting to hang El-Sayed’s poor judgment around his neck. Stevens dismissed Piker — an agitator who has said the United States deserved 9/11, and Israel got what was coming to it on October 7, 2023 — adding that “someone who’s campaigning with someone like that is not going to win in Michigan.” McMorrow went further. Piker “says extremely offensive things in order to generate clicks and views and followers,” she observed, “which is not entirely different from somebody like Nick Fuentes.”

 

The radical left quickly turned on McMorrow, who has for years been elevated to “rising star” status by the Democratic Party’s political elite, calling her, in left-wing broadcaster Emma Vigeland’s formulation, “Mallory McCuomo.” The epithet conveys McMorrow’s contemptible centrism, which stands in unfavorable contrast to El-Sayed’s revolutionary virtues. But she is no centrist. The fact that she’s picked this fight at all — even as Stevens keeps her head down and increasingly outpaces both El-Sayed and McMorrow in the polls — is illustrative of the establishmentarian sentiments that were apparent in CNN’s profile of Elissa Slotkin. The Democratic Party’s decision-makers know radical Islam is a loser outside Dearborn’s confines.

 

But as Slotkin’s pandering suggests, Michigan Democrats are threading a needle. Their delicate maneuvers are likely to confuse general election voters by smudging the bright line they know they must somehow draw.

 

If there’s a winner in this fight, it may be Mike Rogers, the former Michigan Republican congressman and longtime chairman of the House Intelligence Committee who’s the likely GOP nominee for Senate. Rogers does not mince words when it comes to the threat posed by Islamist elements abroad or on the home front. And with Michigan now transforming into ground zero for active terrorist threats inside the United States, the general Michigan electorate may not be willing to countenance nuance when it comes to dealing with Islamists.

A Strait-Up Debacle

By John R. Puri

Thursday, April 09, 2026

 

I can think of one important way that Iran is better off — and the United States and the rest of the world far worse off — than before the war began. As of now, the regime controls the Strait of Hormuz in every meaningful sense. Iran decides which ships get through, if any. Iran determines whether one-fifth of the regular global fuel trade is cut off, at will. Iran can extort a toll from any ship that wishes to escape the Persian Gulf, so long as it fulfills the regime’s terms.

 

President Trump announced a cease-fire on Tuesday, declaring that U.S. forces would cease striking Iran in exchange for the mullahs opening the Strait of Hormuz. In doing so, he conceded what everyone knows: Iran, and Iran alone, controls whether the strait is open or closed. We know this because, despite Trump’s cease-fire, the Strait of Hormuz remains very much closed.

 

As the Wall Street Journal reported hours ago:

 

Ship crossings through the Strait of Hormuz were limited to eight dry bulk and container ships moving cargo to Iran on Thursday, with the waterway effectively closed to other vessels, according to ship tracker Marine Traffic. Transits in both directions normally number about 135 a day.

 

Brokers said four Chinese tankers with Saudi and Iraqi crude set sail for the strait on Thursday. Four stopped at the entrance of the Persian Gulf and one turned its transponder off and could no longer be tracked. It couldn’t be determined whether the three ships were negotiating passage with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The brokers said the fourth tanker was on schedule to cross the strait on Saturday. “Let’s be clear: the Strait of Hormuz is not open,” Sultan Al Jaber, chief executive officer of Abu Dhabi National Oil Co., posted online. “Access is being restricted, conditioned and controlled.”

 

Any non-Iranian ship that dares to cross the strait might have to pay a hefty fee for the privilege of not getting blown up. Iran is reportedly charging vessels up to $2 million, or about $1 per barrel of oil carried, paid in cryptocurrency. If traffic in the strait returns to normal levels, that rate could raise $20 million each day for the cash-strapped Iranian regime. A per-vessel levy could extract hundreds of millions of dollars per day.

 

What can the United States do to liberate the Strait of Hormuz from Iran’s grasp? Apparently nothing. U.S. forces have spent over a month trying to end Iran’s capacity to strike tankers, to no avail. Trump threatened to obliterate the country’s infrastructure unless the mullahs reopened the strait, and they did no such thing. He has tried diplomacy, pursued international coalitions, floated risky operations, and promised naval escorts. Nothing has worked. If the United States could open the strait by military force that we are willing to use, we would have done so already.

 

It is clear that American officials underestimated how cheaply and easily Iran could lock up the strait, even after its major offensive capabilities were disabled. The waterway is just 24 miles across at its narrowest point, and unconventional warfare has made safe passage virtually impossible. Small crewed boats can plant sea mines, while unmanned boats laced with explosives can ram directly into tankers. Inexpensive Shahed drones can eat up costly interceptors. The real killers are Iran’s anti-ship missiles, whose mobile batteries can moved frequently and placed anywhere along Iran’s 1,000-mile coastline.

 

Remember also that Iran does not need to be capable of striking every ship that moves through the strait. Even a small likelihood of a successful attack can deter all vessels from crossing. Consider: If a terrorist wants to remove all planes from a given airspace, all he has to do is take down one of them.

 

If Iran could have closed the Strait of Hormuz at any point as a key source of leverage, why did it wait until it was being bombed from all angles? It was probably deterred by the prospect of overwhelming U.S. military force. The neat thing about deterrence is that it can prevent an enemy from taking many actions at once, including those you do not expect. American hard power might have discouraged Iran from attacking its Gulf neighbors and from attacking ships in the strait.

 

But once you spend deterrence by executing a threat, it’s gone. The United States and Israel already bombed Iran to kingdom come. What can they do now to make Iran open the Strait of Hormuz? Assassinate its leadership? Sink its navy? Bury its nuclear material? Ravage its industrial base? Destroy its missile facilities? It has all been done. By its own admission, the U.S. military has run out of targets. What more does Iran have to lose?

 

Here is the reality as it currently stands: Iran can cut off a fifth of the global energy trade whenever it wants, and it’s doing so right now. The United States and its allies — if it has any left — are unable or unwilling to change that. President Trump has agreed to stop all bombing of Iran for the chance that the regime might decide to open the Strait of Hormuz. If it does, Iran can still block all Western-aligned vessels and charge everyone else a toll, providing the mullahs with an enormous new revenue stream in perpetuity. If this new status quo holds, Iran can wield its control of the strait as a catastrophic weapon against the global economy, closing it again whenever the regime feels threatened — or simply wishes to issue demands. And Americans are supposed to believe that we have the upper hand here?

 

What a disaster. So long as Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz, it is not remotely obvious that the United States won this war. Quite the opposite.