Economists Against Economics

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, June 11, 2026

 

It was an exhibition in moral blackmail masquerading as an argument. It made no attempt at persuasion. Rather, it was a fundraising pitch aimed at the already converted.

 

That explains why the article published Wednesday in The Guardian by Thomas Piketty, Joseph Stiglitz, and their four other left-wing economist co-authors made such a splash.

 

The very first sentence of the article, which contends in its headline that “growth” (bracketed with scare-quotes) is “a doomed strategy,” fatally undermines its premise: “We live in an age of manufactured scarcity.”

 

No, we don’t.

 

Globally, households consume roughly $40 trillion more today in goods and services than they did at the turn of the century, and not because those goods and services have become more expensive.

 

In that same period, the average price of consumer electronics collapsed. The cost of important but nevertheless discretionary goods like clothing, furnishings, and new cars is essentially flat. It’s in markets where there is substantial state intervention — food and housing, childcare and medical care, and education — that consumer costs have ballooned over the last quarter century.

 

But state-managed capitalism, to the extent that oxymoronic phenomenon exists, is the model these economists advocate.

 

Not only does one-tenth of the world languish in extreme poverty while 90 percent do not, but these economists also mourn that climate change will invariably condemn us to a brutish squabble over the world’s diminishing resources. “These are not separate crises,” they write. “They are symptoms of an economic model that has reached the end of the road.”

 

It wouldn’t have to be this way if the West could only kick its addiction to wealth generation.

 

The “simple” formula in which wealth creation would reduce poverty has failed, the authors contend. “Growth has become decoupled from shared prosperity.”

 

It is entirely unclear what the authors are talking about here.

 

Extreme destitution, as defined by the World Bank as subsisting on less than $3 per day, fell off a cliff with the implosion of what was once the world’s foremost poverty generator, Soviet-style Marxism. In 1981, over 47 percent of the world’s population qualified as extremely impoverished. By 2018, that figure had declined to about 11 percent. Even the Covid-19 pandemic couldn’t reverse these trends.

 

“Using a poverty line of $4.2 per day, the pandemic slowed down the poverty rate reduction but it did not halt it,” the International Labour Organization reported last year, “meaning in 2020 the global poverty rate was still lower than two years before.”

 

Ah, but what about that 11 percent, the majority of whom live in sub-Saharan Africa? These economists contend that only wealth-transfer schemes “from the global north and south” stand a chance of alleviating their suffering. That is unlikely. After all, so many of the governments under which the extremely poor live don’t need Thomas Piketty to tell them that anti-growth policies are the way to go.

 

“What is different today is that the majority of the world’s poorest people are stuck in economies that have been stagnating for a long time,” wrote Our World in Data’s Max Roser.

 

Countries like Madagascar cannot redistribute their way to wealth because there is little to distribute. Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of Congo have stagnated for decades as they cling to policies that discourage foreign investment and domestic enterprise. The Central African Republic cannot attract wealth because it is beset by the corruption and caprice that flourishes in state-managed economies that are more vertically than horizontally structured.

 

The Guardian’s cavalcade of progressive economists accurately note that sticky poverty is a product of “policy choices.” After all, “If governments can manufacture poverty, they can also dismantle it.” They’re right, as the post–Cold War era has amply proven. But they’re not talking about the governments who maladminister their countries and deprive their people of the opportunity to flourish. They’re talking about the Western world, which they assume (there is no effort to prove the claim) owes its largess to the exploitation of the developing world.

 

At this point, the article devolves into a dog’s breakfast of Marxian tropes and appeals to global proletarian camaraderie.

 

At a “planetary” level, the plight of the poor can only be addressed through “employment guarantees,” “workplace democracy,” compensating “unpaid care work,” and “universal public provisioning.” What does all that mean? Nobody knows. But we do know what it will take to deliver us into the sunlit uplands of history: The “public control of strategic assets” to prop up “the social and solidarity economy.”

 

“International solidarity is therefore a legal and moral obligation rooted in the historical reality that many rich countries built their wealth by impoverishing the south,” read a sentence that could have been composed by the Comintern in 1921, “through patterns of extraction that continue today in new forms.”

 

By the final paragraphs, the reader is wading hip-deep through a fetid cesspool of socialist buzzwords. The West must commit to “debt justice,” which in practice leaves Western taxpayers on the hook for profligacy and mismanagement in the developing world. Another wealth transfer in the form of “reparative climate finance” would also be nice. And this isn’t just sound economic policy, these ostensibly economic minds contend. It’s a “moral obligation rooted in the historical reality that many rich countries built their wealth by impoverishing the south.”

 

“Around the world,” the authors conclude, “Indigenous struggles, feminist organizing, trade unions, and climate justice movements are defending and building alternative futures rooted in collective care and territorial rights.”

 

Are you ready to fly the red banners and storm the Winter Palace yet? No? Then perhaps you weren’t the intended audience for this one.

 

Indeed, it’s not clear who this article is for save the Leninist deadenders who do not need to be convinced that the panacea to what ails the planet is the forcible expropriation of wealth. One must wonder whether the authors have ever encountered a skeptical audience. Fermenting as they do in a bath of unalloyed praise from the commanding heights of culture and politics, perhaps these economists have allowed their persuasion muscles to atrophy.

 

The point here was not to convince the persuadable. Rather, it was to radicalize the already persuaded, to destroy rather than to build. If there is a saving grace, it is in the feebleness of their case in favor of their fashionably bespoke Bolshevism.

Why 60 Minutes Should Take Critiques of Its Work Seriously

By Conor Friedersdorf

Thursday, June 11, 2026

 

After Scott Pelley was fired from 60 Minutes, the longtime CBS News correspondent uttered a single sentence that captured both the greatest fears of the program’s fans and the core grievance of its detractors. Criticizing his new bosses—especially CBS editor in chief Bari Weiss—he said, “There’s a subtle political bias that I’ve never seen at 60 Minutes before, or at CBS News before.”

 

CBS News fans fear political bias at the organization because they believe that President Trump seeks to neuter it, and that its parent company stands to profit by appeasing him through its managers.

 

Critics of CBS News have long argued that its journalists inhabit a liberal bubble that blinds them to their prejudices––blindness epitomized by the claim that subtle political bias has never existed at the network, when, for decades, liberal suppositions have informed its selection and execution of stories.

 

Both the fans and critics have a point––and insights from both are needed if CBS News is to thrive, an outcome every American should want. 60 Minutes is often better than most of what passes for TV news, despite notable misses. Improving it is easier than creating something half as good. And it consistently reports on malfeasance in government and beyond in ways that benefit us all. But even its best reporting will fail to have an impact on Americans who don’t trust it.

 

The current turmoil at CBS News began in 2024, when Trump sued its parent company, Paramount, for $10 billion, alleging that CBS News edited an interview with Kamala Harris deceptively to help her in the presidential race by airing different versions of her answer on Face the Nation and 60 Minutes. The lawsuit was a preposterous attack on First Amendment press freedoms. Yet Paramount agreed to settle, paying $16 million to cover Trump’s legal fees and contribute the rest to his future presidential library––a settlement reached as it sought Trump-administration approval for an $8 billion sale to Skydance. Critics called it a bribe, and that perception was understandable. (Paramount executives and spokespeople have emphatically denied the accusation, and both Paramount and the Federal Communications Commission denied any connection between the settlement and the merger.)

 

Now Paramount Skydance wants to buy Warner Brothers in another multibillion-dollar deal that will require various regulatory approvals. Trump has said that he’ll involve himself in the matter. Nothing could be more logical than 60 Minutes staffers suspecting that their new corporate owners might also go to great lengths to please Trump, or to avoid upsetting him. I can’t imagine any new overseer installed from above giving 60 Minutes notes on stories related to Trump without eliciting suspicion––a judgment that holds wherever one stands on Weiss, whom I know and like, or on the debates about notes Weiss has given on 60 Minutes stories. As a rule, we should want journalists at big corporations to be on guard against political meddling, even when, as outsiders, we can’t know whether or to what degree their concerns are warranted.

 

Given all of that context, why is a large faction of Americans compelled by the notion that CBS News and even 60 Minutes would benefit from Weiss or other outsiders adding viewpoint diversity to its shop?

 

Over the weekend, Pelley gave an hour-long interview to Lulu Garcia-Navarro at The New York Times, telling his side of what happened at the show. In a short clip that circulated online, Pelley commented on a meeting in which Weiss asked senior staff, “Why does the country think you’re biased?”

 

Pelley said, “I wasn’t there, but that is what I’ve been told by my colleagues who were there. And they were shocked.” The reaction was “Uh-oh,” he continued, because “she didn’t offer any kind of a metric. What’s your metric? Why do you think so? Do you have a poll? Is there market research? What are you talking about?” Pelley’s response was widely mocked by conservatives and independents, who perceived him to be cluelessly dismissing one of their long-standing concerns. I see why. In an era of distrust toward the media, Americans “see ‘a great deal’ (46 percent) or ‘a fair amount’ (37 percent) of political bias in news coverage.” Pew Research Center found in March 2025 (before Weiss joined) that CBS News is less trusted than ABC and NBC among both Republicans and Democrats. Ad Fontes Media, which scores the reliability and skew of media organizations, rates 60 Minutes as skewing left.

 

None of that proves that 60 Minutes is biased. But its journalists––like journalists at every news organization––should reflect on the various reasons why many Americans perceive bias. Asking staff to share why they think such perceptions exist is a reasonable query from any editor in chief. If this was seen as shocking, then the staff would benefit from more ideologically diverse colleagues.

 

As rival narratives about the turmoil at CBS News harden, the network is in more need than ever of staffers who grasp why partisans on both sides of the culture war are compelled by different understandings, and why many Americans are unsure which narrative gets closer to the truth. Among liberals, the whole of Pelley’s hour-long interview is being celebrated as a stirring defense of 60 Minutes. Its appeal is easy to understand: Pelley is an experienced journalist who has reported with bravery from war zones, not someone who sat in a studio his whole career. And he is suited for the camera: His voice, pacing, and manner project gravitas, and he shows emotion at moments that make everything he says feel credible. But anyone compelled by Pelley’s narrative of events should try to understand why it failed to compel so many others.

 

Because I am a cynical writer who looks extra closely at the words of anyone who seems to be good on television, Pelley’s account raised lots of red flags. Asked early in the interview how it felt to be fired from a program where he had worked for so long, Pelley said he could imagine no better way to describe it than “like your spouse was murdered.” He said he felt sorry for “these people that I left behind” at CBS News who are “still trapped there.” He called the firing of several senior staffers at the show the “Black Thursday Massacre.” He said, “When somebody wipes out, murders, a large number of your family members, people are hurt, and shocked, in disbelief. And just desperate for some explanation.” This is language chosen for emotional impact, not precision––it felt like he sought to manipulate my feelings, not inform me.

 

Pelley told The New York Times, “I have been in combat in Afghanistan. I have been in combat in Iraq. I have been in the war zone in Ukraine multiple times, risking my life and the happiness of my family because of my devotion to the broadcast.” In fact, he was covering soldiers who were in combat, a distinction worth drawing, both for accuracy and because muddying that distinction is needlessly offensive to many Americans, who predictably erupted in outrage. What’s more, neither fighting as a soldier nor covering it as a journalist renders someone correct in unrelated disputes.

 

Even worse, parts of Pelley’s narrative were inconsistent. Pelley said that Nick Bilton, the journalist and filmmaker recently hired by Weiss to lead the 60 Minutes newsroom, introduced himself to staff in an email, writing that “he was excited to tell the staff about the new crop of correspondents.” Pelley recounted, “When I saw that I thought, Okay, they’re gonna fire all of us, eventually. That’s the plan. He put it in writing for all of us to see.” Later, when the two met in person for the first time at a staff meeting, Pelley told Bilton that he would never be welcome at the show and that Weiss is “murdering 60 Minutes,” adding, “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it.” Asked why he felt compelled to speak up, Pelley said that he realized he was the senior person in the room. “Only I could do it,” he said. “None of them could be asked to take that risk.”

 

This suggests he felt speaking up was a risk. But when asked if he walked into a subsequent meeting with CBS leadership expecting to be fired, Pelley explained, “Furthest thing from my mind. It hadn’t occurred to me,” and that when he walked in and saw Weiss, he thought, “This is terrific of her. She’s come to this meeting, and now I’m going to be able to ask her these questions. She’s going to be able to explain what happened.” He joked, “Some reporter I turned out to be. I just didn’t connect the dots. Was this meeting contentious? Yes. But 60 Minutes is known for two things: a ticking stopwatch and hard questions.”

 

“You wanted to remain at 60 Minutes?” Garcia-Navarro asked.

 

“Absolutely,” Pelley replied. “It didn’t occur to me that this could happen.”

 

Watching the interview, Pelley seems convincing at each given moment. But try to reconcile them all. He experienced the firing of his colleagues like lots of family members being murdered … but “absolutely” wanted to go on working at 60 Minutes, for their “murderers”? He believed that Weiss was hired in order to murder 60 Minutes … yet when seeing Weiss after the “massacre” she carried out, he thought, This is terrific of her. She’s come to this meeting, and assumed that their discussion would go well?

 

Pelley saw some colleagues fired en masse, read an email he perceived as a plan in writing to fire them all, and attacked Weiss and Bilton in a staff meeting because he felt that it would be unfair for junior colleagues to take that risk … but it never occurred to him he might be fired? The culture at 60 Minutes is supposedly such that likening your boss to a murderer and asserting she has a secret agenda to destroy the show is a standard form of debate at a place where hard questions have always been possible … but that same boss asking a question about perceptions of bias was “shocking” to everyone?

 

Perhaps everything that Pelley said felt true to him in an emotional moment when he was reeling from being fired, not broadcasting as a correspondent. But I find it striking that so many journalistic outlets covered the interview without noticing or mentioning its tensions and contradictions (even though Garcia-Navarro expressed skepticism in follow-up questions). Neglecting to scrutinize narratives that flatter our preconceptions is one of the behaviors that cost journalists public trust.

 

Among Americans, clear majorities disapprove of the job that Trump is doing and the job that the news media is doing. It shouldn’t be hard, within any large news organization, to raise the subject of bias (there are many kinds) or to suggest edits that guard against left-leaning bias, without being seen as a traitor to journalism who must be allying with Trump to destroy it.

 

But Trump’s efforts to exert leverage over news organizations through their corporate parents makes it harder than it would otherwise be to distinguish untoward meddling from valuable feedback. And corporate takeovers or management shake-ups always make journalists anxious, because, as at The Washington Post, they can easily end in mass layoffs and audience flight.

 

Then again, when your news division is trailing its competitors, in an era when there’s more competition for attention every year and the average age of your viewers is 58 years old, stasis is perilous, too. To survive and fulfill its mission, CBS News must achieve two goals that are not mutually exclusive, but that may prove out of reach: to resist political interference from the Trump administration and to convince more Americans that it is worth trusting—or at least watching and considering.

The Left’s Citizens United Dishonesty Continues

By Christian Schneider

Thursday, June 11, 2026

 

The prescient final scene of the 1978 movie National Lampoon’s Animal House informs viewers that “Bluto” Blutarsky (John Belushi), the peeping Tom, acoustic guitar enemy, and master of the food fight who proudly carried a grade point average of “zero . . . point . . . zero,” would eventually go on to become a U.S. senator. And yet Bluto’s academic rigor might surpass that of the senators of 2026.

 

Last week, 39-year-old Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia gave a speech in which he decried the amount of money in politics.

 

“American politics is coin-operated,” Ossoff preached. “Money goes in, favors come out, and that’s why spectacular wealth buys an ever-greater share of power over our national affairs, while the mere citizen is treated with contempt.”

 

A commonsense voter might conclude that this is why it is unwise to give government figures so much power over our lives. But forget it, Ossoff was rolling. He then pivoted to a game of Progressive Mad Libs, in which Democrats drop in random crowd-pleasing phrases:

 

“Citizens United was the most destructive court decision in modern American history. It’s unleashed a flood of secret money, corporate money, billionaire money on both sides.”

 

At this point, intentionally misunderstanding what the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the 2010 Citizens United decision is a requirement for Democratic politicians, but Ossoff’s mendacity is especially breathtaking.

 

In the Citizens United decision, the Court struck down a federal law that allowed the government to regulate the content and timing of political speech leading up to an election. In this specific case, the law barred a film critical of Hillary Clinton from being released in the months before the 2008 presidential election. In fact, the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law had criminalized certain types of group political speech outside the times set forth in the law.

 

There are plenty of reasons to be outraged by the current president’s myriad corrupt schemes, including his acceptance of a $400 million luxury Boeing 747 from Qatar’s royal family — a gift that could cost taxpayers over $1 billion to retrofit to presidential security standards and that Donald Trump has reportedly arranged to keep for personal use after leaving office.

 

But none of that has anything to do with Citizens United, which governed campaign speech, not foreign gifts to sitting presidents. Trump’s Qatari flying palace and his shady dealings with Middle Eastern nationals pouring billions of dollars into the Trump family’s cryptocurrency accounts have nothing to do with campaigns or political speech. They are completely outside Citizens United’s remit.

 

Nevertheless, for liberals, the words “Citizens United” have become shorthand for everything wrong with government, leading shameless populists like Ossoff to cite the case even when it’s irrelevant. That’s because even Democratic bigwigs don’t know what the Court actually ruled. Actor and political operator George Clooney once called Citizens United “one of the worst laws passed since I’ve been around,” evidently unaware it was a matter settled by the judicial system, not Congress.

 

But imagine what America would look like if McCain-Feingold were still fully the law of the land. Liberals, confident that the government has our best interests at heart, rarely stop to consider what happens when malign forces control the opposition. Yet go ask a group of progressives whether they think Donald Trump should be in charge of regulating the timing and content of their political speech leading up to federal elections.

 

Over the past year, Democrats have offered a torrent of public criticism over Trump’s attempts to punish comedians like Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert for telling unflattering jokes. Campaign finance laws like McCain-Feingold would give Trump the ability to put these comedians in jail if they criticized him before an election. A Trump-controlled Federal Election Commission could deem a late-night monologue or an unflattering network story about the president to be an election communication meant to influence the vote, with his obeisant Department of Justice taking the wheel of the political-speech paddy wagon.

 

Late-night comedians and news anchors, after all, speak on behalf of corporations, which, per Citizens United, enjoy the same First Amendment rights as individuals. Yet liberals have spent decades mocking the idea that “corporations are people.” Justice John Paul Stevens argued that because corporations have “no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts,” and “no desires,” their “personhood” often serves as a “useful legal fiction.”

 

But corporations use their First Amendment rights to affect politics quite frequently. Back in the peak-woke era of 2021, Major League Baseball — a corporation — chose to move its All-Star game out of Atlanta to protest a bill in the Georgia legislature that tightened some voting rules that had been loosened during the pandemic. In 2019, the National Basketball Association moved its All-Star game out of Charlotte to protest a bill requiring people to use the bathrooms intended for their sex. Not surprisingly, there were no criticisms from progressives when these corporations used their First Amendment rights to speak out on political issues.

 

(Around that same time, Gillette ran an ad during the Super Bowl that decried “toxic masculinity,” and Citibank boasted that it had signed an amicus brief in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, in which Colorado baker Jack Phillips was harassed for refusing to bake a cake for a gay wedding. Phillips won at the Supreme Court, and Citibank issued a press release stating that it was “very disappointed” with the outcome.)

 

Needless to say, neither Jon Ossoff nor any other Democrat has condemned these corporations for exercising their First Amendment rights to advance their political activism. Ossoff also seems to have forgotten to criticize the $38.1 million in independent expenditures made in his behalf to help him win his last Senate election. (For progressives, labor unions and other pro-government groups that pour money into politics don’t count as “special interests.”)

 

The irony, of course, is that Citizens United is one of the few legal bulwarks protecting Americans — including Ossoff’s preferred comedians, journalists, and activist corporations — from a government that might prefer they stay quiet. Yet Ossoff rails against the decision even as his own party has benefited enormously from the independent spending it enabled, and while the very corporate speech he theatrically disdains has consistently advanced progressive causes. Ossoff is clearly positioning himself as a presidential candidate in 2028, presumably believing he can finance a national campaign with hugs.

 

Denying either citizens or collective groups of citizens the ability to engage in political speech is stealing from them their most basic right to engage in civic life. It’s a lesson even Senator Blutarsky could understand.

Groupthink in Tinseltown

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, June 10, 2026

 

About 12 to 15 years ago, I did a bunch of speaking events in Southern California. Book tours, after-dinner right-wing funny guy gigs, luncheon think tank-y panels, whatever.

 

It was then that I came to believe that upscale, ideologically committed Southern California conservative Republicans are a funny species of conservative. Homo conservativus californianus australis, or Southern California conservative Republican, is closely related to a species I know much better: Homo republicanus conservativus novae-yorcensis or perhaps Homo sapiens republicanus conservativus gothamensis. 

 

As with the Asian elephant and African elephant, the similarities are obvious while the differences are subtle. First, both are elephants. And they both have long memories, especially for grievances. The differences have to do with their habitat. Asian elephants, like New Yorkers, live in much closer proximity to humans. This has garnered them a reputation for being more dangerous, even though that might not be actually true. It’s just that there are more opportunities for conflict with elephants when you’re more likely to bump into them. Meanwhile, African elephants are bigger and stronger, and in a sense, healthier. But because they tend to live further away from human populations, violent interactions are less common. At a distance, they seem more docile and peaceable. But the reality is the African ones are actually more volatile if you cross them.

 

Another similarity between SoCal and NYC right-wingers is the understandable sense that they are surrounded, because they are. As a result, they fall into small groups where that feeling is both alleviated and intensified simultaneously. That’s what happens when you go from “I’m alone” to “we’re alone.”

 

This tendency is much more pronounced, in my experience, with the California crowd. I’ll give you an example. When I did those swings through L.A., Orange County, etc., at almost every event, someone would come up to me and say some version of “It would be so great if the L.A. Times ran your column, but they’d never do that!”

 

This would then put me in the uncomfortable position of having to tell them, “Actually, I’ve been an L.A. Times columnist for years.” I’d even point out one of the highlights of my career: Barbra Streisand canceled her subscription to the LAT in protest.

 

The responses varied, from very awkward apologies to shock to laughter. But the explanation was always the same, “I stopped reading that paper years ago.”

 

I never had that kind of experience with New Yorkers and the New York Post, which also carried my column, in part because republicanus conservativus gothamensis lives on a steady diet of Gotham’s paper of record. New York is also more of a media melting pot than Southern California.

 

There are other differences between Southern California right-wingers and their New York cousins, beyond the greater prevalence of vitamin D deficiencies among denizens of the Big Apple. The children and grandchildren of Goldwater’s “little old ladies in tennis shoes” inherited more of the paranoid style. I remember one lady who picked me up in a luxury sedan at the airport for a lunch talk—a very successful lawyer, if memory serves. She explained to me that one of the major campuses of UCLA or USC was now fully compliant and subservient to Sharia law. “They’ve gone full Sharia,” I remember her saying.

 

Not wanting to be rude, I mumbled dryly, “Huh, I hadn’t heard that. I kinda feel like that should be bigger news.”

 

I bring this up to make two points, one about insiders and one about outsiders.

 

How groupthink happens.

 

The conventional wisdom is that ideological polarization is the result of “the Big Sort.” Like-minded people moving to live among like-minded people. But Yoni Appelbaum makes a persuasive case in his book, Stuck, that this gets the causality backward. We aren’t becoming ideologically polarized because people are moving, but because they aren’t. “The problem isn’t that we’re sorting ourselves out; it’s that we’ve ceased to mix ourselves together,” he writes.

 

Not everything about the Big Sort thesis is wrong, though. We do self-sort, but locally, and virtually in digital spaces. In these small spaces, the pressures of conformity push us to more extreme positions. As Cass Sunstein famously put it in “The Law of Group Polarization,” deliberation within subgroups tends to push members “toward a more extreme point.” 

 

Think about it this way. If you belong to an ideological niche group—climate activists, gun controllers, gun rights enthusiasts, Christian nationalists, atheists, whatever—and you start regularly going to meetings with like-minded people, the undertow of the conversation is going to pull you to a more intense version of your beliefs. Obviously, there are counterexamples. Sometimes facing that kind of groupthink elicits the desire to rebel and quit altogether. But these examples tend to be the exceptions that prove the rule.

 

This is where groupthink comes from. Pick almost any institution or issue where you think groupthink exists: faculty departments in higher education, the mainstream media, right-wing media, left-wing media, philanthropy, boutique intellectual or political ghettos, sports or celebrity fan clubs. First of all, gatekeeper functions prevent outsiders from even getting in the door. If you’re a laissez-faire free market devotee, American Compass or Bernie Sanders’ Senate office is probably not going to hire you. But let’s say your commitment to free market principles is weak and your curiosity in alternative economic theories is strong. You might get hired, but very quickly whatever sympathy you have for the free market will be discouraged while your curiosity in statism rewarded.

 

Second, there’s self-selection. A few agnostics and atheists, out of intellectual curiosity, might be interested in attending a Bible study group, but most would simply say, “That’s not for me.” The person who thinks queer theory is stupid isn’t going to apply for the faculty position in queer studies.

 

Third, there’s status-seeking. Most people who join an affinity group seek to stand out according to that affinity. A New York Jets fan club rewards people for things like their commitment to the Jets, their knowledge of the Jets, and their attendance record at Jets tailgates and games. Ideologically committed groups reward those who sacrifice for the cause and don’t waver. Hating the enemy group is celebrated. The guy who says “the socialists make a good point” at a libertarian meetup does not often rise to the top of the pecking order. The dude who hates the socialists more than anyone else might.

 

All of these dynamics are at play in organizations and institutions, but they are also at play in the virtual tribes that increasingly define our political culture. In other words, this stuff happens inside Fox News or MS NOW, but it also happens with, and among, their audiences. The latter reinforces the former and the former rewards the latter. You can see such dynamics form like weather fronts on social media any day of the week.

 

The view from the outside in.

 

Then there’s what we might call out-groupthink. Over my 20 years at National Review there were countless times when progressive journalists and academics offered theories of what the thinking inside National Review was. I can’t remember a single time when I thought, “Wow, they nailed it.” I’m not saying nobody ever had a theory or insight of any merit. Some folks did actual reporting that supported their claims. But the ability of outsiders to guess at the motives and internal debates was always weighed down or distorted by the assumptions of the person on the dry side of the fishbowl.

 

I got to thinking about all this because of the rush to claim “they” stole the election from Spencer Pratt. I wanted Pratt to win, though perhaps not quite as fervently as some. L.A.—and California—desperately needs to have the Democrats’ monopoly broken up. Pratt wouldn’t be my first choice, and it’s quite possible that if elected he would fail so spectacularly as mayor it would set back the cause of competitive politics in California. But I thought it would be worth the risk.

 

It didn’t happen. Pratt ran an impressive race, but not so impressive he could overcome the massive headwinds of a wildly left-wing city. His final tally lined up with his poll numbers pretty well. The surprise was Nithya Raman’s overperformance, specifically her late pickup in mail-in votes.

 

Now, I think the way California handles elections is a scandal—a scandal of incompetence and self-indulgence, not a scandal of corruption.

 

Regardless, both the incumbent Mayor Karen Bass and left-wing firebrand Nithya Raman would have much preferred a runoff with Pratt than another Democrat. The conspiracy theories about how “they” stole the election gloss over this point. So who is “they”? If it’s the establishment controlled by Bass, “they” screwed up. If it was Raman, “they” had to have done it without the help of the people running the city government—or the state government (Steve Hilton, the GOP candidate for governor, made the runoff). That doesn’t mean a “they” couldn’t have done it. It sounds like the Democratic Socialists of America—Raman’s faction—may have harvested ballots, which is why she got so many mail-in votes. But as far as I can tell, that’s not illegal in L.A. (even if it should be). So, it’s not a conspiracy to steal the election in any legal sense. It was merely a successful effort to win.

 

But from the outside, it’s pretty easy to see what you want to see and to attribute a bad outcome to an undifferentiated overclass called “they.”

 

And the easiest place to get this perspective is from outside L.A. Pratt had enormous buzz on social media and Fox News. Great for him. But how many people caught up in the frenzy were actual registered voters in the City of Los Angeles? Not that many. Or not that many more than the polls indicated.

 

There are much better examples of out-groupthink than this, but this is the one people are talking about. And it will do.

 

It’s worth noting that out-groupthink is where most conspiracy theories come from, by people looking from the outside in. These people construct their cases backward, starting with conclusions about results they don’t like and ascribing motives that fit their predetermined narrative. That’s what Rep. Thomas Massie did this week with fevered antisemitic B.S. about the tragic attack on the USS Liberty, and what Candace Owens does about pretty much everything. She’s the antimatter universe version of Jerry Seinfeld’s Uncle Leo, who sees antisemites behind every bad outcome. “They don’t just overcook a hamburger, Jerry.” Owens sees semites the same way. They don’t just land men on the moon, Jerry.

 

Not all wrong or outlandish theories become full-blown conspiracy theories. But almost all such theories start from a position of radical distrust. If you think “they” have sinister motives, plausible explanations that don’t involve evil intentions seem less plausible. Occam’s razor gets dull, and the most likely explanation seems like an exercise in naivete, giving the bad guys the benefit of the doubt.

 

And giving the bad guys the benefit of the doubt is what gets you kicked out of your self-selected clubs.

Apparently, California Has a Racially Segregated Missing Person Alert System

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, June 11, 2026

 

Here’s a story that’s so crazy that, upon first glance, I assumed that it must be a hoax:

 

 

But it’s true. California has, indeed, racially segregated its missing person alert system. And not in the distant past, but beginning in 2022.

 

The two most recent additions to California’s system are the Ebony Alert, which is for “the suspicious or unexplainable disappearance of a black woman or black person,” and the Feather Alert, which is for when a “missing person is an indigenous woman or an indigenous person.” Per the website of the California Highway Patrol, the Ebony Alert was “introduced through Senate Bill 673 and became law in 2024,” while the Feather Alert was “was introduced through Assembly Bill 1314, signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom,” and went into effect on “January 1, 2023.”

 

I also discovered that California has a “Yellow alert,” but, mercifully, given the state’s history, that one isn’t in the same vein as the others.

 

Why are progressives like this? I can grasp why most states have separate alerts for children and senior citizens. I cannot grasp why California has separate alerts for people of different races. And even those are weird when you dig in. The CHP notes that the “Ebony Alert” accompanies investigations into “the suspicious or unexplainable disappearance of a black woman or black person.” Why are those two things separated? Black women are black persons. There’s no “or” about it. The same goes for the Feather Alert, which accompanies investigations into “the suspicious or unexplainable disappearance of an indigenous woman or indigenous person.” Again: one group contains the other. I suppose if you’re already slicing up adults into racial groups, then creating more weird subdivisions comes naturally. But it doesn’t half look strange.

 

And . . . well, racist. The people who passed this bill, remember, are the same people who tried to repeal California’s Proposition 209, which holds, inter alia, that:

 

(a) The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.

 

They lost, mercifully. But they’re still trying. Why? Because they are absolutely consumed by race. They may have different ends than the segregationists of old, but they are no less interested in dividing up the citizenry.

 

The rationale for these changes is presumably that California is a racist society, and that, in consequence, some citizens receive less attention than others. But this argument seems weak across the board. First off, instituting race-specific government programs is unconstitutional in both California and in the United States more broadly, and that the architects of such schemes believe that their attentions are pure does not alter that one whit. Second, there are no equivalent programs for Asians or Hispanics, which raises obvious equal-protection issues, and calls into the question many of the other claims that are routinely made by California’s government. Third, if California were indeed an extremely racist place, then flagging the race of the missing person at the outset of a search would surely be wholly counterproductive? The missing persons alert system is designed to recruit the public into helping the authorities crack the case. But if California is systemically racist, then wouldn’t the obvious reaction of its people be to look at the racial category attached to the alert and ignore it?

 

What a bizarre moment we lived through in the early 2020s.

The Absurd Reflecting Pool Freak-Out

National Review Online

Thursday, June 11, 2026

 

One must wonder whether President Trump’s least discriminating critics have ever read the fable of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” — or at least whether, if they have, they understood that it was not an advertisement in favor of unyielding panic. There are many, many things to criticize about our 45th and 47th president, but it cannot be the case that literally everything the man does is wrong. That even his decision to clear up the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C., became an occasion for condemnation, anger, and charges of presidential impropriety suggests that, eleven years into his domination of American life, some among us have yet to internalize this fact.

 

Before Trump decided to clean it up, the Reflecting Pool was a mess. This was not unique in recent American history. Under President Obama, the federal government spent $30 million renovating the Reflecting Pool and then, almost immediately, spent yet more money to deal with an algae outbreak. Between 2015 and 2016, further repairs were made after the eastern end was damaged during construction. And, in 2017, the pool was completely drained in response to an outbreak of parasites that proved harmful to ducks. Nine years later, when Trump announced his more substantial makeover, the Reflecting Pool needed attention once again. It was full of algae; it had several leaks that needed attention; and, in the estimation of Trump’s advisers, the basin required repainting to enhance the water’s reflective effect.

 

As part of a broader attempt to beautify Washington, D.C., Trump signaled his intention to take on the project and, in so doing, provoked some wild reactions. A near-endless supply of “preservationists” told the newspapers that Trump’s planned changes to the basin-coating would make the pool look like a residential swimming pool, and thereby deprive us of our “our shared cultural landscape heritage”; a series of reflexive partisans insisted wildly that the attraction was fine as it was, despite the presence of algae that had turned the pool a ghastly greenish brown; and Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, took to sharing photographs of the in-progress project, alongside captions that implied that the mere existence of a temporary construction site represented a terminal failure of planning. (Quite how Newsom squares this position with California’s ongoing high-speed rail debacle, he has never explained.) The opposition was breathless, fevered, and typically extremely silly.

 

The best argument made was that Trump had bypassed the usual channels before moving ahead with his plan. But, in this case, that was likely a net plus. It is not at all clear that there were any legal obstacles to the White House’s decision to ignore the usual review process, and, given that the usual reviewers are a bunch of pretentious naysayers, their involvement would most likely have served no purpose beyond slowing the restoration down. Clearly, President Trump wanted the pool to be presentable in time for America’s 250th anniversary celebrations, and, clearly, the only way to achieve this was to cut out the network of groups, societies, fellowships, and other self-appointed arbiters of taste whose implacable opposition to him was foreordained. Absent those encumbrances, Trump put himself back into his old real estate developer mode, and got the thing done posthaste.

 

And it looks good! Which is why, despite the predictions of disaster, the new criticism of the cavilers is that the pool now looks exactly like it used to when it was working as designed. “The Reflecting Pool is full again — and looks almost the same,” the Washington Post declared this week. Which is exactly what one would want to say about a successful restoration project, is it not? (The “nearly” in that sentence, of course, is a grudging substitute for “better.”) A monument needed fixing, and it was fixed, quickly and competently. Not every development has to be a crisis. Not every moment calls for extended debate. Not all features of American life require interrogation by postmodernist bores. Sometimes, a pool is just a pool. President Trump understood this, and for that he will never be forgiven.

It’s Always Something

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, June 10, 2026

 

The case for supporting Graham Platner, my Democrat friends assert, is the case for voting for any Senate candidate with a “D” next to his name. A Democrat-controlled Congress (that the Democrats will win a majority in the House is generally taken as given as of this writing, though I’m not sure it should be) puts a stop to Donald Trump’s legislative agenda, which is a very compelling argument until you consider that Donald Trump does not have a legislative agenda to speak of. But there are other levers of power attached to a congressional majority—oversight, confirmations, etc.—as well as an opportunity for Democrats to put forward their own legislative agenda, forcing Trump either to accept their bills or veto some popular proposals. And though a small Democratic majority in the Senate would not be able, on its own strength, to remove Trump (and possibly other members of his administration) from office once the Democrat-controlled House has handed down yet another impeachment (as many observers assume it will, as a matter of course), every jackass with a Kik account and a “D” next to his name who ends up seated in the Senate puts Democrats one step closer to realizing that end.

 

That isn’t nothing. There are a dozen good reasons to impeach Trump and other members of his administration and remove them from office—from the illegally launched and incompetently executed war in Iran to the massacres of civilians at sea to the still-relevant issue of the failed coup d’état of 2020–21—and it would be useful and salubrious to have an empowered congressional opposition to check Trump’s various abuses of power, which range from trying to evade Senate confirmation in making high-level appointments to his attempt to simply loot the Treasury to set up a $1.8 billion slush fund to use for his own political purposes. The personal, venal corruption attending this administration is epic, and Democrats could perform a very useful public service by making it a headline issue under a new Democratic majority, if one should come to pass.

 

The case for supporting Ken Paxton, my Republican friends assert, is the case for voting for any Senate candidate with an “R” next to his name. A Democrat-controlled Congress (that the Democrats will win a majority in the House is generally taken as given as of this writing, though I’m not sure it should be) puts a stop to Donald Trump’s legislative agenda, which is a very compelling argument until you consider that Donald Trump does not have a legislative agenda to speak of. But there are other levers of power attached to a congressional majority—oversight, confirmations, etc.—as well as an opportunity for Democrats to put forward their own legislative agenda, forcing Trump either to accept their bills or veto some popular proposals. And though a small Democratic majority in the Senate would not be able, on its own strength, to remove Trump (and possibly other members of his administration) from office once the Democrat-controlled House has handed down yet another impeachment (as many observers assume it will, as a matter of course), every jackass with a Kik account and a “D” next to his name who ends up seated in the Senate puts Democrats one step closer to realizing that end.

 

That isn’t nothing.

 

There are many dangers associated with Thomas Friedman-style “China for a Day” thinking. But if I could wave a magic wand and create Democratic majorities sufficient to carry out a broad and wide act of national political hygiene by ending, via acts of Congress, the political careers of Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, Todd Blanche, et al., I would be sore tempted to do my best Harry Potter impersonation: “In tenebras exteriores!”

 

I expect they’d raise my taxes, too, and I suppose I could live with that, even if I am tempted to adapt H.L. Mencken: “No man is genuinely happy under a Democratic government if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when Republicans were in charge.”

 

I hear people talk about these elections as though they were attempting to channel Machiavelli, as though there were some compellingly clever strategic consideration informing their planned votes. But I often detect lurking beneath that the politics of cooties—the unspoken belief that one becomes morally contaminated by casting a vote for the other party or even by declining to cast a vote for one’s own party. “Yes, yes, x is awful”—where x = Graham Platner or Ken Paxton—“but not as awful as y” where y = the other party. I think that line of thinking often serves as a way to give oneself a moral get-out-of-jail-free card for indulging in political tribalism over decency. I write that as someone who has, as far as I can tell, precisely one thing in common politically with the great majority of my Democratic friends: the belief that the Republican Party at this moment is not only wrong on a great many questions of policy but is, more consequentially, a dangerous and depraved personality cult. I told Michael Medved on his radio show on Monday that I would find it impossible to support any Republican for any office at this time. Even if that means giving the Democrats a Senate majority? he wanted to know.

 

Medved is far from an unthinking Republican loyalist, but the assumption in the question was mistaken in a way that seems to me a little bit illuminating. I told him that my preferred electoral outcome for the immediate future is seeing Republicans “stomped into goo.” I know what that means in practical terms. I don’t know that we have a word for negative polarization that is bipartisan, but, if there is one, that is approximately what I am feeling right now. If there were a way to get Republicans stomped without the party of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez getting more power, then I’d be all for that. But there isn’t.

 

Voting is not the beginning or end of civic life, or even the most important part of democratic participation. Whatever convenient lie people tell themselves, “Vote for x” or (the one I hear more often) “Tell people they have to vote for x” usually isn’t the result of clear-eyed political calculation—it is usually a demand for an act of tribal fealty, preferably a public act. And if someone demands that you demonstrate your loyalty by pretending that Graham Platner or Ken Paxton is a different sort of man than what he is, or by insisting that you keep quiet about what kind of man he is for the sake of party cohesion, then that person does not deserve your trust or your loyalty. That kind of person will always find an excuse for doing something awful in the urgent cause of the moment, as though the greater good were composed of lesser evils.

 

You can always find a reason to pull for your team. It’s always something. But don’t go mistaking team spirit for patriotism, civic virtue, or the higher good.