Enes Kanter Freedom Obviously Doesn’t Belong in the WNBA

By Helen Lewis

Sunday, August 16, 2026

 

Why shouldn’t Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White play women’s basketball? The answer is simple: They’re not female. By all evidence, the two former NBA players have XY chromosomes—White has fathered children—and have been through male puberty. They have significant athletic advantages over female athletes and should not be eligible for the WNBA. To reach this conclusion, I don’t need to peer into the pair’s souls to see whether they’re pink or blue, nor do I need to decide whether they are sincerely applying for the WNBA draft or just trolling.

 

Although, let’s be clear, they are trolling. On August 6, Freedom sent a letter to the WNBA’s commissioner that might as well have read: Hello—I would like some attention. The 34-year-old, whose NBA profile lists him at 6 foot 10 and 250 pounds, played pro basketball for 11 seasons. Now he wants to register for the women’s draft. He argued on X that he is “simply asking that the current rules be applied equally to everyone—the rules that represent the very values many WNBA players and coaches have publicly advocated for.” In an interview on Friday, he imagined catching a pass from the Indiana Fever star Caitlin Clark, dunking the ball, and then bumping chests with her—“which I’m allowed to do,” he said, “because I’m now a woman.”

 

The backdrop to this stunt is the controversy over the Fever guard Sophie Cunningham, who told ESPN last month, “I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men,” and has been mocked as “MAGA Barbie” because of her views. The players’ union put out a statement condemning the “hate, abuse, and demonization of any person or group of people, including transgender people.”

 

As it stands, the WNBA’s collective-bargaining agreement restricts entry to “players who are women” but does not define women. The league has so far waved away Freedom and White. “There are no immediate eligibility matters affecting the WNBA,” it declared in a statement Wednesday, “and we strongly denounce the bad-faith efforts to use these topics to demean or marginalize others.”

 

No one—not even White and Freedom—seriously believes that the WNBA will let the two trollish men play as women. But the league apparently hopes to reject them without ever grudgingly coughing out an agreement with Cunningham’s view that biological males don’t belong in women’s sports. Five years ago, the WNBA’s official Twitter account celebrated Andraya Yearwood and Terry Miller, biologically male athletes whose female competitors in Connecticut sued to keep them out of girls’ races in high-school athletics. The ACLU defended the trans girls’ right to compete. Above a picture of Yearwood and Miller, the WNBA expressed its own support: “We support you and all of the other trans athletes just trying to compete in the sports they love.” (Six years on, there has been no ruling in the case.)

 

The WNBA has become an appealing target for culture-war politicking, in part because the successes of Clark and a handful of other exceptional players have significantly raised the league’s profile in the past few years. As its prominence grows, its ability to sidestep controversy shrinks.

 

Not long after Freedom’s declaration, White also announced plans to enter the draft. After a short, lackluster career in the NBA, he is now a conservative activist who has run for the U.S. Senate in Minnesota, and he is currently under a no-contact order with his ex-wife because of alleged threats against her and their teenage son. (He has disputed the accusations.) White has declared that he is indeed a woman, if only for basketball purposes. “I’ve always trusted the science and I thought I was a man my entire life, but after further review, a strong look at my personal preferences, it would appear that I am indeed sometimes identifying as a transgender woman,” he said on Fox News. He has since bought a long wig and accused a television network that canceled an interview with him of “not giving Black women a voice.”

 

When the WNBA uses the words bad faith, the only reasonable interpretation is that league officials do not believe that White and Freedom are women, despite their self-declarations. Funny story: I’m still on the advocacy group GLAAD’s enemies list for saying the same thing in 2017, in a column headlined “A Man Can’t Just Say He Has Turned Into a Woman.” At the time, Britain’s government was debating whether to loosen requirements for a person to legally change their gender. Many feminists feared that without any gatekeeping, nothing would stop male creeps and predators from using a new identity to victimize women (as the rapist Karen White did in a women’s prison). Although my article acknowledges the existence of transgender identities, it also argues that legal protections for trans people should rest on a medical diagnosis, or at least a formal bureaucratic procedure, rather than a simple verbal declaration.

 

Now, it seems, the WNBA agrees with me—White has not magically turned into a woman because he says so. You are allowed to dispute people’s self-identification. But only if they are a Republican.

 

***

 

In the United States, many progressive organizations, including the ACLU, maintain that the female category belongs to anyone who (sincerely) identifies into it. The underlying argument is that trans people should not have to seek medical treatment or alter their physical presentation to have their inner identities respected.

 

Freedom and White have elicited much less deference. Pod Save America’s Jon Lovett recently declared, “If they would like to play in the WNBA, they better fucking transition. Let’s get them on some fucking hormones.” The left-wing satirist Walter Masterson demanded that the two men “commit to the bit” and “chemically transition, or STFU.” But this is not a demand that is applied, say, to male sex offenders who ask to be housed in women’s prisons in California. Several years ago, the ACLU and other groups successfully lobbied for a law directing prison authorities to house trans women in a women’s facility if they request it, regardless of whether they have physically transitioned at all.

 

Bombarded with pro-trans commentators insisting that he medically transition, White has gleefully thrown progressive talking points back at them. “Don’t tell me how to be a Black woman! Taking hormones are optional,” he wrote in one X post. In another, he added, “Genitalia doesn’t determine gender.” Royce’s clapbacks are near-verbatim rehashings of popular activist slogans.

 

Over the past decade, many sports have wrestled with the question of how trans and nonbinary athletes can be accommodated fairly and safely. In some cases, such inclusion has presented no problems—biological females have competed in sports for both sex categories because they have no unfair advantage in either. (The WNBA accommodated the player Layshia Clarendon, who came out as trans and nonbinary, until their retirement in 2024.) Admitting biological males to women’s sports presents a more difficult question. Almost everyone agrees that men are on average stronger and faster than women, but how much of that advantage can be mitigated by testosterone suppression? Various sporting bodies have tried different approaches in the past decade, although many—including the International Olympic Committee and the Women’s Tennis Association—have now concluded that the women’s category cannot admit males, no matter how comprehensive their physical transition has been.

 

Having belatedly realized that the majority of Americans do not agree with their enthusiasm for male inclusion in women’s sports, the response of the left has often been to say: Why are we even talking about this nonstory? The columnist Candace Buckner of The Athletic criticized Cunningham for “choosing to weigh in on the divisive topic of transgender athletes in women’s sports, a grossly exaggerated ‘issue,’ and opening the door for a flood of agitators to defile the discussion.” But surely, athletes are allowed to have an opinion about competitive eligibility for their own league? For a long time, the right told stars such as Colin Kaepernick, who wanted to make political points about racism and injustice, that they should “stick to sports.” Some on the left now think that female athletes should not even have that grace.

 

***

 

What Freedom and White’s trolling has exposed is a widespread refusal to defend gender-self-identification policies on their own merits. One can argue that there is no such thing as male athletic advantage, or that inclusion for trans people is more important than fairness and safety for women. Both of these arguments are wrong, in my view, but at least they are internally coherent. What we get instead is a squeamish refusal to own the consequences of the approach that liberals endorse: White and Freedom are cynical operators, and that’s all anyone needs to know.

 

My counterpoint would be that cynical operators will always be with us. Any regulations that can’t deal with that fact are, by definition, bad regulations. Self-identification is unworkable in practice for the same reason that prison abolition isn’t viable: Bad actors will ruthlessly further their own interests at other people’s expense. For more examples, see how rich students are asking for disability accommodations to secure an advantage in college exams. How some air travelers are using wheelchair services to skip lines—at the expense of genuinely disabled people. How the service-animal exemption for airplanes was stretched so far that someone eventually tried to take a peacock into the cabin. Wherever there is an unpoliced boundary, some individuals will cross it.

 

Why would gender be exempt from this phenomenon? In 2024, soon after Germany passed a gender-self-ID law, a neo-Nazi named Sven Liebich declared that he was now Marla-Svenja Liebich and would therefore require accommodation in a women’s prison. (Marla-Svenja kept Sven’s handlebar mustache, however.) After a public backlash, Liebich was sent to a men’s jail, although it is unclear what legal basis the German state had for declaring this one particular case of self-identification fraudulent.

 

The WNBA appears to be following the same playbook—gearing up to make an arbitrary decision because of bad publicity, rather than engaging with the fact that its policies have created an exploitable loophole. Keeping out Freedom and White is not a hard problem to solve: Just say that you respect people’s identities, but sports are segregated by sex.

 

Progressives are losing the fight over gender identity in women’s sports. It’s time to concede and move on. They should save their energy to fight some of the truly egregious discrimination imposed against trans people by red states and Donald Trump’s executive orders. No one’s interest is served by refusing to articulate why Freedom and White don’t belong in the WNBA.

Trump’s Last Loyal Constituency

By David Frum

Sunday, August 16, 2026

 

“Many secrets; no mysteries.” That’s the master code of the Trump administration. When it does something strange, there’s never any mystery as to why: Somebody close to the president, or possibly the president and his family themselves, intends to score a dishonest dollar. Exactly who and how may be secret. Exactly why is no mystery.

 

So it is with the news that the Department of the Treasury has ended ownership-reporting requirements for U.S. businesses and purged the existing database of ownership information. This seemingly technical-sounding change is a huge gift to financial crooks, who can now store and launder dark money in U.S. financial institutions with less risk of detection. But the gift comes at the direct expense of banks, mutual funds, insurance companies, and other financial institutions, which now have to shoulder the burden of verifying customer data themselves.

 

The Treasury advertises the measure as deregulatory, lifting burdensome red tape from business owners. But the relief to honest business owners is tiny. The added burden on the financial sector is huge. The real winners here are shady business owners. In 2021, Capital One, the Trump Organization’s then-bank, closed more than 300 of the Trump Organization’s accounts on suspicion that they violated anti-money-laundering rules. The action just taken by the Treasury may best be understood as payback for those who tried to enforce the law against Donald Trump.

 

After the 9/11 terror attacks, Congress took action to prevent terrorists and other criminals from using the U.S. financial system to move money around undetected. Congress enacted laws requiring U.S. financial institutions to “know your customer.” If someone tried to open an account for a shell company, perhaps owned by another shell company, the financial institution had to pierce the layers of concealment to know the human beneficial owners of the account.

 

The information required was pretty basic: name, address, birth date, and a government ID—a Social Security card, say, or a passport. For the great majority of U.S. enterprises, these rules were easy to comply with. Almost 80 percent of American businesses have no employees other than the owner. You have probably divulged the requested information dozens of times without inconvenience.

 

For the institutions receiving the information, however, its collection was very burdensome. Most clients told the truth. Some did not. How to tell which was which—and how to authenticate the information provided by untruthful clients? The consequences of a mistake could be catastrophic for the financial institution. In 2024, TD Bank paid $3 billion in fines—and accepted limits on the future growth of its business—to settle U.S. claims that it had not properly monitored accounts opened by fentanyl traffickers.

 

To protect themselves, financial institutions pay third-party agencies to check information about their customers, especially those algorithmically identified as high-risk. One study puts the cost of financial-crimes compliance in the United States and Canada at $61 billion.

 

Financial institutions have clamored for years for some relief from the tangled mess of reporting imposed on them. In 2020, Congress attached a new Corporate Transparency Act to the 2021 Pentagon budget, which imposed an obligation on most businesses operating inside the United States to report their ownership directly to the government. The Corporate Transparency Act authorized the Treasury to establish a database of this information. At first, the database would be accessible only to law enforcement, but the plan was to open the database to financial institutions too. If a financial institution sensed something amiss, the federal database would assist its investigation. The goal was less to exclude criminals from the banking system than to use “the banks to track the money and find the criminals,” Aaron Klein, an expert in banking regulation at the Brookings Institution, explained to me.

 

By destroying the database, the Trump administration has removed that help from financial institutions and foreclosed an essential avenue for tracking crooks.

 

Despite the Treasury’s claims that this purported deregulation of financial information “is a victory for common sense and American small businesses,” in the words of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, the change provides scarcely any benefit at all to honest businesses. They still have to report the relevant names, addresses, dates of birth, and government-ID numbers every time they transact with a financial institution. That burden remains the law. They have been relieved only of the slight additional chore of filing the same information with the federal government—a chore that lowered their costs of doing business. Those costs are now destined to rise.

 

The purported “deregulation” is, however, a great benefit to tax evaders, drug traffickers, money launderers, and other criminals hoping to elude scrutiny of their finances. If they can locate a weak or careless or greedy financial institution, they can open accounts with imperfect information—and they now stand a much higher chance of getting away with their deception. The Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency Coalition estimates that the Treasury’s action reduces the number of enterprises required to report their true ownership from 32.6 million to 11,667.

 

The Trump administration is the most pro-crime administration in United States history—as long as the crime in question is committed by the president, his family, his donors, or his friends. Klein at Brookings noted that Trump is using anti-money-laundering laws to require notice of remittances to Mexico of as little as $200 (the legal threshold is $10,000) even as his associates, including Paul Manafort, are allowed to keep anonymous bank accounts in Delaware.

 

Across the federal government, enforcement against rich-people crimes has been crippled or abandoned. Inside the Department of Justice, resources have been redistributed away from white-collar-crime enforcement, and Trump has stopped enforcing laws against bribing foreign officials altogether. Pre-Trump, some three dozen lawyers worked on domestic public integrity at DOJ. That figure has been cut to two. The team that policed lawbreaking in the crypto industry has been disbanded.

 

The Treasury’s announcement last week is merely the latest Trump gift to crooks, cheats, and traffickers. As his popularity collapses among almost every other demographic, Trump seems to recognize that the criminal-American community is his last and most loyal constituency.

Identifying the Enemy

By Andrew Stuttaford

Saturday, August 15, 2026

 

I wrote last year about the way in which Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, a Social Democrat, led her center-left party to take a tougher stance on immigration after she became its leader in 2015. Not unconnectedly, she became Denmark’s prime minister in 2019. Unsurprisingly, Frederiksen has reiterated her position on immigration in the wake of the events in Ceuta, and in language unimaginable from almost anywhere else on the left.

 

On August 12, the Danish parliament debated Ceuta and its aftermath. Among Frederiksen’s remarks were these (translation by Google Translate, but from my very, very limited knowledge of Danish it looks to be accurate):

 

A few years ago, Denmark stood very much alone in Europe. Now a majority of EU countries support it, and this has made it possible to create concrete political results. We have succeeded in changing EU legislation so that it is now possible to establish reception and departure canters [for illegal migrants] in countries outside the EU, and . . . Danish authorities are working concretely to make it a reality. In other words: Denmark is now pushing Europe forward, and we intend to continue to do so — also when it comes to the issue of legalizing illegal migrants who are already in Europe, because we are against that. We are against that. It is no secret that I and the Spanish prime minister deeply disagree on immigration policy. We do so at a national level, and we do so at a European level. The Spanish government can make its own national decisions, just as Denmark can. But I and we will not accept that Danish society has to pay the price for decisions in Spain that we fundamentally disagree with. [Emphasis added.]

 

In other words, given the rules governing internal movement within the EU, the amnesty for illegal migrants forced through by Spain’s far-left prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, had implications elsewhere in the bloc. That’s something that Sánchez, who has complained loudly about a lack of “solidarity” within the EU after the Ceuta crisis would do well to remember, a point that Frederiksen addressed later in the debate.

 

Frederiksen also turned her attention to the danger posed to Europe by “undemocratic forces.” After identifying Russia as the principal threat, she then turned her attention to what she referred to a “big enemy that has started to grow from within (en stor fjende er begyndter begyndt at vokse op indefra).”

 

Who might this be?

 

It is foreigners who have come to Europe [“udlændinge, der er kommet til Europe”], it is Hamas supporters, it is people who commit terror against European societies, it is people who do not recognize our fundamental European values, it is people who sympathize with some of the darkest forces in this world. So Europe is threatened. The problem is that we are threatened both from outside and now from within, but it is not because of a disagreement between the Danish and Spanish governments, but because of people with an Islamic background [“folk med islamisk baggrund”] who do not want the open, free European society, unfortunately.

 

As a reminder, Frederiksen was on the left and is on the left. To Bernie Sanders, she must be the Dane from hell.

 

Moreover, she has just co-signed a letter with Italy’s redoubtable (oh, sorry, “far right”) Giorgia Meloni, who is, in many respects, Frederiksen’s polar opposite, as the duo acknowledge in the letter:

 

We are aware that many might be wondering about our cooperation. We come from very different political backgrounds, and we certainly do not agree on everything.

 

But:

 

We do not accept uncontrolled immigration to Europe, and we have promoted a strict immigration policy, both in our Nations and in Europe.

 

And they defend their stance not only on conventional grounds (problems with crime and so on), but something deeper:

 

We are both proud of Europe’s Christian cultural heritage and we want to protect it. We expect those who come to our countries and choose to make Europe their home to respect our values and not seek to impose ways of life on us that we do not share.

 

The reference to “cultural heritage” is carefully chosen. This is not, it should be stressed, some sort of theological declaration. Meloni is a Catholic, if somewhat idiosyncratically so, and a churchgoer. Frederiksen is a member of the Church of Denmark but is not a believer. However, for reasons tied to culture and social cohesion, she is a “virkelig hardcore tilhænger” (a really hardcore supporter) of the Danish church, a stance, incidentally, that has its equivalents in the home of the Church of England.

 

Contrast the attitude of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of France’s hard left LFI. He will be running (again) for the French presidency next year and, based on current polling, he may emerge as the leading candidate of the left.

 

Mélenchon talks of a “New France” formed and defined by a process he refers to as “créolisation” (a concept borrowed from Édouard Glissant, a poet born in the French Caribbean), something new formed by the mix of traditional French and immigrant culture, rather than the traditional French model which is, at least in theory, assimilationist.

 

Mélenchon’s approach is, above all, a matter of political calculation. He has realized that the white Catholic working class (“les ouvriers blancs catholiques”) are not going to help build the path to socialism he is looking for. He seems to have concluded that citizens of the nascent New France just might. Given France’s demographics, that has meant a sharp turn toward Muslim voters, which seems to be working. In the 2024 European elections, an estimated 62 percent of those French Muslims who voted (there was a high abstention rate) opted for the LFI and an estimated 69 percent chose Mélenchon in the first round of the 2022 presidential elections.

 

Mélenchon dismisses talk of an informal Islamo-leftist “partnership.” He also denies allegations of antisemitism.

 

Of course he does.

 

Fortunately, his sort of politics would be impossible in New York City, say, or Michigan.

 

Oh.

Operation Edgelord

By Alan Jacobs

Tuesday, August 11, 2026

 

Those who deny the Myth of the Good War—the belief, described in my previous essay in this series, that World War II is a distinctively, perhaps uniquely, good war—fall, I think, into four broad categories.  

 

One: A Plague on Both Your Houses. The serious writers who say explicitly that there is no moral difference between the Allies and the Axis are few and far between. The more common view may be illustrated by A. C. Grayling’s 2006 book Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan. Grayling argues that such bombing was a grievous moral crime, but he also, right from the outset, says:

 

It is unquestionably true that if Allied bombing in the Second World War was in whole or part morally wrong, it is nowhere near equivalent in scale of moral atrocity to the Holocaust of European Jewry, or the death and destruction all over the world for which Nazi and Japanese aggression was collectively responsible: a total of some twenty-five million dead, according to responsible estimates. Allied bombing in which German and Japanese civilian populations were deliberately targeted claimed the lives of about 800,000 civilian women, children and men. The bombing of the aggressor Axis states was aimed at weakening their ability and will to make war; the murder of six million Jews was an act of racist genocide. There are very big differences here.

 

Similarly, in his recent Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II (2025), Paul Thomas Chamberlin argues that the war brought about the functional demise of colonialism but was effectively a comprehensive victory for imperialism—imperialism with two distinct and mutually hostile wings, the American and the Soviet, but imperialism all the same. Nevertheless, Chamberlin says in his introduction, “Nazi Germany stands as perhaps the most abominable regime in human history. The Axis powers committed many of the vilest atrocities the world has ever seen. And no serious scholar laments the defeat of Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and imperial Japan.”

 

Explicit claims of moral equivalence are rare; but it’s not hard to find moral equivalence strongly implied, though with room built in for plausible deniability. See, for instance, Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, which takes the form of a series of historical snapshots, such as this one:

 

Winston Churchill published an article in the Evening Standard called “How to Stop War.” It was June 12, 1936.

 

Fine speeches were useless, Churchill said, and platitudes were a crime. There was only one way to stop war, and that was through military might. “Safety will only come,” he wrote, “through a combination of pacific nations armed with overwhelming power, and capable of the same infinity of sacrifice, and indeed of the ruthlessness, which hitherto have been the attributes of the warrior mind.”

 

And:

 

The German Consul of Cleveland went to Henry Ford’s birthday party in Detroit. Ford was turning seventy-five, and the German consul had a gift for him from Adolf Hitler. It was a big gold-and-white medal with four gold eagles and four little swastikas on it, and with it came a wide red silk neck sash that stood out dramatically against Henry Ford’s white suit. It was July 30, 1938.

 

The snapshots are presented without commentary; readers are free to draw their own conclusions. But the book’s subtitle is telling, is it not? And in an Afterword Baker writes, “Was it a ‘good war’? Did waging it help anyone who needed help? Those were the basic questions that I hoped to answer when I began writing.” The last words of that Afterword, and therefore of the book, are:

 

I dedicate this book to the memory of Clarence Pickett and other American and British pacifists. They’ve never really gotten their due. They tried to save Jewish refugees, feed Europe, reconcile the United States and Japan, and stop the war from happening. They failed, but they were right.

 

Readers are free to draw their own conclusions, but Baker’s own conclusions seem straightforward: the leaders of the nations that fought the Second World War brought about “the end of civilization,” and the only people not responsible for that are the pacifists. To his pair of key questions, the answers are that it was not a good war and it did not help anyone who needed help. Of course, Baker might well reply, “I didn’t say that!” He’s got wiggle room.

 

Two: Say What You Want about the Tenets of National Socialism, Dude, At Least It’s an Ethos. (Come on, you know the source.) Here we get to the people I really don’t want to talk about, but must. The obvious example is Darryl Cooper, a podcaster and self-proclaimed historian whose Substack page is, as I write, the bestselling one in the site’s History category—he’s about 15,000 subscribers ahead of Adam Tooze—and whose podcast has occasionally been the top one on iTunes, ahead of Joe Rogan. The dude is making bank.

 

Cooper essentially flips the Story of the Good War—the one I said in my previous post is widely endorsed, not the extreme version Elizabeth Samet believes in—on its head. As far as I know—I can’t see what’s going on behind his paywall—he doesn’t say Hitler was a hero or that the Axis powers were paragons of virtue. He just says that they were a lot better than the alternative, i.e. the postwar liberal order that the defeat of the Axis made possible.

 

Overviews of the controversies surrounding Cooper may be found here and here, but the best summation of Cooper’s position may be a tweet that he later deleted, in which he juxtaposed an image of the drag queen show at the Paris Olympics that looked a whole lot like the Last Supper with a photo of Hitler’s procession through a conquered Paris and said that the latter was “infinitely preferable in every way.” If I may risk a second comedy quote, this reminds me of Larry David: “One thing about Hitler that I admire is that he wouldn’t take any sh-t from magicians.”

 

But of course if you’re going to say that—by which I mean not (a) Hitler took no sh-t from magicians but rather (b) Hitler’s conquering France is “infinitely preferable” to a blasphemous drag queen show—you will require a very different interpretation of the events leading up to World War II than Americans have tended to endorse. Thus Cooper’s repeated insistence that Hitler was a man of peace whose hand was forced by the warmonger Winston Churchill, and that while the Holocaust did indeed happen, it was essentially a great big accident, never planned but resulting from a chaotic Nazi response to Churchill’s aggression. (Whoops!)

 

I am not here to refute, but merely to describe—however: the Myth of the Good War may be selective in its use of evidence, but virtually every claim Cooper makes can be not only questioned but straightforwardly disproven: See detailed and quotation-laden critiques by Niall Ferguson and Andreas Koureas.

 

Three: Just Asking Questions. This group arises in response to the previous group. It’s a diverse body of folks: For instance, Tucker Carlson, after interviewing Cooper, said, “I think you are the most important popular historian working in the United States today,” and added, “People can certainly take issue with any factual claims you’re making. I assume they’re all right.” This is Carlson agreeing with Cooper but also, shrewdly enough, leaving himself an escape hatch: he “assumes” that Cooper is correct—but of course assumptions can be overturned and in any case the issues are worth exploring—so many think, not just Carlson.

 

Often the people exploring are more circumspect than Carlson was: Elon Musk listened to the Carlson interview with Cooper, linked to it, and commented (in a since-deleted post): “Very interesting. Worth watching.” This stance has become widely known as Just Asking Questions, though Joe Rogan, who also interviewed Cooper, calls it “Just talking to people.” But in both cases it might better be called: Just Listening to People At Great Length. Cooper got many hours from Carlson and Rogan alike to make his case against the Myth of the Good War, with virtually no pushback. And maybe that’s how it should be. Who am I to judge? Hey, I’m just asking questions.

 

Four: Are You Offended Yet? In this category come the trolls, for instance Nick Fuentes, who cheerfully admits that 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis—“cookies in an oven,” he calls them—but also, when asked by Piers Morgan whether he regretted saying that “Hitler is really f—ing cool,” asked, “Regret saying a fact? No, no, that’s absolutely true.” He went on:

 

And I’m tired of pretending it’s not, to be honest … . It’s just cool — the uniforms, the parades, it’s cool. As a guy, you look at World War II, and it’s fascinating, and it’s interesting, and it’s compelling, and it’s cool.

 

And throughout this section of the interview Fuentes sees himself as a representative figure: “The thing is, my generation, we’re just done with the pearl-clutching.” When reminded that there are people still alive whose parents were killed by the Nazis, Fuentes says simply, “I dont care.” Fuentes here presents World War II as an aesthetic (cool vs. uncool) rather than a moral (good vs. evil) phenomenon, and if people are outraged by that, it’s a sign that they Just. Don’t. Get. It.

 

So these are the four primary ways to reject the Myth of the Good War, the story that has made World War II so central to the American imagination: by seeing the combatants in the war as morally equivalent—or at least not greatly distinct; by seeing the Axis powers as more admirable than the allies; by disavowing commitment to any particular narrative in favor of “just asking questions”; and by redescribing the war as an aesthetic event, with no interest in the morality of any side.

 

If you’re an American who thinks of the war as the comprehensive defeat of totalitarian regimes and the emergence of your own country as the world’s regnant superpower, or a Brit who sees the war as a nearly miraculous triumph of the plucky underdog, or even a German or Japanese person who sees the end of the war as Stunde Null (Zero Hour), an opportunity to start over and build your country anew, then World War II might seem to you an event of unique meaning—an event upon which to build a society-governing story.

 

But perhaps you see the war as a scene, in Matthew Arnold’s famous lines, “Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night.” Perhaps for you the war meant the collapse of Western society into militarism or rudderless liberalism or whatever your most-hated -ism is. Perhaps it’s something you observe only in order to deem it cool or uncool. And perhaps you just don’t know what you think about any of it. Those are very different situations, but what they all have in common is a decentering of World War II: It is no longer an event you interpret in order to anchor your sense of social meaning and purpose. Instead, it’s just something that happened, like the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act or the War of 1812.

 

Is that where we are now?

California’s Lawfare Could Further Empty Out Hollywood

By John Fund

Sunday, August 16, 2026

 

Two heavyweight Hollywood unions — the Directors Guild of America and the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, which represent a combined 200,000 film and television workers in the U.S. and Canada — are sounding the alarm about Hollywood’s future. They are urging Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison and California Attorney General Rob Bonta to settle the state’s antitrust lawsuit against the merger of Paramount and Warner Bros.

 

“We cannot overemphasize how damaging the current timeline for the trial . . . is to an already struggling industry,” their letter reads, referring to the March 2027 date set for the antitrust trial. At risk is American film and TV production, especially in California, which is down more than 40 percent from 2022: “We are aware of productions that have been put on hold or canceled altogether, leading to further reductions in available work for our members and other industry workers.” It is worth noting that the Directors Guild is headed by Christopher Nolan, whose new movie The Odyssey is now topping box office charts, making him one of the most powerful voices in Hollywood.

 

Everyone is worried about Hollywood’s future. Paramount’s board has approved a plan to move out of California if the state’s Attorney General Bonta doesn’t agree to settlement talks in his Captain Ahab–like antitrust case by October 1. Ellison is confident that the company can beat the suit opposing Paramount’s $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros., but he is making it clear that the studio’s willing to move to Georgia, Texas, or Tennessee. It already has a presence in these states. Ellison is also well aware that Paramount would save $500 million a year in no-income-tax Texas or Tennessee and almost as much in Georgia, which has a flat 4.99 percent rate.

 

Bonta’s office has denounced Paramount’s announcement, calling it “another attempt to blackmail the state into letting an illegal deal through.” But even Xavier Becerra, the state’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate in this year’s election and Bonta’s predecessor as attorney general, is appalled at Bonta’s intransigence: “You get way more done in the conference room than you do in the courtroom.”

 

Should Bonta not budge, Texas Governor Greg Abbott says he would welcome Paramount. His office noted, “Texas offers the best business climate in America. The state has no corporate income tax and no personal income tax. Paramount already maintains major production facilities in Texas.”

 

There is no disputing that the entertainment industry in California is in dire straits. A Burbank resident who works in film revealed that, because of the slowdown in production, she has worked only twelve days so far this year and is “really close” to giving up. “Hollywood is dead,” proclaims Mark Geragos, the publisher of Los Angeles magazine. High production costs, rapacious unions, and city-led restrictions on location shooting have driven jobs away. The number of on-location shoot days in L.A. has fallen from 37,000 in 2022 to fewer than 20,000 in 2025, a drop of 46 percent. Production has shifted to other states, as well as to the U.K. and Canada, where labor is cheaper, tax credits are plentiful, and union rules are less stringent.

 

Should Paramount decide it has to abandon California, here’s a further suggestion. Ellison should finance a documentary detailing how California is now becoming best known for chasing good-paying jobs out of the state. There is no shortage of well-known actors who are fed up with California and who would be happy to narrate it. One might be Dennis Quaid, the star of Reagan, who is selling his Brentwood home. He told Entertainment Weekly: “I feel like people pay these taxes for no services. . . . People are angry and half-angry, and they’re half kind of feel like giving up, to tell you the truth.”

 

Bonta is clearly an ambitious politician, no doubt someone who thinks the “AG” abbreviation of his title stands for “Aspiring Governor.” Does he really want to run for higher office with the reputation of having diminished California’s signature industry?

The Presidential Soft-Launch Has Begun

By Raleigh Adams

Sunday, August 16, 2026

 

As someone who swallowed the “girlboss feminism” propaganda of the last decade whole, my lingering instinct watching Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) in the news these past two weeks has been: Good for her!

 

AOC has frozen her eggs, on livestream at that. Reports emerged that she quietly ended her years-long engagement to her longtime fiancé Riley Roberts. And, perhaps most surprisingly, one of the most recognizable faces of contemporary progressivism has begun laughing about the excesses of the very political culture that helped make her famous: “Woke 1.0 was crazy.”

 

Taken separately, these are all seemingly favorable developments to see in the congresswoman. Publicly documenting egg freezing helps normalize difficult conversations about women’s fertility and reproductive health, even if the reasons or efficacy behind AOC personally choosing to do so are dubious. Ending a relationship that no longer works or is going nowhere is hardly a scandal. Possessing the humility to admit that, to borrow former Biden White House aide Temi Egbewole’s formulation, “Peak woke got weird” is a welcome development in practically anyone, even if admittedly a shallow act. Somewhere out there, patron saint of millennial girlbosses Carrie Bradshaw is raising a Cosmopolitan to AOC.

 

So why does the whole thing feel so off?

 

Perhaps because, taken together, these revelations look less like a series of unrelated developments in the life of a 36-year-old congresswoman (even representatives are entitled to an early midlife crisis) and more like the construction of a 2028 presidential candidate.

 

The 2028 presidential soft launch has begun, and its first stage is making America’s most ambitious politicians seem like normal people again.

 

AOC didn’t need to launch a grassroots campaign: She’s already famous, too much so if anything. Her problem is the AOC that the American public is familiar with was crafted for a particular historical moment: democratic socialism, abolishing ICE and decriminalizing illegal immigration, the Green New Deal, 2020 racial politics, defunding the police and the military, and abolishing prisons.

 

For a presidential campaign, particularly after Democrats’ recent electoral disasters and the rising internal threat of the DSA to the Democratic Party’s institutional makeup, she has to become someone who could plausibly win a presidential election as the Democratic nominee to voters who currently regard her as a creature of the progressive internet.

 

The goal here isn’t to bring AOC into the limelight. Rather, it is to show the American public that, despite the limelight, she’s just like them! Axios has suggested this separation from “peak woke” politics is perhaps more indicative of AOC’s ulterior motives. She is distancing herself from the beliefs that were convenient for her to get into elected office at the time, and is now trying to present a public image that is more appealing to the national electorate. The Woke 1.0 vote is secured, but if the rumors of her presidential aspirations are true, AOC’s appeal must expand beyond her online fan base.

 

Enter Alexandria, the normal thirtysomething woman. She’s worried about finding the right partner to marry, about how time may be running out, about whom to possibly start a family with. The public egg-freezing disclosure is fascinating because it makes one of the most ideologically defined politicians in America suddenly legible through an extremely conventional dilemma faced by many professional millennial women.

 

Her public explanation explicitly framed the decision in terms of preserving options and resisting the scrutiny women receive over their reproductive decisions. For these reasons, at least, AOC should be applauded. It is not the public’s business to opine on whether she will, or should, have children. And, setting aside the considerable question of whether fertility treatments such as egg freezing are financially accessible to the average American woman, AOC managed to shift a conversation about reproductive health away from the familiar trenches of abortion politics and toward fertility instead. That is potentially fertile political ground. Even women who disagree with AOC on abortion can recognize the anxiety of wondering whether motherhood will remain an option, and Republicans — despite a politics increasingly preoccupied with declining birth rates, marriage, and family formation — have not always proven particularly adept at speaking to those anxieties.

 

Alongside the egg freezing, the news of her breakup with Roberts, without suggesting that AOC herself directly orchestrated the timing of the break-up coming to light, only rounds out this developing biography. To the public eye, AOC is becoming less Rosa Luxemburg and more Carrie Bradshaw.

 

Still, lest Republicans ridicule AOC’s spectacle too much, their prospective candidates appear to be undergoing the same ritual.

 

In a recent interview with Katie Miller, Secretary of State Marco Rubio answered that if given the opportunity for a free weekend, he would ideally spend it watching College GameDay before the Saturday afternoon games, and then follow that up with the NFL games on Sunday — checking with his wife first, of course. Similarly, the key to a lasting marriage for the Rubios? Compliance on the husband’s part, according to the secretary. And finally, something everyone can get behind: The benefits of the keto diet just don’t outweigh the joy of a good Pop-Tart.

 

Why is the secretary of state presenting the general public with this information about his personal and family life?

 

Because it communicates, in approximately thirty seconds, that he’s just like you. He may be secretary of state and managing foreign wars, nuclear powers, and diplomatic relations, but behind all that, he’s a wife-guy and football fan — in other words, relatable to the average American voter. That’s a political biography compressed into a TikTok-ready soundbite.

 

Anecdotal accounts commenting on Rubio’s interviews seem to point to their effectiveness, with viewers declaring he “would win the 2028 election in a landslide if he were the nominee. He is far more impressive and likable than JD Vance,” and that “I don’t ask for a lot, but I need them to be POTUS and FLOTUS.”

 

Such publicity moves aren’t new among politicians with a potential eye on the White House. American politicians have always manufactured relatability: eating at diners, kissing babies, talking about baseball, clearing brush, Bill Clinton at McDonald’s, Obama filling out March Madness brackets.

 

But social media has changed the required texture of the performance.

 

The old litmus test for a political candidate was whether you would have a beer with them. Now, in 2026, that judgment has shifted to whether they are someone with whom you could share memes in a group chat.

 

What is emerging is something closer to the politician as influencer. Social media has collapsed the old distance between public figure and private person, and politicians are now expected to cultivate the same parasocial intimacy as the people populating our Instagram and TikTok feeds. Voters do not merely want to know a candidate’s policies; they want glimpses of the person supposedly existing between press conferences — the marriage jokes, strange eating habits, weekend plans, anxieties, and occasional oversharing. The politician no longer simply needs a platform and a biography. He needs a personality compelling enough to follow.

 

Americans expect politicians to disclose hobbies, dating habits, favorite foods, fertility decisions, television habits, music tastes, memes, marriages, divorces, and workouts.

 

And because voters are extraordinarily practiced consumers of influencer culture, generic relatability no longer works very well. For Rubio to say he enjoys spending time with his family sounds focus-grouped and scripted. To say his wife may hate it, but he would love to spend a weekend only watching football sounds like a dad you would meet in your local Walmart. Likewise, AOC could have claimed that she believes Democrats should learn from their past mistakes. To quip about Woke 1.0 being crazy is something you would say over Saturday brunch. That distinction is central to what both AOC and Rubio are doing as they size up their futures.

 

AOC needs voters to forget, momentarily, that she is AOC, the Democratic Socialist champion. Rubio needs voters to remember that Marco Rubio the dad exists underneath his all-consuming roles in the Trump administration.

 

The time is ripe for this kind of experimentation. With likely contenders but no inevitable heirs apparent in either party, ambitious politicians have the luxury of spending the next year or two quietly testing an increasingly important question: What version of me would Americans be more likely to elect president? For Ocasio-Cortez, the answer emerging looks something like an economic populist shorn of some of the cultural baggage of 2020, repackaged as a recognizable Millennial woman contemplating marriage and motherhood while downplaying the mistakes of her political youth. For Rubio, it is the inverse: the seasoned statesman who spends his working hours negotiating with foreign powers but, given the choice, would rather spend his weekend planted in front of a television watching an ungodly amount of college football. The résumés are already written. What remains to be workshopped is the person attached to them.

 

None of this is to say that the personalities being presented are necessarily false. AOC really froze her eggs, and Rubio probably really would happily liquefy his brain watching 14 straight hours of college football. The artifice, if there is any, lies not in invention but in selection. Presidential politics does not require constructing a human being from scratch so much as deciding which of a person’s perfectly genuine pieces might add up to an electable character.

 

And perhaps my lingering girlboss instinct was right after all. Good for AOC. Freeze the eggs. Dump the fiancé. Repent of Woke 1.0. Cheer on your SEC team and snack on Pop-Tarts. Just don’t be surprised if, somewhere between the fertility clinic and the next round of Sunday games, an exploratory committee appears.

The Party of Strength

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, August 14, 2026

 

Yesterday the president ordered the Navy to ditch the electromagnetic catapult system it uses to propel fighter jets off the decks of aircraft carriers. America is returning to the good ol’ days of steam catapults, he declared.

 

Experts were baffled. “Replacing the electromagnetic catapults with steam will be a complex endeavor that will likely cost billions of dollars,” the Wall Street Journal noted. The old system used more mechanical parts and required more money and technicians to maintain; modern U.S. carriers will need to be retrofitted with new (meaning: old) infrastructure to support them.

 

Installation of an electromagnetic system is already nearly half-finished on a supercarrier that’s under construction in Virginia. That will now need to be reworked to accommodate the executive order at “significant cost, schedule, and integration risk,” the contractor told the paper.

 

What gives?

 

Dispatch contributor Jesse Singal had a theory. “This means either some random aide thinks the old system is cool, and told Trump about it at a moment when [the president] was particularly lucid, or Trump has some sort of financial stake in a steam-catapult company, but it’s 99.9 percent one or the other.”

 

I would have put the odds slightly lower, at around 90 percent. In a movement as besotted with nostalgia as Trumpism, there’s always a chance that the president prefers doing something the old way simply because that’s how it used to be done. American greatness was at its zenith in his youth, and in his youth carriers used steam. QED.

 

But certainly, if you had to bet, you’d bet on Singal being right. And he is right, it appears. Per the Wall Street Journal, “Trump is making good on a promise he made almost 10 years ago to go back to the steam system after hearing a sailor praise it while visiting a ship during his first term.” Some random person told him steam catapults were cool, and the alleged coolness of steam catapults became an idée fixe.

 

Plant a seed in Donald Trump’s head and you never know what poisonous fruit might grow.

 

As it happens, the steam-catapult idiocy isn’t the only fiasco in the news this week that involves the world’s greatest military.

 

Fiascos.

 

The most sordid has to do with conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, where morale has allegedly deteriorated after nine months at sea. “Family members and sailors say the roughly 5,000 service members aboard Lincoln have endured food and water shortages, disrupted mail service, and long workdays with little time off,” Stars and Stripes reported. Some crew members are said to have complained of suicidal thoughts. More than one has tried to go overboard.

 

A different kind of fiasco that came to light recently took place earlier this year in Germany. In April and May, U.S. infantry from Fort Hood held military exercises against a Ukrainian drone unit. Despite the Pentagon having had many months to learn from Russia’s battlefield misery and adapt its tactics accordingly, the Americans were defeated “easily.” The armored vehicles they used were spotted and “killed” so quickly, in fact, that U.S. units had to “re-spawn” simply to keep the exercise going, one official told the Wall Street Journal.

 

The third fiasco has to do with Iran. Everyone knows that America has burned through an outsized share of its missile stockpile during the war, but only lately has it become clear how outsized it is. Some experts estimated that half the supply of high-tech THAAD interceptors was gone; the truth, according to sources who spoke to CNN, is more like 80 percent. (Half of all Patriot missiles have been spent as well.) Amid the predictable finger-pointing and scapegoating at the top, the Pentagon has issued an urgent memo to defense contractors begging them to start cranking out weapons “significantly faster.”

 

Joint Chiefs chairman Dan Caine is reportedly so spooked that he’s urged Trump to find an off-ramp from the war before our “dangerously low” remaining supply of munitions runs out. The president is now resigned to “low-keying it” in Iran, opting for economic pressure over military escalation because escalating might be too perilous for … us.

 

There’s a fourth, less visible but momentously important, fiasco in motion. Even before the president returned to office, the United States passed the grim milestone of spending more on debt servicing than it does on defense. But under Trump, the problem has worsened considerably: In an age of high interest rates, America nonetheless borrowed more in the first 10 months of this fiscal year than it did in all of fiscal year 2025. Last month’s budget deficit was the steepest since March 2021, putting us on track for an annual deficit of no less than $2 trillion.

 

As more of our money goes toward servicing our debt, less of our money will necessarily go toward national defense. That would be bad enough if we weren’t spending big bucks on certain foolish and wasteful vanity projects, but we are. The president doesn’t seem to care a whit.

 

Amid all of that, the Trump administration now appears doomed to a strategic defeat in Iran. America’s Gulf allies are already coming to terms with Iranian ownership of the Strait of Hormuz, preferring to pay a “fee” to their Shiite enemies so that tankers can safely transit the strait than suffer through another pointless U.S. escalation. If the Pentagon can no longer defend Saudi oil fields from Iranian retaliation due to munitions shortages, the Saudis are better off letting themselves be extorted. That’s the state of confidence in America overseas now.

 

All in all, there’s a solid case to be made that this presidency will end with U.S. military power at its weakest point since the Carter years. And we’re still not even halfway through it: Trump being Trump, there’s a decent chance that he’ll treat the Pentagon’s overextension as an excuse to live out his dream of abandoning NATO before he leaves office. Having done major damage to American prestige by behaving too hawkishly in the first 19 months of his term, he’s fully capable of doing major damage by behaving too dovishly over the remaining 29.

 

All of this has to matter politically, no?

 

Traditional advantages.

 

Since Vietnam, Republicans have been the party of strength abroad. The Cold War, the Gulf War, the war on terror, now the war with Iran: The GOP is forever eager to throw roundhouses at foreign villains while the hippie Democratic base cries, “There has to be a better way!” If you’re a hawk who believes in hard-power projection, choosing between blue and red has been a no-brainer since 1980.

 

Will that still be true in 2028, though? How many more military-related fiascos will it take from the Trump administration before the traditional Republican advantage on national security among voters ends up as depleted as the Pentagon’s missile stockpile?

 

That’s a trick question, actually. According to some polls, that advantage is already gone.

 

As noted elsewhere by CNN reporter Aaron Blake, two recent surveys found the parties statistically tied on questions about “strength.” A Reuters poll saw Democrats ahead, 37–36, when it asked which side will do a better job handling “war, foreign conflicts, and terrorism.” That’s a 12-point swing away from Republicans since Trump was reelected in late 2024.

 

A Fox News poll had the GOP still ahead on national security but by a narrow margin of 50–48, within the margin of error. That too reflects a 12-point turnaround dating back to before the Iran war.

 

Not everyone who’s moving from right to left on questions related to national security is a disappointed hawk, needless to say. Some are swing voters who bought Trump’s hype in 2024 about “ending endless wars” and now feel bait-and-switched. Others are Tuckerite isolationists who dream of making the world safe for postliberalism. But there are surely people who favored the president in 2024 because they believed even a war-skeptical Republican would project military power more competently and responsibly than the liberal weenie alternative—and have learned otherwise the hard way.

 

Those hawkish voters now face having to watch the tough guy they supported forced to acquiesce in Iranian control of Hormuz because he’s maneuvered himself into having no other option. Their humiliation will be ineffable. How loyal will they remain to a party whose biggest foreign policy accomplishment over these four years is likely to be vastly increasing Iran’s regional prestige?

 

What’s the pitch to them post-Iran to keep loyally turning out for a party led by J.D. Vance?

 

Before you answer, bear in mind that the current war might not be the worst strategic defeat America suffers before Trump leaves office. The president’s ineptitude and the Pentagon’s munitions shortfall are bound to influence China’s calculations about Taiwan and Russia’s about Europe. Trump has never been likely to intervene to defend U.S. allies in either scenario, but between the current strain on the military and the heat he’s taken from “America First-ers” for being too bellicose, he’s really unlikely to intervene now.

 

In fact, having just watched China flex its muscle over oil markets, he might not even consider doing so. A man who’s afraid of being remembered as Herbert Hoover won’t risk challenging an enemy who can plausibly threaten him with a global recession simply by boosting its oil consumption.

 

If the president’s bluff is called and he declines to fight, what’s left for right-wing hawks then? What does American paralysis in years three and four of Trump 2.0 do to perceptions of “the party of strength”?

 

I can understand feeling skeptical that the GOP might lose its traditional advantage on national security, which has been a fact of political life for the better part of 50 years. It’s unthinkable! But as it turns out, it’s not the only issue right now on which the party is seeing a longtime advantage evaporate.

 

As Blake notes, perceptions of Republican economic stewardship have also collapsed under the weight of tariffs and gas-price hikes driven by the war. The same Fox News poll that I mentioned earlier has Democrats ahead 54–45 on which side would better handle the economy, giving the left its biggest lead since 2006. Reuters has the margin at a more modest 37–36, but not since May 2017 had Republicans trailed on the question (which was asked slightly differently at the time). Unthinkable! Yet here we are.

 

Come 2028, if the GOP is no longer the party of “strength” and no longer the party of prosperity, what will it be the party of, exactly?

 

The paths ahead.

 

My cynical answer is that it’ll become the National Front. Eighty percent of its agenda will be about expelling swarthy undesirables, 10 percent will be about learning to love Russia and China, and the rest will involve snorting various progressive and protectionist economic policies. Stop fighting illiberals abroad and start fighting liberals within. The J.D. Vance program, in other words. Right-wing hawks will wander off into the wilderness.

 

My more cynical answer is that it’ll become the National Front but will still command the votes of most traditional Republicans, including hawks, because hyperpartisanship always trumps hard experience. No matter how humiliating the rest of the president’s term becomes militarily or economically, right-wingers will anxiously reassure themselves that any Democrat would be worse. Better a belligerent dope who makes decisions about aircraft carrier technology based on word of mouth than a tax-and-spend technocrat beholden to hippies.

 

“The National Front plus a big group of willfully delusional conservatives” is a pretty good description of the Republican coalition right now, no? Why wouldn’t it continue?

 

Democrats will make it easy in some ways for the GOP. For instance, the left is vastly less likely to support war with Iran than the Trump-led GOP is and, with the notable exceptions of Ukraine and NATO, isn’t meaningfully more likely to favor other foreign interventions. If you’re a Mark Levin-style conservative hawk who thinks the big problem with the current conflict is that we haven’t dropped enough bombs, why would you think President Mark Kelly will be more likely to scratch your itch than President Vance would?

 

The left’s hard tilt against Israel is another huge red flag for hawks. Even if the broader right comes to see the Iran war as a mistake and proof of the president’s incompetence, most Republicans outside the “young chud” Tucker Carlson niche will view it as having been directionally correct on clash-of-civilizations grounds: Trump understood the Muslim threat. A Democratic Party that’s now pro-Palestinian writ large, pro-Hamas out on its fringe, and captivated by politicians named Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed is not an obvious home for those Republicans.

 

Then again, no one knows how big the Tucker Carlson niche might get by 2028. If the GOP turns into a party in which terms like “goyslop” become common parlance, in which the supposed “real” clash of civilizations is with Israel specifically and global Jewry more generally, one would hope Republican hawks would take that as their cue to pull up stakes and declare independence. Or even—gasp—consider supporting a Democrat like Kelly who seems not obviously crazy and not very interested in the various sinister tentacles of the Jewish octopus.

 

Another way of saying all that is that Trump’s various military fiascos, Iran most prominently, might be just the thing needed to accelerate horseshoe-ification. “The party of strength” in the future might be an uneasy coalition of left- and right-leaning liberals who lean toward projecting America military power against illiberal regimes—when the goals are feasible and the people giving orders are capable, neither of which is true in the present war.

 

Whereas the opposition party of the future might be a similarly uneasy coalition of left- and right-leaning illiberals who lean against American military imperialism, especially when practiced against illiberal regimes and especially especially against illiberal regimes that are waging war on Israel. That octopus isn’t going to slay itself, you know.

 

If you had to bet on political trends, though, you’d always bet on inertia, particularly in an age of turbo-charged tribalism. “Strength” has been part of the right’s tribal identity since the Reagan era; even Trump, who won two elections by questioning GOP-led wars, reinforced that identity with boorish alpha-male bravado and a lust for dominance. Asking Republicans to relinquish it, even after the Iran fiasco, is asking a lot.

 

And asking Democrats, whose base led the opposition to Vietnam, Iraq, and Iran, and whose anti-American socialist wing is ascendant, to claim it is asking just as much.

 

So we will likely forge on into 2028 with both parties in their familiar roles, with Republican candidates halfheartedly promising strength and Democratic candidates half-heartedly demanding restraint. No one on either side will feel very convinced by the posturing, but longtime partisans will relish the reassurance that their tribal identity is, more or less, still what it’s always been. The president isn’t the only American besotted by nostalgia.