How We Won the War on Terror

By Tod Lindberg

Monday, August 31, 2026

 

On September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush gave a major speech to Congress and the country in which he outlined the coming U.S. response to al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attack. He said, “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.” Thus began what would soon be known as the “Global War on Terror,” or GWOT, in its unlovely acronym.

 

Over the quarter century since, a parade of commentators, scholars, and politicians has marched through the media to offer overwhelmingly negative judgments on the GWOT. Here is former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski in 2007: “The damage these three words [“war on terror”] have done—a classic self-inflicted wound—is infinitely greater than any wild dreams entertained by the fanatical perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks.” CNN’s Fareed Zakaria in 2008: “Bush’s basic conception of a ‘global War on Terror’… has been poorly thought-through, badly implemented, and has produced many unintended costs that will linger for years if not decades.” In the journal International Security in 2012, John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart pronounced the GWOT “an ill-conceived and remarkably unreflective effort.” Boston University’s hawk-turned-isolationist Andrew Bacevich, who lost a son in Iraq, in 2021 repeated his long-standing conclusion: “The Global War on Terrorism was a needless and costly distraction.” From the anti-interventionist left, here was journalist Spencer Ackerman in 2021: “We’ve learned from the war on terror, that security solutions to political problems are doomed to failure, they’re doomed to making those political problems worse.” In his recent book The Return of the Great Powers, Cambridge University’s Brendan Simms decries “the huge cost and abysmal failure of the ‘War on Terror.’”

 

These blanket judgments are wrong.

 

They are heavily colored by the American experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, almost as if “GWOT” was just another name for those wars. In fact, the record of the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan is, in its own right, far more complicated. But more to the point, the “war on terror” was indeed “global,” not just focused on these two countries. And it was a war not only in the kinetic sense but also insofar as it marshaled a full spectrum of resources of the United States and allied governments in identifying and targeting malevolent organizations and their support structures abroad before they could effectively target American and allied interests. And this war, the real Global War on Terror in its totality, has been a remarkable success, notwithstanding Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

WHAT DIDN’T HAPPEN

 

Let’s begin with the obvious. In the fall of 2001—that is, in real time after the 9/11 attacks but before the opportunity for retrospective judgment arrived—the question of what horror might be coming next for the United States took on an urgency unseen since the aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor 60 years before. Osama bin Laden’s spectacular plot succeeded not only in destroying the twin towers of the World Trade Center and gashing the Pentagon but also in its more general and visceral objective: It terrorized.

 

What would its perpetrators do next? This was a question whose answer was unknown to government officials and individual Americans alike. One could and did speculate. Would bombs be going off downtown in New York, Washington, and other big cities? What about a dirty bomb producing a cloud of radioactive debris? What about an actual “loose nuke”? Would platoons of would-be martyrs undertake massive urban assaults? Would chemical weapons be unleashed on the subway, like in the 1995 sarin attack in Tokyo? Powdered anthrax of unknown origin was already taking lives through the mails; was a massive aerosolized attack next? Were water reservoirs and the food supply about to be poisoned? Would more airplanes be turned into fuel-air bombs?

 

The answer to all these worries turned out to be no—but that was not for want of terrorist ambition or effort. Following 9/11, foreign-trained or inspired jihadist terrorists attempted numerous suicide or sabotage attacks. Individuals included would-be “shoe bomber” Richard Reid, dirty-bomb plotter José Padilla (who trained with al-Qaeda), and would-be “underwear bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. A number of plots targeted infrastructure, including the Brooklyn Bridge, fuel tanks at JFK airport, and a rush-hour backpack-bomb attack on the New York City subway. Financial buildings were another target. A group was planning an attack on Fort Dix, New Jersey.

 

In some cases, the attacks came close to deadly success but were undone by the incompetence of the perpetrators—a bomb that did not detonate properly in Times Square, as well as the shoe- and underwear-bomb failures. Some did come off to lethal effect, such as the bombing of the Boston Marathon in 2013, which killed three and injured hundreds; an attack at a government building in San Bernardino in 2015, in which two shooters killed 14; and the Pulse nightclub attack in Florida in 2016, in which a gunman killed 49. Yet none of these successful attacks was remotely close in scale to 9/11, and the perpetrators came not from abroad but were self-radicalized jihadists on American soil of Chechen, Pakistani, and Afghan origin.

 

According to a regularly updated New America Foundation database, only one lethal attack in the United States took place under the direction of a foreign jihadist organization: the 2019 shooting at Pensacola Naval Air Station, which killed three. In New America’s tally, the total number of American lives lost to jihadist terror attacks in the United States since 9/11 stands just over 120—barely 4 percent of the direct 9/11 death toll (excluding the 19 hijackers) of 2,977.

 

By the broadest and most important indicator, then, one must ask: If this is failure, what would success have looked like?

 

Meanwhile, numerous other jihadist terrorist attacks were foiled by American authorities, often in collaboration with allied governments. Hundreds of individuals are serving prison terms in relation to these plots. A 2015 RAND working paper analyzed 150 successful and foiled terrorist plots from 1995 through 2012. It found that plots were more likely to be thwarted in the years after 9/11 than in the six years before.

 

Why? Many of the details we will never know. These operations were and are the work of counterterrorism and counterintelligence efforts undertaken internationally, domestically, and locally (the NYPD Intelligence Bureau is the most notable example of the latter). The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces date back to the establishment of the first such regional office, in New York in 1980. After 9/11, the FBI substantially expanded the program, which does its own work but also liaises with other federal, state, and local law enforcement. There are now about 200 JTTFs, including at least one in each of the bureau’s 56 field offices. Protecting the United States from terrorist attack is the bureau’s stated “number one priority.”

 

HARDENING THE TARGETS

 

Substantial resources have also gone into “hardening” potential terrorist targets. The most conspicuous is the airport screening of the Transportation Security Administration, created in legislation Congress enacted in November 2001. The Aviation and Transportation Security Act federalized airport screening and began the process of requiring airlines to report all passenger and crew manifests, including biographical data such as sex and date of birth, to the government.

 

As the shock of 9/11 wore off over the years, the TSA came in for criticism for its randomized practice of selecting the occasional grandmother for additional screening procedures. Nevertheless, the “security theater” so roundly mocked seems to have been an effective deterrent to attempts to smuggle weapons onto planes. Well before 9/11, Americans had largely forgotten how easy that used to be during the hundreds of hijackings worldwide from the late 1960s through the 1970s.

 

Consider the case of the Federal Air Marshals program. The number of armed agents flying incognito increased from about 30 before 9/11 to an estimated 3,000 in the years since. There are hundreds of inbound international flights on American carriers daily, so the program places one to four marshals on routes (including domestic routes) that officials deem high-risk—or in response to specific intelligence on a threat.

 

There’s no public record of marshals foiling a plot in the air, though there have been reports of marshals intervening with unruly passengers, presumably including circumstances in which the reason underlying the unruliness was initially unknown. But does the program deter, as is its major purpose? Hard to say, but would Americans feel safer, and actually be safer, if the Department of Homeland Security announced it was halting the program to divert the resources elsewhere? Should we no longer require that cockpit doors be hardened against easy entry on grounds that only intoxicated or crazy passengers, not terrorists, have tried to bust through them since 9/11?

 

These questions are especially relevant because all initiatives intended to prevent or deter represent an opportunity cost—if you do one thing, you won’t have money left to do another. The resource allocation has been neither random nor frivolous but has rather been the product of risk analysis and deliberation by officials who take their responsibilities seriously. That they may err and that their errors may become clear only after a failure is hardly a warrant for the dismissal of the seriousness of their efforts.

 

The 9/11 attack also brought forth legislation intended to enhance federal authority to detect and disrupt terrorist plots. The first to be signed into law, within weeks of 9/11, was the Patriot Act, which (among other provisions) broadened wiretap rules to encompass multiple devices, thus making it easier to track plotters rather than specific phones. Government officials have credited the new rules as instrumental in foiling the New York subway attack. The Patriot Act also enabled domestic law enforcement and U.S. foreign intelligence agencies to share information; government officials early on identified the firewall separating foreign and domestic counterterrorism agency missions as a leading cause of the failure to detect the 9/11 plot.

 

Next was the Homeland Security Act of 2002, which created the new Cabinet department and revamped or consolidated numerous protective agencies there. The department would also become a clearinghouse for collecting relevant information from the FBI and intelligence agencies. Meanwhile, the “what went wrong” investigation of the estimable 9/11 Commission produced a slew of recommendations enacted in subsequent legislation. In 2004 came a major intelligence overhaul, which created the coordinating position of director of national intelligence as well as the National Counterterrorism Center. State drivers’ licenses had to meet new federal standards set forth in the REAL ID Act of 2005. Those IDs, which provide confident correspondence between the ticketed passenger and the person boarding a plane, were the last link in the government’s comprehensive knowledge of who is flying where (and it took two decades for states to implement the program fully). The process now has integrated facial-recognition systems, which have the added benefit of speeding up the security checks at airports. Welcome to what U.S. spy agencies refer to as “ubiquitous technical surveillance.” This is worrisome to many civil libertarians. But taken simply as a security measure, the ubiquity provides a new level of deterrence.

 

As Abe Greenwald noted, writing in these pages 15 years ago on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, a decade without a comparable attack on the homeland should have been thought a considerable achievement. At this writing, the record stands at a quarter century. There is no predicting what will come in the years or even days ahead, and if a failure on the scale of 9/11 is in our future, that will be very bad indeed—but it will not negate the 25 years of prevention Americans experienced through 2026.

 

TAKING THE FIGHT TO THE TERRORISTS

 

Beyond the homeland defensive measures of the kind discussed above, a key premise of the GWOT was that taking the fight to terrorist organizations where they were quartered would reduce their ability to target Americans at home and U.S. interests abroad. Again, let’s start with the basics: Even before 9/11, the United States had the ability to identify and strike its enemies, from genocidaires in former Yugoslavia to jihadists. But doing so wasn’t necessarily easy, and the willingness to do so was often lacking.

 

Following the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and the revelation of its direct tie to a new type of Islamic radicalism, the FBI led an investigation that produced criminal charges against the conspirators and lengthy prison sentences, then an international manhunt for the ringleader of the attack, Ramzi Yousef. A policy debate erupted in Washington and elsewhere over whether the “law enforcement” model of response was adequate for terrorist attacks or whether the new danger required a new approach. In 1995, Pakistani authorities working with the FBI and CIA nabbed Yousef and transferred him to the United States, where he was tried and convicted—a temporary victory for the complacent “law enforcement” model.

 

The United States made no attempts to target jihadists abroad until the deadly al-Qaeda attacks on U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998. Later that month, U.S. officials tried to target and kill the head of the organization, Osama bin Laden. A Tomahawk attack on al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan reportedly missed him by hours. The Clinton administration, the 9/11 Commission found, had had numerous other opportunities to attempt to kill bin Laden—all, however, “uncertain” and carrying “high risks.” The commission found “no credible evidence that the U.S. government had actionable intelligence that could have prevented the 9/11 attack.”

 

This politick but contentious bipartisan conclusion took President Bush off the hook for his first nine months in office—and President Clinton off the hook for seven years of muted response following the World Trade Center bombing. His refusal to focus on the threat lasted the entirety of his second term—at the start of which, and well ahead of the embassy bombings, the CIA was already well aware of the danger bin Laden posed. The story of Clinton 2 was one of multiple declined opportunities to take out bin Laden and one unsuccessful attempt. Of course, it is impossible to assert that capturing or killing bin Laden would have prevented 9/11, but the commission’s bland assertion that no “actionable intelligence” the U.S. government had “could have prevented” it is hypothetical hindsight speculation that minimizes the undeniable ambivalence of the Clinton administration about how far to go to do it.

 

Here’s another hypothetical: If we had had the drone-strike technology of today at the time of bin Laden’s emergence, especially after the embassy attacks, but before 9/11, would Clinton have tried harder? I think the answer is no, because seriously going after jihadist terrorists abroad required the paradigm shift that 9/11 produced.

 

That shift produced the Global War on Terror as offense. Its charter was the Authorization to Use Military Force, which Congress passed three days after 9/11 and Bush signed into law four days later. It gave the president authority “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided” the 9/11 attack “or harbored such organizations or persons.” The law included no expiration for this authority, and every president since has relied on it. The executive branch has invoked it for air strikes and military operations against jihadists in Afghanistan, Djibouti, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen, as well as in “support” of counterterrorism efforts in partner countries from the Middle East to Africa and the Philippines.

 

Its first major use was in the U.S. military and CIA paramilitary operation toppling the Taliban government in Afghanistan. In his September 20, 2001, speech to Congress, Bush delivered an ultimatum to the radical Islamist Afghanistan rulers: Shut down and deliver al-Qaeda or “share their fate.” When the Taliban refused, they were effectively acknowledging their role in the attacks by having harbored and continuing to harbor the 9/11 plotters. The U.S. campaign swiftly toppled the government, dispersing the Taliban and al-Qaeda to remote regions of the country and over the border into largely lawless northwest Pakistan.

 

Our military’s ability to carry out such a mission was little known. The supremacy of U.S. military power was well understood, especially after we demonstrated in 1999 that we could halt a genocide in Kosovo by the judicious application of air power. Nevertheless, the speedy collapse of the Taliban came as a revelation to many.

 

The skill set already available in time for Afghanistan in 2001 would continue to develop over the succeeding years of the War on Terror. The visible culminating points to date—and there is no indication they represent peak achievable U.S. capability—were the destruction of the Fordow nuclear site in Iran in 2025, the raid on Venezuela nabbing its ruler, Nicolás Maduro, and the utter military dominance over Iran in the 2026 war (an intervention whose geopolitical consequences have still to be reckoned, of course). The U.S. military is very good at what it does, and a significant reason is the experience gained fighting the Global War on Terror.

 

WHAT WE’RE GOOD AT

 

The two central means of striking jihadists abroad were (and remain) drone or air strikes and raids by Special Operations forces. Like the FBI’s terrorism task forces, the military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) predated 9/11 but got a tremendous boost in its aftermath. The Iraq War was its crucible. During the war’s worst phase, 2004–2006, JSOC was under the command of General Stanley McChrystal. He realized that its highly capable operators nevertheless lacked the skills they needed to defeat the gathering insurgency of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). He embarked JSOC on a crash program of changing its ways to meet the challenge. It successfully did so alongside President Bush’s “surge” of troops to Iraq in 2007–2008 and the “Anbar awakening,” in which Sunni sheikhs switched their sympathies from the fanatical AQI insurrectionists to the United States. The Iraq experience—the turnaround that actually won the war for the United States but has never been acknowledged as such—produced sufficient stability by 2009 to allow President Barack Obama to make good on his opposition to the war from the outset by ending the U.S. military presence there in 2011.

 

Unfortunately, Obama proved wildly off when it came to the emerging successor to AQI, the Islamic State. A civil war that blew up in Syria in 2011 proved a magnet for jihadist foreign fighters against the Assad regime, and many consolidated their loyalties under the Islamic State’s founder, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. As late as January 2014, Obama pooh-poohed the Islamic State as a “JV” squad compared with bin Laden’s al-Qaeda—even as its all-black flags were rising over considerable swaths of territory in Syria and Iraq, including the strategic city of Mosul, which fell less than six months after Obama’s glib comment. The atrocities of the newly proclaimed caliphate were boundless, from beheadings and sex slavery to genocide against the Yazidi people of Iraq.

 

The necessity of destroying the Islamic State was obvious. But the challenge was greater due to Obama’s unnecessary withdrawal from Iraq and then his reluctance to provide adequate resources to make good on his new pledge to “degrade and destroy” the caliphate.

 

Painfully slowly, U.S. Special Operations deployments increased, this time to lead allied Iraqi Army and Kurdish forces in pushing the Islamic State back. This culminated in urban combat to retake Mosul house by house in 2017. This was the U.S. military’s “by, with, and through” model, first advanced in the 1990s, in action. We fought an enemy in partnership with local forces, with U.S. Special Operations fighters on the ground effectively running the show and directing air power in support. The approach became paradigmatic for ground operations in the Global War on Terror. The idea was that American boots on the ground in large numbers would be unnecessary with properly trained and led local forces. The eventual victory over the Islamic State was the product primarily of the ingenuity and efficacy of U.S. Special Operations forces implementing the model.

 

Afghanistan was likewise a proving ground. The role of JSOC and CIA paramilitary operators evolved over two decades from initial successes on horseback directing precision air strikes in October 2001 to a key role assisting the Afghan army in keeping the regrouped Taliban at bay. JSOC developed a specialty of finding and killing or capturing “high-value targets”—al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders. Special Operations raids in 2008, for example, hit 550 targets, killing about 1,000. To his credit, Obama saw great value in JSOC capabilities and leaned on them even more heavily than Bush had. Al-Baghdadi met his end in a Trump-era raid in Syria in 2019. He detonated a suicide bomb vest, taking out as well two children who were with him.

 

President Trump, in his first term, wanted out of Afghanistan but got talked out of it. Unfortunately, President Biden could not be. His rigid timeline produced the appalling, unnecessary, and lethal spectacle of the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. forces in August 2021. Note that in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the failures to stem the revival of terrorist satrapies were the product not of military inefficacy but of political decisions made by the commander in chief, the U.S. president. And the military and political successes the United States achieved in the past quarter century required brave U.S. leadership under extreme pressure, which the United States got from Bush during the Iraq surge and from Obama after his belated recognition of the Islamic State threat.

 

The Philippines, by contrast with Afghanistan, provides an example of efficacious military operations that ended well. Starting in the 1990s, several Islamist separatist groups conducted a bubbling insurgency in the south Philippines, replete with kidnappings, bombings, and beheadings. The Joint Special Operations Task Force-
Philippines deployed 500–600 personnel from 2002 to 2017. CIA paramilitary officers joined as well. The counterinsurgency efforts of Filipino forces aided by Americans—“by, with, and through”—culminated in 2017 with a five-month battle in Marawi, which wiped out the jihadists but for local remnants.

 

One must not omit mention of the greatest Special Operations raid of all time, orchestrated in close collaboration with the CIA. In May 2011, Navy SEAL Team Six entered a walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan and killed Osama bin Laden. This raid, like many others, also yielded a substantial cache of intelligence, including letters lamenting the decline of al-Qaeda in recent years—as well as bin Laden’s personal collection of porn videos, which in turn prompted the greatest New York Post front-page headline of all time: OSAMA BIN WANKIN’.

 

In some cases, the potential for collecting intelligence stemming from elimination of a high-value target through a raid justifies the greater risk of a JSOC operation. In others, taking an enemy off the board is sufficient reward in itself to allow for a drone or air strike. A 2006 air strike called for by Special Operations forces took out Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Qasem Soleimani, the head of Quds Force, the branch of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps working outside the country, met his end in a 2020 drone strike in Iraq.

 

Targeted drone and air strikes numbered in the multiple thousands in Afghanistan and in the hundreds in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Although he would claim credit for reducing U.S. reliance on targeted killings by drone in 2013, Obama in his first term took the number of strikes to its peak, in 2010. During his time in office, the United States killed or captured 45 jihadist leaders from al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and Al Shabab in East Africa. This seems to be an indication of the indispensability of drones and targeted killings to presidents in the overall scheme of protecting the country.

 

The United States has lost about 660 Special Operations personnel fighting the Global War on Terror. More than half died in Afghanistan, with Iraq accounting for about 1 in 5. Other theaters of the GWOT claimed a total of about 90. The figure is just under 10 percent of the total U.S. service members killed over the past quarter century, including in Iraq and Afghanistan. Add another 140 or so CIA paramilitary fatalities, about whom the public record is understandably much thinner.

 

Was this success? In Afghanistan, it was—until Biden’s catastrophic bugout, which threw success away. Afghanistan was hardly easy duty, but the total number of American combat deaths there from 2020 until the chaotic withdrawal itself, during which 13 service members lost their lives in a suicide bomb attack, was four. The number was fewer than 20 in each of 2017, 2018, and 2019. If this were truly a “forever war,” as critics took to calling it contemptuously, by 2021 it was “war” only in the sense of a support operation that gave Afghan forces the spine they needed to keep the Taliban at bay.

 

In Iraq, the rise of the Islamic State after we had quelled the post-Saddam chaos counted as a failure of vigilance, its destruction as a success. Notably, Iraq is no longer a source of security concerns outside its borders. And recall that Iraq was very possibly the single most destabilizing country in the world from 1969 onward, after Saddam Hussein took power.

 

If Saddam Hussein had been left unmolested, would Iraq be as placid as it is today? Would Saddam have kept a lid locally on the global rise of Islamic State–style radicalism, or would he have humored it and helped it along? Most observers note that the gravitational power of terrorist organizations rises with success (for example, 9/11 and the declaration of the Islamic State caliphate) and declines over time with setbacks, such as the defeat of the Islamic State. As a 2022 study by George Washington University researchers observes, “Both IS and al-Qaeda—the two brand names of global jihadism—are severely weakened. Both have suffered crippling blows to their leadership, and neither appears to have the stature, manpower, territorial control, and ability to operate on a global scale they had in their heyday.” Far-reaching international plots—the 2015 attacks in Paris, for example—seem to have receded in favor of retail jihadist efforts to recruit local “lone wolf” actors. Bigger attempted plots tend to be thwarted. That’s an improvement.

 

THE TOOLS OF THE GWOT

 

From its inception, the Global War on Terror has been subject to criticisms large and small, ranging from tactics to overall conception. From their first use in the War on Terror, drone strikes have come under sharp attack. Some expressed concern about civilian casualties, and that’s a legitimate issue insofar as it is morally wrong and illegal to target civilians. But no U.S. drone strike goes forward without an assessment of risks to civilians. Numerous anecdotes describe strikes called off due to civilians being too close to the target. Unfortunately, civilian death as “collateral damage” has always been an element of warfare, and it will stop only when the use of force is no longer necessary as an instrument of national policy.

 

Drones are also remarkably precise, far more so than the cruise missiles lobbed toward bin Laden. True, drone strikes anger those in proximity to them. Some claimed that drone attacks would call forth a flood of new recruits committed to jihadist terror. There has been no such flood. Jihadist movements in Africa have been growing in recent years, but their ambitions lie only distantly in attacking Americans and U.S. interests. Their agendas are primarily locally focused.

 

Some have also questioned the overall efficacy of drones and targeted killing. Critics acknowledge that such operations hit their targets efficiently and, in the case of drones, at effectively no risk to U.S. military personnel. But won’t junior members of terrorist organizations simply step up to fill the shoes of their eliminated superiors, whether they died by drone or raid? Certainly, but as captured documents have revealed, the disruptions have created difficulty and friction in jihadist organizations in the descriptions of their leaders themselves.

 

We should also keep in mind the moral dimension of targeted killing in wartime. Let us not mince words. In the characterization of future CENTCOM commander and Defense Secretary James Mattis, speaking to his Marines early in the Iraq War, “There are some a******s in the world that just need to be shot.” This is true, and the reason in the case of jihadists is that they are evil and intend to do evil.

 

At a broader level, some, like Brzezinski, took early issue with the very idea of a “war on terror” or with “global war on terror” as a descriptor of what lay ahead for the United States after 9/11. Time proved them wrong. Of course, a nation shouldn’t go to war against a tactic in the expectation of crushing it as the favored means of policy of your enemies’ organizations, especially when terrorism is all they’ve got. But you can go to war against those who plot and practice terrorism and those who house and fund them. You can take the armed conflict to them, where they are. Waging war on terrorists is what the United States has done for 25 years with more success than failure, Biden’s Afghanistan tragedy excepted.

 

STOPPING THE MONEY FLOW

 

The Global War on Terror has had two other main components, one on the economic side, one diplomatic. The U.S.-led clampdown on terrorist financing has been one of the singular achievements since 9/11. If money is the mother’s milk of politics, that’s no less true for the means to pursue jihadist politics through terror.

 

The basic principle has been to interrupt the flow of funds before the money can get where the jihadist paymasters want it. Various points in the flow offer different opportunities for disruption. One almost amusing example from 2016, as the war against the Islamic State was picking up steam: U.S. air strikes blew up more than $500 million in physical cash in Islamic State distribution centers, where the paper dollars were awaiting payout for various expenses, including the salaries of fighters.

 

The process of disruption is generally less kinetic, however, with the U.S. Treasury Department in the lead role. A 1990s law gave the secretary of state the authority to brand malign entities with the designation of Foreign Terrorist Organization, subjecting them to sanction. A quick post-9/11 executive order from President Bush granted the Treasury Department the authority to name Specially Designated Global Terrorists and substantially increased the scope of available sanctions. Following designation, Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control can move in to freeze assets, deprive designees of access to the international banking system, and prohibit transactions with U.S. citizens and entities, from businesses to NGOs. Whereas pre-9/11, money used to flow alarmingly freely, now jihadists and their supporters have to work much harder to finance their activities. Designated entities have increased from several hundred a few years after 9/11 to more than 900 by the mid-2010s to more than 3,000 today.

 

In 2004, Treasury announced the establishment of its Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence as a consolidated clearinghouse for its activities and its liaison with other government agencies, including the Justice Department, the FBI, the IRS, and the intelligence agencies.

 

The United States has also pressed banks and other private-sector financial institutions into service in combating terrorism and other crimes. One such requirement is called “Know Your Customer,” an anti–money laundering program that predated 9/11 but was enhanced after. Banks must demonstrate that they have done what is necessary to have a “reasonable belief” that their customers are who they say they are. They also have to engage in assessing the potential risk a customer poses and monitor for suspicious transactions. They and other institutions have a strong incentive—a “safe harbor” protection from civil action against themselves—to file Suspicious Activity Reports about whatever they encounter with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, another part of Treasury’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. The key point is that each bank has a compliance officer overseeing the green-eyeshade version of “If you see something, say something.” Numerous individuals convicted of abetting terrorist plots have faced charges of bank or wire fraud as well.

 

The United States has not merely focused within its own borders but also worked internationally to establish a global system for bank-customer identification and monitoring and reporting on suspicious activity. Global sanctions also contributed to putting the squeeze on Islamic State finances.

 

As in the case of the international crackdown on terrorist financing, so too did the kinetic element of the War on Terror involve international partners and diplomacy, as did counterterrorism intelligence gathering. The U.S. leadership role in international politics has long required the support of allies and other partners. Unsurprisingly, the 9/11 attack was a turning point.

 

Pre-9/11, Saudi Arabia, though itself conventionally Sunni in religious outlook and a kingdom as authoritarian and repressive as they come, was also a significant funder of radical Islamist ideology—Salafism or its Wahhabi variant. No doubt some members of the House of Saud were true believers in terrorist jihad. Others probably concluded pre-9/11 that providing a payoff to the radicals would result in less domestic pressure for a revolution to install a caliphate at home. In any case, the Saudi government spent billions on madrasas teaching radical Islam around the world. Fifteen of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudi nationals, as was bin Laden prior to being stripped of his citizenship for denouncing Saudi Arabia’s hosting of U.S. forces during and after the 1991 Gulf War to eject Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. Saudi ambivalence continued after 9/11, even as the United States turned up the diplomatic pressure on Riyadh to crack down on financial flows from the Kingdom to al-Qaeda. Then a series of al-Qaeda suicide bombings inside Saudi Arabia from 2003 to 2006 produced a greater sense of urgency. Major cuts in funding for madrasas abroad ensued.

 

Well aware of the threat it faced from the radicalism it had helped promote, Saudi Arabia was also keenly aware of a potentially greater danger that entered the scene in 1979: Iran. Iran’s Twelver Shiism regards Sunni Islam as erroneous and the Gulf states that embrace it as rivals seeking to thwart Iran. For different but no less heartfelt reasons, revolutionary Iran has long sworn to wipe Israel off the map. Israel, for its part, was never a proponent of the United States going to war to topple Saddam Hussein; it saw Iran as the bigger problem. This view converged with the Saudi view and, by various accounts, led to the development of a security and intelligence dialogue between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

 

That exchange increased after the 2006 Lebanon war and intensified further around 2009–2010. The head of Israel’s Mossad met repeatedly with Saudi counterparts. The Iranians, for their part, were aware of this budding relationship, and they hated it. In 2011, the Justice Department announced it had unraveled an Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir, by detonating a bomb at the Georgetown restaurant he frequented. But—why him? It seems plausible that he was playing an outsize role in developing stronger covert ties between Saudi Arabia and Israel, which were little reported on at the time.

 

In any event, the perception of where the biggest terrorist threat comes from was evolving, with events from al-Qaeda and the Islamic State to Iran. U.S. diplomacy to develop the subtle Sunni–Israeli dialogue into something bigger eventually yielded the Abraham Accords—still a work in progress, especially with regard to Saudi Arabia itself, but a great diplomatic breakthrough nevertheless.

 

THE 25-YEAR ODYESSEY

 

The 25-year Global War on Terror has had many successes—and where it has failed, especially in Afghanistan, the reason was not that the United States was in the fight, but that we precipitously left for gratuitous reasons. The same had been true with the rise of the Islamic State, thankfully corrected by its eradication.

 

Look again at that quotation from George W. Bush’s speech of September 20, 2001. Of the War on Terror, he said: “It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.”

 

There aren’t many terrorist groups of global reach left in business. That’s impressive in its own right, but put it aside. Bush’s rhetoric seemed to imply an achievable end point—but only superficially. Terrorism of some sort will always be a threat, and so the Global War on Terror will continue. The terrorists themselves will see to that. The question is whether we can maintain our vigilance.

It’s the Debt, Stupid

National Review Online

Monday, August 31, 2026

 

A heavily indebted debtor is not well-advised to be seen to play games with his creditors, and that was what Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was widely perceived to have done a couple weeks ago. Yields on 30-year Treasuries had been trending up for some time and had reached 5.33 percent, their highest level since 2001 (a number worth watching by mortgage borrowers too). And so the Treasury announced (choosing unusual timing given the refunding cycle) that it would be buying longer bonds with short-term maturities. This only had a brief effect on the 30-years. It took a second announcement doubling the size of the proposed buyback to make a somewhat more lasting dent, possibly helped by a slight easing of oil prices. The yield on the 30-years is around 5.19 now. Was the Treasury playing games in order to nudge long-term rates down a little?

 

Quite a few thought so, including, awkwardly, Stanley Druckenmiller, a billionaire investor who was once a mentor to Bessent. He dismissed the Treasury’s argument that this was nothing more than “liquidity management.” Rather, he argued, the Treasury was undertaking price management, something very different. As Friedrich Hayek argued years ago, monkeying around with prices rarely ends well.

 

Adding to suspicions that this might have been going on were the president’s well-known views on interest rates, doubtless sharpened by the upcoming midterms. Memories were also fresh of the Treasury’s intervention (using euros) in support of the ailing yen at the end of July. This had raised eyebrows, as the U.S. rarely intervenes to support a foreign currency. The last time the Treasury was involved in propping up the yen was during the Asian financial crisis, although it did try to help cap the rise in the Japanese currency after the Fukushima disaster (when there had been expectations that a lot of money would return to Japan).

 

Bessent later tied the Treasury’s most recent intervention to fears of the “forced unwinds” (of financial positions) that could be triggered by disorderly yen markets. This could “destabilize global markets and ultimately raise borrowing costs for American families and businesses.” He also noted, among other matters, that Japan is a “major holder of U.S. Treasuries.” Those are not unreasonable arguments, and far from underhanded, although Bessent might have been franker (if, perhaps, too frank) to specify that among those borrowers about whom he was concerned was Uncle Sam. In 2025, interest expense amounted to 15 percent of federal spending, a number that is set to be boosted further by persistent deficits, the dark magic of compounding, and the higher interest rates that those facts all call for. Any difference that the cost of AI-related borrowing may be making to rates may be a nice excuse, but any effect is probably at the margin. One thing, however, that is as close to certain as anything can be is that the low interest rates of the previous decade are gone for the foreseeable future. Another is that the reversal of anything that was left of the peace dividend has further to go.

 

The unfortunate reality is that so long as the U.S. keeps piling up more debt, there is only so much that clever maneuvers can do to ease the costs and vulnerabilities that go with it. Creditors won’t take any positive effect of the proposed buybacks on yields as an indication of better times to come and, worse still, may well regard them as a warning sign. Their effect won’t last for long and will be outweighed by inflation concerns, as, indeed, Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh is clearly signaling. It was telling that his hawkish words did more to discourage gold bulls (for now) than Bessent’s buyback plans.

 

To be clear (not that it should be necessary), a failure to be seen as taking inflation seriously would in due course be expected to push yields higher: Investors tend to put a higher sticker price for lending to a depreciating currency, and, adding to the pressure, more of the marginal buyers appear to be moving speculative funds quicker than in the past.

 

One way or another, the debt, starting with the deficit, has to be tamed.

Fiscal Armageddon, Revisited

By Marc Joffe

Monday, August 31, 2026

 

Back in 2011, many fiscal hawks, including yours truly, warned of a financial crisis if the federal government failed to restrain its deficit spending. But the deficits continued, and even exploded during the pandemic, yet the day of reckoning has yet to arrive.

 

Now that relatively high interest rates are worsening fiscal conditions, it is worth revisiting those 15-year-old warnings to see whether they apply again. Can the federal government continue to run large deficits without triggering a financial disaster, or are we already living on borrowed time?

 

When speculating about the likelihood of a policy disaster, it is best to be nuanced. Otherwise, fiscal conservatives risk suffering the fate of the climate change extremists. We have now seen numerous failed warnings of climate disaster with more to come. If she is a presidential candidate in 2028, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will undoubtedly be reminded of her 2019 statement: “The world is gonna end in twelve years if we don’t address climate change,” made during her efforts to promote the Green New Deal. These warnings may spur action in the near term, but they destroy credibility down the road.

 

Before discussing the likelihood of a fiscal disaster, it is important to define what such a crisis would look like. There are two general scenarios:

 

1.      An explicit or implicit default on U.S. Treasuries, causing Treasury securities to lose value and likely triggering widespread disruptions across financial markets followed by a sharp economic downturn.

 

2.      Rapid price inflation (perhaps worse than the 1970s peak or the recent surge) as the Federal Reserve creates money to service the debt and economic actors lose confidence in the dollar.

 

Although many analysts dismiss the possibility of a U.S. Treasury default as unprecedented, international experience confirms that, though a sovereign issuer can create the funds needed for debt service, there is no guarantee it will do so.

 

In either scenario, various claims on the federal government would face large markdowns in real dollar terms. Affected claimants would not be limited to Treasury holders but would also include government employees, contractors, and those receiving entitlement benefits or expecting to do so. These claimants could then default on their own obligations, causing the federal payment failure to reverberate throughout the economy.

 

When I evaluated the risk of a U.S. Treasury bond default in 2011, I focused on the ratio of net interest on the debt to federal revenues. This ratio is theoretically more attractive than debt-to-GDP because the numerator factors in interest rates in addition to the amount of debt, whereas the denominator considers the government’s ability and willingness to tax economic activity. Countries with low interest rates (like Japan) and/or high taxation (like France) should be able to avoid a sovereign debt crisis even with very high debt-to-GDP ratios.

 

The last major default on federal debt, which took the form of abrogating Treasury bond gold clauses in 1933, occurred when the interest-to-revenue ratio reached 30 percent. Similar levels preceded major sub-sovereign defaults in the Anglophone world around that time: Arkansas, Alberta, and New South Wales.

 

Above that level, it is plausible to think that political leaders decide (implicitly or explicitly) that interest costs are crowding out other spending priorities to such an extent that default becomes a viable option. A sovereign nation with a widely used fiat currency, such as the contemporary United States, could address interest-rate crowd-out either by defaulting or by issuing more debt. But taking this latter option would likely necessitate creating large volumes of new reserves, triggering the inflation scenario I outlined above.

 

Modeling from 2011 indicated that the U.S. would hit the 30 percent interest-to-revenue threshold by now. A long-term forecast by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that year, its alternative fiscal scenario, the one widely viewed as more realistic, showed that in 2026, net interest would account for 6 percent of GDP and revenue would be 18.4 percent of GDP, yielding an interest-to-revenue ratio of 32.6 percent and placing us in crisis territory.

 

In reality, the 2026 ratio is coming in at around 20 percent. The CBO’s revenue forecast was not too far off: 17 percent of GDP rather than the 18.4 percent forecast. The big miss was on interest expense, which is only about 3.4 percent of GDP compared with the 6 percent forecast.

 

The reason that interest expense was much lower than expected was that interest rates remained low into 2022. The CBO projected the average interest rate on all federal borrowing to reach 5 percent by 2015 and 5.2 percent by today. Instead, it fell to less than 2 percent in the early 2020s and has only reached 3.45 percent most recently. Older Treasury bonds issued during the low-rate years continue to hold down the government’s average interest cost.

 

So, the low interest rates of the 2010s and the pandemic period appear to have forestalled the predicted crisis. But now that rates have returned to more normal levels and older, low-interest bonds are rolling off, interest expense is surging. This year’s total of just over $1 trillion is almost triple its 2021 level in nominal terms, and more than double its share of GDP.

 

It therefore appears that after a long reprieve over the last decade, we are once again headed toward the crisis we hawks warned about 15 years ago.

 

We should recognize, however, that the current trend is not immutable even without policy reform. Interest rates could go back down. If the current boom in AI infrastructure collapses, there will be less competition for borrowed funds, and thus lower rates for other borrowers, including the U.S. Treasury. Or, if the AI boom continues and accelerates economic growth, we could see a sharp rise in federal tax revenues, making high interest costs more affordable.

 

Now we will have to catch a break to stop the surge in interest expense that is already underway. Unlike in 2011, we are clearly on the road to something awful.

 

It is time to dust off the old warnings and demand a renewed focus on federal debt and deficits. It may already be too late to avoid the feared markdown of claims on the federal government, but we can still take action to minimize and phase in these adjustments rather than face the disorderly unwinding that now seems to be our destiny.

The First Postliberal

By Stephanie Slade

Monday, August 31, 2026

 

Note: This article is adapted from Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right

 

***

 

It is impossible to discuss L. Brent Bozell Jr. without making reference to his more famous friend, William F. Buckley Jr. The two were debate partners at Yale in the late 1940s. They became brothers-in-law when Bozell married one of Buckley’s sisters. A few years later they co-authored a book together. And Bozell was there on the masthead in 1955 when Buckley founded National Review.

 

But Bozell is best remembered today, to the extent he is remembered, for the intensity with which he broke from his brother-in-law’s magazine and the brand of “fusionist” conservatism it represented. In 1966, he left National Review to start a rival publication, Triumph—a “radical Christian” journal that grew ever more radical over the course of its 10-year run. He was really “a kind of proto-integralist,” the historian George Nash told me, referring to the modern faction of Catholic radicals with ties to Vice President J.D. Vance.

 

Vance and his fellow “postliberals” could learn a thing or two from the trajectory their forerunner followed.  

 

Bozell began his career as a champion of individual liberty. In 1959, he accepted a commission to ghostwrite The Conscience of a Conservative for Barry Goldwater, a rising star on the right. The slim book—which shocked everyone by becoming a bestseller and propelling the Arizona senator to the GOP presidential nomination four years later—became something of a bible for believers in limited government. And it’s safe to say the volume reflected the views of its true author at least as much as those of the man whose name was on the cover. A friend tellingly described it as “an accurate distillation of Goldwater’s past statements and speeches liberally spiked with pure 200-proof Bozell.”

 

Yet Bozell’s outlook soon began to sour. A Catholic convert, his religious views grew increasingly dogmatic and illiberal. Goldwater-style small-government politics started to bore him; he questioned whether freedom was really worth dedicating one’s life to.

 

His restlessness was typified by a decision Bozell made to move his family, a wife and eight young children, to a remote village in Spain in the early 1960s during the Francisco Franco dictatorship. That “half-historical, half-mythical Spain of conquistadors and mystics, crusaders and missionaries” called to him, wrote his biographer, Daniel Kelly. Once there, he drank in the sense that a different approach to politics was possible.

 

Bozell’s writing reflected the changes he was undergoing. In the early 1960s, a National Review senior editor named Frank Meyer had begun characterizing American conservatism as a glorious “fusion” of the traditionalist and libertarian streams of thought. Once, not very long ago, Bozell would have found nothing to object to in that formulation. But the Bozell who now sent in his contributions to National Review from Spain was no longer the man who had penned the Goldwater manifesto. “He was now an ultraconservative throne-and-altar Catholic,” wrote Sam Tanenhaus in his long-awaited Buckley biography, “convinced salvation could be reached by only one route: the recovery of the pre-Enlightenment ideal of the Christian West.”

 

Bozell’s dissatisfaction spilled into view with “Freedom or Virtue?,” one of the longest essays in National Review history. The piece, a direct attack on Meyer’s worldview, was summed up in its final line: “The story of how the free society has come to take priority over the good society is the story of the decline of the West,” Bozell averred.

 

Like many on today’s postliberal right, he had come to reject the idea that government’s role should be strictly limited to protecting life, liberty, and property, mocking that position as “the mystery of the trinitarian state.” He now believed that government was an “instrument” that could be used to reduce the frequency of occasions for sin. If the state made it harder to legally obtain a divorce, fewer people would be tempted to abandon their spouses; if the state prohibited businesses from operating on Sundays, fewer people would be tempted to skip church.

 

Too much political freedom enabled vice. “So viewed, freedom is hardly a blessing,” Bozell wrote. “If individual man is to have any hope of conforming with his nature, he needs all of the help he can get.”

 

In the years that followed, Bozell’s views grew more fanatical. He had long labored on what he promised would be a two-volume work on how the Supreme Court went astray under Chief Justice Earl Warren. But by the time publication day for the first book rolled around, he had already grown tired of it. “Not only did the new Brent fail to write the book’s promised second volume; in February 1968, less than a year and a half after the first volume’s publication, he repudiated the entire work on religious grounds,” Kelly wrote. Shockingly, “he had come to realize that the Constitution had never possessed legitimacy. A product of the liberal mentality of an earlier age, it vested final authority not in God, from whom all genuine authority flowed … but in ‘the people.’” This made the Constitution almost blasphemous, in Bozell’s view.

 

The same year The Warren Revolution was published, Bozell departed National Review to found Triumph. The new magazine was initially greeted with excitement among conservative Catholics. Over time, though, it gained a reputation for “expressing ‘extreme’ opinions in ‘extreme’ language and calling for ‘extreme’ action to achieve its ends,” according to Kelly. It appeared to embrace theocracy, urging the Catholic Church to “forthrightly acknowledge that a state of war exists between herself and the American political order” and arguing against capitalism on the grounds that “socialism with its slave-labor camps is hardly a worse system than one that allows the free exchange of money for goods and services which include [the pornographic film] Deep Throat.”

 

“My father questioned whether America was salvageable,” Bozell’s son L. Brent Bozell III told me. By the early 1970s, he had “even accepted the New Left fashion of spelling America with a k instead of a c,” Kelly wrote.

 

Bozell’s economic views also took a collectivist turn. He now felt that free markets were at odds with a society’s obligations to the common good. Later, he would express support for “government policies that, in effect, impose ‘compulsory self-denial’ on the rest of us in order to help the poor.”

 

These changes put a strain on his relationship with Buckley. Some observers wondered if that wasn’t the point: Bozell seemed desperate to escape his brother-in-law’s shadow, and one friend suggested that a simmering jealousy manifested in “root-and-branch attacks on America” that “he thought would cause Buckley pain.”

 

If founding Triumph was meant to show that he, too, could succeed where Buckley had, the results were mixed at best. Readers were turned off by the editors’ increasingly anti-American bent. Subscription numbers declined and the magazine struggled along, in or near the red, for just under a decade before shuttering.

 

Kelly pointed to Bozell’s periodic “explosions” at Buckley (as well as “the grandiose fantasies he entertained—converting the American people en masse to Catholicism” and “bringing the world under the scepter of Christ the King”) as possible manic episodes. Indeed, not long after closing down his magazine, Bozell was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

 

The disease took a brutal toll. To say that Bozell’s behavior during this period was bizarre doesn’t do justice to the reality. He injured himself repeatedly and suffered “spells of delusion.” He would disappear without warning only to turn up in a hospital or jail cell, sometimes in a foreign country. He was once arrested in Northern Ireland for commandeering a public bus when he couldn’t find a taxi, Kelly wrote, and “came to believe that he was the pope and simultaneously the commandant in chief of the IRA.” He struggled with alcoholism; debt accumulated.

 

Eventually—almost miraculously—Bozell and his loved ones did manage to get his illness under control. And at the tail end of his life, there’s a lesson that may have applications to conservative politics today. He was “shattered, physically and mentally,” said Brent III. “When he died at age 71, he looked 91. But he came out of it, ultimately, in this state of grace that was astonishing. He became truly a holy man.”

 

Bozell all but gave up politics completely. He spent his time visiting prison inmates, serving food at soup kitchens, and attending daily Mass at a monastery in northeast Washington, D.C. “Gaunt, stooped … it could be hard to tell him from the people he aided,” Kelly wrote. “Yet year after year, he managed to keep limping along, held up by the will to bestow and receive mercy.”

 

Bozell died in April 1997. He is remembered fondly by many movement conservatives as the man who made the strongest intellectual challenge to Meyer’s fusionist arguments—a challenge that has found new resonance among postliberal thinkers and activists today. But in the end, despite the recurring challenges they faced, fusionist ideas put down roots on the American right in the second half of the 20^th century. Even Bozell eventually conceded that his rival’s ideas had “become the de facto consensus” among American conservatives.

 

In fact, one could squint and argue that Bozell’s life (if not his ideology) embodied the fusionist ethos. Fusionism, after all, says that social problems are better solved through voluntary cooperation via civil society institutions rather than by wielding the coercive power of the state. Bozell may have come to believe that government can and should play an active role in addressing the loss of virtue in American culture, but he was also a consummate institution builder and social entrepreneur who was forever rolling up his sleeves and starting new projects with a goal of doing something about society’s problems himself.

 

In 1966, Bozell launched his magazine. In 1970, he founded an “apostolate” that included a film production company and direct-mail outfit to promote Christian values through the media, as well as a Catholic “summer school” in Spain that lives on today as Virginia’s Christendom College. In 1971—foreshadowing the “Benedict Option” promoted by the journalist Rod Dreher in recent years—Bozell began encouraging faithful Catholics to secede from modern America and form traditionalist communes with like-minded families. He later founded a group called Misión Guadalupe to aid and evangelize poor Hispanic immigrants to the United States.

 

When Meyer urged people not to assume it was the state’s job to solve their problems and instead called for “the imaginative exercise of voluntary altruistic effort to restore a widespread sense of responsibility for social well-being and to guard against moral degradation of citizens,” he probably wasn’t thinking of his old National Review colleague. But ironically, Bozell’s experience gives us an excellent example of what an imaginative exercise of voluntary altruism can look like in practice.

Porn Brain Will Destroy Us

By Matthew Loftus & Samuel James

Monday, August 31, 2026

 

In case you haven’t noticed, men and women are struggling with each other. Both groups report less interest in love and family than in any generation past. Even dating has fallen on hard times. And in romance’s absence, some dangerous trends are emerging.

 

Chief among those worrisome trends is a way of thinking and speaking about women that is becoming more common, especially among highly online, right-leaning men. Examples of this mentality include the idea, expressed in articles, videos, memes, and much else, that all women, or at least all attractive women, are extraordinarily promiscuous. Several highly followed male accounts likewise declare that women are withholding their affections from deserving, decent men and sharing their bodies with strangers, often while working “fake email jobs” that would not exist in a just world. “Manosphere” influencers often portray attractive women as hypocrites and unattractive women as worthless (or man-hating).

 

This type of online content talks a lot about the crises of declining fertility, loneliness, and family formation. In that way it does overlap with concerns of mainstream conservative voices. The difference is that, in this online world, the problem is always female. The issue is clearly and only women who deny men marriage and sex due to promiscuity, career ambition, or feminism. This movement obsesses over every woman’s “body count” (the number of men she has slept with) and publishes content warning fellow men that every woman is, by nature, disloyal.

 

This is not so much an ideology as it is an attitude. And we have a term for it: porn brain.

 

Misogyny or the Madonna-whore complex per se is nothing new. What is new is the way that widespread access and addiction to pornography shapes and weaponizes a particular form of misogyny. Porn is like the artificial hormones that make factory-farmed chickens too heavy to walk: a modern innovation that supercharges depravity. Porn addiction’s effects on cognition and moral judgment are well documented, even if analyses of how porn warps social and political views are rare.

 

A majority of American men consume pornography at least several times per year. Porn is so powerful in no small part because it takes one of sex’s many joys—another person opens up to you and affirms your desirability—and distills it into pure artifice, hacking the brain in similar fashion to cocaine. Internet pornography is particularly potent, featuring a combination of endless novelty, anonymous access, and 24-7 availability. Recent years have seen more people open up about the effects their addictions have had on their relationships and mental health (celebrities like Billie Eilish and Terry Crews have spoken about their personal journeys to overcome pornography).

 

The images and videos show women as perfectly submissive to whatever a man wants; they are never too tired, nor do they ever just want to talk about their day before engaging in acts that are often painful or uncomfortable in real life. Many of them go to extremes to cosmetically enhance or contort their bodies; certainly no stretch marks or sagging breasts can be detected. Most have the same amount of pubic hair as a prepubescent girl.

 

Pornography’s prevalence in a man’s life can trigger the experience of hyperreality: the point at which the lines between a simulation or symbol and the thing itself become impossibly blurred. Video pornography (by far the most consumed kind) tends to have some kind of dramatic content. The women in the videos are called “actresses.” The sex itself may be real, but the personalities, seduction, tension, and dialogue are all part of the same psychological illusion that movies and television attempt. When a man immerses himself in pornographic content, he’s not just seeing naked bodies. He’s seeing the naked bodies talk and act in a way that builds out an imaginative plausibility structure. Thus, the deeper this imaginative plausibility structure takes root, the more likely he is to see a woman offline and suspect she is, at heart and perhaps behind closed doors, just like the characters he’s been watching onscreen (this is to say nothing of OnlyFans and the illusion of relationship it promotes). Women who are not sexually desirable become invisible to the porn-brained mind, while everyone who is desirable reminds him of what he wishes he had.

 

We should distinguish porn brain from incel (“involuntary celibate”) ideology. Incels critique American society for its economic and sexual abandonment of certain men. While many incels exhibit porn brain, their cultural critique does not require it. Porn brain is just reshaping one’s soul by shoveling in more filth, more id than ego. Married men are not immune to porn brain; posts blaming frigid postpartum wives and their sweatpants for our declining birth rates reveal porn brain at work.

 

To be clear, not every man who views porn develops obvious or extreme symptoms of porn brain. That being said, even if a person who consumes pornography does not post violently misogynistic content, the spiritual and psychological effects are still happening within them. Porn brain manifests itself in an intense but inarticulate distrust of real sexual intimacy. Ironically, porn brain tends to be anti-sex. The men profiled in Daniel Kolitz’s nightmarish report on “gooners” (a community of full-time masturbators) are extraordinarily cynical about actual sex. Some online influencers, including some women (e.g., Diane Yap and Pearl Davis) argue in favor of porn brain’s major premises, on the logic that women really are promiscuous and treacherous and that men are better off without them. Andrew Tate, an actual pornographer and alleged sex trafficker who is more of a straight-up misogynist than porn-brained, has claimed that having sex with a woman because it feels good is “gay.” The more that sex is disconnected from the reality of two souls becoming one flesh, the more bizarre one’s utterances become.

 

Women are not immune. A woman who tries to make ends meet by selling content on OnlyFans, for example, is choosing to use both her identity as a woman and the weaknesses of men as economic leverage. This, too, is porn brain: an outlook on life that sees other human beings as opportunities to take. Women likewise have their own versions of genderslop, their own kinds of porn, and their own cultural roadblocks to a rich life that brings men and women together.

 

By volume, however, pornographic websites, the ones tailored to male desire above all else, are the chief source of porn brain in society. They habituate millions of men to imagining profoundly false things. They offer a counterreality that is both addictive and comforting, not just for the orgasm achieved, but for the narrative offered. Porn brain is like a powerful pair of glasses that disfigure what men see when they look at the world.

 

While every man has a choice whether to use porn, many have never known a family or friends without it. These men are not merely villains, they are victims, too: Victims of a political culture that was impotent to protect them, victims of family dysfunction and social disintegration, and victims of a rapacious industry that has fed them lies their entire lives.

 

Porn brain does not have to be the end of anyone’s story. There is help available, from software that will block access and enlist a friend to help check on you, to support groups that offer solidarity and guidance. “Neuroplasticity,” the capacity of our brains to rewire themselves, is both the threat of pornography (how addiction and dependence take root) and the hope against it. The man who has learned to think in pornographic ways can learn to not think in them, too. For almost all men caught in the throes of porn brain, the most powerful antidote is meaningful relationships, with men and women, that shatter porn’s illusions and expel its appeal by giving them a taste of a much richer, more meaningful life.

 

The stakes are high. Future generations depend on men and women finding one another. Porn brain’s infection of our culture is a lethal one.

The Return of the ‘Zionist’ Slur

By Daniel Schatz

Sunday, August 30, 2026

 

When I first heard Zohran Mamdani rail against Israel and Zionism, I did not think of the war in Gaza. I thought of Poland in 1968. The political language I grew up hearing about from my parents and grandparents — the language that helped drive them from their country of birth — was suddenly echoing through New York, decades later and an ocean away.

 

My family was among the thousands of Jews forced out of Communist Poland little more than two decades after the Holocaust. They were harassed, humiliated, stripped of their place in society, and ultimately driven from the country for no reason other than being Jewish. The regime never called its campaign antisemitic. It called it anti-Zionist. That distinction made much of what followed possible.

 

After Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War in 1967, the Soviet Union and nearly all of its Warsaw Pact allies severed relations with Israel. In Poland, Communist leader Władysław Gomułka warned that Polish Jews celebrating Israel’s victory constituted a “fifth column.” When student protests erupted the following year, “Zionists” became the convenient enemy within. The significance of that word is difficult to overstate. Poland’s Jewish population then numbered around 30,000 in a country of 32 million. Yet government propaganda transformed the small number of Jews who had survived the horrors of the Holocaust into a network of supposedly disloyal cosmopolitans whose true allegiance lay elsewhere.

 

The word “Zionist” rapidly lost any precise meaning. A Zionist was disloyal, cosmopolitan, and connected to foreign interests: someone whose real loyalty supposedly belonged to another country. Then came the machinery. Tens of thousands of meetings were organized in factories, universities, and even sports clubs, adopting “anti-Zionist” resolutions. Jews were expelled from jobs, universities, and government institutions. They effectively had their citizenship revoked and were forced to emigrate.

 

In Łódź, Jewish journalists were dismissed as “Zionists,” while physicians were asked for baptism certificates. Communist propaganda recycled material from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an antisemitic book. Within months, Jewish communal life in a city that had once been one of Europe’s great centers of Jewish culture was devastated, and the city was “Judenrein” — cleansed of Jews.

 

People were interrogated, humiliated, and professionally destroyed. Friends and colleagues stopped speaking to them. Families that had survived the Holocaust were branded foreigners in the country they considered home. Some could not bear it. Mieczysław Rakowski, later the last prime minister of Communist Poland, recalled a letter sent to Gomułka by a woman in Kraków with two sons and a sick husband. “Do me a favor and send some poison capsules,” she wrote. “I have no strength to live anymore. I do not want my sons to spend their whole lives paying for having a Jewish father.”

 

Jozef Dajczgewand, one of the leaders of the March 1968 student protests and now a resident of Sweden, was arrested that month, tortured, and sentenced to two years in prison. In an interview for this article, he recalled that during one interrogation, police forced him to undress while screaming “f*ing Jew.”

 

“I closed my eyes,” he told me, “wondering for a second if it was Poles who committed these acts or the same Nazis who had persecuted my parents.” When he emerged from prison, most of his friends had already fled. “I could feel the echoes of history,” he said. He ended up leaving, too.

 

The victims were made stateless. Their possessions and savings were confiscated through humiliating exit procedures. Most had never belonged to a Jewish or Zionist organization. Many had never been to Israel. But that did not matter: Their Jewishness made them suspect.

 

My parents and grandparents were among those forced to start again somewhere else. And throughout it all, the authorities insisted they had nothing against Jews. They were merely fighting Zionists.

 

That was the genius — and the obscenity — of the word.

 

The political vocabulary developed behind the Iron Curtain did not disappear when Communism collapsed. It spread through the developing world and the international left, eventually finding a home in parts of Western academia and progressive politics. Moscow and its allies helped popularize the idea of Zionism as racist, imperialist, colonialist, and fascist — an enemy not only of Palestinians but of progressive humanity itself. Communist propaganda compared Zionism with Nazism. In 1975, the Soviet bloc joined Arab and developing countries to provide the majority for the United Nations resolution declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” Anti-Zionism had become more than a position on the Middle East. In parts of the global left, it was becoming an identity.

 

The echoes of that time are difficult to miss today when Israel is again described as imperialist and colonialist. It is compared with apartheid South Africa and, with increasing frequency, Nazi Germany. Jews — the descendants of one of history’s most persecuted peoples — are recast as privileged oppressors. Palestinian violence is increasingly described not primarily as violence to be judged on its own terms but as “resistance” by a colonized people. Parts of the left have even found common cause with Islamist movements whose views on women, homosexuality, religious freedom, and liberal democracy contradict almost everything progressives claim to believe.

 

Zohran Mamdani did not invent this worldview, but he speaks its language fluently. In his 2017 rap song “Salaam,” Mamdani gave a shout-out to the “Holy Land Five,” leaders of a charity whose officials were convicted of providing material support to Hamas. During his 2025 New York City mayoral campaign, he declined to affirm Israel’s right to exist specifically as a Jewish state. Asked about the slogan “globalize the intifada,” Mamdani initially refused to condemn it. And at a Democratic Socialists of America gathering in 2023, Mamdani explained why activists needed to make Palestine “hyper-local” for Americans: “When the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF.” With that sentence, Israel ceases to be simply a distant country whose policies he opposes. It becomes an explanation for injustice in New York. Perceived American police brutality and racism are folded into the indictment of the Jewish state.

 

For someone whose family lived through Poland in 1968, this mechanism feels unnervingly familiar: Stretch the meaning of “Zionist” until it becomes synonymous with “oppressor,” then, you can sort the Jews themselves. The “good Jew” is the Jew who condemns Israel loudly enough, repudiates Zionism, and demonstrates that his Jewish identity presents no obstacle to progressive politics. Such Jews are eagerly presented as proof that anti-Zionism cannot possibly become antisemitic.

 

The Jew who refuses that test gets different treatment. If Israel forms part of his family history, religious consciousness, or understanding of Jewish personhood, he is increasingly expected to explain himself. If he calls himself a Zionist, what may be a central element of his identity is transformed from a political belief open to disagreement into a moral stain. Once a political culture starts sorting Jews into acceptable and unacceptable kinds, history shows us we need to pay attention.

 

Mamdani is not alone. Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Abdul El-Sayed, and progressive media figures such as Hasan Piker share much of this worldview. Bernie Sanders’s and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s enthusiastic support for Mamdani has helped move a politics once largely confined to the activist left closer to the Democratic mainstream.

 

This summer produced a pointed warning. On July 23, New York Central Synagogue’s senior rabbi, Angela Buchdahl, publicly addressed Mamdani. New York’s Jews, she said, did not merely need police protection. They needed leaders to stop rhetoric that “demonizes Jews and the Jewish state and helps create the climate in which threats and violence flourish.”

 

Less than a month later, violence entered her own synagogue. During Shabbat services a few weeks ago, a man disrupted the congregation, assaulted a congregant and a security guard, and damaged synagogue property. He was charged with assault and criminal mischief as hate crimes. Buchdahl had not been alone in raising the alarm; days earlier, ten New York rabbis had met Mamdani at City Hall. They raised the recent stabbing of a Jewish New Yorker and their concern that rhetoric surrounding Israel was increasingly spilling over onto Jews in New York.

 

There is no evidence that the synagogue attacker, or the man charged in the earlier stabbing, acted because of anything Mamdani said. That is not the point. Political leaders help set the boundaries of prejudice. They determine which ideas remain shameful and which become part of ordinary political conversation.

 

My family’s story taught me where that can lead. Poland’s antisemitic campaign did not begin with thousands of Jews standing at railway stations holding one-way travel documents. It began with words — in speeches, newspapers, university campuses, and political debates. A political movement discovered that it could say things about “Zionists” that would have sounded uglier if it had simply said “Jews.”

 

Then a colleague stopped saying hello, a journalist lost his job, and a professor disappeared from his university.

 

I do not believe Jewish New Yorkers are about to be expelled from their city. The danger today is subtler, and therefore easier to ignore: An old prejudice is being recast in a new moral vocabulary. Hostility toward Zionism is presented not merely as permissible, but as virtuous — and Jews are increasingly expected to prove their virtue by joining in.

 

History rarely announces that it is repeating itself. Sometimes it just swaps out the words.

Always Ready for His Closeup

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, August 28, 2026

 

“President Trump is one of the greatest showmen in history, and we fully expect to have a spectacular showing in Dallas and draw a massive viewership,” RNC spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre recently told Axios.

 

I’m sure Ms. Baldassarre is a formidable one. You would have to be, to go through high school with the first seven letters of your last name spelling out “bald ass.”

 

But such juvenilia aside, I’m not so sure. Ms. Baldassarre was responding to reported concerns that the upcoming GOP midterm “convention” in Dallas may struggle for its desired audience as it will be up against the opening games of the NFL season. Vice President J.D. Vance’s first night keynote will compete with a Superbowl rematch of the Patriots and Seahawks. Who can doubt that a man with such exquisite comedic chops will win the crucial battle for ratings?

 

“President Trump gathered his top political advisers in the Oval Office early this month to solve a problem of riches: How to spend his super PAC’s $400 million political war chest with fewer than 100 days to go before the midterm elections,” according to The Atlantic.

 

The gurus debated different approaches, but Trump knew better. “The solution Trump settled on, according to three people familiar with the meeting, was to lean into the Democratic strategy of focusing on himself.”

 

Now, in the abstract, just because this is perfectly consistent with Trump’s narcissism—“America has a fever and the only prescription is more me!”—this isn’t necessarily a bad idea. Democrats are going with the time-honored strategy of making the election a referendum on Trump, so making Trump more popular has a certain logic to it.

 

The logic is even more compelling when you take into account that, at this point, it’s impossible to argue that a vote for a Republican isn’t a vote for Trump by proxy. Trump, more than any other president in American history, has turned his party into an extension of his personal brand. Traditionally, parties support their incumbents. But Trump has routinely intervened in primaries to make loyalty to him the litmus issue, endorsing challengers who vow to be Renfields to his Dracula. The only way the speaker of the House’s press conferences could convey his abject, supine, lickspittelry better is if they began with Trump wheeling out a kennel and having Mike Johnson emerge in a leather S&M onesie. “Gimp, say a few words for the fake news.”

 

There’s more resistance in the Senate, and Majority Leader John Thune deserves more respect and credit for it. But the Senate Republicans, for understandable reasons, keep their resistance very low-key, lest they invite too much of Trump’s wrath. Even the supposedly “YOLO” lame duck senators routinely couch their criticism in the Bad Boyar tradition, claiming that Trump is getting “bad advice.” As a result, the average voter draws the reasonable conclusion that the Senate, too, is simply an extension of Trump. So, again, if the midterms are a referendum on the president—as they pretty much always are, to one extent or another—getting Trump’s favorability out of the mid-30s makes sense in the abstract.

 

The problem is that Trump isn’t an abstraction—he’s been the dominant political figure for a decade. And he’s unpopular.

 

But I don’t think his unpopularity is his only problem.  He’s become boring. His “unpredictability” has become utterly predictable, for friend and foe and bystanders alike. He has no new material. It’s all variations of a very, very, familiar theme.

 

Yes, he can still make me mad. And he can infuriate Democrats. But his schtick is tired. He keeps trying to update the same material. He now says Lake Ontario is “Lake America.” It’s a dumb stunt, but it’s also unoriginal. He did this with the Gulf of Mexico already. That was dumb, too. But at least it was transgressive and shocking. It displayed a kind of confidence—confident asininity is still confidence. This feels more desperate.

 

I remember reading a profile of Bob Hope in his final years. He was making a made-for-TV movie and there was a scene in which a passing car was supposed to splash mud on him when going through a puddle. Hope told the director to make it a lot of mud, so it would be really funny. So, they followed his make-the-gag-bigger advice and had him drenched with gallons of mud. The quantity of the mud didn’t contribute much to the quality of the humor. It was a sad little vignette—the mud splash bit was a staple of an earlier era of humor, but sensibilities had changed.

 

That’s how “Lake America” feels to me. Hit the cowbell with a bigger hammer, the old logic went, and people will love it. Not so much anymore

 

The bigger problem for Trump is that he’s become the “establishment” and the status quo. His rebel-in-the-White-House schtick is now incongruous with the reality that he’s not the rebel anymore—he’s the empire.

 

You can see this playing out on the Democratic side. Numerous “Resistance 1.0” candidates lost their primaries because the old resistance movement worked on the assumption that Trump was an aberration, an unrepeatable fluke. But the fluke was repeated. And this time the “Deep State” backstabbers and Never Trumpers in the crumbling ancient regime were purged. His Cabinet has no John Kellys, Jim Mattises, Jeff Sessionses, Mike Pompeos, or Bill Barrs. It has abject loyalists for the most part, and a few tacticians who know that they can never say “No” to the president but also that they can maneuver how they say yes. He is the unitary executive in the executive branch, and the GOP. The new crop of Democrats still hate Trump, but they see Trump as the face of the status quo and the establishment. And so do Democratic voters, and a lot of independents, and a good number of Republicans.

 

The diehard MAGA types still talk like Trump is taking on the establishment, but where? Mitch McConnell’s hospital room? Mitt Romey’s poolside? Trump controls the party in power. He’s routed the resistance. The only people who earnestly use the phrase “Never Trumper” anymore are the people desperate to keep fighting old fights, to replay greatest hits, to hold onto to the self-serving frisson that they are the insurgents. Though some want to mine the reserves of anti-Never Trump hatred to create a “Never Vance” bogeyman.

 

It’s a rule in ideological media that it’s more fun—and more profitable—to be on offense than defense. National Review always got more traffic and subscribers when Democrats were in power. Rush Limbaugh was at his height when he was the “leader of the opposition.” The Nation surged under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, and shrank under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. It’s just easier—and more fun—to play the armchair general than to be in the trenches, responsible for your choices or your team.

 

It’s no surprise that the MAGA infotainment complex is reeling. Megyn Kelly is flailing for relevance, chasing edgelord content to hold attention. Benny Johnson’s views have cratered since the election. Take a gander at this:

 

Source: The Righting.

 

Defending Trump is even harder than a normal president because his predictable unpredictability makes it impossible to make a consistent argument in defense of his policies when his policies can change on a dime. As I’ve argued many times, this has caused a lot of people to revert to a blanket “In Trump We Trust” approach, defending his genius and instincts, rather than his ideas. But that gets hard when the schtick gets old and prices keep going up. Trotting out the talking points about his virility doesn’t work as well when he’s falling asleep at Cabinet meetings.

 

Trump is becoming a Citizen Kane figure before our eyes, increasingly spending his waking hours trying to turn Washington into a Xanadu that will outlive him. When Susan mocks Kane for spending all of his time collecting baubles and trinkets in his monument to himself, Kane responds “You may be right—I sometimes wonder—but you get into the habit.”

 

For Trump, the habit he’s retreating into is talking about marble and gold and how he knows how to build things better than anybody. He knows more about grass than anybody, so let’s talk about the lifespan of grass, rather than the lifespan of the war in Iran. If he has to talk about politics, he’d rather talk about his “landslides,” like Al Bundy talking about his four touchdowns in one game.

 

Yesterday Howard Lutnick removed his cranium from Trump’s sphincter long enough to explain to the press why he has to be allowed to renovate the Kennedy Center.

 

The president works all day, every day. And there are two things that he does for enjoyment. He plays golf on the weekend, and he builds. He loves to build.

 

So, this—like, why are we talking about this? This is what he enjoys. So late at night, 11 o’clock at night, he calls me and wants to talk about things he’s building because it’s fun for him.

 

...

 

And the one thing he likes to do during the week is construction. So I am helping him so he can enjoy constructing the Kennedy Center.

 

And, according to Lutnick and the DOJ, if he can’t figure out a way to put his mark on the Kennedy Center, we might just have to tear the whole thing down.

 

What I love about Lutnick is his natural gift for saying dumb stuff as if it was smart. Remember when he suggested withholding Social Security checks in order to out fraudsters? “A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining.”

 

The key to understanding Lutnick is that he speaks for Trump’s id, not Trump’s ideas or political interests. He says to cameras what everyone else whispers to Trump at Mar-a-Lago. So while the professionals want to argue that Trump is focused on Iran or affordability and deny the “fake news” that 70 percent of Trump’s brain is occupied by renovation projects, Lutnick wants to make the case for letting the baby have his bottle. If he was the spokesman for Louis XVI, he’d be telling the press that the king’s obsession with locks and clocks was something to celebrate even as the sans culottes were building the scaffold and sharpening their pitchforks.

 

There’s always been a King Lear quality to Trump. He wants all the pageantry and esteem of the presidency, but not the responsibilities. He likes to have Natalie Harp post charts designating him the greatest president of all time, but cannot muster the energy to even be a serviceable one if it gets in the way of selecting bathroom tiles. This kind of schtick worked when it was new and shocking, it’s now old and pathetic, aimed more at reassuring himself—and the handful of true believers he thinks represent the silent majority. Never trust a man to make good decisions when the only counsel he listens to is flattery.

 

Making the midterms a referendum on Trump is what Trump wants. He cannot fathom the idea that he’s not actually popular or that Trump fatigue is setting in, even among the faithful. He recently told Michael Cohen that if a presidential election were held today, he’d win by 25 points. No wonder he thinks the solution to the GOP’s problems can be found in more rallies, more greatest hits, more clanging cowbells about the enemy within. Let’s have another chorus of “Free Bird,” or in his case, another shake-weight dance to “YMCA.”

 

Like poor old Norma Desmond, he’s always ready for his closeup.