The Great Relearning Begins Anew

By Marian L. Tupy

Sunday, June 28, 2026

 

The novelist Tom Wolfe gave us the phrase in a 1987 essay about the hippies of Haight-Ashbury, who decided that hygiene, monogamy, and other rules of polite society were bourgeois inventions. They threw them out, moved into communes, and were visited by afflictions that modern medicine had not seen in generations. Doctors at the free clinics started teaching sanitation lessons that Victorian housewives once took for granted. Wolfe called that the Great Relearning: Civilization that discards its hard-won knowledge does not leap ahead to utopia but is dragged back to the starting line.

 

We are living through a Great Relearning of our own.

 

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, a set of propositions seemed settled beyond dispute. Central planning had impoverished half of Europe while markets enriched the other half. Prices were not arbitrary impositions but signals carrying more information than any ministry could gather. The right to own a business, to keep the fruits of one’s labor, and to trade freely across borders had lifted more human beings out of poverty than every charity in history combined. They were the conclusions of an experiment run across a continent, with a control group on either side of a barbed wire line.

 

A generation later, those conclusions have been forgotten. Voters in wealthy democracies, and the young above all, are electing self-described democratic socialists who promise to repeal economics by decree. In New York, a democratic socialist won the mayoralty in November on a platform of frozen rents, city-owned grocery stores, and an expropriation of someone else’s wealth. The voters in Washington, D.C., are all but certain to elect a similar candidate. The 20th-century socialists buried hecatombs of corpses. Yet it is the intellectual corpse of socialism that is being revived.

 

What are the lessons that the voters have forgotten? Free trade is desirable because it lets Vietnamese seamstresses and Iowa farmers prosper by doing what they do best, while protection taxes a nation’s own citizens for the privilege of buying less. Rent control is ruinous because a price pinned below the market ensures that fewer apartments are built and maintained. Public ownership of factories fails, because the managers risk no money of their own and answer to no customer free to walk away. A municipal grocery cannot serve you, because a shop that is forbidden to fail has no reason to stock what you want. Confiscatory taxes defeat themselves, because capital, unlike the wage earner, has feet. Chronic deficits and the inflation they summon are cruelest of all, for they levy a tax that no legislature ever votes on and that the poor can least afford to dodge.

 

None of that should surprise us. We are not blank slates onto which empirical argument permanently writes. We are the descendants of small bands of chimpanzees who survived by raiding neighbors and dividing a fixed supply of meat. The zero-sum intuition that one man’s gain must be another’s loss is older than agriculture and far older than Adam Smith. Markets are recent and counterintuitive. Human nature does not change, and so the case for liberty must be made afresh in every classroom of every generation.

 

Which is precisely where the chain has broken. When you stop teaching a lesson, you guarantee its repetition. In 2024, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression found that on college faculties, the far left outnumbers the far right by 16 to 1. Self-described Marxists and socialists now outnumber self-described conservatives on the American faculty. In fields like history and sociology, a conservative voice has become a near-mythical creature. A student may pass four years hearing the case for markets only as a caricature to be refuted. The post–Cold War cohort was never taught why the Wall fell and is now relearning it the slow way.

 

The dearth of academics and public intellectuals willing or able to defend sound economics is also wreaking havoc on the right, aggravated by a president whose populist “solutions,” including tariffs and nationalization of shares in publicly traded companies, permit no commitment to principles or long-term thinking. Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump’s opposite, thought differently. Freedom, he warned in 1961, is never more than one generation from extinction. It must be fought for to be passed on.

 

My hope is modest: that the young will relearn the affordable lessons before they reach the final, expensive one. Friedrich Hayek explained it in 1944: Socialism, whether implemented by the left or the right, is unstable, because when its promises collide with arithmetic, a government must choose between abandoning the program and abandoning the voters who object. The choice may not be as obvious to those in power as it should be.

The Democracies Can Still Triumph

By Simon Sebag Montefiore

Sunday, June 28, 2026

 

There is such a thing as too much history. Although this may be a strange reflection for a historian who has just finished a world history in a time of European and Middle Eastern war, the fetishistic obsession with curated versions of nations and empires in the past can blind one to the present and what really matters: how people and their families today wish to live. Yet history is a deathless arsenal of stories and facts that teaches us how humans lived and also sometimes how we should live. In our post-religious era—in which, beneath the cloak of secular humanitarianism, righteous religiosity and virtuous crusading remain as potent as ever—history has attained the authority, authenticity and prestige that religion and its prelates once possessed. Politicians deploy its propulsive power to justify their deeds and appetites. And that is why history matters and why it has to be right—or at least, as close to what happened as we historians can manage.

 

The Ukrainian war and the wars that followed October 7 in the Middle East marked the end of an exceptional period: the 70-Year peace, which was divided into two phases, 45 years of Cold War, then 25 of American unipotency. If the first era was like a chess tournament and the second like a game of solitaire, today is like a multiplayer computer game, a tournament of power in which many new smaller and middling contenders compete for power alongside the mega powers, some of them like India on the verge of superpowerdom, others that are suddenly planetary or at least continental players, and a few tiny but rich enough to deport themselves like mini-empires. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was not a new way of exerting and expanding power. Its flint-hearted ferocity was a return to what the dynasts of the past—warlords, kings, and dictators—would find routine. Normal disorder has resumed, but in a new realm of kinetic speed and inexorable interconnectivity that I call the Ultraworld. And there is no laboratory of technical ingenuity so fast and so rich as war.

 

Democracies won the 20th century on the battlefield as well as in the marketplace and the war of ideas, resulting in a world order made in their own image. But they did not prepare for or predict the resurgence of autocracies, nor the way that the postcolonial states—and the supranational institutions they now controlled—would, after many decades, reject the liberal democratic world order. The autocracies are surging, and democracies ebbing. It is impossible to define exactly what causes one state to fall and another to rise, but Ibn Khaldun identified asabiyya, the cohesion essential for a society to thrive: “Many nations suffered a physical defeat, but that’s never marked their end. Yet when a nation becomes the victim of psychological defeat, that marks the end.”

 

Control states—autocracies that combine traditional menace and digital surveillance— disdain but also fear and envy the gaudy, outrageous, inventive, clamorous mess (part fairground, part farmyard) of the democracies that deliver freedom in the open world. Dictatorships move faster and plan bigger, and can even be formidable and majestic under experienced leaders. But they are also weaker: violence, corruption, coercion, and control are wired into the closed world. Virtually all contemporary dictatorships are cosplay democracies with term limits, elections, and legislatures—the few ruling, as Amos Perlmutter put it, in the name of the many. The rigidity and delusions of tyrannies are incorrigible; their purity spirals end in executions, not just cancellations; their adventures end in devastation and slaughter. When autocrats fall, they take the state and the people down along with them. The only leaders more buffoonish and lethal than the fairground hucksters elected in our failing democracies are the omnipotent clowns of tyranny.

 

Democracies are built on invisible trust: Over and over again, when anomie strikes, trust disappears, and so does openness. “As soon as any man says of the affairs of state, What does it matter to me?” Rousseau wrote, “the state may be given up as lost.” The lesson of recent years is that the gains and values that were taken as won after the atrocities of 1939–45—making racism and anti-Semitism taboo, the legal structure that defined and banned crimes of genocide and war-making, the right to abortion and the other triumphs of the great liberal reformation of the 1960s—have to be fought for again.

 

The so-called rules-based order was degraded not just by the fecklessness or cynicism of U.S. presidents but also by its own ideological stagnation—as demonstrated in all manner of scandals and outrages, but perhaps best demonstrated in January by the failures of the United Nations and humanitarian NGOs to condemn the massacre of Iranian protesters by the Islamic dictatorship. In spite of their original values of humanitarianism and neutrality, these organizations have been morally debased from within, using the language of human rights and international justice yet deploying it on behalf of autocracies and against the liberal democracies that created them. They need to be reformed, or they will become impotent. And we may all live to greatly miss Western humbug in the decades ahead. Meanwhile, the very vocabulary of humanitarianism and antiracism has become so selectively applied or debased as to be meaningless. We need to develop a new vocabulary.

 

Now let us turn to the crisis of democracy. Open societies are slow, their leaders amateurish, their policies inconsistent, but when they mobilize they are flexible, efficient, and creative. Technology can undermine democratic solidarity and aid tyranny and conspiracism, yet it also advances openness and justice. Its very facility means that atrocities and wars can be instantly recorded and viewed everywhere in our new virtual-arena world. But the multiheaded, indestructible Hydra of social media is an unpredictable power center, competing with elected, parliamentary, civic, and media institutions to complicate and distort already polarized societies.

 

I no longer use virtual for online life, because its effects are only too real, even visceral. It grants power without responsibility or consequence. Moral panics and witch hunts are built into human nature and feature frequently in history. But they end. Online, the inquisitions follow one another seamlessly. The once-vaunted values of public life are now reduced to the lower standards of private life—venality, vulgarity, rudeness, incontinence, and ignorance. A society that diminishes the value of knowledge is at risk. The internet has promoted emotion over knowledge and memes over books, and it has created a crisis of literacy, leading sophisticated societies to embrace conspiracies and myths—a trend that could be fatal to the success of democracies but invaluable for despotates.

 

The immediate challenge is to learn to manage our new technologies, to control their addictiveness and surveillance and the lack of inhibition they encourage while enjoying their benefits. The invisible power of the unelected despots of data and tech lords must be diminished; if families cannot control the disaster of digital addiction, states will have to legislate for them. Artificial intelligence will replace many jobs globally but in the comfort democracies—those legacy states, once imperial powers, overstretched by welfare promises, legal entitlements, and executive paralysis—it will hit middle-class digital mediators who moved data around an onanistic internet economy. If things go wrong, the overqualified graduate activist class could provide the revolutionaries of the future. AI, too, would certainly be a dangerous tool in the hands of overmighty states just as it could be invaluable in the right hands.

 

Because everyone will have access to the same information, AI will accentuate the value of personal connections, again promoting lineages and networks that at their most extreme may appear to be sinister establishment conspiracies. The Ultraworld not only accentuates the effects of technology but also enables traditional systems. We live in a time of resurgent family power—from neo-monarchies such as North Korea, theocratic Iran where the Khamenei dynasty seems to rule, and many states in Asia and Africa to the demo-dynasties of the West—which proves surprisingly compatible with transactional politics and autocratic systems. Meanwhile foolish, faddish governments have promoted new technologies and made their societies more dependent on internet systems to the point that military catastrophes and the breakdown of entire cities or even countries will be inevitable—and lethal, given that most city dwellers have lost the most basic skills of craft and survival. In the case of massive grid sabotage, AI could compound the chaos and lead to a starvation of city-dwellers unthinkable in modern times. But AI will also, after two centuries of long days in factories and offices, contribute to new health advances and ways of working, and time for family and pleasure. Ironically, the loss of many white-collar jobs will raise the importance and prestige of artisans and craftsmen—the skilled people who can actually make things—and farmers who grow food. In the AI world, they, not men and women in suits, will be highly rewarded and even revered.

 

The peril for comfort democracies is that they can no longer satisfy the entitled demands of their citizens, nor assuage their popular, fearful rage against decline, poverty, and immigration. Meanwhile, the traditional markers of Western success—legal codes, civic institutions, bureaucratic processes, the guardianship of a cozy ruling caste and the pious but unrealistic orthodoxies of privileged patriciates—are in danger of becoming obstacles to governance and to individual freedoms, if not actual engines of paralysis. The sociologist Max Weber foresaw the paralysis of this bureaucratization that is now unleashing a rising fury against democracy itself. The cycle can probably only be broken only by the election of iconoclastic radical politicians. The selection of leaders who can dynamically solve the issues of the electorate is what democracy is meant to do to forestall collapse and revolution, though the danger with such radical governments is that they tend to break more than they solve, and move toward cults of personality and authority. The balance is delicate; the peril is one that only dedicated citizenship can prevent; the prize is democracies that again reflect the wishes and trust of their electorates.

 

A parallel crisis is the conundrum of how comfort democracies can fulfill citizens’ expectations of social services and health care ’til death, a challenge exacerbated by aging populations, without such punishing taxes that they strangle their own golden geese. America and Europe have been immeasurably enriched, culturally and economically, by the arrival and absorption of immigrants from all over the world. Yet a new much larger immigration deluge is likely imminent, posing a dilemma for democracies that believe they must choose between virtue and survival. Political parties and leaders who do not legislate for this, nor discuss and confront factions and sects that are opposed to free speech and open societies due to ideological zeal—and fear of small groups of illiberal activists—will place democracy itself in danger by making it appear obsolete, unworkable, or corrupt.

 

The almost magical ability of smartphones and digital markets to deliver curated products to consumers has had unforeseen consequences. Even the richest emperors of the past did not have the ability to satisfy their whims that is now possessed by any student in Chicago or Berlin or Kinshasa. Yet these easy luxuries have simultaneously raised the entitlement of citizens and their expectations of largesse from their underfunded, over-bureaucratized, overpromising governments, which are left seeming slow and inept. Unsuitable leaders are chosen on irresponsible promises and then tossed aside in favor of new brazen or naïve overpromisers. This only encourages the distrust, fury, and conspiracism now raging through our societies. These digital technologies have also created an echo chamber of self-confirming views, which has contributed to an unreal, simplified view of a nuanced, messy world.

 

Magical capitalism has likewise changed private lives. As education and prosperity rose, well-off people married later and had fewer children, and women had more choices and higher standards. Gender-selective abortion in East Asia led to a disproportionate amount of male children, who are adults today. In this century, a combination of prosperity, women’s rights, and smartphones has wrought unexpected changes. Couples started to meet online, but the curation that catered to personal tastes raised people’s expectations of dating, sex, and marriage, just as digital entertainment and powerful algorithms—offering gaming, news, and pornography—presented an initially thrilling but ultimately solitary life at home.

 

Not everyone is lonely; some women, no longer obliged to marry, are probably happier and freer. But in many cases, what I call algorithmic companionship—which doesn’t require empathy or sympathy for others—has replaced the real sort. The result is an epidemic of solitude, if not loneliness; a dramatic drop in fertility; and a romantic famine across North and South America, Europe, and China. Yet as the populations there shrink, populations are booming in less prosperous and less secular regions, including Africa and the Middle East. This epoch of new middling and continental powers should be Africa’s moment. Treasure-states such as Nigeria and South Africa, with their mineral resources, should be emerging as world powers. But if instead they continue to fail, migrants will move north to enjoy the benefits and safety offered by the comfort democracies. Migration has always been the engine of history.

 

Identities are evolving too; younger generations may no longer embrace the nation as their prime identity. Comfort Democracies face a crisis that is a symptom of success: their grants of entitlements, of free education and social liberties, and luxurious lifestyles,  all unequaled in human history, have empowered highly educated activist cadres of the young who exploit those values and rights while rejecting the legitimacy of democratic states that some even regard as historic criminal conspiracies fit only for destruction.   Such movements as we see today may play out, and others will arise. Active citizenship can defeat intolerant ideologies in debate and at the ballot box. But in turbulent times, small, impassioned groups can capture or paralyze states, as has happened often in history. In what I call the war democracies—Taiwan, Israel, Ukraine—the stakes are so clear and society is so awakened that this is not a problem. But one wonders if young citizens of any of the comfort democracies—especially the fuddled legacy powers such as Britain and France—would now be willing to give their lives in conscript armies to defend supposed national interests, and if human-rights activists would actually allow a struggle such as the Second World War to be fought today at all.

 

Capitalist democracies have inbuilt inequalities, but their inconsistency is also their strength: They are adaptable. To restore the trust, magnanimity, and asabiyya essential to democracies, they will need to address those inequalities. Companies and data panjandrums will have to share AI’s profits and protect the poor. In foreign policy, too, the democracies need to regain self-confidence—and back democratic allies against forces that threaten our systems and values. Liberal democracies need to show they can win—without destroying their own values from within. That is how democracy triumphed after 1945—and why it is now under threat.

 

However unsettling these jactitations appear, the open world remains the happiest and freest place to live. Population growth and climate change can be solved only by either catastrophic population decline—pandemic, natural disaster, thermonuclear war—or cooperation on a planetary scale. “The real problem of humanity,” said Edward O. Wilson, “is we have palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.” To navigate the looming tempests of chaos, humans will seek not only the consolations of family but also some sort of religiosity, even God, to fill a void unfilled by political orthodoxies and unsatisfactory plenty, and to explain not just the unstoppable virtuosity of our own technologies, but the half-monstrous, half-seraphic nature of we who created them.

 

Just because we are the smartest ape ever created, just because we have solved many problems so far, does not mean we will solve everything. Human history is like one of those investment-warning clauses: Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Yet the harshness of humanity has been constantly rescued by our capacity to create and love. The family is the center of both. Our limitless ability to destroy is matched only by our ingenious ability to recover.

The Angry, Whining Left Meets the Angry, Whining Right

By Jim Geraghty

Friday, June 26, 2026

 

Darializa Avila Chevalier — a community organizer who won the Democratic primary for New York’s 13th congressional district this week, graduated from Columbia University with a bachelor’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies in 2016.

 

Chevalier was one of the leaders of the 2023–24 Columbia encampment and protests that smashed windows, overturned furniture, and led to about 220 arrests in two separate waves. (The Manhattan district attorney’s office later moved to dismiss the charges against most of the protesters.) By 2025, nearly 80 Columbia students had been either expelled or suspended for up to three years over their roles in the encampment or subsequent protests.

 

Since 2019, Chevalier has been a doctoral student in sociology at the City University of New York. (On average, Ph.D. programs take five to seven years, so she’s hitting that seventh year now.)

 

It’s not that Chevalier has never held a job in the private sector; according to her LinkedIn, for two years she was a paralegal at Sivin, Miller & Roche, “a New York law firm dedicated to achieving justice for victims of police and prison abuse.”

 

She has never held any elective office before; she has never run an organization. During most of her time as a doctoral student, she’s been an “activist.”

 

Chevalier was recruited by Justice Democrats, the group that recruited and promoted Raúl Grijalva, Pramila Jayapal, Ro Khanna, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib. Justice Democrats writes of Chevalier that “[s]eeing her family navigate immigration issues, economic hardship, and structural racism shaped her commitment to justice.”

 

Chevalier’s father is a landlord renting out his two-bedroom, 2.5-bathroom townhouse-style condominium with updated bathrooms, tile floors, and an assigned parking spot in Miami for $1,750 a month.

 

The message and agenda of the Justice Democrats and Democratic Socialists of America were succinctly summarized by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani in his inaugural address: to “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” This past week, the “warmth of collectivism” overran establishment Democrats with the cold, ruthless efficiency of the Borg assimilating a Starfleet crew.

 

In most (but not quite all) of New York City’s congressional primaries, the verdict is clear: The existing American economy has failed to provide opportunities or a good life for far too many people. Only socialism — which its most ardent adherents insist has never been tried in its truest form — can provide a better life.

 

Compared to some of my colleagues, I’m a pessimist in my assessment of the U.S. economy lately. The cost of living is too high, the inflation rate never got down to that 2 percent range that we want, tariffs made imported goods more expensive, and our second straight octogenarian president’s economic policies are erratic and contradictory. One day, the artificial intelligence company Anthropic had a $200 million contract with the Pentagon; the next, Trump ordered “EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic’s technology.” Then a few months later, Trump says he no longer thinks Anthropic is a national security threat. Good luck making long-term business investment decisions when the federal government’s policies can turn on a dime via a Truth Social post.

 

Still, even in subpar economic circumstances, an American — particularly a young and able-bodied American — has a buffet table of opportunities for a better life that is the envy of the rest of the world.

 

Back in November, I looked at the diagnosis of modern America from that hateful little troll Nick Fuentes and pointed out that even with our flaws, a young person in America today has more opportunities to improve his life than roughly 99.99 percent of human beings in the history of human existence.

 

(Fuentes reportedly makes an average of $60,000 per month from his program, although some months he made more than $100,000. That little twerp makes beaucoup bucks ranting into a camera about how America is no longer the land of opportunity. If he’s aware of the irony, he hides it well.)

 

There’s a bizarre mirror image between the angry populist Groyper right and the angry populist DSA or woke left. They’re both utterly convinced of their own unparalleled victimhood, the unmatched injustice of their daily lives, and the absolute failure of modern American society to provide opportunities for a better, happier life. Furthermore, both fringes share a desire to tear down the existing structures and traditions of American life.

 

All these whiners should shut the heck up. If you’re an American, you’re lucky enough to live in one of the most generous societies that has ever existed. I won’t repeat the whole thing; click and reread it if you missed it or forgot when I laid it out in excruciating detail in November, but America gives a young person more opportunities for education, jobs, career advancement, and the good life than just about anywhere else. If you do not apply for help, you cannot complain that no one is willing to help you. If you do not even try to take advantage of existing opportunities, you cannot legitimately complain that American society has somehow failed you.

 

Some readers absolutely hated that edition of the Jolt, because they really love their narrative that they’ve been uniquely screwed and life has been particularly unfair to them. Or they hated my declaration that “no one ever said that achieving the American dream was going to be easy. No politician is coming to save you. The person who has the most influence over your quality of life is you.” Because it’s a lot more satisfying to blame other people than to look at our lives and contemplate how we’ve let ourselves down, and a lot easier to believe in some politician as a messiah figure — complete with their own temples.

 

There is no shortage of Gen-Z members who want to believe they have it harder than any generation before them. Never mind that there’s no draft, that there’s no Cold War-style threat of potential imminent nuclear annihilation, that there’s no Great Recession, that AIDS is a shadow of the menace it used to be, and that the threat from al-Qaeda and ISIS is a fraction of what it used to be (unless you want to count that New Jersey congressional candidate). Your great grandfather had to storm Omaha Beach to fight Nazis; today, you just have to vote for Susan Collins to do that.

 

It is not surprising that the socialist — and in many cases, de facto communist — revolution is being led by angry young people in New York City. Everyone likes to repeat the lyric, “If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.” Implied in that is that it is hard to make it in New York City, and no place is actually harder to live in than the Big Apple. The competition for the best-paying and most glamorous jobs is fierce. New York City has the highest cost of living in the country, and it has competed for that crown for a long, long time. You’re smart? Great, but in a metro area of almost 20 million people, there are lots of smart people around. You’re hardworking? Pal, in New York City, that’s a requirement, not a unique asset.

 

One of my all-time favorite essays ran in 2010 in the comedy site Cracked, asserting, somewhat jokingly and somewhat seriously, that the trope of montages in movies leaves people with an unrealistic sense of how much effort it takes to become really good at a particular task. People tend to drastically underestimate how much time and effort it will take to become exceptional at something they want to do. A whole lot of young people set out to live the good life in New York City and are surprised to find that after a couple years, they have not achieved it.

 

There’s a real discussion to be had about the “elite overproduction hypothesis” and whether inevitable changes in the professions of academia, media, law, nonprofits, etc. led to lots of people preparing for and expecting a comfortable white-collar career in a profession that was declining or shrinking. But almost no one walks directly out of college into the good life. (Even fewer walk out of high school into it.) Yes, technological changes have made those entry-level white-collar jobs scarcer — the sort of internship or post-internship gigs where you’re answering the phones, sorting the mail, refilling the toner into the photocopier, and generally doing the drudge work that no one else at the company wants to do. But almost no one finds their first real job is what they wanted. And in a strange way, that’s a blessing; if you instantly achieve your dream in your early twenties, what do you do with the rest of your life? How do you grow? How would you ever develop any sense of accomplishment, determination, or tenacity if everything came easily to you and you achieved everything you wanted quickly and effortlessly?

 

What we have are young people who grew up comfortably to older Millennial, Generation X, or late Baby Boomer parents, who think the level of wealth and success their parents achieved is the baseline. But what they saw growing up was often what their parents had achieved after at least a decade in the workforce, and often considerably longer. The peak earning years are, supposedly, from 45 to 54, although it varies a lot. It is unrealistic to expect that when you’re starting your career, you will be able to afford a lifestyle comparable to what your parents enjoyed in their middle age or later middle age.

 

Now throw in social media and its ability to create the perception that everyone else is living a luxurious, low-stress, or even hedonistic life except for you, and people really walk around with unrealistic expectations for their own lives.

 

This isn’t even counting the false perceptions cultivated by young people who are nominally employed and being financially supported by their parents. Because I’m so in tune with young people these days, I enjoyed the recent kerfuffle about pop star Olivia Rodrigo calling out young men for having “fake jobs.”

 

On the 12th track, “Expectations,” Rodrigo sings about going back into the dating minefield with higher expectations for men, because the bar was on the ground for far too long. In the song, she jokes that now she “won’t settle for a guy with a fake job / They seem so desperate for loving / But baby I’m not.” While it’s nice that Rodrigo’s is finally demanding the love she deserves, it’s even better that she is drawing attention to a larger epidemic we have on our hands: dudes with fake jobs.

 

What is a fake job?

 

A fake job is one that requires more than 30 seconds of uninterrupted speech to describe, is full of ums and ers, and relies on vague metaphors to describe, like, “we’re like if Palantir was Wendy’s” or “Chief Vibes Officer.” Ideally, you should be able to describe your job in one sentence, like “I build airplanes, or “I teach children algebra”, or “I operate the Tower of Terror at Magic Kingdom.” If [I] were to ask you what you do and you started talking about synergy or “maximizing shareholder value” or whatever the [f***] verticals are, I’m going to freak out and ruin everybody’s night. Your job is fake, and you are a spy.

 

You know, a fake job, like “aspiring congressional candidate backed by the Democratic Socialists of America.”

Here Come the New Jacobins

By Becket Adams

Sunday, June 28, 2026

 

If you think it’s bad that the Democratic Party refuses to acknowledge its violence problem, just wait until you realize there is a growing contingent within the party that not only condones it but views it as a necessary means to an end.

 

It has long been thus in left-wing politics, as my colleague Noah Rothman argues, with certain periods involving more revolutionary violence than others.

 

The thing to recognize now, at this moment in U.S. politics, is that we’re fast exiting one of the more peaceful periods.

 

Consider the angry reactions last week to the sentencing of nine Antifa members convicted of partaking in the 2025 premeditated armed assault on federal workers at an ICE detention center in Texas.

 

Taken at face value, the outraged responses from left-wing activists and even members of the press to the convictions leave the impression that the guilty had done nothing worse than set off fireworks and hand out pamphlets.

 

Yet what happened in Texas was far more serious, and claims to the contrary can’t be dismissed as simple ignorance or a difference of opinion. We have to accept that those who regularly downplay or misrepresent such incidents do so because they support the underlying actions. We also must recognize that these people are fast gaining real power and influence.

 

In 2025, members of the North Texas Antifa cell organized and planned an attack on federal personnel stationed at an ICE facility in Alvarado. On July 4, after conducting reconnaissance and “gear checks,” they arrived at the detention center dressed in black uniforms, equipped with body armor and first aid kits, and armed with eleven firearms. They disabled the facility’s CCTV cameras and set off fireworks to lure the federal personnel out into the open.

 

Rather than rushing out, however, the center’s receptionist called 911.

 

Lieutenant Thomas Gross of the Alvarado Police Department responded to the call. As he arrived and began issuing commands, one of the attackers shouted, “Get to the rifles!” Gross was then shot in the neck, according to his bodycam footage. At the same time, a second gunman fired approximately 20 to 30 rounds at two unarmed correctional officers who had stepped outside the ICE facility.

 

The correctional officers were unharmed, Gross survived, and the attack was thwarted.

 

The assailants and coconspirators were later arrested.

 

On March 13 of this year, a federal jury in Fort Worth, Texas, convicted nine members of the cell on charges ranging from providing material support to terrorists to rioting with intent to commit violence. The trial lasted twelve days. Benjamin Hanil Song, the group’s leader, was convicted of attempted murder for shooting Gross. Five witnesses who had pleaded guilty testified that the cell was organized around Antifa ideology.

 

On June 23, Song received a 100-year sentence; seven codefendants were sentenced to a combined 350 years.

 

The case was straightforward, and the sentences were fair.

 

But try telling that to the worst elements of the far left.

 

“These sentences are a travesty and totally unjustified, but that’s the point,” complained Democratic Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan on X. “Americans hate the fascist Trump regime, so the only way they can try to cling to power is brute force. [The ‘Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence’ presidential memo] is a grave threat to all of us and more bulls**t ‘terrorism’ charges like these are coming.”

 

Alec Karakatsanis, founder of the Civil Rights Corps, added elsewhere: “The sentences handed down today are a huge threat to the possibility of a democratic society. . . . The evidence of an illegal conspiracy is non-existent, but this is how the authoritarian dragnet targets those fighting against repression. Everyone should be learning about this case.”

 

Earlier this year, the New Republic published a sympathetic profile of the accused Antifa members, describing the case as “the first big test of Trump’s crackdown on free speech.” Its author continued to insist even after the sentencing that the case “is far muddier than the DOJ has claimed.”

 

In reaction to The Guardian’s reporting last week on defendant Daniel Sanchez-Estrada, who was convicted of obstructing a federal investigation and tampering with evidence, MS NOW regular Krystal Ball remarked: “I read this 5 times to make sure I was properly comprehending that he is actually facing 30 years for having leftist reading materials. Beyond insane.”

 

Perhaps a sixth reading would clarify matters.

 

More fromBecket Adams

 

Sports Journalists Jettison Their Affection for Silent Protest

 

Media ‘Pounce’ on Susan Collins for Having the Temerity to Notice Platner’s Past

 

The Scott Pelley Meltdown Is Revealing

 

Worse than activists behaving as activists is how major news outlets covered the sentences, with many downplaying, ignoring, or mischaracterizing entirely the details of the July 4 assault in Texas (emphases added):

 

“Anti-ICE protesters sentenced to decades in prison in latest crackdown on dissent,” PBS News announced.

 

“Federal judges in Texas gave eight members of an alleged ‘antifa cell’ prison sentences as long as 100 years for their roles last summer in a protest that turned violent outside an ICE facility,” said the Washington Post.

 

The Guardian headlined its story, “Texas anti-ICE protesters convicted of terrorism charges sentenced to at least 50 years in prison,” with a subhead that read, “Activists accused of being part of antifa get long prison terms in case seen as test of Trump’s crackdown on dissent.”

 

The BBC, for its part, stated, “Eight people with alleged ties to Antifa collectively sentenced to 450 years in prison over ICE centre protest.”

 

Describing the Antifa connection as “alleged,” even when a court has already established those links, and characterizing the sentences as overreactions to routine “ICE center protests,” when the convictions include attempted murder and evidence tampering, are deliberate and extremely revealing editorial choices.

 

The facts are a matter of public record, available from the Justice Department and Texas courts, and have been widely discussed on social media. There’s even bodycam footage, so the perpetrators’ actions should not be in dispute.

 

Yet, certain Democratic officials, left-wing magazine writers, and even mainstream outlets maintain that the sentences are excessive and that the cell’s underlying conduct was not especially serious, if they mention the conduct at all.

 

We can’t chalk this up to “agree to disagree.”

 

If these people cannot even acknowledge so clear-cut an example of political violence, especially one as indefensible and one where the facts are so readily available, they will condemn nothing done by left-wing agitators. Raise the possibility that the Democratic base has grown unusually comfortable with violence, and the response is an immediate and reflexive dodge: “Melissa Hortman!” or “January 6!” shouted on a loop.

 

This leaves us in the unhappy position of having to acknowledge the obvious: There is a growing and increasingly influential wing of the Democratic Party that views political violence as defensible and acceptable, if not favorable.

 

Don’t take my word for it.

 

Recent polling data says as much.

Confessions

By John McCormack

Sunday, June 28, 2026

 

Vice President J.D. Vance has a confession to make in Communion, his new memoir about his adult conversion from atheism to Catholicism: He doesn’t fear eternal damnation—not now, not ever.

 

“I don’t worry about what I will find on the other side of eternal sleep,” Vance writes. “Even as a child,” when he was a low-church Protestant, “I never feared hell.”

 

Vance observes that this is a “particularly odd part of my own theology” that “wasn’t just inconsistent with common sense. It was inconsistent with Christian doctrine.”

 

Catholics, after all, believe that humans are saved by God’s grace but have been given the free will to accept or reject that gift. According to Catholic teaching, mortal sin—that is, a sin about a serious matter committed with knowledge and free will—severs one’s relationship with God. The sacrament of penance and reconciliation—a.k.a. confession—is the usual means by which Catholics receive God’s forgiveness.

 

Vance writes that his lack of fear of hell is especially odd given that such fear is explicitly mentioned in a common version of the Act of Contrition that a Catholic prays after confessing his sins:

 

O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins, because I dread the loss of Heaven and the pains of Hell, but most of all because I offend Thee, my God, Who art all good and deserving of all my love.

 

I firmly resolve, with the help of Thy grace, to sin no more and to avoid the near occasion of sin.

 

Trying to square his own theology with Catholic teaching, Vance concludes in the book that one possibility is that Catholic teaching is wrong and John Calvin was right about predestination:

 

John Calvin, the great Reformation theologian, argued that our destinies are decided by God before we’re even born. From a Reformed perspective, this concept of “predestination” affirms a paradox: God is sovereign, but man also has free will. For my own part, the idea makes my head spin. But who knows—perhaps Calvin was on to something, and the concept of predestination helps to explain my own relatively untroubled perspective on the afterlife.

 

Vance reports he also reached out to the Dominican priest who baptized him in 2019 to ask: “Is it possible for a Christian to believe in the concept of hell without being particularly afraid of it?”

 

The priest, Father Henry Stephan, responded, as recounted in the book:

 

“Hell is real, but it’s also difficult to fathom. The more one cultivates a friendship with God, however imperfect, the more it seems unthinkable to choose separation from Him.” We spoke a bit about the Act of Contrition and how the prayer explicitly invokes the pains of hell. “Remember, the prayer doesn’t stop there,” Father Henry reminded me. “We detest our sins, according to the prayer, ‘most of all, because I have offended Thee, Who art all good and deserving of all my love.’ ” He continued: “Fear of hell is good enough to avoid presumption and a license to sin. But to stay there, psychologically or spiritually, is to remain stunted. It’s totally inadequate in the grand scheme of things. God’s goal isn’t only to motivate us to fear punishment; it’s also to enter into friendship with Him.

 

Vance’s musings about hell tell us a few things about him.

 

First, they count as a mark of sincerity about his religious views. Why publicly admit and grapple with these ideas if he were simply pretending to be a devout Catholic for political gain?

 

Second, they suggest there’s plenty of room for Vance to grow in the Catholic faith. With respect to Father Stephan’s counsel, I don’t think anyone, including Vance, would say Vance has never feared hell because he has always loved God so much that it has always been “unthinkable to choose separation from Him.”

 

Third, they serve as an answer to a question that has troubled me for several years: How does a man who publicly presents himself as a serious pro-life Catholic seem to find it so easy to deliberately lie in public after converting to faith? Part of the answer may be that Vance feels he has nothing to lose.

 

The line between non-sinful political spin and bearing false witness isn’t always clear, but Vance has delivered some statements that count as the latter. In 2021, as he was angling for Donald Trump’s endorsement in the Ohio Senate race, Vance said that there was massive voter fraud that occurred in the 2020 elections. “There were certainly people voting illegally on a large-scale basis,” Vance said. A retiree addicted to Fox News might sincerely believe such a false claim, but there’s no way that the Yale Law-educated former Never Trumper Vance believed there was voter fraud “on a large-scale basis.” Six years of investigations by Republican-controlled states—and a year and a half of federal investigations in Trump’s second term—have not yielded evidence of widespread illegal voting in 2020.

 

As the GOP vice presidential nominee, Vance wrote in September 2024 on social media of Haitian migrants living in Springfield, Ohio: “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.” These “reports” were in fact baseless rumors—quickly debunked by the Springfield Police Department—that smeared an entire community of people. It turned out a woman living in Canton had been arrested for torturing and eating a cat, but she was not Haitian—she was a U.S. citizen born in Ohio.

 

Vance never apologized. “The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” Vance told CNN’s Dana Bash at the time.

 

“You just said that this is a story that you created,” Bash replied.

 

“It comes from firsthand accounts from my constituents. I say that we’re creating a story, meaning we’re creating the American media focusing on it.”

 

The “cat memes” were a calumny, but they served the greater good in Vance’s view.

 

***

 

In Communion, Vance presents himself as a “Christian statesman” who decided in 2021 to run for Senate in order “to make what I thought were more explicitly Christian arguments about the economy.”

 

“If Christianity is true, it must be true for the whole human person at all times of life,” Vance writes. “We are not merely private moral actors but also public ones.”

 

But holding himself up as a Catholic role model creates the very real risk that he will lead others astray when he flouts Catholic teaching. Consider, for example, Vance’s enthusiastic support for killing instead of capturing suspected drug runners—killings that are contrary to the principles of just war, according to leading Catholic scholars.

 

“Killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military,” Vance wrote on Twitter on September 6, 2025, shortly after the initial U.S. strike that killed 11 people on a boat in the Caribbean Sea. In response to a post that said “killing the citizens of another nation who are civilians without any due process is called a war crime,” Vance replied: “I don’t give a shit what you call it.” Since Vance made those comments, we have learned that two of the 11 people were killed in a follow-on strike while they were clinging to wreckage from the first strike, and some of the 11 people killed may have had nothing to do with drug running.

 

Another way in which Vance seems to be failing to live up to the calling of a Catholic statesman is his willingness to coddle antisemites in his political coalition.

 

In 2022, when then-Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene spoke at a conference organized by the Hitler-loving white nationalist Nick Fuentes, Vance said Greene, who had endorsed Vance’s Senate campaign, “did nothing wrong.” In the fall of 2025, Tucker Carlson, the top-rated podcaster and Vance cheerleader, roiled the conservative movement when he hosted Fuentes for a two-hour interview in which Carlson posed no challenging questions to the neo-Nazi influencer. The writer Rod Dreher, a friend of Vance’s who attended Vance’s baptism, described the Carlson-Fuentes podcast as a “Two-Man Unite The Right Rally.”

 

In December 2025, Vance rebuked Fuentes for using a racist epithet against Vance’s Indian-American wife Usha. He also condemned antisemitism “and all forms of ethnic hatred” as having “no place in the conservative movement” while simultaneously white-washing Carlson, who has done more to mainstream antisemitism on the right than anyone.

 

“Tucker’s a friend of mine,” Vance told Unherd editor Sohrab Ahmari. “And do I have disagreements with Tucker Carlson? Sure. I have disagreements with most of my friends,” Vance added, without specifying what his disagreements are.

 

“The idea that Tucker Carlson—who has one of the largest podcasts in the world, who has millions of listeners, who supported Donald Trump in the 2024 election, who supported me in the 2024 election—the idea that his views are somehow completely anathema to conservatism, that he has no place in the conservative movement, is frankly absurd,” Vance continued. “And I don’t think anybody actually believes it.”

 

In addition to Carlson’s softball interviews with neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes and a Nazi revisionist historian, Carlson released a 9/11 truther documentary in September 2025 in which he suggested the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were a “false flag” operation of which Israel had advance knowledge. And just last week, Carlson endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory about the assassination of political activist Charlie Kirk. Kirk “was not murdered for his opinion on transgenderism, obviously,” Carlson said. “I believe, and most people who knew him well … believe he was most likely murdered for his evolving views on Israel.”

 

Does Vance actually believe that Carlson’s 9/11 and Kirk conspiracy theories don’t amount to antisemitism?

 

***

 

Vance certainly isn’t the first Catholic politician to lie, to flout church teaching, or otherwise fall short of the duties of a Catholic statesman. Nearly every Catholic Democratic politician and more than a few Republicans favor laws that permit lethal violence against an entire class of human beings—unborn children.

 

But Vance’s unstated but practical approach to politics—that good ends justify illicit means—is still pernicious. It’s an approach to politics that is rooted, in part, by what he fears and what he does not.

 

While visiting a church in England that had fallen into disrepair, Vance writes, he “discovered something like the fear of death: not of my own physical death, or of the spiritual death of hell, but of civilizational death.”

 

If one fears the death of Western civilization—but not the death of one’s own soul—certain moral shortcuts become easier to take. Calumnies against Haitian migrants can be spread in the service of opposing mass migration. The slaughter of unarmed people on boats, who may or may not be transporting cocaine, might put a dent in the drug trade.

 

The verse in the Bible to which Vance keeps returning in his book are words spoken by Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew: “Ye shall know them by their fruits. ... A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.” That is undoubtedly true, but it does not mean that a good end can justify illicit means. In his letter to the Romans, St. Paul explicitly condemns the idea that we may do evil so that good may come of it. Another Catholic convert, St. John Henry Newman, put it more starkly: “The Catholic Church holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die of starvation in extremest agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say, should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one wilful untruth, or should steal one poor farthing without excuse.”

 

This is the true radicalism of the religion to which Vance has converted—the religion in which he is, like all practicing Catholics, still growing. Some of the wisest words in Communion are spoken by Father Henry Stephan, the Dominican priest who baptized Vance. “For most of us, grace is not something that happens in a moment,” Father Stephan told Vance. “You don’t feel God’s presence and then change in an instant. Real grace comes through practice. This is why we demand that you live a sacramental life: going to church, taking Communion, doing confession. This is a process.”

Horseshoe Politics and the ‘Hidden Hand’

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, June 26, 2026

 

“People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about,” Thomas Frank wrote in What’s the Matter with Kansas?

 

Rarely has an idea been simultaneously so right and so wrong.

 

Progressives loved this thesis when Frank put it forward, because what Frank meant by it was that Republican voters were idiots who didn’t understand or vote on economic issues the way Frank thought they should. According to him, American politics was one long exercise in bait-and-switch. Voters are fed a steady diet of culture war issues, but get sops to fat cats. As Frank writes, “The trick never ages; the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. ... Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation.”

 

Now, in the Trump era, my hostility to this thesis has softened somewhat. It’s hard to read this passage, 21 years after publication, and not see the glint of a point shining amid the bile “... the people at the top know what they have to do to stay there, and in a pinch they can easily overlook the sweaty piety of the new Republican masses, the social conservatives who raise their voices in praise of Jesus but cast their votes for Caesar.”

 

After all, we have a president who turned the GOP into a pro-choice party and periodically ends his tweets “Praise be to Allah!” He won saying that “she’s for they/them” while Trump is for you, and then proceeded to put his name on everything he could and dedicate the government to punishing his enemies and building monuments to himself.

 

But I still disagree with Frank because his understanding of “interests” was cartoonishly tendentious and arrogant. The question-begging was off the charts. He took for granted that he understood the interests of voters better than they did, he defined “interests” as narrowly economic, and he assumed that his preferred policies were uncontestably correct and effective.

 

Take his scorn for the pro-life argument. Who is to say that some pro-life voters didn’t actually believe what they professed to believe? Why is that not a valid reason to vote for a candidate? Surely, if we still had slavery in America, he wouldn’t gainsay someone who voted for an abolitionist, even though that abolitionist candidate opposed universal healthcare or a hike in the minimum wage. In a democracy, people decide what their interests are. Defining interests as support for a welfare state that more “generously” transfers wealth to the voter is fine. But saying that’s the only definition of legitimate interest is b.s.

 

But if you take that part out of it, I have to say I have a newfound respect for Frank’s claim. Voters do get their interests wrong. A lot.

 

I can make this point about Trump voters all day long. The Hispanic voters who believed he was just going to deport rapists and murderers, the farmers who thought he would be good for agriculture, the exporters and manufacturers screwed by tariffs, the hawks and the doves, and the friends and enemies of Israel have all been handed high fecal-content sandwiches at various points, and the larder is not close to bare.

 

But let’s look at the anti-Israel craze running through the Democratic Party. Basically, the prevailing demand is that Democratic politicians must say Israel is committing genocide and must commit to withdrawing support for Israel. Some resist, but the pressure is everywhere.

 

Now, I think it’s simply a lie that Israel is committing genocide. But let’s say that it is. How is making opposition to Israel the signature litmus test of the Democratic Party in the self-interest of voters? How does it lower rent in Brooklyn? How does it expand healthcare in Detroit? Answer: It simply doesn’t.

 

The answer to this from the anti-Israel crowd is much like my point about abortion voters. People get to decide what their interests are. For the left, and for much of the right, Israel is now a culture war issue. And left-wingers are just as capable of voting on culture war issues as the benighted right-wing voters Frank mocked.

 

Sure, some will hide behind a tiny fig leaf and say that aid to Israel could be spent on priorities at home. The fact that the numbers involved are a rounding error on a rounding error in terms of the money they want to spend doesn’t matter to them. You could probably fund Medicare for All for 15 minutes with all of the aid to Israel over the last decade combined. Their fig leaf covers their animosity like a postage stamp on Godzilla’s knee—it doesn’t conceal the true scope of the monstrosity at all.

 

But, as J.D. Vance might say, let’s forget about Israel.

 

I spend too much time thinking about horseshoe theory, or at least many readers tell me as much. I’m not the first to note that antisemitism is often the tip of the spear of horseshoe theory. I think that’s true. But why?

 

One easy answer that certainly explains a lot of it is simply bigotry. When a British visitor to the White House wanted advice on how to get in good with Woodrow Wilson, “Colonel” Edward House advised his friend on how to get a sympathetic hearing: “Never begin by arguing. Discover a common hate, exploit it, get the President warmed up and then start on your business.” I can think of several presidents this would work with.

 

Shared hatreds bring people together. Peter Viereck called this phenomenon “trans-tolerance.” When anti-Communism was a unifying cause, anti-Communists would forgive almost any other factor to broaden their coalition.

 

But I think this is only a partial explanation. Antisemitism boils down to a conspiracy theory. And pretty much all conspiracy theories work from the assumption that hidden forces and interests are manipulating events for their benefit. Most forms of Marxism work on this kind of assumption. But so do most forms of populism. The same tendency that ascribed lightning and volcanic eruptions to angry or mischievous gods fuels the assumption that our material circumstances were intended by the Powers That Be.

 

Since long before the name “capitalism” was affixed to notions of the free market, this has been the heart and soul of complaints about capitalism. I refer you to a famous observation by Balzac, if you can forgive the potty mouth: “Behind every great fortune there is a crime.” This summarizes the thinking of centuries of anti-capitalist thought. It’s based on some variation of the assumption that there is a finite amount of wealth in society and therefore when one person gets richer, someone else gets poorer. For those committed to this idea, the protestations and denials of the capitalists are lies in service to their conspiracy against the public good.

 

It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that all defenses of capitalism are to one extent or another based on refuting this mythology. Adam Ferguson, the “father of sociology” who inspired Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek, observed:

 

Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.

 

Ferguson’s “establishments” became known as institutions, which in economics are simply rules. From this insight, Adam Smith developed the idea of the “invisible hand” and Hayek the “spontaneous order.”

 

The problem is that we are wired to believe that social arrangements are intentionally designed. As Michael Polanyi observed, “Wherever we see a well ordered arrangement … we instinctively assume that someone has intentionally placed them in that way.” This tendency leads to what Karl Popper called the “conspiracy theory of society.” This is “the view that an explanation of a social phenomenon consists in the discovery of the men or groups who are interested in the occurrence of this phenomenon.”

 

In short, it’s a cui bono theory. If Group X benefits from something, Group X must have intended it.

 

And we, as a species, like cui bono theories. Robert Nozick called them “hidden hand” theories, and they’re the opposite of “invisible hand” theories, because the whole point of Smith’s invisible hand is that there is no hand; beneficial cooperation operates “as if” guided by an invisible hand.

 

This sort of thinking explains a lot of the horseshoe. The antisemites of the left and right share the same conspiracy theory about how the economy—or Congress—works. But it’s not just the antisemites. Identitarians of the left and right believe that society is a zero-sum competition over scarce political resources. They disagree on which groups should win the competition, but they share the same worldview about how “the system” works—or should work. Donald Trump has declared that oil companies are “price gouging” because he thinks gas prices should be lower. It’s the exact same logic as Elizabeth Warren’s: look at inconvenient facts and assume sinister intentions.

 

This is the gateway drug to big government and what the Catholic Church calls “statolatry”—idolatrous worship of the state. If all the private institutions and private interests are greedy and selfish, then only the state—which looks after the interests of all the people—can be trusted to advance the people’s interests. Take the profit motive out of industry, and the “exploitation” vanishes, according to this fairy tale (tell North Koreans there is no exploitation in their factories and mines). If you think everything in our society is intended by someone, best to give power to the state so it can act in everyone’s interests.

 

We should get back to the problem of voters getting their interests wrong. Their error is not necessarily that they have the wrong interests. Most people vote on the economy in one way or another, and that’s entirely defensible. It’s wholly legitimate to want lower rents or more affordable groceries. So it’s not so much that they get their interests wrong, it’s that they’re wrong about how their interests are best advanced.

 

Rent control doesn’t work. Price controls don’t work. But if you think the economy is a static pie and that someone’s fortune is the intentional cause of your misfortune, then “make the billionaires pay for it!” politics not only makes sense but is morally compelling. Bill de Blasio, the ridiculous and failed former mayor of New York City, campaigned for mayor, and later president, on the slogan, “There’s plenty of money in this world. There’s plenty of money in this country. It’s just in the wrong hands!”

 

It would take me a thousand “news”letters to catalog all of the misery and bloodshed that can be laid at the feet of this idea.

 

Never mind that this idea would be morally wrong even if it were true. But it’s a lie. The “robber barons” of the 19^th century were accused of every manner of evil based on this Balzacian thinking. Now, not every so-called robber baron was an angel, but the truth is that the robber barons weren’t, as a class, robbers—they were givers. Cotton magnate, businessman, and public intellectual Edward Atkinson explained it well. “Through competition among capitalists,” he wrote in Addresses Upon the Labor Question, “capital itself is every year more effective in production, and tends ever to increasing abundance. Under its working the commodities that have been the luxuries of one generation become the comforts of the next and the necessities of the third. ... The plane of what constitutes a comfortable subsistence is constantly rising, and as the years go by greater and greater numbers attain this plane.”

 

Talking to some workers in 1886, Atkinson tried to explain how everyone gained from a free market. Cornelius Vanderbilt, Atkinson observed, made a profit of 14 cents from every barrel of flour shipped over his railroads. His efficiency in transportation lowered the price of flour for consumers. Atkinson asked, “Did Vanderbilt keep any of you down?”

 

If you’re the kind of voter who answers, “Yes,” it’s not that you have your interests wrong, you’re just wrong about how your interests are best served.

Silent Treatment

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, June 26, 2026

 

The vice president shared this thought yesterday with an audience at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, drawing applause at the end.

 

If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. Like, the idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy. And by the way, if you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions, tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration.

 

Even for J.D. Vance, that’s pretty J.D. Vance. Let’s give the devil his due, though: He’s right.

 

Not about the “deep state” supposedly persecuting poor Richard Nixon and Donald Trump. That’s dumb MAGA chum that a man who aspires to lead his party in 2028 is obliged to dump into the political waters. But he’s correct that Watergate wouldn’t have ended the Nixon presidency had it happened today and probably correct that it wouldn’t have made waves in the press for long.

 

The fact that Vance is happy about that makes what he said an almost pristine expression of postliberal psychopathy, capturing in two sentences everything that’s disgusting about him and his movement. Self-serving revisionist history. Gleeful vice-signaling. Flaunting the corruption of the White House in which he serves. Celebrating the brainless partisan tribalism of degenerate Republican voters.

 

We could do Watergate and no one would blink is just the sort of boast you’d expect from someone bent on undermining the moral assumptions on which Western liberalism is built. It’s elegant shorthand for Trumpism’s core conviction, that the less accountability there is in politics—for the right, not for the left—the better.

 

A timely illustration of that philosophy came a few days ago when Pete Hegseth successfully forced one of America’s most admired soldiers into early retirement.

 

If you don’t know who Gen. Chris Donahue is, take a moment to acquaint yourself. The four stars on his chest and the position he momentarily holds as the top Army commander in Europe barely tell the tale. He led Delta Force in battle against ISIS. As commander of the 82^nd Airborne, he was famously the last man out of Afghanistan when U.S. troops withdrew in 2021. In his current role he’s been “leading the service’s effort to take lessons from Ukraine and apply them to future conflict,” per The Atlantic.

 

Not a man the military would lightly part with, one might think. He must have done something awfully bad for our defense secretary, who famously loves warfightin’ warriors, to send him packing.

 

Nope. No one’s sure why Hegseth wanted Donahue out—and that seems to be how the secretary likes it. “The less accountability there is in politics, the better” means he doesn’t owe Americans any explanation for wrecking the military that’s supposed to keep America safe.

 

Trust in Trump.

 

I wonder if Chris Donahue himself has been given the courtesy of an explanation for his de facto dismissal.

 

Maybe not. Retired Navy Adm. Nancy Lacore spent 35 years in the service before being canned by Hegseth and “has said she was given no cause for her firing,” the New York Times noted this week. We can take an educated guess in her case as to why a guy who thinks one of the big problems with the military is that it isn’t more macho might not want her around.

 

What’s confounding about Donahue’s departure is that he seems to be a Hegseth stereotype about bad-ass soldiers come to life. Why would the secretary want to get rid of him?

 

The closest thing on offer to a meritorious reason is that “Hegseth has sought to oust anyone who doesn’t fit his idea of a military leader, including those involved in the calamitous American exit from Kabul under President Biden.” But Donahue bears no blame for that. He “was called in to restore security at Kabul airport” only after the U.S. withdrawal there had turned chaotic. And it was the Marines, not his Army troops, who failed to secure the airport’s Abbey Gate, where a suicide bomber killed 13 American service members.

 

Besides: Given how the last four months have gone, if failure in war is grounds for dismissal from the military, then Pete Hegseth should be the first person out the door.

 

“Donahue would be at least the sixth three- or four-star Army general to depart unexpectedly, out of the roughly 60 generals in the service who hold those ranks,” according to The Atlantic. That includes former Army Chief of Staff Randy George, another esteemed commander who was let go in the thick of conflict with Iran for similarly unexplained reasons. George’s firing offense appears to have been his support for four officers, two of them black and the other two women, whom Hegseth had declined to promote.

 

But whether that’s the real cause is anyone’s guess. The secretary hasn’t explained.

 

On Thursday, another legendary military officer, retired Adm. William McRaven, a former special ops commander, chimed in to observe how deeply weird it is that the service branches are being purged of their most talented leaders without a word of justification from the man in charge of the Pentagon to the public he allegedly serves.

 

“I can tell you from experience that Generals C.Q. Brown, Randy George, Jim Mingus, J.P. McGee, Dave Hodne, Jim Slife, and Joe Berger and Admirals Lisa Franchetti and Jamie Sands were war fighters through and through,” McRaven wrote, naming a few of the brass inexplicably purged by Hegseth. “When crucial decisions regarding the professionalism, effectiveness, or morale of the military are made, the people and their duly elected representatives have a right to know why these decisions were made.”

 

Under liberalism, sure. But not under postliberalism.

 

To postliberals, electing a figure like Trump implicitly amounts to a sort of waiver by voters of their right to accountability from their government. You don’t hand power to a nationalist strongman expecting that he’ll dutifully explain his thinking on policy periodically like some egghead technocrat. You do it because you don’t expect that. You trust him. Your vote is a vote of confidence in him and his instincts.

 

Under postliberalism, the people’s role in government ends on election night. (Unless the Democrats win, of course, in which case rigorous oversight going forward is a must.) The administration couldn’t be any plainer about that. “TRUST IN TRUMP,” the official White House Twitter account declared a few weeks ago amid spiking anxiety over gas prices, going on to quote the president: "Just sit back and relax, it will all work out well in the end - It always does!"

 

That’s your answer as to why Chris Donahue was fired: Trust Trump and Hegseth. It’s what Americans supposedly agreed to do in 2024, so that’s all the explanation to which they’re entitled.

 

The last 16 months are littered with examples of that ethos at work. DOGE ran roughshod over federal agencies with little explanation to Congress or voters about what it was cutting and why. Dozens of outrageous federal pardons were issued without elaboration because the obvious reason for them was indefensible. The “Liberation Day” trade war arrived without warning of how ambitious and disruptive it would be, and later a hot war was launched on Iran with the same problem.

 

Even the Justice Department’s files on Jeffrey Epstein, an obsession of the president’s own base, would still be hidden if not for a revolt in Congress that forced their publication. MAGA fans who turned out in 2024 may have thought they were voting for transparency on Epstein by voting for the president, but that’s not how postliberalism works. To Trump, they were voting to signal their absolute trust in him.

 

If he thought they shouldn’t see the Epstein material, that should have been good enough. No further explanation required.

 

The virtue of arbitrariness.

 

If I had to guess the actual reason that Pete Hegseth wanted Chris Donahue out, I’d bet on some combination of fragility about being out of his depth as defense secretary and the weird grudge he seems to hold against the Army, a recurring target of his purges.

 

The nature of that grudge is unclear, but Hegseth is a former Army man himself and claimed in one of his books that he quit the service in a rage after it identified him as a potential “insider threat” due to one of his sketchier tattoos. He’s also allegedly paranoid about being replaced as defense secretary by Army Secretary Dan Driscoll and has moved to sideline Driscoll by dumping allies of his like Randy George. Maybe Donahue was another ally.

 

Or maybe it simply bugged Hegseth to have someone in the chain of command as universally admired as Donahue is. It’s not just a matter of jealousy (although it probably is that too). An officer as distinguished as Donahue having to answer to a cosplaying yutz who used to host Fox & Friends Weekend only made Hegseth’s yutziness more glaring by contrast to the brass, I’m sure.

 

A more mediocre military will make the secretary’s own mediocrity less conspicuous.

 

Wittingly or not, by refusing to explain Donahue’s dismissal, Hegseth is advancing postliberalism in a few ways. For one thing, he’s conditioning the public—and its representatives—not to expect accountability from their leaders, even in matters as grave as who’s in charge of the military on which Western civilization’s survival depends.

 

As with every other form of recurring Trumpist corruption, outrage at the Pentagon purges has become increasingly hard to sustain due to the sheer enervating familiarity of it. Pay-for-play pardons, rampant White House graft, firing generals like Donahue, all of it without explanation: That’s just how things work now. A country that’s been forced to adapt to authoritarianism expects nothing more from its leadership.

 

That’s why Watergate would be a 12-hour news story in 2026 and why Vance is darned excited about it.

 

McRaven identified another postliberal achievement in his essay about the Pentagon purges:

 

What is particularly concerning about these firings is the effect the dismissals will have on the officer ranks. Throughout my time as a senior officer, I never hesitated to provide my best military advice to the secretary or the president even when that advice ran contrary to their stated position. Never once did I fear that by providing my advice I would be fired or asked to retire early. Not only was it my obligation to be forthcoming, but it was also the expectation of those leaders that I would be brutally candid. Hopefully, that level of honest engagement kept the secretary and the president from making poor military decisions. However, these recent firings raise a real risk that senior officers will be overly cautious about providing their best advice and, therefore, that the chance for military miscalculation will grow dramatically.

 

On the one hand, we needn’t worry too much about the quality of the advice military officers are giving the president. If he wants to do something, he’s going to ignore them regardless.

 

But insofar as firing people like Donahue signals to the rest of the military that no soldier is indispensable if he displeases Hegseth, it surely will influence the willingness of military advisers to say things to Hegseth that displease him. The secretary himself is a notorious yes-man, of course. He “strives to tell the president exactly what he wants to hear,” as one source put it to The Atlantic in April, with others pointing to Hegseth’s insufferable press briefings during the war about all the stuff being blown up as obviously designed to pander to his boss.

 

To postliberals, the great virtue of not telling anyone why Donahue was fired lies in its arbitrariness. If a dissenter in the ranks knows which lines he can and can’t cross, he’ll avoid the latter but might test the former. If he doesn’t know where the lines are, though, he’ll err on the side of biting his tongue in all situations lest he inadvertently step over one. In a sycophantic authoritarian personality cult, in which dissent is seen as disloyal even when it involves telling hard truths, that sort of arbitrariness is essential to enforcing conformity.

 

Not coincidentally, as the last four months have demonstrated in Iran and the last four years have demonstrated in Ukraine, authoritarian personality cults tend not to be very successful at war.

 

Demoralization.

 

There’s one more benefit to postliberalism in Hegseth’s arrogant silence about his purges. It’s demoralizing to the military.

 

That seems counterintuitive. Why would any administration, particularly one as theatrically militaristic as Trump’s, want to hurt morale? To which I would answer: for the same reason postliberals seek to demoralize any institution. The more demoralized it is, the easier it is to co-opt.

 

The last 16 months can be understood as one long exercise in demoralization for the Pentagon. Trump’s second term began with a bombing campaign against the Houthis, which was cut short after it became too costly and is remembered now mainly for the editor of The Atlantic being accidentally added to the Cabinet group chat. The president then began deploying the National Guard to left-wing cities like Los Angeles and Washington, pitting the troops against public opinion and dragging Guardsmen away from home for long stretches. (At last check the force in D.C. was standing watch over the slime in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.)

 

Soon the White House started targeting boats in the Caribbean with airstrikes over alleged drug trafficking, the very first instance of which resulted in a probable war crime. Service members participating in the operation began consulting with attorneys due to the questionable lawfulness of what they were doing. Hegseth, meanwhile, went out of his way to make clear that atrocities would no longer be punished by a military that prioritized toughness and “lethality.”

 

The administration did score some impressive successes, destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities last year and capturing Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro with no loss of American life. But both victories were largely spoiled.

 

Not much has changed for Venezuelans since their leaders began answering to Trump. The Maduro operation was little more than a play to coerce Caracas into forking over some of its oil, turning the U.S. military into muscle in a shakedown. And last year’s successful strikes on Iran were superseded by a strategic debacle this spring that depleted American munitions, damaged American bases, and led to a capitulation over the Strait of Hormuz so humiliating that the president has lately resorted to defending the regime’s right to have ballistic missiles.

 

Through it all, the secretary of defense has behaved like a clown, interrupting his frequent made-for-Instagram workouts to lecture generals about haircuts and physical fitness, take joyrides in military aircraft with Kid Rock, wage culture war on right-wing bugaboos like vaccinations with predictable results—and of course rid the Pentagon of figures like George, Donahue, and others whose authority the rank-and-file might respect more than his own.

 

Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon is like Todd Blanche’s Justice Department, a formerly disciplined and (somewhat) ethical institution from which those who are discomfited by the ethos of postliberalism will be forced out, incentivized to quit, or discouraged from joining in the first place. As the quality of personnel degrades, so will the quality of the institution—but whoever’s left to staff it will accept, whether grudgingly or enthusiastically, that they’re now working for a government that thinks Watergate was either fine or ackshually good.

 

Like any virus, postliberalism will infect everything it touches if it isn’t stopped. In the long run, there’s no such thing as a “partial” kakistocracy.