The Democratic Socialists of America Hate Billionaires — Except Fidel Castro

By John Fund

Sunday, August 23, 2026

 

We all know that the Democratic Socialists of America hate billionaires. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani says they shouldn’t exist. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), the diva of the Democratic Socialists, says: “You can’t earn a billion dollars. . . . You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn that.” But there’s one billionaire that the DSA does celebrate — the late Fidel Castro.

 

On the occasion of what would have been Castro’s 100th birthday this month, the DSA praised him as “an organizer, a fighter, and stalwart symbol of anti-imperialist struggle and self-determination,” while bizarrely denouncing U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio for supposedly committing genocide against the Cuban people.

 

The DSA leadership has refused to walk away from its statement of admiration for Cuba. Former Univision news anchor Jorge Ramos pressed DSA national co-chairs Ashik Siddique and Megan Romer on whether they regard Cuba — as well as Venezuela and Nicaragua — as a dictatorship. Neither would say so. Romer, in fact, claimed that “Cubans have access to their democracy in a way that we do not.” She apparently believes that the Cuban government is more democratic than the American. Siddique invoked the familiar dodge of the U.S. embargo against Cuba, as if that is to blame for Cuba’s problems rather than the fact that Castro was a committed Marxist. Siddique added, “It’s hard for us to judge other countries being dictatorships when we have Donald Trump as president.”

 

This kind of moral equivalency infuriates many moderate Democrats. Florida Representative Jared Moskowitz, who defeated a DSA member in a primary election this month, told CNN that he has many people in his district who escaped socialism during the Mariel boatlift, a mass exodus of refugees from Cuba in 1980. He says they find it inexplicable when they see the DSA “embrace 100 years of Fidel Castro,” or when media commentators such as DSA favorite Hasan Piker dress up as Mao Zedong and praise the Soviet Union.

 

Castro was a master at exploiting Cubans, ruling over them with an iron fist for over half a century while 90 percent of the population lived in extreme poverty. One of his bodyguards, Juan Reinaldo Sánchez, who defected, wrote a tell-all book in 2016, The Double Life of Fidel Castro: My 17 Years as Personal Bodyguard to El Lider Maximo. He detailed Castro’s 29 luxury homes, four yachts, and his private island (Cayo Piedra), which featured a dolphinarium, a floating restaurant, and a helipad.

 

Monica Showalter, who used to report on the world’s wealthiest individuals for Forbes, says that in 2006, the magazine’s research listed Castro’s wealth at $900 million and growing. His extended family now sits on cash reserves of $18 billion, with many of its members living in Europe and the U.S. She expresses contempt for the DSA’s take on billionaires, noting that the organization views uber-entrepreneur Elon Musk as “the bad guy,” while Castro, “who stole and hid his wealth is the hero.”

 

She adds:

 

They don’t hate billionaires at all. They like them if what they do to become billionaires is steal from the public, not serve the public. That is what they like: lionizing bandits while raining hatred on anyone who produces things of value.

 

Is it possible for the DSA to go any farther down the path of depravity to make excuses for dictatorships? Apparently, yes.

 

The Sunday Times reports that five high-ranking activists of the DSA visited China last year on a trip organized by Chinese officials. Among their stops was a parade attended by Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Dee Knight, a DSA member who sits on its China working group, reported that “Beijing buzzed with excitement” during the parade. He has also been an apologist for China’s ruthless treatment of the Uyghur population. Reportedly, after a previous visit to China, he insisted that he “found nothing to support western accusations of slave labour.” According to the Times, Alexander Reid Ross, a professor at Portland State University who studies extremist politics, says of the DSA’s pro-China wing:

 

It looks like what they’re doing is laundering an authoritarian state’s preferred narratives in exchange for VIP treatment. In my view that opens up serious vulnerabilities regarding who they’re working for and to what effect.

 

Is North Korea next on the hit parade of the DSA’s favorite foreign tyrannies?

Vice Cannot Build Virtue

By Nathan Beacom

Monday, August 24, 2026

 

Are there two different moralities for public and private life? For centuries, the mainstream answer in the Western tradition was no. For Aristotle, the Stoics, Cicero, Boethius, and the Scholastics, it was natural to think that those who held authority in a political community should have exceptional virtue. To be virtuous meant not just achieving good outcomes, but achieving them in the right way and for the right reasons.

 

But later, a different answer emerged from the pen of Niccolò Machiavelli. The Italian diplomat reinvented virtue, not as a nobility of soul expressed in justice, prudence, and self-control, but as the ability to win, hold, and exercise power. To do this well, he wrote, the leader must have a flexible disposition and be willing to do evil in service of the state.

 

Machiavelli was writing in 1532. But in a fascinating recent conversation at the New York Times, this debate played out again, this time with journalist Ezra Klein siding with the classical mainstream and activist Christopher Rufo appearing to take a more of the secular-modern approach. Because Rufo professes—both to Klein and in general—to be building a culture of virtue in America, Klein pressed him on the apparent viciousness of the leaders of Rufo’s political movement. “I guess one thing I think about, when I think about Donald Trump and virtue, is corruption … The number was about $4 billion in this term,” Klein said. “It doesn’t look virtuous.”

 

In response, Rufo appealed to Machiavelli. “Politics is always a conversation between virtue and virtù,” he said. Here, virtù refers to Machiavelli’s conception of political excellence, defined not by moral rectitude, but by an “ends justify the means” approach to gaining and wielding power. Rufo also dismissed academics who want political practitioners to use “pure means” to reach “pure ends” as laughably naïve.

 

This “realistic” approach to politics, which would allow us to look past right and wrong in our pursuit of power, is a race to the bottom. And while Rufo himself would balk at such a philosophy taken to its extreme (he is willing to acknowledge and push back on some of the problems with his own side when pressed by Klein), there are those in political life who are willing to go further than he. The more we excuse bad behavior to achieve our own ends, the more we justify the bad behavior of others. Thus we foster an environment where the public competes to outdo one another, not in virtue, but in vice.  

 

***

 

Rufo is not alone in his espousal of Machiavelli. Patrick Deneen, one of the most prominent conservative intellectuals in America today, has written (in his book Regime Change) that we must “use Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends.” The problem is that, almost by definition, Aristotelian ends are inseparable from Aristotelian means. Virtue ethics is characterized by a belief that, in order for an action to be good, it must be good the whole way round. As Aristotle famously pointed out in the Nicomachean Ethics, a virtuous act is one that is noble in its object, intention, and execution. You cannot, for Aristotle, do something that is intrinsically wrong, even for the sake of something good. Aquinas followed the philosopher in this opinion, too: “An evil action cannot be justified by reference to a good intention.”

 

Suppose that, in order to start a public conversation on a topic you consider important and insufficiently discussed, you felt it was necessary to invent a salacious story in order to rile up public passions. Suppose you made up a story that immigrants were stealing and eating people’s pets in order to start a conversation on immigration. For a virtue ethicist, a good end and a good intention (supposing, for the sake of argument, that prompting a public discussion of border security is the good being aimed at) cannot justify an act that is in itself bad, in this case the act of lying and the act of slander.

 

Cicero, in his great work De Officiis, had harsh words for those who imagined that political expedience could be disconnected from moral standards. “Bad men,” the Roman statesman wrote, “are accustomed, in considering any question, to weigh the morally right against what they think is expedient; good men are not.” For a good man, there is no question of the politically expedient trumping the morally right. For Cicero, the answer is easy: “It is the error of men who are not strictly upright to seize upon something that seems to be expedient and straightway to dissociate that from the question of moral right. … Away, then, with questioners of this sort for their whole tribe is wicked and ungodly.”

 

We sometimes seem to think that we can deceive, massage the truth, manipulate, propagandize, tolerate corruption, and sow division so long as, at the end of the day, we win political influence and push our policies through. But you can see how this becomes a race to the bottom indeed, as competing factions with competing ends concur only on the underhanded means they will use to achieve victory. One side’s lowering of moral standards lowers the bar for the other. A culture of cynicism develops in which everyone assumes that other actors are acting in bad faith and, as a result, makes excuses for their own bad faith.

 

You can say, if you like, that this is just the nature of politics, and nobody likes to see how the sausage gets made. Yes, politics involves policy compromise, it involves accepting imperfection, and it involves strategic thinking. But to say that this compromise extends to the moral character of our means is to create a crooked culture in which only the most cynical win. Policy compromise is necessary. Moral compromise undermines a republic.

 

Republican government relies on the self-government of citizens and leaders, because it is a form of rule in which the citizens have a wide latitude of freedom and a voice in the direction of their own community. Montesquieu, one of the key influences on America’s founding, put it this way in his Spirit of the Laws: “There is no great share of virtue necessary to support a monarchical or despotic government: the force of laws, in one, and the prince’s arm, in the other, are sufficient to direct and maintain the whole: but, in a popular state, one spring more is necessary, namely, virtue. When virtue is banished, ambition invades the minds of those who are disposed to receive it, and avarice possesses the whole community.”

 

John Adams, in a letter to his friend Mercy Otis Warren in 1776, put the relationship between public and private virtue in a republic plainly: “Public Virtue cannot exist in a Nation without private, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics.” Public and private virtue are not severable; they are manifestations of one and the same moral character. One cannot be an Aristotelian at home and a Machiavellian in the office.

 

***

 

Rufo further justifies support for immoral leaders by explaining that politicians are “not your priests. They are kind of blunt instruments”—the character of a political leader does not matter; what matters is whether you can use him to advance your agenda. This manner of thinking seems to have become more common. Voters have become far more tolerant of breaches of public trust and bad character.

 

But again, this cuts against the grain of the classical tradition. It struck Aristotle as common sense that a ruler needs to be a person of good character. “If the ruler is not temperate and just, how will he rule well?” he wrote. Elsewhere, he said that “the statesman, the man who controls or is competent to control … the administration of the commonwealth, must essentially also be a good man.”   

 

Here again, Cicero is helpful. In his Laws, he held that the morals of the people were most influenced by the example of those who lead them.

 

My opinion is, that the manners of mankind change with those of their superiors. Hence, great men of a vicious life are doubly pernicious to the state, as being not only guilty of immoral practices themselves, but likewise of spreading them far and wide among their fellow-citizens. The mischief they do, is owing not only to their being debauched themselves, but also to their debauching a crowd of their foolish imitators. In a word, they do more harm by their example than by the crimes they commit.

 

The crowning moral tradition of the East, Confucianism, holds a similar view. The book of Mengzi’s sayings and doings begins with the philosopher reproving a king for his obsession with profit, on account of the fact that his example will lead everyone in the kingdom to the same vice, ending in “total usurpation.”

 

***

 

William Wordsworth, after the death of Lord Nelson in 1805, composed a famous poem describing his vision of the ideal leader: “Character of the Happy Warrior.” Among the qualities of the happy warrior are a steadiness in the face of struggle, endurance under suffering, and a sympathy for those whom he leads.  

 

But there is another quality essential to good activity in public life: a refusal to use bad means for the sake of good ends. Wordsworth had been chastened by his observations of the French Revolution. As a political idealist, he had thrilled in 1789 at the cry of “liberty, equality, and fraternity,” but he soon was disillusioned as he watched the supposed heroes of liberty and virtue, in mobs and kangaroo courts, massacring innocent people. The ancien régime was corrupt and unjust, yes, but the medicine had become worse than the disease.

 

What Wordsworth observed in his poem was that much of the world’s evil comes from men who consider themselves to be pursuing good ends. A good statesman, a happy warrior, does not make this mistake. He will not advance by shady means, he will not win the public by deceiving them, he will not grovel before evil men for the sake of influence and power. “He labors good on good to fix, and owes/ To virtue every triumph that he knows.”

 

When virtuous policies are implemented through wicked stratagems and by bad people, those policies themselves are discredited. We might think, for example, of the manner in which the personal and political vice of Joseph McCarthy did more to discredit reasonable concerns about Soviet influence in America than to address them.

 

A lasting culture of virtue cannot be built on unvirtuous means. A perception of hypocrisy and cynicism reigns among the public with regard to their political leaders when it is discovered that they have lied, twisted the truth, or cheated the system. Vice does not propagate virtue; it propagates further vice.

 

More than this, our souls, our characters, are not left untouched when we give up virtue for Machiavellian virtù. The great historian Will Durant summarized virtue ethics with the memorable phrase: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” We cannot expect that if in politics we are hateful, scornful, rude, dishonest, equivocating, and temporizing, we will remain kind, generous, honest, courteous, and courageous in our personal life. We cannot live long as both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

 

This is not an idyllic demand for a utopia of flawless morality. There is no world in which the ship of state is manned top to bottom with perfect saints—all the more reason why the hands at the helm and at the watch should be people of integrity, all the more reason why officers should set an example of virtue for the humblest deckhand to follow.

 

The health of our polity, of our republic, will depend upon those who are willing to be called naïve, people who will not do a thing they think is wrong for the sake of political victory. Men and women who will not give up their integrity are like a ballast by which the ship of state keeps an even keel. Without them, the Scylla of civil strife or the Charybdis of tyranny will bring a republic to its end.

Democrats Take Aim at the Civil Rights Act

By Seth Mandel

Wednesday, August 19, 2026

 

Last year, as the Trump administration continued its investigations into anti-Semitism at elite universities, several civil-rights attorneys at the Department of Justice were temporarily transferred to the agency running the anti-Semitism probe to help with the workload. One of those was Haley Van Erem.

 

The events that followed produced lessons in three problems that have held back the government’s attempts to restore the civil rights of America’s Jewish college students:

 

1. The ideological opposition to combating anti-Semitism among career bureaucrats.

 

2. Those same bureaucrats’ resentment at being told to apply civil-rights law, specifically Title VI, to Jews.

 

3. The Trump administration’s aversion to process norms.

 

Van Erem quit and has now filed a “whistleblower” complaint that appears aimed at derailing the application of civil-rights law to Jews, even as she perfunctorily denounces anti-Semitism.

 

Van Erem contends that the administration began the investigation already believing the colleges violated Jewish students’ civil rights. That’s probably true: by the time Van Erem grudgingly joined the inquiry, civil-rights violations had been happening in full view of the public. These included university employees discriminating against Israeli students on the basis of national origin, mobs physically blocking Jewish students from accessing areas of campus, and the uneven application of university codes of conduct to the detriment of Jews.

 

Van Erem also complains that she was given overly strict deadlines that prevented her from dragging out the process to her satisfaction, and that she was often overruled by her superiors—though her complaint actually paints a picture of her bosses being surprisingly receptive and willing to incorporate the objections of an employee who made clear that she didn’t want to be there. Last, Van Erem describes an administration that would launch investigations without evidence of wrongdoing, but because of the sheer volume of anti-Jewish agitation permitted on these campuses, this particular claim is so ridiculous and self-discrediting as to make one question whether Van Erem is engaging in some form of interpretive performance art.

 

The Trump administration’s aversion to process norms is real, but Van Erem vastly inflates their importance because her motive seems to be to fatally undermine federal application of Title VI processes to Jews. Therefore, the occasional example of genuinely inappropriate interference in education—Trump’s team proposing external curriculum monitors at Harvard, for example—must be exaggerated into something that rises to the level of actionable legal reprisals, such as “gross mismanagement, by departing from investigative sequencing and quality controls as required by regulation.”

 

That last point, the desire to put in legal jeopardy those who investigated anti-Semitism at top universities, is key to understanding this whole event.

 

Like clockwork, Jamie Raskin, the Maryland congressman and ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, took the baton handed to him by Van Erem and promised retribution for Trump officials. He called the anti-Semitism investigations a “frame-up operation” and threatened to push changes to the Civil Rights Act itself.

 

Raskin’s promised lawfare against federal employees involved in strengthening the enforcement of civil-rights law is no doubt the goal of complaints like those voiced by Van Erem. Raskin, further, is the perfect receptacle for these complaints. His Jewishness provides cover for Democrats who are, as Raskin presumably is, intent on dismantling federal protections for Jews and insulating the Democratic Party from accountability for its exploding anti-Semitism.

 

Raskin is also a co-sponsor of legislation that would enforce a partial arms embargo against Israel. He has fought anti-Semitism-related legislation and has been critical of Israel’s response to the October 7 massacre since the beginning of the Hamas-instigated war.

 

Raskin also demanded testimony from Harmeet Dhillon, the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, alleging that it was a “a distinct possibility” that Dhillon “deliberately orchestrated a scheme to attack universities, their faculties, and their administrators for political purposes while defrauding the American people and the courts.”

 

If the Democrats, as expected, win control of the House in the midterms, they are vowing to use this power to make government officials pay, and pay dearly, for daring to investigate universities’ discrimination against Jewish students. In the past, this would have struck most observers as a bizarre choice of priorities. In 2026, it’s what the public has come to expect from Raskin and company.

The Plight of America’s Overextended Carrier Fleet

By Stephen Walsh

Monday, August 24, 2026

 

Ten aviators killed or missing, six imprisoned, four enlisted sailors lost in mishaps, and 20 aircraft destroyed: That was the price paid by the USS Midway during history’s longest aircraft carrier deployment, from April 1972 to March 1973. Imagine if the USS Abraham Lincoln, which left the Middle East this week after more than 270 days at sea, returned without two of its four fighter squadrons. It is an unfathomable thought.

 

But the Lincoln is paying a different price born from an overreliance on aircraft carriers for deterrence and intractable combat. Even at the Vietnam War’s climax, Midway entered port about 10 times during that deployment, allowing stressed crews to briefly escape the ship before resuming their daily brushes with death. No such luck for the Lincoln. The United States’ supply of aircraft carriers cannot satisfy the demand imposed upon them as the most visible symbols of U.S. commitment. Only systemic reforms or major capacity expansion can solve the 11-ship carrier fleet’s supply-and-demand problem.

 

A friend aboard the Lincoln estimated that sailors received seven hours of liberty in Guam last December, and another 18 in Oman in July, for approximately 25 hours of liberty over 285 days at sea. This is the newest manifestation of a trend that has been building for years and is a hell of the Defense Department’s own making.

 

The idea that sending Lincoln to port outside the Middle East sometime over the last few months would have meaningfully diminished U.S. strength likely overstates the dependence of combat operations on carriers. The U.S. has surged massive power to the Middle East. Through March and April, the U.S. Air Force, with help from the Lincoln and Gerald R. Ford strike groups, dismantled Iranian air defenses before settling into familiar “therapeutic bombing” wrapped in more aggressive language and deterrent posturing over the summer. In April a third carrier, USS George H.W. Bush, joined the campaign. That is a huge force for trading limited blows.

 

The Ford was sent home in May after its own 11-month cruise, prompting concerns that reduced firepower would weaken negotiations, despite the presence of the Air Force, a naval surface armada, and two other carriers. The Lincoln was prevented from leaving CENTCOM for rest and resupply for similar reasons. Aircraft carriers seem to be the only palatable symbols of U.S. military resolve.

 

This problem didn’t start and won’t end with the Lincoln. Carriers were extended for deterrence in the Middle East and Europe, and combat operations in Somalia, Yemen, and Venezuela in the decade leading to Operation Epic Fury. Lincoln’s logistical issues were extreme, but the reasons for the extension were common, despite the war. The U.S. Navy wielded 16 attack carriers and numerous supporting antisubmarine carriers in Vietnam. But today, as Rear Adm. Thomas Moore famously said in 2013, “We’re an 11-carrier Navy in a 15-carrier world.” Reducing demand through improved strategic discipline or more creative messaging seems unlikely, and the effects of constant extensions are well documented.

 

 

Understanding fleet overcommitment requires a command structure crash course. The 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act solidified two separate chains of command. Service chiefs, including the chief of naval operations, develop and equip their branches. They advise the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff but can’t command operations. The geographic combatant commanders (CoComs) lead the uniformed operational chain of command, responsible for seven territorial regions. Carriers deployed to the Middle East are under the control of CENTCOM’s commander, tasked with theater objectives over force development. The Pentagon’s Global Force Management process reconciles CoCom requests and service training needs with the secretary of defense as arbiter.

 

The Optimized Fleet Response Plan (OFRP) prescribes seven-month cruises in a 36-month cycle meant to avoid overtaxing ships. Combatant commaders must ask the defense secretary if they want to exceed this length by 30 days or more. Extensions and “double pumps”—deploying twice within an OFRP cycle—are used to maximize ship availability. Lincoln’s deployment is the second of a “double pump.” It has spent about 14 of the last 27 months deployed, well beyond OFRP’s policy of seven to eight months every 36.

 

The OFRP was implemented in 2014, seeking to restore fleet health as leaders prioritized competition with China in the mid-2010s. The plan worked initially, with just one of nine deployments between 2016 and 2018 extended. But the fleet was too small to sustain seven-month cruises.

 

The first Trump administration extended only three of 12 boats but relied on double pumps with minimal port visits to overcome COVID-19, maintenance problems, and the president’s fixation with Iran. The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 2020-21 double pump established the punishing precedent that a carrier can operate without port calls. The Lincoln made headlines in 2019 when its deployment was extended to nearly 300 days to deter an "imminent threat” from Iran, despite skepticism that its presence actually affected that country’s behavior. The Nimitz was extended in January 2021 after being ordered home, when its exit provoked negative media coverage like Ford’s in 2026. Iran’s continuing intransigence after being pummeled by carriers makes one wonder if all this was worthwhile.

 

The Biden administration initially kept carriers out of the Middle East but extended the USS Harry S. Truman in the Mediterranean when Russia invaded Ukraine, despite the land-based theater’s ample Army and Air Force presence. Officials argued that carriers were reassuring to allies, but the mission’s abandonment after Hamas attacked Israel in 2023 suggests it wasn’t really necessary.

 

Carriers returned to CENTCOM for “the most intense naval combat since World War II” in the Red Sea. Crews shot down drones, flew large strikes into Yemen, and came under rocket and cruise missile attack. Six of seven participating carriers were extended.

 

Only two carriers deploying from the continental U.S. have returned on time without being double-pumped since 2019: the USS Carl Vinson in 2022 and the USS Nimitz in 2023, both of which operated in the Pacific without being redirected to the Middle East. The USS George H.W. Bush is the only ship of the second Trump administration to have avoided extension so far, but it has been at sea for just four months. Even if the Iran War ends tomorrow, extensions will likely continue.

 

U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (PACOM) has gotten the worst of this deal. Each West Coast carrier like the Lincoln in CENTCOM is one fewer that can be used for Asian partner engagement and deterrence of China. The USS George Washington, the Japan-based carrier intended for crisis response in the Pacific, relieved the Lincoln in the Middle East. This was highly unusual and signaled PACOM’s descent down the priority list.

 

The Navy also bears the costs of carrier overuse as it pivots itself for war against China. A potential fight over Taiwan in 2027 has provided the service’s modus vivendi for years. Naval aviation and the carrier force are trapped between the war they want and the one they’re stuck with. The service absorbs the maintenance costs, retention problems, and material diminishment inflicted by campaigns it can’t control.

 

A larger fleet can expand supply, or systemic reform can reduce demand. Either way, resolution requires legislative intervention. Both Republican and Democratic administrations overuse carriers for strategic messaging, and attempted strategic pivots have been ineffective. As retired Adm. James Foggo wrote in U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, “Navy attempts to deny [requests for forces] diplomatically and internally have failed.”

 

Fleet expansion is a popular cause and would increase supply. But there are three problems with the Navy’s shipbuilding plan. First, the Navy has an unfortunate track record of over-cost or failed acquisitions through the last several decades. It has, according to the Congressional Budget Office, consistently underestimated shipbuilding costs. Second, U.S. shipyards suffer from low manning and production, often struggling to complete major projects.

 

Third, the plan does not call for increasing the number of active carriers. As new Ford-class ships enter service, they will replace aging Nimitz-class boats. The total number of warships would increase but the carrier fleet would still be taxed unless other types of ships are used for strategic messaging—a prerogative of the executive branch. If senior leaders will only accept carriers as signals of U.S. strength, regardless of the other assets present, then the current shipbuilding plan won’t help.

 

Goldwater-Nichols Act reform could reduce demand by increasing services’ power and reducing that of the combatant commands. The act corrected serious problems with military disunity and was a major legislative victory, but detractors have argued it took too much influence away from the individual services, disrupted acquisitions processes, and produced strategic incoherence. Jim Thomas, former vice president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, has been a leading voice on this front. He proposed in 2015 congressional testimony that a general staff could act as the military’s “global brain” to ensure forces are allocated more sensibly. He argued, “there is no central military entity today that has the authority to prioritize efforts across regions,” a capability critical to Gen. George Marshall’s successful World War II mantra: “Win in Europe, hold the Pacific.”

 

But there are serious civil-military relations concerns with a general staff, which was resisted in 1986 as an affront to civilian control of the military. The Hudson Institute’s Bryan McGrath argued in 2022 that tension between services and combatant commands is inherent in the constitutional order. Civilian control of the military, it follows, guarantees that short-term political objectives affect military deployments. “Assuming that the process can either account for or eliminate politics,” he admonished, “represents the conceit of the technocrat.”

 

Systemic reform that preserves the American character would be a generational undertaking. James Locher, an architect of the original legislation, has expressed openness to reform but warns that “the intellectual and political challenges of formulating this legislation will be staggering.” Likewise, fleet expansion requires massive taxpayer investment and congressional commitment. But carriers will continue as overextended symbols of fraying American power without congressional intervention.

 

The Lincoln’s journey has been terribly difficult but at least its crew left the Middle East safely. An F/A-18 Super Hornet was captured on video narrowly avoiding a surface-to-air missile last spring. Thankfully, that pilot did not pay the price that Midway’s lost aviators did. But if naval aviators must be on the line dodging missiles, they at least deserve a few port calls.

A Swedish Palestinian Lawmaker Sets an Example for the West

By Seth Mandel

Thursday, August 20, 2026

 

Simona Mohamsson, leader of Sweden’s Liberal Party, was born in Germany to a Palestinian father and Lebanese mother, both Muslim. On the debate stage Monday night, Mohamsson wore a Star of David necklace.

 

“I am the minister for integration, but first and foremost I am wearing this star to show solidarity with Sweden’s Jews,” the 31-year-old said. “Today, all party leaders must pledge that they stand behind the security that Sweden’s Jews deserve, and ensure that they keep their own parties clean. That is what is at stake. There are children today who do not dare to live out an important part of their identity because antisemitism is being used to terrorize an important minority in Sweden.”

 

In one fell swoop, Mohamsson schooled nearly the entire Western world.

 

Since October 7, 2023, even the most generous approaches to anti-Semitism from left-of-center politicians can best be summed up in Joe Biden’s 2024 convention speech, in which he said that the Hamasnik demonstrators outside the hall “have a point.” Thus, even those who didn’t fully sympathize with the terrorist sympathizers have held to the following concept: Western anti-Semitism, while bad, cannot be disentangled from the State of Israel’s actions.

 

It’s an easy trap to fall into, to tell oneself that people are upset at what they are being told about a faraway conflict and they just “take it too far,” or some similar excuse. “You can criticize Israel’s actions without resorting to anti-Semitic caricatures,” responsible adults will say, as if that is some novel breakthrough in civility.

 

And of course it’s true. But when addressing anti-Semitic violence aimed at Jews around the world, why pretend it has anything to do with Israel at all? Those who attack Jews on the streets, those who harass Jewish children, those who firebomb synagogues—these people are not making political statements about Israel. They are not making any statement at all. They are just trying to harm Jews.

 

Israel is not part of the conversation unless you make it part of the conversation. And if that’s what you do, then you are reacting to anti-Semitism by looking for a reason people might hate Jews. The fact is, it doesn’t matter a whit what someone’s post-hoc justification or pretext for racial violence might be.

 

If someone attacks Jewish children in the street, I don’t care what they’re angry about. It’s entirely irrelevant. Every single instance of anti-Semitism is inexcusable.

 

That’s what Mohamsson understands. A government has an obligation to its citizens, period.

 

We should also raise our own standards. Yes, a Palestinian should be expected to follow Mohamsson’s example. The expectation that Arabs, especially those from Palestinian backgrounds, ought to be forgiven for withholding empathy from Jews because of a conflict in Israel is deeply corrosive to society and, frankly, insulting to Palestinians.

 

Two other aspects of this act of solidarity are noteworthy. First, the Liberal Party is polling poorly, and rather than seeking to raise its popularity by bending the knee to the populist mob, it is showing spine and adhering to its principles.

 

Second, Mohamsson is also a human-rights activist. The self-proclaimed human-rights community is rarely concerned with human rights; too often they are Israel-obsessed anti-Zionist activists. It is nice to see an actual-human rights activist who advocates for human rights.

 

Sweden’s Left Party, according to a recent investigation, is chock-full of those who have expressed support for terrorists, denied the Holocaust, or made statements in support of the October 7 attacks. Many of the party’s parliamentarians also wrote a letter of support to convicted Palestinian terrorists.

 

Ebba Busch, leader of the Christian Democratic Party, echoed Mohamsson’s gesture, according to a translation from Israel Hayom’s Hebrew edition: “There is nothing Swedish about a five-year-old girl in Gothenburg, who walks around wearing the Star of David that Simona is wearing today, deserving to hear threats and hatred and even [threats] to die.”

 

May we one day live in a world in which such stories aren’t newsworthy.

Why 2026 Could Be a Bigger Blue Wave Than 2018

By John McCormack

Monday, August 24, 2026

 

If the bottom falls out for Republicans in November and they lose control of the Senate, a big reason will be that President Donald Trump’s approval rating on the economy is far worse now than it was during the midterm elections of Trump’s first term.

 

Back in 2018, even as Trump’s overall approval rating was in the low 40s, voters consistently gave him a net-positive approval rating on the economy: His economic approval rating sat at or above 50 percent, according to Gallup. But in 2026, Trump’s overall approval rating has sunk to the high 30s, and his rating on the economy is significantly worse than his overall rating. American voters disapprove of his handling of the economy by nearly 2 to 1.

 

Earlier this month, a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed Democrats with a slight edge over Republicans on the economy (37 percent to 36 percent) for the first time since 2017. Fox News polling this year has similarly found Democrats opening up an advantage over Republicans for the first time since 2010—with the Democratic advantage at 9 points in July.

 

David Wasserman, elections analyst for The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, noted that the groups in which the decline in support for Trump has been most pronounced are independents, Hispanic voters, and white voters without a college degree. “We’ve seen bigger declines in Trump support and Republican support among those groups because they’re where he made the biggest strides and therefore had the most ground to fall,” Wasserman told The Dispatch. “These are voters who rehired Trump to the White House because they were nostalgic for what things cost during his first term, but are inclined to either sit out the election or vote for a Democrat.”

 

“I would be betting my life it’s going to be worse than 2018,” one GOP campaign strategist told The Dispatch. The strategist pointed to private campaign research showing that white women without a college degree, a demographic that backed Trump by a wide margin in 2024, had turned against the president and the GOP, and that shift is “almost entirely economically driven. Basically these are women to whom Trump offered an alternative economic vision that was appealing to them, and none of that stuff has, from their perspective, panned out.”

 

The alternative economic vision that Trump campaigned on in 2024 wasn’t that the rate of inflation would merely slow relative to the Biden presidency—but that prices would actually drop if Trump was elected. “Prices will come down. You just watch. They’ll come down and they’ll come down fast. Not only with insurance, with everything,” Trump said at an August 2024 rally in North Carolina. “We intend to slash [energy and electricity] prices by half within 12 months, at a maximum 18 months.”

 

Of course, prices continued to increase during Trump’s second term. Over the past 12 months, overall inflation was a little over 3 percent—north of the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target—and energy inflation was 15 percent.

 

“People really, really don’t like inflation,” Michael Strain, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, told The Dispatch. “That resolves a lot of the mysteries of trying to interpret what’s happening with people’s perceptions of the economy.”

 

Voters aren’t merely upset that inflation is 3 percent rather than 2 percent over the past year—they remember overall prices being 30 percent lower back in 2020. Trump’s approval rating on inflation is shy of 26 percent, according to Nate Silver’s average of polls.

 

But Trump isn’t simply the victim of setting expectations too high, he’s also the victim of self-inflicted political wounds. His tariffs remain deeply unpopular: Only 33 percent of voters approve of Trump’s trade policy, with 60 percent disapproving, according to an average of polls compiled by Silver. A YouGov poll from July found 72 percent of Americans saying that Trump’s tariffs had increased prices.

 

“A lot of the stuff you buy at the grocery store is imported, and a lot of the stuff you buy at retail stores is imported,” Strain said. Beef prices, for example, jumped nearly 20 percent since Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs in April 2025. Trump effectively conceded his tariff policies have raised prices on Americans when he announced on Friday that he would allow 300,000 metric tons of beef to be imported over the next three months not subject to higher “out of quota” tariffs (and claimed importers pledged to sell the beef for 25 percent below current market prices).

 

Strain added that “whatever the merits of the war in Iran are, just analytically speaking, that has led to higher inflation rates at the gas pump.” Gas prices are now $1 per gallon more expensive than they were a year ago.

 

Mortgage rates, now hovering under 7 percent, put a house purchase out of reach for many Americans, and Trump has done little to reassure bond markets that drive those rates. “I think his fiscal policy has put upward pressure on the rate of inflation by running huge deficits,” Strain said. Still, he noted that in many other respects the economy remains “very strong” like it was in 2018, with the unemployment rate now around 4 percent. “The difference really is inflation,” Strain said.

 

Voters’ perception of the economy is just one important factor among several that will affect the outcomes in November. If the economy were the only thing voters cared about, after all, Democrats wouldn’t have swept to power in the House in 2018.

 

But the GOP’s strength on the economy in 2018 is one reason they were able to oust a Democratic incumbent in one purple state (Trump had carried Florida by just a point back in 2016) in addition to flipping three deep-red states (Indiana, Missouri, and North Dakota) while losing seats in two purple states (Nevada and Arizona).

 

In 2026, Democrats need to gain four seats on net to take control of the Senate, which will require them to flip seats in at least two states that Trump won by double digits (Texas, Iowa, Alaska, and Ohio) in 2024. Democrats are heavily favored to flip North Carolina, while Maine, where incumbent Republican Susan Collins has defied gravity, remains a tossup. Democrats are only playing defense in Michigan, where far-left Democrat Abdul El-Sayed’s nomination has kept the race competitive.

 

“People underestimate just how red Texas, Ohio, Iowa, Alaska are,” Sean Trende, elections analyst at RealClear Politics, told The Dispatch. “These are states that are redder than New Jersey and Virginia are blue.” (In 2024, Trump lost those two blue states by about 6 points while carrying the four red states by 11 to 14 points.) But even with that tough map, Trende still thinks Democrats have roughly a 2-in-5 chance of taking control of the Senate, while Silver’s model gives Senate Democrats closer to a 3-in-5 chance. “We both agree that it could easily happen,” Trende said of Silver’s model. “He thinks it’s a little easier than I do.”

 

Meanwhile, in the House, “a really great night for Democrats would be getting back to the same seat count they ended up at in 2018 at 235,” said Wasserman, who noted that gerrymandering and other factors have reduced the number of swing districts. “That’s harder to do this cycle because they’d have to reach deeper into Trump territory. Whereas in 2018, Democrats were able to win a variety of districts that Trump carried by mid-single digits in 2016, this time around, Democrats would need to win some double-digit Trump seats to get to that same result.”

 

But with Trump’s overall approval rating in the high 30s and his economic approval rating in the low 30s, there’s a decent chance they’ll do just that in November—especially if voters follow the request Trump made at a rally on Friday night to “pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot.”

The Self-Destructive Opposition to Data Centers

National Review Online

Monday, August 24, 2026

 

Anti-data-center sentiment is sweeping the nation, and, this being an election year, politicians of both parties are jumping to indulge it. In blue New York, Governor Kathy Hochul has signed an executive order that enacts the country’s first moratorium on “hyperscaler” installations. In purple Pennsylvania, Governor Josh Shapiro has reversed his previously bullish position on data centers, taken to describing their developers as “bullies” and “speculators,” and established what he proudly describes as the “strictest guardrails in the nation.” In red Texas, Governor Greg Abbott has halted all approvals for new data centers, pending the results of a comprehensive state audit that will take months to complete. By the end of the year, one would expect skepticism — if not hostility — to be the default mode in all 50 states.

 

The politics surrounding data centers have certainly changed. A year ago, most Americans were ambivalent on the question. Today, polls consistently show that a supermajority of voters is opposed to the construction of new facilities near their homes and, more broadly, that the very term “data center” has become toxic. The reasons for this toxicity vary — some respondents cite water usage, others electricity prices, environmental concerns, and noise pollution — but the message does not. Per Gallup, only 7 percent of Americans “strongly favor” the construction of a data center in their area.

 

Not all of these concerns are unfounded. There is, for example, no reason that taxpayers should provide subsidies to the corporations that are building data centers, or that eminent domain should be used. And while most of the concerns about noise or pollution are unfounded, it is entirely legitimate for the citizenry to demand sensible zoning regulations in the same manner as it would elsewhere. Still, the sheer scale of the opposition — and the speed with which it has coalesced — is redolent of a moral panic akin to those that attended the introduction of nuclear power or fracking or 5G. Bluntly put, the vast majority of the sensationalist claims that are made about data centers are nonsense. They do not use a notable amount of water. They do not tend to increase the cost of electricity. They are not unusually noisy. Indeed, compared with almost any other industrial project, they are astonishingly clean.

 

As has occasionally been his wont, President Trump seems to be the only politician in the United States who is wholly unmoved by these broader trends. Asked recently about the issue, Trump said, “If I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state, and I had a chance to get a big plant in, an AI plant or a data center, I would absolutely want it because the jobs are enormous, and the money paid, the taxes paid, are just enormous.” Trump added, “It’s going to create success. It’s going to create tremendous innovation medically.”

 

On PBS, James Henson, the director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, described these words as “tone-deaf.” And perhaps they are. But politics is about more than merely following the crowd, and when Trump insists that “if you don’t take it, you’re going to be left behind because there are plenty of places that want it,” he is undoubtedly correct. The internet — and, more specifically, artificial intelligence — are here to stay. As such, the question is not whether more data centers will be built, but where. The answer to that question can be, “In America, by Americans.” It can be, “In China, by the Chinese.” It can even be, “In space.” But make no mistake, there will be an answer. At the risk of also being “tone-deaf,” we believe that the answer ought to be, “In America, built by Americans, for Americans, with the jobs, economic benefits, and tax revenues benefiting Americans.”

 

Since its founding, America has been a place where people build. We approve of this, and we would like to see the United States own this technological revolution in the same way as it has owned so many others — from mass-produced automobiles in the 1910s, to commercial radio in the 1920s, passenger aviation in the 1930s, integrated circuits in the 1950s, lunar exploration in the 1960s, personal computing in the 1970s, GPS in the 1980s, the internet in the 1990s, smartphones and cloud computing in the 2000s, and fracking in the 2010s. There are no obvious historical examples of Americans rejecting a new development and benefiting from that rejection. The AI build-out is unlikely to serve as an exception to that rule.