Fractured Realities

By Jesse Singal

Tuesday, October 13, 2026

 

“Seven men drugged and gang raped a 20-year-old woman,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently. She was giving a speech in Ithaca, New York, and the subject, naturally, was the scandal at Cornell University centering on the alleged sexual assaults of a woman named “Jane Doe.” (Her name has been made public but she, like the men she has accused, has received death threats, so I’m not going to use it.)

 

Ocasio-Cortez’s description of what happened was as lurid as it was terrifying. “They lured her into a fraternity house,” she said. “They drugged her with ketamine. They then posted to a group chat that she was incapacitated, and seven men took turns gang raping her for seven hours.”

 

As Fox News and others subsequently pointed out, Ocasio-Cortez’s description of what happened isn’t true—at least not if you believe Doe herself. The legal complaint she filed, thrusting her case into the national spotlight, paints an extremely disturbing picture, but one that’s significantly more complex than Ocasio-Cortez’s. Doe does accuse some of the men of rape, and multiple institutions of not properly investigating it or disciplining her alleged rapists, but she also acknowledges a complicated series of events that began with consensual (albeit inebriated) group sex, and that devolved from there. The hourslong episode was significantly fuzzed up by heavy drinking and ketamine use. That’s important to note not because it excuses any immoral or illegal behavior that occurred, but because it makes it difficult to know exactly what did occur—especially in light of points of disagreement between Doe and the men she has accused.

 

But if you get your news and analysis from certain sources—including a sitting U.S. representative—you might come to believe otherwise, that this is quite straightforward. “Even if Doe was willingly wasted beyond belief, that doesn’t make it okay for seven men to spend hours raping her,” wrote Jessica Valenti, a widely read feminist commentator.

 

In these communities, the “facts” of the Jane Doe case are closely linked to beliefs about the case: Seven frat bros raped her, and then both the university and police callously disregarded her. As the lefty outlet Common Dreams summed things up in an article covering Ocasio-Cortez’s statement, this all points to “a culture in which students accused of sexual assault are ‘protected’ while survivors like the woman in the Cornell case, identified as Jane Doe, are often forced out of their campus communities.”

 

If this isn’t exactly what happened—shouldn’t that matter? Shouldn’t we at least be able to get on the same page when it comes to the basic facts of what the accusations are?

 

***

 

Icame of age politically in a much, much simpler world. There was CNN, and there was Fox News. CNN was basically right about everything, and Fox News was basically wrong about everything.

 

We didn’t view the landscape as simple at the time; we thought a disastrous degree of balkanization was underway, with people breaking into their own ideological camps and getting skewed versions of the world as a result. The basic storyline was that once we’d had ABC, NBC, and CBS, and the nation was relatively united on the receiving end of the authoritative, fatherly gaze of Walter Cronkite. Then came the rise of AM radio and cable news, and these new, vitriolic forms of political communication split the nation in two.  

 

Of course this is and was an oversimplification. Our supposedly more united, more reality-based era of postwar mass media coincided, at times, with levels of discord and in-the-streets violence that dwarf what we’ve seen lately. From the late 1960s into the early 1970s, bombings and political assassinations were a routine part of American life. So we shouldn’t exaggerate or romanticize.

 

But we also shouldn’t downplay the extent of the fracturing that has taken place since then. If someone had told me in 2004 that “Going forward, this is the best American political discourse will ever be,” I would have screamed. At the time, vitriolic and pernicious figures like Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage were at or near the peaks of their powers. They were interested only in division, not understanding. Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder, Savage’s 2005 book, became a New York Times bestseller.

 

And yet it did get much, much worse. The Fox News-ification of the right was met with an MSNBC-ization on the left. More and more Americans began relying on partisan outlets for news. But that was nothing compared to what happened next thanks to smartphones and social media. Most important here is Eli Pariser’s idea of a “filter bubble,” first coined in 2011, which found its way into the dictionary: “an online environment in which people are exposed only to opinions and information that conform to their existing beliefs.” If you had only two words to understand where we’re at, those are the words: filter bubbles.

 

Since the mid-2010s or so, hyperpartisan online media has made the debates at MSNBC and Fox News look like calm political discussions at a picnic. The right was first to develop online fever swamps of hyperpartisan misinformation—or effective ones, at least—probably because it had such a head start in mastering partisan media. And by 2016, the online right was becoming an increasingly deranged Wild West. This is indisputable, and it likely played some role in the rise of Donald Trump (albeit a role that is sometimes overstated, in my opinion).

 

Less attention has been paid to the collapse of epistemological standards in left-of-center spaces, and that’s been the focus of much of my media criticism in recent years. That’s because I live there and think (likely delusionally) I can play a small part in nudging things back on course, not because I think the left is “worse” on this front. I do think we are catching up to the right, though. “Highbrow misinformation”—misinformation afflicting highly educated types who tend to skew left—is an increasingly dire problem.

 

But the problem isn’t just two main factions constantly at war with one another over conflicting conceptions of reality. Even within our primary American political factions, there’s now micro-balkanization. That is, Americans who broadly agree on the big political questions are cordoning themselves into not just ideological but even factual foxholes, unable to understand not just their political adversaries on the other side of our ideological divide, but even their nearby neighbors.

 

I voted for Obama twice and against Trump thrice (please clap). Rough math suggests there are about 30 million Americans in this particular tribe—we are just 10 percent of Americans, give or take. A small slice. It worries me, then, that I so often find myself aghast at how others in this camp have completely different views from me, not on political questions, but on basic matters of factual reality (and they feel the same way about me). That’s what I mean by micro-balkanization.

 

Perhaps the first national controversy that got me worried about this occurred in 2019, when kids from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky were filmed on the National Mall engaged in some sort of rowdy cheer—and what appeared to be some sort of showdown between Nick Sandmann, one of the high schoolers, and a drum-toting Native American activist named Nathan Phillips. The initial snippets of video were interpreted by some as evidence that the kids had harassed the activist in question. Soon, though, longer videos came out that provided much more context, making it considerably more difficult to accuse the Covington kids of any wrongdoing. They showed that the kids were already in a tight cluster, riled up and doing a school-spirit cheer, when Phillips began marching in while beating his drum. The kids, confused or amused or both, began dancing and cheering in time with his drumming; there was no clear evidence, anywhere, of mockery or animus. It was a confusing situation that demanded discretion by journalists, and many failed. Grown adults, some with advanced degrees, claimed that you could tell by the awkward smile on Sandmann’s face that he had evil in his heart. CNN, the Washington Post, and NBCUniversal ended up settling with Nick Sandmann’s family (the terms are undisclosed).

 

Things only got worse, though. It was the significantly higher-stakes events of Kenosha, Wisconsin, that convinced me there was a real crisis of micro-balkanization on the left.

 

First, Jacob Blake was shot by police in August 2020, a shooting that was immediately and widely understood, in left-of-center spaces, as being unjustified. That quickly became the truth of the matter in some circles, with then-candidates Kamala Harris and Joe Biden soon contacting Blake’s family and speaking with Blake himself over the phone. Harris, according to Blake’s lawyer, told Blake she was proud of him.

 

In fact, police arrived on the scene to arrest Blake for an outstanding sexual-assault warrant. He violently resisted arrest, withstood multiple tasing efforts, and attempted to get into a car with children in the back seat to flee the scene. All of this was on video. The officer who shot him claimed that Blake was swinging a knife toward him at that moment, and the available evidence supports this claim. This appears to have been much closer to a textbook example of a justified shooting than an unjustified one. To this day, though, left-of-center America is divided over the basic facts of the case—over objective matters, many caught on video. (For more information on this, see my podcast episode going into the details of the incident, which relies largely on an independent review that led to the decision not to press charges against the officers involved in the incident, and which doesn’t leave much room for doubt in my opinion.)

 

Blake’s shooting led to both peaceful protests and some genuinely destructive rioting. Of course I can’t say with certainty that the rush to judgment caused the rioting, but it certainly didn’t help that so many politicians immediately claimed that the shooting was unjustified.

 

One consequence of all of this was Kyle Rittenhouse. After the rioting kicked off, the then-17-year-old traveled from his nearby hometown in Illinois to (as he saw it) offer his assistance, patrolling the area to try to keep the peace. He had a rifle with him, one of many people who were open-carrying in Kenosha that day. Video shows he was confronted and then chased by a man who had just been released from a psychiatric hospital. Backed into a corner, Rittenhouse shot and killed the man. Bystanders (who in the moment couldn’t have known that the initial shooting appeared to have been justified) then began chasing Rittenhouse, eventually catching up to him and attacking him, at which point he killed one and maimed another. Rittenhouse was eventually arrested and charged with a number of crimes, including homicide.

 

I was shocked by how quickly misinformation about these incidents spread in the left-of-center media ecosystem given—again—the presence of video that did at least answer certain objective questions, like what preceded Rittenhouse’s initial decision to open fire. Between the videos and the textual reality of Wisconsin law, it seemed clear he had a solid self-defense claim. None of this was a mystery, especially after the New York Times published an in-depth visual investigation making it clearer what happened when. But this didn’t matter—partisans and journalists who are too credulous of partisans developed a number of false beliefs about the Rittenhouse case. As I wrote in 2021, “I watched many influential media figures and politicians engage in this weird snowballing act of collective truthiness—they turned Rittenhouse into a monster, into someone who had committed obviously premeditated acts of murder, in a manner that ran dozens of laps ahead of the available evidence.” Through sheer repetition of false claims, these figures had convinced themselves and many others of a version of events that badly conflicted with reality. As a result they were surprised and outraged when, somewhat predictably, Rittenhouse was acquitted on all charges. They shouldn’t have been.

 

***

 

In the days after the Cornell story went viral, another example of micro-balkanization popped off—a memorable one centered on the right.

 

Starting last Friday, a rumor metastasized in the MAGAsphere: Texas state representative and senatorial candidate James Talarico hadn’t been knocked off the campaign trail because of a nasty bout of the flu, as his team claimed, but because he had been spirited off to Ohio to be checked into a psychiatric hospital.

 

I’m not even going to try to sum up how the influencers spreading this claim came to this conclusion, because the underlying conspiracy theory is addled and confusing. But it broke into the mainstream after a MAGA hanger-on named Rhein Amacher posted audio in which he called the Ohio facility at the center of the conspiracy theory, posed as Talarico’s relative, and was told by the woman on the other end of the line that Talarico had checked out that day. Except none of this made much sense. Amacher’s own claims about the timing didn’t line up given when Talarico had been seen on the ground in Texas, a psychiatric hospital likely wouldn’t give out the info Amacher claimed to have received, and the tired-sounding woman said what she said only after repeatedly searching for a James Talarico and not finding anyone. The Talarico campaign issued an unambiguous statement calling this claim a “lie,” and the hospital has stated that Talarico has never been a patient there.

 

Sunday night I saw that Amacher had joined an X Space to promote and discuss his bombshell. I joined and found myself in a MAGA-dominated hangout with a couple of other journalists thrown in. I asked Amacher questions about the timing discrepancy and how he fact-checked his now-viral claim. Amacher’s answers didn’t pass muster but could be best explained by his repeated admissions that he is not a journalist and doesn’t see himself as held to the same quality-control standards (he said this explicitly). During the call, we found out that the hospital had issued a flat denial. It was a fascinating moment. I can’t say that every MAGA-affiliated type on the call was unmoved by this apparent debunking, but for the most part, at least among those dominating the conversation, the goalposts quickly shifted. It could still be true. Talarico had not provided sufficient debunking of the claim promoted by the guy who openly admitted he hadn’t done much vetting.

 

As of Monday, the most overheated MAGAheads are continuing to promote this very, very crazy story. Others, alongside most respectable conservatives, find the whole thing embarrassing (which it is). More fracturing. More micro-balkanization.

 

All of this misinformation is bad in its own right. It is bad when people strongly believe things that aren’t true or that haven’t yet been verified as such. But what is perhaps most pernicious here is the paranoia micro-balkanization breeds, the extent to which it digs people deeper into conspiracy-minded foxholes. If you think that Kyle Rittenhouse was obviously guilty, or that the shooting of Jacob Blake was obviously unjust, or that it’s obviously the case that the Jane Doe case was prosecutable, or that Donald Trump obviously won the 2020 election, or that the lamestream media is obviously covering for Crazy James Talarico, then you are likely to become increasingly disillusioned by the fact that reality isn’t conforming to your false beliefs, that certain people aren’t being prosecuted or hauled off to prison.

 

That’s exactly what I’m seeing now in the MAGAsphere—widespread outrage and incredulity, all of it feeding on itself, that Talarico is “getting away” with this. It is a Known Fact in these communities that he really did check into a psychiatric institution, despite all evidence to the contrary.

 

It would be terrible to live in a country without loud and ongoing disagreement. Most people don’t want that. But there are limits to the strain; we’re in the midst of an experiment, worsening by the day, of just how many different realities a single polity can withstand.

Remember Those ‘Root Causes’ of the Border Crisis?

By John R. Puri

Tuesday, October 13, 2026

 

For four years, the Biden administration and the media kept telling us that the crisis at the southern border was out of the president’s hands because it was caused by international, uncontrollable “root causes” of migration. No matter what policy changes Biden made, millions of migrants would keep showing up. They were pushed out of their home countries by forces beyond domestic politics, like poverty and violent conflict — as though these were novel developments.

 

This was the official line from beginning to end. In March 2021, two months after Joe Biden was sworn in, he assigned Vice President Kamala Harris to help stem the flow of migration by addressing its “root causes” in poor Latin American countries. The administration rarely specified what forces or events it was referring to.

 

Almost three years later, in 2024, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said in an interview that the migration crisis was

 

not specific to the United States’ southern border. This is something that we are seeing throughout the hemisphere and throughout the world. We have an increase in authoritarian regimes. We have more extreme weather events that are driving people from their homes. We have poverty. And America is proving to be prosperous with more than 8 million jobs that need to be filled. We recovered from the COVID pandemic more rapidly than any other country. This is something that is not specific to the southern border.

 

Based on such defeatism, media outlets concurred that the administration was helpless to deal with record border crossings.

 

Time magazine wrote in 2023: “There’s very little a homeland security secretary or an American President can do to reverse human migration patterns predominantly caused by climate change, new storm patterns, rampant violence and economic need.”

 

The New Yorker wrote in 2023: “Much of the migration to the United States in recent years has been driven by profound developments in Central and South America and in the Caribbean, where economic turmoil, natural disasters, and drug-related violence have brought many states to the brink of collapse, and where gangs and drug cartels often operate beyond state control.”

 

The Cato Institute told Axios in 2024 that “apprehension numbers have little to do with changes in enforcement tactics or new policies,” because “it’s really primarily reflective of the state of the U.S. economy,” and “the smuggling networks have taken years to build out — but once they’re built out, there’s nothing you can do to rewind the clock and eliminate those.”

 

Axios itself wrote in 2024: “Much of the current crisis is rooted in factors Biden’s team has had little control over — including unprecedented global calamities that have pushed millions of migrants to the U.S., decades of congressional inaction, and the state of key agencies after the Trump administration.”

 

Mayorkas told PBS that year, “We can only do so much within a broken immigration system, a system that is fundamentally broken,” since the problem was “hemispheric and global.”

 

Then, in 2025, the Trump administration entered office and immediately changed border policy by shutting down pathways to admission. In the administration’s first full month, border encounters fell to the lowest level in recorded history — 8,349, compared to 140,641 the year before and 29,105 just a month earlier — and have pretty much stayed at that level ever since. The record was beaten again in July 2025, with just 4,592 encounters.

 

So much for those supposedly insurmountable “root causes.” When the push factors of migration — poverty and conflict in home countries, attractive conditions in America — are relatively constant, it turns out that policy incentives are what really matter.

Sneak Preview

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, October 12, 2026

 

The Trump administration’s approach to the war in Ukraine is a bizarro version of the Biden administration’s approach. In both cases, the White House had a rooting interest in the conflict. And in both cases, it was willing to aid the side it favored.

 

Yet, in both cases, it wasn’t willing to provide enough aid to give that side a decisive advantage. And so the fighting drags on, a stalemate sustained by American ambivalence.

 

Joe Biden’s team feared Russia might widen the war if it felt too threatened, so it landed on a compromise in which Ukraine would receive billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. weapons—but with restrictions that they be used for defensive purposes only, limiting their strategic effectiveness. HIMARS were being dispatched to Kyiv as early as June 2022, for instance, yet it wasn’t until the lame-duck period in November 2024 that the White House agreed to let the Ukrainians use those systems to fire longer-range missiles inside Russia.

 

Enough support for Ukraine to keep fighting but not enough for Ukraine to win: That was the Biden way. Where would the conflict be today if Volodymyr Zelensky and his army hadn’t been required to pull their punches?

 

Donald Trump’s ambivalence toward the war is different from Biden’s. The president wants to boast that he kept his campaign promise to end the fighting, and he plainly doesn’t care if the fastest route to achieving that is to force a humiliating peace on Ukraine. He seems to regard the Ukrainian resistance as a personal inconvenience, frustrating the rapprochement he’s sought with Moscow since 2017.

 

Repeatedly since returning to office, Trump has blamed Kyiv rather than Moscow for refusing to come to terms, never mind that Ukraine has reliably agreed to Trump’s various ceasefire proposals while Russia has reliably rejected them. The “first round of diplomacy [last year] established a dynamic that still defines negotiations,” the New York Times explained. “Ukraine received no reward for saying yes, and the Kremlin paid no price for saying no.”

 

Trump has also bucked Europe’s effort to marginalize Vladimir Putin—hosting him for a summit in Alaska, inviting him to the G20 summit in Miami later this year, and, as of Friday, striking a deal with him to import 300,000 tons of Russian diesel into the United States. Europeans want to treat Russia’s president like a pariah to signal a Western consensus that wars of conquest are immoral and a breach of international laws. The president doesn’t believe in those norms, or in morality, so naturally he doesn’t share the consensus.

 

But he also knows that overtly favoring Russia in the war wouldn’t fly with Americans. The Cold War is still too recent, Putin’s villainy is too cartoonish, and Ukraine’s struggle to repel a fascist invader is too manifestly just to make it politically safe for the White House to side decisively with Moscow. Even many members of Trump’s own party wouldn’t stomach it. So the president has been stuck with his own postliberal version of an unsatisfying Biden-esque compromise: He’s given Russia enough support to encourage it to keep fighting but not enough for it to win.

 

Trump cut off shipments of American weapons to Kyiv at the start of his term and, to this day, regularly amplifies the Kremlin’s talking point that Zelensky is the main obstacle to peace. But he’s also stayed on the right side of public opinion at home by supporting elements of Ukraine’s defense, allowing U.S. intelligence to continue to supply information to the Ukrainians, and allowing the Pentagon to sell weapons to Europe for Ukrainian use.

 

Maybe not for much longer, though. The lame-duck era of Trumpist foreign policy is almost upon us.

 

Scapegoating Ukraine.

 

The thing to understand about Trump’s diesel deal with Putin is that it serves no policy purpose whatsoever.

 

Relative to the amount of fuel the United States uses in a day, 300,000 tons (or 2.25 million barrels) is a rounding error. David Frum did the math in a piece for The Atlantic and calculated that it represents around 16 hours of American diesel consumption.

 

We could get the same amount from Canada, and far more conveniently. In fact, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke with Trump yesterday and pledged afterward that “we will continue to maximize our exports of oil and diesel to the United States that yield well over a million barrels of diesel per day.” Why is the White House so excited about a deal with Moscow that will yield about as much diesel as our northern neighbor supplies us with every 54 hours or so?

 

There’s no policy reason. The reason is political: The president needs a scapegoat for the high gas prices that are threatening to destroy his party at the ballot box next month, and he’s decided that Ukraine is it.

 

It’s not the dumb war that he started in Iran that’s juiced the cost of oil, he hopes swing voters will believe. It’s the damned Ukrainians who keep bombing Russian refineries, damaging the infrastructure of a major global supplier. Trump made the case as bluntly as it can be made in comments to reporters last month. “He’s causing a shortage of diesel fuel,” he said of Zelensky back on September 13. “This isn’t done by the Middle East, this is done by what’s happening with Russia and Ukraine.”

 

If you’re mad that you’re paying $6 a gallon to fuel up your tractor or 10 percent more on all sorts of goods due to rising transportation costs, don’t blame Republicans and the logjam in the Strait of Hormuz. Blame the man in Kyiv, the hero of Democrats and Western liberals everywhere.

 

There’s a grain of truth in that argument. Because oil is a commodity, fewer exports from Russia do affect prices everywhere. But of the two wars currently influencing global markets, there’s no question which has done more to reduce supply: “The diesel blocked in the Persian Gulf is around three times as large as supplies missing from Russia compared with before the Iran war, according to data compiled by the International Energy Agency,” the Wall Street Journal reported a few weeks ago.

 

Zelensky echoed that point in an interview Sunday with ABC News. “Because of the war in the Middle East, the prices are rising,” he asserted. “They’re increasing because of the war in the Middle East, of the blocking of Hormuz. ... Everybody understands it.” The president is hoping that’s not true, that there are millions of suckers out there preparing to vote who don’t understand it because they’ve forgotten when, exactly, gas prices began to take off and who was responsible.

 

The diesel deal with Russia is Trump’s attempt to reach them. At its simplest, it’s his way of showing that he’s doing everything he can to bring down the cost of living (300,000 tons sounds like a lot!). But by giving the United States a public stake in continued Russian oil production, it also tees him up to argue from now until Election Day that every Ukrainian strike on a Russian refinery in the interim is the real reason the price of diesel remains lofty. Not the war in Iran, you see, where things are tightening up in the strait again.

 

If you doubt that the word has gone out to right-wing media sycophants to start scapegoating Ukraine in the home stretch of the campaign, look no further than the interview Fox News did this weekend with new White House press secretary Katie Zacharia. Out of nowhere, Fox host Rachel Campos-Duffy (who’s married to Trump’s transportation secretary, by the way) claimed that a million children had been killed on each side of the conflict and griped that that “ingrate Zelensky … keeps blowing up refineries and making things more complicated for the president ahead of the midterms.”

 

It’s a desperate messaging ploy by a party of demagogues that’s out of solutions and is looking to divert voter anger away from itself by any means necessary. Isn’t it?

 

Here’s the problem with my theory: If this is all just a cynical smear campaign to shift blame for gas prices away from the war in Iran, why is there so much reporting right now that the White House really is trying to end Ukraine’s strikes on Russian refineries behind the scenes?

 

Envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff have allegedly warned the Ukrainians that the U.S. might stop sharing intelligence with them if the attacks don’t stop. European officials claim they were likewise warned that America could end weapons sales for Ukraine’s use if Russia’s refineries remain in the crosshairs. The president went as far as to say yesterday that it’s time for a new leader in Kyiv.

 

If this is all about finding an election scapegoat for Republicans, those threats make no sense tactically. (Or economically, especially for a president who’s supposed to be “transactional.”) If Zelensky gave in to the White House’s demands by halting the refinery strikes and the price of diesel didn’t fall meaningfully afterward, the case that Ukraine is to blame for expensive gas would collapse. Trump would lose his scapegoat. He should want Ukraine to keep up the bombing, at least until Election Day, so that he can go on blaming it, no?

 

If this isn’t ultimately about scapegoating, what is it about?

 

Lame duck.

 

There are two possibilities. Maybe it was initially about scapegoating, but has since become one of those grandiose lies Trump tells that he yearns to believe so fervently that he does, in the end, talk himself into believing it.

 

The “2020 was rigged!” hysteria is the supreme example. He was embarrassed about losing to Biden, concocted a story to scapegoat others for his supposed defeat, then became psychologically invested in it. The wish was the father to the thought. If nothing else, amid his despair at losing political influence, it probably soothed him to see so many dimwitted Republican apparatchiks still loyally willing to amplify his fantasies.

 

The Ukraine smear campaign might be following the same formula. The stalemate in Iran is a supreme personal humiliation for the president—it’s going to loosen his grasp on power considerably if the current midterm polling is accurate, and a lot of Republicans who convinced themselves that he has some sort of magic electoral touch will be disillusioned with him after the vote.

 

Scapegoating Ukraine for expensive diesel looks like another desperate coping mechanism for him, one in which he’s so heavily invested emotionally that he’s come to believe it and is trying to get Zelensky to stop his attacks. At this point he might sincerely believe that doing so will drive oil prices down dramatically and rescue the GOP on Election Day.

 

It won’t, though.

 

Even if you think the average American is so dim that his memory of seven months of inflationary hardship caused by the Hormuz bottleneck can be wiped by a few weeks of anti-Ukraine propaganda, doing so would likely require a strong, concerted messaging effort from the right a la the “2020 was rigged!” nonsense. That won’t happen this time. Numerous Republicans who support Ukraine, ranging from old-school hawks like Mike Pence to vulnerable centrists like Sen. Susan Collins and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, criticized Trump’s decision to lift sanctions on Russian diesel this weekend. Fitzpatrick even promised to introduce legislation next month overturning the decision—as if it weren’t already illegal.

 

I wonder if even postliberal Russia-slobberers like Tucker Carlson might decline to carry the president’s water in this case. The Tuckerites are usually game to blame Ukraine and its liberal allies for any problem (any that can’t be blamed on Israel, anyway), but they’re eager to attribute a Republican wipeout at the polls next month to Trump’s decision to attack Iran, a supreme betrayal of the “America First” ethos. Blaming the Ukrainians instead for high gas prices that have driven public discontent would complicate that.

 

But let’s say Trump did manage to convince voters that strikes on Russian refineries have contributed meaningfully to pain at the pump. That’s what Russia deserves for having started the war, many would say. It’s Putin’s fault that oil is expensive. And the president would have no reply. He’s never engaged seriously with Russian culpability for the war’s many terrible consequences because there’s no serious case to be made that Russia isn’t culpable.

 

At the barest minimum, as Zelensky himself recommended this weekend, the United States should be demanding that if Russia wants Ukraine to stop targeting Russian refineries, it should agree to stop targeting Ukraine’s own energy facilities—especially its power plants and electrical infrastructure. Why has the White House placed the onus for ending energy attacks on Kyiv rather than Moscow?

 

Which brings us to the other possibility. Maybe what we’re seeing here isn’t Trump in denial about what’s causing high gas prices, but rather Trump looking ahead to his lame-duck period. Once the polls close on Election Day, three weeks and a day from now, he’ll have shed his last remaining reason to ever again care about U.S. public opinion.

 

If he wants to spend his final two years in office forthrightly taking Russia’s side against Ukraine, feeding with his cronies at the trough of Russian corruption and dispensing at last with the ambivalence that American voters’ hostility to Moscow has forced upon him since 2017, he’ll be free to do so. What we saw this weekend may have been a sneak preview of a lame-duck Trump unleashed, demagoging the refinery strikes not because he needs an electoral scapegoat, but because he wants a pretext to end American support for Kyiv once and for all.

 

I’ve been leaning toward that theory since the White House announced on Sunday a surprise “energy ceasefire,” in which it seemed at first blush to have endorsed Zelensky’s offer for a halt on attacks on energy facilities on both sides. But it hadn’t: The “energy ceasefire” that Team Trump proposed was limited to oil refineries, doing Ukraine no good whatsoever. The country has just one refinery, after all, and that was taken offline by Russia long ago.

 

Under the circumstances, proposing a ceasefire limited to refineries is like proposing a ceasefire that would spare cities named “Moscow” in either country from attack. It’s so comically lopsided that it feels like a deliberate insult to Ukraine. As if to underline the insult, shortly after Trump declared the “energy ceasefire,” Putin bombed a Ukrainian power plant in Kharkiv.

 

It’s all a big joke and the presidents of the United States and Russia are in on it together. How’s that as a sneak preview of the next two years?

 

Consolations.

 

There are two consolations. One is that Zelensky might be playing a little joke of his own in return, scaling up attacks on Russian data centers that have damaged Moscow’s digital influence campaigns abroad. It can’t be good for Donald Trump’s postliberal GOP to have Kremlin bots suddenly go dark three weeks out from a national election.

 

The other is that this weekend’s repulsive sellout of the Ukrainians helpfully raises the stakes of the election at a moment when persuadable voters are making up their minds. If I’m right that Trump intends to do things “his way” abroad for the duration of his lame-duck presidency, it’s that much more important that Congress be led next year by a party willing to constrain him. Needless to say, the Republican Party is not that party.

 

Then again, there’s only so much that even a Democratic Congress could do to solve the underlying problem here. Americans chose to be led by someone who’s always been more Putin than Zelensky in spirit and has never made much of a pretense to the contrary. A left-wing legislature might be able to use its leverage to keep Trump from aiding Russia in material ways, but the president and his supporters will go on insisting to the end that Ukraine is somehow to blame for its own brutalization. “Might makes right” is the logic of postliberal moral perverts, and America has many more of them than a lot of us realized. No law will cure that perversion.

 

Retired Adm. William McRaven, the former head of U.S. special operations, wrote today for The Atlantic about another case of Trumpist moral perversion, the decision to livestream Nidal Hasan’s execution. “In almost 40 years of service, I came to realize that Americans share a common longing to be seen as the good guys,” he observed. “We were proud that our parents or grandparents fought against Nazism and fascism. As a nation, we stood tall against totalitarianism and communism. A younger generation sacrificed to keep America safe after 9/11. We made mistakes along the way; we always do. But despite these stumbles, inevitable in a complicated and violent world, I never once doubted that within our DNA was a sense of nobility that shaped the American character.”

 

I never did either, until about 10 years ago. But the truth reaches us all eventually.

Trump’s Affection for Russia Is No Mystery

By Jonathan Chait

Tuesday, October 13, 2026

 

A large majority of the Republican Party, including many officials who initially viewed Donald Trump with deep skepticism, decided early in Trump’s first term that the investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election were the hysterical product of Trump Derangement Syndrome in the Deep State and the media. There was no mystery to solve, no scandal to uncover, in Trump’s affinity for Vladimir Putin. And yet this strange alliance continues to bedevil American foreign policy.

 

On Friday afternoon, Trump announced that he had held another call with Putin, and came away once again depicting the Russian dictator as a cherished friend to whom he owes a great deal. “I have just concluded a highly successful discussion with President Vladimir Putin, of Russia, wherein it was agreed that Russia will immediately supply over 300,000 Tons of Diesel Fuel to the American and Global Marketplace, another 500,000 Tons during the month of November, and 1,000,000 Tons immediately thereafter,” he wrote on Truth Social.

 

Later that day, Trump reemphasized his debt of gratitude. “I want to thank President Putin, to be honest with you. We have massive amounts of oil coming into our country, and it’s diesel, which is what we want. So, thank you,” he told reporters outside the White House.

 

Many of Trump’s comments make little sense, and these were no exception. But he was using a particular kind of illogic that conflicts with his standard brand of nonsense. Trump typically depicts international trade in starkly mercantilist terms. Exports, in his mind, are a form of profit, and imports are a loss. Trump sees trade deficits as a form of theft, and conceives of a “good deal” as one in which the United States reduces its imports or increases its exports. This holds true of all goods, including oil. “We don’t need their fuel, we don’t need their energy, we don’t need their oil and gas. We don’t need anything that they have,” Trump said dismissively of Canada last year.

 

Yet when it comes to imports from Russia, Trump inverts his standard accounting methods. He presents Russian oil as a kind of gift, something Putin plans to “supply.” (A more accurate verb to describe this transaction would be sell.)

 

In reality, diesel fuel exists in a global market, and adding a small amount of Russian diesel into this enormous international supply would have a barely detectable effect upon its price. A more important effect would be on the Russian economy. Economic sanctions have hampered its ability to attract foreign currency, and the Trump-Putin plan would suspend sanctions on Russian diesel exports. Doing so would in fact appear to violate American law, which prohibits importing oil from Russia unless it makes peace with Ukraine, though illegality does not usually deter Trump.

 

The most immediate outcome of this plan has been to present Ukraine as the cause of economic turmoil and Russia as the innocent victim of Ukrainian warmongering. Trump almost immediately began to praise Putin and assail the Russian dictator’s adversary. Volodymyr Zelensky “could have settled this war many times—many, many times—and he chooses not to,” Trump told reporters on Friday outside the White House. “He wants to make problems for the world. He wants to make problems for our farmers, our ranchers, with diesel fuel, because Russia supplies a large portion of the diesel fuel throughout the world.” Trump’s solution? “I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal. Because they could have made many deals, and for some reason, he never does.”

 

There is no universally agreed-upon explanation for why Trump has remained so consistently faithful to Putin. One theory holds that Putin masterfully strokes Trump’s ego. Although Trump does respond to flattery, the flaw in this hypothesis is that other leaders have tried, and often failed, to mimic this formula. Europeans have met Trump’s second term with obsequious displays and gifts. Ukraine floated a proposal to rename the Donbas region “Donnyland.” Poland proposed christening a base “Fort Trump.” Yet these countries have remained largely frustrated.

 

A second theory holds that Trump simply admires dictators. This one contains a bit more truth, as seen by Trump’s swooning over Xi Jinping and even Kim Jong Un. But the dictators running Iran and Venezuela have hardly managed to duplicate the Trump-Putin partnership.

 

A third theory depicts Trump as merely amoral, driven by transactions and indifferent to moral concerns. Yet he has continued to defer to Putin even as the Russian dictator has undermined Trump’s own standing by aiding Iran in its war with the United States. Meanwhile, Zelensky’s assistance against Iran seems to have bought him no goodwill whatsoever. Trump’s view of the war is moralistic—he simply blames the victim rather than the aggressor. “You don’t start a war against someone 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles,” he said last year of Zelensky.

 

Explaining the depth of Trump’s identification with Putin may require looking at a possibility that conservatives have been dismissing out of hand for a decade: manipulation and corruption.

 

During the 2016 campaign, Russia dangled a lucrative deal to develop Trump-branded properties in Russia that would deliver hundreds of millions of dollars in profit with no risk. More recently, The New York Times reported that Trump advisers and Russian officials have floated deals that would enrich Trump’s inner circle as part of ending the war.

 

Russia has tried to bribe foreign officials, especially by handing out pieces of its resource wealth, in numerous countries. It would be strange if Putin didn’t try to replicate this tried-and-true method in the United States.

 

Perhaps the best evidence against corruption is that Trump now has access to so many other sources of wealth that he hardly needs any financial incentive to tilt toward Russia. Yet Putin seems able to bring the American president around to his way of thinking, if not effortlessly (their most recent phone call reportedly consumed an hour and a half) then at least reliably.

 

There is obviously no investigation at the moment into Putin’s efforts to influence American foreign policy. Instead, incredibly, we have an investigation into the Russia investigation. The Trump administration is working to gin up criminal charges against former CIA Director John Brennan, former FBI Director James Comey, and other American officials whose crime was to explore whether something fishy was going on between the Trump campaign and Moscow.

 

My colleagues Jonathan Lemire and Simon Shuster report, “Some of Trump’s closest advisers have privately wondered what Putin has done to so thoroughly enthrall the president.” Perhaps instead of dismissing the people who were trying to shed light on this mystery and then attempting to throw them into prison, these advisers should be taking their concerns seriously.

Is Terrorism a Midterm Sleeper Issue?

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, October 13, 2026

 

Nationally, voters’ top concerns heading into next month’s election are the economy, health care, and the stability of American democracy. By contrast, public safety does not rate.

 

With Joe Biden out of office, “immigration” has become less salient. So, too, has the issue of “violent crime,” along with America’s rates of violent criminal offenses. “Terrorism” doesn’t even register as an issue in 2026. But in certain localities, the prospect of not just criminal but terroristic violence is a live concern among voters.

 

Take Minnesota, where Governor Tim Walz’s top lieutenant, Peggy Flanagan, is waging an unexpectedly difficult campaign to succeed retiring Democratic Senator Tina Smith. This week, a Star Tribune/KARE 11 poll of the North Star State’s voters found a four-point race between Flanagan (47 percent) and GOP nominee Michele Tafoya (43 percent), with independent voters favoring the Republican candidate by six points.

 

Flanagan’s struggles are, perhaps, largely explained by the exposure of the massive fraud ring in Minnesota over which Walz presided — a scandal that cast a pall over his party and forced him to forgo a third campaign for governor. But at the bottom of the poll’s write-up, the Star Tribune reminded its readers that the state is still on a heightened state of alert following an attempted terrorist attack on the Mall of America last week. “I was driving by the Mall of America 15 minutes ago, and I thought: ‘God, would I feel safe going in there?’” 60-year-old real estate agent Andria Gandrud told the outlet’s reporters. “I want to feel safe.”

 

Last week, federal authorities arrested 18-year-old Sheikhdoon Abdullahi Mohamud following a two-year investigation into his efforts to execute a mass casualty attack on behalf of Islamist terrorist groups abroad — both the remnants of the Islamic State and the Somalia-based outfit al-Shabaab. “I wanna get martyred inshallah,” Mohamud told an FBI informant. His purchase of an AK-47 and 200 rounds of ammunition from an undercover agent indicates that the suspect sought to murder as many Minnesotans as he could.

 

“The recent charges recall similar investigations from more than a decade ago when a wave of Somali-Americans from Minnesota faced charges for wanting to leave the United States to fight alongside Islamic extremist groups,” the Star Tribune reported late last week. “One major 2015 case led to indictments against 11 Minnesotans charged in a conspiracy to provide support to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.”

 

The recent attempted attack underscores how elevated the Islamist terrorist threat to U.S. security has become in recent weeks. Proactive efforts by law enforcement interdicted a plot against the Texas and New York state capitols, Jewish institutions in Los Angeles and New York City, and American service personnel in Kansas and California. But aspiring terrorists only have to get lucky once.

 

Of all the potentially catastrophic events that law enforcement thwarted this year, the attacker who targeted dozens of Jewish preschoolers in his March 12 attack on Michigan’s Temple Israel synagogue came closest to engineering an epochal bloodletting. There, 41-year-old Ayman Mohamed Ghazali rammed his truck into the synagogue’s façade and opened fire on the building. As his truck burst into flames and the facility’s security personnel returned fire, Ghazali turned his weapon on himself before he could murder his targets. The media’s self-proclaimed security experts were quick to blame President Donald Trump for angering bloodthirsty Islamic radicals with his war against Iran. But the FBI swiftly noted that Ghazali was “inspired by Hezbollah’s militant ideology,” and his goal was to kill as many Jews as possible.

 

That event has become a focal point in this year’s U.S. Senate race in Michigan. As is his conspicuous wont, Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed published a statement on this terrorist event from the perspective of its perpetrator. “A week earlier, an airstrike killed his niece and nephew,” the Democratic nominee wrote (true enough: Ghazali’s brother was a Hezbollah commander involved in combat operations against the IDF in Lebanon). “We can and must condemn the attack on Temple Israel, and we can and must condemn the violence 6,000 miles away.” He infamously added, “Hurt people hurt people.”

 

With the primary race behind him, El-Sayed apologized for those remarks. But he was quite proud of himself at the time. “It was a risk,” El-Sayed said in an internal call with campaign staffers. “All of our team was really worried about saying something, but leadership is being willing to say the thing if you believe it to be true that nobody else is going to say.”

 

El-Sayed’s insouciance has added relevance today amid indications that he is misleading Michigan’s voters about the nature of his and his family’s connections to the U.S.-designated terrorist organization the Muslim Brotherhood.

 

During a sit-down interview with Meet the Press host Kristen Welker on Sunday, El-Sayed repeatedly assured her that neither he nor his family had ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. It was later revealed, however, that Abdul’s sister insisted her whole family were staunch supporters of that organization. That was in 2012, right around the time El-Sayed signed an open letter in support of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Egyptian President, Mohamed Morsi, calling on him to “purge the media and the police.” El-Sayed’s campaign insists the allegations are “racist” and “untrue,” but El-Sayed’s associations render those denials unpersuasive.

 

Between his birth mother’s work for a charity that supported Hamas and al-Qaeda and his father-in-law’s ties to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an unindicted co-conspirator in a high-profile terrorism financing case, El-Sayed’s associations would be a source of concern even if the terrorist threat were in retreat. Underlying all of it is the public’s unexpressed apprehension — a nagging suspicion that El-Sayed’s commitment to combating Islamist terrorism is conditional, and that his election will have consequences that extend well beyond banal politics.

 

No one is talking about terrorism, but people are thinking about it — particularly in the upper Midwest. And if Democrats in this part of the country underperform on Election Day, they can attribute it to what may be the sleeper issue of the year.

Who Is Ilhan Omar?

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, October 13, 2026

 

Much of Ilhan Omar’s family story is a black box, but we are presumably about to learn more about it.

 

Federal authorities raided her Washington, D.C., residence in what’s reportedly a probe related to her immigration paperwork.

 

The representative has alleged an effort to weaponize federal law enforcement and silence her. The Trump administration, which has repeatedly overreached in pursuit of its political opponents, doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt in such matters, although questions have swirled around Omar’s background for years.

 

She has always responded with angry dismissals, even when the Minneapolis Star-Tribune — not exactly a right-wing news source — has made inquiries.

 

The allegation that’s gotten the most attention is that Ilhan Omar married her brother.

 

The underlying suggestion is that Ilhan’s family split up in the 1990s as it sought refuge from war-torn Somalia. Allegedly, the future representative, her father, and one of her sisters used the false name Omar to come to the United States as part of another Somali family getting asylum, while her siblings — under the family’s original name — got asylum in the U.K.

 

Then, Omar supposedly got her brother into the States, too, via a sham marriage.

 

If nothing else, she’s had a very odd marital life; she’s almost the Zsa Zsa Gabor of Somali Americans. Omar was in an Islamic marriage with one man (named Ahmed Hirsi), then married the man believed to be her brother (Ahmed Said Elmi), then divorced Elmi and officially married Hirsi — before divorcing Hirsi and marrying a political consultant who is now her husband.

 

In her memoir, she says nothing of substance about Elmi. She doesn’t use his name and claims she spent very little time with him. She also doesn’t name any of her siblings. She gives the impression of wanting to provide as a little information about her background as possible and stick to the more important work of maligning her adopted country.

 

Even if Omar tried to pull off a less charming version of the Gérard Depardieu movie Green Card, the statute of limitations has run out regarding any potential fraud.

 

That means it’s possible that federal investigators are looking at the circumstances of her father’s arrival here. He, too, is outlined only vaguely in Omar’s memoir.

 

She refers to him as an educator, a strange description of a man who was, according to an admiring obituary, “an esteemed senior officer in the Somali National Army.”

 

The article in a publication called the Sahan Journal said that her father “joined the Somali National Army after obtaining a military education in Russia.”

 

“When he returned to Somalia,” it continues, he “began his climb in the military hierarchy, eventually becoming a colonel.” A friend told the outlet that her father led a regiment during the Somali-Ethiopian war in the late 1970s and “was one of the officers who were recognized for their work.”

 

Assuming this is correct, it makes Omar’s account very curious. Usually, relatives are proud of the military service of their family members, and are prone, if anything, to exaggerate it. Here, though, Omar apparently wants us to think he was only, say, the assistant principal of Mogadishu High.

 

If her father was a military man, it must be an embarrassment that he served the regime of Somalia’s tinpot dictator Siad Barre. There’s also the possibility that Omar is being coy because her father represented himself to U.S. immigration authorities as a teacher, rather than a Soviet-trained colonel in a blood-soaked military.

 

There’s also a question of whether Omar was too old to automatically get naturalization when her father obtained it.

 

If she’s being smeared, Omar should sit down with a neutral journalist and walk through the details of all this. It seems unlikely she’ll ever do this, though, while it’s a certainty that she’ll continue to excoriate the United States — whether it’s the country that welcomed her as a penniless refugee, or that tries to denaturalize her for alleged immigration fraud.

On the Strange and Tragic Accident at Six Flags Over Georgia

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Tuesday, October 13, 2026

 

NBC reports:

 

A person died, and several others were injured at Six Flags Over Georgia on Monday, officials said, after witnesses reported seeing a man fall from a roller coaster.

 

The Cobb County Department of Emergency Communications confirmed the death but did not provide additional details about the incident at about 4 p.m. at the amusement park just outside Atlanta.

 

Naturally, I don’t know what happened here. But I do know a lot about roller coasters and how they work, so I thought it might be useful to put this incident into context for those who don’t.

 

The context? That this is absolutely unheard of. One is nine times more likely to be killed on a commercial airplane than on a roller coaster. Especially that roller coaster. The ride in question, Goliath, was designed by a Swiss company called Bolliger and Mabillard (B&M), which, since 1990, has been the gold standard within the amusement industry. In its history, B&M has constructed 136 roller coasters, 133 of which are still operating, and 18 of which are of the same type as Goliath. Despite those roller coasters having given hundreds of millions — perhaps billions — of rides, nobody has ever died on one of them as the result of a malfunction.

 

The lap bar system on B&M’s hyper-coasters (that’s Goliath’s type) is generally considered to be the best in the business. The design is simple. The molded restraint is shaped to fit over the thighs and against the abdomen — which means that, in order to escape, a normally sized rider would have to squeeze both his hips and his thighs past the clamshell. Ceteris paribus, that is not possible, as this image from the patent filing shows:

 

 

The restraint’s locking system uses a mechanical ratchet at the pivot point. This allows the clamshell to move inward (often, during the ride, the restraint will click down further) but prevents it from opening again. When the bar is pressed down toward the rider’s thighs, its multiple redundant locking catches (“pawls”) engage a toothed wheel that must be released before the bar can rise. Under normal operating procedure, the restraint must be down at least three clicks before the ride’s computer system will allow the train to leave the station. After the train is outside of the station, there is no way to release a restraint without specialized equipment that is available only during an evacuation or scheduled maintenance. The best available estimate is that each seat is able to restrain 35 kilonewtons — about 7,900 pounds-force applied at the rider-contact point — before breaking. That is roughly equivalent to the combined weight of two Ford Escapes hanging from each restraint.

 

Today, Twitter is full of people insisting that the same thing as happened on Goliath “nearly” happened to them on a roller coaster in recent years. It almost certainly did not. I have no doubt that most of those people truly believe that they were in danger, but, in reality, they weren’t. Modern roller coasters are designed to make the riders feel as if they are going to fall out, and most are highly effective in achieving this sensation. Still, it remains just that: a sensation. Statistically, one has a far greater chance of being killed at an amusement park by a vending machine than by a roller coaster. The tolerances involved here are just extraordinary.

 

That said . . . this incident does look different from any other I’ve encountered. As far as I can see, the restraint that supposedly failed did seem to be up at the time of the accident — or at the very least, it seemed to be less far down than it should have been — and, unusually, it seemed to be the only restraint in the row that was in that condition. When one adds in that a) the deceased apparently fell out toward the end of the ride, rather than the beginning (this matters, because, if the restraint had been up from the start, the rider would almost certainly have been ejected earlier) and b) that one of the other passengers suggested that, before he fell from the train, he’d lunged forward to try to catch his phone, I’ll confess to being baffled.

 

It seems to me that there are four options here:

 

1.      That this was a catastrophic failure of B&M’s design, akin in nature to a plane crash or a person’s being struck by lightning. The chance of this happening is at least one in two billion, but, somehow, this was the one. This failure could have been in the computer system, the sensors, or the restraint mechanism itself. Knowing what I know, I find it extremely hard to believe that this is what happened, but it has to be considered given the available details.

 

2.      That Six Flags Over Georgia is responsible for a catastrophic maintenance problem that left one or more parts of the safety systems fatally unreliable.

 

3.      That there was no technical problem, and that Six Flags Over Georgia is responsible for misusing a working ride. This misuse could have involved the train being deliberately dispatched while in an unsafe condition (the safety rules can in theory be overridden, but that process is too complicated to be enabled by mistake), or it could have involved a rider who was too large to ride being allowed to ride nevertheless (conceivably, a rider with an unusually large abdomen could stop the bar before it was lowered securely over the thighs, leading to a situation in which the ratchet was technically locked — and remained locked — but there was sufficient clearance for the rider’s hips and thighs to move past it during negative-g portions of the ride).

 

4.      That this was a perfect storm, involving negligent maintenance, plus indifferent ride operations, plus unusual behavior from the rider, and that, together, this led to an impossibly unlikely accident.

 

We will see. This is all very strange. Until now, it has always been the case that people who died on roller coasters fell into one of a handful of camps. Those are 1) that they should not have been riding in the first instance (because, for example, they had no legs, or had a terrible spinal injury); 2) that they walked onto the tracks and were hit by a train; 3) that they had a preexisting condition (e.g. an aneurysm or a weak heart) that they did not know about; 4) that they just happened to die on a roller coaster, but were not killed by it; or 5) that they stood up or jumped out or convinced the operator not to secure them. This one is different. I’d be shocked if, after 36 years of perfection, B&M’s systems were suddenly called into question. But you never know. A full inquiry will be forthcoming.