The Watchdogs Are Barking Themselves Hoarse

By Marie-Rose Sheinerman

Sunday, August 09, 2026

 

Last May, President Trump held an “intimate” dinner at his members-only golf club in Virginia for the top-220 investors in $TRUMP, a meme coin he launched days before the start of his second term that, by the end of 2025, would generate $636 million for him. About 100 protesters gathered outside in rain jackets, baseball caps, and muddy sneakers to confront the dinner guests arriving in shiny dress shoes, tuxedos, and black Cadillac SUVs. They pointed to the dinner as the encapsulation of the troublesome grift of Trump’s second term: trading personal access to the president in exchange for cash and funneling money to a Trump-owned property. “This is like the Mount Everest of corruption,” Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, a Democrat, said that night, standing before a crowd spotted with signs reading grifter in chief and don the con.

 

But a year later, when Trump hosted the winners of the second iteration of the so-called crypto contest at a luncheon gala in Mar-a-Lago in Florida, no large group of protesters greeted the attendees. The private Florida resort is a logistically more challenging location for a protest than a golf club 45 minutes from downtown Washington. But the ever intensifying rush of ethics concerns had also made the crypto contest fade into the background, even for activists who closely follow each allegation. The Mar-a-Lago edition of the feast didn’t make headlines the way the first had done. “I think maybe it is because people have become more inured to some of what was going on, and it wasn’t breaking through in the same way,” Lisa Gilbert, a co-president of Public Citizen, a consumer-rights group that helped organize the protest last year, told me. “As profiteering becomes the norm, it’s harder to explain why it’s outrageous.”

 

Washington’s ethics watchdog groups thought they were prepared for Trump’s second term. During his first four years in the White House, they had quickly learned which possible misuses of taxpayer funds to focus on, which apparent case of profiteering off the presidency to anchor a report around, and which allegations of nepotism or self-dealing to try to pitch to journalists as worthy of a story. Most such allegations frequently generated shock and anger, and some surveys of Trump voters found that they were outraged at several of his Cabinet secretaries for spending millions in taxpayer dollars on first-class air travel and personal security, or Trump’s family businesses making millions while he was in office. Sometimes, the backlash prompted accountability: Three of Trump’s Cabinet members were forced out, lawmakers from both parties launched inquiries into alleged ethics violations, and top officials reimbursed the government for travel originally paid for by taxpayers.

 

This term, the watchdogs are even more alarmed by what they’re witnessing, and they are racing to keep up. Public Citizen added litigators and researchers, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) hired an expert in cryptocurrency. Last year, the Campaign Legal Center filed its highest number of ethics complaints in a single year and launched a tracker of “corrupt transactions” to ensure that “the exhaustion factor” doesn’t get in the way of keeping a careful count of such instances, even if the media no longer closely cover each one, Saurav Ghosh, the group’s director of federal-campaign-finance reform, told me.

 

That doesn’t mean the public has grown indifferent. Although polls show that voters have long considered most politicians to be corrupt, a recent survey by Echelon Insights found that the share of Americans who see corruption as the biggest issue facing the nation is now 17 percent, up from 8 percent in December 2024. But there has also been a dampening of objections to possible instances of self-dealing, especially among Republicans, and the examples of accountability are scarce.

 

Within a few days of the inauguration last year, the administration had fired 17 inspectors general, dismantling oversight of taxpayer funds, quid-pro-quo business ventures, and ethics-law violations. The president made roughly $2.2 billion last year, according to The New York Times, a windfall that came mostly from cryptocurrency deals, a new source of income that now forms the bulk of his net worth at a time when his administration has made eroding crypto oversight part of its economic agenda. He also booked up to $117 million in legal settlements, mostly with major tech and media companies, and $125 million from foreign golf and real-estate deals—roughly twice the revenue generated from such deals in 2017. The president has also made more than 21,000 securities trades, often in quick bursts tied to market-moving moments he sparked, according to a Bloomberg analysis. His sons’ portfolio of defensive-technology companies, meanwhile, has collectively generated more than $3 billion in direct government business since Eric and Donald Trump Jr. made their investments, The Washington Post found.

 

“I think the big difference in this term is just how blatant all of it is. In the first term, there was at least a head nod towards Trump as president being separate from Trump the businessman,” Jordan Libowitz, a spokesperson for CREW, told me. “Now that’s gone.”

 

The White House sees things differently. Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, told me in an email that the allegations of corruption are “the same, tired narrative that Democrats have pushed against President Trump, his family, and his administration for a decade.” She said that the president’s assets are “held in fully discretionary accounts managed by independent third-party financial institutions” and that he has no conflicts of interest.

 

But it’s hard to deny the shift in scale from Trump’s previous four years in office. One of the many examples of how much has changed: In the fall of 2019, the administration announced that the G7 summit would be held at Trump’s golf club in Doral, Florida, which alarmed not just watchdog groups but also Republican lawmakers who didn’t think the president should award his own company a government contract. Two days later, Trump retreated and blamed “Media & Democrat Crazed and Irrational Hostility” for his reversal.

 

This March, the Doral golf club played host to the Shield of the Americas summit, a gathering of Latin American and Caribbean leaders to discuss combatting drug cartels. Trump has announced that the G20 summit later this year will be held at the same hotel because it’s “the best location” for the job. The reaction from GOP members of Congress to the news ranged from silent to “thrilled.”

 

***

 

Many of the major ethics scandals of Trump’s first term seem almost quaint: Housing Secretary Ben Carson, or possibly his wife, spent $31,000 on a dining set. Ivanka Trump endorsed Goya beans. EPA Secretary Scott Pruitt spent $43,000 to install a phone booth.

 

What seemed to generate a drumbeat of headlines then was the cost of Trump’s travel, especially to his own properties. Although Trump had once ridiculed President Obama for taking a 2012 vacation that cost “taxpayers millions of dollars,” he often traveled several times a month to his private properties in Florida and New Jersey. Less than two months into his first term, The Washington Post reported that Trump had spent nearly one of every three days in office at one of his own properties. A Government Accountability Office report found that the president’s four trips to Mar-a-Lago in one month of 2017 cost taxpayers a total of $13.6 million.

 

A year and a half into his second term, Trump has made 270 visits to his properties, marking a 14 percent jump compared with the same point in his first term, according to the CREW tracker (which updates daily). Trump’s taxpayer tab for golfing trips hit $70 million last fall, HuffPost calculated. If he continues golfing and traveling at the current pace, the analysis showed, this term will run taxpayers $300 million—twice what they paid during his first term. Those costs include protecting the president and his family; the Secret Service spent nearly $100,000 at Trump-owned properties in the first five months of the second term.

 

A related category of recurring stories from the first term concerned Trump’s Cabinet members and their questionable taxpayer-funded travel. In the fall of 2017, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price became the administration’s first Cabinet member forced to resign following outcry over his use of public funds for work trips in private jets. Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin’s firing followed after, among other things, the public learned of a taxpayer-funded trip to the United Kingdom he’d taken with his wife. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke left the administration in 2018 following several scandals involving misuse of government-funded travel, including to Dallas and the Virgin Islands. And Pruitt, the EPA secretary, faced scrutiny over repeated trips home to Tulsa and abroad on the taxpayers’ dime. In Trump’s second term, the focus of outrage is rarely the trips themselves, but rather what happens on them—for example, FBI Director Kash Patel’s taxpayer-funded trip to Hawaii, where he went on a “VIP snorkel” at a Pearl Harbor memorial, and his trip to Milan for the Olympics, during which he was filmed drinking in the locker room with the U.S. men’s hockey team.

 

One of the many scandals surrounding Kristi Noem when she led the Department of Homeland Security involved a $70 million jet supposedly intended for high-profile deportations, as well as the purchase of two luxury planes for $172 million. Her replacement, Markwayne Mullin, uses one of the planes to fly home to Oklahoma most weekends, and the department says he picks up the bill, although they won’t provide details on how that’s calculated. Another is reportedly being used by Melania Trump.

 

Yet another category of ethical issues that has gained relatively little notice is the volume of merchandise being sold by the president and those in his orbit. In February 2017, a weekslong controversy followed Kellyanne Conway, then a top aide to Trump, promoting Ivanka Trump’s clothing line during a Fox & Friends appearance. Conway faced bipartisan accusations of violating a statute that prohibits federal employees from using “their public office for their own private gain,” including through “the endorsement of any product, service, or enterprise.” The Republican chair of the House Oversight Committee pushed for a prompt review of Conway’s statements, including possible disciplinary action.

 

Now brand promotion and trademarked gear have become so ubiquitous in the White House that the Oval Office study—a small room that past presidents have used for tasks such as reviewing speech drafts and making calls—has been transformed into a shrine for baseball caps and collectibles emblazoned with maga, gulf of america, and trump 2028. Officials throughout the administration are known to enjoy self-branded merchandise (maybe Patel most ardently). This past spring, the Trump Organization applied for a trademark for “Trump 250” images to allow the president to profit from clothing or knickknack sales tied to America’s 250th birthday. The Trump Organization’s flagship store launched 168 new products in time for Trump’s second Inauguration Day, according to a count by CREW. Truth Social, Trump’s primary form of communication with the public, is his own company as well—meaning that anyone who wants to hear directly from the president must do so on an app where their clicks and page views generate ad revenue for Trump. (Many of those ads are for his own products.) The company recently launched a service selling to Wall Street early access to the president’s digital communications, which frequently move markets.

 

But perhaps the most significant category of self-dealing allegations is the one with no first-term analogue. A few days before Trump’s second inauguration, an Emirati royal backed a deal to purchase a 49 percent stake in World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s primary crypto venture, for half a billion dollars. The deal, reportedly signed by Eric Trump, included $187 million up front and at least $31 million set to go toward entities linked to the family of Steve Witkoff, a lead Middle East negotiator for the administration and a co-founder of the crypto firm. A majority of the wealth that Trump has amassed this term, according to financial disclosures, comes from his family’s cryptocurrency businesses. World Liberty Financial applied for a national-trust bank charter in January and is expected to receive permission to operate like a bank in the near future, NOTUS reported this summer, a move that could give executives yet another way to direct money toward the president.

 

For Trump’s birthday, in June, a bloody spectacle arrived on the White House South Lawn, courtesy of UFC Freedom 250; World Liberty Financial was an “official partner,” and fighters were paid bonuses in “stablecoins,” cryptocurrency issued by the company. The Trump family also used the fight as an opportunity to sell physical silver and gold coins—some priced as high as $12,000—featuring Trump’s face and purportedly “designed by President Trump” through a collaboration between UFC and the Trump Organization. The Public Integrity Project, a legal nonprofit, sued to try to stop the event, calling it “a volcano of corruption,” but failed. Several other groups, including CREW and Public Citizen, raised questions and condemned the festivities. But the fights continued as planned.

The Common Good

By Dan Hugger

Sunday, August 09, 2026

 

On June 19, the Barack Obama Presidential Center opened in Chicago. Its museum, featuring exhibits across four floors, is organized around four themes that shaped the Obamas, the Obama presidency, and the American people. They include “Toward a More Perfect Union,” “The People’s House,” “We the People,” and “Working for the Common Good.” The common good theme shaped the Obama administration from the very beginning. On January 20, 2009, President Obama would invoke the common good in his inaugural address:

 

The nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous. The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our gross domestic product, but on the reach of our prosperity, on the ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart—not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.

 

The nation was then still in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis, which had come to a head with the bankruptcy of the financial services company Lehman Brothers in September of that year and would become the defining issue of the 2008 presidential campaign. The George W. Bush administration, the Federal Reserve, and Congress would pursue a series of costly interventions to mitigate the crisis and stimulate an economic recovery. Most controversially were government interventions such as loans, asset purchases, and injections of equity to save private corporations judged “too big to fail.” This struck many Americans at the time, on both the left and the right, as favoring the prosperous over the populace, and economic metrics over human need.

 

It was an ideal time for the recovery of the language of the common good.

 

A decade and a half later, we are now in the midst of a new attempt to recover the same language on the American right, and the New York Times has noticed. Elisabeth Zerofsky, writing on the recent ideological struggles within the Heritage Foundation, reported:

 

According to [Richard] Stern [former director of Heritage’s budget center], [Heritage President Kevin] Roberts began to talk, around the office, not about individual liberty but about the “common good” — not about freedom as the right to do as you want but as you “ought.” Roberts adopted what Stern described as a “policy sweep,” a push not for smaller but for larger government, with more regulatory powers. One of his former chiefs of staff, Stern recalled, liked to say that the most appropriate limit on the government was no limit.

 

Andrew T. Walker, dean of the School of Theology and professor of Christian Ethics and Public Theology at Southern Seminary, while declining to comment on Zerofsky’s reporting, argued on X that this passage:

 

seems to helpfully capture the entire “fight on the right” as a fundamental, zero-sum dispute: whether there is such a thing as the “common good”—and, if so, what its substance and scope are. How you approach the common good will tell you where you are on today’s conservative spectrum. The thicker one’s conception of the common good, the more one will migrate toward a politics that focuses less on individual autonomy and more on the intrinsic goods necessary for social flourishing.

 

On a superficial level, it seems that Walker’s assertion could be right, but as Lord Acton said, “Common report and outward seeming are bad copies of the reality, as the initiated know it.” Employing the language of the common good, even doing so with great frequency, is not actually the same as having a thick conception of the common good. Obama, for example, would steer the nation through the 2008 financial crisis using government interventions like those of his predecessor. The Affordable Care Act, a signature achievement of his administration, required employers to provide no-cost birth control coverage to employees. The Little Sisters of the Poor, who would spend over a decade fighting this mandate to preserve their religious freedom, would surely have a word to say about whether the mandate really did further the common good.

 

Just as there are reasons to suspect the thickness of Obama’s commitment to the common good, so with many figures on the “new right” who loudly proclaim themselves its defender. In his 2023 book Regime Change, Patrick Deneen, professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, makes the case for using “Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends.” Chris Rufo, senior fellow and director of the Logos Initiative at the Manhattan Institute, has argued that politics requires holding a tension between Aristotelian virtue and Machiavellian virtù. Such frank admissions open the possibility that the use of the language of the “common good” by the new right is cynical.

 

Cynical or not, the definitions of the common good offered by many on the new right as the controversy unfurled across X for the past week were both minimal and elastic. The political commentator Michael Knowles offered up the following definition: “It’s the kind of good that is not diminished when shared.” This definition has its roots in the classical world but has three deficiencies. First, it is a definition of a kind of good and not the common good as such. Second, it is essentially the same as what in modern economics is known as a “public good.” These goods and services, because of their non-excludable and non-rivalrous nature, are usually, although not always, provided by the government and paid for by taxation. The classic example is the lighthouse whose light is seen and shared by all. But the most damning of all, Knowles’ definition ignores more than two millennia of philosophical and theological reflection on the common good in the Christian West.

 

While no institution or tradition has a monopoly on the common good, the Catholic Church has engaged in a rich, sustained reflection on the common good for some 2,000 years, developing and extending its conception of it and bridging the gap between the reflections of the ancients and application in the modern world. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, quoting the Second Vatican Council document Gaudium et spes, defines the common good as, “the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily” (section 1906).

 

The catechism further explains that the common good consists of three essential elements. First, respect for “the person as such” which obligates public authorities “to respect the fundamental and inalienable rights of the human person” ( section 1907). Second, “the social well-being and development of the group itself,” which obligates public authorities “to arbitrate … between various particular interests … [and] make accessible to each what is needed to lead a truly human life: food, clothing, health, work, education and culture, suitable information, the right to establish a family, and so on” (section 1908). Lastly, to secure peace “the stability and security of a just order” which “presupposes that authority should ensure by morally acceptable means the security of society and its members. It is the basis of the right to legitimate personal and collective defence” (section 1909).

 

Taking this mature, theologically informed perspective dissolves the “zero-sum dispute” that seemed so clear to Walker. If a thick conception of the common good includes “respect the fundamental and inalienable rights of the human person,” the critics of the new right appropriation of the language of the common good are not necessarily enemies of the common good itself.

 

The language Stern heard Roberts employ at Heritage “not about freedom as the right to do as you want but as you ought,” is another key to dissolving seeming tension. The turn of phrase is originally Lord Acton’s, truncated to obscure its true meaning:

 

The Catholic notion, defining liberty not as the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought, denies that general interests can supersede individual rights. It condemns, therefore, the theory of the ancient as well as of the modern state.

 

Debates about the common good should not be framed as the common good versus the individual. Any honest grappling with the common good must include a serious commitment to the fundamental and inalienable rights of the human person as a part of and not an obstacle to the realization of the common good. Writing for the Daily Wire days later, Walker, on further reflection, acknowledged this reality. “We must assert what no healthy society can do without: a true account of the human person, the priority of the family, respect for human rights, and the rule of law,” he wrote. This rejection of the zero-sum new right and postliberal framing of the debate is the first step to the restoration of the common good.

 

The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church lists the four permanent principles at the heart of Catholic social teaching: the dignity of the human person, the common good, subsidiarity, and solidarity. It does so for good reason. None of them can be realized without the others. When postliberals and others in the new right devalue the dignity of the human person by celebrating the violent clerical fascist regime of Francisco Franco, undermine subsidiarity by arguing for the military occupation of American cities, and deny the demands of solidarity by devaluing and dismissing the concerns of their fellow citizens with their political program, they discredit the common good they claim to want to uphold.

Media and Academia: Increasingly Irrelevant, Increasingly Distrusted

By Becket Adams

Sunday, August 09, 2026

 

The story of modern academia resembles that of the modern press: an institution designed to provide continuity, trust, and a coherent worldview between generations that has become hollowed out by political factions and twisted into an intensely unlikeable caricature of its former self.

 

Last week began poorly for higher education with the American Association of University Professors’ unprecedented endorsement of Michigan Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who quipped in April that Vice President JD Vance’s “brown kids” will eventually discover their father thinks they “are less American than everyone else,” and urged Second Lady Usha Vance to “get out” of her marriage while she still can.

 

The week then closed even worse for academia and the news media with the resignation of Jason Arday, an apparent plagiarist and probable fabulist whose brief career as a darling of both industries owed as much to the excesses of higher education as to those of the press, as if he were the unnatural offspring of some cursed union between the two.

 

Arday, who spent years as the toast of the teachers’ lounge as Cambridge University’s youngest-ever black professor, leaves behind him a wreck of fabrications and red-faced supporters.

 

A book he claimed to have published, Being Young, Black and Male: Challenging the Dominant Discourse, was never actually published. Contrary to his claims, he is evidently not a visiting professor at the University of Glasgow, Ohio State University, or Nelson Mandela University, nor an honorary professor at Durham University.

 

Then there’s the matter of Arday’s published works, most notably his 2015 Ph.D. thesis, which appears to have included more than 100 instances of flagrant plagiarism. There are additional allegations that papers he published in 2018 and 2021 likewise contain substantial plagiarism.

 

All of this is in addition to the litany of likely falsehoods or at very least embellishments the now-former professor of sociology of education attached to his personal biography: He claimed he ran 600 miles in six days; he said he ran 30 marathons in 35 days, some of it while suffering a hairline fracture; he claimed he personally raised $7.4 million for charity (he said later it was he and a consortium of individuals, none of whom he can name because of a nondisclosure agreement); he said he appeared in a BBC childhood documentary series that aired in 1964 and whose participants were born in 1956 or 1957 (he was born in 1985); he said he was threatened at knifepoint by a masked man who demanded he resign as professor (the university found no evidence); he boasted that a charity that does not send volunteers overseas had sent him overseas; and he claimed someone once mailed a severed pig’s head to his parents’ house, leading to a police investigation of local butchers in which one was found to have sold a “whole hog” the morning of the package delivery (police have no record of any such event, and the butchers named by Arday say the authorities never contacted him).

 

There’s more: In Arday’s forthcoming memoir, which as of this writing Simon & Schuster has no intention of pulling, he claims to have started his master’s degree while reading at a preschool level; he claims a brain tumor caused him to lose his memory; he claims he once begged a judge not to punish two muggers, only for those same men to later appear as students in Arday’s class; he also claims he became godfather to one of the muggers’ children.

 

Though it is reasonable that one or two of these tales could have slipped past the gatekeepers in the press and the supposedly cerebral eggheads of higher education, it is indefensible and shameful that so many went largely unchallenged for so long. Remember, the bulk of his ludicrous CV didn’t appear after the accolades, but before. News outlets propped him up as a wunderkind even amid his increasingly preposterous backstory; academia elevated him to the highest heights, revealing that, just like the peer-review system, few, if any, in higher education do the reading.

 

There’s gullible, and then there’s whatever it is that made a celebrity of Arday.

 

“Meet Jason Arday, Cambridge University’s youngest ever black professor, who didn’t speak until he was 11,” gushed a 2023 CBS News headline.

 

The Guardian reported, “[H]e learned to talk at 11 and read at 18 — then became Cambridge’s youngest black professor. Diagnosed with autism as a child, Arday found his voice through speech therapy and his mother’s unflagging support. Now he is using it with the same tenacity that saw him run 30 marathons in 35 days.”

 

No one actually confirmed his marathon claim. Reporters showed up for day one and day 35 of the marathon, and everyone took him at his word in between.

 

Even People magazine published a puff profile titled “Man Who Was Illiterate Until Age 18 Becomes Cambridge University’s Youngest Black Professor,” while the style publication Rake was agog over his “bespoke style.”

 

Meanwhile, the BBC was positively in love, publishing an article on February 23, 2023, whose opening lines read: “Although he could not speak, the young Jason fervently questioned the world around him. ‘Why are some people homeless?’ he remembers wondering. ‘Why is there war?’”

 

In an unbylined blog post, Cambridge University itself described Arday as a “highly respected scholar of race, inequality and education.”

 

The post added, “At 37, he will be the youngest Black person ever appointed to a professorship at Cambridge — a platform he intends to use to inspire more people from under-represented backgrounds into higher education, building on the university’s many initiatives in this area.”

 

Interestingly, the anonymous blog post and the February 2023 BBC article have identical language.

 

The BBC reported: “His mother played a critical role in developing his self-confidence and skills. She introduced him to a wide range of music in the hope this would aid his conceptualisation of language. But it also kick-started a lifelong interest in popular culture that has characterised some of his research. Supported by his mentor, college tutor and friend Sandro Sandri, Prof Arday finally began to read and write in his late teens.”

 

Cambridge published this: “As a child, Arday’s mother played a critical role developing his self-confidence and skills, in particular by introducing him to a wide range of music. Her hope was that this would aid his conceptualisation of language, but it also kick-started a lifelong interest in popular culture that has characterised some of his research.”

 

Then, in a moment of unintentional comedy, both posts quote Arday as remarking, “When I started writing academic papers, I had no idea what I was doing.”

 

You don’t say.

 

On August 5, after Arday announced his resignation, news host Piers Morgan asked, “How did this serial fantasist ever get to be a Cambridge professor? That’s the most interesting part of this farce.”

 

Yes. Yes, it is.

 

Just as shameful as the journalists who touted this fraudster are the academics who slurped up his nonsense like greedy pigs at feeding time. It is shameful on its face, but doubly so given that we are told ad nauseam that these people are smarter and more qualified to direct policy than the average voter. Not likely. Upon hearing about 30 marathons in 35 days or 600 miles in six days, the average voter would not have swooned, published glossy profiles, and handed out academic awards. The average voter would have immediately said, “BS,” followed by, “Prove it.”

 

Most shameful of all is that none of this needed to happen. Arday did not force himself on anyone. He was scooped up by industries eager to promote him for an aesthetic and thus prove their own virtue, but not for any real talent or skill.

 

Beneath this humiliation, as Arday slinks back to obscurity, is a story about the rot of a once-respected public institution and how it overlaps with the corruption of a second institution. For both higher education and the press, the problems are the same: Facts and truth are no longer at the center of everything but are subordinated to the “message” and the correct “narratives.”

 

Promoting Arday was bad on the merits, but the social damage such incidents cause demands attention. The news media and higher education are supposed to serve a public good, but that goes only so far when they have no goodwill. Just like the news media, the percentage of U.S. adults who say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education has seen a sharp decline, falling 19 points since 2015 to just 38 percent — one of the sharpest long-term declines among major U.S. institutions, according to Gallup.

 

The decline stems from rising costs, the perception that college does little to prepare students for work or life, and, you guessed it, higher education’s “perceived political agendas.”

 

So what better moment, with confidence already low, for the AAUP to rally behind El-Sayed or for Cambridge to pick an aesthetically “correct” midwit and foist him onto the world? This is the same destructive obliviousness that has wreaked havoc on the news industry, where pro-journalism groups, apparently blind to their credibility crisis and shrinking audiences, continue to bestow honors and accolades on actual and accidental clowns.

 

“Wouldn’t it be the most ridiculous story ever told,” Arday said in 2023, “if the boy who couldn’t read and write at 18 gets a Ph.D. before he’s 30?”

 

Yes. Yes, it would be.

Iran Is Rewiring Its Proxy Network

By Ahmad Sharawi & Bridget Toomey

Sunday, August 09, 2026

 

Among the millions traveling to Iraq for Arbaeen — the annual Shiite pilgrimage to Karbala and Najaf — at least six Iranian men entered the country, presenting themselves as escorts assigned to accompany Iranian pilgrims. In reality, they were officers of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), sent to help Iraqi militias operate drones.

 

The world got a glimpse of this truth on July 29, when American and Saudi aircraft struck Iran-backed militia positions in northern Iraq, killing the officers. Tehran acknowledged their deaths but described the men as “advisers,” labels that obscured their apparent mission. At least four of the officers were connected to the IRGC Aerospace Force, which oversees the military force’s drone operations.

 

These six men’s deaths exposed how Tehran is rebuilding its battered network of proxies for the next phase of regional conflict. Specifically, the Islamic Republic is deploying mid-level commanders and moving Lebanese, Iraqi, and Yemeni fighters and specialists among proxy-controlled territories to prepare for renewed regional escalation. At the same time, it is organizing smaller, decentralized cells outside traditional militia hierarchies to make the network more resilient and less vulnerable to decapitation strikes.

 

Mehdi Mohammadi, a senior adviser to the speaker of Iran’s parliament, Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, described the emerging trend in the Axis of Resistance as “strategic integration.” According to Arab media reports, Iraqi militia units that launched missiles and drones toward the Gulf states and Jordan operated under the direct supervision of IRGC officers. These officers masquerade as diplomats and operate from the Iranian Embassy in Baghdad.

 

Tehran moved its own officers closer to the battlefield to retain the final say over escalation. Senior Quds Force officials sat at the center of this ecosystem. The Quds Force is the IRGC’s expeditionary arm; it includes Iranian commanders who have supervised drone teams from Iran-backed groups such as Kataib Hezbollah and Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba — groups that have attacked American positions and U.S. and Iraqi energy infrastructure.

 

Iran flew between 10 and 21 IRGC personnel, along with drone and missile equipment, to Yemen in July, according to Reuters. This trip reopened direct flights between Iran and the Houthis after roughly a decade without direct air access. Such flights are intended to give the IRGC easier access to its Yemeni partner. The deployment’s significance was further underscored in that it came mere days before the Houthis announced a naval blockade of Saudi Arabia. That move followed the Kingdom’s July 13 bombing of Sanaa airport, as part of an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to prevent the plane from landing.

 

In Iraq and Yemen, Tehran was positioning its proxies for escalation. In Lebanon, it had gone further by embedding IRGC personnel inside Hezbollah’s command structure and rebuilding effort after Israeli strikes eliminated the group’s senior leaders.

 

The extent of the IRGC’s presence in Lebanon came into view inside a Beirut hotel room. In March, Israel struck the Ramada Plaza hotel, killing at least four men who had checked in under Lebanese aliases using authentic Lebanese passports. Like the IRGC officers who entered Iraq as pilgrimage escorts, these men appeared on paper to be something they were not. Israel and Iran later identified them as Quds Force personnel responsible for finance and missile development.

 

Additional reservations for suspected IRGC officers, also traveling under falsified Lebanese identities, were later discovered at another Beirut hotel. Tehran had reportedly deployed as many as 150 IRGC personnel to Lebanon, where they were helping reorganize Hezbollah into smaller, compartmentalized cells designed to survive further Israeli attacks.

 

This model was also increasingly present in Iraq. The Islamic Republic created smaller cells to attack Arab countries hosting U.S. forces. Reuters reported that three or four teams, each composed of roughly ten fighters drawn from Iran-backed Iraqi militias, launched at least seven drone attacks toward Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates in April and May.

 

The cells offered Tehran several advantages. To begin, they were harder to detect and thus less vulnerable to decapitation strikes. But more importantly, they were not subordinate to a single militia. Iran assembled fighters from different groups — both from within the Iraqi network and other countries — for specific missions. This strategy created a proxy structure that was more integrated across militias, which IRGC–Quds Force Commander Esmail Qaani described as the “the unification of the operations room.” At the same time, the move allowed the IRGC to retain more control over fighters, instead of operating through a standard militia chain of command.

 

Houthi fighters in Iraq reportedly launched attacks on Saudi Arabia — a shared target of Tehran and the Yemen-based rebel group. Regional officials described the attack as a joint Houthi–Iraqi operation under IRGC supervision, despite Riyadh’s initial attribution mentioning only Iraq. The Houthis quickly claimed attacks on the Kingdom’s energy infrastructure. When Saudi Arabia and the United States launched an airstrike on Iraq in response, they killed a Houthi commander alongside the IRGC advisors.

 

Cooperation between Iran’s proxies is not new. Hezbollah has trained and supported Iran’s other proxies, alongside the IRGC, since its inception. Iran also mobilized its Axis of Resistance to support the only other state partner in the group, the Assad regime in Syria, during the country’s civil war.

 

The groups also coordinate political and financial activity among themselves. The Houthis opened an official office in Baghdad in June 2024, after years of visits and engagement; twelve years earlier, the group’s primary television network was inaugurated in Beirut under Hezbollah’s guidance. Similarly, Iraqi militias maintain representatives in Lebanon, who coordinate closely with Hezbollah.

 

To be clear, the novelty does not lie in the close contact between elements of Iran’s Axis of Resistance — it lies in the axis’s shifting form. Previously, the Iran-aligned militant groups focused on training and supporting each other in the face of immediate threats. Now, under more direct leadership of the IRGC, they are using each other’s territory as launching pads for regional aggression — all in the interest of the Islamic Republic.

 

Washington is seeking cooperation from officials in Beirut and Baghdad in countering Iranian influence in their countries. President Donald Trump hosted Lebanese President Joseph Aoun and Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi in separate July visits, extending good will to two governments that have promised to bring armed groups under state control. But dealing with the governments of Iraq and Lebanon requires both carrot and stick. In that vein, the United States should condition further diplomatic and economic support to Iraq and Lebanon on action: The two countries must expel IRGC and foreign proxy personnel, investigate Iranian operatives and local facilitators, and close offices that other Iranian proxies have opened in their territory.

 

It’s past time for Washington to confront Tehran’s efforts to transform its proxy network. If we don’t act now, the United States and our regional partners face a growing, multifront terror threat that will destabilize the region and challenge our interests for years to come.

What Came After Hiroshima

By Wesley Liu

Saturday, August 08, 2026

 

Most books about Hiroshima, Japan, ask readers to confront the atomic horror of August 6, 1945. Kiyoshi Tanimoto’s Hiroshima, 8:15: The Lost Memoir asks something more difficult: what comes afterward.

 

Although Tanimoto wrote the manuscript in English only a few years after the bombing and sent it to the writer John Hersey, it remained buried among Hersey’s papers for decades before recently being rediscovered in Yale University’s archives and finally published. The title refers to the moment, 8:15 a.m, when the atomic bomb detonated over Hiroshima.

 

Many readers first encountered Tanimoto through Hersey’s book, Hiroshima, which followed six survivors of the bombing and introduced Tanimoto to an international audience. However, this memoir offers something Hersey never could. In this memoir, Tanimoto speaks for himself—not as a historian reconstructing the past or as a journalist assembling evidence, but as a local Methodist pastor trying to shepherd his congregation through the collapse of everything they believed about their country, their government, and even themselves. That perspective makes Hiroshima, 8:15 far more than another account of the atomic bomb. It is a meditation on what happens when a civilization loses a war and must decide what parts of its soul should survive.

 

The most remarkable insight comes surprisingly early. Reflecting on Hiroshima after the bombing, Tanimoto refuses to place ultimate blame on technology alone.

 

The atomic bomb was a terrifying weapon, but it was man’s fighting spirit that made the war more terrible. Despite the great blow, unprecedented in all history, which they had suffered, the people of Hiroshima never said a word about giving up. The greater the amount of sacrifice, the stronger they were determined to avenge themselves. Herein lies the delusion of war and the unsolved problem of cruelty.

 

This is a startling observation because it rejects the easy assumption that unimaginable, overwhelming destruction naturally extinguishes the will to fight and produces peace. Many accounts of Hiroshima treat the bombing only as the event that finally brought World War II to an end. Tanimoto does not deny its military significance or human devastation, but he observes something more unsettling: Even after Hiroshima was reduced to ruins, the desire for revenge persisted among many who survived—and indeed, the more a people has suffered, the harder it becomes to admit that the suffering was in vain. This is not the conclusion of a political theorist. It is the observation of a pastor watching wounded people wrestle with grief, anger, and despair.

 

That pastoral perspective shapes the entire memoir. Tanimoto rarely writes about grand strategy or diplomatic negotiations. His attention is fixed on ordinary people—the members of his church, his neighbors, his family, and the moral condition of the nation around them. He is interested less in who won the war than in what the war did to the human heart.

 

Nowhere is this clearer than in his account of Japan’s surrender. Reading the newspapers the morning after the emperor’s August 16, 1945 announcement, Tanimoto admits that he did not initially feel relief. The defeat, he recalls, “cut deeply” into his heart after years of sacrifice, leaving many young Japanese in what he called a “vacuum state.” Yet amid that despair, one passage from Emperor Hirohito’s address slowly redirected his life. The emperor declared that he could no longer "endure seeing the people suffer further” and hoped to open “a road to eternal peace.” Those words became, in Tanimoto’s own resolution, a lifelong calling: “Let me struggle forever to construct peace for eternity.” Significantly, he adds that “it would be days before I reached this personal resolve.” Recovery, he insists, is gradual.

 

One of the memoir’s most revealing conversations occurs with Capt. Sawano, a naval officer and longtime Sunday school superintendent in Tanimoto’s church. Rather than lament Japan’s defeat, Sawano argues that the country “should make a new start.” The dream of world dominance, he concludes, had been arrogant, and perhaps defeat itself was “a divine providence” calling Japan back to humility. For Sawano, the country’s renewal would depend less on politicians than on “religious people and educators.” Tanimoto clearly sees this conversation as pointing toward a deeper reconstruction. Political reform alone would never be enough. A broken nation first had to recover its moral bearings.

 

His reflections on the collapse of imperial ideology are equally fascinating. He describes a people whose “minds and spirits” had been “shaken from their foundations.” Even his intensely patriotic father decided to burn the portraits of the emperor he had carefully collected throughout his life. Christians like Tanimoto had long rejected emperor worship and suffered for doing so—yet Tanimoto is troubled by the speed with which the broader public abandoned the emperor altogether. “What a great change had come,” he remarks. His concern is not nostalgia for the old order but the realization that convictions adopted too easily can also be discarded too easily. He supports dismantling the emperor’s divine status as essential to democratization, but he worries that simply replacing one unquestioned orthodoxy with another would leave Japan no freer than before.

 

Yet Tanimoto does not pretend he was immune from the assumptions of wartime Japan. One of the memoir’s greatest strengths is its honesty about how slowly deeply-held beliefs give way. While speaking with a Filipino soldier serving in the Allied occupation forces in Japan, Tanimoto instinctively praises the discipline and morality of the Japanese military, describing its adherence to Bushido, an ancient samurai honor code. The soldier interrupts him: “The Japanese have ruined Manila.”

 

At first, Tanimoto is bewildered. Having never served in the armed forces, he genuinely knew little about the atrocities committed across Asia. Only after listening to returning soldiers does he grasp the truth. Looking back, he confesses that he became “ashamed” of the trust he had once placed in the Imperial Army and finally understood the Filipino soldier’s indignation. It is one of the memoir’s most compelling moments because readers watch Tanimoto’s moral understanding change in real time. He does not write as someone who always possessed clarity. He writes as a pastor learning difficult truths alongside his congregation.

 

A similar complexity emerges several months later. In December 1945, as Hiroshima was beginning the slow work of rebuilding under the Allied occupation, an American reporter visited the city and assumed that its survivors resented the United States. By this point, Tanimoto’s own thinking had changed considerably. The immediate anger, confusion, and desire for revenge that had followed the bombing had gradually given way to a painful process of self-examination. “The people in Hiroshima do not resent the Americans,” Tanimoto tells the reporter. “If we feel resentment, it is against the Japanese leaders and not the Americans.”

 

The answer astonishes the reporter, but Tanimoto explains that he had scarcely reflected on the morality of the atomic bomb itself because survival had occupied every waking hour. There were church members to locate, families to comfort, and a devastated city struggling simply to live with a new “atomic disease.” Only later, after conversations with returning soldiers, members of the Allied occupation forces, and foreign visitors, did his attention turn toward the political and moral decisions that had led Japan into what he called “such a reckless and lousy war.” Their conversation soon broadens into a discussion of Japanese expansionism, Western colonialism, immigration restrictions, and competing visions of the international order. Neither man completely persuades the other, yet when the reporter remarks that “the future world is a world for everybody,” Tanimoto admits that the idea “deeply penetrated” his heart. Once again, the memoir’s defining quality is not certainty but a willingness for difficult conversations and an openness to moral reconsideration of deeply held convictions.

 

By the memoir’s final chapters, Tanimoto concludes that Japan’s reconstruction will require more than constitutional reform. As a Christian minister, he argues that “the realization of democracy in Japan” must begin with renewing individual values through Christianity. Yet he carefully distinguishes this from partisan politics. The church, he insists, “should be independent from political organizations but not indifferent to politics,” maintaining that “government administrations must be guided through Christian conscience.”

 

Whether readers share Tanimoto’s theological commitments or not, the larger point remains compelling. Institutions alone cannot sustain a free society. Political renewal of institutions requires moral renewal of individuals. That is ultimately what makes this such a remarkable memoir.

 

Eighty-one years after Hiroshima, those issues remain as urgent as ever. The technologies of war have changed dramatically. Human nature has not. Tanimoto’s enduring contribution is not simply that he survived history’s first atomic bombing. It is that, as a pastor rather than a politician or historian, he understood that the greatest challenge after war is not rebuilding cities. It is rebuilding consciences.

Ransom Note

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, August 07, 2026

 

Of the many terrible consequences of the Iran war, an underrated one is the traction it’s created for a “real postliberalism has never been tried” movement to get rolling on the right.

 

It isn’t all bad. In the short term, a splinter faction of disgruntled Lindberghians is actually useful to the anti-Trump cause. To take one obvious example, the president will find it harder to convince Republicans that this fall’s election was rigged than he did in 2020–21 because the discontented far right has a motive this time to vouch for the legitimacy of a Democratic victory.

 

The left didn’t cheat; it won because American voters don’t want to fight Israel’s battles, they’ll insist. Trump conquered the right in 2016 by making it safe for Republican voters to believe that Bushism failed. Now the Lindberghians need to do the same to him, and they’re going to try.

 

Also, there was surely going to be some sort of “real postliberalism has never been tried” wing of the post-Trump right even in a timeline where the war never happened. It’s in the nature of revolutionary populism to fracture into more and less austere strains once the galvanizing messianic leader passes from the scene. With or without the Iran conflict, the Lindberghians were going to stake a claim in 2028.

 

But they’re more viable now, mid-war, than they otherwise would have been. If you’re the sort of chud whose big problem with the last 18 months of kakistocracy is that we’re too close with Israel and not nearly close enough with Russia, good news: Your time is coming.

 

The grand poobah of “real postliberalism has never been tried” in modern right-wing politics is Tucker Carlson, who conferred last week with disgruntled populists like Rep. Thomas Massie, former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, and former counterterrorism official Joe Kent on a way forward for the Tuckerite right. They don’t agree on everything—Greene is a nationalist, Massie a staunch libertarian—but all seem to believe that putting “America First” starts with reducing Israeli influence.

 

On Wednesday Carlson revealed the fruits of that conference in a podcast modestly titled “Rebuilding America After the Great Betrayal.” I lack the grace to sit through a 94-minute monologue by a guy whose devotion to Putinism once led him to marvel at the sophistication of Moscow shopping carts, but I trust that Axios’ summary of the 10-point manifesto that Tucker revealed fairly states his agenda.

 

Those 10 points were framed, apparently, as the foundation for “whatever comes next.”

 

Oh? What comes next?

 

Ransom note.

 

Coverage this week of Carlson’s gambit has reliably pivoted to speculation about him running for president in 2028, either as a third-party candidate or as a dark-horse entrant into the Republican primary. The manifesto is his campaign platform!

 

I don’t think that’s primarily what this is about.

 

Until there’s evidence of a falling out between him and his acolyte J.D. Vance, I default to believing that Tucker will stand aside. He’s unlikely to defeat Vance, for one thing, especially if Trump is in the vice president’s corner: Carlson’s net approval among Republicans fell from +54 two years ago to +7 earlier this year after he began attacking the president over Iran, such is the GOP base’s loyalty to its leader.

 

Running and losing would be bad. Running, losing, and weakening Vance with the right such that Democrats win narrowly in 2028 would reduce Carlson to Nader-esque infamy among the Republican base, damaging postliberalism long-term.

 

He might be willing to take that risk if he felt obliged to punish Vance over the war, but he went out of his way to absolve him for it during an interview in June. The vice president is “in a horrible situation” with respect to Iran, forced to defend a conflict he didn’t support, Carlson observed. “And every day I feel sorry for J.D. Vance. Every day I say a prayer for him. Always consider him a friend.” He pronounced the VP “really smart” and “obviously” preferable to Marco Rubio as a Republican nominee in 2028.

 

That doesn’t sound to me like a man who’s expecting to run for president. That sounds to me like a man who’s expecting J.D. Vance to run and who intends to use his influence on the right to make sure that the GOP establishment—and Vance himself—remains tethered to postliberalism after Trump retires.

 

The manifesto is a ransom note. As long as the party doesn’t drift too far from Carlson’s principles, whether due to a conservative resurgence or some felt need to moderate for the sake of “electability,” there will be no Tucker candidacy. That’s a powerful incentive for Vance’s skeptics in the GOP’s ruling class to put aside their qualms about him and their infatuation with Rubio. They can get behind our postliberal vice president and have an uneventful, unifying presidential primary, or they can back a traditional Republican and take their chances against a charismatic challenger in Carlson whose warmth toward Russia makes Trump look like Ronald Reagan.

 

“I do want to be involved in offering an option of some kind,” Tucker said in that June interview about the coming presidential cycle. Pay the ransom by doubling down on postliberalism or try to beat me in ’28: That’s the option he’s offering to the GOP.

 

The manifesto is also a sort of “break glass in case of emergency” option for postliberals. Conceivably, Vance could falter politically, losing popularity on the right because of his role in brokering June’s pitiful peace deal with Iran or to other failures yet to come. Trump, being Trump, could also decide that he simply likes Rubio better, shunting Vance aside and effectively killing his chances at the nomination. Postliberals can’t control whether the VP runs—but they can control whether Republicans will field a candidate to fill the vacuum left by his absence. Carlson’s 10-point vision is his way of volunteering to be the Troy Jackson to Vance’s Graham Platner, I suspect.

 

The manifesto does one more thing for him. It sets him up to be the guru of postliberalism in a Trumpless American right.

 

That role currently belongs to the president, who boasted earlier this year that “America First” means whatever he says it means. It isn’t always, or even often, the case that the leader of a revolutionary movement is also its definitive ideological authority among followers; those roles could diverge once Trump is gone, even if Vance wins the presidency. I imagine that Carlson believes they will, and that he’s well positioned as a talented demagogue to define the parameters of the nationalist vision for grassroots Republicans while his friend J.D. goes about executing the program.

 

Putin has Aleksandr Dugin, the Russian nationalist philosopher sometimes described as his “Rasputin.” President Vance will need a Dugin too. The manifesto is Tucker’s job application to right-wing voters, offering himself as someone who’ll keep the next Republican president honest about continuing to follow “America First” principles while in office.

 

And should that president spring a new “great betrayal,” 2032 is only a few years away.

 

What is the “nationalist vision” according to Carlson, though?

 

Virtue, postliberal style.

 

Per Axios, the 10 points are organized thematically according to virtues that he believes should define America. Fairness. Sovereignty. Industry. Beauty. Health. Honesty. Optimism. Wisdom. Decency. Unity.

 

It’s an irritating rhetorical conceit, for more than one reason. “Like many lists created by Carlson’s erstwhile opponents on the socialist left, these are slogans that are meant to be unopposable,” Douglas Murray noted in a piece for The Free Press. “Or to put it another way, as a logician taught me many years ago, there is no point in uttering a phrase the opposite of which would be uttered only by a madman.”

 

Who could oppose “fairness” and “wisdom”? Who, for that matter, could be against “social justice” and “diversity”?

 

It’s irritating too because, as with their cherished concept of “the common good,” it’s another case of postliberals babbling about virtue while conveniently reserving to themselves the right to say which beliefs and policies do—and don’t—define those virtues. I invite you to judge for yourself how sincerely an apologist for Russian fascism, who very clearly wants to expand the right’s “big tent” to include white nationalists and Holocaust revisionists, cares about “decency” or “wisdom” in the abstract.

 

An honest manifesto of postliberalism would state forthrightly that it rejects traditional Christian notions of right and wrong because those values undermine the ruthlessness required to dominate one’s political opponents. That’s how you know Carlson’s claptrap is foremost a political document, not an ideological one: It’s sugar-coated to make it easier for gullible Americans to swallow.

 

Speaking of which.

 

Read through Axios’ summary and you’ll run across some of the usual nationalist hobby horses. “Unity” means fewer immigrants; “wisdom” means ditching progressive dogma about gender fluidity; “optimism” means natalism; “beauty” grouses about America’s brutalist architecture, an evergreen preoccupation of “RETVRN” bros on social media. None of these ideas are galvanizing to the left. But there are some in there—lots, actually—that do have crossover appeal.

 

“Fairness” and “honesty” refer to anti-corruption measures like holding government officers to the same rules as the average joe and punishing officials who lie to citizens, an obvious shot at Trump. “Sovereignty” and “decency” are anti-war planks about not letting allies—including one very specific ally—lead us into foolish wars or spend U.S. tax dollars on genocide. “Health” borrows Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s agenda of better eating and less reliance on pharmaceuticals. And “honesty” nods at conspiracy theorists by calling for full disclosure on everything from Jeffrey Epstein to the Kennedy assassination to 9/11.

 

Republicans are reportedly planning to turn next month’s pre-midterm national convention into a two-day horror movie about democratic socialists taking over the country. Carlson’s manifesto is a sort of “prebuttal” of that, eschewing pure left-bashing for a more traditional populist attack on The People’s enemies on all sides, including the Trumpist establishment. That’s just the sort of pitch you’d make if you were looking to attract some of the many left-wing postliberals who are disillusioned with the Democratic Party and might be open to radical new political coalitions, especially one that encourages scapegoating Israel.

 

Still, to any traditional conservative, what pops about Carlson’s 10 points is what’s absent. There seems to be nothing much in there about individual freedom or smaller government, cornerstones of postwar right-wing thought—as Tucker, a former loud-and-proud libertarian, surely intended.

 

Identity, not freedom.

 

That’s why they call it “postliberalism,” you might reply, and you’d be right. By definition, the term describes a politics that deprioritizes personal liberty relative to other values. I’m not surprised that Carlson’s vision reflects that; I’m surprised that he was honest about it, declining to pay lip service to freedom to make his agenda more palatable to voters the way he sugar-coated his dishonesty about virtue.

 

But I shouldn’t be. The point of the manifesto, after all, is to replace freedom with identity as the value around which American politics should be organized.

 

Carlson wasn’t subtle about that, ending his podcast with these words: “If you’re going to fix it and rebuild this country and turn it into a place that the grandchildren you hopefully will have can inherit and thrive, you’re going to need to do something about the pressing question of American identity. ‘What does it mean to be an American?’ But it’s fixable, you just have to try, and we will be trying. And we’ll tell you, as we continue to do that."

 

Traditionally the question “What does it mean to be an American?” has been answered with some variation of “It means you’re free.” To be an American during the Cold War was to stand for liberty against communist tyranny; to be an American at the Founding was to stand for liberty against imperial tyranny. A civil war was fought, and a civil-rights movement later mobilized, over whether blacks were “American enough” to deserve the same freedom of self-determination that whites enjoyed.

 

Because postliberalism cares a lot about identity but very little about liberty, its recurring interest in the question of what it means to be an American inescapably feels ominous. If the answer isn’t some version of “freedom” or allegiance to constitutional values, then that answer must be more tribal and exclusionary. In postliberal hands, “the pressing question of American identity” is necessarily obsessed with determining who shouldn’t be able to claim that identity, not who should.

 

And so a classical liberal who shares some of Carlson’s goals would nonetheless need to suffer some sort of brain injury to trust him and his ilk to craft policy to advance them. A chronically low birth rate is a major national problem, but no rational person wants belligerent nationalists with low regard for personal liberty writing laws on it. Americans probably do rely too much on medication to treat health issues, but the sort of conspiratorial crank who thinks an mRNA flu vaccine will kill more people than it helps should have no say over how it’s regulated.

 

It’s not “the common good” per se that’s the problem, in other words, it’s that illiberals who think about the pursuit of happiness in collectivist terms have been willing to go to remarkable lengths historically to subordinate individual freedom to achieve it. American conservatives spent most of the 20^th century warning naifs about that. I guess we’ll have to do it again.

 

I will give Carlson his demagogic due, though: I can imagine his program proving seductive to many Americans, and not just the usual suspects on the chud right. There are intimations in his manifesto of a vision of human betterment that both of our major parties conspicuously lack. Bigger families, beautiful cities, an economy that values building things over securitizing them—nationalists have always been better than liberals at offering a sense of purpose, which liberalism leaves to the individual to decide for him or herself.

 

It isn’t hard to believe that a country suffering a crisis of meaning, in which artificial intelligence makes American labor increasingly expendable and American life increasingly comfortable, might drive demand for political movements selling purpose above all. We’re already well down the path of seeking religious meaning in politics, as the cultishness of the right over the past 10 years demonstrates. If the culture changes in ways that boost that demand, as it seems poised to, I expect the Carlsonian version of “identity politics” will benefit.

 

A country capable of electing Donald Trump twice is capable of electing anyone. That’s good news for postliberals—on both sides.

J.D. Vance’s Burrito Offensive

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, August 07, 2026

 

Sometimes a burrito isn’t just a burrito.

 

Let me be honest with you: I’m on a mini-vacation and I’m looking for an easy topic. I thought about tackling Tucker Carlson’s 10-point plan for pretending to be a serious person, but I just can’t do it. Besides, Douglas Murray beat me to the punch in pointing out that this agenda demonstrates the degree to which Tucker’s head is Israeli-occupied territory. Forget Judea and Samaria, the really settler-colonial drama is in Tucker’s cranium.

 

I do respect how he’s bringing back some of the greatest hits—including attacking the sin of usury and the slavery of debt. The “slavery” of debt is No. 2 on his 10-point platform. Meanwhile, “breaking the slavery of interest” was a mere No. 11 on the National Socialist German Workers’ Party’s list.

 

There will be plenty of time to deal with all of this nonsense later.

 

I want to tackle a different nonsense. A headline from the Telegraph:

 

How burritos are tearing apart the Republican Party

 

Rising food costs – and conservatives’ eating habits – at heart of social media row

 

And Fox News:

 

Burrito debate rips open GOP civil war on affordability: ‘We will lose, and deserve it’

 

A viral complaint over the price of a burrito has exposed a widening conservative divide over affordability

 

“This is nothing short of a battle for the future of the Republican Party,” Politico’s White House reporter, Megan Masserly, declared on the Playbook podcast this week, according to the Telegraph. That’s right. Sorta. But this fight isn’t really about burritos or even “affordability.”

 

You can read the Telegraph piece or Jim Geraghty’s analysis if you want to dive into the details of this social media firestorm. But the short version is: Someone from Turning Point USA, the campus right-wing network, quoted a student summarizing his concerns with affordability as “A burrito shouldn’t cost $20.”

 

Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen, a friend and colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, indirectly defended the current administration with some conventional Twitter mockery. “Cry me a river. The burritos in the college cafeteria are included in your meal plan.”

 

Then the vice president made fun of Thiessen by calling him fat (which he isn’t), tweeting, “I’m surprised to hear Mark [sic] say this. If you’ve ever met him in person, it’s quite obvious the man has never missed a burrito.”

 

And with that, everyone was off to the races. I agree with the folks—Eric Erickson, Ben Shapiro, Geraghty, et al.—who pushed back on the claim that $20 burritos are really a thing. I mean, sure, they exist. But generally speaking, if you’re dropping Hamiltons like Aaron Burr on burritos, you’re either ordering some very rarefied burritos or you’re having $10 burritos delivered by DoorDash or Uber Eats.

 

Some have noted the awkwardness of the sitting vice president lending aid and comfort to the kids whining about “affordability,” given that “affordability” is a word, and concern, that Vance’s boss believes is a Democratic hoax. Weirder still: Trump’s policies are one of the major contributors to higher prices. You can support his anti-immigration efforts, in whole or in part, while still acknowledging that driving out cheap labor—the kind of labor that goes into making a lot of America’s burritos—isn’t helping affordability. Likewise, you can love his tariffs all you want, but I would love to see a serious argument for how they’ve made things like burritos cheaper. Ditto rising fuel costs. Oh, and then there’s the monetary theory. One funny irony: Generally speaking the same folks who ridiculed opponents of Trump’s Liberation Day fiasco—mocking people for thinking cheap stuff from China mattered—are now bitching about affordability. Remember it was Vance who said, “We believe that a million cheap knockoff toasters aren’t worth the price of a single American manufacturing job.”

 

It’s absolutely true that the Biden era (and Trump’s first term before that) contributed to inflation significantly. I’m always surprised when people seem to think bringing the rate of inflation down means lowering the price of things. It doesn’t. A lower inflation rate is a decline in the rate of increase. Deflating prices—something we are not seeing, at least in the burrito sector—would mean lower prices. Barring deflation, what makes things more affordable is rising real wages. Things have been fairly meager on that front since Trump took office.

 

Now, if you’ve been following the burrito wars, you’ve heard all of this already. And if you haven’t, you don’t really need to hear any more, because this “civil war” isn’t about burritos or even affordability. It’s all about J.D. Vance.

 

You may have noticed in recent weeks that Vance and his surrogates have been jumping ugly on his critics lately. Indeed, Vance’s cheap insult of Thiessen was a counterpunch in response to a very tough column Thiessen wrote about Vance titled, “Trump’s Iran strategy is working. His vice president’s isn’t.”

 

Now, I didn’t love the column. I don’t think Trump’s Iran strategy is working. But I agree that Vance’s Iran strategy is worse and that Vance’s internal White House strategy is to undermine his boss. But my main objection to the column is that it falls perilously close to a mode of analysis I am very weary of: Donald Trump cannot fail, he can only be failed. We see a lot of this from some Republican senators who put the blame for Trump policies on unnamed subordinates giving the president “bad advice.” It’s a Trumpified version of the old “good czar, bad boyars” canard.

 

But none of that is particularly relevant. Marc was just the latest victim of the Vance team’s effort to silence any internal opposition to his capturing the 2028 nomination. Dan McLaughlin had an excellent piece on this at the end of last month, when Vance loyalists were flaying Rod Dreher for turning on Vance.

 

Vance wants a coronation, not a contest. Moreover, as Dan noted, for a certain segment of the right, there is no substitute for Vance. If you want someone—someone who can actually win the nomination at least—who champions postliberal, Orbánophilic, cultural and economic nationalism and statism, he’s your only choice. Tucker is not going to be your guy. Indeed, it wouldn’t shock me at all if Tucker’s thinking is to build up a base of ultra-MAGA supporters and then endorse or team up with Vance at some crucial moment. That might seem outlandish now, but the longer the Vance people go without training their vitriol on Tucker, the more plausible that scenario will seem.

 

Axios had a write-up of Vance’s war with his detractors. The piece wasn’t terrible, but the headline could have been written by Vance’s press team: “Pre-Trump GOP is coming for Vance.” Vance wants—needs—people to believe that the “MAGA revolution” is permanent, because if it is then he is the rightful heir to it. The first problem with the headline, and some of the analysis, is that it is Vance who turned on the pre-Trump GOP. He was one of them, felt the wind on his wet finger, and changed course. The second problem is that the author—and Vance’s surrogates—believe that MAGA is what they say it is. Marc Thiessen, Ben Shapiro, Rod Dreher, the late Lindsey Graham, et al. have not been “Never Trumpers” by any stretch for a very long time. Some have been pro-Trump longer than Vance himself. What makes them Vance’s enemies is that they don’t agree with him on various policies or accede to Vance’s sense of entitlement.

 

Vance’s theory of politics is that he needs to be the avatar of the Very Online populist right. His “big tent” is explicitly aimed at attracting the Nick Fuentes and Tucker crowd, while nightsticking the “neocons” out of the tent. Groups like TPUSA are his base, which is why he thought it wise to do his “hey fatso” schtick with Thiessen. And it’s why his surrogates piled on. From the New York Times:

 

An ally of the vice president said the columnist had it coming. “It’s neither appropriate nor constructive for self-described ‘Republican’ commentators like Marc Thiessen, who earns an absurd living promoting war after war on television, to use their platforms to dismiss the economic anxieties of young Americans,” said Alex Bruesewitz, a former Trump campaign aide.

 

He added: “I support elected officials who speak the truth. The vice president was right: Marc Thiessen appears to be severely obese. He should lay off the burritos.”

 

The idea that Bruesewitz is a champion of “truth-telling” politicians is transparent nonsense. Indeed, if he thinks it’s outrageous for Republicans to mock concerns about affordability, he’d be attacking Donald Trump, the undisputed leader of the Republican Party.

 

It’s also nonsense that Vance is a serious champion of affordability. His economic ideas are closer to Elizabeth Warren’s than they are to those of traditional conservatives, which is why he says so many silly things about GDP, Milton Friedman, etc. But that’s not why he ran to the defense of a kid whining about $20 burritos. He ran to his defense to bully a critic and to further secure the support of the whiners.