The False Comfort of Going ‘No Contact’

By Noelle Mering

Sunday, October 04, 2026

 

Prior to 2020, Sarah, a thoughtful young writer from Chicago, spoke daily with her close friends about everything from work and relationships to music and politics. After 2020, and the political upheaval that that year contained, that open range of conversation seemed to contract to the dimensions of a snow globe. Their formerly unguarded discussions became self-conscious and circled the same subjects: masking, anti-racism, gender, sexuality.

 

The change was not simply in what the group talked about, but in the militancy with which they talked about it. One friend derisively described her aging father as “ableist” because he felt sad about the physical limitations that came with growing old. Another recounted a fight with her mom because the daughter refused to come home for Thanksgiving as she considered it a settler-colonialist holiday.

 

Amid this contraction and escalation, Sarah, like many others, began questioning the speed and substance of the social changes unfolding around her. Her hesitation began with the rise of gender interventions for minors. But vocalizing her uncertainty made her anathema within her friend group. It turned out the shared history of friendship she assumed could accommodate disagreement no longer could. One by one, they began to ice her out.

 

When I spoke with Sarah about losing her friend group, she initially concluded that those friendships must not have been what she thought they were. Later, she reconsidered. The friendships had been real. What changed were the terms under which they could continue. “I think there really was a time when nothing — especially nothing so impersonal — could have come between us. And then something changed, and all of a sudden it was possible to imagine such stupid fractures.” Her friends demanded conformity to beliefs that just a handful of years earlier none of them had held and treated her hesitation as grounds for ending friendships that had lasted far longer.

 

Sarah’s experience is one familiar to many — and it’s part of a disturbing trend I document in my new book. It’s often called going “no contact” — discarding family and friends over political or ideological disagreements. Though in some ways those hot button topics have receded or been replaced, many people, like citizens in a war-torn city, are still navigating a lingering obstacle course of rubble long after the bombs stopped dropping. With approximately 68 million Americans estranged from a family member, such ruptures are now quite common and affect friendships and families alike. Estrangement is nothing new, and sometimes, it is entirely warranted. But something has changed in both its justification and its direction — not to mention the frequency at which it now occurs.

 

At the heart of that change is a profound shift in our concept of family. Traditionally, the family was understood as a natural and pre-political institution, befitting the human condition. We come into the world in existential poverty, radically dependent upon particular people. Our need calls forth their care, and those relationships make claims upon us. Family unity doesn’t depend upon agreement or perfection. The inevitable friction of living in intimacy with imperfect people helps us grow in our capacity to love.

 

But if family is understood instead (as many progressive academics have long held) as a social construct nested in power differentials, family friction begins to look like oppression. Family bonds become brittle and conditional under the weight of such a reduced and suspicious rendering.

 

Into that vacuum enters the political tribe, which tends to become inflated and inflamed as the familial tribe weakens. Once a populace has effectively transferred their identity and loyalty to the political tribe, they will inevitably judge their most intimate relationships according to its exacting demands.

 

In families now, that judgment tends to be at the instigation of the young toward the old. This is a reversal of the old archetype (sometimes warranted, sometimes not) that long populated our movies and moral imagination of the authoritarian father cutting off a wayward son or daughter over morally transgressive behavior. The newer direction of ideological estrangement inverts these roles, with the adult child in the authoritarian role cutting off a parent over politically transgressive beliefs.

 

One father I interviewed for my book summarized his experience of this shift: “Overnight it seemed the conversation with my [progressive] daughter turned into ‘I don’t want to hear any reasons why you voted that way. I don’t want to hear your side of things. I only want to hear you tell me that you were wrong.’” To him, the divide was one of disagreement. To her, she received news of his vote as a personal threat. The recourse then was not argument or persuasion, but penance and contrition. The daughter’s message to her dad was of looming excommunication: Affirm the correct things, or you lose access to me.

 

Sadly, estrangement rarely ends there. It has cascading effects, disrupting proximate and secondary relationships and reaching into generations to come. Many older parents who have been cut off by their adult children also endure the grief of losing relationships with their grandchildren. And those who initiate the cut-off often find themselves without an easily replicable support system amidst the precarities of life.

 

Why has ideologically driven “no contact” become so normalized? There are plenty of explanations. Social media habituates us into relational habits of muting and unfollowing. TikTok psychologists with short-form videos invite viewers to search their relationships for signs of toxicity. Therapy-speak can catastrophize ordinary friction, freezing a difficulty into a diagnosis: narcissist, toxic, traumatic, manipulative. And our political divisions too often now are not disagreements over the best means of achieving shared ends, but what those ends should be in the first place.

 

All of these are real and consequential. But beneath them lies something deeper: We have impoverished the very things that once protected us from political cannibalization. Without a deeply human — and therefore deeply spiritual — principle of unity animating family and friendship, we try to manufacture through rigid uniformity the unity that we no longer know how to sustain.

 

Anyone from any point on the political spectrum can become politically belligerent in ways that fracture relationships. But an ideology that continually finds new ways to pit the individual against the family — as though the flourishing of one were definitionally at odds with the flourishing of the other — supplies that belligerence with justification, direction, and a delicious sensation of righteousness.

Rama Duwaji’s Radicalism Is the Media’s Blind Spot

By Becket Adams

Sunday, October 04, 2026

 

Our news media tell us the spouses of public figures are fair game for investigative reporting.

 

Just ask any conservative Supreme Court justice.

 

Yet, for some strange reason, this generally accepted convention tends to run only one way.

 

Take Rama Duwaji, the wife of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. She’s an unhinged ultra-left-wing radical, a superfan of anyone dedicated to the mission of humbling the United States and erasing Israel from the map, yet she is nevertheless a media darling.

 

A shiny penny says this would not be the case were she a radical in the other direction.

 

Duwaji just wrapped up attending an overseas wellness retreat known as the “Women Sanctuary,” her third visit this year, hosted by organizers who have called for “abolishing Israel” and “cleansing” it of Jews. To be fair, if this were an isolated incident, it’d be silly to hold Duwaji responsible for the retreat organizers’ rhetoric, as if she were answerable for every word they posted.

 

The thing is, Duwaji is constantly in the company of these types of people, to the point where one feels justified drawing assumptions. The retreat is only the latest in a long string of choices and preferences on Duwaji’s part that all point in one direction.

 

Recall that she skipped America’s 250th-anniversary festivities this year for a “Plants of the Quran” retreat in Mallorca, hosted by the same “cleanse Israel of Jews” group. She also co-hosted a “Mary in the Quran” retreat in Corsica, which recast the Virgin Mary as a “Palestinian woman giving birth under occupation.”

 

Duwaji and her husband staged a big to-do this year where they hosted agitator and anti-Israel activist Mahmoud Khalil and his family at Gracie Mansion on the anniversary of his 2025 detention by ICE.

 

Khalil, who is not a U.S. citizen, helped lead the 2024 anti-Israel protests at Columbia. He has called the U.S. government a “killing machine” and once bragged: “The top echelons of the United States government are coming after me; that means I’m doing something right.” Or he is simply an unbelievably lousy guest. Try telling that to Duwaji and Mamdani, both of whom treat him as a martyr for the cause.

 

And let’s not forget about Duwaji’s social media presence, including a spree of “likes” for posts celebrating and justifying the October 7, 2023, massacre of Israeli civilians. One liked post called the New York Times’ reporting on the October 7 sexual violence against Israeli women a “mass rape hoax” that had been “fabricated.” Other liked posts described the attack as resistance, accused Israel of a “vile land grab,” called the Sde Teiman prison a “concentration camp,” and labeled former President Joe Biden a “butcher” over his support of the U.S. ally.

 

Neither Mamdani nor his wife has offered any serious defense of those “likes,” aside from maintaining that she did all this in her capacity as a “private citizen.” That defense has so far satisfied most of the press.

 

Duwaji also provided an illustration for a collection of essays edited by the activist Susan Abulhawa, who called October 7 “a spectacular moment that shocked the world.” Abulhawa has also called Jewish Israelis “rootless soulless ghouls” and Israel a “cultureless, rootless human aberration in the form of a manufactured ‘nation.’” And she’s complained that “we live in the time of Jewish supremacist demons.”

 

There is more from Duwaji, including social media activity from when she was much younger: sharing a tribute to a Palestinian bomb maker, sharing the message “F*** #TelAviv. Shouldn’t exist in the first place. They’re occupiers,” and boosting allegations that U.S. soldiers are guilty of “mercilessly slaughtering 3rd world civilians” to maintain “American hegemony.”

 

There is quite a body of evidence for Duwaji’s radicalism, all of it pointing to her intense hatred of Israel and her more than admiring regard for actual terrorists and murderers, including those intent on doing the United States harm.

 

Yet, for reasons that are probably as clear as you suspect, you will find hardly a word of this radicalism described in, say, the New York Times or the Washington Post. The scrutiny has come almost entirely from right-of-center outlets.

 

Perhaps the Times cannot bring itself to look too closely at a potential ideological ally, especially when Duwaji’s view of the war lines up so neatly with the paper’s own framing of it.

 

Or perhaps the news media simply do not have the resources and manpower to pursue the matter, having committed the bulk of their investigative assets to tracking which flags Mrs. Alito flies above the family home on holiday weekends.

On the Education of Children

By Hannah Anderson

Friday, September 25, 2026

 

Over the course of their educational journey, my children have attended public school and private school and have been homeschooled. This means that I’ve made and agonized over more decisions about their education than I care to remember. So, when I read Nikole Hannah-Jones’ essay on the struggle to make educational choices for her daughter in keeping with her values, I immediately empathized.

 

Hannah-Jones, a long-form journalist with the New York Times whose work focuses on school and housing segregation, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning essayist and founder of the 1619 Project. But when reflecting on her own daughter’s journey over the last 10 years, Hannah-Jones confesses regret, or at least uncertainty, about her choice to keep her daughter in a struggling New York City public school as an act of solidarity with other black families—a choice she named as an attempt to “challenge New York City’s separate and unequal school system.”

 

The essay raised more universal questions, though, ones I’ve asked myself multiple times over the years: What responsibility do I have to my child? What does it mean to stand in solidarity with my neighbors? Would removing a child from public school mean I was abandoning those neighbors and betraying my own values of community? Unlike Hannah-Jones, I am a white mother in broader Appalachia who chose to remove my son from our local public school and enroll him in a prep school on financial aid. I made this decision, in part, because I became convinced that fighting for my own child’s education was not a self-serving decision but was, in fact, my moral duty within my community.

 

Still, the decision was not obvious. My son spent his elementary years very happily in a Title I school that was the heartbeat of our rural working-class community. His father and I were both heavily involved, volunteering in different capacities, serving on the PTA, and supporting a program that organized shelf-stable food for kids at risk for hunger. By middle school, however, the kids in our community transitioned to a county school about a 40-minute bus ride away. That’s when the cracks began to show.

 

The distance meant that we were less involved, both as parents and as community members. Grade size more than quadrupled, and days were spent almost exclusively indoors in an industrial-sized school building. By sixth grade, my son had also been diagnosed with Level 1 autism (a reality we overlooked, in part, because the thick community of his elementary school had supported him in ways that weren’t obvious until they were absent). Halfway through the year, he began coming home in tears, exhausted and anxious. The classwork itself wasn’t the problem. If anything, it was that the classwork was not sufficiently stimulating to justify what was required to participate in the educational process. He was leaving home early, coming home late, expending tremendous attention and  energy to cope with overcrowded hallways, windowless rooms, and sensory overload—all while his mind craved academic challenge.  He didn’t have words for it in this way, but he was quickly becoming discouraged and disengaged, disillusioned with a system that asked more of him than it seemed to be returning. He was a bright kid for whom the physical experience of school was very difficult, and if it was going to be hard, he needed a return on his investment to believe that it was worth his effort.

 

To be clear, I don’t think the school, teachers, or administration failed my son, but I do think the system as it was set up couldn’t meet his needs. I was looking at a kid whose education and love of learning were at risk. I knew I could force him to continue in the environment with promises that it would get better and that he just had to find the way through. But I wasn’t sure I believed that myself. I wasn’t confident the system would be adaptive enough to ensure that he didn’t slip through the cracks.

 

So, as a mother, I faced a dilemma not unlike Hannah-Jones’. At some instinctual level, I knew that removing my son from the public school meant more than switching educational settings. It was, in a way, removing him from a particular community—the “public” in public school. It meant charting a course that would separate him from our neighbors, and after so many years of being invested in our small community, that truth made me sick to my stomach. I knew that removing him from the system that almost everyone else participated in meant setting him on a trajectory away from them.

 

But then, wasn’t that already happening? When I put him on the bus every morning and let it take him to a school in a different part of the county, wasn’t he already leaving? Wasn’t part of the problem a crisis of community—that his community wasn’t reciprocal, wasn’t able to show up for him as much as he showed up for it?

 

Over the next few months, I scoured the internet for options. Homeschooling wasn’t possible for different reasons, and I wasn’t confident that online schooling could adequately meet his needs. I was open to the idea of a small faith-based school, but finances were prohibitive. Then I clicked on the most elite private school in the broader region, only to discover that it offered heavily discounted tuition for those who qualified. We started the process of admissions, and my son began seventh grade in a uniform.

 

I am happy to say that he thrived in his new school in much the same way he had thrived in elementary school. The smaller class size meant more dedicated attention. Students had a form of recess through middle school, so he was regularly outside and active. Because the school had an open-roster policy, he was able to be involved in team sports and discovered a love of running. He sang in choir, spent five years in Latin, and participated in Model U.N. School was still challenging, but his investment was rewarded, and that made all the difference. By the time he graduated, his interest in physics had led to the establishment of a new level of mathematics instruction—despite his being the only student in his class who wanted to study multivariable calculus.

 

While the school was racially, religiously, and ethnically diverse, it was not economically diverse—or at least, not visibly so. My son, who had once sat in class with the children of truckers and waitstaff, was suddenly surrounded by the children of doctors and lawyers. I distinctly remember the moment I realized that the children of our congressman were on my son’s cross-country team. The school also hosted a boarding program for international students, and some of my son’s peers were dropped off by private drivers.

 

The culture shock was dizzying. To this day, my son lives between worlds, never fully fitting in either the working-class community of his early education or the elite world of his prep school classmates. But the complexity of his experience also means that he is very sensitive to wealth inequality, having seen both sides of the spectrum. He also knows the truth about education in the United States—a truth that, ironically enough, can be obscured in the public school system.

 

The promise of public education is that every child has a right to learn and that democracy depends on an educated populace. The reality, however, is that the education a child receives in the United States is highly dependent on ZIP code. So much so that real estate agents sell homes partially based on “great schools.” These fault lines are predicated by a complicated history of zoning, redistricting, redlining, and gentrification. We speak of universal public education, but it is a parochial system with location too often being the primary factor in whether a school can succeed in the mission of educating every child. With a private school, that pretense is stripped away, and the cold, hard facts of the matter become clear: In the United States, education is deeply tied to wealth.

 

Perhaps it was my relative lack of resources or keen sense of powerlessness that made the stakes clear for me in a way they weren’t initially clear for Hannah-Jones. I could only afford to pay a certain amount to improve my son’s education, but I also couldn’t afford to leave him where he was. The question wasn’t whether he could survive in public school, but what survival would cost him and whether it was fair to ask him to sacrifice for a system that couldn’t reward his sacrifice. More to the point, keeping him in his public school would have had negligible effect on a problem of this scale, but it would have had a significant effect on him.

 

So, when the opportunity came, I took it.

 

It was humbling to accept that the challenges were bigger than my own will or ideals. But it was also clear that if I could not improve educational opportunities for other children, I could improve them for one child. And in some strange way, I became convinced that failing to do that would be a greater moral risk than placing him in an elite school where the inequality of the American educational system was on full display. Because at the end of the day, I was the one responsible for my son.

 

Our children are not concepts, projects, or the manifestation of our ideals. They are living souls whose first community is the family to whom they have been entrusted. Correspondingly, what distinguishes a parent-child relationship from other relationships in a community is that the primary responsibility for a child’s well-being falls on parents. This does not mean that I don’t have a responsibility to my neighbor’s children or that I can harm my neighbor’s child in order to care for my own. It simply means that when responsibilities to your child and community do not neatly align, the question of seeking a child’s well-being should not be cast in opposition to being a faithful member of a community.

 

Being a faithful member of a community includes being a faithful parent to my own child. It is also undoubtedly more than this. But at a basic level, it was no one else’s job to know my child, to see what he needed, and to move heaven and earth to make sure that he got it. It was my job to advocate for him as an individual. It was not the system’s job. It was not my neighbor’s job. It was mine—and if I failed to do it, I would fail my responsibilities to both him and my community. After all, part of my job as a parent is to care for my child in the ways I can and not pass that responsibility off to other members of the community. And hopefully, by meeting my son’s needs now, he will have a better chance of maturing into a faithful member in his own right, contributing his particular gifts and abilities to help others flourish as well.

 

Not every child or family faces the dilemma I did. For many, public schooling provides what children need to thrive. I also know that many children who need different options can’t follow the path my son took, both because of a lack of resources and because many loving parents are themselves unable to navigate the complex puzzle of American schooling. It is not lost on me that my son had parents who were educated enough to find the solutions he needed for his own education. But because we had the solutions, it was our duty to implement them.

The Rise of Dumb, Anti-Innovation, Job-Saving Laws in Blue Cities and States

By Jim Geraghty

Sunday, October 04, 2026

 

Our James Lileks laments the City of Minneapolis requirement that self-driving cars have a $31.50/hour nondriver sitting in the driver’s seat, even though they are not driving the car:

 

You expect that they will find new ways to protect jobs threatened by societal advances. Think of all the entry-level pump jockey jobs lost! When people were permitted to refuel their cars on their own! The city should require all gas stations to have someone stand by every pump, doing nothing. After a year at this position, they will be eligible to be promoted to stand by the electric car charging stations, doing nothing.

 

Oh, James! Let us turn our eyes to the Garden State of New Jersey, where pumping your own gas has been illegal since 1949. Raised in New Jersey (Exit 10), I never learned how to pump gas until well into adulthood. Then, while stopping there many years later, I got out and started pumping my own gas like a regular Billy the Kid outlaw until the attendant rushed out and made me stop. Heaven forbid I do something I’ve probably done hundreds of times in other states!

 

Why does New Jersey still require “pump jockeys”?

 

The exact role of a pump jockey is outlined in the New Jersey Retail Gasoline Dispensing Safety Act and Regulations, in which they describe a pump jockey as someone who pumps gasoline and prevents others from pumping gasoline. They are generally minimum wage jobs, earning 16 dollars an hour.

 

The ban is enforced with fees which are primarily intended for gas stations in violation. For pumping your own gas, the first offense ranges from 50 to 250 dollars. There is a 500 dollar fine for each subsequent offence. Attendants, themselves, will also act to prevent consumers from pumping themselves.

 

The primary motivation to keep the ban in place has been to protect jobs and provide a better service. There are estimated to be about 7000 gas station attendants employed in New Jersey. Lifting the ban would cause the loss of these low requirement jobs.

 

If a local or state government could ban assembly-line robots, automated telephone switchboards, automated teller machines, online shopping, self-operated elevators, and pinboys (the folks who used to reset pins at the bowling alley by hand), they would do so.

 

I was going to add banning self-checkout to the list of ridiculous ideas, but California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, and Washington have contemplated legislation that would require a balance between employee-operated and self-checkout stations, a certain number of employees per self-checkout station, and/or stricter limits on the number and types of items that customers can bring through self-checkout. (This is an anti-shoplifting effort.)

 

Rhode Island passed its law; starting January 1, 2027, any grocery store in the state that provides self-service checkout stations must have a ratio of one manual checkout station for every three self-service stations. Heaven forbid we let the grocery stores decide for themselves! Heaven forbid we allow customers to decide which option they want to use!

The Truce Is Over

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, October 02, 2026

 

I’ve been toying lately with a hot take that the era of political activism driven by cultural grievances is ending.

 

The gist of it is that a politics based on culture war is a kind of luxury, the sort of thing people fight about when their country is sufficiently well off that they don’t need to prioritize fighting about money. Pitched battles over trans rights and Confederate statues make sense when inflation is low, labor-force participation is high, and interest rates are ZIRP-y.

 

When times are good, you can afford to roll the dice on a con man selling luxury nationalism as a panacea for all ills. How much harm could he do, right?

 

But when times are no longer good; when inflation is chronically high and unremediated by administrations from both parties; when America can no longer guarantee the stability of Middle Eastern oil markets; when chaotic government and a spiraling national debt are pushing rates ever upward; when politicians from the party of “fiscal responsibility” seem to think it’s bad that the dollar is the world’s reserve currency; and when a frightening new technology promises to make tens of millions of jobs obsolete—in an era like that, the fate of Confederate statues will no longer seem so important.

 

Ergo, the future of partisan political activism in America is economic, not cultural, warfare, I tell myself.

 

Then I think: That’s the stupidest idea you’ve ever had.

 

When, historically, has economic turmoil ever eased cultural divisions rather than inflamed them? If anything, privation is the great incubator of cultural radicalism. Impoverished people will make all sorts of moral compromises in politics if they’re promised relief from their financial misery in return. Joining a kulturkampf against some designated scapegoat is a small price to pay for being able to feed your family.

 

It took less than a decade after the stock market crash of 1929 for the Nazis to rampage through Poland. And it wasn’t an economic vision that they were there to impose.

 

Hard times economically in America might plausibly cause activists on both sides to escalate their cultural disputes and grow more radical in their goals. You don’t need to look hard for recent examples in the GOP: From screeching about an ad that dared to depict a Medicaid recipient as white to conversations in populist media about, and I quote, “the Indian question,” race is an increasingly prominent part of political identity for elements of the young grassroots right.

 

For 10 years their party has been led by a guy who regularly bellows about expelling undesirables. They’ve taken that worldview to its inevitable conclusion.

 

There’s an exception to my theory of privation and culture war, though. Last week I pointed out the curious “truce” on abortion that’s emerged between the two parties, a notable cultural deescalation in an era of escalating economic hardship.

 

During his debate with Joe Biden in 2024, then-candidate Donald Trump went as far as to say, “The Supreme Court just approved the abortion pill, and I agree with their decision to have done that, and I will not block it.” Wary of the backlash in 2022 to the end of Roe v. Wade, the president has ducked the issue since returning to office. Democrats, meanwhile, have had bigger fish to fry politically, flogging the cost of living and the war in Iran and generally feeling little urgency to address a status quo in which abortions have in some ways become easier to obtain than ever.

 

But the truce is ending, apparently. According to the Washington Sun, Iran isn’t the only war that the president is preparing to resume after the election.

 

Two avenues.

 

Citing a senior administration official, the Sun claims that Todd Blanche has been told by the White House to go slow on abortion litigation—until November. “Once the midterms are over and it’s truly lame-duck time, we’ve heard the gloves will be off,” one conservative source told the outlet.

 

Before we go further, I know what you’re thinking: Yes, it is remarkable that the president would be dictating law-enforcement priorities to the Justice Department based on his party’s political needs before an election. And yes, it’s extra remarkable that he would be doing so on this subject in particular. How many thousands of infant lives were lost this year because Trump and Blanche feared that impeding abortion might hurt Republicans’ midterm prospects?

 

And yes, it’s extra extra remarkable that the White House evidently intends to respond to a midterm drubbing by doubling down on initiatives which they have every reason to expect will be unpopular, like Iran and new abortion restrictions. But I wrote that piece already.

 

Anyway, the litigation that Blanche is slow-walking has to do with mifepristone, the so-called “abortion pill” taken in tandem with misoprostol that’s now responsible for more than 60 percent of terminations. Pro-lifers spent the last few years challenging the lawfulness of the FDA’s initial authorization of mifepristone decades ago but have been stymied in court so far on procedural grounds. They might eventually revive that line of attack depending on lower court rulings, but the legal strategy to halt distribution of the drug has since branched out.

 

One avenue is to have the FDA, now under Trump’s control, restrict mifepristone itself. The agency is currently conducting a safety review of it; the president’s new nominee to lead the FDA was cagey during her confirmation hearing about which way that review might go. Deauthorizing mifepristone altogether would be a bombshell, igniting ferocious political and legal battles, but the agency wouldn’t need to go that far to reduce access to it. (And might be reluctant to do so, given the drug’s other medical uses.) It could simply require women to seek prescriptions in person instead of obtaining them via virtual “telehealth” appointments with doctors in blue states and then ordering the pills by mail, as they’re currently able to do.

 

“Tens of thousands of patients in states with abortion bans” have gotten hold of mifepristone that way, the New York Times notes. A new FDA rule closing the telehealth loophole would make it considerably harder to evade state abortion bans.

 

The second avenue is for the Justice Department to start enforcing the Comstock Act, about which I’ve written a few times before. That’s an old federal law that prohibits sending material “intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion” via U.S. mail or common carriers like UPS. It was rarely enforced during the Roe era, being presumptively unconstitutional under that case’s holding, but it was also never repealed. The end of Roe made Comstock viable law again, which means the DOJ could use it to try to block interstate commerce of mifepristone even if the FDA doesn’t issue new rules restricting it.

 

And if it does, it might go further than barring women from receiving the drug directly from providers. It could “also stop pharmacies and health care providers from getting shipments,” according to experts who spoke to Axios in 2023. If that happens, even a patient who visits a doctor in person to get a prescription might find that there’s no one locally who’s able to fill it for her.

 

Presumably Trump’s post-midterm abortion strategy will draw from both approaches. The FDA will announce that it’s discovered alarming new evidence that mifepristone is unsafe and will issue some restriction on it; the president and his attorney general will then use that finding to revive Comstock, insisting that the health risk to women is a national emergency that they have a solemn duty to address.

 

How is that likely to play out politically next year?

 

Wargames.

 

The polling on this topic isn’t voluminous, but it’s safe to say that something resembling a total ban on mifepristone would be quite unpopular.

 

In 2024, an Axios poll found that 76 percent of independents and even 51 percent of Republicans believed women should be able to obtain the drug from their doctor or a clinic. Another survey taken this past June by the Kaiser Family Foundation backed that up, with 65 percent opposed to prohibiting “medication abortion” versus 33 percent in favor. If the FDA deauthorized mifepristone entirely, or the DOJ used Comstock to keep it out of pharmacies, Trump and the GOP would need a very compelling “safety” argument to avert a serious backlash.

 

Ask Americans whether the pills should also be available by mail, though, and opinion softens. The same Axios poll saw independents drop to 51 percent and Republicans to 23 percent on that question. A recent poll by the Center Square detected ambivalence as well, with 51 percent of adults somewhat in favor of abortion by mail and 37 percent somewhat opposed. When asked whether they’re more concerned about safety and verification risks in sending drugs through the mail or more concerned about women’s access to abortion if they can’t visit a clinic in person, the sample split 48-39.

 

An FDA ruling that mifepristone is unsafe might push public opinion further toward the pro-life position. And if the White House were to eventually land on a compromise in which the drug remained accessible in blue states but unavailable in red ones, I can imagine Americans broadly tolerating it on federalism grounds. What’s the point of letting states ban abortion, they might reason, if those bans can be skirted by simply dropping something in the mail?

 

On the other hand: How likely is it that Trump, having just been reduced to a lame duck, will agree to a politically feasible compromise following a humiliation at the polls that exposed just how lame he is? What will be stopping him post-drubbing from going big on abortion (and Iran, and tariffs, and everything else Americans don’t like about his agenda)? Having been rudely owned by the libs at the polls, an all-out war on mifepristone would be an obvious way to own them right back.

 

Again and again during his second term, he’s taken issues on which his party is either competitive with Democrats or enjoys an advantage over them and farked them up so badly that they’ve become liabilities. Overreaching on abortion by mail feels like the logical next step.

 

Trump isn’t the most interesting political player in this conflict, though.

 

Democrats.

 

The new Democratic Congress will see obvious opportunity in a renewed culture war over abortion, particularly given the left’s post-Roe electoral advantage on the issue. Legislation punishing the FDA for restricting mifepristone would be sketchy—defunding a scientific agency because it reached the “wrong” finding about a drug’s safety is horrendously bad precedent—but the Comstock Act is a more fruitful target.

 

A bill to repeal that law’s abortion provisions would pass a Democratic House easily.

 

It would also almost certainly die in a Democratic Senate, a casualty of a Republican filibuster. (Unless November’s blue wave is truly tidal, I suppose.) But maybe the left would prefer that for selfish electoral reasons: If the new restrictions on mifepristone are allowed to linger until 2028, they can be used as a cudgel against Republican presidential nominee J.D. Vance and his party during that cycle.

 

And while it’s true, as I said, that the public might accept restrictions on sending abortion pills through the mail to states where it’s banned, it’s hard to predict how opinion might move on that question following a pro-choice messaging onslaught. Democrats would push hard to convince Americans that mifepristone is safe no matter what Trump’s highly politicized FDA might say to the contrary, with lots of doctors on their side.

 

“If the drug were dangerous, there would have been an epidemic of side effects among the millions of women who have taken it over the years,” they’ll say. “If the evidence that it’s safe were thin, the drug wouldn’t have remained legal for years under Democratic and Republican administrations.” Those arguments will carry weight.

 

The very fact that the White House asked Todd Blanche not to make any sudden moves on abortion before November means Trump’s own team believes Republicans are likely to lose the battle for public opinion. And I don’t blame them: The KFF survey I mentioned earlier found opinion split 36-64 when Americans were asked whether it should be a crime for healthcare providers to send abortion pills to women in states where abortion is banned. That’s a bad starting point for a national abortion dragnet.

 

Probably the safest prediction about how Democrats will react to restrictions on mifepristone, though, is that it will further boost the party’s support for court-packing.

 

Whatever the administration is planning will be litigated out the wazoo, needless to say, and a Supreme Court that overturned Roe and usually defers to presidential authority over all aspects of the executive branch is unlikely to meddle with Trump’s agenda at the FDA and DOJ. If the court upholds his attempt to limit abortion in blue states by curtailing national access to mifepristone, that’s another talking point for progressive Jacobins bent on radical judicial reform.

 

2028.

 

And then there’s the vice president.

 

J.D. Vance is certainly pro-life but has been characteristically slippery about the extent to which federal power should be used to restrict abortion nationally. In 2022 he declared that a 15-week ban proposed by Senate Republicans was “totally reasonable.” The same year, in an interview, he considered the problem of pro-choicers providing transportation for pregnant women in red states to seek abortion in blue ones. “If that happens, do you need some federal response to prevent it from happening?” he wondered. “I’m pretty sympathetic to that, actually.”

 

But as the GOP’s new vice presidential nominee in 2024, he committed to not imposing a federal ban on abortion and said Trump would veto any effort by Congress to pass one. “Donald Trump wants to end this culture war over this particular topic,” he declared, and called for “letting the states figure out their own abortion policies” so that the federal government could focus on bringing down the cost of living.

 

Two years later, having failed to bring down the cost of living, the Trump-Vance administration is preparing to revive the culture war over this topic in a way that might end up affecting blue states’ ability to set their own policies on abortion. Was the “real” J.D. Vance the guy who called in 2023 for using the Comstock Act to “shut down all mail-order abortion operations” nationwide or was the real Vance the guy who said a year later that he supports keeping mifepristone accessible? I suppose we’re about to find out.

 

As with Iran, there’s no truly good outcome for him in a renewed abortion conflict, I think. If Vance were to try to distance himself from this war the way he’s tried to distance himself from that other one, it would deepen the doubts that some Reaganites have about his ideological kinship with them. Some conservatives have already begun building the case against letting the GOP continue on a nationalist trajectory post-Trump; Vance going squishy on restricting abortion by mail because he’s worried about swing voters in 2028 would add a pro-life angle to that case.

 

He does need to worry about voters outside the Republican tent, though. The VP’s infamous comment about “childless cat ladies” before he ran for Senate has done him enough damage that he felt obliged to renounce it in his latest book, an almost unheard-of example of a Trump toady expressing regret for speaking intemperately. Clearly he thinks he has work to do rehabilitating his image with women to improve his chances in 2028 (his recent appearance on The View also points that way)—yet now here he is, on the verge of his administration resuming the abortion wars with a dramatic escalation that will land squarely on younger women.

 

At some point the president’s how-low-can-he-go job approval will start to weigh on his heir apparent and a broadly unpopular abortion initiative is unlikely to lighten the load. Ultimately Vance may have little choice but to do what he’s going to end up doing on everything else for the next 27 months—defending the boss as best he can, urging socialists to “get the hell out” of the country, and hoping that what’s left of the GOP’s favorability come 2028 isn’t a smoking crater. Maybe devising a few more new welfare benefits will help him atone.

Your Data Center Life

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, September 17, 2026

 

We are in the midst of a passionate debate over the desirability of “data centers.” Thus far, this debate has been stained by a profusion of silliness, superstition, and cynicism. But more than anything else, it has been notable for its profound tardiness. In 2026, data centers are such an inextricable part of American life that to discuss whether they are welcome is the equivalent of agonizing over what we think of this newfangled “television” thing. The public, we are told, has become anti–data center. If so, it is upset by the “center” rather than the “data” part of that equation, for whether they know it or not, Americans now rely on data centers in much the same way as they rely on their lungs. In every moment of every day, data centers are humming away behind the scenes, making the modern world possible. In 1973, Arthur C. Clarke suggested that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Were he writing today, he might have gone further: once that “magic” technology has been widely adopted, wonder can turn to contempt.

 

Certainly, we wildly underestimate the extent to which we rely on data centers. Take my actions today. This morning, I sat down with my coffee and looked through National Review’s website. To get there, I typed “nationalreview.com” into my browser, and before I’d even hit “Enter,” my computer used a data center to look up where that site was located on the web. Once that location had been discovered, my browser then contacted the website via its primary IP address — which, in the case of a popular site such as National Review, meant a digital “visit” to whichever one of the many “proxy” data centers happened to be geographically closest to me. After a secure connection to that data center had been established, my browser then started assembling the text, images, videos, podcasts, fonts, scripts, advertisements, and other elements that made up the page I hoped to see. Because this involved all manner of different content types — some cached, some dynamic, some streaming — and required the use of application servers, database servers, and distributed content-delivery networks, it invariably required trips to multiple data centers, all playing different roles. Thus, before I had read a single word, my computer had been served 150 web requests, across 34 domains, having contacted roughly ten data centers spread across networks operated by nine different companies. Because everything worked as it should have, this process was invisible. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t happening. Without seeing it, I had taken a remarkable journey around the world.

 

And that’s just for a visit to the homepage of a website. Presumably, like me, you have a smartphone. Have you ever thought about how it works? At the same time that I was visiting nationalreview.com today, my phone was relentlessly pinging data centers across the globe. An email arrived, a message appeared in the family group chat, a video from yesterday finished uploading to the cloud: those actions were the result of data centers, data centers, and — yep — data centers. When my weather widget refreshed its forecast, my calendar picked up a change to an appointment, one of my apps downloaded an update, and my stock ticker moved: data centers did that. Each one of the little conveniences that I have slowly stacked over time involved computers in one or more data centers doing work on my behalf. Magic? Not on your life.

 

Having had my coffee, I ran some errands in my car, and as usual, I used Waze to avoid the traffic. In so doing, I blithely connected to an unfathomably impressive piece of infrastructure — all of which remained out of sight. My phone accurately calculated its position on Earth by listening to a series of precisely timed signals sent from a bunch of satellites up in space and comparing the data issued by each to determine where I was. At the same time, its internet connection linked it to a host of servers that, among other things, supplied the requisite maps, calculated optimal directions, and processed real-time traffic information that had been collected from other drivers. To obtain even the simplest of instructions — “turn left” — I was the beneficiary of signals from space, mathematics in my pocket, and information that had been processed by distant computers in data centers across the world. While driving, I turned on Apple Music, and thanks to a data center nearby, I had at my disposal virtually all of the music that has ever been recorded. On my way home, I made a phone call to my wife and thereby relied on a data center in my carrier’s network to connect us and route my conversation to the right place. Had I driven through a toll, a data center would have matched my transponder to my billing record. If I’d stopped for gas or lunch and paid by card, the payment would have been authorized by my bank’s data centers. All this, for a simple trip to the barber!

 

We take all this for granted. Once, we had to go to the bank to cash a check, wait on the phone to buy a plane ticket, take a trip to a shop to buy a light bulb, drive to a video store to rent a movie, call theaters for showtimes, and consult encyclopedias to find the most elementary of facts. We don’t now — because of data centers. On Sundays, during NFL season, I watch the games over the internet on my TV, which requires a lot of data centers; I participate in two fantasy football leagues and one pick ’em league, all of which are hosted in data centers; and, like many others, I text my friends during the games — via a data center, naturally. So reflexive is this behavior that we have forgotten how it works. But we’d notice if it went away. If, during the next Super Bowl, even 10 percent of the nation’s data centers were to be summarily switched off, the people of the United States would be on the verge of revolution.

 

The term we have chosen to describe the technology I have discussed here is “the cloud.” But, of course, there is no such thing. There are just data centers and the computers that run inside them. Conceptually, “the cloud” is a useful abstraction. But if taken too literally, it blinds us to an important reality: Each one of the 5,427 data centers in the United States is a real place, full of rows of real machines, that run on real electricity, and that are maintained by real people. Your data — by which I mean your emails, your bank account, your business files, your photographs of your kids — are sitting somewhere on a real hard disk. If I drove to where that hard disk is and smashed it up with a pickaxe, it would break, and the only reason that you probably would not permanently lose the data that it once held is that the data also exist in some other real location, on another real disk, in another data center, that is maintained by another real person. Bluntly put: The integrity of your data — and of your ability to access it whenever you want — is the result of your having cheap access to lots of different data centers, in lots of different places, so that if something bad happens to one of them, your stuff is backed up elsewhere.

 

I am not deaf to the criticisms of the architects of our present artificial intelligence boom, many of whom have inexplicably decided to sell their product by telling people that it will put them out of work or perhaps even kill them. But I cannot accept the argument that America’s many data centers have been built despite the public rather than because of it. Whether they wish to admit it or not, Americans love the internet. They have filled “the cloud” with baby pictures, wedding videos, group chats, school assignments, tax returns, saved games, and emails stretching back 20 years. They expect their entire photo library to survive a lost phone, their documents to appear on whichever computer they happen to be using, and the 107 videos of their child’s first steps to remain available indefinitely.

 

In aggregate, the scale of data storage may be vast, but the items that make it up are invariably personal. The retention of this information has required an extraordinary amount of physical infrastructure, and there is no good reason to expect that AI will be any different. Pew reports that half of American adults have used AI, and that a quarter — that’s 65 million people — use AI every day. In computing jargon, this translates into antiseptic terms: “exabytes,” “teraflops,” “megawatts,” and the like. But that’s a distraction from what matters — which is that when someone types “How do I fix my dishwasher?” into his iPhone, he expects to receive an answer.

The Unbearable Lightness of American Restraint

By Ludovic Hood

Wednesday, September 30, 2026

 

Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being turned on a cruel paradox: A life unburdened by weight feels like freedom until the weightlessness itself becomes unbearable.

 

A similar temptation inspires “restraintism,” a school of foreign-policy thought that has gained traction among the populist right, including influential pockets of the Trump administration. Reports this month that the Pentagon is weighing cuts of between 25,000 and 40,000 troops in Europe — while Russia escalates its hybrid warfare on the Continent — mark the latest turn in a fierce behind-the-scenes debate.

 

The “restrainers” promise a lighter foreign policy: narrower interests, an end to wars of choice, and the use of force only as a last resort. After two decades of costly, inconclusive war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the appeal is easy to understand. However, a great power cannot shed its mass simply because it has grown weary of the weight.

 

The populist-right restrainers are not the Barry Posen realists who would prune “liberal hegemony” while keeping a balance-of-power watch on Eurasia. Nor are they progressive budget-cutters who recast strategy around “human security” and climate policy. Their political project is more radical.

 

Many of these restrainers would retrench to the Western Hemisphere; they regard NATO as a bad bargain and view Ukraine as a problem for Europe to solve. Some see value in Pacific alliances that constrain China, though they demand more quid pro quo from the Japanese, Koreans, and Australians; others argue for pulling back to the second island chain.

 

Restrainers are not two-dimensional isolationists. They support international trade, diplomacy, and a strong military with which to safeguard the homeland. What they reject is the post–Cold War claim that Americans’ security and prosperity are bound up with global stability, specifically the order made possible by Pax Americana.

 

The restrainers’ diagnosis contains kernels of truth. The United States arguably overreached after its triumph over the Soviet Union; nation-building projects proved unbearably costly; threat inflation became a Beltway habit; and allies underinvested because they could. But none of that makes the remedy of restraint sound.

 

While geography and a nuclear arsenal make America difficult to invade, they do not make us immune to coercion. A hostile power that dominates Asia or Europe need not land a soldier in California or Connecticut to coerce markets, choke energy routes, weaponize supply chains, and force American firms and U.S. partners to live on its terms. Homeland security is downstream of he who writes the rules beyond the water’s edge.

 

Slogans such as “strong defense” and “diplomacy first” are compatible with almost any worldview — the fight is about thresholds and presence. If restrainers would deter China while drawing down in Europe and the Gulf, they owe an account of why Taipei, Tokyo, Seoul, and Canberra should treat American commitments as more credible after Washington has advertised its eagerness to leave. A smaller forward presence does not make diplomacy easier. It makes stalling, probing, and seizing cheaper for adversaries.

 

“Allies will do more if we do less” is a hope, not a plan. Free-riding is real, as are abandonment panic, nuclear hedging, and bandwagoning with the nearest bully. Spheres of influence, sold as sophisticated great-power politics, mean a Russian veto over Ukraine; a Chinese veto over Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea; and an Iranian veto over the Gulf and the Red Sea.

 

The record of restraint is not encouraging. On at least three occasions in the 20th century, Washington narrowed its commitments and advertised new lines in the sand — and then watched adversaries cross former red lines, leading to conflicts that were more costly than if the United States had stood its ground.

 

In 1919, after U.S. intervention proved decisive in ending the First World War, America’s political class chose to withdraw from European security, spurning President Woodrow Wilson’s vision of collective security and the League of Nations. Isolationism carried the day in the 1920s and 1930s, but it emboldened two revisionist powers: Japan to the east and Germany to the west. The Axis’s subsequent declaration of war on America in December 1941 brought Washington and the American people into a conflict far costlier than early engagement might have required.

 

Less than five years after World War II, American attempts to prioritize commitments in the Pacific backfired when Secretary of State Dean Acheson laid out an American defensive perimeter that ran through Japan and the Philippines but omitted the Korean Peninsula. Within months, Soviet-backed North Korea invaded South Korea. The United States then fought a three-year war costing 36,000 lives, essentially to restore a frontier that its leaders had implied was not worth defending.

 

In the 1970s, a war-weary America retrenched in the wake of the Vietnam denouement, counting on Cold War equilibrium to deliver stability. What followed, however, was a decade of Soviet and proxy advances, from Angola and Ethiopia to South Yemen and, in 1979, Afghanistan, capped by the humiliation in Tehran. Adversaries had read American fatigue as opportunity — and Jimmy Carter, a president who longed for a foreign policy of restraint based on “moral idealism,” was compelled to reassert American hard-power redlines in the Middle East via his Carter Doctrine.

 

The same dynamics are visible in Eastern Europe. Russia’s 2022 invasion followed 15 years of unanswered probing: Georgia in 2008, Crimea and the Donbas in 2014, then a full-scale war now in its fifth year. A settlement that ratifies conquest would not close the file. It would signal to Moscow — and to Beijing — that aggression and nuclear threats can move borders. That is why publicly floating a large-scale U.S. drawdown in Europe, while Russian drones and sabotage campaigns test NATO members, is not burden-shifting. It prices the next grab as a bargain.

 

The historical record is not an argument for reflexive primacy. Responsible American leadership means bearing the weight where American power is irreplaceable, coaxing rich allies to carry more of the load, and avoiding nation-building projects. The opposite of reckless hegemony is not frictionless withdrawal — it is a visible, potentially costly presence in the theaters that will decide whether the next decade is contested or conceded.

 

Restraint has its appeal, but it belies what follows when America does less: emboldened rivals, rattled allies, and rules written by states that do not share core American interests. Pulling forces back from Europe or the Pacific will not insulate Washington from great-power conflict; rather, it all but ensures a more costly reckoning down the road. Lightness feels elegant, right up until the floor gives way.