The Rocks and the Orgy

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, August 12, 2026

 

Rarely have I felt so remnanty.

 

Many of you know that I named my podcast The Remnant, partly as a homage to Albert Jay Nock, a fascinating, brilliant, intellectually flamboyant weirdo, belonging to a great tradition of homeless geniuses and, often, cape-wearing eccentrics, content to be out of step with the times. Nock introduced me to the concept of the remnant, as laid out in his amazing 1936 essay “Isaiah’s Job.” Nock believed that right-thinking has to exist. In other words, there are true things—moral, political, ethical, economic, theological—that cannot be reduced to mere opinion or passing fad. The masses are rarely, if ever, bound to right-thinking, but that doesn’t mean nobody is. For Nock, the right-thinkers are the remnant.

 

But Nock himself stood on the shoulders of Matthew Arnold, who did the heavier lifting in working out what the remnant was—and wasn’t. For both men, the remnant was the small slice of the people who got it, who understood what right-thinking was and tried to live up to it.

 

For Arnold, the idea of the remnant goes back to the Hebrew prophet Isaiah and the Greek philosopher Plato—Jerusalem and Athens for the win!—both of whom used the word to describe similar groups.

 

Arnold quotes Plato: “There is but a very small remnant of honest followers of wisdom, and they who are of these few, and who have tasted how sweet and blessed a possession is wisdom, and who can fully see, moreover, the madness of the multitude, and that there is no one, we may say, whose action in public matters is sound, and no ally for whosoever would help the just. …”

 

This remnant, Arnold’s Plato continues, can be compared “to a man who has fallen among wild beasts; he will not be one of them, but he is too unaided to make head against them; and before he can do any good to society or his friends, he will be overwhelmed and perish uselessly.”

 

Therefore, the lover of wisdom should hide from the masses behind a “wall” and resolve to “live his life clear of injustice and of impiety, and depart, when his time comes, in mild and gracious mood, with fair hope.” (If your Straussian spider-sense is tingling, it will pass.)

 

Isaiah was not so defeatist. “Isaiah, however, does not make his remnant confine itself, like Plato’s, to standing aside under a wall during this life and then departing in mild temper and good hope when the time for departure comes,” Arnold writes. “Isaiah’s remnant saves the State.”

 

I’ll spare you the biblical exegesis on how Isaiah managed that and skip ahead. Arnold believed, basically as a mathematical proposition, that members of the remnant could reach a sufficient share of the population to wield actual power, in a small-r republican way, and put society on a just path. That was his hope for America.

 

Nock was more on Team Plato while Arnold was more on Team Isaiah. Nock thought there was no real point in trying to save the world or society. He was one of the “Superfluous Men”—a ragtag group of brilliant curmudgeons and ivory tower observers whose ranks included H.L. Mencken, Irving Babbitt, Allen Tate, George Santayana, and José Ortega y Gasset. The term “Superfluous Man” was borrowed from Russia to describe intellectuals out of step with their times. Nock even titled his autobiography Memoirs of a Superfluous Man.

 

Nock’s self-styled superfluity was a bit of an act. He claimed he didn’t read the newspapers, but William F. Buckley’s father once recounted discovering Nock on the floor devouring the Sunday papers. But Nock’s public persona and arguments pointed elsewhere. An “individualist” back when that term had not just libertarian or anarchist connotations but also aristocratic and Platonic overtones, Nock championed the idea that one should resist the fads and obsessions of the age and simply tell the truth as you see it. This was in part because Nock believed that most fads and obsessions were simply ancient ideas repackaged with modern labels. He would agree with my estimations that there are vanishingly few new ideas.

 

“Taking his inspiration from those Russians who seemed superfluous to their autocratic nineteenth-century society and sought inspiration in the private sphere, even to the point of writing largely for their desk drawers,” writes Robert Crunden, Nock’s best biographer, “Nock made the essential point: ransack the past for your values, establish a coherent worldview, depend neither on society nor on government insofar as circumstances permitted, keep your tastes simple and inexpensive, and do what you have to do to remain true to yourself.” You might say he championed the “Benedict Option” minus the Benedictine stuff.

 

This idea was more pithily captured by one of my favorite and oft-repeated quotes, from another superfluous Russian of another age: Alexander Solzhenitsyn. “You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”

 

Arnold defined the remnant as “that substratum of right thinking and well-doing.” Nock accepted that definition, but he tellingly ended the quote there. Arnold’s full statement described the remnant as “that substratum of right thinking and well-doing which in all ages must surely have somewhere existed, for without it the continued life of humanity would have been impossible.”

 

For Nock, the remnant was a term for eternal internal exile. For Arnold, it was the direction to look in the hope that help was on the way.

 

Arnold was more of a small-r republican, believing that if the remnant could attain a kind of critical mass—simple raw numbers—it could lead society on a more just path. Arnold was not an enemy of democracy, nor was he advocating a kind of Leninist avant-garde. He believed that “[p]roperty and intelligence cannot be trusted to show a sound majority themselves; the exercise of power by the people tends to educate the people.” In other words, the only way for the majority to learn sound government is to give them the power to govern in the first place. The remnant can merely help them to learn from their mistakes.

 

What I love about the term “the remnant” is that it appeals to both the Plato-Nock side of the coin and the Isaiah-Arnold side. In biblical terms, a remnant is both something left behind and something to rebuild with. It’s the last of your seedstock and the means for regrowing plentiful crops in the future.

 

I did not intend to go so long with the eggheadery, but I’ve never really explained in much detail my fondness for the term “the remnant,” which is weird given that it’s the title of my little podcast and such a big part of my worldview. I never subscribed to the pure Nockian fatalism. But I was always respectful of the point that the remnant can never count on victory.

 

No cause is truly lost, and no cause is truly won. It’s arguments forever. Sometimes—often—right-thinking loses the argument.

 

I don’t pretend to have a monopoly on right-thinking, as Nock and Arnold define it, nor do I claim to always live up to it even when I am confident of its existence. But I do believe that one should argue for what you think is right, even when you think you’ll lose. And just because you might lose in the moment, that doesn’t mean your arguments won’t find purchase in the soil down the road, even long after you’re gone.

 

Woke 1.

 

What put me on this path was the conversation about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez using the phrase “Woke 1.”

 

My friend Charlie Cooke’s summary is useful—and correct:

 

Seeking to dismiss the record of one of the many kooky political candidates with whom she is now reflexively associated, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez laughed aloud as if she had been told that she had a speck of mustard on her lip. “I have a local city councilman that has this saying, ‘Woke 1 was crazy,’” she submitted. “And I think that what’s important is that we have to assess what a candidate is saying now.”

 

Is it? Do we? Why? “Woke 1” was, indeed, “crazy.” But Ocasio-Cortez’s implication is that that “crazy” moment was something that happened to her and her ideological compatriots — like an earthquake or an invasion from the sea — rather than something that was contrived, dispersed, and enforced by her and her ideological compatriots. In this, Ocasio-Cortez seems confused once again by the appropriate pronouns. It wasn’t “crazy.” They were crazy. And that “they” includes her.

 

Charlie goes on, and I agree with all of it. The idea that a politician can get away with not merely kowtowing to mass hysteria, but egging it on, exploiting it for personal glory and political profit, and unleashing it on opponents, and then shrug it off by saying, in effect, “Man, that was weird. Let’s all forget about that!” is simply outrageous and preposterous.

 

While I agree with Charlie and many other folks piling on Ocasio-Cortez, I have two objections. The first is the phrase “Woke 1,” which, as many have noted, implies a Woke 2. “Calling it ‘Woke 1’ is like calling it ‘World War One’ in 1930,” another friend, Dan McLaughlin, observed.

 

But that’s not my primary problem with Woke 1. Sure, if you want to define “woke” by some coherent, or incoherent yet bounded, ideological commitments, the term works well enough. But even on those terms, the “political correctness” of the ‘90s should be Woke 1, since most of that nonsense was already there. The young’ns may not remember, but I do. “Women’s herstory,” “don’t call them seminars, call them ovulars,” “hate speech,” “phallocracy.” This stuff was commonplace when I was in college.

 

If we’re going to analogize Woke 1 to World War I, then the era of political correctness was at least akin to the Franco-Prussian War, laying the groundwork for what was to follow. Most of the academic terms we associate with woke craziness—“intersectionality,” “white privilege,” etc.—were coined in the late 1980s or 1990s.

 

But if we broaden our understanding of that “crazy” time a few years ago to moments of mass hysteria and elite panic, then the political-correctness era was merely one chapter in a much older story. I’m already running long, but the craze for eugenics—led by progressive elites in America and the U.K.—was another such chapter. The latter stages of the French Revolution marked another, and not the first. The history of humanity is punctuated by bouts of St. Vitus’ dance and tulip bulb crazes and is littered with the bodies of lynched Americans, Huguenots, Cathars, and, of course, Jews, Jews, and more Jews. McCarthyism had good arguments on its side, but the populist frenzy it represented undermined those arguments.

 

Which is to say that defining what we might call “Greater Woke” as a phenomenon purely of the left is folly. Which is why I find criticisms from the right, including Charlie’s, as wholly sound and correct as they are, to be a bit like the sound of one hand clapping.

 

Nick Catoggio alluded to this yesterday. After endorsing the criticisms from the right, Nick added:

 

I wouldn’t trust any Republican with power who supported Trump’s coup plot in 2020 even if he or she now claimed to be contrite. Repentance is cheap in politics; character, as demonstrated by terrible judgment, is destiny. If your reaction to the Woke 1 era is to laugh it off and muse that neo-McCarthyism was crazy, man, you’ve told us something important about your own character.

 

It’s fine—nay, necessary—to mock the “defund the police” nonsense of Woke 1 (which I did, often). It’s absolutely correct to reject a chuckle and shrug as a sufficient mea culpa for your own participation in a puritanical, hysterical jihad against reason and sound argument. If I can’t trust a leader to be sane in crazy times, I can’t trust you at all. It’s easy to be sane when it’s in your political self-interest.

 

But an enormous number of leaders on the right have failed the exact same test. Focusing on Woke 1 doesn’t absolve the fanatics and hysterics of the right nor the people who surrendered to the fanaticism and hysteria of the Trump era—and continue to this day as enablers and peddlers of it. If you claim to stand for the Constitution and honest elections but sat down for Trump’s attempt to steal an election, never mind cheered it on, why on earth should I take your fair-weather patriotism seriously?

 

Similar questions flood the mind: If you endlessly mock the eminently mockable idea of defunding the police but shouted that we should defund the FBI solely because it executed a lawful and justified raid on Mar-a-Lago; if you decry the “weaponization” of the justice system under Biden but yawn at the deliberate criminal prosecution and persecution of Trump’s enemies and accidental pawns in his narrative; if you rail against the “cancel culture” of your enemies but cheer the same practice among your friends; if you wax sanctimonious about the antisemitism of the left but insist upon a “big tent” for the antisemites on the right; if you deplore the cronyism and corporatism you call “socialism” when deployed by Democrats but celebrate the same thing when championed by Republicans; if you heap scorn on left-wing identity politics but celebrate talk of “Heritage Americans” and other “real Americans”; if you spoke of the “Biden crime family” in whispered earnestness but write off Trump’s corruption as simply his nature … you get the point.

 

Your selective condemnations of your opponents make me trust you less, not more. Your double standards reveal what your real standards are.

 

I should be clear because I mentioned them by name, I don’t include Charlie and Dan in this broadside. They’ve criticized many or all of the things I’ve mentioned, and many more.

 

But my problems with the broadsides remain. We live in a moment of competing hysterias, populisms, and institutionalized corruptions. They are not symmetrical or ideologically identical. The sins are piled high on both sides, but they are not all of equal weight or height. But such scorekeeping misses an important point. And my refusal to accept lesser evils as tools of some greater good enrages many people who only want to talk about one side of the scale.

 

To borrow a term from Julien Benda, we live in an age marked by the organization of political hatreds.

 

What I love about Nock was his stubborn refusal to join a team during a similar time. “The simple truth is that our businessmen do not want a government that will let business alone,” Nock observed. “They want a government they can use.” When Biden or Obama were president, I could make that observation about the pigs at the trough, to the sound of right-wing applause. I could make the same observation now under Trump, to the sound of right-wing silence.

 

I think the corruption now is more open and hypocritical for reasons that should be obvious. But they were no less true under Biden and Obama. Nock believed that causes like communism, fascism, Nazism, and, yes, the New Deal were “merely so-many trade-names for collectivist Statism, like the trade-names for tooth-pastes which are all exactly alike except for the flavouring.”

 

Now, I do not think the New Deal, for all my well-chronicled objections, was “exactly alike” those other movements (though many prominent people, including some New Dealers at the time, would not object to the claim nearly as much as you might think). But I would rather live in an era that worried that the statism of the New Deal risked sliding into those other -isms than in one where such -isms are fine, so long as “we” are the ones in charge.

 

If right-thinking exists, and I think it does, I think it is probably more of a spectrum of views than a binary formulation. For me, what defines right-thinking involves the word “right” less and “thinking” more. I can disagree with people I consider to be part of the remnant. We can argue about the efficacy of this program or that. We can debate how much we should tax and spend. What wars to fight, and which threats to simply endure.

 

Thinking is an activity, not a fixed state of mind. If you care about facts and reason, if you think that a kernel of truth or justifiable anger is not an excuse for hysteria, if you think leaders owe people calmness and prudence precisely when panic and rage are popular and momentarily rewarding, if you think the Constitution and the rule of law should be paramount precisely when most people find them most inconvenient, if you think that the rules of supply and demand cannot be suspended because they hurt your feelings or lend weight to your political opponents, and if you think the path to truth lies in arguing with people you disagree with, not pandering to people who already agree, then I consider you part of the remnant.

 

I don’t care if you vote Republican or Democrat. I can happily and productively talk to progressives who don’t think facts are partisan all day. But I don’t have five minutes for members of either party who claim facts are only facts when they confirm their desires or inconvenience their enemies. The electorate may be thermostatic in its beliefs, but the truth of those beliefs isn’t.

 

I have to side with Arnold and Isaiah because I believe that’s the only path out of the darkness. But I have to acknowledge that Plato and Nock had a point, too. A number of prominent right-wing “influencers” have told me or people I know that one must abide, even abet, lies and slanders in order to stay “relevant.” They tell themselves and others that they do so for noble reasons, to defeat the worst ideas and nudge the powerful or the people toward better ones. I have no doubt that is true, particularly for some politicians trying to navigate these toxic waters. I can muster some sympathy and grace for these people. But not a lot, because I’ve seen how the seduction of relevance often renders their compass unreadable or unreliable. What starts as seduction too often ends in comfort at the orgy.

 

I expect politicians to compromise with reality because politics is, and always will be, about muddling through and settling for the good instead of the perfect. My problem with this era is the way the politicization of everything causes normal people and “influencers” alike to think like politicians. They make what is good for their party, or the person running it, their true north, and the orgy the rightful spoils of power.

 

The remnant of Arnold and Isaiah holds that we should not accept this as inevitable and permanent. There is hope. There is work to do. There is a reason to get out of bed and try to persuade people to commit to right-thinking. Meanwhile, the remnant of Nock, Plato, and Solzhenitsyn speaks to me, not in its fatalism, but in its warning that right-thinking is not something you do solely in pursuit of the prize or payoff of “relevance,” but because right-thinking is its own reward. It is self-justifying. Hope for relevance. Work for relevance. But don’t make it your true north, for that way lies the rocks and the orgy.

You Didn’t Build This, Establishment Democrats

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, August 12, 2026

 

Mainstream Democrats are patting themselves on the back this morning, a target into which the party’s jilted far-left fringes would love to shove a knife.

 

Each of these warring parties agrees that the clandestine establishmentarian machinations doomed Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong. That’s the narrative they both want. It allows the mainstreamers to revel in their omnipotence, and it reinforces the persecution complex that animates so many of the Democratic Party’s far-left critics. But the plot has some holes in it.

 

Hong’s defeat is certainly more evidence of an often-overlooked truism: Campaigns matter. And the great DSA hope in the race for Badger State governor ran a terrible one. She wedded her sincere but unpleasant personality with a variety of broadly unpopular policy preferences, and she refused to conceal her contempt for those who were repelled by the joyless lifestyle brand that she mistook for a political philosophy.

 

The establishment pulled out all the stops — in a comically manic fashion, at times. But the progressive left didn’t ride to her rescue. Indeed, they maintained a conspicuous distance from Hong. Those two factors contributed to the candidate’s loss, but this was not an admirable exhibition of collective action. Rather, it was an organic display of mutual revulsion.

 

But Hong’s double-digit lead in the polls remained durable for weeks prior to her public struggle session, and her lead might have collapsed as a result of her own actions more than her party’s. And, as Hong’s backers are quick to note, another progressive who stayed in the race — State Senator Kelda Roys — drew over 7 percent of the vote. Even with all these circumstances conspiring against her, Hong fell short of her goal by just about 3,000 votes of the over 780,000 cast.

 

Hardly a resounding rebuke. And if it was a repudiation, it was one that was reserved only for Hong. The national media’s focus on the success of the rearguard action that took her down may obscure the successes the American far left enjoyed in last night’s primaries.

 

In Minnesota, Senator Bernie Sanders’s pick for Senate, Peggy Flanagan, won her race. She’ll run on a platform that endorses nationalizing the health insurance industry, “tearing ICE apart,” and restricting the public’s right to engage in political speech. If he wins his race for Congress in Minnesota’s second district, Matt Little will take many of Flanagan’s views to Washington as well as the fashionable luddism overtaking so-called progressives. Unlike previous cycles, Ilhan Omar didn’t even face a modest challenge from her fellow Democrats. She’ll be back to advocating the wholesale “transformation of our political and economic systems” in no time.

 

Establishmentarian Democrats want — and, to some extent, deserve — credit for pushing back against the rise of far-left progressivism within their ranks. But at the same time, they also want to promote the notion that Democratic primary voters aren’t as radical as some of the candidates they endorse. Rather, they’re just hungry for change.

 

The results in the race for the Democratic nomination in Connecticut’s first district on Tuesday night lend some veracity to that claim. There, Representative John Larson, a forgettable Methuselah whose career in Washington roughly coincided with the theater-wide release of “The Matrix,” was soundly defeated by Hartford’s relatively unobjectionable mayor, Luke Bronin.

 

That’s generational turnover, and a data point in favor of the mainstream left’s face-saving proposition. And to be fair, plenty of far-left candidates have lost their primaries this cycle even with the support of the American socialist diaspora. Cori Bush, Nida Allam, Junaid Ahmed, and Kat Abughazaleh came up short, too. The results in those races contribute to the mountains of evidence that indicate, when it comes to socialism, the Democratic Party is divided along the lines of class and race.

 

But despite Hong’s loss — one she almost seems relieved by — the Democratic Party’s voters have ensured that this will be a far more radical party in 2027.

 

The next Congress is likely to include figures such as New Jersey’s Adam Hamawy, an unrepentant onetime character witness for the architect of the first World Trade Center bombing. He’ll be joined by Melat Kiros, a political neophyte whose boundless compassion allows her to see the 9/11 attacks from the perspective of the attackers, and Chris Rabb — a radical progressive who isn’t sure if the Jews didn’t engineer their own massacre on Bondi Beach last year. These representatives will caucus with the likes of Claire Valdez, whose campaign literature contends that everything positive you’ve ever heard about America is a lie, and Darializa Chevalier — a dogmatic idealist so committed to her dystopian vision that she cannot even bring herself to say that murderers belong in prison. Neither would exist in her ideal world. But neither would America, given Chevalier’s commitment to “undermine and eradicate” it by bringing “unrest and violence” to its streets.

 

These far-left figures will join Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Summer Lee, Ayanna Pressley, Delia Ramirez, and Greg Casar in the House’s growing “progressive squad.” And their ideology may get a toehold in the Senate if the bad political environment for the GOP papers over Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s many flaws.

 

None of this is to dissuade establishmentarian Democrats from pulling out all the institutional stops to arrest the rise of socialism within its ranks. But they should put the self-congratulations on hold. They’ve lost a lot of ground to their erstwhile complacency, and they’ve only just begun to fight back. There’s a lot of fighting to do yet.

How ‘Israeli’ Came to Mean ‘Jewish’ in the American Press

By Seth Mandel

Tuesday, August 11, 2026

 

New York Magazine’s new issue gives new meaning to the term “food Nazi.” The latest edition is dedicated to the proposition that Jews can never fully belong, that they are always visitors to society but never at home. The magazine uses food as the specific lens through which to view this blood-and-soil worldview.

 

The line getting the most attention is the magazine’s description of the State of Israel as “the land mass currently called Israel,” a declaration that New York Magazine doesn’t recognize the Jewish state. And that indeed is quite newsy. But the publication’s discussion of Jews in New York itself makes the story package not just geopolitical gobbledygook but a direct attack on Jews anywhere.

 

The conceit behind the story package is the emergence of a restaurant and cultural scene referred to as SWANA, which stands for Southwest Asia and North Africa. Jewish Israelis, while geographically part of SWANA, are not included, “given the political framework” of the term.

 

Much of the writing in this story package tries to dance around that particular point, but every so often it comes through: “Israelis,” in the context of this new progressive dogma, means “Jews.” An Arab who lives in “the land mass currently called Israel” is obviously not being excluded from this club. Indeed, the “political framework” of the category would elevate what the magazine terms a “Palestinian from the pre-1948 borders” as first among equals.

 

There is of course much irony in the fact that, before 1948, “Palestinian from the pre-1948 borders” would have meant Jews, especially during the portion of the Mandate when Arabs in the Holy Land still considered themselves part of a Syrian polity. But I digress.

 

Let’s take another example from the package: “The Israeli chefs Daniel Soskolne and Loren Abramovitch don’t own a restaurant, nor do they want to; they cook independently under the name LEV, hosting regular pop-ups at an event space in Bed-Stuy where they could be described as the chefs in residence.… In 2021, as their profile was rising, they were called out by the Palestinian artist Amanny Ahmad, who posted on Instagram that LEV ‘made a career out of cooking Palestinian food (under any name but that).’”

 

This was a particularly telling accusation, because as Soskolne says, “We never nationalized our food.” That is, they never claimed it was Israeli or Palestinian or Swamalandian or from the moon. Instead, Soskolne said: “We have so much influence from all over the world. Some of it is Jewish, some of it is not.”

 

You can see in this comment that Soskolne understands the problem from a pro-Palestinian perspective. He was born in Israel, and he cooks some food with Jewish influences, so he should not be allowed to make dishes that are popular among anti-Semites who call Israel by a different name.

 

Again, were Soskolne and Abramovitch “Palestinians from the pre-1948 borders” they would not be protested by this Palestinian racist who told them to stop making falafel.

 

There is a farcical quality to some of this. A person modifying Syrian cooking and calling it Palestinian and then telling a Jew he may not also cook the dish is reminiscent of the line from the Princess Bride in which Vizzini accuses the Man in Black of “trying to kidnap what I’ve rightfully stolen.”

 

Abramovitch and Soskolne are an interesting team for progressives to villainize, considering the fact that they have built their careers on coexistence. In the village where Abramovitch grew up, a Jewish Food Society profile from 2021 tells us, Shabbat and holiday meals were occasions for communal dining, giving Abramovitch the Jewish part of the tradition. A few miles away were his Arab friends who he’d watch cook labneh and from whom he learned “a particularly warm approach to hospitality.”

 

It was a combination that became known as “Jewish Palestinian” cuisine. A February 2023 Surface Magazine article about the duo enthuses: “Pairing the culinary traditions of the global Jewish diaspora with Palestinian influences, the duo’s melting-pot cuisine has earned them a devoted following.”

 

The two chefs abide by progressive orthodoxy: They offer ritual denunciations of Israel and accuse it of committing genocide. But is that enough to be SWANA? Probably not, New York informs us: “After October 7, as Israel began its retaliation against Gaza, Abramovitch persuaded Soskolne that they should post about what was going on. On November 9, they wrote on Instagram that they and their friends and family in Israel were ‘suffering from the horrific and brutal acts on Oct 7th’ and ‘suffering from the massive killing in Gaza, the killing of so many innocent people must stop.’”

 

Ah, they recognized the humanity of both Jews and Arabs. And how are the duo trying to make up for this cardinal sin? They are, New York explains, “avoiding cooking falafel.”

Quality Control

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, August 12,2026

 

Last night was a rough one at the polls for socialists. In both parties.

 

The socialist in chief is forever boasting about the power of his endorsements, but he took an embarrassing “L” in one major race and scored an ominously underwhelming victory in another. The defeat came courtesy of former pillow maven Mike Lindell, who stepped down as CEO of his company last week to focus on becoming governor of Minnesota. Which is a bit like a middle-aged accountant quitting his job to focus on trying out for the NFL.

 

Lindell is one of Trumpworld’s most hallucinatory “rigged election” cranks and Minnesota is a reliably blue state, especially in a national environment as anti-Republican as the present one. His realistic best-case scenario was winning his party’s nomination before getting annihilated in the general election; in the end, GOP primary voters chose to put him out of his misery early, handing him a double-digit defeat. “Republican gubernatorial nominee Mike Lindell” is beneath the dignity of even the deeply undignified modern right, it seems.

 

The candidate is processing the people’s verdict just as you’d expect.

 

The president had better luck in South Carolina, where Sen. Darline Graham “won” the race to replace her late brother as the GOP’s nominee for Senate this fall. But as wins go, it wasn’t much of one: Despite Trump’s backing and public sympathy for the Graham family, she took less than 33 percent against a crowded field of conservatives that included former Gov. Mark Sanford, Rep. Russell Fry, and Rep. Ralph Norman, whom she’ll face in a runoff in two weeks.

 

Most of the two-thirds of Republicans who couldn’t bring themselves to support Graham are likely to favor Norman in the next round, one would think. (“The long and short of it, she’s got a pretty low ceiling,” one operative told Politico before the vote.) If she loses, it’ll be the second time in two months that a Trump endorsee was defeated in a statewide primary runoff in South Carolina—and the second time in August alone that a Trump endorsee was beaten in a key primary in the deep-red South.

 

I’m too much of a pessimist to believe that the president has “lost his touch” or that Republican voters have begun to practice quality control toward weak candidates after 10 years of brainworm “slopulism.” But if you want to tell yourself a story about the fading influence of a very old, very unpopular president based on the primary results of late, it isn’t hard.

 

The most one can say for Trump’s defeats last night is that both were inconsequential. Republicans were doomed in Minnesota this fall no matter whom they nominated, especially against an opponent as formidable as Amy Klobuchar. And Ralph Norman will serve the president’s agenda in the Senate as faithfully as Darline Graham will.

 

The truly consequential defeat on Tuesday was inflicted on left-wing socialists in Wisconsin, where progressive Francesca Hong shockingly blew a 20-point lead in polling over David Crowley, a guy who dropped out of the race a month ago before re-entering at the Democratic establishment’s behest. Combine that with Abdul El-Sayed’s unexpectedly narrow victory in last week’s Senate primary in Michigan, and we now have a clear trend of “normie” Democratic voters successfully—or almost successfully, in El-Sayed’s case—practicing quality control against questionably electable far-left candidates in important Midwestern battlegrounds.

 

Hong’s defeat is a heavy blow to the supposedly ascendant Democratic Socialists of America. Isn’t it?

 

Winning by losing.

 

Hong spent most of the race dishing out boilerplate left-wing economic populism about universal healthcare and taxing the rich. What turned her into a national figure was coverage of her recently resurfaced musings on abolishing prisons, canceling Thanksgiving, and the “proximity to whiteness” that her biracial son has given her—positions so toxic that even Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez glibly dismissed them on grounds that “Woke 1 was crazy.”

 

The candidate wasn’t smooth about cleaning up after herself, either. Asked recently by CNN whether she still holds the same views on Thanksgiving, Hong equivocated before lamenting,“Thanksgiving is also a time that’s incredibly painful for many people in our communities.”

 

Essentially, her “Woke 2” campaign against oligarchy and the high cost of living was rebranded in the home stretch as a “Woke 1” campaign of cultural radicalism. And Wisconsin Democrats weren’t going to gamble their party’s chances in a tough gubernatorial race, with a Trumpist election denier waiting on the other side, on a candidate like that. Woke 1 was crazy, they seemed to say last night—and “crazy” wasn’t worth the risk in a general election.

 

Is it really a loss for the DSA, though, that its banner won’t be carried this fall by someone who’s already become a laughingstock for her “Woke 1” positions?

 

Consider that Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders, the two most prominent socialists in the country, declined to endorse Hong. (Sen. Elizabeth Warren dismissively said “I don’t know her” when asked if she’d support the Wisconsinite.) Sources close to Sanders whispered to Politico that “Hong is less vetted and not as sharp on some of her messaging than other candidates,” in the publication’s words, and noted that the senator didn’t want to be involved in another electoral fiasco after the Graham Platner mess.

 

“Francesca Hong’s loss is the best imaginable result for progressives, because this was the left-wing Doug Mastriano: a completely unelectable candidate with no ability to fundraise,” pollster Lakshya Jain observed last night. Mastriano was such a weak, fringy opponent that Democrats ended up spending money to help him win Pennsylvania’s Republican gubernatorial primary in 2022; the same happened in reverse this year in Wisconsin, with right-wing groups spending money to help Hong. Had she prevailed yesterday, democratic socialists would have been staring down the barrel of a brutal “DSA candidate fumbles winnable swing state to ‘Stop the Steal’ freak” headline in November, the last thing they need as they try to gain influence within their party. They’ve now been spared that.

 

They’ve also been spared an inevitable national Republican ad campaign aimed at tying all Democratic candidates—but especially progressives—to Hong’s nuttery. Before Tuesday, I saw theories kicking around online that it would be good for other DSA-adjacent candidates like El-Sayed if she won her primary because she’d end up as a lightning rod or “heat shield” for them from right-wing criticism. That strikes me as far-fetched: More likely is that “socialists hate Thanksgiving” talking points would have seeped into other races, scaring off undecideds who already suspect “Woke 2” Democrats of remaining ardently “Woke 1” behind closed doors.

 

I’m particularly skeptical of the “heat shield” logic with respect to El-Sayed, an out-of-central casting bogeyman for nationalists by dint of his radicalism, his brashness, and his Muslim faith. He’s the villain that Republicans thought they were getting in Zohran Mamdani, whose geniality and outreach to Trump has made him harder for them to hate. Hong’s clownishness would not have obscured El-Sayed’s villainy in Republican messaging this fall.

 

Besides, El-Sayed has plenty of “Woke 1” culture-war clownishness in his own Very Online archives for the GOP to exploit. Among other things that CNN recently discovered after sifting through his old YouTube videos (many of which have now been quietly deleted) is an episode in which he “questioned whether football could be ‘ethical’ or ‘safe’ and linked the sport’s ‘ethos’ to narratives used to justify slavery and westward expansion.” This guy is running in Michigan.

 

All told, a Hong victory in the primary would have gained the DSA little or nothing and probably cost it much. It won by losing. And then, across the border in Minnesota, it won by winning: Peggy Flanagan, the state’s lieutenant governor and a staunch progressive endorsed by Sanders, crushed centrist Rep. Angie Craig in the Democratic primary for Senate by nearly 20 points. Flanagan will cruise to victory again in November, assuring the far left of having a fellow traveler in that seat.

 

Shedding the hated “Woke 1” socialists while advancing the “Woke 2” strain seems like a decent outcome for the DSA to me. But it leaves us with two questions. How the hell did Francesca Hong blow a 20-point lead, anyway? And why did she fall short in her race while El-Sayed managed to hang on in his?

 

Woke 2 versus Woke 1.

 

The irresistible answer to the first question is another question. Did she ever really have a 20-point lead in this race?

 

Yeah, yeah, I know what the polls said. But the polls also said that El-Sayed led Rep. Haley Stevens by something like 15 points in Michigan before he eked out a 1-point victory. The polls say a lot of things. The fact that they’ve now missed the outcome in two key Midwestern Democratic primaries by Grand Canyon-sized margins means there’s obviously some sort of systemic methodological error afoot.

 

The most likely culprit is nonresponse bias. In surveying Wisconsin and Michigan, pollsters may have gotten high response rates from stereotypical pro-Hong and pro-El-Sayed progressives—white, college-educated, politically engaged, and very eager to share their opinions. Whereas stereotypical pro-Crowley and pro-Stevens normies—nonwhite, less educated, too busy with work and life to sit through political surveys—were less likely to pick up the phone. The result: Wildly mistaken blowout forecasts in both races.

 

One wonders whether El-Sayed would have pulled it out in Michigan if the polling there hadn’t signaled to Stevens supporters that there was really no point in bothering to turn out for her.

 

There’s another possibility, though: Maybe last night’s upset was less a matter of methodological error than sharp movement in the race after the final polls were taken.

 

There was a lot going in the Wisconsin primary in the home stretch. Hong was getting blown up in the media over her “Woke 1” pensees; meanwhile, Crowley was back in the race after two other Democratic candidates dropped out, elevating him as the last best hope of Thanksgiving enthusiasts. And he got a huge assist from Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, who joined him on a last-minute barnstorming tour of the state to try to save the party from a looming electoral disaster. Evers pulled no punches on the trail too, warning Democratic voters frankly that Hong would probably lose to the GOP this fall.

 

Undecideds and late-deciders were taking all of this in. Then El-Sayed won his primary while conspicuously underperforming his polling, further spooking Democrats who worry about the electability of socialist candidates. On the day after the Michigan race, former Biden operative Dan Kanninen read the tea leaves in Wisconsin and presciently explained why he thought Hong’s grip on the race wasn’t as tight as the polls suggested. Beat for beat, the reasoning he laid out anticipated what happened last night.

 

In the end, as Semafor’s Dave Weigel noted, neither Hong nor El-Sayed underperformed expectations. She received more than 300,000 votes, which would have won any other Wisconsin gubernatorial primary this century. He received nearly 750,000, a landslide total by the standards of Michigan’s 2018 primary. Hong lost, and El-Sayed nearly lost, because “pollsters are just not catching these armies of quieter Dems (and some crossover indies) cannonballing into the polling booth,” as Weigel put it. The normies in the party showed up in unexpected droves to try to do quality control.

 

Why didn’t both candidates lose, though? What was the secret sauce that got El-Sayed over the hump but not Hong?

 

Any answer to that will necessarily be speculative, but there are some important differences between the two. One, as I alluded to earlier, involves endorsements. The same triumvirate of Sanders, Warren, and Ocasio-Cortez that withheld support from Hong in Wisconsin backed El-Sayed in Michigan, which is to say that the progressive movement was invested in his success to a degree that it wasn’t in hers. Even if those endorsements were only marginally useful in drumming up extra turnout for him, margins were everything in these two races. El-Sayed ended up winning by fewer than 16,000 votes; Hong ended up losing by fewer than 4,000 to the Evers-endorsed Crowley.

 

Another difference is demographics. Michigan has a small but influential bloc of Arab and Muslim voters, and El-Sayed cleaned up with them, taking nearly 80 percent of the vote in Dearborn and earning more ballots there than Kamala Harris did in the 2024 presidential election. Maybe that’s due to his outspoken criticism of Israel, maybe it’s due to his historic significance as a potential U.S. senator who’s both Arab and Muslim himself, maybe a bit of both. But dominating with that constituency may have been decisive to his statewide margin. Hong didn’t have the same advantage.

 

A third is simple charisma. El-Sayed is sufficiently talented as a speaker that none other than Bill Clinton allegedly encouraged him to run for office someday after listening to his commencement address at the University of Michigan in 2007. He’s also a “fighter” by temperament in the obnoxious populist sense of the term: Passionate about his causes and disdainful of his opponents, he scratches an itch for combativeness that’s common among his party’s grassroots after nearly two years of being steamrolled by Trump.

 

Hong is none of that. She’s soft-spoken, seemed unsure of herself in interviews, and lacked the native belligerence that modern populists crave. In the age of Trump, if you’re going to come for Thanksgiving, come hard.

 

Ultimately, though, I think the key difference is that El-Sayed gave Democratic voters a reason to look past any discomfort they may have felt about his radicalism, whereas Hong never did.

 

That was also true in Minnesota of Peggy Flanagan, a leftist but a known political quantity. “Flanagan and Hong were both the progressive candidates in their race, but Flanagan [is] also very much an ‘establishment’ figure (the incumbent [lieutenant governor]!) who obviously everyone is broadly comfortable with,” Matt Yglesias noted. In El-Sayed’s case, I suspect, Democrats got comfortable with his radicalism because it was mostly directed at a target toward which they too feel hostile: Israel and pro-Israel lobbying outfits like AIPAC.

 

Turning a Democratic primary in 2026 into a de facto referendum on a single issue is potentially a good strategy, depending on the issue. A for-or-against referendum on Israel when you’re arguing the “against” position? Good strategy. Opposing Israel is a key plank of “Woke 2” and liberals are increasingly comfortable with that.

 

Turning it into a for-or-against referendum on Thanksgiving when you’re arguing “against” for whatever insane reason? Not so good. That’s “Woke 1.” And Woke 1, as we’ve learned, was crazy.

 

If there’s a lesson from the varying results for progressives in Michigan and Wisconsin, then, I suspect it’s that Democrats will tolerate radicalism provided that it directionally reflects their own preferences. Whether El-Sayed can stay on the right side of that calculus as “Woke 1” skeletons come tumbling out of his closet remains to be seen.

Yes, ‘Woke 1’ Was Crazy. Now, About Those Fascist Cartoon Dogs . . .

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, August 12, 2026

 

Democrats just needed permission to express their pent-up resentments over the hoops they were made to jump through during the era Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez derisively referred to as “Woke 1.” The admission by a high priestess of the faith that its more “crazy” tenets are now apocrypha unleashed a cascade of relieved recriminations, as though “woke” was something that was done to the Democratic Party.

 

If the Democratic Party’s most ambitious office-seekers now see wokeness as a political albatross, that’s good. But not everyone got the memo.

 

“Superficially, if ‘Paw Patrol’ has politics, they are clunkily left-wing,” read one of many mind-numbing sentences in The Economist’s dissection of the popular children’s show. The cartoon dogs who double as first responders are conscientious environmentalists, support free and fair elections, and are “vaguely leftish” when it comes to communitarian ideals. And yet, the dogs are nevertheless class traitors, and they are inculcating in our unsuspecting youth a deference to authority that greases the skids for fascism.

 

You see, one of the cartoon dogs is a police officer, thus rendering the show “pro-police ‘copaganda’” — a sentiment shared by commentators and academics alike. Indeed, given the apparent lack of executive oversight, the “Paw Patrol” may even serve as a “sly advert for privatized state services,” The Economist continued. “It is very tempting to dismiss the whole debate as killjoy hogwash and culture-war lunacy.” Indeed, it is.

 

What a throwback. The item harkens back to peak “Woke 1,” when seemingly every liberal with a laptop competed with one another to deconstruct every aspect of American society in pursuit of the kernel of evil at its nucleus. These cartoon dogs were frequent targets of this mania.

 

The abstract of a study published in the journal Crime, Media, Culture accused the children’s show of promoting the “core tenets of neoliberalism” and encouraging “complicity in a global capitalist system that (re)produces inequalities and causes environmental harms.” Its plotlines feature “dismaying gender politics are in tune with the franchise’s gross rightwingery,” The Guardian’s Caspar Salmon wrote of the franchise’s covert boosterism for “Trumpian individualism, disdain for the state, and capitalist materialism.”

 

What felt like a critical mass of social media users called on the entertainment industry to “defund Paw Patrol” and even to “euthanize the police dog” — the sort of stuff that was once exclusive to the confines of America’s mental institutions. “It’s a joke, but it’s also not,” New York Times reporter Amanda Hess conceded. “The effort to publicize police brutality also means banishing the good-cop archetype,” she noted. And because “the movement rests on understanding that cops do plenty of harm,” even small children must be dragooned into it by depriving them of cultural products that fail to cast American authority figures in a negative light.

 

So, yeah, that was “crazy.” But as The Economist reminds us, it’s still crazy.

 

If Democrats are as enthusiastic to repudiate wokeness’s most laughably militant excesses, they should be just as eager to root out the philosophy’s last redoubts: media and journalism, academia, and — contrary to the contrived backlash against Paw Patrol — entertainment. If they were serious, they might heed wokeness’s demand that they “do the work.” They’re not, though. Perhaps because the Democratic left wants credit for claiming to have abandoned the toxic brand “woke” while refusing to elaborate on how their views have evolved or criticizing the philosophy’s true believers.

 

It’s enough to make you wonder if the newfound critics of “Woke 1” on the left are entirely sincere.

Democratic Socialists Hit a Wall in Wisconsin

National Review Online

Wednesday, August 12, 2026

 

It turns out even Democratic primary voters have their limits.

 

Despite multiple polls showing Democratic Socialist Francesca Hong with a double-digit lead, she managed to lose Tuesday’s primary for Wisconsin governor to Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, who had been so far behind he actually suspended his campaign last month. Crowley will now face off against Representative Tom Tiffany (who ran unopposed in the GOP primary) in November for the chance to lead the state for the next four years.

 

Hong is 37 years old, a former failed chef, and currently assembly representative for Madison, the state capital — a political environment infamous for the out-of-touch extremism of its leftism. It is difficult to convey just how robotically Hong publicly committed herself to her ideology over the years — the most obvious example being her recent inability to decide whether or not she still wanted to “Cancel Thanksgiving,” because settler-colonialism is still “very painful for many people in our communities.” Throughout her elected career, Hong made her views on crime well-known: “Police exist to uphold white supremacy. Defund then abolish. Reform can’t be an option.”

 

As Hong surged in polls, panic set in among Democrats that they could squander a crucial race. In a desperate gambit, incumbent Democratic Governor Tony Evers, a two-termer who chose to retire, endorsed and campaigned with Crowley, bluntly telling reporters (multiple times) that he did not think Hong could win in November.

 

His bet paid off.

 

While Crowley is no moderate (he has called for expanding Medicaid in the state to allow people above the income threshold to buy into it, and co-sponsored legislation declaring abortion a form of health care), he is much more of a standard-issue Wisconsin Democrat than Hong would have been.

 

Interestingly, this represents the second polling miss of the month in the Midwest — in the Michigan Senate race, Abdul El-Sayed was expected to crush Representative Haley Stevens, only to barely hang on.

 

Perhaps the strength of the Democratic Socialists has been greatly exaggerated.

Tony Evers, Electoral Gangster

By Christian Schneider

Thursday, August 13, 2026

 

The day before Tuesday’s stunning Democratic gubernatorial primary in Wisconsin, Governor Tony Evers traveled the state to stump for his preferred candidate, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley. It was unusual that a sitting governor got involved in a partisan primary for his successor, but in this case, the circumstances of Evers’s involvement are almost too incredible to believe.

 

Effectively, Evers, a relatively moderate Democrat, stood up to the socialist wave overcoming his party, and he did so armed with only a soup ladle. Francesca Hong, a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America and a backbencher in the state legislature, had shot to the front of the gubernatorial field, imperiling the Democrats’ chances of winning against Republican Representative Tom Tiffany in November. Every legitimate poll had Hong walking away with the race, leading by double digits, and in some cases doubling the vote of her next-closest competitor.

 

Republicans clearly wanted Hong to be the Democrats’ candidate. Past tweets of hers expressed crackpot theories, including the idea that Thanksgiving and virtually every other holiday should be canceled, that police and prisons should be abolished, and that being in a place with too many white people made her uncomfortable. Hong actually believed all the lunacy that your uncle on Facebook is trying to convince you Democrats believe.

 

“She’s not ready for prime time,” Crowley said of Hong. “And the fact that she’s been asked very simple questions and the way that she’s responding to those questions makes the news even more should cause all of us to pause.”

 

Nonetheless, Hong was coasting on a socialist momentum within the Democratic Party that had birthed U.S. Senate candidates including Graham Platner in Maine and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. And in the past few weeks, Hong’s nomination seemed inevitable.

 

It was, until Evers stepped in and reversed the race in a way that may never have been seen in modern politics. In order to stop Hong and face down the socialist wing of his party, Evers convinced Crowley, who had dropped out of the race weeks before, to reenter the contest and become the “establishment” candidate. And for weeks, it looked as if the effort was going to fall short, given Hong’s huge polling lead. And yet, on Election Day, it appears that Democrats all over the state decided to side with Evers in preventing Wisconsin from becoming a national laughingstock.

 

Democrats suddenly snapping out of an ideological delusion in favor of electability isn’t entirely unprecedented. In 2019, after Bernie Sanders was barreling toward the presidential nomination, lesser candidates such as Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar quickly dropped out of the race and threw their support behind the establishment candidate, Joe Biden, who went on to defeat incumbent President Donald Trump.

 

But Evers’s last-minute switcheroo was even bolder, as he exhumed the dead corpse of a previous candidate in order to topple the socialist front-runner. He didn’t need candidates dropping out to coalesce establishment voters; he actually added more candidates to the race to do so. And in the span of about a week, he apparently turned an entire state against an extreme candidate. (And it wasn’t just the state — national figures including Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Elizabeth Warren all declined to endorse Hong, treating her as if she were a Steve Bannon underwear calendar.)

 

Evers’s emergency machinations should go down as one of the bravest political coups in American history, in one of the most chaotic elections the nation has seen. In the words of Saturday Night Live’s Stefon, this race had everything, from sex scandals to candidates tanking their campaigns with fiscal mismanagement. And it was all capped by a candidate dropping out of the race, then jumping back in and winning the nomination just weeks later.

 

Evers is darn near the last governor you’d expect to strike so swiftly and decisively. He plays the part of soft-spoken, aw-shucks Midwestern governor to perfection (even though he is occasionally prone to public profanity).

 

And yet, while Republicans may be angry that the Democrats have a more viable candidate to run against Tom Tiffany, there is something admirable in anyone who stands up to the creeping influence of socialism and expanded government control of our lives. Republicans rooting for Hong were playing a dangerous game — while Tiffany was polling ahead of Hong, we have now seen just how wrong polls can be. Hong could have beaten Tiffany; then the state’s residents would have been stuck with a lunatic as their governor. At least now Badger State residents can know that their next governor will be a sane person.

 

And for that, whether on the left or right, they should thank Tony Evers for throwing himself on the socialist grenade.