Throwing the Book at Librarians

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, April 22, 2026

 

Here’s the entry for the verb form of “ban” over at Dictionary.com: “to prohibit, forbid, or bar; interdict. to ban nuclear weapons.” Examples include: “The dictator banned all newspapers and books that criticized his regime.”

 

And here’s the definition of “ban” as a noun: “the act of prohibiting by law; interdiction.”

 

Now, here are some recent headlines:

 

“Book bans and attempted bans remain at record highs, with ‘Sold’ topping the list” (the Washington Post); “Book bans mired at record high” (The Hill); Book Bans in U.S. Hit Record Levels (Daily Beast); “Book bans hit 4,235 titles in 2025 as group warns censorship is near record highs” (CBS affiliate KOMO). Lots of these, and many more, are based on the AP story about the Monday release of the American Library Association’s annual list of “Banned and Challenged Books.”

 

Some articles are more nuanced than others about the ALA’s methodology and definitions. A banned book is a book that is removed from a library. A book has been “challenged” if someone or some group merely complained about it. The complaints vary. Some challenges are simply about whether the work is age-appropriate and should therefore require parental approval or only be available upon request. Others request or demand outright removal from the library’s collection. The ALA is not very helpful in breaking down these distinctions.

 

Still, I’ll be clear up front: I think some of the challenges are silly, overwrought, or bigoted. If I were a librarian, I’d be pissed if I were told A Clockwork Orange should be removed because some activists think it’s icky.

 

But let’s look at the most challenged book of 2025, Sold by Patricia McCormick. I haven’t read it, but from the reviews and Amazon page it sounds like a good, albeit disturbing, book. It’s received awards and made many “best of” lists. What’s it about? A 13-year-old girl who is sold into prostitution. Publisher’s Weekly calls it “hard-hitting” and says that “the author beautifully balances the harshness of brothel life with the poignant relationships among its residents.” In a starred review, Booklist calls it, “An unforgettable account of sexual slavery as it exists now.” It was a National Book Award finalist. (At least that’s what the Amazon page tells me).

 

It has also sold more than 500,000 copies worldwide and is available at thousands of libraries and pretty much every bookseller in America. First published 20 years ago, it is currently the No. 1 book bestseller in Amazon’s category of “Teen & Young Adult Fiction on Sexual Abuse.” Though, as is often the case, charges that a book has been “banned” tend to boost sales.

 

But, come on. Sold hasn’t been banned anywhere in the United States. Indeed, the Supreme Court basically banned book banning more than 50 years ago. The last serious attempt to ban a category of books—ones intended to influence elections—came from the Obama administration, which argued in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that the government could prohibit the publication of books (and other media, like documentaries) that might influence voter decisions near elections.

 

In the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, mere possession, never mind sale or publication, of banned books was a crime. I’m not up to speed on the rules in modern China or Iran, but from what I’ve read, book bans in these countries mean, at minimum, that it is illegal to import, publish, sell, or distribute them, and I’m going to just guess that possessing them is not the safest thing to do either. I’m pretty comfortable saying that book bans in North Korea have teeth as well.

 

So, just talking about the plain meaning of words, it is journalistic malpractice to talk about “book bans” in the way that many news outlets do on a regular basis.

 

Let’s provide some more context.

 

There are roughly 9,000 public library systems in the U.S., with about 17,000 outlets. There are another 3,700 or so academic libraries. And, according to the ALA’s own statistics, there are between 90,000 and 98,506 public school libraries in America.

 

And how many times was Sold challenged—again, not banned—in 2025?

 

Thirty-six.

 

The ALA doesn’t tell us if any of the challenges resulted in having the book removed from the shelves. But let’s assume for argument’s sake that in all 36 cases it was removed.

 

That would mean that out of some 120,000 libraries (give or take), Sold was removed from .03 percent of libraries.

 

The horror.

 

Look, I am stipulating that it’s a good book. I am also happy to concede that libraries should carry it, all things being equal. But is it so outrageous to think an “unforgettable account of sexual slavery as it exists now” shouldn’t be readily available to third-graders? I’m asking sincerely. I’m fine with my 23-year-old daughter reading it. Would I want her to read it at age 10? Probably not. Would I want my kid’s grade school to require parental permission before she could take it out, or even take it down from a shelf? Yes, yes, I would. I certainly wouldn’t have bought it for her until she was older. That doesn’t make me a character out of Fahrenheit 451 or 1984.

 

It’s very strange that in a world where trigger warnings are a thing for grown-ups, people set their hair on fire about others wanting to restrict access to tales of forced prostitution and brothel life to very young children. (And let’s be clear: Sold is by no means the most controversial or offensive book being challenged out there). I mean, I can’t listen to NPR or watch a news broadcast about sex abuse without the host or anchor warning the audience that “mature themes” or “disturbing images” are coming up. But the equivalent for books is nightmare fuel for many progressives and journalists.

 

Almost every day I catch one of the ACLU fundraising ads featuring authors Judy Blume and Jason Reynolds freaking people out about the rising tide of book-banning in America. Book banning in America “is worse than I’ve ever seen,” Blume tells us. “It’s people in power who want to control everything. Well, I say ‘no’ to censorship.”

 

“We all have a First Amendment right to read and learn different viewpoints,” Reynolds says. “That’s why every book belongs on the shelf.”

 

I agree that all adults have a First Amendment right to read and learn different viewpoints (the usual caveats about obscenity laws and the like notwithstanding). But the idea that every book deserves to be on a library shelf is preposterous nonsense.

 

Indeed, if every library carried every book, why would we even need librarians? Part of their job is to curate what books they have in their collections. Why? Because there is a finite amount of space in any library.

 

I couldn’t find recent numbers on how many books are in the average public school library. But a 2009 report said that it caps out at just below 14,000 books. There are more than 1 million titles published in the United States (meaning they are currently available for purchase). Thanks to the explosion of self-publishing, some 4 million books were published in 2025 alone, though only 642,242 of them were released by traditional publishers, according to Publishers Weekly.

 

Look, I’m as confused as you probably are at how you can have just over a million active titles in print when we’re churning out 4 million (or 642,000) books in a single calendar year. But I’m told that it makes sense when you factor in how many books essentially evaporate upon publication. But any way you slice it, a library with room for 14,000 books in total—and room for a tiny fraction of new books—means librarians have a job to do in picking what books to carry and which ones not to carry. Indeed, for every new crop of books added to a library, it is a fact of logic that some will have to go.

 

And that’s what so grating about Blume’s saccharine populist prattle about “people in power who want to control everything.”

 

You know who has a lot of power over libraries? Librarians. And, not surprisingly, librarians and their trade association would like to keep it that way. That’s fine. That’s human. But their arguments are cynical and demagogic.

 

Again, I am sure I disagree with lots of angry parents or activist groups like Moms for Liberty about what books should be allowed in public libraries and schools. But I also know that I disagree with a lot of librarians, too. Disagreeing with librarians isn’t censorship. And winning an argument with a librarian about a specific title in a specific school is not book-banning.

 

Journalists notoriously show an inordinate amount of deference to trade associations and other “good” organizations they agree with. Lots of journalists take any statement of the Southern Poverty Law Center at face value, because they want a credentialled organization to lend heft to their worldview. Every year, the American Society of Civil Engineers gives America a bad grade on its “Infrastructure Report Card.” And every year, people who want to spend billions on our “crumbling infrastructure” cite it as dispositive evidence that we need to spend more, despite the fact that our infrastructure is not crumbling. That is why ASCE puts out the report card. The same journalists—or their editors—who swallow their findings uncritically become suddenly skeptical when some group raises similar warnings that conflict with the preferred narrative. Long before the Heritage Foundation became such a mess, it issued “report cards” on military readiness. Do you remember reading about them? Do you remember mainstream outlets uncritically amplifying them?

 

The ALA website is chock-a-block with self-congratulatory encomiums to the vital role libraries play in a democracy: “The freedom to read is essential to our democracy.” I agree with some of their arguments. Libraries are good things.

 

The group’s “Freedom to Read” statement says, “Most attempts at suppression rest on a denial of the fundamental premise of democracy: that the ordinary individual, by exercising critical judgment, will select the good and reject the bad.”

 

Well.

 

You know what else is a fundamental premise of our democracy? That children aren’t “ordinary individuals.” The biggest clue that I am right about that: Children aren’t allowed to vote. They’re also not allowed to ditch school, drive cars, fight in wars, or watch R-rated movies without a parent. But it’s antithetical to democracy to say they shouldn’t be allowed to read R-rated books without parental consent? Come on.

 

Also, given that librarians get to decide what tiny fraction of the total number of books to carry and which they shouldn’t, they are claiming an unquestionable monopoly to select “the good and reject the bad” when it comes to the books in their collections? That doesn’t sound very democratic to me.

 

Why do I say it’s unquestionable? Because if you question their decisions, you are guilty of pushing for the “suppression” of “the fundamental premise of democracy.” And pliant media outlets will describe you or your organization as a bunch of censors and book banners.

 

Who elected librarians to be the unassailable voice of democracy? At least school boards and politicians have been elected—which is an even bigger part of democracy than libraries.

 

The ALA sponsors a program called Everyday Democracy and something called the “Dialogue to Change” process, which “encourages diverse groups of people to come together, engage in inclusive and respectful dialogue, and find common solutions to community problems.” Of course, it “places a great deal of importance to using a ‘racial equity lens’ at every stage of the process …”

 

The ALA tells us that “Topics suited for this model” include “community issues such as racism, violence, regional sprawl, and more. Any issue where community members need to be part of crafting a solution.” I just wonder, what if—looking through a racial lens—a local community decided through lengthy change-dialoging, that the library shouldn’t carry the newsletter of the KKK or back issues of white supremacist publication Stormfront. What if crafting a solution to the problem of growing racism in the community was the prohibition of the regular meetings of the Nick Fuentes Book Club on library property? (I know what you’re thinking: “That’s ridiculous, those racist jabronis don’t read.” But still.)

 

That’s not the ALA’s preferred process, but would it be so outrageous for members of the racially sensitive, small-d democratic gathering to make the case? Not in my opinion. But fine, let’s imagine instead that the librarian insisted with Dr. Strangelovian “there’s no fighting in the war room!” irony, that library offerings are not suitable topics for “everyday democracy” powwows and required you to fill out all of the right forms consistent with the Library Bill of Rights, which the ALA says must “protect the rights of individuals to express their opinions about library resources and services.”

 

How Orwellian is it that following the democratic, First Amendment-faithful process prescribed by the American Library Association amounts to “censorship” or “book banning” whenever it’s successful?

Maximum Warfare, All the Time

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, April 22, 2026

 

It’s truer now than when I said it last summer: There’s no juicier Dispatch bait than partisan redistricting.

 

It’s the consummate “both sides” issue. Not only have both parties shamelessly gerrymandered House maps to favor themselves in states they control, they’re getting more shameless by the minute.

 

For a publication like ours, proudly unattached to either tribe and marinating in disgust at the shabby state of American politics, the redistricting wars are a recurring opportunity to point a righteous finger and cast a pox upon both houses.

 

In fact, with respect to last night’s referendum on redistricting in Virginia, I’d go as far as to say that smug “both sides” ambivalence is the only reasonable reaction to the result.

 

On the one hand, the whole thing stinks on ice.

 

Virginia voters narrowly approved a constitutional amendment authorizing the state legislature to redraw House districts for the coming midterm. Currently the state’s House delegation is split 6-5 in favor Democrats, in line with the electorate’s slight liberal tilt. (Kamala Harris won Virginia in 2024 by just under 6 points.) Under the new map, the House delegation is likely to break 10-1 for Team Blue.

 

Monopolizing 90 percent of the House seats in a 52-46 state feels a bit … disenfranchise-y.

 

The process also reeked. “Without the two-thirds vote needed in each house to call a special legislative session last year, Democrats instead seized on a budget session called by Glenn Youngkin, then the governor and a Republican, to schedule the referendum,” the New York Times noted. To make matters worse, the question presented on yesterday’s ballot was ludicrously biased, asking voters whether they wished “to restore fairness in the upcoming elections” by permitting redistricting.

 

Meanwhile, longstanding left-wing objections to so-called “dark money” went out the window in pursuit of victory. “Dark money” refers to expenditures by outside nonprofits that aren’t legally required to reveal their donors; roughly 95 percent of spending for the campaign in Virginia came from such sources.

 

In the end the referendum passed 51-49, underperforming Harris’ 2024 margin and grossly underperforming Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s 15-point landslide last fall. An amendment to a state constitution that will have national implications was adopted by the thinnest of simple majorities. Ridiculous.

 

On the other hand, Donald Trump and his party deserve all of it and more.

 

Some conservatives seem to have forgotten that it wasn’t Democrats who mainstreamed cutthroat mid-decade redistricting. The president did that when he strong-armed reluctant Texas Republicans into redrawing their own state’s House map last year. (Unlike Virginians, Texans didn’t even get to vote on the matter. The state government acted unilaterally.) As ever, when given a choice between upholding a norm that makes politics a bit less ruthless and bulldozing it to maximize his own advantage, Donald Trump chose the latter.

 

That forced Democrats into a choice of their own: sit by and let red states game the midterm by redrawing blue districts into oblivion? Or to fight fire with fire in blue states by doing some hasty redistricting of their own? They too chose the latter: California voters passed a referendum authorizing their state legislature to produce a more Democrat-friendly House map, and now Virginians have followed suit.

 

Republicans whining today about last night’s result are no different from a man who starts throwing roundhouses and then, when his enemy rears back, puts on a pair of spectacles and says, “You wouldn’t hit a man with glasses, would you?” Rarely have we seen a more vivid example of the hypocrisy of the loathsome modern right, at once viciously and unabashedly ruthless yet consumed with its supposed victimization. That’s Trumpism through and through.

 

There are three lessons from Tuesday’s result.

 

‘Dominance as strategy’ fails again.

 

There’s a common thread between Trump’s fiasco in Iran and Republicans’ fiasco in Virginia.

 

Watching the returns come in last night, I thought of this Wall Street Journal story from March about advisers warning the president before the war that the enemy might close the Strait of Hormuz. “Trump acknowledged the risk,” the paper reported, but “told his team that Tehran would likely capitulate before closing the strait—and even if Iran tried, the U.S. military could handle it.”

 

He had no strategy to deal with a draconian yet entirely foreseeable response to his own aggression. His “strategy,” such as it was, was blind faith in his own dominance: The president plainly believes that any opponent will break if he bullies them ruthlessly enough.

 

Plainly and wrongly, as we’re seeing in the strait.

 

That was also his approach to Europe and it didn’t work in that case either. He slapped tariffs on European nations last year, tried to extort them into forfeiting Greenland to the United States, then seemed taken aback when they were unwilling to help him out with Iran. America is the world’s most powerful country and he’s the most powerful man in it, so when he wants something, he expects adversaries to comply without a fuss: That’s the extent of his “strategic” thinking.

 

When they don’t comply, he has no fallback plan. It’s as if he literally can’t imagine his attempts at intimidation failing, even though they fail all the time.

 

His approach to redistricting followed the same script. Why he thought the left would roll over and decline to retaliate after Texas went nuclear last year is unfathomable to me, even allowing for the fact that Washington Democrats are weenies, generally speaking. My guess is that Trump got the same sort of advice from political aides about redistricting that he got about the Strait of Hormuz—the enemy will escalate—and he responded in the usual way, waving it off.

 

Surely the enemy would cower and capitulate rather than take him on.

 

But Democrats didn’t, any more than the Europeans or Iranians did, and as usual Trump had no Plan B. He and other party leaders didn’t spend as much political capital as they could have to defeat the Virginia referendum, according to unhappy local Republicans. And the president overestimated his ability to compel GOP lawmakers in states like Indiana to set aside their qualms and move forward with redistricting to make him happy.

 

The result is an out-and-out debacle. By one estimate, Democrats momentarily stand to net more House seats from mid-decade redistricting than the GOP does. (That could change if Florida moves forward with its own redistricting scheme.) Even the supposedly red House districts that were created in Texas may not be as red in reality as the president expects, as they’re based on a dubious assumption that Hispanics who voted Republican in 2024 are still on the team.

 

There’s no strategic logic to any of this, just a reptilian postliberal instinct that greater ruthlessness is always the optimal choice when trying to get one’s way.

 

‘Dark woke’ is real.

 

L. Louise Lucas is the president pro tem of Virginia’s state Senate and was a key figure in getting her state’s redistricting referendum over the line. Last night, as the race was called, a tweet she sent in February went viral.

 

She was responding at the time to a post by Sen. Ted Cruz grousing about the supposed unfairness of Virginia’s attempt at gerrymandering. Nodding to the role Cruz’s home state of Texas had played in the process, Lucas wrote, “You all started it and we f—ing finished it.”

 

You can’t do better than that to summarize Democratic attitudes about the result.

 

After 15 months of Republican power grabs under Trump, the left is palpably delighted to have beaten the GOP at its own cutthroat game. Even the normally underwhelming Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader, sounded a Breitbart-ian yawp for partisan bloodsport in the aftermath. Vowing to aggressively contest any newly redrawn districts in Florida, he ended his victory message this way: “Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.”

 

That’s an almost lyrical synthesis of the spirit of “dark woke,” the idea that Democrats must behave more ruthlessly than they have in the past to counter a faction as corrupt and malevolent as Trump and his band of fascist chuds. Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.

 

Virginia liberals had special reason to embrace “dark woke,” in fact, beyond simply wishing to level the midterm playing field that had been tilted by Texas. The heavily Democratic northern part of the state is home to many federal employees—and former employees, as thousands have been axed since January 2025 thanks to Trump initiatives like DOGE. Revenge wasn’t just political last night; for some it was personal, as the margins in Northern Virginia attest.

 

“Dark woke” also helps explain why Spanberger changed course after claiming last year as a candidate that she had “no plans” to redistrict Virginia. She’s a potential national figure for her party but would have obvious liabilities in a Democratic primary, like a reputation for squishy centrism (and an eight-year stint in the CIA). Hopping aboard the revenge train on redistricting was an irresistible opportunity for her to build cred across the left-wing ideological spectrum. Democrats of all stripes desperately wanted to punch the presidential bully in the face, and she wasn’t about to block the blow.

 

The inescapable takeaway from the result and the left’s elation over it is that Democrats will come hard at Trump and Republicans once they regain some power in Washington—not just congressional power either, and not just next year. Right-wingers who worry that the president’s abuses of power are creating precedents that will be used against them by a Democratic executive down the line were vindicated last night, I think. Virginia is proof of concept that leftists will not take some de-escalatory high road toward Trump’s provocations when they return to the White House. They want payback.

 

That’s terrible for us civic-minded “both sides” Dispatch types, but if most Americans thought like Dispatch readers this country wouldn’t be the disaster it’s become. For years, right-wing populists have bayed for a “fight”—maximum political warfare, everywhere, all the time. Now they’re going to get one, according to the rules they themselves prefer.

 

This too might backfire.

 

Dispatch contributor Jessica Riedl lives in Virginia and offered a thoughtful reason for voting for the referendum. If you hate gerrymandering, you kind of had to support gerrymandering in this case, no?

 

“I consider this the best way to ultimately discourage mid-decade gerrymanders because it prevents the instigators from being rewarded with much more net House seats,” Riedl wrote. “And I believe this cross-state backlash will discourage this mid-decade gambit from being repeated in the future.”

 

That’s the logic of mutually assured destruction. By raising the cost of war to both sides, each will be deterred from initiating future hostilities. In theory.

 

In practice, having not one but two parties committed to maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time, makes me think further escalation is more likely than not.

 

Riedl’s plan could work, I suppose. Perhaps Republicans, chastened by how the Texas gambit has backfired, will reach out to Democrats at the national level to pass some sort of congressional ban on partisan redistricting. That’s the only way to solve the prisoner’s dilemma in continuing to leave the individual states to their own devices. Without a ban, eventually another solidly blue or red stronghold will succumb to the temptation to gerrymander and the country will instantly return to a Texas-versus-Virginia race to the bottom.

 

The problem with the Riedl scenario is that, except in extreme cases, America doesn’t do bipartisan good-government reforms anymore.

 

If we did, the presidential pardon power would be gone already or careering toward extinction via constitutional amendment. It isn’t. Trump abused that power during his first term but Democrats did nothing about it when they regained control of government in 2021. Joe Biden abused it before leaving office in 2025, and of course congressional Republicans have done nothing in response. Not with Trump now embarked on an unprecedented, wildly corrupt rampage of clemency for cronies.

 

Gerrymandering will follow the same course, almost certainly. When the smoke clears after the next Census is taken and it comes time to reapportion House delegations based on population shifts, whichever party stands to gain more from partisan redistricting will inevitably decide that a national ban on such things isn’t a good idea after all.

 

That party will probably be the Republicans. Red states are likely to pick up House seats from blue ones in the next reapportionment, sweetening the pot for the GOP to continue gerrymandering. And that’s not all: If Democrats win big in 2028, as seems increasingly likely, the right will be well positioned for a big backlash win of its own in the 2030 midterms. And that cycle is crucial, as state lawmakers elected that year will be the ones who draw the House maps for the next decade of congressional races.

 

Combine that with the disgruntlement that rural red-leaning Virginians are destined to feel toward Democrats for drawing them into blue districts under the state’s new map and we have the makings of a long-term backfire to the referendum that passed last night.

 

Ultimately, then, mutually assured destruction isn’t the best reason to have supported Virginia’s referendum. The best reason is much simpler: Given that the president and his party are already trying to game the next elections through gerrymandering, there’s no reason to think Democrats would have benefited in any way by defeating last night’s referendum. Taking the high road now would not have led an opponent that’s already traveling the low road to eschew such tactics going forward.

 

“We must act ruthlessly because the other party will surely do so when it has the chance!” is the sort of self-serving hypothetical you hear in arguments to eliminate the filibuster or pack the Supreme Court. But in the case of mid-decade gerrymandering, there’s nothing hypothetical about it. Democrats in Virginia didn’t nuke the other party’s House seats to preempt some potential future push by Republicans in Texas to do the same.

 

Republicans in Texas did it. They launched a first strike. And if they were willing to do that unprompted this time, no sense of propriety or “fair play” would have stopped Republicans from doing the same in 2030 even if last night’s referendum had failed.

 

All the result in Virginia did was give the GOP a small fig leaf to cynically hide behind when, not if, it presses its advantage in reapportionment at the start of the next decade. We wouldn’t need to be so ruthless, they’ll say, if Virginia Democrats hadn’t reacted so poorly to our earlier ruthlessness in Texas. The left hit a man with glasses. For that, it must pay.

The Wheel of Redistricting Keeps A-Turnin’

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, April 23, 2026

 

A columnist sometimes repeats himself. A columnist sometimes repeats himself for 30 years.

 

So, one more time: Yes, Virginia, gerrymandering is normal.

 

Redistricting is inherently political. When a legislature does it, it is the most political thing a legislature does. When a political party does it via referendum, as the Democrats have just done in Virginia, it is that much more political.

 

In the case of Virginia, it is also ruthless and, if I am being entirely honest about my feelings here, hilarious.

 

Virginia is something pretty close to a 50/50 state with a small Democratic advantage, if we take as a useful partisan proxy that Democrats have averaged 51.8 percent of the vote in the five most recent presidential elections. And, as you might have expected from those numbers, its House delegation was pretty close to 50/50, too, with a slight Democratic advantage: six Democrat-leaning seats to five GOP-leaning seats, six current Democratic members and five current Republican members. And that was pretty much that, until Tuesday.

 

It is not as though Democrats were, or are, above gerrymandering—the practice was named in 1812 for Elbridge Gerry, a member of Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party (which was the progenitor of the modern Democrats) who got started in U.S. politics early enough to have signed the Declaration of Independence—but Virginia put a little distance between the hacks and ward-heelers on the one hand and the political cartographers on the other with a commission (“independent,” you understand) that did the map drawing.

 

Until the idiots in my home state of Texas got involved.

 

Acting on orders from President Donald Trump, Texas Republicans—who enjoy a modest but consistent advantage in their state—decided to try to wring an additional five House seats out of Texas’s Republican-leaning population, and decided to do so mid-cycle, no less, rather than waiting for the usual post-census redistricting. It was an offense against political norms, to be sure, though its outrageousness was exaggerated.

 

Amusingly, Texas Republicans are having a bit of buyers’ remorse about that. Those Trump-leaning Tejano districts in the south of the state do not seem to be as reliably GOP-leaning as Republicans had hoped—the folly of the straight-line projection is a classic goof—and Republicans are having internal discussions just now in which they are raising the possibility that the redraw will end up costing them one House seat on net.

 

But Democratic states—California and Virginia prominent among them—already had launched their responses. Under the new map in Virginia, Republicans will enjoy an obvious advantage in only one of Virginia’s 11 House districts, down from five. The Democrats basically tried to corral as many of the Republicans in the state as they could into a single red district, leaving the rest of the commonwealth free for them to bustle in.

 

That’s H.L. Mencken’s democracy in action: Republicans got what they were asking for, good and hard.

 

There’s a lot of po-faced GOP snuffling and sulking this week in Virginia, with Republicans complaining that this kind of thing just isn’t fair. When the federal government goes after Donald Trump’s political enemies, Republicans turn their noses up and sniff, “Politics ain’t beanbag.” Democrats win an election in Virginia, on the other hand, and Republicans are ready to literally make a federal case out of it.

 

If any of Trump’s sycophantic little enablers had ever bothered to read one of those Bibles the president hawks, they might have come across some observations about living by the sword and dying by it. The same is true for procedural maximalism in politics. For a long time, that maximalism was something conservatives complained about: Democrats’ weaponizing confirmation hearings, Democrats’ abusing the filibuster, Democrats’ using parliamentary shenanigans such as reconciliation to push through legislation they couldn’t hope to pass otherwise—and, of course, Democrats’ going to court to ask sympathetic federal judges to deliver to them the political victories they could not win in the legislatures or at the ballot box. Gerrymandering was kind of a Democratic thing, too, for a long time, and Democrats did not object to it very much until Republicans got good at it, having somehow roused themselves from their traditional comfortable stupor and employing high-tech tools to perform the political equivalent of laser microsurgery on electoral maps around the country. Republicans, thus sated, returned to their traditional comfortable stupor.

 

But the wheel of history turns, and Democrats eventually figured out how to do redistricting as successfully—and ruthlessly—as Republicans.

 

And so here we are.

 

There is no way to impose any kind of strict logic or reason on the districting process. Legislative districts have to be roughly equal in population, but Americans do not live in rectangular districts of roughly equal population density. There are always going to be salamander-shaped House districts or those in the form of a lobster claw—even when the mapmakers are not going entirely hog-wild in the pursuit of partisan interests. There is no mathematical test to rely on—the test is seemliness, restraint, and moderation.

 

No sensible citizen expects that the districting process will be free from partisan considerations—even when it is executed by supposedly independent commissions. But it is possible to go too far. And given the Republican effort in Texas and elsewhere, Democrats are not without an excuse to bring the hammer down in Virginia.

 

And Republicans, having been the aggressor, now will play the victim.

The Problem With Today’s Anti-Feminists

By Ivana Greco

Thursday, April 23, 2026

 

There’s a popular story circulating among people on the right at the moment. It goes something like this: America in 2026 is failing families. Young people are getting married less often than in past generations. They’re having fewer children. There’s a growing divide between the sexes, especially among Gen Z.

 

Recent polling showed 53 percent of Gen Z women identify as Democrats, versus 35 percent of men from the same cohort. Political polarization is so bad that it’s making it hard for young people to date. Even those who do get married and have kids are struggling: to afford housing, to take care of elderly parents, even to buy gas and groceries. The United States is in the middle of a “loneliness epidemic,” with most Americans—including a staggering number of young people—reporting feeling isolated. We don’t seem to value the work of the home much anymore, even as the need for Americans to do the unpaid labor of taking care of families, the elderly, and communities grows ever more urgent. This story resonates because it is deeply true. Every ordinary American feels it. What we are missing is a coherent explanation of why this is happening. What is causing this American malaise?

 

Some have found the villain(ess). It’s the women. Specifically, the working women.

 

Anti-feminism has been around as long as feminism: The two have formed a sort of yin and yang during the decadeslong battle over the proper role and rights of women. In its 2026 form, anti-feminism can be described as a spectrum. On one end are the extremists, who want to enact lunatic measures like repealing the 19^th Amendment. Further towards the center, anti-feminism has as its target the “girlboss,” or the high-achieving, career-focused woman who neglects hearth and home, family and community, for the C-suite or boardroom.

 

This latter view has found a wide footing in more mainstream circles. Earlier this month, Inez Stepman, a senior policy analyst at the Independent Women’s Forum, penned an article on “The Myth of the Independent Girlboss,” arguing that “the girlboss model is incentivized to the exclusion of more traditional choices, such as relying on a husband’s single income, which are punished by our tax code, our antidiscrimination laws, our immigration policy, and our culture’s ethos.” While recognizing the “millions of women [who] create real value in the economy and deserve their paychecks,” Stepman bemoans “the wild proliferation of ‘email jobs’ and administrative compliance positions … jobs disproportionately filled by the fairer sex.” In March, conservative podcaster Katie Miller claimed that “Feminism was used to get women into the workforce to break the foundation of the American family. Motherhood is the true biological destiny for women.” In January, the author Carrie Gress argued in a new book that feminism, in all its iterations, simply can’t be squared with Christian morality. And back in October, the writer Helen Andrews argued that the explosion of women in the workforce is the result of a rigged system; “It is an artificial result of social engineering, and if we take our thumb off the scale it will collapse within a generation.” According to Andrews, businesses, academia, and the like are suffering because “female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions.”

 

These anti-feminist arguments are not carbon copies of each other. But the mainstream forms do have a coherent throughline: American society is being harmed by many of her working women, especially those in elite, HR, and academic jobs. (One terminological note: Let’s distinguish anti-feminists who would affirmatively like to see far fewer women in the workforce from those who critique various versions of modern feminism—sometimes they overlap, but often they don’t). There is a consistent argument here: America would be better off without her “girlbosses.” Is it a good one?

 

Opponents sometimes criticize anti-feminists as hypocrites: Miller, Stepman, Gress, and Andrews all have high-profile jobs boosted in part by their public opposition to feminism and “feminization.” I’m not sympathetic to that criticism; it’s fine to advocate for those in a lifestyle you don’t personally adopt.

 

The real issue with the anti-feminists is that they often make very little effort to reckon with the true cost of what they’re advocating. The most important of these is poverty. Raising a family in America right now is very expensive. Most mothers work because that’s what it takes to balance the family budget. Not long ago, I talked to a mom who stays home with a bunch of kids, and her husband doesn’t make a lot of money. She sometimes has to decide whether their limited income should go to the grocery bill or for gas to see Grandma. This mom doesn’t regret the choices her family made, but she’d be the first to admit that it’s extremely hard. (Even among the upper middle class, it costs a lot to raise kids these days.) Why are we criticizing moms who go out to earn a paycheck to lighten that load?

 

Poverty is not the only wolf hunting the “traditional family”: Insufficient social safety nets are another. A very well-off family can have mom at home without worrying too much about something happening to dad. Presumably they’ve gone to the expense and trouble of making sure they’re covered by good life insurance and disability insurance, with the added plus that mom likely has enough education and work experience to re-enter the workforce if needed. Families in the middle or lower rungs of our class ladder, however, don’t always have all those backup plans. If dad is an independent long-haul trucker, maybe he doesn’t have decent health insurance or access to good long-term disability insurance in case of disaster. Should dad get cancer and be out of work during treatment, and mom isn’t working and has little kids at home, it may be really hard for the family to adapt to this crisis. Preparing for retirement, old age, illness— these and more can be very difficult in families where only one spouse works. Two spouses in the workforce not only means more money, it also means more security, and American families that have a breadwinner/homemaker division of labor usually know they’re choosing a risky option—even if they think it’s worth it.

 

To give the anti-feminists their due, I assume in good faith that most of them want to protect women in “traditional” families. Scott Yenor, the Chair of the American Citizenship Initiative at The Heritage Foundation, has advocated for allowing businesses to support “traditional family life by hiring only male heads of households, or by paying a family wage.” But this doesn’t take into account the broader economic forces that are shaping women and men’s work in the United States. Anti-feminists often focus on elite jobs: the increasing number of female lawyers, for example, or women in prestigious academia. But whatever the impact of more women accessing the Ivory Tower or sitting on the Supreme Court (which, for the record, I think is good), this trend is not causing the average working-class man to lose his job. Nor does it explain why so many blue-collar men struggle to find work that pays well. Instead, men are coming out the losers as the U.S. economy shifts away from manufacturing and construction jobs, which are traditionally held by men, into health care jobs, which are traditionally held by women. Let’s not forget that even when America’s workforce was overwhelmingly male, we still had the Great Depression. Male jobs can still be subject to macroeconomic factors regardless of what the ladies are doing.

 

Put another way, even if we eliminated all the gender studies departments in colleges across America tomorrow, this is no help to a middle-aged man currently working at a brass plant in Ohio that recently announced it was closing and sending its jobs to Asia. Fewer women in the C-suite will not reverse globalization, automation, and the other broad economic forces creating headwinds for male employment. It’s not possible to help families that want to have a breadwinner/homemaker division of labor without squarely grappling with the reality of the true cause of downward pressure on male wages. The problem is not the girlbosses. It’s mostly China and robots.

 

Indeed, a major gripe I have with anti-feminists is that they make it harder to achieve policy wins for moms and dads at home. In my own work advocating for homemakers, I can attest that it is extremely difficult to convince centrist and left-of-center lawmakers to support measures supporting stay-at-home parents when they fear these policies are actually a Trojan horse for trying to kick women back to the kitchen. There are many practical measures we could take to help these parents, including encouraging corporations to hire at-home parents who want to return to work, considering how to reform our Social Security system to better protect homemakers, or how to reform our 401(k) system to better protect “traditional families.” All these and more become fraught, though, when the question shifts away from helping families make the choices that work for them, and instead becomes: Are we trying to protect stay-at-home moms, or are we trying to force girlbosses into roles that they don’t want? Even reasonable measures can fail to gain traction when they are sucked up into a broader culture war.

 

To be sure, anti-feminists are correct that modern American society does not respect the work of the home enough. As our society grapples with declining birth rates, the increasing proportion of elderly in need of friend and family support, as well as the breakdown in community ties, it is inevitable that we will need some sort of reckoning over our inability to value work that does not appear in the GDP. However, trying to force this reckoning by attacking girlbosses is essentially a poison pill. Setting up a dichotomy in which women in paid careers are the enemy and women at home are the heroes will not help.

 

After all, there is no bright line between the two. Many women in America move in and out of the workforce depending on family needs; a woman might take a few years off to care for babies, return to paid work when the family’s youngest child is in kindergarten, and then leave paid work again once grandpa needs serious care. Similarly, many moms who have full-time care of their kids at home also work after their kids are in bed, or on weekends. I recently talked to a mom who takes care of her kids during the day, but waits tables at night after her husband comes home from work. This job helps pay for extras, but it also gives her something to do that isn’t taking care of kids. We had this conversation, as a matter of fact, because I was sitting at a table in the restaurant where she worked and she was my waitress. She brought me a Guinness and some fancy pizza as I worked on an essay while my husband was putting my kids to bed after I’d spent the day homeschooling the big kids and taking care of the babies. After we talked about why I was in a bar at 7:30 p.m. with a computer and a stack of books, she talked about why she was there. Yes, we agreed, even though kids are great, it’s nice to have other stuff in life.

 

Can the anti-feminists truly account for women like us? Maybe we are acceptable to the anti-feminists because we do so much childcare, but let me be clear: I do less laundry, cook less elaborate dinners, and keep the house less clean because I write. In terms of being able to reliably find matching socks and being sure where the new car registration paperwork is, the family is worse off because I’m writing this after the kids are in bed. I’m doing it anyway, because I want to. Family life necessarily involves tradeoffs and compromises, and a wise mother understands flexibility around everyone’s preferences and needs (including her own) is key to making the work of the home … work.

 

***

 

My most serious problem with the anti-feminists has to do with the one place they are having a significant impact: They’re making work and relationships harder for young conservative women. Young liberal women, to be clear, are too far out of their direct sphere of influence to be seriously affected; the same is not true of young conservative ladies.

 

In talking to other moms who have kids at conservative religious high schools and colleges, I hear the same thing over and over again: There’s a lot of hostility to “girlbossing” and this is carrying over to young conservative women who appear too ambitious or too career-oriented. I’ve heard from one mom whose teenage daughter at a small religious high school is encountering rumblings of “repeal the 19^th” from some of the boys she goes to school with, and finds it depressing. A recent op-ed in the Hillsdale Collegian, a newspaper at the famously conservative Hillsdale College, is titled “Sexism isn’t based or trad.” Its author, a female college student who attends the Traditional Latin Mass and says she likes wearing dresses (these are markers of modern conservative young womanhood, for those not acquainted with this world) says she’s “tired of sexism on this campus” and she “had never encountered anything like it before coming here.” Among other problems, the author observes that “I’ve even heard several women seriously argue that women are intellectually and creatively deficient compared to men.” It’s a snapshot of anti-feminism in the wild, I guess, having escaped the internet and entered real life.

 

Over and over, I have heard from younger women that it is really hard to date in this environment, or to understand how to situate themselves with respect to anti-feminist theories. In many ways, it can feel like anti-feminists—having benefited from the doors opened to them in terms of achieving prestigious, flexible jobs and a family—are now working on closing those doors to the next generation. If I were in college today, I’d probably view many of the anti-feminists as having achieved success in both work and family life, and then trying to pull up the ladder behind them.

 

The anti-feminists’ black-and-white thinking—women vs. men, female careers are bad and homemakers are not—is deeply unhelpful in this environment, because it doesn’t help guide the younger generation in what they most need in order to find a partner: the ability to get along. My husband and I recently celebrated 22 years since our first date. We met when I was 18 and are now both in our early 40s. When there is marital discord in the Greco household, usually it took two to tango. There’s no “winning” in a good marriage, no easy divide between who is right and who is wrong. There’s just trying to work things out around all the many inevitable problems, big and small, that life throws at you, and trying to keep a good sense of humor about the whole thing. It’s hard to help young people learn this lesson when Andrews, for example, describes “cohesion” and “empathy” as stereotypically feminine. Relationships require working hard to understand the other person’s point of view and buckets of compromise to function well. It’s not “feminine” to talk through problems with your wife or girlfriend, but too many young men are being taught the opposite.

 

Ultimately, the problems anti-feminists identify are real, but their villain is not. Too bad for us: They’re still capable of making the problem worse by scaring young people with a bogeyman—or, I guess, a bogeywoman.

‘Elite Overproduction’ and Disappointed Aspirations

By Andrew Stuttaford

Wednesday, April 22, 2026

 

Signs of radicalization among young voters are growing harder and harder to miss, and it is a trend that is not likely to ease up any time soon. At its core, much of it is a byproduct of elite overproduction, a term coined many years ago by Peter Turchin, then a professor at the University of Connecticut, and about which I first wrote in 2016:

 

To put it more crudely than Professor Turchin ever would, this occurs when members of the elite (or those with the talents to join it) become too numerous for society to accommodate their aspirations.

 

In 2026, I would rewrite the second half of that sentence as follows:

 

This occurs when members of the elite (or those with the talents to join it, or who have been led to believe that they have such talents) become too numerous for society to accommodate their aspirations.

 

I touched on the issue that amendment reflects in my original 2016 article:

 

If a third of new entrants to the work force are university graduates, they won’t all be above average, especially those who attended one of academe’s less leafy groves. Their degrees will be the equivalent of the high-school diplomas of half a century ago, a ticket to the ballpark, not the VIP suite. For many graduates, gently shepherded through often undemanding schoolwork and gently burdened with a monstrous debt, dreams will turn into nightmares. There will be no place for them on the track to success. Their expectations were unrealistic, but their disappointment will be real. If their teachers haven’t already radicalized them, life may do the trick.

 

And so to a recent article in the Financial Times by John Burn-Murdoch. In it, he notes the discontent felt by many young adults but adds that they are earning more than their parents at this stage in their lives. That can, of course, be explained in part by factors such as housing affordability, but something else is going on.

 

Burn-Murdoch:

 

[W]hat shapes people’s satisfaction with their place in the economy isn’t so much their pay cheque as where they sit relative to others like them both today and in the past. As Andrew Clark and Andrew Oswald showed many years ago, this aspiration gap, between someone’s position in society and the one they could reasonably have expected given their age and education level, reliably drives discontent.

 

Why has this gap grown so wide?

 

Burn-Murdoch:

 

Over recent decades, we have unwittingly engineered a society and economy in which the aspirations of every subsequent generation have been raised while their ability to realistically achieve them has not. Specifically, the expansion of higher education, while well intentioned and clearly beneficial in many aspects, has upset the balance between expectations and outcomes. . . .

 

As more and more people go to university, the average graduate shifts from being among the economic elite to being the norm, placing them much further down the socio-economic pecking order than graduates of yesteryear. They were told putting in the years of hard work would bring with it not only a good job and wage but a certain status in society; most have found out it hasn’t.

 

Burn-Murdoch writes that even though only 10 percent of graduates are in the lowest earnings quartile, one in three are in that bottom segment when it comes to earnings relative to expectations (something similar, incidentally, is happening to nongraduates). Perhaps those expectations were unrealistic, but, as noted above, their disappointment is real enough, and that’s what counts.

 

As I argued last year, the radicalization produced by this sense of disappointment played a significant part in Zohran Mamdani’s rise and eventual victory in New York City, and it is not easy to see what will reverse it, especially if AI creates more losers than winners, even if only for a while.

 

I doubt if that will be good news politically, and so I will dust off (again!) my thoughts from 2016 of what policies shaped by the demands of the elite “surplus” could look like:

 

[It] will be focused on a largely fruitless (but for a few, fruitful) “war against inequality” centered on a drastic redistributive effort. Taxes will rise steeply, on capital gains as well as income, and, given time, on the mere ownership of capital: We can expect a wealth tax on the living, a foretaste of death taxes to come.

 

Spending will doubtless soar, on infrastructure (occasionally even sensibly) and on retraining schemes for jobs that will never be. Health care will grow ever closer to single-payer. For the upper middle class squeezed by automation, reinvented as Robin Hoods on the make, all this will combine power play (the opportunity to redistribute away the gains of their more successful competitors) with marvelous career opportunities (someone has to operate the machinery of redistribution) and, of course, claims to the moral high ground. . . .

 

I hope that I am wrong.

Manufacturing Racism

National Review Online

Thursday, April 23, 2026

 

For decades, the Southern Poverty Law Center has stood as a malignant expression of progressive activism, blaring out warnings about the rise of hate, establishing preposterously wide-ranging public lists of organizations designated as “hate groups,” collaborating hand in glove with both the mainstream media and (until recently) the federal government, and raising millions of dollars toward the nominal goal of “fighting white supremacy.” Well, it turns out that it was funding it as well.

 

On Tuesday, the Department of Justice handed down an eleven-count indictment of the SPLC on charges of wire fraud, false statements to a bank, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The purported scheme? It turns out that for years the SPLC has been secretly funding “informants” and infiltrators in multiple racist groups around the country, paying them for inside information into these organizations’ activities — and incidentally supporting their white supremacist lifestyles.

 

The indictment outlines more than $3 million disbursed to white supremacists from 2015–2024, and they don’t sound like minor figures. They include someone who led the National Socialist Party of America, an imperial wizard of the United Klans of America, a former chairman of the neo-Nazi National Alliance, and the national president of American Front, among other white nationalist luminaries. Since high-level positions in fringe racial groups aren’t ordinarily lucrative, any amount of money handed to their leaders potentially could have kept them in the racism racket.

 

The sums, in some instances, were substantial — more than $1 million for one hater, more than $300,000 for another, and more than $275,000 for yet another.

 

Worse, a couple of the SPLC-funded informants showed up in SPLC anti-hate materials, suggesting that the group was working both sides of the fence.

 

Notably, according to the indictment, one SPLC-funded organizer helped plan the notorious “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 and assisted people in getting transportation to the event. This doesn’t mean that Charlottesville was “an op,” but it would mean that the SPLC had at least a fingerprint on it. This organizer, the indictment says, kept receiving SPLC funds for years afterwards.

 

All of this is highly embarrassing to the SPLC. Whether it is criminal is another question. The government’s theory in this case is that the SPLC was defrauding its donors by failing to reveal to them how their donor money was being spent and spending on a purpose at odds with its mission. The SPLC counters that it has long used informants to advance its work, although it now says it’s discontinuing the practice.

 

This is bad news for sundry fanatics and bigots who will now find themselves off the gravy train of an organization that purportedly fought racism by paying for it.

Turkey Is the Weak Link in Trump’s Economic War on Iran

By Sinan Ciddi & Ahmad Sharawi

Thursday, April 23, 2026

 

With a military blockade in place in the Strait of Hormuz, the Trump administration is pivoting toward economic warfare against the Islamic Republic. The Treasury Department has provided the United Arab Emirates and Oman with a list of banks in their jurisdictions that enable Iranian illicit activity. This early warning — extended to China and Hong Kong — is intended to make clear that any financial support for Tehran will trigger U.S. repercussions. The key challenge now is inconsistent enforcement, particularly regarding Turkey.

 

The Turkish regulatory and commercial environment remains a critical conduit for Tehran’s access to hard currency and for sustaining global financial channels.

 

A network of Iranian-linked exchange houses operates outside the formal banking system in major cities such as Istanbul and Ankara. These entities often allow users to transfer funds without opening bank accounts, offering near-instant settlement with minimal documentation — hallmarks of Iran’s shadow banking architecture. Because Iran is barred from the global SWIFT financial messaging system, these currency exchange houses have become highly attractive tools for evading sanctions with limited regulatory oversight.

 

Washington has targeted some of these networks under counterterrorism authorities. In 2024, the Treasury Department designated Seyyed Mohammad Mosanna’i Najibi, an Iranian-Turkish national who managed currency exchange businesses in both countries, as a terrorist. According to Treasury, Najibi used these entities to circumvent U.S. sanctions — holding funds for Iran’s Ministry of Defense in accounts outside Iran, facilitating revenue from Iranian oil sales, and transferring money to suppliers tied to the Ministry of Defense and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Israel also sanctioned two Turkish entities in 2025 for providing and facilitating millions of dollars to the IRGC-Quds Force.

 

Even more alarming is that Turkey continues to host a U.S.-sanctioned Iranian bank, Bank Mellat, on its own soil. Bank Mellat is an institution linked to financing the Basij, the IRGC’s paramilitary arm. Rather than forcing its closure, Turkish authorities treat the bank as a legitimate, supervised entity, allowing it to remain operational despite it being sanctioned, indicating that Ankara’s regulatory framework permits entities tied to Iran to persist despite their violations of U.S. sanctions.

 

Bank Mellat’s lending largely stays in Iran, so its branches in Turkey act as extensions of the Iranian system. The bank holds deposits linked to its Tehran headquarters and the sanctioned Central Bank of Iran. Its 2024 annual report states it can rely on capital support from Iran. Turkey’s permissive environment allows Bank Mellat to operate, weakening U.S. sanctions enforcement.

 

The pass that Turkey has seemingly received is worse when one considers the Trump administration’s decision not to punish other Turkish financial entities that have helped Iran evade U.S. sanctions, which were supported and facilitated by the government of Turkey.

 

In 2019, Turkish public lender Halkbank was indicted in the U.S. for running a brazen sanctions evasion scheme. At least two of the bank’s employees were convicted during Trump’s first term for their involvement in efforts to purchase illicit Iranian natural gas, paid for with gold. By March 2026, Trump’s Justice Department decided to enter into a deferred prosecution agreement with Halkbank — one of the largest violators of U.S. sanctions on Iran.

 

According to findings by the U.S. Treasury Department and the Justice Department, Halkbank facilitated at least $13 billion in transactions on behalf of Iran between March 2012 and July 2013, with some estimates placing the total closer to $20 billion. A portion of those funds is believed to have supported Tehran’s regional proxy network.

 

Congressional reports suggest that, from 2012 to 2018, Iran spent about $16 billion each year to back militant clients across the Middle East. Treasury guidelines allow civil penalties up to twice the value of illicit proceeds, which could expose Halkbank to fines of up to $40 billion. Separately, Kuveyt Türk Bank is now facing litigation in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York over allegations that it routed Hamas-linked dollar transactions through U.S. banks.

 

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has pursued direct policies to promote the survival of Iran’s regime. This is somewhat understandable: There is little doubt that the Iran war is placing a severe strain on the foundations of Turkey’s economy. Every $10 increase in global oil prices is estimated to widen the country’s current account deficit by roughly $3 to $5.1 billion. Turkey already grapples with one of the highest inflation rates in the world — currently exceeding 30 percent annually — intensifying pressure on Erdoğan’s government to rein in rising consumer prices. Additionally, Ankara is justifiably concerned about a potential for Iranian refugee flows, which would heighten existing levels of frustration for the Erdoğan government.

 

Legitimate worries aside, however, Erdoğan prefers the survival of the Tehran regime. For him, a weakened but still Islamist regime in Tehran may be more strategically useful than a democratic government that could realign Iran with the West.

 

Iran’s network of regional proxies has long shaped the balance of power in the Middle East. As long as groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza remain armed and active, Israel faces persistent security pressure.

 

In this environment, a perpetually threatened Israel creates space for Erdoğan to cast Turkey as a central diplomatic and political actor. By inserting itself into moments of crisis, Ankara can seek to elevate its role as a regional power broker.

 

Washington should intensify enforcement against Iran-linked financial networks in Turkey. This includes targeting exchange houses, front companies, and urging Ankara to shut down sanctioned entities, such as Bank Mellat. The Treasury and Justice departments should be prepared to invoke Section 311 of the Patriot Act to designate institutions like Kuveyt Türk as primary money-laundering concerns. This would cut them off from the U.S. financial system and send a clear signal: No bank — Turkish or otherwise — can use American financial channels to fund Iranian terror without consequence.