Strengthen NATO, Don’t Wreck It

By Rebeccah Heinrichs

Thursday, May 14, 2026

 

Many on the right have joined President Donald Trump’s heated ridicule of the behavior of our European allies during Operation Epic Fury: their risk aversion, penchant for process over decision and action, and overall lack of preparedness and capability to confront the Iranian terror threat, while simultaneously criticizing the one ally with the will and capability to do so. The transatlantic alliance has in fact been unhealthy for some time, dating back to before the Obama administration conspired with German Chancellor Angela Merkel to reset relations with Russia and pursued policies, including the Paris Climate Accords, that weakened the West to the advantage of China. But there is much more to the story, and today both sides of the Atlantic should grapple with some hard truths and work to end the feuding. The United States needs NATO allies and is the indispensable leader of the alliance for the foreseeable future.

 

“I am not currently recommending any additional changes to our posture in Europe.” That was the congressional testimony of General Alexus Grynkewich, commander of the U.S. European Command and the NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe, on March 18. Roughly six weeks later, the Department of Defense announced that it would withdraw 5,000 American troops from Germany. The announcement followed President Trump’s Truth Social post suggesting that he was considering withdrawing troops after German Chancellor Friedrich Merz claimed that Iran was “humiliating” the United States.

 

The Department of Defense then sent a notice to Congress specifying that the planned deployment of a Long-Range Fires Battalion (LRFB) to Germany was also canceled. That deployment was possible only because Trump rightly withdrew the United States from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty during his first term, after Russia deployed prohibited systems in violation of it. He did so over intense opposition from Democrats. The Biden administration was later forced to grapple with the same acute Russian threat to Europe and, remarkably, initiated the deployment of the LRFB to strengthen deterrence and prevent Russia from expanding its war beyond Ukraine. The LRFB deployment could have been a masterly strategic accomplishment of Trump’s second term. But it is now poised to be undone by his own war department — if Congress permits it. There is already bipartisan objection to the announcement.

 

In early March, Merz said that he and Trump were “on the same page in terms of getting this terrible regime in Tehran away.” He was right. The Islamic Republic’s terrorism exports and missile force have posed as great a threat to European security as they have to American and Israeli security. But the war is unpopular in Germany, and Merz’s claim that the Iranians were “humiliating” the United States was aimed at a domestic audience. As bad as the comment was, removing U.S. troops from Germany isn’t a reasonable punishment in part because, despite Merz’s public kvetching, Germany has been quietly and steadily enabling Trump’s ongoing war against Iran. General Grynkewich explained during those recent congressional hearings that, despite the initial and highly publicized British refusal to permit the United States to initiate bomber strikes against Iran from the joint base at Diego Garcia, and despite complaints from some European politicians, the reality is that European countries are helping, and more than passively so.

 

Merz’s public insistence that “Germany is not a party to this war, and we do not want to become one” does not change the fact that Germany has been key to Operation Epic Fury. Ramstein Air Base is a central command-and-logistics hub for the military campaign, and there are no flight restrictions at German bases. Germany under Merz has also been receptive to the United States’ urging that Europeans share more of the defense burden across NATO and shoulder more of the help for Ukraine. Germany is the largest European buyer of American weapons and the largest supplier of weapons to Ukraine. Under Merz, Germany has agreed with Trump’s criticisms of previous German policies to dismantle nuclear power plants in favor of dependence on Russian gas. Friedrich Merz is no Angela Merkel.

 

In London, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s ghastly decision to prevent the United States from operating freely from Diego Garcia was reversed within days. The United States has since operated freely out of the joint base, as well as out of RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire and a network of other U.K. bases, including RAF Menwith Hill, RAF Molesworth, RAF Croughton, and RAF Digby. And, despite Starmer’s condemnations of the United States’ war against the Iranian regime, the U.K. military is working closely with the Americans on providing intelligence. British politicians may have pandered to domestic audiences who oppose the war, but British air defenders have been busy intercepting hundreds of Iranian drones heading toward Gulf states where American forces are deployed, and the Royal Air Force is flying sorties in the Middle East to help counter Iranian attacks.

 

France’s Emmanuel Macron has also aggravated Trump. At a dinner, Trump said Macron was willing to help with the Strait of Hormuz, but only after the war ended. Trump mocked the French president and derided NATO as a “paper tiger.” But France is also playing an important role in support of Operation Epic Fury. The French are giving the United States access to sovereign French bases and granting overflight access to hundreds of sorties. They sent air-defense systems, including a SAMP/T and multiple helicopters, to the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Kuwait. This is in addition to the dozens of Rafale fighters they have deployed to the UAE for air-to-air defense. The French armed forces have moved their sole aircraft carrier from the Baltic Sea to the Eastern Mediterranean, positioned eight frigates in the wider Northern Indian Ocean, and are currently routing two minesweepers to the region.

 

Among NATO’s smaller members, public support from their governments has been clearer. Belgium’s defense minister called the U.S. war “a righteous cause to try to decapitate the Ayatollah regime.” All three Baltic states have expressed support for the United States. Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna of Estonia stated that Estonia backs the United States and Israel in “every action that curbs the Iranian regime’s capabilities,” and dozens of Estonian parliamentarians signed a statement of support. Lithuania’s president put the matter bluntly: “We cannot say with one hand that the presence of U.S. troops on the territory of Lithuania is a matter of course and we simply accept it as a given, but when we are asked to contribute to international missions, we say that this is none of our business.” No doubt if they weren’t rightly prioritizing the acute threat from Russia, they would send whatever military forces they had.

 

***

 

A sign of the strange times is that some commentators, taking cues from President Trump’s public haranguing of European allies, now suggest that the Gulf states are more helpful allies than old Europe. Sure, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE are cooperating with the United States and Israel by sharing intelligence and allowing logistical access. It represents a welcome change in the region. Still, this new and bolder support does not come close to the contributions the United States receives from European allies, whose integration with the U.S. military reflects decades of joint planning, earned trust, and military competencies forged through combat in the Middle East and coordinated war-gaming exercises as part of active deterrence against Russia.

 

Even so, Trump has threatened to punish Europeans for not doing enough or for their political leaders’ public criticisms. Beyond removing troops from Germany, ideas have ranged from withdrawing troops from Spain — despite the indispensability of Naval Station Rota — to no longer recognizing the Falklands as British territory, a report mercifully dismissed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Redeploying U.S. forces may sometimes be necessary as threats change, but removing troops as punishment from host nations that enable U.S. power projection amounts to cutting off America’s nose to spite our face.

 

This does not mean that American frustrations with European allies aren’t legitimate. Starmer’s public criticisms of the war, antagonistic remarks about Israel, and initial refusal to grant full access to Diego Garcia earned anger not only from President Trump. Republican members of Congress who value NATO and the special relationship were dismayed by London. Spain was — and remains — the European ally most defiant of Trump and opposed to seeing the United States win Epic Fury. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez not only condemned the war; the socialist leader also lambasted Trump and has refused to permit United States strikes from Spanish bases. Spain has long been an obstinate NATO member and was the only ally to refuse Trump’s call for defense spending at 5 percent of GDP, the alliance’s stated standard.

 

The fact is, though, that while NATO’s members share a national security interest in an American victory, Operation Epic Fury is not a NATO mission. The United States neither informed nor consulted allies, nor did it ask for assistance, before it and Israel went to war. There were sound reasons for acting this way, but it nonetheless makes it politically difficult for European leaders to express enthusiasm at the start of the war. Compounding matters, Trump initiated Epic Fury mere weeks after threatening to forcibly take control of Denmark’s territory of Greenland and publicly humiliating ally leaders who opposed those threats.

 

Trump’s focus on Greenland has shone a spotlight on the United States’ profound national security interest in preventing Russia or China from taking control of the Arctic. But the threat to forcibly seize Greenland — even if one believes it was a Trumpian maximalist bluff — created a serious rupture of trust among allies who had been willing to bear with tariffs and public rebukes, and it collapsed goodwill among the most pro-American factions in European capitals, where favorable views of the U.S. dropped to an all-time low.

 

European conservatives from the U.K. to Germany to Poland who otherwise expressed solidarity with Trump and the American right on border security and immigration also condemned the Greenland gambit and did so forcefully. And there is no political support in the United States for seizing Greenland, which likely explains why the president dropped the issue and left it to Rubio and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte to pursue a diplomatic resolution with Denmark.

 

What made the episode especially breathtaking was its timing. Just months earlier, Trump had been praising Europe’s willingness to invest more in conventional defense and shoulder a greater share of NATO’s burden. The Greenland crisis also followed immediately after the highly successful U.S. raid to capture Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro. That achievement should have dominated the news cycle, allowing the administration to highlight its military competence and deter adversaries. Instead, Trump’s Greenland threats had a serious negative impact on U.S. influence and worked directly against his broader objectives, including rallying allies to help open up the Strait of Hormuz.

 

It is one thing to demand that allies rebuild and invest in their militaries and carry a greater share of the collective defense burden; it’s quite another to castigate them, let alone threaten their sovereignty. It should surprise no one that European democratic leaders now lack domestic political mandates to openly join the war. And yet, because of abiding shared interests, Europeans have been working with the United States to execute Epic Fury, if only quietly.

 

So what now? Europeans are at least a decade or more from having the military capabilities to replace what the United States provides. They need the United States to remain the backbone of NATO for the foreseeable future. And the United States needs the collaboration of its European allies not only to help provide security against Russia but to project power into Africa and the Middle East from European bases. Again, Grynkewich explained this to Congress. He said, “To fly bombers from the United States, or even from locations in the theater, and project power into the Middle East requires a tanker bridge. That tanker bridge is projected from USEUCOM bases.” In plain English: we refuel, safely, from supportive and trustworthy European allies. To remove the infrastructure in Europe that gives U.S. forces communications, weapons-detection abilities, intelligence, and logistics would cost the United States dearly.

 

***

 

It’s time for the U.S. and Europe to cease the feuding.

 

The United States is winning against the Islamic Republic, but to turn military success in the campaign into a geopolitical masterstroke, Trump will need an international armada to escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz. And to get that, he will have to adjust his diplomatic approach — not toward our enemies but toward our allies. Rather than publicly berating allies, he should move the disagreements to private channels. It should go without saying, but there should be some formal acknowledgment on the U.S. side that there will be no more threats over Denmark’s territory. And on the other side of the Atlantic, European leaders should explain to their skeptical publics that the American campaign against the Iranian regime has served their interests, has made them safer, and merits support.

 

Security conditions in the Strait of Hormuz are sufficient for the mission to be underway, which is why the United States is more forcefully transiting the strait with U.S. Navy destroyers. Operation Epic Fury has eliminated most of Iran’s defense-industrial base, including its ballistic missile arsenal, launchers, and long-range drones. Iran’s navy has been largely neutralized after losing 150 warships and the bulk of its naval mine inventory. More than 250 senior Iranian officials have been killed and some 2,000 command-and-control structures struck.

 

Even so, the rump Iranian regime continues to try to attack U.S. ships, and it appears that Trump is prepared to resume military operations against Iran to further degrade the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ ability to terrorize the strait. European leaders should support the resumption of U.S. strikes and stand ready with a multinational armada as soon as the last wave of operations concludes. The more the United States can internationalize its efforts to restore and maintain a free and open maritime corridor through the strait, the faster — and more permanently — it can reopen a choke point that carries roughly 25 percent of global seaborne energy. The official position of the U.K. is that it is willing to help keep the strait open, and the French defense minister has said that the French, Belgians, and Dutch have a joint mine-clearing program that they could contribute. They’re not the only potential partners. Bringing more allies into the campaign would help overwhelm whatever IRGC elements remain willing to harass shipping along the coast.

 

Although U.S. energy dominance enables the United States to absorb disruptions caused by Iranians terrorizing the strait, it remains politically desirable for Washington to end the war decisively — and as soon as possible — and to bring gasoline prices below $3 per gallon. For U.S. allies and partners, reopening the strait is not merely desirable but imperative.

 

India, for example, sources nearly half of its crude oil through the strait, and the conflict is already inflicting costs on the population of this crucial U.S. partner. While only about 4 percent of European crude oil imports pass directly through Hormuz, Europe has reduced its dependence on Russian energy by sourcing roughly 8 percent of its liquefied natural gas import requirements from Qatar, shipments that must also pass through the strait. That shift followed pressure that began during the first Trump administration to end reliance on Russian energy, including sanctions implemented on the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline. To complete the picture, 75 percent of Europe’s jet-fuel imports come from the Gulf region. For Japan, around 95 percent of oil imports pass through the strait; for South Korea, roughly 70 percent of crude imports do so.

 

It is intolerable for the United States or any of its allies to permit Iran to run an extortion racket by charging fees for safe passage. Doing so would concede unacceptable leverage to Tehran — and by extension, to China, Iran’s most powerful backer — and set a dangerous precedent for Chinese ambitions in the South China Sea. Whether or not Trump says he needs allies and whether or not allies want this war to be their war, shared interests remain clear: The Islamic Republic must lose and the United States and Israel win.

 

Trump is at his best when he urges Europeans to be strong and to work with the United States. As Secretary Rubio said in his Munich speech, “We believe that Europe must survive, because the two great wars of the last century serve for us as history’s constant reminder that ultimately, our destiny is and will always be intertwined with yours. . . . We should be proud of what we achieved together in the last century, but now we must confront and embrace the opportunities of a new one — because yesterday is over, the future is inevitable, and our destiny together awaits.”

 

King Charles III recently concluded a warm state visit to the United States, which could not have been timelier. Trump and Charles got along very well, and Trump even lifted sanctions on Scottish whiskey as a favor to Charles — even after Charles delivered a speech to a joint session of Congress extolling Ukrainian bravery and underscoring the need to support NATO. The address elicited a bipartisan standing ovation and compliments from Trump. The visit gives Europeans something to build on. Repairing transatlantic relations is necessary, and Trump has shown he is willing to change course if it serves his interests. Trump’s direction to remove 5,000 American troops from Germany may be redeemed, if, for example, the president shifts them to NATO’s eastern front — Poland or Romania — and he can easily reverse the decision not to deploy the LRFB missile battalion. Poland has already publicly signaled it would be happy to host additional U.S. forces. The threat from Russia against Europe remains acute, and this move would go a long way to assure allies and Putin that the United States is committed to NATO.

 

We have heard often that “America First” does not mean America alone. But if the United States behaves like a bully toward its allies, we may find ourselves feeling increasingly lonelier than we’d like. Trump has initiated a war that American and Israeli forces have executed with the help of allies — privately — to the benefit of the entire world. Allies will be needed in a much more public way to help win the peace.

How the American Right Went European

By Dominic Green

Thursday, May 14, 2026

 

In 2018, Steve Bannon, lately disemployed by the first Trump administration, attempted to launch the Academy for the Judeo-Christian West in an 800-year-old monastery at Trisulti, south of Rome. The New Right was rising in Europe and America, and Bannon wanted to harness the populist mood across the West. Working with the Dignitatis Humanae Institute, a conservative Catholic think tank, he devised a curriculum for training the young warriors of a New Right international.

 

It sounds like a parody of The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel of decadence at Davos, or The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse’s 1943 novel of philosophical frottage in a monastery. It turned out more like Mann’s Death in Venice — an old man capsized in a deck chair as the unattainable image of youth flits away from him forever.

 

The Europeans needed no lessons from the American impostor. They had impostors of their own. Also, their new populists were not new at all. They already had intellectual outriders and party infrastructures. Many of them had already worked in government, and were veterans of the coalition management and bureaucratic ambushes that would waylay the first Trump administration. Some were not conservatives at all.

 

While the Republican Party was stifling Pat Buchanan’s primary challenge in 1992 and chasing the peace dividend of the Cold War, European politics had taken a nationalist turn by popular demand. By 2017, the Europeans were decades ahead. Bannon’s strategy of playing the left at its own game was old news. The dust and tear gas of 1968 had barely settled before a group of French intellectuals led by Alain de Benoist formed their Nouvelle Droite and planned how to run the New Left’s “march through the institutions” in reverse direction.

 

Government by hands-on, orange-faced charisma was introduced in Italy by Silvio Berlusconi in 1994, while Donald Trump was refinancing his casinos and married to Marla Maples. The watershed for immigration restriction in Europe came in 2001, when the Danish People’s Party, supporting a center-right coalition from outside the government, gave Denmark Europe’s strictest immigration policy. Meanwhile, first-term president George W. Bush wanted to give illegal immigrants a path to citizenship, and he softened further in his second term.

 

In 2002, the neofascist bruiser Jean-Marie Le Pen broke through the cordon sanitaire of France’s two-step presidential electoral process, requiring the centrist candidates to ally in a “republican front” against him in the runoff. In 2004, while Trump was limbering up for the first season of The Apprentice, another entertainer with a blond bouffant and well-timed zingers on immigration and Islam, Geert Wilders, launched the Party for Freedom in Holland. Wilders’s signature policies, economic deregulation and immigration restriction, were proto-Trumpian. So was his trolling of Holland’s liberal media. By 2010, when Trump was asking where Barack Obama had really been born, Wilders’s party was on the Danish track and supporting a center-right coalition from outside the government.

 

In Britain, the long march to the Brexit referendum of 2016 started in 1993 and gathered speed after Nigel Farage became leader of the UK Independence Party in 2006. Farage, like Wilders, is an economic liberal and cultural conservative: an admirer of Thatcher and Reagan. So is Nicolas Sarkozy of France. Sarkozy’s presidency, from 2007 to 2012, sounds like an out-of-town warm-up for Trump’s. He mocked the experts and the big-city liberal bobos (bourgeois bohemians) in the name of the silent majority, denounced immobilisme in government, and used the media to make himself le hyperpresident who personalized every issue. He ended up in jail for corruption.

 

As Hollywood upcycles European art-house movies for the general market, so the New Right in America has drawn on familiar precedents from the New Right in Europe. For over a century, however, America’s cultural empire has exported English-speaking ideas in the other direction; the directors Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, epitomes of the French New Wave, worshipped American idols, especially the Hollywood movies of the British director Alfred Hitchcock. In politics, these kinds of exchanges have produced an unprecedented alteration on both sides of the Atlantic.

 

American and European conservatives have changed places. Some of the most prominent American conservatives talk like Europeans, only in English, while mainstream European conservatives think in English and speak in subtitles.

 

***

 

Conservatism is two traditions, divided despite a common interest in Edmund Burke. There is the English-speaking conservatism of ordered liberty that emerged from within the liberal system of English constitutionalism and that extracted a futuristic Protestant self-image from the Hebrew Bible. And then there is the hard stuff. European conservatism developed in aristocratic and Catholic reaction to Anglophone constitutions, French revolutions, and the market exchanges that Thomas Carlyle called the “cash nexus.” Compared with this, most American conservatism is classical liberalism in risk-averse mode.

 

European conservatism was a reaction to the democratic revolutions of 1649, 1776, and 1789. It sought to restore legitimacy to a privatized and aristocratic political culture, and to rebind the theoretically indissoluble bonds between the nation and the “church and throne” before they were again unpicked by Jews, freemasons, heretics, and other beneficiaries of the Enlightenment conspiracy. American conservatism is the product of this “Anglo-Saxon” enemy: the middle-class, commercial, and public culture of contracts and democracy.

 

The founders of this European reaction were French: the Marquis de Sade before the revolution of 1789 and the Savoyard Joseph de Maistre after it. “The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar, upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end,” Maistre wrote, “without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, unto the death of death.” We can see why Maistre’s stylish and morbid polemics against modernity fell from intellectual favor after 1945. If you heard about him after that, it was in Isaiah Berlin’s anatomy of the Counter-Enlightenment and the roots of fascism.

 

Compare Maistre’s rantings about ritual sacrifice with James Madison’s measured warnings against faction in politics, or Sade’s elaborate flagellation rituals with Stormy Daniels’s tapping a rolled-up copy of Forbes magazine on Donald Trump’s rump, and we see the civilizational divide between Anglophone conservatism and the rest of the West. To map the differences of American and European conservatism, we should subtract Britain from Europe, as usual in the history of politics and gastronomy. Do that, and in America’s first 150 years we find little traffic with conservative intellectuals in Europe outside the channels of liberal Protestant theology and Catholic social doctrine.

 

In the early exchange programs — Carlyle and Emerson in the 1830s, Poe and Baudelaire in the 1840s, Henry James with himself in the 1880s — the American partner seems more interested in his interlocutor’s aesthetics than in his hostility to mass democracy. Nietzsche did not detonate in America until the 1920s, via the paraphrases of H. L. Mencken. Europeans liked American novelists but had no use for American political theories, discounting, that is, a mutual interest in the kind of trashy racial science that Tom Buchanan reads in The Great Gatsby.

 

After 1945, aligning Western Europe with American priorities became a strategic necessity. The purging of European conservatism’s illiberalism and its alignment with the Anglo-American tradition was part of Europe’s reconstruction. The conservatism we know as the “Burke-to-Kirk” syllabus is an artifact of the early Cold War. It assimilated the market theories of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman into the prosperity doctrine of American progress. It applauded émigré skeptics such as Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss when they warned that democracy was susceptible to mass irrationality; had not the sainted Burke warned as much? But the romance of unreason gave conservatism much of its appeal. The sainted Burke had admitted that too.

 

European conservatism was to politics as Madame de Staël’s Romanticism was to aesthetics. In On Germany (1813), de Staël called Romanticism a sensibilité, a “way of feeling” with origins in poetic memories of chivalry and Christian spirituality. This medieval mélange is pure Maistre. In the commercial world of English-speaking conservatism, it became an affected kind of Tory bohemianism: Benjamin Disraeli’s ruffles, Russell Kirk’s pipe and haunted slippers, William F. Buckley’s asking Allen Ginsberg to read a poem on Firing Line and admitting that he likes it. These mannered irrationalities are the harmless tribute of private vice to public virtue.

 

The fusionists of post-1960s American conservatism excluded the irrational and emphasized the bottom line. After 1945, Western Europeans first adopted Anglophone liberalism as part of their moral rehab, then watched enviously as Britain and America administered the tough love of the markets to get out of their 1970s slump. The European governments stalled for as long as they could: Sarkozy’s 2007 victory was expected to initiate France’s Thatcherite age, but it never happened. In Eastern Europe, conservatives learned the hard way that ordered liberty, even of the Orbán kind, is a bulwark against tyranny. After 1990, no one in Europe cared about sensibility and chivalry. They wanted market liberalism and the nation-state.

 

***

 

Today, the leaders of European conservatism sound like the children of Thatcher and Reagan. Britain’s Nigel Farage has positioned his Reform UK party in the pro-market, center-right niche that made the Conservatives the most successful party in Western democracy. Polling suggests that he will win Britain’s next elections. In Holland, Geert Wilders moved his Party for Freedom (PVV) into the same lane. In the 2023 elections, the PVV became the largest party in the Dutch parliament and entered the ruling coalition.

 

In Italy, Giorgia Meloni may have started in neofascist youth groups, but she governs in the center-right Christian Democratic tradition that developed as an antidote to fascism in post-1945 Western Europe. In Sweden, Jimmie Åkesson’s Sweden Democrats are the second-largest party in the Riksdag and support a center-right coalition from outside the government. In Hungary, Péter Magyar, whose Tisza party in April’s elections ended Viktor Orbán’s and Fidesz’s 16-year run, wants to trim the state and reduce the public debt.

 

Though France is the exception on economic policy, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally is unexceptional in becoming the acceptable face of once unacceptable opinions. Her long campaign of dédiabolisation, freeing her party from her father’s sinister shadow and France from the memory of its fascist collaboration, has paid off. Though Le Pen is banned from running in the 2027 presidential elections because of an embezzlement conviction, her likely heir, 30-year-old Jordan Bardella, leads the polls by offering a classically French menu of state intervention.

 

While the Europeans sound Burkean, the voices of unreason dominate American conservatism. They dominate American liberalism, too, but conservatives were supposed to be the adults in the room. We know how they let this happen. The decline of mainline Protestantism hollowed out cultural values. Globalization hollowed out the middle class. The teachers’ unions hollowed out education. State-mandated racial discrimination hollowed out the promise of colorblind meritocracy. Mass immigration hollowed out the coherence of American society. Identity politics and resentment filled the fearful hollows. Social media merely accelerates the transmission and percolates the pattern of the old European reaction into the space where Burkean constitutionalism used to be.

 

The Democratic Party has adopted anti-Jewish politics to bridge the social gap between affluent white liberals and their non-white rank and file. The metaphysics of resentment and delusion have eaten into all levels of the party and its allied institutions, especially the universities and the schools, and fused into a single ideology. The same mutation is metastasizing at elite and popular levels among Republicans and conservatives, especially among the young. As the Trump era enters the home stretch, conservatives must now decide if the Republican Party will go the same way.

 

America has always had racists. But where does the current march of folly lead? European conservatives are perplexed to see American conservatives, for so long the embodiment of reality-principle politics, disinterring dusty and dangerous fantasies from Europe’s past. They expect better from Americans. So do most Americans.

The New Politics of Resentment

By Ryan J. Owens

Sunday, May 31, 2026

 

A new wave of class-baiters and grievance politicians have shown how deeply economic liberty is under attack in parts of America. We should be alarmed because economic liberty is not merely about economics; it is about human flourishing.

 

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently filmed a “tax the rich” video outside the Manhattan residence of Ken Griffin, founder of Citadel. His message was clear — that wealth creators are villains. Griffin rightly called the stunt “creepy weird.” He could have added “dangerous” and “economically destructive.”

 

On the other side of the country, Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson mocked concerns that wealthy residents and businesses will flee Washington’s new “millionaire tax” and take their jobs with them, stating: “I think the claims that millionaires are going to leave our state are, like, super overblown. And if — the ones that leave, like, bye.”

 

These attitudes from leaders of some of the nation’s largest cities are not merely juvenile; they are immoral, self-defeating, and profoundly economically illiterate.

 

America rests on the idea that citizens are and ought to be free to rise through hard work and risk-taking. That’s what “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is all about. If you’re confused as to why, go ask a former Soviet, Cuban, or Venezuelan.

 

Frederick Douglass understood all this. The former slave explained the liberation he felt when, at last, he earned wages for his work: “To understand the emotion which swelled my heart as I clasped this money, realizing that I had no master who could take it from me — that it was mine — that my hands were my own” affected him in ways few Americans today can comprehend.

 

Every dollar the government spends comes out of your pocket. Every “free” item provided by the state comes courtesy of a taxpayer who has a job and a family to support. When government treats private success as public property, it tears the fabric of liberty.

 

The new politics of resentment characterized by the statements of Mamdani and Wilson wrongly asserts that if one person succeeds, another must fail. Imagine telling a professional athlete he has become too skilled and must intentionally perform worse to preserve “fairness.” Imagine telling a student that the reason she should not receive an A is that she studied harder than everyone else.

 

Prosperity is not a zero-sum game. Innovation begets innovation and reward. When wealth grows broadly, jobs are created.

 

Of course, some taxation is necessary. Roads must be built. Courts must function. Public safety matters. But there is an enormous moral difference between taxation that sustains basic government operation and taxation that is driven by resentment and entitlement.

 

Resentment politics are also economically self-defeating.

 

Whether large or small, governments cannot operate without a solid and sustainable tax base. To establish such a tax base, you must first incentivize people to invest their time and resources into economy-growing endeavors. How do you do that? Return money to the people who take those risks and make those investments. By pushing companies like Citadel out of state, cities such as New York and Seattle have engaged in a remarkable act of self-immolation. They are stripping their own people of sustainable tax revenue.

 

Resentment politics and populism also make for bad economic policy.

 

People respond to incentives. When individuals are free to innovate and to keep a meaningful share of what they earn, prosperity grows. Individuals generally allocate resources more efficiently than centralized government planners. Families know their needs better than bureaucracies do.

 

The evidence is increasingly difficult to ignore.

 

Between 2020 and 2024, hundreds of thousands of Americans migrated from high-tax states such as New York, Illinois, and California to lower-tax states such as Florida and Texas. Florida alone gained roughly 1.2 million residents from domestic migration over the past decade. Meanwhile, New York lost about 1.9 million residents during that same period.

 

Citadel moved its headquarters from Chicago to Miami in 2022. Goldman Sachs expanded heavily in South Florida in 2021. Technology firms and financial services companies have increasingly relocated employees and investment activity away from high-tax, heavily regulated states. This movement of capital (and philanthropy) has followed the movement of people because incentives matter.

 

Where other states impose punitive taxes, Florida has no state income tax. Where other states strangle business with regulations, Florida enjoys a favorable regulatory environment (with some room for improvement). And where other states single out hard working, successful people like Ken Griffin, Florida’s culture admires entrepreneurship.

 

Other states should pay attention. Because in the long run, people — and prosperity — tend to flow toward places that offer economic liberty.

A Year of Deregulation Ignited an American Nuclear Renaissance

By Andrew Follett

Sunday, May 31, 2026

 

The Trump administration issued four executive orders last May to cut red tape and create a faster nuclear regulatory approval process. The result was the most productive year in the modern history of nuclear power, according to the Department of Energy.

 

In twelve months, the U.S. has seen the first non-light-water reactor construction permits and groundbreakings in decades, multiple small modular reactor (SMR) design approvals, major funding commitments, the restart of long-dormant plants and fuel cycle activities, new testing infrastructure, and parallel regulatory pathways that invested billions into the sector.

 

The core deregulation-focused order reformed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to cut red tape, set strict licensing deadlines of a maximum of 18 months for new reactors, capped regulatory fees, and created expedited pathways for designs already tested by the Department of Energy or Department of Defense. Companion orders addressed DOE reactor testing reforms and revised the agency’s authorization process to reduce red tape while maintaining safety.

 

DOE launched the Reactor Pilot Program shortly after the orders, creating a streamlined DOE pathway outside traditional NRC bottlenecks for advanced reactor demonstrations. It selected 11 projects, with three already securing Final Documented Safety Analyses that will reach criticality, the state in which a nuclear chain reaction becomes self-sustaining, by July 4 of this year. This is a remarkable achievement.

 

“The idea of selecting eleven projects and aiming to have three operating by July 2026 is incredibly fast by historical standards. It reflects a major shift in philosophy,” Jeff Terry, vice provost for research at the Illinois Institute of Technology and an expert on nuclear energy systems, told National Review. “Instead of requiring every possible question to be answered before anything gets built, regulators and the Department of Energy are now much more willing to test designs in stages and learn from actual operation.”

 

In 2025, prior to Trump’s order, the NRC got 90 percent of its budget from fees on the nuclear industry and ran up the bill by charging power plants $318 per hour for staff time.

 

“When an agency gets most of its funding by billing the industry hourly, there’s naturally less pressure to streamline reviews,” Terry continued highlighting the previous incentive structure. “Longer reviews support larger staffs and bigger budgets. Over time, that can create a system where process becomes the priority instead of speed or efficiency. When coupled with politicized NRC commissions, bad choices were made.”

 

Overall, America will add enough nuclear energy production to power 2 million homes by 2027 and 4 million by 2029, according to the Department of Energy. Six reactors at Hatch, Vogtle, and Farley plants are already pursuing 345 MW of combined uprates, alongside major Southern Company loans. Much of this will come from restarting the Palisades and Crane reactors.

 

“Suddenly, existing nuclear plants look incredibly valuable again because they already have grid connections, trained operators, and large amounts of carbon-free generation,” Terry stated. “Effectively, they began to sell something more valuable than kWhs. The UPRISE goal of adding 2.5 gigawatts by 2027 is ambitious, but I think it’s achievable if most of that capacity comes from uprates and restarting relatively recent shutdowns. Uprates are actually one of the easiest ways to add nuclear capacity because you’re improving equipment at plants that already exist rather than building entirely new reactors. Restarts are harder, but Palisades showed it can be done if the plant hasn’t deteriorated too far and the economics are strong enough.”

 

A major $40 billion U.S.-Japan partnership targets 2.5 million homes powered by Small Modular Reactors in Tennessee and Alabama. The advanced nuclear company NuScale finally received NRC approval for its upgraded SMR design after a decade of red tape and regulatory gridlock. America has inked major export deals selling the technology too. For example, a Poland Westinghouse/Bechtel contract of more than $25 billion, Lithuania SMR assessment, and Latin America and Indo-Pacific cooperation with $56 billion in announced energy deals.

 

TerraPower’s Natrium fast reactor received the first-ever NRC construction permit for a commercial non-light-water reactor in March 2026 and broke ground in April. Dow/X-energy Xe-100 permit review is underway. Kairos Power started nuclear construction on Hermes in May 2025 and broke ground on Hermes 2 in April 2026, including a Google partnership.

 

“Most SMRs that have advanced so far, like NuScale or the BWRX-300, still rely on familiar light-water reactor technology” Terry continued. “That makes them easier for regulators and utilities to understand because the industry already has decades of operating experience with water-cooled reactors. Natrium is different. It uses liquid sodium as a coolant and operates as a fast reactor, which changes the entire physics and engineering profile.”

 

The upside is enormous. Fast reactors can use fuel more efficiently, potentially reduce certain types of nuclear waste, and operate at lower pressure than water-cooled systems. Natrium also includes molten-salt energy storage, which means it can ramp electrical output to support renewable-heavy grids without constantly changing reactor power levels.

 

The DOE granted approval for Radiant Industries’ Kaleidos nuclear microreactor, which would be the world’s first mass-produced microreactor, making it possible to build and bring nuclear facilities online much more quickly. Microreactors could be constructed in a factory and deployed to remote locations to provide reliable power, much like diesel generators. This approval, the first of its kind under the DOE’s new Authorization Pathway for Nuclear Facilities, represents a significant milestone in the new era of faster and more accessible nuclear power deployment begun by the White House last year.

 

Brand new reactor designs will be subjected to full-power tests, granted to the Idaho National Laboratory’s Demonstration of Microreactor Experiments (DOME) facility. The DOME microreactor test bed opened at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) in April, the world’s first such facility. The co-located Nuclear Energy Launch Pad was established in March to support broader iterative testing on federal and non-federal lands, with initial company selections and ongoing applications.

 

“For years, one of the biggest problems in U.S. nuclear development was that even very small experimental reactors had to navigate a system designed for massive commercial power plants,” Terry continued. “That made testing slow and extremely expensive. What these new programs do is remove a lot of that friction. Developers can use pre-approved sites, existing infrastructure, and DOE oversight to validate designs much more quickly. Instead of spending ten years trying to get permission to build something, companies can move into demonstration much earlier.”

 

There’s also been strong progress on microreactors for military bases, with the mobile microreactor of Pele mobile microreactor advancing to the point of delivering fuel. That’s in addition to the DOD identifying nine potential Army installations and major nuclear projects at Eielson AFB and Advanced Nuclear Power for Installations programs moving forward in April.

 

Regulatory approval was issued for nuclear-powered AI data centers on federal lands at INL and Oak Ridge, leveraging existing assets for rapid deployment. Additional executive action on space nuclear power supports reactors on the Moon by 2030.

 

These changes have enabled quicker movement from concept to testing/construction compared to prior decades of delays while demonstrating that deregulation directly translated into real construction activity and first-of-a-kind deployments.

 

This despite massive obstructive activity from Democrats, which I previously documented. Each existing U.S. nuclear plant spends an estimated $4.2 million annually just meeting government-paperwork requirements and another $4.4 million to pay government-mandated security staff, according to a 2017 American Action Forum report.

 

Biden-era nuclear bureaucracy proposed nuclear regulations that were mathematically impossible to meet by using assumptions that seemed intentionally designed to prevent the development of new reactors. It took an incredible 43 years to get approval and start building one of America’s newest nuclear reactors at Watts Barr in Tennessee.

 

“Right now, the U.S. has momentum in licensing reform, fuel supply, restarts, and advanced reactor development. But momentum alone isn’t enough,” Terry noted. The real test is whether companies can move from isolated demonstrations to steady, repeatable deployment.”

 

The actions have revitalized U.S. nuclear energy through deregulation, streamlined processes, and accelerated deployment.

 

In one year, Trump’s deregulation orders have ignited America’s most productive nuclear era in modern history. By slashing red tape, imposing hard deadlines, and shifting from endless paperwork to real-world testing, the U.S. has moved from decades of paralysis to a surge of new permits, groundbreaking construction, reactor restarts, and billions in private investment, delivering the clean, reliable power the country actually needs.

 

Nuclear momentum is no longer a slogan; it’s measurable gigawatts coming online. The real test now is whether this burst of speed becomes the new normal.

The Cuban Dream Dies by Cuban Hands

By Noah Rothman

Friday, May 29, 2026

 

Long after the Soviet Union sacrificed its romantic appeal among enthusiasts for Marxian revolutionary struggle — what with its Stalinist crimes, its own imperial ambitions, and its skepticism toward the “liberationist” movements of the 1960s — Communist Cuba remained an object of the global left’s affections. You can still hear some of that old tenderness in the bluster deployed by the regime’s last defenders. But there is an increasingly elegiac quality to their table-pounding.

 

There can be no denying the hardships that Cubans face, all of which are attributable to machinations in Washington, according to the “socialist newsweekly,” The Militant. Sure, there are a misguided few who would welcome market-oriented reforms. And yet, the newsweekly says, “The big majority understand that there is no future for working people in Cuba without fighting along a course of working-class solidarity against the U.S. rulers’ attempts to reimpose its domination and plunder of the country.”

 

“Cuba has always been a symbol of resistance to American imperialism,” Common Dreams contributor Jawad Khalid brooded. If the Trump administration’s pressure on the regime culminates in military action, they will have “underestimated” the “fighting spirit” of the country and the degree to which its “entire civilian population” is “mobilized for resistance.” The Cuban national motto “says it all.” Khalid concludes, “Homeland or death, we will prevail.”

 

The far-left magazine Jacobin recently published an interview with the Cuban regime’s ambassador to the E.U., Juan Antonio Fernández Palacios, who fueled the delusions to which the magazine’s readers cling. “After all these years of building socialism, we have not been able to achieve everything we dreamed of achieving,” Palacios conceded. But Cuba remains “a symbol of resistance.” Its “doctrine is the war of the entire people, urban and rural alike,” he warned. “That is how the revolution was made: guerrilla warfare from the mountains and, also in urban areas, the action of revolutionary movements.”

 

That is an articulation of the insurgent-warfare doctrine formalized by the French philosopher Régis Debray. He called it “focoism,” after the agile bands of guerrillas (“focos”) who successfully toppled Cuba’s dictatorial Batista regime in 1959. Marxian revolutionaries spent the last half of the 20th century attempting to export the model into which Che Guevara and Fidel Castro stumbled. It’s understandable why a theory of revolutionary violence, which proposes that whole societies can crumble at the feet of tiny militant sects, would appeal to radicals who are themselves few in number. But the Cuban revolution’s unique circumstances were not replicable. “Focoism” failed.

 

The universalism inherent in the international proletarian revolution died with the Cold War. The Cuban regime’s last remaining principle is its hostility toward the U.S.-led world order that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. To the socialist dreamers out there, the consequences of that hostility — Cuba’s crippling poverty, its stratified society, and its retreat from the world stage — are badges of honor. But for the Cuban people and, increasingly, the Cuban regime itself, vestigial anti-Americanism has become an unaffordable luxury.

 

The Trump administration is squeezing the economic vice it yoked around the island’s throat. Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro is gone and, with him, the subsidized oil that his Chavista regime used to subsidize Cuba’s existence. The sanctions regime Washington has imposed on Havana is the most restrictive Cuba has ever experienced. The country is in a state of economic freefall, and its leaders are desperate for relief.

 

In a desperate bid to assuage Trump, Havana allowed Cubans abroad to invest in private enterprises on the island. The regime freed more than 2,000 political prisoners in April, the second such amnesty this year and the largest in some time. The head of the CIA, John Ratcliffe, met with senior Cuban officials in Havana this month — a trip the regime acknowledged as a peace overture.

 

None of it has persuaded Trump to pull his foot off the gas. Nor are the Cuban people likely to be mollified by half measures or the empty bluster of the Castro regime. In a clear-eyed dispatch from inside Cuba, Left Voice contributor Pablo Oprinari paints a dire portrait of life on the island.

 

The “garbage crisis” is pernicious, he writes. The people trudge through it in the streets, set it alight for warmth, and dig through it for sustenance. Most “survive only by receiving remittances from relatives abroad” or by taking whatever hours the small number of private enterprises are offering workers. Teachers and doctors would “rather work 12 or 14 hours in a bar,” which explains the shortage of both. But the few fortunate private-sector workers in Cuba don’t have it nearly as good as the country’s leadership caste — a cadre that conspicuously excludes “people of African descent.”

 

Although Oprinari blames the “imperialist blockade” for Cuba’s stratified society, that stratification and the embourgeoisement of the country’s wage earners are an existential threat to the revolution. “In the wake of this and growing inequality, a social base favorable to the restoration of capitalism is emerging,” he warns.

 

Only the Cuban revolution’s true believers can still contend with a straight face that the island’s problems have been imposed on them by the United States. Yes, Trump’s sanctions and blockade tactics have throttled the island’s economy, Cuban economist Mauricio de Miranda Parrondo conceded in a New York Times op-ed. “But Cuba’s economy was already on the brink of collapse,” he added. “What is happening in Cuba today is essentially the result of decades of structural economic failure under a rigid political system that has consistently resisted any reform.” And that resistance is buckling.

 

Ossified revolutionary slogans might sustain the Cuban regime’s comfortable apologists in the West, but they are packaged and retailed to a foreign audience. The Marxian left remains invested in the mythology of the Cuban regime, but they’re the last holdouts. Havana lost the fight it waged for 50 years on battlefields that ranged from Latin America to sub-Saharan Africa, and Trump is finally forcing the regime to contend with the consequences of its defeat. Communist Cuba’s supporters hope to avoid a confrontation with that reality. Who can blame them? Self-delusion is all they have left.

The CliffsNotes Guide to Anti-Zionist Brainwashing

By Seth Mandel

Friday, May 29, 2026  

 

The story of Taryn Thomas’s recovery from the intellectual isolation of pro-Palestinian activism provides a handy guide for anyone interested. Her quotes in her Telegraph profile are perfect as a CliffsNotes-style outline of the anti-Zionist movement in the West:

 

“People I know, whether it was activists or people I look up to, were already posting their thoughts.” This is Thomas reflecting on her social circle at Stanford after the massacres of October 7 but before Israel’s ground incursion in response. She didn’t know much about the conflict, but those around her had talking points ready to go to defend Hamas and indict Israel as soon as the attack happened. This is key to anti-Zionist activism: It isn’t grassroots or organic; it is pre-packaged and distributed to an army of propagandists.

 

“I never really understood why, but we were told that in order for us to be free, Palestine has to be free.” Thomas, who is black, was introduced to the pro-Palestinian cause at Black Lives Matter events. This is classic anti-Zionist media strategy: Co-opt someone else’s oppression and tell them that they are the victim of the Jews. Immediately making it about someone other than the Palestinians also frees one from the burden of the Palestinian share of blame for the state of the conflict.

 

“It seemed like everyone was a lot more educated than me and very certain and sure of themselves that this is a genocide. The only safe position was the more radical one in the encampment.” Once inside the activist wing of the mission, one quickly finds that the lazy river flows only in one direction. If you float along, you drift into increasingly more extreme territory; it is staying in one place or exploring moderate positions that require effort.

 

“I thought going further to the Left would be the solution to the extremism I was seeing from the Right.” Modern politics in general encourages people to mirror the other side’s radicalism as a balancing mechanism, which only perpetuates the cycle of extremist drift.

 

“I was confused by what our mission was. At what point did the pro-Palestine movement turn into this anti-Israel, anti-America movement? We completely lost sight of the victims we were claiming to be supporting and fighting for.” Thomas found her fellow activists destroying people’s property and tagging administrative offices with messages like “Death to Israel” and “Death to America” and “Kill cops,” which made her realize she had been pulled into Omnicause liberalism, in which progressive dogma dictates the adoption of a pro-violence message toward any and every political or ideological opponent.

 

“I experienced a lot of cognitive dissonance—what I was seeing versus what I’d been told. It was like I arrived a year too late to a funeral.” This was Thomas’s reaction to the Nova Exhibition, which sought to recreate the conditions at the music festival where hundreds were murdered or sexually assaulted on October 7. By going to Nova, she was seeking out ways to reassure herself that she was still on the right “side” of this conflict. Exposure to reality only added to her doubts. This, too, is characteristic of the information wars around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Anti-Zionism requires the dehumanization of Jews as a starting point.

 

“I needed to see it for myself.” She accepted an invitation to visit Israel so she could temper her ideological priors with real-world knowledge.

 

“My best friend of three years asked, ‘Is this in Israel?’ I said, ‘Yeah, do you want to talk about it?’ She immediately blocked me. I hadn’t even expressed anything. I literally said I went. Period.” The act of seeking out real-world knowledge is viewed as treachery in progressive circles.

 

“I lost every single friend.” Thomas posted a video from Israel explaining her shifting views.

 

“Then my therapist came across the video and decided to end our professional relationship, asking me to find a new provider after learning about my views as a Zionist.” Western anti-Zionism is genuinely rotting society’s institutions from the inside out. When Jews in progressive spaces talk about the infiltration of anti-Semitism into every corner of their personal and professional lives, they are telling the truth. People who deny this is happening are lying. Anti-Zionism is an ideology that harms everyone and helps no one.

The Cheap Courage of the A-Listers

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, May 29, 2026

 

Milli Vanilli was not in fact a one-hit wonder. The act had five hits, all from the same album, Girl You Know It’s True. That was in 1989.

 

So imagine a big concert on the National Mall in 1989 and one of the headliners was … Mario Lanza or Johnnie Ray. You see, they were huge in 1952, which is as far from 1989 as 1989 is from today.

 

I don’t mean to pick on Milli Vanilli. Well, actually I do—or did. (I set out to write about how Milli Vanilli was kind of a precursor to the AI era.) The duo (before one of them died) became famous for neither writing (common enough) nor actually singing their own music. They were simply avatars for a team that created a simulacrum of a band. One can easily imagine a future where AI does all the work behind the scenes, but they’ll still need meat props to front the act. I don’t think people will want to go to concerts just to watch holograms or robots perform music made by machines. But I’ve decided not to write about that. So, back to my point).

 

Or consider the C+C Music Factory, words I never thought I would ever write. The group formed in 1989, so they might be a get for the concert 37 years ago. Vanilla Ice had his big hit, “Ice, Ice Baby,” the following year. He really was a one-hit wonder. Given how much he leaned into his white status, I’m sure someone called him one-hit Wonder Bread. The Commodores, on the other hand, were actually pretty great for a while. Their high-water mark was probably 1978, which was 48 years ago. They’re still around, but they’re almost the Ship of Theseus of music acts: Only one of the original members is still with the band (William "WAK" King is the Methuselah of funk). But it keeps going.The reason I’m talking about these acts is they are—or were—among the “featured performers” of The Great American State Fair, which is part of America’s 250^th birthday bash on the mall organized by the Trump administration. Most of the acts have pulled out, which may be great news for the ones that simply got lumped into “…and many more!” at the bottom of the poster.

 

 

You could actually do a great This Is Spinal Tap-like mockumentary borrowing a plot device from Rocky. Remember how Apollo Creed wanted a big, patriotic bicentennial boxing match, but no real contenders were available, so he plucked from the obscurity of South Philly a palooka named Rocky Balboa? So in This Is MagaPalooza, Richard Grenell, fresh off his successful work at the Trump-Kennedy Center, could knock on the door of Andy Dwyer—lead singer of Mouse Rat, formerly Teddy Bear Suicide, God Hates Figs, (the on-the-nose) Department of Homeland Obscurity, Nothing Rhymes With Blorange, etc.—and tell him that he’s got his ticket to the show. Grenell’s next stop would be to drive up to Scranton and tell Kevin Malone, the drummer for Scrantonicity 2, that he’s hit the jackpot.

 

I should back up. If you haven’t followed this story, it’s simultaneously very funny and very sad. The very funny part is captured in part by the poster alone and the reactions to it. Most acts elicited shocked expressions of “They’re still touring!?” or even “He’s still alive!?” No undue offense intended for any of them, but to say these are D-list acts is an insult to The Romantics and Flock of Seagulls (yes, they’re still touring). Also funny: Most of the acts have backed out. I mean, when you’ve lost Bret Michaels—lead singer of Poison, winner of season 3 of Celebrity Apprentice, and former host of Rock My RV with Bret Michaels—it’s not a good sign.

 

The sad part is that our politics have gotten so gross that no A- or B-listers would conceive of participating in the 250^th celebration of the American founding. I blame everyone, but not equally. When a deeply unpopular, intensely partisan, vindictive, and corrupt president is throwing his face and name on buildings and even currency, it shouldn’t be a surprise that left-leaning artists will have nothing to do with something so closely associated with him. Indeed, as a business decision, it would be stupid to play at the Great American State Fair, because many of your fans will punish you for it. Indeed, Michaels says one of the reasons he pulled out is that he received so many threats. “Concerns have also been raised regarding the safety of my fans, band, crew, family and myself, including threats that are completely unfounded and unforgivable,” Michaels said in a statement.

 

I agree.

 

This should be an utterly nonpartisan event. But Donald Trump has made the GOP an extension of his personal brand in almost every conceivable way. If Republicans held on to Congress after the midterms, I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if Lindsey Graham, Mike Lee, or Ralph Norman proposed renaming the Republican Party the Trump Party. Regardless, when you turn the Trump Party into a Republican In Name Only Party, you shouldn’t be shocked by this kind of thing.

 

That said, this does raise a broader problem for the right. It hasn’t had a deep bench of traditional celebrities for a very long time. Clinton Eastwood is a titan (though technically a libertarian). Gary Sinise, Kelsey Grammer, and Jon Voight are pretty solid, but after that you head into Scott Baio, Kevin Sorbo, and Kid Rock territory very quickly.

 

Right-wing hunger for celebrity approval has always been a little embarrassing, and even harder to explain, at least rationally. I think part of it comes from envy. But part of it also comes from a kind of patriotism and, truth be told, a kind of nationalism. That’s why the only place the GOP has had any real success with A-list celebrities is country music. I think this reflects very, very poorly on Hollywood and other elite performers. This country made a lot of very famous people very rich, and they talk about America as if it’s an albatross.

 

Billie Joe Armstrong, the lead singer of Green Day, told a London audience, “F— America … I’m f—ing renouncing my citizenship. I’m f—ing coming here.” What set him off was the repeal of Roe v. Wade. “There’s too much f—ing stupid in the world to go back to that miserable f—ing excuse for a country,” Armstrong continued. “Oh, I’m not kidding. You’re going to get a lot of me in the coming days.”

 

I could find no evidence that he has in fact forfeited his citizenship.

 

I could fill the next 20 paragraphs with similar statements from the likes of Madonna, Harry Belafonte, Spike Lee, Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda, Oliver Stone, et al.

 

But let’s talk about Adam McKay, the writer and director behind many of Will Ferrell’s biggest hits. McKay often heaps scorn on how dumb America and Americans are. He and Ferrell privately referred to their first three movies together as “The Mediocre White Man Trilogy.” Indeed, in his own telling, he has monetized what he calls “American stupidity” like few others. But at least he owns his ingratitude: “I’m a 53-year-old white guy, and it happened that I chose a profession that pays probably a hundred times more than it should.”

 

Still, that hasn’t stopped him from enjoying the windfall he’s made off the moviegoers he considers marks. When he revealed he was wearing a Democratic Socialists of America T-shirt to a Vanity Fair reporter, the reporter lightly joked, “I guarantee no one has ever worn that shirt in that car.”

 

McKay responded, “What exactly is your point?” he shot back, with a vein protruding from his forehead. “JUST BECAUSE I HAVE BELIEFS I CAN’T DRIVE A NICE CAR?!!” [All caps in original.]

 

No one is saying that, dude, but whining about income inequality, as he often does, while driving a Bentley, tells us something.

 

I singled out McKay because my problem with the performative anti-Americanism of so many celebrities is the ingratitude. And ingratitude for the wild success these people have had doing what they love strikes me as, at some level, unpatriotic. But if I were to call them unpatriotic, I would be thrown in with the Trumpists and others they call “fascists” or whatnot. Patriotism has to mean, at some level, love of country or at least the idea of your country. It’s fine to criticize America, and it’s certainly patriotic to criticize the government (depending to some extent on the content of the criticism).

 

I’m weary of the “this is how you got Trump” genre of punditry. But that right-wing hunger for celebrities of our own is one of the reasons Trump won in 2016. As regrettable as I think the Trump presidency and his distorted understanding of patriotism have been for this country, I understand why A-listers earn so much resentment. Fabulously rich, famous, and attractive people gather to collect awards from each other every year. And every “awards season” we’re subjected to numerous people pissing from a great height on the country that made them fabulously rich and famous. They clutch their Oscar, Emmy, or Golden Globe trophy and celebrate their own courage for denigrating America. But their courage-on-the-cheap costs them nothing but having to endure sustained applause before opening their yaps once again. They don’t all do it, but enough do to make the point. And the applause and fawning coverage reinforce the resentment.

 

I think there’s no end to the stupidity of anti-elite populism, on the right and the left. But at least the billionaires who attract pitchforks understand the anger, envy, and resentment their wealth invites. The Oliver Stones and Adam McKays think they are absolved from similar resentment because they have “BELIEFS” about the little people off whom they profit. It’s like they welcome a revolution on the mistaken belief that it will eat them last.