Your Data Center Life

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, September 17, 2026

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

The Unbearable Lightness of American Restraint

By Ludovic Hood

Wednesday, September 30, 2026

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

‘Just Say It’s a Genocide’

By Noah Rothman

Friday, October 02, 2026

 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did not even bother to disguise her wholly justified irritation with the far-left agitators who, in the spring of 2024, chased her and her then-fiancé around a Brooklyn movie theater in pursuit of a shibboleth.

 

“Just say it’s a genocide,” one of her pursuers demanded. “Just say it. Just say the word. That’s all we want.”

 

AOC’s harasser deserves points for honesty, at least. At the time, amid the fog of war and with so many global institutional interests invested in portraying Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocidal, the activist class was as inclined toward intimidation and violence as it was to persuasion. The movement’s members sincerely believed that they had the evidence on their side. After all, everyone worth listening to insisted that they were right.

 

But the campaign to delegitimize Israel predated the October 7 massacre and the war that followed, and it continues today — almost one year after high-tempo combat operations in Gaza concluded in an ambiguous cease-fire. Still, the charge of “genocide” persists, but it does so in the absence of either the fog or the evidence. Today, we know that the so-called famine that was said to prevail in Gaza has been replaced with a minor outbreak of childhood obesity, and the Gazan population (according to even the Hamas-led Gaza Health Ministry) experienced more growth than almost any other country in 2025.

 

Either Israel is executing the most incompetent genocide in history, or the allegation is and always was unsubstantiated.

 

With contrary evidence mounting, the activist class has placed a peculiar emphasis on just saying the word “genocide.” Indeed, they do so with an urgency that suggests they sense a closing window of opportunity.

 

Maine’s Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, Troy Jackson, recently apologized for telling an interviewer that “It’s unfortunate that there are people here in Maine that don’t like to use that term [“genocide”] only because they’re Jewish.” But as Semafor’s Dave Weigel pointed out, Jackson has been hounded by the activist class to say the word “genocide” as often as possible, despite having long ago checked that box. “Pass the ‘genocide’ litmus test, and you might be forced to re-take it, again and again,” he wrote.

 

In his bid to replace retiring Representative Nancy Pelosi, California State Senator Scott Wiener failed that litmus test earlier this year during a debate when he failed to hold up a sign affirming his support for describing Israel’s actions as genocidal. “Shame,” the crowd chanted. The abuse that followed seemed to teach Wiener a lesson. “Days later — under fire from progressives — Wiener released a video,” KQED reported. “He acknowledged that genocide has occurred.”

 

Michigan Representative Haley Stevens was similarly abused by an irate activist who sought only a declaration of fealty to his preferred myth. Stevens admirably brushed off his hectoring even as she was bombarded with fabrication after fabrication, including the still-unretracted claim published by the New York Times in which it was alleged that Israel had trained dogs to perform sodomy on prisoners.

 

The activists’ demands carry imperative weight. It’s as if they feel they must force as many people as possible to commit themselves, rhetorically at least, to the notion that a genocide didn’t just happen but is ongoing in the Gaza Strip.

 

The hectoring activist class regards mouthing “genocide” as table stakes, and every Democrat must ante up if they are to be taken seriously in progressive politics. In this way, they force their representatives to make a reputational investment in the existence of a genocide that they cannot take back lest they admit they lied or were muscled into promulgating a lie.

 

In this, however, we see the activist strong-arming campaign not as strength but as weakness and insecurity. The evidence for their outlook is elusive while the evidence against it is plain to see. There’s precious little time left to maximize the political effect of the hysteria that accompanied Israel’s response to the October 7 massacre, and the anti-Israel crowd seems to know it.

Howard Zinn and the Failures of the Left

By Jeremy Black

Thursday, September 17, 2026

 

The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn, by Dave Zirin (Dutton, 320 pp., $33)

 

This biography, an apotheosis of Howard Zinn, begins with the words, “What would Howard say?” Apparently, for each major social or political event, people want to hear “the analysis of an activist-historian.” And that is what we are offered: sage as saint, plus Dave Zirin, sports editor at The Nation, as amanuensis and guardian of the Sacred Flame.

 

There are various ways to write about historians. For example, David Hayton’s portrait of the British historian Lewis Namier (who, rather unlike Zinn, was outside of the establishment), offers possibly the best combination of personal and intellectual biography; it addresses contexts and contingencies, the play of professional connection and the role of patronage. Hence Hayton does a good job of explaining the political reasons why Namier did not get an academic post for so very long.

 

And then there is Zirin. All he can say about Zinn’s academic career is, “Given what we know about the complicity of ‘the Academy’ with the FBI, the Red Scare may have scared away his teaching prospects.” Zirin’s subject is a hero. The author is fired up not only by his perception of the past (he did not meet Zinn until the mid-1990s) but also his urgent concern about the present, directed at “Trump and his cabinet of reality-show contestants, pro-wrestling executives, and fascist-fanfic authors.” These villains, Zirin says, “lock away the works of Zinn not because they loathe the historian but because they fear the history.”

 

In a scene-setting introduction, Zirin uses the tired concept of false consciousness to explain why the Black Lives Matter protests were followed, a few years later, by 77 million voters’ choosing to reelect President Donald Trump. The book’s prospectus promises engagement but not necessarily debate or nuance. In other words, exactly what might be anticipated of a work about Zinn:

 

Think of this book as ‘A People’s History of Howard Zinn’: it’s a story about the small acts and grand struggles of the twentieth century that shaped him and the ways he shaped those struggles as well. A closer look at his life also provides insight into how to tough it out during the worst of times and why we can never let the bastards steal our hope.

 

And so we start, in “a jungle of terrible odors” where Zinn was born, Brooklyn in 1922. The author’s emphasis is on the city’s poverty even though, especially at that time, it was far better to be a Jew born in New York than in Eastern Europe. Having worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and enlisted as a bombardier during World War II, Zinn returns home and becomes part of a radical milieu that, Zirin argues, resisted paranoia: “Because Western powers no longer needed the Red Army to fight the Nazis on the Eastern Front, the USSR was quickly branded an existential, godless enemy.” Tell that to the Poles. Besides, as Zirin has to note, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s perception of domestic radicals was widely shared in America.

 

It is not only Hoover who is criticized but also “anti-communist liberals.” Zinn in 1948 backs the presidential campaign of Henry Wallace, candidate of the Progressive Party, against Harry Truman. He gets a post at Spelman, a historically black women’s college in Atlanta. There, “intersectionality” (avant la lettre) and “Black feminist activism” play out, with Zinn as an active participant opposed to the “paternalism” that does not accept his views. He is dismissed in 1963. In 1964, he joins Boston University. Old academic quarrels rarely retain their relevance or interest, but Zinn’s clash with Boston University’s president and later chancellor, John Silber — a conservative Democrat critical of many left-wing nostrums — provides Zirin with an opportunity to employ his subtlety to go after Donald Trump. He writes, of Silber: “The ego on display was truly and even impressively ahead of its time. The man was born fifty years too soon. And just as with a certain modern, far more powerful, far less well-read individual, the students knew how to hit him where it hurt.”

 

The book makes much of Zinn’s involvement in the “Black Freedom Struggle,” with an emphasis on his support for “modes of leadership that didn’t come from the top down, but from the bottom up.” The rest of the 1960s find Zinn occupied with civil rights and the movement against the Vietnam War. Zirin sees “anti-liberalism” as the common theme that linked the supporters of the war with those who opposed civil rights: a somewhat warped presentation. That leads him to a hilarious question: “Why wasn’t the entire country in the streets?” He also continuously snipes at others who might share Zinn’s limelight: RAND Corporation whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, for example, is “a smooth talker” who enjoys fame and is always willing “to go to the press with bravado.” Alan Dershowitz is “the future publicity-addicted defense attorney, now disgraced for his association with notorious child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.” Judgment is absent and histrionic language is spread thick. Meanwhile, Zinn’s intellectual influence is exaggerated.

 

Given the great noise that Zinn made relative to his little insight and nuance, it might be asked why one should bother with a new biography of the man. The fact is that Zinn would make a worthwhile topic for a good book: one primarily about the misleading character of so much historical “analysis” (e.g., as Zirin mentions, “When Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, Zinn attempted to theorise the traumatic event by speaking about it in the context of President Johnson’s war agenda”), the divisions and failures of the left, and the successes of capitalism — not least in the sales of Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Zirin is incapable of such analysis and does not appear to understand the questions.

 

The biographer’s focus is the notion of “this land’s five-hundred-year ongoing fight between progress and reaction.” So much for other historical themes. So much for urbanization, economic growth, and religion: the latter conspicuous for its neglect by both Zinn and Zirin, and a subject handled far better by Philip Jenkins in A History of the United States. Indeed, in terms of works that are far better than Zinn’s, Walter A. McDougall’s Freedom Just Around the Corner and Throes of Democracy, complemented by his Promised Land, Crusader State, deserve close attention.

 

Zinn was, of course, a polemical political scientist rather than a historian; a master at leaving out of his scholarship what did not really suit his purposes. He was no Fernand Braudel in his scope and interests but a shouter, one without particular insight or originality. Read A People’s History, if you must, but do not bother with Zirin. He does not illuminate his subject’s problems and deficiencies. He magnifies them many times over.

Why the Right Is Nixonmaxxing

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, October 02, 2026

 

Earlier this week, Donald Trump shared a 43-second clip of CNN’s Harry Enten going through the latest midterm polling data.

 

“In the 2024 election versus Kamala Harris, [Trump] got 99 percent of the MAGA GOP vote—perhaps surprisingly, I might have thought it’d be 100 percent, but it was 99 percent,” Enten said in the clip. “Compare that to his approval rating now with the MAGA GOP. It’s 98 percent; there’s been no real decline in MAGA support.”

 

You can understand why Trump would celebrate this news.

 

Of course it leaves out a few things, including the other 13 minutes of Enten’s analysis. We’ll get to that. But the clip also ignores the fact that people who self-identify as MAGA are definitionally Trump supporters. It’s sort of like asking self-described vegans whether they support eating salad, or asking Hells Angels, “Do you think biker gangs should be legal?”

 

Weirdly, Enten, who is very good at his job, didn’t address this problem. In fairness, the share of voters who describe themselves as MAGA has not shrunk that much. From what I can tell, the share of people self-describing as MAGA has dropped about 7 to 10 points. So, if MAGA means “super-committed Trump supporter,” the total number of them has not dropped a lot, and, among self-identified super-committed Trump supporters, they remain super-committed to Trump.

 

Enten’s larger point was that Trump is venting support of non-MAGA Republicans like a space station with a blown-out airlock. In 2024, Trump got 56 percent of the non-MAGA GOP vote. Now, if polls are to be believed, he is supported by just 7 percent of self-identified non-MAGA Republicans, a drop of 49 points. “So, his support is definitely not just ebbing there,” Enten said, “but is absolutely crashing there.” Indeed, 10 percent of non-MAGA Republicans say they will vote Democratic in the midterms. Oh, and among “pure independents”—i.e., people who don’t lean toward either party—support for Trump has dropped like Hans Gruber exiting Nakatomi Plaza. In 2024, he won them by 15 points. Since then, support for Trump has dropped 86 points to minus-71. It’s as if Gruber plunged through the pavement and kept going.

 

Oh, and Trump’s overall approval rating is stuck in the mid-30s, and a new AP-NORC poll this week had his approval on the economy at 17 percent.

 

I know what you’re thinking: The obvious strategy for the GOP to climb out of this hole is to tell voters the economy is doing great and to pretend that Trump is on the ballot. Also, the best way to repel grizzly bears is to slather yourself in a thick paste of salmon, honey, and vanilla ice cream and then grab a bear cub for a selfie.

 

Dead, rested, and ready.

 

On the MAGA and MAGA-adjacent new right, Richard Milhous Nixon is supposedly so hot right now. The hotness is called “Nixonmaxxing.” Christopher Rufo released a video called “Nixon Forever.” Introducing it, he suggested emulating Nixon, who “left behind a blueprint for counter-revolution—the last hope for restoring the American republic.” On social media, Rufo helpfully explained that “[t]he right’s rediscovery of Richard Nixon is not about particular policies—some good, some bad—but about the aesthetic, the attitude and the narrative of the self-made man who won 49 states on behalf of the Silent Majority, and was taken down in a Deep State coup.”

 

To their credit, the Nixonmaxxers concede that the case for Nixon is mostly a vibes thing. Or as Rufo puts it with little apparent sense of irony, “aesthetics.” I mean we’re talking about the guy who wore a dark suit and wingtips on the beach and needed 3-by-5-inch notecards to navigate small talk with strangers.

 

Scott Greer, a dabbler in white identity politics, concedes that “the new Nixon myth … has issues.” Nixon, Greer writes, “had few substantive accomplishments as president, especially on the issues dear to the Online Right. While one of the better presidents when it comes to foreign policy, he had no real domestic achievements, aside from advancing liberal causes and programs. In many ways, the country actually got worse on his watch, with crime spiraling out of control and the economy plummeting. Nixon may not be responsible for these developments, but he certainly didn’t solve them.”

 

Greer really can’t avoid this conclusion given his belief that a “serious conservatism will always amount to white identity politics no matter how much its advocates deny it. The sooner we acknowledge this, the sooner we can make America great again.” So he acknowledges, with some soft-pedaling, Nixon’s central role in codifying affirmative action and extending the civil rights agenda of Lyndon Johnson.

 

(For an excellent primer on the strengths and weaknesses of Nixon’s legacy, I can’t recommend enough Dan McLaughlin’s “Nixon’s Not the One.”)

 

I think the vibes-merchandising of Nixon is pretty amusing. It reminds me of the hipster effort from a while back to make Spam—the tinned lunch meat—hip and cool. I mean, who can forget the SPAMERICAN Tour?

 

But given how Rufo, J.D. Vance, the Trump DOJ, et al. don’t seem to think it’s entirely a joke, we should give it some serious consideration.

 

I think there are a number of reasons why this is happening. Some of them are openly and honestly argued by the Nixonmaxxers. They like his Rousseauian appeal to the “Silent Majority.” They like his willingness to use all the instruments of the state for political advantage, including numerous economically preposterous moves. They prefer Nixon’s dour anger to Reagan’s sunny charm. I think some find Nixon’s intense white-dude awkwardness appealing as they try to embrace “whiteness” as an identity. They certainly love Nixon’s hatred of lefty elites. In a National Conservatism Conference speech, Vance won cheers for invoking Nixon’s line, “the professors are the enemy.”

 

Vance and others also insist that Nixon was taken down by the “deep state” and that, on the merits, Watergate would be “like a 12-hour news story” today; the “idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy,” he said.

 

Such messaging serves some obvious purposes. If Watergate is synonymous with a presidency-destroying scandal, that implies there’s a limit to what Trump can get away with. If Watergate was no big deal, then it’s an open question whether anything—from January 6 forward—can be considered a big deal. It definitely buries the dead letter of Congress’ impeachment power even more deeply.

 

Similarly, the idea that Nixon was unfairly taken down by the deep state makes the paranoia surrounding the thick constellation of conspiracy theories MAGA relies on seem more legitimate, and legitimizing, for the MAGA crowd whenever inconvenient facts get in the way.

 

And of course, retconning the story that Nixon marshaled the necessary integrity and character to resign from office for the good of the country into a sad mistake forced on him by his enemies in the deep state and media has to have particular appeal for Trump, given his adamantine inability to imagine doing such a thing.

 

Nixonmaxxed Weber.

 

But I think there’s another reason, which will take a minute to explain.

 

The great German sociologist Max Weber identified three sources of legitimate political authority. First there is traditional authority, which rests on inherited customs, the royal line of succession, and that kind of thing. Then there’s legal-rational authority, which is the impersonal rules of law and process, whether it’s democratic elections under a constitutional regime or the bureaucratic systems of, say, the old Soviet Union.

 

The third is charismatic authority. I should be clear that charisma in the Weberian sense doesn’t mean “charming” in the way we mean someone who has a lot of charisma or “rizz” (which is derived from “charisma”). But Weber does mean charming in the older sense, as in charmed, as if by spell or magic or, in biblical terms, gifted with divine grace or favor.

 

Charismatic authority rests on the heroic, exceptional, even superhuman traits the charmed see in a transformative leader. Napoleon, Jesus, Muhammad, Mao, Ayatollah Khomeini, Joseph Smith, Gandhi, Hitler, Mussolini, Atatürk: History is full of such examples, good, bad, divine, and satanic.

 

Weber is not offering normative or moralistic opinions about charismatic leaders—and neither am I. Please do not infer any moral equivalence here, because I am not implying any.

 

The challenge for societies, Weber argued, was when charismatic leaders die (or, I suppose, retire). The movements they built were based on an intense personal, often religious, but always passionate, commitment to the leader. When the leader is gone, that leader’s followers and elites are generally left with a conundrum: How do we keep going? How do we stay true to the mission, the cause, or the movement? What do we do with the power left to us, and how do we keep it?

 

Weber calls this the “routinization” or “bureaucratization” of charismatic power. Under a charismatic authority, people follow the leader because the leader’s authority is derived from him personally. He is the ruler. When the leader departs, “Do this because the leader says so” becomes “Do this because this is what the leader would have wanted.”

 

After Jesus ascended to heaven, the church was built to institutionalize his teachings. After Mao died, the party bureaucracy took over. When Fidel Castro died, the Cuban government stayed committed to Castroism. Charisma is replaced with rules, institutions, procedures, and laws that allow the uncharismatic to rule in the “spirit” of the leader’s ideas without the spiritedness of the leader’s personality.

 

Trump was elected as a legal-rational leader. In 2016, he lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College. In 2020, he lost both. In 2024, he won both. But over this whole period, he has chafed, squirmed, and railed against the constraints of the legal-rational box he was elected to. He wants to be a charismatic leader who governs based on will, “instincts,” personal authority, and Weberian charisma. At the midterm “convention,” Republicans played a video that explained how “God made Trump” to save us. “On June 14^th, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker,’ so God gave us Trump.” Just this week, he once again explained that he was betrayed by his Supreme Court appointees because they haven’t shown him personal loyalty. The idea that Supreme Court justices should be constrained by the law rankles him because he thinks he is above the law and loyalty to him should be the highest law. Do what the leader says, for he is your leader.

 

Some Trump fans agree with this to one dismaying extent or another. Some of his sycophants and enablers merely pretend to, as political requirements demand. But everyone deeply invested in Trumpism, and the political projects made possible by it, is desperate to keep the party going. They don’t want to go back to the pre-Trump era of Reaganism.

 

Ironically, Reagan was a charismatic figure, too. When he finished his second term, he was very popular, which made it possible for his vice president to run as the inheritor of the Reagan mantle. People wanted four more years, which is why George H.W. Bush was the first sitting vice president elected directly to the presidency in 152 years. Bush distanced himself at the margins from Reagan when he ran in 1988, but Reagan’s popularity and success were what made victory possible. Bush was no Reagan, but the assumption that he would routinize Reaganism is what got him elected.

 

A lot of J.D. Vance’s fans have convinced themselves that he will have a similar success at the end of the Trump era. I am very skeptical that voters will want four more years of this at the end of Trump’s presidency. And it is dawning on some folks that Vance, for whatever skills you think he has, has nothing like Trump’s charismatic connection with voters. You might think he has charisma—I don’t—but he certainly doesn’t have Weberian charisma.

 

So, what do you do if you’re professionally, politically, and personally invested in the Trumpian transformation of the GOP and politics writ large? How do you successfully routinize his shtick into our politics so that his uncharismatic heir can gain and wield power? Well, you might construct an ornate theory about another charisma-deficient politician who nonetheless navigated politics brilliantly. You might look for someone who symbolized and personified your own resentments. You might lionize a “realistic” statesman who was content to make peace with our enemies, withdraw from foreign wars, and dismiss the idea of standing up for freedom and human rights. You might try to rehabilitate a leader who shared your view that the point of power was to use it for the betterment of your team or tribe and to punish your enemies whenever possible. You might claim that a certain disgraced president was actually a kind of prophet without honor, a John the Baptist heralding what was to come.

 

In other words, you might just start Nixonmaxxing.

Don’t Be Like China

By Judson Berger

Friday, October 02, 2026

 

You might not have heard of the case of Guo Degang. He’s a popular comedian in China who recently was investigated for the offense of modifying the lyrics to a Chinese revolutionary song in, of all places, Wuhan. Reportedly, he changed the line, “The sun is about to set in the west; all is quiet on Weishan Lake,” by swapping the lake for “the Forbidden City.” You had to be there, I suppose. For this lyrical tweak, “he was reported to [Wuhan’s] culture and tourism bureau,” according to the New York Times, and fines followed.

 

Now, before you say, “but Jimmy Kimmel” — if only Kimmel could have been so subtle. Yet the Guo episode is one of many reminders lately that the China model is nothing to emulate.

 

For the record, the FCC’s Kimmel fit was “preposterous,” as we’ve editorialized, and the court system is taking up that fight. And that is a crucial detail, the independent judiciary. Ask Jimmy Lai. Jianli Yang, writing on Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington, cites a more recent administration fight with the media to point up and appreciate our differences in that regard:

 

Here an apparently unrelated event during Xi’s visit becomes important.

 

The White House had barred CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from White House grounds. The organizations sued. Other major media organizations stood with them. Then U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, appointed by Trump himself, ordered their access restored. The administration complied.

 

Consider how strange this must appear from Beijing. A president appoints a judge. The judge later rules against the president. The president is angry. The ruling nevertheless takes effect.

 

Jianli goes on to argue that, in the emerging AI debate, America must hold onto its values and not adopt, for instance, “China’s methods of surveillance, information control, centralized data collection, and political management” in pursuit of technological goals.

 

Yet Beijing’s command of economy and society continues to hold a certain allure among Western policymakers and provocateurs alike: whether seen in the New Right’s pursuit of an industrial policy of our own or the far left’s fandom toward (in the words of one noxious host) “Chinese-style Communism” and “Cultural Revolution sh**” or, going farther back, the media’s early praise for China’s Covid response.

 

Thérèse Shaheen, addressing other misconceptions, explains that the country is not doing nearly as well economically as is often portrayed. She writes,

 

The Chinese Communist Party has been working overtime to present China as an unstoppable economic and technological power. Artificial intelligence has become particularly useful to this narrative. China’s advances in AI are real. So are its accomplishments in electric vehicles, batteries, robotics, drones, solar panels, and advanced manufacturing. But the Trump administration, along with other Western governments, much of the business world, and many economic and political analysts confuse the technologically sophisticated portions of the Chinese economy with the Chinese economy itself. China remains a mostly poor, mostly uneducated, aging society riven with internal inconsistencies. Only a sliver of its population is involved in the tech sectors that have the world so mesmerized.

 

Despite Trump’s praise for Xi as a “great leader” and his touting of their “fantastic relationship,” Jim Geraghty also lists the myriad ways China and its entities have tried to (almost literally) blow up that relationship: sending components to Iran that can be used in drones and missile guidance systems, providing satellite images to Iran of a U.S. base in Jordan before a fatal attack over the summer, allegedly conducting a cyber-espionage campaign that compromised federal agencies, and so on.

 

But most important, the personal liberties we take for granted remain unrealized in China, certainly by comparison. Guy Denton published a startling profile this week on a member of the long-persecuted Uyghur minority. Read it:

 

When Mihrigul Tursun arrived in the United States, nothing around her made sense.

 

The food, clothes, and buildings that permeated her new life were unfamiliar and disorienting. Insomnia and anxiety haunted her. When she managed to sleep, she was plagued by nightmares of what she’d escaped. In moments of distress, she would withdraw to the bathroom to scream and weep in privacy, running the shower and playing loud music to conceal the noise from her young children.

 

Slowly, however, she adjusted. And while the trauma of her past life will never fully disappear, America has come to feel like home. “I am safe here,” she told National Review in a telephone interview. “Nobody can hurt me.”

 

Tursun, a Uyghur Muslim, fled China to escape the government’s relentless campaign of religious persecution. Her arrival in America came only after years of abuse in China’s vast network of Uyghur internment camps. And her story is emblematic of a broader crisis unfolding in China that the Western world seems reluctant to address. The Chinese Communist Party does not simply wish to exterminate the Uyghurs — it seeks to purge China of all forms of religious faith.

 

As Guy reports, Tursun was detained in a Xinjiang camp several times, held once “in a roughly 45-square-foot cell with more than 60 other women,” conditions that led to several deaths: “The prisoners were frequently tortured. Tursun was once strapped to a chair and electrocuted. Others, she learned, were forcibly sterilized. Before she left China, Tursun was injected with a mysterious substance. She fears that it may eventually kill her.”

 

By all means, Hasan Piker, keep ranting about the model of Chinese-style imprisonment.

Is the Kennedy Center Naming Stunt Gross Negligence?

By Brian T. Allen

Saturday, October 03, 2026

 

It’s time for September art news. I for one am sick of reading about stunts and lawsuits over whether or not a certain middling, mostly middlebrow music hall in that midsize, widely reviled city — the Swamp — can be called the Trump Kennedy Center. Why in the world is President Trump involved in it? It’s no Palais Garnier. He can’t possibly care to bask in JFK’s afterglow. Camelot’s nearly as old as I am and far more moth-eaten.

 

I’m a stickler for ethics in museums, so why not in the performing arts? The Kennedy Center is a nonprofit, a messy one since the government owns the building and subsidizes it. Most of the board is appointed by the president, so there’s no trustee recruitment-board committee and trustees aren’t picked on the basis of their capacity and interest. That’s a terrible arrangement and a typical public-private partnership morass, as is the Smithsonian. It’s still a nonprofit. How can a board chaired by President Trump and mostly appointed by President Trump name the building after President Trump? Who’ll sign the naming contract on behalf of the Kennedy Center? Trump will be on both sides of the table. Isn’t this self-dealing?

 

Are the new members — and the ex-officio members, all pols — embracing a duty of care, making informed, thoughtful decisions, or a duty of prudence, exercising caution? How about a duty of loyalty? A board chairperson threatening to demolish a building unless it’s named for him? That’s a new one in the annals of trusteeship. Part of a Kennedy Center ceiling fell, not all of it, but it left a hole. “How convenient,” I thought, wearing my PR hat. Lawyers for the board say that naming the building after President Trump is necessary to induce him to lead the fundraising for its financial rescue, but that would be a reward for something he hasn’t done yet.

 

One of my readers told me that Trump’s involvement in the Kennedy Center has to be a prank played on people he despises as much as they despise him. That’s the center’s core audience of government employees, lobbyists, diplomats, pols, camp followers, and their families. If Trump is in a comeuppance mood — and why shouldn’t he be? — I’d suggest he go retrocession and push to send a big chunk of the Kennedy Center’s bourgeois socialist and parasitical audience, found in large numbers in Arlington and Alexandria, back to the District of Columbia, where the Founders put them in what was initially a tilted ten-square-mile box.

 

Arlington and Alexandria, plantation towns at the time, demanded for decades to be freed from the District to protect their slave-based economy. Congress complied, finally, in 1846. In 2026, Congress can rescind the retrocession. There’s a bill pending in the House to do exactly that. Fight, fight, fight for that to make a real difference, and keep trimming the government’s bloated payroll.

 

Sweet revenge indeed. Enact retrocession and, poof, 400,000 new Washingtonians will savor the joys of D.C. rule, that holy grail of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and by “joys,” of course, I mean miseries. Call it a reckoning, an atonement, a move for American’s 250th, effective altruism, a flagon of castor oil, or a comeuppance for the ages. It’ll be the mother of all pranks. But, please, let’s not play with a symphony hall, a theater, a place where young and old, rich and poor, go for cultural enrichment.

 

Plaintiffs in the lawsuit are challenging both the renaming and the closing of the Kennedy Center, and they’re weighing whether or not to ask the federal judge on the case to remove the board and place the Center in receivership or, at least, to appoint a monitor. The bar is high. The District of Columbia has an attorney general. Who knew? He enforces fiduciary standards for District charities. The ball might be in his court as well. It’s a distraction and diminishes Trump’s agenda.

 

***

 

Will the White House ballroom and the triumphal arch tap federal defense money if private fundraising lags? (Daniel Torok/Official White House Photo/via Wikimedia)

The new White House ballroom and triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery are to be privately funded, but shouldn’t we know by whom? They’ll be public buildings, after all, and this is Quid Pro Quo Land. The Clinton Library, not even a public building, was privately financed, too, and it’s thought that much of the money raised was in the form of backdoor bribes. After thousands of years of human depravity, leave it to the Clintons to find a new MO for theft.

 

According to President Trump, whom I admire, both the ballroom and the triumphal arch will be War Department assets, with drones flying from them and new laser Pentagon gizmos atop them. Good, in theory. We live in parlous times. Most of us in rural Vermont are armed to the teeth.

 

But cynical me. It does indeed make these two projects seem more urgent, but how is the fundraising going? If it’s sputtering — together they’re costing, I hear, $650 million — will defense dollars (public money) fill the gap? How much has been raised? The new Obama Library insisted that no federal dollars would be involved, but the project got $135 million in state and local road, sewer, and drainage improvements, with the Feds eventually covering the costs through reimbursements. Channeling my inner Oliver Twist: “Please, sir, I want some more.” Information, that is. Who wouldn’t?

 

***

 

No need to rush, Marbles. It doesn’t look as if the British Museum’s Parthenon sculptures will be leaving London any time soon. Pictured, the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum in London, 2022. (Photo by Diego Delso, delso.photo, License CC BY-SA)

Once in a while, say, every appearance of Halley’s Comet, I’m wrong. I’ve written a few times about the Elgin Marbles, the Parthenon sculptures displayed at the British Museum since 1817. The Greeks say that Lord Elgin stole them, and they want them back, though Elgin seems to have gotten the okay from Athens’s Ottoman rulers. I thought the British Museum’s trustees would cave. Only the technicalities needed to be massaged, among them British law, which forbids the deaccession of art from national museums without Parliament’s approval. Elites were dying to ease their fake guilt over pretend imperialism. The closest Brits ever came to conquering Greece was Prince Philip’s marriage to Queen Elizabeth II, and he was a German and Dane playing a Greek.

 

Parliament has priorities, top of which is an Islamophobia mirage. A close second is enjoying a state of salaried paralysis. It’s not helping. The British Museum’s trustees hoped to circumvent the law and lend the Parthenon sculptures to the Greeks long-term, meaning from here to eternity. But Greeks say they will accept nothing short of ownership. The deal is as dead as Patroclus. Good. There’s no evidence the Brits don’t own the Marbles, among the greatest of the museum’s treasures.

 

The museum staff is ambivalent. The new director doesn’t want his obituary headlined “Returned Priceless Antiquities to Ingrate Greeks to Juice Notting Hill Vanity.” And the curators know that everyone in the third world will say everything in the museum was swiped, and before long the place will echo in emptiness.

 

***

 

Left: Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Count-Duke of Olivares, c. 1626, oil on canvas.
Right: Rembrandt van Rijn, Saint John on Patmos, c. 1661, oil on canvas. (Getty Museum; Courtesy of The Leiden Collection)

Earlier this week, I wrote about my visit to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, always a joy. I saw good exhibitions, but the big news is the museum’s acquisition of The Portrait of the Count-Duke of Olivares, by Diego Velázquez (1599–1660). Velázquez along with Goya and El Greco are enthroned on Spanish art’s Olympus, but Velázquez is a special case. He was Philip IV’s court painter and also chief curator of the many royal palaces, so he was busy and didn’t paint much — 130 or so pictures. Many are in the Prado, and nearly all the rest are in captivity in other museums.

 

Olivares was Philip IV’s prime minister for years. His portrait is a head shot with an armored and sashed torso. Velázquez painted it in 1626 as a gift from Philip IV’s court to the Vatican’s ambassador to Spain. It stayed in Italian private collections until last year. The painting’s nice, not great, and Velázquez did magnificent full-length portraits of Olivares. Still, it’s a good thing to have. I don’t know how much the Getty paid. A stiff, drab full-length Velázquez portrait of Philip IV’s first queen, dating to the late 1620s, sold for $35 million in 2024. Since the Getty’s new picture is merely a bust and doesn’t have her big hair and certainly not her fancy farthingale, it probably paid a fraction of this.

 

In other big acquisition news, Thomas and Daphne Kaplan, owners of the famous Leiden Collection, announced a few days ago that they bought their 18th Rembrandt painting. It’s a boy! Or, more precisely, a saint, that is, Saint John on Patmos, from about 1661. Last seen in 1923, it’s dark and brown, in Rembrandt’s late style. The Kaplans bought it at Sotheby’s last year for $9 million but didn’t spill the beans until now. I admire them. They spot misattributed and long-lost art with a gimlet eye, sometimes taking risks, and are generous lenders.

 

***

 

Two final pieces of the puzzle that is Ambassador Leah Campos and Kehinde Wiley. She ordered a painting by Wiley removed from the walls of our embassy in the Dominican Republic, for which the painting was commissioned by the Obama State Department in 2013. It’s a big picture of four young artists, two black and two who look mixed-race, and she didn’t like it. “We are turning away from globalist and woke ideologies,” she said in her announcement about sending the painting back to Washington.

 

I thought playing Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It” while the painting was taken off the wall was revelatory. Not gonna take what? Looking at art depicting two black people and two mixed-race people? That’s 85 percent of the Dominican people. That’s 20 percent of Americans. Be careful what you say and be careful what you play. Why should an undiplomatic art critic need to give advice to a diplomat?

 

I wrote a note to Ambassador Campos asking her to describe to me how the picture expressed “globalist and woke ideologies.” The subjects are students, and they do indeed look ratty, but the theme is kindred spirits, a warm and fuzzy concept espoused by young artists among other tender souls. I heard from Campos. “It is my intention,” the ambassador said, “that everything we project from the U.S. Embassy, including the art and decor, reflect the beauty, strength, and commitment to liberty of the United States of America and its people.” Fair enough. She bailed on explaining “globalist and woke ideologies” and why she’d evoked lesbians — “I saw a huge painting of a picnic in a park with flowers and some lesbians” was her response upon seeing the work, in which women seem to be dancing. Alas, the new art that the Art in Embassies program sent her earlier this year is mostly junk.

 

Wiley wrote a straightforward, nice letter to President Trump asking to buy the picture back. He’s a good, though not great, artist, and the decent thing would be to sell it back to him for what the State Department paid for it. End of an illuminating story.